Bianca Stone
What is immortal?
And if it is immortal how is it that
it has an incurable disease
and wanders around
a total aberration, a mutant, while
the catamount vanishes from the species.
Is it that we live at the top of the food chain, alone
with no link to anything above us,
no elegant forfeiture in the mouth of the tiger?
Or is our problem that
we do not actually live
at the top of the food chain.
And are devoured daily by thought. And time.
Holy and obscene; unmentionable.

Time does not go beyond its maiden name.
And anyway, right now, everything tastes good.
All the male poets' poems, and dirty, dirty chocolate layer cake.
I swallow it with a glass of milk.
The crumb crawls down my throat
and enters me. The power of Christ compels
not I—but the wish to be changed—
everything is challenged
by the sudden flame of joy—
how uncomfortable we are with happiness.

But Darling, you're staggering.
Your temple mouth is being foresworn.
Sister, crying in the hammock
because your lover will not come—
the children are screaming and running with blue guns
in the air, with little cuts on their feet.

And you, little mole angel, restless song,
smashed idol, bronzed cat head
on the hood of a car headed into the ravine
driven by our ancestor's dark awe of a comet—

how can someone not become
heartbreaking in one sense
of the word—not find
they are a strangerin their own household
of truly
unnamable need?
from the book WHAT IS OTHERWISE INFINITE / Tin House
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I wrote this poem for my sister while working on my manuscript at her house. Basically it's about mental suffering, an activity that pushed me to consider the scale of "doer" and "done-to" and the food chain. We're at the top, so who is to blame for feeling devoured by thoughts? What constitutes a life-form—and if we don't know, then how does this hierarchy work? The poem then looks to the love of the sister; empathizes; acknowledges the namelessness of this ancient—even biblical—ambiguity. 

Bianca Stone on "Does Life Exist Independent of Its Form?"
"Alan Chazaro: How Bay Area Graffiti Led Me to a Life of Writing"

"There, among other diverse and marginalized voices, we learned how to merge individual needs with community goals; to blend political imagination with social action; to connect historical knowledge with our poetry....what is poetry if not the graffiti of literature, centuries of pages being tagged by the once-voiceless until they cannot be ignored?"

via 48 HILLS
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What Sparks Poetry:
Keene Carter on Susan Stewart's Cinder


"'Bees' is a wonderfully successful poem, as is the book Columbarium and indeed all of Cinder. I've pried into it a little because of its success, which is, as I've tried to show, tied directly to its 'failure'—a 'failure' in quotation marks because it is the failure to represent everything, and that's like calling death a failure of life: the requirement is absurd, even if the sentence is true."
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