Want to learn how to create an iPhone App?
Check out this blog post I did for Jane Friedman
It starts like this: As anyone who has ever seen a heist film knows, it always starts out with a sequence where the criminal mastermind assembles the perfect team. Turning a graduate student paper I wrote—”Paradise Lost as a Primer on Office Politics”—and turning it into the 144th most downloaded paid business app was surly a heist or coup of sorts. This is how I did it, with no computer programing skills, and how you can do it to.
Today’s Poem
Chicagoing
All of fifth grade was going
overnight to Chicago. I didn’t
think the Field Museum
would be that great: dusty
bones of dinosaurs, the rotten eggs
smell around a sarcophagus, more candy
models of a nucleus. So what.
A tour of Wrigley Field: do they
call it that because of what’s stuck
under each seat? The Shedd is nothing
much. Just a large aquarium full of ducks,
halibut, and a few sad-looking box turtles.
Its destitute compared to Sea World.
And besides the bus rides with Mrs. Hettinger
singing and making us sing Frere Jacques.
I though all this and shook my little fist,
destitute. Me and three other slow learners
sitting with the substitute. We didn’t earn
the right go because of an F or a couple of Ds.
We prayed for someone to get sick
on the bus and for the driver to have
run out of sawdust.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
In the Cards
Playing the three-card
Monty and hoping
happiness hides in the crease
of one of those folded hearts
or around the blistering
cigarette burn on a spade.
I’ll get my money by Monday
and get on with the getting gone.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Fable
He woke as a mouse
might. Lazily, still drunk.
Remembering the glue
paper trap from last night
binding his feet in place,
in spite of the throbbing
bass. Stop, squeak, shake,
and repeat. Calling for help
in an empty house might
stir the wrong neighbors
or a stray tomcat.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
In an Abandoned Notebook:
Field guide to the new ecosystem
of my mind. Do not feed the haunted
ideas of my forefathers. Pay no fare
for ex lovers crossing dark water.
Abandon the hot-air balloon ride
before you leave the tree line.
Hope the martyr and the mentor
speak true as the hair on their faces.
Protect the endangered dreams,
they are the only children left.
These birds will lead you home.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Inarticulate
He lost something inside
her mouth. Directions to his bosses’
house. A letter he forgot to mail.
The way a t-shirt just laundered
smelled as he pulled it overhead.
All the conjugations of the word run
in Spanish. Where he last put an empty
cup of coffee down. The year
that Miles Davis went electric.
The name of the movie where the kids
woke up after sleeping in the footprint
of a dinosaur. Which airports
look the same and the different
subways it takes to get there.
Those lips, a man could shipwreck
against. He’s retracing his steps
to the plank. There the teeth gnashed
each other momentary then receded.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Discotheque
Satan takes them to a discotheque
in Spain. The ex-girlfriends come and go
talking about some guy named Angelo.
This is the part of the joke
where I woke up wondering,
who dragged me down past the bar
and stole my new handmade shoes.
Evil eyes, the faces aching in the echo
of the bass. Someone had filled
the room with owls. Like Tupac,
he’s always releasing new material.
I know all the songs of the woebegone.
I sing them into the birdcages of girls
go-going and, for once, feel at home.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Paint by Number
Make sure you’ve got a clean
brush. I’ve already primed
the canvas and outlined
everything you need.
Now don’t forget to keep
a fresh, damp cloth nearby.
Some of you will see a ship
clearing the rocks, but still
about to tip. Others find Jesus
ghosted in light blue, the shape
shadows make, and covered
not in a shroud, but in numbers.
This is a one-handed, lonely
equivalent of a sing-along.
I’ve seen your earlier work:
ink spots cloaking Caesar’s
assassins. The Vermont boat-
house marked by a missing
set of oars and the birds circling.
Lies of omissions, are. You can
get this wholesale as a commodity,
like negative space or the rearranging
of a warm bed. Even the wine
I’m drinking tastes like it was made
yesterday from a full color photo
of an old man with a handful of grapes.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Trespass
When I stopped his cold heart’s
beating, the tail continued writhing
fruitlessly. Half the length of a full
grown man, he could climb to the tree-
top without disturbing the songbirds
dancing on the bowing branches. How original:
me with seven pounds of wood at the end of a spade
after ten good shots. Which sins do we choose to call
cardinal? He knew the direction of the hollow
spot to enter my basement where the drywall
would rub a new skin out. This is better than sharing
dens with copperheads. Better too than being
caught raiding a bluebirds’ nest. I returned
his head and body together in a brown bag,
sent him home to the forest without
flattery, gladness, or prayer. One of us
is cursed, naked, and venomous.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Head Above Water Blues
Last year I earned fifty dollars
too much for earned income credit.
Three fourths of day’s work put me
over the poverty line, so says the taxman.
This isn’t what getting over supposed
to look like. Two grand would’ve
came back to me if I just slept
in when they called a substitute teacher.
Those kids chasing Monarchs to the milk-
weed, counting the days of molting,
crossing off each lifecycle—this easily worth
almost any day in my life. That day didn’t
fill up my egg crate with yokes, or pay
off the poor man’s thirst for the spirits,
the ones, and the zeros that wet bankers lips.
-Jason Braun
The future of the book: is it in apps?
The future of the book: is it in apps?.
Kevin Eagan giving Paradise Lost a shout out at his blog Critical Margins.
Today’s Poem
Contender
Black eyes were easy,
it was the running and jumping
rope that kept me from being a contender.
Breathless and stupid, holding myself up
after the local champ’s body shot
stole every gasp in the room—the roundhouse
kick that turned my nose permanently to the left.
For two weeks, I smiled brightly through the shiner
that tagged along. But put me on roadwork
and there better be cops and dogs
giving chase. Once I woke face
down on the canvas, outclassed by a much leaner
man, and realized this isn’t where you win fights.
Jumped to my feet as I remember, bobbing
and weaving. But when I watched the tape,
before the ref stopped it, I was the perfect
picture of a handful of leaves in gust of wind
just waiting to fall.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Lesson on Gripping a Pencil
Told me to look around and see how does your neighbor
grip their pencil? What is the position of their thumb,
index, and middle finger? No, this won’t do.
All the small muscles in my hand went jellyfish.
He cannot hold the tripod grip, I over heard
this and something about developmental and tissues.
Sometimes I held it as a paintbrush, praying
to draw the words out to do my work.
Then it became as an ice pick might, chipping
away the recess hours in punishment at a desk.
Thirty years later I hold this pencil like a small bird
I’ve entered in an agreement with and we get along fine.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Missing My Exit at the On Ramp, a Meditation
For the old boards over the well that never
broke. For the stray pellet gun burst
that planted a spider web inside a window
to grow in the darkness. For the fist fights
that didn’t end curbside, mute, and toothless.
For my high school friend, Chuck,
running from the cops in his old pontiac
lemans and the parents he beat to the grave.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
A Boy Acquires Language
In the open mouth of pregnant pause,
where wasps came and went and stung
when he finally looked through
a keyhole, or at that tower of stacked
magazines somebody else’s dad had.
Handed him seven words for fertilizer
before betting he couldn’t make a fist.
Here is the place of naming grown-up
drink and smoke. Remember, engineers
don’t know anything about trains.
This is the kind of thing you can shout
in a boat. All year he looked at Dick
and Jane’s book waiting for the sound
to come out.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Ostinato
The same weasel I played
jazz with for four years,
came back trying to bump
me out of the saddle with this girl
at the Stagger Inn. Earlier,
he was ear-hustling in line
behind us, waiting to talk
of his newest band. After midnight,
a sense of scarcity can be smelled:
There’s not enough love to go
around or the idea that a record’s
no good by the time everybody’s laid
ears on it. Maybe I’m the one repeating
myself and jealous and drunk.
Either way it’s still the same three or four
low notes calling home from infinity.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
The Girl With the Mona Lisa T-Shirt
Might be the missing key
to art appreciation. Cut
out all the atmospheric
landscape. Zoom in, raise
the contrast and screen-
print what’s left of the mystery
on an American girl’s chest.
Both are famous the world over.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Bare Blub Swinging in Smoke on an Early Sunday Morning:
What do you know about the evolution
of horses? How long since you held
a job or a woman? Where did you become
acquainted with the accused?
What did the white rabbit
say to Alice in the beginning?
How do the Baltimore drunks,
careening in the moonlight
measure time? Which way
did Ahab go looking for Japan?
Which lounge is the best for running
numbers? When did you seek counsel?
This is true until it isn’t, right?
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Like Words Could Do This
“Language is not the same thing as honey or squids or cold winds; nor is it the same as thoughts or feelings or perceptions,” Sharon Crowley, Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students
On an overcast morning you called
me honey, brought coffee and poached
eggs. It was all an act and part of our game:
Lip to tooth to tongue and cuss.
Like the shower and under other waters
writing on each others’ bodies in squid ink.
Every cold wind was flowing
through Brooklyn that winter and I wasn’t
moving there anytime too soon.
A place isn’t anchored only with a name.
Otherwise, why would New York City
still shadow me.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Detection
In this story, a boy in love
with detective fiction confronts
stovetop clues to his grandmother’s
new-found forgetfulness. He can’t
believe the woman who taught him
to read to be caught in time’s undertow.
Sherlocking through the basement
together, flashlight in hand,
no one knows which way to the fuse box.
Stormy nights like these he stops
reading and wonders, maybe the very same
thing as his grandmother does:
Where did my father go?
Who made this mess for me to clean up?
Why doesn’t Dr. Watson kick down the door?
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
After Seeing Rossetti’s The Day-dream
The garden must have sprung
up around her dress
just this afternoon. She couldn’t
have climbed that far all swoony-
eyed with an open book and flower
in her good hand. She would’ve
snagged each barb on silk,
slingshotting one sandal at a time
down as her father cussed.
No, the garden’s still growing.
She grasps the branches like a horseless
set of reins. Rossetti’s distracted.
He tells her: I’ll give you ten thousand
shades of green to know his name.
The one that’s trapped below
your breath, below the beating.
The one owning the hum and click
of each of your lungs.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Self Portrait as Still Life
The box fan in the window
whirls, but doesn’t disturb
the wren shuffling the deck
of leaves outside. Five book-
shelves cradling dust
mites and countless homes
for spiders. The roll top desk
grandfather left. What would
he have written on this yellow
legal pad—list of Louis L’Amour
books he remembered reading,
notes of where he might have left
some keepsake: keys to a small
boat, a kind set of hands to touch
a woman with. Now a photo
of a girl too beautiful to keep.
A hoarding of rubber chickens,
broken watches, notes on the word
fuselage, and tomorrows locked
in a collection of mason jars.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Seeing what Van Gogh Saw
At an August sunset
twenty students miss seeing
it. Also, the groundhog and fox-
scent. Even the raccoons
rattling the leaves. The professor
notes reactions in a moleskin.
Stones thrown and insults arc
with authenticity. Almost
lost in the trees, the last bit of sun.
A boy leans into a girl’s ear:
This is what Van Gogh painted
before he committed suicide.
The van’s engine and fog lights
call them back. She’s grape-vining
her legs around him. Someone
else picked up his backpack.
He carries her and his sweat
works on her like Novocain.
Seeing a sunset is seeing the residue
of the terrain and trains
you took to get here.
-Jason Braun
Today’s Poem
Distribution
The newspaper boy. His skeem
that got this going. Our papers
disappeared every morning,
not long after they landed in the bush,
teetering on the lawn chair, or top
of my sedan. This is seven a.m.
Weeks later our mail started to turn
up missing. The box in the door—
gone. Then the starts to the next
house in the street. Still, on the last
day of the month he presents his bill.
He rings the bell. The milkman.
His skeem to smother the boy
in his own news ink.
-Jason Braun
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