#softblow

[bostonpoetryslam]

we poured glitter on our poverty & lipstick on our council walls. life was something for bandanas & french-kissing the tangerine flesh. something for smearing honey on each other's lips, for covering our crop tops before our fathers. i'll tell you something about haram: we recited every handclap better than the qur'an.

Aria Misha Aber, “ode to glitter & council blocks,” published in SOFTBLOW

[williamjamespoetry]

# You and your mother are attempting to swallow a pond of significant size. Algae turns your teeth a slimy green, slides along your tongue like jellied fur. A small perch with three hooks in his lip swims to the back of your throat, sets out a fine china set for two. A minnow who fancies himself a whale pours tea into small cups.

from "Swallower" - read the rest of the poem at http://www.softblow.org

[word-tree]

Valentine for Your Hair - Ann Ang

Old couples: numlocked in circles of light: boiled water,  fairprice. The Straits Times saves lives. Twenty cents from the karung-guni: so little, he got less.  Five years, then children, then they paint the flats. Banglas wash all, a vast drying lake.  But us? Flip your hair:  I'll drink marker ink like air.  Your hand on my face unlimbs me— a thawing chicken wing. We are tight,  a wallet in the sand's back-pocket.  By the tankered sea, you kiss me:  wire-mesh, old smoke.  Drive me like a car—I am instant noodles for the salt.  When morning comes, let us turn off the light with wet hands.

[word-tree]

Look - T.F.D.

Marina, they were pretending not to look, the gawkers. The stressed-out noon boots the afters into rest and your evening unhinges with pale swerve the course we cannot see. Yes, what is it you are doing at night and has being in the middle of a square impaired your spatials? Where is the circle, why is the boyish boy unsocked and topped off his block? All the eyes are darkened here, the puttering gazes wetting like rocks in the unread riverbed. The women here unweave me, your hair tricks in dipping flips my ability to look and be still. Detail, as in she is looking up from unfinished notes, stirring my belt out of buckle. White all around you, we keep our fidgeting minimal, our colors uncollected. You look like you aren't being looked at.  Marina, I am fearful no longer of the way I came away from others. Lightness wants me to leave in discreet ornaments tied up to your long red robe. You are saved by this square. I will ascend your braids I will remain on this tile until you are untied; that things this side bring themselves in–there is a table–to a form of wood we can delegate themes for, a posture like a canoe being culled into the bank, your lonesome back and the straightness of sight. They will all be taking away from this–taking–the unfound feeling that cannot be called lost. Assure me that the getting of to where we are is the part of me that will call to you tomorrow in remembering how the lines in your face drew out the last of my gaze. The point, which is to look, is also a walking away.  Marina, upstairs the exercises of refugees are seen by members only. A face is unstructured, eyes are often driven by the insurmountable feast of breath on pause. In doing all of this seeing we are the most seen; topical difficulties fall from the borders as beauty is bolted into the skip and a smooth rock trundles in the positioning of the pallid glance. At first, the thing that was first of fell and everything following the air I lost in greeting you. I know this most of all and lastly or that arriving here is connect. Can they take you and not your images home? Are they given anything in the sitting, the unfit sprig of attempted indifference? You've lost the lines in your look, the patience in your face ripples slowly into the unavailable discord of our complex shore. 

[word-tree]

the singaporean talks to the african about rivers - joshua ip

there are none in my country, only ditches. so when you say desire is the river that swallows in its wake all other rivers, i say that sounds much like an overflow ditch, which may or may not be considered a canal, uncomfortable for casual swimmers, rife with trash, incapable of supporting life, - but i do, i do get your analogy. after great rain, a storm drain's swelling comes: a single blockage of that gutter makes a city-full of what you might call lakes and i call ponds - who gives a dam (or bund) what we call what we know to be desire? but i fear more the silent desperate smoulder than the open flame. water or fire, the ways of want change not by plain or polder. the unseen still outweighs the salient swirl - such is with continents as is with isles for after all i understand denial is still the longest river in the world 

[word-tree]

Something Small and Bright - Laura McCullough

Ghosts have taken over my face: they rise like theater sets under my cheekbones, and suddenly I am looking out of my eyes through theirs, feel my lips changing shape, gestures in muscle that are not mine. When this happens, I know I am not alone; there are a lot of people in here. Some aren't surprising: my mother, for example,  also my friend Stephen. The first time I laughed through his face, I knew something about his malleable brow I hadn't known before, and felt the way the small muscles surrounding the mouth have always surrendered to mirth,  giving way to humor without letting things get out of hand.  For a long time, I knew all of the faces that might come up,  but not so any more. It could be anyone, maybe one of you.  And the word ghost was a lie: this is not about dead people,  not about grief, but if I told you what it was about, I would still be lying. Go ahead and put your hands to your face -– or don't -– who am I to tell you what to do? I put my hands to my face, cupping the bones beneath the skin. My palms begin to warm, and then it happens: I feel the small kisses,  tender at first, and then insistent, then the noise like a flock of startled birds leaving a tree. Inside that noise, I can begin to dance across the stage I hadn't known was under my feet until the rising voices burning against my cheeks force me to open my mouth. Don't be afraid: what bursts forth will only burn away what I have been trying to gnaw off; inside this peeling lacquered mask see something small and bright. 

[word-tree]

I Thought I Knew Something About Men - Laura McCullough

until I had a daughter who taught me I know nothing about women.  Or about men either: to look at her,  my eyes become a man's eyes, and I want to possess the fine line of her foot encrusted with sugar. I am so hungry.  Her eyes make me know something about pearl farmers -- why they dive, how they learn to hold their breath because so many lives depend on it.  Her hands are small butterflies looking for a net; they come to sleep inside my own. When she tilts back her head, I can see the glazed mother-of-pearl throat and lean close to breathe the sweet ocean inside.  When I laugh, she laughs, her pearl tongue testing pleasure. When I put a finger to my bottom lip smoothing color across it, she touches her mouth.  I thought I knew something of men until I saw them look at her and break into small boys all over the floor -- their delight rolling through them like water taking air. When I look at her, I see I've never looked at myself. 

[hours]

"A silverfish is neither silver, nor a fish, though I'd like to believe when we evolved from fish, we wore our skins like mirrors, and the alphabets inside ourselves, glimmered on the precipice of word."

— Leigh Phillips, The Central Dogma, Softblow, Feb 2013