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Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

It’s said that any dream of weather produces its opposite

Not so much unremembered, as splintered into humid fragments: as in last night’s dream of being taken by the hand and led into a crowded house somewhere in the countryside. Was it some kind of storage shed, or stable? Sacks of grain stacked end to end formed beds, as in a dormitory. Old women spread cotton sheets across them and gestured at what would be my space. The windows had no panes. They looked out over dust-speckled fields, skies the color of soot. You were nowhere to be found. Light bulbs swung from wires in the bathroom stalls. The drains were slow. A child showed me a door that led into a yard. Someone had fixed the rainspout to double as a shower. We tilted our chins up, but only moths swirled out of the shadows, the touch of their wings slighter than drops of rain we were sure would come.

 

In response to small stone (112).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

The life of a painting

Clive Hicks-Jenkins:

A man and a woman were standing in front of my painting Green George, and he was speaking with lively enthusiasm about the work, explaining to her what the artist had been attempting in it, and the technical tricks he’d used to pull off the effects. She gazed up at him adoringly, basking in the light of his knowledge. What he had to say sounded most interesting and plausible. Even I was impressed.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

To/For

This entry is part 23 of 47 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2012

 

Here it is, then: another message to you, sent from this wrought iron table under the dogwood where I sit writing. The birds are masters of solitude or concentration, or ninjas in disguise. They hurtle past, one after the other, intent on one thing at a time. What else would you like to know? I’ve told you about the secret name I was given in childhood to confuse the gods, so liberal with their gifts of illness and malaise; I’ve told you about the black sow my grandfather brought from his farm, a gift on my fifth birthday. I had just been discharged from nearly a month in the hospital— for what, I don’t really know, and cannot remember. They penned it up for the night in the unfinished bathroom, next to the also unfinished kitchen (I think it was being expanded). It kicked at the plywood slats all night and squealed, or bleated. Is that what you call the sound of an animal that knows it is going to be sacrificed in the morning? I didn’t see, but I could hear the men sharpening knives and starting a fire by the guava trees. I shut my ears and burrowed into the bedclothes. They were so happy I had been returned, that time had wrought its little miracles. What did I know, and who was I to say that such a feast was not in fact the payment required? I no longer burned with fevers. The purple eruptions on my lips were gone. The animal’s shirt of hair would be singed, its insides bled, its sacs of bile and pulsing liver hung up in the trees— dark garnets glinting among the leaves.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

How to question authority

This entry is part 34 of 39 in the series Manual

 

Loudly, so the police sirens will be abashed.

Softly, so your blood-sucking interrogator will lean in close where he can be asphyxiated by your garlic breath.

From within, so the authorities will begin to doubt themselves.

From beyond the grave, which affords some form of protection against reprisal.

Through the slogan NO, which, as nitric oxide, reduces blood pressure by expanding the veins during its brief half-life in the bloodstream.

Through songs, which spread by invisible spores and can grow six inches in a day.

In the voice of unreason, since all the reasonable men defer to whomever commands the most barking guns.

Casually, as if walking on hot coals.

Automatically, through negative phototropism.

Surreptitiously, linking to your co-conspirators only through quantum entanglement.

With an absense of authority, which calls the very logic of authority structures into question.

Joyously. Because otherwise what’s the point?

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Liminal

“Did I say the day was a sea? I may have meant the day is a diffusion and a scattering of trajectories…” ~ Seon Joon

Or an inlet. An inlet might be good. Might be a little enclosure, a leading into or away. Marsh, lagoon, bay, sound. Estuary, tide pool, terrace, shelf, strand. As in, to be stranded for a little while with me, myself, and I might learn to work free of pretense, defense— Tonight, even the youngest girl said, If we’re going out for dinner, can it be someplace where there isn’t a lot of noise? Guinness World Records lists the anechoic test chamber of a lab in Minneapolis as the quietest place in the world. They say, sitting in the dark in its double walls of insulated steel, concrete, and fiberglass acoustic wedges, you’d hear your heartbeats echoing, your organs paddling in their shallow pools: you would become the sound. The longest anyone has sat there is three quarters of an hour, before he begged to be released, became disoriented; I believe it. How many times have I woken at dawn from dread spreading through my chest, loud pounding in my ears, the telephone’s insistent chime? My students, facile with their shiny hoard of new discursive phrases, write of the liminal. I lodge there often, where possibility is its most ambiguous flower.

 

In response to cold mountain (55).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Death of the Author

A small pin-striped bird alights
on the dead cherry tree next to the porch
& starts gleaning its breakfast
from crevasses in the decaying wood.
At length I remember its name,
black-and-white warbler—
& in so doing, forget the name of the author
whose Collected Shorter Poems I hold
in my lap. They’re orphaned for more
than a minute by my poor memory.
If I can just get the first letter…
something beginning with a G, perhaps?
That letter like a smile
warped into a grimace…
Or a T, that tall gallows.
The warbler stops to issue his usual
six whispery notes. Bill Knott.

*

I’m the proud owner of 15 new “homepubs”—homemade publications—from the great contemporary poet Bill Knott, who prints them up and bundles them off along with a limited edition print and an original painting to anyone who orders a painting through his website. Check it out. I find I like the whole concept of home pub, especially now that I have a new batch of homebrew ready to drink (more on that soon).

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Ramadan in Istanbul

Human Landscapes:

It’s at night that Ramazan becomes palpable to the nonobservant, and that’s one of the reasons I love it. The whole city becomes as nocturnal as I, by disposition and habit, already am. The streets are lively well past midnight: people stay out late, strolling on the shore, filling sidewalk teahouses in the warm night air. Children are up late too—they don’t fast, but in summer there’s no need to wake for school in the morning, so they’re out and about, walking with their families and playing on the sidewalks. There’s something of a fairground atmosphere: cotton candy and ice-cream and street vendors selling cheap plastic toys. But the gaiety goes hand-in-hand with marks of piety, like the low, continous sounds issuing from the mosques—Qur’an recitation, prayers, ilahi—and the lightbulbs strung between their minarets.

Posted on by Dave Bonta

Changes at the Morning Porch

Tinkering with WordPress sites can be a lot of fun, but often doesn’t produce visible differences as far as site visitors are concerned. This morning’s tinkerings with The Morning Porch, however, have brought one highly visible change that I think dramatically improves the reader’s experience: In the “On this date” sidebar widget, I now include the full text of posts from previous years so one can read them without clicking through. Also, I believe the widget will now change in sync with my timezone rather than stay tied to GMT, as it did before.

I should also note the addition of a new site to the “other micropoetry and microessay blogs” section of the Morning Porch blogroll: Northern Light: A Daybook, by the western Massachusetts-based poet Rosemary Starace, author of Requitements.

*

For those of you who are fellow WordPress geeks, here’s what changed behind the scenes and why. When I moved the site to its current location in late 2009 after two years on Tumblr, none of the posts had titles—Tumblr isn’t as insistent on that point as WordPress is. Rather than do the smart thing and start creating titles at that point, manually pasting the first few words and an ellipsis into the title field of each post going forward, I couldn’t bring myself to let the archived posts remain titleless. So I found a nifty plugin designed for a slightly different purpose, Blogger Title Fix, that would automatically substitute a short excerpt for the title field. It worked pretty well, but I had to hack the hell out of the plugin I used to display “on this date” links so that it would link to the date rather than the (nonexistent) titles. Last year, that plugin—A Year Before—got a major update, but when I upgraded, I found it didn’t play nice with Blogger Title Fix, and since its codebase had been substantially rewritten and I am a terrible coder, I couldn’t figure out how to hack it as I had its predecessor. But at some time in the intervening months I must’ve run across another, newer and more general title-adjusting plugin called Auto Post Title and given it a quick try without thoroughly checking out its features, because I found it unactivated among my plugins at The Morning Porch this morning. This time I realized that one of the things it can substitute for a title is the excerpt, so it was just a matter of radically shortening the standard excerpt length with another plugin, Advanced Excerpt, so my titles wouldn’t be the same length as the posts. (I could also do this via a hack to my functions.php file, of course, but in my opinion such things belong in plugins rather than theme files.)

So I was happy to have replaced an old, unupdated plugin with a newer one, which still leaves me dependent on a plugin where I shouldn’t be, but puts off the day when a major change in WordPress core suddenly makes all the post titles disappear. And then I was able to update to the current version of A Year Before, and oddly enough, what it uses for a post excerpt is still the standard—it’s unaffected by the Excerpt Length plugin—so I was able to include the full text of Morning Porch posts as previously mentioned, which I think adds a whole new dimension to the site. Moral: it pays to reexamine one’s plugin configuration on a regular basis. Just because a given setup works doesn’t mean it’s optimal.

Posted on by Luisa A. Igloria

Preliminaries

This entry is part 22 of 47 in the series Morning Porch Poems: Summer 2012

 

Let us dispense with.
Have you receipts
for my ripened figs?
You took my pleasure,
you skimmed the trees
without so much
as touching down.
I took you for
abundance, unasked-
for sugar, fat in
a time of drought;
in return you pressed
my substance, absently,
into a distant fold—
slip of paper shedding
its metaphors.

 

In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.