on certain days

Ruins

                                                                                                                                                 Reservoir Fire 2011

Some lines selected here and there fromTraci Brimhall's OUR LADY OF THE RUINS

This is not the place your life begins or ends.

We want to ride the horse of the past backward
through time to first wounds...

Take the blackbirds from your hair and lay them in grass. If
their eggs hatch in your hands, go north.

Find the immaculate muscle which did not
burn, and take it.

the revelation of stone is slow

Say the body is a needful animal petitioning the sky
to satisfy its thirst. Say it is a haunted cabinet.

These are the ruins
I mapped onto my body so I might always be lost.

I dreamt my daughter dove
for whale bones on the abyssal plains,
surfaced from the seafloor bearing
spines, ribs, colossal skulls.

When he asks for a sacrifice, I offer
another woman's son.

A woman's body is a memory with no language.

reading

Some lines from THRONG by Jose Perez Beduya:

When you speak again
Use your wilderness voice
Not your factory voice

You and I conferenced
All night
Exchanging
Cold pronouns

You think hollowness unlike depth
Is a grace or a loveliness

Wheel away the dusk and floodlights
Squeeze through the trees

Because cars are an eternal river

So many minutes to a field

We were the long
Lawns while the muzzle
Flashes in the fields
Were our sisters

Our record- and peace-
Keeping done remotely by objects

Our bodies so clean
They're smoke

A curfew of the skull

We drank
Water from our uniforms
And tasted
The dead in everything we ate
We waited for a pattern
To cut down through the clouds
We measured our era of drifting
Not in years but daughters

books

Such beautiful creatures these books of poetry by my fellow
NEA writers. Their covers startling mostly. Titles like Throng
and Sad Daughter. I want one, a book I mean. A book book.
No chapbook. No POD. Nothing against those. A book of my poems.
That's this year. And/or the next and next. How long is a game.
And so I'll read. I ordered some of their books, those I could find
on Amazon. In alphabetical order will go my reading. Perhaps
too some writing here about what I learn as I go through the stack.

THRONG by Jose Perez Beduya
OUR LADY OF THE RUINS by Traci Brimhall
THE SECOND REASON By Jenny Browne
JUVENILIA by Ken Chen
WITHOUT by Maxine Chernoff
SLOW LIGHTNING by Eduardo C. Corral
NECROPOLIS by Jill Alexander Essbaum
COFFLE by Reginald Flood
SAD DAUGHTER by Sarah Gorham
VELROY AND THE MADISCHIE MAFIA by Sy Hoahwah
SUNDAY HOUSES THE SUNDAY HOUSE by Elizabeth Hughey
WE ARE STARVED by Joshua Kryah
HOUSEHOLD MECHANICS by Sarah Mangold
MULE by Shane McCrae
ORANGE CRUSH by Simone Muench
UP JUMP THE BOOGIE by John Murillo
VOYAGER by Sikranth Reddy
BY THE NUMBERS by James Richardson
COPPERHEAD by Rachel Richardson
ROMEY'S ORDER by Atsuro Riley
LITANY FOR THE CITY by Ryan Teitman
ARCO IRIS by Sarah Vap
PERSONS UNKNOWN by the late Jake Adam York
MUSEUMS OF ACCIDENTS by Rachel Zucker