by Wislawa Szymborska

Everything’s mine though just on loan,
nothing for the memory to hold,
though mine as long as I look.

Memories come to mind like excavated statues
that have misplaced their heads.

From the town of Samokov, only rain
and more rain.

Paris from Louvre to fingernail
grows web-eyed by the moment.

Boulevard Saint-Martin some stairs
leading into a fadeout.

Only a bridge and a half
from Leningrad of the bridges.

Poor Uppsala, reduced to a splinter
of its mighty cathedral.

Sofia’s hapless dancer,
a form without a face.

Then separately, his face without eyes;
separately again, his eyes with no pupils,
and, finally, the pupils of a cat.

A Caucasian eagle soars
over the reproduction of a canyon,
the fool’s gold of the sun,
the phony stones.

Everything’s mine but just on loan,
nothing for the memory to hold,
though mine as long as I look.

Inexhaustible, unembracable,
but particular to the smallest fiber,
grain of sand, drop of water—
landscapes.

I won’t retain one blade of grass
as it’s truly seen.

Salutation and farewell
in a single glance.

For surplus and absence alike,
a single motion of the neck.

by Dorothea Grossman

It was your idea

to park and watch the elephants

swaying among the trees

like royalty

at that make-believe safari

near Laguna.

I didn’t know anything that big

could be so quiet.

And once, you stopped

on a dark desert road

to show me the stars

climbing over each other

riotously

like insects

like an orchestra

thrashing its way through time itself

I never saw light that way

again.

I am referring, of course, to Girl With the Extremely Well-Modulated Voice. It’s uncanny at first—like getting a cup of coffee from Katie Couric, if Katie Couric were a vaguely sad 26 year-old in an Amherst Crew t-shirt who, whenever no one was in line to buy coffee, slowly undid and redid her ponytail and then sighed heavily. I am concerned that she is using her extremely well-modulated voice as a shield. During the period of time after you have placed your order but before they have given you your change, when everyone is free to discuss whatever topics they consider pertinent, the rest of the coffee shop girls are very open. Once you’ve been in there a few times, they will cheerfully tell you about how they’re meeting with a midwife later or give you an article they photocopied from Newsweek about Glenn Gould or whatever. Girl With the Extremely Well-Modulated Voice, however, will only ask you if there’s anything else she can get you today. GWtEW-MV ends way too many sentences with “today,” as if she viewed her life as one unbroken stretch of customer service, within which the present moment is only a passing inflection in a long, pleasingly-enunciated sentence. -danbrooks via CombatBlog

by Michael Dickman

Make a list
of everything that’s
ever been

on fire –

Abandoned cars
Trees
The sea

Your mother burned down to the skeleton

so she could come back, born back from her bed, and walk around the
house again, exhausted
in slippers

What else?

Your brain
Your eyes
Your lungs

*

When you look down
inside yourself
what is there?

You are a walking bag of surgical instruments
shining from the inside out

and that’s just
today

Tomorrow it could be different

When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying on
a windowsill

The voices of my friends
in the sunlight

All of us running around
outside our
deaths

*

Someone is here
to see you
again

Someone has come a long way with their arms out in front of them
like a child

walking down a hallway
at night

Make room for them –
they’re very tired

I wish I could look down past the burning chandelier inside me

where the language begins
to end
and

down

“I didn’t particularly understand what I had to offer as a confidant to anybody, much less straight women with endless romantic problems and a passion for trying on Capri pants.

As I moved away from home, to bigger and bigger cities, I discovered that there were lots of scruffy and poorly dressed drone-rock-loving gay men in the world — especially of my age group — who had nothing in common with the Sanfords and Wills I’d seen on TV. Just because I was into dudes didn’t mean I had to suddenly love dance music or fine furnishings. And yet, despite my continued shortcomings as a stereotypical gay man, I remained a strangely alluring target for a large number of straight women.”

-Thomas Rogers, Salon.com

A good 96 percent of the Penney’s inventory is made of polyester. The few clothing items that are made of cotton make a sincere point of being cotton and tell you earnestly about their 100-percent cottonness with faux-hand-scribbled labels so obviously on the Green bandwagon they practically spit pine cones.