1.
strange, how many people
with thoughts
like this one: i could look good as a blonde
if i didn’t have
my face
which would not look good
as a blonde.
there is a bird here. it cries,
like my childhood.
we can all be doing all sorts of things
under a huge tarp.
how many fingers
am i holding
(your nose)?
2.
in my grandfather’s yard
we glued pipe cleaners
onto our arms. “y’all want
to clean or not to clean?!
i’m gonna
have another cuppa.”
a mile away,
bessie smutt learns
about Life from teddy bernstein
who told her simply: grab it
if you wanna. there are simply
so many things to watch
on netflix. his member
rises and falls
like the sea
of my childhood.
grandpappy always knew
the way to clean. we clean
our souls. call 773
202
bleep bleep bleep bleep
Luna.
3.
and
the hawk said to the nightingale
put / my toothbrush back
now it’s been 3 months
and
i wept
for all that is kept
and all that must be
(swabbed)
in my mind’s
(tooth)
a dentistwithgrapefingers
fondles me (so gently)
everything reminds me of You
like that thing of staples i found
lying prone on the ground
next to some Carrots probably gobbled up
and discarded.
You gobbled
me up but i am not
Discarded. (or am I !)
lately there are people’s babies
everywhere. i am not sure
what
that
means.
Tags: humor, poetry, rachel stone
AKA just about every poem in The New Yorker ever.
Reputable contemporary poems wish they could get on this level.
On no account should you allow a Vogon to read poetry at you.
If captured by Vogons and held at poem-point, however, trying to enjoy it is the best survival strategy.
Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes,
And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts
With my blurglecruncheon, see if I don’t!
YES YES YES YES. THANK YOU. YES.
I
I..
I –
I love this.
That first one sounds like poetry by Birds Rights Activist on twitter.
Birds Rights Activist is hilarious!
loooooooool
*deletes poems she was gonna submit to The Toast*
*placenta
*something. about…placenta
*talking about, breakfast – ?
*- ha ha no dumbass it’s a symbol for placenta
I am imagining all of these read in Poet Voice (you know what I mean, that elevated tone that turns normal words into singsong incantations).
It’s great. These are great. And I love poetry, I do, but only when it’s true and direct and real and not taking itself too seriously.
HA! Poet Voice. I took a Creative Writing class in college where the TA insisted we all read our poems in that pretentious tone. She got mad at us a lot.
I feel like I’ve rejected all of these from various lit mags, from people who were dead serious.
I want to know more about your job as “poetry rejector,” please. Sounds ripe with stories.
I feel like it needs to be an article.
there are simply
so many things to watch
on netflix. his member
rises and falls
like the sea
of my childhood.
This is my new favorite poem. I may get a tattoo of it on my ankle.
During my MLIS internship, I had to attend many mind-numbingly boring meetings in which I never had anything to contribute but my boss thought they would be a good learning experience for me. (Spoiler alert: they weren’t.) To keep myself from falling asleep I started writing down verbatim snippets of what my fellow attendees were saying and arranging them into blank verse poems. I was able to find one of them after digging through my email – I had sent it to a friend so he could admire my brilliance.
Here you go:
1.
not a grievance but you know
you keep touching it
you’ll be touching it pretty frequently
I’m pretty sure it’s mandatory now
I have to say I find it difficult
2.
I’m not sure who calls it separation
that’s a useful bucket to have
permanent or temporary separation
ceases to be exposed to a hazard
you have to promise not to look at the messy stuff
3.
after a certain amount of time
you can’t come back
because I’ve seen discipline somewhere
this is so not clear in my head
is this the only place?
I did a poem out of subject lines of emails I sent to my boss once. Made much more interesting than it sounds because we have a very strange, hilarious relationship.
The other day my boss sent me an email after hours, from her phone, that said “Charles Dickens, Tale of Two Cities” and nothing more. I haven’t asked her what email was about for fear that my next assignment will be reading the book…
!! Do you still have it?
I did something similar when I was with a literary agency. I would take single sentences or fragments from manuscript proposals and IM them to my friends. I have like 4 single spaced pages in my drive. Some favorites below:
-cruise ship investigator
-p.s. there is a problem with my caps lock, hence all the misused capital letters below.
-It hasn’t been easy as the world’s smartest sex machine.
-eccentric poultry fancier
-I have direct experience from the spirit world
-fuses the adventure and intrigue of LION KING with the delicious romance of PRINCE AND ME.
omg please submit this list unedited as a piece for The Toast
do it
EDIT: maybe break it up into random stanzas so they think you wrote it. i won’t tell
Look, you can’t just throw out WORLD’S SMARTEST SEX MACHINE and then leave us hanging. It just isn’t fair! I now desperately need to know about the trials and tribulations that this sex machine has gone through.
also what are “eccentric poultry,” I picture a chicken in a top hat and monocle who’s like, really into UFO’s or something
It just seems like brains aren’t really a priority with sex machines.
I have a coworker whose conversation is just tiny perfect gems of nonsense, mostly because he just doesn’t *ever* think before he speaks. My favorite was the conversation I had with him about how no, Robert, dwarf humans are *not* a separate species.
lately there are people’s babies
everywhere. i am not sure
what
that
means.
These are fascinating, do you have anything entitled “Stillbirth”
there are simply
so many things to watch
on netflix.
INDEED.
so much depends
upon
the netflix
queue
filled with documentaries
that
seemed interesting at the
time.
I seriously considered getting an MFA at one point, but I am so, so happy that I went with law school instead.
I spent a stupid amount of time yesterday compiling a list of ridiculous quotes from the student handbooks of fundamentalist Christian colleges (it’s a bizarre fascination of mine) and because I was copy-pasting them from a pdf, they came out formatted weird. Some of my favorite resulting minipoems:
Abercrombie & Fitch
and its subsidiary
Hollister
have shown an unusual
degree of antagonism to biblical morality
—–
They should also remember that cars have the right
–
of
–
way on campus
—–
Note
:
If siblings qualify to live
off campus
together and are of
different genders, there are to be no
other roommates
—-
(no cartoon or theme ties)
(no cowboy boots)
Please submit this to The Toast, I would read all of it forever
Bizarre hobby-havers unite! I have not advanced to poetry-writing yet.
Birds Rights Activist is hilarious!
Please submit this to The Toast, I would read all of it forever
Amanda Palmer?
I am now worried that if it weren’t for the title I would’ve thought these were serious. Even though they made me laugh really, really hard.
Did anyone else ever encounter that PBS piece about a poet wife and her writer husband having a super pretentious disagreement about their relationship to words, in the form of an exchange of letters read out loud, set to terrible contemporary string music? It was awful.
The dead swans lay in the stagnant pool.
They lay. They rotted. They turned
Around occasionally.
Bits of flesh dropped off them from
Time to time.
And sank into the pool’s mire.
They also smelt a great deal.
…still takes the cake.
as a former editor of a pretentious urban university’s lit-mag, this is giving me flashbacks