10 poems // November 10
this time with multimedia effect
1 //
After the Party // Julio Cortázar
And when everyone had gone
and just the two of us were left
among the empty glasses and dirty ashtrays,
how beautiful it was to know that you
were there like an oasis,
alone with me at the night’s edge,
and you were lasting, you were more than time,
you were the one who wouldn’t leave
because one pillow
one warmth
was going to call us again
awake to the new day,
together, laughing, disheveled.
— — —
Después de las fiestas
Y cuando todo el mundo se iba
y nos quedábamos los dos
entre vasos vacíos y ceniceros sucios,
Qué hermoso era saber que estabas
ahí como un remanso,
sola conmigo al borde de la noche,
y que durabas, eras más que el tiempo,
Eras la que no se iba
porque una misma almohada
y una misma tibieza
iba a llamarnos otra vez
a despertar al nuevo día,
juntos, riendo, despeinados.
2 //
untitled // by Lauren Ireland
there is a dove there is a dove there is a dove
there is a dove there is a dove there is a dove
it’s scary time I am coming down your street
I am coming for you through gates of horn
through the window tell me why are spiders
why are spiders drawn to water at the actual end
of the actual world you are standing there alone
3 //
Phenomena // by Robert Wood Lynn
Some said the earth had slowed down and some
said the sun was drifting further out but we didn’t know
out of what. Scientists had long stopped returning the calls
from the radio DJs who’d never let them get a word in
anyhow. What had changed was vague and difficult
to define but it was apparent something had changed.
Or was in the process of changing. Perhaps not from
one thing to another like a tadpole or a skipped song,
but from one thing into its own difference. The years
wrinkling in the knuckles of your hand. A gathering up
of light. The news soon settled on calling it a Hole
in the Sky though everyone, even the news knew it wasn’t
that at all. The truth again too complicated, having many
specific ambiguities that a Hole in the Sky smooths over.
You had to admit it sounded better—like a dream we could
all be in together if we ever all managed to fall asleep
at the same time. Morning did not ruin it the way it ruins
so much else. The whir at the low end of the dial, soft
and low in spite of the shouts of the DJs. The sound
of something larger than us breathing out. The whole
of everything wishing us well. Meaning it this time.
4 //
Would You Rather Be Happy Or Precise // by Eve Kenneally
Another year spent extracting vials of myself — peeling patterns from what’s left over. Everyone in group therapy has the same mother. Everything after 7 PM has teeth, so I drink like a man. I stagger each week beneath the new week, the weight of which I bargained for. Do you feel close to your body?
A little too close if you ask me
5 //
Diogenes Tries to Forget // by Mary Karr
It’s one of those days when everything is half-off,
half-on. My shirt, for example, which I notice
is buttoned wrong while staring in the diner window.
I think I want a slice of pecan pie, some life
sweeter than this, life my childhood in Texas.
There’s no pie today, just you,
by accident again, bent over your coffee
like the “V” the geese fly south.
It’s a fall day. Because we’re melancholy,
we kick leaves, pick up rocks to consider
tossing them at dogs. I only breathe with one lung since
you’ve been gone, you say. And I love you
with one hemisphere of my brain,
the dumb one, which forgets.
6 //
untitled // by James Tate
I like that
the way things are never the same again
It frightens me
and I like that
7 //
from Poems from an Email Exchange // by Hanif Abdurraqib
Re: Your Submission 12:40am
Editor
to Me
My dude,
Truly, this is not going to work
why does it always have to be about
the inside of the body with you poets
can’t our heart just be an untethered
and unspectacular thing that keeps us from a funeral
we regret to inform you that Ohio is barely a state
we regret to inform you that the Midwest
is only Chicago
and other places that want to be Chicago
we drove through Ohio once and saw
only the promise of a waiting hell
on a billboard between farms
maybe this is why you are so lonely
maybe this is why you write only about exits
we have seen skyscrapers
we believe ourselves infinite
we cannot accept poems about grass
what is grass to someone who
is always looking up?
8 //
Deconstruction // by Mary Ruefle
I think the sirens in The Odyssey sang The Odyssey,
for there is nothing more seductive, more terrible,
than the story of our own life, the one we do not
want to hear and will do anything to listen to.
9//
Dynamic Disks, 1933 // by Raymond Antrobus
My phone memory is full
of canvases I have cried in front of—
circles, holes—
Shadows on water.
——
was a point
you wanted to stay
but couldn’t stop
floating in the air.
The sight of you
is a thing
I keep orbiting.
I was afraid
of rejection—
knew I’d give it
too much meaning,
or not enough.
——
Sat in the glossy Guggenheim gallery,
eyes on Kupka’s Dynamic Disks
I began to think of relationships as circles,
the blue/red/white/black spirals imperfect
and un-unioned, obscuring the broken run
of black lines, the way
they break
like eggs, waves, light bulbs, marriages.
Since our separation I have been spilling
ink on lined pages, wondering what stopped
working when the plates were put away and
how many times we asked with water in our eyes
what we wanted if it wasn’t art on the wall
in the house by the sea?
František Kupka - Dynamic Disks (Disques dynamiques)
10 //
found poem from summer notebook 2025 // (by me)
