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whisperthatruns · 28 days
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The Door
Go and open the door. Maybe outside there’s a tree, or a wood, a garden, or a magic city. Go and open the door. Maybe a dog’s rummaging. Maybe you’ll see a face, or an eye, or the picture of a picture. Go and open the door. If there’s a fog it will clear. Go and open the door. Even if there’s only the darkness ticking, even if there’s only the hollow wind, even if nothing is there, go and open the door. At least there’ll be a draught.
Miroslav Holub (1923--1998), tr. from the Czech by George Theiner, text from Sean Singer’s daily email, The Sharpener
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whisperthatruns · 28 days
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“Memory, origin of narrative; memory, barrier against oblivion; memory, repository of my being, those delicate filaments of myself I weave, in time into a spider’s web to catch as much world in it as I can. In the midst of my self-spun web, there I can sit, in the serenity of my self-possession. Or so I would, if I could.”
— The Scarlet House, Angela Carter
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whisperthatruns · 1 month
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The problem with any first sentence, said Joan Didion, is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone. Before beginning, too many options. Then, in the next breath, none. When you can't sleep, goes an old cure for insomnia, start telling yourself the story of your life. For some reason, writer's block has always felt to me like a kind of insomnia. I like that Norman Mailer said there's a touch of writer's block in a writer's work every day. I don't remember who said, Insomnia is the inability to forget. When you're having trouble writing, get up, go out, take a walk in the street. You will discover that certain streets exist precisely for this purpose. Once, I saw a man---homeless by the look of him---digging through the trash. He pulled out a couple of sheets of newspaper, examined them, and threw them back. Fishing deeper, he hauled up a magazine, squinted at the cover, and threw it back. Shit, he said, walking away. There ain't nothing to read in these fucking cans anymore.
Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books, 2023)
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whisperthatruns · 1 month
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"It was an uncertain spring." I had read the book a long time ago, and, except for this sentence, I remembered almost nothing about it. I could not have told you about the people who appeared in the book or what happened to them. I could not have told you (until later, after I'd looked it up) that the book began in the year 1880. Not that it mattered. Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. [...] I like the novelist who confessed that the only thing to have stayed with him after reading Anna Karenina was the detail of a picnic basket holding a jar of honey.
Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books, 2023)
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whisperthatruns · 1 month
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Edward Gorey - Dracula & Lucy
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whisperthatruns · 2 months
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If I don't survive it, please remember the right things about me: The time I was caught singing among the violins. Perhaps I lost my bow, thought no one would notice the difference. Perhaps my voice came back and so I used my voice.
Sarah Matthes, from “A Preposition to Follow 'Live'," Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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whisperthatruns · 2 months
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Getting Out of St. Paul
Hiding in the tall grass on the north side of the tracks, you're trying to pull the burrs out of my hair. It's night. My pack bolsters below my knees. I crane my ear to the east listening for the hum of shifting steel. Light another, smoke silent and slow. Calm myself by thinking things I know: that there are other people in the world, that the heart is a fingerless glove. I don't want new thoughts, don't want to look beyond the next train. A switchman rolls by in an ancient caboose, laughing at his radio. He knows that there are other people in the world. Slip your glove around me. From across the tracks I imagine a bull is watching us. He sees two lost fireflies alighting and darkening, rising and falling, and, at the arrival of a sweet, low sound in the distance, suddenly going out.
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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whisperthatruns · 2 months
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Accidental Yahrzeit
It is still early December, it is the beginning of the season of the death days of so many I loved, and the birthdays of those other dead who died in different seasons, and the days are full of meaningful oak leaves, specific soups, a little sudden crying by the sheer blue curtains--- you know when the sun catches a whole universe of hanging dust? A bit of light better lit by all the light that surrounds it? Under a white draped cloth, what you had made me: a menorah. Black and steel. Slim welds. Opening fingers. And the candles were too large for their metal wells, so we whittled them thinner with paring knives. And you don't know that the holiday ended days ago--- And I'm not going to tell you. Nine white lights open their eyes to a night they've never seen, and the record player spins a slipping voice through the room, the heat is on, the couch is green, the dark days of my longing approach, they turn up my street, they fill my yard with omens: a sneaker tread, a grey fox and a red, both together, a sapling seizing out of the ground like an arm. But inside, your arm is around me--- outside there is loss but inside there is a deep and abiding remainder, tomorrow there is all that but look, look at now, this: my sorrow suspended in your steel, my light lit up in your love.
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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whisperthatruns · 2 months
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Transitory Mitzvah
In the subway car, a mystery of proximity: a yawn passing from mouth to mouth, across a line of seated strangers, in perfect order. I watched it moving like a secret through a row of children, washing toward me as each person opened their lips to swallow it up and then, in unbroken revolution, give it away. I thought this must be G-d: air moving through human bodies like a soft needle picking up stitches along pale cloth. And I felt my neighbor expand in her crest of breath, hand floating to her mouth like wood rising in water, and I prepared myself for the gift--- But the yawn turned across the aisle. I saw it grow inside a child and then drift into his mother, as it passed again and again away from me. What would you unsee so you could be inside of it? Could it ever be enough just to say: it happened, nothing opened or closed around me, air moved and was wind, air moved and was breath, air moved and was death, my life, it did not change---
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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whisperthatruns · 2 months
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Lament for the Living
We feel them walking over us in their intolerable shoes, knocking down our stone doors. And what would they have us do---come outside? We will not afternoon among the pigeons, who loiter like blanched old men in a sauna, moaning "arrgargahhh" but meaning to say "shut the door" but meaning "let this day end me." Their dicks lolling across their thighs, gummy and white as gefilte fish. Overwrought? Yes. But this is just one tunnel through the story, and it is not the one that leads to some outside that is sweet and green. What if we had known we were in the last five years of our lives? What a relief! To look around and say how fine it is, to awaken in the cracked sun, to knock back a berry into our mouths like a large and living pill! To have two and a half years to eat before our time is reset into a new measure of halfness. And it goes. For decades we split ourselves across the longing of an asymptote, until one day we reach down to wipe and we're putting our hand through a ghost. And then it becomes intolerable. Like fruit salad--- a grape disguised in the juices of a cantaloupe. We leave behind a dotted line, and all these people! They follow it like a map to heaven, when all we meant was "cut here."
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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whisperthatruns · 2 months
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Wet Body Hot Stone
In everything, I see only myself--- no need to paint irises on stones. Dark fish gasp across rapids, and my lungs and stomach gather in a tight bouquet to spice the blood. I cut my finger---the skin grows back strong and smooth--- a new bright brick in my barricade. Then comes the night and there are no stilting tree tops to make into my fingers, no nape of neck pressed into this ditch of clay. Night eats the liver out of the river's stunned pools. There must be more left than my mind. Universe, please--- send me the shade of someone I love. The old woman made of nightmare who sits on my chest---even she has her bad dreams. My life has been the wet imprint of someone else's body as they rise from a wide, hot stone and take to the river to rinse again. When I die free me from parallel--- Let me feed every tree---
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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whisperthatruns · 2 months
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V. There was a moment in this poem when I walked into and out of a riddle with the swift indifference of a swinging silver pendulum, when I could have slipped my tongue like a wet key into the air's warm door. Do you remember the bird and how she sort of came out of a banana? I felt weird about that. But at the moment I saw it, clear and bright and physical as a papier-mâché mobile of the sun and its adorers. There is a word living inside the word "breathing," like a caged bird covered by thick muslin. It's smaller than the shape my mouth makes to say it--- quicker, like pointing to the night sky, and saying only "never mind, you missed it."
Sarah Matthes, from “To Examine the Marks in Fishes,” Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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whisperthatruns · 2 months
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II. If I set the fish in the river, the bird will fish it out. Of all the things our human tongues have done, "fishing" is perhaps the greatest violence: Making a name into a word that means to kill the name.
Sarah Matthes, from “To Examine the Marks in Fishes,” Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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whisperthatruns · 2 months
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Self Portrait at the End of My Life
I do remember beauty: A blue pool in the pine barrens, the fermata of a summer afternoon, tangles of hair on a soft stomach, my lips combing through them; Working quick and hard on a fire in the black backyard, knowing soon I'd see those bright lit faces bursting through the screen door saying there you are; And then being alone: howling on the mountain until my spirit expands, pans out and sees my body disappear below the tree-line; Or the vast expansive solitude of being a child in the backseat of the car at the end of a long trip home, the hum of adult voices, my head cradled in the sling of the seatbelt, the dark and permeable glass, the sky spilling in--- Still, I wanted the next thing. To collapse the paper dolls of my life back into the flank of an aspen. To hear the insides, like floating with your ears below the water. I suppose that's what I'm getting now, though I always pictured it differently. I thought I'd be on my back.
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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whisperthatruns · 2 months
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The Burning Bush Is a Blackberry Bush
I wrote the poem. And then I rewrote it, and made it worse. I thought time would heal it. Time passed. I did research: Exodus, midrash, my mother. I rewrote the poem. I ate fistfuls of soft berries. Navy lips. Purple lips. Juice bursting out of black balloons. I made it worse. The poem knocked around my mind like unlabeled preserves darkening in the fridge. Outside the page: tableaus of simple beauty. Three different trees in one line of sight---plum, pear, palm. Inside: A hand runs under a faucet, the soap stinging invisible cuts to life. Have you seen a blackberry bush at the exact moment of its blushing, when its tight little spheres bleed the green seeds bloody--- have you walked by shoeless on the way to the lake, the sun lifting the hairs on your cheek, no matter where you turn, something you love coming after you, the bush burning in the stripped light, unripe, alive, surviving---
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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whisperthatruns · 2 months
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Aphasia
The barista I knew when I was young says Come, sit with me, and tells me how he doesn't believe in reality anymore. This chair, these teeth could be anything that isn't a chair, or teeth. I'm not interested in his latest endeavor, a drawing he shows me, naming it "Shame." A sketch of a man: such large hands over what kind of face. I have to go, or I say so, and sit on the street that erupts twice a year: once with white pear blossoms, once in bare wired branches---vibrations in the sky. At home my father watches the television muted, saying Who is this, and What are these fellows doing, and every few minutes he hears a sound that might be the ice box spawning, and on double canes he walks to the front door, like a paper puppet shaking in the light. I am going to stay on this bench a very long time, watching autumn's fingers paint salted lines around the spaces where the leaves have pressed their damp brown bodies to the ground, and I will try to find a way to carve the space around my body into quiet, or lift a spindle from my tongue to tighten these sounds into simply something else. When I finally go home, I am going to ask my father how his day was, and he'll say The egg is on top of the egg but he won't mean an egg and he won't mean an egg.
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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whisperthatruns · 2 months
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There's a special darkness cast around a single light left on at home. Sometimes I think if I had known they were just joking about eating the roach. If I hadn't pretended my voice was lost a day after it had come back. If only I had known that the ones I would love were the ones that would never leave and that the staying would make them so unlovable.
Sarah Matthes, from "Harder All the Time to Go Back to New Jersey," Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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