The Kid rode west. That was where the light went. A small house there. The rest of it below the prairie. The Kid only a small moving piece that never reached the horizon. The distance reduced into a proverb.
-Bob Hemen, Right Hand Pointing
Category Archives: books poetry lit
Quotidian: Atticus on Poetry
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From “Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City” by Durs Grünbein
“My little bird won’t come”
—Immanuel Kant, 1803
1
Why moan about it, Johnny-come-lately? My friend,
When you were born your city was long gone.
Misty eyes don’t turn hair grey and you,
Your name: too quick for it, too green.
Seventeen years, a childhood hardly, were plenty
To erase the past. They sealed the wounds all up
In strict and somber grey; enchantment ceded to bureaucracy.
The Saxon peacock wasn’t slaughtered out of need—
Lichens, inexorable, bloomed on sandstone flowers.
They come back like hiccups, elegies: why brood, why bother?
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Poetry: ‘Suicides”
I’ve known a few. Found one, in fact.
Surprising there aren’t more,
When you stop to think of it.
I mean, it’s not hard to do,
really, if one is intent,
and we are an impulsive species—
what more natural than at some moment of great pain
to just say “Screw it” and duck out?
And yet it would seem that most of the time
there’s something holding us to life,
a kind of gravity that stills or thwarts
all but the most determined.
The one I found, he talked of it.
I didn’t try to dissuade him—
he had his reasons.
But that gravity stayed him somehow,
kept him in place through wave after wave of temptation,
until, quite suddenly, it didn’t.
-Ben Downing, The Yale Review
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Poem: Childhood Home
I beg to move back in, even though
the ceilings have been lowered and I am too
tall to walk inside. I will crawl instead.
-Stephanie Palumbo, Cellpoems
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Poetry: On the Late Bus
ahead of me
on the late bus to Bristol
the woman leaned her head
upon the rain-smeared window
and surrendered herself to sleep
I was reading,
no, fighting through
a novel an ex had given me,
when grace feathered my hands
wisps of a ponytail,
the ends of ten golden inches,
kissed my book-cradling fingers
I held pose
as if meditating
until her awakening
-Tony Press, Right Hand Pointing
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Poetry: Groundspeed by Emilia Phillips
A falling plane as vessel. As Valkyrie—
The espresso shots tremble, darkening; the ounces
chatter on the tray as the unceilinged twin-
engine roar scourges the ear of the drive-thru
worker who only made out double tall. Out the window,
the plane jerks kite-like, tether whipped serpentine, &
drops like an elevator into the abandoned strip’s
parking lot a block from the register, nose snapped like
pencil lead guided by the god-hand that wanted to write
something (elegy, condemnation) across the weedy
& scarred blacktop. The falling plane as thrall, apologia of who’s
to become shadow. After hours, she guided us outside
with chilled canisters of heavy cream sweetened with vanilla
pressurized to spray. It was her last
night on the job. I used to dream I could float two stories
high, like confetti above a fire barrel, but when I
addressed my grounded companions, they said, You’re not
flying. When I say tangible, I mean to
touch. I mean, Of the earth & not above it. & yet love
is an act of falling; & parting, falling out.
read the rest at Green Mountains Review
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Book Love: Jane of Lantern Hill
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Illustration Love: Robot Western “Far Out” by Gautier Langevin and Olivier Carpentier
Far Out is a robot western graphic novel by Montreal-based author Gautier Langevin and designer Olivier Carpentier. You can read it online, and here’s an interview with Langevin that’s a good overview of the inspiration and concept. My favorite bit: “Machines are becoming more and more human, human more and more machine, and as of culture, what else it is but a very powerful technology helping mankind to thrive throughout the tragic wheel of time?” 
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Poetry: ‘All the Right Tools’ and ‘Late Aubade’ by James Richardson
These poems by James Richardson left me weak with wonder and the intense love that only words weaved in the way that perfectly resonates with my particular soul can cause. LOVE.
All the Right Tools
It is aggravating to have to stop writing to fix things. We hope these tools
will get you back to the important work faster.
—Inscription in a toolbox, a gift from my parents, 1973
will get you back to the important work faster.
—Inscription in a toolbox, a gift from my parents, 1973
That good slow tool the sun,
with a trumpeter’s strict breath,
swells hemispheres of fruits
to scarlet or dusk or amber
imperceptibly,
not breaking one.
That good slow tool the moon
pulls the quiet
wide-eyed face of the ocean
to its face,
not a drop through its long fingers
slipping down.
That good slow tool that turns
trees and lives to wreckage
brilliant and strange,
that train so smooth and slow
we hardly know we’re on
is Time, but is there one
slower still
that would reverse
these words and call
your breaths and all
your strayed thoughts home
to be you, standing again?
Late Aubade
after Hardy
So what do you think, Life, it seemed pretty good to me,
though quiet, I guess, and unspectacular.
It’s been so long, I don’t know any more how these things go.
I don’t know what it means that we’ve had this time together.
I get that the coffee, the sunlight on glassware, the Sunday paper
and our studious lightness, not hearing the phone, are iconic
of living regretless in the Now. A Cool that’s beyond me:
I’m having some trouble acting suitably poised and ironic.
Coffee and Irony 