Continuity by Terrance Hayes

Continuity

 

Before getting into the cab, she hands him a cup.
Then, after they kiss, she hands him the cup again.

As they walk, she hands him a man-made substance.
Then, after they kiss, she hands him the cup again.

She hands him a chalice of lightning
& he hands her a chalice of fire.

Then in the next shot, after they kiss,
They exchange chalices again.

When she goes through the metal detector,
She carefully places a pair of hoop earrings in a plastic tray.

When she retrieves them,
They are two silver bangles she fits to her wrists.

When they climb from the cab in the rain, her hair is wet,
But when they kiss on the sidewalk her hair is dry again.

After she takes off her helmet & breastplate,
& enters the water wearing nothing but courage,

She says to him, “You are nude,
But you must be naked to win.”

Or she says, “To survive you must lay bare
The heart,” according to the closed captions.

When they climb from the river, her hair is a river
Where night has fallen, tangled with twigs & stars,

Parting like a path of escape.
But in the very next shot,

As they climb from the river,
Her hair is braided with wire & string.

When he bangs on the rain-streaked window
Of the cab yelling her name in a pivotal scene,

Briefly reflected in the window in the rain
Tangled with wires & stars above a river

Is the hand of a fan or stagehand or bodyguard,
Body double, bystander, interloper, beloved ghost,

& the two of us watching from a bridge on the far side.

 

To Stammering by Kenneth Koch

To Stammering

 

Where did you come from, lamentable quality?

Before I had a life you were about to ruin my life.

The mystery of this stays with me.

“Don’t brood about things,” my elders said.

I hadn’t any other experience of enemies from inside.

They were all from outside—big boys

Who cursed me and hit me; motorists; falling trees.

All these you were as bad as, yet inside. When I spoke, you were there.

I could avoid you by singing or acting.

I acted in school plays but was no good at singing.

Immediately after the play you were there again.

You ruined the cast party.

You were not a sign of confidence.

You were not a sign of manliness.

You were stronger than good luck and bad; you survived them both.

You were slowly edged out of my throat by psychoanalysis

You who had been brought in, it seems, like a hired thug

To beat up both sides and distract them

From the main issue: oedipal love. You were horrible!

Tell them, now that you’re back in your thug country,

That you don’t have to be so rough next time you’re called in

But can be milder and have the same effect—unhappiness and pain.

Théâtre de l'Odéon by Emily Fragos

Théâtre de l'Odéon

I could not rise from the dark and go out into the cool,

night air of that beautiful city,

could not get on with my conniving, young life.

What had been smooth and good became impossible, slowly,

 

mechanically, placing one foot in front of the next, so that legs,

as if buried in snow, might inch along the river

 

and the alleys with the clochards and the cats,

and I might seem a bright young thing again.

 

And all this before the shock of loss, the dying, who linger

with their weak bodies and blank faces,

 

and my own stupid share of human harm

inflicted upon the innocent,

 

and long before Time, that asp,

started laughing, laughing at me.

Minstrel Man by Langston Hughes

Minstrel Man

Because my mouth

Is wide with laughter

And my throat

Is deep with song,

You did not think

I suffer after

I've held my pain

So long.

 

Because my mouth

Is wide with laughter

You do not hear

My inner cry:

Because my feet

Are gay with dancing,

You do not know

I die.

Sonnet: The Wall by Donald Justice

Sonnet: The Wall

 

The walls surrounding them they never saw; 

The angels, often.  Angels were as common 

As birds or butterflies, but looked more human. 

As long as the wings were furled, they felt no awe. 

Beasts, too, were friendly.  They could find no flaw 

In all of Eden:  this was the first omen. 

The second was the dream which woke the woman. 

She dreamed she saw the lion sharpen his claw. 

As for the fruit, it had no taste at all. 

They had been warned of what was bound to happen. 

They had been told and told of something called the world. 

They had told and told about the wall. 

They saw it now; the gate was standing open. 

As they advanced, the giant wings unfurled.

Travel by Frank O'Hara

Travel

Sometimes I know I love you better

than all the others I kiss it’s funny

 

but it’s true and I wouldn’t roll

from one to the next so fast if you

 

hadn’t knocked them all down like

ninepins when you roared by my bed

 

 

I keep trying to race ahead and catch

you at the newest station or whistle

 

stop but you are flighty about

schedules and always soar away just

 

as leaning from my taxicab my breath

reaches for the back of your neck

Affection by Emily Jungmin Yoon

Affection

We watch the moving topography of brutality, the red slopes

and orbs mapping deaths from virus, from fire, from firearms.

It feels impossible to think redand visualize beauty and yet

red roses are splashed all around the city, so brazenly alive

that they stupefy me. People stop, pose, take pictures

of their loved ones under the mess of flowers.

I love the red beak of the rose-ringed parakeet even after I find

the threat they pose on the land I live. Affectionmeans both

     fondnessand disease.

Words reflect the world, which is to say nothing makes sense.

If we say only civilization can finishthe world,

does it mean to completeor destroy? If we say the world might

     weather—

to endure or wear away?

Blueberries for Cal by Brenda Shaughnessy

Blueberries for Cal

 

Watching little Henry, six, scoop up blueberries

and shovel them into his mouth, possessed.

 

I’m so glad I brought blueberries—wish my kids

could/would eat them. Cal can’t; Simone won’t.

 

Henry’s sisters Lucy & Jane took turns feeding each

other goldfish crackers and sips of juice.

 

Arms around each other’s neck and back. Tiny things.

I wish my daughter had a sister like that

 

and my son a nervous system that let him walk

and munch berries. Sometimes I can’t bear

 

all the things Cal doesn’t get to do. I want to curse

everything I can’t give him.

 

Admire/compare/despair—that’s not the most real

feeling I’m feeling, is it? I feel joy in Henry’s joy.

 

Blueberries for the child who wants them.

There’s all this energetic sweetness, enough to go around,

 

to give and taste and trust. More than enough.

For Cal, too. I want to remember this.

 

My children seem to subsist on music and frosting.

Where there’s frosting, there’s cake.

 

Where there’s music, someone chose to make a song

over all other things on this earth.

Shahid Reads His Own Palm by Reginald Dwayne Betts

Shahid Reads His Own Palm

 I come from the cracked hands of men who used

           the smoldering ends of blunts to blow shotguns,

 men who arranged their lives around the mystery

          of the moon breaking a street corner in half.

 I come from "Swann Road" written in a child's

           slanted block letters across a playground fence,

 the orange globe with black stripes in Bishop's left

          hand, untethered and rolling to the sideline,

 a crowd openmouthed, waiting to see the end

           of the sweetest crossover in a Virginia state pen.

 I come from Friday night's humid and musty air,

           Junk Yard Band cranking in a stolen Bonneville,

 a tilted bottle of Wild Irish Rose against my lips

           and King Hedley's secret written in the lines of my palm.

 I come from beneath a cloud of white smoke, a lit pipe

           and the way glass heats rocks into a piece of heaven,

from the weight of nothing in my palm,

           a bullet in an unfired snub-nosed revolver.

And every day the small muscles in my finger threaten to pull

           a trigger, slight and curved like my woman's eyelashes.

Fence of Sticks by Deborah Digges

Fence of Sticks 

As I was building a fence of sticks I heard the question,

Weren’t there times worse than this for art?

Weren’t there those who, rather, bristled were they understood,

who worked alone, the manuscripts thrown out or bled beyond the margins.

I was sewing the wire between the pine and sycamore,

tightening the warp with willow and forsythia, some just in bloom.

I thought of those who’d rather hang themselves than call truth heresy.

Upon whose deaths the citizens rejoiced.

They who burned everything.

Those who died longing to say more, whose heads rolled singing.

I was strict with myself, worked long past noon.

The gloves made the weaving hard so I wrought barehanded.

So many pages ending _____, or neatly numbered, or written across the mind.

Those for whom art was not an occupation.

Indeed some never wrote again after what war or famine. Some wrote of nothing else.

I gathered the climbing roses’ whips almost impossible to fit,

that made a lovely spiraling pulled taut, resisting,

each section a stay against the ocean of dead leaves.

A wind came up, the early heat unnerving. Those who refused to make it easy.

They who’d be damned to change a word. The way it came to them

so they would claim. The way was given. How heavy the lengths,

year after year, of pine boughs, Christmas wreaths brown to the bone,

red ribbons like a shout, like an embarrassment,

the holly sprigs still sharp as thorns. Those who died having said too much.

Or who must stop every few lines to dip the quill. They who ran out of time.

Those who ripped folios from the classics.

The boxwood leaves, like oaks’, hold to the bough.

You must strip them by hand, yank the twigs backwards.

I took an ax to the twisted yew, blow after blow, and still it tore.

Its sap ruins this page. I had to pull myself away to write is this not happiness? 

Boy coming out Gay going far to Lady way to Queer by Rickey Laurentiis

Boy coming out Gay going far to Lady way to Queer

 

I confess the Trans is dangerous. It leans provocation

On the teeth of the mind: an idea, to kill all other ideas? like Category,

Order, Line? Suppose the Problem of the Century still

be the Color Line since the Problem is, increasingly, the line?

I walk my far lyric to self. Was I gay or trans, when? Will

I Rickey or Key? The Danger be if Trans willingly tear up and confuse all

Surfaces, & neat embankments and leveed cities sufficiently

keeping one hood from another, what else? If you Look

at me liking what you See-are you Gay? Fag? Distinctions Bi? What am l

going toward once a Boy-going-gay (never Man) coming forth to Lady,

(few deny) for Queer's umbrella (gained) for Dreamed

Queen (all gained) to What else? Tho if I be Queer should Women who snarl

Love at me be lesbian, are Men who throw want at me straight? Carl,

I was gay my whole twenties & do I miss it but I miss the staying gay

after tongues kiss, that little Bottom Shame glossed in that name, Bottom.

Now Gay to Queer Miss to Dream to Trans,* all nice. Tho trans will suffice.

On the Thirtieth Friday We Consider Plurals by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

On the Thirtieth Friday We Consider Plurals

 

At the border, a flock of journalists.

A sacrifice of tires burned behind us.

Beneath the picnic tents, a funeral of families.

What else will we become in Gaza if we gather,

if we carry our voices to the razored edge?

We were met by a gallop of prayers,

clamoring recitatives puncturing the shroud

of humid air. We were met by a delirium

 

of greetings, peace-be-upon-us surreal

between embraces, the horizon locked

and loaded. What is upon us

will require mercy. Let the plural be

a return of us. A carnage of blessings—

bodies freed from broken promises,

from the incumbrances of waiting.

Under Limestone by Richie Hofmann

Under Limestone

 

It rained in fluted torrents,

the earth smelled of manure.

It was like desire

entering and possessing you quietly.

We undressed.

The sun through the windows made shapes

on the couch I lay face down on.

Our jeans were soaked

and wrinkled on the radiator, our socks heavy.

Then your eyes were opening a little.

Then you could hear the mopeds starting up again.

When it was dry enough, we found a small bistro

where we had prosecco and fries,

and took pictures of one another in our damp clothes

under trees and buildings

of the hated regime.

Love Poem for an Apocalypse by Dave Lucas

Love Poem for an Apocalypse

 

I wish I’d met you after everything had burned,

after the markets crash and global sea levels rise.

The forests scorched. The grasslands trespassed.

My love, it is a whole life’s work to disappear—

ask the god with his head in the wolf’s mouth or

the serpent intent on swallowing all the earth.

Ask the senate subcommittee for market solutions

for late capitalism and early-onset dementia.

You and a bird flu could make me believe in fate.

I think we might be happy in the end, in the dark

of a hollow tree, a seed bank or blast-proof bunker,

if only you would sing the song I love, you know

the one about our precious eschatology, the one

I always ask to hear to lull me back to sleep.

In This Heavy Traffic by Charles Simić

In This Heavy Traffic

What if I were to ditch my car

And walk away without a glance back?

While drivers honk their horns

As I stroll into the nearby woods,

Determined, once and for all,

To swap this breed of raving lunatics

For a more benign kind who dwell

Long-haired and naked close to nature.

I’ll let the sun in the sky be my guide

As I roam the countryside, stopping

To chat with a porcupine or a butterfly,

While subsisting on edible plants I find,

Glad to share my meal with a moose,

Or find a bear licking my face

As I wake from a nap wondering, Where am I?

Stuck in the traffic, you damn fool!

Interlude by Seán Hewitt

Interlude

Go to the lamplight
Go to the empty ring-road in its sleep
Go to the gates, go through
Go in the dew with your wet shoes
to the river, to the oxbow, to the weir –
Is he there?

See where the willows shiver
See the yellow of the pollen on the surface
of the water – stardust
of his slyness, his slipping away –
his gone-before-you-got-here –

so turn, so follow the cortege
of the fallen leaves from the bank,
from the reeds where the coots
and the water voles nest
and find the iron bridge, and cross it

Go to the larks in the Papal field
Bend to the violets and the archangels
Go to the hawthorn and knock
for the stolen child. Go to the holm-oaks –
Is he there?

Say love, I have read the sacred book
of this park each night, I have known
its shibboleths, its ruminations,
its ghosts, its undead – the guards –
the fire in the gatehouse

and still, go on to the empty barracks
decrepit and ruinous, to the rook-riven
parapets. Go to the car park by the pitch
with the headlights waiting, with the engines
killed and the windscreens all fogged over

Stand in the purgatory behind the trees
to watch the man passing the windows
like an angel, bowing to them
Watch each pane of glass lower
See the faces lit in the dashboard glow –
But stop – any one of them
might be a guard, sitting out, so quick,
run, quick, follow

the bike-light as it rattles uphill
to the standing shadows – is that him
by the hawthorn with the lighter,
with the cigarette, wearing his mask?

No, but take his hand. Say come, let us
find him. And careful now of the mud-slick
passage through the thicket, through the thorns
and the dog rose to the grotto, to the splay
and coil of the bodies moving, slowly,
to the groans and the breath, to the open eyes

watching, to the white tissues
and the scuffed ground
and see that man, there –
the one bent over himself, emptying
the animal of his body over the earth –
show your wound to him, stranger.

Say, Stranger, prove my body –
Say, Love, am I not a ghost –

Why I Loved Him by Camonghne Felix

Why I Loved Him

I can’t tell you

Why I loved him or

What it meant. When you

Are a child, you know only

The kind of love your little

Life lacked, so every

Blooming flower is a field. What I know

Is that there were two skies

And under one, I was a shadow. His

Sky was as blue as his eyes. Some

Of that is my doing and the rest of it

Is time. These days, he traces the shape of

The curds above him and I lay out under

A separate sun. Both of us are fine

With this. We picked our place

Under the lid of god and we shut

Our eyes to it every night. That’s what it means

To have loved goodly—to meet

Fate in a lavender hall and walk

Right past it, the white train quivering,

Nostalgia in your wake.

I Write the Land by Najwan Darwish

I Write the Land 

I want to write the land,

I want the words

to be the land itself.

But I’m just a statue the Romans carved

and the Arabs forgot.

Colonizers stole my severed hand

and stuck it in a museum.

No matter. I still want to write it –

the land.

My words are everywhere

and silence is my story.

 

(Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid)

Habibti Ghazal by Hala Alyan

Habibti Ghazal

Nineteen’s slow violence. Your arm a tusk slicing the air—whoa, habibti—

for that first Jack-and-Coke. Here we go, take it slow, habibti.

Soon, you’ll become an emergency: I.V. bag and emerald bruise. 

First love hammering your door, but you’re no habibti,

no bait turned proposal. On the third page of an old journal, 

the same question in pale ink: Can I be my own habibti?

You glaze-eyed. You lit like a county fair. The long twine 

of a decade, hold the tattoo needle to skin and sew habibti.

Even the sea rots here. This prop city with its prop heart. 

The hot-eyed men whistling the streets: Hello, habibti.

Hello, cream. Hello, daughter of men. Hello, almost-wife. 

I can’t teach you about metaphor; I’m stuck in the future. O, habibti,

I want to see those legs running. There’s the oncoming headlight of boy: 

Ribcage. Fist. War. It’s time, habibti. Please, habibti. Go, habibti.

 

Wanting to Die by Anne Sexton

Wanting to Die

 

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.

I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.

Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

 

Even then I have nothing against life.

I know well the grass blades you mention,

the furniture you have placed under the sun.

 

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build.

 

Twice I have so simply declared myself,

have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,

have taken on his craft, his magic.

 

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,

warmer than oil or water,

I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

 

I did not think of my body at needle point.

Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.

Suicides have already betrayed the body.

 

Still-born, they don’t always die,

but dazzled, they can’t forget a drug so sweet

that even children would look on and smile.

 

To thrust all that life under your tongue!—

that, all by itself, becomes a passion.

Death’s a sad bone; bruised, you’d say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,

to so delicately undo an old wound,

to empty my breath from its bad prison.

 

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,

raging at the fruit a pumped-up moon,

leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

 

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,

something unsaid, the phone off the hook

and the love whatever it was, an infection.

You, Emblazoned by Cass Donish

You, Emblazoned

  

^{for Kelly Caldwell (1988–2020)}

Yet your voice was here—

                         just there-here in our house, shining eyes 

who dazzled twice, already timed,

a pulsing wind below the glass in spring, 

and coaxed, intelligent, stoic, touching everything, you stirred 

me to life, in spite of illness and damage

to the country, field laid waste, election blaze, illness 

wasting a brain, a mind. Mars, and ocean, canceled. 

Cream and streamers, canceled, 

                                     censored.  

“I am,” you said, 

                         though your skin flickered

to hackberry bark, or as bullet 

pierced pineal gland, blinking out 

your day-night clock. Your syllables

endure frail days, which blow through equinox, 

dissipate, time out—

            you imagined the planet 

            with you already gone:

a sad expression, no real loss, the earth still a wild salon,

yet the name you chose 

is etched into air, a violent wind 

parts my chest, tenderviolet, electric

nights in our sheets, no longer  

countable, unrecounted. You, here, again, 

my is-are-were, have-been-is, in my 

arms, bed is-was our house-eyes, in my  

only thought only root only gone, 

my big only gone still here voice 

blazing, I mourn you-her, 

her-you, who were born-dreamed into the world’s thicket 

yet reinvented through an inner radiance,  

the radiance of a name,  

the name that is yours, the radiance that is-was yours 

                                     that is-was you—