In today’s straw hat
I think of your photographs.
Heat heats up the brim.
Author: taylor mardis katz
poeming & farming in the hearty hills of vermont
Poem (Tony Hoagland).
Totally
I’m raking leaves and singing in my off-key voice
a mangled version of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,”
a song I thought I hated;
that’s how it goes when your head and heart
are in different time zones—
you often don’t find out till tomorrow
what you felt today.
I know I do not understand the principles
of leaf removal; I pile them up
in glowing heaps of cadmium and orange,
but I identify so much more
with the entropic gusts of wind
that knock them all apart again.
Is it natural to be scattered?
When I look into the sky I am often dreaming
of a television program that I saw some months ago;
when I walk into a dinner party
I am thinking of the book I mean to read
when I get home—you might say
my here is disconnected from my now,
so never am I entirely anywhere,
or anyone. But I won’t speak cruelly
of myself: this dividedness is just what
makes our species great: possible for Darwin
to figure out his theory of selection
while playing five-card stud,
for surgeon Keats to find a perfect rhyme
wrist-deep in the disorder
of an open abdomen.
For example, it is autumn here.
The defoliated leaves look frightened
at the edge of town,
as if the train they missed
had taken all their clothes.
The whole world in unison is turning
toward a zone of nakedness and cold.
But me, I have this strange conviction
that I am going to be born.
Don’t Let Me Name Your Band.
This was 2007. Or 2008.
(I do still stand by some of these. One day, when Shake the Baron is famous, they’ll comment to their hip documentarian, “Man, I wonder if we would’ve made it big like this if we had been called the Spastic Sassies?”)
Poem (Kevin Young).
Cakewalk
Baby, you make
me want
to burn up all
my pies
to give over
an apple to fire
or lose track
of time & send
a large pecan
smokeward, or
sink some peach
cobbler. See, to me
you are a Canada
someplace north
I have been, for years,
headed & not
known it,
If only I’d read
the moss on the tree!
instead of shaking
it for fruit—
you are a found
fallen thing—
a freedom—not this red
bloodhound ground—
Get it while it’s relevant (my chapbook)!
Seventeen poems. One epigraph. Acknowledgements. Photograph & cover design by Misha Marston Johnson. Sewn binding by Heather Garner. Limited edition (50 run). Only 5 small dollars. Click it, people; make it big.
(If you want one of these, write an electronic letter to taylormkatz@gmail.com.)
chapbook (noun): a small paperback pamphlet, typically containing poems or fiction.
Poem (mine).
Love Poem, 2 of __
Veronica,
For whatever reason of all the things here
the wild blackberries in bushes lining the lakes
and roads remind me of you the most.
There are two miniature Jerusalem donkeys,
so they are Jewish it seems. There are three
horses and grasshoppers and dragonflies everywhere.
I am told there are also rattlesnakes and bears
and mountain lions but I haven’t been able to confirm that.
There are trees, so many trees it’s hard to believe.
I have nothing especially solid to say since
it’s been too long since I spoke to you in the flesh.
I will be so glad to see you when I return.
With love and an edge of fire,
Sylvain
Would you wear this shirt? (therumpus.net)
Photographs (Garry Winograd).
(Click to enlarge…aren’t they wonderful?)
Central Park Zoo, New York City (1967)
*
World’s Fair, New York (1964)
*
Untitled from Women Are Beautiful (1970)
*
Untitled from Women Are Beautiful (1969)
Damn Good Poem (Jericho Brown).
Elegy
This is what your dying looks like.
You believe in the sun. You believe
I don’t love you. Always be closing,
Said our favorite professor before
He let the gun go off in his mouth.
I turned 29 the way any man turns
In his sleep, unaware of the earth
Moving beneath him, its plates in
Their places, a dated disagreement.
Let’s fight about it, baby. You have
Only so long left. A man turns
In his sleep, so I take a picture.
He won’t look at it, of course. It’s
His bad side, his Mr. Hyde, the hole
In a husband’s head, the O
Of his wife’s mouth. Every night,
I take a pill. Miss one, and I’m gone.
Miss two, and we’re through. Hotels
Bore me, unless I get a mountain view,
A room in which my cell won’t work,
And there’s nothing to do but see
The sun go down into the ground
That cradles us as any coffin can.
Simic-Inspired Poem (Mine).
Now He’s In Berlin
Jacob was sharpening the hemlines of his ice skating costumes. The fast-blooming weeds of the world were preparing their seedpods for the morning’s breathy swoop. The ice skating costumes pouted, mourning the lengths of their adolescence. Outside the window, the Olympic judges cut pints of okra into stars.
panache, perhaps 