Weekly Edition #31
Art by Holly Stapleton
I Have a Time Machine by Brenda Shaughnessy
But unfortunately it can only travel into the future
at a rate of one second per second,
which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant
committees and even to me.
But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next
moment and to the next.
Thing is, I can't turn it off. I keep zipping ahead—
well not zipping—And if I try
to get out of this time machine, open the latch,
I'll fall into space, unconscious,
then desiccated! And I'm pretty sure I'm afraid of that.
So I stay inside.
There's a window, though. It shows the past.
It's like a television or fish tank.
But it's never live; it's always over. The fish swim
in backward circles.
Sometimes it's like a rearview mirror, another chance
to see what I'm leaving behind,
and sometimes like blackout, all that time
wasted sleeping.
Myself age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment
at having lost a library book.
Myself lurking in a candled corner expecting
to be found charming.
Me holding a rose though I want to put it down
so I can smoke.
Me exploding at my mother who explodes at me
because the explosion
of some dark star all the way back struck hard
at mother's mother's mother.
I turn away from the window, anticipating a blow.
I thought I'd find myself
an old woman by now, traveling so light in time.
But I haven't gotten far at all.
Strange not to be able to pick up the pace as I'd like;
the past is so horribly fast.
Other poems I read this week: (Read the full poem in the link)
"I love aroused rooms inviting us to lie down as their roof
I love lying on my side, casting a shadow for a straight line
casting a string of villages for a voluptuous body
I want the mole nearest your lip
to know, this is my promise"
"Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up
from the pages of books and from your own heart.
Be still and listen to the voices that belong
to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields.
There are songs and sayings that belong to this place,
by which it speaks for itself and no other."
-2007, VI [“It is hard to have hope”] by Wendell Berry
"your country has over 200 dialects
that’s over 200 ways
to say Love
to say family
to say I am a song
to say I belong to something
that does not want to kill me
& does not want to siphon the gold from my
blood or the stories from my bones"
"There are two sides to every story,
Mother said, but since I'm the adult
& you're the child, only my side counts.
Yours Will count, too, one of these days,
but right now your job is to listen,
so when it's your turn to be a parent
& your child tries to interrupt you
while you're speaking, you'll know what to say."
-Don't Talk Back by Hal Sirowitz
"where are my gangs,
my teams, my mislaid sisters?
all the women who could have known me,
where in the world are their names?"
-the lost women by Lucille Clifton
"When I was a kid, I was excited about carrots,
their spidery neon tops in the garden’s plot.
And so I ripped them all out. I broke the new roots
and carried them, like a prize, to my father
who scolded me, rightly, for killing his whole crop.
I loved them: my own bright dead things.
I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong.
Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented
the contentment of the field. Why must we practice
this surrender? What I mean is: there are days
I still want to kill the carrots because I can."
-I Remember the Carrots by Ada Limón
Recommended Listening:
Ultimatum - Disclosure ft. Fatoumata Diawara
Tiny Desk Concert: Ólafur Arnalds (Oh my!)
Histoire naturelle by Jonathan Personne
Curls - Bibio
Lost Love Letters - Fog Lake Drops of Honey - Erik Kufs
Links of the Week:
Is There Anything Else I Can Help You with Today? by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Watch: Marimba Challenge Cup Winner
Interview: Tom Gauld and his Shareable Collection, ‘The Snooty Bookshop’
The Cleveland Museum of Art’s releases over 30k images of public domain works
Epoch (what a concept for a video. phew!)
Lexicity (The first and only comprehensive index for ancient language resources on the internet)
Also, if you're in Bangalore in mid-February, go attend the multi-disciplinary festival Unbox 2019, a celebration of collaborations at the intersection of design, social innovation, culture, technology, art and enterprise.
The Alipore Post subscribers get a special 10% discount if you use the code UNBOXALIPORE10 on checkout. :)
