Daphne Gottlieb Famous Quotes
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All the black leather
she needs
is the E-Z boy recliner
where her love is parked
with one of his hands wrapped around a remote,
the other, a bottle of beer.
She's right. It's kinky.
The way he doesn't look away
from the TV,
as her head bobs
in his lap
like a fisherman's float
on a nature program,
hectic
with the pace
his breath sets.
His crotch swells
under her mouth's
prowess. He's such
a sweetheart
he waits
until the
commercials
to come.
I go through periods of not writing. Until there's something I can't find in the world that I need, so I write.
MY MOTHER GETS DRESSED
It is impossible for my mother to do even
the simplest things for herself anymore
so we do it together,
get her dressed.
I choose the clothes without
zippers or buckles or straps,
clothes that are simple
but elegant, and easy to get into.
Otherwise, it's just like every other day.
After bathing, getting dressed.
The stockings go on first.
This time, it's the new ones,
the special ones with opaque black triangles
that she's never worn before,
bought just two weeks ago
at her favorite department store.
We start with the heavy, careful stuff of the right toes
into the stocking tip
then a smooth yank past the knob of her ankle
and over her cool, smooth calf
then the other toe
cool ankle, smooth calf
up the legs
and the pantyhose is coaxed to her waist.
You're doing great, Mom,
I tell her
as we ease her body
against mine, rest her whole weight against me
to slide her black dress
with the black empire collar
over her head
struggle her fingers through the dark tunnel of the sleeve.
I reach from the outside
deep into the dark for her hand,
grasp where I can't see for her touch.
You've got to help me a little here, Mom
I tell her
then her fingertips touch mine
and we work her fingers through the sleeve's mouth
Someone Should Write Me a Love Poem but I'm Stuck Doing It Myself
The frightening truth about desire
it's on but
i don't know
whether i want
to be
her, fuck her
or borrow
her clothes.
watch your tense and case
oh baby
i want to be your direct object.
you know, that is to say
i want to be on the other
side of all the verbs i know
you know how to use.
i've seen you conjugate:
i touch
you touched
you heard
she knows
who cares
i'm interested in
a few decent prepositions:
above, over, inside, atop,
below, around and
i'm sure there are more
right on the tip of
your tongue.
i am ready to spend
the present perfect
splitting your infinitive
there's an art to the way you
dangle your participle and
since we're being informal it's okay to
use a few contractions, like
wasn't (going to)
shouldn't (have)
and a conjunction:
but (did it anyway)
and i'm really really glad
you're not into dependent
clauses since all i'm really
interested in is your
bad, bad grammar
and your exclamation point.
I was 14 and madly in love for the first time. He was 21. He made me suddenly, unaccustomedly beautiful with his kisses and mix tapes. During the year of elation and longing, he never mentioned that he had a girlfriend who lived across the street.
I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.
As she bends for a Kleenex in the dark, I am thinking of other girls: the girl I loved who fell in love with a lion
she lost her head over it
we just necked a lot; of the girl who fell in love with the tightrope, got addicted to getting high wired and nothing else was enough; all the beautiful, damaged women who have come through my life and I wonder what would have happened if I'd met them sooner, what they were like before they were so badly wounded. All this time I thought I'd been kissing, but maybe I'm always doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, kissing dead girls in hopes that the heart will start again. Where there's breath, I've heard, there's hope.
There is nothing going on. I took nothing you wanted. You can't have it back.
I'm entranced by the idea of reading the culture back to itself, because I'm conscious that we as people and also as a culture are myth-making machines. So I'm interested in a resistance to that: What we can bend, what we can break.
That's point of writing: building what you need, right?
This week
in live current
events: your eyes.
All power can be
dangerous:
Direct
or alternating,
you, socket to me.
Plugged in and the grid
is humming,
this electricity,
molecule-deep desire:
particular friction, a charge
strong enough to stop
a heart
or start it
again; volt, re-volt--
I shudder, I stutter, I start
to life. I've got my ion
you, copper-top,
so watch how you
conduct yourself.
Here's today's
newsflash: a battery of rolling
blackouts in California, sudden,
like lightning kisses:
sudden, whitehot
darkness and you're
here, fumbling for
that small switch
with an urgent surge
strong enough to kill
lesser machines.
Static makes hair raise,
makes things cling,
makes things rise like
a gathering storm
charging outside
our darkened house
and here I am:
tempest, pouring out
mouthfulls
of tsunami on the ground,
I've got that rain-soaked kite,
that drenched key.
You know what it's for,
circuit-breaker, you know
how to kiss until it's hertz.
I KNEW IT WAS OVER
when tonight you couldn't make the phone ring
when you used to make the sun rise
when trees used to throw themselves
in front of you
to be paper for love letters
that was how i knew i had to do it
swaddle the kids we never had
against january's cold slice
bundle them in winter
clothes they never needed
so i could drop them off at my mom's
even though she lives on the other side of the country
and at this late west coast hour is
assuredly east coast sleeping
peacefully
her house was lit like a candle
the way homes should be
warm and golden
and home
and the kids ran in
and jumped at the bichon frise
named lucky
that she never had
they hugged the dog
it wriggled
and the kids were happy
yours and mine
the ones we never had
and my mom was
grand maternal, which is to say, with style
that only comes when you've seen
enough to know grace
like when to pretend it's christmas or
a birthday so
she lit her voice with tiny
lights and pretended
she didn't see me crying
as i drove away
to the hotel connected to the bar
where i ordered the cheapest whisky they had
just because it shares your first name
because they don't make a whisky
called baby
and i only thought what i got
was what
i ordered
i
You can take this mouth this wound you want but you can't kiss and make it better.
Poetry is a lousy form of activism; it doesn't really change much. And maybe we can point to one or two historical times when a poem has started a revolution or a rebellion or an uprising, but it doesn't happen that often, and if you put the number of poems next to the number of political acts, it would be pretty slim.
I'm not a girl anymore, I'm a woman and my heart beats like prizefighter's fists, and I have not stopped yet, I will not stop.
I go in and out of season. I won't write for months, and then all of a sudden, I'll write like I've got a fever.
Hypothesis: To burn and not consume.
Hypothesis: To consume and not extinguish.
I think that I have less conviction than ever that poetry matters - that poetry changes or saves anything or anyone. But, in fact, that's tremendously freeing. If it doesn't matter much, the stakes are lower and you can't really fail. It's insurrection. It's a tiny alphabet revolution. A secret. A psalm.