New York Review of Books
2015
daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
I will wait in the real sand,
the tangible form of rock,
in the conversion of fate by breath.
With words I feed the creation of time
— someone else can speak, someone else can write.
Liquid movements cycled by the marrow
of a false body.
The glass absorbs the sky.
I will wait in the sane, in the dust of the rock
—in the shadow of dryness I erase them.
Soothe me with passive thoughts.
Soothe me because I don't exist.
________________________
Liliana Ponce
Theory of the Voice and Dream
translated from the Spanish by Michael Martin Shea
World Poetry 2025
Homosexuality
So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping
our mouths shut? as if we'd been pierced by a glance!
The song of an old cow is not more full of judgment
than the vapors which escape one's soul when one is sick;
so I pull the shadows around me like a puff
and crinkle my eyes as if at the most exquisite moment
of a very long opera, and then we are off!
without reproach and without hope that our delicate feet
will touch the earth again, let alone "very soon"
It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate.
I start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear
to my heart, that proud cur at the garbage can
in the rain. It's wonderful to admire oneself
with complete candor, tallying up the merits of each
of the latrines. 14th Street is drunken and credulous,
53rd tries to tremble but is too at rest. The good
love a park and the inept a railway station,
and there are the divine ones who drag themselves up
and down the lengthening shadow of an Abyssinian head
in the dust, trailing their long elegant heels of hot air
crying to confuse the brave "It's a summer day,
and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world."
1954, First published, Poetry, Chicago 1970
_____________________
Frank O' Hara
from Super Gay Poems
edited by Stephanie Burt
Belknap Press of Harvard University
2025
July 22, 1937 – October 12, 2025
“When he writes, the page just falls away.”
WENDELL BERRY
Evocation
As beautiful as the idea of a shoulder,
the skin of a cup that mirrors the spine,
the spartan stone confesses
stubbornly in the dead limb.
It was not milled oats, it breathed.
It rubbed and pleaded with the sea's tears
it was serrated and sandy
glad levity inviting the barbarian stranger.
It was beautiful as the shoulder of cattle,
between the grass and flies,
between the light of August as dreamed in April
and, and, it was only the palm of her hand.
__________________________
Erin Moure
from Super Gay Poems
edited by Stephanie Burt
Harvard University (Belknap Press)
2025
Mehdi Hasan sits down with Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir and Palestinian actress Hiam Abbas to discuss their latest film ‘Palestine 36,’ which explores the ‘Great Revolt’ against British rule in Palestine from 1936-39, before the Nakba in 1948. The film is Palestine’s official submission to the Oscars for 2026 and received one of the longest ovations from an audience at the Toronto International Film Festival. They also discuss censorship in Hollywood and what it was like filming in the middle of an ongoing genocide.