A pack of young flirts was patrolling the party, …
Mary Jo Bang
Alice cannot be in the poem, she says, because …
The rhinestone lights blink off and on. …
What is desire …
It was relatively painless except for being …
This bald year, frozen now in February. …
We were told that the cloud cover was a blanket …
A personal lens: glass bending rays …
At a book of details …
You once sat on straw mats but clearly …
Three items in an envelope. A photograph of two, four, six, eight, nine boys boarding a bus. Not boys, men. Dressed in the long wool coat of winter. Something “based on the life of.” What can a moment outlast? That question becomes a theory, theorem, mechanism. Three boys, one girl, a tree brushing back air off her forehead. Paper, six clean sheets, a monogrammed envelope. An index. The physical bias to existence becomes some wedge, the inexact value of an empire of ether. Tick-tick. The amphibian emerges from water, walks off stage. It’s as if evolution is embodied in absence. Someone is lying on her back. She turns over. Her breath is in the air. Or in the idea of atmosphere. …
That the walls have no texture suggests that we, …
September is work to the center …
I was living a life that was more …
Naked or not, I’m a costume that moves, figurine with a face that changes. You could call me a mood. I begin cheerful but sometimes turn solemn when confronted with my own mythology (wolf in a cape, cat scratch on a cupboard door, mouse tail in the hand of a bland farmer’s wife, a drop of blood on her shoe). Today’s beginning ended in a dream. In a fantastical bed, a lover leaned in to kiss me just as I realized I was part machine, part primitive urge. I left the bed and said, You know, don’t you, not everyone is so disposed. And then I heard from inside my head, You should say, not everyone is so disposed to your utopia. Only then did I realize I’d been inexact. Even here there are scolds that tell you how to be. Sometimes they live inside. Naked or not, I am trying to tuck my arms invisibly behind my back so that all you can see are my breasts and my highly simplified head. …
The role of elegy is …
The aqua green goes with the pink …
I was working in a bookstore and as an antidote to the twin torment of exhaustion and boredom, one day I went with a friend on a walking tour. We made it as far as Berlin and there I met the man I would move with to a boarding house, then to furnished rooms in the flat of a civil servant, and from there one morning in January to the Registry to be married. Afterward we moved to a studio apartment and two years later to the school where boys returning from the war would remove their collars and sew them back on with red thread to demonstrate the end of their allegiance to the cruel and fastidious past. Everyone wanted to be launched into a place from which you could look back and ask whether the red was also meant to enact spilled blood. You could say so, but only if you want to insist that history's minutia is best read as allegory. The fact is, history didn't exist then. Each day was a twenty-four hour stand-still on a bridge from which we discretely looked into the distance, hoping to catch sight of the future. It's near where you're standing now. One day we were lying in the sun dressed in nothing but our skin when a camera came by and devoured us. …
The story is written, the slip of a girl is loosed …
Fragile like a child is fragile. …