A Prayer for the New Year

Photo by Matthew Smith on Unsplash

Mysteries, Yes
by Mary Oliver

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds
will never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
"Look!" and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads.

Rerun Two: Right Then

Photo by Jessica Lucia // CC BY-ND 2.0

Right Then

Ransacking the grass
at the edge of the parking lot,
the loveliest jay I’ve ever seen. 

His features, 
so fine. His blues, 
so bright. 

He cocks his crest 
at my idling car 
: 

I sigh behind the wheel. 

He screams. 
Another bird flutters down. 

She is smaller than her mate, 
her neck feathers 
mute and iridescent 
as shade-grown violets. 

Two hops and he is gone 
into the brambles. She follows 
: 

Right then. 
That’s when I miss you.



Originally published in Passionfruit #5

Rerun One: The Death of the Lobster

Photo by Andrew Verboncouer

The Death of the Lobster

To know the future
there must be a death.
Hand me the axe.

Margaret Atwood, from "Circe/Mud Poems"

I. 

The death of the lobster will commence quietly.
One night, she will awake
and find her shell slightly too snug.
Her shell has stopped growing.
She has not.

Tomorrow, her shell will be tighter,

the next day, tighter still.

Her shell is everything

that holds her, inside and out. It is
the legs that click her across her cave.

It is the teeth in her stomach

that grind fish into food.

The constriction will continue.

She will lose

her appetite.

She, then, will waste away,

a diminishing prisoner

within a shrinking cell. 

II. 

The time will come. Her time. 

She will pump her shell

with sea water, more, more,

until it cracks.

She will wrench 

the lining from her guts

and pull it from her mouth,

a conjurer's string of scarves.

She will withdraw

withered arms from rigid sleeves.

She is too weary

to be doing this. Still, it needs

to be done.

She will thrash her body

through the rupture in her armor.

The world will go black.

It will feel like dying,

and it is.

But it is not the end.

III.

Beneath her split shell

she has grown another,

flimsy and mica-thin.

When she wakes,

she will flood this young covering

with water, filling

until it inflates, solidifying

by the moment.

Before long, she will have claws

that will hold. Legs to stand on.

Teeth to feed her.

She will rise

on new feet. She will raise the broken shell

to her mouth

and start eating.

The old house will never be home again.

Yet from this calcium-rich rubble

she will pick good bricks

and build another.

Originally published in Public Pool

Ten Years Later

photo: Dan Whale via Unsplash

The first-ever Thing Written Down appeared on this blog ten years ago today.

Yeah, I know.

The intervening decade feels more like a lifetime. The world is changed.

I am changed, too. Very little of my life now resembles my life then. But I'm still writing things down, and I'm still glad you're here.

Two Recent Features

detail from Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party

Thanks very much to Maudlin House for including me as a featured writer this month. 

Thanks, too, to the Phillips Collection, for highlighting my poem on The Luncheon of the Boating Party.

I wish the poem's themes of gaslighting and harassment were less relevant right now. But they're not, and so I'll add my voice to the chorus:

me too.

Interlude: Other People's Poetry

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Telescope

by Louise Glück

There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you are living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You've stopped being here in the world.
You're in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You're not a creature in a body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you're in the world again.
At night, on a cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
every thing is from every other thing.

Another Bird Poem, If You Can Believe That

I'm honored to be a part of Monstering magazine's inaugural issue.

You can read my poem "Ketoconazole" here. It even comes with its own soundtrack.

Performance of a Lifetime

Dr. Moran tapped his heavy silver pen against a sheaf of test results. “Well,” he said, “I’ve found the problem.”

I’d arrived enervated in his office a few weeks ago, drifting through the door in a fog of weakness and fatigue. Headaches hammered me all day. I was 23 years old and my bones ached. I couldn’t feel my feet. My guts felt oily and torqued. Once a month or so I slipped into a hot, dizzy spell that made the floor slant and my eyes blur. None of this was new.

Want to read the rest? Click here or, better yet, go to your local bookstore and buy the summer issue of Bitch magazine.

Buy a few copies, actually. It's good.

One Poem in Qu

"Luncheon of the Boating Party" by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

I went on some pretty bad dates last year. The worst one turned into a poem.

(I recommend taking a very close look at the action in the upper-right corner of the Renoir above.)

"Blind Date, Phillips Collection" is out now in Qu Literary Magazine. 

Goodbye, James.

"Jellyfish on a Stick," by James C. Christensen

James C. Christensen (1942 - 2017) was an exuberant collaborator, a generous teacher, and a friend. The world is a stranger and more beautiful place because he was in it.