#kim addonizio
To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall
Kim Addonizio
If you ever woke in your dress at 4 A.M. ever
closed your legs to someone you loved opened
them for one you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming
==
Today in:
2021: You Mean You Don’t Weep at the Nail Salon?, Elizabeth Acevedo
2020:Let Me Begin Again, Philip Levine
2019:Hammond B3 Organ Cistern, Gabrielle Calvocoressi
2018:Siren Song, Margaret Atwood
2017:A Sunset, Ari Banias
2016:Coming, Philip Larkin
2015:The Taxi, Amy Lowell
2014:Winter Sunrise Outside a Café Near Butte, Montana, Joe Hutchison
2013:The Last Night in Mithymna, Linda Gregg
2012:America [Try saying wren], Joseph Lease
2011:Boston, Aaron Smith
2010:How Simile Works, Albert Goldbarth
2009:Crossing Over, William Meredith
2008:The World Wakes Up, Andrew Michael Roberts
2007:Hour, Christian Hawkey
2006:For the Anniversary of My Death, W.S. Merwin
2005:The Last Poem About the Snow Queen, Sandra M. Gilbert
“The rain, the lightning. The river town, the fireworks off the dock. Someone will run through a lawn sprinkler, someone else open a hydrant. Someone will pull you from the fire, someone else wrap you in flames.”—Kim Addonizio, ‘The Givens’, Wild Nights: New and Selected Poems
“Today I want to resolve nothing. I only want to walk a little longer in the cold”—Kim Addonizio, closing lines to “New Year’s Day,” Tell Me (BOA Editions Ltd., 2000)
(…) blessing of the rain,
and lift my face to it.”
by Kim Addonizio
Like a haunted river no bridge wants to lay itself down over.
Like a taxidermied grizzly in the student union.
You cry at a frequency only subatomic insects can hear.
That time with him in Houston.
Sometimes you flame into a scary flower.
An eruption of coherence in the postmodern seminar.
You stand in a shallow creek and your reflection floats slowly downstream without you.
Alcohol is your emotional-support animal.
The fan hums erratically.
An unclaimed suitcase of miniature toiletries, burst open on the baggage carrousel.
Like an amoeba without an e-scooter.
An extra in an epic battle scene, trampled by a non-Equity horse.
You’re a red-breasted flute, but everyone else is a dowel.
A Zen koan growing in the White House Rose Garden.
Sun-damaged curtains in the parlor of an abandoned friendship.
You’re the queen, but you’re a bee being swept into the pool’s filtration system.
Like a version, touched for the very last time.
Spooky piano music rising from the dishwater.
You wake up alone to a bird reciting Keats.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I’m nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are let off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again.
―Kim Addonizio
“Have an uncomfortable mind; be strange. Be disturbed: by what is happening on the planet, and to it; by the cruelty, and stupidity humanity is capable of; by the unbearable beauty of certain music, and the mysteries and failures of love, and the brief, confusing, exhilarating hour of your own life.”— Kim Addonizio (via withnailrules)
To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall
Kim AddonizioIf you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever
closed your legs to a man you loved opened
them for one you didn’t moved against
a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach
seaweed clinging to your ankles paid
good money for a bad haircut backed away
from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled
into the back seat for lack of a tampon
if you swam across a river under rain sang
using a dildo for a microphone stayed up
to watch the moon eat the sun entire
ripped out the stitches in your heart
because why not if you think nothing &
no one can / listen I love you joy is coming
“Why don’t we lie together, wing-bones touching? You look like someone I used to love, only colder.”—Kim Addonizio, from Wild Nights; New Poems; Pareidolia
