From Soft Targets by Deborah Landau

From Soft Targets

A breath leaves the body, and wishes it could return maybe,

the news to the left and right rich with failure, terror, dither,

the bloated moon in constant charge of us like vapor—

and this did frame our constituency, even in our cozy homes

even in a painless state on the downriver, oh oblivion—

sipping champagne as another night brings forth its big dancing plan its damage.

I had a thought but it turned autumn, turned cold.

I had a body, unwearied, vital, despite the funeral in everything—

ample with bodies, covered in graves and gardens, potholes and water,

an ardent river we walked together, a wine and rising breeze.

Much trouble at hand, yet the lilies still.

That summer we sat with our backs to the street, letting time pass—

lying all afternoon in the grass as if green and insect were the world.

I am, I am, and you are, you are, we wrote, until the paper seemed a tree again

and we walked beneath it greener and unsullied afresh.

Massive powers that be, what will be?

We smoke our pipes to forget you

& mildly now we bide our time

the violence and real cities under siege,

but also filled this morning

with coffee drinkers, office workers, taxi drivers, boys on bikes.

Golden we were in the moment of conception,

and alive, as if we always would be.

[Making] by Vera Pavlova

[Making]

Making love as much as we wish,

skinny-dipping whenever we feel . . .

How is life, naked kids?

Life teems in every cell!

All alone, as in an Eden,

no laws, as in dreams . . .

I spread my skirt on the grass:

life of mine, come to me.

(Translated by Steven Seymour)

Daphne, After by Carol Muske-Dukes

Daphne, After

 

So Spring blossomed in spite of itself.

Uniform skirts up-rolled high by wild girls

curbside, smoking. Still, two of us, heads

 

together, translating. Our selves as Stoic

teens, thinking Marcus, Marcus A.!

So: month of rose pagodas, of lilacs

 

impetuous, blue. Twigs spill from

her dropped text, as she flees

translation class, the nun’s query.

 

He demanded her name first. Just

steps from the bus stop. Sunset:

shade before ancient dark. Blossoms

 

beneath her, beneath the shock-light of

staggered street lamps coming on. Leda’s

Zeus, his suit & tie, swan’s hiss in her ear.

 

She told me only. The great wings of

aloneness closed in us, we learned how

the passive voice was magnified: “The soul

 

is dyed with the color of its thoughts.”

Powerless to move, she became past

tense of strength once standing tall

 

at her father’s grave. His name in brass

florets. But Latin offhand—“to seize or

abduct.” Ovid’s shudder: Vos mos non

 

sit sponsa . . . Once we might have found it

funny: You will not be a bride, you will be

a tree. At each ring where her flesh became

 

bark, a path opened: root split. Some

believe that anger can take the place of

love. She found the verb for it. Having to

 

do with the forest & a young girl running fast,

calling out—then silence. Becoming as she

had, one of them, reaching skyward. Their

 

witness, bowing. Those wings hidden in

the tree, meaning she was not ready to be

cut down, not ready to be chopped into little

 

sticks & tossed into fire’s assumed supremacy—

all that smoke, her ashes refusing to fly.

 

Spring by Robert Hass

Spring

 

We bought great ornamental oranges,

Mexican cookies, a fragrant yellow tea.

Browsed the bookstores. You

asked mildly, “Bob, who is Ugo Betti?”

A bearded bird-like man

(he looked like a Russian priest

with imperial bearing

and a black ransacked raincoat)

turned to us, cleared

his cultural throat, and

told us both interminably

who Ugo Betti was. The slow

filtering of sun through windows

glazed to gold the silky hair

along your arms. Dusk was

a huge weird phosphorescent beast

dying slowly out across the bay.

Our house waited and our books,

the skinny little soldiers on the shelves.

After dinner I read one anyway.

You chanted, “Ugo Betti has no bones,”

and when I said, “The limits of my language

are the limits of my world,” you laughed.

We spoke all night in tongues,

in fingertips, in teeth.

Hunger by Ama Codjoe

Hunger

 

When I rose into the cradle

of my mother’s mind, she was but

a girl, fighting her sisters

over a flimsy doll. It’s easy

to forget how noiseless I could be

spying from behind my mother’s eyes

as her mother, bulging with a baby,

a real-life Tiny Tears, eclipsed

the doorway with a moon. We all

fell silent. My mother soothed the torn

rag against her chest and caressed

its stringy hair. Even before the divergence

of girl from woman, woman from mother,

I was there: quiet as a vein, quick

as hot, brimming tears. In the decades

before my birthday, years before

my mother’s first blood, I was already

prized. Hers was a hunger

that mattered, though sometimes

she forgot and I dreamed the dream

of orange trees then startled awake

days or hours later. I could’ve been

almost anyone. Before I was a daughter,

I was a son, honeycomb clenching

the O of my mouth. I was a mother—

my own—nursing a beginning.