Strong Verbs Are Just Better

15.10.18, Walker Art Gallery: Catherine Smith Gill and Two of...

Fri, 14 Dec 2018 07:55:42 GMT

15.10.18, Walker Art Gallery: Catherine Smith Gill and Two of Her Children, by James Tissot. So much of the 19th c portraiture galleries was drab and brown, and then this delightful impressionist-influenced work pops up. https://ift.tt/2E4kLaq

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Rachel Rose - The Prayer

Fri, 14 Dec 2018 00:20:27 GMT

In the morning I prayed the prayer of thanks
for having not been made a man.
I prayed the prayer of the unbeliever
which required that I bite the hand that feeds me.
It was the morning of the first day. I said Kaddish
for the dead and the undead. Which is to say
living. Which is to say my own hand, owned
by mine teeth. How I prayed for belief!
It was the evening of the first day
and I prayed the prayer of thanks
for having been made to bleed.

I lacked the genetic code for piousness.
It was the second day. What do you know? Sunrise!
I prayed the prayer of thanks for having not been made
a Christian. Which is to say known entity.
It was a long day, the second day. No moon.
I prayed in bed with you for the second
coming. I took the Lord’s name in vain.
Which is to say I spake it in passion.
Which is to say I linked my body to the holy war
of creation. Who shall forgive whom?

The third day was a dawn of rain.
All day white mushrooms bloomed in the wet leaves.
My grief was like unto the fungus spreading leagues underground
but all that emerged were those white fingers pressing
through the grave of earth. Let there be sleep, you said
and I slept.

The fourth day was an eclipse in the temple.
I prayed on my knees to the gold circlet of darkness
that had once been the sun. I prayed in the four directions
and burned the four sacrificial hearts, read the ash
for clues. As the smoke rose
the waters rose in the four directions.
No prayer could cool that benediction of heat
and I believed, at least, in fire.

It was the morning of the fifth day
and I prayed the prayer of thanks for having not been born
a lamb. As we ate you wiped my bloodied lips with linen.
We lifted our goblets of light and smashed them on the tabernacle.
Which is to say we prayed the prayer of those who have drunk
to abandon themselves. Which is to say we became unrecognizable
to each other. Which is to say I’m sorry I was unfaithful
though I remember little of the act. Your body was a shrine
but I went through the wrong gate.

We were glad for the sixth day.
We were hungover with effort and joy. Which is to say
we prayed the prayer of children on a treasure hunt.
I said the words of thanks to God for not having made me gold.
Night was a relief. I stared through the darkness
at the domes of mosques.

On the seventh day we could not rest. You paced the dawn.
I sang the scream of beaten women. You wailed at the wall. I kissed
the bronze knife of the Goddess. You ripped the sacred garments.
I served the breasts and miracles
on a platter of relics. You lit the joss sticks
and copied the sutras by hand.
I plucked the eyes from the vine
caught the stones in my mouth. I said the prayer
of thanks for not having to be reborn. Which
is to say Ash. Which is to say Amen.

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Dana Gioia - Being Happy

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 00:29:41 GMT

Of course it was doomed. I know that now,
but it ended so quickly, and I was young.
I hardly remember that summer in Seattle—
except for her. The city seems just a rainy backdrop.
From the moment I first saw her at the office
I was hooked. I started visiting her floor.

I couldn’t work unless I caught a glimpse of her.
Once we exchanged glances, but we never spoke.
Then at a party we found ourselves alone.
We started kissing and ended up in bed.
We talked all night. She claimed she had liked me
secretly for months. I wonder now if that was true.

Two weeks later her father had a heart attack.
While she was in Chicago, they shut down our division.
I was never one for writing letters.
On the phone we had less to say each time.
And that was it—just those two breathless weeks,
then years of mild regret and intermittent speculation.

Being happy is mostly like that. You don’t see it up close.
You recognize it later from the ache of memory.
And you can’t recapture it. You only get to choose
whether to remember or forget, whether to feel remorse
or nothing at all. Maybe it wasn’t really love.
But who can tell when nothing deeper ever came along?

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15.10.18, Walker Art Gallery: Frederic Lord Leighton has a...

Fri, 30 Nov 2018 19:38:34 GMT

15.10.18, Walker Art Gallery: Frederic Lord Leighton has a strong investment in Elijah’s mystic experience, it seems https://ift.tt/2QAK5at

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Maria Minolo - This Year

Fri, 30 Nov 2018 01:28:39 GMT

I want to devour my favorite books again, fuck
the ones I “need” to read because they will “dazzle” and
“compel” me, and anyway if I ever see “tour de force”
on another back cover I will throw up and die. I want to
eat more grains. I want to write poetry that consumes

my sadness, spins it into candelit softness and homemade
truths. I want to bake cookies. Buy lipstick. I want to kiss
the love of my life with dry leaves on the ground; I want
the leaves to understand that falling doesn’t have to mean
hurting yourself. I want to stop buying lipstick. I want to
think hard about holing up in a cabin in the woods forever,
and then I want to stop thinking about it. I want to cry

at the front row of a Bon Iver show; for the agony,
I’d rather know. I want to buy date-me heels and not
wear them, I want to take photos and not post them. I want
to be right and not show it–I want to learn that some
things are best kept to myself. I want to keep things.
I want to let go only when I’m ready. I want to say
“let’s go” almost always. I want take-offs and landings. I
want to be safe and brave at the same time. I want to quit
drinking but I probably won’t. I want to write more
lists. I want to stop writing lists. I want to leave

room for surprises. Don’t you? I want too leave spaces
blank. I want to leave a few boxes unchecked.

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6.8.18 Obviously I like most of my photos, or I

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 10:41:22 GMT

6.8.18 Obviously I like most of my photos, or I wouldn’t post them so indiscriminately, but every so often one of them just… stands out. This is one of those

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Context for new friends & followers: I currently have a series of IFTTT widgets set up to archive photos from my photography tumblr (which itself is composed of copies archived from instagram, as well as shots like this taken on my camera). Because I am basically indiscriminate - if it's in focus and I like the content, I post it, rather than selecting for The Best Photos - there can be a LOT of content, and the IFTTT widget can't add cut-tags, so they post to this blog under private lock. You can see recent ones at speculumannorum_feed, if that's your jam.

Because I've used up 50% of my DW image storage in three years (which is pretty good odds, actually! That's a lot of pictures!), I am thinking of setting up a separate paid account and shifting the archive to that. I'll announce when/if I do.

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Fiona Wright - Poppies, Katoomba

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 23:02:51 GMT

I didn’t come here to write poems about flowers
but there are poppies of palest purple.
Blown open, each petal
cup-shaped, like an empty hand and
every time I travel my chest winds tight:
what kind of creature
cannot take a holiday? In a hotel bar,
I chance upon an old friend of my father
nibbling on sones, he says that as a child
I’d said I want to be alone
with my own thoughts and this winds me,
although I can’t say why. The poppies
are membranous, the poppies are
precarious, the poppies
are bruis-coloured at their centre.
By the time I get the poppies
to my desk
they are bedraggled,
their hard, green hearts
all they have left to show me.

Best Australian Poems 2016

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Ann Vickery - An Object exists only as it might exist to Another

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 22:18:32 GMT

The melancholia of not being Anne Boyer.
The melancholia of melancholy,
of listening for factories out there in the sea
when everyone else was searching for whales.
The melancholia of a word without a poem,
of the poem as pristine category looking forwards
to an unseasonable year. The melancholia
of mid-size body suits still wrapped in the box.
The melancholia of the test subject
reduced to running slip or outmoded art form.
The melancholia of the barely perceptible
snakeskin purse clutched on dry afternoons
of laissez-faire capitalism. It’s true, isn’t it?
Only the romantic can be that real.
The melancholia of sharp, leopard-print belts
burning naively at the fashion blog
found in the heart of yesteryear.
The melancholia of the human
as a class of actors, reciting Moby Dick
to the signature tunes of Prince. The melancholia
of melancholy, writing city rather than cosmos.
The melancholia of repetition,
recidivist as the eye that refuses
to gaze back at you. One woman’s fantasy
is another’s solipsism.
The melancholia of not being loved,
firstly in the age of Aquarius and then again
in the age of the Anthropocene.
Or the melancholia of window dressing
the incision between innocence and experience.

Cordite Issue 55

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Ellen van Neerven - Invisible Spears

Thu, 18 Oct 2018 22:25:32 GMT

A stadium can hold the most sound
drowning out the bora ring
mudding the lines we needed to know
where we’re going
now it’s a clusterfuck to get the train home
flip up seats and overflowing beer
the rude odour of tomato sauce
and the black faces they never show on TV
the team with the most blackfullas
they don’t want to win
the commentator’s curse
the tiddling fear
of invisible spears
we can’t score goals
on this sacred land
celebrated as animals
GI doing the goanna, yeah
but not people
with military intelligence
you don’t want us protecting
our land like the Maori
– that means it was our land to protect
we don’t need
a haka of whitefullas
just let us resist.

Overland Issue 220.

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Hessom Razavi - Shabnam Nightwish

Thu, 11 Oct 2018 22:19:25 GMT

‘You can bury them deep under, sir; you can bind them in tunnels, … but in the end where a river has been, a river will always be.’
'Thrones, Dominations’, Sayers and Walsh

was not the Pashtun lur
with sea green eyes on the cover of
National Geographic, walking back into Tora Bora,
caves of illiteracy, tunnels of childbirth,
certainty in a plum coloured burqa.

she was not the Iranian khahar leaning on a
street-side maple tree, marked from a rooftop
to leave herself in little red trickles on a
shaky hand-held film strewn to millions.

not the somali gabar in a Dadaab tent with
litter for toys, mouthing a canister nozzle as
a teething ring, innocent to how hopes are sung
in tongues to pin-prick moonrise.

Shabnam Nightwish, the jinn,
truant, cryptic and near in all these

women like subterranean rivers, latent and
drip-soaking the roots of sires and tectonic
plates, sunless seas of mothers and wives ferried
in caverns under sail of kismet or false ballot,

lagoons of womankind inverted and
weeping up to nourish others, invisible
till visited by Shabnam, night-sung to merge
in culverts, protected to learn and stream

up sinkholes of knowing, reclaim their wombs
and settle on work like shabnam, cut furrows in
slanted fields of lore, sluice tradition from
baked clods to amaryllis flowers, take possession

and reach daylight, a liberty of sea green
whirling like smokeless fires.

Best Australian Poems 2016

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Geoff Page - Ekphrasis

Thu, 04 Oct 2018 22:05:32 GMT

One thinks of how the details must converge,
the storytellers’ small manipulations
across the wild millenia of firelight,

the father and the son, their unfamiliar
waxy wings, their awkward altitudes
the sea and metal sun withholding judgement,

the young man flying (as he must) too high,
the older man more cautious over whitecaps
as artists, in their turn, who feel both callings,

the sun which lifts a youth beyond himself
the waves below mere space between two points
which must, they know, lead onwards towards that more

pragmatic view designed to bring us Brueghel’s
Landscape with the fall of Icarus,
that seascape with its ploughboy on the left

who pays it no attention; and, later on,
the Auden poem, published 1940,
when young men met again, with aluminium

wings, were plunging bravely through the air
and Breughel’s ‘expensive, delicate ship’ had even
then and even now 'somewhere to get to’

where Daedalus and Icarus, aloft,
on insubstantial wings and powering through
the tricky air, are not beyond re-use.

Best Australian Poems 2016

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Omar Sakr- ghosting the ghetto

Thu, 27 Sep 2018 22:19:37 GMT

for Steven

In their third floor brick flat, the one tucked into the asphalt folds of Warwick Farm, past El Toro motel, down where the winding road straightens out opposite takeaway tucker, my grandparents were rebuilding Lebanon, and no one seemed to mind. Every Sunday we made like pilgrims in Holden Commodores, traversing highway homeland

to bicker and eat. As adults renewed rivalries, we kids splashed in the Abraham River, once known as Adonis, an ancient baptismal turquoise that cleaved through the hallway. Sometimes the country changed with us & we climbed Mount Lebanon in the lounge, cooling our bodies beneath old olive trees.

The tapestries were gaudy, the TV a small cube in the corner, and smoke was forever on the air. In that, metaphor & country are one. As with every hajj, there were too many bodies and the door was kept open for us to spill from, an ecstasy of difference. In this, metaphor & Arab are one: no lone place can hold in its small clay hands so many rivers

and no Ark can contain us, whatever scripture commands.

In adolescence, the Kaaba flowered between us, a black square lotus edged in gilt across the sides, doors of gold gleaming in afternoon light. It made ants of us and the mountains and rivers, the motels and convenience stores. Now we spoke by rote, prayers half-memorised in the sacred hours of the insomniac, sinking budding secrets

and the kinds of questions that can unmake family.

When the girls started to stand apart, trying to hijab their modesty, we saw jamarāt all around us, & lined our hands with bits of rock to hurl at the devil. Only the walls were a mirage and it was our cheeks which split beneath thrown stones. Later, it made perfect sense to learn that in 1627, a gutter was added to the Kaaba

to protect it from flooding. Or perhaps to stop it from blooming.

Before my grandparents began to recreate Lebanon out of ruined cartilage, someone should have checked if they were students of history, or if they knew their way around a map. Beirut became Bondi became Liverpool, & the local creek behind the cricket pitch drowned the old rivers, and new names blessed our flesh, like Nike, Adidas, and Reebok.

Someone should have checked if they knew a flower could replace the house of god.

Boys have no business with god, except where he can be found in the slap of hard feet on concrete, in the seismic collision of shoulders and hips lunging for the try line, or the throng & buzz of bees and wasps among long grass and thin weeds; or sticky lips locked on lips in the secret space beneath houses. Boys have no business with god

until their bodies lengthen and sin begins to stick to their tongues.

Soon after, our weekly hajj halted. Our family became families and rupture became familiar. In this, metaphor & Middle East are one. In the long months away from that imagined country, I heard of an older cousin, a name hushed by others, a man in love with men, and in his absence I saw my future: who knew you could ghost the living?

Who knew you could bury the ghetto in forgetting?

I am unearthing yesterday, ungathering this bouquet of quiet, reappearing

in inches. Lebanon was left incomplete in Warwick Farm, & everywhere else we went the ragged tops of mountains peeking out of windows; the Sacred House in fragments, in bloodied bits of stone, in black and gold petals on the floor. Though the builders are gone,

they left the blueprints in my skin, every alley & every river, every ghost & every ghetto.

*The Kaaba is a building at the centre of Islam’s most holy
mosque Al-Masjid Al-Haram, in Mecca. It is the building all Muslims pray
towards, and to which they must journey at least once in their
lifetime, which is called the hajj. The Kaaba has many names, including
Sacred House, House of Allah, House of God in Heaven, etc.

** As part of the hajj, Muslims perform a ritual known as the
Stoning of the Devil, in which they throw stones at three pillars known
as al-jamarāt.

From The Disappearing. Original formatting here.

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