"She hovers at the window, alert to how the house breathes, exhalations as the front door opens, shudders. She hears movement. Footfalls, creaks, the downstairs kitchen cupboards. House-breaths rattle her apartment door the slightest, ripple. If the house was a body, the hallway and the staircase might be lungs."
"firefighters have been tirelessly protecting
I want to hug them and say thank you
can’t extinguish the fear and anxiety
we live in a different world now."
The moon
finds holes
in adobe houses
then slips in
to sit on the floor.
-- 'On the Floor' by Humberto Ak'abal, trans. from Spanish by Michael Bazzett #SundaySentence#TodaysPoem#poetry#bookstodon
"I choose, for moderate comfort, a thin tree
whose tallest branch has yet one leaf
hunched brown. A flag? Defiance? Obstinance?
A declaration I suppose.
I make it mine."
"while in heaven right next door somebody has plugged
a radio into a long extension cord and music from the local radio station has scared
the raccoons away and bushels of corn are picked by a woman who loves the feel
of the perfect ears in her hands because this is her heaven you see not the heaven
of raccoons"
Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it’s the emptiness
that makes a wheel work
pots are fashioned from clay
but it’s the hollow
that makes a pot work
windows and doors are carved for a house
but it’s the spaces
that make a house work
existence makes a thing useful
but nonexistence makes it work.
— Lao-tzu from ‘Taoteching: With Selected Commentaries from the Past 2,000 Years’, tr. from Chinese by Red Pine
"Next morning I'll confess I overmarmaladed
the toast on purpose, trying to make up
for the chromatic deficiency, for orangelessness,
though the sky begins to show at times
we can observe, now, look -"