by Danielle Deulen | Jun 10, 2021 | Lit from the Basement
With the boys old enough for school, Max went and got himself a job, and now we just do not have enough time to do the show proper. We hope to drop the occasional show in the future, but are uncertain if it will be back with the release frequency from before.This...
by Danielle Deulen | Dec 15, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian by Ross Gay Tumbling through the city in my mind without once looking up the racket in the lugwork probably rehearsing some stupid thing I said or did some crime or other the city they say is a lonely place until yes the sound of...
by Danielle Deulen | Nov 17, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Autobiographical: Another Draft by Jacqueline Osherow It looked like a fifties-movie version of a mutant life form on a distant planet— but I adored it with a needy passion, called it my botanical Halley’s Comet since it would only bloom one day a year or so the owner...
by Danielle Deulen | Nov 3, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Yours by Mary Robison Allison struggled away from her white Renault, limping with the weight of the last of the pumpkins. She found Clark in the twilight on the twig-and-leaf-littered porch behind the house. He wore a wool shawl. He was moving up and back in a padded...
by Danielle Deulen | Oct 20, 2019 | Uncategorized
Photo of a Girl, 1988: Cyborg by Faylita Hicks Somewhere, Carolina Standing next to my Momma, I mimic the exposure of internal systems, revealing an elegant smile creased white in the brunt of my dark face, blue grease slipping down the side of my neck. My...
by Danielle Deulen | Oct 6, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
A wonderful bird is the pelican by Dixon Lanier Merritt A wonderful bird is the pelican, His bill will hold more than his belican, He can take in his beak Enough food for a week But I’m damned if I see how the helican! A wonderful bird is the pelican...
by Danielle Deulen | Sep 15, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Things that Leave an Aching Feeling Inside by Lee Ann Roripaugh The flittering plop of moths bumping up against the ceiling late at night, and the shadowed, mosaic out- lines of their bodies littering the ceiling light’s bright glass bowl— round, triangular wings...
by Danielle Deulen | Sep 1, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
To learn more about Karyna McGlynn visit her page on the Poetry Foundation’s website by clicking here. This poem comes from Karyna McGlynn’s book Hothouse. Click here to purchase. Click on the printer icon to print this page To hear a version of...
by Danielle Deulen | Aug 18, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Who Would I Show It To? by Sally Ball [Merwin] I so much trusted your capacity for delight. Some suicide I’ve been able to see as an end of deep suffering. Your suffering was not to me invisible but outweighed by your curiosities, your sweet...
by Danielle Deulen | Aug 4, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
The Immigrants (Winter Wear) by Rane Arroyo They are, at first, scared of snowmen. Of the snow and the white men so easily born between the hands of children veiled in breaths and winter wear. The immigrants worry about bodies built without concerns for their souls,...
by Danielle Deulen | Jul 14, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Unmailed Letter by Joy Harjo It’s noon. I can hardly stand it. If anything touches me, I am ashes. Your laugh, and I considered myself resurrected, but then made the correction for time and space and it still added to an irrational number. It’s elementary. You can’t...
by Danielle Deulen | Jun 30, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Map by Bruce Snider There ought to be a fire somewhere in Indiana, not this night across the fields in Indiana. And God said let there be light, and there was light. And God said let there be corn, and there was Indiana. I kiss my love, taking his hand near the deer...
by Danielle Deulen | May 5, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
A Citizen by Don Bogen It’s true I lived in the twilight of empire, the glow at the center already muffled in rumor, the provinces indistinct, conspiratorial, alliances like sand falling through the tired fingers of diplomats while the orators held forth endlessly in...
by Danielle Deulen | Apr 28, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Something New by Carmen Giménez Smith’s You have to want the induction of marriage with its lot of glue along with its half-death, helmets with initials carved in, persnickety daughters demanding liberal nods, half-baked urbaniacs living on Main and Third...
by Danielle Deulen | Apr 21, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Ambition by Gary Soto For years our ambition was to eat Chicken. To sit in the back yard, In an aftershock of heat When the sun was out of the way. This happened. Drunk under a tree We became sophisticates of the lawn chair And beer bottles—trumpets we raised All...
by Danielle Deulen | Apr 14, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Lightening by A. Molotkov I wrap my mother’s body in a small blanket. She is light in my arms. Sprawled by a fig tree, my father asks, Are thoughts made of our own flesh? I hesitate. Our flesh is a ship stripped of sails. We listen to the sound of the oars. A fig...
by Danielle Deulen | Apr 7, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
[but the rain is full of ghosts tonight] by dawn lonsinger and it has taken something from me, driven my feet from the earth, tendered a gift that displaces me. The water pours through where-I-was like a lesson no one will tell me—a breaking up by filling. Each...
by Danielle Deulen | Mar 31, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Animals by Frank O’Hara Have you forgotten what we were like then when we were still first rate and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth it’s no use worrying about Time but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves and turned some sharp corners the...
by Danielle Deulen | Mar 24, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
The Romantic Lead by Ian Williams I yawned all the while we stood on the prow of a ship with our arms open in front of a green screen, I mean, a sunset. The week before I had to watch myself, my black and white self in a fedora, quick step through lines, We’ll always...
by Danielle Deulen | Mar 17, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
The Soild I Have Eaten by Aimee Nezhukumatathil The state soil of New York is named for the place where a man lost his finger to a rattlesnake. The finger lies quiet in the ground. The snake’s great-great-grandsnakes still chitter through this Honeoye soil. Sometimes...
by Danielle Deulen | Mar 10, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Dangerous for Girls by Connie Voisine . It was the summer of Chandra Levy, disappearing from Washington D.C., her lover a Congressman, evasive and blow-dried from Modesto, the TV wondering in every room in America to an image of her tight jeans and piles of curls...
by Danielle Deulen | Mar 3, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Cities in Dust by Siouxsie and the Banshees Water was running, children were running You were running out of time. Under the mountain, a golden fountain Were you praying at the Lares shrine? But oh your city lies in dust, my friend Oh, oh your city lies in dust, my...
by Danielle Deulen | Feb 24, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
The Same City by Terrance Hayes The rain falling on a night in mid-December, I pull to my father’s engine wondering how long I’ll remember this. His car is dead. He connects jumper cables to his battery, then to mine without looking in at me and the child. Water beads...
by Danielle Deulen | Feb 17, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
The Cinnamon Peeler by Michael Ondaatje If I were a cinnamon peeler I would ride your bed and leave the yellow bark dust on your pillow. Your breasts and shoulders would reek you could never walk through markets without the profession of my fingers floating over you....
by Danielle Deulen | Feb 10, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Litany by Rebecca Lindenberg O you gods, you long-limbed animals, you astride the sea and you unhammocked in the cypress grove and you with your hair full of horses, please. My thoughts have turned from the savor of plums to the merits of pity—touch and interrupt me,...
by Danielle Deulen | Feb 3, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
What Myth Is by Carl Phillips Not only what lasts, but what applies over time also. So maybe, for all my believing, not you, on either count. Anymore than this hand where it falls, here, on your body; or than your body itself, however good sometimes at making—even...
by Danielle Deulen | Jan 27, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Letter from New York by Erika L. Sánchez Every street—fried meat and onion, smears of shit and a gaggle of gadgets. What is the soul but this endless circuitry, the bright and pitiful idea you carry of yourself? Everything open open. When you say available, what you...
by Danielle Deulen | Jan 20, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Report from the Daughter of a Blue Planet by Yona Harvey Night after night the land delivers its verdict. Blades of grass struggle through earth, hearts & lungs develop in their sacs. Beetles mingle with dust & buds of flowers unfasten for the last time. The...
by Danielle Deulen | Jan 13, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
[ode] by D.A. Powell where have you gone blue middle of a decade? the gates creak. a sigh so vastly different the diary is pure spine. in the most gingerly way each leaf opened reveals the less of you 83, 84, 85: your relics in a converse...
by Danielle Deulen | Jan 6, 2019 | Lit from the Basement
Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted...
by Danielle Deulen | Dec 30, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate...
by Danielle Deulen | Dec 23, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Visitation by Mark Doty When I heard he had entered the harbor, and circled the wharf for days, I expected the worst: shallow water, confusion, some accident to bring the young humpback to grief. Don’t they depend on a compass lodged in the salt-flooded folds of...
by Danielle Deulen | Dec 16, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Nightingale by Paisley Rekdal The boy sits at the kitchen table pointing through the window at the dark. There is a bird that comes at night, he says, that makes the most beautiful music. Steam off the edges of the field, the gray and brown and green of it and beyond...
by Danielle Deulen | Dec 9, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Portrait of the Alcoholic Floating in Space with Severed Umbilicus by Kaveh Akbar linebreak in Fort Wayne I drank the seniors Old Milwaukee Old Crow in Indianapolis I stopped now I regret every drink I never took all around ...
by Danielle Deulen | Dec 3, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Visions and Interpretations by Li-Young Lee Because this graveyard is a hill, I must climb up to see my dead, stopping once midway to rest beside this tree. It was here, between the anticipation of exhaustion, and exhaustion, between vale and peak, my father came down...
by Danielle Deulen | Nov 25, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
What is the Body by Hannah Dow if not a nest indiscernible like a plover’s shallow hole in sand lined with shell, untouchable like a woodpecker’s mine in a tree’s soft patch. If not a verb, a being, the way a pregnant woman who arranges her home in...
by Danielle Deulen | Nov 18, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
I Watch Her Eat the Apple by Natalie Diaz She twirls it in her left hand, a small red merry-go-round. According to the white oval sticker, she holds apple #4016. I’ve read in some book or other of four thousand fifteen fruits she held before this one, each equally...
by Danielle Deulen | Nov 11, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Drift by Brenda Shaughnessy I’ll go anywhere to leave you but come with me. All the cities are like you anyway. Windows darken when I get close enough to see. Any place we want to stay’s polluted, the good spots taken already by those who ruin them. And...
by Danielle Deulen | Nov 5, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Door by Dana Levin And then an uprush of air— And then the cellar doors banging back, the strong dusk light falling in like a stanchion, a gold nail hammered through the blackened trees— Can you see it? You, psyche, burden, friend? This is the first time I can...
by Danielle Deulen | Oct 28, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Ghazal of Dark Death by Federico García Lorca [translated by Catherine Brown] I want to sleep the sleep of apples, far away from the uproar of cemeteries. I want to sleep the sleep of that child who wanted to cut his heart out on the sea. I don’t want to hear that the...
by Danielle Deulen | Oct 21, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Departure by Ocean Vuong Dawn cracks: a lightning bolt carving slowly through the clouds. All night I listened to your breath. Even tasted your lips when the moon turned you pale as a corpse. I haven’t killed a thing since the morning we followed gunshots into a field...
by Danielle Deulen | Oct 14, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Wishbone by Richard Siken You saved my life he says. I owe you everything. You don’t, I say, you don’t owe me squat, let’s just get going, let’s just get gone, but he’s relentless, keeps saying I owe you, says Your shoes are filling with your own damn blood, you must...
by Danielle Deulen | Oct 7, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Rodin’s Fallen Caryatid by Lindsay Bernal She’s collapsing under her big stone: woe, love, whatever. Vase, urn, bowl, the cup made of hands at the brook ––what holds is hollow. Does a child ever recover from losing the vessel who bore her, pushed her out of one...
by Danielle Deulen | Sep 30, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
The Sonnets To Orpheus: Book 2: Xiii (Be Ahead of All Parting) by Rainer Maria Rilke Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by...
by Danielle Deulen | Sep 23, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Manistee Light by Samiya Bashir Brother I don’t either understand this skipscrapple world— these slick bubble cars zip feverish down rushes of notcorn or notbeets notcabbage and the land and the land— you should know, man, nothing grows down here anymore except...
by Danielle Deulen | Sep 17, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Obedience, or the Lying Tale by Jennifer Chang I will do everything you tell me, Mother. I will charm three gold hairs from the demon’s head. I will choke the mouse that gnaws an apple tree’s roots and keep its skin for a glove. To the wolf, I will be pretty...
by Danielle Deulen | Sep 9, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
The Explosive Expert’s Wife by Shara Lessley Sky Gate: the abandoned observatory at Wadi Rum The astronaut’s suit smells like spent gunpowder, the magazine says, meaning the moon is the after- math of war, or perhaps it’s the scent of satellites orbiting long-dead...
by Danielle Deulen | Aug 30, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
White, White Collars by Denis Johnson We work in this building and we are hideous in the fluorescent light, you know our clothes woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels and ride up and down the elevators, filled with us, turning and returning like the spray...
by Danielle Deulen | Aug 29, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Researchers Find Mice Pass On Trauma to Subsequent Generations by Lisa Fay Coutley Even before I was born, before my father took my mother’s head in his hands, her black curls like sprockets sprung from his palms, & held her face under the lukewarm water of our...
by Danielle Deulen | Aug 29, 2018 | Lit from the Basement
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold...
