January 2012
29 posts
9 tags
Traveler
Your first time out of the country of your own skin, I didn’t bring a map.
You always hated that I’d been lucky enough to pick my way through streets
I couldn’t pronounce to find cathedrals, graveyards. If you were a city, you said,
I’d only like to know your suburbs.
If you were a city, I said, I’d like to know your poor neighborhoods, your inner parts.
Read your graffiti. Drink...
“Being an artist means forever healing your own wounds and at the same time...”
– Annette Messager
moledro
dictionaryofobscuresorrows:
n. a feeling of resonant connection with an author or artist you’ll never meet, who may have lived centuries ago and thousands of miles away but can still get inside your head and leave behind morsels of their experience, like the little piles of stones left by hikers that mark a hidden path through unfamiliar territory.
“He moves toward her knowing he is about to / spoil the way they don’t know each...”
– excerpt from “Adults” by Jack Gilbert
9 tags
Dogheaded
(after “Scenes from the Battle of Us” by Cate Marvin)
Suzanne Highland
You are like a dream journal with an ellipsis in the middle of an image of bruised knees and being found crouching under the sink.
I am like a labrador biting fast to the leash because she’s tired of useless mouths.
My mother made me floss even when it bled. You can be the...
5 tags
8 tags
Endangered Species
(after “Real Estate” by Richard Brautigan)
Suzanne Highland
I have hands that are like sticks that can break themselves.
In winter, I go for weeks without moving.
I feel as if I am half of a bald eagle’s nest:
Some pine needles Some sticky feathers Shoot what you can now we’re off the list.
12 tags
“Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different...”
– Desmond Tutu
9.
Sometimes after I have come or just before I fall asleep, my mind seems to go out on a path the width of a thread and of endless length, a thread that is the same color as the night. Out, out along the narrow highway sails my mind, driven by curiosity, luminous with acceptance, far and out, like a feathered hook whipped deep into the light above the stream by a magnificent cast. Somewhere, out of...
8 tags
Sleepwalking
Suzanne Highland
They are at a party. They fight. They do this a lot, someone says to someone else, looking over their shoulder at that dark corner of the yard. She yells TRUST ME and a few more people turn their heads to look. He shushes her; tells her she’s being hysterical. She yells OF COURSE I— and he yells –EVER TRY SO HAR— and she yells –ON’T EVEN CA— and he throws his hands...
11 tags
“Most editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.”
– T.S. Eliot
8 tags
“Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”
Six Word Short Stories
For sale: baby shoes, never worn. -Ernest Hemingway
Machine. Unexpectedly, I’d invented a time. -Alan Moore
Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses. -Richard Powers
The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly. -Orson Scott Card
Longed for him. Got him. Shit. -Margaret Atwood
Epitaph: Foolish humans, never escaped Earth. -Vernor Vinge
December 2011
23 posts
7 tags
“Sometimes, I think the only art left for us is slowly peeling the label off a...”
– Lynda Barry
4 tags
Purple & Heart
Suzanne Highland
The condom was full of ants on the bathroom floor, lodged in between the toes of the bathtub foot. A cleft chin, old combs from the 60s. You were working out an equation, subtracting me to singularity, one lone lamp, a fan whirring softly. I coughed up a beetle, a worry stone, a prim Japanese fan, we bowed to each other when it was over. Sex is just...
“There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of...”
– William S. Burroughs
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters
“Realize, Allen, that if all the world were green, there would be no such thing as the color green. Similarly, men cannot know what it is to be together without otherwise knowing what it is to be apart. If all the world were love, then, how could love exist? This is why we turn away from each other on moments of great happiness and closeness. How can we know happiness and closeness without...
3 tags
“GILBERT: … it’s a profound experience to be with people from my past again. To...”
9 tags
5 tags
6 tags
A Meditation On The Twenty Minute Walk Home
Suzanne Highland
Open your eyes — now. Be thankful for eyes that open at all. For windows that open, for the streetlight outside that gathers insects to it like a warm-bellied mother. For yours.
Fill yourself with simplicity. Think less of yourself. Be yourself. Someone will tell you it’s impossible — don’t listen. Open your...
“Life’s not a bitch, life is a beautiful woman; you only call her a bitch...”
– Daylight, Aesop Rock
