A simple little school dress

I love the simple style
of these check school dresses.
They look lovely on my granddaughter
     who is five
A pretty and practical design.

The yellow check is not often seen
in my local area
so I ordered on line
I bought three.
     One to wear,
          one in the wash
     and one ready to wear.

I know they will wash well
and keep their fresh look
as long as my daughter in law
     doesn’t throw the jeans
          in the wash as well.



Taken from an online review of a Marks & Spencer Classic Checked Dress, posted on 17th May 2014. Submitted by Uschi Gatward.

Praise Yeezus.

And it works.

It works because it's beautiful
You either like it or you don't
There’s no reason why it's beautiful.

Either it moves you too,
Or it doesn't,
And that's that.

It's all the same shit,
It’s all music —
If you like sound, listen.



Taken from a review by Lou Reed of Kanye West's album, "Yeezus", published by The Talkhouse on July, 2 2013. Submitted by Charles Githua.

Fall in love, or be asphyxiated

At certain points, reading
the work can even be said
to resemble the act of
making love to a
three-hundred-pound woman.
Once she gets on top,
it’s all over.

Fall in love, or
be asphyxiated.



Taken from Norman Mailer's 1998 New York Review of Books review of Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full, posted on Futility Closet. Submitted by Marika.

German Undershirts

Just the way they feel against my skin
it must be some special kind of German cotton
I don’t know
I put one on
it slides over my skin
and immediately I see a whole world
that city where I lived
where I did so many things
like Oz, a strange place
but most of its was beautiful!
I see my flat where I used to live
staying up all night with music
and dancing and crazy things
I smell the coal again
and the snow
just from this undershirt
I bought the child’s size
Germans are much bigger than I am
they’re really big ladies
they’re like beautiful Walkyries
I missed my German undershirts
then I found them on the internet
made in Germany
the quality is unbelievable
they last forever



From a product review on German Amazon. Punctuation removed. Submitted by Grace Andreacchi.

Fundamentally Curious

It’s an act so
immense, so apparently monstrous and yet
deeply personal that it’s
almost
impossible to judge.
He erased himself, and all
those 8,000 souls, for

one woman.

Because he loved her.

There’s something
terrifying
in that kind of love, something that asks
for so much
it can’t possibly be returned,

or ignored.



Taken from an AV Club review of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Children of Time". "Possible" has been corrected to "possibly" in line 14. Submitted by Wesley Brown.

More Pigs Occur

So.

The first thing we see
is a plastic trash bag
with some paper chains spilling out.
A man
in a green t-shirt grabs it and deposits it
in a dumpster.
A boy
on a bike watches him.
A man uproots
some plants in a greenhouse
and harvests the squiggling maggot-y worms in the potting soil.
He puts a couple of them into medicinal capsules. Mirrors figure
conspicuously.

Later
something happens to Kris.
The man
puts her under a spell. She sees, tastes, feels
and does whatever he tells her to, but she can't
look at him because he says

his head is made of the same substance as the sun.

Her mind records
entire conversations, and the complete text
of Henry David Thoreau's Walden.
Another man collects, records
and plays sounds
and performs synchronous surgery on Kris
and a pig, apparently transferring a parasite
from one to the other, establishing
an indefinable psychic link
between them.

Kris encounters Jeff
on a train.
They connect. Their thoughts
get mixed up, which is to say that they're both convinced
that some of their memories have been
appropriated by the other. Their conversations
transpire
in several different places at once, or perhaps
at different times
in the same place.

Or different times at once. Some orchids growing
on tree roots
by the edge of a stream
change color.

More pigs occur.

Some association
is evinced between them, Kris
and other somnambulists.

Kris is
confused
and afraid.



From a review of the film Upstream Colour, RogerEbert.com, 11 April 2013. A few subclauses left out. Submitted by Wesley Brown.

Dancing on the Edge

His characters
Come on
And make small
Anodyne
Statements
Then compose their faces,
Into expressions
Of meaningful
Intent
Have you seen my glove?
Your glove?
Yes...my glove.
This glove?
The other glove.
Another glove?
Yes....have you
Seen it?
No.
Followed,
By an expression
Of Fleeting
Wind.



Taken from a TV review by A A Gill in the Sunday Times, 10th February 2013. Submitted by HWB.

Houndstooth

Things started to go downhill
while I was trying to
administer novocaine to a dog.
I'm still not entirely sure what happened.
I was trying to inject his gums with anesthesia
when a message popped up,
telling me I had failed.

Game over.


Taken from a review of an ipad app called 'Dental Surgery', 4th December 2012. Submitted by Mat Riches.

A relationship with the vernacular

Let us also recognize
our own native
detachable snake-hips,
our rangy legs,

our educated feet.
Our arms and fingers
wave and snap
in a special way.
Our shoulders hang
as no other people’s
shoulders hang.



Taken from 'Musical Myths of the American West', by Stephen Brown, a review of two books in the Times Literary Supplement, 9 November 2012. The poem is a quotation from the writings of Lincoln Kirstein. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

A night at the opera

Big ideological statements
Giant snakes
One expects to get one or the other
One is rarely deprived of both.

The means are the simplest
As the audience files in
a small army of white-dressed people
are placidly picnicking.
As the music starts
they strip off their clothes
and paint each other blue.
Yes, it sounds weird
but the Ring is weird.

Sometimes they are slaves
Sometimes they are even inanimate.
The gods all sport matching platinum hair.

They don’t try to fool us
and yet something about them
is perfect anyway.



Picked out of a review of Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold on the blog Likely Impossibilities. The word 'are' replaces 'seem to be' in line 8. Submitted by Grace Andreacchi.

Live your dash

On your tombstone
you’ve got your birth date

and the day of your decease —
and you’ve got your dash.

Live your dash.
Hold still and watch the birds.

Like the hummingbirds —
why are there so many of them?



Taken from the London Evening Standard's review of Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss, 30th March 2012. A comma has been removed after 'tombstone'. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

What shall remain

Our civilization will be known for our diaper landfills
and our nuclear waste sites
Other fragments of our culture might survive as well:
bits of Tupperware
mountains of lithium batteries
or maybe the traces of our highway system.

The foundation of a skyscraper might make
for a breakthrough excavation
but the islands of plastic bottles
floating in the oceans may prove puzzling.

Perhaps we will bury a cache of digital archives somewhere
to be deciphered one day
like the hieroglyphics on an Egyptian sarcophagus.



From the Design Observer review of A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil McGregor. The review is written by Adam Harrison Levy. Submitted by Grace Andreacchi.