The people Jesus loved were shopping at The Star Market yesterday.
An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout
breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.

Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and
hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:
shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if The Star Market

had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in
with the rest of them: sour milk, bad meat:
looking for cereal and spring water.

Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car
in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have
been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept

out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands
and knees begging for mercy.

If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought, I will be healed.
Could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?

- Marie Howe, "The Star Market"

The higher the buildings, the lower the morals. - Noel Coward

"It is folly to punish your neighbor by fire
when you live next door." - Pubilius Syrus

And there was a beautiful view
But nobody could see.
Cause everybody on the island
Was saying: Look at me! Look at me!

Laurie Anderson, "Language Is a Virus"

I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves. - August Strindberg

The clouds sank down
down to the pavement
between five and seven tonight
taillight soup, headlight soup
we were swimming in fog light soup
down the highway in a daze
watching for the dim light
down the road, in the distance

- Raymond A. Foss, "Taillight Soup"

One year ago today,
the first loose piece of Los Angeles tipped in to this site.

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size. - Virginia Woolf

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age. - Robert Frost

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.
- Josh Billings

To want to write, but to lack words.
More accurately, to lack some
thing to feel.

This unpainted
desk, cars outside
proving themselves on the hill,
smoke from burning fields
slipping unnoticed under the sun
until someone drowns
in his own breath.
To listen for some wind.

To feel responsible for listening
and to be unmoved, an air sock
limp as an unfilled dunce's cap
waiting some change in the weather,
something full as the river
you fished last weekend
without luck

and then swimming saw
the whitefish
grazing on stones

the flickering trout steady
as mobiles suspended
on more levels
than you thought water
could contain.

- Ingrid Wendt, "Feeling Dry"

Marilyn Monroe wasn’t Jean Harlow.
Jayne Mansfield wasn’t Marilyn Monroe.
Anna Nicole Smith wasn’t Jayne Mansfield.
Thankfully, there is only one Britney Spears.

But know, whoever you are,
whatever your gender, hair color, physique,
within you there does reside an unhappy blonde
archetype with enormous breasts.

It is her you need to contact.


- Elaine Equi, "#4 The Girl Can’t Help It (Jayne Mansfield unbuttons her blouse)" via Silliman's Blog

My living will, waiting to be signed,
sits next to an old New Yorker
it's my ritual to read with breakfast
each morning, to finish
one issue before going to the next,
and this way I skip
the news merely timely—October 2004
with a fundraiser bringing Kerry
within blocks of President Bush
proves painful in December '05
but fast turning to find Graham Greene
his authorized biography reviewed,
I'm relieved, though perplexed, by
Because of an ambiguous comma
in a document Greene signed on his deathbed
other scholars were forbidden to quote . . .
and I wonder as I slowly eat
my oatmeal with raisins and cranberries
and four summer blueberries
I pick from their bag in my freezer,
gathering what pleases me, a woman of 73
with a will nearby, if I might not like
lingering in an ambiguous comma
someday, not rushing
to an afterlife I don't believe in,
drifting dreamily, held
for a day or two in its pause.

- Myra Shapiro, "Because of the Ambiguity"

Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.
- Donal Henahan

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you don't know where you are going,
any road will take you there. - Lewis Carroll

Buy the ticket, take the ride. - Hunter S. Thompson

I am your pilgrim, who wanders
to stay home; your monk,
who keeps silent when you demand
confessions and theology.

You are too difficult to love
directly; you have no roof
or floor, and I am too pious
for your rain and mud.

So I keep your shrine, the best of you,
the clean, the smiling rest of you.

I am a stubborn priest, who knows himself
only in the dwindling oil of you,
the weeping and rebellious flame
about to die.

- Val Vinokur, "Your Worship"

Give my regards to Broadway
Remember me to Herald Square
Tell all the gang at Forty-second Street
That I will soon be there.
- George M. Cohan

Much that is terrible we do not know. Much that is beautiful we shall still discover. Let's sail till we come to the edge.
- Thomas M. Disch