celestialsterling

[celestialsterling]

we’ll fly together until the stars collide

[celestialsterling]

The Marquise

[celestialsterling]

not lore accurate

[celestialsterling]

"i like my body"

by E.E. Cummings

i like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing. Muscles better and nerves more. i like your body. i like what it does, i like its hows. i like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling -firm-smooth ness and which i will again and again and again kiss, i like kissing this and that of you, i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes over parting flesh… And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill of under me you so quite new

[celestialsterling]

im glad you’re back

[celestialsterling]

Poetic Subjects

by Rebecca Lindenberg

The capital city. Arrowroot. Water-bur. Colts. Hail. Bamboo grass. The round-leaved violet. Club moss. Water oats. Flat river-boats. The mandarin duck.                         — The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

The sky. And the sky above that. The exchange of ice between mouths. Other people's poems. My friend says we never write about anything we can get to the bottom of. For him, this is a place arbored with locust trees. For me, it's a language for which I haven't quite found the language yet. The dewy smell of a new-cut pear. Bacon chowder flecked with thyme. Roasted duck skin ashine with plum jam. Scorpion peppers. Clothes on a line. A smell of rain battering the rosemary bush. The Book Cliffs. Most forms of banditry. Weathered barns. Dr. Peebles. The Woman's Tonic, it says on the side, in old white paint. The clink of someone putting away dishes in another room. The mechanical bull at the cowboy bar in West Salt Lake. The girls ride it wearing just bikinis and cowboy hats. I lean over to my friend and say, I would worry about catching something. And he leans back to say, That's really the thing you'd worry about? We knock the bottom of our bottles together. How they talk in old movies, like, Now listen here. Just because you can swing a bat doesn't mean you can play ball. Or, I'll be your hot cross if you'll be my bun. Well, anyway, you know what I mean. Somewhere between the sayable and the unsayable, poetry runs. Antidote to the river of forgetting. Like a rosary hung from a certain rearview mirror. Like the infinite rasp of gravel under the wheel of a departing car.  Gerard Manley Hopkins's last words were I'm so happy, I'm so happy. Oscar Wilde took one look at the crackling wallpaper in his Paris flat, then at his friends gathered around and said, One or the other of us has got to go. Wittgenstein said simply, Tell all my friends, I've had a wonderful life.

[celestialsterling]

Sunset Song

by Fernando Pessoa tr. Luísa Freire

Leaning my chin on my hands, I looked far away to sea Where the dying sunset commands senses Of half-mystical majesty. And I felt a strange sorrow, the fear, The desire like a sudden love For something is not here And that I can never have.

[celestialsterling]

Moon in Virgo

by James Lee Jobe

You are not beaten. The simple music rises up, children’s voices in the air, sound floating out across the land and on to the river beyond, over the valley’s floor. No, you cannot go back for those things you lost, the parts of yourself that were taken, often by force. Like an animal in the forest you must weep it all away at once, violently, and then simply live on. The music here is Bach, Vivaldi; a chorale of children, a piano, a violin. Together, they have a certain spirit that is light, that lets in light, joyful, ecstatic. “Forgive,” said The Christ, and why not? Every day that you still breathe has all the joy and murderous possibilities of your bravest dream. Forgive. Breathe. Live. The moon has entered Virgo, the wind shifts, blows up from the Delta, cools this valley, and you are not beaten; the children sing, it is Bach, and you are brave, alive, and human.

[celestialsterling]

Poetry, Richard Siken

[celestialsterling]

Canyons by Raja Nandepu

[celestialsterling]

they had so much fun on their date

[celestialsterling]

-Anne Sexton

[celestialsterling]

Issac reading Crush by Richard Siken is something so personal to me

[celestialsterling]

[celestialsterling]

If I speak I’m in trouble

[celestialsterling]

when will we stop pretending?

[celestialsterling]

Can't believe it worked