"to the bone" by Dorothy Allison
this morning i read this poem with a girl i tutor (who’s not a big fan of poetry) and she loved it. thank you paula bohince.
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this morning i read this poem with a girl i tutor (who’s not a big fan of poetry) and she loved it. thank you paula bohince.
[ID: the poem 'as bee' by paula bohince. poem text reads,
"Forgive my trespass, I mistook for work a crown
of raspberries and custard. Thank you, tartlet, thank you,
Miss, for arranging it on a doily on a saucer, thank you, Nature
for these hypnotizing concentrics. My mother
(did I have one?) was likewise hypnotic. My queen,
she used and tossed me, thoughtless, from the palace.
But this isn’t a poem of woe. I’m illiterate
to that emotion. Spackled with sugar,
I’ve swum through dispassionate debris. I’m ready
to lie, freakish and freezing, in a berry.
This is my first and only spring on earth. I get it.
I’m free as an orphan who’s aged out of a baffling system.
Still, the snowfall mornings. Still, the rosy sometimes.
To be alone in this world is fatal. I accept that.
It was all a blur, anyway. No biography. A complicated coin
paid my passage. Thank you. I won’t be returning."
/end ID]
new poem by me just dropped in amok issue 1 which i don't think will be sold internationally so i have decided to post it here in full. yay!
ALTThere was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想妄淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."
That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
The heart at the center was filled after all.
I wish I could travel through time and transcend language to hold this woman’s hand and tell her “girl, he ain’t shit”
Silver Springs - Fleetwood Mac
Time casts a spell on you,
but you won’t forget me
I know I could have loved you,
but you would not let me
nothig has hit like this since leith ross' we'll never have sex
The Hand – Annabelle Dinda
Every time a guy writes a song, he's a cowboy, a sailor
Playing with the world in his palm like the first pioneer.
Every time he opens his mouth, it's a loud movie trailer
Clipping every image and sound he thinks proves he was here.
A hand, a spike, a physical fight,
A flash of light, a curtain,
A toll, a tithe, the passage of time,
A height, a dive, a burden,
A girl, a night, a typical type,
A siren in the water,
A scroll, a nod, a message from God,
A son, a Holy Father.
Every time a guy writes a song, he's a sailor, a cowboy
Holding out the world in his palm like he made it himself.
Every time I open my mouth, I think, "Wow, what a loud noise!"
Still on the soapbox, just hoping I seem underwhelmed.
The hand, the pen, the writing again,
The Wind around the Willow,
The felt, the ice, the passage of time,
The melting down the window,
The ‘now’, the ‘then’, the thinking of "when",
The bottle in the ocean,
The strike, the pause, the message from -
God forbid she shows emotion.
This isn't rage, it's worth a mention.
This is a fake internal tension.
Sometimes, I spread out one opinion
And stand on its back to gauge attention.
This isn't rage, it's too specific.
I like to hate symbolic limits.
This is no statement, I'm complicit.
This is a dream, GOD put me in it.
A hand, a spike, a physical fight,
The Wind around the Willow,
A toll, a tithe, the passage of time,
The melting down the window,
The now, the then, the thinking of "when",
The siren in the water,
The strike, the pause, a message from God.
Does that make me His daughter?
A hand, a shove, a valley, a jump,
A score under the wire,
Just sweep me up, just sweep me up
And take me somewhere higher,
Just sweep me up, just sweep me up
And take me somewhere higher,
Just sweep me up, just sweep me up
And take me somewhere higher.
Holy shit this song hits like a fucking truck
I feel like I just had a religious experience
Big Thief | Mary
and i know that someday soon i’ll see you
though now you’re out of sight
and you’ll kiss me like you used to
in the january night
what did you tell me mary when you were there so sweet and very
full of field and stars you carried all of time
oh and heavens when you looked at me your eyes were like machinery your hands were making artifacts in the corner of my mind
God
by Michael Bazzett
for Ada Limón
Look, it’s not that I believe in him. Nor he
in me. We have moved beyond all that.
I just like having someone there in the dark.
Usually we sit in silence, waiting for passing
headlights to glide across the ceiling and knock
stray prayers loose from where they got
stuck on their way out, so many years ago.
It’s almost like finding old piñata candy,
says God, picking one from the floorboards.
He unwraps it, takes a quick taste. Winces.
Nods like he’s just remembered something
for the thousandth, thousandth time.
What is it? I ask. It’s kind of like chewing
tinfoil, he says. All that aching naked hope.
A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew's Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge (1851–52) by John Everett Millais
[The art] depicts a pair of young lovers and is given a dramatic twist because the woman, who is Catholic, is attempting to get her beloved, who is Protestant, to wear the white armband declaring allegiance to Catholicism. The young man firmly pulls off the armband at the same time that he gently embraces his lover, and stares into her pleading eyes. The incident refers to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre on August 24, 1572, when around 3,000 French Protestants (Huguenots) were murdered in Paris, with around 20,000 massacred across the rest of France. A small number of Protestants escaped from the city through subterfuge by wearing white armbands.