8.01 / January 2013

Inquiry into Coil [wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/Evans2.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Enough of obsidian and enough of fine linens and figs, let’s thrash down onto a maelstrom of tusks, a madman’s pinbone blanket. We’re not woodmice, so let’s roil around properly like a den of prairie vipers.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/Beckenstein.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″] They come for us with their hacksaws and pipe cutters, their chainsaws and drills. They brace themselves, boots on the rotting pier, and bore into us with their shrieking machinery. We submit to them.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/Miller.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Baby feet kick her ribs but she still had all of them not like Adam. Her organs busy knitting baby limbs, rows of stitches can’t drop a stitch they must be perfect.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/Stout.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Alanis warns of Mr. Play-it-safe whose first flight ends in demise,           and I think my nephew Jacob, fifteen, autistic, might grow up to be like that guy, though his first flight was this fall to my brother’s wedding in Ohio.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/Gouirand.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Among the lessons you ask, this one about the tongue-what I hunger for is not the only territory. The body exists, surrounded on all sides by currents of nothing, this suspension we call late. Over the flame, you break chocolate from the bar.

NEW ENGLAND OEDIPUS [wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/Mass1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] With eyes that debrided sleep, he’d been the only sound on this side of New Hampshire, except for a cough somewhere, the lisp of a kite in perfect wind, snap of a stick, what went unsaid.

Golden teeth glistening In the mouth of the city Silver clouds colliding At the tongue tip of the day Bite off all the darkness They whispered; And chew the light well.

O fireflies, fate in a fire’s worth of open bellies: we wander the afternoon air ardent in prose’s possibilities, prick those savage eyes, prying loose the dust of rumination, rudimentary room.

gay boys and the bridges who love them [II]. [wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/sax1.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] saw it with my own headlamp. lit halogen filament, breaking between a thirteen year old’s haunted hands, costumed in our realest ghosts. we went door to door. unwrapping hard candy and hard boiled eggs.

1. Revel in how good-looking he is, how he channels Jude Law when his lazy eye doesn’t wander, how his weaving a ghillie suit that he keeps in the rusted hutch of his white pick-up shows exceptional dedication. 2.

I THINK THEY KILLED MATTHEW FIELDS [wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/Boswell1.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/8_1/Murray.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″] Whatever is placid plain you acid wash and cover, let simmer & smolder & set, those idle places we hover over. All elbow grease can smack alike onerous, egregious, can’t it, ingrained to grind & groan. You pine for pain, set your face for it.

CLAUDINE READS IN THE BATH Miuccia Prada was “mad about obliterating references”, as if one could be mad for the destruction of her own heritage the way one should be mad about things like tangerine nail lacquer and red dress/redhead combinations in film and bags big as a room, “though I realized how many pieces

  As he finished an incantation in a language few understood, the saffron-clad pandit pointed to the fire. This gesture was signal for Kris to (1) pinch his right ring-finger and thumb into a small stainless-steel bowl containing a mixture of soil, clarified butter, and camphor and (2) drop this pinchful into the flames.