“Jars” by Fidelis Tan
Intriguing opening paragraph, predictable plot, but I was hooked and I read the whole thing.
(The thing with online fiction is you often read it while connected to the internet. So many distractions! So if you have a story that’s interesting enough to read and finish, then it’s worth sharing, I think.)
I also liked:
“What the Chicken Knows (Or, The Eight Stages of Grief)” by Maria Pia Vibar Benosa
— by Petra Magno
Sappho Beyond Hades
Jo Walton
The shades are silent and there is no making.
She misses the warmth of sunlight on stone
and the sound of children playing.
There are children here, but they are all so grave,
like their elders, moving gravely through death’s halls.
She misses the bright constellations, she misses burning.
She has begun to forget the sound of the sea
and the heft of words.
When she has forgotten how to yearn
when not even blood will bring back names to her
she will slip down through Lethe to begin once more
with “Aaa, oooh, milky goo”, and that is a star, and this
is what it means when you get the words right.
Snowshoe to Otter Creek
Stacie Cassarino
love lasts by not lasting
—Jack Gilbert
I love that Philippines Free Press has already updated its website. New stories/poems every week!
Some recommendations:
“The Battle of Ayala” by Glenn Diaz
“Two Poems” by Allan Justo Pastrana
the divining that doesn’t reach the ear, as all hear,
from the gut, pure animal pain instead when the car
they’re in passes by—so what of the poor pig lying
near the gutter, writhing for being alive still, the throat
slit, from where too much blood gushed,
from what seems to be the only opening, like a window
alone that you lean to, pocket of air, the middle
you once dreamed about, that is as hollow as what a body
can be made of. That no one recalls the last word. That no-
body makes a sound—
* * *
Another thing I love: that friends and fellow writers are telling me that they enjoyed “Summer Evening“, with Tin Lao saying it’s “sick, a la Inglorious Basterds/Pulp Fiction”.
Go read! /whore
EMERGENCY POSTCARD TO A.O.
It’s hard for me to hear over the din
of this living, the racket of oceans
& the gulls overhead. I started to forget
about me & thought maybe
it was for the best. Probably I had my greatest
ever shot already & all that comes next
is some new disappointments. Remind me
again that together is something we can’t
do alone.
—Nate
EMERGENCY POSTCARD TO L.R.
Dandelion stalks populate the yard, reaching
in rusty light, & who knows why
their fuzzy heads are vacant? I can see
the dew on the grass from where I’m sitting
just like I can hear you in your voice.
Who would question my desire
to run outside & feel the dangerous AM
dampness or to risk it all to tell you about it?
—Nate
EMERGENCY POSTCARD TO J.F.
All these birds wake me up just like always
though the me that they sing to is new every day
& relieved to find out a body doesn’t have to do
everything. I’m trying to believe it. I’ve only
ever wanted a reason to slow down, an angle to navigate
that made me feel worth it. Yesterday, I drove
the wrong way from you; soon I’ll jump back
& try the sequence again – you & me lost
together & looking for landmarks that tell you what’s
right: dragonfly light, summer bees exhausted
in the window, that wherever we are is okay.
—Nate
AGNI Online: What Depresses Me by Juanita Brunk.
I vowed to document every memorable piece I read online or offline, so I’m sharing this.
or to all that comes and goes, people
and things that arrive
and then vanish
with a brevity that might, on another day,
from another heart, more valiant,
less fickle,
appear as radiance,
and the grief, praise.
So beautiful it melts the heart.
Heavy Things
by Denver Buston
the world cannot bear the weightlessness of sparrows
or the confetti of our illegible addresses
the moon’s breathless ascent
the world cannot bear it
so the world makes heavy things
like airplanes
and skyscrapers
like your heart
and heavy things fall down
because the world cannot bear them either
I get bored a lot lately. I’m struggling with this story I’m trying to finish – I’d write continuously and just hit a brick wall. It’s infuriating. But then – Lent is coming, which means more time to sleep and be with the family in Bulacan. More time to write. Also, the boyfriend and I are celebrating five months today. That doesn’t sound too bad.
And I found this poem! Stunning. Boredom brings great things. Sometimes.
* This is not to be confused with the smallest measurement of time.
______
Policy mandates a period of 30 seconds for subway doors to remain open to allow for the flush of entering and exiting people. An observational study has shown, though, that the doors remain open an average of 12 seconds. This is enough time for two people in love to separate, but as was one instance on May 18, 2007, it is not enough time to reunite.
______
You know you are close to the end when your train pulls into the station with droplets of rain clinging to its sides.
______
Ways we successfully pass time from Manhattan to Queens, Queens to Brooklyn, Brooklyn to Brooklyn:
The NYT crossword puzzle (Wednesday).
Cat Power’s rendition of “Silver Stallion.” (Repeat as necessary.)
A game of “Who would you eat? Who would you fuck?”
If, by chance, you have a moment to love something, anything, with heartbreak, choose
to do so. Exercise, though, what is advised and advised and advised as caution—
consider the consequences of such seconds.
______
Tapping the face of your father’s watch will not stop you from disappointing him today. You will do so again tomorrow. And the day after.
______
Photo from Tumblr. She’s pretty eee. ♥
Stressing over not writing (as in, Oh my god why am I not writing) is starting to become…stressful, and so I’ll stop worrying about it for now. I’m taking a break! I’ll watch DVDs! And eat! A lot! Read books and think and be peaceful. Lovely. Lovely plan.
Here, read a beautiful poem from Dora Malech while I gather my wits.
Let Me Explain
by Dora Malech
Spring, and the tulips urged me
stick to schedule, flower furiously.
I asked for mountains but settled
for some flood-buckled linoleum.
Air was the only sure thing
and even she put up a fight.
I called my eyes near-sighted,
my hands near misses, my arms
close calls, my face old hat,
my head a bluff and raised
my body, a wishing machine.
Stars, thanked. Days, numbered.
I wore a coat because you can’t trust
weather and I looked like rain.
Good poems make you want to write something pretty. :) Here are two from Katie Ford.
“Colosseum” is excellent. A bit long, so just read it over here. When one is the site of so much pain, one must pray/ to be abandoned.
She talks about her collection in this interview. (I want a copy of it eeee. ♥)
Here’s another poem:
Nocturne
by Katie Ford
I can see the whole city, lights edging the harbor like yellow pins in uneven
cloth beneath the hands of a woman cutting the measured lines of a dress:
when it is done she will put it on to see if it fits.
Blackish harbor, facing east no facing west, lights
meaning anything but exit, ships waiting for dawn so they can navigate out,
fog in the cove, cigarette smoke in this
restaurant at the top of the Prudential.
Please do not use your hands to touch my face.
Please let me be decided.
Lights fringe the harbor, she is sewing a dress a centimeter too small,
you tap off the ashes, I lean into the winding smoke because it is not a myth,
because I can bring even an ending into the body.
The city now unsettled beneath us. My face eye-level in the class.
Please help me get up from this table.
Please put that thing down.
She turns an edge under. Smoke is taken in, smoke like a text
etched into two tablets of lung. Here, and here: Sinai.
Atoms fill their due portion of each ash.
Please look somewhere else with your eyes.
She undoes the knotted threads where she wants the blue and gray strips closer
to each other, crop of lavender, dust.
Please do not touch my face.
When she is done she takes off her clothes, raises her arms to get into the dress.
Please do not touch my face.
The harbor at its darkest, stillest, like a question in a throat.
I stared at the ruin, the powder of the dead now beneath ground, a crowd assembled and breathing with indiscernible sadnesses, light from other light, far off and without explanation. Somewhere unseen the ocean deepened then and now into more ocean, the black fins of the bony fish obscuring its bottommost floor, carcasses of mollusks settling, casting one last blur of sand, unable to close again. Next to me a woman, the seventeen pins it took to set her limb, to keep every part flush with blood. * In the book on the ancient mayfly which lives only four hundred minutes and is, for this reason, called ephemeral, I couldn't understand why the veins laid across the transparent sheets of wings, impossibly fragile, weren't blown through in their half-day of flight. Or how that design has carried the species through antiquity with collapsing horses, hailstorms and diffracted confusions of light. * If I remember correctly what's missing broke off all at once, not into streets but into rows portioned off for shade as it fell here, the sun there where the poled awning ended. Didn't the heat and dust funnel down to the condemned as they fought until the animal took them completely? Didn't at least one stand perfectly still? * I said to myself: Beyond my husband there are strange trees growing on one of the seven hills. They look like intricately tended bonsais, but enormous and with unreachable hollows. He takes photographs for our black folios, thin India paper separating one from another. There is no scientific evidence of consciousness lasting outside the body. I think when I die it will be completely. * But it didn't break off all at once. It turns out there is a fault line under Rome that shook the theater walls slight quake by quake. After the empire fell the arena was left untended and exotic plants spread a massive overgrowth, their seeds brought from Asia and Africa, sewn accidentally in the waste of the beasts. Like our emptying, then aching questions, the vessel filled with unrecognizable faunas. * How great is the darkness in which we grope, William James said, not speaking of the earth, but the mind split into its caves and plinth from which to watch its one great fight. And then, when it is over, when those who populate your life return to their curtained rooms and lie down without you, you are alone, you are quarry. * When the mayflies emerge it is in great numbers from lakes where they have lived in nymphal skins through many molts. At the last a downy skin is shed and what proofed them is gone. Above water there is nothing for them to feed on— they don't even look, except for each other. They form hurried swarms in that starving, sudden hour and mate fully. When it is finished it is said the expiring flies gather beneath boatlights or lampposts and die under them minutely, drifting down in a flock called snowfall. * Nothing wants to break, but this wanted to break, built for slaughter, open arches to climb through, lines of glassless squares above, elaborate pulleys raising the animals on platforms out of the passaged darkness. When one is the site of so much pain, one must pray to be abandoned. When abandonment is that much more—beauty and terror before every witness and suddenly you are not there.
