The Excelano Project Official Blog

Ten Steps around the Origin of a Circle

Posted by Jillian Blackwell | Filed under Announcements

I will let this falling be a baptism

I will use my lungs for suitcases

The gasp of these days will be new as the morning outside your window.

I won’t move somewhere warm

I’ll stay right here and move like the earth, create seasons for my life with my rotations,

I’ll wear skirts more, so I’ll have some reason for my spinning.

You said you like skirts.

All I want to do is find four walls that stretch out far, far,

For a room so tall I forget about the ceiling.

I want windows,

I’ll put Magritte’s painting of a landscape painting in front of a window in front of my window.

I’ll call it the human condition, know that everything new is just a repetition of something that preceded

Learn how lovely the lenses of perception can be.

Maybe I will run out of sleep someday.

If I do, I’ll spend my nights tracing the stripes of your bed sheets,

Meditating on how the weight of your sleeping body lends a curve to those straight lines,

As I might walk a tightrope and dip the line with my footsteps.

Heaviness is coupled to balance, together they are breathtaking and terrifying.

We live in upstairs rooms.

We are suspended above the ground, held up by three stories of air.

I tell myself we are floating,

I think about the empty space around us and below us.

I string beads of silence into our conversations like pearls,

Placing more space between thoughts,

Then hide the conservations in the attic of my mind,

Maybe you will find them again on rainy days

When you open me like an oyster.

You will be wherever I am.

Or maybe I will be wherever you are.

Or maybe I will be wherever your hands are.

I will know the grid of this city like the crosshatch of my windowpanes.

I will be the architect to my life.

I will build something here.

There will be no windowpanes or city blocks between us.

I will only be as sad as I am when looking out a window.

With a cup of coffee cradled in my hands,

There is sweetness to make the bitterness pleasant.

I have ten fingers.

They travel across the terrain of your body.

I am not going anywhere.

I have everything at my fingertips.

Comments (0)| Other posts by Jillian Blackwell| April 12th, 2012

masonry

Posted by Tiffany Kang | Filed under Poetry, Print

“someone i loved once gave me a boxful of darkness. it took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” – mary oliver

“it’s not your fault. you didn’t do anything wrong,” i said.

sometimes, my mother was a diamond.
the hardest known mineral since antiquity,
diamonds can only be scratched by other diamonds.
goldsmiths like to call it “tough love”
but my brother and i knew it as childhood –
a time we wish lasted half the length it did,
living in a home whose walls we felt safer outside of.

he and i were pebbles,
who spent our years trampled beneath the
jeweled heels of galloping horses.
every step was another gem stomping on our necks,
another slap into the gravel: my mother tried to coax beauty
into ugly stones like us by powdering our faces to dust.
but we were just pebbles, worthless until treated otherwise,
made for tossing in the river,
to see how many times we could skip before we drowned.
to see how wide our ripples could spread,
each one a little more lifeless than the next.

she tied necklace chains around our wrists,
and studded belts across our backs,
another gem — “it’s good for your posture,” she said.
no wonder she only fed us organic foods,
insisting on natural but bitter ingredients,
we drank orange juice only if it had been beaten from pulp.
downed vinegar with every mouthful of discipline,
at least we were well-behaved children.

once in a while, i accidentally catch a glimpse of the scars.
the sight of them surprises me, because i rarely look
at those places on my brother’s body
anymore. but i’ve learned that pain doesn’t become invisible
if you avoid making eye contact with it.
hatred cannot become a better man,
unless you let it escape from the prison you built.

so i have stopped trying to understand what you were thinking
when you sewed his lips together with needle and string,
why he was forced to sleep in the garage for a month,
how i snuck leftovers to the basement
because his hunger was never a metaphor.
i have come to terms with the fact that i may not find
the answers to these questions,
but forgiveness requires of me that i stop asking them,
because i have always known why.

the answer
is that sometimes,
love is a diamond who we cannot blame for
being the sharpest and strongest jewel.
love is a beautiful knife, like the blade she once held at his throat.
and love may act like a murderer, but it will not take your life.

because love also saves you
from the people that love you
so much
that they hurt you.

mama, three months ago you hugged me for the first time.
my gut reaction was to raise my arms in self defense,
but i froze up instead, and locked them to my sides like an orphan
finally meeting the one who gave her away.

i didn’t know where to put my arms,
didn’t know how to reply because tender hands
have never been a part of your body language.
but your touch that day was round and quiet
and gentle enough to hold someone
as fragile as a pebble.

Comments (0)| Other posts by Tiffany Kang| April 11th, 2012

Cheshire Cat

Posted by Hannah Van Sciver | Filed under Announcements, Poetry, Print, Show Poems

Love,
You are the dirtiest four-letter word I know.
You are the rick-roll pop-up video.
You are a urinal on display at the MOMA.

(No disrespect to Marcel Duchamp.)
I’m not a cynic. Just a realist overfed with contradictions like necco sweethearts;
Besides, the only difference between cynics and realists these days
is how frequently they check facebook.

I blame America;
we boast both the world’s highest quality of life and the highest incidence of depression:
this shouldn’t come as a surprise, when even our happy meals cause blood clots.

I had been trying for weeks to write any poem that wasn’t a love poem.
But love, like a whack-a-mole, kept popping up.

Dearest Love, you are in a state of identity crisis.
You are a dandelion wisp caught on the lipstick of kids raised against a paradoxical backdrop:
Porn glistening on the well-stocked walls of a convenience store,
movies rated R (not for gore) but for a two second shot of nipples,
and disney-sponsored fairytale endings –
kids learn how sex works before they know what love feels like.
I was no exception to this trend.

And speaking of mythology, when Prometheus brought fire to the mortals,
the Gods punished him by having an eagle eat out his liver once a day for all eternity.
This reminds me of Valentine’s Day. There is a reason everyone hates it.
People fear that which makes them look inadequate, and hate the things they do not understand.

Love, you are not something I understand.
You are a language still foreign to my tongue,
But I’ve always had a propensity for falling head-first into pools of the things I try most to avoid,
And so, I must confess-
Lately – I’m a little bit in love.

I had all but waned to a crescent when I was suddenly lovestruck,
love struck and spun my sliver into a smile,
I’ve been grinning like the Cheshire Cat for five months now,
because for the first time since forever,
I’ve stopped measuring moments by how
if I were to disappear into the night, would it have been enough?

The answer is so often yes, and besides,
I’m too busy deciding whether her eyes are blue, green or grey
to consider such morbid hypotheticals.
I’m leaning towards green, though
I do not know the answer.

As a professional bullshit artist, I’ve learned to define the terms
I do not understand by stating what they are not, so:
Love, you are not a metaphor.
You are not a box of chocolates, nor a rose,
nor a sunrise, nor a battlefield.
You are not a stranger.
You do not make the world go round,
and you are certainly not all I need.

But I do need you.

Love. is like not knowing the answer.
Though not a metaphor, love, you are a little like a simile.
A little like a glass simultaneously half full and empty.
You’re like my mother walking in on us at 1 pm,
You’re like the way we kiss when there’s food in our mouths, because we are disgusting,
You’re like the dead flowers I keep in a glass on my desk, from the day I came back from Christmas vacation and you stood at the corner with a bouquet of green roses.
You’re like for the first time I feel beautiful wearing nothing but skin.
You’re like a bottle of wine with a twist-off cap.

You are not the heels of our hands.
But maybe, just maybe, you are the heels of our feet.
I am digging in my heels.
I suggest everyone do same,
because to all the realists checking facebook:
I don’t know when, exactly, but
I swear one day. It will come.

Comments (0)| Other posts by Hannah Van Sciver| April 11th, 2012