Happy Holidays, Bitches.






Leah "Hummus" Green



Christina Sighting.

from "Clearances"

IV

Fear of affectation made her affect
Inadequacy whenever it came to
Pronouncing words ‘beyond her’. Bertold Brek.
She’d manage something hampered and askew
Every time, as if she might betray
The hampered and inadequate by too
Well-adjusted a vocabulary.
With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You
Know all them things.’ So I governed my tongue
In front of her, a genuinely well-
Adjusted adequate betrayal
Of what I knew better. I’d naw and aye
And decently relapse into the wrong
Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.

Seamus Heaney

a love poem written in youth. stupid, stupid


Original Pink
for Silvia

We never want to
ground ourselves—
why is that?

You see the dumb sky—other skies,
stretched,
perfectly numb—

and you’re filled
with huge globs of joy.

The canvas for perfecting
and projecting,
being blank essence—

what was the original pink?
—a steady, uninflected
heartbeat

pulsing from our chests into
stillness—from our fingers
beaming as they touch?

I just posted this at my family's blog

where my cousins and I insult each other and talk shit about various moments of family history, but I thought I'd post it here as well.

A great poem and a thematically linked picture of me and Barach, who is chatting up a lady somewhere right now in Philadelphia on this, the biggest bar night of the year:


Louisiana Perch
by Ron Padgett

Certain words disappear from a language:
their meanings become attenuated,
grow antique, insanely remote or small,
vanish.

Or become something else:
transport. Mack
the truck driver falls for a waitress
where the water flows. The

great words are those without meaning:
from a their or
Or the for a the
The those

The rest are fragile, transitory
like the waitress, a

beautiful slender young girl!
I love her! Want to
marry her! Have hamburgers!
Have hamburgers! Have hamburgers!

Franz Wright, Irvinite

"I did try to go to graduate school at UC Irvine with Charles Wright. Even that was too much reality for me. I couldn't stand the atmosphere in the academic world. I remember leaving graduate school after the first six months and thinking, this is the real fork in the road."

-Franz, in his interview in Image, which can be found on poetry daily news site: http://www.poems.com/essawrigf.htm

I always sort of thought he had the Irvine mark on him, which I picture as a sort of pathetic hangdoggedness with a glint in the eye.

Ohio State stinks.

Dialogue with Animal - VI

Today these hands are mine.

I say it in a dream – a dismal haze.

Today I will do what is good and mindful.
I will do what is natural to the light.

I move, mistaken, on the inside.

Today I’ll writhe up from this hole
and take a bite from all the brightest golden apples.
Succulent -

But even as I say it, twisted with pleasure,
I rap against the inner notches of my ribs and wake
in the dark wet, where heat
of a distant noon sun seeps through
the outside of the skin pulled close around
this rotting cavity, this suffocating world,
and hear the sound of mine own voice, speaking,
above me -

Today I am animal.

A Poem I Think Is HOT HOT HOT

Kitty in the Snow

Meanwhile I fuck this sculpture
In my mind until it melts, then stop.
Mmm, cold.
At the party I talk to everyone's honey
And sip poison and then go home,
Get shitfaced, and get it on with myself.
I'm so good, I give it to myself every bad way I know.
I whisper in my ear as I come:
Sarah Manguso, you're a damn fine lover.
Maybe someday we can be together, too.

Sarah Manguso