Prose Poems

The writer on her new poetry collection, rearranging the nervous system, and a fact’s capacity to contain its own strangeness.

In a career spanning over two decades, Wayne Koestenbaum has copped to a lot.

A snow lark hovers over the isolated Isle of the Dead A shadow on the beach is an echo of Venus who bestows upon me some ripened red fruit In this isolated moment waves produce a dream that seduces me

David Berman committed suicide, and I’m like a blackbird that has flown into a bay window and awoken in a flower box, dizzy in gardenia shade, trying to get un-stunned and back on the wing before the neighborhood cats come round.

Bruce Boone Dismembered selects from four decades of unflinching, intimate prose and poetry on gay life by the cofounder of San Francisco’s New Narrative movement.

Girl C is supposed to be hard at work today but she keeps missing her stops, slipping. As the train falls out of view once again, she returns to her world of desire, instead of the world of transport and commuting and punctuality. She allows herself to float into the passenger car, and her pockets empty themselves and her clothing flies off-screen as per instructions provided one hundred years ago.

Around certain clusters of the dead, almost magnetically, a vortex of opacity gathers in the record. 

One must think of, but finally, I had to agree, not walk around naked, not in body or spirit. Not write about, when what is a word, at the risk of disconnection, no longer ask. What it would take. Acknowledge the dark, though with dreams in color and. If still possible. Moist skin against the page.

In any narrative, facts are present or not. One might assume the more facts, the better the constructed history, since facts are meant to reflect what can’t be computed by storytelling alone, which is said to be subjective and therefore inaccurate.

Zachary talks about wanting to be with someone because he feels like he can be a better person for someone else.

The challenge is not to launch into space. It is how to treat other people.

Each wounds you badly, but no boy hurts
Like the first one did

on the other hand if someone were to ask Leopoldo about his pilgrimage to Cajas, 

1. I’m not interested in propaganda.

As rioting continues in the UK, Bhanu Kapil’s first book, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, now published ten years ago, feels as relevant as ever, giving us a chorus of voices talking about dismemberment and change.

The phase vocoder bends the pitch of
  my voice toward a norm.

This First Proof contains the poems “Ghost Mist (Pacific Coast Highway),” “With,” and “Glitch.”

After September 11, I kept thinking that the United States wouldn’t invade Afghanistan. I was so wrong about that.

The apes are mulling about the magazine racks and rhinoceros are shuffling their feet. 

Our love arrived on a platform of the subway station at Grand Army Plaza.