Category: Poetry

“Boy in a Whalebone Corset” by Saeed Jones

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

The acre of grass is a sleeping
swarm of locusts, and in the house
beside it, tears too are mistaken.
thin streams of kerosene
when night throws itself against
the wall, when Nina Simone sings
in the next room without her body
and I’m against the wall, bruised
but out of mine: dream-headed
with my corset still on, stays
slightly less tight, bones against
bones, broken glass on the floor,
dance steps for a waltz
with no partner. Father in my room
looking for more sissy clothes
to burn. Something pink in his fist,
negligee, lace, fishnet, whore.
His son’s a whore this last night
of Sodom. And the record skips
and skips and skips. Corset still on,
nothing else, I’m at the window;
he’s in the field, gasoline jug,
hand full of matches, night made
of locusts, column of smoke
mistaken for Old Testament God.

“Boy in a Whalebone Corset” from Prelude to Bruise by Saeed Jones (Coffee House Press, 2014). Copyright © 2014 by Saeed Jones (on Twitter @theferocity)

To hear a selection of five poems from Jones’s Prelude to Bruise (and a playlist inspired by poems in the book) visit  “5 Poems From “Prelude To Bruise” Read By Saeed Jones” on Buzzfeed.

“And the days are not full enough” by Ezra Pound

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry8 Comments 
And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
                Not shaking the grass.

Ezra Pound

“Muse” by Kim Addonizio

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry
When I walk in,
men buy me drinks before I even reach the bar.
They fall in love with me after one night,
even if we never touch.
I tell you I’ve got this shit down to a science.
They sweat with my memory,
alone in cheap rooms they listen
to moans through the wall
and wonder if that’s me,
letting out a scream as the train whines by.
But I’m already two states away, lying with a boy
I let drink rain from the pulse at my throat.
No one leaves me, I’m the one that chooses.
I show up like money on the sidewalk.
Listen, baby. Those are my high heels dangling from the
    phone wire.
I’m the crow flapping down,
that’s my back slip
you catch sight of when the pain
twists into you so deep
you have to close your eyes and weep like a goddamned
    woman.

 

“What We Haven’t Read” by Joseph Mills

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry2 Comments

We play the party game,
admitting what we haven’t read.
Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary,
anything of Faulkner’s.
Amid mock gasps, we name titles
with a mix of embarrassment,
swagger, and relief
that we can finally reveal
how we never made it
more than twenty pages
into Portrait of a Lady,
Middlemarch, Moby Dick.
We don’t bother pretending
we’ll get to them eventually.
We’re confessing, but unrepentant,
and then we begin to get serious:
the newspaper, warning labels,
the mortgage, legal contracts,
every Christmas card from her
for the last twenty years,
the letter he sent before he died,
the lab’s blood results last month
and this month and the next.

Joseph Mills, This Miraculous Turning

“His Elderly Father as a Young Man” by Leo Dangel

On By Christina's WordsIn Music, Poetry

This happened before I met your mother:
I took Jennie Johanson to a summer dance,
and she sent me a letter, a love letter,
I guess, even if the word love wasn’t in it.
She wrote that she had a good time
and didn’t want the night to end.
At home, she lay down on her bed
but stayed awake, listening to the songs
of morning birds outside her window.
I read that letter a hundred times
and kept it in a cigar box
with useless things I had saved:
a pocket knife with an imitation pearl handle
and a broken blade,
a harmonica I never learned to play,
one cuff link, an empty rifle shell.

When your mother and I got married,
I threw the letter away –
if I had kept it, she might wonder.
But I wanted to keep it
and even thought about hiding places,
maybe in the barn or the tool shed,
but what if it were ever found?
I knew of no way to explain why
I would keep such a letter, much less
why I would take the trouble to hide it.

“His Elderly Father as a Young Man” by Leo Dangel, from Home from the Field. © Spoon River Poetry Press, 1997.

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“Old Man” by Neil Young