#Matthew Rohrer

[havingapoemwithyou]

poem by Matthew Rohrer

[sageandscorpiongrass]

hello! for some reason, the thought of asking about web weaving prompts completely escaped me until now. you're the first I am asking! hello!!!

I don't see this sort of web weaving subject around, so is it possible to make one about an abandoned AI? (the fictional, sapient kind, not the ones irl lol)

like an AI, with a sapient mind, just..... alone. lost between the lines of code in cyberspace, wishing for someone like them to destroy their isolation

How can you mourn for something not living?

I hope this fills the prompt well! It was very interesting to do. I'm sorry it took so long! ;^^

Subtitle, Weldon Kees | Can't Help Myself, Oliver Rain | Ancient Dreams in a Modern Land, MARINA | If I Were Paul, Mark Jarman | Robot Apocalypses, Beatrice Bywater | One More Love Poem, Dunya Mikhail | Just Take My Wallet, Jack Stauber | Machine, John Ciardi | There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier, Matthew Rohrer | Conjure, Rachel Blau DuPlessis | More than whispers, less than rumors, Bob Hicok | The Day the Saucers Came, Neil Gaiman | The Birds Outside My Window Sing During a Pandemic, Lee Herrick | End Poem, Julian Gough | 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke & Stanley Kubrick

[text transcription and image ID in alt text]

[llovelymoonn]

favourite poems of december

torrin a. greathouse ekphrasis on nude selfie as portrait of saint sebastian

snehal vadher hello flowers and cigarettes

robert pinsky death and the powers: a robot pageant

wendy barker taking a language

cindy juyoung ok terms and conditions

carl phillips this far in

christian wiman hard night: “the ice storm”

cathy linh che split: “the german word for dream is traume”

linda hogan when the body

david trinidad the late show: “a regret”

omotara james my mother’s nerves are shot--

marie howe the good thief: “death, the last visit”

kaveh akbar portrait of the alcoholic floating in space with severed umbilicus

donald britton in the empire of the air: “italy”

snehal vadher figures in a windswept language

jane wong after preparing the alter, the ghosts feast feverishly

ofelia zepeda ocean power: “deer dance exhibition”

lucille clifton good woman: poems and a memoir, 1969-1980: “the lost baby poem”

emily pérez dworzec

ouyang jianghe mother, kitchen (tr. austin woerner)

cathy linh che i walked through the trees, mourning

sam willets tourist

ed bok lee whorled: “if in america”

dan gerber marriage

matthew rohrer poem written with issa [“a friend emails”]

richard siken crush: “litany in which certain things are crossed out”

april bernard anger

claudia rankine citizen: “you are in the dark, in the car...”

barbara hamby letter to a lost friend

joy harjo everybody has a heartache: a blues

cathy linh che go forget your father

kofi

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

From Matthew Rohrer's book, Surrounded by Friends.

[LitBowl]

[embraceyouropacities]

“Poem for Friends” — Matthew Rohrer

On someone else’s estate running through it to avoid the outdoor wedding there is a grave in a little copse of trees so panting  we hide out there

How beautiful to lie down not to be the dead ones there whose eye sockets are filled with dirt nothing is theirs anymore you pass me a crumpled joint

swaying a little like a poem while black birds wail in the air and the commuter train wails all we have to do is make tacos tonight and be friends

[poem-today]

A poem by Matthew Rohrer

There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier

There is absolutely nothing lonelier than the little Mars rover never shutting down, digging up rocks, so far away from Bond street in a light rain. I wonder if he makes little beeps? If so he is lonelier still. He fires a laser into the dust. He coughs. A shiny thing in the sand turns out to be his.

Matthew Rohrer

Matthew Rohrer writes: I was coming out of a bar in Manhattan in the rain at night. I felt lonely. Then I thought: there is nothing lonelier than that little guy up there on Mars, never shutting down. And if he’s beeping up there, how much lonelier still, that no one can hear it. Still, I like to think the engineers designed him to beep.

[manwalksintobar]

The Ants // Matthew Rohrer

Nothing is more important to the ant whose exoskeleton has been breached by mushroom spores that are now controlling his nervous system and compelling him to climb to a high leaf only to die and release the spores over the whole forest than this poem about his sad plight.

Otherwise his life is meaningless. Forage. Chew. Recognize by scent. Abdication of the will. A huge wind that comes and sweeps his fellows off the grass. When he dies up there in the treetops the mushroom grows right out of his head and breaks open lightly dusting the afternoon.

Everything he thought he was here on Earth to do has been left undone. Through the trees the spores move on their sinister ways. I put down the science magazine written for elementary school kids in which I have briefly disappeared.

[nsantand]

Matthew Rohrer – Não há absolutamente nada mais solitário

Não há absolutamente nada mais solitário / do que o pequeno Mars Rover, (...)

Não há absolutamente nada mais solitáriodo que o pequeno Mars Rover,sempre em funcionamento, escavandorochas, tão longe da Bond streetsob a chuva suave. Será queele emite pequenos bipes? Se sim,ele é ainda mais solitário. Ele dispara laserna poeira. Ele engasga. Algo brilhante na areia revela-se ser dele. Trad.: Nelson Santander There Is Absolutely Nothing Lonelier There is absolutely nothing…

[razorsadness]

As Matthew Rohrer put it, “I must learn to say the things I never intended to say,” and then I want to add: I also want to learn to say all the things I intended to say— intended and unintended in the very same breath. This seems to me a power,

inherent in language itself, to make and re-make, to vision and re-vision, to act and re-act to the world as it throbs, or culture as thesis-antithesis- synthesis, fear and some trembling necessary and full. Barbaric yawps! Walking home drunk the other night, I said a bunch of weird, good things

and you did, too and while it’s hard to remember exactly what the shadows of what and the feeling still linger—even now, even sober—we were so fired up, because the night was so ridiculously in flower, so and so and me and you

electrified and shocking, terrific and true, and we were laughing together, leaving our strung-out presence like presents around the city, me an amplifier and you a defender. One thing I definitely remember is talking earlier—earlier when?—earlier ever

about how you convince everyone that you’re talking directly to them, and I convince everyone I’m dangerous with speed—it’s true I like being worn out, even when I read, and sometimes, too, overwhelmed and even panicked (though mostly after the fact). When experience kicks me

and everything turns black, or polka-dot, or mechanical bull or post-avant, my teeth in the trees my blood on the windshield, it's just an indication that I need to act decisively—to do something for myself with myself and keep living. It's the best I can do for the people who'd miss me,

but more importantly for the ones who I would miss terribly. Life is overwhelming for good and for ill. But what isn't overwhelming? Beauty is overwhelming. Data is overwhelming. Text and the devil and the heavens overwhelming.... How to live and what to do? To make sense all the time (or maybe ever)

in this life/of this life is a sham. Nothing is perfectly nailed to the wall. I want as much as possible for the carnival of what is. Better worn out and wary, than a mannequin pretending. "The slightest loss of attention leads to death," said Frank O'Hara. I say: Be prepared for the darkness

when it takes you, but stay alive and stay light for as long as you can.

—Matt Hart, from "Amplifier to Defender" (Sermons and Lectures Both Blank and Relentless, Typecast Books, 2012)

[lissielives]

You start to cry, because you will never be able to demonstrate that your love for her is your powersource, it is a glowing rod in your chest; because people die without ever knowing simple things about themselves. from Light Music Matthew Rohrer

[s3cret-in-your-throat]

How beautiful to lie down

not to be the dead ones there

whose eye sockets are filled with dirt

nothing is theirs anymore

- Matthew Rohrer, "Poem for Friends"

[havingapoemwithyou]

credo by Matthew Rohrer

[finishinglinepress]

NEW FROM FINISHING LINE PRESS: In The Thaw of Day by Cynthia Good

On SALE now! Pre-order Price Guarantee: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/in-the-thaw-of-day-by-cynthia-good/

Good’s #poetry collection chronicles the speaker’s escape from an #abusive #marriage and coming to terms with trauma experienced over the course of a lifetime, and the journey to #recover while finding deep meaning and joy in the smallest things earth offers: …the ocean, sky, dirt and air, and space // between my cells… Believing it’s essential to express what burns inside us, even at the risk of ridicule, the author grapples with big questions including impermanence and why we are here, how the wind off the Seine /crawls under your scarf. The black / and white photo from the museum, / an image of Basquiat between us / tells me Basquiat is dead, / and in this photo, all of us are memory. The collection is bursting with the natural world, filled with whales and wild mushrooms, taking the reader from Paris and Mexico to Los Angeles, Atlanta and the moon. The book looks at #grief following the loss of the poet’s long marriage, the death of her mother, and her father to suicide, while always finding something to be thankful for, even if it’s, the way a leaf / still shudders after the wind.

Cynthia Good is an award-winning author, journalist and former TV news anchor. She has written six books including Vaccinating Your Child, which won the Georgia Author of the Year award. She launched two magazines, Atlanta Woman and the nationally distributed PINK magazine for women in business. Good’s poems have appeared in many acclaimed publications such as Green Hills Literary Lantern, The Penman Review, Awakenings, and Terminus Magazine.

PRAISE FOR In The Thaw of Day by Cynthia Good

An occasion for celebration, Cynthia Good’s lively and enlivening new collection dazzles with lyric precision, emotional control and lucid beauty. Good’s observations about the natural world and the life of the body are delicious with detail and gritty with the wisdom of a life lived deeply and well.

–Deborah Landau, author of Skeletons

Cynthia Good’s poems beautifully and roughly navigate all of life’s travails—grief, love, the body, motherhood, daughterhood. All the while, the speaker in these poems remains steadfast to life and survival. These poems are imagistic, lyrically plain spoken, and wise.

–Victoria Chang, author of The Trees Witness Everything

Cynthia Good’s IN THE THAW OF DAY is a book of such precision. Her close, intimate descriptions of the remembered scent of her father’s cigarettes, or caring for injured snails, or the memory that inheres in a painting is the heart of these poems. One of the poems begins “I wanted to tell you about….” and that spirit really animates this whole collection. Good wants to tell us so many things, so many of them tiny, beautifully ornate, and so many of them about her father, who haunts these poems. Without being too dogmatic, this book moves from the past to the present in a way that leaves the reader in touch with a melancholy and beautiful planet that has room, if only briefly, for everything.

–Matthew Rohrer, author of The Sky Contains the Plans

Please share/repost #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #read #poems #literature #poetry

[firstfullmoon]

Matthew Rohrer, “Credo” [ID in ALT]

[watney]

[manwalksintobar]

every which way but the luminous fork // Matthew Rohrer

A man drives down the highway in a semi with an orangutan and a luminous fork. Each week he and the orangutan run around a different truckstop café like maniacs when the maple syrup kicks in. They pretend to wrestle with a highway patrolman and then film this and put it on TV. Meanwhile, the luminous fork lies patiently in the glove compartment. The man promised his son he would use the luminous fork at the Big Texan Steakhouse, where you get a free 72-ounce steak if you eat it in one hour. And the luminous fork had always wanted to see the Cadillac sculpture garden. When they get there the cars have been defaced and have no chrome. The orangutan is sick from a convenience-store sandwich and the luminous fork notices for the first time how much hair the orangutan’s lost. “The lullaby of the passing traffic!” the orangutan demands in his own way. He is sick all over the dash. The man lets him sleep in the truck, and takes the fork into the Big Texan, where the decor is garish, to no one’s surprise. His waitress looks concerned when he takes the fork out of his pocket. She thinks: it’s a plot to cheat on a steak!