The Culture Channel

Today's poem:

Great Things Have Happened

We were talking about the great things
that have happened in our lifetimes;
and I said, "Oh, I suppose the moon landing
was the greatest thing that has happened
in my time." But, of course, we were all lying.
The truth is the moon landing didn't mean
one-tenth as much to me as one night in 1963
when we lived in a three-room flat in what once had been
the mansion of some Victorian merchant prince
(our kitchen had been a clothes closet, I'm sure),
on a street where by now nobody lived
who could afford to live anywhere else.
That night, the three of us, Claudine, Johnnie and me,
woke up at half-past four in the morning
and ate cinnamon toast together.

"Is that all?" I hear somebody ask.

Oh, but we were silly with sleepiness
and, under our windows, the street-cleaners
were working their machines and conversing in Italian, and
everything was strange without being threatening,
even the tea-kettle whistled differently
than in the daytime: it was like the feeling
you get sometimes in a country you've never visited
before, when the bread doesn't taste quite the same,
the butter is a small adventure, and they put
paprika on the table instead of pepper,
except that there was nobody in this country
except the three of us, half-tipsy with the wonder
of being alive, and wholly enveloped in love.

--Alden Nowlan

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Happy Easter if you celebrate! Happy Sunday if not.

Here is today's poem:

Sunflower Astronaut
by Charlie Espinosa

[commence imbibition]

I begin my log in the seed capsule. There is little to report.
I am dormant. I am alone. I am drifting through the void.
Sometimes, I wonder what lies beyond the vacuum-sealed walls.
Sometimes, I swear I hear a very faint, very beautiful, song.

I have landed. Surface: moist. Atmosphere: favorable. Competition: unknown.
I discard the shriveled seed coat. Every cell in my body pulses with life.
Enzymes fly like meteorites and I emerge, gasping from my pod.

[commence germination]

There is no need to waste time with instructions.
I open my endosperm sack and gorge on the stored feast of sugar.
Invigorated, my radicle, that intrepid probe, plunges into the depths.
For the first time I taste, no absorb, the rich minerals of the new world.

My cotyledons unfurl like two green sails into the light.
Ah, sweet solar wind, filling my chlorophyll with galactic energy.
Gradually, I establish myself here, growing up and down, in light and dark.

[commence vegetative growth]

Forgive me. I have not been carefully logging my progress.
The divisions, they simply became too numerous to catalogue.
Besides, I was in a kind of trance, conducting the photo-symphony–
Keeping my glucose stocks fat and multiplying my meristems.

The important point is that I am tall with a well-defined stalk and enviable leaves.
There are other sunflowers too, and a rather impudent beast who is fond of digging.
All in all, I have adapted well. I am happy. Though I don’t care for the beast.

[commence ripening]

For months I have studied the sun. My head of bracts tracked its arc like an antenna.
Now I am a sun, with a yellow crown and a hot core of disk florets and pollen.
I, too, emit signals to orbiting bodies who come and go with fertile stardust.
Was this my mission, to set into motion a new solar system?

I merge with another star. My head sags under the weight of our fruits.
The inflorescence fades. The wind scatters my wilted petals over the floor.
It has become difficult to know where I end and where this planet begins.

[commence decomposition]

The digging beast beheaded me and made off with my seeds.
The sparrows peck at what’s left. Somehow, I don’t seem to mind.
Each day, a little darker, a little colder, siphons me away.

I said before I began alone, but now I remember something else:
Being a seed among other seeds encircled in a halo of yellow rays.

*

I made gyoza! #mygyoza They might not look that great but they are delicious!

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Today's poem:

After After
by Kristi Maxwell

This was after we moved into pencil drawings of tree houses on stilts, but before the cows grazed in the diminishing field of the freckle signifying our face.

This was after a refusal of berries too close to rotting, but before self-consciousness about metaphor.

This was after the butter-soaked collard greens, but before we deflated the ache as if it were something reusable and easily stowed.

This was after the pimple you mistook for jam and, obviously, failed to wipe off, but before the last comma, which we obstinately misplaced.

This was after the bite mark, but before the tongue.

This was after the nosegay protecting the nose from the plague-stench, but before the video of the autopsy of the woman with a bra and panties matching your own.

This was after lushness, but before lushness.

This was after the ghosts caught fire and after their flimsy collage of light, but before the building conceived space and before the hard labor and before the dead men.

This was after the green shoe busted and the wool shoe, but before the description of a bus-struck owl.

This was after we knew, but long before saying.

*

I made my appointment to return my old modem and router for 2:15 pm today before I decided to take today off, because 2:15 put it right in the middle of my lunch hour. However, having taken the day off, 2:15 became the worst possible time to do it. But it's done! Not without a slight misadventure. I put the address in for a Lyft and doublechecked the confirmation text and was like, okay, 74-10 Austin Street. But when we arrived at 74-10 Austin Street, it was a residential building. And I'm like, I know it's just up the block there and the guy is like, but this is the address you requested. So I get out and start walking and I'm like, I know it's here, I've been here before, where the fuck is it??? So I recheck my phone and the address is...71-40. I would have sworn on a stack of bibles everything said 74-10, but it did not. Brain, why are you like this???

Anyway, the equipment return was quick and smooth, and Shake Shack was 2 doors down, so I had Shake Shack for lunch and it was all good.

Here's today's poem:

Five passages between uncertain territories

1
The wind has got trapped in the chimney;
its plaintive howls crash, slash and rumble
all the way to the backbone and back again.
Walrus angels ride their ancient motorbikes
on the Wall of Death.

2
I burrow deep into heretic soil, lie quietly
close to roots and corms, listen to the sounds
of critters in the field, beasties by the roadside:
their adventure songs of rescue, revelation,
revival and sunrise.

3
Because you travel the undiscovered country,
carrying the black flag, mallet and stake,
I offer you heartware – I stay tuned in all right;
but you know I don't trust you any farther
than to the rim of the map.

4
I lost my little mittens and my hands are cold.
All around, purple pearls and snailshells lie
scattered like random pebbles; I pick them up
gingerly, clovefully. I count them three times,
then once more for luck.

5
Cloaked in furs and feathers I shall sojourn
in abandoned observatories, hurdy-gurdy
power stations, mills by mystic lakesides,
stitching tales of hope and hardship, breaking
every bone in the book.

--Jane Røken

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