I Take Your T-Shirt to Bed Again

And by now it has almost lost its scent—

your scent, as when you were here and turned

towards the wall while I pressed my body

into your body and sighed, “You smell like candy”

into your t-shirted back. Yes, the smell is yours

the shirt warmed by your lean torso, tufted

and delicious. I’ve washed my clothes in your soap,

but that wasn’t it—there must be something sweet your pores

pour forth. In three days you will be here and we will drink

from and with each other, sleep in close quarters,

naked, awake to heat and singing cells and slickness. But now,

 too tired even to please myself, I breathe the shirt that covers

my pillow and dream—our yes and yes and yes opening and opening—

----Amy Lemmon

Published in The Best American Poetry 2013 (Scribner, 2013)

Originally published in Vitrine:a printed museum

best american poetry....and best of the net!

I'm getting some great poetry news so far in 2013. My poem "I take your T-shirt to bed again..." was selected for The Best American Poetry 2013, which will be published by Scribner in September. I've written for the Best American Poetry blog several times, but this is the first time my work will actually appear in that estimable annual collection.

Furthermore, Gerry LaFemina's poem "Bright Windows," which I selected for the Summer 2012 issue of Ducts.org, was chosen for the 2012 Best of the Net Anthology! That should be online later this month, I hear. I'll post again when it's out.

lives of nobody's saint

There was a man in the East named Nobody, and that man was like another Job, great among all the people of the East. For he was great in race and lineage, great in power, great in knowledge, great in compassion and mercy, great in manifold perfection, great in honor and reverence, great in daring, great in glory and felicity. All these things are shown in Holy Scripture.

I'm working on final corrections (yikes!) to the manuscript of Saint Nobody. And this morning I've been reading about the medieval and early modern tradition of the Saint Nobody--sometimes called Nemo, Nought, Niemand, etc. Awhile back a reader of this blog told me about Martha Bayless's book Parody in the Middle Ages: The Latin Tradition, which has translations and original Latin texts of some very interesting stuff.

Right now I'm reading "The Combined Nemo"--a wickedly tongue-in-cheek treatise on the holy figure of Nobody that basically compiles a lot of references in the bible to things that "nobody" is, does, or can do. It's very bizarre. (Scroll all the way down this page to see one 16th-century representation of a secular Nobody, who is to blame for all the broken and missing things in a bourgeois household. It's most likely going to be on the cover of my book.)

Another article I read mentions the connection between a Nobody character and the wise fool, such as Shakespeare's Fool in Lear. It occurs to me that this character must also be connected to one of my favorite tarot cards--The Fool, which has the number zero in the major arcana.

I'm not sure how any of this is going to help me finish my book, but it's a lot of fun to mess around with and think about.

reading is fun-damental

Opening with an old slogan from my childhood (whatever happened to the RIF program?) to muse on the power of the book.

Yesterday I was in our favorite local restaurant waiting for Bob and the kids to arrive, reading my most recent purchase: Chapter after Chapter by the amazing Heather Sellers. A little boy came up to me (he'd been sort of walking back and forth from his family's table to the front of the restaurant while his party got a baby in the stroller and figured out the tip) and asked about the book. I told him it was for people who wanted to write their own book and had advice about how to do it.

He told me he loved books, and that he was into the fourth Harry Potter novel. I assumed he had to be older than Bobby, but said "I'm seven, almost seven and half." I asked him if he liked the movies or the books better. "The books are more extravagant," he said. "But I like them both."
I so want Bobby to be friends with this kid! (didn't get his name this time, but maybe we will meet on the playground)

Later, much later, I found myself engrossed in Erin McGraw's The Good Life, a collection of devastatingly good short stories. It had been an exhausting day. I had struggled with some sort of serious mental funkiness for over 48 hours, manifesting in various negative patterns. Now, immersed in Erin's world of an alcoholic priest, a frustrated divorced mother, and a self-help author who attends morning mass for her injured, controlling mother, I literally couldn't stop reading. The door clicked open--Bob returning from his gig at Iridium with Lee Konitz--and I checked the clock. Two-thirty!

The power of good writing. I hope I can provide this for my readers, enable them to lose themselves, lose track of time, take them away from the angst and sturm und drang and whatever Germanic term you like to describe their own noisy brains. That's the only thing that matters.