IT GETS HARDER TO FUNCTION IN THE WORLD
life is so much more bearable when you’ve got new music
but I’m starting to not even like music
I don’t have an accent
*you* have an accent
I have become partial to all kinds of distortions
which is how it begins pretty soon
I’ll need an outlandish array of sexual props to [anything]
once I had a fear of waterslides
and my wife was raised by white supremacists
as difficult as that might be to believe
I like when this desperation comes to the fore
particularly in my friends
but this isn’t where I envisaged things ending up
just as I never envisaged hiring out bouncy castles for a living
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SAM RIVIERE co-edits the anthology series Stop/Sharpening/Your/Knives, and received an Eric Gregory Award in 2009. Faber published his debut pamphlet in 2010. His first book is ’81 Austerities’ (Faber & Faber, 2012).
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Learn more about Sam Riviere:
Author Website
81 Austerities
S/S/Y/K
I asked a man I was in love with once /
if he was in love with me. No, he said.
Get used to it, kid, everybody wants something from you. /
And they’ll swear they’re giving you a gift.
Prague is falling behind the windows /
like an autumn curtain falls on summer /
like a fish falls after a whale
I’d listen to her work her way through its drama: the //
little girl’s errors hitched to curiosity, her wandering hands, the /
way the wolf and the girl had much more in common than not
say it /
briefly //
like /
a finch’s whistle
My sisters, deep in our cells, are still feeding me. /
But I know I will be their last queen.
A different me is silhouetted in the lit windows of every house I drive //
past – me: reading a book, me: making dinner, me: alone staring back.
I am waiting for you. Part of my wall /
will need to go to get you in. It will /
never heal. This is how they’ll find me, /
small, perfunctory, unfit for a king, but /
I’ll hold it all
Women love to dance with him, my mother said. /
He’s so easy to follow. But those women /
never had to clench against his slaps and rages.
God unlike the stories, never casting out /
a child, unloosing the sky
