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For Poetry Monday:

Fairy-tale Logic, A.E. Stallings

Fairy tales are full of impossible tasks:
Gather the chin hairs of a man-eating goat,
Or cross a sulphuric lake in a leaky boat,
Select the prince from a row of identical masks,
Tiptoe up to a dragon where it basks
And snatch its bone; count dust specks, mote by mote,
Or learn the phone directory by rote.
Always it’s impossible what someone asks—

You have to fight magic with magic. You have to believe
That you have something impossible up your sleeve,
The language of snakes, perhaps, an invisible cloak,
An army of ants at your beck, or a lethal joke,
The will to do whatever must be done:
Marry a monster. Hand over your firstborn son.

First published in the March 2010 issue of Poetry. Stallings remains the poet my age I most admire. I am struck by how the examples from the octave are all from European folklore, while those of the second are from Greek Mythology (with the last common to both domains).

---L.

Subject quote from Best Guess, Lucy Dacus.

larryhammer

Our second car has reached the vehicle life-stage of junker. It’s 28 years old, sun-weathered with a paint job best described as “former,” but even if sold for (increasingly costly) parts it’s worth way less than the cost of repainting it. The roof is rusting, the upholstery is starting to fray, and a couple door latches don’t work from one side or another. Eaglet hates riding in it, partly from embarrassment (see: is twelve) but in all fairness, the never very strong a/c is now so anemic it doesn’t reach the back seat.

So, yeah, old, and honestly not a great car: a Geo Tracker, from the last year Geos were sold before its assets were split between Chevrolet and Suzuki, the companies that collaborated on the models. A cheap ride, from a line with a deserved reputation of being cheaply made. I describe it as a put-put class SUV. Locks and windows are fully manual, as is the conversion between 2- and 4-wheel drive (you have to get out to lock/unlock the wheels). When asked to maintain highway speed on an uphill with the a/c on, it can manage two out of three at best—but it got us through many roads where high clearance 4WH is a hard requirement. We did a lot of back-of-beyond camping out of that car.

Though not these days: it’s nowhere near large enough for three people + gear, and we don’t fully trust it for long distances anyway. Heck, the back row isn’t really big enough for a baby seat, thus the Subaru Forester bought the week before Eaglet’s arrival.

But the thing is, that Tracker still runs. The body is wearing out, but the driving is fine, around the city. We keep expecting it to break down any week now, but it hasn’t, nor has it ever needed repairs more serious than an oil or refrigerant leak. Certainly, our finances would appreciate it holding on for another couple years—and frankly, it just might. For a cheap-in-many-senses thing, it has done remarkably well.

Some sort of metaphoric point could be made from this, but I’ll let others codify exactly what.

---L.

Subject quote from Kiss, Prince and the Revolution.

larryhammer

For Poetry Monday:

I Sit and Sew, Alice Dunbar Nelson

I sit and sew—a useless task it seems,
My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams—
The panoply of war, the martial tread of men,
Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken
Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death,
Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath—
But—I must sit and sew.

I sit and sew—my heart aches with desire—
That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire
On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things
Once men. My soul in pity flings
Appealing cries, yearning only to go
There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe—
But—I must sit and sew.

The little useless seam, the idle patch;
Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch,
When there they lie in sodden mud and rain,
Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain?
You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream
That beckons me—this pretty futile seam,
It stifles me—God, must I sit and sew?

Alice Ruth Moore was born in 1875 in New Orleans to mixed-race parents, and is better known today as a journalist and activist than for her poetry and fiction, or for that matter for being a teacher. Her first husband was poet and novelist Paul Lawrence Dunbar (married 1898-1906, when he died, though she left him in 1902 for being abusive) and her third was journalist and activist Robert J. Nelson (married 1914-1935, when she died).

---L.

Subject quote from War Pigs, Black Sabbath.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Origami

Member Posts

“you are my best guess / if i were a gambling man, and i am / you’d be my best bet”

“you don’t have to be beautiful to turn me on / i just need your body, baby, from dusk till dawn”

“day of judgement god is calling / on their knees the war pigs crawling”

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