#lynda hull

[whisperthatruns]

Night Waitress

Reflected in the plate glass, the pies look like clouds drifting off my shoulder. I’m telling myself my face has character, not beauty. It’s my mother’s Slavic face. She washed the floor on hands and knees below the Black Madonna, praying to her god of sorrows and visions who’s not here tonight when I lay out the plates, small planets, the cups and moons of saucers. At this hour the men all look as if they’d never had mothers. They do not see me. I bring the cups. I bring the silver. There’s the man who leans over the jukebox nightly pressing the combinations of numbers. I would not stop him if he touched me, but it’s only songs of risky love he leans into. The cook sings with the jukebox, a moan and sizzle into the grill. On his forehead a tattooed cross furrows, diminished when he frowns. He sings words dragged up from the bottom of his lungs. I want a song that rolls through the night like a big Cadillac past factories to the refineries squatting on the bay, round and shiny as the coffee urn warming my palm. Sometimes when coffee cruises my mind visiting the most remote way stations, I think of my room as a calm arrival each book and lamp in its place. The calendar on my wall predicts no disaster only another white square waiting to be filled like the desire that fills jail cells, the cold arrest that makes me stare out the window or want to try every bar down the street. When I walk out of here in the morning my mouth is bitter with sleeplessness. Men surge to the factories and I’m too tired to look. Fingers grip lunch box handles, belt buckles gleam, wind riffles my uniform and it’s not romantic when the sun unlids the end of the avenue. I’m fading in the morning’s insinuations collecting in the crevices of the building, in wrinkles, in every fault of this frail machinery.

Lynda Hull (1954--1994), Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2006)

[haveyoureadthispoem-poll]

"That / poured-on dress / I lived days // and nights inside, / made love / and slept in, a mesh and slur of zipper // down the back."

Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!

[rustbeltjessie]

Poetry Mamas // April 2019

[razorsadness]

Spell for the Manufacture & Use of a Magic Carpet

When the last commuter trains etch black signatures of departure over tracks and subways glide untroubled through quiet tunnels, find an obscure girl. Let her weave a carpet of white & new wool, the best wool

of the Garment District. Obtain a wand from the Armenian in the hour of the sun when the moon is full & in Capricorn. Go to a park or a rooftop where you'll suffer no disturbance. Spread your carpet facing East & West,

& having drawn a circle to enclose it, hold your wand in the air. Name backward the chain of names from each current of the past into whatever crests foamless toward the future. Invoke the faces abandoned in cloakrooms

of childhood, summoning each discarded voice. Thank each panicked corridor & lucid clinic doorway, blessing the hands that ministered to you for they have carried you to this wild incompletion. Remember them,

shed them in the East & North, to the South & West, raising in turn each of the carpet's corners. Go home. Fold your carpet until you need it. Order your house & remove each dooryard stone.

Wait for a night of full or new moon when open windows free the sleepers' heated breath. On a roof where you'll risk no harm, write with a feather, on a strip of azure parchment, those characters found on page three hundred and seven

in the Dictionary of Angels. Hold the wand in your left hand, the parchment in your right, recite the arcana of angels for each precinct. Thank whatever god you understand, whatever buoys you past

each harbored absence. Ask then to discover the secret thing you seek, gazing out always over the diners & arcades to the cities of New Jersey rising white, small beyond the Palisades.

—Lynda Hull, from Ghost Money

[thecallofthewildgeese]

musical and dangerous as the human heart

I am a city person – the orange glow of lamp posts, the smell of warm asphalt hit by rain, the constant thrumming of cars, these are all more familiar to me than anything natural, anything wild. Which doesn’t mean, of course, that I don’t yearn for all the things Lynda Hull describes in this poem.

The way she describes these swamps, so sensually colorful, makes me almost feel like I’m there, hearing the cicadas, smelling the pungent green of the swamp. It feels deep, wild, beautiful, and dangerous. The multitude of senses she awakens in us reflect the multifaceted relationship with her parents, unpredictable but familiar, people you know most of all and don’t know at all. The natural world is, as she tells us, as musical and dangerous as the human heart.

Insect Life of Florida, by Lynda Hull

In those days I thought their endless thrum was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights. In the throats of hibiscus and oleander I’d see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells enameled hard as the sky before the rain. All that summer, my second, from city to city my young father drove the black coupe through humid mornings I’d wake to like fever parceled between luggage and sample goods. Afternoons, showers drummed the roof, my parents silent for hours. Even then I knew something of love was cruel, was distant. Mother leaned over the seat to me, the orchid Father’d pinned in her hair shriveled to a purple fist. A necklace of shells coiled her throat, moving a little as she murmured of alligators that float the rivers able to swallow a child whole, of mosquitoes whose bite would make you sleep a thousand years. And always the trance of blacktop shimmering through swamps with names like incantations— Okeefenokee, where Father held my hand and pointed to an egret’s flight unfolding white above swamp reeds that sang with insects until I was lost, until I was part of the singing, their thousand wings gauze on my body, tattooing my skin. Father rocked me later by the water, the motel balcony, singing calypso with the Jamaican radio. The lyrics a net over the sea, its lesson of desire and repetition. Lizards flashed over his shoes, over the rail where the citronella burned merging our shadows—Father’s face floating over mine in the black changing sound of night, the enormous Florida night, metallic with cicadas, musical and dangerous as the human heart.

[violettesiren]

In those days I thought their endless thrum was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights. In the throats of hibiscus and oleander

I’d see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells enameled hard as the sky before the rain. All that summer, my second, from city

to city my young father drove the black coupe through humid mornings I’d wake to like fever parceled between luggage and sample goods.

Afternoons, showers drummed the roof, my parents silent for hours. Even then I knew something of love was cruel, was distant.

Mother leaned over the seat to me, the orchid Father’d pinned in her hair shriveled to a purple fist. A necklace of shells

coiled her throat, moving a little as she murmured of alligators that float the rivers able to swallow a child whole, of mosquitoes

whose bite would make you sleep a thousand years.egret in reeds And always the trance of blacktop shimmering through swamps with names like incantations—

Okeefenokee, where Father held my hand and pointed to an egret’s flight unfolding white above swamp reeds that sang with insects

until I was lost, until I was part of the singing, their thousand wings gauze on my body, tattooing my skin.

Father rocked me later by the water, the motel balcony, singing calypso with the Jamaican radio. The lyrics

a net over the sea, its lesson of desire and repetition. Lizards flashed over his shoes, over the rail

where the citronella burned merging our shadows — Father’s face floating over mine in the black changing sound

of night, the enormous Florida night, metallic with cicadas, musical and dangerous as the human heart.

Insect Life of Florida by Lynda Hull

[thensson]

I love you like a beast

The Waves, Virginia Woolf || Insect Life of Florida, Lynda Hull || Ruckus at the Butcher Shop, Arthur John Black || Upside Down, mangonimbus || How to be a Dog, Arthur Kane || Beauty and the Beast, John Dickenson || Little Beast, Richard Siken

[beaningeneralacceptance]

Found this lil ref sketch I did of one of my deckhands so I'll do a lil rant about them

There is Wilder and Wilcox (the twins, referred to as "The Wils") who are the youngest of the crew and also ex-pirates of an unknown group, Justice (around the same age as Edward) and Mad(dox), a viking man from Keraxe (for whom I have yet to settle on a backstory)

Meet Wilcox, a young girl whose magic can expand further than Enizor's and protect the ship's hull from taking damage by adding a magic layer ontop. She and her brother were hanging out at Sailor's Lodge before Lynda arrived from the Stepstones and decided to join her crew, because, well, they needed the money.

The two of them also like to guess what Lynda was before the amnesia and they are completely honest with their opinions and unbothered by what others think

(Some design changes have been made to the hair bangs since then)

[obeetlebeetle]

3, 10, and 20 :3

If you could see any extinct species in the wild, what would it be?

huh. well I'm not typically a dinosaurs guy but IMAGINE seeing a plesiosaur just out there swimming around. like holy shit

What's your favorite invertebrate?

i am so partial to crabs of all kinds, but let's give a special shout out to a particular favorite, the sand flea!!!!

What's your favorite poem or song lyric about nature?

tommy pico's nature poem (REALLY good), lissa kiernan's 'eclogue on decommissioning', ada limón's 'notes on the below', fatimah asghar's 'pluto shits on the universe' (it counts), lynda hull's 'insect life of florida', robert creeley's 'the sound' and 'human song', seamus heaney's XXXI and XXXII, and many many more but I do not currently have access to my bookmarked list of favorite poems. not doing song lyrics bc I would be here all day<3

[insanepoetics]

— Lynda Hull

[jshoulson]

Today’s Poem

Jackson Hotel --Lynda Hull

Sometimes after hours of wine I can almost see the night gliding in low off the harbor down the long avenues of shop windows

past mannequins, perfect in their gestures. I leave some water steaming on the gas ring and sometimes I can slip from my body,

almost find the single word to prevent evenings that absolve nothing, a winter lived alone and cold. Rooms where you somehow marry

the losses of strangers that tremble on the walls like the hands of the dancer next door, luminous

with Methedrine, she taps walls for hours murmuring about the silver she swears lines the building, the hallways

where each night drunks stammer their usual rosary until they come to rest beneath the tarnished numbers, the bulbs

that star each ceiling. I must tell you I am afraid to sit here losing myself to the hour’s slow erasure

until I know myself only by this cold weight, this hand on my lap, palm up. I want to still the dancer’s hands

in mine, to talk about forgiveness and what we leave behind—faces and cities, the small emergencies

of nights. I say nothing, but leaning on the sill, I watch her leave at that moment

when the first taxis start rolling to the lights of Chinatown, powered by sad and human desire. I watch her fade

down the street until she’s a smudge, violent in the circle of my breath. A figure so small I could cup her in my hands.

[on-poetry]

Even then I knew / something of love was cruel, was distant.

Lynda Hull, Insect Life of Florida

[faithfulmuse]

I might have said you'll pay for the wild & reckless hour,

 pay in the currency of sweat and shiver,

   the future squandered, the course

 of years reconfigured, relinquishment so

complete it's more utter than any falling in love. Falling

  instead in flames, burning tiles spiraling to litter

 the courtyards of countless places that will

   never be yours, the fingerprints,

 tossed gloves & glittering costumes, flared

cornices & parapets, shattering panes, smoked out

  or streaked with embers, the tinder of spools, such

 a savage conflagration, stupid edge-game,

   the way junkies tempt death,

 over & over again, toy with it. I might have

told you that. Everything you ever meant to be, pfft,

  out the window in sulphured matchlight, slow tinder

 & strike, possession purely ardent as worship

   & the scream working its way out

 of your bones, demolition of wall & strut

within until you’re stark animal need. That is

  love, isn’t it? Everything you meant to be falls

 away so you dwell within a perfect

   singularity, a kind of saint.

-Lynda Hull, The Only World, from “Suite for Emily”

[rustbeltjessie]

What r some books that r close to uu

Ohhhh this is so difficult. There are so many. So I’m gonna go with whatever pops into my head.

Books I first read a long time ago that are close to me: On the Road by Jack Kerouac, The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, Girl Goddess #9 by Francesca Lia Block, the Dangerous Angels series by Francesca Lia Block, Sassafras Cypress and Indigo by Ntozake Shange, The Early Diaries of Anaïs Nin, Angel Maker by Sara Maitland, Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing by Jamie Schweser & Abram Shalom Himmelstein, Foxfire by Joyce Carol Oates, Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe, Fatal Interview by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings from the Girl Zine Revolution, Memoirs of a Beatnik by Diane Di Prima, Written On the Body by Jeanette Winterson, Pussy King of the Pirates by Kathy Acker, A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, The Night Country by Stewart O’Nan, Why Things Burn by Daphne Gottlieb, Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, etc. etc., etc.

Books I’ve read more recently that already feel close to me: The Girl in the Green Silk Gown by Seanan McGuire, The Wendys by Allison Benis White, frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss, Saint 1001 by Daphne Gottlieb, The Collected Poems of Lynda Hull, Juno Loves Legs by Karl Geary, I Love You So Much It’s Killing Us Both by Mariah Stovall, Some Strange Music Draws Me In by Griffin Hansbury, First Love by Lilly Dancyger, Romantic Comedy by James Allen Hall, Fifty Beasts to Break Your Heart and Other Stories by GennaRose Nethercott. Etc.

[razorsadness]

LYNDA HULL (1954–1994)

Lynda Hull, like Walt Whitman, not to mention Dorothy Parker, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, W. S. Merwin, Anne Waldman, Patti Smith, & Amiri Baraka, was born on the mystifying planet of New Jersey. Hull’s poems dazzle like the lighter fluid inside the sturdy, stainless steel lighter she stole from her father, a spout of spitfire, when she ran away from home at sixteen. “I remember this the way I’d remember a knife against my throat: that night, after the overdose, you told me to count, to calm myself,” Hull writes in “Counting in Chinese,” a poem derived, one assumes, from Hull’s years high as the moon on the lam in Chinatown, married to an outlaw gambler from Shanghai. Taking up her pen & mostly laying down her syringe, Hull was divorced & remarried to a poet by 1984, living on fugitive wonder & figurative language, lines of Hopkins & Akhmatova in Arkansas &, later, Indiana. Hull sometimes read her poems wearing dangling earrings & ankle-strapped high heels with her flapper’s hairdo dyed the same color as her beret. In addition to lighter fluid, Hull’s poems display the properties of rain just before it evaporates. Hull’s poems hold saltwater: “Tide of Voices” in Ghost Money (1986), “Shore Leave” in Star Ledger (1991); “Rivers into Seas” in The Only World (1995), published a year after her death in a car crash in Provincetown a few miles from the beach. When she wakes on the other side, Hull spends the hours she’s not writing poetry mulling figures of wonder with holy wine while listening to fugitive jazz. Sometimes Bird appears with his horn on the cover of Ornithology. Having retained her uncanny ability to channel varieties of sound, Hull scats to Bird like Ella Fitzgerald wiping sweat from her brow. Sometimes ghosts come by. When she was alive, Hull memorized the entirety of “The Bridge,” a fifty-six-page multi-section poem about the Brooklyn Bridge written by Hart Crane, Hull’s favorite poet, in 1923 when he was twenty-three & working as a copywriter in Cleveland, nine years before his suicide. Hart Crane comes by sometimes. Hull regales him with passages of “The Bridge” long into the eternal evening.

—Terrance Hayes, from “Two Tributes” (Boston Review, October 2021)

[whisperthatruns]

At the hour the streetlights come on, buildings turn abstract. The Hudson, for a moment, formal.   We drink bourbon on the terrace and you speak in the evening voice, weighted deep in the throat. They plan to harvest oysters, you tell me, from the harbor by Jersey City, how the waters will be clean again in twenty years. I imagine nets burdened with rough shells, the meat dun and sexual. Below, the river and the high rock where boys each year jump from bravado or desperation. The day flares, turns into itself. And innocently, sideways, the way we always fall into grace or knowledge, we watched the police drag the river for a suicide, the third this year.   The terrible hook, the boy’s frail whiteness. His face was blank and new as your face in the morning before the day has worked its pattern of lines and tensions. A hook like an iron question and this coming out of the waters, a flawed pearl— a memory that wasn’t ours to claim.   Perhaps, in a bedroom by lamplight,   a woman waits for this boy. She may riffle drawers gathering photographs, string, keys to abandoned rooms. Even now she may be leaving,   closing the door for some silence. I need to move next to you. Water sluiced from the boy’s hair. I need to watch you light your cigarette, the flickering of your face in matchlight, as if underwater, drifting away. I take your cigarette and drag from it, touch your hand. Remember that winter of your long fever,   the winter we understood how fragile any being together was. The wall sweated   behind the headboard and you said you felt the rim where dreams crouch and every room of the past. It must begin in luxury— do you think—a break and fall into the glamour attending each kind of surrender. Water must flood the mind, as in certain diseases, the walls between the cells of memory dissolve, blur into a single stream of voices and faces.   I don’t know any more about this river or if it can be cleaned of its tender and broken histories— a tide of voices. And this is how the dead rise to us, transformed: wet and singing,   the tide of voices pearling in our hands. 

Lynda Hull, “Tide of Voices”