the curious life of Roo, the invincible girl

Carlin by Brent Green (THANK YOU MATT DAVIS, GOD AMONG MEN)

“Carlin” ¬This is the house where I grew up. My Aunt Carlin moved in there with us when she was 35. She had diabetes and she just wanted to die.She was my mother’s sister, so my mother took her in. “She’s good to me, like scotchgard, she keeps me clean,” she said.I’d like to think her head was burning, there was a furnace in there, she was struggling to adjust and couldn’t pull the weight. She was all out of coal. But I remember it slow, no burn and cold.When I was a kid I read all these beginner science books- “There’s a Skeleton Inside You,” “Floating and Sinking.” That kind of thing.
I learned about buoyancy. I learned matter can never be created nor destroyed. I learned energy is rolling or waiting to be rolled. Degrees in a triangle, in a book, the bulge at the world’s belly. Fulcrums supporting the weight. Bridges twisting in a hurricane before they break, sound vibrating. Push and push back, centrifugal force, conductivity, pulling science off the cross, twisting it in your hands until the room glows and tradition breaks.Carlin was slowly going bad around us- she would go to the hospital and come back missing a couple of toes, or part of her leg, a finger, she was getting amputated away. It was like watching a person with an apple for a head, rotting, a speedy inevitable decay. The space around her eyes turned brown, they were going bad, then she was blind. She wouldn’t take any medicines. her mind was filled with poisons already- apple seeds around the core, her brain floating on a sea of mercury looking for the shore. Your body finds its own feet, and your eyes will find the door, but the knob won’t turn itself. She was long hollowed of health. She thought she’d never die. I was pretty sure she would.The thermometer burrowed another cavity in her teeth, your temperature is rising, the sea is getting deep. She spotted Virginia Woolf in the creek beside our house and went outside to talk to her, chasing her down. There is no beauty, no wonder, no time lapse tricks, just weight. The only trick is to pull the weight. There is no Jesus by the tracks, no insulin, teeth can’t hold onto gums, chattering and grinding them to boney nubs, hollowed and grim, smiling when the lights go down. It was much much brighter when the lights went down.By the oven’s heat, I was standing in the kitchen. It was difficult to watch someone disappear that way. I don’t have those kind of visions. It’s difficult to gain perspective. …If I could have any superpower, I wouldn’t get smaller as I move farther away.I listen to those Bob Dylan songs with the volume all the way up. I can’t turn the fucking music up loud enough. A room full of young men in wheelchairs- a pile of crutches by the door. Bandages, amputees, half-leg, drugs/half-life, liver/shelf life. Bringing our children home from an unnecessary war one piece at a time.
Matter and only matter, right?

A thunderstorm blowing stars around. The creek flooding, fish flopping around by the driveway. Ghosts rising by the doorframe. You are sitting very, very still. Watching it crash hard outside the window. There is a world out there you do not effect at all. I’m fighting for a change. I’m holding onto hope, no depression and light. Everyone needs something to hold onto… right?

But it is not enough. Louder.

(long pause for music- beautiful marching music)

Carlin wore a homemade cotton dress, on it a floral pattern stitched from the hair straight from her head, every day, yellowed and thin, liquor ornamenting skin.

Her husband sunken in the navy writing letters by a 75 watt lightbulb in the belly of a whale.
And she carried all of this in a head boiling with sounds
And the head and dress and hair are burning up and burning her down
And she brought all of this and loneliness when she moved in with us.¬¬¬

When your tongue muscle died and we squeezed words from you one by one, syllables stretched and we’d invent sentences from fragments.
That was fun. Sad, but fun.
like a string of bells ringing on the side of a snow sled made from an iron lung.

What am I building this for? What the hell am I building this for. I have a right to know.
I was not buoyant enough,
There wasn’t enough air in me to float.
The clouds were low and grey, like lead weights.

There are a lot of ugly things in this world
Wind staying mostly outside
Birds are exploding on powerlines

We are all rising up.
For Carlin and Garland, Sandy Green and Ida Jean, Thomas Alva Edison… and Einstein. We are all rising up. From Baltimore to the farmhouse. A lot of old cars use gasoline.
For Marc Chagall and Leonard Cohen. Washington’s wooden teeth. We are trying.
Virginia Woolf has surfaced on a bed beside your boat
And deep in your new cavity blind rabbits wheeze and moan
There was a choir in the farmhouse where she stood
Deep voices pushing dust around a cello’s crooked boards
And a woman on piano singing songs
And Carlin in her own room trying not to sing along.

Hallelujah, hallelujah.

I can hear a million moths flurrying around the front porch.
I beat my way through them and close the door to the kitchen.
There is euphoria all around you.
You are swimming in it.

http://site.nervousfilms.com

A weird poem-thing that is awful and probably about, what, rape? It’s awful, but there are a lot of great parts:

Two of Us by Neil Azevedo

Quarter View, From Nauset by Carl Phillips

Quarter View , From Nauset by Carl Phillips

Love, etc. Have been remembering
the part in Sophocles
where a god advises the two heroes

they should be as
twin lions, feeding—how
even the flesh of late

slaughter does not
distract them from keeping
each over the other

a guarding eye.
What part of this is love, and
what survival

is never said,
though the difference it makes is
at least that between a lily and, say,

a shield. I think of you
often, especially here,
at the edge of the world or a

part of it, anyway,
by which I mean of course
more, you will have guessed, than

the coast, just now, I
stand on. Against it,
the water dashes with

the violence of two men who,
having stripped it, now take for their
own the body of

a third man on the bad
sofa of an even worse
motel room in what eventually

is movie—one
we’ve seen … The way
what looks like rape

might not be. You’d like
the light here. At
times, a color you’d call anything but blue.

Someone Should Write Me A Love Poem, But I’m Stuck Doing It Myself by Daphne Gottlieb

Someone Should Write Me A Love Poem, But I’m Stuck Doing It MySelf by Daphne Gottlieb

1. when i was in high school, i had to memorize the
conjugation of the latin verb “to love.”

2. i have no idea what happened to my mother’s wedding
ring. last night at 12:17 am, i really needed to know.

3. “beautiful” and “amazing” just mean “beautiful” and
“amazing.” nothing more.

4. i memorized the latin verb by singing the forms to the
tune of “the mexican hat dance”:

amo
amas
amat

amamus
amatis
amant

5. someone called at 1:19 in the morning. the area code is
from somewhere in arizona. i don’t think i know anyone
in arizona. there wasn’t a message.

6. if someone lets you sleep over and has to go to work while
you’re still asleep and they let you sleep in even though though
they don’t really know you, it’s nice to leave a thank you
note. or make their bed.

7. i haven’t been beautiful in days and i need more sleep.
don’t think about it too much. it doesn’t mean a thing.

8. i have had my shirts altered so i can wear my heart on my
sleeve.

9. told me i’m beautiful and amazing and where are you,
who told me i’m beautiful and amazing, next time please
write it down, i will be beautiful all day after i make the
bed, amazing after i throw the latex away; how is it, the
everywhere of our hands and no trace of handwriting
anywhere

10. i still sing:

amo
amas
amat

amamus
amatis
amant

Lillian Gish Goes to Helly by Richard Siken

But she has been there before, has a suite
in fact, where she can swan and collapse
on a series of fainting couches: velveteen,
plush, gem-colored. In 1913, during the
production of A Good Little Devil, Lillian
collapsed from anemia. She took delight in
suffering for art. Although not a religious
man, Sartre was fascinated by suffering
as well, said Hell is other people and meant it.
Some like to suffer and some try to eliminate
desire. Buddha, God bless him, had a great
idea: whatever is subject to change is subject to
suffering. But let’s face it, he was fat and sat
around in his underwear, while we delight
in changing our wardrobes. You, terrible
in your solitude. Me, ruined and desperate
in my cowboy shirt with the pearly buttons
and significant stitching. We can suffer with
the best of them, Lil, effortlessly working off
our karma as the drunken father breaks down
the wooden door, or we roam, dying, through
the streets of Montmartre. I am no stranger
to love and I am not waiting for you, because
I believe we will be reborn, because I believe
everything, and I believe that we will meet
again and suffer together again. The future
belongs to China and yet I want to learn
French. This, too, is another kind of suffering.
Once, at a truck stop, I ate an entire banana
cream pie and half a pound of bacon, which
is a kind of suffering for some, but I felt
fucking great. You know this, you must know
this. We are lovely and full of desire, we die
so many times and come back here, to cross
paths. I didn’t fall off the roof, I was pushed.
I want neither revenge nor relief. I crave no
rescue. What I want, Lillian, is to be gigantic
and perfectly lit, to be with you again, carnal
in our reincarnation. The future will find us
handsome taikonauts in a small ship spinning
out of control, flawed by love and plunging
realistically toward the heart of a hellish sun.
In the future we will suffer together in outer
space and eat crème brûlée out of a silver tube.
The novelty never wears off, Lil. It never does.