We Were Emergencies, Buddy Wakefield

We can stick anything into the fog and make it look like a ghost.
But tonight let us not become tragedies.
We are not funeral homes
with propane tanks in our windows
lookin’ like cemeteries.
Cemeteries are just the Earth’s way of not letting go.
Let go.
Tonight, poets, turn your ridiculous wrists so far backwards
the razor blades in your pencil tips
can’t get a good angle on all that beauty inside.
Step into this
with your airplane parts
move forward
and repeat after me with your heart:
I no longer need you to fuck me as hard as I hated myself.
Make love to me
like you know I am better than the worst thing I ever did.
Go slow.
I’m new to this,
but I have seen nearly every city from a rooftop
without jumping.
I have realized that the moon
did not have to be full for us to love it,
that we are not tragedies
stranded here beneath it,
that if my heart
really broke
every time I fell from love
I’d be able to offer you confetti by now.
But hearts don’t break, y’all,
they bruise and get better.
We were never tragedies.
We were emergencies.
You call 9 – 1 – 1.
Tell them I’m havin’ a fantastic time.

  -- Buddy Wakefield, "We Were Emergencies"

Amor y la Mujer/Love, by Lola Haskins

Amor y la Mujer

Se lo prueba, como si fuera un vestido.
Decide que no le queda,
y empieza a quitárselo.
Su piel se desprende, tambien

Love

She tries it on, like a dress.
She decides it doesn't fit,
and starts to take it off.
Her skin comes, too.

from: Bel Canto, Ann Patchett

“Most of the time, we're loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It's not such a bad thing, being loved for what you can do.'
'But the other is better.'
'Better. I hate to say better, but it is. If someone loves you for what you can do then it's flattering, but why do you love them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which means you have to know them.” 

  -- Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

Echo's Bone, Samuel Beckett

Women in particular seem most mutable, houses of infamous possibilities.... An almanac of his inconsistencies was not unthinkable. But these women, positively it was scarcely an exaggeration to say that four and twenty letters made no more and no more capricious variety of words in as many languages as they, their jigsaw souls, foisted on them that they might be damned, diversity of moods.




Sometimes he feels as though this old wound of his life had no intention of healing.



 -- Samuel Beckett, Echo's Bones

Many excerpts from: A Tale for the Time Being, Ruth Ozeki

Excerpts from, Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine

Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context -- randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out "I swear to God!" is to be called insane, crass, crazy.


You don't know. You don't know what she means. You don't know what response she expects from you nor do you care. For all your previous understandings, suddenly incoherence feels violent. You both experience the cut, which she keeps insisting is a joke, a joke stuck in her throat, and like any other injury, you watch it rupture along its suddenly exposed suture.


Yes, and in your mail the apology note appears referring to "our mistake." Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion. This is how the apparatus she propels you into begins to multiply its meaning.

What did you say?


Not long ago you were in a room where someone asks the philosopher Judith Butler what makes language hurtful. You can feel everyone lean in. Our very being exposes us to the address of another, she answers. We suffer from the condition of being addressable. Our emotional openness, she adds, is carried by our addressability. Language navigates this.

For so long you thought the ambition of racist language was to denigrate and erase you as a person. After considering Butler's remarks, you being to understand yourself as rendered hypervisible in the face of such language acts. Language that feels hurtful is intended to exploit all the ways that you are present. Your alertness, your openness, and your desire to engage actually demand your presence, your looking up, your talking back, and, as insane as it is, saying please.


Another friend tells you you have to learn not to absorb the world. She says sometimes she can hear her own voice saying silently to whomever -- you are saying this thing and I am not going to accept it. Your friend refuses to carry what doesn't belong to her.

You take in things you don't want all the time.... then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn't be an ambition.


To your mind, feelings are what create a person, something unwilling, something wild vandalizing whatever the skull holds.


The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you.


The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.


Yes, and you do go to the gym and run in place, an entire hour running, just you and

your body running off each undesired desired encounter.


You can't drive yourself sane. You are not insane.


This is what it looks like. You know this is wrong. This is not what it looks like. You need to be quiet. This is wrong, You need to close your mouth now. This is what it looks like. Why are you talking if you haven't done anything wrong?

You are not the guy and still you fit the description because there is only one guy who is always the guy fitting the description.


The world out there insisting on this only half concerns you. What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only.


How to care for the injured body,

the kind of body that can't hold
the content it is living?

And where is the safest place when that place
must be someplace other than in the body?


The worst injury is feeling you don't belong so much
to you --


What feels more than feeling? You are afraid there is something you are missing. Something obvious. A feeling that feelings might be irrelevant if they point to one's irrelevance pulls at you.

Do feelings lose their feeling if they speak to a lack of feeling? Can feelings be a hazard, a warning sign, a disturbance, distaste, the disgrace? Don't feel like you are mistaken. It's not that (Is it not that?) you are oversensitive or misunderstanding.


Every day your mouth opens and receives the kiss the world offers, which seals you shut though you are feeling sick to your stomach about the beginning of the feeling that was born from understanding and now stumbles around in you -- the go-along-to-get-along tongue pushing your tongue aside. Yes, and your mouth is full up and the feeling is still tottering --


And yes, I want to interrupt to tell him her us you me I don't know how to end what doesn't have an ending.


-- Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric

The Intimate Nature of Knife Fights, Wishes, Steve Connell

Three nights with which to wish three wishes.

On the first night I wish for love.

It is a love not like I've had, but like I've always wanted. One with the sturdiness of steel to support us. One chipped out of ice that withstands the hottest flames we can throw at it without melting. It is a love of grand design, immaculate, like I was told love was. Like a spider's web, infused with air and light, weaved with spontaneous precision and set off perfectly by crystalline drops of water. refraction. and twilight.

But alas, wishes are for make-believe, so the wish did not come true.

Three nights with which to wish three wishes; now I'm down to two.

Three nights with which to wish three wishes.

On the second night I wish for love.

A perfect love born of two imperfect souls. A love that surprises you with flowers and rubs your feet when you're tired. A "good morning my lovely!" type love. A love that has headaches and argues over movies but still holds your hand and gives you the last bite, that kind of love. The love that goes to work late, stays in your arms. The love that tells secrets over ice cream, a laugh out loud to the sweet spinning sky and dance on the side of the road because "that is my favorite song!" type love.

An embarrasing, awkward, imperfect love. A limpish, gimpish, lame little love with no need for "excuse me" and no time for polite. That gets messy and sloppy and has fun in the doing so. A wonderfully perverse little unique little lovely that takes pride in the clumsy-um-umsiness of peanut butter and limericks and dances badly, so gladly, so badly from the inside of a mirror. That is the love I rolled down hills of wishes for on the second night.

But wishing is for children who haven't learned to not have fun.

Three nights with which three wishes, and now I'm down to one.

Three nights which with to wish three wishes.

On the third night I wish for love.

Hard earth love. Early morning cold love. Love of chapped lips and running noses, "make do with daisies; I can't afford roses" type love. A love of give and burn, live and learn, spit and rage and get better with age. That is the kind of love I am looking for. A love that is up all night with tears or with secrets. A love that finds solace in the heartache of fighting, knowing it relents like wheat against wind and moonlight and soft apology and gentle kiss. This is not love that needs the sunset nor weeps only from extravagance but rather in brightest day or darkest night, roof of steel or floor of mud, take shelter in my arms and my promises, take nourishment in the succulence of my lip and measure the horizon by the nearness of my gaze.

That is the type of love I fractured an eyelid wishing for on the third night.

Three nights with which to wish three wishes, now what'm I to do?

I wish for someone to send me love, instead they sent me you.

And now I got no more wishes. All I got is you.

I got no more wishes. All I have got is you.

I got no more wishes; all I've got is you.

Huh, sonofabitch. Realization.

My three wishes came true.

 -- Steve Connell, Wishes, The Intimate Nature of Knife Fights