Category: friendship

Brunch Poem Day 5 (mine).

Published on by taylor mardis katz1 Comment

On one of the shortest days of the year,

fuel
a savory pastry (goat cheese & figs)
two porcelain mugs of coffee beside an old blue stove
and travel plans for March of twenty-twelve

found
not the scarf
not the one brown glove (god dammit)
the photographic nose for street level Manhattan
a doll-sized shopping bag on the partitioned wood of the subway station

forgiven
the six months in between (immediately)
8th Avenue for calling itself Hudson
the scrape of winter through hand-me-down stockings

formative
the sung August revival on a rooftop
the making of the song itself (on central grass, of course at night)

filibustered
no cabs on 14th and All I want
is one Yuletide Bullet is that so much to ask!

formalism
Edward Hopper painted Paris & some humans
though he was awkward with his French & missed America
and it not the patrons of the small café that had the grace
it was the trees

fortune
is like Formica
and we call it
passé

finally
In the middle of the night Sam awoke
to find us faced in to each other, almost
fetal, like two seahorses defending
their tiniest of spines & snouts from the current
of a larger fish’s tail: four hands clasped
together as if holding to the railing of a ship
whose lower decks are full and we
(above & not protected from the sea)
must bare the spit & throttle of the hours
until dawn. And in retaliation we spit ourselves
back at the black & grip until our knuckles
denounce blood though the swill of Sunday’s face
is fast to call us shameful, call us rash.

Brunch Poem Day 3 (mine).

Published on by taylor mardis katzLeave a comment

Between two and three am we go
upside down: his feet flat

on the ground in a splay
of yogic yes as my mismatched

socks slide farther down my ankles,
heels for all to see. From between

my legs, I watch him rise
into a slow headstand, hands

at his ears, elbows two points
of a triangle. It looks like he’s swimming

and he looks straight ahead. The speed
at which he lowers down is like

the pace at which my grandfather,
eighty-six years old, eases himself

into the pool. Later, much later,
near nine am, I dream he gives me

unremarkable objects that hide
inside their seams three hundred gifts,

accompanied by a letter in his capitalized
scrawl. I awake without having read it,

though I trust it is inscribed in the air
between the headstand and the floor.

New York Endeavor (mine).

Published on by taylor mardis katz1 Comment

In honor of a friend of mine, who knows me better than I might care to admit, I’m going to challenge myself to write a poem every day while I’m home in New York. These poems will all be posted on this site. They will likely be short, or possibly they will be rambling, but surely they will be mine. The challenge is to see what I can make when I’m under the constraint to make something every day. No: the challenge is to put on display what I’ve made on the day that it was made. The terror of the challenge is posting a poem that you’ll all know was Made That Day, which means I won’t really get to eye it and dine with it and give it love nudges for weeks until it’s in shape. Hence, this experiment is a search for new shapes, as well as an ode to advice not taken until now. Along the lines of O’Hara, I’ll call this endeavor Brunch Poems, and either you’ll read it, or you won’t.

(photograph: “Woman Looking at Victory Garden Harvest Sitting on Lawn, Waiting to be Stored Away for Winter” by Walter Sanders)

 

Poem I read out loud to a group of people last night at an ad hoc poetry gathering

Published on by taylor mardis katz1 Comment

I like the word ziggurat a lot more than I like ziggurats

We will not associate with the noun
we will love the word for its z-ness
and its sound
its utter rarity
and for the fact that I once said rarity to you on your birthday & you remembered it
and titled a photograph “rarity”
and the photograph had many trees in it, only trees on a hill, long and leaning
and the rarity was that many of them, and was you
it was january twenty-third; you were twenty-four years old
we walked for hours there was not a single ziggurat in our mouths or in the trees
the trees has been planted quite planned quite public for all to see

this is not a story about ziggurats or bridges or the publicity of gardens
this is not a story about age or of how our mothers boast of our first and current talents
there is nothing of the triangle here
nothing of the sphere
this is a story about geometry, and not at all about geometry
this is a story I wrote for you so that you would remember it

(this is a story that only the two of us know)