apollonysus

[apollonysus]

Lover

Easy light storms in through the window, soft             edges of the world, smudged by mist, a squirrel’s

nest rigged high in the maple. I’ve got a bone  to pick with whomever is in charge. All year,

I’ve said, You know what’s funny? and then, Nothing, nothing is funny. Which makes me laugh

in an oblivion-is-coming sort of way. A friend writes the word lover in a note and I am strangely

excited for the word lover to come back. Come back             lover, come back to the five and dime. I could

squeal with the idea of blissful release, oh lover, what a word, what a world, this gray waiting. In me,

a need to nestle deep into the safe-keeping of sky.             I am too used to nostalgia now, a sweet escape

of age. Centuries of pleasure before us and after us, still right now, a softness like the worn fabric of a nightshirt

and what I do not say is, I trust the world to come back.             Return like a word, long forgotten and maligned

for all its gross tenderness, a joke told in a sun beam, the world walking in, ready to be ravaged, open for business.

-Ada Limón

[apollonysus]

Saying I Am a Survivor in Another Language

We are in the moment before we decide, for the first time, to have sex.

We fill our mouths with salami and wine. I am careful, peeling wax paper off glazed sponge cake

baked by nuns who live down the street. One nun, this morning, took my hand in hers

while she told me that the most important ingredient is the silence of prayer.

I cannot tell you this, but I held onto her while she walked me through a village

made of thick paper. A train with a real light and human figurines hot-glued to look

like they were heading somewhere. I was terrified. I didn’t touch a man for seven years.

Asleep. Your eyelashes open against my chest. You are the first person to not know this.

-Taneum Bambrick

[apollonysus]

The Gift

In the garden, my father sits in his wheelchair garlanded by summer hibiscus like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche. A flowering wreath buzzes around his head— passionate red. He holds the gift of death in his lap: small, oblong, wrapped in black. He has been waiting seventeen years to open it and is impatient. When I ask how he is my father cries. His crying comes as a visitation, the body squeezing tears from his ducts tenderly as a nurse measuring drops of calamine from an amber bottle, as a teen at the car wash wringing a chamois of suds. It is a kind of miracle to see my father weeping this freely, weeping for what is owed him. How are you? I ask again because his answer depends on an instant’s microclimate, his moods bloom and retreat like an anemone as the cold currents whirl around him— crying one minute, sedate the next. But today my father is disconsolate. I’m having a bad day, he says, and tries again. I’m having a bad year. I’m having a bad decade. I hate myself for noticing his poetry—the triplet that should not be beautiful to my ear but is. Day, year, decade—scale of awful economy. I want to give him his present but it is not mine to give. We sit as if mother and son on Christmas Eve waiting for midnight to tick over, anticipating the moment we can open his present together— first my father holding it up to his ear and shaking it, then me helping him peel back the paper, the weight of his death knocking, and once the box is unwrapped it will be mine, I will carry the gift of his death endlessly, every day I will know it opening in me.

-Sarah Holland-Batt

[apollonysus]

Crush

Maybe my limbs are made mostly for decoration, like the way I feel about persimmons. You can’t really eat them. Or you wouldn’t want to. If you grab the soft skin with your fist it somehow feels funny, like you’ve been here before and uncomfortable, too, like you’d rather squish it between your teeth impatiently, before spitting the soft parts back up to linger on the tongue like burnt sugar or guilt. For starters, it was all an accident, you cut the right branch and a sort of light woke up underneath, and the inedible fruit grew dark and needy. Think crucial hanging. Think crayon orange. There is one low, leaning heart-shaped globe left and dearest, can you tell, I am trying to love you less.

-Ada Limón

[apollonysus]

A land not mine

A land not mine, still forever memorable, the waters of its ocean chill and fresh. Sand on the bottom whiter than chalk, and the air drunk, like wine, late sun lays bare the rosy limbs of the pine trees. Sunset in the ethereal waves: I cannot tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again.

-Anna Akhmatova

-translated from the Russia by Jane Kenyon

[apollonysus]

Drink Now

The oncologist says my friend Paul will need a total gastrectomy “if he’s lucky”—

Paul the most kind of us, Paul the most eloquent lover of food and drink I’ve ever known,

who taught me about Barolo and Barbaresco, about Burgundian Pinot and the sunbaked clay soil

of the Côte-Rôtie—and who will die now at forty or else survive as never again the same Paul

once the endoscope has snaked down his throat, once the surgeons have cut out his stomach

and sectioned his esophagus, and sutured it back to whatever is left of the small intestine—I’m sorry,

if you’re still reading this, but there’s no happy ending, no plot twist in which he “fights it” and “beats it”

and “wins”—sorry, whoever you are, in whatever future you’ve found us, but Paul and I also

once lived: once gossiped and boozed and so loved the world that we, too, were almost convinced

it might last without end: our eyes shining just like yours, like delirious kids, when we used to laugh

into the glorious, now and forever, lost eyes of our beautiful friends.

-Patrick Phillips

[apollonysus]

A Children’s Story

Tired of rural life, the king and queen return to the city, all the little princesses rattling in the back of the car singing the song of being: I am, you are, he, she, it is— But there will be no conjugation in the car, oh no. Who can speak of the future? Nobody knows anything about the future, even the planets do not know. But the princesses will have to live in it. What a sad day the day has become. Outside the car, the cows and pastures are drifting away; they look calm, but calm is not the truth. Despair is the truth. This is what mother and father know. All hope is lost. We must return to where it was lost if we want to find it again.

-Louise Glück

[apollonysus]

Glow

In the black illegible moment of foolish want, there is also a neon sign flashing, the sign above the strip joint where my second big love worked as a bouncer and saved the girls from unwanted hands, un-paid for hands. Thin-lipped ladies with a lot on their minds and more on their backs, loaded for bear, and for the long winter’s rain, loaded for real, and I’ve always been a jealous girl, but when he’d come home with a 4 am stomp in his boots and undress to bed, he was fully there, fully in the room, my sleeping body made awake, awake and there was gentleness to this, a long opening that seemed to join us in the saddest hour. Before now, I don’t know if I have ever loved anyone or if I have ever been loved, but men have been very good to me, have seen my absurd out-of-my-place-ness, my bent grin and un-called for loud laugh and have wanted to love me for it, have been so warm in their wanting that sometimes I wanted to love them, too. And I think that must be worth something, that it should be a celebrated thing, that though I have not stood on a mountain under the usual false archway of tradition and chosen one person forever, what I have done is risked everything for that hour that hour in the black night where one flashing light looks like love, I have pulled over my body’s car and let myself believe that the dance was only for me, that this gift of a breathing one-who-wants was always a gift was the only sign worth stopping for, that the neon glow was a real star, gleaming in its dying, like us all, like us all.

-Ada Limón

[apollonysus]

Vespers

End of August. Heat like a tent over John’s garden. And some things have the nerve to be getting started, clusters of tomatoes, stands of late lilies—optimism of the great stalks—imperial gold and silver: but why start anything so close to the end? Tomatoes that will never ripen, lilies winter will kill, that won’t come back in spring. Or are you thinking I spend too much time looking ahead, like an old woman wearing sweaters in summer; are you saying I can flourish, having no hope of enduring? Blaze of the red cheek, glory of the open throat, white, spotted with crimson.

-Louise Glück

[apollonysus]

Aubade as Fuel 

Your lip an abstraction of iris always arousing the question of the bed. Which goodbye lasts? Only yesterday my hands rich with dirt. I told you Milkweed is my new salvation addiction. You know I always need to save something, to control it. I can make a pollen island, make your collarbone a spiritual landscape, the air around us orange and alive. The shape you left in the sheets a Rorschach I read as a rattlesnake’s skeleton in the silverware drawer, no, a fire in a cabin, no, a cabin on fire, the absence it will make. But look at me now, my heat signature a whole bouquet of howling, straddling scarves of smoke.

It’s O.K. that it’s over. Leaving is a lesson of pleasure. My ribs, sets of parentheses. My heart, an aside, an apple ready for the twist. My legs around your hips, a pillory, our shame public to the night. Tulip shadows on the nightstand, an apology marooned and lightless, each bite mark on your shoulder synonymous with grief. You ask me to brush the match against the red phosphorus of Goodbye in a way that makes you believe it. I ask to be the one on top, the one struck bright when God pours out the lightning. 

 -Traci Brimhall

[apollonysus]

When I Tell My Husband I Miss the Sun, He Knows

what I really mean. He paints my name across the floral bed sheet and ties the bottom corners to my ankles. Then he paints another for himself. We walk into town and play the shadow game, saying Oh! I'm sorry for stepping on your shadow! and Please be careful! My shadow is caught in the wheels of your shopping cart. It's all very polite. Our shadows get dirty just like anyone's, so we take them to the Laundromat—the one with the 1996 Olympics themed pinball machine— and watch our shadows warm against each other. We bring the shadow game home and (this is my favorite part) when we stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled my husband grips his own wrist, certain it's my wrist, and kisses it.

-Paige Lewis

[apollonysus]

Ode to Eating a Pomegranate in Brooklyn

When I fall in love again I will have another heart

and a second set of eyes which is one way

to watch the woman you love          grow old

The story of my heartbreak started like this:

someone gave me a key that opens many doors

I traded it for a key that opens only one

I traded that one for another and that for another

until there were no more doors

         and I had a fist full of keys

At any given moment only part of the world is gruesome

There are three pomegranates in the fridge

waiting to be broken open

When I fall in love again

my beloved and I will spit seeds into the street

until the birds come to pluck them

When I fall in love I’ll count the tick

of little pits in city puddles

I’ll forget the dead

                                  and count the doors instead

-Patrick Rosal

[apollonysus]

What Carries Us

First, there was the horse. Imagine creatures as majestic, standing. All their lives they stand, withholding. Imagine being tamed. Learning to be still, to be speed. Imagine birds as large as horses. We would be flying, grabbing a majestic creature by its collar. In cylinders of metal, we are four-legged beast-lives of liminal spaces. One time I was so tired of flying I wondered if I will spend all my life packing then unpacking. A complaint of privilege. We are such spending creatures. And when I say we are beasts, is that a metaphor? Metaphor, according to Papastergiadis, is also transportation, between absence and presence, “articulating action.” Its “very process,” in times of extremity, is “akin to prophecy.” I like the idea of transportation as articulation, that the end of metaphor is a kind of arrival, like getting off the train at an unknown stop. So when I say we are beasts, perhaps what I mean to do is remember that predators have forward-facing eyes, and we do grab others by the collar, and we do fly in metal, in preparation for the kill. What I want to do is slow down time. Imagine love as a horse. Think about us—a distance apart only a flying thing could connect us— standing and pacing, tamed and watching, then finally with each other, laughing as if to collapse, unbridled as wild horses. In this era of brevity in this era of metal in this era of abbreviation, yes, I’m trying to make you think of me longer. Yes, this whole time, the bird, the train, the whole thing about metaphor, I said to say this, that this is what carries us, the slow consideration of what each other is, can be. And first, there was the horse.

-Emily Jungmin Yoon

[apollonysus]

McDonalds Is Impossible

Eating food from McDonald's is mathematically impossible. Because before you can eat it, you have to order it. And before you can order it, you have to decide what you want. And before you can decide what you want, you have to read the menu. And before you can read the menu, you have to be in front of the menu. And before you can be in front of the menu, you have to wait in line. And before you can wait in line, you have to drive to the restaurant. And before you can drive to the restaurant, you have to get in your car. And before you can get in your car, you have to put clothes on. And before you can put clothes on, you have to get out of bed. And before you can get out of bed, you have to stop being so depressed. And before you can stop being so depressed, you have to understand what depression is. And before you can understand what depression is, you have to think clearly. And before you can think clearly, you have to turn off the TV. And before you can turn off the TV, you have to free your hands. And before you can free your hands, you have to stop masturbating. And before you can stop masturbating, you have to get off. And before you can get off, you have to imagine someone you really like with his pants off, encouraging you to explore his enlarged genitalia. And before you can imagine someone you really like with his pants off encouraging you to explore his enlarged genitalia, you have to imagine that person stroking your neck. And before you can imagine that person stroking your neck, you have to imagine that person walking up to you looking determined. And before you can imagine that person walking up to you looking determined, you have to choose who that person is. And before you can choose who that person is, you have to like someone. And before you can like someone, you have to interact with someone. And before you can interact with someone, you have to introduce yourself. And before you can introduce yourself, you have to be in a social situation. And before you can be in a social situation, you have to be invited to something somehow. And before you can be invited to something somehow, you have to receive a telephone call from a friend. And before you can receive a telephone call from a friend, you have to make a reputation for yourself as being sort of fun. And before you can make a reputation for yourself as being sort of fun, you have to be noticeably fun on several different occasions. And before you can be noticeably fun on several different occasions, you have to be fun once in the presence of two or more people. And before you can be fun once in the presence of two or more people, you have to be drunk. And before you can be drunk, you have to buy alcohol. And before you can buy alcohol, you have to want your psychological state to be altered. And before you can want your psychological state to be altered, you have to recognize that your current psychological state is unsatisfactory. And before you can recognize that your current psychological state is unsatisfactory, you have to grow tired of your lifestyle. And before you can grow tired of your lifestyle, you have to repeat the same patterns over and over endlessly. And before you can repeat the same patterns over and over endlessly, you have to lose a lot of your creativity. And before you can lose a lot of your creativity, you have to stop reading books. And before you can stop reading books, you have to think that you would benefit from reading less frequently. And before you can think that you would benefit from reading less frequently, you have to be discouraged by the written word. And before you can be discouraged by the written word, you have to read something that reinforces your insecurities. And before you can read something that reinforces your insecurities, you have to have insecurities. And before you can have insecurities, you have to be awake for part of the day. And before you can be awake for part of the day, you have to feel motivation to wake up. And before you can feel motivation to wake up, you have to dream of perfectly synchronized conversations with people you desire to talk to. And before you can dream of perfectly synchronized conversations with people you desire to talk to, you have to have a general idea of what a perfectly synchronized conversation is. And before you can have a general idea of what a perfectly synchronized conversation is, you have to watch a lot of movies in which people successfully talk to each other. And before you can watch a lot of movies in which people successfully talk to each other, you have to have an interest in other people. And before you can have an interest in other people, you have to have some way of benefiting from other people. And before you can have some way of benefiting from other people, you have to have goals. And before you can have goals, you have to want power. And before you can want power, you have to feel greed. And before you can feel greed, you have to feel more deserving than others. And before you can feel more deserving than others, you have to feel a general disgust with the human population. And before you can feel a general disgust with the human population, you have to be emotionally wounded. And before you can be emotionally wounded, you have to be treated badly by someone you think you care about while in a naive, vulnerable state. And before you can be treated badly by someone you think you care about while in a naive, vulnerable state, you have to feel inferior to that person. And before you can feel inferior to that person, you have to watch him laughing and walking towards his drum kit with his shirt off and the sun all over him. And before you can watch him laughing and walking towards his drum kit with his shirt off and the sun all over him, you have to go to one of his outdoor shows. And before you can go to one of his outdoor shows, you have to pretend to know something about music. And before you can pretend to know something about music, you have to feel embarrassed about your real interests. And before you can feel embarrassed about your real interests, you have to realize that your interests are different from other people's interests. And before you can realize that your interests are different from other people’s interests, you have to be regularly misunderstood. And before you can be regularly misunderstood, you have to be almost completely socially debilitated. And before you can be almost completely socially debilitated, you have to be an outcast. And before you can be an outcast, you have to be rejected by your entire group of friends. And before you can be rejected by your entire group of friends, you have to be suffocatingly loyal to your friends. And before you can be suffocatingly loyal to your friends, you have to be afraid of loss. And before you can be afraid of loss, you have to lose something of value. And before you can lose something of value, you have to realize that that thing will never change. And before you can realize that that thing will never change, you have to have the same conversation with your grandmother forty or fifty times. And before you can have the same conversation with your grandmother forty or fifty times, you have to have a desire to talk to her and form a meaningful relationship. And before you can have a desire to talk to her and form a meaningful relationship, you have to love her. And before you can love her, you have to notice the great tolerance she has for you. And before you can notice the great tolerance she has for you, you have to break one of her favorite china teacups that her mother gave her and forget to apologize. And before you can break one of her favorite china teacups that her mother gave her and forget to apologize, you have to insist on using the teacups for your imaginary tea party. And before you can insist on using the teacups for your imaginary tea party, you have to cultivate your imagination. And before you can cultivate your imagination, you have to spend a lot of time alone. And before you can spend a lot of time alone, you have to find ways to sneak away from your siblings. And before you can find ways to sneak away from your siblings, you have to have siblings. And before you can have siblings, you have to underwhelm your parents. And before you can underwhelm your parents, you have to be quiet, polite and unnoticeable. And before you can be quiet, polite and unnoticeable, you have to understand that it is possible to disappoint your parents. And before you can understand that it is possible to disappoint your parents, you have to be harshly reprimanded. And before you can be harshly reprimanded, you have to sing loudly at an inappropriate moment. And before you can sing loudly at an inappropriate moment, you have to be happy. And before you can be happy, you have to be able to recognize happiness. And before you can be able to recognize happiness, you have to know distress. And before you can know distress, you have to be watched by an insufficient babysitter for one week. And before you can be watched by an insufficient babysitter for one week, you have to vomit on the other, more pleasant babysitter. And before you can vomit on the other, more pleasant babysitter, you have to be sick. And before you can be sick, you have to eat something you’re allergic to. And before you can eat something you’re allergic to, you have to have allergies. And before you can have allergies, you have to be born. And before you can be born, you have to be conceived. And before you can be conceived, your parents have to copulate. And before your parents can copulate, they have to be attracted to one another. And before they can be attracted to one another, they have to have common interests. And before they can have common interests, they have to talk to each other. And before they can talk to each other, they have to meet. And before they can meet, they have to have in-school suspension on the same day. And before they can have in-school suspension on the same day, they have to get caught sneaking off campus separately. And before they can get caught sneaking off campus separately, they have to think of somewhere to go. And before they can think of somewhere to go, they have to be familiar with McDonald's. And before they can be familiar with McDonald's, they have to eat food from McDonald's. And eating food from McDonald's is mathematically impossible.

-Chelsea Martin

[apollonysus]

The Kitchen Counter

Today I heard a young woman read a poem in which her husband lifts her bare bottom onto the kitchen counter and, in the next line, spreads her legs.

The marriage has problems. They may already be divorced. But suddenly I am ruing the fact that no one has lifted my bottom onto a kitchen counter.

Not when my bottom trotted high and proud. And not when it began to eye the floor as if contemplating the future.

And now, I’m going to die without ever being taken on those cold hard tiles. Don’t tell me it’s not too late. It is.

-Ellen Bass

[apollonysus]

All My Friends Are Finding New Beliefs

All my friends are finding new beliefs. This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees. In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew God whomps on like a genetic generator. Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon. Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine. One man marries a woman twenty years younger and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant; another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea, decides to die. Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees, high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt, sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of  being ... All my friends are finding new beliefs and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track of the new gods and the new loves, and the old gods and the old loves, and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives, and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness, and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends, my beautiful, credible friends.

- Christian Wiman

[apollonysus]

Torn

Witness the wet dead snake, its long hexagonal pattern weaved around its body like a code for creation, curled up cold on the newly tarred road. Let us begin with the snake: the fact of death, the poverty of place, of skin and surface. See how the snake is cut in two—its body divided from its brain. Imagine now, how it moves still, both sides, the tail dancing, the head dancing. Believe it is the mother and the father. Believe it is the mouth and the words. Believe it is the sin and the sinner— the tempting, the taking, the apple, the fall, every one of us guilty, the story of us all. But then return to the snake, poor dead thing, forcefully denying the split of its being, longing for life back as a whole, wanting you to see it for what it is, something that loves itself so much, it moves across the boundaries of death, to touch itself once more, to praise both divided sides equally, as if it was almost easy.

-Ada Limón