If My Inheritance Were Visible to the Naked Eye

The man on the subway in dirty white Converse would turn
sudden, still holding a rolled flier under his nose like a mustache,
to click like the clasp of an old pocketbook on the dust of golden

around my body, forming the shape of an egg.
But how full of biography we are today! reading
book club fiction on our journey, tears and banjos

welling up. My vita, I’ll tell you, is this: I read a book
about Stamford, Connecticut, and within a week I’m there.
When I put on sparkle eyes, enunciate in round tones

from the diaphragm, people shiver and sigh
and feel comforted. At times, I feel up to it.
So that’s pretty much what I’m dealing with.

Martha Wainwright

Ginsberg said:

"Observe what's vivid."

The Rainbow Connection

Me and him

Mom

All the Little Eyelets Maybe

I watch the haunted places before bed.
I eat natural chips. We learn the lady,
the witch of the house, her green brocade,
her chandelier. Things around the house drop.
Refrigerator fan, Blair Witch frog.
Ink on our fingers we float like that.
Call our spirits Keep us still.

This is where I am

Travel

Bonnie Prince Billy

The Waking by Theodore Roethke

(translated into Chinese and back into English and then into Dutch and back into English)

I to awake sleep, and inspects me awakes well to awake slowly. I feel myself the impossible in no matter what destiny that I gemaa frightened have kt. Where I can the academic society go by my. We thought by the feeling. What has it knew? I hear myself am the dancing of the ear to the ear. I awake sleep, and inspect myself well to awake slowly. These this way dense surrounding me, is you? The god blesses the ground! I will run there, gently and where the academic society can go by my. The tree approves slightly; But can tell who how our? The records maggot climb the trede on circles; I awake sleep, and inspect myself well to awake slowly. For this reason have of course very do another question to you and I, inspect living air, and, lief, the treads where academic society well to go. The ultrasound this maintains I regular is. I would have know it. No matter what always leaves of. And dichtbijgelegen. I awake sleep, and inspect myself well to awake slowly. Where I can the academic society go by my.

View from yesterday's accommodations

(Thanks, e.!)

Friday at the Met

Lou Reed & John Cale

Helen Levitt

Cento

(poem made up of other people's lines)

Almost impossible for a girl, a woman
to myself all day like a fieldful of August
so green to say goodbye to

Egg Meditation: A Prose Poem

Sometimes she would lie on the floor sort of meditating, gathering a kind of strength and also letting her mind drift. Often as she lay there, she would see a tree on a hill and then herself under the tree and then a sort of forcefield of energy radiating out from her in the shape of an egg. The egg, she could tell, was both protection and a field connecting her to the tree, the hill, everything else. She would breathe there in her egg, making it brighter and stronger, letting it make her brighter and stronger. But she knew she mustn’t hold too tightly to it, or to the idea of it, or think to much about it, or even talk about it later to others. Otherwise, she would separate herself from it and from the protection/connection it offered. And then up would float Veruca Salt, grasping for a golden egg, a little girl in white tights and yowl, transformed in her desire. And who wants to be Veruca? You relished her falling down that bad egg chute. You found yourself wanting her to suffer, even as the Oompa Loompas sang and gloated, gloated and sang. But, really, we’re all Veruca; we’re all the egg; we’re all the gloating Oompa Loompas. Have some compassion, she thought, still on the hill. Have some compassion for your own white tights; your own orange song; your own golden glow.

Rita Hayworth

Is It Tuesday?

It's Tuesday July sun on the brick wall through the grate
the kind of bird that screams and the kind that sings and
the kind that squawks are out there, going. Someone
is camping somewhere. This is the kind of nature
poem where I sit on my couch and eat sprouted bread
and honey off a blue speckled camping plate. Lots
of slamming, the building is falling to med students,
roaches. Soon I will get on the 1 and take it down
to uptown. I'll walk across the park and get adjusted
in those spaces I can't see, where ligament connects
to whatever ligament connects to. Me, joanna penn
cooper, born in a garage, walking straight
to the Upper East Side to get my butt muscles adjusted.
The squawk, the call, the chirpchirpchirp
this is me showing out in New York City.

Malena Mörling reading Tomas Tranströmer