ariachristina

my parents are sunshine
but without else, on a desert.
here in chicago, cloudy days,
wide water.

Legs

- - - - - I want long lean

- - - - - - - - - - luscious

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - love legs

-

- - - - - smooth soft sad

- - - - - - - street strut legs

-

- - - - - fast free fifth-beat

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - funk legs

Becky Stark

chips 93
p.1/frontispiece

The Funeral Trio

First, Stan Getz:

My father always plays your CDs on Sunday mornings

Bringing relentless Brazilian sunshine into the house

The finely wrinkled eyes

Paths of light

Bloodred flecks brown, earthy yellow

A translator from light to sound to emotion

Even the girl from Ipanema might shed a tear or two.

-

Then Dr. Seuss,

Stumbling his way down into the dark subconscious

Mind

Painting it with brightstripes, licking the walls of thought

Happily to tast the simple joy

To give the finger merrily to Freud

And other such somber grown-ups.

-

The slap in the face--

Miles, Time is before time

Too cool, torn-voiced pimp

Silverplay, brasshustle

Grasped by a hand from the sky

His own hand unseeing, dancing

Lungs, throat, and cheeks doing what they do.

Did.

John Brinker

chips 92
p.92. volume 55. blue w/Her Back on cover.

swing

aint worth
if you aint got
- that

titles

you need to whisper
don't accept me - it's more about where i am going - so different without you - come closer - so you're not angry? - i'm not done growing yet - he looks crazy to me - i'd like to be lost with you - i hate everyone, i hate everything, say sandwich, don't look at it, thursday?, that's not mine, mine!, give me that - just when we have become close, you have to leave - to me they are the only real things in the world - i would be lost without you - you have become a ghost - now now now - the only thing i want, i can't have - what is it like out there? - how do i look in your eyes? - just hold me - you couldn't have known - i wish we could talk like we used to - i'm here - i just want to go home -I don't want to forget you -i was lonely for something i forgot about - please forgive me if i take you for granted

for sam brown's drawings

For page after page our characters exchange comments that are insignificant but heavy with desolate unhappiness: 'Are you cold?' 'No, I'm not cold.' 'Would you like some tea?' "No thanks.' 'Are you tired?' "I don't know. Yes, perhaps I'm a bit tired.' This is how our characters talk. They talk like this because they don't know how to talk anymore. Little by little the most important matters, the most terrible confessions, come out: 'You killed him?' 'Yes, I killed him.'

natalia ginzburg 'Silence'

a plea so desperate

-"what do you want me to do? stand on my head!?"
-please. stand on your head.

Lorrie Moore, I think: How to be an other woman.
and a plea so desperate it reads, come get me yesterday from a book I never read by?~Laurie Colwin ~ sleeping arrangements ah Laura Cunningham: on Page 86: "...am driven into the camp. Later that night, I scribble a postcard plea to my uncles, an appeal so desperate it reads: "Come get me yesterday."

at all

one night of love don't make up for six nights alone
but I'd rather have one than none Lord I'm flesh and bone
sometimes it seems that she ain't worth the trouble at all
but she can be worth the world if somehow you can touch her at all

Willie Nelson -
Waylon Jennings

atlantis

bookstore on Santorini
your past life 11/8 pm You were born somewhere in the territory of modern Greece around the year 775.Your profession was that of a sailor or shoemaker.The lesson that your last past life brought to your present incarnation: The world is full of ill and lonely people. Do you remember now? do. you. remember.

love invents

Elizabeth, the book's protagonist and sometime narrator ah so it was not just the manuscript copy I read- It's startling when the book shifts to third person just before the halfway mark. "She was not drippingly miserable, she was not an affront to society," the narrator tells us. "She paid her bills. She didn't smell or piss on other people's lawns. She suffered from the opposite of `phantom limb' syndrome; something essential appeared to be present, but it was not." {she didn't become manager at the used bookstore where she worked and she didn't go to law school and she didn't own any cleaning supplies, which her mother would have said was a bad sign}
Elizabeth exists only when love, or at least the semblance of sex, exists. interesting-review-bostonphoenix
I was looking for this line: "it is a life that makes sense to me. . . . I am happy every morning and I am sad only late at night."

sensibility

all the gifts and all the needs --R.Bespallof

breakdown, call it breakdown, what are you going to do about it? (that's what I'd like to know) --P.Simon
if it were me, I'd pretend the crack wasn't in me. pretend it's in the grand canon. - baby et up all her spinoza? --F.ScottFitzgerald

worn-out shoes --N.Ginzburg

alone, alone, I'm all alone --the bridge of san luis rey