Cheers to tough broads (e.g. Ms. Cara Price and Co.)

Sigh no more, ladies
Time is male
and in his cups drinks to the fair.
Bemused by gallantry, we hear
our mediocrities over-praised,
indolence read as abnegation,
slattern thought styled intuition,
every lapse forgiven, our crime
only to cast too bold a shadow
or smash the mold straight off.
For that, solitary confinement,
tear gas, attrition shelling.
Few applicants for that honor.

-Adrienne Rich

Zelda Fitzgerald burned to death in an asylum fire--something I never knew until I began to read Women and Madness by Phyllis Chestler, a classic, apparently. I found an original edition on my grandmother's bookshelf a month ago, next to Yeats and a stack of Edith Piaf records. I asked her if she remembered when she got it, not expecting a very lucid response, but she, in her eighty-seventh year, squinted at the title, smiled ruefully, and nodded. I put it back on the shelf and bought my own copy.

Erasure

thanks Marcine :)

"Pero me iré al primer paisaje..."

...de choques, líquidos, y rumores [...]
Allí todas las formas guardan entrelazadas
una sola expresión frenética de avance."

-from Cielo vivo, by García Lorca

Yesterday, a woman in the class I co-teach wrote about frost. She came from the West Indies, arrived in freezing New York, and was astonished to find "smoke" coming out of her brother's mouth when he talked. They had found, as children, that in their new home even their breath seemed to change...
It's been so long and so short since I first arrived, to the point where I no longer bother to comment on how time here expands and collapses at will, I--we all--just live within it. Sometimes, (a lot of the time) the tiring friction of trying to make it be linear, to fit it into years, months and days, degrees, leases, and semesters, makes me want to escape to another unknown place, to jumble it all up again, and leave before it solidifies.
But then again, I sometimes can catch my head and let it rest, I can realize the route I walked this morning does, in fact, circle around and turn back into itself.

Bent Orbit

My favorite way of remembering is to forget.
Please start the record of the sea over again.
Call up a shadow below the pendulum of a gull's wing.
In a city of eight million sundials, nobody has any idea
how long a minute really is.
              
    -Elaine Equi

"Fugaz" is my new favorite word in Spanish.

Somewhere in Northern Virginia.

Wherever you are, whoever you are, submit your stories!

Submit here

From the collection:

Old Habits, New Faces

Memories from before I had a right to them...

Their eyes pass
in different directions but

they smile, they turn
their faces to the sky.




I have a tendency to be nostalgic for events that have already happened to other people.

"Poet's Work"

Grandfather

advised me:
Learn a trade

I learned
to sit at desk
and condense

No layoff
from this
condensery.

-Lorine Niedecker