snakesnakewhale

I know nobody's here yet, just planting seeds

Gillian Weiss, 2007

I am fifteen years old and I have to decide
when to let Daniel Hazard kiss me.

He repairs old Fords. We drive past sand
dunes, until something rattles in his trunk

and he pulls over to investigate but instead crawls
on top of me in the front seat.

I have an artificial leg. He doesn't know
that and when his hand rubs against me

and I'm not real, he stops and says,
"What the hell?" like I've offended him.

Everything is different now. Daniel
Hazard calls every day except Sundays

which he spends with his family
and I guess that means he's a good guy

and has the values my mother talks about.
He's afraid to hold my hand because he thinks

it might throw me off balance. Hand-holding
doesn't throw me off balance.

I want you to know this, because maybe you
wondered about people with fake legs, maybe

you wanted to hold their hand but you didn't
because you thought you might trip.

Judy Grahn, 1969

Her words pour out as if her throat were a broken
artery and her mind were cut-glass, carelessly handled.
You imagine her in a huge velvet hat with great
dangling black feathers,
but she shaves her head instead
and goes for three-day midnight walks.
Sometimes she goes down to the dock and dances
off the end of it, simply to prove her belief
that people who cannot walk on water
are phonies, or dead.
When she is cruel she is very, very
cool and when she is kind she is lavish.
Fishermen think perhaps she's a fish, but they're all
fools. She figured out that the only way
to keep from being frozen was to
stay in motion, and long ago converted
most of her flesh into liquid. Now when she
smells danger, she spills herself all over,
like gasoline, and lights it.
She leaves the taste of salt and iron
under your tongue, but you don't mind.
The common woman is as common
as the reddest wine.

imogen xtian smith, 2022

it's me again, come clean. i hid behind brown whiskers, whiskey & shame, cloistered in girlfriend's closets from folk who'd clock me faggot out F-150s, hang your head Tom Dooley stuck in their teeth. Camouflage & excess, white lines & booze---everything inside me cardinals, prunes, pulls a rosin gut drone to recollect. i say remember bb, your first dress? Pink & pretty with blue lattice & curls, looking all Christina from Christina's World, high country Carolina. It was easy getting drunk in leotard, laughing. Easy spending summer among laurel, forgetting Laurie Foster, dead femmes drowned & raised americana. More difficult to untwist the thorn, tongue jelly & cauterize, divest from fear within. Could i ever be one of them---like that woman i'd pass on King St., 14-eyed Docs & stubble chin, rouge lips & black dress buying goth CDs on weekends?

    Not exactly---also yes.

Here i am, soldered together with Marlboro kisses, Vintage Seltzer sober in floral print, alter for rhododendron & metro rat---swap Brown Mountain for cherry tips, Maria Hernandez & chosen fam bound deep as Hodges Gap.    Appalachia,
i paint my eyelids bluer than blue ridges so neither of us gotta look far to find. If you see me out your window, i'm every name you spit---friend, sister, brother, fag---clad shameless in Queen Anne's lace. Find me staring up Bed-Stuy beeches, a bit of my heart back on Beacon with the scrappy mountain ash. Lonely town, i can smile now, remembering that first girl i knew---warm at home & listening to The Cure. i dream a dyke bar for every hollow, queeraoke sluts singin' Tammy off key, highways safe for walking, ballads & barn quilts & string figures claiming joy. i dream we dredge rivers & find no women there.

James Wright, 1971

Already she seems bone thin
When her clothes are on.
The lightest wind blows
Her dress toward the doorways.
Everybody thinks he can see
Her body longing to follow
Helpless and miserable,
Dreaming itself
Into an apparition of loneliness,
A spirit of vine wondering
At a grape here and there,
As the September spider,
The master, ascends
Her long spine.

Already she weighs more, yet
She still bows down slightly,
As I stand in her doorway.
It's not hunching, it's only
That children have been reaching
Upwards for years to gather
Sweetness of her face.
They are innocent and passionate
Thieves of the secret hillsides.
Now she rises, tall, round, round.
And round again, and, again, round.

I'm a fucking dork

Louise Glück, 2001

We were taught, in those years,
never to speak of good fortune.
To not speak, to not feel---
it was the smallest step for a child
of any imagination.

And yet an exception was made
for the language of faith;
we were trained in the rudiments of this language
as a precaution.

Not to speak swaggeringly in the world
but to speak in homage, abjectly, privately---

And if one lacked faith?
If one believed, even in childhood, only in chance---

such powerful words they used, our teachers!
Disgrace, punishment: many of us
preferred to remain mute, even in the presence of the divine.

Ours were the voices raised in lament
against the cruel vicissitudes.
Ours were the dark libraries, the treatises
on affliction. In the dark, we recognized one another;
we saw, each in the other's gaze,
experience never manifested in speech.

The miraculous, the sublime, the undeserved;
the relief merely of waking once more in the morning---
only now, with old age nearly beginning,
do we dare to speak of such things, or confess, with gusto,
even to the smallest of joys. Their disappearance
approaches, in any case: ours are the lives
this knowledge enters as a gift.

W.S. Merwin, 2005

The sky goes on living it goes
on living the sky
with all the barbed wire of the west
in its veins
and the sun goes down
driving a stake
through the black heart of Andrew Jackson

Hunter S. Thompson, 1955

(yes, that Hunter S. Thompson. He was 15. Submitted here as a curiosity.)

I could see the moon hung high in the sky and the mocking grin on his face.
I know he was looking straight at me, perched high in my lonely place.
His voice floated down through the crisp night air and I thought I heard him say, "It's too bad my boy, It's an awful shame that you have to go this way."
This chilled my heart and I shuddered with fear, for I knew he was right as right could be.
It was then that my skin began to crawl and I thought, "What I'd give to be free!"
Her face came back to me then like a flash, I remembered the touch of her lips.
I remembered the beautiful gold of her hair, her sky-blue eyes and the touch of her finger-tips.
Then I cursed myself and tore my hair for I knew I'd been wrong from the start.
I'd thrown away every chance I'd had and finally broken her heart.
My grief was of that special kind that only comes to men when they reach the end of a lonesome road and see what they could have been.
I cried as i thought of the people outside who were happy, and honest, and free.
And I knew that not even the lowest one would care to trade places with me.
Cold sweat broke out on my forehead now and my scalp felt tight and drawn.
What could I do to escape my fate, the electric chair at dawn?
I seized the bars, and shrieked, and wailed, like a soul who is lost in hell.
But the only voice that answered me was the mid-night toll of a bell.

W.B. Yeats, 1915

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out of love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.

All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?

John Greenleaf Whittier, 1846

So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore!
The glory from his gray hairs gone
Forevermore!

Revile him not -- the Tempter hath
A snare for all;
And pitying tears, not scorn and wrath,
Befit his fall!

Oh! dumb be passion's stormy rage,
When he who might
Have lighted up and led his age
Falls back in night.

Scorn! would the angels laugh, to mark
A bright soul driven,
Fiend-goaded, down the endless dark,
From hope and heaven!

Let not the land, once proud of him,
Insult him now,
Nor brand with deeper shame his dim,
Dishonored brow

But let its humbled sons, instead,
From sea to lake,
A long lament,
as for the dead,
In sadness make.

Of all we loved and honored, nought
Save power remains --
A fallen angel's pride of thought,
Still strong in chains.

All else is gone; from those great eyes
The soul has fled:
When faith is lost, when honor dies,
The man is dead!

Then, pay the reverence of old days
To his dead fame;
Walk backward, with averted gaze,
And hide the shame!

Jane Kenyon, 1978

I scrub the long floorboards
in the kitchen, repeating
the motions of other women
who have lived in this house.
And when I find a long gray hair
floating in the pail,
I feel my life added to theirs.