We had to present proof for everything: My mother was born August 31, 1954. On that day inside the womb of a minute she burst from another woman’s life,
There is no title. There is no title. The body is content. The body is window. The body is container, curtain, chair, grid. Do you see? Bones & shoulders, a spine
There’s this cathedral in my head I keep making from cricket song and dying but rogue-in-spirit, still, bamboo. Not making. I keep imagining it, as if that were the same
Of birdsongs, I know only three for certain: cardinal, blue jay, raven, though perhaps the last two don’t count—not as song. More call than song. More cry, by which I mean
The first poem in Leonard Cohen’s posthumous book The Flame made me laugh. Not because the lyrics are especially funny (although there are touches of Cohen’s characteristic wry humor), and not because the poem is foolish (it’s quite good), but because it is practically a medley of every single theme and obsession Cohen took up over his sixty-year career. Holiness and pussies are just a start. One almost senses him (knowingly, always knowingly) ticking off boxes. Angels and devils: check. Art, sartorial elegance, and slaves: check, check, check. Messianism: check:
You know that part of town where the miners once lived? Sooty frame houses, porches whose floorboards spring up? Rusty screen doors that close with a thrum, then a series of clicks, then a squeak?
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