My Hole. My Whole. by Sam Sax

My Hole. My Whole.

what to call you who i’ve slept beside through so many apocalypses

the kind that occur nightly in this late stage of the collapsing west

boyfriend was fine even though we are neither boys nor men but love 

how it makes us sudden infants in the eyes of any listener—how 

it brings us back to some childhood we never got to live. that was, 

at the time, unlivable. my sweetheart. my excised sheep’s-heart. 

my fled garden. my metal garter. after yet another man calls his wife 

his partner at the dog park it’s clearly time to find another name for you—

he says it’s my partner’s birthday we’re going to buca di beppo then key largo—

and wild how quick a name becomes yet another vehicle 

through which to reproduce violence. partner fit like a skin and then 

that skin tightened and tore off—you who are neither my chain 

italian restaurant nor my all-inclusive vacation spot. not my owner

or my only or my own. not my down payment or my dowery

of sheep and crop. not lost. not loss. apophasis is a way of naming 

what is by what is not—but what is? my boutonniere. my goofy queer. 

my salt. my silk. my silt. my slit. my top and my basement. my vanquished 

prostate. my battered apostate. my memory. my memory. my meteor. 

all these names for what exactly? to introduce what is to those 

who don’t know. this is my whole. this is my hole. take part of me.  

Winter by Ruth Stone

Winter

The ten o’clock train to New York,

coaches like loaves of bread powdered with snow.

Steam wheezes between the couplings.

Stripped to plywood, the station’s cement standing room

imitates a Russian novel. It is now that I remember you.

Your profile becomes the carved handle of a letter knife.

Your heavy-lidded eyes slip under the seal of my widowhood.

It is another raw winter. Stray cats are suffering.

Starlings crowd the edges of chimneys.

It is a drab misery that urges me to remember you.

I think about the subjugation of women and horses;

brutal exposure; weather that forces, that strips.

In our time we met in ornate stations

arching up with nineteenth-century optimism.

I remember you running beside the train waving good-bye.

I can produce a facsimile of you standing

behind a column of polished oak to surprise me.

Am I going toward you or away from you on this train?

Discarded junk of other minds is strewn beside the tracks:

mounds of rusting wire, grotesque pop art of dead motors,

senile warehouses. The train passes a station;

fresh people standing on the platform,

their faces expecting something.

I feel their entire histories ravish me.

Temple of Poseidon, Sounion by Aria Aber

Temple of Poseidon, Sounion

 

My father drives the boat back to the cape.

The wind is cold as we hike up the cliff

to the wilderness around the temple.

My father comes here every year, and sometimes

he invites me. He captures all on film: leafless fig trees,

then the marble column engraved with Byron’s name.

Graffiti from 1810! he exclaims, as if it is the first time.

Elegant, he says. How can something destroyed be so elegant?

My father is the descendant of a nomadic tribe.

First his ancestor settled, then he became Muslim.

Being oppressed is our type of fun, he told me when

I was a child, and then: Never ask me about that again.

Now I’m an adult, restraining the impulse

to elegize what is still alive. And yet this is what

I will remember him as, I decide: the black camera steadying his hands,

the exacting way the lens detains the distant isles,

and what the frame omits, the other country, that other light.

We eat baked cod with pickled onions and speak about politics

in a formal way, as if none of it concerns our lives.

There are things I never tell him, and things he cannot

ask me, careful not to disturb the air around us.

Here, the sun takes hours to set. We study the raw marble

of the ruins, then turn our faces toward a reddish sky.

No, let me be precise: the light over the Aegean Sea turns tawny,

then apricot, then the color of apricots burning very slowly.

The Lights Are On Everywhere by Charles Simić

The Lights Are On Everywhere

 

The Emperor must not be told night is coming.

His armies are chasing shadows,

Arresting whippoorwills and hermit thrushes

And setting towns and villages on fire.

 

In the capital, they go around confiscating

Clocks and watches, burning heretics,

And painting the sunrise over the rooftops

While the people wish each other good morning.

 

The rooster brought in chains is crowing,

The flowers in the garden have been made to stay open,

And still dark stains appear on palace floors

Which no amount of scrubbing can wipe away.

Theory of Memory by Louise Glück

Theory of Memory

 

Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious ruler uniting all of a divided country—so I was told by the fortune-teller who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.

Stranger by John Glenday

Stranger

 

Today, I am a new man,

a stranger in the town that bore me.

 

How simple it is to become a ghost —

just one word, one gesture, and we slip

 

through the fretwork of other people’s lives

as easily as water through a stone.

 

Just for today, if I were to pass myself in the street

I wouldn’t even raise my hat, or say hello.

The Old Professor’s Book by Ishion Hutchinson

The Old Professor’s Book

Evening blooms in heat a braying of bells 

from August Town; my mind fizzles 

over “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” its sporadic arc 

welding and breaking the question, how to 

align poetry with truth. A stalled elevation, 

returning in my old professor’s blight 

marginalia, his book, offered abruptly, 

taken, stowed away, now posthumously examined: 

fragile pencil webbings of flickered exclamations, 

impatient the way he paced the blackboard, 

erased a word (“meteors”), hurled glances 

somewhere far off, beyond me, himself

a boy-comet, weeping to his duty. 

Once I strayed to the tubular steel chair 

chained in a corner, glistening sweat 

on one leg, our eyes wounded appraisal 

met there and he cracked the air, charged 

me pick up Browning’s chorus. I couldn’t. 

He died. His pupil flowered later into 

the voltage of self-alienating poetry, 

away from that moribund grammarian’s 

blind reluctance. Still, as moving iron 

will fuse and repel, by his book, I am 

the unspared prodigal of his abuse.