Tag Archives: what’s love got to do with it?

Half-Rack at the Rendezvouz

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Half-Rack at the Rendezvouz
by William Notter

She had a truck, red hair,
and freckled knees and took me all the way
to Memphis after work for barbecue.
We moaned and grunted over plates of ribs
and sweet iced tea, even in a room of strangers,
gnawing the hickory char, the slow
smoked meat peeling off the bones,
and finally the bones. We slurped
grease and dry-rub spice from our fingers,
then finished with blackberry cobbler
that stained her lips and tongue.

All the trees were throwing fireworks
of blossom, the air was thick
with pollen and the brand-new smell of leaves.
We drove back roads in the watermelon dusk,
then tangled around each other, delirious
as honeybees working wisteria.
I could blame it all on cinnamon hair,
or the sap rising, the overflow of spring,
but it was those ribs that started everything.

“Half-Rack at the Rendezvouz” by William Notter, from Holding Everything Down. © Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, 2009.

Dear dainty delicious darling

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Gertrude Stein—how we’ve been told you are obtuse, impossible, all but meaningless, when in fact you are loving, inventive, playful, sexual, flirtatious, silly. Why has it been easier for the world to imagine Gertrude as a stern remote genius than as a woman of brilliant mind and wit passionately in love with another woman?

Wonder why indeed.

There is a wonderful (though out of print) collection of Stein’s love notes to Alice, edited by Kay Turner: Baby Precious Always Shines, You can find used copies easily enough. The notes are handwritten, so some words aren’t entirely clear and are marked with brackets and best guesses. Here’s one from the collection:

Dear dainty delicious darling, dear
sweet selected [enemifier?] of my soul
dear beloved baby dear everything
to me when this you see you will
have slept long and will be warm
and completely [loudly?] loved by
me dear wifey, [your?] baby
—yb

Poem a day #27 And enter into my body

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And enter into my body

Do you believe there is some place that will make the soul
less thirsty? […] Be strong then, and enter into your own body;
There you have a solid place for your feet.
Kabir

It takes a certain strength
to enter into my body

To enter into the cave of my
ancient history, bloody handprints
decorating the walls

To enter into
the electrical storm raging
between nerves and neocortex,
where fight and flight are
Rock’em Sock’em robots who
cannot leave the ring, where I
may knock your block off then
retreat, neither action fully under
my control

It takes a reckless fortitude
to come home to a house
of sagging plaster hanging
from creaking joists settling
into a slope with no record
of termite inspections and taxes
overdue

Will you enter into if you must
learn spelunking? Will you enter
into if I cannot promise the survival
center of my brain stem will learn
to live civilized? Will you come home
to my bed in the room with no heat
and only one outlet?

Will you enter into my body,
into the animal core of me
through the door made for your key?

Just file it a bit on the end
and turn hard to the left, twice

Poem a day #26 Bound (alternative version)

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Bound

Bound to her
I descend,
repelling, sliding along
ropes anchored
where the earth splits,
lowering us
into searing core

Heat our destination
and goal

Coming to rest
in the crevice of her voice –
Be still little one—

Poem a day #25 Bound

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Bound

In the center, I,
swirling, sure in the pull
of my mass—neutron

Circling, she, tethered
to me—proton

Only when bound one
to the other
am I fixed, force
elemental, shaped
by dark matter and
god particle

Broken from her
by a blast of destruction
I’d wobble unstable,
freed I’d radiate
residual fallout

Proton! Bind me!
Keep me bound
to you, bound
and stabled.

Poem a day #17 What I Know about Loving at 47

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What I Know About Loving at 47

No pop song or novel or poem
or prose or lecture or prayer,
no advice ever given
has prepared you for falling
in love.

Nothing in the universe
entire has prepared you
for falling
out of love.

“Falling” is a wildly inadequate word
for how love colonizes your mind
and your body, floods your brain
with chemicals, presses your lungs
into service as bellows
for its own fires.

Biologically speaking, love may be
no different from a parasitic
wasp yet how I’ve begged
to be stung, shocked into
that mysterious moment
when every emotion is fed through
a meat grinder and comes out
as love sausage—
that moment, each time, when
the Big Bang echoes in our minds
disguised as an original idea.

Desire and lust may be the swing
on the front porch of love’s
country house, or the brambled path
to its outhouse, the only difference being
whether your ass is covered or bare
when you sit down to do
what needs to be done.

Having loved means being able to hurt
in ways you won’t want to survive
because surviving means you are done
with the loving.

The more vast your love the more you
will hurt your love the more you will
be unable to say you are sorry though
you are, you are—a three-sided vortex
that is the origin of the myth
of the Bermuda Triangle.

Never ever ever ever ever ever ever love
somebody more than you love
yourself. Good luck on that.

Do not let experience or knowledge
or lesbian feminist anti-colonialist
anti-parasite anti-sausage cynicism
stop the sway or get in the way of the need
for love’s gravitational tug.
Carry a tow chain in one hand, a tide chart
in the other, leave the life vest
on the shore, dive in. With practice
drowning gets easier, and I practice now
every day.

Poem a day #16 This Great Upheaval of During

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This Great Upheaval of During*
1.2

during the season of my discontent
during the spring of blue rain
during the summer between corn and husk
during the gale force affair

during the winter spent whetting knives
during the borderline prime
during the fortnight I could do no wrong
during the parable of mine

during the tunnel between dusk and dawn
during the strangling want
during the recoil to a New England mill
during the urge to declaim

during remorse like a slap to the head
during rue like a prayer
during regret, lesion and balm
during resolve like a sieve

during the pain
during the game
during the maim
during the bane
during the feign
during the dame

______________________

*Title is a line from the article “The Estrogen Dilemma”
by Cynthia Gorney

Bill

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Bill
for Cindy

It was his nature to run
so he ran.
Ran in hours, not miles,
with no map other than
genetic memory.
He ran deep.

His hip had never healed.
He ran with a leg-dragging gait
mistaken as disability.
He ran with no gesture
that could be taken
as bitterness.
He ran true.

He ran for days with
the even clip of
a wind-blown boat.
He didn’t need to tack.
He ran direct.

When he tired, he still ran
until the need to run ran out
and then he’d find a porch
by a door, usually a woman’s door—
he preferred women—
and sit and wait to be found.

Having learned to suppress
her panic, Cindy was waiting
for the call. Your dog
is on my porch. I don’t know how
he got here, it’s so far. Sometimes
she had to look up the town
on a map, although she’d lived
in Rochester for decades

Bill was waiting when she’d
drive up and open the door.
Settling into the passenger seat,
he’d smile, nuzzle her hand.

To love any being with its own
purpose, its own work,
you learn the compromise
between how you think
the world should be and how
your love needs to live.
And if you are lucky
these distance between these
is only as far
as a husky can run.

A Few Reasons to Oppose the War

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A Few Reasons to Oppose the War
Lisa Suhair Majaj

because wind soughs in the branches of trees
like blood sighing through veins

because in each country there are songs
huddled like wet-feathered birds

because even though the news has nothing new to say
and keeps on saying it
NO still fights its way into the world

because for every bomb that is readied
a baby nestles into her mother
latches onto a nipple beaded with milk

because the tulips have waited all winter
in the cold dark earth

because each morning the wildflowers outside my window
raise their yellow faces to the sun

because we are all so helplessly in love
with the light

From Geographies of Light (Del Sol Press 2009).

Lisa Suhair Majaj, a Palestinian-American writer and scholar, was born in Iowa, raised in Amman, Jordan, educated in Beirut, Lebanon and in Michigan, and after spending many years in Massachusetts currently lives in Nicosia, Cyprus. Her poems and essays have been published in more than fifty journals and anthologies across in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East, and have been used in art installations, photography exhibits and political forums, as well as in more traditional venues. Her recently published poetry volume, Geographies of Light, won the Del Sol Press Poetry Prize. She is also co-editor of three collections of critical essays: Going Global: The Transnational Reception of Third World Women Writers (Garland/Routledge 2000), Etel Adnan: Critical Essays on the Arab-American Writer and Artist (McFarland Publishing 2002), and Intersections: Gender, Nation and Community in Arab Women’s Novels (Syracuse University Press, 2002).

Pick a Peck of Peaches

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Picking Peaches By the Peck
version 1 draft 3

I love peaches by the peck
I’ve picked pecks of peaches

Summers past in summer’s pastures
pecks of peaches I have picked

But now, my dear, I pull not pick
hand-selected pecks of peaches

pull my peaches out of you
pecks of perfect peaches

each peach crowning, fuzzy-head
pecks of peach perfection

from between your legs wide-spread
that have carried pecks of peaches

You labor, labor, pant and moan
we’ve been expecting peaches

birthing peach, then birthing more
pecks of peachly procreation

I pluck each peach and dry its down
another among our perfect peaches

the last one birthed I offer to
my Queen of Peach Proliferation

to bite and suck and eat all up
rolling in our pecks of peaches

peach juice splashed on thigh and chin
we’ve devoured pecks of peaches

I’ve picked peaches and I’ve picked you
and we’ll pick pecks of peaches

abuzz with love we’ll propagate
pecks of plumping perfect peaches