The Way Things Work

is by admitting
or opening away.
This is the simplest form
of current: Blue
moving through blue;
blue through purple;
the objects of desire
opening upon themselves
without us; the objects of faith.
The way things work
is by solution,
resistance lessened or
increased and taken
advantage of.
The way things work
is that we finally believe
they are there,
common and able
o illustrate themselves.
Wheel, kinetic flow,
rising and falling water,
ingots, levers and keys,
I believe in you,
cylinder lock, pully,
lifting tackle and
crane lift your small head--
I believe in you--
your head is the horizon to
my hand. I believe
forever in the hooks.
The way things work
is that eventually
something catches.

by Jorie Graham

Hive

by Nick Flynn

What would you do inside me?
You would be utterly

lost, labyrinthine

comb, each corridor identical, a
funhouse, there, a bridge, worker

knit to worker, a span
you can't cross. On the other side

the queen, a fortune of honey.

Once we filled an entire house with it,
built the comb between the floorboard

& joist, slowly, at first, the constant

buzz kept the owners awake, then
louder, until honey began to seep

from the walls, swell
the doorframes. Our gift.

They had to burn the house down
to rid us.

from Blind Huber

excerpt from a novel

"Nooo." She ducked her head and giggled. What he said bore no relation to what she felt, but she was seduced by the idea of herself prancing through his imagination as a tiny porn queen while the truth of what had happened lay safely hidden in a pocket of misunderstandng. At the same time, she felt a compulsion to make him understand her, and she was disconcereted to realize that the more he refused to do so, the more desperate the compusion whould become. "Really," she said, smiling. "It wasn't like that." And she told the story again.

from Mary Gaitskill's Two Girls, Fat and Thin

words.of.the.day

decoction

• noun a liquor containing the concentrated essence of a substance, produced as a result of heating or boiling.

— ORIGIN Latin, from decoquere ‘boil down’.

lath

/laath/

• noun (pl. laths /laaths/) a thin, flat strip of wood, especially one of a series forming a foundation for the plaster of a wall.

— ORIGIN Old English, related to LATTICE.

-Definitions lifted from Oxford Condensed online.

Broken Tulips

by John Ashbery

A is walking through the streets of B, frantic
for C's touch but secretly relived
not to have it. At Tamerlane
and East Tamerlane, he pauses, judicious:
The cave thing hasn't been seen again,
schoolgirls are prattling, and the Easter rabbit
is charging down the street, under full sail
and a strong headwind. Was ever anything
so delectable floated across the crescent moon's
transparent bay? Here shall we sit
and, dammit, talk about our trip
until the sky is again cold and gray.

Another's narrative supplants the crawling
stock-market quotes: Like all good things
life tends to go on too long, and when we smile
in mute annoyance, pauses for a moment.
Rains bathe the rainbow,
and the shape of the night is an empty cylinder,
focused at us, urging its noncompliance
closer along the way we chose to go.

from Where Shall We Wander

Future Conditional

by Marilyn Hacker

After the supper dishes, let us start
where we left off, my knees between your knees,
half in the window seat. O let me, please,
hands in your hair, drink in your mouth. Sweetheart,
your body is a text I need the art
to be constructed by. I halfway kneel
to your lap, propped by your thighs, and feel
burning my hand, your privacy, your part
armor underwear. This time I'll loose
each button from its hole; I'll find the hook,
release promised abundance to this want,
while your hands, please, here and here, exigent
and certain, open this; it is, this book,
made for your hands to read, your mouth to use.


fromLove, Death, and the Changing of Seasons

Masochism

by Quan Barry

after Lucie Brock-Broido

was the meek .
was montgomery overcome.

was bombed. was empty buses.
was bull's eye to bullet,

the billy club, the bloody church.
am black, historically

was skin kindling. was prey
to hook and hood. was the named thing

and never called. learned
to take a beating. was silent

despite the presentation of the throat,
the brick and truncheon,

the gutting clean. nineteen
fifty five and the we

walking there and back. was the seeing
of things for the first time, the tele-

vision, the web of fire.
opposed the politicians in the door,

the turning on of the dogs, the sicking
of the hoses. am the nonviolently

strong. was the women and children first.
was song. was the lifting out of egyptland.

was black eyes. was swollen lips. was asking for it.
the sitting down. the giving over.

from Asylum