• Poetry: “Disown” by saartha

    And it broke my heart but I
    killed every trembling thing. The yearning
    spaces subsided, they were reddened, they
    were convinced to stillness.

    And it broke my heart but God
    became God-in-exile, became
    yearning spaces. I buried my demons
    with a knife, and left them to it. Exile
    was the new love, it was a barren land,
    it took no prisoners.

    And it broke my heart but the pieces
    hardened, they were as clockworks,
    they counted down the hours. I was
    waiting, my body was a sharp plane,
    a border, I was waiting, everything

    had already happened, I had killed it,
    it drifted through the motionless diaspora,
    the hours turned on me and they had teeth.

    – by saartha

  • Poetry: “Lovesong” by Ted Hughes

    He loved her and she loved him
    His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
    He had no other appetite
    She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
    She wanted him complete inside her
    Safe and Sure forever and ever
    Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

    Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
    Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
    He gripped her hard so that life
    Should not drag her from that moment
    He wanted all future to cease
    He wanted to topple with his arms round her
    Or everlasting or whatever there was
    Her embrace was an immense press
    To print him into her bones
    His smiles were the garrets of a fairy place
    Where the real world would never come
    Her smiles were spider bites
    So he would lie still till she felt hungry
    His word were occupying armies
    Her laughs were an assassin’s attempts
    His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
    Her glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
    His whispers were whips and jackboots
    Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
    His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
    Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
    And their deep cries crawled over the floors
    Like an animal dragging a great trap
    His promises were the surgeon’s gag
    Her promises took the top off his skull
    She would get a brooch made of it
    His vows pulled out all her sinews
    He showed her how to make a love-knot
    At the back of her secret drawer
    Their screams stuck in the wall
    Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
    Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

    In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
    In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

    In the morning they wore each other’s face

    —Ted Hughes

  • Poetry: “Nearer:Breath Of My Breath:Take Not They Tingling” by E. E. Cummings

    nearer:breath of my breath:take not they tingling
    limbs from me:make my pain their crazy meal
    letting they tigers of smooth sweetness steal
    slowly in dumb blossoms of new mingling:
    deeper:blood of my blood:with upwardcringing
    swiftness plunge these leopards of white ream
    this pith of darkness:carve an evilfringing
    flower of madness on gritted lips
    and on sprawled eyes squirming with light insane
    chisel the killing flame that dizzily grips.

    Querying greys between mouthed houses curl

    thirstily. Dead stars stink. dawn. Inane,

    the poetic carcass of a girl

    - ee cummings

  • Poetry: “The Rabbit Catcher” by Sylvia Plath

    It was a place of force -
    The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,
    Tearing off my voice, and the sea
    Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead
    Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.

    I tasted the malignity of the gorse,
    Its black spikes,
    The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers.
    They had an efficiency, a great beauty,
    And were extravagant, like torture.

    There was only one place to get to.
    Simmering, perfumed,
    The paths narrowed into the hollow.
    And the snares almost effaced themselves –
    Zeroes, shutting on nothing,

    Set close, like birth pangs.
    The absence of shrieks
    Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy.
    The glassy light was a clear wall,
    The thickets quiet.

    I felt a still busyness, an intent.
    I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt,
    Ringing the white china,
    How they awaited him, those little deaths!
    They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.

    And we, too, had a relationship -
    Tight wires between us,
    Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
    Sliding shut on some quick thing,
    The constriction killing me also.

    - Sylvia Plath, 1965

  • Poetry: “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” by Sylvia Plath

    On the stiff twig up there
    Hunches a wet black rook
    Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
    I do not expect a miracle
    Or an accident

    To set the sight on fire
    In my eye, nor seek
    Any more in the desultory weather some design,
    But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
    Without ceremony, or portent.

    Although, I admit, I desire,
    Occasionally, some backtalk
    From the mute sky, I can’t honestly complain:
    A certain minor light may still
    Lean incandescent

    Out of kitchen table or chair
    As if a celestial burning took
    Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then —
    Thus hallowing an interval
    Otherwise inconsequent

    By bestowing largesse, honor
    One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
    Wary (for it could happen
    Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical,
    Yet politic; ignorant

    Of whatever angel any choose to flare
    Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
    Ordering its black feathers can so shine
    As to seize my senses, haul
    My eyelids up, and grant

    A brief respite from fear
    Of total neutrality. With luck,
    Trekking stubborn through this season
    Of fatigue, I shall
    Patch together a content

    Of sorts. Miracles occur.
    If you care to call those spasmodic
    Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,
    The long wait for the angel,
    For that rare, random descent.
    —–Sylvia Plath

  • Poetry: Apocrypha

    Envy tastes like copper filings.

    It settles into the stomach wall and plies
    its sinuous trade, hawking green-eyed girls
    at the tented market of the womb — thin-mattresses
    waifs with syringe-scored ribs.
    Under fallopian awnings
    they turn their chlorinated eyes inward,
    lashes slice into the flesh as they blink slowly,
    once, twice.

    Envy sidles into the blood, jangling metals and plastics,
    is yearn-swollen fingers all ringed in agates and amethyst–
    so fat that knuckles bulge tumescent out of the gold bands.

    Eel-headed, it stretches and pants, breath filled
    with rotted diamonds.
    It claws and adores and kisses the edge
    without guessing the center, cobbling a
    hermetic path, yellow and grey,
    down into the rickety basement door
    of the second heart–
    the secret heart, shut as a reliquary
    that whispers sulfuric villanelles into the dark
    while storm shutters screen against glass
    threatening expulsion from the apple-bled
    rooms of the interior.

    This other heart is a city of wan-faced slattern-beasts,
    snouts pressed against frozen windows, bones
    howling for hot bread. But it is beautiful there, in the black
    aorta, blood pure as grain alcohol.
    In these jealous walls the self instructs the self–
    the second heart murmurs
    its beatific perversions
    to the first.

    from Apocrypha by Catherynne M. Valente

  • Poetry: “Instructions” by Neil Gaiman

    Touch the wooden gate in the wall you never saw before,
    Say ‘please’ before you open the latch,
    go through,
    walk down the path.
    A red metal imp hangs from the green-painted front door,
    as a knocker,
    do not touch it; it will bite your fingers.
    Walk through the house. Take nothing. Eat nothing.
    However,
    if any creature tells you that it hungers,
    feed it.
    If it tells you that it is dirty,
    clean it.
    If it cries to you that it hurts,
    if you can,
    ease its pain.

    From the back garden you will be able to see the wild wood.
    The deep well you walk past leads down to Winter’s realm;
    There is another land at the bottom of it.
    If you turn around here,
    you can walk back, safely;
    you will lose no face. I will think no less of you.

    Once through the garden you will be in the wood.
    The trees are old. Eyes peer from the undergrowth.
    Beneath a twisted oak sits an old woman. She may ask for something;
    give it to her. She
    will point the way to the castle. Inside it
    are three princesses.
    Do not trust the youngest. Walk on.
    In the clearing beyond the castle the twelve months sit about a fire,
    warming their feet, exchanging tales.
    They may do favours for you, if you are polite.
    You may pick strawberries in December’s frost.

    Trust the wolves, but do not tell them where you are going.
    See more after the cut

  • Poetry Corner: Angel of Flight

    Angel of flight and sleigh bells, do you know paralysis,
    that ether house where your arms and legs are cement?
    You are as still as a yardstick. You have a doll’s kiss.
    The brain whirls in a fit. The brain is not evident.
    I have gone to that same place without a germ or a stroke.
    A little solo act—the lady with the brain that broke.

    In this fashion I have become a tree.
    I have become a vase you can pick up or drop at will,
    inanimate at last. What unusual luck! My body
    passively resisting. Part of the leftovers. Part of the kill.
    Angel of flight, you soarer, you flapper, you floater,
    you gull that grows out of my back in the dreams I prefer,

    stay near. But give me the totem. Give me the shut eye
    where I stand in stone shoes as the world’s bicycle goes by.

    - Anne Sexton

  • Poetry: Her Sweet Anatomy

    “Number 8″ from Pictures of the Gone World
    by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

    It was a face which darkness could kill
    in an instant
    a face as easily hurt
    by laughter or light

    ‘We think differently at night’
    she told me once
    lying back languidly

    And she would quote Cocteau
    ‘I feel there is an angel in me’ she’d say
    ‘whom I am constantly shocking’

    Then she would smile and look away
    light a cigarette for me
    sigh and rise

    and stretch
    her sweet anatomy

    let fall a stocking

  • Poetry Corner: “Lady Lazarus”

    I have done it again.
    One year in every ten
    I manage it–

    A sort of walking miracle, my skin
    Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
    My right foot

    A paperweight,
    My face a featureless, fine
    Jew linen.

    Peel off the napkin
    O my enemy.
    Do I terrify?–

    The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
    The sour breath
    Will vanish in a day.

    Soon, soon the flesh
    The grave cave ate will be
    At home on me

    And I a smiling woman.
    I am only thirty.
    And like the cat I have nine times to die.

    This is Number Three.
    What a trash
    To annihilate each decade.

    What a million filaments.
    The peanut-crunching crowd
    Shoves in to see

    Them unwrap me hand and foot–
    The big strip tease.
    Gentlemen, ladies

    These are my hands
    My knees.
    I may be skin and bone,

    Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
    The first time it happened I was ten.
    It was an accident.

    The second time I meant
    To last it out and not come back at all.
    I rocked shut

    As a seashell.
    They had to call and call
    And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

    Dying
    Is an art, like everything else.
    I do it exceptionally well.

    - from “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath