the lesson of the falling leaves by Lucille Clifton

the lesson of the falling leaves

the leaves believe

such letting go is love

such love is faith

such faith is grace

such grace is god

i agree with the leaves

Ordinariness of the Soul by Zbigniew Herbert

Ordinariness of the Soul

In the morning mice scamper

over the head

over the floor of the head

shreds of conversations

scraps of a poem

the room’s muse

enters

in a blue apron

sweeps

such important guests

visit my master

well Heraclitus the Ephesian for example

or the prophet Isaiah

today no one rings

the master paces about impatiently

talks to himself

tears up innocent papers

in the evening goes out in an unknown direction

the muse unties her blue apron

rests her elbows on the window sill

leans out

waits

for her sergeant

with the red mustaches

(Translated by John and Bogdana Carpenter)

I will tell you the truth about this, I will tell you all about it by Tracy K. Smith

I will tell you the truth about this, I will tell you all about it

Excellent sir, my son went in the 54th regiment

Sir, my husband who is in Company K, 22nd regiment, U.S. colored troops

And now in the Macon Hospital at Portsmouth with a wound in his arm

Has not received any pay since last May

And then only $13.

Sir, we the members of Company D, of the 55th Massachusetts volunteers

Call the attention of your excellency to our case.

For instant, look and see that we never was freed yet.

Run right out of slavery in to soldiery and we hadn’t nothing at all.

And our wives and mothers, most all of them is a perishing all about.

And we all are perishing ourself.

I am willing to be a soldier and serve my time faithful like a man.

But I think it is hard to be put off in such doggish manner as that.

Will you see that the colored men fighting now are fairly treated?

You ought to do this and do it at once.

Not let the thing run along. Need it quickly and manfully.

We poor oppressed ones appeal to you and ask fair play.

So please, if you can do any good for us, do it in the name of God.

Excuse my boldness, but please, your reply will settle the matter

And will be appreciated by a colored man

And who is willing to sacrifice his son in the cause of freedom and humanity.

I have nothing more to say.

Hoping that you will lend a listening ear.

To a humble soldier.

I will close, your for Christ’s sake.

I shall have to send this without a stamp.

For I h’ain’t money enough to buy a stamp.

The Climate by Annelyse Gelman

The Climate

It was like watching a wave approach

from a great distance, so great

that at first it is not a wave at all, but

a mere horizon, static and singular,

so that one, it being possible, presumably,

to avail oneself of the diversions

of the beach, might turn one’s back

on the ocean altogether, might turn instead

to the sand, heaped and tunnelled,

the sunscreened hand that fumbles

for a book, indeed, the book,

the sentence, the syntax, the sun

blanching the page, stained, perhaps,

with sweat, the creamy pleasure

of not-laboring, when one would otherwise

labor, the pleasure of wasting

oneself, of decadent uselessness,

though one might, of course, always alarm

to some emergency, a child caught

in the undertow, say, who must be

dragged to shore and breathed into

like an empty balloon, an empty balloon

on which everything depends, might,

bent over the small body, waiting for it

to rise, to float, casting a shadow

the size of oneself, not even see,

though one was, of course, warned

it would come, and soon, the shadow

of that wave, like a new sky, already

overhead and even now descending.

Association by Franz Wright

Association

Dawns when I can’t sleep I walk,

in thought, all the way

around Walden.

My father loved Thoreau, I wish

he could have walked there

with me once,

my hungover Virgil. Lying in bed

with a big ax

lodged in my head, I still hear him

as if from the next room

bumping into things and cursing.

Give us this day, he mutters,

our daily stone. Nice.

Can’t blame him, though. This morning

can’t sleep for missing him.

Death Again by Jim Harrison

Death Again

Let’s not get romantic or dismal about death.

Indeed it’s our most unique act along with birth.

We must think of it as cooking breakfast,

it’s that ordinary. Break two eggs into a bowl

or break a bowl into two eggs. Slip into a coffin

after the fluids have been drained, or better yet,

slide into the fire. Of course it’s a little hard

to accept your last kiss, your last drink,

your last meal about which the condemned

can be quite particular as if there could be

a cheeseburger sent by God. A few lovers

sweep by the inner eye, but it’s mostly a placid

lake at dawn, mist rising, a solitary loon

call, and staring into the still, opaque water.

We’ll know as children again all that we are

destined to know, that the water is cold

and deep, and the sun penetrates only so far.

Ode to Fat by Ellen Bass

Ode to Fat

Tonight, as you undress, I watch your wondrous

flesh that’s swelled again, the way a river swells

when the ice relents. Sweet relief

just to regard the sheaves of your hips,

your boundless breasts and marshy belly.

I adore the acreage

of your thighs and praise the promising

planets of your ass.

O, you were lean that terrifying year

you were unraveling, as though you were returning

to the slender scrap of a girl I fell in love with.

But your skin was vacant, a ripped sack,

sugar spilling out and your bones insistent.

O, praise the loyalty of the body

that labors to rebuild its palatial realm.

Bless butter. Bless brie.

Sanctify schmaltz. And cream and cashews.

Stoke the furnace

of the stomach and load the vessels. Darling,

drench yourself in opulent oil,

the lamp of your body glowing. May you always

flourish enormous and sumptuous,

be marbled with fat, a great vault

that I can enter, the cathedral where I pray.

Deportation Letter by Javier Zamora

Deportation Letter

The words Notice to Appear flap like a monarch trapped in a puddle.

Translation: ten years in a cell cold enough to be named Hielera.

If not that, a plane with chains locked to her legs. My aunt swam across

the Río Bravo twice to see her second daughter born in Greenbrae.

¿Why can’t my sister come here? asks the one who speaks English.

The monarch’s beaten, but it won’t listen. Since nothing’s wasted,

it might get eaten, it will nourish ants already gathering.       

---

It was a hill like this. I was tired. I couldn’t keep running and fell. If it wasn’t for

the women who went back to pick me up from the shore, I wouldn’t be here.        

---

Somewhere along here there’s a bridge. A cactus-pear bridge,

red like: the dirtiest sunset, Gila monster hiding, leftover sardines in tin.

¿The hibiscus sprouting? ¿Bougainvillea? One daughter wakes

and sees them and the volcano, and fire flowers through her window.

She’s never seen the bridge her mom isn’t afraid of.       

---

My aunt, twenty-five years selling pupusas near that pier, ten and counting

cleaning houses, baking bread, anything in Larkspur. Most people

in La Herradura haven’t seen their parents. Her daughter Julia,

over there. Here, her daughter Adriana takes the bus to school every day.       

---

The first try we were already in that van and La Migra was chasing us. The driver

said he was going to stop, we should open the doors and run. There were a lot of

      trucks.

Sirens. Men through the speakers. I got to a bush and hid. One dog found me.

He didn’t bite. He just stood next to me till one gringo handcuffed me.       

---

This beach, these hills, are pretty. It looks like La Puntilla, except it’s cold.

I wish Julia was here. Javier, take a picture of Adriana and me. I’ll send it to Julia.        

---

It’s complicated. Mamá me dejaste, decí que vas a regresar, I said, at night

on that same bed you sleep in now. Same bed next to the window

from which you see the lemons, the custard apples, the bean fields,

then the volcano. I’m sorry none of us ever saw you draw butterflies

like we see Adriana draw them, with the caption: “the butterflies

were going to save the world from tornado. And did.”

The Descent of Man by Vijay Seshadri

The Descent of Man

My failure to evolve has been causing me a lot of grief lately.

I can't walk on my knuckles through the acres of shattered glass in the streets.

I get lost in the arcades. My feet stink at the soirees.

The hills have been bulldozed from whence cameth my help.

The halfway houses where I met my kind dreaming of flickering lights in the woods

are shuttered I don't know why.

"Try," say the good people who bring me my food,

"to make your secret anguish your secret weapon.

Otherwise, your immortality will be

an exhibit in a vitrine at the local museum, a picture in a book."

But I can't get the hang of it. The heavy instructions fall from my hands.

It takes so long for the human to become a human!

He affrights civilizations with his cry. At his approach,

the mountains retreat. A great wind crashes the garden party.

Manipulate singly neither his consummation nor his despair

but the two together like curettes

and peel back the pitch-black integuments

to discover the penciled-in figure on the painted-over mural of time,

sitting on the sketch of a boulder below

his aching sunrise, his moody, disappointed sunset.

I Don’t Want to Be Demure or Respectable by Mary Oliver

I Don’t Want to Be Demure or Respectable

I don’t want to be demure or respectable.

I was that way, asleep, for years.

That way, you forget too many important things.

How the little stones, even if you can’t hear them, are singing.

How the river can’t wait to get to the ocean and the sky, it’s been there before.

What traveling is that!

It is a joy to imagine such distances.

I could skip sleep for the next hundred years.

There is a fire in the lashes of my eyes.

It doesn’t matter where I am, it could be a small room.

The glimmer of gold Böhme saw on the kitchen pot

was missed by everyone else in the house.

Maybe the fire in my lashes is a reflection of that.

Why do I have so many thoughts, they are driving me crazy.

Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere?

Listen to me or not, it hardly matters.

I’m not trying to be wise, that would be foolish.

I’m just chattering.

Violins by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Violins

He never saw a violin.

But he saw a lifetime of violence.

This is not to presume

That if he had simply seen

A violin he would have seen

Less violence. Or that living among

Violins, as though they were

Boulangeries or toppling stacks

Of other glazed goods like young adult

Fiction, would have made the violence

Less crack and more cocaine,

Less of course and more why god oh why.

More of one thing

Doesn’t rhyme with one thing.

A swill of stars doesn’t rhyme

With star. A posse of poets doesn’t rhyme

With poet. We are all in prison.

This is the brutal lesson of the 21st century,

Swilled like a sour stone

Through the vein of the beast

Who watches you while you eat;

Our eternal host, the chummed fiddler,

The better tomorrow,

MMXVI.

To the Young Who Want to Die by Gwendolyn Brooks

To the Young Who Want to Die

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.

The gun will wait. The lake will wait.

The tall gall in the small seductive vial

will wait will wait:

will wait a week: will wait through April.

You do not have to die this certain day.

Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.

I assure you death will wait. Death has

a lot of time. Death can

attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is

just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;

can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.

Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness.

Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.

Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

The Clouds Act Bleakly by Frank O'Hara

The Clouds Act Bleakly

The clouds act bleakly

and when they can manage it,

crush someone's head in

without a sound of anger.

This is a brutal mystery.

We meet in the streets

with our hands in our pockets

and snarl guiltily at each other

as if we had flayed a cloud

or two in our salad days.

Lots of things do blame us;

and in moments when I forget

how cruel we really should be

I often have to bite my tongue

to keep from being guilty.

Testament Scratched into a Water Station Barrel by Eduardo C. Corral

Testament Scratched into a Water Station Barrel

In the desert, the moon

shivers. Tonight, to stay awake, I’ll cut my feet

with glass.

Outside Oaxaca, in a clinic, my mother said,

“I hate your Indian face.”

In the dream I’m running. My limbs skeletal

and scabbed.

After my mother’s death, I found, in a box,

her wedding dress.

As I lifted the lid, a stench corkscrewed

into my nostrils:

the dress had curdled like milk. During the day

I gather tinder.

Paper. Shed snakeskin. When the last light

above the mountains

knots into stars, I crouch under mesquite,

make a fire.

Sometimes the moon stops shivering. Sometimes

I tally what I owe.

In the dream I’m running through a hallway.

The floor uneven.

The walls green. Last month, as my son blew out

the candles

on his cake, I noticed, for the first time,

the hideous shape

of his nose. Tonight I’ll pinch my thighs to stay

awake. My mother,

in the clinic, said, “The rain has a fever, it

needs plenty

of rest, it needs to drink plenty of water.” The doctor

scribbled in a file

then asked for more money. If my mother

could see me now!

My feet bloody. My face darker than ever.

Tonight, to stay awake,

I’ll sit close to the fire. In the dream I stumble,

but I never let go

of my right breast: an urn heavy with my own

ashes, an urn

I’m lugging God-knows-where.

Keeping Quiet by Robert Bly

Keeping Quiet

A friend of mine says that every war

Is some violence in childhood coming closer.

Those whoppings in the shed weren’t a joke.

On the whole, it didn’t turn out well.

This has been going on for thousands

Of years! It doesn’t change. Something

Happened to me, and I can’t tell

Anyone, so it will happen to you.

What Is a Diagnosis to a Demon by Shauna Barbosa

What Is a Diagnosis to a Demon

My Gods fast together. Nod in agreement

before relaying results. I stroll around on the verge

of an omg a gasp a wow a why don’t the doctors

jazz it up a bit. Say it’s a delayed overdose,

a you been out here looking for what’s been looking for you.

Turn the heat up. Say there’s something bigger waiting.

Say what doesn’t drown you makes you taller.

Say every new wound is still a regular old wound.

Say you’ll meet a man who’s going to love you

while your body grows with nothing in it.

Tell me he’ll have a voice deeper than demons.

Tell me he’ll be tall like stacked milk crates.

That way he could also be a bedframe.

Could carry decaying vinyl. Tell me

I could shoot a ball straight through him.

Don’t tell me a couple hours before morning break

that it’s just a cyst. A li’l fibroid. A change in diet,

a birth-control pill, and come back next year. My God,

just break me to blood, let me bleed to abandon

on a white couch, from the same cancers

obsessed with all my fat aunties from the South.

I was taught to bring food up to my lips.

For quality assurance, I want all the salt.

I want to drop with the beat.

Baked Goods by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Baked Goods

Flour on the floor makes my sandals 

slip and I tumble into your arms. 

Too hot to bake this morning but

blueberries begged me to fold them

into moist muffins. Sticks of rhubarb 

plotted a whole pie. The windows

are blown open and a thickfruit tang

sneaks through the wire screen

and into the home of the scowly lady

who lives next door. Yesterday, a man 

in the city was rescued from his apartment

which was filled with a thousand rats. 

Something about being angry because

his pet python refused to eat. He let the bloom 

of fur rise, rise over the little gnarly blue rug, 

over the coffee table, the kitchen countertops

and pip through each cabinet, snip

at the stumpy bags of sugar,

the cylinders of salt. Our kitchen is a riot

of pots, wooden spoons, melted butter. 

So be it. Maybe all this baking will quiet

the angry voices next door, if only

for a brief whiff. I want our summers

to always be like this—a kitchen wrecked

with love, a table overflowing with baked goods

warming the already warm air. After all the pots

are stacked, the goodies cooled, and all the counters

wiped clean—let us never be rescued from this mess. 

The Little Book of Hand Shadows by Deborah Digges

The Little Book of Hand Shadows

You who began inside me, 

see a tortoise, a stork, a wolf come out of my hand.

Stand behind me, your shadow eclipsing

my shadow.

Make the cock crow by opening and closing two fingers. 

We can be anyone now.

We can be spirit, ships homing, ten brothers in heaven. 

Can you feel the sweet wind of their wing beats?

Can you smell the damp forest 

as the walls fill up?

The breathe with things. 

Crook your right forefinger which forms a paw.

Remember a crab moves a little sideways. 

Pick me up like you used to and whirl me around.

Mother Hubbard's dog's begging. 

Your Dapple Grey appears to be running.

Our shadows spill shadows. 

They pool, they molt.

They grow out of the dark, they grow 

out of themselves.

They crowd the ark, they crowd the world with their finger-ears 

and thorny toes and their broken beaks

and knuckled hearts, 

their broken beaks and knuckled hearts.

A Dream of Burial by James Wright

A Dream of Burial

Nothing was left of me

But my right foot

And my left shoulder.

They lay white as the skein of a spider floating

In a field of snow toward a dark building

Tilted and strained by wind.

Inside the dream, I dreamed on.

A parade of old women

Sang softly above me,

Faint mosquitoes near still water.

So I waited, in my corridor.

I listened for the sea

To call me.

I knew that, somewhere outside, the horse

Stood saddled, browsing in grass,

Waiting for me.