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Richard Siken, Gun Case

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I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that’s okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.

Richard Siken from the long and short of it

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T'o LOVE SoMeOne long-term is to atTenD A thOUSAND FUnERaLS OF THe PEOPLE THEY USED TO BE.

The people they're too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don't recognise inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness:

FEIDI PRIEBE

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Good Bones by Maggie Smith

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happy "everyone forgets that icarus also flew" monday. i want to throw up !

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The Reminder

by Jason Tandon

My friend long dead visits me in a dream. "You're married," he says, "you've had a child." "Yes," I say, feeling my face flush with shame. "I grieved for you," I say. "I climbed a rooftop in a slanting rain and spit my curses at God." He smiles, and the rows of his teeth appear like spotless glasses brimming with milk.

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A Meeting - Wendell Berry - USA

In a dream I meet my dead friend. He has, I know, gone long and far, and yet he is the same for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed, grown strange to what I was. Yet I, the changed one, ask: 'How you been?' He grins and looks at me. 'I been eating peaches off some mighty fine trees.'

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I can’t even be alone when I’m alone, the way the field hums all our old songs, the moon pulling everything closer. You’re the ghost in my throat, the lump I swallow and swallow, the name that comes out of my mouth no matter who I meant to call. I meant to call more people back. To love someone other than you and myself and the dog. Now look at the moon, its far hard rim, a coin in the wide dark palm of the sky—it’s the way I remember your body, brilliant and out of my reach. I’ve been lonely for years but never minutes. That’s why I’m so terrible at it, that’s why I keep needing to be rescued. Night here has a pulse, electric and warm, each ear of corn a live wire. It’s the crickets, the thrum of rubbed wings, it’s the way you used to touch me—your limbs all bows, my limbs all strings. Look at the sky, it’s everywhere tonight, relentless and empty of signs. Look at the field, the way there’s no one else in it, the way even now, having left you, I’m still what’s left.

— Ali Shapiro, Leave Me Alone But Take Me With You

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if i leave you then maybe i won’t have to miss you so much by Ali Shapiro

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anthropology, ali shapiro

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Breaking Up

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

I fell out of love: that’s our story’s dull ending, as flat as life is, as dull as the grave. Excuse me–I’ll break off the string of this love song and smash the guitar. We have nothing to save.

The puppy is puzzled. Our furry small monster can’t decide why we complicate simple things so– he whines at your door and I let him enter, when he scratches at my door, you always go.

Dog, sentimental dog, you’ll surely go crazy, running from one to the other like this– too young to conceive of an ancient idea: it’s ended, done with, over, kaput. Finis.

Get sentimental and we end up by playing the old melodrama, “Salvation of Love.” “Forgiveness,” we whisper, and hope for an echo; but nothing returns from the silence above.

Better save love at the very beginning, avoiding all passionate “nevers,” “forevers;” we ought to have heard what the train wheels were shouting, “Do not make promises!” Promises are levers.

We should have made note of the broken branches, we should have looked up at the smokey sky, warning the witless pretensions of lovers– the greater the hope is, the greater the lie.

True kindness in love means staying quite sober, weighing each link of the chain you must bear. Don’t promise her heaven–suggest half an acre; not “unto death,” but at least to next year.

And don’t keep declaring, “I love you, I love you.” That little phrase leads a durable life– when remembered again in some loveless hereafter, it can sting like a hornet or stab like a knife.

So–our little dog in all his confusion turns and returns from door to door. I won’t say “forgive me” because I have left you; I ask pardon for one thing: I loved you before.

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— MARIE HOWE.

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“This is not what the door’s for—slamming you up against, opening your legs with my knee. And it isn’t leaving, the thing I keep doing with my shoes still on, or in the car in the driveway in broad daylight after waving goodbye to your neighbors again. But my body’s a bad dog, all dumb tongue and hunger, down on all fours again, tied up outside again, coming when called but then always refusing to stay. I know what I’m trying to say, but it isn’t talking, the thing that I do with my mouth to your ear, even though we got the orifices right. To leave I would have to put clothes on, and they’d have to fit better than all of this skin. To leave I would have to know where to begin: like this, pressed up against the half-open window? Like this, with my foot on the gas? If seeing is believing then why isn’t touching knowing for sure? I just want my nerves to do the work for me, I don’t want to have to decide. There’s blood in my hands for fight and blood in my legs for flight and nowhere a sign. Believe me, I’ll leave if you just let me touch you again for the last last time.”

— Ali Shapiro; “I Keep Trying to Leave But the Sex Just Gets Better and Better" (via commovente)

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Christopher Citro

OUR BEAUTIFUL LIFE WHEN IT’S FILLED WITH SHRIEKS

I’m doing a balancing act with a stack of fresh fruit

in my basket. I love you. I want us both to eat well.

We’re not allowed to buy blackberries anymore

because they’re mean to their workers and you

read left-wing news sites. Till when? I asked and you

said nothing. So that’s one healthy food off the list.

I’m still buying pineapples and you’re still eating them.

I guess you’ve never seen the websites about those.

Nobody in this supermarket knows that I am a puma.

This morning our cat rolled on the floor showing me

her belly which I leaned down and rubbed.

Beneath a backyard pine tree the neighbor’s cat

was eating one of our cat’s moles—at least the moles

we rent from the landlord for her. It’s so complicated

staying alive sometimes. The voices of the collection

agencies on the answering machine sound menacing.

They’re paid to sound that way and they’re not paid

much more than the people they’re menacing,

which can get you thinking if you’re the sort of

person who likes to think about that sort of thing.

Other people subscribe to adventure cycling

magazines and read about men who rode across

Turkey in the late 1800s before anything was

happening in the world. Before cantaloupes

probably existed. When you could get an honest

wage for an honest day’s blackberries. When we

loved like fierce mountain storms, with the blood

of eagles in our hearts, exchanging grocery lists

that just said you you you you all the way down.

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It's world poetry day so here are some of my favorite poems:

Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert

What the Living Do by Marie Howe

Night Walk by Franz Wright

Crossword by Lloyd Schwartz

The Great Fires by Jack Gilbert

Love Train by Tomás Q. Morín

Divorced Fathers and Pizza Crusts by Mark Halliday

Perhaps the World Ends Here by Joy Harjo

in another string of the multiverse, perhaps by Michaella Batten

acknowledgments by Danez Smith

Death Wish by Josh Alex Baker

San Francisco by Richard Brautigan

How to Watch Your Brother Die by Michael Lassell

You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life by Rebecca Hazelton

On Political(ized) Life by Kanika Lawton

All the Dead Boys Look Like Me by Christopher Soto

It Was the Animals by Natalie Diaz

In Time by W.S. Merwin

It Is Maybe Time to Admit That Michael Jordan Definitely Pushed Off by Hanif Abdurraqib

Dear Life by Maya C. Popa

I Could Touch It by Ellen Bass

To The Young Who Want To Die by Gwendolyn Brooks

Accident Report in the Tall, Tall Weeds by Ada Limón