Stephen Burt (2015)
Everybody wants a piece of me.
I have been weighed and measured,
tested and standardized,
throughout my young life. It happens to everyone,
or to everyone with my ability.
Now I live quietly
and mostly in the dark, amid sawdust and sheer
or streaky wooden surfaces. My role,
when I reach maturity,
may be to help people behave
more sociably, and reduce
the irritations of summer,
or else to make it easier to eat.
For reasons I cannot fathom, I weep when it rains.
My handlers keep me wrapped in awkward cloth.
They will not let me touch my friends
or show any curves. They have taught me how to shave.
A few twigs and dragonfly wings got caught
near the center of me long ago; they serve
to distinguish me from others of my kind,
along with some bubbles of air.
I am worth more when I am clear.
When I am most desirable
you should be able to see yourself through me.
Some of my distant relatives
will probably never go far,
because they are too irregular, or opaque.
Many of us will end on a cart.
I, on the other hand, have had my work
cut out for me by so many gloves
and tongs, pallets and barges, poles and planks
that I am sure I will go to New York;
there people who own
the rights to me will give elaborate thanks
to one another, and go on to take me apart.
Friday, November 20, 2015
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Poker
Paul Farley (2015)
You’re told this deck was found in some shattered bothy or croft north of the Great Glen, missing its six of diamonds, shuffled and dealt to a soft pliancy, greased with lanolin
and you’re told this deck lived behind the bar in a barracks town and came out to play most nights, cut between the Falklands and Iraq, its spring long gone, dark-edged with mammal sweat
and you’re told this deck is the one recovered from a halfway house where fatty stalactites grew in a microwave oven, where a bottle of Famous Grouse was brandished in a fight
and it might be a pack of lies or it might be a sleight of hand, and you can’t tell which is a bluff because words are a good disguise for holding nothing. I’ve found that nothing is more than enough.
You’re told this deck was found in some shattered bothy or croft north of the Great Glen, missing its six of diamonds, shuffled and dealt to a soft pliancy, greased with lanolin
and you’re told this deck lived behind the bar in a barracks town and came out to play most nights, cut between the Falklands and Iraq, its spring long gone, dark-edged with mammal sweat
and you’re told this deck is the one recovered from a halfway house where fatty stalactites grew in a microwave oven, where a bottle of Famous Grouse was brandished in a fight
and it might be a pack of lies or it might be a sleight of hand, and you can’t tell which is a bluff because words are a good disguise for holding nothing. I’ve found that nothing is more than enough.
Tuesday, February 3, 2015
The Duck Shit at Clarion Creek
Idra Novey (2014)
We liked to stick it in a BB gun and shoot it. We tattooed with it. We said hallelujah, the poor man's tanning lotion. Then the frack wells began, something black capping the water and we got high watching a green-backed heron die. We got funny at Clarion, flung each other's underwear into the trees. Why was it we got naked there and nowhere else? Maybe we knew we were getting good and ugly, rusted inside as the trucks we rode into the water. Maybe we knew we only appeared to be floating, but soon and wholly we'd go under, and there would be nothing in return.
We liked to stick it in a BB gun and shoot it. We tattooed with it. We said hallelujah, the poor man's tanning lotion. Then the frack wells began, something black capping the water and we got high watching a green-backed heron die. We got funny at Clarion, flung each other's underwear into the trees. Why was it we got naked there and nowhere else? Maybe we knew we were getting good and ugly, rusted inside as the trucks we rode into the water. Maybe we knew we only appeared to be floating, but soon and wholly we'd go under, and there would be nothing in return.