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I miss poetry.

by Lindsay

Reasons to Survive November”
                  
                  November like a train wreck
                  as if a locomotive made of cold
                  had hurtled out of Canada
                  and crashed into a million trees,
                  flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.
                  
                  The sky is a thick, cold gauze
                  but there’s a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
                  and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
                  full of luminous red barns.
                  
                  Or maybe I’ll visit beautiful Donna,
                  the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
                  and roll around in her foldout bed.
                  
                  I know there are some people out there
                  who think I am supposed to end up
                in a room by myself
                  
                  with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
                  a locked door and my slack mouth open
          like a disconnected phone.
                  
                  But I hate those people back
                  from the core of my donkey soul
                  and the hatred makes me strong
                  and my survival is their failure,
                  
                  and my happiness would kill them
                  so I shove joy like a knife
                  into my own heart over and over
                  
                  and I force myself toward pleasure,
                  and I love this November life
                  where I run like a train
                  deeper and deeper
                  into the land of my enemies.
                  
                  — Tony Hoagland

The Movement of a Caravan over the Landscape
by Sarah Manguso

That we rode harder into the wind,
That the story got told,
That the broken candies were eaten first,
That they were eaten last,
That all subjects grew extinct eventually,
That in the inn I ruined our lives,
That in the barn I tried to save them,
That I failed,
That per Fitzgerald the manner remains intact for some time after
the morale cracks,
That in the interregna all suffer equally,
That the languages we are born ready to speak leave us one by one,
That unless we’re actively procreating we’re acting metaphorically,
That I’ve never been to France,
That I’ve been to Ohio,
That I remember almost nothing I did there,
That it is meaningless to say I liked that,
That emotions accumulate into a few categories,
That each new one is itself plus everything like itself,
That when animals act like people we love them more,
That when they do we want them never to stop,
That we give them the names we wish we had,
That men have children and manufacture new mothers,
That I anticipate escaping my fate or not,
That I anticipate the future by never buying groceries,
That I know the flesh is incidental but keep so many photographs,
That the story gets told,
That it was the reason for these various movements.