#j estanislao lopez

[soracities]

"Can I tell you that, sometimes, I utter the word justice and mean revenge? On my best nights, I mean mercy, but my best is my rarest form."

J. Estanislao Lopez, from "My Uncle's Killer"

[llovelymoonn]

j. estanislao lopez intelligent design \\ sheila heti pure colour

buy me a coffee

[lunchboxpoems]

INTELLIGENT DESIGN

An engineer in Wisconsin claims to have improved grief's design. Aerodynamic, he says, showing off his sketches, barely grief at all! Applying physics like salve to a wound, he remembers what Torricelli said about vacuums, what Carnot said about absolute terror. He grabs a pencil and revises one more time. There's money to be made in this, his father would assure, chopping chicken-necks through the afternoon. Flightless birds! The engineer pores over schematics, grimaces at draft after draft. His last sketch: confused. Joints unlabeled. A room inside a room inside a room.

J. ESTANISLAO LOPEZ 

[therambleandrumble]

Reasons to Despise Being Literary

J. Estanislao Lopez

You know exactly the caliber of human being

you’re not. The birds are old news in the ongoing

docket of the beautiful. You jot inconsequential notes:

The Spanish morir (to die) recalls the English, more.

A slant rhyme: serenaded to; serrated tooth.

You know that, as Keats died, he did so in the throngs

of unrelenting failure. Your apologies are too well crafted,

and so read as insincere. You insist the world sloshes around

like fluid in the skull, but the only person listening

already agrees. When two mirrors face each other,

the image bounces at light speed, shrinks into pure calculation.

Amazing!—but outside your expertise. There’s a taste

of ruin in the air you’re convinced has waited centuries

for an articulation only you could orchestrate.

You continue to believe this into the last decade of your life.

Like a machinist who has come to terms with his outdatedness,

you recline staring upwards. Only the naïve call it the firmament.

All you can offer anyone suffering in the world is a sentence,

which is more often than not not enough.

[spookyabuki]

This century is younger than me.

It dresses itself

in an overlong coat of Enlightenment thinking

despite the disappearing winter.

It twirls the light-up fidget spinner

won from the carnival of oil economies.

In this century, chatbots write poems

where starlings wander from their murmuration

into the denim-thick clouds of a storm.

When the chatbots inevitably learn

to kill their darlings,

we’ll ask if we are their darlings,

we’ll dive further inward if not or if so.

In films, the intelligent computer always arrives

at a misunderstanding of the human soul

because it lacks our ability

to lie to ourselves.

To feign hope and love through disillusion.

—J. Estanislao Lopez, “Poem With Human Intelligence,” from Poetry September 2023

[sicknessinmotion]

you are the grief i remember you as

fortesa latifi // fleabag // j. estanislao lopez // @promqueendyke // okechukwu nzelu // glennon doyle melton.

[ashtrayfloors]

Places with Terrible Wi-Fi

The Garden of Eden. My ancestors' graves. A watermelon field in Central Texas where my father once slept. Miles of rivers. The waiting room of a hospital in which a doctor, thin-looking in his coat, shared mixed results. A den of worms beneath frozen grass. Jesus's tomb. The stretches of highway on the long drive home after the burial. The figurative abyss. The literal heavens. The cheap motel room in which I thought about praying despite my disbelief. What I thought was a voice was simply a recording playing from another room. The cluttered attic. Most of the past. The very distant future, where man is just another stratum in the ground. The tell of Megiddo. The flooded house and the scorched one. My favorite cemetery, where I can touch the white noise distorting memory. What is static if not the sound of the universe's grief? Anywhere static reigns.

—J. Estanislao Lopez, from The Best American Poetry 2023 (Simon & Schuster, 2023)

[april-is]

April 28, 2022: A Metaphor, J. Estanislao Lopez

A Metaphor J. Estanislao Lopez 

Imagine you raise a glass of iced water to your lips, and, feeling a strange touch, you look into the glass to find a dead gnat floating at the surface. You see, there are metaphors everywhere about the presence of evil. But metaphors are misread. We discover later in life, too late to change it, that evil is not signified by the gnat (the gnat is the casualty), but by the water, which we raise to our lips every single day.

--

Today in:

2021: Ode to the Unbroken World, Which Is Coming, Thomas Lux 2020: What Kind of Times Are These, Adrienne Rich 2019: Conversation with Phillis Wheatley #2, Tiana Clark 2018: Love Poem, Denise Levertov 2017: Young Wife’s Lament, Brigit Pegeen Kelly 2016: For the Confederate Dead, Kevin Young 2015: Awaking in New York, Maya Angelou 2014: when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story, Gwendolyn Brooks 2013: Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey, Hayden Carruth 2012: My Place, Franz Wright 2011: from The Wild Geese, Wendell Berry 2010: Love After Love, Derek Walcott 2009: To This May, W.S. Merwin 2008: Father, Ted Kooser 2007: from Little Sleep’s-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight, Galway Kinnell 2006: Crusoe in England, Elizabeth Bishop 2005: Dream Song 1, John Berryman

[noleavestoblow]

"Yesterday, I buried another squirrel. Every morning, he’d gnaw on my plastic lawn chairs, shavings accumulating across his tiny organs. Is his death political? Everything is. Different, though, those two politics, dying for and dying of."

―J. Estanislao Lopez

[kitchen-light]

The older I get, the less I see the care of noticing. Maybe this is why I read poems. A poem does not have to happen. It does not have to trend itself toward the extraordinary, to escalate or conflict or inflict or do anything other than pay attention — however the poet chooses, to whatever the poet chooses to pay attention to. To record that attention — to transcribe a litany of detail, and then to walk through the open doors that such detail allows for, by, say, placing the sky inside an open casket — is to make real the dream of poetry, which is the beautiful and generous space of play and care and grief and love and so much else.

Devin Kelly, from his essay ‘J. Estanislao Lopez's "What the Fingers Do" | Thoughts on detail, perfection, and loss.”, published on December 11, 2022

[soracities]

J. Estanislao Lopez, "A Metaphor", We Borrowed Gentleness

[cleverwordsandotherstuffilike]

”Our hands contain our humanness. Sometimes they give us away. They clasp a chair while we pretend not to be scared. They sweat from the palms while we beg our foreheads to stay dry. They also hold. They pray. They dance along the keys of a piano. They tickle. They dust themselves in flour. They shape bread. They scratch the back of a lover. We hide so much in this life, but I don’t know if it is possible to hide the way a hand can open and close itself out of care or loss or love.” Devin Kelly Ordinary Plots: J. Estanislao Lopez's "What the Fingers Do"

[rosyjuly]

J. Estanislao Lopez, Poem with Human Intelligence

[spiritunwilling]

Places with Terrible Wi-Fi - J. Estanislao Lopez | Conscientious Objector - Edna St. Vincent Millay

[shanubydoo]

“Places With Terrible Wi-Fi”

by J. Estanislao Lopez

The Garden of Eden. My ancestors’ graves. A watermelon field in Central Texas where my father once slept. Miles of rivers. The waiting room of a hospital in which a doctor, thin-looking in his coat, shared mixed results. A den of worms beneath the frozen grass. Jesus’s tomb. The stretches of highway on the long drive home after burial. The figurative abyss. The literal heavens. The cheap motel room in which I thought about praying despite my disbelief. What I thought was a voice was simply a recording playing from another room. The cluttered attic. Most of the past. The very distant future, where man is just another stratum in the ground. The tell of Megiddo. The flooded house and the scorched one. My favorite cemetery, where I can touch the white noise distorting memory. What is static if not the sound of the universe’s grief? Anywhere static reigns.

[i-know-how-my-story-ends]

"Yesterday, I buried another squirrel.

Every morning, he’d gnaw on my plastic lawn chairs,

shavings accumulating across his tiny organs.

Is his death political? Everything is.

Different, though, those two politics, dying for and dying of."

- The Systemic, J. Estanislao Lopez