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—

 

The Moon After Election Day by Alex Dimitrov

The Moon After Election Day

 

I’m looking at the moon tonight,

the closest it’s been to Earth since 1948

and feel relieved we can do little to ruin it.

That can’t be true, you say, and for a moment

even the moon’s loneliness escapes isolation

and depends on something else. It’s attached.

Like us and what we abandon. Us

and the evil we refuse. The same evil

we share history with, the thin membrane

between you or me and the worst of life.

It’s already past midnight and another election

is over in the United States of America.

The oceans will not continue into infinity.

Nor will our money. Nor will this suffering.

We have voted and proven again

we do not know one another. I am trying

so hard to understand this country, I tell you

even as I’m about to fail loving you (I know this)

in the way people need to be loved

which is without deception, which is almost

impossible. Don’t you love it though, you say,

and I remember the first time I saw you in a room

without anyone else. Don’t you love the moon?

And because it’s easy to say it, I do, I make sure

to tell you I do. Despite the news I knew years ago:

no one saves anyone. We’re on the moon.

 

Weekend Guests from Chicago, 1945 by Toi Derricotte

Weekend Guests from Chicago, 1945

 

In their brand-new caramel Cadillac,

Julia and Walter arrived at four,

Trunk stuffed with leather suitcases,

Steaks, champagne, and oysters in a cooler,

And Walter’s only drink—Johnnie Walker Blue.

Julia, hands flaring, in the clunky music

Of a pound of real gold charms,

Walter in a tan linen jacket

And shoes soft as old money.

 

Sweet-tempered, sweet-tongued,

He’d tease the women to blushing,

And let his wife reign queen

In a diamond ring to knock your eyes out.

 

She was known from New York to L.A.

For her fried chicken and greens,

And didn’t hesitate, after hours of driving,

To throw an apron over a French cotton dress

And slap the flour on thirty or more pieces.

 

Oh, the chicken breasts and thighs

Spattering, juicy, in just the right degree of heat,

As she told stories, hilarious and true,

To a kitchen full of steamy women

That made them double over and pee themselves.

 

Saturday morning, men to golf,

And women in floral robes

With cups of a New Orleans blend

So strong they said

It stained the rim and turned you black;

Me, in a high chair, straining

For language, my bottle

Stirred with a spoon of coffee

And half a pint of cream.

 

At fifteen,

My first trip cross-country on a train,

I stopped to spend the night.

We took the El to Marshall Field’s,

Where Julia bought my first expensive cold creams

And hose the shades of which—for the first time—

Dared the colors of our colored skin.

 

She told me she had lovers,

One a handsome Pullman porter.

My last nights onboard,

I, myself, enjoyed a notable service:

A café-au-lait gentleman

Woke me for breakfast

By slipping his hand through the sealed drapes

And gently shaking my rump.

I waited all night,

damp with wonder.

 

She had a wart on her chin or nose—

I can’t remember which—

She wore it

Like exquisite jewelry,

The way Marilyn Monroe wore her beauty mark,

With unforgettable style.

If I can stop one heart from breaking by Emily Dickinson

If I can stop one heart from breaking

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain.

Her small body rides in my arms by Mosab Abu Toha

Her small body rides in my arms

as I run to the hospital.

There is no electricity

and the inner hallways are

a forest lined with cots.

The girl I carry

is dead,

I know that.

The pressure of the explosion

tore apart her thin veins.

I know she is dead,

but everyone who sees us

runs after us.

You are alive

for a moment,

when living people

run after you.

The Reinvention of Happiness by Jack Gilbert

The Reinvention of Happiness

 

I remember how I’d lie on my roof

listening to the fat violinist

below in the sleeping village

play Schubert so badly, so well.

The Quiet World by Jeffrey McDaniel

The Quiet World

 

In an effort to get people to look

into each other’s eyes more,

and also to appease the mutes,

the government has decided

to allot each person exactly one hundred  

and sixty-seven words, per day.

 

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear  

without saying hello. In the restaurant  

I point at chicken noodle soup.

I am adjusting well to the new way.

 

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,  

proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.  

I saved the rest for you.

 

When she doesn’t respond,

I know she’s used up all her words,  

so I slowly whisper I love you

thirty-two and a third times.

After that, we just sit on the line  

and listen to each other breathe.