Perverse Pleasure

Madhuja'r jonmodiney lekha kobita - Anindya Chatterjee জুলাই মাসে,

কোনও কোনও জন্মদিন আসে।

ঘরের পাশে,ভিড়ের বাসে

স্মৃতির ঘাসে,

জলোচ্ছ্বাসে জন্মদিন আসে।

এমনই এক জুলাইজাতক

কলেজস্ট্রিটের বৃষ্টিস্নাতক

তারই জন্যে শুভেচ্ছারা

ছিটিয়ে জল পাগলপারা

এখন অবশ্য বারিশধারা

শহরছাড়া…

দূরে কোথাও দূরে কোথাও

অন্য মুলুক অন্য পাড়া

তা-ও দেখি মেঘ সৃষ্টিছাড়া

টিপ করে টুপ ফেলল গালে

জন্মদিনের সাতসকালে

জন্ম নিল ইলশেগুড়ি,

জন্ম নিল জলছবিরা,

জুলাইকালে জুলাইকালে

চালের পায়েস গুনছে অতীত

অমুক সালে তমুক সালে

লংশটে,

আষাঢ়মাসেই এসব ঘটে

আরবজলের সাগরতটে

কী আষাঢ়ে গপ্পো বলো

কী আষাঢ়ে গল্প বটে

শুভ জন্মদিন মধুজা

Perverse Pleasure

Cynthia Cruz


Phosphorescence

Photographs of photographs and Polaroids
of stacks of books on fragments
and photographs and pamphlets
on letters sent and imminent
collisions. What the body does not know
it wants. And the mind.
In the song I wrote,
I said I wanted to be
like you, but then
I pulled back.
I am afraid most of the time
of my own intensity.
Not its kinesis, its brilliant light
and energy, but that it might
frighten you.
I have tried my whole life
to contain it, hold it
back. Make myself
into the perfect song,
the most contained
poem. But now I am
letting go of all that.
I have taken to photographing
my every moment
in an attempt to locate
the place where I lost myself.
When the body and the mind conflate
or, rather, when the body and language.
That is the moment I have been waiting for.

Perverse Pleasure

Forty-Four
- Devin Johnston

In a deck chair
under castellated clouds
Campari and tonic
bitterness
and through damp air
the gleam of a distant lake
the property of stillness
or tang of iron-heavy water
turrets and castellations
September days
with a few acquaintances
talking seldom
and then always
in dry tones
of scuffed gravel
horseradish in vinegar
the snort before a sneeze
a piquant phrase
and wake of laughter
ceruleans
on wooded slopes
along the Cuivre
appetite
without fulfillment
no more outrageous hopes
one mountain pale
beyond another
 

Perverse Pleasure

June 7. To get a head start
by  Joanne Kyger

                             Yea, but I'm too old
                             Yea, but I'm growing too old
                             To wait around this long
                             ______________________

                             Nobody wants to sit with me
                             _______________________

Forgive this interlude for a while: I became infinitely
glamorous and careless, like the best memory, of past
loves.
___________________________________________

I often tell women's secrets to men
___________________________________________

It was open, in the clear gray, morning. Babies
cries, and a dog barks, birds shrill from the top
of the trees.
            I'm going to run away from all this.
I am going to enter into another dimension.
            Oh my little head and hope. I am projected
ahead. I will realize the continuum from the past.
I will not be abusive, I am smitten in glory.
           I am full of hopeful rushing. On into
the high out rocking waves.

Perverse Pleasure

Map

Naomi Shihab Nye

Once

by mistake

she tore a map

in half.

She taped it back,

but crookedly.

Now all the roads

ended in water.

There were mountains

right next to her hometown.

Wouldn't that be nice

if it were true?

I'd tear a map

and be right next 

to you.

Perverse Pleasure

Love Song

by  Denise Levertov

Your beauty, which I lost sight of once
for a long time, is long,
not symmetrical, and wears
the earth colors that make me see it.

A long beauty, what is that?
A song
that can be sung over and over,
long notes or long bones.

Love is a landscape the long mountains
define but don't
shut off from the
unseeable distance.

In fall, in fall,
your trees stretch
their long arms in sleeves
of earth-red and

sky-yellow, a little
lop-sided. I take
long walks among them. The grapes
that need frost to ripen them

are amber and grow deep in the
hedge, half-concealed,
the way your beauty grows in long tendrils
half in darkness.

Perverse Pleasure

Diane di Prima

Song for Spring Equinox
 

It is the first day of spring, the children are singing
(they are supposed to be sleeping) the clock is ticking
the cats are waiting for supper, one of them pregnant
kittens to herald the spring, nothing is blooming
nothing seems to bloom much around farms, just hayfields and corn
farms are too pragmatic, I look at ads
for hydrangea bushes, which I hate they remind me of brooklyn

for chinese wisteria vines, which I can't picture
but they sound exotic and mysterious
a kind of blue purple, I decide I'll get some

will I be disappointed, will they be yellow?
will I hate the Shetland pony we are buying
will we run out of wholewheat flour this week
before a new supply drives up from the city?

oh, it is very like being a pioneer,
but then everything is in this country, and in the country
especially. it was like being a pioneer on 5th street, too
and houston street, and amsterdam avenue
and in brooklyn, under the streetlights growing up
rollerskating at dusk with stickball games in the street
was the most pioneery of all,

it is slightly boring,
it tastes a lot of the times crossword puzzle
and ordering things thru the mail, which never come
or turn out wrong, or come the wrong color (wisteria)

I can't blame Alan for planning to go to India
to free his kundalini, so that his ears peel
or something dreadful happens to his physique
we are built for the exotic, we americans, this landscape leaves us
as open as a piece of chocolate cream pie 

Perverse Pleasure

Impermanence By Alex Dimitrov Issue no. 227 (Winter 2018) The first ending. And knowing it would end I wanted another. Lover, summer, pen with which to write it all down. The first disappointment. Which is not remembered but lives in the body. And how familiar it became. To take  the same walk home or lean over ledges,  to say my own name when meeting someone.  Again and again for the last time: the taste of salt in the afternoon. Flowers for no one—alive and sold on the street. What did I think was promised in being? The way a stranger can finish you off. Once only. And never the same after that. After knowledge.  How people are being detained  and shot with our money.  All of which cannot prepare us for death of which I am a student  and which is this country's business: the permanence of others. Even our cruelty toward one another. Will end. And I know  that looking at the night sky is me looking at the past. At light that's long escaped and travels alone but won't always.

Perverse Pleasure

Green Night By Edward Hirsch Issue no. 182 (Fall 2007) (Summer, 1982) We walked down the path to breakfast. The morning swung open like an iron gate. We sat in Adirondack chairs and argued for hours about the self—it wasn't personal— and the nature of nature, the broken Word, the verse of God in fragments. We trotted back and forth to readings. The trees were the greenest I had ever seen. We cut bread from a large brown loaf at a long wooden table in the mountains. A farmer hayed the meadows and the afternoon flared around us. Pass the smoky flask. Pass the cigarettes: twenty smouldering friends in a package. We swam in the muddy pond at dusk. The sky was a purple I had never seen. Someone was always hungover, Scheming with rhymes, hanging out. Nothing could quench our thirst for each other. At the bonfire, we flamed with words. The houses were named after trees. I slept with someone at the top of a maple. It was a green night to be a poet in those days. We didn't care if the country didn't care about us. Image: Pinterest

Perverse Pleasure

Diffused love
by Suchi Govindarajan
:::::::::

To grow up without cold seasons is
to find an obsession dusted with snow
For too long, my sun kept drawing shadows
But in my dreams, I would see tree trunks
branching into fragile hands
my bare prayer held up against the white

I imagined the weighted blanket of it
how it might quieten my heart's chaos
make my longings more calm and austere

In days when sunspots flecked my lashes
and the sand felt blister-rough as though it
would fuse into glass and catch the glare,
I dreamt of becoming a migrant bird
compelled to find routes away from the sun
I would follow every winter wind and current
And as calendars faded to blue-ink endings,
I would fly to lands full of diffused light

Like the Earth, I too would complete my orbit
pulled by a strange and foreign love.

Perverse Pleasure

The Root of Mother is Moth
By Terese Svoboda
Issue no. 106 (Spring 1988)

At dusklight she slips
into acetate underclothing,
all rustling.
                Has she slept
all day? Or is that housedress
draped over the hassock warm? From her motion,
  one of submission, her pale arms
                 upraised, the slip sliding,
           talc issues invisibly.

Mother is faceless so far up in the dark.
Just her torso glows,
and the color around her takes on the design
of a falling leaf, grey-yellow plaid.

     From the mirror, she draws what little light
there is inside her, and sighs.
                           But she is really very young
                 and will think so later.

Now nothing can claim her.
               I am quiet, all chrysalis,
                         hidden in her closet.