Writers Almanac / Jerry Roscoe

Garrison Keillor has recently read the work of poet and father Jerry Roscoe on Writer’s Almanac. Read and listen to November 28, 2009’s rendition of Bouquet. From September 2, 2007, you can hear a reading of Adequate Love.

Of course, if you like what you hear, you can pick up a copy of The Unexamined Life by Jerry Roscoe on Amazon.

New Microfiction

A good friend since the fewest of years has written a terrific short piece that’s up at Staccato. I hope you take a look; you’ll be happy you did.

Tips and Tricks (ST)

One easy way to lose weight
is to fall in love with someone
who is already in love
with someone else. Then,
when you’re about to eat dinner,
think about that. It’s like magic
without the magic!

The Animal Psychic Speaks (ST)

The Animal Psychic Speaks

The hawk says, “I’m hungry! Where’s that mouse?”
The pig says, “Pardon me, I have the hiccups.”
The possum is thinking about intersections and her next of kin.
The anteater prefers gumdrops, but feels too shy to say so.
Those Japanese beetles see plenty of holes in the leaves’ argument.
When the stallion runs, he forgets where he comes from.
Today is your luckiest day: This rattlesnake’s on your side.

Reading Books Underground (JR)

With the end of school mid-May, the start of summer employment, and my move to Brooklyn, I’ve been doing more of my reading underground. Specifically, in trains. Instead of feverish — if sporadic — two-hundred page evenings of devotion, I now wade through books as the tortoise, not the hare. Reading on trains, twice a day, on average 34 minutes per trip, has altered the texture of daily life, the ways I experience New York. Instead of being a slave to The Savage Detectives, I cohabitate with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 2666. Fewer late nights in the living room on the couch, having been kicked out of the bedroom by my employed girlfriend, unable to not keep following Arturo Belano and our collective fate of obscurity, (or worse, happenstance notoriety) through Mexico, Europe, and South America, the atmosphere occasionally ruptured by poltergeists driving death-laden semis, shaking the apartment.

Even askance glances at other commuters are changed. My aesthetics heightened to some absurd transcendent level where it feels like I understand the totality of everyone around me, their inner sum from their appearance. Or maybe I don’t feel I understand anything at all, but merely take in the passengers’ appearances in a hungry, superficial visual chomp. I smile. Even if it’s illusion, I laugh at all of us. Or at least that’s what 2666 has done to me.

BTDubs (ST)

My book review of Kathleen Willis Morton’s The Blue Poppy and The Mustard Seed is in the current issue of Tricycle — check it here.

Untitled (ST)

He was always on fire. Nobody knew
how to put him out.
When he sat down for dinner
the fork and knife turned molten
in his bright hands.
He slept on kindling and his dreams
were eddies of smoke slipping under the bedroom door.
If a wind caught him at the right time he might roar up
anywhere, say an office supply store,

Google: “the displacement of”

The displacement of a bone end from a joint is called

the displacement of a harmonic oscillator is given by

the displacement of a vibrating object is measured by

the displacement of a wave traveling in the positive x-direction is

the displacement of a wave traveling  in the positive x-direction

            is where is in m and is in s.

 

the displacement of a wave traveling in the positive.

the displacement of an object is

the displacement of native americans

the displacement of atoms in solids by radiation

the displacement of concepts.

Rellenar las ausencias

Rellenar las ausencias

You are the nighttime devil’s semis
burning down the warehouse road
crashing through potholes in dropped toolbox cacophony
echoes off walls,
clanging.

I know it’s your
poltergeist locomotion
death driving a furnace
fueled by suicide
driven to death.
Obsession pushes my head under water.
A junkyard dog mutters nightmares lodged in his throat.
The harbinger left.
I wait.

-JR

The Park Is Open!

Washington Square Park opened again either today or yesterday. It was odd to have a whole in the middle of the area. Standing in the middle of the park, finally, this part of town between Broadway and 6th Avenue makes a little more sense to me.

Here’s a not-so-great photo and poem to commemorate the occasion. Perhaps a form of rellenar las ausencias.