Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Flirt
    Flirt
    Flirt
    Ebook95 pages41 minutes

    Flirt

    By Noah Blaustein

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    In this stunning first collection of poems, Noah Blaustein’s narrators face the complexities that shape a life: adolescence, fatherhood, our responsibility for the lives of others, the exhilaration of romantic love, and memory. These anxious, frequently witty poems flirt with physical danger, with grief and happiness, and with mortality as a means to transcend the mundane in our day-to-day lives. As the parent narrator says at the end of “Rave On”: “This / life of mine I now know / is no longer mine to take away.” While the narrator believes that there’s no person “that doesn’t benefit from some pain,” this evocative collection proves that life is both pain and comfort, and ends on a prayer of hope for the speaker’s children: “This is a prayer / for my children asleep in their bunk beds. . . . / May they never acquire / death’s thin cello wire, / what connects my cortex to my toes, what plays / memory’s midnight wrong song. . . . / There is beautiful music / out there. There is beautiful music.”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of New Mexico Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2013
    ISBN9780826353849
    Flirt
    Author

    Noah Blaustein

    Noah Blaustein is the author of Flirt (UNM Press) and the editor of the anthology Motion: American Sports Poems. He lives in Santa Monica, California.

    Related to Flirt

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2022

      Five Poems
      3 min read

    • Article

      Summer Beach Reads

      Jan 10, 2021

      Summer Beach Reads
      7 min read

    • Article

      Body Language

      Aug 14, 2019

      Body Language
      5 min read

    • Article

      Gutbucket

      Feb 27, 2024

      Gutbucket
      18 min read

    • Article

      Until The Sea Closed Over Us And The Light Was Gone

      Jul 1, 2020

      —Dante, Canto XXVI But if the truth is dreamed of toward the morning—El Paso Although it was really last summer’s song,all this summer Despacito played on as slower then I turned myself to gazeupon Juarez. The summer everything hurts my eyes, a dozen

      6 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2020

      In class, I stared because of the blood going blue.The chalk that coated our fingerly teeth.The way we lapped each other (on the shorewhere the flowering). I gave away our location. Smacked my lips in the coat closet.Sucked at her teeth. We, on all e

      4 min read

    • Article

      ‘Goodnight Stranger’: Featured Fiction from Miciah Bay Gault

      Jul 30, 2019

      An excerpt from Gault's debut novel, a literary thriller reminiscent of the work of Shirley Jackson and Henry James's 'The Turn of the Screw.' The post ‘Goodnight Stranger’: Featured Fiction from Miciah Bay Gault appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      Tommy Pico, Poetry

      Mar 21, 2018

      Tommy Pico, Poetry
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Inherited Imagination

      Aug 18, 2020

      The Inherited Imagination
      9 min read

    • Article

      Journey To Solace

      Aug 12, 2019

      Journey To Solace
      5 min read

    • Article

      An Open Palm

      Apr 14, 2022

      An Open Palm
      10 min read

    • Article

      Are You Lonesome Tonight?

      Aug 8, 2019

      Are You Lonesome Tonight?
      6 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      Nov 1, 2020

      The American linden sways nonplussed by the storm,a bounce here, a shimmy there, just shaking like musicleft over from the night’s end wafting into the avenues before sleep.I remember once walking down Clinton Street, and singingthat line returning,

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Corridor Stories

      Sep 1, 2022

      The Corridor Stories
      5 min read

    • Article

      Come Stay

      Jan 16, 2024

      Come Stay
      23 min read

    • Article

      Above Santa Cruz

      Jul 2, 2019

      Above Santa Cruz
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Way Back Home

      Apr 30, 2022

      Morning light in Sydney has a quality of powdered gold, spilt celestial talcum. It gets up the nose. The streets seem to have nothing to think about other than parking and shopping, violence a concept from another hemisphere. The calm seems deliberat

      6 min read

    • Article

      J. Jezewska Stevens

      Dec 15, 2017

      The party was a failure. I can’t even tell you what a failure it was. There are no words. Only a great pain in my chest when I wake up. On the veranda. It’s better when I sit in the chair. Oh, but then I can see around. The gauzy curtains, pushed by

      15 min read

    • Article

      JT in My Mind

      Mar 16, 2020

      JT in My Mind
      7 min read

    • Article

      New Titles

      Oct 10, 2018

      By George Keithley George Braziller, Inc. “The Donner Party is one of the three or four finest book-length American poems ever written.”—Poetry. “Out of the western migration of the 1840s…Keithley has made a lean, taut narrative poem that moves with

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Same Story

      Mar 29, 2021

      FROM ISSUE #53: MISTAKES SUZANNE ROBERTS is the author of Bad Tourist: Misadventures in Love and Travel (Bronze Medal Winner from the North American Travel Journalists Association for Best Travel Book) and the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Da

      13 min read

    • Article

      The Circle Holds

      Mar 18, 2024

      The Circle Holds
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Lives of Bryan

      Jun 1, 2023

      The Lives of Bryan
      19 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Flirt

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Flirt - Noah Blaustein

      X.

      Field of Diamonds in the Sky

      Every second, one in eight Americans

      looks at the moon and tonight

      it has holes in it from all the staring. My elbow

      has stopped bleeding but the dull throb

      in my back, old friend, has returned. I’ve stopped

      off for the smoothie special, Jamaican

      Me Crazy, the taste of dusk. No matter

      what’s been broken, I’ve always been amused

      when the E.R. says quantify your pain,

      one to ten. What to do with

      the striations of feeling I can’t

      enumerate, say that’s an eight

      o’clock mood. I don’t mind

      some pain. My wife said the moon

      has the best milk for a baby,

      go get it. My wife says I love you

      but not as much as I would

      if you could fly. I’m desired

      at a party in this valley tonight

      but the things I’d like to taste there

      are the difference between fun

      and happiness. When I returned

      from surfing Teahupo’o, my brother said

      you feel more alive in those two

      weeks than you do all year

      but you’ve got to work. The body

      was meant to take risks, seek

      forgiveness not receive permission. With

      a baby, sneezing has become fun again

      but this Jamaican Me Crazy is a secret,

      a little pit stop not in the schedule

      between baked chicken

      and let’s spoon. Depending

      on how you fly, it takes two

      days to get to the moon. This world

      loves comfort but I don’t know a body

      that doesn’t benefit from some pain.

      Love & Death

      That cliff face where the sandstone

      footholds broke under our weight

      & the red rocks echoed into

      little avalanches & blue sky. Not

      until the Bryce Canyon rangers hoisted

      us over the cliff’s edge did we

      look down, where we

      started from & almost fell

      to, those monolithic boulders

      on the canyon floor no bigger

      than my red thumbnail

      pressed against that sky. In

      the emergency lights & bronze

      of afternoon, Cristina’s face

      looks wet & as we drive out

      the national forest to find

      a diner I ask had she ever

      wondered if she had just died

      but the person she was with

      wanted her back so badly

      that they wished her back. Life,

      she said, was like that growing up

      in El Salvador during the war,

      the guerillas or government

      attacking at night. Her family

      huddled together in the living room

      under blankets & automatic fire

      & everyone dying & wishing

      each other back. Except they

      didn’t get milkshakes afterward. It was

      always around dawn & she’d go

      with her father to pick mangoes from the yard

      so they could drizzle the fruit’s orange

      meat with green aiguashte. Or they’d pick

      watermelons to be quartered & sprinkled with salt—

      tastes so bright they knew they’d survived.

      History

      The orchids in the flower shop droop in prayer—

      a president and his war procession shake

      preselected parade hands up the street.

      Juan Juan, my barber, asks in Spanish,

      these elections, these wars, do I protest?

      He says, "I would. Mi corazón está aquí

      but I’m not really here."

      He sharpens his strop razor.

      The sun hits the aluminum windowsill

      at full squint.

      For months at lunch at the cantina

      I’ve looked at the halved bodies on the front page

      and done nothing

      but draw zebras with table salt,

      make, on my way home,

      the neighbor’s plastic flamingos chuckle.

      I’ve protested privately, I say, "but I

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1