Weekly Edition #48

Jun 17, 2019

Art by Gustav Klimt

Five Hundred Years by Nick Flynn

In
sleep our hands find each other. Outside,
the street, paved with bottlecaps– yesterday
a parked car glistened, now– a mere scatter

of green shattered glass. You murmur

from a dream, I feel
night press on my chest, like the earth
tamping the dead back into earth. If we had five

hundred years to work this out,
if after all that time

we remembered, if we still cared, if we
had fingers to dig, if there were shovels,

we could find each other, blood
compressed to rubies, lungs to slate,

fingers gone yellow, blue leaking
from your eyes, my shoes, side-

by-side beneath the window
as if I had simply
disintegrated out of them, yours,

toe-to-hell, as though you struggled.

Other poems I read last week:

"The day begins with a fog
that will not unroll. The weather
is falling everywhere, everywhere
we sit the grass bleeds to the touch.

What we have not yet said will not get said.
When you unzip your dress
a thousand insects run for cover,
the goldenrod breaks into a slow swoon.

Your touch is like the touch
of the wasp undulating in its nest,
your tongue the quick lash
of a mirror breaking on the wrist.

Everything else can wait, but will not." -Last Meeting by Ira Sadoff
"I’m not going to cry all the time
nor shall I laugh all the time,
I don’t prefer one “strain” to another.
I’d have the immediacy of a bad movie,
not just a sleeper, but also the big,
overproduced first-run kind. I want to be
at least as alive as the vulgar." -My Heart by Frank O'Hara

"Marc says the suffering that we don’t see

still makes a sort of sound—a subtle, soft
noise, nothing like the cries of screams that we
might think of—more the slight scrape of a hat doffed
by a quiet man, ignored as he stands back
to let a lovely woman pass, her dress
just brushing his coat. Or else it’s like a crack
in an old foundation, slowly widening, the stress
and slippage going on unnoticed by
the family upstairs, the daughter leaving
for a date, her mother’s resigned sigh
when she sees her. It’s like the heaving
of a stone into a lake, before it drops.
It’s shy, it’s barely there. It never stops." -The Sound by Kim Addonizio

"We were driving to your funeral
and our father was not crying
because he has a way
of tying ribbons around grief.
It was the year we learned
the piercing that prefaces the blood
holds the most delicate of darknesses.
Then it was the year we opened
all our faucets & waited for the sea
to bleed to death. Then it was the year
we set fire to your mitt. Then, suddenly
the year we started to believe
every thorn was just a bridge.
Then the year all we talked about
was boxing. Then the year
my stomach hurt all year, & then
the year no one spoke of you.

If there were an antonym for suicide
we could all choose when to be born.
I would have been born after that day
so I could not remember you.
So my fingers would stop pointing
at all the things that aren’t there." -1999 by Kevin Gonzales