WHAT IS MY LIFE ABOUT?
by Julie Price Pinkerton

This naked, lonely question
is still simmering in a crock pot
on the counter of a beach bungalow

where no one lives. But if you like,
I can show you some examples of what falls
out of my life when it’s whacked like a piñata:

My friend Emily reminisces about the cat
she used to have, and still misses.
“Clearly, Pippin and I were telepathic.”

In my collection of very bad Christmas decorations
there is a cloisonné manger scene with a baby Jesus
who has a snout like a piglet.

I have been criticized for always looking downward
when I walk. But in only five decades I have found enough
coins to sink a rowboat.

If I were a household object I would insist
on being a gooseneck lamp or the yarn mane
of a toy horse.

Most of my prayers are like drive-by shootings.
Please help me. Please save her. Thank you
for the parking spot.

—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith

---

Julie Price Pinkerton: “I am a poet of faith. I’ve never written that sentence before. I was raised in a Baptist church on a gravel road on the outskirts of Brazil, Indiana. All of Brazil, Indiana, is kind of an outskirt. The church of my childhood was weird and toxic. Long story. At the center of it: Our pastor’s son (who became a pastor himself) was a pedophile. Nobody knew this until many years later, but something was off there, and I could tell. I hated going there. I stuck with my faith, though. Went to a really small Methodist college, the University of Evansville. A battering ram hit my faith in God when I was a freshman and our school’s entire basketball team was killed in a plane crash. Among the lost was the boy I had just started dating. But faith was still there, flailing. Post-college adult stuff. Marriage, divorce, the switching of churches, the switching of denominations (within Christianity), jobs, cities, marriage again, and hobbling along with my belief in God, which never leaves, but baffles me repeatedly like a train I can hear blaring somewhere in the woods but I cannot find the tracks. I’m 54 now. And Christ is still the only thing that makes sense to me. My atheist friends find this quaint. That’s OK.”

https://www.rattle.com/what-is-my-life-about-by-julie-price-pinkerton/

#poem #poetry #literature

#bookstodon

---

♲ br00t4c - 2024-12-20 18:02:39 GMT

2024 'Best of the Rest': Our Favorite Books of the Year!#BookLovers #BookRecommendations #MsMagazine #WomensLiterature #Literature

msmagazine.com/2024/12/20/2024…

This is it... the ultimate List of lists

https://lithub.com/the-ultimate-best-books-of-2024-list/

#reading #literature #2024

#literature. #books #reading US #civilwar #sherman

#literature #reading #books #civil #war #us #sherman
Current book I'm reading. Has detailed maps.
I prefer hardbound books.

#literature #reading #books #civil #war #us #military
General WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN
American Civil War

A quotation from Travers, P. L.

You do not chop off a section of your imaginative substance and make a book specifically for children, for — if you are honest — you have no idea where childhood ends and maturity begins. It is all endless and all one.

P. L. Travers (1899-1996) Australian-British writer [Pamela Lyndon Travers; b. Helen Lyndon Goff]
Essay (1978-07-02), “I Never Wrote for Children,” New York Times

#quote #quotes #quotation #audience #books #childhood #children #literature #maturity #writing
Sourcing / notes: https://wist.info/travers-p-l/73367/

"Here there was no arranging or 'inventing'; everything was spontaneous and took its own place, right or wrong."

From The Writer's Almanac 12/7/2013

It's the birthday of the woman who said: "It is a solemn and terrible thing to write a novel." That's the novelist Willa Cather, born in the village of Back Creek near Winchester, Virginia (1873). When Cather was nine years old, she and her family left their home in Virginia to homestead in Nebraska, and the Nebraska prairie is the setting of her great novels O Pioneers! (1913) and My Àntonia (1918).

But Cather's productive years as a writer were spent not in Nebraska but in New York City. She moved there in 1906 when she was offered a job as managing editor at McClure's magazine. She lived with Edith Lewis in a studio apartment at 60 Washington Square South, in a red-brick row house, on a block called "Genius Row" because over the years its tenants included Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, O. Henry, Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, and John Dos Passos. Despite living in the midst of it, Cather seems to have stayed at the periphery of the Bohemian community of Greenwich Village.

Willa Cather worked at McClure's for five years, but it was stressful work, and she was not writing much of her own fiction. In December of 1908, she got a letter from her mentor, the writer Sarah Orne Jewett. Jewett wrote: "My dear Willa, — I have been thinking about you and hoping that things are going well. I cannot help saying what I think about your writing and its being hindered by such incessant, important, responsible work as you have in your hands now. I do think that it is impossible for you to work so hard and yet have your gifts mature as they should — when one's first working power has spent itself nothing ever brings it back just the same, and I do wish in my heart that the force of this very year could have gone into three or four stories. [...] I want you to be surer of your backgrounds, — you have your Nebraska life, — a child's Virginia, and now an intimate knowledge of what we are pleased to call the 'Bohemia' of newspaper and magazine-office life. These are uncommon equipment, but you don't see them yet quite enough from the outside [...] You need to dream your dreams and go on to new and more shining ideals, to be aware of 'the gleam' and to follow it; your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet center of life, and write from that to the world that holds offices, and all society, all Bohemia; the city, the country — in short, you must write to the human heart, the great consciousness that all humanity goes to make up."

It took Cather awhile to take Jewett's advice. A couple of years later, she quit her job at McClure's, but even then she did not dig into her own background for her work. Instead, she published her first novel, Alexander's Bridge (1912), which she later admitted was a forced effort. After she published her first novel about Nebraska, O Pioneers! (1913), she knew she had found her place as a writer. She compared writing O Pioneers! to writing Alexander's Bridge: "Here there was no arranging or 'inventing'; everything was spontaneous and took its own place, right or wrong."

Cather followed up O Pioneers! with My Àntonia (1918), another novel set in the prairies of her childhood. An interviewer asked Cather if My Àntonia was so good because it was rooted in the Nebraska soil. She said: "No, no, decidedly no. There is no formula; there is no reason. It was a story of people I knew. I expressed a mood, the core of which was like a folksong, a thing Grieg could have written. That it was powerfully tied to the soil had nothing to do with it. Àntonia was tied to the soil. But I might have written the tale of a Czech baker in Chicago, and it would have been the same. It was nice to have her in the country; it was more simple to handle, but Chicago could have told the same story. It would have been smearier, joltier, noisier, less sugar and more sand, but still a story that had as its purpose the desire to express the quality of these people. No, the country has nothing to do with it; the city has nothing to do with it; nothing contributes consciously. The thing worth while is always unplanned. Any art that is a result of preconcerted plans is a dead baby."

Cather's other novels include The Song of the Lark (1915), One of Ours (1922), and Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927).

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2013%252F12%252F07.html

#writers #writing #literature

https://mastodon.social/@gutenberg_org/113606168803274867 gutenberg_org@mastodon.social - English novelist, poet and musicologist Sylvia Townsend Warner was born #OTD in 1893.

Warner initially trained as a musicologist and contributed to the Oxford University Press's Dictionary of National Biography before transitioning to a literary career. Lolly Willowes (1926) it is her debut novel and one of her most celebrated works, it is a feminist tale about a spinster who finds liberation through witchcraft.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Townsend_Warner

https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72223

#books #literature

MOTEL NIGHT ATTENDANT
by Mark Evan Johnston

Out here on Route 38,
I’ve learned the difference
between noise and sound.
Sound is familiar: the whirr
and clank of the ice machine,
the clink of a radiator,
the sough of the wind,
an occasional train.
Here noise means trouble.
Number 32, angry
with his wife, throws
a Gideon at her head.
I only hope he doesn’t
throw the lamp.
I sit here beneath
sixty watts of darkness
reading a trash novel,
waiting for the cheap tinkle
of this small bell to sound
but it never does.
Everything is in order:
the linens (call them that)
for tomorrow’s chambermaids (call them that),
the books, the Coke machine.
I make sure the Planter’s peanuts
don’t turn green
behind their sun-struck plastic.
Sometimes I almost hope
for trouble: a random shout,
an untimely splash in the pool,
a crying out that doesn’t
have to do with sex.
I want to have to go down
to Number 18 and set
things straight.
Years ago (here comes old Krebs),
we had a murder here,
before my time.
(He works the night-trick
at the mill.)
Some loon got trashed
(Krebs doesn’t stop to talk)
and poured beer on his wife
while she was getting off
on the Magic Fingers.
(Krebs always leaves
his shoes outside his door.)
He cried and tried to blame
it on the management, but
it came out he tampered
with the wires. Dupard
was his name, Canadian.
But don’t get me wrong.
I’m not looking to open up
Number 10 and find someone
dangling from the south end
of my sheets, or blood
pooling from under
the bathroom door.
Krebs, a night’s work himself,
has the country music on too loud.
The 3:15 sounds lonely,
the bell stands mute,
the buzzing of our new
neon sign would like
to drive me crazy.
But that’s not a noise.
That’s a sound.
No trouble tonight.

—from Rattle #27, Summer 2007

---

Mark Evan Johnston: “A few years back, when I would visit my daughters outside Pittsburgh, I stayed at a small motel. It had the air of being the sort of place where someone might have been murdered once, or would someday be murdered. I realized as I thought about it that this impression was created by the expectant silence of the place, a silence into which random sounds would occasionally intrude. In ‘Motel Night Attendant,’ I have attempted to register how these small intrusions might strike the speaker of the poem.”

https://www.rattle.com/motel-night-attendant-by-mark-evan-johnston/

#poem #poetry #literature

But isn’t that what poetry is all about?
Images speaking to the unspeakable
In our dreams as we lie awake in our sleep?

ALLEN GINSBERG’S DEAD
by M.L. Liebler

Why, to write down the stuff
and people of everyday,
must poems be dressed in gold,
in old fearful stone? …
I want poems stained
by hands and everydayness.
—Pablo Neruda
I know Allen Ginsberg’s dead,
And I want to write
A poem for him just like every-
Body else wants to do, but I can’t
Help but think of my neighbor
Who too died alone, recently, in his home of
30 years, and how he was a person
Who will never have a poem
Written in his honor or to his memory.

He was a person who will never have
His life enshrined in sound
And symbol of verse or song.

I didn’t know my neighbor either,
But I want to remember him
With verse and poesy just the same.

I want to celebrate
His life as the important treasure
He must have been as someone’s

Husband, father, brother, friend.
I want to do this
Simply because he lived.

My neighbor wasn’t famous,
And I probably only saw him once
Or twice in all the years that I lived
Behind his back fence.

But his words always made me
Amazed at the kindness of this world
When he spoke softly to me,
While he tended his garden.

I don’t remember his words
As memorable quotes spoken
By a famous person. It was just small talk

Spoken in the lexicon of the backyard.
No “Howl” or “Kaddish” or
“Sunflower Sutra” to be sure,

But graceful words that rose
And danced over the fence,
Behind his red bricked house.

So, while I would really love
To write a poem for Allen Ginsberg,
Like everyone else, right now
It seems more important for me to capture
My neighbor’s life, just another person
Whom I never knew.

I’ll write it all down
In a poem that he’ll never read
And that his family will never see
In print or hear at a public reading.

But isn’t that what poetry is all about?
Images speaking to the unspeakable
In our dreams as we lie awake in our sleep?

And, now, because I’ve shared this poem
With all of you, we are forever connected
All of our bones together
Side by side in the rich graveyard
Soil of poetry and life.

—from Rattle #9, Summer 1998

---

M.L. Liebler: “When I’m in the second grade, I start scribbling stuff. It’s—you guys know, being poets and writers—it’s in there; you can’t do anything about it. But I had no idea, and I would get in trouble for it. They would call my grandmother and say, ‘He scribbles, and we don’t know what it is, but he’s scribbling again, so you pay for the book.’ When I got to the fifth grade I was doing this all the time, scribbling on paper and notebooks and so on. I remember having a big English textbook that had a pelican on a post in the ocean, and when I opened that book I noticed that it had things in it that had a lot of white space around them. When I saw that, I thought, ‘That’s kind of what I’m scribbling. What I’m scribbling has a lot of white space around it.’ So at that point, that’s when I was first able to say, ‘Oh, it’s a poem.’” (web)

https://www.rattle.com/allen-ginsbergs-dead-by-m-l-liebler/

#poem #poetry #literature

The Writer's Almanac from Saturday, November 30, 2013

It's the birthday of the man who said, "A successful book is not made of what is in it, but of what is left out of it": Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri (1835). In 1867, he published his first book, a book of short stories called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. It didn't sell many copies, but two years later, he published The Innocents Abroad (1869), a humorous book of travel writing. It was an immediate best-seller, and remained the best-selling of all Twain's books during his lifetime. In it, he wrote: "We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can 'show off' and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our own untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off. All our passengers are paying strict attention to this thing, with the end in view which I have mentioned. The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad."

During the next 25 years, Twain published most of his best-known books: Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Then he teamed up with his nephew to publish the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which were hugely successful. But after these successes, things began to fall apart. Twain invested money into all sorts of companies, including throwing a huge amount of money behind an invention by one of his friends: an automatic typesetting machine called the Paige Compositor. Twain was dazzled by the invention; he described the machine as a "magnificent creature" and a "sublime magician of iron and steel." He wrote to his brother: "All the other wonderful inventions of the human brain sink pretty nearly into commonplace contrasted with this awful mechanical miracle. Telephones, telegraphs, locomotive, cotton gins, sewing machines [...] — all mere toys, simplicities, The Paige Compositor marches alone and far in the lead of human inventions." The typesetter was a dismal failure, and Twain went bankrupt.

Twain published another book, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), but it got bad reviews and didn't sell very well. His financial situation got worse and worse, and he moved to Europe, where his family could live well for less money. He sold rights for a new novel to Century Magazine for $6,500, and quickly wrote Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894). It sold better than A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but not well enough, so he earned money on a worldwide lecture tour.

In 1896, his favorite daughter, Susy, died at the age of 24 from spinal meningitis. Twain, his wife, Livy, and their daughter Clara were living in England when they got word that Susy was ill, and she died before they could make it home. After Susy's death, Twain sank into depression. A few years later, in 1904, his beloved wife, Livy, died. A year after her death, on this day in 1905, Twain turned 70 and had a huge party at Delmonico's restaurant in New York City. There were 170 guests, including Willa Cather, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Andrew Carnegie. The guests assembled in a parlor, and at 8 p.m. a 40-piece orchestra played a march to alert them that it was time for dinner. Each guest's menu had drawings of Twain in different stages of his life, including in his most recent career as a lecturer — that drawing showed him proclaiming, "Be good and you will be lonesome." Each guest received a 12-inch bust of Twain as a souvenir.

After dinner, several telegrams were read aloud, including one from President Theodore Roosevelt, lamenting the fact that he could not attend; and another full of birthday wishes from a group of British writers, including Rudyard Kipling, J.M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Twain's good friend, the writer and publisher William Dean Howells, gave a toast that ended in a sonnet he had written for the occasion.

After Howells' toast, Twain got up and gave a speech. He compared his 70h birthday to his first, and decided that the 70th was far superior; he said: "I remember the first one very well, and I always think of it with indignation; everything was so crude, unaesthetic, primeval. [...] Why, even the cradle wasn't whitewashed — nothing ready at all. I hadn't any hair, I hadn't any teeth, I hadn't any clothes." He said, "I have achieved my 70 years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else." Then he proceeded to explain the lifestyle that had gotten him there, which included eating mince-pie after midnight; smoking at all times when he was awake (including in bed); avoiding exercise at all costs; and living what he called "a severely moral life." He ended his speech: "I am 70; 70, and would nestle in the chimney corner, and smoke my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and that when you in your turn shall arrive at pier No. 70 you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart."

https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2013%252F11%252F30.html

#writing #literature #thewritersalmanac

Thanksgiving for Two
by Marjorie Saiser

The adults we call our children will not be arriving
with their children in tow for Thanksgiving.
We must make our feast ourselves,

slice our half-ham, indulge, fill our plates,
potatoes and green beans
carried to our table near the window.

We are the feast, plenty of years,
arguments. I’m thinking the whole bundle of it
rolls out like a white tablecloth. We wanted

to be good company for one another.
Little did we know that first picnic
how this would go. Your hair was thick,

mine long and easy; we climbed a bluff
to look over a storybook plain. We chose
our spot as high as we could, to see

the river and the checkerboard fields.
What we didn’t see was this day, in
our pajamas if we want to,

wrinkled hands strong, wine
in juice glasses, toasting
whatever’s next,

the decades of side-by-side,
our great good luck.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58040/thanksgiving-for-two?mc_cid=fa788b5ee2

#poem #poetry #literature

Wooden Window Frames
by Luci Tapahonso

The morning sun streams through the little kitchen’s
wooden panes; its luminescence tempts me to forego coffee.
But I don’t. The dark coffee scent melds with the birds’
chirping along the hidden acacia. Then, a small bird
alights on the cross of the wooden clothesline.
Its tiny head turns from side to side, then as if sensing me,
it gazes at me through a window square.
We ponder each other, then remember our manners,
and it flies off into the clean, cold air.

My Kiowa friends say a visit from a bird
is the spirit of a departed loved one.
I think again of Marie, my friend, my comadre –
the many feast days, powwows, and trips we shared.
We cruised down Taos’s one main street,
and rushed to Smith’s grocery for last-minute necessities,
or Walmart for the white cylinder candles for wakes.
We hauled huge, bulging bags to the town dump.

Oh, sister, this entire town brims with memories
of our long sisterhood, since our early twenties
when we were young mothers,
but that was in the last century.

This quiet casita is surrounded by tall stands
of elm and cottonwood trees, their bare, brown
branches stark against the deep, blue sky.

Every other week, snow falls in thin waves
onto the flat ochre houses
that seem anchored to the ground.
Outside of these thick adobe walls, a stillness settles upon everything.
As memories drift all around, I gather ingredients for a stew,
scents of coffee and toast linger around the arched doorway,
and the warm air in the kitchen lightens the chopping of vegetables.
Soon, the windowpanes are damp from the simmering stew.

All there is now, is to wait, sip coffee, and watch the snow
fall in layers on the roofs, trees, fences, and cars.

I am in a serene cocoon of memories.
All our conversations and laughter are silent now.
Somewhere north of here, dogs bark playfully,
probably romping in the fresh snow.
Just up the road at the pueblo, your family gathers.
They replenish the fire, stir pots of red chile
and place potato salad and platters
of sliced oven bread on the table.

Copyright © 2024 by Luci Tapahonso. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 28, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“A dear friend, Marie Reyna, passed in 2022. Because the Covid pandemic had just ended, there wasn’t a public memorial. Then, in January of 2024, I was awarded a Helene Wurlitzer [Foundation] residency—allowing me to write and live in Taos for three months. It offered me an extended chance to visit and be with Marie’s family, relatives, and friends. I could finally memorialize and grieve the loss of our long friendship.”
—Luci Tapahonso

https://poets.org/poem/wooden-window-frames

#poem #poetry #literature

The Ecstasy of Jan Beatty

She is the punk laureate of working-class Pittsburgh, and her poems are equal part protest and jeremiad.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/1634976/the-ecstasy-of-jan-beatty?mc_cid=03d3ee7c83

#poems #poetry #poets #literature

Juke
By Diane Seuss

What kind of juke do you prefer?
For me, it’s the kind with three
songs and thirty-seven blank
title strips. Three songs, and two
are “Luckenbach, Texas.”
The third is beautiful and arcane,
but the patrons hate it,
and the record skips.
I prefer the three-song juke
and the three-toothed human

smile. I found the juke of my dreams
in a bar called “Chums,” no clue
the origin or meaning
of the quotation marks. It was a prime
number of a bar, and now it’s dead.
One night, drinking half-and-
halfs, half beer, half tomato juice,
with schnapps chasers, a cheap
source of hallucination.
A soon-to-be-defrocked Catholic

priest, Vic Jr., my mother, and me,
our faces streaked blue with pool
chalk, juke red as a beating heart,
and just a strip of hollyhocks
and a tree line between us
and the northern lights.
I was young. I looked like a Rubens
painting of a woman half-eaten
by moths. What lucky
debauchery, the ride back

on a washboard dirt road,
taking everything for granted,
flipping off the aurora borealis
like it was some three-toothed human
in flashy clothes dancing
to get my attention.
I wasn’t a mean drunk then,
just honest.
Next morning, mom walked in
on the naked priest

in the shack’s garage,
washing himself with a rag
and cold water from the well
in a metal dishpan. I’d later do dishes
in that pan and wash my hair
in that pan. We popped popcorn
on the one-burner wood-burning
stove and ate it out of that pan.
I’m talking about a time and a place.
All I can say of it is that it was real.

The song choices were limited,
so the grooves were dug deep.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/161499/juke?mc_cid=4530d316f0
#poem #poetry #poets #literature

#literature #poem
found a great online site for #lyrics
from all over the world with translations in English and Spanish
f.e. #Nahid-Kabiri from #Iran
https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/2299

someone can provide me the online version of #Octavio-Paz #El-laberinto-de-la-soledad ?
#Mexico
I had it in copied paper - but seems I threw it away :(

The Balm of Life
Short Story by Miles Harvey

https://lithub.com/balm-of-life/

#stories #literature #writing

I Wake up in the Underworld of My Own Dirty Purse
by Karyna McGlynn

My stage name is Persephone.
I perform nightly for a smattering
of ill-informed Tic Tacs.

Now that I’m finally tiny,
I only have two fears:
that someone will leave
my Whole World in the sun
unattended & gravity’s strap
might one day strain & break.

Down here, no one desires me,
but there are relatively few decisions:
what flavor gum to huff,
how many grains of granola.

I spend my time rolling around
with lipsticks: matte nudes
& cabernet mistakes that looked
better on the models. I bind
my thighs with dental floss,
finally learn the aerial arts.

There are bobby pins.
I have to watch myself. I become
begummed, magnetized.
Things stick. Sometimes I can’t
shake them. For a whole week
I was Working Shit Out
with a broken necklace that had me
ensnared by the hair.

In my dark bordello,
Bic lighters are barges
out in deep water. I taste
the tang of their flint sharpening,
receding, hear the cargo
sloshing, the boatswain’s call
at the far edge of my sanity.
Sometimes keys wash up to me—
all faint numbers & silver teeth.
I no longer know what they open.

More than once, I’ve considered
setting the place on fire.
So easy. Plenty to kindle:
petrified pretzel logs, illegible receipts,
& sometimes, incredibly, a tampon
escaped from its casing—string
like a fuse on a soft stick of dynamite.

On hot nights, I unscrew my purse
perfume & move my naked body
like a question across the cool
roller-ball. She is a Silent Oracle
who only answers in spirits
& fumes: pomegranate, lily
of the valley, amber, wet fern,
African violet. I have eternity
to translate this Olfactory Code
into a working escape plan.

For lack of space: Please Help.
This is what I’ve been reduced to.
I hope someone Up There is looking
for me. I hope my Mother is
burning the goddamn crops.

https://poems.com/poem/i-wake-up-in-the-underworld-of-my-own-dirty-purse/

#poem #poetry #literature

Love Song for the End of Us
by Kenzie Allen

In the great die-off, the fireflies will become fewer still.
The jar, empty. The hills and exultation

dark. Vestibules crawl through the shape of an arch
slowed then dead, memory locked to the last survivor

and whatever stories they told; a cardinal returned each summer,
vanished. Perhaps my children brown in the ultraviolet.

Save any space you can.
The hum of June buffets the doors not so long before we mourn.

There was a garden. Something to pray for, even at the wake.
I want to say it was enough.

I shudder to think of the bear trap shattering bone,
his tender paw gripped in a mouth he should never encounter,

or the gills cut through clear with filament
sharp as invisible; lipless fauna surrounded by fire

on every shoreline. We've seen so many
feathered stomachs filled up with ash;

beyond doubt, no air is left—
yet the breath leaves.

Only the lights on the sidewalk tell you
anything is left to be open to be left.

The flame hailing from the sill
in candle, holy water, paper stars—

that's the tongue of this house laid bare,
wide and beckons welcome.

I have prepared the linens.
I kissed a prayer to each crevice

like cupped hands, a flower pressed
brief and capsized by mid-afternoon

bad deeds done by strange fingers,
as though you don't know where you've been.

from the book CLOUD MISSIVES / Tin House

Some of this poem was inspired by my time living in St. Louis, the “Gateway to the West” and where I used to catch fireflies, and in Trondheim, Norway, where the city and nature were so intertwined. The rest was inspired by the markers of our irrevocable impacts on this earth and the more than human world. We are bound to its future as much as it is bound to us.

Kenzie Allen on "Love Song for the End of Us"

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