#films #rare #restored #literature
LOST HORIZON ~ Ronald Coleman
https://archive.org/details/lost-horizon-1937-ronald-colman-jane-wyatt-edward-everett-horton-thoma
#literature
TODAY: In 1802, William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, see a “long belt” of daffodils, inspiring the former to pen “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
By William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud
AGAINST THE SOLAR ECLIPSE
by Alejandro Escudé
It’s a black swath that cuts across
A part of the country that’s a myth.
Does Ohio even exist? Not here,
Where the post office blends
With the sky and the cops drive
Black and white cars off freeway
Overpasses. In one photo, a man
Peers down at a brass contraption
Like some 21st century Galileo,
A pinprick on the sun shadowed
By that communist rock in the sky.
Or was it the other way around?
I can’t recall. It’s all mathematical
Gibberish, if you ask me. A train
Stopped the traffic the other day
And that was more real than the
Eclipse. The sun is like an orange
At the grocery store at age fifty.
Who still buys the citrusy orbs?
If fact, the supermarket aisles
Are too bright these days. I should
Wear those ISO glasses they all
Wore to observe the eclipse.
See what? Nature? Apocalypse?
Down on this planet, it’s light
Pandemonium. Hysteria denied.
I’ve had enough of branded news.
Music mimicking music. It’s called
The cosmos. That death-trap
Beyond the atmosphere. Boneless
Graveyard, aqueduct to nothingness.
Honestly, I’ll take God. He’s not
In fashion right now. But I prefer
The ambiguity of faith to ignorance,
Which is what you see in crowds,
Lawn chairs and binoculars, tents,
Motorhomes, a sheet afloat, the sun
Figured there, reflected, swallowed
By time’s stupid, arcing mouth.
—from Poets Respond
April 14, 2024
Alejandro Escudé: “Human beings, in my point of view, are absolute masters of denial and distraction. The eclipse was just another event that reminded me of how well society can turn its gaze up and away from real societal issues, personal problems, true miracles, thought, insight, love, in order to participate in one more pointless venture.”
https://www.rattle.com/against-the-solar-eclipse-by-alejandro-escude/
The Battered Inside
by Niels Hav
Translated from the Danish by Per Brask & Patrick Friesen
The battered inside of the cupboard under the kitchen sink
makes me happy. Here are two honest nails
hammered into the original boards that have been there
since the apartment block was built. It's like revisiting
forgotten members of our closest family.
At some point the boards were blue;
there is some leftover red
and a green pastel. The kitchen sink is new
and the counter has been raised ten centimeters. Probably
it's been renovated several times through the years.
The kitchen has remained current; there are new lamps,
electric stove, fridge and coffee maker.
But here under the sink a time warp has been allowed
its hidden existence. Here is the wash tub with the floor cloth,
the plunger and a forgotten bit of caustic soda.
Here the spider moves about undisturbed.
Maybe there's been kissing and dancing in this kitchen.
Probably there's been crying.
Happy people newly in love have prepared fragrant meals
and later cooked porridge while making sandwiches for lunch boxes.
Hungry children have stolen cookies. Laughter has resounded
in the stairwell and ropes have been skipped in the yard
while new cars were being parked outside. People moved in and out,
old ones died and were carried downstairs, newborn babies
were carried upstairs. Everything according to order—
my nameplate will also disappear from the door one day.
I get down on my knees in front of the kitchen sink
and respectfully greet the plunger, the spider
and the two honest nails.
COURAGE
by Ansuya Patel & Batya Weinbaum
When I wrote a check for fifty dollars,
that’s all I have I said to the taxi driver
who locked the doors of his black Mercedes.
He drove like a maniac down a dirt road.
Shall I drive, I asked. Don’t you trust me.
I’m not going to kill you, he yelled like
he was doing me a favour. This is where
you hang up faith, watch it somersault into air.
He placed a hand on my thigh. You don’t want
to touch me, I may have some awful disease.
His fist hit the steering wheel. Crazy bitch,
shut up. Give me all the money you have.
I swallowed my curses he unlocked the door,
I got out fast, fear he’d run me down. I walked
for what seemed miles. A car passed by
and stopped. You ok? I need a cab, I said.
Not around here. Get in, I’ll drop you. I talked
music, he said he was off to steal wheels.
He turned up the music to electro beats. My feet
tapped courage, I prayed all the way to neon lights.
Once home I picked up a pair of scissors, cut off
my hair, it fell like a curtain at the end of the show.
—from Rattle #83, Spring 2024
Tribute to Collaboration
Ansuya Patel & Batya Weinbaum: “We chose the theme courage. We both wrote a draft initially and used couplets to weave our experiences into one story. We had both been attacked by a stranger in a car many years ago. Writing in couplets allowed us to create the journey that changed us forever and remind us that courage has no gender. We have reclaimed our lives and the open road, proving that resilience is a formidable force in the face of adversity, and that no experience however dark can define the boundless potential within every individual.”
Eating Poetry
By Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52959/eating-poetry?mc_cid=d657a731c6
Ryan McCarty: “I’ve been so struck by all the people I hear talking about their plans to watch the solar eclipse. Everyone is traveling, planning, convening. Thirty-one million people are supposed to be traveling to get somewhere within range. I love cosmic phenomena, but I love the way people obsess about them even more. I find myself wondering exactly what they hope to see—what they imagine—and if there’s any chance that one of these hyped-up celestial flickers might just one day change everything while we’re all standing around staring, together. Add in the almost apocalyptic warnings that accompany these kinds of events – communications breakdowns, gas shortages, traffic pileups, snack shortages—and I can’t stop imagining. That’s where this poem started.”
WHAT WILL WE SEE WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT?
by Ryan McCarty
My neighbor, near me on the bus, moves his lips
while looking at his phone. They’re like two
little birds whispering to that tiny sunrise he holds.
He will finish, snap out, look up, and laugh with me
at the empty roads, I know it, because we’re speeding
reckless in the wide open streets. The whole
world flew south to find a place to watch
one unimaginably distant body come
between us and another even more
distant body. If we believe the old stories,
they’re men and women, our mother
dancing, shielding us, hiding our father’s glare.
If we believe the new stories, roads will turn
to parking lots and children will forget
the names of their families, wandering lost
in a sea of empty gas stations and dehydration.
If we believe only the story that something
inevitable is happening, we will marvel
at the precision, at our predictive powers,
at the blurred lines between chirping crickets
and the notifications ringing in our pants.
Or, instead, on the roads, in our yards, high
behind windows built for silence, ludicrous
in our magical glasses, could we just lose
the tale? Know what the end might look like?
In the momentary darkness, fumbling
for our offerings to coax the daytime back—
our multitools and battery-powered radios,
our spare cash and backup maps, will we breathe
in that chill air, when everything purples,
when the birds change key, when millions
of us look, not to the sky but left and right, and see
each other, gone out of our way to stand,
together, where the light disappears.
—from Poets Respond
April 7, 2024
https://www.rattle.com/what-will-we-see-when-the-lights-go-out-by-ryan-mccarty/
#literature #science #fiction #horror #film #art
MONDAY AFTERNOON MOVIE
The War of The Worlds. 1953. Gene Barry
Science Fiction. This is the story that was broadcast in 1938 over the radio as a show by Orson Wells, but listeners thought it was real, and panicked.
Written by H.G.Wells.
I love Internet Archives.
https://archive.org/details/sci-fi-horror/04+-+The+War+of+the+Worlds+1953.mp4
Some Things, Say The Wise Ones
By Mary Oliver
Some things, say the wise ones who know everything,
are not living. I say,
You live your life your way and leave me alone.
I have talked with the faint clouds in the sky when they
are afraid of being behind; I have said, Hurry, hurry!
and they have said, Thank you, we are hurrying.
About cows, and starfish, and roses there is no
argument. They die, after all.
But water is a question, so many living things in it,
but what is it itself, living or not? Oh, gleaming
generosity, how can they write you out?
As I think this I am sitting on the sand beside
the harbor. I am holding in my hand
small pieces of granite, pyrite, schist.
Each one, just now, so thoroughly asleep
The Old Poets of China
by Mary Oliver
Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
#poem#poetry #literature
Moving towards Home
By June Jordan
“Where is Abu Fadi,” she wailed.
“Who will bring me my loved one?”
—The New York Times, 9/20/1982
I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
Nor do I wish to speak about the nightlong screams
that reached
the observation posts where soldiers lounged about
Nor do I wish to speak about the woman who shoved
her baby
into the stranger’s hands before she was led away
Nor do I wish to speak about the father whose sons
were shot
through the head while they slit his own throat before
the eyes
of his wife
Nor do I wish to speak about the army that lit continuous
flares into the darkness so that the others could see
the backs of their victims lined against the wall
Nor do I wish to speak about the piled up bodies and
the stench
that will not float
Nor do I wish to speak about the nurse again and
again raped
before they murdered her on the hospital floor
Nor do I wish to speak about the rattling bullets that
did not
halt on that keening trajectory
Nor do I wish to speak about the pounding on the
doors and
the breaking of windows and the hauling of families into
the world of the dead
I do not wish to speak about the bulldozer and the
red dirt
not quite covering all of the arms and legs
because I do not wish to speak about unspeakable events
that must follow from those who dare
“to purify” a people
those who dare
“to exterminate” a people
those who dare
to describe human beings as “beasts with two legs”
those who dare
“to mop up”
“to tighten the noose”
“to step up the military pressure”
“to ring around” civilian streets with tanks
those who dare
to close the universities
to abolish the press
to kill the elected representatives
of the people who refuse to be purified
those are the ones from whom we must redeem
the words of our beginning
because I need to speak about home
I need to speak about living room
where the land is not bullied and beaten to
a tombstone
I need to speak about living room
where the talk will take place in my language
I need to speak about living room
where my children will grow without horror
I need to speak about living room where the men
of my family between the ages of six and sixty-five
are not
marched into a roundup that leads to the grave
I need to talk about living room
where I can sit without grief without wailing aloud
for my loved ones
where I must not ask where is Abu Fadi
because he will be there beside me
I need to talk about living room
because I need to talk about home
I was born a Black woman
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?
https://us12.campaign-archive.com/?e=58c6df03ad&u=c993b88231f5f84146565840e&id=8608edadd1
America's Next Motorcycle Philosopher?
An interview with Matthew Crawford.
https://www.racket.news/p/americas-next-motorcycle-philosopher
Stunt Double
By Tomás Q. Morín
In this life, there are stars
and there are stunt doubles.
Before I became one of those fathers
obsessed with memorizing his lines,
making peace with the Big Director
in the sky who doesn’t like ad libs,
before all that, I was the star
of my own low-budget soap opera.
Once, my brother and I pushed a car
while my mother started it.
She had a recurring role as Single Mexican Mom.
Once, I was so hungry for candy
that I ate half a bag
of unsweetened coconut flakes.
Once, my father was cast as twins
for a few seasons.
In one scene, he played Tall Dark & Handsome,
a bricklayer with smoldering eyes.
A few scenes later, he was alone,
in a white t-shirt, still a heartthrob,
but a heartthrob cooking heroin
as Generic Drug Addict #1.
Once, I forgot my father was not actually a twin.
Now, I play Funny College Professor
who teaches students how to write poems.
But never fear, my son,
I haven’t forgotten all my training.
The most important skill
a stunt double must possess is knowing
how to fall safely.
I’ve fallen into poverty.
Fallen into love.
Fallen into money.
Fallen out of love.
Fallen into jail.
Fallen into hunger.
Fallen into fairy tales.
Fallen into plunder.
Fallen into trauma.
Fallen into hate.
Fallen into drama.
Fallen into, wait,
there’s a story of neighbors
in our home for a dinner party
that we never told you.
Casual Racist White Man said,
“We have a half-breed running back
that’s dynamite on the team.”
If I had not been in your room,
falling asleep with you,
then that’s checkmate. That’s rancor.
That’s malice. That’s ill will
on an ill wind. That’s venom.
That’s justice. That’s blood. That’s get
the fuck out of my house,
the house where number block 7
is the luckiest number block
in Number Land,
the house with the green sofa
in front of the windows where
every time I sit and read Interior Chinatown
I swear it is the best novel ever written.
In this life, there are stars
and there are stunt doubles.
I would fall off a cliff for you
a thousand times and call it a good day.
When I see people celebrate in the park,
I remember the early years.
I can see Jennifer and her partner
kicking a ball with you
at my work’s holiday party, just before Jennifer says,
“He has the most gentle high five ever.”
It was the golden hour then, like it is now.
I still linger too long over the Windmill Cookies
on the craft table while you rehearse your lines.
Seven plus three equals.
Six plus four equals.
Five plus five equals.
When the end credits roll up on my days,
I really just want someone to say he never flinched
and that no animals were harmed
in the making of this life.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/162008/stunt-double
CHEAP MOTELS OF MY YOUTH
by George Bilgere
They lay somewhere between
the Sleeping In The Car era
and my current and probably final era,
the Best Western or Courtyard Marriott era.
The Wigwam. Log Cabin. Kozy Komfort
Hiway House. Star Lite. The Lazy A.
Just off the interstate, the roar
of the sixteen-wheelers all night long.
The dented tin door opening to the parking lot,
the broken coke machine muttering to itself.
“Color TV.” “Free HBO.” “Hang Yourself
in Our Spacious Closets.” A job interview
at some lost-in-the-middle-of-nowhere
branch campus of some agricultural college
devoted to the research and development
of the soybean and related by-products.
Five-course teaching load, four of them
Remedial Comp. Candidate
must demonstrate familiarity
with the basic tenets of Christian faith.
Chance of getting the job
one in a hundred. Lip-sticked
cigarette butt under the bed.
Toilet seat with its paper band,
“Sanitized for Your Protection,”
dead roach floating in the bowl.
As the free HBO
flickers in the background,
you stare in the cracked mirror
at a face too young, too full of hope
to deserve this. And you wait
for the Courtyard Marriott era to arrive.
—from Cheap Motels of My Youth
2023 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner
George Bilgere: “When I was eight years old my parents got divorced. My mother packed her three kids into an old Chevy station wagon and drove us from St. Louis to Riverside, California, looking for a fresh start. She had visited there when she was an Army nurse stationed in LA during the war and fell in love with the place. That cross-country car trip, full of cheap diners, cheap hotels, and desperation, changed my life. I fell in love with the vastness and beauty, the glamor and tawdriness, of America. I’ve travelled all over the country since then, on that ancient and deeply American quest, the search for home.”
https://www.rattle.com/cheap-motels-of-my-youth-by-george-bilgere/
The Cleaving
By Li-Young Lee
He gossips like my grandmother, this man
with my face, and I could stand
amused all afternoon
in the Hon Kee Grocery,
amid hanging meats he
chops: roast pork cut
from a hog hung
by nose and shoulders,
her entire skin burnt
crisp, flesh I know
to be sweet,
her shining
face grinning
up at ducks
dangling single file,
each pierced by black
hooks through breast, bill,
and steaming from a hole
stitched shut at the ass.
I step to the counter, recite,
and he, without even slightly
varying the rhythm of his current confession or harangue,
scribbles my order on a greasy receipt,
and chops it up quick.
Such a sorrowful Chinese face,
nomad, Gobi, Northern
in its boniness
clear from the high
warlike forehead
to the sheer edge of the jaw.
He could be my brother, but finer,
and, except for his left forearm, which is engorged,
sinewy from his daily grip and
wield of a two-pound tool,
he's delicate, narrow-
waisted, his frame
so slight a lover, some
rough other
might break it down
its smooth, oily length.
In his light-handed calligraphy
on receipts and in his
moodiness, he is
a Southerner from a river-province;
suited for scholarship, his face poised
above an open book, he’d mumble
his favorite passages.
He could be my grandfather;
come to America to get a Western education
in 1917, but too homesick to study,
he sits in the park all day, reading poems
and writing letters to his mother.
He lops the head off, chops
the neck of the duck
into six, slits
the body
open, groin
to breast, and drains
the scalding juices,
then quarters the carcass
with two fast hacks of the cleaver,
old blade that has worn
into the surface of the round
foot-thick chop-block
a scoop that cradles precisely the curved steel.
The head, flung from the body, opens
down the middle where the butcher
cleanly halved it between
the eyes, and I
see, foetal-crouched
inside the skull, the homunculus,
gray brain grainy
to eat.
Did this animal, after all, at the moment
its neck broke,
image the way his executioner
shrinks from his own death?
Is this how
I, too, recoil from my day?
See how this shape
hordes itself, see how
little it is.
See its grease on the blade.
Is this how I’ll be found
when judgement is passed, when names
are called, when crimes are tallied?
This is also how I looked before I tore my mother open.
Is this how I presided over my century, is this how
I regarded the murders?
This is also how I prayed.
Was it me in the Other
I prayed to when I prayed?
This too was how I slept, clutching my wife.
Was it me in the other I loved
when I loved another?
The butcher sees me eye this delicacy.
With a finger, he picks it
out of the skull-cradle
and offers it to me.
I take it gingerly between my fingers
and suck it down.
I eat my man.
The noise the body makes
when the body meets
the soul over the soul’s ocean and penumbra
is the old sound of up-and-down, in-and-out,
a lump of muscle chug-chugging blood
into the ear; a lover’s
heart-shaped tongue;
flesh rocking flesh until flesh comes;
the butcher working
at his block and blade to marry their shapes
by violence and time;
an engine crossing,
re-crossing salt water, hauling
immigrants and the junk
of the poor. These
are the faces I love, the bodies
and scents of bodies
for which I long
in various ways, at various times,
thirteen gathered around the redwood,
happy, talkative, voracious
at day’s end,
eager to eat
four kinds of meat
prepared four different ways,
numerous plates and bowls of rice and vegetables,
each made by distinct affections
and brought to table by many hands.
Brothers and sisters by blood and design,
who sit in separate bodies of varied shapes,
we constitute a many-membered
body of love.
In a world of shapes
of my desires, each one here
is a shape of one of my desires, and each
is known to me and dear by virtue
of each one’s unique corruption
of those texts, the face, the body:
that jut jaw
to gnash tendon;
that wide nose to meet the blows
a face like that invites;
those long eyes closing on the seen;
those thick lips
to suck the meat of animals
or recite 300 poems of the T’ang;
these teeth to bite my monosyllables;
these cheekbones to make
those syllables sing the soul.
Puffed or sunken
according to the life,
dark or light according
to the birth, straight
or humped, whole, manqué, quasi, each pleases, verging
on utter grotesquery.
All are beautiful by variety.
The soul too
is a debasement
of a text, but, thus, it
acquires salience, although a
human salience, but
inimitable, and, hence, memorable.
God is the text.
The soul is a corruption
and a mnemonic.
A bright moment,
I hold up an old head
from the sea and admire the haughty
down-curved mouth
that seems to disdain
all the eyes are blind to,
including me, the eater.
Whole unto itself, complete
without me, yet its
shape complements the shape of my mind.
I take it as text and evidence
of the world’s love for me,
and I feel urged to utterance,
urged to read the body of the world, urged
to say it
in human terms,
my reading a kind of eating, my eating
a kind of reading,
my saying a diminishment, my noise
a love-in-answer.
What is it in me would
devour the world to utter it?
What is it in me will not let
the world be, would eat
not just this fish,
but the one who killed it,
the butcher who cleaned it.
I would eat the way he
squats, the way he
reaches into the plastic tubs
and pulls out a fish, clubs it, takes it
to the sink, guts it, drops it on the weighing pan.
I would eat that thrash
and plunge of the watery body
in the water, that liquid violence
between the man’s hands,
I would eat
the gutless twitching on the scales,
three pounds of dumb
nerve and pulse, I would eat it all
to utter it.
The deaths at the sinks, those bodies prepared
for eating, I would eat,
and the standing deaths
at the counters, in the aisles,
the walking deaths in the streets,
the death-far-from-home, the death-
in-a-strange-land, these Chinatown
deaths, these American deaths.
I would devour this race to sing it,
this race that according to Emerson
managed to preserve to a hair
for three or four thousand years
the ugliest features in the world.
I would eat these features, eat
the last three or four thousand years, every hair.
And I would eat Emerson, his transparent soul, his
soporific transcendence.
I would eat this head,
glazed in pepper-speckled sauce,
the cooked eyes opaque in their sockets.
I bring it to my mouth and—
the way I was taught, the way I’ve watched
others before me do—
with a stiff tongue lick out
the cheek-meat and the meat
over the armored jaw, my eating,
its sensual, salient nowness,
punctuating the void
from which such hunger springs and to which it proceeds.
And what
is this
I excavate
with my mouth?
What is this
plated, ribbed, hinged
architecture, this carp head,
but one more
articulation of a single nothing
severally manifested?
What is my eating,
rapt as it is,
but another
shape of going,
my immaculate expiration?
O, nothing is so
steadfast it won’t go
the way the body goes.
The body goes.
The body’s grave,
so serious
in its dying,
arduous as martyrs
in that task and as
glorious. It goes
empty always
and announces its going
by spasms and groans, farts and sweats.
What I thought were the arms
aching cleave, were the knees trembling leave.
What I thought were the muscles
insisting resist, persist, exist,
were the pores
hissing mist and waste.
What I thought was the body humming reside, reside,
was the body sighing revise, revise.
O, the murderous deletions, the keening
down to nothing, the cleaving.
All of the body’s revisions end
in death.
All of the body’s revisions end.
Bodies eating bodies, heads eating heads,
we are nothing eating nothing,
and though we feast,
are filled, overfilled,
we go famished.
We gang the doors of death.
That is, our deaths are fed
that we may continue our daily dying,
our bodies going
down, while the plates-soon-empty
are passed around, that true
direction of our true prayers,
while the butcher spells
his message, manifold,
in the mortal air.
He coaxes, cleaves, brings change
before our very eyes, and at every
moment of our being.
As we eat we’re eaten.
Else what is this
violence, this salt, this
passion, this heaven?
I thought the soul an airy thing.
I did not know the soul
is cleaved so that the soul might be restored.
Live wood hewn,
its sap springs from a sticky wound.
No seed, no egg has he
whose business calls for an axe.
In the trade of my soul’s shaping,
he traffics in hews and hacks.
No easy thing, violence.
One of its names? Change. Change
resides in the embrace
of the effaced and the effacer,
in the covenant of the opened and the opener;
the axe accomplishes it on the soul’s axis.
What then may I do
but cleave to what cleaves me.
I kiss the blade and eat my meat.
I thank the wielder and receive,
while terror spirits
my change, sorrow also.
The terror the butcher
scripts in the unhealed
air, the sorrow of his Shang
dynasty face,
African face with slit eyes. He is
my sister, this
beautiful Bedouin, this Shulamite,
keeper of sabbaths, diviner
of holy texts, this dark
dancer, this Jew, this Asian, this one
with the Cambodian face, Vietnamese face, this Chinese
I daily face,
this immigrant,
this man with my own face.
-
Li-Young Lee, “The Cleaving” from The City In Which I Love You, published in 1990 by BOA Editions.
Source: The City in Which I Love You (BOA Editions Ltd., 1990)
Falling in Love With Speculative Poetry
If you generally dislike mainstream poetry, speculative poetry could be your gateway into verse.
By Diane Callahan
https://reactormag.com/falling-in-love-with-speculative-poetry-2/
introduction to quantum theory
BY FRANNY CHOI
There are only so many parallel universes
that concern us. In one, he isn’t dead.
In another, you drink light with your hands
all winter. There is a universe in which no one is lying
emptied in the street as the gas station burns, a universe
in which our mothers haven’t learned to wrap
their bones in each small grief they’ve found.
There is a universe in which there is no difference
between the past and the ground. Another
where the oceans pull the moon. And so on.
This is an incomplete list. It has been abridged
for your comfort. I could tell you
about the many universes in which bad things
happen to people other than the people
you love. Yes, in another life, it’s someone else’s sister
who climbs to the roof that night. In another life,
the boys rise darkly from the asphalt to choke
the engines of cruisers, and no one gives birth
chained to a hospital bed, and no one’s child washes
blue, ashore. Sure. You can have these worlds.
You can warm them in your hands at night. But know:
by signing, you agree also to be responsible for the universe
where the oceans glow red, the universe where
what we call shadow is pulsing with the musk
of hooves, and especially the one in which
humans exist, but only in the nightmares
of small children. Will you hold that one too?
The version of the story that never learned
to consider sound? and the one where sound
is only the opposite of metal? and the one
where the sound of metal is never enough
to quiet the dead?
https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-twenty-franny-choi-the-adroit-journal
