Ab Antiquo

I started this thread in Ab Antiquo of Yestermonth, and figured I'd transfer it here once I found something I really loved and I did this morning.

I figured we'd extend it to short stories, one act plays, excerpts from novels/novellas, etc. etc. Basically anything not a role play and fiction (maybe even some creative non-fiction!).

Original content and otherwise welcome.


Epistemology

Catherine Barnett
Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle,
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate,
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing.
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love.
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another
tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare,
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.

Cemeteries
I kill time in cemeteries.

Sticky, humid cemeteries in the summer.
Golden, dead cemeteries in the fall.
Barren, watchful cemeteries in the winter.
Greeting the new dead in the spring.

When I have time to kill, I do it in mausoleums, sepulchers, graveyards.
I use, abuse, and muse over the refused, when I have time to kill.

To remind myself I’m alive.
To remind myself I’ll die.
To remind myself to remember I’ll be forgotten.
To remind myself I’ll be
Reduced to ashes
Behind marble plaque
Underground.
Thrown in the sea,
Where I’ll rest for eternity.

Just to remind myself I’m not alone.
That we’re all headed to the Sunset Limited.

After reading this, I think Sara Teasdale is my spirit animal.

"Only the lonely are free"


Morning Song
Sara Teasdale

A diamond of a morning
Waked me an hour too soon;
Dawn had taken in the stars
And left the faint white moon.

O white moon, you are lonely,
It is the same with me,
But we have the world to roam over,
Only the lonely are free.

Merry Autumn
Paul Laurence Dunbar

It’s all a farce,—these tales they tell
About the breezes sighing,
And moans astir o’er field and dell,
Because the year is dying.

Such principles are most absurd,—
I care not who first taught ’em;
There’s nothing known to beast or bird
To make a solemn autumn.

In solemn times, when grief holds sway
With countenance distressing,
You’ll note the more of black and gray
Will then be used in dressing.

Now purple tints are all around;
The sky is blue and mellow;
And e’en the grasses turn the ground
From modest green to yellow.

The seed burrs all with laughter crack
On featherweed and jimson;
And leaves that should be dressed in black
Are all decked out in crimson.

A butterfly goes winging by;
A singing bird comes after;
And Nature, all from earth to sky,
Is bubbling o’er with laughter.

The ripples wimple on the rills,
Like sparkling little lasses;
The sunlight runs along the hills,
And laughs among the grasses.

The earth is just so full of fun
It really can’t contain it;
And streams of mirth so freely run
The heavens seem to rain it.

Don’t talk to me of solemn days
In autumn’s time of splendor,
Because the sun shows fewer rays,
And these grow slant and slender.

Why, it’s the climax of the year,—
The highest time of living!—
Till naturally its bursting cheer
Just melts into thanksgiving.

I loved this when I read it through the first time, then loved it again when I read it through the second time after reading her description of it, so I'll post that at the end in case you want to read her thoughts and then read the poem again!


The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.
Donika Kelly

I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs

and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead

on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow

feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.

I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot

feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls

skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.

To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white

petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am

in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.






About This Poem

“Often, I am thinking of how I can ground love—feeling it, being in it—and being present in my body and in joy, in my work. These moves feel so urgent to me as a black lesbian in this political and cultural moment, where the news each day seems to argue against me and my loved ones’ humanity.”
—Donika Kelly

I love when I finish a poem and there's that small hole that opens up in my heart. This one did that very well. Read across (that wasn't clear to me).


Love Story
Marilyn Chin

The aerogram says come the photos show bliss
Another felicitous union a fresh beginning
He’s so handsome fat she’s so new world slim

The envelopes are red the writing vermeil
He’ll get a good job an iron rice bowl won’t break
She’s caught a princely man a silent one like her father

Sister dyes pink eggs Auntie boils cider knuckles
The Great Patriarch is happy a bouncy grandson
A bundle of joy from a test tube in heaven

Thank you for your blessings for your lucky lycee
A young nurse cares for her now in a small hospice near the sea
He’s alone on Silicon Hill that’s where he’s happy

Emails turn silent Instagrams remiss
Thank you for the white gardenias they’ll sweeten her soul
The joss paper boats will net fish for her in the next world

Praisesong
Sarah Browning

At the coffee shop you love,
white mugs heavy on the table
between us, young baristas—
spiky haired and impatient—
cannot imagine how two people
so old to them can feel so wanton,
coffee growing cold between us,
middle-aged bodies growing hot
under the other’s gaze. Even now,
apart, you send me songs so I may
listen to love from the golden throat
of a saxophone, piano keys playing
jazz across my soft belly.
How is it the tide of terror
has quit rising in me, or rises
and recedes as tides do, bringing
sea glass worked smooth
and lovely by the sheer fact
of time, bringing trash—
plastic mesh and old sneakers—
useless things now we might
bag up and remove, bringing
a lapping tongue of water up
over our toes as we hold hands
and walk along its edge—
carefully, gleefully, both.

I sit in the parking lot of the Bates motel after hours
and the neon sign blinks No Vacancy as we talk shop

About how grief can sink a person faster than an old Ford in a swamp
About how trauma sits in drug cellars or in backlit windows

And we forget for a while.

Fat Jokes

I have four nipples.
Two of them, on the bottom left and right corner of all my shirts.
From the chronic pinching and pulling,
to hide my under belly, otherwise known as "The Beast".

That's what the kids in High School yelled, when I lifted my arms to grab a copy of Catcher in the Rye.
"Yo! Check out the beast!"
I quickly pinched my nipples and pulled hard, letting the book fall to the floor. It was more important to save face,
than hold on.

Recently, I've killed the beast, but my artificial nipples remain. I haven't thrown away those T-shirts, those sweaters, in memory of him.
And sometimes on the street, I'll catch a glance of another four-nippled sister or brother, in the middle of the battle, or having already tamed the beast.
I always nod.
They always nod back.

"Hero in disguise"


My father was a mailed check.
Every month, I’d watch him come through the mail slot
Between or on top of, sometimes under, white envelopes I would come to learn were collection agencies.
To save on meals, we ate toothpaste sandwiches until we got ill.
“It’ll keep your teeth healthy,” my mother always said.
She’d walk out the house to cash my father at the nearest bank.

My father was crystals, fine, like white powder,
Mixed with water and injected into my mother’s veins.
He was the white of her eyes as they rolled to the back of her head and she collapsed on the couch,
Our last piece of furniture that we both slept on to keep warm.

My father is a ghost.
I never learned to play catch,
Or tie my shoes the right way,
I still cut myself when I shave.

“I won’t ever be my father,” I tell myself,
As I heat him up on a layer of aluminum foil,
And inhale him through a straw.