From realpoetik at scn9.scn.org Sun Sep 6 17:44:23 2009 From: realpoetik at scn9.scn.org (RealPoetik Magazine) Date: Sun, 6 Sep 2009 17:44:23 -0700 Subject: [Realpoetik] Dorothea Lasky In-Reply-To: <86a3fe410909061332h5650b639x7cf8ea3e72411e3e@mail.gmail.com> References: <86a3fe410909061332h5650b639x7cf8ea3e72411e3e@mail.gmail.com> Message-ID: <86a3fe410909061744w53438301m6c54b4eb14e9f1df@mail.gmail.com> I AM NOT OF THIS WORLD I am not of this world And when I tell you that You do not believe me And force me to do things I don’t want to do What do I want to do? I want to become a poem Poem poem you went tunneling out of me Ectoplasmic material The sound of z No one believed the monstrosity Of my birth No one believe the monstrosity Of my death Instead they treated me As the kind of human We all esteem Sun, sunshine A demon mask, the moon Trees Bitter trees And butter, a proposition A proposition And days A proposition All of me A candle Burning as bright as a bird A demon wife to dark night A demon wife I was to the dark night Dorothea Lasky is the author of AWE (Wave Books, 2007) and Black Life (Wave Books, 2010). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, The Laurel Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Satellite Telephone, among other places. Currently, she researches creativity and education at the University of Pennsylvania. -- RealPoetik realpoetik.blogspot.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From realpoetik at scn9.scn.org Sun Sep 13 19:29:09 2009 From: realpoetik at scn9.scn.org (RealPoetik Magazine) Date: Sun, 13 Sep 2009 19:29:09 -0700 Subject: [Realpoetik] Brett Fletcher Lauer Message-ID: <86a3fe410909131929t7a106410v163c2dcf23d093fa@mail.gmail.com> A FIFTH MEMORY Let's not speak of ravens, keyholes at twilight, subjects immediate to observation appearing partly as a doctrine of chance. It is unlike me to dispute what is grand. A cloud field can herald distress, command numbers to fragment, but the rainfall lacked compulsion, how birds listed as unclean were birds of prey, not a model for conduct. Every day began with trust; segments fitted together like small bodies of animals and plants. Arriving home a touch positioned your face upright regardless of industrious wind. Restore me to that then, however streaked with gloom, however riddled through with worm and sorrow. Part of the problem was mandatory participation, the other your radiant neck from certain sadness, half-feelings in August, or the will to walk many-sided. Restore me to a prior arena beyond where this letter fills a hand mildly. There exists no such thing as three beginnings. Earlier gestures were vague in declaring intention, and what the echo from the cliff responds with is a general void, minor modifications in mood like English weather. Restore the song its bird, bird its egg, egg to concept. This world mirrored a wonder formerly praised until we discovered the structure of horror in all inventions. I anticipated otherwise, the arrangement of light on a woodland stream to dazzle; a red fox paused on a hilltop to restore a condition decayed. What could determine the next question? What answer could halt the mind and its written description from an eternity grazing on itself? What answer could relinquish such control or once more bury it in a hole with anything else the animals might claim? NO NEW INFORMATION When I hang in the air it will be by popular demand. There is a contingency of people who think loving me is wrong. I made this for them. I care deeply about our republic but I’m unsure what to do next. I’m lonely. Duh. Even I can learn to endure, but can no longer speak for us. Your anxiety is noted. There is something radically wrong in the letter I left or else Scandinavian. I feel my apartment getting dirty. I make a cup of tea. It is an accomplishment. Later, I’m going to haunt everything in this room. *Brett Fletcher Lauer* is the Managing Director of the Poetry Society of America and a Poetry Editor at *A Public Space*. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in *American Poetry Review*, *Boston Review*, *Tin House*, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn. -- RealPoetik realpoetik.blogspot.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From realpoetik at scn9.scn.org Sun Sep 20 16:46:17 2009 From: realpoetik at scn9.scn.org (RealPoetik Magazine) Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2009 16:46:17 -0700 Subject: [Realpoetik] Catherine Meng Message-ID: <86a3fe410909201646i35a7d038u1ef03c6acb6f3ce6@mail.gmail.com> SEASON 2 EPISODE 23 The island is a graph in which this exists: you are sitting are you sitting? you are standing are you standing? you are reading you must be reading because you read the island as the poem does without confidants it wields a nasty frond or has never known this tender shoot it grows * Ocean begets its image in its own turns how it circles out from the start & cuts off – how it begins an ending like a wave would. All the parts are in shadow complete with unseen gears that fall across the face making acronyms outside of compliance always peeing where the others have peed. We have a century! We have a history! Suddenly even the present is revisable. * Subscription cards fall out of your mouth like retold stories we snore through but in this case they were never told so this is a big fiction with first fruit breathing toward intent – really letting the moment unfurl it until the ripened object takes the shape of something there is no copy of * immediately the thing sounded * & I busied myself with my glasses. Writing poems for the republican squid I was nasty in a nice way same as my enabling neighbors. Here at last was the imagined but never realized place leaping into real life * I lost my first fraction of sight in math class 2 years after I watched a load of dripping laundry get pulled mid-cycle from the machine * William Blake: Do you still have my eyeglasses? Nobody: No, I traded them. do you have any tobacco? William Blake: No, I traded it. Nobody: For what? William Blake: I’m not telling. Nobody: Liar. William Blake: Thief. * The boy had gone missing but the dog remained a nuisance digging up relations we never saw die until the only habit that remained was kunst – perhaps it survived to revise past tendencies always kunst in the dream kunst in the dinner kunst in the tent * when we arrived there were 74 cigarettes & now there is one but we still haven’t decided on who will be chief we soon discover voting decides nothing at all but the toy of voting can be just as pleasing as a seashell * There was nothing wrong with anything, but you could not place yourself anywhere * The jungle minutely vibrated * with strains of destroyed music under palms of a formal math you are always in a car before me turning to the left * In our liver perhaps we knew we were being watched by a world of terrified animals but we often forgot that ache & loved each other. * I think I see a polar bear. No. It’s a white rock. * Perhaps I knew in advance that the dead thing would die because I dreamed it died before it did & told the dead thing so. He tried to act unaffected but I saw his skin betray his theater. Way after the fact I became pleased with my decision. I didn’t mind falling behind a Winnebago on the freeway. I barfed silently as if on stilts – as if it was not a good island. * The pilot said nothing to the contrary. The pilot has the best manners because, duh! He’s the pilot. Or he was. * When birds fly through the jungle all at once the many ventricles sputter out – * that we were stranded outside of the greater sadness that we took up canteens & masked, made a go at survival. Unsure our legs weren’t broke unsure our brains thumped right unsure our brains registered anything against the blue screen. *Catherine Meng* lives in Berkeley, CA. Her first collection of poems, *Tonight's the Night*, was published in 2007 by Apostrophe Books. -- RealPoetik realpoetik.blogspot.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: From realpoetik at scn9.scn.org Sun Sep 27 13:38:09 2009 From: realpoetik at scn9.scn.org (RealPoetik Magazine) Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 16:38:09 -0400 Subject: [Realpoetik] D. A. Powell Message-ID: <86a3fe410909271338m7a27849fl7abc69abe2223920@mail.gmail.com> couplets unheroic he had a girlfriend on the side. he had a boyfriend on the side he had too many sides: back- front- and be-, the problem was: he’d hide and in my mind, the darkest runnings: don’t think I didn’t suspect the mysterious calls from portland. the hickey upon his pec the cum towel he never laundered had become crusty and shrunk he drank to function but didn’t function: instead he was a drunk I pity the woman who marries this straight boy who likes to cheat who’s a bomb in the sack for anyone—unless it’s not his mate still, I pray he is safe, and not always dreaming of my casket like a crappy hired mourner, carrying his own little wilting basket for Donald Haines Eason, the last *D. A. Powell* is the author of four books of poetry, most recently *Chronic * (Graywolf, 2009). He is co-author, with David Trinidad, of *By Myself: An Autobiography* (Turtle Point Press, 2009). Powell has published recent poems in *New England Review*,* Barrow Street*, *Tin House* and *A Public Space*. He teaches in the English Department at University of San Francisco. -- RealPoetik realpoetik.blogspot.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: