Beautiful Gab (swan dress Bjork), Me (“Medulla Bjork”), and my lalove Claire (yarn bomb Bjork).
I went to a party once and everyone there was dressed as Bjork.
I miss being Bjork.
A giant wave of Halifax just came over me.
Claire
My hope is constant;
If dust shall strip our bones of all but bones, then here is the flesh. Steadily, steady, steadily.
My hope is constant;
If dust shall strip our bones of all but bones, then here is the flesh. Steadily, steady, steadily.
I Remember
By the first of August
the invisible beetles began
to snore and the grass was
as tough as hemp and was
no color—no more than
the sand was a color and
we had worn our bare feet
bare since the twentieth
of June and there were times
we forgot to wind up your
alarm clock and some nights
we took our gin warm and neat
from old jelly glasses while
the sun blew out of sight
like a red picture hat and
one day I tied my hair back
with a ribbon and you said
that I looked almost like
a puritan lady and what
I remember best is that
the door to your room was
the door to mine.
Anne Sexton
Collection of a Lover and Mathematics
i
As if I could calculate you
know the total sum of you
by adding your atoms
8 octillion
to the breaths you have taken in
and let out again.
or by multiplying the stones
you’ve skipped over the surface of the lakes you’ve seen
with the triangles of your freckles
(which means I must count them first)
maybe simply add the length of
the curve from your ribs to hips,
(only seen when lying naked on your side,)
to the length of my forearm pressed and laid out
in front of us, forever adjacent,
maybe instead I must only put together
our convex and concave, together our
definite and excellent bodies.
ii
you are the line from wrist to wrist
when your arms are stretched out
a familiar pose on our shadowed bed,
then there the mid point, your heart beat.
and I know the rhythm,
I hum the rhythm while I walk along our sidewalk
I tap the rhythm against your palm when we talk
you trace it into slow circles on my arms
you tell me all about my back. the moles and
gaps of plain skin, invisible lines from ribs to knees, you speak
in inches, tracing things I will never see.
iii
when you would try to sleep
I would blur my eyes until your outline faded
and I’d tell you everything I saw
the oval of your breathing
— the strength of your lungs and that
arch from shoulder to neck to shoulder
and your spine! a hyperbola in the
morning—bent towards your toes, a
stretching reflecting the bottom of the sun
then by evening the small circles
stacked into a line, the straight
ray of you, as if your body did
not stop at the top of your head
more than just your muscles and bones—
your soul so huge the whole world huge
every leaf is the ball of your foot
every stone a fist or a toe
and when finally, exhausted I’d stop explaining
and your arm became the shore line and I’d
curl up in our bed, the white ocean,
and you’d tell me about your boat, my body
and tracing all the lines in our parallel story
we’d finally arrive at nothing
and let the whole world convince us to sleep.
iv
do you remember how I would lie in the back yard
try my time down in the grass and mud
and you’d come and count all the syllables in a poem?
you said the strongest men you knew
were ones who read day in and night through
and slept only when the birds came up to sing
their way to morning
I should have known then about our ending
v
After we’d made it through three homes
sixteen months and one broken shoulder
we gave each other somehow
two broken hearts
my hair was falling out, a change in the weather,
and I’d pull and let the strands linger on the tips of my fingers
watch the wind catch them and tuck them away
high against a tree top, maybe
even against the nest of a bird, or
the purple lilacs you loved so much.
you gave me a countdown
in fourteen days you would be moved away
you’d take your sixty books and two guitars
you’d move the one desk and the one dresser
take the two wooden chests filled with your clothes
and leave me, one, alone in our home.
Claire Siesfeld
Claire.
I am in the lake, in the center of the picture, just under the surface.
gpoy, all the days. its cloudy and the backyard is green and i really could go for a wedding.
