Tom Snarsky

You walk down alameda shuffling your deck of trick cards over everyone Like some precious only son Face down, bow to the champion You walk down alameda looking at the cracks in the sidewalk Thinking about your friends How you maintain all them in a constant state of suspense For your own protection over their affection Nobody broke your heart You broke your own because you can't finish what you start Walk down alameda brushing off the nightmares you wish Could plague me when I'm awake And now you see your first mistake was thinking that you could relate

For one or two minutes she liked you But the fix is in You're all pretension I never pay attention Nobody broke your heart You broke your own because you can't finish what you start Nobody broke your heart You broke your own because you can't finish what you start Nobody broke your heart You broke your own because you can't finish what you start Nobody broke your heart If you're alone it must be you that wants to be apart

& #soapboxpoem 6/31: “Alameda” by Elliott Smith

POST-POP & FRIENDS SAT 3.07 3:33PM August Smith Stephanie Yue Duhem Wallace Barker Audrey Lee Tom Snarsky Maggie Zhu Pierre Minar Tom Will The Carroll Mansion 800 E Lombard St, Baltimore

reading at this tomorrow with many amazing people!! if you can make it, it would be great to see you :)

they are magical aren’t they!!

many thanks to @alexandranaughton.bsky.social for having me 🐦

Grackle I am a poet at the height of my powers says the light purple sponge covered in little mozzarella shreds on its arc into the garbage I am an emerging poet says the woodpecker frightened by the glinting CDs on their strings too afraid to breach the treeline I am a prize-winning poet says the unfried catfish closing its primeval jaw irrevocably around the bright orange bait I am a poet says the common grackle accusing, lamenting

honored & grateful to be back in Be About It today with 2 more bird poems :) here’s one~

When a reading of text has proceeded by laborious stages within the test-rig of detailed study, pause to allow the overall effect to integrate back into a coherent human reading, and ponder whether your life may even have been changed, just a little, or your beliefs about large questions; whether your habits of feeling have been flattered or boastfully challenged, or whether your relation to the text builds up a kind of trust. This aspect is what you will take away with you when all the study is finished, and it should last you through a lifetime.

J. H. Prynne, on reading

Miles my dream feeds on me like a school of small fish feeds on a sinking stone

Joe Wenderoth

PAUL KLEE, 1879-1940 Water Water, topped by waves, topped by a boat, topped by a woman, topped by a man. Harriet Watts

3 I must be saved. By succeeding?

LAST THINGS LAST In the heart’s centre the only prayers are steps receding

Redgreen and Violet-Yellow Rhythms by Paul Klee

& #soapboxpoem 5/31: Paul Klee, in translations by Harriet Watts (“Water”) & Anselm Hollo (the other two). Included also is a painting of Klee’s I quite love that lends its title to a poem in MOUNTEBANK

The poster for Dodo Eraser’s reading tonight, Thursday March 5th, at the Ottobar in Baltimore. Featuring readings by Stephanie Anderson, Jameson Draper, Ewen Glass, Ben Niespodziany, Travis Shosa, and Tom Snarsky

The poster for Bruiser Mart, which is Bruiser Mag’s book fair running from 6PM late into the night at Ottobar, featuring some wonderful small presses + readers and also a dance party

I’m so excited to be reading at this tonight! if you’re in Baltimore it would be great to see you :)

POEM The snow falls And the sky grey On my head where the roof is frozen The night Where will the shadow go which follows me Whose is she A star or a swallow In the corner of the window The moon And a dusky woman It's her Someone goes and doesn't see me I look to turn the gate And the fire almost out that sparkles For me alone But there where I vanish it makes a mortal cold

Pierre Reverdy, tr. Alice Notley

The web page http://www.librarius.com/cantales_dm.htm

The executioner three times her smote Upon the neck, and could not strike again, Although he failed to cut in two her throat, For at that time the ordinance was plain That no man might another give the pain Of striking four blows, whether soft or sore; This executioner dared do no more. But half dead, with her neck cut three times there, He let her lie, and on his way he went. The Christian folk that all about her were, With sheets caught up the precious blood she spent; And three days lived she in this same torment, But never ceased at all the faith to teach, That she had fostered; dying did she preach;

To them she gave her goods and everything, And of Pope Urban put them in the care, And said: "This much I asked of Heaven's King, A respite of three days, that you might share With me these souls; and too I would prepare Before I go my house a church to make, That it be kept forever for my sake." Saint Urban, with his deacons, privately, The body took and buried it by night Among his other saints, right honourably. Her house is Church of Saint Cecilia hight; Saint Urban hallowed it, as well he might; Wherein in noble wise unto this day To Christ and to his saint men service pay.

& #soapboxpoem 4/31: from Chaucer, the Second Nun’s Tale about Saint Cecilia, who survives three blows from the executioner and lives for three more days.

HORSE AND RIOT/YOSHIRO ISHIHARA When two horses run inside us another horse runs between them. When we go out to riot we run with the third horse. It's this horse that goes out with us to riot not the other two at its sides. Therefore what runs off from us when we halt is the one horse not the other two at its sides. When two bandits run inside us another bandit runs between them. When two hollows run inside us still another hollow runs between them. What goes out with us to riot is this last bandit and this last hollow. --Translated from the Japanese by Hiro Sato

Yoshiro Ishihara, tr. Hiro Sato

MONOPOLY Finally the day came when a monopoly owned everything in the world So it went looking for its stockholders to celebrate But they were all owned by it they were all dead they were someplace Their photographs hung in elevators which went up and down up and down carrying nobody Everyone else was in bed doing the exercises to get in shape for noon Hey the monopoly said lets uncork the Empire State Building and get blotto Silence The monopoly scowled All it wanted was a little good-fellowship, like you get in the highrise apartment-buildings Then the sky got awful dark Gee And everyone was in bed frantically doing those exercises that prepare us for death Exercises known as “fucking” “kissing” “caressing” Everyone was unaware that they had been bought Or that the earth was about to sell them to the moon For a little light

Bill Knott

it’s lovely! it was my first Nerval :)

thank you so much Maya! 💜🙏

A copy of The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans by St. Geraud, né Bill Knott.

WIDOWER’S WINTER Outside, the snow is falling into its past... I do want this night to end. In the fireplace, a section of ash caves in. The fall day you were buried, birds went over, south, thick enough to carry someone. They took my gapes of breath. -Their fuel? We are together in some birds, who fail. I didn't even want to look at your grave, its heroic little mound like the peck of dirt we hope to eat in our life.

LIFER (AKA "HAPPY BIRTHDAY'') our prisoner has received a package containing a cake which of course he thinks must conceal a file or a hacksaw-blade and starts to dig down into toolorate. Get our swing with icicles for actually however his salvation his way out his escape route has been carefully laid out in brightcolored frosting over darker frosting the crucial message the delicate pinkly lettering overlooked unheeded falls shredded apart now by his hopeful search

& #soapboxpoem 3/31: two poems by Bill Knott. Bill Knott went entirely his own way, and I admire so much how he made his work available toward the end of his life with handmade books, free PDFs on his website, and YouTube videos of him reading his work that are still up to watch.

Conrad Aiken

42 very short pages... 226press.com/pdf/will.pdf

Or 2 pages exactly: 226press.com/pdf/mississa...

I suppose that is what it means to be haunted.
In my real life I neither expect
nor want you. Yet, some rehearsal of the past is always with me.

PRECISION Walking, remembering, In the grass, I see what I think is a small coprinus, but I look more closely and decide: broken soda cracker. Of course, this Southern California lawn probably wouldn't be growing mushrooms. I have already catalogued Icelandic poppies —flamingo, salmon, vermillion, party dresses —on the lawn, and purple flags on another, a whole bed of tiny white irises and nasturtiums spilling over the cement-banked edge of another yard. It is March, and camellias are crowding the bushes at every house, pink, white, deep rose frills, china-like, perfect. Behind me, the mockingbird is singing one of his best songs, piccolo oboe harp and squeeking door all combined. The drama is only a memory; I arrived yesterday at the Los Angeles airport and could not help some part of me wishing/expecting to see you, M.,

waiting for me to return. I suppose that is what it means to be haunted. In my real life I neither expect nor want you. Yet, some rehearsal of the past is always with me. Even this morning, walking before breakfast in Santa Barbara when I saw an ugly ranch house with the porch light still on, presumably from the night before, I thought, "He hasn't come home. She is asleep on the couch with her clothes on, exhausted from waiting most of the night." And when I walked past another house with the shades still drawn but rock music pouring out of the closed windows, so incongruously at 8 a.m. thought of a young couple who have just awakened to make love and don't want to do it without the right music. And I felt safe outside in the sunshine, just observing the flowers. There is no way I can imagine love, sex or romance without pain, the cutting, cutting sharp knife of denials; what I want now is an orderly world

where morning is each beautful object in place, the sun pouring in the window like champagne, the china-white egg cup with its neat boiled egg, a burst of tulips, or poppies or camellias on the table in crystal or cut glass, the hot teapot, scalded and then filled with a fine dark tea, and the day stretching plain, unadorned before me, Mozart as companion, a book, a book, about death or life but not about love. We must go beyond beauty to find it. Invisible, I want to wait for it wearing the cap of darkness.

A copy of Cap of Darkness by Diane Wakoski

happy #twopageplustuesday! feel free to share any poems you love that run a bit long — I’d be delighted to read them :)

here’s one by Diane Wakoski~

Approach to the Desert Space
Mostafa Nissabouri
Tr. Guy Bennett

#twopageplustuesday
@tomsnarsky.bsky.social

Mackerel, the cat

Give me that lemonade and the last cigarette I'm leaving for Paris

Philippe Soupault, tr. Pat Nolan

thank you Gregory! all credit to @godzillakent.bsky.social for a gorgeous in-house cover design :) 🎭

El Desdichado I am the shadowed-the bereaved—the unconsoled, The Aquitainian prince of the stricken tower: My one star's dead, and my constellated lute Bears the Black Sun of Melancholia. You who consoled me, in the tombstone night, Bring back my Posilipo, the Italian sea, The flower that so pleased my wasted heart, And the arbour where the vine and rose agree. Am I Love or Apollo? ... Lusignan or Biron? My brow is red still from the kiss of the queen; I've dreamed in the cavern where the siren swims... And twice a conqueror have crossed Acheron: Modulating on the Orphic lyre in turn The sighs of the saint, and the fairy's screams.

…features and sparkling eyes vanished into a shadow where still shone the last gleam of a smile... Such was that vision, or such at least the main details I can remember. The cataleptic state in which I had been for some days was explained away to me in scientific terms, and the remarks of those who had seen me then irritated me when I realized that they attributed to mental aberration my actions and words which coincided with the various phases of what were for me a series of logical events. But I felt a greater affection than ever for those of my friends who, from kindness or patience, or because of a set of ideas similar to mine, made me give long accounts of the things I had seen in my mind. With tears in his eyes, one of them said to me: "Is it not true there is a God?" "Yes!" I answered enthusiastically. And we embraced each other, like two brothers of that mystic country I had half-seen. What happiness I found at first in that belief! For thus the eternal doubt about the immortality of the soul, which troubles the greatest minds, had been solved for me. No more death, no more sadness, no more cares. My loved ones, relatives, and friends, had given convincing proof of their eternal existence, and I was only separated from them by the hours of the day. I waited for the hours of the night with a gentle melancholy.

& #soapboxpoem 2/31: a poem & some prose by Gérard de Nerval (trs. Peter Jay & Geoffrey Wagner, resp.). I’m 32 right now, the year when Nerval started to experience his episodes. Coming out of them, and seeing a friend, was like finding “the arbour where the vine and rose agree.”

Now your whole life is holding the halves
Together

Lowery SAFFRON Workstand with Side Clamp (for Kristi) & Dovekie two new poems from Tom Snarksy

many thanks to @alexandranaughton.bsky.social for hosting these (+ a couple more to come!), & to Kristi for being the dedicatee of my dreams 💜 beaboutitpress.substack.com/p/lowery-saf...

Lowery SAFFRON Workstand with Side Clamp for Kristi I’m trying to get better by force of will so we can eat sushi without me scream-sneezing near the other couples, no now we are old & full of sleep, or l am, on the couch watching Abbott Elementary we were both teachers so we know the mall plotline could happen. Last night, before bed I gave you a lymph massage as delicately as I could, one YouTube video and a prayer, snuck back downstairs & read a book but fell asleep only after coming back up to be with you, as I always will— I’d break god’s arms if he tried to stop me keep me from your sleep-breathing in then out, my tide, my body clock, my only season

feeling very lucky to have a couple new poems up at the always-excellent Be About It Press, including this belated Valentine for my wife :)

A small white piece of an ancient mosaic, I hold it on my palm. Her time here someone else’s spring, a palace spring, company all the time, some part of hope, a continent. March rain, first flowers. Did anyone see her with purple anemones in her eyes, but for Antinous.

some part of hope, a continent.

Mirkka Rekola, tr. Anselm Hollo