Thresholds
Museum M / Winona Brussels
Kim Hyesoon, Autobiography of Death
Danez Smith
my poems are fed up & getting violent. i whisper to them tender tender bridge bridge but they say bitch ain’t no time, make me a weapon! i hold a poem to a judge’s neck until he’s not a judge anymore. i tuck a poem next to my dick, sneak it on the plane. a poem goes off in the capitol, i raise a glass in unison. i mail a poem to 3/4ths of the senate, they choke off the scent. my mentor said once a poem can be whatever you want it to be. so i bury the poem in the river & the body in the fire. i poem a nazi i went to college with in the jaw until his face hangs a bone tambourine. i poem ten police a day. i poem the mayor with my bare hands. i poem the hands off the men who did what they know they did. i poem a racist woman into a whistle & feel only a little bad. i poem the president on live TV, his head raised above my head, i say Baldwin said. i call my loves & ask for their lists. i poem them all. i poem them all with a grin, bitch. poemed in the chair, handless, volts ready to run me, when they ask me what i regret i poem multitudes multitudes multitudes.
Bureau. Ixelles, 2022.
Bureau. Foret, 2022.
The Lyric “I” Drives to Pick up Her Children from School: A Poem in the Postconfessional Mode
By Olena Kalytiak Davis
KASK atelier, 2021.
October
By W.S. Merwin
I remember how I would say, “I will gather
These pieces together,
Any minute now I will make
A knife out of a cloud.”
Even then the days
Went leaving their wounds behind them,
But, “Monument,” I kept saying to the grave,
“I am still your legend.”
There was another time
When our hands met and the clocks struck
And we lived on the point of a needle, like angels.
I have seen the spider’s triumph
In the palm of my hand. Above
My grave, that thoroughfare,
There are words now that can bring
My eyes to my feet, tamed.
Beyond the trees wearing names that are not their own
The paths are growing like smoke.
The promises have gone,
Gone, gone, and they were here just now.
There is the sky where they laid their fish.
Soon it will be evening.
Source: The Moving Target (1963)
moving woodblock Brussels hottest day cramped tram
woman with grey hair places her hand between the edge and the plastic seat
other hand
finger strums an area where the bubble wrap has left a section of wood exposed
chiselled grooves and high points
threads of a giant harp
2022
Dual show with David Daniels at Winona Brussels 3.12.22 / notes
“And he was teaching this class to people 40 years old, who had been in the Battle of the Bulge and 12 year old wiz kids on Marvel to his mistress, and they were talking about the line and through the iron bars of life near the end. And I think it comes from that image. And then, almost all my life, I have been interested in opening up myself and other people and seeing what’s inside, that there’s gates into people and knowledge is really a gate into the universe so I think it comes from that too. And in the Messiah, they have opened your gates, your everlasting doors. That is a very beautiful corral, and of course to the Muslims, paradise is heaven, and Allah’s description of paradise is the garden under which the river runs. Well, this is supposed to be a code for the sensations of the human being and the blood running under them or the poetry in the person is the river and the heart is the fountain and they always have the fountains, the rivers, like the Oriental rugs. They’re all a garden. And then I would say in all cultures they have the idea of the inside of the human being, Marvel’s garden and the green thought and the green shade.”
Interview with David Daniels: https://ubu-mirror.ch/papers/daniels_interview.html
also: http://www.thegatesofparadise.com/
To My Enemies
By Bert Meyers
I’m still here, in a skin
thinner than a dybbuk’s raincoat;
strange as the birds who scrounge,
those stubborn pumps
that bring up nothing…
Maddened by you
for whom the cash register,
with its clerical bells,
is a national church;
you, whose instant smile
cracks the earth at my feet…
May your wife go to paradise
with the garbage man,
your prick hang like a shoelace,
your balls become raisins,
hair grow on the whites of your eyes
and your eyelashes turn
into lawn mowers
that cut from nine to five…
Man is a skin disease
that covers the earth.
The stars are antibodies
approaching, your president
is a tsetse-fly…
Source: In a Dybbuk’s Raincoat: Collected Poems (The University of New Mexico Press, 2007)
New Rooms
by Kay Ryan
The mind must
set itself up
wherever it goes
and it would be
most convenient
to impose its
old rooms—just
tack them up
like an interior
tent. Oh but
the new holes
aren’t where
the windows
went.
July/August 2012
Abandoned marble mine at Onjuva. Kaokoland, Namibia, 2019.
My Life Was the Size of My Life
Jane Hirshfield
My life was the size of my life.
Its rooms were room-sized,
its soul was the size of a soul.
In its background, mitochondria hummed,
above it sun, clouds, snow,
the transit of stars and planets.
It rode elevators, bullet trains,
various airplanes, a donkey.
It wore socks, shirts, its own ears and nose.
It ate, it slept, it opened
and closed its hands, its windows.
Others, I know, had lives larger.
Others, I know, had lives shorter.
The depth of lives, too, is different.
There were times my life and I made jokes together.
There were times we made bread.
Once, I grew moody and distant.
I told my life I would like some time,
I would like to try seeing others.
In a week, my empty suitcase and I returned.
I was hungry, then, and my life,
my life, too, was hungry, we could not keep
our hands off our clothes on
our tongues from
From The Beauty (Knopf, 2015)
Always packing. 2022.
My bitch!
by Danez Smith
after Nicole Sealey
o bitch. my good bitch. bitch my heart.
dream bitch. bitch my salve. bitch my order.
bitch my willowed stream. bitch my legend.
bitch like a door. your name means open
in the language of my getting by. bitch sesame.
let’s get together & paint our faces the color
of our mothers if our mothers were sad men
soft only in bad lights. let’s swirl the deep grape
& coffee pencils until we look like odd planets
on our way to looking like the daughters
we secretly were. caked & cakes hairy
just short of grace. we look terrible
when we’re the most beautiful girls in the world.
bitch my world. bitch my brother. bitch my rich trust.
i’ll miss you most when they kill us.
The Art of Disappearing
By Naomi Shihab Nye
When they say Don’t I know you?
say no.
When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone is telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.
If they say We should get together
say why?
It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.
You’re trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.
When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.
When someone you haven’t seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don’t start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.
Source: Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. 1995.
Towards the Source. Zine in collaboration with Daniella Mooney. Cape Town/Namibia, 2018
Faint Music
By Robert Hass
Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.
When everything broken is broken,
and everything dead is dead,
and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,
and the heroine has studied her face and its defects
remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,
as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves
has lost its novelty and not released them,
and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,
watching the others go about their days—
likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—
that self-love is the one weedy stalk
of every human blossoming, and understood,
therefore, why they had been, all their lives,
in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—
except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool
of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic
life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,
faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.
As in the story a friend told once about the time
he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.
Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.
He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,
the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.
And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,”
that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.
No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch
he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,
scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp
along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word
was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise
the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,
and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up
on the girder like a child—the sun was going down
and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket
he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing
carefully, and drove home to an empty house.
There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties
hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.
A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick
with rage and grief. He knew more or less
where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.
They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears
in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”
she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights,
a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.
“You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?”
“Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now,
“I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while—
Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall—
and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,
and go to sleep.
And he, he would play that scene
once only, once and a half, and tell himself
that he was going to carry it for a very long time
and that there was nothing he could do
but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened
to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark
cracking and curling as the cold came up.
It’s not the story though, not the friend
leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”
which is the part of stories one never quite believes.
I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain
it must sometimes make a kind of singing.
And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—
First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.
Source: Sun Under Wood (Ecco Press, 1996)
Breakfast with couchsurfing host. Tokyo, 2017.
Walking to the lake. Kawaguchiko, 2017.
A Pity, We Were Such a Good Invention
By Yehuda Amichai
They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.
They dismantle us
Each from the other.
As far as I’m concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.
A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.
We even flew a little.
Bedroom in Woodstock, Cape Town. 2019.
Ode to the Crop Top
by Kyle Carrero Lopez
O sliced crêpe;
dress code break;
half- set sun;
slut symbol;
cracked window;
short story;
a whole summer carnival, shrunk.
How I adore your spunk,
your sincere open call for air
on my belly hair.
The little Target® boy
groaning eww as I pass
isn’t worth any ire.
He’s playing with fire,
but his parents lit the torch.
To think such small cloth
sparks grown brains aflame.
Why you in a girl’s top,
the man yells in DC.
I could have cut him one too,
so we’d both feel the breeze.
From Muscle Memory published by [PANK] Books, 2022.
Otter trail. 2016.
The Quiet World
By Jeffrey McDaniel
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
Source: The Forgiveness Parade. 1998.
Illustration by Paul Klee
My grandmother. 2006.
Elegy IX (missing you)
By Jason Schneiderman
Our campsite in the Brandberg. Scary night. Namibia 2018.
Spitzkoppe
Patricia Lockwood, “Rape Joke”
by The Awl July 25, 2013
by Mark Bibbins, Editor
The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.
The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.
The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.
Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”
No offense.
The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word interesting, as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.
Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.
The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.
The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living.
Not you!
The rape joke is that he carried a knife, and would show it to you, and would turn it over and over in his hands as if it were a book.
He wasn’t threatening you, you understood. He just really liked his knife.
The rape joke is he once almost murdered a dude by throwing him through a plate-glass window. The next day he told you and he was trembling, which you took as evidence of his sensitivity.
How can a piece of knowledge be stupid? But of course you were so stupid.
The rape joke is that sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee’s house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.
The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.
OK, the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock.
Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.
The rape joke is he called wrestling “a soap opera for men.” Men love drama too, he assured you.
The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass’s My Century, which he never even tried to read.
It gets funnier.
The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.
The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said “he didn’t have those urges when he looked at her anymore,” not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!
The rape joke is that he was your father’s high-school student — your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.
The rape joke is that he knew you when you were 12 years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.
The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.
The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.
The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.
Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.
You know the body of time is elastic, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.
The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.
The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.
It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.
The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.
The rape joke is that after a while you weren’t crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.
The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.
The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.
The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.
The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren’t Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati Ohio.
Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.
Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends — haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.
The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.
The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.
The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.
Admit it.
via: https://www.theawl.com/2013/07/patricia-lockwood-rape-joke/
Checkers run, Joburg 2021.
Ethics
by Linda Pastan
In ethics class so many years ago
our teacher asked this question every fall:
If there were a fire in a museum,
which would you save, a Rembrandt painting
or an old woman who hadn’t many
years left anyhow? Restless on hard chairs
caring little for pictures or old age
we’d opt one year for life, the next for art
and always half-heartedly. Sometimes
the woman borrowed my grandmother’s face
leaving her usual kitchen to wander
some drafty, half-imagined museum.
One year, feeling clever, I replied
why not let the woman decide herself?
Linda, the teacher would report, eschews
the burdens of responsibility.
This fall in a real museum I stand
before a real Rembrandt, old woman,
or nearly so, myself. The colors
within this frame are darker than autumn,
darker even than winter — the browns of earth,
though earth’s most radiant elements burn
through the canvas. I know now that woman
and painting and season are almost one
and all beyond the saving of children.
Diana in Obs, 2020.
The Poem
By Franz Wright
It was like getting a love letter from a tree
Eyes closed forever to find you —
There is a life which
if I could have it
I would have chosen for myself from the beginning
Source: Walking to Martha’s Vineyard (2003)
Diane Victor’s window, August House. Johannesburg, 2021.
I worried
by Mary Oliver
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?
Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.
TURNING
By W.S. Merwin
Going too fast for myself I missed
more than I think I can remember
almost everything it seems sometimes
and yet there are chances that come back
that I did not notice when they stood
where I could have reached out and touched them
this morning the black Belgian shepherd dog
still young looking up and saying
Are you ready this time
Source: The Moon Before Morning
Greenhouse, The Merwin Conservancy (home and palm garden of WS Merwin & Paula Merwin), Haiku, (Maui) HI SOURCE
Jussi Pyky. 21 x 30cm, pen on paper, 2019.
If I can write
I do
If I can write
I do
I can write
I do
Mahogany L. Browne
Sweater
by Jane Hirschfield
What is asked of one is not what is asked of another.
A sweater takes on the shape of its wearer,
a coffee cup sits to the left or the right of the workspace,
making its pale Saturn rings of now and before.
Lucky the one who rises to sit at a table,
day after day spilling coffee sweet with sugar, whitened with milk.
Lucky the one who writes in a book of spiral-bound mornings
a future in ink, who writes hand unshaking, warmed by thick wool.
Lucky still, the one who writes later, shaking. Acrobatic at last, the
sweater,
elastic as breath that enters what shape it is asked to.
Patient the table; unjudging, the ample, refillable cup.
Irrefusable, the shape the sweater is given,
stretched in the shoulders, sleeves lengthened by unmetaphysical
pullings on.
Source: Come, Thief. 2011.
Daniella with sharpened blades, 2020.
Auckland Studios, 2020.
Words From A Totem Animal
by W.S. Merwin
Distance
is where we were
but empty of us and ahead of
me lying out in the rushes thinking
even the nights cannot come back to their hill
any time
I would rather the wind came from outside
from mountains anywhere
from the stars from other
worlds even as
cold as it is this
ghost of mine passing
through me
I know your silence
and the repetition
like that of a word in the ear of death
teaching
itself
itself
that is the sound of my running
the plea
plea that it makes
which you will never hear
oh god of beginnings
immortal
I might have been right
not who I am
but all right
among the walls among the reasons
not even waiting
not seen
but now I am out in my feet
and they on their way
the old trees jump up again and again
strangers
there are no names for the rivers
for the days for the nights
I am who I am
oh lord cold as the thoughts of birds
and everyone can see me
Caught again and held again
again I am not a blessing
they bring me
names
that would fit anything
they bring them to me
they bring me hopes
all day I turn
making ropes
helping
My eyes are waiting for me
in the dusk
they are still closed
they have been waiting a long time
and I am feeling my way toward them
I am going up stream
taking to the water from time to time
my marks dry off the stones before morning
the dark surface
strokes the night
above its way
There are no stars
there is no grief
I will never arrive
I stumble when I remember how it was
with one foot
one foot still in a name
I can turn myself toward the other joys and their lights
but not find them
I can put my words into the mouths
of spirits
but they will not say them
I can run all night and win
and win
Dead leaves crushed grasses fallen limbs
the world is full of prayers
arrived at from
afterwards
a voice full of breaking
heard from afterwards
through all
the length of the night
I am never all of me
unto myself
and sometimes I go slowly
knowing that a sound one sound
is following me from world
to world
and that I die each time
before it reaches me
When I stop I am alone
at night sometimes it is almost good
as though I were almost there
sometimes then I see there is
in a bush beside me the same question
why are you
on this way
I said I will ask the stars
why are you falling and they answered
which of us
I dreamed I had no nails
no hair
I had lost one of the senses
not sure which
the soles peeled from my feet and
drifted away
clouds
It’s all one
feet
stay mine
hold the world lightly
Stars even you
have been used
but not you
silence
blessing
calling me when I am lost
Maybe I will come
to where I am one
and find
I have been waiting there
as a new
year finds the song of the nuthatch
Send me out into another life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way
From Decreation by Anne Carson
Wish
by W.S. Merwin
Please one more
kiss in the kitchen
before we turn the lights off
Sappho. 570 BC
