//EDICIÓN VERANO
//2012//SUMMER EDITION
//CONTRIBUTORS
well hey, that’s pretty neat. keep your eyes peeled!
smashing all the empty beer bottles
collected in the attic room
where i’ve spent the past year
in my head
slowly picking out pieces
of all the shattered thoughts
and using them to create a sculpture
entitled ‘getting somewhere’
i’m way too fucking poor
for this city
i don’t care about money
but i can’t reach people.
this whole place is an antique store
‘do not touch’
— thanks, the management
i haven’t felt
the human in a persons’ eyes
since i’ve been here.
hi guys. i have a new e-chapbook titled schwerverletzt which you can download here. it’s a collection of previously posted poems and flash fiction of mine from the last few months. thanks!
today i want to burn into the quiet corners of the earth,
be extinguished by rain showers of such little significance
even the most devout of weather-watchers doesn’t bother report.
i want to feel in my bones and their marrow
the slow hiss of a cigarette put out in a puddle.
Translation of Czesław Miłosz’s poem, written in the Spring of 1973, from the Spanish translation by Xavier Farré.
Tidings
What will we say of earthly civilization?
That it was a system of colored marbles, of smoked glass,
in which luminous threads of liquid curled and uncurled.
Or that it was a collection of brilliant, upright palaces
with their turrets and their armoured gates
through which a faceless monster passed.
And that everyday they drew lots, and whoever picked a low number
was taken as a sacrifice: the elderly, little boys, little girls, men.
Or we will also say that we lived in a golden fleece,
in a iridescent net, in a cocoon like a cloud
that hung from a branch in a galactic tree.
And that this net was woven of signs:
hieroglyphs for the eye and the ear, rings of love.
And the sound resonated on the inside engraving us in time,
in the twitching, the fluttering, the gurgling of our language.
So, with what were we able to weave the border
between outside and inside, between light and the abyss,
if not with ourselves, with warm breath,
with the color of lips, with gauze, with muslin,
with the pulse that, when silenced, the world dies?
Or perhaps we won’t say anything about earthly civilization.
Because, really, no one knows what it was.
i’m leaving the single blank page of the letter you sent me in my window
my hope that the sun browns your ciphers revealing your belief in me
try not to forget the promise of summer
remember every physical sensation
sun-taught skin
heavy semi-solid walks through humidity
residual heat escaping at night through black asphalt
laughter reverberating in hollow ribs
don’t cling to nostalgia
keep holding on
if those are the things you want
you can make them reappear
with a touch of flexibility
keep on trudging
with backpacks and books
and folk songs and a taste
for making life less impossible
We follow white blazes and sing to forget the hours,
the days, the weeks like rocks in our stomachs.
You bring me water from a spring, unstrap
my pack. Show me where it hurts, you say,
but I won’t let you touch me. My fingers throb
with thaw, and I show you three constellations—
an unrivaled beauty, a hunter, and a mother bear
with three cubs trundling towards the north star.
You set fire to our maps and give your faith
to the voyaging starlight. Night arrives with clouds,
so I close my eyes to see what is burning.
We find paw prints and rush down the mountain,
but we are still afraid, so we make love
in a Confederate graveyard, my back scratched
by frost and brown leaves. We are quiet, even though
there are no birds and no moon to hear us.
Because we’re lost. Because pleasure is stronger
than fear, and I am afraid of everything.
Because you are fluent in the gray language of winter.
Because we must admit we’re wrong—we can’t find
our way by the stars. And we can’t remember what
we came here searching for, but we found our names
on separate trees. We found a dead cub in the snow,
something so innocent it could not be saved.
(Source: boxcarpoetry.com)
