Category: saucy

Damn it feels good to have a sideyard.

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The sideyard was better than ever before

The sideyard, according  to a new neighbor-friend named Neil “felt like the 60s again.”

The sideyard had around 70 people attend which is record-breaking for the sideyard

The sideyard had a tiki torch

The sideyard had such good loud music that the police came

The sideyard thanks “Tendrils,” the new house band, who will perform acoustically from here on out so that we don’t get evicted

According to a girl I met, the sideyard was “the most fun event I’ve ever been to.” EVER!

Neighbor and friend Jed said about the sideyard, “Don’t ever let me miss this again.”

The sideyard offered free wine and decaffeinated coffee

The morning after the sideyard I had both a real hangover as well as a happiness hangover

 

Thank you to everyone who came to the sideyard

Thank you to everyone who let themselves enjoy something so analog

Thank you to everyone for coming out to hear poetry; we poets need you, we poets are you, we are all poets

 

(photos by misha marston johnson)

Tomato poems! In honor of the last day of summer (Guillermo Saavedra).

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On the Tomato

Brief Vaudevillian Hypotheses Apropos of This Androgynous Fruit

 

1

Behold the hero of the vegetable patch

a modest American marvel

with the face of a Chinese lantern.

2

Sheer light made of water:

a fleeting heart, pumping

muted cries of jubilation.

3

Her fancy dress, her festive

fantasy of red confirms a doubt:

she’s a lady tossed in the salad by mistake.

16

A tomato rots: here lies

a misfortune greater

than the fall of an empire.

39

Voluptuous little flag:

he makes every dry spell

fresh.

41

To sink one’s finger into

its soft flesh: a crime or copulation

as vague as your idea of bliss.

44

A tomato crosses the river

on a moonless night:

becomes a plum.

55

(Mark Twain)

A salad can be an anthem to joy

but the proof

is in the tomato.

60

To bite into a tomato thinking

of nothing: so the peak

of summer will burst in your mouth.

64

Columbus’s was egg

and prophecy: America

is a tomato under sail.

66

A tomato was raised

by two elderly lemons:

now it’s a sweet tangerine.

75

And yet, there is no more

voracious love than that of salt

searching for it on the plate.

97

The taste of tomato

remembered: the damp

face of a barefoot child.

 

 

translated from the Spanish by Cindy Schuster

Poem based on an archived letter (mine).

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A piece from my creative translation project of last semester, made up of letter poems: letters to Alice Notley, from all sorts of cool ladies, turned into poems. This one’s based off of a letter from Anne Waldman. You poets might recognize some of the names she’s referencing.

Thanks to Heather for her handwriting.

Scanner inspiration comes from Frankie.

“The Wild Party” (Joseph Moncure March).

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“The Wild Party” by Joseph Moncure March

Misha, in all of his wisdom, gave me a classily bound and rare (#434 out of 2,000) edition of this book for the holidays. Its pages are thick, and uneven at the edges. The author uses colons shamelessly, and well. Art Spiegelman (illustrator, author of “Maus”) rediscovered this book years ago and illustrated a new version of it (that’s where the picture above comes from). Here’s a tiny taste of the roaring twenties romp that lies between the covers (a party based on this book will undoubtedly occur at my house in the near future):

9

Some love is fire: some love is rust:
But the fiercest, cleanest love is lust.
And their lust was tremendous. It had the feel
Of hammers clanging; and stone; and steel:
And torches of the savage, roaring kind
That rip through iron, and strike men blind:
Of long trains crashing through caverns under
Grey tumbling streets, like angry thunder:
Of engines throbbing; and hoarse steam spouting;
And feet tramping; and great crows shouting.
A lust so savage, they could have wrenched
The flesh from bone, and not have blenched.

What the Body Wants (poem) (Amy Gerstler).

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What the Body Wants

Not temperance or etiquette, but heavy petting.
Not modesty, but the sweaty chase me games
of childhood. Not renunciation, but chocolate
custard, served in mother’s chipped pink ceramic
custard cups. Not bones, but the marinated all day
meat. Not pious missionary safaris, embarked on
limping and soul-injured in monsoon season.
No cautionary fore-glimpse of its burial place,
the trees waiting, patient and starved for nitrogen
in their secluded grove. The body, undaunted
scholar of its own encyclopedia of greeds,
craves a front row seat for the new satyr play,
lusts after the happy sacraments of black
cashmere sweaters midwinter, big dinners
with plenty of bread to sop up the gravy,
and long nights of athletic sex that leave it giddy
and winded, hallucinating dime-sized fireworks,
gasping that it can’t continue, it’ll expire
on the spot. Then a blessed second wind blows
in out of nowhere, followed by more naked
horseplay, racing thoughts, confessions whispered
into the darkened grate of another body’s hazy face.
Soon absolution ensues, and a little late stargazing,
as the body teeters on the cusp of sleep. Next morning,
the whining, ungrateful mind arises unconsoled,
and the body must begin its cajoling all over again.

Poem (mine-all-mine).

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Boy, teach me
how to guru

how to blow
on through

the rest of these
young XY’s

with lines attached.
I see you (boy)

firstborn of a wild
acorn morn

where the willows
caw their hip

misnomers. Miss
Homer’s what

they call me
at the bar you

saw me swillin’ in
my ankles brushed

up along some
damn nice flooring

the microphone in
my lady hand

I demand
of you I demand

you call me other
-wise call me wise

call me by my given name
at the very least boy call

your momma