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A newsletter about rejiggered classics, transmasculine underpinnings of the plucky heroine, and the failure-limits of graciousness, from table manners to family estrangement.
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you’re not a bird—
YOU’RE NOT A BIRD!!
GOOD MORNING, this is art!
I see you! I’m looking! Is everybody looking up?
Not a bird!
Singing, yes, winging, check,
turning, soaring, plainly singing,
Tell us what you’re thinking!! Tell us all your thoughts
Maybe if you’re swinging back here later
we could bring you something
or just meet you, what you want
(do you want things? are you thinking? like—
I know you’re not a bird.)
I am going fucking crazy standing
here inside a field and thinking how
a bird might land here later, whether I’m allowed
to ask more questions, when to start tipping off the crowd,
when to lose my mind,
when to turn my nose to ground,
whether birds are listening,
what on earth a bird is,
where the birds are now.
To "To A Skylark"
One of the things I really enjoy about your writing is that even the pieces which I believe are referential to things (books? stories? poems?) I am not familiar with (like this one) make me laugh in recognition of a certain manic hilarity that I associate with exhausted-but-defiant existentialism. But maybe I’m projecting??
More poetry needs to be about How Things Are Not Other Things.