CLOUDS

‘clouds, mist find solace in the canyons of the Santa Catalina Mountains’

from ‘The Place Where Clouds Are Formed’, in Where Clouds Are Formed, by Ofellia Zepeda (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008),  p.5.

‘You want I’ll be irreproachably/ tender no man but a cloud/ in trousers’

from ‘A Cloud In Trousers’, in Electric Iron, by Vladimir Myakovsky, trans. Jack Hirschman and Victor Erlich (Maya: Berkley, 1971), np.

GARDENS

‘Deers / on the main road: display solutions beyond STAR FURNISHINGS and all wildness ROCKED in/ Styrene LADIES of Honour with some ground…’

punk faun, by Redell Olsen, (Oakland: Subpress, 2012), p.11.

‘By his own scythe, the mower mown’

‘Damon the Mower’, in ‘The Selected Poetry of Marvell’, by Andrew Marvell, (New York, Signet Classics, 1967), p.80.

‘Lightly you lope, pale deer, lifting / A story from pages of snow’

‘Of Mule and Deer’, in This Isa Nice Neighborhood, by Farid Matuk (Chicago: Letter Machine Editions, 2010), p.1.

SWANS

‘we are both swans in the same pond/ wrapping our long black necks around each other/ until it hurts.’

‘Magazine Stand’, in Fjords vol. 1, by Zachary Schomburg (Boston MA: Black Ocean, 2012),  p.12.

WORK

‘If my health benefits cost 316 each month, then is it a benefit?’

Labor, by Jill Magi (Brookly & Callicoon New York: Nightboat Books, 2014), p.16.

‘there was reporters trying to get a shot of the bodies’

Coal Mountain Elementary, by Mark Nowak (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2009), p.159.

ELEGIES

My shoulder playful and turned away toward the lake/ between your knees’

a, by Sophie Robinson (Los Angeles: Les Figues Press, 2009), p.7.

‘Every angel terrifies’

Dunio Elegies, by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Gary Miranda (Portland, Tavern Books, 2013), p.11.

‘As I went down to the Rotton Lake I remembered’

Elegies, by Muriel Rukeyser, (New York: New Directions, 2013), p.5.

FAILURES

I cannot/ reconcile my/ concept of/ personal/ dignity/ with the/ fact that/ mr/ [blair]/ posseses/ the power/ to/ determine/ my/ life and death

poisons, their antidotes, by Sean Bonney (Sheffield: West House Books, 2003), n.p. Bonney’s more recent books are also highly recommended

‘Then she breathed into/ a felt sense of screaming burn it, burn it, burn it…’

An Army of Lovers, by Juliana Spahr and David Buuck (San Francisico City Lights Books: 2013), p. 50.

SCIENCE

‘This gravitational song meted against displacement’

From ‘Around the World’, in Gravity, by Allen Fisher (Cambridge: Salt, 2004), p.15

MAGIC

‘The magic words are: Up against the wall mother/ fucker this is a stick up!’

From ‘Black People’ in Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1979), p. 137.

 
 
In August 2014 I was the Summer Resident at the Arizona Poetry Center. As part of the residency I was asked to select  some of my favourite books from the library for a display, and I made the list you’ve just read. I also wrote a new section of my poem Living In while in Tucson.