Poetic Statement 1-10
1. On the knees sucking a pestle. [Gripped in particular horrors: the stinked history of other inappropriate drills— being a girl.] Becomes revolving locale, cataclysmic obsession, a time-warp nightmare. In motel rooms: a ditty, a slim filth; asking questions such as when does one become whole, gentle whore? [Unfillable state.] 2. Which language rankles? Unsettling […]
Black Took Collective’s Call for Dissonance
FOUNDED: 1999 LOCATION: CAVE CANEM RETREAT FOR AFRICAN AMERICAN POETS, ESOPUS, NY At Cave Canem each year, a suite of black poets are invited to a castle to write poems. One night in 1999, we who have become Black Took called the other fellows down into the dungeon to begin to create an alternative sphere […]
Your Duck is My Duck
Way back—oh, not all that long ago, actually, just a couple of years, but back before I’d gotten a glimpse of the gears and levers and pulleys that dredge the future up from the earth’s core to its surface—I was going to a lot of parties. And at one of these parties there was a […]
the companion
They called the child the companion. We will raise him as we would have ourselves, they agreed, but they were young, and stayed up late at night preparing the nursery and sharing their worries. What if the companion is ugly? I will grow thin and wrinkled, said the mother. I will not shave, the father […]
from DEEPSTEP COME SHINING
Oncet after a heavy rain he come back at daybreak threw down a few dollars and cents alongside a set of pretty glass eyes into a little dish on the dresser flopped crosswise on the bed and slept I started to write I feel lost here and I’m […]
The point of the leak is to imagine the flood: Hilary Plum in conversation with Caren Beilin
Hilary and I have spoken before. With each new book that appears, I diligently come forward as her friend and colleague, as a fellow writer in the fun as fuck trenches of indie publishing, which feels like ascendant exile, sometimes like a lot of rubble, but to me where anything good could happen. It’s often […]
Our Audubon
You and I both must know that birds are the blessing disseminated. I only knew you eight years ago. But I found you again in the bookstore here. I touched your book like a mirror pureed into pages—it was the you I remember, the you of our brief friendship. I touched the corners and numbers. […]
from FOUR PERSONAL ADDRESSES
1. One square meter of prison.
Juicy Salute
I hate it when you drive but I love being a passenger My hands in my lap are curled like two shrimp A maternal feeling, fleetingly A phalanx of pines fleecefully Pines and firs and ferns falling to in the rear view & large-winged birds crossing paths in the sunroof, two cursors enskied My dread […]
When I Kissed July
The room was with me— the subway tile, my railway kitchen, the window plant too. I didn’t look. I tore off June, went directly to it. I’ve been murdered and plowed under, all the above, all the way. To die and to know you died, it’s worse than death to die this way. Someone neutral […]
