America's Next Motorcycle Philosopher?
An interview with Matthew Crawford.
https://www.racket.news/p/americas-next-motorcycle-philosopher
#literature
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
I know it’s mostly due to my growing up in Oklahoma, a Brown Dirt Boy, but I love this little chapbook from Myna Chang!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/95121430-the-potential-of-radio-and-rain
https://newworldwriting.net/myna-chang-the-potential-of-radio-and-rain/
KILL THEM IN THE MORNING
by Tishani Doshi
I’m trying to find where it says,
If your enemy comes to slay you at night,
kill them in the morning. What happens
in the hours of waiting? Do you sing
to one another across the trenches,
stargaze from casements, then set off
to duel at first light? What is it about the sun
rising that’s so self-righteous? The firstness,
the lightness? There’s an allegory somewhere
about a girl holding scissors encircled by soldiers
with guns. Don’t we know that the dragging
from trains takes place after dark, that wars
always happen offstage until they’re not? Summer
is almost upon us, romantic and lonely. I know,
I know, no tightrope-walking allowed between our house
and the neighbour’s. Haven’t you dreamed
of disappearing for a day, then returning
to life, triumphant? Wouldn’t you want
to know who missed you, who rejoiced?
The idea that there are no innocent people.
What colour would you call this hair
under the rubble? My enemy’s enemy
is an Ottoman couch. But we’re here now,
those of us alive, standing on the beach,
facing the rosy dawn—how it slip slaps us
into forgiveness, how we turn the other cheek.
#poem #poetry #literature
https://www.rattle.com/kill-them-in-the-morning-by-tishani-doshi/
Burning a Book
by William Stafford
Protecting each other, right in the center
a few pages glow a long time.
The cover goes first, then outer leaves
curling away, then spine and a scattering.
Truth, brittle and faint, burns easily,
its fire as hot as the fire lies make—
flame doesn’t care. You can usually find
a few charred words in the ashes.
And some books ought to burn, trying for character
but just faking it. More disturbing
than book ashes are whole libraries that no one
got around to writing—desolate
towns, miles of unthought-in cities,
and the terrorized countryside where wild dogs
own anything that moves. If a book
isn’t written, no one needs to burn it—
ignorance can dance in the absence of fire.
So I’ve burned books. And there are many
I haven’t even written, and nobody has.
Freedom
by William Stafford
Freedom is not following a river.
Freedom is following a river,
though, if you want to.
It is deciding now by what happens now.
It is knowing that luck makes a difference.
No leader is free; no follower is free—
the rest of us can often be free.
Most of the world are living by
creeds too odd, chancy, and habit-forming
to be worth arguing about by reason.
If you are oppressed, wake up about
four in the morning: most places,
you can usually be free some of the time
if you wake up before other people.
Choosing a Dog
by William Stafford
“It’s love,” they say. You touch
the right one and a whole half of the universe
wakes up, a new half.
Some people never find
that half, or they neglect it or trade it
for money or success and it dies.
The faces of big dogs tell, over the years,
that size is a burden: you enjoy it for awhile
but then maintenance gets to you.
When I get old I think I’ll keep, not a little
dog, but a serious dog,
for the casual, drop-in criminal —
My kind of dog, unimpressed by
dress or manner, just knowing
what’s really there by the smell.
Your good dogs, some things that they hear
they don’t really want you to know —
it’s too grim or ethereal.
And sometimes when they look in the fire
they see time going on and someone alone,
but they don’t say anything.
https://poetrying.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/choosing-a-dog-william-stafford/
https://mastodon.social/@gutenberg_org/112100644017684450 gutenberg_org@mastodon.social - Irish dramatist, folklorist and theatre manager Lady Gregory was born #OTD in 1852.
Her works often depicted the lives of ordinary people in rural Ireland & explored themes of Irish identity, tradition, & the struggle for independence. Some of her notable plays include "The Rising of the Moon," "The Gaol Gate," & "Hyacinth Halvey." She was also a dedicated folklorist and collector of Irish myths, legends, & folk tales.
Lady Gregory at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/4092
TRASH
by Lowell Jaeger
This year’s leaves are last year’s leaves
again. Even the loam breathes.
I believe this and Leonard YoungBear says
in the old days there was no such thing as trash:
Indians camped and left ashes only, or bones,
bits of hide, feathers, mounds of buffalo dung.
What the dogs didn’t eat, coyotes did.
Or wind, snow. Beneath trees and prairie grass
everything from the earth returned. Human life
too, Leonard says, should be like that.
I know, I say, I’m not afraid anymore
of dying. It’s trash
that worries me. Caskets. I keep thinking
of tin cans, foil, yellow rubber raincoats don’t
rot very quick, don’t burn either; bury them
and something spits them back. I’d sooner fall
in the woods, feed the sharp teeth of many hungers
beyond my own. And part of me will swim downstream
in the cold eyeball of a fish next time, my soul
under the wings of a young bird learning to fly.
—from Rattle #37, Summer 2012
Lowell Jaeger
“As a teen in the great north woods, I spent long quiet hours in my hometown library, where I found solace from troubles at home, troubles in school, and troubles in the world. I sat in the big leather chairs and read T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland. I had no clear understanding of the book, such a foreign, worldly voice, so unlike the talk of local lumberjacks and factory workers. Yet that poem and I sat and conversed mysteriously beyond the words on the page. For a while, that poem was my best friend. I’d be honored if any poem of mine were ever so esteemed.”
Bob
by Angela Narciso Torres
In the dream, in bed with a cold,
I asked God for my mom back.
God misheard and brought
my bob back instead, that sleek cut
I wore in junior high, blade-edged,
barely grazing the shoulders
one side curtaining my right eye,
the other tucked behind
my ear like a secret. I was still
the gangly twelve-year-old
my brothers teased: When you stand
sideways no one can see you.
That year, Aunt Girlie, back from America,
scanned me from head to toe
saying, don’t worry, hon,
even Twiggy made it without ’em.
Mom looked away, not knowing
whether to laugh or cry. If God
brought my mom back, I would’ve said,
flipping my bob, it’s okay, Mom.
I’ll be okay. And I was.\
The Way It Is
by William Stafford
There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
Ask Me
by William Stafford
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
