7.06 / June 2012

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_6/Pafunda1.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Dear Mom and Dad,   I wanted to make something clean. Don’t you know? I wanted to make something that was not porous, no matter how closely you looked-and not you, but your machine, lens exponential in its uncompromising pronouncement. Something without fleck or pore, without texture.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_6/Gilson.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] When did you know you were gay? my boyfriend asks in bed one night.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_6/Starke.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] There is an old black and white photograph of my grandfather and his brothers on the farm. They are all strong men with thick forearms, forceful, tall with rounded bellies, bursting beneath dirt-crusted overalls.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_6/Newman.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] She just happened to be. Her anatomy was coincidental. Each breath could have been another’s breath. Her hair lost its way growing. Laila knew no way to go forward that did not involve sideways. She found Nan or Nan found her in just such a confusion.

Note: These poems are made from New York Times articles published one hundred years prior to my compositions. Human Eclipse [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_6/Persina1.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_6/Smith.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] Margot kept things from the dig. She had a rusted fork that, when she touched its prongs to her tongue, tasted of done air. A tooth, a rib. Whose, she didn’t know. She didn’t trouble herself with ghosts. A rip of shirt, dusty soft.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_6/Curtiss.

Dear Jeny [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_6/Pfaff1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I know this is your name because I read it on your embossed name tag. I’m writing this down because I can’t shout loud enough to tell you over the noisy rattle and bang of the paint mixer and the customer assistance in aisle 12b announcements.

These poems are presented in a PDF in order to preserve the author’s artistic intent.

AVEC (Ah-vek): I. My favorite foreign word and the word of my sexual dreams. Avec lover. Avec or sans clothing. II. Pronounced yes with the face plain as a plowed field. Pronounced no in your neon lipstick. III. The lavender soap smell of everything French and possible in the warm morning. IV.

1. We’ll Get to Now Later Sometimes, when two people love each other very much, they want to get closer. So they put their bodies as close as possible to each other, like the pages of a brochure, or two legs inside a mermaid costume. This is called making love. Having sex.

  Daphne as a Housewife [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_6/Mulroy2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] As you leave potato skins in the sink like opened envelopes, you imagine the quiche you are making grows into a tree. The spinach pocks into leaves, the yolk into sap.

Geography Lessons “hic svnt dracones” -The Lenox Globe (ca. 1503 – 1507) In the country of your childhood, country of the crossroad, of the winged creature at the hour of its extinction, you put a secret in the ground to kill the secret & the ground goes black.

At some point in your life, you’ll want to believe the writers and the artists, the travel sites and the brochures, and visit the State of Maine. You’ll particularly surrender to the coast, we predict, and therefore must try some lobsters.

Hinterland [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_6/Jaffe1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] I collected everything: aglets for my shoelaces, jabots for my breasts. So this is it? I wondered. I stitched myself to windows, attempted great somethings: a leap, for instance, between my bedroom and the smooth shuttered garage.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_6/Fenn.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] I was born a mother of three children on an island in the north. Every day I put one on my back and two in their stroller and went out to the coffee shop.

Victoria’s Secret Says: Be A Summer Bombshell [wpaudio url=”/audio/7_6/Dwyer1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Take your paper dolls swimming and drown every last one. Spend a week bleeding and two sucking on metal keys. Spread your painted toes across the dashboard of his car. Scale metal gates that pinch your armpits like alligator teeth.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_6/Goldstein.mp3″ text=”listen to these essays” dl=”0″] “These muscles,” Says He Notice what you eat, and you will find in it the taste of your own flesh… -Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals”   I am new to eating animals, newer still to poultry, and preparing to cook my first whole chicken.

Make this one about a girl who wastes away. You can tell us about her growing up, flipping stones out into the driveway                                                                       with her piano fingers, but make sure you tell about the wasting; the self-loathing                                                        with the quiet vigilance of a mailman.

How to Fight Back Hayward, California   I’m gonna scratch up his car, pour sugar in his gas tank and watch the whole thing blow. A girl inside a car of women, almost women, speed down Mission Blvd to downtown Hayward. Jalapeno poppers on their laps, dinner.