won't you celebrate with me by Lucille Clifton

won't you celebrate with me 

won't you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

The Archeologist by Hester Knibbe

The Archeologist 

In one who doesn’t speak the story petrifies,

gets stumbled over, causes hurt. Then,

says the man who should know about the past, then

is a word you need to learn now. Then

lived lives had has

a name a body, sacrificial hands

so god might help us. Feel with your hands and feet

back along these countless steps and hear

the incessant bloodrush, its dark red

presence. That was what the man insisted,

in so many words, pointing to the ornate

temple corridor, an altar

conjured at its vanishing point.

(Translated by Jaqueline Pope)

Lullaby in Echo by Fady Joudah

Lullaby in Echo

Our ancestors didn’t get everything right and died

like several of their dotted letters

and many declensions.

What they slanged we pidgin,

their lilliputian remains

string our present along our future’s feathers:

vane and calamitous, a history to weather,

they laid it on thick

and stabbed heavy

before they left us to us—

to alter them as mutation or idea,

cell or organelle,

strip or particle,

rock, paper, metal.

I swear by the genius phone

that what they did to the living

doesn’t match our binge.

They who revolted more than twice

kept their previous wives and multiple wings

and mistook justice for revenge…

though love after a point abandons reprimand.

They chiseled ore so that we may cement,

paved roads so that we may asphalt,

we guardians of children,

their apps and animations and kindergartens.

Dear daughter, when I was young

we had what had not been.

Dear daughter, I placed some of my heart

in you—no one’s ever lost who neighbors the dark.

And prophets spoke of kindness

up to the seventh neighbor seven floors

up or down from where you happen to be

in a skyscraper. Our ancestors who removed harm

off the roads their enemies took to them,

who microscoped the telescope

and telescoped the micron.

We printed what they sequenced

and drifted in replication. 

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.