Category Archives: #NPM17

Listen. I can never be anyone’s home. There is almost always too much growl. Always too much room for ache, not enough speak. Listen. This is language tucked under the tongue. This is too many folds of skin and not enough let me in. See this: a forest in the core of the bones, ourContinue reading “April 21 – #NPM17”

It is only September. I don’t know how many seasons I will be allowed to love you yet. What I do know is that you have flown one thousand Miles to stand in my kitchen, dropping chocolate chips into pumpkin pancakes like arranging freckles for the face of a perfect child. Feeding me the extraContinue reading “April 20 – #NPM17”

Last night, I dreamt of you with purple in your hair. It did not hurt to think of you and it did not hurt to see you and I let myself hold your face like two fat peonies and pull each petal to my lips, thoughtless, simple, like passing the doorway of a childhood home.Continue reading “April 19 – #NPM17”

their high school principal told me I couldn’t teach poetry with profanity so I asked my students, “Raise your hand if you’ve heard of the Holocaust.” in unison, their arms rose up like poisonous gas then straightened out like an SS infantry “Okay. Please put your hands down. Now raise your hand if you’ve heardContinue reading “April 18 – #NPM17”

Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the swelling presence, andContinue reading “April 17 – #NPM17”

i’ve seen what they make of you how they render you a multiplicity of mistakes they have undone me as well pulled back my shell and feasted on my flesh claimed it was for their survival and they wonder why I only show my face every seventeen years but you you’re lucky if they letContinue reading “April 16 – #NPM17”

Then the pulse. Then a pause. Then twilight in a box. Dusk underfoot. Then generations. — Then the same war by a different name. Wine splashing in the bucket. The erection, the era. Then exit Reason. Then sadness without reason. Then the removal of the ceiling by hand. — Then pages & pages of numbers.Continue reading “April 15 – #NPM17”

for Page poetry makes nothing happen —W. H. Auden the people in the streets are plucked up like radishes from dark earth, heads beat the purplish-red of ripeness. the women lead the stupid & brutish to a future they don’t deserve. the organized are still unbearably human, they still fuck & hurt & harm &Continue reading “April 14 – #NPM17”

Water promises us nothing. Moss blanches in our wells. Strong men wake up to die in old silver mines, to die on saloon carpets in buckets of smoke and teeth. The sun rises over our town like a fist of coins. The streets talk dirty and look up girls’ skirts. Children grow into fistfights withContinue reading “April 13 – #NPM17”

This hour, while a child sleeps, before he wakes and those arcadian hours we make together— is it a continued arch, vaulted, open at both ends, is it a bending?—recommence. Yes, a bending. Light before you’d call it light bluing the sky. The old city below, a fidget toy’s string of buildings; doves calling andContinue reading “April 12 – #NPM17”