After Making Love - Stephen Dunn

No one should ask the other
“What were you thinking?”

No one, that is,
who doesn’t want to hear about the past

and its inhabitants,
or the strange loneliness of the present

filled, even as it may be, with pleasure,
or those snapshots

of the future, different heads
on different bodies.

Some people actually desire honesty.
They must never have broken

into their own solitary houses
after having misplaced the key

never seen with an intruders eyes
what is theirs.

  -- Stephen Dunn, "After Making Love"

Autobiography of Eve, Ansel Elkins

Wearing nothing but snakeskin
boots, I blazed a footpath, the first
radical road out of that old kingdom
toward a new unknown.
When I came to those great flaming gates
of burning gold,
I stood alone in terror at the threshold
between Paradise and Earth.
There I heard a mysterious echo:
my own voice
singing to me from across the forbidden
side. I shook awake—
at once alive in a blaze of green fire.

Let it be known: I did not fall from grace.

I leapt
to freedom.

The Uncanny Valley by Amanda Nadelberg

Fireflies careening the fields regardless
of charm, without attention, jesters slid
into the sea and time was forthcoming.
There was a story being told.

The lake asked nothing. (It was late
and certainty required that you talk less
or at the very least move over.) Under
the song he said ‘no more peonies’
buttoned the door back on its frame, the
street a ceremony in and of itself which
made cars implements, plain miracles
capsizing baskets in candied fields.

The men and women were useful, abolishing
daisies, and every time the band plays
I’m Ursula wondering still at the door
a terminal of the face (such is any incident
on the way home) a field of aftermaths,
a horizon because of boats.

Cloth begot embrace while television
considered fish, flowers by Mary and the
fonts belonging to the post office coterie.
While the room is recreated and the woods
are just outside, denouncing, there’s styled
behavior in the country in the city nonetheless,
there are sermons in the sky, tonight, whole
haggled systems, photographs abiding and
I create nothing, I broke his collarbone
and went away, listened to a song and pulled
the world up around my head. Today is a long
time in any number of places we don’t go.
No one says thank you. They get older and
they fake it whether or not we’re there.

  -- Amanda Nadelberg, The Uncanny Valley

Final Section of "Mayakovsky," by Frank O'Hara

4

 

Now I am quietly waiting for

the catastrophe of my personality

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and

brown and white in trees,

snows and skies of laughter

always diminishing, less funny

not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of

the year, what does he think of

that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,

perhaps I am myself again.

  -- Frank O'Hara, 4, Mayakovsky

watch your tense and case, Daphne Gottlieb

oh baby
i want to be your direct object.
you know, that is to say
i want to be on the other
side of all the verbs i know
you know how to use.

i've seen you conjugate:
i touch
you touched
you heard
she knows
who cares

i'm interested in
a few decent prepositions:
above, over, inside, atop,
below, around and
i'm sure there are more
right on the tip of
your tongue.

i am ready to spend
the present perfect
splitting your infinitive
there's an art to the way you
dangle your participle and

since we're being informal it's okay to
use a few contractions, like
wasn't (going to)
shouldn't (have)
and a conjunction:
but (did it anyway)

and i'm really really glad
you're not into dependent
clauses since all i'm really
interested in is your
bad, bad grammar
and your exclamation point.

  -- Daphne Gottleib, watch your tense and case

“Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently” by Raul Gutierrez

Trees talk to each other at night.
All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.
Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.
Tiny bears live in drain pipes.
If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.
The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.
Everyone knows at least one secret language.
When nobody is looking, I can fly.
We are all held together by invisible threads.
Books get lonely too.
Sadness can be eaten.
I will always be there.

  -- Raul Gutierrez, “Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently”

Undoing Gender, Judith Butler

Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.

 -- Judith Butler, Undoing Gender