• 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

  • Poetry: “Tulips” by Sylvia Plath

    This is one of my favorite poems ever.

    The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
    Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
    I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
    As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
    I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
    I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
    And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

    See more after the cut