Look by Fanny Howe

Look 

Look at the snow, the ice, the rock

that bucks like a waterfall.

No crocus, no beanstalk,

no fruit or sun-dripping

iridescent rain.

There will be no list

outside a courthouse door

giving your name or the hour

of your appearance.

No announcement of

which of your friends

was first, last or in the middle.

No more nostalgia. 

You are a farmer in winter now.

Guilty of Dust by Frank Bidart

Guilty of Dust

 

up or down from the infinite C E N T E R

B R I M M I N G at the winking rim of time

 

the voice in my head said

 

LOVE IS THE DISTANCE

BETWEEN YOU AND WHAT YOU LOVE

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

 

           -

 

then I saw the parade of my loves

 

those PERFORMERS comics actors singers

 

forgetful of my very self so often I

desired to die to myself to live in them

 

then my PARENTS my FRIENDS the drained

SPECTRES once filled with my baffled infatuations

 

love and guilt and fury and

sweetness for whom

 

nail spirit yearning to the earth

 

           -

 

then the voice in my head said

 

WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE

 

OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS

REVOLT AGAINST IT

 

WHAT YOU LOVE IS YOUR FATE

Undoing by Khadijah Queen

Undoing 

In winter traffic, fog of midday

shoves toward our machines—snow eclipses

the mountainscapes

 

I drive toward, keeping time against

the urge to quit moving. I refuse to not

know how not to, wrestling

 

out loud to music, as hovering me—automatic

engine, watching miles of sky on the fall—loves such

undoing, secretly, adding fuel to

 

what undoes the ozone, the endless nothing

manifested as sinkholes under permafrost.

Refusal, indecision—an arctic

 

undoing of us, interrupting cascades—

icy existences. I cannot drive through.

You Were Wearing by Kenneth Koch

You Were Wearing

 

You were wearing your Edgar Allan Poe printed cotton blouse.

In each divided up square of the blouse was a picture of Edgar Allan Poe.

Your hair was blonde and you were cute. You asked me, "Do most boys think that most girls are bad?"

I smelled the mould of your seaside resort hotel bedroom on your hair held in place by a John Greenleaf Whittier clip.

"No," I said, "it's girls who think that boys are bad." Then we read Snowbound together.

And ran around in an attic, so that a little of the blue enamel was scraped off my George Washington, Father of His Country, shoes.

 

Mother was walking in the living room, her Strauss Waltzes comb in her hair.

We waited for a time and then joined her, only to be served tea in cups painted with pictures of Herman Melville.

As well as with illustrations from his book Moby Dick and from his novella, Benito Cereno.

Father came in wearing his Dick Tracy necktie: "How about a drink, everyone?"

I said, "Let's go outside a while." Then we went onto the porch and sat on the Abraham Lincoln swing.

You sat on the eyes, mouth, and beard part, and I sat on the knees.

In the yard across the street we saw a snowman holding a garbage can lid smashed into a likeness of the mad English king, George the Third.

why some people be mad at me sometimes by Lucille Clifton

why some people be mad at me sometimes

 

they ask me to remember

but they want me to remember

their memories

and i keep on remembering

mine 

A Stranger by Saeed Jones

A Stranger

I wonder if my dead mother still thinks of me.

I know I don’t know her new name. I don’t know

 

her, not now. I don’t know if “her” is the word

burning in a stranger’s mind when he sees my dead

 

mother walking down the street in her bright black

dress. I wonder if he inhales the cigarette smoke

 

that will eventually kill him and thinks “I wish I knew

a woman who was both the light and every shadow

 

the light pierces.” I wonder if a passing glance at my dead

mother is enough to make a poet out of anyone. I wonder

 

if I’m the song she hums as she waits for the light to change

or if I’m just the traffic signal holding her up.

 

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

 

i

 

When you open my ear, touch it

gently.

My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.

Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium

when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.

 

You may encounter songs in Arabic,

poems in English I recite to myself,

or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.

 

When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear.

Put them back in order as you would do with books on your shelf.

 

ii

 

The drone’s buzzing sound,

the roar of an F-16,

the screams of bombs falling on houses,

on fields, and on bodies,

of rockets flying away—

rid my small ear canal of them all.

 

Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision.

Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up.

Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours,

my doctor, day and night.

 

The Cello by Ruth Padel

The Cello

I met him in the courtyard at dusk, where they weave the tents

at Sukkoth—a wanderer who had come into his own.

The olive tree had been hard-pruned along its central branch

and only the tips were in leaf, gray fingers stretching to light,

but you could see the new growth, a haze of turquoise rust. Roots

had blistered the sea-pebble paving into a mound like a verruca.

I thought of the black ceramic bird my mother notched

in the center of her pies, whose yellow beak cracked the crust.

 

He had a cello in his hand. The grain glowed peat-swirl

brown of a mountain tarn, but plum-maroon under the f-holes

as if someone had been at it with mammoth blood.

The spike glittered between one round stone

and the next. Take this, he said. I’m giving it to you.

I looked away, at marble grooves framing the half-dome

niche where a tap hangs over the copper cup chained

to the wall. I ran my finger down the neck and scroll.

 

I imagined lifting a handle stuck to the lip of a broken amphora

face down under the tree, like history keeping a lid on rising

roots. Every choice is a loss. The past is not where you left it.

That corridor you didn’t follow, the gate to unknown

woods, shadow grin of a winding stair, the door you never

found time to open—they whirl within, cracking the floor.

I met him at twilight where they put up the tents at Sukkoth,

a wanderer who had come into her own.

Economy by W. S. Merwin

Economy 

No need to break the mirror.

Here is the face shattered,

Good for seven years of sorrow.

When They Say Pledge Allegiance, I Say by Hala Alyan

When They Say Pledge Allegiance, I Say

 

my country is a ghost // a mouth trying to say sorry and it comes out all smog // all citizen and bullet and seed // my country is a machine // a spell of bad weather // a feather lacing my mother’s black hair // I mean her dyed hair // I mean her blonde hair // I mean her hair matches my country // so shiny and borrowed and painted over // my country is a number

 

like—

 

it is 1948 and my great-great-grandmother flattens bread with her hands // while my other great-great-grandmother prays with her hands // one watches her land disappear // the other builds a house on land that will disappear

 

my country is an airport line a year of highways an intermission // my country is Stockholm syndrome // is immigrant mouth saying thank you saying please saying // my country is no country but ghost // is no man but ghost // my country is dead // my country is name the dead // give them their salt

 

my country is a mouth trying to say pledge and it comes out all salt // my country is a mouth and nobody can pronounce my name // I mean my country forgets my name // I mean my country is always asking for my name // and I’m always saying it twice // spelling it like an address // my country is a number

 

like—

 

it is 1967 and every Arab leader is crying every mother is clutching // the sons she has left and my great-grandmother names my mother // nostalgia while my other great-grandmother names my father // a gun // my country is all ghost // my grandmother is all ghost // my grandmother is a country I mean my grandmother is my country // I mean my country is a lie is an emptied house is one thousand cardboard boxes // my country is remember when we left Akka // I mean Gaza // I mean Homs // my country is a number

 

like—

 

it is 1990 // my mother is crossing a border I mean desert I mean life // I am at her heels // I am paying attention // I mean I am learning to pray to a flag // I mean I am learning English // I mean I am forgetting Arabic

 

or—

 

it is 1994 and I am falling in love with a white boy // a habit I’ll never kick

 

or—

 

it is 2006 and my grandparents won’t evacuate // won’t leave another war // and all summer I dream of floods // collect bullets and love the wrong person

 

or—

 

it is 2003 and I am in Beirut watching Baghdad burn because of America // I mean I am in my country // watching my country burn because of my // country

 

or—

 

it is 2016 and who saw it coming // some saw it coming

 

or—

 

it is 2020 and the women in Beirut are a sea // I mean my country // looks beautiful in red // I mean I look beautiful in red // I mean this country likes me in red

 

or—

 

it is every year and my country is taken // I mean my country is stolen land // I mean all my countries are stolen land // I mean sometimes I am on the wrong side of the stealing // my country is an opening // I mean bloom // I mean bloom not like flower // but bloom like explosion // my country is a teacher // I mean do you want to see my passport // I mean do you like my accent // I mean I stole them // I mean I stole them // I mean where do you think I learned that from

Without End by Adam Zagajewski

Without End

Also in death we are going to live,

only in a different way, delicately, softly,

dissolved in music;

one by one called out to the corridor,

lonely and yet in a group,

like schoolmates from the same class

which extends beyond the Ural Mountains

and reaches the Quaternary. Released

from unending conversation on politics,

open and candid, at ease, even though

shutters are being closed with a bang

 and hail will rattle on the windowsill

in Turkish march, dashing,

as usual. The world of appearances won’t fade away

at once, for a long time it will continue

to grumble and curl like a wet

page thrown into the fire. The quest for perfection

will find fulfillment casually, it will bypass

all obstacles just as the Germans

learned how to bypass the Maginot Line. Paltry

things, forgotten, kites made of the thinnest

paper, brittle leaves from past autumns,

will recover their immortal dignity and the systems,

big and victorious, will wither like a giant’s sex.

No longing anymore. It will overtake

itself, amazed that it chased for so long

its erotic shadow. And we will be no more,

not having learned yet

how to live at such an altitude.

 

(Translated by Clare Cavanagh)

I Lost My Horse by Cecily Parks

I Lost My Horse

I was looking for an animal, calf or lamb,

in the wire, metal and hair along the fence line.

Wire, metal and hair and there, in the gully, a man

 

I was pretending was dead. I pretended

to leave him where the woods met the meadow,

walking fast because I’d left my horse lashed

 

to a fence I lost track of two valleys

ago. Like a horse, I shied from the dead.

Here, calf. Here, lamb. I listened, wanting

 

(without my horse, my calf or lamb) to be

whipsmart rather than wanted. I wore orange

on antelope season’s first afternoon 

 

and waited for the click that means the safety is

off. When I spoke, my story was about picking

skulls clean. I wanted everything to be

 

afraid of me, the horseless girl who wanted

to kill a dead man again. The white bed

with a window behind its headboard became

 

ice on the meadow road and a tree to stop

a truck dead. I meant to trace my boot steps

back to the fence where things went wrong,

 

find my horse mouthing the bit, tied up by her

reins. I looked for the horse because she looked

safe enough to love. I looked for the calf

 

or lamb because there was no calf or lamb.

The man left before I could leave him, and I pretended

the world was afraid of me because I was alone.

Song of Chickens by Jack Mapanje

Song of Chickens

Master, you talked with bows,

Arrows and catapults once

Your hands steaming with hawk blood

To protect your chicken.

 

Why do you talk with knives now,

Your hands teaming with eggshells

And hot blood from your own chicken?

Is it to impress your visitors?

Our Generation by Carl Dennis

Our Generation

Whatever they say about us, they have to agree

We managed to bridge the gap between

Those who arrived before us and those who’ve followed.

We learned enough at the schools available

To fill the entry-level positions at the extant sawmills

Our elders managed, at banks, freight yards, and hospitals,

Then worked our way up to positions of trust.

There we were, down on the shop floor

Or up in the manager’s office, or outside the office

On scaffolds, washing the windows.

Did we work with joy? With no less joy

Than people felt in the generations before us.

And on weekends and weekday evenings

We did our best to pursue the happiness

Our founders encouraged us to pursue

And with equal gusto. Whatever they say about us,

They can’t deny that we filled the concert halls,

Movie houses, malls, and late-night restaurants.

We took our bows onstage or waited on tables

Or manned the refreshment booths to earn a little extra

For the things we wanted, the very things

Pursued by the generations before us

And likely to be pursued by generations to come:

Children and lawns and cars and beach towels.

And now and then we stood back to admire

The colorful spectacle, the endless variety,

As others before us admired it, and then returned

To fill our picnic baskets, drive to the park,

And use the baseball diamonds just as their makers

Intended they should be used. And if we too

Crowded into the square to cheer the officials

Who proclaimed our country as fine in fact

As it is in theory, a few of us, confined to a side street,

Carried signs declaring a truth less fanciful.

A few unheeded, it’s true, but no more unheeded

Than a similar few in generations before us

Who hoped that the truth in generations to come,

Though just as homely, would find more followers.

Suggested Donation by Heather Christie

Suggested Donation

In the morning I drink

coffee until I can see

a way to lobe life

again. It’s okay, there’s

no difference between

flying and thinking

you’re flying until

you land. Somehow

I own like six nail clippers

and I honestly can’t

remember ever buying

even one. My sister

came to visit and

saw them in a small

wooden bowl. I

heard her laughing in

the bathroom. I hope

she never dies. There’s

no harm in hoping

until you land.

The deer are awake.

Is one pregnant?

If they kept diaries

the first entry would

read: Was born

Was Licked

Tried Walking

Then they’d walk

away and no second

entry would ever exist.

I run the deer’s

archive. It’s very

light work. Visitors

must surrender

their belongings.

Surrender to me

your beautiful shirt.

Red Brocade by Naomi Shihab Nye

Red Brocade

 

The Arabs used to say,

When a stranger appears at your door,

feed him for three days

before asking who he is,

where he’s come from,

where he’s headed.

That way, he’ll have strength

enough to answer.

Or, by then you’ll be such good friends

you don’t care.

 

Let’s go back to that

Rice? Pine nuts?

Here, take the red brocade pillow.

My child will serve water

to your horse.

 

No, I was not busy when you came!

I was not preparing to be busy.

That’s the armor everyone put on

to pretend they had a purpose

in the world.

 

I refuse to be claimed.

Your plate is waiting.

We will snip fresh mint

into your tea.

 

Elegy for a Dead Labrador by Lars Gustafsson

Elegy for a Dead Labrador

 

Here there may be, in the midst of summer,

a few days when suddenly it’s fall.

Thrushes sing on a sharper note.

The rocks stand determined out in the water.

They know something. They’ve always known it.

We know it too, and we don’t like it.

On the way home, in the boat, on just such evenings

you would stand stock-still in the bow, collected,

scouting the scents coming across the water.

You read the evening, the faint streak of smoke

from a garden, a pancake frying

half a mile away, a badger

standing somewhere in the same twilight

sniffing the same way. Our friendship

was of course a compromise; we lived

together in two different worlds: mine,

mostly letters, a text passing through life,

yours, mostly smells. You had knowledge

I would have given much to have possessed:

the ability to let a feeling—eagerness, hate, or love—

run like a wave throughout your body

from nose to tip of tail, the inability

ever to accept the moon as fact.

At the full moon you always complained loudly against it.

You were a better Gnostic than I am. And consequently

you lived continually in paradise.

You had a habit of catching butterflies on the leap,

and munching them, which some people thought disgusting.

I always liked it. Why

couldn’t I learn from you? And doors.

In front of closed doors you lay down and slept

sure that sooner or later the one would come

who’d open up the door. You were right.

I was wrong. Now I ask myself, now this

long mute friendship is forever finished,

if possibly there was anything I could do

which impressed you. Your firm conviction

that I called up the thunderstorms

doesn’t count. That was a mistake. I think

my certain faith that the ball existed,

even when hidden behind the couch,

somehow gave you an inkling of my world.

In my world most things were hidden

behind something else. I called you “dog,”

I really wonder whether you perceived me

as a larger, noisier “dog”

or as something different, forever unknown,

which is what it is, existing in that attribute

it exists in, a whistle

through the nocturnal park one has got used to

returning to without actually knowing

what it is one is returning to. About you,

and who you were, I knew no more.

One might say, from this more objective

standpoint, we were two organisms. Two

of those places where the universe makes a knot

in itself, short-lived, complex structures

of proteins that have to complicate themselves

more and more in order to survive, until everything

breaks and turns simple once again, the knot

dissolved, the riddle gone. You were a question

asked of another question, nothing more,

and neither had the answer to the other.

 

(translated by Yvonne L. Sandstroem)

 

Supercell by Ange Mlinko

Supercell

I’m waiting for this shrub to sew itself back in its soil.

Hearing its roots rip when I transplanted it made me ill

(though a cress or a lettuce remains my most favorite food).

A wind tore it up again, or it was undermined by flood.

 

Through the sorghum fields between Victoria and Lavaca,

a supercell, spurting electricity, smothered the ton of lava,

mounted in the sky, that characterizes sunset there.

But the tapestried sorghum fields created an atmosphere

 

that defied the monotony I associate with agriculture.

Planting, for me, means flowers, fitting embouchure

for birds; or aloes, answering to a sculptural imperative

 

to induce repose, and not just keep us, Lord, alive.

This hardy Duranta attracts hummingbirds and butterflies.

May it thrive, and sew itself in as the soil dries.

 

Between Victoria and Lavaca, in my mind’s eye

I saw a thousand Comanche in cumulonimbi

racing thirty hundred stolen horses over the prairie

to the sea. When the sorghum field, that tapestry,

 

was little more than “Chocolate Swale” (a sign stuck in the silt,

née swamp), official history passed the bolus of guilt

back and forth, from the Comanche, who kept back captives,

to the Texans, who (in what may have been an interpretive

 

blunder) slaughtered the chiefs, back to the Comanche,

who torched their captives in revenge and went on “an orgy

of horse-thieving.” While at night Comanche jump

 

on Texas with a thump, the dream of one Buffalo Hump

results in enough calico and ribbon to get lost in

(as I sew myself into this clay) riding back to Austin.

 

Too late. Juliet Constance managed to get her hem wet

but they seized her and stripped her down to the whalebone corset

—flummoxed. While the townspeople watched from dinghies offshore,

on that hand-over-hand surf, helpless, they later swore

 

her whalebone corset wouldn’t budge. They saw the town burning,

the warehouses looted; and in the smoke’s going and returning,

Comanche donning the top hats and pigeon-tailed coats.

Adorned with all the brass buttons a merchant ship could float,

 

and twirling their parasols and festooning each his horse

with ribbon, the Comanche rode off. In the cumulonimbus

of their dust, they took our bibelot Juliet.

 

Buffalo Hump, meet Whalebone Corset!

For a gold watch her young husband perished. El Dorado:

where there’s pyrite in the piranha, gilt in the sweet potato.

 

Gold in the sorghum tassels, gold in the sargassum weed

strewing the shore where they put Juliet on a stolen steed.

Gold when wet, that is; rust-brown when dry; furring the coast,

drying at different rates in the sun, so gold and rust co-roast.

 

It seemed a herd of buffalo was barbered by some god at first.

But in these alien bouquets tossed from the largest sea on earth,

and bounded by no lands, live animals find harbor.

Exquisite minnow worlds of crabs, shrimp—sheer automata—

 

crawfish cling to the tangle and grape (cf. “sargasso”).

I’ve seen the gulls in their tuxedo’d appetite clothed go

pecking there. Meanwhile, into an upended frisbee’d

 

world my kids shake the bundles of sargassum seaweed,

collecting their own marine menagerie for observation.

The liverish waves play on, sunlight doled out in rations

 

from grape-stained clouds to whiten froth exploding in our ears.

A sulfurous wind blows in, then as suddenly disappears.

The deep-blue, upended frisbee looks like nothing less

than a saucer of primal soup from Genesis,

 

the first meal of the first day. By the seventh all Creation and we

were invited to the feast of ourselves, into perpetuity.

She was saved a second time, that Juliet,

when a crop of arrows foundered on her whalebone corset.

 

Saved, then, with nothing more than a sunburn. And still

nothing more than a stone commemorating Linnville

between new tract housing and the littoral.

 

Calico of wildflowers sewing themselves to the soil,

and a man licking his arrowhead, that his DNA be

shot through the heart that pins her to the ponderosa tree.

  

The Sea is History by Derek Walcott

The Sea is History

 

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?

Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,

in that grey vault. The sea. The sea

has locked them up. The sea is History.

 

First, there was the heaving oil,

heavy as chaos;

then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

 

the lantern of a caravel,

and that was Genesis.

Then there were the packed cries,

the shit, the moaning:

 

Exodus.

Bone soldered by coral to bone,

mosaics

mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

 

that was the Ark of the Covenant.

Then came from the plucked wires

of sunlight on the sea floor

 

the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,

as the white cowries clustered like manacles

on the drowned women,

 

and those were the ivory bracelets

of the Song of Solomon,

but the ocean kept turning blank pages

 

looking for History.

Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors

who sank without tombs,

 

brigands who barbecued cattle,

leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,

then the foaming, rabid maw

 

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,

and that was Jonah,

but where is your Renaissance?

 

Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands

out there past the reef's moiling shelf,

where the men-o'-war floated down;

 

strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.

It's all subtle and submarine,

through colonnades of coral,

 

past the gothic windows of sea-fans

to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,

blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

 

and these groined caves with barnacles

pitted like stone

are our cathedrals,

 

and the furnace before the hurricanes:

Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills

into marl and cornmeal,

 

and that was Lamentations—

that was just Lamentations,

it was not History;

 

then came, like scum on the river's drying lip,

the brown reeds of villages

mantling and congealing into towns,

 

and at evening, the midges' choirs,

and above them, the spires

lancing the side of God

 

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

 

Then came the white sisters clapping

to the waves' progress,

and that was Emancipation—

 

jubilation, O jubilation—

vanishing swiftly

as the sea's lace dries in the sun,

 

but that was not History,

that was only faith,

and then each rock broke into its own nation;

 

then came the synod of flies,

then came the secretarial heron,

then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

 

fireflies with bright ideas

and bats like jetting ambassadors

and the mantis, like khaki police,

 

and the furred caterpillars of judges

examining each case closely,

and then in the dark ears of ferns

 

and in the salt chuckle of rocks

with their sea pools, there was the sound

like a rumour without any echo

 

of History, really beginning.

Not Even This by Ocean Vuong

Not Even This 

 

Hey.

 

I used to be a fag now I’m a checkbox.

 

The pen tip jabbed in my back, I feel the mark of progress.

 

I will not dance alone in the municipal graveyard at midnight, blasting sad

songs on my phone, for nothing.

 

I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was

indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in

a storm.

 

The way Lil Peep says I’ll be back in the mornin’  when you know how it ends.

 

The way I kept dancing when the song was over, because it freed me.

 

The way the streetlight blinks once, before waking up for its night shift, like

we do.

 

The way we look up and whisper sorry to each other, the boy and I, when

there’s teeth.

 

When there’s always teeth, on purpose.

 

When I threw myself into gravity and made it work. Ha.

 

I made it out by the skin of my griefs.

 

I used to be a fag now I’m lit. Ha.

 

Once, at a party set on a rooftop in Brooklyn for an “artsy vibe,” a young

woman said, sipping her drink, You’re so lucky. You’re gay plus you get to

write about war and stuff. I’m just white. [Pause.] I got nothing. [Laughter,

glasses clinking.]

 

Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it.

 

Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns

to gold.

 

Our sorrow Midas-touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow.

 

I’m trying to be real but it costs too much.

 

They say the Earth spins and that’s why we fall but everyone knows it’s the

music.

 

It’s been proven difficult to dance to machine gun fire.

 

Still, my people made a rhythm this way. A way.

 

My people, so still, in the photographs, as corpses.

 

My failure was that I got used to it. I looked at us, mangled under the TIME

photographer’s shadow, and stopped thinking, Get up, get up.

 

I saw the graveyard steam in the pinkish dawn and knew the dead were still

breathing. Ha.

 

If they come for me, take me home take me out.

 

What if it wasn’t the crash that made me, but the debris?

 

What if it was meant this way: the mother, the lexicon, the line of cocaine on

the mohawked boy’s collarbone in an East Village sublet in 2007?

 

What’s wrong with me, Doc? There must be a pill for this.

 

Too late—these words already shrapnel in your brain.

 

Impossible in high school, I am now the ultimate linebacker. I plow through

the page, making a path for you, dear reader, going nowhere.

 

Because the fairy tales were right. You’ll need magic to make it out of  here.

 

Long ago, in another life, on an Amtrak through Iowa, I saw, for a few blurred

seconds, a man standing in the middle of a field of winter grass, hands at his

side, back to me, all of him stopped there save for his hair scraped by low

wind.

 

When the countryside resumed its wash of gray wheat, tractors, gutted

barns, black sycamores in herdless pastures, I started to cry. I put my copy

of Didion’s The White Album down and folded a new dark around my head.

 

The woman beside me stroked my back saying, in a Midwestern accent that

wobbled with tenderness, Go on son. You get that out now. No shame in

breakin’ open. You get that out and I’ll fetch us some tea. Which made me

lose it even more.

 

She came back with Lipton in paper cups, her eyes nowhere blue and there.

She was silent all the way to Missoula, where she got off and said, patting my

knee, God is good. God is good.

 

I can say it was beautiful now, my harm, because it belonged to no one else.

 

To be a dam for damage. My shittiness will not enter the world, I thought,

and quickly became my own hero.

 

Do you know how many hours I’ve wasted watching straight boys play video

games?

 

Enough.

 

Time is a mother.

 

Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.

 

In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for

love is Yêu.

 

And the word for weakness is Yếu.

 

How you say what you mean changes what you say.

 

Some call this prayer. I call it watch your mouth.

 

When they zipped my mother in a body bag I whispered: Rose, get out of there.

Your plants are dying.

 

Enough is enough.

 

Body, doorway that you are, be more than what I’ll pass through.

 

Stillness. That’s what it was.

 

The man in the field in the red sweater, he was so still he became, somehow,

more true, like a knife wound in a landscape painting.

 

Like him, I caved.

 

I caved and decided it will be joy from now on. Then everything opened. The

lights blazed around me into a white weather

 

and I was lifted, wet and bloody, out of my mother, screaming

 

and enough.

 

Man Eating by Jane Kenyon

Man Eating

The man at the table across from mine

is eating yogurt. His eyes, following

the progress of the spoon, cross briefly

each time it nears his face. Time,

and the world with all its principalities,

might come to an end as prophesied

by the Apostle John, but what about

this man, so completely present

to the little carton with its cool,

sweet food, which has caused no animal

to suffer, and which he is eating

with a pearl-white plastic spoon.

American Wedding by Essex Hemphill

American Wedding

 

In america,

I place my ring

on your cock

where it belongs.

No horsemen

bearing terror,

no soldiers of doom

will swoop in

and sweep us apart.

They’re too busy

looting the land

to watch us.

They don’t know

we need each other

critically.

They expect us to call in sick,

watch television all night,

die by our own hands.

They don’t know

we are becoming powerful.

Every time we kiss

we confirm the new world coming.

 

What the rose whispers

before blooming

I vow to you.

I give you my heart,

a safe house.

I give you promises other than

milk, honey, liberty.

I assume you will always

be a free man with a dream.

In america,

place your ring

on my cock

where it belongs.

Long may we live

to free this dream.

  

Poetry, a Natural Thing by Robert Duncan

Poetry, a Natural Thing

 

Neither our vices nor our virtues   

further the poem. “They came up   

      and died 

just like they do every year 

      on the rocks.” 

 

      The poem 

feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, 

      to breed    itself, 

a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping. 

 

This beauty is an inner persistence 

      toward the source 

striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,   

      a call we heard and answer 

in the lateness of the world 

      primordial bellowings 

from which the youngest world might spring, 

 

salmon not in the well where the   

      hazelnut falls 

but at the falls battling, inarticulate,   

      blindly making it. 

 

This is one picture apt for the mind. 

 

A second: a moose painted by Stubbs, 

where last year’s extravagant antlers   

      lie on the ground. 

The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears   

      new antler-buds, 

      the same, 

 

“a little heavy, a little contrived”, 

 

his only beauty to be   

      all moose.

Young Relics by Emma Hine

Young Relics

They broke into houses,

my sisters. The empty ones,

just built, where nobody had yet

tried to sleep. Little mounds

of sawdust still in the corners,

no floorboards loose.

I imagine them being the way

I’ve seen them be with horses,

hands gentle on the walls—after all,

a house must learn to hold a family

with all its quivering systems

of energy and grief. I once saw Sierra

with a colt that wasn’t ready

to be ridden. She stood in the stall

and talked until his heart rate slowed.

All through our neighborhood

new houses were dark and panicking.

Enter sisters.

Bringing comfort where it wasn’t

supposed to be, no key for entry,

no light allowed, just a ritual gift

for the rooms alone to remember:

hands on their painted flanks.

Voices in the eaves.