My grandfather’s home is a  three-car garage 2400 square ft blue sanctuary. Purchased in 1984 for $187,000, the dusty chandelier in the foyer is Southern California classy. I remember seeing a picture of my 1^st birthday party which was held in its living room: a cake shaped like a Yule log, three maraschino cherry topping – a chocolate frosted chocolate cake. In the faded photos that are usually forgotten inside of the cabinet located along the second floor hallway between the cabinet for last season’s clothes and the cabinet for extra towels we are eating in front of the first big screen television. We celebrate me at the foot of the television. Peanut shells are strewn across the cement in the backyard.

He gathers them from local bars: saves them for the crows. I assume the gardener throws them away sometimes but usually there are thousands of shells choking the grass at any given time; if you leave your shoes on inside the house, he gets apoplectic. Take off your goddamn shoes kid! Shit man, we just had the carpets cleaned. Okay, be cool. He’s a mix of angry salesman and Mexican jazz aficionado. Be cool man.

I am more fascinated by my grandfather than by any other human being I have ever met. He is unconscionably spiteful, unparalleled in generosity, undeniably alcoholic, unmistakably hilarious, and unstoppably hardworking. I have hated him more than anyone in my life, and have loved him more than anyone in my life at varying points. He has a big screen television in his bedroom. His bedroom is off limits to anyone without his expressed permission to enter. He and my grandmother have had separate rooms for as long as I can remember. They have been married for over 50 years. I have seen them kiss only a handful of times.

After he broke his neck he spent two weeks in the hospital. On the first day out, he asked me and my brother in his room: we were to disrobe him and put on his pajamas. He couldn’t do it himself anymore. I was tasked with removing the pants. I was the only one willing to pull off the underwear. He made jokes the whole time; my brother was in heaven. His task came next. Put some fresh underwear on kid, and shut up. Your brother likes it. His penis was much smaller than I expected.

There is one impressive angel statue in his room: it is the oldest in the house which has over 250 angel statues. It is heavy: I’d guess 20 pounds and made of soft stone. Fifteen years ago I broke it. Do not remember how but I still remember watching it fall off the table and cracking in half at the middle. Everyone was very calm. Super glue. All of it. This was my first contact with the substance. We used two tubes and it worked wonderfully: the stone is porous enough inside for it to work wonders. But the crack is still visible. He likes it. Most of the furniture in his room a dark wood.

A large portrait of my family leans against the bottom of his chest of drawers. It is of my grandparents and their two children: both girls. Taken in the late 70s. Everyone has big hair. The TV in his room is always on. He forgets to turn it off when he leaves for work. He saves stacks and stacks of tapes he’s taken of military specials on the history channel. His room is the master bedroom. It is the size of my first apartment, but with a much nicer bathroom and two full length closets with meticulously organized clothes. Many ties in rows, progressing in color: Black to Ash to Forest green to beige. No peacocking. Military grade greens and grays only. All is an ode to the Second World War. He is a fan of the United States Military. There is a heavy jacket in the closet. The heavy jacket is never worn.

It was purchased when he went to Nepal to visit Mt. Everest. He got food poisoning at the base of the mountain. He laughs when he says his Sherpa gave him two sleeping bags. One to replace the other when it would inevitably become soiled. The jacket got him through the nights: he never liked the cold.

In 2003, I am eighteen. I head to my grandparents’ home to do some laundry. My grandfather is fighting with my mother about something. She is nervous and twitching her hands. He calls her a stupid whore, and I lose it. I tell him if he says another goddamned word I will punch him right in the mouth. He laughs. He laughs and tells me to shut the fuck up and get out of his goddamned house. My mom tells me to leave. I am ashamed because I do leave, I do leave and she stays there with his anger. I go and get the only tattoo I will ever receive. My grandfather forgets about the fight the next day, says my tattoo is stupid. He is losing his hair so quickly. Rogaine chestnut brown streaks across the forest green marble countertop. The watery consistency of blood, the smell of oil and burnt tires. His head, all wires and scalp. The first manic-depressive diagnosed in the Herrera family. The depression is hidden in his bedroom: tapes and tapes of documentaries/shades drawn/dirty duvet/yellowing stacks of magazines/heavy wooden drawer of pills/receipts kept from each early afternoon drink session/don’t come in/quietly crying/that angel is so heavy/don’t touch anything/hair gel stained toilet seat/drain clogged with what’s left/old batteries rattle in the drawer/never wears that jacket/no pictures of his father/no pictures of his past/superglued together. The mania is still talked about in hushed whispers: Lynn pushed down the stairs/the affair/broken neck/thousands of dollars of presents/new car for every kid/Disneyland hotel/money/money/money/I love you/I love you/I  love you

1/TEENS+TINY KNIVES

2/LEGALITY+HETERONORMATIVE ICONOGRAPHY

 3/ALLEGIANCE+ANAPHORA

4/MANIPULATION+SMOLDERING FUTURE

BRIDE+STAMFORD, CT

5/WAR+DEATH+MEN ONLY

6/SLAVERY+EVERYTHING IS DIAMONDS M’KAY

7/GOD WATCHES YOU DRESS+NO GAY STUFF PLZ

1/

STORIES

An uneasy crowd gathers in the morning sun and I should live a little more each day. The marks on my arm appear in the cold. In the shed out back, stretched across the big chair, there is a book about the brain opened on my lap. Enough about brains I say to my brain. Press Enter and make vigorous love until you feel less huge and more human. If I had a yard I would abandon washing machines in it then listen to that song that gets me late at night, my friends’ poems circling my head like a flock of yellow finches. I believe in our pets buried in the pines. I beat the hell out of a white handkerchief before waving it. Do you know any horror stories? Every night I tell God one more and like Scheherazade, for this, he keeps putting off my death. – Bianca Stone @biancaston  

2/

The New York School

Jimmie Schuyler was a beautiful man. His face was broad and covered entirely with skin. I imagine he liked to smile but found it sometimes painful since he lived in New York so long and was friends with more famous people like John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara and Paul Legault wrote a “memory translation” of Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, which won Ashbery a Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and the first time I went to Paul’s apartment in Crown Heights he used his manuscript to prop open the bedroom window so we could smoke pot and not piss off his roommates. When Fence publishes Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 2 by Paul Legault, I wonder what awards he’ll get for it. Barbara Guest is always thrown in the New York School canon by academics because they need a woman to balance that cock-heavy assemblage of mid-century New York poets, I’m sure I’m spelling canon wrong, I admit I know very little about Guest except for a story Leonard Schwartz told me about how just months before Guest died, he interviewed her for his radio show at Evergreen in Olympia and she was still sharp, he said, but she couldn’t remember T.S. Eliot’s name, she kept calling him “that little English boy,” and I’m pretty sure I like Barbara Guest and I’ll never win The National Book Award and Frank O’Hara’s face is not as beautiful as Schuyler’s, though he has the nose of a Roman warrior and this makes him a great poet, I’m sure, and canon worthy.   I remember reading Ted Berrigan’s journals in an old issue of Shiny on one of my first visits to the city. It felt like just the right thing to read as Berrigan was young and writing his own newness to New York and transfiguring its moment’s energy into The Sonnets and I was probably sitting by myself, not dancing—it was past 3am at an East Village Bulgarian club—when some guy who said he was a painter told me he had the keys to Allen Ginsberg’s E. 12^th St. apartment. Ginsberg had been dead awhile and Peter Orlovsky recently vacated the apartment, he said, and Orlovsky had smeared shit all over the living room wall before he left. The painter asked me if I wanted to see Orlovsky’s shit and I said no, and I was so dejected when I returned to Portland after that trip, I got off the plane and was on my way back to my apartment when I ran into a guy I want to call James Taylor, because he looked just like James Taylor. When I was 14 James Taylor lent meHowl, and there he was almost 10 years later, he was carrying a guitar and he said now that he was 52 and had lost a bunch of teeth and hair, that when he sang his songs at open mikes people took him seriously.   Maybe it was Eric Baus who told me about the recording of Ceravolo reading one of his later tortured New Jersey Catholic poems as a crackling opera record played in the background and he sat on the edge of his made bed in a stained tank top, leaning into the tape recorder in an elegiac whisper, dispirited by God’s ambivalence, while his kids were grown and out getting fucked up in New York City and Rosemarie hadn’t fucked him in over a year. How I imagine Ceravolo’s recording is so perfect I never felt the need to hear it, though I’m sure it’s up on PennSound, and when I finally moved to New York one of the first people I met was Keith McDermott, who told me he was Joe Brainard’s last boyfriend. He seemed amused when I said I was a poet, and to prove I was a poet I sent him my poem “Earth Took of Earth,” which goes:   I’d feed pieces Of Albertson’s chicken To the chickens in Stead of worms.   Albertson’s chicken Was a kind of chicken Chickens could eat.   Because Albertson’s Chicken could be fed To chickens it was Not really chicken.   I never saw The chickens I fed Chicken in the chicken Department at Albertson’s.   I was named after Joe Albertson. He died. I ate his chicken and When my family was Poor we ate our chickens.   It’s a true story. Keith replied by asking if Mr. Albertson owned the farm I grew up on, and this confused me because I assumed that even if you’re from the East Coast you’ve heard of Albertson’s, it’s a supermarket found all over the West Coast and in parts of the Rockies, and while I didn’t grow up on a farm I have smelled a lot of terrible things in my life. I had to leave the Bernadette Mayer celebration for the publication of Studying Hunger Journals at the Poetry Project because there was so much BO in that room, and I was SURE I was sitting right next to the source of the smell, and I still don’t know who it was or if it was anyone famous or not because I didn’t dare turn my nose or face toward him and it made me so crazy I just left.   Charles Bernstein said poetry is the flowering of associative thought, and I didn’t think I liked Charles Bernstein until Jamie Townsend told me that quote the other night, as we were writing what will surely become our great collaborative tome, titledRob Halpern Is An Android. Jamie and I never talk about Kenward Elmslie or Maureen Owen but I’ve written a few poems about Alice Notley, who with Ted Berrigan begat two children, Anselm and Edmond, and Anselm Berrigan begat two children with Karen Weiser and I wonder what kind of poets their kids will be, or if instead they’ll become lawyers or tree fellers or waiters or drug addicts or screenwriters. It’s so hard to predict the future, which is why most of us write about the past I LOVE HANNAH WEINER it’s true, the past is more interesting than the future or the present and I can’t remember anything about the movie Pollock. I wish a bald Sigourney Weaver played the part of Jackson Pollock. That would make the film more memorable. I wish every Jackson Pollock was secretly a portrait of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens and you could smell in Pollock’s paintings what you imagine Weaver’s skin smells like and Jackson Pollock got the best lot of the Cedar Tavern coterie, his paintings sell for millions and his alcoholism and creativity have been mythologized, but then that’s it, his actual paintings no longer exist, you can’t see them in a space that doesn’t humiliate and demoralize the viewer through cynical displays of institutional power. A Pollock hung in the Met may as well be an oversized cock made of real gold which pisses counterfeit money on anyone who stands within eight feet of it while earning less than $500,000 a year. I always liked Robert Rauschenberg more. It’s strange, the beginning of this poem was all about friendship, and when I started writing about art the poem became about value and I’ve always been a poet, even when I thought I was a painter and I thought all day about Rauschenberg and Jean Debuffet and Joseph Beuys, I was thinking like a poet.   I often wonder about the flirtations between Ted Berrigan and Alice Notley, when Berrigan was visiting faculty at the Iowa Writers Workshop and Notley was so young and full of admiration for the wily New York poet. She must have wanted so badly to be part of the poetic life of New York City, to be filled with the breath and babies of this poet named Ted, who was 11 years her senior, and Berrigan I’m sure loved fucking Notley (they were both Scorpios) and he loved knowing Notley would probably cook him dinner and she’d listen to all his new poems afterward as if she’s hearing the true secrets of the pope’s depravity. Iowa is directly in the middle of the country, and when I went to the Iowa Writers Workshop—that’s right, I really went there—one day Mark Levine performed a close reading of “The Day Lady Died,” and Mark kept repeating the line “I don’t know the people who will feed me” as if it was the most profound thing O’Hara ever wrote, and I sat there wondering if Mark would be a better poet if instead of fucking Jorie Graham he got fucked by Ted Berrigan and most poets don’t have a vision, but I do, it’s clear and conflicted and it’s radiantly directionless.   When I google new york school poetry the fifth result is Thom Donovan’s recipe for writing a New York School poem inJacket2, and I think I use in this poem all 23 of the ingredients Thom listed, except for #7: “something that sounds amazing even if it doesn’t make any sense to you.” So maybe MY HANNAH WEINER CHEERLEADER FUCKS ME WITHOUT A CONDOM might work, or maybe I wanna be Rachel Levitsky, I wanna be her girlfriend tonight, and as I walked through Central Park with Thom two Augusts ago I told him everything that was wrong with some job he was about to take over from me, and I paid $5 admission for us to get into the Met (I should have paid less) where Robert Wilson and Philip Glass staged Einstein on the Beach in 1976. It put them $120,000 in debt to rent the opera house for two nights, but it launched their international careers and I continued to complain to Thom about my miseries, which is something I love to do, and Thom told me he could handle whatever pressures the job would present and I thought You’ll find whatever weight will crush you, Thom Donovan, and I was right. After a few months Thom was miserable and I was so glad I never unfriended him because you can’t walk around the city heartbroken and alone, listening to PennSound on your headphones. It’s fine to look through the shitty poetry in the New Yorker while you’re heartbroken on the subway, but no one will believe you if you told them you’re listening to poetry, they’d all assume you’re going to work, heartbroken, listening to The Kinks or Lady Gaga because people know they exist, and they don’t really believe in poetry, they don’t believe anybody does it or reads it and sometimes I think they’re right. Geoff Olsen texts me and asks if I’m going to the Anne Boyer and Macgergor Card reading at the Zinc Bar this afternoon and I text back, “Think i’ll skip it but what are you doing after?” and Geoff Olsen responds that he’s going to see Les Misérables and I text back, “No les puke for me,” and Geoff Olsen responds, “No lesbian puke for you, joseph bradshaw,” and I know poetry exists when I notice I’ve set my phone down on my copy of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons.   I was born the same year Paul Thek made a list of all the possible people in his life who might love him unconditionally and forever. There were a lot of NOs on Thek’s list. Robert Wilson and Peter Hujar are two I remember. The only YES, I think, was Susan Sontag, who Thek hadn’t spoken with in over a decade. I can’t imagine taking such a bleak inventory. The closest I come is when I write the names of my friends and the people I don’t know in my poems, as I sit and wait for another call or text to summon the transformation of this totally ordinary and idle afternoon, though I don’t need to write YES or NO beside Eileen Myles or Bethany Ides or Jamie Townsend or Tim Dlugos or anyone because love renews our static names, and I can be Joseph “Paul Thek” Bradshaw and add as many friends to my poem as I wish, and each name is both YES and NO, and together we’ll never think of anything horrible ever again YES and NO and I’ll never be lonely YES and NO with you so close YES and NO and six Google searches related to the New York School are new york school johnand poetry twentieth century english poetry and new york school district and new york law school and language poetryand confessional poetry.   In the Encyclopedia of the New York School Poets the entry on Ed Sanders’ pseudo-memoir, Tales of Beatnik Glory, which is set in the Lower East Side of the 1960s, it says Sanders creates “a kaleidoscopic vision of the era of affordable housing, burgeoning radicalism, and idealistic social discovery.” Is it sad that our era has none of these things? Is it confounding that poetry is still written, and so much of it? I’ve already written over 2,000 words in this poem and it’s not even done, so I guess it doesn’t matter that I can’t afford to live in New York forever and my friend Andy Stallings in New Orleans just sent me a poem called “To Paul Legault in New York” and Andy’s never been to New York or to Paul’s bedroom, and he must be unhappy in New Orleans because he ends the poem like this:   You don’t have to go far to feel the good air all around you crashing blossoms fooled by false spring who   cares how brief I’d give anything now to get fooled for awhile like that   I think I know what Andy means. That feeling of false spring, when the thing you so badly crave will disappoint you and you know it, yet your desire continues and you can’t contain it—it’s like friendship. If you’re my friend, I can smile for a long time at you but you won’t see my smile, you’ll only see its afterimage: my lips’ broken circle remains a moment, hanging among the echoes of my teeth and you don’t know what to do with this image, so you tend to forget I know how to smile—and yet you’re still so kind to me. When I read this to Jamie, he said I should include the part about how I was reading Ashbery’s “The Skaters,” when I dropped the pen I was absently twitching through my boredom. I set the book facedown and picked up my pen. Pausing, I looked at the book on the desk and thought, “I’m not gonna pick that up again,” so there it’s been for the past three weeks, the foundation for what’s become a lopsided tower of John Wieners’ Selected Poems and Telephone Books’ anthology The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (I couldn’t stop laughing through Rachel Blau Duplessis’ reading of her piece at the launch party, though I don’t think it was supposed to be funny) and the draft of “The New York School” I read to Jamie and my copy of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer and the Green Integer edition of Andre Breton’s Earthlight and Benjamin Paul Blood’s The Poetical Alphabet and Grave of Lightand a scattered halo of empty Nicorette wrappers surrounds the whole fragile and unconsciously constructed edifice.   Would I ever fuck John Giorno? Not a chance, no matter how many times that octogenarian Buddhist platitude guru begged for it. But I fuck Jack Spicer constantly. Frank O’Hara thought Jack Spicer was ugly, but I don’t. Around the time I ran into James Taylor in Portland, I had a dream (Spicer says this is a false thing to say in a poem) that Spicer grabbed me by the back of my neck, and with his fingers he plugged my nostrils and my mouth, and he covered my eyes and leaned into my ear and whispered, “I have your holes.” Spicer’s been inside me ever since, and my hands are not my hands, and when I’m eating I don’t know who is feeding me, but I know what I’m consuming: a ½ cup of Campbell’s Condensed Tomato Soup provides 20% of my Daily Value of Sodium and 20% of my Potassium and 7% of my Total Carbohydrates and 4% of my Fiber and 8% of my Vitamin A and 10% of my Vitamin C and 4% of my Iron and I like Ted Greenwald’s poem that goes:   one foot in the other world the other foot in the other world   because the other world is where I find my friends.   Ian Dreiblatt just texted, “standing on the union st bridge, watching a dolphin flop round the putrid frigid gowanus. my heart’s just like that dolphin. la la la my one voice my other &c.” I’m so glad I receive these messages from the other world, and I’m sure Jack Spicer has something to do with Ian’s heart dying as he watches, an astral double to a wayward dolphin. And though it’s something that happens to all of us, isn’t it still so beautiful? A disoriented dolphin swims into Brooklyn to die on this frigid January evening, as I breathe in the glittering air and know it’s both good and false, and I know that when I go out later tonight, when my body follows my feet into another world, I’ll remember Ian’s dying heart and I’ll remember my own dying heart, and I’ll remember my phone so I can text my friends to let them know it’s OK they’re running late, I’ll busy myself by negotiating with eight million people the remainder of the oxygen pumping through our thinning flopping blood, and while I wait I’ll text my other friends in their other worlds in New Orleans and Portland and Kansas City and Philly and Berkeley and Toronto and Seattle and Jersey. I wonder if their hearts are dying too.

– Joseph Bradshaw, who as far as I can tell, does not have a twitter

3/

  @steveroggenbuck

before dad’s second marriage she was still sick when T and I stayed over on the weekends in little hands down the shirt I’m sleeping it’s okay sweetie every little piece is asleep is asleep a year’s worth of skin might heal better if we told them I packed my room when church got out two men made me write it on a green sheet of paper sign your name  so many adjectives later a court date in the mail — probation +150 hours + mandatory therapy + a restraining order + test to see if I was attracted to children = I passed or whatever means not attracted to children the psychologist said sexually normal a red lollipop and I could show the results to my family in a couple hundred weekends

Figure 1: Breakfast Nook Angel

Figure 2: Living Room Angel

Figure 3: Kitchen Counter Angel

Figure 4: Kitchen Counter Angel II (Precious Moments Collection)

1. Myself
2. Thomas (my brother)
3. Ralph (husband… he only gets this categorization when he is in a good/charitable mood)
4. Sasha (family cat: 2007 – present)
5. Tahti (family cat: 1997-2007)
6. Wookie (family cat: 1985-1996)
7. Sales (Nordstrom, Macys, Crate and Barrel, Lexus)