Author: Christina's Words

“The darkness around us is deep.” ~ William Stafford

“As she bends for a Kleenex in the dark, I am thinking of other girls . . .

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“As she bends for a Kleenex in the dark, I am thinking of other girls: the girl I loved who fell in love with a lion—she lost her head over it—we just necked a lot; of the girl who fell in love with the tightrope, got addicted to getting high wired and nothing else was enough; all the beautiful, damaged women who have come through my life and I wonder what would have happened if I’d met them sooner, what they were like before they were so badly wounded. All this time I thought I’d been kissing, but maybe I’m always doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, kissing dead girls in hopes that the heart will start again. Where there’s breath, I’ve heard, there’s hope.”

– Daphne Gottlieb, Kissing Dead Girls

“Poetry Swimsuit Issue” by Charles Greenley

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Sounds like an unsexy idea at first,
Walt Whitman arching his back with a strategically placed leaf,
or Robert Frost on the road not taken, prancing in a g-string,
but the idea sells itself, handled the right way.

Imagine the typical swimsuit issue fare:
women running on wet sand in bikinis,
topless slovakian blondes self-censoring with their hands,

and if editors can choose women with
hourglass curves and watermelon cleavage
to represent the feminine ideal,

then the poetic version could forsake the big names,
an Olds, a Clifton, or a Dove,
and pick oiled, bronzed poets to help sales.
There must be a twenty-year-old brunette
with Barbie dimensions writing poetry somewhere,
even if it’s a limerick about the Cat in the Hat.

Imagine a poet at the bookstore,
dressed in nothing but anthologies.

Imagine a poet at the library in a two-piece,
holding her book upside down.

Imagine a poet leaning over a typewriter,
her top moist with ink.

And once the pictures are taken,
after the women have selected what poems
appear next to their photo spreads,
once the issue goes to press,

we’ll be able to pinpoint the moment
poetry became cumbersome words
men thumbed past to get back to gawking,
when poetry became popular,
for the same reason most everything else does.

— “Poetry Swimsuit Issue” by Charles Greenley, from Rattle #20, Winter 2003

“It often happens that the real tragedies of life . . .

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“It often happens that the real tragedies of life happen in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes however a tragedy of artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthrall us”

– Oscar Wilde, The Picture Of Dorian Gray

“What We Want” by Linda Pastan

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names—
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there
even in full sun.

“What We Want,” by Linda Pastan, from Carnival Evening.

“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be . . .

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“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?”

– David Foster Wallace