Saturday, January 25, 2025

My Crush Walked into the Library with a Woman on His Arm and I Almost Lost My 4-Year Chip Over It by Nicholas Goodly

My Crush Walked into the Library with a Woman on His Arm and I Almost Lost My 4-Year Chip Over It


I know how hysterical it sounds
I can’t convince you of the chase,
the sore run in the dark, you can’t know

how deep a thought will take you. I bet
Judas Iscariot was a generous lover,
would screw you within an inch of your life.

I’d invite this into my home,
a madness I could dance to.
We all want the same thing. A man

says Sylvia Plath was a handful.
I am her scorpion twin. If this is not
about desire, what is it? I am scared

to put my finger on it. You have it too,
not the reason you married him,
but the reason you won’t leave.
















Thursday, January 23, 2025

Vigil by Camille Rankine

Vigil


Long day’s night, the endless dream.

Hot night on the veranda, frog chirp, cicada scream.

Sharp night, a naked light, your voice come back over and over.

Howl shaking loose night’s woven threads.

Dog day’s night, cloudburst, rumble.

Night lifts its head.

Sloe night, lip sweat, steeped indigo.

Bright night’s incessant afterglow, and the day won’t take me back.

Twilight, not awake, not asleep.

Night the sky collapsed.

Solstice night hour after hour.

Waking and it’s still night:

Quarter to three, night’s heavy limb across my chest.

Night closing its capacious robes over me.

Unremembered night, the night I loved you best.

Nightingale’s song, your damp curls against my neck.

Night they put you in my arms.

That winter night, the early dark, your breath marking the air.

Night’s whispered name.

Night of helicopter’s drone and a punishing rain.

Night’s redaction, and a home turns ash and grave.

Watchful night, hand in hand, faraway pinprick of flame.




Wednesday, January 22, 2025

The Courtesy of the Blind by Wisława Szymborska

The Courtesy of the Blind

 

The poet reads his lines to the blind.

He hadn’t guessed that it would be so hard.

His voice trembles.

His hands shake.

 

He senses that every sentence

is put to the test of darkness.

He must muddle through alone,

without colors or lights.

 

A treacherous endeavor

for his poems’ stars,

dawns, rainbows, clouds, their neon lights, their moon,

for the fish so silvery thus far beneath the water

and the hawk so high and quiet in the sky.

 

He reads—since it’s too late to stop now—

about the boy in a yellow jacket on a green field,

red roofs that can be counted in the valley,

the restless numbers on soccer players’ shirts,

and the naked stranger standing in a half-shut door.

 

He’d like to skip—although it can’t be done—

all the saints on that cathedral ceiling,

the parting wave from a train,

the microscope lens, the ring casting a glow,

the movie screens, the mirrors, the photo albums.

 

But great is the courtesy of the blind,

great is their forbearance, their largesse.

They listen, smile, and applaud.

 

One of them even comes up

with a book turned wrongside out

asking for an unseen autograph.


(Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak)




Wednesday, January 8, 2025

We skip school to listen by KB Brookins

We skip school to listen

 
To Jill Scott as we spin
on a merry-go-round.
We say I’ll miss you
& that’s the mushiest
we got, for now. We make
MLK community center our home
away from gays too afraid
to be honest. We look up
at the muggy sky, humming riffs
of A Long Walk. We walk back
to school, where we drop into
days that queer like midnight clouds.
We think I love you,
instead say let’s go back
before the hall monitors trip.
We trip on melted sidewalks
that make grooves of their own
in the shape of our feet.
We skip school to swing
jump & stumble into
our new love



Tuesday, January 7, 2025

Land’s End by Malachi Black

Land’s End

 
When did you wake? The sheets, still
softened by your sleep, are tousled
 
now, and almost cold. I turned
and, where your warmth was, all
 
was winter’s paw when I returned.
Come back, and lay your shiver down
 
beside me in this open bed; there
is no safety in the world outside
 
this quilt, this pillow, this bare thread.
Lie here, and let me braid your hair
 
until my hands are veined and old—
and weathered as the fisherman’s,
 
whose fingers cast an ancient net
into a brightness they can’t hold.



Sunday, January 5, 2025

A Violet Darkness by Najwan Darwish

A Violet Darkness

And all that remains for me is to follow a violet darkness 

on soil where myths splinter and crack. 

Yes, love was time, and it too 

splintered and cracked 

like the face of our country.


My share of the people 

is the transit of their ghosts.


(Translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid)




Saturday, January 4, 2025

A Sunset by Robert Hass

A Sunset 

The sky tonight on the top of the ridge

Was bruise-colored, a yellow-brown

That is one definition of the word “sordid,”

Which, I think, used to describe

That color, carries neither a moral

Nor an aesthetic judgment. The sky

At dusk was sordid and then brightened

And softened to a glowing peach

Of brief but astonishing beauty,

If you happened to be paying attention.

I could take a hard right here

To the angry adolescent boy in Texas

Who shot and killed nineteen children

With a high-powered weapon my culture

Put into his hands. How to enter

The hive of that mind and undo what

The imagination had done there?

He wore a flak jacket, bought two rifles

At a local store, one of which fires forty rounds

A minute. He had it specifically in mind

To kill children of that age, the lithe-

Bodied young in their end-of-term clothing.

The connective tissue in this veering

Is the idea that it is the experience of beauty,

Not rules, not fear of consequences

Or reverence for authority, that informs

Our moral sense. This may be where

John Ashbery would introduce a non sequitur,

Not from aversion to responsibility

But from a sense he no doubt had

That there was a kind of self-importance

In the introduction of morality to poetry

And that one might, therefore, be better off

Practicing one’s art in more or less

The spirit of the poor juggler in the story

Of Christmas who, having no gift to bring

To the infant god, crept into the church

In the night and faced the crèche and juggled.