Just so you remember who you dealin’ with
The purest snow, we sellin’ white privilege
Designer drugs will turn niggas limitless
Designer clothes, these hoes losing innocence
The book of blow, just know I’m the Genesis.
Open the box, it’s like ten Christmases
My folks in the box is serving life sentences
I live in a world that never leaves witnesses
Just so you remember who you dealin’ with.
Pusha T (excerpts from “Just So You Remember”)
O Love this happened or it did not.
In a room with green walls
my son was born. The cord was torn
too soon, so they cut off
his head to save his heart. He lived
for a long time.
For a long time there was no breath or cry.
When finally he spoke,
he spoke the wide, whorled leaves of corn.
He spoke the crickets
in clusters beneath the sheaves, he sang
the soil in. He sang the wind
in the dune and hush of ebb tide. Some say
he died. Some say he died.
Rebecca Foust
I could hear something from the kitchen
where I stood paring apples for the pie
planned to mark the moment
of my 10-year-old’s playdate, his first
since the move and our first time
with a troop of boys over to trample
the flowerbeds, tear down the old treehouse
and, whooping and laughing,
strip the citrus trees bare. Boys will be boys,
I thought, so so so seduced by the plural-
my son for this day not alone,
but this sound was different.
Not the glorious cacophony
of boys-being-boys, but just one boy-my boy-
lying face down in the dirt
while a hail of green oranges rained down.
I helped him up, wiped his face,
and broke up the circle of boys,
boys with eyes cast down and sometimes
sickled sideways to wink or grin in a way
they thought I couldn’t see. I had a choice
then: make a scene and send them home?
Or, somehow allow them to stay?
There was the pie, and the desolate day ahead,
the desolate tomorrow, and the chain
of desolate yesterdays slung slack behind.
There was my son for whom,
it being his first playdate since the move,
this was a normal playdate, and who,
when I asked, said, You can’t
send them home-they’re my friends!
There was the ER Doc who’d told me
to go home where no one would have to try
to save him, and his nurse, whose glass voice
asked me twice, have you ever prayed?
I needed them on board, and later, the teachers
who wanted to transfer or expel him.
His Sunday-night stomachaches, and the time
I saw him at recess in the bushes, hiding
his eyes so he would not be seen.
So there was all that, and the here-and-now
of a child unable to fathom malice or guile
and able to forgive anyone of anything.
There was also the pie. And, God forgive me,
I let those boys stay.
I practically begged them to stay.
Rebecca Foust
I made soup tonight, with cabbage, chard
and thyme picked outside our back door.
For this moment the room is warm and light,
and I can presume you safe somewhere.
I know the night lives inside you. I know
we made mistakes, dividing you, and hiding
you from inside. I know a trans girl
was knifed last week, another set aflame,
and that these things happen all the time.
I know I lack the words, or all the words
I say are wrong. I know I’ll call, and you
won’t answer, and still I’ll call. I want to tell you
you are loved with all I have, recklessly,
and with abandon, loved the way the cabbage
in my garden near-inverts itself, splayed
to catch each last ray of sun. And how
the feeling furling-in only makes the heart
more dense and green. Tonight it seems like
something one could bear.
Guess what, Dad and I finally figured out Pandora,
and after all those years of silence, our old music
fills the air. It fills the air, and somehow, here,
at this instant and for this instant only
—perhaps three bars—what I recall equals all I feel,
and I remember all the words.
Rebecca Foust
“Barn’s burnt down-now I can see the moon.” –Mizuta Masahide
It’s 52 o’clock & the Project of You
has begun anew: quit drinking
again, start jogging. Floss. Get a clue
about what-it-all-means, what you
mean to do. Wake before noon
now & then. Mend the broken yolk
of your mind; bail its sunk boat.
Meditate. And for God’s sake, eat
more fruit. See the dentist & proctologist;
have some fun. Commit at least one
unoriginal sin (with a condom, please,
& without a gun). Go to the barn, burn
it down, burn the day. Then you can
see the moon, without yourself in the way.
Rebecca Foust
I was thirteen, and there was a boy’s
mouth where my legs met. My heart beat
like a bird caught in a bag, let’s say
for her plumage. I could smell his want,
thirteen and there was a boy, and I became
something salt and sweet
where my legs met. My heart like a bird
swelled and split
the clear air with its song. I was the must,
the first press wine,
thirteen, and only this boy and the needles
under the pines,
that cedar bed, fragrant and ancient as dust
and where my legs met-thirst-
a boy, my heart like a bright, caught bird.
Rebecca Foust
Sắp đến ngày giỗ mẹ rồi
Con trai nhớ mẹ bồi hồi mẹ ơi
Nhớ hình dáng mẹ một đời
Lưng khom bóng xế chơi vơi bãi bờ
Nhớ thời lúc thuở bé thơ
Ầu ơ mẹ hát giấc mơ canh dài
Nhớ khi trái gió trở trời
Đêm năm canh mẹ thức thời năm canh
Khi con đã lớn trưởng thành
Tình thương của mẹ càng thêm rộng dài
Lo về cuộc sống tương lai
Lo luôn hạnh phúc trọn đời cho con
Nay giờ mẹ mãi chẳng còn
Con thương nhớ mẹ héo mòn mẹ ơi
Công lao của mẹ biển trời
Sông sâu núi thẳm chẳng vơi nổi còn
Ước gì giờ mẹ bên con
Để con đáp trả đền ơn hỡi người
Nhưng nào ước được mẹ ơi
Mẹ đi… đi mãi… xa rồi mãi xa…
Phú Quang
It’s not my hands that are shaking—it’s my mind.
Cut off my head!
That’s where the pain lies.
Mishima believed sincerity was found in the entrails.
This must be a mistranslation.
I think he meant reality.
Hope is the dark part of morning,
The trees and not the sky behind.
A glimmer without a color.
Most people want justice
But in absence of justice
They will take vengeance.
As if dying was peak existence.
We called it sweet
In the cherry season of history.
Elisa Gabbert
There was a metal band that was just called Death.
I used to think I wasn’t afraid of death, but actually what I wasn’t afraid of was being dead.
You can’t attend your own funeral, but you have to attend your own death.
You are going to die of something.
I hope I die of boredom in my sleep.
Do you ever remember being so excited about the future you were afraid you might die before it happened?
I mean, who cares, of course, democracy is dead.
Death wish, free will, cause and effect, happiness as misery.
I wonder if the wealthy dinosaurs were the last to die.
Hemingway titled a book Death in the Afternoon, which is the best possible name for a cocktail, then invented a cocktail named after it. I am extremely jealous of this whole move.
I don’t actually want to die laughing.
“Only one image of Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe has been authenticated: a watercolor portrait painted several hours after her death.”
There was 100% a culture of dead bodies are cool.
Is a beautiful woman still beautiful even if all men everywhere are dead?
Vanity ends with death.
Who wants to be present in the moment? I want to die when an asteroid hits my cryogenic chamber.
Naps, but for death.
You can’t actually sleep when you’re dead.
The secret to immortality is boredom. If you’re bored enough you’ll never die.
Die with dignity like Benjamin Guggenheim.
Death by attrition. War of natural causes.
Death has an anchoring, as in dragging-down, effect, so, don’t die.
“Sex” and “death” kind of rhyme.
You can sleep in your deathbed.
Sappho: “To die is evil. The gods think so, Else they would die.”
Cry now, die later. Move to Europe, smoke and die cool.
I want to die someday.
I don’t want to die laughing.
Elisa Gabbert
Once as a kid, I was so bored at my parents’ office that I made a deck of cards.
How bored are dogs? Pretty bored, I think.
I wonder what would bore a tortoise.
I don’t trust books that aren’t a little boring.
It’s almost like there should be different words for “boring because simple” and “boring because complex.”
You can call this banality versus tedium, or “bad boring” versus “good boring.” Kubrick movies are often great while also boring.
Whether something is boring or not has nothing to do with how good it is.
You could also call “boring because complex” interesting-boring (boring in an interesting way) or slow-interesting (interesting, but at a pace that sometimes resembles boredom).
To state the obvious, all good poetry is slow-interesting.
I often wonder why having a beverage makes something boring more interesting.
I wonder why we don’t get bored in the shower.
Michel Siffre lived alone in a cave in Texas for six months and got so bored he contemplated suicide, making it look like an accident.
I heard on the radio that lazy people have higher IQs—because their minds are more active, they don’t get bored doing nothing.
I don’t think this is true.
Some people outside are having a boring conversation about dogs in general.
When it rains it’s boring.
When it rains it bores holes into your body. Turns out it was acid rain!
Being so bored you actually start crying must be a transformative experience.
Just speaking for myself here but I love being bored.
Like to me, sex is not art. Once it’s over it’s boring again.
We’re in the bargaining stage of civilization, and it’s boring.
Civilization got bored with itself.
Pretty cool how we’ve evolved to find peace boring!
A boring man war movie.
“This is boring.” “No, it interrogates boringness!” “This is doggerel.” “No, it interrogates talent!”
What, poets can’t be bored by eclipses?
How boring not to have a crush on anyone.
You can only be bored almost to death.
Did you ever have a kiss so bad you felt like you were the bad kisser?
I think this is related to how boring people make me feel boring.
Did you know that you can trick people into being more interesting by being more interesting yourself?
I used to be bored around my parents, which made them boring. In my thirties I was shocked to learn that I didn’t know everything about them.
So if you have to spend time with boring people, try being DAZZLING.
I’m glad Andre Gregory knows the Andre character is a “raging narcissist” mansplaining bore.
My most common thought while lucid dreaming is “God, what a boring dream.”
My TED Talk topic would be “Jiro Dreams of Sushi Is Not an Enjoyable Movie.”
I would just make people watch it and stop it every now and then to say, “See? This is boring and oppressive.”
A totally fascist approach to sushi.
Execution in art has become a great tromping bore but: sorry artists, you still have to execute.
I sometimes think After Hours is the worst movie that’s anyone’s favorite movie.
I associate it strongly with Joe Versus the Volcano, since I think of both as somehow “angry boring.”
It takes a special kind of mediocrity to be offensive and boring at the same time.
I’m so over the “boring on purpose” defense.
I think I mean if the language is boring there should at least be some emotions or ideas or something.
Boring through, or thoroughly boring?
I was very boring today.
Sometimes the dystopia was boring.
At least everyone was boring at the same time about something inherently interesting.
Elisa Gabbert