Diane Seuss

 

Mountains black today, hiding when the wind cooperates

Mountains black today, hiding when the wind cooperates behind Whitman
beards, legless homeless talking to themselves on red dirt corners, laughing 
at the nothing there is to laugh at, holding up blank cardboard signs, 
the want so great they can’t put words to it, and I belong nowhere, have 
never belonged anywhere, not where I was raised, not where I was not raised, 
not in any classroom or strip motel or restaurant of any false or real ethnicity, 
not chic, not invisible, not urban but no farm where my apron can flap 
in the wind, not in any workplace, my god, workplaces, I know this is 
the wail of a teenager and yet I’m not really wailing, am I, am I wailing, 
I’m saying this body has never been a home, my shack a shackle, dog 
is a good boy but he bites, poems are someone else’s clothes I slipped 
into so I could skip town, even the hospital where I was born was borrowed 
from the Catholics, nuns thought I was odd and tried to foist me off 
on the Buddhists but they reached through the fog and handed me back

Diane Seuss

Self-Portrait with Sylvia Plath’s Braid

Some women make a pilgrimage to visit it

in the Indiana library charged to keep it safe.

I didn’t drive to it; I dreamed it, the thick braid

roped over my hands, heavier than lead.

My own hair was long for years.

Then I became obsessed with chopping it off,

and I did, clear up to my ears. If hair is beauty

then I am no longer beautiful.

Sylvia was beautiful, wasn’t she?

And like all of us, didn’t she wield her beauty

like a weapon? And then she married,

and laid it down, and when she was betrayed

and took it up again it was a word-weapon,

a poem-sword. In the dream I fasten

her braid to my own hair, at my nape.

I walk outside with it, through the world

of men, swinging it behind me like a tail.

Diane Seuss

Romantic Poet

You would not have loved him,

my friend the scholar

decried. He brushed his teeth,

if at all, with salt. He lied,

and rarely washed

his hair. Wiped his ass

with leaves or with his hand.

The top of  his head would have barely

reached your tits. His pits

reeked, as did his deathbed.

But the nightingale, I said.

Diane Seuss

 [I hope when it happens]

I hope when it happens I have time to say oh so this is how it is happening

unlike Frank hit by a jeep on Fire Island but not like dad who knew too

long six goddamn years in a young man’s life so long it made a sweet guy sarcastic

I want enough time to say oh so this is how I’ll go and smirk at that last rhyme

I rhymed at times because I wanted to make something pretty especially for Mikel

who liked pretty things soft and small things who cried into a white towel when I hurt

myself when it happens I don’t want to be afraid I want to be curious was Mikel curious

I’m afraid by then he was only sad he had no money left was living on green oranges

had kissed all his friends goodbye I kissed lips that kissed Frank’s lips though not

for me a willing kiss I willingly kissed lips that kissed Howard’s deathbed lips

I happily kissed lips that kissed lips that kissed Basquiat’s lips I know a man who said

he kissed lips that kissed lips that kissed lips that kissed Whitman’s

lips who will say of me I kissed her who will say of me I kissed someone who kissed

her or I kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed someone who kissed her.

Zaidie Smith

 

from White Teeth

Archie dragged his head off the steering wheel. And in the moment between focusing on the sweaty bulk of a brown-skinned Elvis and realizing that life was still his, he had a kind of epiphany. It occurred to him that, for the first time since his birth, Life had said Yes to Archie Jones. Not simply an 'OK' or 'You-might-as-well-carry-on-since-you've-started', but a resounding affirmative. Life wanted Archie. She had jealously grabbed him from the jaws of death, back to her bosom. Although he was not one of her better specimens, Life wanted Archie and Archie, much to his own surprise, wanted Life. 

Lytle Shaw

  

Some Failed 18^th Century Jacket Blurbs

It would be a poem presentable even in the highest company were its out-buildings painted, and the blight of its mineshafts roped off or over-planted.

The modern encyclopedias divide human knowledge among memory, reason and imagination, awarding this last province to poetry. Rare prize!, one I contemplated throughout my short and airy sojourn with the current author, to the effect that landing very much at my desk a few seconds later, I could neither tease out with reason nor recollect how the encyclopedists arrived at such a prudent division.

Though I believe I have severed an optical nerve straining after their obscure allegories, the wood-block prints in this text save one from a monotony more or less continuous with the progress of the type.

When I oversaw the Physicians drain three quarts of liquid from Samuel Johnson's testicle, I felt certain to have seen the last of this troubling fluid.

Lytle Shaw

 

 Bummer Tent

These looser fleets come around
        time to time
lambasting water-slaps
        at your summer camp -- 
a song like "Lady Bird"
        brings them entwined
        horsey kundalini.

Horseshit, his brother rules
        an elbow knows
tables surround our eyes

        Beard finger
        neglected yard work

this arm chair tackle
has trouble with answers.

 For Coventry Patmore

Thus we availed him to boat about,
send word of gloat
Admiral Nelson style.
If I spell it out, it would resemble
a small town shown.

Showing says the ladron
involves a quantity of human mass
carved angel pending.

So rock schemes, wit strips
lift our additions
to the budget bucket:
headlong thunks
sink sounds in
Coventry Patmore's hair gel
or the canals in Tucker Boatwright's county.