Secret Wineskins

Love Like Salt

By Lisa Mueller 

It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet
without being given a second thought

It spills on the floor so fine
we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies
in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table
talking of holidays and the sea.

We Are All Broken Together

A Very Long Poem

Posted on March 11, 2013 by edunn7

This poem is very long
So long, in fact, that your attention span
May be stretched to its very limits
But that’s okay
It’s what’s so special about poetry
See, poetry takes time
We live in a time
Call it our culture or society
It doesn’t matter to me cause neither one rhymes
A time where most people don’t want to listen
Our throats wait like matchsticks waiting to catch fire
Waiting until we can speak
No patience to listen

But this poem is long
It’s so long, in fact, that during the time of this poem
You could’ve done any number of other wonderful things
You could’ve called your father
Call your father
You could be writing a postcard right now
Write a postcard
When was the last time you wrote a postcard?
You could be outside
You’re probably not too far away from a sunrise or a sunset
Watch the sun rise
Maybe you could’ve written your own poem
A better poem
You could have played a tune or sung a song
You could have met your neighbor
And memorized their name
Memorize the name of your neighbor
You could’ve drawn a picture
(Or, at least, colored one in)
You could’ve started a book
Or finished a prayer
You could’ve talked to God
Pray
When was the last time you prayed?
Really prayed?

This is a long poem
So long, in fact, that you’ve already spent a minute with it
When was the last time you hugged a friend for a minute?
Or told them that you love them?
Tell your friends you love them

…no, I mean it, tell them

Say, I love you

Say, you make life worth living
Because that, is what friends do
Of all of the wonderful things that you could’ve done
During this very, very long poem
You could have connected
Maybe you are connecting
Maybe we’re connecting
See, I believe that the only things that really matter
In the grand scheme of life are God and people
And if people are made in the image of God
Then when you spend your time with people
It’s never wasted
And in this very long poem
I’m trying to let a poem do what a poem does:
Make things simpler
We don’t need poems to make things more complicated
We have each other for that
We need poems to remind ourselves of the things that really matter
To take time
A long time
To be alive for the sake of someone else for a single moment
Or for many moments

Cause we need each other

To hold the hands of a broken person
All you have to do is meet a person
Shake their hand
Look in their eyes

They are you

We are all broken together
But these shattered pieces of our existence don’t have to be a mess
We just have to care enough to hold our tongues sometimes
To sit and listen to a very long poem
A story of a life
The joy of a friend and the grief of friend
To hold and be held
And be quiet

So, pray
Write a postcard
Call your parents and forgive them and then thank them
Turn off the TV
Create art as best as you can
Share as much as possible, especially money
Tell someone about a very long poem you once heard
And how afterward it brought you to them

taken from Marty S. Dalton's website

holds its freshness

Poem: "The Iceberg Theory," by Gerald Locklin from The Iceberg Theory (The Lummox Press).

The Iceberg Theory

all the food critics hate iceberg lettuce.
you'd think romaine was descended from
orpheus's laurel wreath,
you'd think raw spinach had all the nutritional
benefits attributed to it by popeye,
not to mention aesthetic subtleties worthy of
veriaine and debussy.
they'll even salivate over chopped red cabbage
just to disparage poor old mr. iceberg lettuce.

I guess the problem is
it's just too common for them.
It doesn't matter that it tastes good,
has a satisfying crunchy texture,
holds its freshness
and has crevices for the dressing,
whereas the darker, leafier varieties
are often bitter, gritty, and flat.
It just isn't different enough and
it's too goddamn american.

of course a critic has to criticize;
a critic has to have something to say
perhaps that's why literary critics
purport to find interesting
so much contemporary poetry
that just bores the shit out of me.

at any rate, I really enjoy a salad
with plenty of chunky iceberg lettuce,
the more the merrier,
drenched in an Italian or roquefort dressing.
and the poems I enjoy are those I don't have
to pretend that I'm enjoying.

Daily Bread

No-Knead Sandwich Bread

Makes one 9-by-5-inch loaf 

Mix the dough in a bowl with a spoon (you can double or triple the recipe if you like), and let it rise in the refrigerator overnight. The refrigerated dough can be used after 8 hours, or for up to 3 days. That means you can bake a loaf every morning and have sandwich bread by lunchtime.

4 cups all-purpose flour

1½ teaspoons instant (“rapid rise”) yeast

2 teaspoons salt

1⅔ cups water (Start with this amount, but you will probably need around 2 cups. The dough should be sticky, with very little dry flour visible.)

1. In a large bowl, whisk the flour, yeast, and salt until combined. Add the water and stir together until combined. Add enough water that you don’t see white flour that is not incorporated into the dough. Likely you will need up to 2 cups total water. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate the dough overnight.

2. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and let rest for about 2 hours to come to room temperature.

3. Spray a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan with vegetable oil spray or brush it with oil. (Bread will stick if you do not grease the pan.)

3. On a generously floured work surface, turn out the dough. Sprinkle it lightly with flour and pat the dough into an 8- by 12-inch rectangle. Position the short side of the rectangle so that it is parallel to the edge of the counter. Fold the dough into thirds as you would fold a business letter: bring the bottom third up and fold the top third down to meet it. Rotate the envelope of dough one quarter turn. Stretch it into a rectangle again and fold it as before. Rotate the envelope so the seam is on top and pinch it firmly together to secure the dough into a log. Flip it over so that the seam is on the bottom. If necessary, roll the dough back and forth, moving from the center outward, until you have a log that is the same length as your bread pan.

4. Place the dough in the pan with the seam side down. Cover loosely with an oiled piece of plastic wrap and let rise for 1 to 1½ hours, longer if the room is cool. The center of the loaf should dome about one inch above the rim of the pan.

5. About 20 minutes before the loaf is ready to be baked, position a rack in the lower third of the oven and set the oven to 400 degrees. When the dough has risen, make three shallow, diagonal slashes across the top of the loaf with a serrated knife. Bake the loaf for 10 minutes and decrease the oven temperature to 375 degrees. Bake for an additional 25 to 30 minutes, or until the crust browns. (Total baking time is 35 to 40 minutes.)

6. Tip the loaf out of the pan and tap the bottom of the loaf. It should make a hollow sound and the bottom of the loaf should have browned. If it still seems squishy, put it back in the oven, directly on the oven rack without the pan, and bake for another 5 minutes or so.

7. Set the loaf on a rack to cool completely. Do not cut into the bread until it is thoroughly cool; it continues to bake and set as it cools. Once it is completely cool, store it in a plastic bag or wrap it in a clean tea towel. 

Recipe by Sally Vargas and adapted by Janet Kelley

Notes: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

"I am writing because they told me never to start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence--I was trying to break free."

"To bake a cake in the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger."

"If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent  propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast."

"When does a war end? When can I say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?"

"The time, while pruning a basket of green beans over the sink, you said, out of nowhere, "I'm not a monster. I'm a mother."

"I came to know, in those afternoons, that madness can sometimes lead to discovery, that the mind, fractured and short-wired, is not entirely wrong."

"He was only nine but has mastered the dialect  of damaged American fathers."

"Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war."

"We sidestep ourselves in order to move forward."

"I was once foolish enough to believe knowledge would clarify, but some things are so gauzed behind layers of syntax and semantics, behind days and hours, names forgotten, salvaged and shed, that simply knowing the wound exists does nothing to reveal it."

"A storm of mother."

"That she was waiting. Because that's what mothers do. They wait. They stand still until their children belong to someone else."

"We were exchanging truths, I realized, which is to say, we were cutting one another."

"I never wanted to build a "body of work," but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work."

"Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?"

"A page, turning, is a wing lifted with no twin, and therefore no flight. And yet we are moved."

"Remember: The rules, like streets, can only take you to known places. Underneath the grid is a field--it was always there--where to be lost is never to be wrong, but simply more.

As a rule, be more."

"What have we become to each other if not what we've done to each other?"

"All this time I told myself we were born from war--but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty.
     Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence--but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it."

"To be gorgeous, you must first be seen, but to be seen allows you to be hunted."





Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco
Mourning Diary by Roland Barthe
Roland Barthe by Roland Barthe
50 Cent

Is Trevor pointing us toward the Trevor Project?

When Love Begins

Don’t Hesitate

–Mary Oliver

If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the
case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.

53 Months

Hundreds of Purple Octopus Moms Are Super Weird, and They're Doomed

January Gill O'Neil

I'd like to be under the sea

In an octopus' garden in the shade.

—Ringo Starr

The article called it “a spectacle.” More like a garden than a nursery: 

hundreds of purple octopuses protecting clusters of eggs 

while clinging to lava rocks off the Costa Rican coast. 

I study the watery images: thousands of lavender tentacles 

wrapped around their broods. Did you know there’s a female octopus 

on record as guarding her clutch for 53 months? That’s four-and-a-half years 

of sitting, waiting, dreaming of the day her babies hatch and float away. 

I want to tell my son this. He sits on the couch next to me clutching his phone, 

setting up a hangout with friends. The teenage shell is hard to crack. 

Today, my heart sits with the brooding octomoms: not eating, always on call, 

always defensive, living in stasis in waters too warm to sustain them. 

No guarantees they will live beyond the hatching. Not a spectacle 

but a miracle any of us survive.

The Terrible Victory

Perhaps the World Ends Here 

by Joy Harjo

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

"Perhaps the World Ends Here" from The Woman Who Fell From the Sky by Joy Harjo. 

Five-Dollar Bills

The August Preoccupations

Catherine Barnett



So this morning I made a list

of obsessions and you were on it.

And waiting, and forgiveness, and five-dollar bills,

and despots, telescopes, anonymity, beauty,

silent comedy, and waiting.

I could forswear all these things

and just crawl back into the bed

you and I once slept in.

What would happen then?

Play any film backwards and it’s elegy.

Play it fast-forward it’s a gas.

I try not to get attached.

But Lincoln!

I see stars when I look at him.

How Good

JULY

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz



The figs we ate wrapped in bacon.

The gelato we consumed greedily:

coconut milk, clove, fresh pear.

How we’d dump hot espresso on it

just to watch it melt, licking our spoons

clean. The potatoes fried in duck fat,

the salt we’d suck off our fingers,

the eggs we’d watch get beaten

’til they were a dizzying bright yellow,

how their edges crisped in the pan.

The pink salt blossom of prosciutto

we pulled apart with our hands, melted

on our eager tongues. The green herbs

with goat cheese, the aged brie paired

with a small pot of strawberry jam,

the final sour cherry we kept politely

pushing onto each other’s plate, saying,

No, you. But it’s so good. No, it’s yours.

How I finally put an end to it, plucked it

from the plate, and stuck it in my mouth.

How good it tasted: so sweet and so tart.

How good it felt: to want something and

pretend you don’t, and to get it anyway.

Which wife?

Witch-Wife

Edna St. Vincent Millay - 1892-1950


She is neither pink nor pale,

 And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale, 

 And her mouth on a valentine. 

She has more hair than she needs; 

  In the sun 'tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads, 

 Or steps leading into the sea. 

 She loves me all that she can, 

  And her ways to my ways resign; 

 But she was not made for any man, 

  And she never will be all mine.

Writing in a time of Cholera

This is Just to Say

I have written

a page

of words

despite

toddlers torn

the wall, funded

federal death penalty

Forgive us

my words

so cold

and so still

We are what we repeatedly do

Wonder

[ASKING]
By Barbara Reyes

there is ghazal swimming inside of her, wanting to be born. on the matter of foretelling, of small miracles, cactus flowers in bloom on this city fire escape, where inside your tongue touches every inch of her skin, where you lay your hand on her belly and sleep. here, she fingers the ornate remains of ancient mosques. here, some mythic angel will rise from the dust of ancestors’ bones. this is where you shall worship, at the intersections of distilled deities and memory’s sharp edges. the country is quite a poetic place; water and rock contain verse and metaphor, even wild grasses reply in rhyme. you are not broken. she knows this having captured a moment of lucidity; summer lightning bugs, sun’s rays in a jelly jar.

this is not a love poem, but a cove to escape the flux, however momentary. she is still a child, confabulating the fantastic; please do not erode her wonder for the liquid that is your language. there is thunderstorm in her chest, wanting to burst through her skin. this is neither love poem nor plea. this is not river, nor stone.

Barbara Jane Reyes, "Asking" from Poeta en San Francisco. Copyright © 2005 by Barbara Jane Reyes. 

Pass the Popcorn

HABITATION

Margaret Atwood

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert 
                    the unpainted stairs 
at the back where we squat 
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire 

“Habitation” excerpted from Selected Poems 1965–­1975 by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1987 by Margaret Atwood. 

https://poets.org/poem/habitation

bath water

"Soaping together

is sacred to us.

Washing each other's shoulders.

You can fuck

anyone---but with whom can you sit 

in water?"

Ilya Kaminsky

#DeafRepublic

Tiny Waves

Artichokes

by Bianca Stone


I bet I’ll never appear in a dream or a summer dress
or next door. Displaying on one hand my prowess, the other
my difficultness, I bet there will be just enough pain
to keep me alive, long enough for the moon to be mine,
just as the sea is of women: the cockle, the star,
and the movements of the earth. Just as
the whale, stuck in its baleen grin, climbs up
out of the depths and moves to its hidden
spawning grounds—

I don’t know. What is it to be seen? I can forget
it’s language I long for. Man and his ciphers
cannot save me. Meaning cannot not pile me up
with more meaning. I go off like a firework
in the yard. I take the limbs off myself
and club the air—for the dead women of television
displayed artistically in the woods, for the details
of their hair, for their pale skin, their now foul,
ravaged cunts—do you have to be thus
to be avenged? I don’t know.

I’ve seen the last of it: an ache.
To be saved. There are wildfires
switching course to worry about.
I take my daughter to the lake and watch her feel the tiny waves.
A seagull lifts a sandwich right from my hands.
I take out my tired breast. And of having felt
like a small event for so long—having felt
like an artichoke, scraped away at with the front teeth,
one scale at a time, worked down
to the meaty heart, but with the ultimate
disappointment of meagre flesh—
of being thus, I bet I will live again.
I bet I will appear in full gear, the armor
of ugly indefinite livability, the real body,
alive or in decay—I’ll appear
like a thundering, I’ll save
myself. And you. And you.









Bianca Stone is a poet and a visual artist.
Her most recent book is “The Möbius Strip Club of Grief.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/artichokes

Blurred

The Forest

José González

Why didn't you tell
Why didn't I know
Landscapes blurred by rain
Mountains covered in snow

Why didn't I see
The forest on fire behind in snow

Why didn't I feel
Why didn't you show
The cracks under the bridge
The gaps along the road

Why didn't I see
The forest on fire behind the trees

Why didn't I see
The forest on fire behind the trees

https://youtu.be/FBqYsRdglnY