There's a rendezvous of strangers
Around the coffee urn tonight


Joy Feasley, You Made Me Very Happy, 2008

An Honest Description of Myself with a Glass of Whiskey at An Airport, Let Us Say, in Minneapolis
-- by Czesław Miłosz

(translated from the Polish by Robert Hass and Czeslaw Milosz)

My ears catch less and less of conversations, and my eyes have weakened, though they are still insatiable.

I see their legs in miniskirts, slacks, wavy fabrics.

Peep at each one separately, at their buttocks and thighs, lulled by the imaginings of porn.

Old lecher, it’s time for you to the grave, not to the games and amusements of youth.

But I do what I have always done: compose scenes of this earth under orders from the erotic imagination.

It’s not that I desire these creatures precisely; I desire everything, and they are like a sign of ecstatic union.

It’s not my fault that we are made so, half from disinterested contemplation, half from appetite.

If I should accede one day to Heaven, it must be there as it is here, except that I will be rid of my dull senses and my heavy bones.

Changed into pure seeing, I will absorb, as before, the proportions of human bodies, the color of irises, a Paris street in June at dawn, all of it incomprehensible, incomprehensible the multitude of visible things.


I’ve Been Known
-- by Denise Duhamel

to spread it on thick to shoot off my mouth to get it off my chest
to tell him where
to get off

to stay put to face the music to cut a shine to go under to sell
myself short to play
myself down

to paint the town to fork over to shell out to shoot up to pull a
fast one to go haywire
to take a shine to

to be stuck on to glam it up to vamp it up to get her one better to
eat a little higher
on the hog
to win out to get away with to go to the spot to make a stake to
make a stand to
stand for something to stand up for

to snow under to slip up to go for it to take a stab at it to try out
to go places to play
up to get back at

to size up to stand off to slop over to be solid with to lose my
shirt to get myself off
to get myself off the hook