Weekly Edition #7
Ode to Your Plants by Jon Lemay
I had every intention of keeping your plants alive.
I remember how much you laughed when I said,
I can barely take care of myself, for God’s sake,
let alone another living thing—because you knew
it was true. I realized a month after you died
that your father had taken them back to New York
along with everything else of yours. In their absence, I noticed
how much sunlight streams through our kitchen window.
I wish I had left a note to your father.
Feel free to leave the plants here, I should have written.
I can keep them alive. I’ll learn.
Art by Yelena Bryksenkova
Other poems I enjoyed reading this week: (read the full poem in the links)
"We might be fifty, we might be five,
So snug, so compact, so wise are we!
Under the kitchen-table leg
My knee is pressing against his knee.
Our shutters are shut, the fire is low,
The tap is dripping peacefully;
The saucepan shadows on the wall
Are black and round and plain to see."
-Camomile Tea by Katherine Mansfield
"I am taking this in, slowly,
taking it into my body:
this grief. How slow
the body is to realize.
You are never coming back." -Slowly by Donna Masini
"I want to tell you:
while you do your sheepish, poor-me routine,
your victim-in-distress sighing,
poor people are being murdered,
prisoners are being zapped with fifty-thousand volts
of electricity to make them behave.
O hollow-hearted, New Age activist that you are,
tell us in your poetry how cooly you’ve risked
your life helping refugees cross the border."
-Set This Book On Fire! by Jimmy Santiago Baca
"There is no end to ego,
with its museum of disappointments.
I want to take my neighbors into the garden
and show them: Here is consolation.
Here is your pity. Look how much seed it drops
around the sparrows as they fight.
It lives alongside their misery.
It glows each evening with a violent light." -Happiness by Paisley Rekdal
Recommended Listening:
This Winter by Morning Mourning Visse - José González Like Sugar - Chaka Khan Houses - Elyse Weinberg (with Neil Young) Song Exploder: Yo La Tengo Love, A Mixtape
Links of the Week:
Wong Ping: Jungle of Desire + 33 Oscar-Qualified Animated Shorts // Dust Kid' (Munjiai)
Where is my mind, Tracy J Lee Botanical: A Collection of Impressionistic Plant Specimens Captured Against Greenhouse Glass Frank Lloyd Wright's 10 traits that every artist needs.
Poorly Drawn Lines FTW! :)
Last thing, The Alipore Post is on Instagram + Facebook.
Okbye.