Prayer (by Kim Addonizio)

Prayer
by Kim Addonizio
[from Tell Me (BOA Editions, 2000)]

Sometimes, when we’re lying after love,
I look at you and see your body’s future
of lying beneath the earth; putting the heel
of my hand against your rib I feel how faint
and far away the heartbeat is.  I rest
my cheek against your left nipple and listen
to the surge of blood, seeing your life splashed out,
filmy water hurled from a pot
onto dry grass.  And I want to be pressed
deep into the bed and covered over,
the way a seed is pressed into a hole,
the dirt tamped down with a trowel.
I want to be a failed seed, the kind
that doesn’t grow, that doesn’t know it’s meant to.
I want to lie here without moving, lifeless
as an animal that’s been slaughtered, its blood smeared
on a doorpost, I want death to take me if it
has to, to spare you, I want it to pass over.

---

(c) 2000 by Kim Addonizio, all rights reserved

Included in the Crisis Chronicles Library with the poet’s permission

We gratefully acknowledge BOA Editions, Ltd,
publishers of Kim Addonizio’s Tell Me (2000),
where this poem originally appeared

Here’s a biography borrowed from her official website, www.kimaddonizio.com:

Kim Addonizio is the author of five poetry collections including Tell Me, A National Book Award Finalist. Her fifth collection, Lucifer at the Starlite, was published by W.W. Norton in 2009.

Addonizio has also authored two instructional books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux), and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, both from W.W. Norton.

Her first novel, Little Beauties, was published by Simon & Schuster in August 2005 and came out in paperback in July 06. Little Beauties was chosen as “Best Book of the Month” by Book of the Month Club. My Dreams Out in the Street, her second novel, was released by Simon & Schuster in 2007.

She also has a word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, “Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing,” available from cdbaby; a book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure (FC2); and the anthology Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, coedited with Cheryl Dumesnil.

Addonizio’s awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship,a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award.Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared widely in anthologies, literary journals, and textbooks, including Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Bad Girls, Chick-Lit, Dick for a Day, Gettysburg Review, Paris Review, Penthouse, Poetry, and Threepenny Review. She teaches private workshops in Oakland, CA, and online.

Please check out these fine volumes of Kim Addonizio’s poetry and prose:

  

 

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The Revered Poet Instructs Her Students on the Importance of Revision

The Revered Poet Instructs Her Students on the Importance of Revision
by Kim Addonizio
[from Tell Me (BOA Editions, 2000)]

Listen.  I’m trying to tell you
how easily the poem you thought
was a beautiful woman becomes
cronelike by a kind of witchery.

How easy, you thought, to write a poem:
you scrawled last night in your journal
and in the morning, by a kind of witchery,
the poem was born, perfect, immortal.

But soon, too soon, what you scrawled in your journal
begins moaning, pitches forward and wails, hating
itself, the fact that it was ever born–imperfect, mortal
and suffering the way everything suffers,

every moaning lover, every wailing child,
each creature destined to be isolate and alone
and suffering the way everything suffers,
but I said that, didn’t I, explained already about suffering

and about each one of you, destined to be isolate and alone
because writing is lonely work, is what I’m trying to say,
did I say that, did I explain already?  I’m suffering
through your poems, and my own, oh God I feel

so desperately lonely is what I’m trying to say,
look at you you’re so young all of you,
I don’t care about your poems, or my own,
do you know how fast it goes, all I want is to be

as young as all of you, look at you
you’re so fucking clueless, oh I want
my life back, where did it go, I want it all to be
different but I’m standing here, lecturing again–

on what, on what?  Oh fuck it,
listen, I was a beautiful woman,
you think I want to be standing here, lecturing?  Look again.
Listen.  I’m trying to tell you.

---

(c) 2000 by Kim Addonizio, all rights reserved

Included in the Crisis Chronicles Library with the poet’s permission

We gratefully acknowledge BOA Editions, Ltd,
publishers of Kim Addonizio’s Tell Me (2000),
where this poem originally appeared

Here’s a biography borrowed from her official website, www.kimaddonizio.com:

Kim Addonizio is the author of five poetry collections including Tell Me, A National Book Award Finalist. Her fifth collection, Lucifer at the Starlite, was published by W.W. Norton in 2009.

Addonizio has also authored two instructional books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux), and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, both from W.W. Norton.

Her first novel, Little Beauties, was published by Simon & Schuster in August 2005 and came out in paperback in July 06. Little Beauties was chosen as “Best Book of the Month” by Book of the Month Club. My Dreams Out in the Street, her second novel, was released by Simon & Schuster in 2007.

She also has a word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, “Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing,” available from cdbaby; a book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure (FC2); and the anthology Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos, coedited with Cheryl Dumesnil.

Addonizio’s awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship,a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award.Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared widely in anthologies, literary journals, and textbooks, including Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Bad Girls, Chick-Lit, Dick for a Day, Gettysburg Review, Paris Review, Penthouse, Poetry, and Threepenny Review. She teaches private workshops in Oakland, CA, and online.

Please check out these fine volumes of Kim Addonizio’s poetry and prose:

  

 

What Do Women Want? (by Kim Addonizio) – video

For more Kim Addonizio, please visit www.kimaddonizio.com

And find all your favorite Addonizio works at Amazon:

   

 

   

Leaving Song (by Kim Addonizio)

Leaving Song

Good-bye to how you’d curl away in sleep,
one hand to your forehead, doing the hard work
of dreaming; and to the early dark,
you on the bed’s edge, pulling on your shoes,
the quick kiss before you joined the others
sealed into cars along the highway,
going away all day and coming back
to set the paper bag beside the sink
and pour the first drink, and the next, the ones
after that; good-bye to your drunkenness,
which I admit I liked because of how
you’d cry sometimes, or follow me from room
to room, naked, dripping from a bath,
able to say what you couldn’t, sober.
Love, I’m going.  Line up the drained bottles,
audience for your beloved Schumann
pounded out at the piano, the rhythms awkward,
the wrong notes repeating… Good-bye, this
is the leaving song, it’s almost over.
I used to lie awake and hold you as you slept;
when you snored I smoothed the fine hair
on your head, and watched your lovely face
and wished you someone else, who even
in the lamplight, and the smoke-thick air
from your constant cigarettes, never would appear.

---

(c) 2000 by Kim Addonizio
All rights reserved

Included in the Crisis Chronicles Library
with Kim Addonizio’s permission

We gratefully acknowledge BOA Editions, Ltd,
publishers of Kim Addonizio’s Tell Me (2000),
where this poem originally appeared

Here’s a biography borrowed from her official website, www.kimaddonizio.com:

Kim Addonizio is the author of three books of poetry from BOA Editions: The Philosopher’s Club, Jimmy & Rita, and Tell Me, which was a finalist for the 2000 National Book Award. Her latest collection, What Is This Thing Called Love, was published by W.W. Norton in January 2004. A book of stories, In the Box Called Pleasure, was published by Fiction Collective 2. She is also co-author, with Dorianne Laux, of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton). With Cheryl Dumesnil she co-edited Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos (Warner Books). Her first novel, Little Beauties, was published by Simon & Schuster in August 2005 and came out in paperback in July 06. Her new novel, My Dreams Out in the Street, has just been published by Simon & Schuster (July 07). She also has a word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, “Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing,” available from cdbaby. Her awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship,a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award.

Please check out these fine volumes of Kim Addonizio’s poetry and prose: