Art and shiny things…
The bakery’s graffiti either spells HOPE
or NOPE. But hope and results
are different, said Fanny Brawne to her Keats
voiding his unreasonable lung.
Getting off the medicine
completely means light again
blinking to light. Device returned
to its factory settings. The complete black
of before the meteor shower
above the bakery. If you lose the smell
of leather, lemon, or rose,
studies show you will fail at being
Poets.org, Christopher Salerno
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
This poem about being a foster kid by Vilaska Nguyen at Blue Fifth Review knocked my socks off.
Twelve hundred a month isn’t worth more than the top ramen on the pantry’s bottom shelf. The Progresso is off limits. So is the Diet Coke. She dares me to even lay eyes on the Cool Ranch because that’ll be the end of me. I can drink all the water I want out of the tap. The fridge is off limits, especially the juice inside. I can get ice from the freezer but only two to three cubes per cup with the tap water. That’s all I need to know about the kitchen. Television watching is okay so long as either she or Mr. Kenneth turned it on. They also have to be sitting in the living room. Other than that, it’s off limits. There’s only one bathroom in the house which means I have to wait my turn, whatever that means. I have to empty the trash when I get home from school. That’s the bag under the kitchen sink and the one in the bathroom. I’m not allowed in their bedroom where the other trash is. My bed is in the extra room with the computer which is also off limits. If Mr. Kenneth needs to relax sometimes with computer games, I have to leave the room and wait in the living room. But if no one’s there, the television is off limits. The phone is off limits too.
This poem by Patrick Rosal absolutely knocked my socks off.
The second time I learned
I could take the pain
my six-year-old niece
—with five cavities
humming in her teeth—
led me by the finger
to the foyer and told her dad
to turn up the Pretenders
—Tattooed Love Boys—
so she could shimmy with me
to the same jam
eleven times in a row
in her princess pajamas.
When she’s old enough,
I’ll tell her how
I bargained once with God
because all I knew of grief
was to lean deep
into the gas pedal
to speed down a side road
not a quarter-mile long
after scouring my gut
and fogging my retinas
with half a bottle of cheap scotch.
To those dumb enough
to take the odds against
time, the infinite always says
You lose.
Read more at Four Way Review
Yes to the wooden giraffe airmailed from Arizona
with a note from your mother-in-law saying no more
excuses to sleep unprotected by your spirit animal,
but no to a new kind of insomnia. Yes to most -philias
not in the dictionary, like car washes in the rain
and bakeries on fire, but no no no to looking at old photos
with a bottle of Maker’s. Yes to your wife drinking
beer in the shower, but don’t hop in and join her,
let her have this moment beautifully wet and alone,
you’re here in the kitchen sautéing spinach and garlic
if she needs you. No to speed limit signs graffitied
but yes to climbing the overpass at night to tell the world
exactly the year that you loved her
This poem by Justin Bigos rocked my world and will rock yours.
Kenneth Branagh has started shooting the live-action Cinderella movie and I am weirdly excited for it. “It is impossible to think of Cinderella without thinking of Disney and the timeless images we’ve all grown up watching. And those classic moments are irresistible to a filmmaker. With Lily James we have found our perfect Cinderella. She combines knockout beauty with intelligence, wit, fun and physical grace. Her Prince is being played by Richard Madden, a young actor with incredible power and charisma. He is funny, smart and sexy and a great match for Cinderella.” RT
Slate has a wonderful article on the backslapping insularity of literary culture. “Instead, cloying niceness and blind enthusiasm are the dominant sentiments. Critics gush in anticipation for books they haven’t yet read; they ❤ so-and-so writer, tagging the author’s Twitter handle so that he or she knows it, too; they exhaust themselves with outbursts of all-caps praise, because that’s how you boost your follower count and affirm your place in the back-slapping community that is the literary web.” RT
The CEO of Fast Company swaps offices (and desks) with a startup. “During a catered lunch with the Studiomates, I polled the group to find out how many of them had worked in a more traditional office setting. Eight of the dozen people at the table had. None of them think they will ever go back. Offices, a couple of people agreed, were built to create barriers to new ideas and getting things done.” RT
Bethany Joy Lenz returns to television with a pilot about a songstress! One Tree Hill fans like me are instantly on board. Plus, we need to fill the void left by Bunheads. RT
Liberate has a brilliant article on what binds up broken relationships. “When Babu Bhatt tells Jerry Seinfeld that he’s a “very bad man,” Seinfeld is stunned. ‘Was my mother wrong?’ he wonders. We’ve all been told our whole lives that we can do and be anything we want — in short, that we’re wonderful — and that we just have to overcome those external obstacles in our lives. If we can just fix those people (or remove them altogether from our lives), alter our circumstances, elect a different President, get a new job, and so on and so forth, then — and only then — will we be free and happy. James’ words — that we’re the problem — are horrifying.
Unfortunately, they’re also true.” RT
Finally, Entertainment Weekly has an A-Z Guide on How I Met Your Mother. Time to catch up for you newbies RT
Coffee and Irony 