SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
i can barely speak in my mother tongues stutter
my accent is bad
i hate jalebi
but i like aloo samosa
i'm a bad brown
girl i didn't join the
SAA or the ISA
power lines held by birds
of prey the hostile expanse above
ditches teeming floral invasive
wayside fleurs
late summer the shoulder sang
holds breeze by
The 31st day of August 1914
I left Deauville a little before midnight
In Rouveyre’s little car
You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,
and have to choose between the starving month’s
nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.
grass is unusual
it was invented by the Romans
unlike most people grass stays where it grows
if grass had gone to the moon it would be there today
because grass looks luxurious
the animal in me
is constant.
thirst starts,
hunger answers.
sleep is uncertain,
restless limbs.
in the night,
I hear footsteps.
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which…
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
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
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I can manage being alone,
can pace out convivial hope
across my managing ground.
Someone might call, later.
What do the dead make of us
that we’d flay ourselves trying
It is the story of the falling rain
to turn into a leaf and fall again
it is the secret of a summer shower
to steal the light and hide it in a flower
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.
Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!
Woman! too long degraded, scorned, oppressed;
O born to rule in partial Law’s despite,
K was supposed to come with the key, I was
to wait outside the gate. I arrived on time,
the time we had agreed on and waited, as agreed,
Both guitars run trebly. One noodles
Over a groove. The other slushes chords.
Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.
An ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
with the tip of my spring tongue, ayîki frog
your mouth will be the web
catching apihkêsis words, …
It is never easy
Walking with an invisible border
Separating my left and right foot
We cannot know this statue, this satyr
with his head propped on a wineskin;
we cannot know if he dreams. In fact,
Down a long, long corridor
I keep walking…
—A window straight ahead so bright it hurts the eyes,
Someone waiting in the lobby of a Hotel Imperial amid
the spaciousness tourists and peeling gold leaf
might see it all as too hesitant for truth
Your best friend falls in love
and her brain turns to water.
You can watch her lips move,
Entirely windless, today’s sea; of these waters’ many names
the best seemed “field-of-pearl-leaves,” for it smelled like the air
in the house he built entirely of doors: pink school door,
creation stories are lullabies for grown-ups
they remind us of all the possible ways & means
that worlds…
i am writing to tell you
that yes, indeed,
we have noticed
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
Random Link Clicker.
Royal Bath Taker.
Receiver of Foot Rubs and Praise.
Coin Exhibit, British Museum.
Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes,
like still-cooling splatters of silver. Stater and shekel,
Sometimes we are led through the doorway
by a child, sometimes
by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing
Sure, there’s a spell the leaves can make, shuddering,
and in their lying suddenly still again — flat, and still,
like time itself when it seems unexpectedly more
60s pulled us from starvation into government jobs
antiquated Indians in Saskatchewan danced for rain
Manitoba Indian doings were hidden for a jealous
Very loud a mad frenzy The wooden
barrel she rode would have roared
(I first wrote “road”)
When I began to write, I didn’t know
each of my words would bit by bit remove
things from the world and in return leave blank
I’ve heard the phrase between you
and me too many times to believe
it to be true, but between me and you
At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through
water through
fresh water into the teal plate of sky soaking foothills, papa,
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
In my body flows the blood of Gallic
Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle
ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.
The snake can separate itself
from its shadow, move on ribbons of light,
taste the air, the morning and the evening,
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid…
Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot…
a glass tube
for my leg says Hugo Ball
my hat a cylinder
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are…
There are things you have words for, things you do not
have words for. There are words that encompass all your
feelings & words that…
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading — treading — till it seemed
