February 2012
1 post
1 tag
sonnet to the nurse (after a spinal tap).
So, I’m not going to lie to you, few and faithful readers—I’ve written some poems lately. But lately, I haven’t wanted to put them here. I like them, and they’re part of the project, and of course they’re yours, but a girl must maintain some semblance of mystery.
I’ll put some up again, and soon, I hope.
Three years ago I wrote a series of sonnets to...
January 2012
1 post
1 tag
we must prove i live.
I need your machines the way you ask my date of birth: We must prove I live. I want the sea, I said. I know it’s strange to want the sea, to want grass, a chair, a chest of gauze-white linens when I want the thin metallic clank, the regular constriction, all the knobs that turn the inside out—It’s really all the same—
This afternoon I saw a woman standing in her driveway....
December 2011
4 posts
2 tags
emily dickinson to the rescue.
At a local poetry reading tonight, one of the readers kept making reference to his “chest brain.” I don’t know what that is, but it kept making me think of Michael Dickman’s “Brain Death” or otherwise oft-mentioned brains. And then I just wanted to go read Michael Dickman.
Standing in her house today all I could think of was whether she took a shit every
...
1 tag
permission to stop.
I want it to be done because now it’s hard. We laugh when I say this at lunch or after dark—There’s no light in which this isn’t true—There’s no time I get permission to stop. One likes it best when it doesn’t make sense and one likes it best when it’s the awful I’d rather not say and one knows the facts like the end don’t require...
1 tag
we weren't asleep.
Last night I dreamed we weren’t asleep at the top of the stairs. You put your hand on the back of my neck and I didn’t have to close my eyes—Of course there was a piano and I watched your arms but by then you were far and the stairs were gone and my mother was there and she said she could see why I’d watch your arms.
1 tag
these will go.
Everywhere this half-winter, heat: hum and warm, but not for lack of warm—
They came two weeks ago and once a day I try to say they’re blisters. Once a day I try to say they’re stars—I know stars are hot and red and I know some who say we walk among them and I can walk, if only just—
I push my leg out into nothing, air and nothing and I wish he wouldn’t take...
November 2011
1 post
2 tags
I keep putting things up and taking them down. I think things are changing, and I don’t want them to and I do. In the last week I’ve written three poems that aren’t form, aren’t prose, aren’t punctuated. I gave my manuscript to a few readers, told them it wasn’t finished and felt, just a little bit, like I was lying. I don’t know what’s happening,...
October 2011
3 posts
2 tags
things have been serious around here.
Mostly because I’ve been seriously focusing on the poems you read here. A while ago, I chucked them into a Word file, and after adding each new one as it was written, I realized I had a, well, serious project on my hands. Or in them. So lately it’s been all reading and test readings and line editing and submitting and big decisions and small decisions and generally more attention given...
i must explain.
Blanket, flat sheet, fitted sheet, pillows—I search with fingers for a brown body and legs: Every itch must be explained. I must explain: Resistance is process, the rocking procedure of waves: a system of water, wet sand, wide lap—I want rest, to rest, something in which to rest: a clean bed or your knees. I search with fingers.
1 tag
up until now.
It’s just that I want this all to be right, right in general, not individual comfort—
Fourteen stories below the hotel window a man in a blue canvas jacket is playing classical guitar: Pachelbel, Beethoven, Debussy. I’m falling asleep in a chair, which is something you wrote that up until now I was reading—I want to be the warm unbroken string, the exact width and...
September 2011
5 posts
1 tag
shapes a body leaves.
She always wrote about the shapes a body leaves, the sways of mattresses and cushions and her own matryoshka belly—
I remember the last sun-soaked hour I knew her, legs thrust from her swollen stomach and laughing in the yellow apartment that had been ours that I’d passed from to make room for the girl she was making—We made so many girls then, and after.
I hate the word body,...
1 tag
we were just almost there.
I slept on the plane, bent forward the way I flopped to sleep in the car when I was small—Lindsey, my mother would say when I woke, you slept.
I slept and half-slept and thought we’d landed but we’d just dropped the wheels—We were just almost there, and in the air I wondered what you looked like sleeping.
1 tag
mine, not mine.
I write so many lines I think are mine but are really lines a poet wrote me—Mine, not mine.
These are all the things I want to say, here where I delete the names and have no face (or if I do it’s one I scrubbed clean years ago in a Chicago bathroom, in the age of rain and foreign phone calls)—
There’s no originality in being grown.
1 tag
a body rises.
I’m not saying I want to trade but just for an hour I wish you’d try on my body. I’ll shake it out, hold it up by the corners out in the yard in the sun and you can run in like running behind a sheet on a line—When I see your shape like a shadow I’ll wrap you in mine—
I promise you’ll notice beautiful things: These wrists are cinnamon-scented, the right...
1 tag
look at the pictures.
Write us a letter. I’m going to shock you. I’m going to put needles in. It’s important we know you believe this. You’re cold. You have to be warm. It’s not about placing blame. The shocks will cascade. I’ll start small. We’ll conduct a private review. Don’t look at this. Look at the pictures. There’s a giraffe. It’s hard for us, too. I...
1 tag
the one we imagined.
Sometimes I think of the house without stairs, the one we imagined as I slipped downstairs from the bathroom to bed. Uninterruption seemed such an easy solution, a way for me to cross, to finally close in—
On Friday I listed the places we couldn’t go: the opera, the river, the graveyard across the state line—I tried to explain I’d gone wide, drawn middle distance less to...
August 2011
4 posts
1 tag
we were behind it.
Last night I dreamed my mother could move us. We crouched under the living room table and she wrapped her arms around me. We closed our eyes and dropped through the floor and then air and then we were in hours before, and though time was still passing in the place we’d just left we were behind it—Though we knew where we’d arrive we walked, still, not to remember but to live...
1 tag
pressure drop.
You ask if I’ve asked for armor and I know what you mean but I wish you’d wrap my chest in plates. I don’t say this because it would be strange and because if you did you’d leave yourself a way in.
Yes, I say, I’ve asked.
For months I’ve tried to describe your hands on my face. To do this I’ve traced cheekbones and nose bones and brow bones and skin, and...
1 tag
after someone said erotic poems are body parts and...
I thought I could fit my hand between your shoulder blades—I could spread my fingers wide and still just touch those bones—
You were between—the speaker, then you, then me, and I was only half-listening, staring at what at this point I know, not you but you bent in purpose beneath thin green cotton.
You were between but I would’ve been interruption, my hand making note of...
July 2011
5 posts
Anonymous asked: In my younger and more vulnerable years...
2 tags
the truth and sense.
We’re all concerned with slant these days, as if there is no sense in truth or, after all, the truth and sense are boring.
No one wants to hear I spent an hour in the closet rearranging skirts and blouses, silk and black and what I wanted you to want because the thing to say is all the pink ribbed bows I tied from chest to neck couldn’t contain the fullness I contain.
It’s not...
1 tag
like a daffodil. →
What went on when I suddenly understood him, yellow with ago and disillusioned with the despair that had fired his student days? I unfolded a map of the city, knowing it would never fit in my pocket again. In the very depths of myself I dug a grave—no path leads to it—and there I planted every bulb I ever felt for him. I had the sudden urge to eat postcards of famous paintings. I had a perfectly...
1 tag
Listen
one.
Today, Abbreviated is a year old.
I didn’t have any plans for this project when I started it. It wasn’t even a project—at the least it was an idea, at the most, a hope.
I had surgery at the beginning of this year. I hadn’t wanted it, but after being sick for a long time, I arrived at the choice, finally, with no other choice. At the time, I drew a hard line—my life before the surgery and my life...
June 2011
7 posts
1 tag
We must resist. We must refuse
to disappear.
—Margaret Atwood, from “Roominghouse, Winter”
1 tag
june, no coast.
I bought the black robe because after the night I needed a way to reenter my body at morning—
I was unused to things, too.
This is how you get it, she said. She held one hand as you, the other as me and pressed her palms together.
I want to be clean though nothing was lost.
It became what it became, just as you said.
I imagine you’re sleeping.
The rabbit was running the way we...
3 tags
to the river.
So have you heard about the Missouri River? Here at the edge of it, we’ve been, well, flooded with photos of swelling water, disappearing shoreline, sandbags at the airport and downtown. We talk about the possibility of rain as much as the rain itself. We’re waiting to meet that water, and when we do, because of what we’ve done to it, we’ll regret a little differently.
The...
1 tag
to remember.
I want the world to know I found it in the hollow of your knee—I held it in my mouth before I swallowed to remember that though once I couldn’t speak I speak now with many tongues, that once I thought I knew but now I know with hands of countries.
1 tag
i mean two things.
Today I told her I wanted to tell you.
This is what they mean when they talk about rooftops and whispers: Confess and be relieved.
Instead tomorrow I’ll feel as calm when I say I don’t know if it’s true. I’ll rest in concrete existence—A patio chair, a tomato, the living room carpet’s faint tea-colored continent: Harmless, familiar, one-sided home.
I mean...
1 tag
each from different heights. →
grammatolatry:
“That time I thought I was in love
and calmly said so
was not much different from the time
I was truly in love
and slept poorly and spoke out loud
to the wall
and discovered the hidden genius
of my hands.
And the times I felt less in love,
less than someone,
were, to be honest, not so different
either.
Each was ridiculous in its own way
and each was tender, yes,
...
2 tags
It’s been a strange few months.
I’ve...
May 2011
3 posts
4 tags
encycloshomaha.
As promised, the piece I read at tonight’s Encyclopedia Show: Omaha.
The conversation with my ocular plastic surgeon always goes the same way.
First, he asks for permission to move my hair from in front of my eye.
Has there been any change in your vision? he asks.
No, I say.
Good, he says.
He traces the swollen outer edge of my eye, the wide inner corner, the puffy fat underneath.
...
3 tags
on a notable absence.
I’ve been traveling. I’ve been visited. I’ve been carrying on and listening and trying patience and worrying and kissing and sleeping.
This is, of course, the stuff of poems anyway.
Now I’m working furiously on a piece for the latest installment of Omaha’s installment of the Chicago-based Encyclopedia Show. This will be Omaha’s third ES; the topic is the...
Anonymous asked: 'But, Nelly, if I knocked him down twenty times, that wouldn't make him less handsome or me more so. I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!'
April 2011
6 posts
from caketrain, issue 05. →
Show me how to look forward to these things. To see them and
pursue. It is something to bark like a dog barks. It is something
to wade in the snow like a chicken, lost. My hands do not feel
their fingers, and so my answers come but do not grasp the
reason for their caring. Still they care. They take long baths and
watch the water flush without spinning down a drain dead
center between a world...
2 tags
then the night.
Some things I’ll never say, not because they’re crude or too revealing—I’ve written and rewrite your organs’ heft, my obsession with death—I’m not afraid to say I love you or I don’t. I’ve no notes I wouldn’t leave—Even this—
Tonight my arms became your legs: I had to illustrate you steepled over me to begin saying what I...
encounter. →
grammatolatry:
“I heard a fly buzz when I got married. I heard a song playing lyrics I will always know the way you know something right after it is said. He says I remind him of Piltdown girl. That hurts like hogwash. I take it with a tumbler of salt. She’s fake! Not even a girl, you know. My car needs new brakes…
No, not technically a prose poem, but a fine poem nonetheless, and...
4 tags
five o'clock: 3/22/2011 →
slope27:
The names are strange, seen with new referents: Richard Meier, said one of us (not Richard Meier), meaning the architect. What straight lines he has.
The weather is the reason I’m here. K’s Diner, Orfordville. It’s 37 degrees and we have no heat because the pilot has to be re-lit. But…
So, our first prose poetry link, provided by the kids at Slope. They’re good kids. I...
1 tag
habit.
I know you think I’m too thin. I know this at my desk in the morning, my arm wrapping my waist, hand tucked into my sweater. I’ve a habit of holding my body in place when I’m still and now I feel bones and think of your fingers resting between them.
I don’t know how to prepare. This morning, I ate.
The last two times in the street you’ve been shaking against me....
3 tags
in april.
As could’ve been predicted, I failed the poem-a-day goal for March—but I did end up with eight attempts, and I can’t count that a failure at all. In April, I’m going to continue; this time, I’m not setting a specific goal, and I’m casting the net a little wider. Part of pressing into the prose poem form, as with any writing, has involved a substantial amount...
March 2011
12 posts
1 tag
about birds.
But maybe this is all supposed to be about birds—
My ex-lover wrote a black wing, a sound in the trees: a span without body, second wing, beak—If not the dead, me, or so I assume, before I learned the whole isn’t the sum.
On Saturday half-clothed I took you in hand—You found wisdom mid-swallow—I opened my mouth against your throat to feel it. Beside the bed, a...
100+.
I always meant to post a little note when I hit 100 followers. Today, by some lovely luck and surprise, I ended up on the featured list for tumblr’s poetry tag and have well surpassed 100 followers.
So, to the tumblr poetry editors, thank you. And to all my followers, both new and old, thank you. I’m humbled.
Here’s to more poems.
1 tag
this was the last time.
For the first time he says I can hang my coat on the hook behind the door.
It’s sturdy, he says.
I slide into the chair. It’s a molded piece of cream-colored plastic attached to steel legs attached to a base and it reminds me of an elementary-school desk. A padded armrest is hinged at the side. He pulls it down and I stretch out my arm.
It’s cold out, he says.
He lines up the...
nogiftwithoutaprice asked: hey, I started following you today after stumbling one of your 8tracks mixes. I liked it.
also, I am by no means a 'writer' and cannot provide peer review for your blog like your other followers though I am a 'reader' and I can tell you I enjoy reading it.
so, no questions here really.
also, I am by no means a 'writer' and cannot provide peer review for your blog like your other followers though I am a 'reader' and I can tell you I enjoy reading it.
so, no questions here really.
1 tag
a small refusal.
I’m exactly over you, exactly half a world away and, being on the righted half, upright in the full Nebraska spring. In one hand is a hand and in the other, wind rushing clear through my crooked fingers to the grass and then away and even as I plant my heel (a small refusal) the world moves—Below me is a city, upside down and rushing, too, and there you are, worn flip-flop soles, the...
writingcreatively asked: Your writing is incredible. As a fellow writer, I am in love.
1 tag
folk remedy.
My mother insists when she was ten or twelve she got rid of a wart with her mother’s dishrag. She stole the rag and rubbed it on that spot—where, I don’t know, even now—and stole out back and buried the rag in the dirt.
She waited. That swath of mystery skin went smooth and she believed.
Maybe that same year or maybe earlier, the neighbor poisoned Pepper, my...
1 tag
after you say i'm delightfully proportioned.
Maybe on a good day, I say, and you tilt your head and ask me whether my proportions change.
I could say today in a meeting my mouth went small, no bigger than a pencil’s fleshy pink eraser, or that today I faced the wind in every parking lot until—the gas tank full, the groceries bought and bagged—I breathed and breathed and then my ribs became as big as two white houses, my...
1 tag
less room than space.
The room had no extraordinary quality—it was less room than space, benign carpet, whitewashed wood, white walls. The bed fit between two walls, one not even half the other’s length, leaving half the bed—my legs and feet under the pale blue blanket—in full view—
One afternoon I dreamed someone had gotten in while I was sleeping and while I didn’t know what...
1 tag
to take as granted.
Distracted by my sucking on that spoon, you just assumed I’d done as I’d been told because whoever gives up limbs to start? Whoever drapes an arm across the nightstand, notes—I will for you—Six minutes at evening—This is all flowers—curled and taped to fingers? Better to say this is what I think you think of me, which is what I think of you, and yes it’s...