September 18, 2024 - “Road trip”
She steps closer to the edge and feels rough pavement press against the bare soles of her feet. She had forgotten her shoes in the room, in the garden, maybe, and she had not missed them, had started to like the way each step was a sweet, shared moment between herself and solid ground, had felt less like she was floating away, now that she could feel the earth beneath her, and so she keeps them off the rest of the evening, the next morning as they eat breakfast and pack up the car, and even as they drive, she rests her bare feet on the dashboard while they talk back and forth about the night before.
September 16, 2024 - “Day drink”
Allan stands in front of you and you slide your almost empty glass towards him. He takes it and places it beneath the tap.
“How you feeling?”
“Like shit”
“Beer’s not helping?”
“Gonna feel like shit either way, might as well enjoy something.”
“Getting older is going to kick you in the ass.”
“That’s what Benny says.”
“How is he?”
You are about to say fine but you stop yourself.
“Not great. He needs something to do.”
“Tell him to come by sometime.”
“I’ll tell him, don’t know if he’ll listen.”
“He really is as stubborn as May.”
“Imagine living with them both.”
“Won’t be forever.”
“Got an end date for me?”
“You know, Ruthie,” Allan’s tone sharpens, “you got somewhere to stay when you need one, I know it’s not what you want, but you got that and –”
“– not everybody does,” you finish, “I know. Allan, I do know that.”
September 14, 2024
Near the Atlantic
writing
by the light of the window /
reading
beneath the night of September /
walking
September 13, 2024 - “Night swim”
You tell him you want to go in the pool one last time and he says he’ll be your lifeguard. You hand him your towel and step in up to your ankles. You say, look at the moon, at the way the light is landing on the water, and he thinks you are stalling but really, you aren’t even thinking about how cold it is because it looks like a painting, like a picture you are making ripples in, a moment you are moving, and he counts down from ten, waiting for you to go under, and so you walk deeper into the water, tell him the moonlight might turn you into a werewolf, and he laughs, says, what? cocks his head and starts his countdown again. You go under before he reaches zero and think about surfacing as something else. You stand in the shallow end and look at the moon, so close to being full. He wraps you in a towel and rubs you dry as you whisper, goodbye, to the water, the slow nights, to the sort of stars you don’t have back home. Inside, you make your shower last. You are trying to find a reason to stay.
September 12, 2024 - “Laxo” by Veronica Scharf Garcia
Veronica Scharf Garcia has exhibited her art throughout the Americas in Florida, New Jersey, California and Peru. She grew up on several continents (the Middle East, Africa and South America). Most recently, Scharf Garcia is living out of suitcases while traveling throughout Europe.
September 11, 2024 - “Movere” by Veronica Scharf Garcia
Veronica Scharf Garcia has exhibited her art throughout the Americas in Florida, New Jersey, California and Peru. She grew up on several continents (the Middle East, Africa and South America). Most recently, Scharf Garcia is living out of suitcases while traveling throughout Europe.
September 10, 2024 - “Centre of the Ring” by Wedge Tai
“This” and “that” having no antitheses is the pivot of Tao.
When the pivot is placed in the centre of the ring, one can deal with infinite changes.
---Chuang Tsu
A bottomless vortex, at the same time
a spinning top lashed incessantly by man’s desires,
whirls faster and faster, into the dark emptiness.
And you, are a grain of sand in the current.
The axis of the vortex is a moonbeam, sprinkled
over the snow-covered plateau, on which lives
no human, except a few pines holding their cones,
and the snow, loitering on the wind to and fro.
The hormone of capital permeates, boosting
straggly twigs from your heart. You must, as a tree,
cut them off to keep your trunk straight upward,
until your head is laden with myriad stars.
Then please come to the ring centre, and tower
as the Tide Control Pillar. In a blink,
what circles around you is no more the vortex,
but the Milky Way pulled off from the sky’s waist.
5. According to Journey to the West, the Tide Control Pillar is a tall thick metal rod that gods placed in the sea to control the tides, but it was later converted by the Monkey King into his powerful weapon.
“Centre of the Ring” is a poem from the author’s collection 2510, which has been featured on Curlew Daily over the last week.
Wedge Tai is a Chinese underground poet living in Beijing. Born in the 1980s and currently working as an English teacher, he writes poems in Chinese and in English that reflect dire political realities and the resistance thereto in the communist regime, and thus hardly gets published in mainstream press. He is the author of the self-printed collection, Disgrace Disclaimer.
September 8, 2024 - “West Beauty” by Wedge Tai
A hundred years, is but a leap of a sparrow
among the trees. Layers and layers of time’s
covered your mound, just as the amorous frost
swallows a stubborn rock into her womb. But I am
a frozen lake, fearless of the reaping wind of age.
Rowing a cypress boat, in the middle of the river,
that boy with long locks, is the very one I adore.
Even death cannot change my love for him.
The home items still radiate your warmth
and your breath, as if you had never left.
Your freezing tenderness and your glowing
rigidity, are a primitive machine that takes me in,
and presses me repeatedly as pig iron.
Rowing a cypress boat, to the other side of the river,
that boy with long locks, is just the one I love.
Even death cannot separate us.
You said, I was a piece of ore from Venus,
too happy on earth to be homesick. Actually,
I am more like red coral in the ocean, while you
are a damselfish swimming about, who is
at times mesmerized by the sirenic jellyfish.
Oh my mother, good heavens! Why can’t you see?
Oh my mother, good heavens! Why don’t you agree?
Now, you’ve long become a bush of white coral,
lighting the darkness underground. But I,
as a grosbeak, am confined in the steel cage
of my own body, dreaming every day
about returning with you to the deep sea.
3. The title refers to the famous beauty called Xishi in the Spring and Autumn Period of China.
4. The italic allusion is taken from the ancient Chinese poetic classic The Book of Songs.
“West Beauty” is a poem from the author’s collection 2510, which we will be featured on Curlew Daily over the next week.
Wedge Tai is a Chinese underground poet living in Beijing. Born in the 1980s and currently working as an English teacher, he writes poems in Chinese and in English that reflect dire political realities and the resistance thereto in the communist regime, and thus hardly gets published in mainstream press. He is the author of the self-printed collection, Disgrace Disclaimer.
September 7, 2024 - “South Nothingness (Namo)” by Wedge Tai
Having no thought is the root; detachment from all forms is the body; persisting in no idea is the essence.
---The Sutra of Huineng
Only by clipping your wings, and squeezing
into hive-like pigeon-holes, can you prove
that you are an eagle.
Only by chopping off your feet, and cramming
yourself into a capsule car, can you demonstrate
that you are a cheetah.
You are a butterfly, that roams among
illusory flowers; or you are a flower,
that expects an illusory butterfly’s visit.
More often than not, you are a caterpillar
nibbling away the leaves under yourself,
until you have nowhere to stay.
All that you covet, is nothing
but bubbles of the seawater of desires
blown by the colossal mouth of capital.
You should be a cactus or a hedgehog,
that turns prajna into long spikes,
to prick the bubbles, and pierce capital’s lungs.
2. The Sutra of Huineng is a Buddhist classic on Zen by the Sixth Patriarch Huineng in the 7th-century China.
“South Nothingness (Namo)” is a poem from the author’s collection 2510, which we will be featured on Curlew Daily over the next week.
Wedge Tai is a Chinese underground poet living in Beijing. Born in the 1980s and currently working as an English teacher, he writes poems in Chinese and in English that reflect dire political realities and the resistance thereto in the communist regime, and thus hardly gets published in mainstream press. He is the author of the self-printed collection, Disgrace Disclaimer.
September 6, 2024 - “East Land” by Wedge Tai
Confucius said, “The wise are not troubled, the benevolent not worried, and the courageous not afraid.”
---The Analects
For millennia, your ancestors, your fathers
and you, have grazed and mated on this land,
and finally wormed into the brown earth,
never wondering what laurels above taste like.
A whip, like a ferocious hissing viper,
repeatedly bites into your backs.
Drenched with blood, you have always thought
that even snakes will be fed full one day.
When one of you was chosen as the Sacrifice,
the others quickly huddled into a roll of toilet paper,
watching a crimson snake winding on the ground,
extolling the sharpness of the butcher knife.
Later, a violent red storm swept away
all the footprints of your forefathers.
Ecstatic, you bid farewell to the past, only to find,
the next day, the sun was still that same sun.
The whip had been burned into ashes; its crack
still kept cloning itself over your head.
It worries your gaunt body during the day,
and at night, it gnaws your inescapable dream.
Those ancient ideograms were castrated
by the bloodthirsty sickle; those yew-scented
totems were dismantled. Thereafter,
you could only survive as a eunuch.
Some of your family and friends, a decade later,
were eaten by wolves in the northernmost
world of ice and snow, some evaporated
in Tarim Basin, and some even lurked within.
Window opened, the air you’ve never breathed
and the views you have never seen
all poured in. You began to look beyond the hill,
and dream of the clouds floating over the crest.
Indeed, you ought to learn the lion’s defiance
and courage, but must decline the poppies
it presents. Go deep into the hearts of
the sages, and nurture your mind into a gingko.
It is time, that you burnished your heart
of raw stone into nephrite. Let your feet
grow claws like daggers, and make your head
shoot out long horns as spears.
“East Land” is a poem from the author’s collection 2510, which we will be featured on Curlew Daily over the next week.
Wedge Tai is a Chinese underground poet living in Beijing. Born in the 1980s and currently working as an English teacher, he writes poems in Chinese and in English that reflect dire political realities and the resistance thereto in the communist regime, and thus hardly gets published in mainstream press. He is the author of the self-printed collection, Disgrace Disclaimer.
September 5, 2024 - “North Sea” by Wedge Tai
The traditional illumines the modern;
the past projects the future.
---Epigraph
Three-meter-thick ice lies under your feet, just as
desires compressed in your heart. North wind is
a scalpel, that removes your flesh from the bones.
The arctic fox, like a paper ball randomly discarded,
rolls on the snow. A seal sticks its head
out of an ice hole, and is pinned by the teeth
of a long-waiting polar bear. A hot red hibiscus
immediately blossoms on the niveous plain of ice.
In North Sea lives a fish, which is called Kun.
Kun’s body extends thousands of miles.1
You exit the Experience Hall, shed your down coat
and creep into your shorts. Boundless seawater
agitates your desolate eyeballs. Where the red
hibiscus once flourished, naked crowds lie
in the sun, air-drying their moldy lusts.
Great liners water wonderlands skyscraping hotels,
like tumours bulging out of the body,
waver in the warm breeze with slopes of poppies.
Turning into a bird, Kun becomes Peng,
whose back measures thousands of miles.
It rages and soars, with wings as clouds masking the sky.
The italic quotations come from the beginning chapter of the ancient Chinese philosophical classic Chuang Tsu.
“North Sea” is a poem from the author’s collection 2510, which we will be featured on Curlew Daily over the next week.
Wedge Tai is a Chinese underground poet living in Beijing. Born in the 1980s and currently working as an English teacher, he writes poems in Chinese and in English that reflect dire political realities and the resistance thereto in the communist regime, and thus hardly gets published in mainstream press. He is the author of the self-printed collection, Disgrace Disclaimer.
September 3, 2024 - “All the time”
For a few weeks after he leaves, you find it hard to be alone, a feeling that whole heartedly infuriates you because there had been a time, not long ago at all, where you loved it. Preferred it, even. You think about going to the bookstore, the beach, taking a walk and getting a beer, think about sitting down in the grass and seeing how strong the sun will get. You think about doing a lot of things you like to do, but the way you did them so happily on your own is something you are having trouble remembering, and you know time heals everything, but you are wondering what you’re supposed to do in all the time until then.
August 22, 2024 - “Untitled” by Masha Vasilieva
Masha Vasilieva is a film photographer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her works have been exhibited at Soho Photo Gallery (exhibition “Krappy Kamera”, 2022) and Glasgow Gallery of Photography (exhibition “Blue”, 2023). She is fascinated by every day life, double exposures and film photography experiments. More of her works are available at https://www.mashafilms.net/
August 21, 2024 - “wrest.” by Linda Dolan
it’s that i tell god: fine.
you stay over there. you sit on that couch.
i’ll sit in this chair. don’t leave.
don’t talk to me.
that i say: anyway, i don’t buy it.
i don’t buy that you couldn’t’ve done so much better
if you made the whole world. i think it’s a shitty plan.
i say: fine. so it’s a shitty plan. and the whole world sucks.
at least i have our heart disease too, at least i’m not the only
one without it, at least you have some messed-up sense of justice.
and: i know my pain is only one small pain
amongst all the great big pains happening everywhere
all the time to all such precious people.
— which is exactly the problem: all such precious people.
and: i’ve been asking you to do something for a really long time.
and: don’t talk to me.
just so you can ask me to do more shit for you.
my whole life taking care of sick people.
and: i do not want to write
what i can only write because he’s dead.
i do not want to live
where i can only live because he’s dead.
i won’t say this is in any way okay.
it’s like how chris and i get in a fight and we fight all week
and then he wakes up at seven a.m. on the morning of our party
and cleans the apartment and vacuums the floors and greets the guests
and i’m glad, thankful, grateful. but that doesn’t mean i wasn’t alone.
so thanks, god, for grad school, the apartment, a nearby yoga studio.
but i don’t need a partner just to vacuum my floors.
i don’t need a god just to vacuum my floors.
also: why doesn’t anyone see that being grateful makes it worse?
i want to be mad and say that god left us. i’d rather he leave us
than treat us like this. i’d rather he just be asleep.
August 18, 2024 - “There is always a moment”
There is always a moment, when you are walking, where you realize you are walking. You catch a reflection in a window and acknowledge that you are a human moving your legs to get somewhere else, and now, you don’t know where you’re going, really, just know you’d like to see the water and some of those small wooden houses on the way.
You pass the children’s museum, the nature center, places the boys went growing up, and suddenly you are thinking there is so much more to see here, that maybe time and space are not your enemy, and you don’t always have to be doing something just because you don’t know what you’re doing.
The pond is a shallow marsh at this hour.
You watch the glass water sitting between reeds, low reaching branches brushing against the surface sending slow ripples out in small rings, and it makes it look like it is raining, very gently, only in one spot, and the sound, too is something you want to give into, a chorus of cicadas, or crickets, something that sings, and you stand still, stay with the reeds and the water and let cars fly past you, wondering if you are seeing something they’re not, if something specific is keeping you here, back to the road, eyes towards the water, and you wish there was somewhere to sit, or lie down for a while, wanting to curl yourself up inside the tall grass.
You see Patty’s porch light flicker on, sensing the setting sun. You hear her screen door swing open a few moments later. You know when you turn you will see her sitting in her favorite chair, watching the woods, and the water, and wondering where summer was off too so soon. She’ll wave you over and tell you to sit. She’ll give you a beer and say, nothing like last year, is it?
August 16, 2024 - “The City Woos You Back” by Betsy Guttmacher
Beloved city I have been unfaithful
I fell in love with creeks rail trails Rosa rugosa
dipped my feet in the mineral cold of the Rio Grande
strapped on snowshoes in backcountry but all this beauty
was never mine not the way you belong to me
and I to you
Countless times my heart said done
My heart said abandon run
you with your sidewalk sparrows eating chicken wings
how can you do this force us to gnaw our own kin
in broad daylight I made plans
bucolic plans out-buildings and a meadow
Still I drag garbage to curb toss other people’s dog shit bags
my car street cleaning the purgatory
later I walk the entire length of Vanderbilt Avenue
high from wine and women friends the magic hour
orange light bounces off red brick Brooklyn
off the leafy view from a venetian verandah
Impossible buildings dragged from all over the world
reassembled all of us tucked in never alone
again you give this walk this moment a life
its Wonder Wheel its density and mirrors
forgive me when I forget to look or can’t bear to
Tonight autumn crisps each street light
bellies full dodge weave hipitty hop every face a smile
everywhere hands are touching and you beloved city
fingers entwine with mine we walk
we whisper lip to ear lovers again
Betsy Guttmacher is a Reiki practitioner based in Brooklyn, NY USA who works privately with individuals, and in community and medical settings. Her creative and healing work centers relationships - to ourselves, each other and our planet. She is a member of the Sweet Action Poetry collective and a contributor to three of its chapbooks. Her poems can be found in the forthcoming Bullshit Lit 2024 Anthology, Bowery Gothic, the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, and the Bridge