SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
for Alton Sterling, Andrew Loku, Philando Castile, et al.
I wanna live, son. But which son are you?
There where the rivers are made
of moonshine and the lights still wait,
i twist and gasp
open and close my mouth
searching for air
whenever a sturgeon is caught in the rainy river
i know
the feel of strange hands touching my body
the struggle
Now I set out across a minefield,
space having taken all I owned, I’m starting over
from a point where every pebble may explode
beneath my shoe and the flowers blaze up
behind my body as I gasp for air,
I lost my talk
The talk you took away.
When I was a little girl
At Shubenacadie school.
You snatched it away:
I speak like you
I think like you
I create like you
take the moon
nd take a star
when you don’t
know who you are
paint the picture in your hand
nd roll on home
take my fear
nd take the hunger
take my body
You’d have to pay us
Could you pay us enough
To live for a stretch
There’s a joke that ends with — huh?
It’s the bomb saying here is your father.
Now here is your father inside
your lungs. Look how lighter
the earth is — afterward.
In the empty classroom, at sunrise, a girl
sits on the floor, staring at a glockenspiel.
She’s shredding the cuticles on her left hand
This is our welfare half
a duplex with mint green
siding shrugged between
i
At the heart there is a hollow sun
by which we are constructed and undone
Tune: Rory Dall’s Port
First printed in Johnson’s S.M.M., Vol. 4, 13th August 1792.
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; …
The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
side a:
1. 18 and Life
her friend takes her to
The rain this morning pours from the gutters and
everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your
glasses to single out what you know is there because
If this brain’s over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James,
who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the
Cévennes
Once one gets what one wants
one no longer wants it.
One no longer wants what?
What horror to awake at night
and in the dimness see the light.
…
It was down that road he brought me, still
in the trunk of his car. I won’t say it felt right,
but it did feel expected. The way you…
The snake can separate itself
from its shadow, move on ribbons of light,
taste the air, the morning and the evening,
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,
lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,
stumbling through tamarack swamps…
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
The air smells of rhubarb, occasional
Roses, or first birth of blossoms, a fresh,
Undulant hurt, so body snaps…
For everyone
The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,
But many at that moment will not say
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.
Lo, ’tis autumn
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
‘O Jesus Christ! I’m hit,’ he said; and died.
Whether he vainly cursed, or prayed indeed,
The Bullets chirped — In vain! vain! vain!
Ay, gaze upon her rose-wreathed hair,
And gaze upon her smile;
Seem as you drank the very air
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
A little black thing among the snow,
Crying “weep! ‘weep!” in notes of woe!
“Where are thy father and mother? say?”
Love in Fantastic Triumph sat,
Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed,
For whom Fresh pains he did Create,
