Ode to Your Plants by Jon Lemay I had every intention of keeping your plants alive. I remember how much you laughed when I said,
I can barely take care of myself, for God’s sake, let alone another living thing—because you knew
it was true. I realized a month after you died that your father had taken them back to New York
along with everything else of yours. In their absence, I noticed how much sunlight streams through our kitchen window.
I wish I had left a note to your father. Feel free to leave the plants here, I should have written.
I can keep them alive. I’ll learn.
Other poems I enjoyed reading this week: (read the full poem in the links)
"We might be fifty, we might be five, So snug, so compact, so wise are we! Under the kitchen-table leg My knee is pressing against his knee.
Our shutters are shut, the fire is low, The tap is dripping peacefully; The saucepan shadows on the wall Are black and round and plain to see." -Camomile Tea by Katherine Mansfield "I am taking this in, slowly,
taking it into my body:
this grief. How slow the body is to realize. You are never coming back." -Slowly by Donna Masini
"I want to tell you: while you do your sheepish, poor-me routine, your victim-in-distress sighing, poor people are being murdered, prisoners are being zapped with fifty-thousand volts of electricity to make them behave. O hollow-hearted, New Age activist that you are, tell us in your poetry how cooly you’ve risked your life helping refugees cross the border."
-Set This Book On Fire! by Jimmy Santiago Baca
"There is no end to ego, with its museum of disappointments. I want to take my neighbors into the garden and show them: Here is consolation. Here is your pity. Look how much seed it drops around the sparrows as they fight. It lives alongside their misery. It glows each evening with a violent light." -Happiness by Paisley Rekdal
Recommended Listening:
This Winter by Morning Mourning
Houses - Elyse Weinberg (with Neil Young)
Links of the Week: Wong Ping: Jungle of Desire + 33 Oscar-Qualified Animated Shorts // Dust Kid' (Munjiai) Unporn Popshot Where is my mind, Tracy J Lee Botanical: A Collection of Impressionistic Plant Specimens Captured Against Greenhouse Glass Frank Lloyd Wright's 10 traits that every artist needs.