Tag Archives for poetry

Currently reading: Absentia

At work, we have a section in the paper called “Western lit,” where my editor reviews books written by Nevada writers. This week, we covered a poetry anthology called Absentia by William Stobb. I haven’t read through a poetry book in a long time, but the poem we featured in the article really struck me so I’m reading through the rest of the book.

This book is largely inspired by the author’s time in Nevada. I can’t remember if I’ve read poetry by a Nevada author before, but I am enjoying it because I’m able to connect to the locations he writes about. His poems are funny, witty, touching, and insightful. I may have a new favorite poet.

So far, my favorite poem of his is called “At the Edge of Perfect Adequacy.”

Harsh and consoling, deeply roaming 
final precincts of oblivion and trials of encounter.

Neither unbounded singularity nor dread 
of solitude, best known unmasked, 
we emit organized sounds in the shape of X.

There is no complete echo. 
There is no unbounded animal.

Three roads meet between Thebes and Delphi. 
Conduct springs from wells deeper than 
a private tongue refusing any relation.

Inward eye to purchase wider than. 
Peregrine towards waking 
the persuasion of our fiber.

Our condition is stranger.

Listen to Stobb’s recorded version of his poem here. I love hearing poets perform their own work. I’ve always been pretty bad at reading aloud my poetry.

The lines I put in bold are my favorite, but I love each part of this poem. I’m enthralled with the idea of “no unbounded animal.” I’ve been thinking of concepts of tribes, natives, primal, nomadic lifestyles and ancient rituals for the book I’ve been outlining, and those lines seem to encompass an essence of restricted wildness, which is interesting. I’m still working through the meaning of the poem but the language and references to mythology stood out to me.

I’m preparing for NaNoWriMo this week, and I find that reading great poetry inspires me and gets me in the mood to write. I find it easier to read poetry than novels before embarking on my own writing. It helps me to be more conscious about each word I choose. It helps me to make each line count.

Poetry Challenge: Day 8

“Soviet Moon Suit”
is the best name for a band, ever
I told you in the museum,
surrounded by rockets

Meet me on the moon
where my blood doesn’t move…

But really,
it is, because the songs
we could write would be
atmospheric like
really trippy prog-rock

Meet me on Mars
where the universe is ours…

We’d be two space cadets,
Astronauts with helmets like
bobble heads,
knocking together when
we kiss, little tap tap taps

Meet me on Saturn’s rings
and slip one onto my finger… 

Space is the most
romantic of all places
and the loneliest
for us time travelers

Meet me out in space
and we’ll kiss among the stars…

Poetry Challenge: Day 7

I am really bad at remembering to post things on time, but here is day 7′s poem. I’m posting day 8 in a few minutes.

She always liked wars
but not the ones where
her friends’ husbands
were shipped away
but the ones

where women looked
badass in green and
held guns bigger than
their bodies

she liked the camaraderie,
the headscarves, the
arm bands with red crosses,
the tailored suits and
little hats

she liked the pictures
of them not holding babies
but weapons and tools
that hurt and heal
that were rusty from sweat
that were decorated with stickers

so when she enlisted
to be a warrior she
didn’t expect to find
herself surrounded by
a world that wanted her to die,
by people who would help it kill her

she just wanted the
glory and a little green hat
and a dog tag with her name on it
to hang around her neck,
not in an envelope mailed
home to her mom

Poetry Challenge: Day 6

Under a shroud of the night
the desert rider flies along the highway
It is at night she thinks the most of light and
color–­neons always looked best against
the muted shades of sagebrush-infested lands

The night is dark but it is also safe and
silent, punctuated by stars. It serves as a shelter.
The door opens
when the sun rises, inviting in
unwelcome demons

She removes the sunglasses from
her face, feels the sweat and the creases
on the bridge of her nose,
notices the sun is brighter than she remembered

And hotter, too, so
Maybe they were right about all this
coming to an end. Plenty survived–
the cockroaches and snakes and cactuses,
the whole planet is now brown like Mars,
red like Mars, from blood and dust

Blood was once her sign of love
But Love is deadly, she thinks, as she
picks at a scab and the snakes
circle her ankles, seeking solace in the
shade of her boots, like
unwelcome demons

Poetry Challenge: Day 4

Read days 1, 2, and 3 here.

revolution
starts with a line
crooked,
a broken promise
played through to static

revolution
starts with a line
crossed,
scribbled out, erased
pressed into a page
creased with indentations

revolution
starts with a line,
a queue, a cue

Poetry Challenge: Days 1, 2 & 3

My friend Ashley has been doing the 30 day poetry challenge that one of our favorite writers Francesca Lia Block has been leading on her blog. I had been meaning to join in but spaced for the last two days. I used to write poetry nonstop when I was studying English, but have fallen out of that pattern. I think it will be fun to write creatively again. I have posted a couple poems here before (here, here, here and here). I have been trying all day to write a few to catch up but I thought for now I can just post three I wrote a long time ago. Tomorrow, I’ll start with a new one!

1. Personification

love is

the tide
that pushes ships
into rocky coves and
its song lingers over the
bloated hands of sailors

- that sweet intangible voice -

a siren.

2. Vampire

I think about you anatomically
I consider your bones –
fallen branches, antlers,
Consider your blood
it runs still inside of you,
fluid inside of me

Thick black spider ink and snake venom and
bark sap, sticky and sweet
My blood is my voice

A wolf’s howl in the night
The moon’s breath on the sea

You smile at me,
waxy and wicked,
teeth like piano keys

3. Shells

Someday we will collapse –
into our bones, out of our shells
(out of ourselves)

desert vines will creep over
our hands and pull us down,
and we will have to go under

into the sea, and the blue
will overwhelm the red
fading from our body
and the blue will shine
from the inside out

someday we will be a
pile of ashes being swept
into the wind,
with the other dust of dreams
that lived – and died

unless the stars have a different
story to unfold for you
unless you let your knees
become bruised –

it is in you.
the chaos will eventually surround you

Smoke screen

in clouds of jasmine and
eucalyptus, you pushed me down.
the lights were soft, cloaked in
smoke, and you blew on them like
candles and they flickered against
the darkness

the room smelled like weed and I felt
the taste in the back of my throat. I put
my lips around the apple, inhaled the
smoke from the bowl–the fruit & the plant
hit my nose with the force of sweetness and a
small forest burning. I felt the fire in my chest.
I always crave the scent of doused matches and
lighter fluid.

this den, this room, we are in middle eastern sands
and you tell me my incense smells aphotic. I lie
and say it’s from Istanbul but I actually
just got it from world market. The eucalyptus reminds me of
rain in berkeley and I recall telegraph drenched.
the hemp and beads damp and slick. the pipe
is cold, glassy and sanitized,
filled with ice to sooth the hit.

I can connect the taste of you with the scent
of you the tang of your skin under your belt buckle,
the sweat pooled in the indentations from the
zipper and the clasp
breathe on me and in your breath
in the electric dark room that could be anywhere
in memories of being both child under tilden park
trees and now woman in cages of iron and burberry perfume
and the many stages in between, encompassed,
I am surrounded, encased and
pulled away.

Technicolor girl

I have cyberpunk on the brain.

At first the colors were beautiful, the future as she’d always imagined it–full of glowing blues and pinks, vibrant reds and oranges against rows of industrial, stark grey buildings. Everything was lit up and illuminated once the council outfitted all of the buildings with new lights in an effort to rebrand the city’s identity. Reform. Reinvent. Abolish the past and its hokey comstock history. The old west was dead. It was time for innovation.

And Codex fell for it, like the others did. For a while.

Outside
the letters of
the neon signs
reflected palindromes
onto the rain littered streets.

No one stopped
to read their poetry.

And soon the colors became oversaturated, and Codex knew that they had been intended to dazzle and distract, blind and bind. They were being held hostage in the beauty. It was a ruse.

Snow day

Diaphanous and heavy,
you circle around me like a
fractured merry-go-round -
dizzying, foreboding of what’s
to come. I love the darkness
and the heady greys that come
with your enveloping mouth.
I love the seasonal rain that turns
us all to stone.

The stoicism of this dark afternoon,
under clouds, under storm clouds
not crackling with electricity but rather
the calm in the storm, the eye of the
snow, that glass maiden with her sharp
touch. I always preferred
a woman with a quick tongue,
a bite that breaks the skin and reveals
the blood. The blood that bleeds
hot and melts the ice, until it molds
again in the shape of your hands
grasping the last of the winter,
the grip impenetrable, unbreakable.

Winter is a harsh bitch
and for that I am drawn into
her frigid embrace. Only she
can I fear and desire, a crazed
and rabid love that freezes as
it poisons.

When the summer pulls the sweat
from my skin it is her touch I crave.
The soft warmth of spring is
but a dull poet’s dream; what I want
is the keen bleak reminder of this
enthralling affair, that pushes me to
the lengths of love and further into
that other lover, the secret solace
of flame.