two sites i’ve found on my random circlings today are really worth mentioning: zalary.com (titled Catharsis? it’s hard to tell), b/c she posted a lovely sylvia plath poem i’d never encountered before, and bouillabaisse for the soul, b/c he raised my eyebrows and made me laugh (the man put his IQ up on his About page!) anyway, it seems like original content.
i find a lot of these, bookmark about half, and return, continually interested, only to a few. it’s hard trying to compile a good set of links. it’s also mildly disheartening coming across people whose designs are so much more sophisticated and whose fanbases are so established. some folks write two lines and get nine comments, just like that. but i shouldn’t complain: it’s moving, however slowly.
almost all of today was spent sitting on the linoleum next to my grandmother’s bed, holding her hand like it was a vase. i’ve never seen her so thin — she must have lost thirty pounds this summer and she never had much spare flesh on her; she’s too thrifty for that — but i tried not to let the dismay show. her face, unlike the rest of her, reassuringly looks mostly normal. i imagine that’s a good sign.
we entertained her, bought her sherbert and bananas, conversed. i made a joke about bringing her harry potter b/c she was too weak to read the john adam’s hardback she was in the middle of. somehow it ended up getting taken seriously and my father brought the thing along w/ him when he arrived. hey, whatever. as i told her, if she likes it, she can see the movie in november.
at quarter to five, i left to go to the dentists. like all college students, i had to do my lastminute checkup before heading off to skool. unlike most, i think, i’m lucky enuf to not have any problem w/ my wisdom teeth. i was petrified he’d tell me they needed to come out — i’ve spent the last year teething, sometimes painfully — but he said if i’m content w/ them, he’ll leave ’em where jesus flung ’em. content, hell — i’m ecstatic. this year, even if they were occasionally a nuisance, they did some good: they inspired a poem or two. i wrote this first semester when i was melodramatic over boy #1: fifth column
I�m growing a new tooth:
I feel it thrusting like a tulip through hard,
February earth: even
when I try to dwell on other things, my tongue
meanders back: you distract me: dark,
intense, and out of place: you are
throwing the rest of me out of sync:
black tulip white tooth, only a surgeon
could remove, stubborn
in the shadowy corner of my mouth:
you frighten me: you feel
less alien to my prodding tongue
every day: you are thriving
even in this crimson, hostile land: I wonder
at a surgeon�s hand
which of us when pulled
will yield. (fall 2000)
it was published in, uh, one of those silly lit mags i write for … damn, now i’ve forgotten which. i think small craft warnings.
ooh, ben just called. and laughed at me for saying i was posting. and derailed my train of thought. blame him.