Login
If George Eliot was interested in religious coexistence, she was also interested in unbelief.
The post B-Sides: George Eliot’s “The Spanish Gypsy” appeared first on Public Books.
Image by NASA via Flickr
He — earth-bound vessel
that he is, god that he
is not — instructed me to write, and so I wrote
∙
∙
∙
∙
∙
∙
∙
I gave you this voice, and you’ve used it to find me. Fool.
— Geffrey Davis, “Like a River”
∙
∙
∙
∙
∙
∙
∙
Like peanut ochre
Like penny grass
Like five-day sentience
Like armor brass
Like evening sprout
Like double mouth
Like lips abeyant
You talk to me
Before I Knew You
Before I knew you I dreamed of you.
In the desert’s glassy dark, your body spread out
on thread grass, I raised a handful of snow
to your lips. You who will teach me silence
in the full light of day, who will take the words
from my mouth with bare hands. Joyful
and at the same time, wretched —
this is what you’ll do to me.
By morning you’ve disappeared,
the sand has settled in my black hair
and I know you well.
Conversation / Incantation
Faceless angel, look at me —
you say you want to run from men
but I am still here.
You are a dream of yourself: a metaphor
for language. Pale in comparison.
For many years, I will live free of guilt
and the lies it makes of our body.
Look, there is something in your hand —
an empty beer bottle
or a dead fish. The earth
is wild with coincidence.
I must confess: once, I held a white dove
by the throat, tore its wings
from its body.
It’s simple, I want to know what violence means.
Compassion
does what it says. And I know this wing which has carried me
can also carry you
if you let it.
Forever the Body / Forever the Self
And some days I fear that if nobody saw me I would not exist.
If I had a story to tell trust
it would not be mine. Patches of darkness,
sky as cloudy marble
tabletop over which we eat and drink. My dear
epicurean, let me scrawl a red ribbon across your throat
with wine.
Let us lock the windows of memory
with the iron shackles of faith.
Forever the body.
Forever the self.
Whatever you think of me now, know
that I have been much more and much less.
Sometimes I forget — and are you not guilty
of this yourself? —
Raphael’s Madonna, beautiful in her crown
of gold leaves, was in fact painted for nobody.
In the painting, the baby Jesus hands a rose to a child
clothed in wolf skin as Mary looks on, cautiously.
Having brought myself before god I bring myself
before you —
my skin burning like the shed skin of a desert snake.
Fields of Indigo
I am scared of what you’ll do to me.
Once I came to you with a fever. You took off
my glasses, spread sesame oil
along the contours of my face
then handed me a cup of dead wasps
and told me to drink. Perhaps I never really knew
what you promised: paradise nothing more
than learning how to draw the bars of my own cage.
It sounds harmless, like a lamb suddenly emerging
from the bush. And what will they say
of our journey? No matter.
How you crawled through fields of indigo
to tell me your secret
as if crawling back to my arms
from the afterlife.
walk toward my voice
What do you want to say, Simon? Light the paper
lanterns
and let them go
this measure of darkness, this ridiculous
ransom.
It’s only the second time you’ve found me
shirtless, walking through each room
a plate brimming with water
balanced on both palms.
The light of the fire has so much
to say to the water
and already I’ve forgotten who you are.
Photo by E. Diop / Unsplash Autumn. The perfect place for a homeland —
dilapidated, thick, stocky.
The wasteland of a deserted construction site
overgrown with magnificent weeds,
decorated with fainted stair flights to the heaven,
unfinished, unaccomplished like teenage poetry.
Lumps of concrete with rusty gristle of reinforcement rods.
Patrols of big-eyes, nostalgic dogs,
which are stuck between their melting love to the man
and progressing faith in the wolf.
There’s neither politics nor culture here,
only solid primordial AWOL.
Here both angels and chimeras
lose their useless wings.
Here the scraggy baby dragons of yellow maples
are barely pinned to the goosebumped space
with black pins of rooks,
and the wind licks the stamps of sorrow —
empty, damp windows.
Photo by Rene Böhmer / Unsplash
My parents were scheduled to divorce on Valentine’s Day.
I was there in the beginning, sat next to my grandmother,
in her teal blue dress and hot combed strands. As a rule,
she refused to appear unrefined. In a warm church in Trinidad,
a wedding evening in hurricane season, we wore our Sunday best,
my mother and I, in matching white lace and wide eyes.
Why shouldn’t this bond be marked by an angel with an arrow,
tasked to put an end to the sorrow of suffering alone
love meant to be shared. The sugar apples of my mother’s cheeks,
rouged more than the red carnation pinned to my father’s smokey
blue suit. I search his handsome jaw and boyish grin for clues. We keep
the happy secrets of these fleeting Trade winds, in the family album,
so old, the memory and the artifact have become one. Pigment sealed
to plastic for eternity, a reality that cannot be undone or loosened,
only destroyed. Marriage is a valentine that misses me
though I have imagined myself able to walk up the aisle,
if not back down it, which is partly why I am disappointed
when the court rescheduled without a reason. Perhaps
the judge on the docket, newly in love, refused to chance the karma
of divorce court. I can say it now, these years later,
I was eager to be asked to witness our legal dissolution.
The annihilation of vows that were broken. Tell me
what’s louder: the pluck of the arrow, or the bang of the gavel,
or the everlasting gaze of the firstborn daughter.
Original illustration by Anne Le Guern
miscarriage 9/24/2021
A cheap print of an aspen grove
In the exam room — it’s not bad,
Cross-lines of bark, long straight lines for the trunks,
Brown and black and gold in the foreground,
Receding to white in the back — the farthest trees, then,
Just a line or two, a white line suggesting
The whole tree.
If I were teaching, say, a child, say
You, I could tell you that it’s called
Abstraction, the line suggests the tree but isn’t,
See the shapes the lines make in your head and it’s a tree
But also isn’t, faint and fainter. But if
You and I were in a forest, if we were in a birch forest in the snow,
Then it’d be a tree and still a tree, a real tree, even if it was so far away we couldn’t see it,
So far so white against the terrible white cold, a tree, a real tree
Just so small and white against the snow it disappeared.
Abstract Trio by Paul Klee / Artvee
What happens when fantastic
becomes fan-fucking-tastic
was not something I considered
until I tried to learn Tagalog,
the f-bomb in this case an infix,
element that sounds vaguely criminal
but is old as fuck itself.
Motherfucker on the other hand’s
much younger — you low-down mother-
fuckers Sidney Wilson wrote to
the Tennessee Draft Board in 1918
can put a gun in our hands
but who can take it out? Black soldiers
like Pvt. Wilson fought in the Philippines
twenty years earlier & before that saved
Roosevelt’s skin at San Juan Hill.
Before the Spaniards they fought Indians:
Kiowa. Comanche: whose children were forced
to forget numu tekwapu — the Comanche
for Comanche — in English-only schools.
Tagalog agglutinates. Stems
glom tense & tone
like coconut flakes on rice balls.
Kain / eat becomes kumain / will eat
by subsuming um (in English a sound
of uncertainty). Mamatay / perish
fibrillates to mamamatay —
one day you will die.
The infix marks the shift: ma,
as though to go from death
the infinitive to death as future tense
one need only bury their mother.
Original art by Pedro Gomes
After “En La Galleria” (1991) by Santiago Carbonell
Finally at the gallery, the couple (all fiction of them),
she in that white bustier, he with the cutout
look of a dandy, his fedora as if caught in dreams
of another century; she with that thick black
belt made to hold the waist in, the one that will
grow with the truth, and the red corduroy, and her
body doing that thing, you know, one hip going up
and the other down, to look alluring. When the viewer
is the art and the art is me or my tribe, this is how
we blacks are framed, lurking in charcoal lines
and untidily fragmented, the lines random,
and the work to reflect reality undermined by
the shifting forces of our century. This is not art,
this is the slightly open curtain, the window looking
out to a dark wet night, and I am filled with the burden
of sorrow of the kind that a man has no words for, no words
to describe the inexplicable fear that his love has changed
her mind and chosen to place every single one
of his canvasses in the cellar. Her lurid walls
are now covered with the random art she’s picked up
at yard sales; and she gives no explanations for this,
though he asks and asks in so many different ways.
It is not you and me standing together before the wall —
those are fictions as I said before. Of course, it is
us in the way that we colonize art, and for every crack
curving down the wall I see a loose strap of a dress
dangling delicately and nakedly from your shoulder.
We live in a world of stains, a world of broad
strokes and thin lines, and the masks of despondence.
Illustration by Anne Le Guern I’m afraid of what’s beyond the dishes
we wash in retrieved lake water. The knowledge
that pines keep private. The sap you hide
in urns over skin is the world I seek.
The way it knows itself.
The way it sustains despite the unsustainable.
I tell you of the hummingbirds enslaved
people in an enslaved country kept in cages.
Outside they dart from feeder to feeder.
They protect the feeders they claim.
Intruders are pierced chased left to die alone
as chairs without people rock on the porch.
All of the clean dishes could
fall pieces on the pine floor.
I’m looking at the paper hummingbirds
stuck to the spice shelf. They are
blue creased strange beneath
coriander cardamom cumin.
The girl who made them is now a woman
afraid of hummingbirds: their blueness wild
wings what they know.
You ask what is broken?
I walk to the porch.
I walk to the lake.
I walk.
I walk.
I walk.
Illustration by Anne Le Guern Spanish
English
I look in the mirror
I look at the Indian women
I look at the colonizer
I spread my legs
and shove
flowers
cactus
animal
god
the cosmos inside me
I explain to the god
with a female bird’s face
that I have nothing inside
that it’s just a creator’s fantasy
that in me no one can be born
because nothing survives
***
exiled
illiterate
errant
b o r d e r l i n e
I want to be
gold india morena
Una india
who makes them
forget my history
and a part of yours
Bird doesn’t want to be god
or to have the face of a bird
She has existential attacks
and would like to read anything
other than a calendar
She wants to dance this night
of skulls without flags
to smoke on buds in bloom
between seas
cactus and desert
between jungle and dew
***
To lie outstretched beneath heavenly bodies
of ancient gods
and reject her forefathers
I called her
Ngünechen & Quetzalcoatl
Negrita Ñaña Compa
We speak in tongues
of sad days
and of hunger
a hunger that can only
be spoken
when you are hungry
She didn’t want to be an ancestor
I tell her that I didn’t either
And so we say our goodbyes
listening to songs
on this old wurlitzer
that snuffs the glow of war
in this final dance.
By Craig Stewart Johnson.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Craig Stewart Johnson is a visual and audio artist based in Gateshead, UK. His artwork focuses on the detail and nuance of everyday textures and places. Developing from an interest in underground music, there is an obsession with the aesthetic aspects of diy culture. Analog methods of production are an ever-present inspiration, the imperfections flowing through the work informing a search for beauty and catharsis in decay. He has exhibited at various location in the UK and further afield, as well as having multiple sound works published though record labels such as Kirigirisu Recordings, Crow Versus Crow and Modern Concern. His mostly recent publication of collage work, Dead Negatives, was published by Paper View Books, Portugal. He is currently a postgraduate researcher at Northumbria University researching self-organisation and DIY culture in underground experimental music.
Article tags
Original illustration by Anne Le Guern
The name of God is sufficient
for me. Merciful, beneficent — I want
to want little else. I shouldn’t
say that I’m there yet, wanting little
else but the name, not when
nothing flusters me like an image,
Mount Tamalpais in acrylic salmon
and sage, the hue, the brown eddies
of my own eyes, every staggering sight —
but I hush them, my zealous eyes. I recite.
Said the angel recite in the name
of your lord. I come from
a people who begin with the name,
who absent the face, who efface
and know it faith. Who say bismillah
before breathing, before leaving. The name
is in the name, ism, in the name,
in Arabic. You see, I don’t see
to believe, don’t desire a babbling bush
or shrinking sea-halves. I am trying
not to worship my eager eyes.
Doesn’t the mantis shrimp see more
color than any other creature alive?
A poet says our long gone loves remain
lateral, unseen but quiet beside us, perhaps.
I admire that belief in a love that doesn’t leave.
Here-ism, or remainism, more convincing
an -ism that beckons than inflicts
a rift. I believe in the weakness of my species,
the lure of our many malevolent -isms.
I won’t name them. For love of the name,
I learn instead all that I can of what grows
softly, without seeking praise.
O linden, lichen, mulberry underripe,
fragrant fisted peony. O flower medicinal,
emollient aloe, I call you by your name,
bismillah, O divine unseen whose name
I know, ism of isms, remain here,
invisible and I will call to you, crouched,
recognizing each green
by touch by name by sense unseen.
Original illustration by Anne Le Guern Build your life on white, on silence and on stillness.
It is quite a distance: my childhood to the prison where you are no longer.
It was explained to me that, for a time, you lived there.
What you did there was not living.
What you were there,
or here, or anywhere, you are no longer.
Wide mouth of the faucet shrieking white.
White onion. Two white onions.
White porcelain dishes atop white linen on the floor.
We are eating a fine meal of what remains of you.
You, who light the evening of this life.
Tonight it is the white dove who you loved.
Her cooing assuring me that you— if only, for a little while— were…
That is, you— if only, for a little while—were. You were.
Or so, I tell myself. Hope dirtying my fingers.
I am always bartering for what others mouth against:
all that I cannot remember. But the oil is fragrant.
So, I beg.
White stars. Their dead shine brighter.
It cannot be your face I remember.
White kleenex worn like a veil on the playground. White bouquet
of vows so freshly plucked the roots pulsed green.
What did I promise then?
To write out of faith. To write faithlessly.
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
/ with no expression, nothing to express.
I do. I do.
White, then, a benevolence, that offered quiet. Turning to the page,
that is this life. To begin again.
It is quite a distance: from here to the time when you and I will meet.
Can be measured by your palm dreading worship down your back
on a Sunday.
And how sorrow makes me prophetic. White albumen ringing the eye.
Measured by this or other revolutions.
To there, I am being led by a horn.
As sweetly as Israfil’s. As obliquely as Pharoah’s.
For that time, I am making my hands full.
With what I collect, I could play a fugue.
A benevolence.
To begin again.
I look. Everywhere the world is bare bright / bone white.
It’s like creating the world all over again.
This grief for you. Where to put it. How to spell it.
To begin again.
On the floor, a fine meal. For the final time
who touched you? Even the white linen is silent.
White circles of devotion in the air; I am always trying to catch her:
the dove who loved you.
If not her, then I want to catch her white feathered refrain.
If not her white feathered refrain, then the life I see
through the white egg shell I am holding to the light.
If not that life, then the light.
If not you. If not yet you, then… then. I want then.
But when my hands come together, it’s no cage I make.
Only more doves.
Slowly the white dream wrestles to life.
begin
We are no longer waiting for you to come home.
Added: again.
We are waiting to join you.
*The italicized lines are from the following writers: Robert Bresson, Robert Frost, Etheridge Knight, and Kamau Braithwaite. The line, “How sorrow makes me prophetic. White albumen ringing the eye,” is an allusion to the lamenting of Prophet Yaqub in the Qur’an (“He turns away from them, lamenting, “Alas, poor Yusuf!” and his eyes turned white out of the sorrow he suppressed.”).
Original art by Pedro Gomes
–after Khaled Mattawa
The car in front stalls
and the associate who took my order
is consoled by a Xylosma
overshadowing the drive thru.
How many more minutes
until I can eat?
I am too anecdotal to answer.
My soul separates its paradigm
from reminder. The Ramadan
before my sixteenth year,
for my first animal style—
anomalous—
over a tall white tee shirt.
I was sure the devotion
swollen between two ground beef patties
could counteract any anguish
that goaded me towards
professing faith in place of
grief. The French fries—well done
before the storm
and filled with cacophonies—
did not mind the line
nor my chasmic appetite.
A Neapolitan milkshake came
to tongue-tie the grumblings
I made amidst the rush,
omniscience broken once more,
for another chance at fabricating
freedom. A few minutes left
I say. A few figments of despair
stripping everything
that would make me whole
to whom—I do not know.
By Jules Sprake.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jules Sprake has experimented with forms of printmaking and poetry, often starting with photographs of buildings or discarded objects to produce work that focuses on dis/connections between the parts. She is interested in the use of traditional printmaking techniques such as etching, cyanotype, salt print or lithography to process these photographs and poems. Sprake has recently exhibited from a series of work, Densities of Blank, at Impact 12: The Printmaker’s Voice and is a mentor with Koestler Arts. She has performed work for the European Poetry Festival and Printed Poetry Project.
The best poets tend to trouble conventions, including those they find necessary.
The post “Maybe it wasn’t a Narrative at All”: Three Poetry Collections appeared first on Public Books.
In this lovely essay at The Millions, Aidan Ryan explores his editing process, and the abandoned, unused writing that he’s accumulated and compiled into a “Miscellaneous” document over the years. Ryan shares inspiring examples of how authors write, build their worlds and the stories of their lives, and continue to draw from and tap into existing work as if dipping into a vat of bread starter. In an anecdote about playing with Legos as a child, he beautifully describes how he liked to tell stories with all of his toys and figurines, from different universes — “I was only interested in the story of everything.” This sentiment is reflected in his insights on writing and editing, but also waiting — the act of putting language aside, but still keeping it close, so that “everything remain[s] possible.”
I think about a folder in the cloud, the one called “Writing.” And the folders within it, branching universes: “Poems” and “Essays,” and within that “Outtakes,” and within that the file called “Miscellaneous,” now over a hundred pages. And I think of the stories that as a child I told and retold in bright plastic—before I found a world of words that I never had to pack away.
By Jesse Kominers.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jesse Kominers lives in Peniche with his daughter, Elsa. His first book, ancestress, is forthcoming from FATHOM.
FreshRSS