A Story About The Body

by Stephen Dunn
The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had
watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a panter, almost sixty,
and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her
work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked
at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his
questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her
door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have
me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double
mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my
breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest
cavity — like music — withered very quickly, and he made himself look
at her when he said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think I could.” He walked back
to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small
blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose
petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on
top; the rest of the bowl— she must have swept them from the corners
of her studio — was full of dead bees.

The Rival

by Sylvia Plath
if the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
you leave the same impression
of something beautiful, but annihilating.
both of you are great light borrowers.
her o-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected.
and your first gift is making stone out of everything.
i wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
and dying to say something unanswerable.
the moon, too, abases her subjects,
but in the daytime she is ridiculous.
your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
white and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.
no day is safe from news of you,
walking about in africa maybe, but thinking of me.

Atlantis- A Lost Sonnet

by Eavan Boland
How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?
I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —
white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is
this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of
where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

Bloom

Bloom by Anna Schuleit is an installation in the soon to be demolished Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Anna and her team filled the center with a variety of nearly 28,000 plants and invited past patients and family to reflect on their time there.

I feel like a single Dippin' Dot.

His Ma

Dimensions of Dialogue

Destino

Destino: a collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney.

She Thinks of Him on Her Birthday

by Deborah Garrison
 
It’s still winter,
and still I don’t know you
anymore, and you don’t know

me. But this morning I stand
in the kitchen with the illusion,
peeling a clementine. Each piece

snaps like the nickname for a girl,
the tinny bite it was 
to be one once. Again I count

your daughters and find myself in the middle,
the waist of the hourglass,
endlessly passed through and passed through

but holding nothing, dismayed
by the grubby February sun
I was born under and the cheap pleasure

it gives the window. Yet I raise the shade
for it, and try not to feel it is wrong
to want spring, to be a season

further from you—not wrong to wish
for a hard rain, a hard wind
like one we sat out in together
or came in from together.

Ice Cube Celebrates the Eames