Two new videos came out this week for songs sung by women in their early 20s. One is the one above. And while it’s blatantly banking on reminding people of last year’s smash hit “I Love the Way You Lie,” and it’s always creepy, because of what we know about her real-life past, to watch Rihanna flirting with the notion of domestic violence as turn-on, I like it. It’s certainly very titillating. Like Requiem for a Dream, from which it also borrows heavily. The song itself is great, too, which certainly helps. Big dumb disco done just right. I think I like it more than any song of Rihanna’s since “Umbrella.” As good as it is, though, it pales in comparison to “I’m His Girl,” by the new Bushwick, Brooklyn band, Friends.

This is subtle, sly disco done just right. (It’s reminiscent of what ESG and Liquid Liquid were doing in the early ’80s. Has anything ever sounded more New York? Was Friends frontwoman Samantha Urbani not born with the perfect name?) But as much as the sound of the record, it’s its sentiment that has lots of people jumping up and down and cheering. Over at the Hairpin, Blanca Mendez called “I’m His Girl,” “the best song about healthy relationships that has ever been recorded.”

What?! Could that be?! Better than “Our House?” Better than “Wonderful Tonight?” Better than “You’re All I Need?” Better than “Make Me Better?”

Well, “I’m His Girl” is very great at expressing some very important ideas about healthy relationships. As Mendez goes on,

“Wisdom like knowing that your worth doesn’t depend on your relationship status and that relationships are not about possession. Even if she’s his girl, she does exactly what she wants when she’s with him and when she’s not. And she doesn’t get jealous when he goes out, because trust! It’s important! No matter how into each other they are, they both need room to breathe. I kept saying, ‘preach, girl, preach,’ as I watched this video.”

I kept saying that, too. And that’s exactly what Kahlil Gibran would have said, too. Since what Urbani is singing about is just like what he wrote in 1923, in his poem “On Marriage,” from The Prophet, which you probably read in college and have heard recited at some weddings you’ve been to. But I’ll put a part of it here, because it is always nice to read again.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

The truth that Gibran and Urbani are getting at is all too rarely expressed in pop songs, which tend to instead focus on the breathless, immature “OMG I’LL DIE WITHOUT YOU!!!” sort of love that Rihanna’s video is about because that kind of love is more combustible and titillating and much more easily rendered into something someone else would want to hear about or watch on a screen. It’s no coincidence that it more often makes for good entertainment. It’s more entertaining. Dysfunctional relationships are far more interesting than nice solid healthy ones — at least from the perspective of someone outside the relationship. The problem is people get stuck on that stuff from the inside, they start to feel like that’s the only way they know they’re in love, when there’s the crazy frisson of passion that borders on pain or emotional abuse, or in the worst cases, violence. People get their inner lives confused with what they like to watch on TV.

Being able to breathe is more boring than not being able to breathe. But it feels better. And it lasts longer.

“Has the number of bodyguards and plainclothes police and private security in obvious public view on New York’s Upper East Side dramatically increased since, say, the last time your editor was in town about a year-and-a-half ago? Because it was outrageous yesterday. We are reminded of Russian Mobsters with their dozen musclehead black-suited thugs outside every ‘luxury goods’ store or ‘hooker nightclub’ in Eastern Europe, in the 1990s.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dbDJzDV1CM

“The better you can forget, the better you’ll be able to remember, scientists now say. To remember facts that are important in your life today, you have to be able to let go of information that you no longer need, says Benjamin Storm, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago…. Your brain is stuffed full of information and for you to have important information at your fingertips — or the tip of your tongue — it has to forget facts that aren’t currently needed.” What are YOU going to forget to learn something new? Tell us in the comments!

by Peter Bebergal

In 1983 I sat cross-legged on the floor of my room, headphones tight against my ears, and placed a record on the platter. The stack of albums next to me was a prime collection of early American hardcore punk — The FUs, Minor Threat, Youth Brigade, 7 Seconds, Crucifix, Negative Approach — but the vinyl that eagerly met the needle was something different.

By the time I laid my teenage, resin-stained fingers on it, “I Had Too Much to Dream” by the Electric Prunes was someone else’s dream long gone by. Released as a single in 1966 and later on the band’s first full length album The Electric Prunes, “I Had Too Much to Dream” reached #11 on the Billboard chart. The song prefigures what would become a dominant psychedelic vibe in pop music, but it wouldn’t be until 1967 when psychedelic rock owned the airwaves with songs like “White Rabbit,” “Light My Fire” and “Purple Haze.” “I Had Too Much to Dream” was rooted in garage rock, which in 1966 was the sound of the burgeoning counterculture: The Troggs, Count Five, ? and the Mysterians, and, of course, The 13th Floor Elevators. These were the bands that would influence the early punks of the ’70s: Iggy Pop, the Ramones and Patti Smith. The hardcore punk of the ’80s might have sped things up a bit, but you could trace a lineage directly from Minor Threat back to the Electric Prunes.

Rock history was kind to what might have been a forgotten one-hit wonder. In 1972, the definitive collection of psychedelic garage rock, Nuggets, used the song as is opening track. As that collection showed, psychedelic rock need not be all sitars and long strobing jams; it could be angry, too. And there was no better energy for a teenage punk looking to blow his mind.

Like almost everyone who played the song over and over again until even the scratches in the record became familiar, mine was a romantic love, born of a deep desire to find meaning beyond the conventional, beyond the mainstream, and beyond what I thought even music could be capable of. In the early 1980s, the Grateful Dead and the ’60s rock played on oldies stations were the only things that smacked of psychedelic. But that was music for old people or the young stoners with their collarless brown leather jackets and Timberland boots. It might be good when you were stoned, but it didn’t contain anything beyond a feeling of feelin’ good. Listening to Cream and Iron Butterfly wasn’t rebellion; it was smoky nostalgia. Drugs and music were a catalyst for rebellion, not for staring at the inside of your eyelids. For hardcore punks looking for music that would shoulder anti-authority sentiment and LSD imaginings, the garage psych of “I Had Too Much to Dream” was just bold enough and, even better, it didn’t sound anything like Jerry Garcia.

The members of the Electric Prunes — Joe Dooley, James Lowe, Michael Weakley Ken Williams, and Mark Tulin — came of age listening to surf music and the bands of the British Invasion. It was music swimming in reverb and whimsy, but edgy enough to lead the way. One day, jamming in their actual garage, a real-estate agent passed by, heard them and introduced them to a producer friend. It was dream come true. Once the young musicians were in the studio it was clear they could play their instruments, but the record producer that discovered them had no confidence in them as song writers. A writing team was commissioned to write the songs. They accepted their fate as a record company assemblage, but soon figured out how to bring put their own signature on it. The Prunes found themselves caught up in a whirlwind of marketing and publicity that manipulated an earnest, if sometimes delusional, mushrooming psychedelic counterculture. The Electric Prunes were just a bunch of teenagers, and with teenage spirit still made something original.

“I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)” starts with a killer opener, a guitar riff played backwards that grows in velocity towards hyperspace and then stops short at the ringing of a gently tapped triangle. Soon the pounding drums and gruff vocals turn it all into rock ’n’ roll again, but it is a rock born of psychedelic storm clouds. The song, as lysergic as anything else at the time, was amateur with a raw energy that prefigured punk. And despite its Top 40 aspirations, “I Had Too Much to Dream” keyed perfectly into the acid-fueled visions of the sixties.

I spoke with the bassist Mark Tulin by phone in 2010 while researching my book, Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, an obvious homage. (Tulin died earlier this year in a scuba-diving accident as part of an underwater cleanup effort in California.) I asked about the intention that had gone into the recording of that song, how much acid had played a role, and how much he and his bandmates thought they were going to turn on the world. As it turned out, none of these things were factors. The band rarely even got stoned. As Tulin told me, “I just wanted to play music and the only way to do that was to be in band. I didn’t have a grand statement. The most important thing on my mind would have been, ‘Can I get a date?’”

“Too Much to Dream” was released as a single a year before 1967’s Monterey Pop Festival secured a legitimate place between counterculture and mainstream for psychedelic rock and the hippies that listened to it. The single was timely. The press hadn’t yet called the burgeoning drug-inflected pop scene ‘psychedelic.’ The Electric Prunes didn’t know much about the music industry yet, but they knew enough that even being a little bit different could be a good thing. “We didn’t try to fit into anything and consequently fit in between everything,” Tulin recalled.

The music historian Elijah Wald has suggested that the Beatles ruined rock by disconnecting it from its blues roots and turning it into something manufactured and produced. But it could also be said they ruined psychedelic rock by disconnecting it from its youthful garage origins. The Beatles made psychedelic sounds for adults, but it was kids who were picking up guitars in their parents’ wood paneled basements and hammering out three fuzzy chords. As Tulin tells it, even the Electric Prunes felt the weight of the Beatles: “Sgt. Peppers set the gold standard for what you should be doing in the studio and took an edge off garage rock. They upped everyone’s sophistication level.”

But along with an emphasis on the studio and sophistication came the business of music, the managers and the producers. The Electric Prunes were given outfits to wear and had to wear them under orders at some television appearances (Tulin recalled burning these outfits one night outside a hotel — you could tell from his voice that it was a fond memory). They just wanted to make music organically, from the original place that led them to their instruments. And that place was not the airy spacey psychedelic motif, but the anger of garage rock. Even more to the point, the drug experience didn’t drive their music. “If I got too high when I was playing I internalized and it might be grand, but it didn’t sit with what anyone else was playing,” Tulin said.

Sitting in my room that day, I gleaned a thousand points of light from that three-minute song. It distilled for me a mostly scattershot belief into a hope that the ’60s counterculture and the ’80s punks were not so different, that music could change the world. Add a little LSD to the mix and you might even change the mind of God.

Punks loved to put up their middle fingers to the hippies, but we owed them just about everything. Even our beloved fanzines were a pale shadow of the ’60s underground newspapers. We refused to admit it, but they had something to fight for. They hated the Vietnam War because they watched their friends and relatives come home in bodybags. We hated Ronald Reagan but we didn’t even know why. There wasn’t a real counterculture to contain or support a teenager straining (and overreaching) for meaning. Even the punks were fighting amongst themselves.

Despite its energy and sincerity, punk was often an empty gesture, raising fists against abstractions and Def Leppard. What I didn’t know was that “I Had to Too Much to Dream” was as manufactured as anything I was railing against in the ’80s. “Too Much to Dream” was less a song than it was an icon. But icons are mostly empty except for what we impose onto them. What I heard in the music, in that fabled song “I Had Too Much to Dream” wasn’t real; it wasn’t a drug-fueled revelation, and the intention driving it was little more than messing around with guitars, meeting girls and going to parties — the surer purpose of rock.

Peter Bebergal is the author of Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhood, out now from Soft Skull Press. He’s also on Twitter.

I’m know it’s all kinds of wrong and I’m sure that those of you who are more sophisticated than I will find the whole thing appalling, but THIS LOOKS AMAZING. Like, I might cancel my plans tonight so that I can stay in and make it. [Via]

From the Internet that brought you everything else comes Awwcupy Wall Street Dot Tumblr Dot Com.

More on Lisa Simeone and how NPR folks are running scared from their own shadows. (Sorry, NPR, there’s no way to sugarcoat this boondoggle.)

by David Roth and David Raposa

David Roth: Did you hear that “Let’s Go Motte!” chants the Cardinals fans were doing in Game 1? Where do they come up with this stuff?

David Raposa: The Best Fans In Baseball continue to surprise and amaze with their improvisational alacrity. You cannot stop The Best Fans In Baseball. You can only hope to distract them with around-the-clock nonsense about how trading an up-and-coming center fielder for a fourth starter and some back-end bullpen arms is A Good Thing.

David Roth: I don’t know that much about St. Louis. I know Fernando Vina was in a Nelly video and that they have tasty Italian-style sandwiches and that they’ve got what you might call a “murder problem.” But are they really protective of La Russa? I am worried that I’ll start talking about him with a Cardinals fan and they’ll be like “No, you are a Zombie Bruce Jenner bunt-aficionado with a hard-on for ethnic-white utility humps.” And then, if they’re really St. Louis-y, they’ll shoot me in the face.

David Raposa: I just got a text message from Eli Roth; he’d like to either sue you for intellectual property theft or have you script-doctor his upcoming feature, No Pepper.

David Roth: Did you see the slo-mo of Holliday and Jon Jay botching a leaping high-five?

David Raposa: As with failed suicide squeezes and making the first out at third base, it’s the thought that counts.

David Roth: I feel like So Taguchi would’ve had that one.

David Raposa: So Taguchi would’ve karate-kicked Holliday’s hand. And put him on the DL.

David Roth: RACIST. Also accurate as regards Holliday but come on man.

David Raposa: I regret nothing except everything. Rick Perry is the co-pilot of my conscience.

David Roth: It’s worth noting that Joe Buck sounds not merely awake, but intermittently interested during the World Series. During the ALCS, it seemed like he was listening to an audiobook and watching the game at the same time. I mostly say this because he kept mentioning stuff from The Help when he was supposed to be talking about Jhonny Peralta. I know book groups are important, but you have to move that meeting or read before the game starts, you know?

David Raposa: I honestly can’t tell the difference between Regular Joe Buck and Joe Buck Zero. Both of them have the same vacant stare and glossy dental veneer. And both give me gas.

David Roth: I think when the Cardinals are involved and/or when a Flashy Black Wide Receiver does something DISGUSTING, Beck cares. Otherwise he’s watching Hulu during the game and eating Ambien like they’re Mike and Ike’s.

David Raposa: Look, are you going to turn down free pharmaceuticals when McCarver’s just give them away? He’s only semi-human! As far as other Fox TV dudes, what I want to know is: who the hell is Eric Karros pissed off at? Besides A.J. Pierzynski. I can’t recall ever seeing a talking head impart received-wisdom observations with such red-ass intensity.

I sense Fox told Pierzynski and Karros to “tone it down” with the hair in the World Series. “This is the Fall Classic, you guys, so no more fucking around. Karros: it’s called Dep Ultra Hold, look into it..”

David Roth: I sense Fox told Pierzynski and Karros to “tone it down” with the hair in the World Series. “This is the Fall Classic, you guys, so no more fucking around. Karros: it’s called Dep Ultra Hold, look into it. Pierzynski, do something about that frosted-tip bathmat on your head. Just get it shortened or mowed or something. Jesus.”

David Raposa: “Five letters: L-A-L-O-O-K-S.” To be fair, I kind of tuned out the in-game banter after the 38th pitching change. Why is it always the AL managers that seem to indulge in NL-worthy managerial excesses?

David Roth: You know how I feel about La Russa — that is that he’s a defective Canadian Club-pickled jerk-gherkin with bad politics, but he did kind of rope-a-dope Washington in Game 1. Poor Wash tried to do the La Russa matchup-computation thing and wound up with glove-collecting Triple-A doofus Esteban German at the plate at a critical juncture in the game. That means the algorithm isn’t working.

David Raposa: Ron Washington would double switch twice and run a wheel play with no one on base, if he could. Though given that pinch-hitting is the ultimate crapshoot (when Lenny Harris or Pat Tabler aren’t available), why not go with the guy that hasn’t seen any playing time in nearly a month? Roll those dice!

David Raposa: I should do a study to see how many teams with three catchers won the World Series. I got a bad feeling Matt Treanor’s going to play a key role in this series. Besides being used as an excuse to post Misty May pics.

David Roth: I feel like Ron Washington and Tony La Russa should be on the cover of a Kashi Good Friends cereal box after the World Series, win or lose. Their relationship is inspiring.

David Roth: The prospect that it could become a trend to pull starters early so as to get Lance Lynn/Scott Feldman into the game earlier is at least amusing to me. In the abstract. I would love to have a real reason to write/think, “That was just WAY TOO MUCH FELDMAN for Pujols right there.”

David Raposa: Is it too late to pitch NBC on a surreal buddy-cop sitcom starring Corey Feldman as Corey Feldman and Rob Schneider as Corey Haim’s teeth?

David Roth: Also I considered trying to get #2MuchFeldman trending on Twitter during Game 1, but it was way more work than I was up for at the time.

David Raposa: The ultimate: Lance Lynn pitching to Scott Feldman! In a 0–0 game! In the 19th inning! (After four rain delays!)

David Roth: McCarver would be openly hallucinating. “What is a bunt, if you think about it? It has feathers, and I think it’s mostly nougat but what is it?” Also Joe Buck was replaced by Paula Abdul in the 11th. She pauses every fourth word and cries a lot and gets into (and loses) a heated argument with a bag of Combos she thinks isn’t respecting her.

David Raposa: Imagine the ratings bonanza if one of the WS games was played at L.A. Reid’s house. I’d offer some Rothian fictionalizing, but all I have in my notebook are Randy Jackson riffs. (Sorry, dog.)

David Raposa: So: soon to be overrated baseball folk hero — David Freese or Michael Young?

David Roth: Oh boy. Freese seems trendier.

David Raposa: I’m going with Young, since Freese hits too many homers, and some enterprising early adapter has already played the Derek Jeter Card on him.

David Roth: Oh wow. Whenever the Jeter Edge is introduced, it’s definitely on. I liked Freese being discussed as a potential batting champion during Game 1.

David Raposa: How many hitting coaches have used that line? “Stop pulling off the ball and go the other way! You could be the next Freddy Sanchez!”

David Raposa: I wonder if scouts ever got punchdrunk and filed reports with lines like, “When Cory Snyder gets control of the strike zone, I can see him hitting a cool .250.”

David Roth: “There’s nothing I see that says Ken Phelps couldn’t be a Triple Crown guy in the right situation.” That is, he could order the Golden Brown Triple Crown at a Golden Corral somewhere, whenever he wanted.

David Raposa: What is the Golden Brown Triple Crown — a Monte Cristo, a flash-fried turducken, and Baked Alaska?

David Roth: And a side of ranch, but yeah. I worry… well, about a great many things. But I worry about how well our generation’s know-it-all SABR-Doof routine is going to age.

David Roth: Because I’m youngish and fairly febrile-brained at the moment, and every time I hear McCarver talking about What A Smart Bunt That Was or whatever, I become a little rage-geyser. And someday, lord willing, I will be old and pissed-off all the time. Because years of excessive scotch/sausage consumption will have left me gouty and bilious. I shudder to think about how unbearable I will be about meaningless matchup-playing and bunt-humping at that point.

David Raposa: But you’ll be bilious and right!

David Raposa: “And speaking of questionable playoff hairdos…”

David Roth: The La Russa bedhead-mohawk. I knew this was coming.

David Raposa: TLR is totally biting on Joe Maddon’s steez. If Maddon is The Postal Service, then La Russa is total Owl City. (Wash is, of course, LMFAO.)

David Roth: You know he’ll never get Maddon’s One-A-Day vitamin spokesmanager gig. I’m amazed they’re doing that after Centrum Silver’s bad experience with Larry Bowa. “Fucking fistful of these every day and I’m swinging around an erection you could use to mow wheat. So all you sons of bitches out there: eat a bunch of these! /sudden, awkward smile into camera.”

David Raposa: I heard that’s why he switched to Bushmills; the Centrum/Johnny Walker Red mix turned his pee black.

David Roth: “The combination made my eyes bleed.” — Tommy Lasorda

David Raposa: Ron Roenicke saw Lucky Charms purple diamonds in his dreams for four weeks after quitting the generic brand cold turkey. He’s now strictly popping fish oil pills.

David Roth: Most team doctors just recommend amphetamines for these guys. Bowa has been on the players’ coffee for so long that his body would shut down if he switched to Taster’s Choice.

David Raposa: Greenies mixed in Folger’s Instant is truly the breakfast of champions. This is now Yakkin’ About 70s Coffee Brands.

David Roth: Taster’s Choice’s spokespeople were Joyce DeWitt and Rollie Fingers, right?

David Raposa: I’m pretty sure it was actually Cathy Lee Crosby and Joe Rudi.

David Roth: That whole era doesn’t make sense to me. It wasn’t even weird to see Dave Kingman driving around in a Maserati with Tom Snyder and Dan Fogelberg. John Ritter was in the Senate.

Everyone watched Bull Durham the wrong way. Except Tony Plush, because someone switched out his copy with Ichi The Killer.

David Raposa: I want to say I saw an episode of “Scooby Doo” where The Banana Splits did lines of coke in the back of the Mystery Machine. But I was probably too distracted by sticking Weebles in my ears and rubbing Aquafresh on my belly to pick up on the salient plot points of Hanna-Barbera fare.

David Raposa: Here’s a Sophie’s Choice for you: Ken Rosenthal’s bowties or Craig Sager’s entire wardrobe.

David Roth: Sager’s suits just make me sad. They’re from the Brian Wilson “Hey Look At Me And What I’m Doing” collection.

David Raposa: #BLACKOPS

David Roth: And Sager’s suits are all cut for Steve Harvey. Dexter Manley shoulder pads, everything’s the color of a cran-something drink. Simon Doonan cries fat tears.

David Raposa: I only wish MLB players were as hip to Sager’s jive as NBA players.

David Roth: Man, are baseball player interviews ever the worst. “I was surprised to see the baseball there, but I hit it with this bat.”

David Raposa: Everyone watched Bull Durham the wrong way. Except Tony Plush, because someone switched out his copy with Ichi The Killer.

David Roth: At least Kevin Garnett will take a break from his permanent audition for the role of Evil Pharaoh in a direct-to-DVD Mummy sequel to goof on Sager. I miss Tony Plush and how off-message he was.

David Raposa: I only wish Nyjer was in the World Series, so Joe Buck would have to explain to America what that lump in his mouth was.

David Roth: What exactly was that? I read somewhere (that is, I am trying to start the rumor) that it was a six-inch Italian BMT from Subway, which he changes between innings. Was it just a fistful of tobacco?

David Raposa: That, or his gum-chewing skills are next level. He just puts the Bubblicious between his jaw and lower lip, and lets saliva and gravity bring the deliciousness to his taste buds. Though now I can’t use the word “deliciousness” without thinking of #BLACKOPS.

David Roth: Do you think there’s anything we can do about those Brian Wilson Taco Bell commercials? I called my congressperson. She says she’s already on it.

David Raposa: The only way the Obama Jobs Plan would pass the House is if it were a rider on a bill to ban Brian Wilson from any and all TV work.

David Roth: I have this feeling Wilson came in with his own handwritten script. “I’m thinking I really shouldn’t blink during this. Also, while I totally get the central conceit of these ads, which is that there is too much garbage-meat inside these pitiably translucent husks for most people to eat without getting a case of the soul-barfs, I’d still like to pretend to call Chuck Norris on this giant portable phone. Also can a graphic that reads ‘#winning’ flash while I’m talking? Because if it can’t you can just go hire Heath Bell or something.” (Or whatever: this is funnier)

David Raposa: I know for a fact he brought in that beard scratcher.

David Roth: Oh I’m sure. Might be too inside, but I’d love to see a version of that commercial in which Tony La Russa walks out halfway through Wilson’s rant, pats him on the shoulder, and puts in Guillermo Mota to eat two bites of chalupa.

David Raposa: Jesse Orosco is available. And I’m sure he’d do the commercial, too.

David Roth: Is that racist?

David Raposa: I prefer to think of myself as “inscrutable.

David Roth: Full circle to Taguchi. We’re done here.

David Raposa: Let’s Go Motte!

David Roth co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. And he tweets!

David Raposa writes about music for Pitchfork and other places. He used to write about baseball for the blog formerly known as Yard Work. He occasionally blogs for himself, and he also tweets way too much.

Photo by Matt Trommer, via Shutterstock.

Ain’t nobody gonna ask Hipster Cop if he’s gay, I guess. Hot GQ pics though. (What a WORLD.)

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Morning

when dark, is not that,
morning, but more like rain:

a sky of smog-stuck potatoes;
frustration without eyes.

The way I did nothing exhausted me:
I fed the wall,

ran water over my body
until it swirled down the drain.

On a determinable plane
I am undetermined,

on a moving train,
unable to find a seat.

The edge is what knows me,
the face half-carved off,

the gutter that gathers its objects
like knives, without connection,

here what is not there and vice versa.
I lie. I have seven jars of lies:

one for each day and the joy!
of repetition. Weeks redouble

and hold me still, anchors sprout
from my feet, stand in for will.

Desire is the lie I tell on Tuesday.
I tell it with my socks off

to be understood. The color
of intent is the crispness of bread;

whoever wants the heel
comes last to the table.

Nuar Alsadir’s first collection of poems, More Shadow Than Bird, is forthcoming with Salt Press. Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, Grand Street, Ploughshares, and Slate. She is on the faculty at NYU and is training to become a psychoanalyst. She lives in Brooklyn.

“Where,” you are asking yourself, “can I find some more poetry?” Perhaps we can point you in this direction, to The Poetry Section’s vast archive. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.