Readings in Contemporary Poetry
Laura Moriarty and Kimberly Lyons
Monday, January 14, 2013, 6:30 pm, Dia Chelsea
Monday, January 14, 2013, 6:30 pm
535 West 22nd Street, 5th Floor
New York City
Introduction by Vincent Katz
Laura Moriarty
Laura Moriarty is the author of A Tonalist (Nightboat Books, 2010); A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975-2007 (Omnidawn, 2007); the novel Ultravioleta (Atelos, 2006); and Who That Divines, which is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2014. She has taught at Naropa University and Mills College and is currently the Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. Awards include a grant from the Fund for Poetry (2007), the New Langton Arts Award in Literature (1998), the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award in Poetry (1992), and the Poetry Center Book Award (1983). She attended the University of California at Berkeley and was born in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Who That Divines
Devises
As Spicer claimed
“I am a geographer”
A case
For belief
But not in the future
Repeats fate
You say follow the map
But I refuse
Further to follow
What you thought
You saw
Me kissing God
Or giving head
What does that
With the unknown depth
Of social debt
Where each word is a vote
And I self-possessed
And you the damsel in distress
Have to do with the death
Alive in my throat?
Or how not to go
Hunted haunted
Divine undaunted
With you as reader
Knowing everything
How not to go on?
As Spicer claimed
“I am a geographer”
A case
For belief
But not in the future
Repeats fate
You say follow the map
But I refuse
Further to follow
What you thought
You saw
Me kissing God
Or giving head
What does that
With the unknown depth
Of social debt
Where each word is a vote
And I self-possessed
And you the damsel in distress
Have to do with the death
Alive in my throat?
Or how not to go
Hunted haunted
Divine undaunted
With you as reader
Knowing everything
How not to go on?
Kimberly Lyons
Kimberly Lyons is the author of several books of poetry including Rouge (Instance Press, 2012); the Practice of Residue (Subpress, 2012); and Abracadabra (Granary Books, 2000). Her broadside Asterisk 12 was published by fewer and further Press in 2012 and writings and poems have appeared in Aufgabe, Talisman Magazine, New American Writing, Unarmed and Peaches and Bats. She is the publisher of Lunar Chandelier Press and a practicing social worker at the Brooklyn Women’s Shelter. She has lived and worked in New York City since 1981.
Boro of Todi
The indefinite grist of the hour’s mill
here is manufactured from a girl
herself as receptacle of a woman’s debris
the vaporous container of the solidified
human gelee.
Every second’s stroking addition
is stored at the crossroads of
my own volition.
A rocky cup strewn path of charms and knots
the crushed pods of invidious thought
stucco the ground with the shells
of the spent hours that fell
to the ground inside this riddled space
decorated with cannon, a tractor, the banquet’s soiled lace
that I used to wipe my face
of rain, coffee, tears and sperm.
From the derivatives all I could learn
inscribed, diluted, washed in the chalice.
The smaller one, shaped like petal
that contorted ejaculates in bliss.
here is manufactured from a girl
herself as receptacle of a woman’s debris
the vaporous container of the solidified
human gelee.
Every second’s stroking addition
is stored at the crossroads of
my own volition.
A rocky cup strewn path of charms and knots
the crushed pods of invidious thought
stucco the ground with the shells
of the spent hours that fell
to the ground inside this riddled space
decorated with cannon, a tractor, the banquet’s soiled lace
that I used to wipe my face
of rain, coffee, tears and sperm.
From the derivatives all I could learn
inscribed, diluted, washed in the chalice.
The smaller one, shaped like petal
that contorted ejaculates in bliss.