Issue Three | May 2013
We bring you Issue Three of Sundog Lit. This is a really great issue, and we’re so proud…
I’m so pleased to have a poem, “Sugaring,” in this beautiful issue:
In one state I was born knowing how to nest
potted in small duties
in a crooked porch town
I grew buttoned against the wind
No one said times were good, but words
got us a long way. Some said out east,
some back east, and rightly or not we guessed
which skies they were pointed toward and which
they assumed we, too, ignored. Wonder was
at all times preferable—had you ever seen
such silent contrails? Something
in the sense of a late decade.
You could reach all the back shelves
with years to spare. Most likely
tastes were as canned as they seem now
but they were the latest we had.
Daylight held hours after the sun.
We turned off TVs. Someone had a Frisbee and
someone sparklers, and the same kids cycled past
until only their voices showed in the dark—
no sound of traffic, and I thought how it would be
if in fact everyone was where they were going.
photo: Doug Wilson, “Smog Covers Tacoma, Obscuring the Foothills Below Mount Rainier, 6/1973” | Documerica Project
I cannot say what anyone wore. Were skirts
about the knee? Was it the year of crochet
or of failed pants no matter how we belted?
I remember we had squirrels. The weed killer men
arrived while we slept. You rushed undressed
and though we were soon hidden
the way you stormed back to me I wondered
who had seen you and what they would say
if I knew who to ask. Later that week or the next
you said: where did the squirrels go?
We have the worst answers.
In the passenger seat of a Honda Civic
at dire speed over half New Jersey
I felt the weather compel our flight while NPR
considered all things except what we were thinking.
On this coast houses are clearly references.
One winter was for a long while like the last.
No one meant to vacuum away the old calendar.
Still, by the time I wanted the habit
it was gone. Now every method shifts
with practice. The best chords are suspended.
They sustain the absence of a root. The tone
of this moment takes seven or eight dubs. Each replay,
the note I want seems like the first note.
Found poetry from @nytimes_ebooks:
The devil is taking down one person per day
We would have country singers’ buses pulling up outside
Like those sign-covered casinos along the reading room
Greet visitors with a grid of the better
The question is for producing change
It also dies by that illusion
And the moxie of turning government
What remains to be stark
I still sometimes find myself spoken
Before they felt that they did
Were you because you
The lake responded exactly
We head home: through the gloss of rain or weight
of snow, or the plum blush of dusk, but always—home,
always under one sky, our sky. And always one moon
like a silent drum tapping on every rooftop
and every window, of one country—all of us—
facing the stars
hope—a new constellation
waiting for us to map it,
waiting for us to name it—together
[via @IrisBlasi] [full text on NY Times]
I have poem in Jellyfish 7.0:
Keep only jewels you can wear at one time even Cary Grant
needed a glass before he got Grace Kelly the trick is knowing
what you get for what you can get
Fantastic poems by Anne Marie Rooney, Rob MacDonald, Lesley Yalen, Laurie Sanborn Young, Leora Fridman, and others.
A book spine poem:
Here is New York
Something like ten million
In September, the light changes
Gawker [h/t Why not, she said]:
Political journalists are deeply uncool people, and not in the way where they’re, like, so uncool that they’re actually cool. They are constitutively uncool. They are not to be trusted on matters of coolness.
The first rule of cool
is not to say what’s cool
on sweat and need
agreed—uncool
except when cool
neither cool or uncool
choose rules
rules are for the ruled
the rules of cool for the uncool
are no different than the cool rules
hot comes in hot
and then is not
but cool stays cool
