I Don't Miss It by Tracy K. Smith

I Don't Miss It

But sometimes I forget where I am,

Imagine myself inside that life again.

Recalcitrant mornings. Sun perhaps,

Or more likely colorless light

Filtering its way through shapeless cloud.

And when I begin to believe I haven’t left,

The rest comes back. Our couch. My smoke

Climbing the walls while the hours fall.

Straining against the noise of traffic, music,

Anything alive, to catch your key in the door.

And that scamper of feeling in my chest,

As if the day, the night, wherever it is

I am by then, has been only a whir

Of something other than waiting.

We hear so much about what love feels like.

Right now, today, with the rain outside,

And leaves that want as much as I do to believe

In May, in seasons that come when called,

It’s impossible not to want

To walk into the next room and let you

Run your hands down the sides of my legs,

Knowing perfectly well what they know.

 

Leaves by C. K. Williams

Leaves

A pair of red leaves spinning on one another

in such wildly erratic patterns over a frozen field

it's hard to tell one from another and whether

if they were creatures they'd be in combat or courting

or just exalting in the tremendousness of their being.

Humans can be like that, capricious, aswirl,

not often enough in exalting, but courting, yes,

and combat; so often in combat, in rancour, in rage,

we rarely even remember what error or lie

set off this phase of our seeming to have to slaughter. 

Not leaves then, which after all in their season

give themselves to the hammer of winter,

become sludge, become muck, become mulch,

while we, still seething, broiling, stay as we are,

vexation and violence, ax, atom, despair. 

The Day Lady Died by Frank O'Hara

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton   

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun   

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets   

in Ghana are doing these days

                                                        I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)   

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life   

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine   

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do   

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or   

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and   

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue   

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and   

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Long Night Full Moon by D. A. Powell

Long Night Full Moon

You only watch the news to find out

where the fires are burning, which way

the wind is blowing, and whether

it will rain. Forecast ahead but first:

A mother’s boy laid out

in the street for hours.

These facts don’t wash away.

 

Autumn Leaves by Frederick Seidel

Autumn Leaves

 

Plop the live lobster into boiling water and let it scream.

You both turn red.

Of course you have to eat it dead.

There can be unfertilized roe

That will turn red also, maliciously delicious, called coral.

The colder the ocean waters the lobster came from, the sweeter

The meat boiled in the brain of heat.

The lobster at the end is as incontinent as falling leaves and doesn’t know.

 

It’s agony to be turning into something else—

And when you certainly weren’t intending to.

This room must be the bedroom, but it smells.

A mouse still alive is standing on the trap, stuck in glue,

Like a man trapped standing on the roof of his submerged car,

Or a woman making love to herself seated in front of a mirror.

Little shrieks from you as you try to get unstuck from you

Becomes a raving hippopotamus that sings and sobs.

 

The fuel for this ravisher unicycle of a world,

Going faster and faster, ever more horsepower,

Is not the president of the United States anymore.

The man on the roof of the car waves his arms.

The butterfly in love lands on fresh tar, tacky goo.

I’m turning into something I wasn’t intending to be—

In agony after the awful metamorphosis

Into a suddenly human being.

 

It’s so fascinating to watch a woman masturbating.

It makes your eyes turn blue.

You watch her doing it for you.

She’s watching, too.

You realize it’s true.

She’s doing it for you.

The man’s cell phone is soaked.

He’s stuck on top his submerged SUV yelling into the vast.

 

The new Swatch wristwatch on my wrist

Handcuffs the suspect for having sexual intercourse

With someone much younger, twisting in the noose.

Let them dangle and twist.

It’s agony turning into something else.

Some sort of cockroach that smells slightly rotten

Walks around on hairs for legs and mutters something,

Then puts on a fine suit and goes outside.

 

Outside it’s fall. This is the weather that people like,

Perfect for people who hate the heat.

The sun shines down at a different angle

Through the atmosphere, producing that look, that light.

A first responder is coming with a boat 

To rescue the man from the roof of his car, a helicopter lowers a ladder

To the boiling lobster. Let me explain to you something

I’ve never understood.

 

Dinosaurs in the Hood by Danez Smith

Dinosaurs in the Hood

Let’s make a movie called Dinosaurs in the Hood.

Jurassic Park meets Friday meets The Pursuit of Happyness.

There should be a scene where a little black boy is playing

with a toy dinosaur on the bus, then looks out the window

& sees the T. Rex, because there has to be a T. Rex.

Don’t let Tarantino direct this. In his version, the boy plays

with a gun, the metaphor: black boys toy with their own lives,

the foreshadow to his end, the spitting image of his father.

Fuck that, the kid has a plastic Brontosaurus or Triceratops

& this is his proof of magic or God or Santa. I want a scene

where a cop car gets pooped on by a pterodactyl, a scene

where the corner store turns into a battle ground. Don’t let

the Wayans brothers in this movie. I don’t want any racist shit

about Asian people or overused Latino stereotypes.

This movie is about a neighborhood of royal folks —

children of slaves & immigrants & addicts & exiles — saving their town

from real-ass dinosaurs. I don’t want some cheesy yet progressive

Hmong sexy hot dude hero with a funny yet strong commanding

black girl buddy-cop film. This is not a vehicle for Will Smith

& Sofia Vergara. I want grandmas on the front porch taking out raptors

with guns they hid in walls & under mattresses. I want those little spitty,

screamy dinosaurs. I want Cicely Tyson to make a speech, maybe two.

I want Viola Davis to save the city in the last scene with a black fist afro pick

through the last dinosaur’s long, cold-blood neck. But this can’t be

a black movie. This can’t be a black movie. This movie can’t be dismissed

because of its cast or its audience. This movie can’t be a metaphor

for black people & extinction. This movie can’t be about race.

This movie can’t be about black pain or cause black people pain.

This movie can’t be about a long history of having a long history with hurt.

This movie can’t be about race. Nobody can say nigga in this movie

who can’t say it to my face in public. No chicken jokes in this movie.

No bullets in the heroes. & no one kills the black boy. & no one kills

the black boy. & no one kills the black boy. Besides, the only reason

I want to make this is for that first scene anyway: the little black boy

on the bus with a toy dinosaur, his eyes wide & endless

his dreams possible, pulsing, & right there.

Excerpt from Citizen by Claudia Rankine

Excerpt from Citizen

On the train the woman standing makes you understand there are no seats available. And, in fact, there is one. Is the woman getting off at the next stop? No, she would rather stand all the way to Union Station.

The space next to the man is the pause in a conversation you are suddenly rushing to fill. You step quickly over the woman’s fear, a fear she shares. You let her have it.

The man doesn’t acknowledge you as you sit down because the man knows more about the unoccupied seat than you do. For him, you imagine, it is more like breath than wonder; he has had to think about it so much you wouldn’t call it thought.

When another passenger leaves his seat and the standing woman sits, you glance over at the man. He is gazing out the window into what looks like darkness.

You sit next to the man on the train, bus, in the plane, waiting room, anywhere he could be forsaken. You put your body there in proximity to, adjacent to, alongside, within.

You don’t speak unless you are spoken to and your body speaks to the space you fill and you keep trying to fill it except the space belongs to the body of the man next to you, not to you.

Where he goes the space follows him. If the man left his seat before Union Station you would simply be a person in a seat on the train. You would cease to struggle against the unoccupied seat when where why the space won’t lose its meaning.

You imagine if the man spoke to you he would say, it’s okay, I’m okay, you don’t need to sit here. You don’t need to sit and you sit and look past him into the darkness the train is moving through. A tunnel.

All the while the darkness allows you to look at him. Does he feel you looking at him? You suspect so. What does suspicion mean? What does suspicion do?

The soft gray-green of your cotton coat touches the sleeve of him. You are shoulder to shoulder though standing you could feel shadowed. You sit to repair whom who? You erase that thought. And it might be too late for that.

It might forever be too late or too early. The train moves too fast for your eyes to adjust to anything beyond the man, the window, the tiled tunnel, its slick darkness. Occasionally, a white light flickers by like a displaced sound.

From across the aisle tracks room harbor world a woman asks a man in the rows ahead if he would mind switching seats. She wishes to sit with her daughter or son. You hear but you don’t hear. You can’t see.

It’s then the man next to you turns to you. And as if from inside your own head you agree that if anyone asks you to move, you’ll tell them we are traveling as a family.