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[thevulgar]

from ALL THE PRETTY HORSES | Cormac McCarthy

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

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PROVISION | WS Merwin

All morning with dry instruments The field repeats the sound Of rain From memory And in the wall The dead increase their invisible honey It is August The flocks are beginning to form I will take with me the emptiness of my hands What you do not have you find everywhere

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HOW TO BECOME A FOREST FIRE | Shira Erlichman

I’ve been taking a class at the local community college. There’s eight of us, including the teacher. We meet in one of the big lecture halls meant for 400 people. The teacher has never studied the topic. “I’ve been many things, but a forest fire, not yet.” The first day was spent reviewing the many things he’s been. He’s been a seal. He lost his whole family in an accident. He searched for them, “eternally” until he became a stone. “My whole world was shut inside me. There was no door. No way in, and definitely no way out.” He’d also become a sheep, a bottle, sea glass, and a cement mixer. The second class wasn’t really a class. He didn’t show. The seven of us waited in silence for a half an hour, then someone broke open a bottle of something potent and we got high, and then we split, each going our separate ways, except for Gina and Tim, a couple who wanted to go at this whole transformation thing together. Our teacher thought that was sweet, but misguided. “Once we’re flames, you won’t be able to tell one of us from the other.” You would expect at least a couple skeptics, but there wasn’t even one. “Look,” our teacher said, “these are the skeptics,” pointing to the 393 empty chairs. I felt a sudden burst of pride. Against all odds, we’d found each other. There had only been one poster, hand-written, no number, no email, just “How to Become a Forest Fire” at the top. Recognizing our impoverished condition, we had all known where to go. The 393 were not yet aware. It’s so easy, after all: to set alarms, and wake up to them, and get in your vehicle, and step on the gas, and fill out the appropriate forms, and lock the bathroom stall, and drop a scarf, and be as you are and think you will always be. Tomorrow is our final exam. No pens, no paper, no gasoline. I approached him after class, after everyone else had left. I felt quite nervous about the exam. “I have no idea who I am,” I told him. “Good,” he said, and I began to see. Like death, they rose. So deep green they were holy, almost ridiculous in their beauty. His lips first, flickering yellow. Then mine. His palms. The forest grew around me. Trees on streets, walking or waiting. Trees on the bus taking up seats. I joined them by the overhead rails, swaying a little with each jolt. Where were we heading? Home, I thought. I was swaying and I wasn’t sure if I was swaying like a person or a tree. Everything burned, as promised. Woman, I thought, panicking. No, stone. No, home. No, woman.

[thevulgar]

EARLY SNOW | Stacie Cassarino

Some mornings are like this, the stupor of longing or pure light, stillness in a rifled grouse, the black woods legible to a woman whose heart is made of false starts, the ruddy life of a hill gone blank or what the face in the window wants to believe of her past, architecture of a white house, this draft of rooms, paramour planets, children with gentle hands, kindling piled near the moon’s pillar, this draft of despotic love, then distance, vacancy, then forgiven words accumulating like snow, just when the world is finished with us, we build a wall with rocks and the work is the whole body inside the idea of belonging somewhere, even if not for long, mineral world of slate and flint, numinous like these days and others wintering, we test what will hold, attenuated voices that lean and fall, the argent sky, the worry we don’t need anyone.

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FROM THIS VANTAGE POINT YOUR VIEW WILL BE CLEAR | Lisa Olstein

Any shift in philosophy introduces the need for new habits of the body. I am learning how gently to lift them, to turn them swiftly and rest them again, on their wings, wings to table, which I say sand smooth each morning. To do it with  no fluttering, with as little as possible. It is a strange gymnastics, their bodies, mine: what to grasp, when to release, the nature of a turn, the will of the whole channeled into the fingertips. It takes all my strength. It is necessary to practice, to imagine myself the moth, my arms its wings, my legs gone. 

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FOOL  | Emily Kendal Frey

Dear Jalapeño, 

Dear Mud, 

Dear Hickory, 

The dreams splay me.

 I follow them 

to the root-ridged cliff

and throw my bicycle 

over. It sticks

like a pile of bones. 

Water rides over its spokes

in moans. Dear Appendage, 

Dear Shortcut, 

Dear Shiver- 

My chest is a cannon. 

The tide is a lined box. 

Wheels are stopped clocks. 

If you can't see

the bottom, jump. 

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HURRY | Emily Kendal Frey

Dear Jalapeño, 

Dear Battery, 

Dear Aperitif, 

Desire works the night shift. 

I buy things but not 

too many things. Enough 

to keep my leaves wet. 

Dear Tongue. 

Dear Grief-

We'll need boxes, not bags, 

to carry this. 

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THE OTHER SIDE  | Emily Kendal Frey

Dear Jalepeno, 

Dear Igloo, 

Dear Straw-

Break me hard

on a scraggly pine. 

Dear Undreamt Archetype, 

Are you mine?

Dear Level, 

Dear Headache-

Finches make the 

sidewalk shake. 

Dear Heatwave, 

Take me higher.

Dear Treble Clef, 

It was all for nothing, wasn't it? 

[thevulgar]

BIRTHDAY POEM Open a box with a box. Open a bottle with a box. Open a bottle with a bird. Remove the paper creased into place and write the bird. Write ivy white wrist bones against a brick wall Write its wings. Write forgiveness, like a hinge. Write its trackway. Write how to trust things with edges. Write its eyes. Write the cobbled grief of undoing. Put the bird back in the box. Now write the bird.

Birthday Poem | Alisha Bruton (via swingingaxes)

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We are cold, chattering        with light, on the cusp of   some bright shore winter waterbirds shrieking                                 a welcome: our hearts— math to math— willing,             but not prepared.

Alisha Bruton, from “I Am Sorry I Compared You to a Cormorant When They Are Not Beautiful Birds,” Diagram (14.3)

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UNHELPFUL INSTRUCTION MANUAL FOR BUSINESS CASUAL ETIQUETTE  | Holly Brown

In the places where I remember misbehaving there are no floors. I once latched onto my mother’s neck with my baby teeth. I once

had sex under a tree during a thunderstorm. We were on a golf course. Nobody clapped politely when it was all over. The thunder was all over everything    

already. The section "other information" on my resume reads: Never been struck by lightning but hopes to someday

for the story. This appears on the reverse side above: Enjoys giving hickeys to see that shade of purple and not because she’s possessive.

I am glad that no future employer has ever flipped my resume over. I am already wearing my pajamas at the interview; the ones with the pink elephants

so I’m not even being subtle about it. When asked what my greatest assets are I say “sounds like you’re an ass man” and chew on my thumb nail.

I only ever steal things that aren’t for sale: bar beer steins, restaurant cutlery. I’m a time thief and I’ll talk your ear off about my affinity

for Camel cigarettes and wine on sale at Walgreens. I am always playing games of hide and seek that no one else acknowledges.

The best part is I never lose. The worst part is no one can hide with me. I do not want to be alone. I never want to be found.

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Frieda Considers Her Former Lover’s Wedding Feast | Shelley Whitaker

after Freaks (1932)

Once the circus draws its curtains & the elephants lean into sleep, the tallest shadows sway over my mind again like windblown tent stakes.

To switch on love’s spotlight makes three rings of the heart, & every evening I ride side-saddle into its center with a man I thought content

to have me mirror his smallness, to dwell with me in the dollhouse of our lives. But again, this body darkens beneath the silhouette of another—

some long-legged acrobat swings her limbs across the moonlight while I sleep, arcs her mile- wide fingers over my lover’s bed & clutches

him away like a mouse into the sky. I could kneel again at the altar of her knees, shrink myself at her door & beg, but to hear my own voice becomes

a study in bird sounds—its thimble-sized warble when I say his name, my please ribboning my throat like the tongue of a hungry chick.

So if I lift from tomorrow’s table to weep, let me at least disappear as myself. My sequins as skin instead of feathers as I slip into shadow. This evening, my tutus

billow like flags in pre-rain wind. I unhook each skirt & tuck it away before the storm. I care for what of me still hangs on the line. Next dusk, I dress myself by what little light is left in my sky.

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Blue Hole #4 | Erin Slaughter

On Monday, Mark Zuckerberg gave the Pope a drone and I let a stranger fuck me in a public bathroom.

There is a way to fall in love with a blue-green sparkle of breath on the neck that has nothing to do with atoms, or crying. Like knocked spread eagle on the carpet in grief, imagining how the camera pans out. One long, slow shot that stretches like a river across the ceiling, or a close-up of the cheese shards in the carpet.

Tasmanian devils are being plagued by a deadly genetic cancer and I am answering

my own text messages with a list of reasons everyone who loves me is wrong or lying. I am drinking a margarita from a can in a dark desert hotel room. I am writing secrets on napkins and leaving them around the house for no one.

Radio says they unclogged an anaconda from a river drain, diamonds on diamonds shed

like the memory of a summer night, the moon looking awestruck. Like he had seen so much and never expected to be seen back.

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holy / war | McKenzie Chinn

that the sight of my bare thigh might ever be more threat than god dream sounds like a you problem.

if my mere thigh might render any action you’d take unholy, maybe

your mama forgot to teach you something. let’s call it what it is:

that the glory of just my thigh is so great, it makes you want children.

the glory of just my thigh makes a praise dance rise within you, and

how it breaks me that a praise dance in anyone could become so grotesque,

can contort into a war you’d wage on a body that would open itself

like some soil tilled in a promised land, a body that would bear you forth in perpetuity.

eve ain’t caused adam to fall. the man made a choice and would chose the same again, and

fuck an apple, he would’ve walked barefoot over a field of thorns if it meant her breath soft in his ear,

her heart alive against his, and his hand in prayer against her thigh.

helen’s face ain’t launched 1,000 ships; men’s foolishness did that.

i want this body and all it renders possible— the dance, the gather, the bend, the bringing forth—

to be your church. let a reverence for all i encompass found your new religion.

learn to love what i make move within you like you love the sun which gives you life.

do not become war because my thigh is so great.

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from NOTES TOWARD A SUPREME FICTION  | Wallace Stevens

To discover winter and know it well, to find, Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, Out of nothing to have come on major weather,

It is possible, possible, possible. It must Be possible. It must be that in time The real will from its crude compoundings come,

Seeming at first, a beast disgorged, unlike, Warmed by a desperate milk. To find the real, To be stripped of every fiction except one.

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POEM | Graham Foust

The heart’s the eye we cry the body through. I want the word for “to not map, ever.”

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YOU THINK YOU ARE LESS REAL THAN YOU ARE | Wendy Xu

You put on some new pants. I put on some sunlight. I put on a coyote. You put on a bigger coyote. You put on all of the coyotes! You put on the sand as it flies beneath your incredible little paws. I put on rain not reaching the desert. You put on how we feel sad after this. You put on the sadness. You put on methods for dealing with it. The sadness tries to put you on but you say No! You wrestle the sadness to the ground. You are big and need large wings. You put on the large wings. You are still a coyote. You put on the howling. You put on things that howl back. There is nothing you won’t put on. You put on the darkness. You put on some stars and even what is between them. You put on the moon. The moon that shines! You put on how we want to stay here! You put on how we forget where we were before. You put on the earth how it cracks. You put on its face when it sees us.