Four Seasons 2020-2021 Three owls hoot and answer the last full moon of a year of love and terror. * Heavy spring rain. No matter who wraps them, my mother’s legs keep weeping. * For the first time this summer, I’m not wrong when I hear the sound of water. * Wind in the branches, someone’s mother calling, someone else’s childhood skipping from yard to yard. Disability Time to get used to wearing mortality
Dead at Last Dead at last! Dead at last! Now I can see the world as it is floating indifferent like the gull from the hospital window white with black wingtips feeling the currents of air guiding its flight. Perfectly free from compassion for me. Nirvana I can’t find the can opener and then I do. The electrician shows me my name on his forearm “Linda” in pink magic marker which is how he remembers
The Announcement A bird came to see me once, a talking magpie that said, This will happen— and I didn’t so much agree as think, why me? It was arbitrary, as far as I could see. Ordinary—being at hand and being asked to do whatever needs doing. Steadfast as a tattoo that can’t be washed off. A castle that isn’t mine reminds me that this was not my idea, especially considering how inevitable death is,
Family Keepsake My grandmother wanted to die but in the online form, I say no, no family member has died by or attempted suicide because having children, no matter the goal, is still giving life. Because that’s what blood is. The psychiatrist asked if she’d tried to kill herself before.
What a pleasure to introduce five poems by the prolific and brilliant Molly Peacock, queen of rhyme and meter, who has done so much to bring contemporary freshness and zing and a sometimes-startling intimacy to formal poetry. In this grouping, Peacock writes about the death of her husband, Joyce scholar Michael Groden, about the strains of caring for a sick and dying person, no matter how beloved, and about the beginning of a new life
TAKE 4 The cat has barfed in the hall, the laundry threatens avalanche, the kids are pounding the bedroom door, clamoring for lunch. There is simply no time for proper porn. Enter the sex GIF: glorious, animated snippet of smooth, heaving bodies, played on endless loop. The sex GIF is perfectly engineered for time-crunch titillation. A sneaking glance at one’s phone during the daily grind is all one needs to transcend into the erotic. Sex
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*The text in the above work was originally published in Short Talks (Brick Books, 1992) by Anne Carson.
