A Word for Living Creatures
An animated typography of Ira Glass on Storytelling
we walk on the dead
no yes I mean
we walk on ash
in a field
of ash of flowers
we breathe in
the scent of bluebonnets
wild daisies wild
flowers we breathe in
ash flowers flesh
the secret
she did not tell
we breathe out
(via thenextweb)
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Elana Bell is the author of “Eyes, Stones” (2012, LSU Press), winner of the Walt Whitman Award for 2011. Her poems have appeared in Harvard Review, Massachusetts Review, CALYX, and elsewhere. Bell is the writer-in-residence at the Bronx Academy of Letters and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.
From “The Trouble With Poetry”:
…mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti —
to be perfectly honest for a moment —Thanks to Bob Fisher for emailing me this.
Filed under: Billy Collins, steal like an artist
She is lamenting the loss of her piano
which is to lament something else,
something that can’t be named,
refuses to be named, refuses
to come out of hiding,
to leave its tomb
or
she is refusing to look
for it, to call for it,
is ordering the stone
be kept in place,
is delaying her visit,
is postponing her flight, is
ignoring you.
