National Poetry Month

Making Love To Concrete Audre Lorde

An upright abutment in the mouth
of the Willis Avenue bridge
a beige Honda leaps the divider
like a steel gazelle inescapable
sleek leather boots on the pavement
rat-a-tat-tat best intentions
going down for the third time
stuck in the particular

You cannot make love to concrete
if you care about being
non-essential wrong or worn thin
if you fear ever becoming
diamonds or lard
you cannot make love to concrete
if you cannot pretend
concrete needs your loving

To make love to concrete
you need an indelible feather
white dresses before you are ten
a confirmation lace veil milk-large bones
and air raid drills in your nightmares
no stars till you go to the country
and one summer when you are twelve
Con Edison pulls the plug
on the street-corner moons Walpurgisnacht
and there are sudden new lights in the sky
stone chips that forget you need
to become a light rope a hammer
a repeatable bridge
garden-fresh broccoli two dozen dropped eggs
and a hint of you
caught up between my fingers
the lesson of a wooden beam
propped up on barrels
across a mined terrain

between forgiving too easily
and never giving at all.

Links, Books

Not that I think there are many people here who aren't already members of fst, but I thought I'd point out that I made a Richard St Vier (from Swordspoint! Yes!) mix for their current theme of 'Singles'- mixes that are only three or four songs. (Unlocked version posted here to _riverside.)

Wooooe, it's been far too long since I finished a story for them, but actually I have a springkink story due on Sunday, so I should shut up and go do the necessary finishing editing for that.

Currently I'm reading Swords and Deviltry, the first one of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd* and the Gray Mouser series, it being one of those books that I kept finding references to for the last few months, and had in the back of my mind that I'd need to buy if I happened to stumble over a cheap copy. This morning I was playing around on sans_daily, and found that they were apparently turned into a terrible comic in the 70's, which inspired me to walk over to the Strand and see if they didn't have a copy. (A decision probably helped in no small part by the fact that what I was currently reading this morning was Kim Stanley Robinson's Blue Mars, and I seem to have waited too long between the second book of the trilogy and this one, because I no longer care about any of the characters At All. Of course, a cast of hundreds might have caused the problem all by itself.) And oh, this book is awesome! It's funny and entirely in-tune with its wish-fulfillment, but most of all it's incredibly evocative of all the pulp fantasy I used to read when I was little. From the first paragraph, it was like finding something you used to love.

I didn't expect that at all. I expected it to be one of those things that are celebrated because they were influential and important, but which are not, actually, all that good. Like H. P. Lovecraft. (Um, don't kill me if you like Lovecraft. I like the idea! But I don't know how anyone can stand to read more than a handful of his stories; they all start to blur together and seem like the exact same plot over and over, to me.) But this isn't like that at all; it's fun and interesting, and sort of cheesy, but it knows it is and can laugh at that. I'm in love.


*How on earth is that pronounced?