With the holidays coming up, I can’t resist but to urge you to support the artists, musicians and poets in your life. You can always buy me a book.

Confessions: My Father, Hummingbirds, and Franz Fanon

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

Every effort is made to bring the colonised person to admit
the inferiority of his culture…
—Franz Fanon

And there are days when storms hover
Over my house, their brooding just this side of rage,
An open hand about to slap a face. You won’t believe me

When I tell you it is not personal. It isn’t. It only feels
That way because the face is yours. So what if it is the only
Face you’ve got? Listen, a storm will grab the first thing
In its path, a Persian cat, a sixth grade boy on his way home
From school, an old woman watering her roses, a black
Man running down a street (late to a dinner with his wife),
A white guy buying cigarettes at the corner store. A storm
Will grab a young woman trying to escape her boyfriend,
A garbage can, a Mexican busboy with no papers, you.
We are all collateral damage for someone’s beautiful
Ideology, all of us inanimate in the face of the onslaught.
My father had the biggest hands I’ve ever seen. He never
Wore a wedding ring. Somehow, it would have looked lost,
Misplaced on his thick worker’s hands that were, to me,
As large as Africa. There have been a good many storms
In Africa over the centuries. One was called colonialism
(Though I confess to loving Tarzan as a boy).

Continue Reading @ Poets.org or @ Narrative Magazine »

The post Confessions: My Father, Hummingbirds, and Franz Fanon appeared first on Jewels.

Passage I

by Maureen N. McLane

garden gate, NE portland

little moth
I do not think you’ll escape
this night

I do not think
you’ll escape this night
little moth

*

bees in clover
summer half over
friends without lovers

*

I bite a carrot
horsefly bites me

view from my bedroom window

*

I thought it was you
moving through the trees

but it was the trees

I thought it was your finger
grazing my knee

it was the breeze

continue reading »

The post little moth / i do not think you’ll escape appeared first on Jewels.

A horse hair falls into the water and grows into an eel.
     Even Aristotle believed that frogs
                                formed from mud,
that mice sprouted like seedlings in the damp hay.

     I used to believe the world spoke
                           in code. I lay awake
and tried to parse the flashes of the streetlight—
       obscured, revealed,
                    obscured by the wind-sprung tree.
Stranded with you at the Ferris wheel's apogee
       I learned the physics
                    of desire—fixed at the center,
it spins and goes nowhere.

       Pliny described eight-foot lobsters
                         sunning themselves
on the banks of the Ganges. The cuckoo devouring
       its foster mother. Bees alighting
                         on Plato's young lips.

In the Andes, a lake disappears overnight, sucked
       through cracks in the earth.
                         How can I explain
the sunlight stippling your face in the early morning?

Why not believe that the eye throws its own light,
       that seeing illuminates
                    the world?
                         On the moon,
astronaut David Scott drops a hammer and a falcon feather,
     and we learn nothing
                    we didn't already know.

The post look-see: photos for your poetry appeared first on Jewels.

you’re a skater who loved to be hated, wanted to be a lover
and lusted after life. you’d nollie so high, you’d clear three moons
in one night. shit, you ate three pies to prove your eyes don’t shine
brighter than your belly- like the the world.
your eyes used to shine.

wanderlust
turned you into vagabond. fear
into vagrant. a vacant
soul your parking lot
you ride
concrete
til heat is eaten by night.

saturn gonna bring
you back.
from vacant.
vagrant.
vagabond. wanderlust.
wunderkind
lover.

ain’t no one going to tell you anything you don’t already know.

The post poem for a skater – 20/30 appeared first on Jewels.

DECEMBER 30
At 1:03 in the morning a fart
smells like a marriage between
an avocado and a fish head.

I have to get out of bed
to write this down without
My glasses on.

The post A Poem for a Rainy Morning appeared first on Jewels.

Here is a snippet. Get the whole thing on poets.org.

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas

more »

The post A Poem for Summer Coming appeared first on Jewels.

when i was 8 i wanted braces – i’d make my own with paper clips.

when i was 10 i wanted contacts – i’d suck on ice and put it in my eyes.

when i was 12 i wanted to be an alcoholic – and get caught, and have someone to fight with me, for me, love me, save me, hold me. instead i hid a bottle of whisky in the basement and counted bug bites and scars with my sister – we each wanted to have it worse off than the other.

at 12 i started smoking – under the bridge under a church, and cried when we got caught and lost our limousine ride.

at 12 i wanted, finally, boys instead of to be one, a boy – i wore showy clothes until a sketchy man followed us on a bus for days: she has a sweet ass. until we rode with mom who talked of target practice and our black belt tests and he never followed us again.

when i was 14 i wanted something to stand for: no war – beads in my hair, hacky sack circles, pot, green beret, red and blue lennon glasses. i’d smoke on the roof of the school and write my own basketball diaries.

when i was 16 i wanted to die, i lied. i wanted someone to discover me and find me worth loving, saving, holding, helping and tell me life would be ok. instead i found my sister and fought for my brothers.

at 28 i’m a perfectionist at 12 times 4 and want time to fu¢k up, with someone, a safety net, to catch me.

The post a perfectionist at 12 appeared first on Jewels.

if i’d have known you as a Saguero, i’d have hunted for your flowers at night: suckled stamina, swam in scents, and kissed each sweetly good night – before they close in morning (for eternity?)

if i’d have known you as a Vampire, i’d have been seduced into the quagmire of dead love – dived from the tallest sky ledge: a gyring peregrine to battle blind bat – no blood required for a beatless heart.

if i’d known you as a Gladiator, i’d have given you an iron mask to bask in the crowd’s glory before watching you die.

if i’d known you as a Man, i’d have held your hand, your body and your mind: loved you in every particle and antiparticle, vast as sand and rings of saturn – and let go.

The post desert poem appeared first on Jewels.

by Paul Otremba

I’ve tried to sift a truth finer than salt
from my mouth. It matters: I get up

or I do not. The books can wait, leaves
burn themselves these days, and the day

begins or it does not. Now wingless,
a wasp masquerading as the sun crawls—

more »

The post Poem for your Pocket appeared first on Jewels.

And so I went on to read an excert from John Berryman’s The Dream Songs. It’s a good picker-upper for the start of any Portland day.

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover y mther told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag

Excerpt from The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. After a quick search, I see they have another, newer, anthology with contemporary artists as well. And we all know my birthday is creeping up…

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