mortalpractice

[mortalpractice]

megan lynne

[mortalpractice]

Everlasting is comrade to this moment's flash; glance away, it's another day, you've lost one chance but here's another,

some cash, a sublet by the water; all this bother moving place to place, shifting syntax, anxiety attacks, the fights

and late-night make-ups, disgrace, mercy in the friend's face may make rich recollection lying on the deathbed or

seconds after a head-bonk ends it and from eternity's cracked-open lid that first pet the vet injected

while you held a paw and wept bounds forth as if from your own chest to greet you.

—Dean Young, from "This Evening from Far Away," Fall Higher

[mortalpractice]

Everyone says Come to your senses, and I do, of you. Every touch electric, every taste you, every smell, even burning sugar, every cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples at the farmer's market, every melon, plum, I come undone, undone.

—Dean Young, from "Delphiniums in a Window Box," Fall Higher

[mortalpractice]

The birds in the first light twitter and whistle, Chirp and seek, sipping and chortling; weakly, meekly, they speak and bubble As cheerful as the cherry would, if it could speak when it is cherry ripe or cherry ripening.

—Delmore Schwartz, from "A Little Morning Music," A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker

[mortalpractice]

Dog At Dusk

Down the roadway, rutted, dusty, Lolly takes her evening run; Enters tall grass, ripened, rusty, Misty pink with after-sun.

Cool beneath the bridge's timber, Where I follow Lolly by, Swims the dark trout, wary, limber; Hangs in cloud the short-lived fly.

All about in quiet rises, While I wait for Lolly there, Spring of ground-green-scent surprises, Mingling with the day-left air.

By the bobbing where she passes I can guess where Lolly goes, Lost to view in lush, lit grasses, I can guess at what she knows.

—Sarah Ludlow Holmes, A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker

[mortalpractice]

On the Pier at Kinlochbervie

The stars go out one by one as though a bluetit the size of the world were pecking them like peanuts out of the sky's string bag,

A ludicrous image, I know.

Take away the gray light. I want the bronze shields of summer or winter's scalding sleet.

My mind is struggling with itself.

That fishing boat is a secret approaching me. It's a secret coming out of another one. I want to know the first one of all.

Everything's in the distance, as I am. I wish I could flip that distance like a cigarette into the water.

I want an extreme nearness. I want boundaries on my mind. I want to feel the world like a straitjacket.

—Norman MacCaig, Many Days

[mortalpractice]

Flying Above California

Spread beneath me it lies—lean upland sinewed and tawny in the sun, and valley cool with mustard, or sweet with loquat. I repeat under my breath names of places I have not been to: Crescent City, San Bernardino —Mediterranean and Northern names. Such richness can make you drunk. Sometimes on fogless days by the Pacific, there is a cold hard light without break that reveals merely what is—no more and no less. That limiting candour, that accuracy of the beaches, is part of the ultimate richness.

Spread beneath me it lies—lean upland sinewed and tawny in the sun, and valley cool with mustard, or sweet with loquat. I repeat under my breath names of places I have not been to: Crescent City, San Bernardino —Mediterranean and Northern names. Such richness can make you drunk. Sometimes on fogless days by the Pacific, there is a cold hard light without break that reveals merely what is—no more and no less. That limiting candour, that accuracy of the beaches, is part of the ultimate richness.

—Thom Gunn, New Selected Poems

[mortalpractice]

I have come to believe, though, that beauty is not so much a quality as it is rather a temporary state through which we transit, as if stepping in and out of a sunlit room. How tiring to have to be beautiful at all times, to remain only in that one room. Much like happiness, I suppose, though the happy ending must be more like a house into which we romance writers move our characters and all their baggage and boxes when at last we're done with them. Poor Lavender Glass, the happy ending just always over another hill. In real life, of course, happiness is a room, too, like beauty. If we're lucky we stumble through its doors every now and then.

—Kelly Link, from The Book of Love

[mortalpractice]

Was this her voice? Yes. She thought it was. She scrubbed herself so thoroughly there was not a trace of death or sadness or mystery left on her new body when she had finished. But when she turned the water off, there was the horror, the stain, all over again. Or perhaps this, too, was just part of what it was to have a body again. Just another room without a door.

—Kelly Link, from The Book of Love

[mortalpractice]

"What secret?" Laura said reflexively. But she knew how unpersuasive she sounded. She was practically a gothic piñata stuffed with bone shards, dead rabbits, secrets so secret not even she understood them. Perhaps it was less the secrets she had and more a secret that had Laura.

—Kelly Link, from The Book of Love

[mortalpractice]

There was something about the sound of his dirty feet on the floor that was the worst thing yet. His expression did not change, but the sound suggested contact with the world was agony. As if whatever Bogomil was made of—surely not flesh?—rejected the contact even as it occurred. Or did the floor, that unremarkable linoleum, reject Bogomil? Yes. The whole room, in a kind of agony, refuted Bogomil. He was smiling. But every footfall was a strike on a bell stopped with mud. A clot of blood trembling on a rusted wire.

—Kelly Link, from The Book of Love

[mortalpractice]

Joy Sullivan, “Sockeye”, Instructions for Traveling West

[mortalpractice]

the garden by louise glück

[mortalpractice]

I load my throat

with gunpowder & mother strikes me like a match.

— K-Ming Chang, from "Postcolonial," published in Kweli

[mortalpractice]

She hummed softly as I read, and my words became many small boats rocking on the tiny pulses of her voice.

Li-Young Lee, "The Invention of the Darling" from The Invention of the Darling

[mortalpractice]

IMAGINARY CONVERSATION

You tell me to live each day as if it were my last. This is in the kitchen where before coffee I complain of the day ahead—that obstacle race of minutes and hours, grocery stores and doctors.

But why the last? I ask. Why not live each day as if it were the first— all raw astonishment, Eve rubbing her eyes awake that first morning, the sun coming up like an ingénue in the east?

You grind the coffee with the small roar of a mind trying to clear itself. I set the table, glance out the window where dew has baptized every living surface.

LINDA PASTAN

[mortalpractice]

Joy Sullivan, "Teeth", Instructions for Traveling West