Pronounced: “fee ASS co”

Fiasco comes from the Italian word for “flask” or “bottle,” because that’s where so many fiascoes begin.

Of course it’s survivable, it must be survivable, but feelings lie and this is a big lie, the feeling you get walking under the windows of the apartment you used to live in that you no longer have the keys to—the lights are on, the drapes are closed, she’s inside and you don’t have a key anymore and it feels like you’ll die any second but it’s survivable, it must be survivable, people survive worse things all the time—they lose fingers, they lose limbs, they lose children, they lose spouses, and here you are, quoting Elizabeth Bishop, so how bad can it be, really? The art of losing isn’t hard to master, even though it may feel like (say it) you lost your spouse, but at least she’s not dead; she’s still alive, and if she doesn’t see you or talk to you, at least she’s breathing somewhere—so this isn’t the apocalypse, this isn’t World War 2, it’s not even Granada, for god’s sake, but how dare you compare your pain from the end of a relationship with the carnage wrought by warfare or the end of the world? How insensitive—how could you—you—with a stable job and a roof over your head, you don’t even have real problems—here you are, going on about the light in her windows when you have your own damned doors and windows, you just want to be inside hers, but you’re not welcome. Get over it. You want problems? Here’s a real problem: In the paper today, there was a story about a little girl who was born unable to sense pain. She can feel things, she just can’t sense pain, so as a baby, she scratched her cornea terribly and didn’t know it, bit clear through her tongue as a toddler, came up to mommy with a mouthful of blood and a tongue stub, scratched her arm till it was bloody, stuck her hand against a furnace until it was puffy with mushroom-sized blisters, so you see there’s a problem, be grateful for your pain as you walk down the street, that pain, it shows you you’re alive—and you’re most certainly alive so be grateful for what the pain is telling you, ripping through you like a chainsaw and making you wish you were dead instead. Sooner or later, seeing her windows lit from the inside, knowing she’s home, you’ll feel dead about it, meaning you’ll feel nothing, honest, it’ll feel better, it will. And I know you don’t want to hear this right now, but someday, all this will feel better and you’ll wake up one day and hear the birds singing again and you’ll notice the sunshine and there will be small animals frolicking on the grass ha ha ha and don’t tell me to shut up I realize it’s still too soon for all this but maybe even though it’s not right now you can hold out for the promises of the spring flowers like crocus and those little tiny daisies next April or May even though right now inside you it’s October, that season not for flowers but for gourds, lying like desperate organs on the ground then rotting as the earth hardens and frosts and the leaves fall to their deaths one after the other, that season of despairing, and it’s dark almost all the time, October, and the dark closes in at you from either end of the day and here you are in early November, a white girl at the Dia de Los Muertos, black dress and marigolds, photos and liquor. This isn’t for you at all, but you’ve got nowhere else to go and you’re walking through the streets, turning your back that place that used to be your home, surrounded by skeletons, you’re all walking together, you’re turning your back to the place that was home. The lighted glass is staring at you through the night. You turn away and one instant later, from somewhere inside, someone you loved flips a switch and the light in the windows is gone.

Daphne Gottlieb, your October is my favorite. –Rives

—Daphne Gottlieb

Pronounced: “SKIL a guh LEE“

Skilligalee is a general term for the smallest unit a currency can be broken up into. The U.S. skilligalee is the penny, the British skilligalee is the pence, the Mexican skilligalee is the centavo, etc. (Excellent 19th Century expression: “Why, it’s not worth a skilligalee!")

So “skilligalee,” besides being fun to say, also means something obscure as a bonus. Unlike “cockernony,” which is fun to say but just means: “ponytail.”

There was a tender in them both, a place picked raw.
As Southern men do, the clasping of hands that know
weather. Eye linked to eye, unflinching, the flat-toned,
muttered how-do. How do you? And the scripted respect,
the pudge-cheeked preacher inquiring idly after the dying
man’s days. Whole wars in them, but just a single rupture.
Their halos florid, overglowing, some news reporter hissing
expectantly into a dead silver mic: Say it, say it. James Earl
liver-toned, wobbling on old bone, one lazy eye perked for
it. It. The King is rolling his Rs, throating elegant, sweating
bullets into his collar. Having shaved too closely, his beard
is peppered red, whispering blood. And still the pleasantries.
Exactly how does one go from commenting on the weather
(it’s hot: awfully humid: smells like rain: hope it lets up) to
asking did you frame my father’s head in your gun sight, did
you empty his dinner chair, lonely my nights, pull back on
that trigger? Jesus, he looks just like his nigga daddy, James Earl
thinks, hopefully not aloud this time. Bet he can call on God
and turn his other cheek with the best of them. Go on, get it out.
I’m dying heah. Cameras whir. The men are like fools, silent,
damned respectful, exactly a yardstick between them.
And it’s the windup, the pitch: Sir I have to ask you, my sir,
my kind sir, excuse me, I hate to bother you sir, but I have to
ask for the record, Did you kill my father? And if the answer
is yes, will there be a throttling, an errant sob, a small silver
pistol slipped from an inside pocket? And if the answer
is no, will there be a throttling, an errant sob, a small silver
pistol slipped from an inside pocket? Time has a way of
growing things all huge. But, surprisingly, James Earl resists
spittle and the wide-eye. No, I didn’t. No. No. That settles it
then, that settles it. And we’re locked in on this limp drama
long after the credits have rolled and Hollywood Squares has
taken over, long after the network has signed off and clicked
into morning snow. Time for a Twinkie and a beer. Time to fall
asleep with a clear head. Time to celebrate the slow sweet
of Southern men. It’s time to rejoice in the fact that nobody killed
nobody, and high time to forget that somebody died anyway.

Patricia Smith, your poem is sublime. Love, Rives

—Patricia Smith

TAYLOR: At the moment, my favorite line of my own is from a new poem I’m working on called “The New Ash on the Roof of our Building.” It goes like this:

We think of the dead as faded floating versions
of who they were in life—same grief, same need,
ghostly, doleful, disconsolate transparency,
except wearing sheets like gods, wraiths, or Romans—
maybe even Roman gods—revenants.

2. Favorite line, right now, of someone else:

TAYLOR: Galway Kinnell’s:

as when flamingoes
change feeding places on a marsh
and there is a moment, after the first to fly
puts its head into the water in the new place
and before in the old place the last to fly
lifts out its head to see the rest of flown,
when, scattered with pink bodies, the sky
is one vast remembering.

3. It’s been __________ since the last time you __________:

TAYLOR: It’s been two days since I last played SCRABBLE.

4. You knew it was a good/bad gig (pick one) when:

TAYLOR: I was once asked by a poetry promoter to arrive at the venue at 8 pm. Cool. No problem. Little did I know that what she really wanted was to insure that I would show up by 9 pm when the door opened. She herself didn’t get there until 10 pm. Show finally started at 11 pm. I went on at midnight. That’s when I knew that this was going to be the worst gig ever. Luckily (I guess), there were only a handful of people left in the room.

5. The proudest money you ever made was:

TAYLOR: The proudest money I ever made was the spare change I earned while teaching. The stupidest money I ever made was saying, “When you have it your way, it just tastes better.”

6. When I say “swingset,” you think (where?):

TAYLOR: Rusty, dangerous jungle gym made of iron tubing and lashed together with strips of razor sharp flashing in the middle of Central Park circa 1970.

7. When I say “covet,” you think (what?):

TAYLOR: A coven of Corvettes in a cove.

8. When I say “credit,” you think (who?):

TAYLOR: Marc Smith deserves all kinds of credit for inventing the poetry slam. Because of him and the bizarre practice of assigning numbers to poems, I get to do what I do.

9. When I say “habit,” you think (…?):

TAYLOR: Of the one I just recently kicked. I won’t say what it was, but I am a clearer, more motivated, healthier person because of it.

10. What’s on God’s iPod?

TAYLOR: Lots of Simon & Garfunkel, REM’s “Losing My Religion” (just for fun), Handel’s “Messiah,” and a couple of demo cuts of Jesus’s cloud band called Chalice.

p.s. (anything else?)

TAYLOR: Terrorism is a Hydra, and George Bush has the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Pronounced: “PYOO pul”

Pupil comes from the Latin word pupilla, meaning “doll,” “puppet,” or “little person,” which is why we call schoolchildren “pupils.”

But “pupil” the eye part? Same deal: when you look into someone’s eyes, you see a miniature reflection of yourself in their pupils.

And that’s the most romantic etymology in the whole wide world.

Pronounced: “OM ful o SKEP sis”

The high-falutin definition for omphaloskepsis is: “meditation while staring fixedly at one’s navel practiced by Eastern mystics as an aid toward inducing a mystical trance.”

The low-falutin definition is more frank. Omphalos means “belly button” in Ancient Greek (it’s cousin to the Latin word umbilicus). And skepsis means “watching” or “considering” (which is where “skeptical” comes from).

So “omphaloskepsis” pretty literally just means: navel gazing.