Saturday, October 31, 2020

Conclusively by Fanny Howe

Conclusively

 
The night was almost too long to bear
Then there was evidence of mercy—a passing car—
milky air—and I could see
dry walls & gravel on the way to the highway
Atlantic for its grays
 
Loss is the fulfillment of the Law
Space collected on a long line
 
I was eliminated as a locus of mothering—
a she—physical but imaginary as a restless daughter
 
Why this body and not another
 
The one who came to destroy the works of women—their
offspring—
knew how many people were resisting incarnation
He counted on them by accommodating them
 
Guilt relieving guilt
is the get of killers whose mouths shine
I can't say enough about this—red because sore
& polished because wet
 
One died to become the spirit-guide
Before that time
there were second persons in everything
Then saints, then no one
to guide anyone to heaven
Cosmic expansion has gone on in its preferred direction
 
I can hear the hour, this never
happened to me before
One day I will shake the blue sky from my hair
and slip back to consciousness—
the things that is always aware
with or without a living creature to share its pleasures
 
Tonight I request the precious gift of final perseverance
shored up in my sheets
not far from a predawn holocaust
of traveling children 



Friday, October 30, 2020

The Little Miracles by Malika Booker

The Little Miracles

 
After ‘A Winter Night’ by Tomas Tranströmer (translated by Robin Robertson)
 
Since I found mother collapsed on the kitchen
floor, we siblings have become blindfolded mules
 
harnessed to carts filled with strain, lumbering
through a relentless storm, wanting to make
 
our mother walk on her own again, wanting to rest
our palms on her left leg and arm like Jesus, but
 
constellations do not gather like leaves in a teacup,
so what miracle, of what blood, of what feeble wishes
 
do we pray, happy no nails hammer plywood, building
a coffin, to house her dead weight, happy her journey
 
crawls as we her children hold on like drought holds out
for rain, learning what it is like to begin again, start
 
with the, the, the dog, the cat, the date, the year, the
stroke, the brain, the fenced in walls, she struggles
 
to dismantle brick on brick. She cannot break this,
we reason, watching her left hand in her lap, a useless
 
echo. We chew bitter bush, swallow our howling storm,
reluctantly splintering under the strain of our mother’s
 
ailing bed-rest. We smile at each of her feats: right hand
brushing her teeth in late evening, head able to lift
 
without the aid of a neck-brace, her off spring’s names
Malika, Phillip and Kwesi are chants repeated over
 
and over as if staking us children as her life’s work,
her blessings, showing how much we are loved. The days
 
she sings walk with me oh my Lord, over and over, walk
with me oh my Lord, through the darkest night… and I sing
 
with her, my tones flat to her soprano, just as you changed
the wind and walked upon the sea, conquer, my living Lord,
 
the storm that threatens me, and we sing and sing until
she says, Maliks, please stop the cat-wailing before
 
you voice mek rain fall, and look how the weather nice
outside eh! Then we laugh and laugh until almost giddy,
 
our mood light momentarily in this sterile room, where
each spoonful of pureed food slipped into her mouth
 
like a tender offering takes us a step away from feeding
tubes, and we are so thankful for each minuscule miracle.
  


Thursday, October 29, 2020

A Winter Night by Tomas Tranströmer

A Winter Night

 
The storm puts its mouth to the house
and blows to get a tone.
I toss and turn, my closed eyes
reading the storm's text.
 
The child's eyes grow wide in the dark
and the storm howls for him.
Both love the swinging lamps;
both are halfway towards speech.
 
The storm has the hands and wings of a child.
Far away, travellers run for cover.
The house feels its own constellation of nails
holding the walls together.
 
The night is calm in our rooms,
where the echoes of all footsteps rest
like sunken leaves in a pond,
but the night outside is wild.
 
A darker storm stands over the world.
It puts its mouth to our soul
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid
the storm will blow us empty.
 
(Translated by Robin Robertson)
  


Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Poem by Katy Lederer

Poem

I think of your face and of its deepest bewilderment.
It makes me sad as if the morning
were a tower or pair
of them—haunted and pure,
degenerate, elevated, strange of view
in solitude. 



Tuesday, October 27, 2020

A Night in Brooklyn by Dennis Nurkse

A Night in Brooklyn


We undid a button,
turned out the light,
and in that narrow bed
we built the great city—
water towers, cisterns,
hot asphalt roofs, parks
septic tanks, arterial roads,
Canarsie, the intricate channels,
the seacoast, underwater mountains,
bluffs, islands, the next continent,
using only the palms of our hands
and the tips of our tongues, next
we made darkness itself, by then
it was time for daybreak
and we closed our eyes
until the sun rose
and we had to take it all to pieces
for there could be only one Brooklyn.  



Monday, October 26, 2020

Spoiler by Hala Alyan

Spoiler

 
Can you diagnose fear? The red tree blooming from uterus
to throat. It’s one long nerve, the doctor says. There’s a reason
breathing helps, the muscles slackening like a dead marriage.
Mine are simple things. Food poisoning in Paris. Hospital lobbies.
My husband laughing in another room. (The door closed.)
For days, I cradle my breast and worry the cyst like a bead.
There’s nothing to pray away. The tree loves her cutter.
The nightmares have stopped, I tell the doctor. I know why.
They stopped because I baptized them. This is how my mother
and I speak of dying—the thing you turn away by letting in.
I’m tired of April. It’s killed our matriarchs and, in the back yard,
I’ve planted an olive sapling in the wrong soil. There is a droopiness
to the branches that reminds me of my friend, the one who calls
to ask what’s the point, or the patients who come to me, swarmed
with misery and astonishment, their hearts like newborns after
the first needle. What now, they all want to know. What now.
I imagine it like a beach. There is a magnificent sand castle
that has taken years to build. A row of pink seashells for gables,
rooms of pebble and driftwood. This is your life. Then comes the affair,
nagging bloodwork, a freeway pileup. The tide moves in.
The water eats your work like a drove of wild birds. There is debris.
A tatter of sea grass and blood from where you scratched your own arm
trying to fight the current. It might not happen for a long time,
but one day you run your fingers through the sand again, scoop a fistful out,
and pat it into a new floor. You can believe in anything, so why not believe
this will last? The seashell rafter like eyes in the gloaming.
I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in.
I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful. 



Sunday, October 25, 2020

By Small and Small: Midnight to 4 A.M. by Jack Gilbert


By Small and Small: Midnight to 4 A.M.

 
For eleven years I have regretted it,
regretted that I did not do what
I wanted to do as I sat there those
four hours watching her die. I wanted
to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms, knowing
the elementary, leftover bit of her
mind would dimly recognize it was me
carrying her to where she was going.



Saturday, October 24, 2020

The Big Fish Story by Mary Stewart Hammond

The Big Fish Story

 
Late fall and not a soul around for miles.
Just me and my man. And those scallopers
trolling a few hundred feet offshore I’m pointing to
saying no, non, nein, nyet, nej,
in every language including body English,
to his idea that we take off all our clothes
smack in the middle of the lawn
in broad daylight and go swimming!
This is the line he throws me: “But, sweetheart,
the young have given up scalloping. Those
are all old men out there. Their eyesight
is terrible.” Which explains why
I’m naked in the water of the coast
of Massachusetts on the fourteenth of October
feeling like silk, like the feel of his flesh
drawing over my skin when we’re landed
on a bed, so I swim off out of his reach
lolling and rolling, diving and surfacing,
floating on my back for his still good eyes.
I know what he has in mind and what
I have in mind is to play him for a while
for that line I swallowed, delay the moment
I’ll do a slow crawl over to him,
Wrap my legs around his waist, and
Reel him in—just the fish he was after.



Friday, October 23, 2020

Ode to Joy by Frank O'Hara

Ode to Joy 

 
We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying
on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs
for our symbol we’ll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter
over an insatiable sexual appetite
and the streets will be filled with racing forms
and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars
will swell from the walls and books alive in steaming rooms
to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably
as water flows down hill into the full-lipped basin
and the adder dives for the ultimate ostrich egg
and the feather cushion preens beneath a reclining monolith
that’s sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness
near the grave of love
No more dying
 
***
 
We shall see the grave of love as a lovely sight and temporary
near the elm that spells the lovers’ names in roots
and there’ll be no more music but the ears in lips and no more wit
but tongues in ears and no more drums but ears to thighs
as evening signals nudities unknown to ancestors’ imaginations
and the imagination itself will stagger like a tired paramour of ivory
under the sculptural necessities of lust that never falters
like a six-mile runner from Sweden or Liberia covered with gold
as lava flows up and over the far-down somnolent city’s abdication
and the hermit always wanting to be lone is lone at last
and the weight of external heat crushes the heat-hating Puritan
whose self-defeating vice becomes a proper sepulcher at last
that love may live
 
***
 
Buildings will go up into the dizzy air as love itself goes in
and up the reeling life that it has chosen for once or all
while in the sky a feeling of intemperate fondness will excite the birds
to swoop and veer like flies crawling across absorbed limbs
that weep a pearly perspiration on the sheets of brief attention
and the hairs dry out that summon anxious declaration of the organs
as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighbors
pouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways
like the ways of gods with humans in the innocent combination of light
and flesh or as the legends ride their heroes through the dark to found
great cities where all life is possible to maintain as long as time
which wants us to remain for cocktails in a bar and after dinner
lets us live with it
No more dying 



Thursday, October 22, 2020

Mother's Day by Dorianne Laux

Mother's Day


I passed through the narrow hills
of my mother's hips one cold morning
and never looked back, until now, clipping
her tough toenails, sitting on the bed's edge
combing out the tuft of hair at the crown
where it ratted up while she slept, her thumbs
locked into her fists, a gesture as old
as she is, her blanched knees fallen together
beneath a blue nightgown. The stroke
 
took whole pages of words, random years
torn from the calendar, the names of roses
leaning over her driveway: Cadenza,
Great Western, American Beauty. She can't
think, can't drink her morning tea, do her
crossword puzzle in ink. She's afraid
of everything, the sound of the front door
opening, light falling through the blinds—
pulls her legs up so the bright bars
won't touch her feet. I help her
with the buttons on her sweater. She looks
hard at me and says the word sleeve.
Exactly, I tell her and her face relaxes
for the first time in days. I lie down
 
next to her on the flowered sheets and tell her
a story about the day she was born, head
first into a hard world: the Great Depression,
shanties, Hoovervilles, railroads and unions.
I tell her about Amelia Earhart and she asks
 
Air? and points to the ceiling. Asks Heart?
and points to her chest. Yes, I say. I sing
Cole Porter songs. Brother, Can You Spare
a Dime? When I recite lines from Gone
with the Wind she sits up and says Potatoes!
and I say, Right again. I read her Sandburg,
some Frost, and she closes her eyes. I say yes,
yes, and tuck her in. It's summer. She's tired.
No one knows where she's been.



Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Angels in the Sun by Ruben Quesada

Angels in the Sun
                               
                  after Turner
 
I would have waited alone a thousand
years for the coming of angels,
blinding bright as the spring sun to arrive,
 
to abandon this world for another.
Stunned by their flashing lights aflame
 
across the bow of their space craft—landing
 
lights for that world. Herds of animals:
horses, humans, and fish fixed.
The angels approached.
 
Come angels! Come beasts!
Men and women cried out
to each other; the angels cried;
 
some were lost between their earthly life
 
and paradise and what is paradise, anyway?
Few imagined being bound to this world;
 
blue halo of emerald mountains;
extraordinary, ordinary—they rose,
a crucifixion yardarm flying away.





Tuesday, October 20, 2020

The Average Mother by Camille T. Dungy

The Average Mother


The average mother loses 700 hours of sleep in the first year of her child’s life; or, what that first year taught me about America.
 
Most of us favor one side when we walk. As we tire,
we lean into that side and stop moving in a straight line—
                        so it takes longer to get anywhere,
let alone home.
 
                        In wilderness conditions,
            where people don’t know the terrain,
a tired person might end up leaning so far into one side
            they’ll walk in a circle rather than straight ahead.
 
It can kill you, such leaning
                        —and it can get you killed.
                                               
                                                Rest helps.
                                                                        I told my husband,
 
I walked in a circle in my mind but you came out okay.
                        Initially, he asked me to clarify,
            but then he let it go.
 
Who wrote that first If You Lived Here You’d Be Home by Now sign? 
 
                        It seems I’m going to have to move.
 
            I am tired and also sick
of helping other people in lieu of helping myself.
 
                        Rest now.
 
It's really not that bad: we’re in the home stretch.
 
            That’s the mind of a parent.
Relentless optimism in the face of sheer panic
                                                                        and exhaustion. 



Monday, October 19, 2020

You Have Astounding Cosmic News by Matthew Zapruder

You Have Astounding Cosmic News 

Dear sociologists, I have been asked to explain poetry to you. Thus
in the offices of Dazed Lute Press the clicking begins. Lately
we’ve been conducting field experiments into our private thoughts. One
faction next to the soul-shaped water cooler wonders whether
there’s any reason at all to remember the feeling of being a child. Is
it best to imagine one’s self again beneath the desk as the rusted
air raid siren explodes with its bi-monthly ritual Wednesday afternoon
fear distribution? Like you, I was always holding particular crayons
in the dimness of certain morning assemblies. I have been told
some of you think the only constant is constant observation. I know
city planners design the city and still there are diffusionists who pace
the deep blue edge of do you know you can never try to discover
why why flowers in the cubicles. Between you and me the buildings
also have a space for the sparrow named never who does not sing
yes the cities die when you leave them, yes no one cares what you do.
The glass-covered-in-dust windows of the thrift store display
a mirror from the 1920s. If you take it it will no longer regard young
lovers with important thoughts pushed towards the mighty river. I
will fall in love exactly about a million times and then I will die. Clouds
playing dominoes agree. At Everest on Grand someone eats yak discussing
the endless undeclared war among the neutral provinces. Long
metallic articulated girders cast thin shadows over thousands of windows.
A photograph of a pacifist smiles. He wore a white suit, was a friend
to the poor and worked for the union of unemployed telegraph workers
who listened for signals pulsing as Joni Mitchell never said from the heart of
a distant star. He was like my grandfather, after he died the city fathers
did not know what there were building when they built a museum
to encase a window in a wall brought from a faraway country where
it once overlooked the sea. Evenings through giant speakers people listen
to troubled sounds whales bounce off continental shelves. Go tell
everyone everything is related, the rich own the clouds, and you can
always locate yourself with so many shadows to instruct you. 




Sunday, October 18, 2020

Usage by Hayan Charara

Usage

An assumption, pejorative, an honest language,
an honorable death. In grade school, I refused to accept
the mayor’s handshake; he smiled at everyone except
people with names like mine. I was born here.
I didn’t have to adopt America, but I adapted to it.
You understand: a man must be averse to opinions
that have adverse impacts on whether he lives
or dies. “Before taking any advice, know the language
of those who seek to advise you.” Certain words
affected me. Sand nigger, I was called. Camel jockey.
What was the effect? While I already muttered
under my breath, I did so even more. I am not
altogether sure we can all together come. Everything
was not all right. Everything is not all right.
Imagine poetry without allusions to Shakespeare,
Greek mythology, the Bible; or allusions without
the adjectives “fanatical,” “extremist,” “Islamic,”
“right,” “left,” “Christian,” “conservative,” “liberal.”
Language written or translated into a single tongue
gives the illusion of tradition. A lot of people murder
language—a lot fully aware. Among all the dead,
choose between “us” and “them.” Among all the names
for the dead—mother, father, brother, sister,
husband, wife, child, friend, colleague, neighbor,
teacher, student, stranger—choose between
“citizen” and “terrorist.” And poet? Immoral,
yes, but never amoral? Large amounts, the number
between 75 and 90 percent of the estimated
150 million to 1 billion—civilians—killed during wars,
over all of recorded human history. Anxious is “worried”
or “apprehensive.” American poetry, Americans.
Young, I learned anyone born here could become
President. Older, I can point to any one of a hundred
reasons why this is a lie. Anyway, I don’t want to be
President, not of a country, or club, not here or there,
not anywhere. He said, “I turned the car around because 
it began raining bombs.” There’s no chance of ambiguity—
an as here could mean “because” or “when”; it makes
no difference—he saw the sky, felt the ground,
knew what would come next; it matters little
when the heart rate in less than a second jumps from
70 to 200 beats per minute. What they did
to my grandfather was awful—its wretchedness,
awe-inspiring; its cruelty, terrible; it was awfully
hard to forget. Just after 8:46 AM, I wondered awhile
what would happen next. At 9:03 AM, I knew
there was going to be trouble for a while to come.
When in her grief the woman said, “We’re going
to hurt them bad,” she meant to say, “We’re going
to hurt them badly.” For seventeen days, during
air strikes, my grandfather slept on a cot beside
a kerosene lamp in the basement of his house. Besides
a few days worth of pills, and a gallon of water,
he had nothing else to eat or drink. Given these conditions,
none of us were surprised that on the eighteenth day,
he died. Besides, he was eighty-two years old.
I can write what I please. I don’t need to ask, May I?
Like a song: men with capital meet in the Capitol
in the nation’s capital. Any disagreements, censored;
those making them—poets, dissenters, activists—
censured. The aftermath, approximately 655,000
people killed. “The Human Cost of War in Iraq:
A Mortality Study, 2002-2006,” Bloomsburg School
of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore,
Maryland); School of Medicine, Al Mustansiriya University
(Baghdad, Iraq); in cooperation with the Center
for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts).
The figure just cited—655,000 dead—resulted from
a household survey conducted at actual sites, in Iraq,
not the Pentagon, or White House, or a newsroom,
or someone’s imagination. Of course, language has been
corrupted. Look, the President, who speaks coarsely, 
says, “We must stay the course.” The problem with
“Let your conscience be your guide” is you must first
be aware, conscious, of the fact that a moral principle
is a subjective thing. I wonder: when one “smokes ’em
out of a hole,” if the person doing the smoking
is conscious of his conscience at work. Am I fully conscious
of how I arrived at this? The continual dissemination
of similar images and ideas. The continual aired footage
of planes striking the towers, the towers crumbling
to the streets, dust, screams, a continuous reel of destruction,
fear, as if the attacks were happening twenty-four hours
a day, every day, any time. For a while, I couldn’t care less
about war. Then I saw corpses, of boys, who looked
just like me. This was 1982, at age ten. Ever since,
couldn’t care less why anyone would want it.
In 1982, any one of those boys could have been me.
Now, it’s any one of those dead men could be me.
The Secretary of State offered such counsel
to the ambassadors of the world that the United Nations
Security Council nodded in favor of war. Criterion
easily becomes criteria. Even easier: to no longer
require either. The data turned out false. The doctrine
of preemption ultimately negated its need. While we
both speak English, our languages are so different from
each other, yours might as well be Greek to me.
When the black man in the park asked, “Are you
Mexican, Puerto Rican, or are you Pakistani?”
and I said, “I’m Arab,” and he replied, “Damn.
Someone don’t like you very much,” I understood
perfectly what he meant. The President alluded
to the Crusades because of (not due to) a lack
of knowledge. Later, he retracted the statement,
worried it might offend the Middle East;
it never occurred to him the offense taken was due to 
the bombs shredding them to bits and pieces. “You are
either with us or with the terrorists” (September 20, 2001).
“You’re either with us or against us” (November 6, 2001).
The day after, the disc jockey advocated, on air,
a thirty-three cent solution (the cost of a bullet)
to the problem of terrorists in our midst—he meant
in New York; also, by terrorists, I wonder did he know
he meant cab drivers, hot dog vendors, students, bankers,
neighbors, passersby, New Yorkers, Americans;
did he know he also meant Sikhs, Hindus, Iranians,
Africans, Asians; did he know, too, he meant Christians,
Jews, Buddhists, Atheists; did he realize he was eliciting
a violent response, on the radio, in the afternoon?
Among those who did not find the remark at all illicit:
the owners of the radio station, the FCC, the mayor,
the governor, members of the House, the Senate,
the President of the United States. Emigrate is better
than immigrate. Proof: no such thing as illegal emigration.
Further proof: emigration is never an election issue.
I heard enthusiastic speeches. They hate our freedoms,
our way of life, our this, that, and the other, and so on
(not etc). Not everyone agreed every one not “with us”
was “against us.” Detroit was farther from home
than my father ever imagined. He convinced himself
soon after arriving here he had ventured further
than he should have. Fewer people live in his hometown
than when he left, in 1966. The number, even less,
following thirty-four straight days of aerial bombardment.
First (not firstly) my father spoke Arabic; second
(not secondly) he spoke broken English; third (not thirdly)
he spoke Arabic at home and English at work;
fourth (not fourthly) he refused to speak English
anymore. Not every poem is good. Not every poem
does well. Not every poem is well, either. Nor does
every poem do good. “To grow the economy”
is more than jargon. Can a democracy grow
without violence? Ours didn’t. They still plan to grow
tomatoes this year, despite what was done.
Several men, civilian workers, identified as enemies,
were hanged on a bridge, bodies torched, corpses
swaying in the breeze. Photographs of the dead
were hung with care. I can hardly describe what is
going on. Day after day, he told himself, “I am
an American. I eat apple pie. I watch baseball.
I speak American English. I read American poetry.
I was born in Detroit, a city as American as it gets.
I vote. I work. I pay taxes, too many taxes. I own a car.
I make mortgage payments. I am not hungry. I worry
less than the rest of the world. I could stand to lose
a few pounds. I eat several types of cuisine
on a regular basis. I flush toilets. I let the faucet drip.
I have central air conditioning. I will never starve
to death or experience famine. I will never die
of malaria. I can say whatever the fuck I please.”
Even words succumbed; hopefully turned into
a kind of joke; hopeful, a slur. However, I use the words,
but less, with more care. The President implied
compassion; but inferred otherwise. This is not
meant to be ingenious. Nor is it ingenuous.
The more he got into it, the more he saw poetry,
like language, was in a constant state of becoming.
Regardless, or because of this, he welcomed the misuse
of language. Language is its own worst enemy—
it’s the snake devouring its own tail. They thought
of us not kind of or sort of but as somewhat American.
Lie: “To recline or rest on a surface?” No. “To put
or place something?” No. Depleted uranium, heavy
like lead; its use—uranium shells—led to birth defects.
When in his anger the man said, “We’re going
to teach them a lesson,” I wonder what he thought
they would learn. In a war, a soldier is less likely
to die than a civilian. He looks like he hates our freedoms.
You don’t know them like I do. He looks as if he hates
our freedoms. You don’t know them as I do.
When in his sorrow my father said, “Everybody
loose in war,” I knew exactly what he meant. It may be
poets should fight wars. Maybe then, metaphors—
not bodies, not hillsides, not hospitals, not schools—
will explode. I might have watched the popular sitcom
if not for my family—they were under attack,
they might have died. Others may have been laughing
at jokes while bodies were being torn apart.
I could not risk that kind of laughter. Of all the media
covering war, which medium best abolishes the truth?
I deceive myself. I will deceive you myself. In the Bronx,
passed as Puerto Rican. I passed as Greek in Queens,
also Brazilian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, even a famous,
good-looking American movie actor. As Iranian
in Manhattan. At the mall in New Jersey,
the sales clerk guessed Italian. Where Henry Ford
was born, my hometown, I always pass as Arab.
I may look like the men in the great paintings
of the Near East but their lives, their ways, I assure you,
are in the past. Plus, except in those paintings,
or at the movies, I never saw Arabs with multiple wives,
or who rode camels, lived in silk tents, drank from
desert wells; moreover, it’s time to move past that.
Did language precede violence? Can violence proceed
without language? It broke my father’s heart
to talk about the principle of equal justice.
The news aired several quotations from the airline
passengers, one of whom was a middle-aged man
with children, who said, “I didn’t feel safe with them
on board.” He used the word “them” though only one,
an Arab, was on the plane. Being from Detroit,
I couldn’t help but think of Rosa Parks.
Then I got angry. I said to the TV, to no one
in particular, “If you don’t feel safe, then you
get off the goddamn plane.” You can quote me
on that. I was really angry—not real angry,
but really angry. The reason? A poet asked me
why I didn’t write poems about Muslim and Arab
violence against others, and I said I did. And then
he said he meant violence against Americans and Israelis,
respectively, and I said I did, and before I could
go on he interrupted to ask why I didn’t write
poems about mothers who sent their sons and daughters
on suicide missions. As if, as if, as if. I respectfully
decline to answer any more questions. Write your own
goddamn poem! Does this poem gratify the physical senses?
Does it use sensuous language? It certainly does not
attempt to gratify those senses associated with
sexual pleasure. In this way, it may not be a sensual poem.
However, men have been known to experience
sexual gratification in situations involving power,
especially over women, other men, life, and language.
My father said, “No matter how angry they make you,
invite the agents in the house, offer them coffee,
be polite. If they stay long, ask them to sit. Otherwise,
they will try to set you straight.” When in his
frustration he said, “Should of, could of, would of,”
he meant, “Stop, leave me alone, I refuse to examine
the problem further.” Because (not since) the terrorists
attacked us, we became more like the rest of the world
than ever before. This is supposed to be a poem;
it is supposed to be in a conversation with you.
Be sure to participate. “No language is more violent
than another,” he said. Then he laughed, and said,
“Except the one you use.” Do conflicts of interest
exist when governments award wartime contracts
to companies that have close ties to government officials?
From 1995 to 2000, Dick Cheney, Vice President
of the United States, was CEO of Halliburton,
which is headquartered in Houston, Texas,
near Bush International Airport. Would they benefit
themselves by declaring war? Please send those men
back home. My grandfather lay there unconscious.
For days, there was no water, no medicine, nothing
to eat. The soldiers left their footprints at the doorstep.
His sons and daughters, they’re now grieving him.
“Try not to make too much of it” was the advice given
after two Homeland Security agents visited my house,
not once, not twice, but three times. I’m waiting for
my right mind. The language is a long ways from here.
After the bombs fell, I called every night to find out
whether my father was alive or dead. He always asked,
“How’s the weather there?” Soon enough, he assured me,
things would return to normal, that (not where)
a ceasefire was on the way. Although (not while)
I spoke English with my father, he replied in Arabic.
Then I wondered, who’s to decide whose language it is
anyway—you, me? your mother, father, books,
perspective, sky, earth, ground, dirt, dearly departed,
customs, energy, sadness, fear, spirit, poetry, God,
dog, cat, sister, brother, daughter, family, you, poems,
nights, thoughts, secrets, habits, lines, grievances,
breaks, memories, nightmares, mornings, faith, desire,
sex, funerals, metaphors, histories, names, tongues,
syntax, coffee, smoke, eyes, addiction, witness, paper,
fingers, skin, you, your, you’re here, there, the sky,
the rain, the past, sleep, rest, live, stop, go, breathe