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To the Girl I Haven’t Met Yet:
I love that summer dress flowing down your body like a waterfall in the sun. And when you curse in the morning before the coffee’s done brewing. The way you wear a hat in the store as if it were your own. I can only love women who look stunning in hats. I love that smile. How if your city had a pageant for its top five smiles, you’d be up there on stage, answering a question on how the world can come closer to not hating itself. Your smile, then, cannot possibly be “killer.” I’ve always wondered why men don’t fall for smiles that can end wars. I can only love a woman who can launch a thousand ships back to their dark, rainy harbors, metaphor for a jilted king’s heart. Why do men turn evil when their hearts break? Does the heart begin pointed north until it is pounded into not? I love the way you photograph. How all of us turn less beautiful in a universe in which time is time, and continues to be time. I can only love girls who spend eternity making the world stop, and by virtue of that, only girls who are eternal. I love that thing you do with your nose and keep wondering how you breathe when you do it. I wonder, too, how you calm yourself when you sleep and how you are most beautiful in the mornings. I love that story you sent me and how it reminded of the bananafish, and I love how you love the bananafish. I love that song on repeat in your room somewhere behind the hundred doors of my body, or maybe somewhere across an ocean. The one that has no words, that makes me feel like I’m on a train headed for another train, and another. But most of all I love that song you keep whistling while your back’s turned, your hair tied in a bun, as you’re dealing with the latest morning of your life, frying eggs.
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Scary Movies, Kim Addonizio
Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,
and I keep expecting some enormous
black-and-white B-movie Cyclops
to appear at the edge of the horizon,
to come striding over the ocean
and drag me from my kitchen
to the deep cave that flickered
into my young brain one Saturday
at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless
between my older brothers, pumped up
on candy and horror—that cave,
the litter of human bones
gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,
I can smell their stench as clearly
as the bacon fat from breakfast. This
is how it feels to lose it—
not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is
that helps you get up in the morning
and actually leave the house
on those days when it seems like death
in his brown uniform
is cruising his panel truck
of packages through your neighborhood.
I think of a friend’s voice
on her answering machine—
Hi, I’m not here—
the morning of her funeral,
the calls filling up the tape
and the mail still arriving,
and I feel as afraid as I was
after all those vampire movies
when I’d come home and lie awake
all night, rigid in my bed,
unable to get up
even to pee because the undead
were waiting underneath it;
if I so much as stuck a bare
foot out there in the unprotected air
they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me
under. And my parents said there was
nothing there, when I was older
I would know better, and now
they’re dead, and I’m older,
and I know better. -
Close All The Windows, Cyril Wong
After discovering the Internet,
my mother has trouble
finding a connection, and
calls me up for help
while I am at work.
We keep miscommunicating.
She has clicked open
so many windows
the computer threatens to hang.
And my logic runs out
of variations to explain
the same thing over
and over. Suddenly,
I imagine she is looking
for her future through
that glowing screen
and I am really helping her
to find back her life after
all her children have left
for new homes,
new families to love.
‘What now?’ she asks.
‘Try again,’ I reply, the phone
pressed to my ear. ‘Close all
the windows. Tell me —
what do you see?’ -
Haven’t posted a poem in a while.
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It’s more fun in the Philippines! Hope the travelers (both local and international) get a hold of this! We’re definitely open for business!
Yeah. It’s pretty fun here.
(via mlq3)
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The Imagined City
Northern Sky. November clouds.
The dim lamplight of sunset.
And us, taking photographs
in a city faraway, now sunken.
Quivering punctuation mark
in the paragraphs of our lives, written
in a tongue spoken only in cold. These
are the stories our children will sleep to.
What almost occurred, but didn’t.
Soon enough, only synopses, inaccuracies.
Narrating from our chairs
with the illusion of an audience. Death
having already forgiven us. Old whispers
the only true accounts of that afternoon—
that brief intersection of lifespans.
A beautiful place: coastal town,
an old man and his dog, mischievous crow.
Who hasn’t liked such a movie?
How could I not pretend to love you?
How could I not begin writing
a sad story then? The plot always inching
toward that last short chapter.
Leaving the listeners lost in the city
of the mundane, and going back to the separate
beautiful worlds of our everyday lives.
Yes, the world is always beautiful.
The sun is always sinking somewhere.
It’s been sinking for eternity.
Always that immortal, fleeting question
we’ll never answer.
