Some Clouds by Steve Kowit

Some Clouds

Now that I've unplugged the phone,

no one can reach me-

At least for this one afternoon

they will have to get by without my advice

or opinion.

Now nobody else is going to call

& ask in a tentative voice

if I haven't yet heard that she's dead,

that woman I once loved-

nothing but ashes scattered over a city

that barely itself any longer exists.

Yes, thank you, I've heard.

It had been too lovely a morning.

That in itself should have warned me.

The sun lit up the tangerines

& the blazing poinsettias

like so many candles.

For one afternoon they will have to forgive me.

I am busy watching things happen again

that happened a long time ago.

as I lean back in Josephine's lawnchair

under a sky of incredible blue,

broken - if that is the word for it – 

by a few billowing clouds,

all white & unspeakably lovely,

drifting out of one nothingness into another.

 

Magical Negro #80: Brooklyn by Morgan Parker

Magical Negro #80: Brooklyn

Here is the bright, young food co-op.

Here is the steeple. Here are the royals

not yet dead. Here are the Niggas With

Amethyst crystals. Shea butter

halos orbit half-shaved heads bowed

for vindication. Our mother patchouli

who art in the apothecary on Flatbush

hallowed be your Dutch wax dress.

Give us this day we light soy candles

for dead brothers. Give us this day we soak

our supremacy wounds.

Give us this day.

Give us fresh juice green

as avocados, and strength

to dismantle Fox news. We are marching

even in our sleep. We are reading

DuBois, getting high off the salt eaters.

Thy kingdom come to yoga. Thy will

be a black feminist Tumblr. Thy will is not

our struggle. Forgive us. We have gathered

to learn to pronounce freedom.

Procession body roll, communion oysters

with prosecco. Roses for our waist beads.

We have moved away from suburbia.

Now we live on Saturn.

We don’t pray anymore

the way our parents taught us.

Instead we stack our arms

with wood and music

hatches from our tongue rings.

Hymns for the dead, hookahs for

the almost-dead. Praise our half-lives.

Our bodies break but we still sage them.

We wrote the good book: instructions

for building new worlds.

Lead us not into white neighborhoods.

Deliver us from microaggressions.

Blessed are we who mourn, we who

are a blood built on a hill of embers.

We no mail-order hipster black wife.

We just trying to text our moms.

We are what we eat, leafy and anointed.

We are who we serve: banquets and bouquets

forever, foreverever, foreverever.

 

The Imagined by Stephen Dunn

The Imagined

If the imagined woman makes the real woman

seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in

gracefulness and intellect and pulchritude,

and if you come to realize the imagined woman

can only satisfy your imagination, whereas

the real woman with all her limitations

can often make you feel good, how, in spite

of knowing this, does the imagined woman

keep getting into your bedroom, and joining you

at dinner, why is it that you always bring her along

on vacations when the real woman is shopping,

or figuring the best way to the museum?

And if the real woman

has an imagined man, as she must, someone

probably with her at this very moment, in fact

doing and saying everything she's ever wanted,

would you want to know that he slips in

to her life every day from a secret doorway

she's made for him, that he's present even when

you're eating your omelette at breakfast,

or do you prefer how she goes about the house

as she does, as if there were just the two of you?

Isn't her silence, finally, loving? And yours

not entirely self-serving? Hasn't the time come,

once again, not to talk about it?

 

Self-Portrait as Myself by Meghan O'Rourke

Self-Portrait as Myself

 

And now I, Meghan, have grown tired, have come

to the limits of my aesthetic fidelity. It is nearly summer,

and summer seems shorter to me

and winter longer and longer, as if life with

its inevitable accumulation of griefs

shifts time the way the myth said: casting a layer

of snow over all our losses. I want a daughter, but

the daughter I’ll never have I can’t imagine

more than I already have. I’d like to say,

these are the stories my mother read me,

and she is gone, and six decades

pass fast, so much faster than the mind absorbs

all the distorted love it feels for the world,

all the knowledge it accrues and wants to continue

to accrue, and in not being able to imagine her —

Stop. Stop here, and feel the light and the heat through

the window by my desk and remember the fields

I’ve stood in, the prickling of time at my leg,

the propeller planes hymning past, the daughter I lost

by not making her — the RNA, the tethered alleles,

the whorls of her fingers like the twisting

clouds above, the high and possible

voice I’ll never hear except within my secret ears. 

 

The Weight by Linda Gregg

The Weight 

 

Two horses were put together in the same paddock. 

Night and day. In the night and in the day 

wet from heat and the chill of the wind 

on it. Muzzle to water, snorting, head swinging 

and the taste of bay in the shadowed air. 

The dignity of being. They slept that way, 

knowing each other always. 

Withers quivering for a moment, 

fetlock and the proud rise at the base of the tail, 

width of back. The volume of them, and each other’s weight. 

Fences were nothing compared to that. 

People were nothing. They slept standing, 

their throats curved against the other’s rump. 

They breathed against each other, 

whinnied and stomped. 

There are things they did that I do not know. 

The privacy of them had a river in it. 

Had our universe in it. And the way 

its border looks back at us with its light. 

This was finally their freedom. 

The freedom an oak tree knows. 

That is built at night by stars.

  

 

I Have a Seat in the Abandoned Theater by Mahmoud Darwish

I Have a Seat in the Abandoned Theater

I have a seat in the abandoned theater

in Beirut. I might forget, and I might recall

the final act without longing ... not because of anything

other than that the play was not written

skillfully ...

Chaos

as in the war days of those in despair, and an autobiography

of the spectators’ impulse. The actors were tearing up their scripts

and searching for the author among us, we the witnesses

sitting in our seats

I tell my neighbor the artist: Don’t draw your weapon,

and wait, unless you’re the author!

—No

Then he asks me: And you are you the author?

—No

So we sit scared. I say: Be a neutral

hero to escape from an obvious fate

He says: No hero dies revered in the second

scene. I will wait for the rest. Maybe I would

revise one of the acts. And maybe I would mend

what the iron has done to my brothers

So I say: It is you then?

He responds: You and I are two masked authors and two masked

witnesses

I say: How is this my concern? I’m a spectator

He says: No spectators at chasm’s door ... and no

one is neutral here. And you must choose

your part in the end

So I say: I’m missing the beginning, what’s the beginning?

(Translated by Fady Joudah)

 

Indigo by Ellen Bass

Indigo

 

As I’m walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs

toward me pushing one of those jogging strollers

with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping,

which this baby is. I can just get a glimpse

of its almost translucent eyelids. The father is young,

a jungle of indigo and carnelian tattooed

from knuckle to jaw, leafy vines and blossoms,

saints and symbols. Thick wooden plugs pierce

his lobes and his sunglasses testify

to the radiance haloed around him. I’m so jealous.

As I often am. It’s a kind of obsession.

I want him to have been my child’s father.

I want to have married a man who wanted

to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much

that he marked it up like a book, underlining,

highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.

Not like my dead ex-husband, who was always

fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours

on his zafu chanting om and then went out

and broke his hand punching the car.

I imagine when this galloping man gets home

he’s going to want to have sex with his wife,

who slept in late, and then he’ll eat

barbecued ribs and let the baby teethe on a bone

while he drinks a cold dark beer. I can’t stop

wishing my daughter had had a father like that.

I can’t stop wishing I’d had that life. Oh, I know

it’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.

It took eight years for my parents to conceive me.

First there was the war and then just waiting.

And my mother’s bones so narrow, she had to be slit

and I airlifted. That anyone is born,

each precarious success from sperm and egg

to zygote, embryo, infant, is a wonder.

And here I am, alive.

Almost seventy years and nothing has killed me.

Not the car I totalled running a stop sign

or the spirochete that screwed into my blood.

Not the tree that fell in the forest exactly

where I was standing—my best friend shoving me

backward so I fell on my ass as it crashed.

I’m alive.

And I gave birth to a child.

So she didn’t get a father who’d sling her

onto his shoulder. And so much else she didn’t get.

I’ve cried most of my life over that.

And now there’s everything that we can’t talk about.

We love—but cannot take

too much of each other.

Yet she is the one who, when I asked her to kill me

if I no longer had my mind—

we were on our way into Ross,

shopping for dresses. That’s something

she likes and they all look adorable on her—

she’s the only one

who didn’t hesitate or refuse

or waver or flinch.

As we strode across the parking lot

she said, O.K., but when’s the cutoff?

That’s what I need to know.