Last Photograph of My Mother Laughing by Sasha Pimentel

Last Photograph of My Mother Laughing

 

The one in the book after this, you’re in the Louvre, whiter

and colder than Venus. It will be winter, your hands

 

in veins, your lips tight as marble. But now, it is spring

in Manila, Jim Croce’s voice is wrapping against

 

an aging purpling sky where a seam of your hair puffs

up—, nebulous perfection. You’ve placed your hand

 

on your hip in young, flirtatious refusal. One wrist steels

with a watch so big, it’s halfway to falling, and your arms are

 

plain and hairless enough to turn into a statue’s missing 

limbs. Gallery mother, swing of my heart,

 

you’re standing above three black-haired sisters

who as I look at you there, are dead.

 

The investigative report says “dark sky, calm wind”

in Louisiana when Jim gazed out the plane’s window,

 

morning sticky with haze. Your city aches in the corner.

And your mouth breaks so cleanly across the sky. 

 

Wanting a Child by Jorie Graham

Wanting a Child

 

How hard it is for the river here to re-enter

the sea, though it’s most beautiful, of course, in the waste

of time where it’s almost

turned back. Then

it’s yoked,

trussed . . . . The river

has been everywhere, imagine, dividing, discerning, 

cutting deep into the parent rock,

scouring and scouring

its own bed.

Nothing is whole

where it has been. Nothing

remains unsaid.

Sometimes I’ll come this far from home

merely to dip my fingers in this glittering , archaic

sea that renders everything

identical, flesh

where mind and body

blur. The seagulls squeak, ill-fitting

hinges, the beach is thick

with shells. The tide

is always pulsing upward, inland, into the river’s rapid

argument, pushing

with its insistent tragic waves — the living echo,

says my book, of some great storm far out at sea, too far

to be recalled by us

but transferred 

whole onto this shore by waves, so that erosion

is its very face. 

 

Theories of Time and Space by Natasha Trethewey

Theories of Time and Space

 

You can get there from here, though

there’s no going home.

 

Everywhere you go will be somewhere

you’ve never been. Try this:

 

head south on Mississippi 49, one—

by—one mile markers ticking off

 

another minute of your life. Follow this

to its natural conclusion—dead end

 

at the coast, the pier at Gulfport where

riggings of shrimp boats are loose stitches

 

in a sky threatening rain. Cross over

the man-made beach, 26 miles of sand

 

dumped on a mangrove swamp—buried

terrain of the past. Bring only

 

what you must carry—tome of memory

its random blank pages. On the dock

 

where you board the boat for Ship Island,

someone will take your picture:

 

the photograph—who you were—

will be waiting when you return 

 

Poem to First Love by Matthew Yeager

Poem to First Love

To have been told “I love you” by you could well be, for me,

the highlight of my life, the best feeling, the best peak

on my feeling graph, in the way that the Chrysler building

might not be the tallest building in the NY sky but is

the best, the most exquisitely spired, or the way that

Hank Aaron’s career home-run total is not the highest

but the best, the one that signifies the purest greatness. 

So improbable! To have met you at all and then

to have been told in your soft young voice so soon

after meeting you: “I love you.” And I felt the mystery

of being that you, of being a you and being

loved, and what I was, instantly, was someone

who could be told “I love you” by someone like you. 

I was, in that moment, new; you were 19; I was 22;

you were impulsive; I was there in front of you, with a future

that hadn’t yet been burned for fuel; I had energy;

you had beauty; and your eyes were a pale blue,

and they backed what you said with all they hadn’t seen,

and they were the least ambitious eyes I’d known,

the least calculating, and when you spoke and when

they shone, perhaps you saw the feeling you caused.

Perhaps you saw too that the feeling would stay.

  

 

Wade in the Water by Tracy K. Smith

Wade in the Water

One of the women greeted me.

I love you, she said. She didn’t

Know me, but I believed her,

And a terrible new ache

Rolled over in my chest,

Like in a room where the drapes

Have been swept back. I love you,

I love you, as she continued

Down the hall past other strangers,

Each feeling pierced suddenly

By pillars of heavy light.

I love you, throughout

The performance, in every

Handclap, every stomp.

I love you in the rusted iron

Chains someone was made

To drag until love let them be

Unclasped and left empty

In the center of the ring.

I love you in the water

Where they pretended to wade,

Singing that old blood-deep song

That dragged us to those banks

And cast us in. I love you,

The angles of it scraping at

Each throat, shouldering past

The swirling dust motes

In those beams of light

That whatever we now knew

We could let ourselves feel, knew

To climb. O Woods—O Dogs—

O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run—

O Miraculous Many Gone—

O Lord—O Lord—O Lord—

Is this love the trouble you promised?

 

On Peripheries of the Imperium by Lawrence Joseph

On Peripheries of the Imperium

i

Eye of the hurricane the Battery, the Hudson

breached, millions of gallons of it

north on West Street filling Brooklyn–Battery

Tunnel, overflowing into the World Trade Center site,

East River, six-to-eight-foot wall of water on South,

Front, Water, John, Fulton, Pearl,

Brooklyn Bridge’s woven cables lifted delicately

in hurricane sky.

ii

Perhaps I make too much of it, that time,

Eldon Axle, brake plates dipped

in some sort of liquid to protect them from

dust, dirt, metal chips the grinding caused —

that time, night shift, press-machine shop

on Outer Drive, rolls of stainless steel put in,

fixed up, because the work you do is around fire

your cuticles burn if the mask’s not on right.

iii

When the mind is clear, to hear the sound

of a voice, of voices, shifts in the attitude

of syllables pronounced. When the mind

is clear, to see a Sunday, in August, Shrine

of Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Ohio,

at a holy water font, a mother washes

her six-year-old’s fingers crushed in an accident

so that they’ll heal.

iv

So what percentage of Weasel Boy’s DNA

do you think is pure weasel? Tooth-twisted,

Yeats’s weasels, in “Nineteen Hundred

and Nineteen,” fighting in a hole.

v

Conflated, the finance vectors, opaque

cyber-surveillance, supranational cartels,

in the corporate state’s political-economic singularity

the greatest number of children

in United States history are, now, incarcerated,

having been sentenced by law.

vi

A comic dimension to it, on this F train

to One Hundred Sixty-Ninth Street

in Queens? He doesn’t want to disturb you,

but, see, he was stabbed in the face

with an ice pick, he lost his left eye — 

lid pried open with thumb and forefinger — 

here, look, he’ll show you — 

a white-and-pink-colored iris.

 

The Testing-Tree by Stanley Kunitz

The Testing-Tree

1

On my way home from school

    up tribal Providence Hill

       past the Academy ballpark

where I could never hope to play

    I scuffed in the drainage ditch

       among the sodden seethe of leaves

hunting for perfect stones

    rolled out of glacial time

       into my pitcher’s hand;

then sprinted lickety-

    split on my magic Keds

       from a crouching start,

scarcely touching the ground

    with my flying skin

       as I poured it on

for the prize of the mastery

    over that stretch of road,

       with no one no where to deny

when I flung myself down

    that on the given course

       I was the world’s fastest human.

2

Around the bend

    that tried to loop me home

       dawdling came natural

across a nettled field

    riddled with rabbit-life

       where the bees sank sugar-wells

in the trunks of the maples

    and a stringy old lilac

       more than two stories tall

blazing with mildew

    remembered a door in the

        long teeth of the woods.

All of it happened slow:

    brushing the stickseed off,

       wading through jewelweed

strangled by angel’s hair,

    spotting the print of the deer

       and the red fox’s scats.

Once I owned the key

    to an umbrageous trail      

thickened with mosses

where flickering presences

    gave me right of passage

       as I followed in the steps

of straight-backed Massassoit

    soundlessly heel-and-toe

       practicing my Indian walk.

3

Past the abandoned quarry

    where the pale sun bobbed

       in the sump of the granite,

past copperhead ledge,

    where the ferns gave foothold,

       I walked, deliberate,

on to the clearing,

    with the stones in my pocket

       changing to oracles

and my coiled ear tuned

    to the slightest leaf-stir.

       I had kept my appointment.

There I stood in the shadow,

    at fifty measured paces,

       of the inexhaustible oak,

tyrant and target,

    Jehovah of acorns,

       watchtower of the thunders,

that locked King Philip’s War

    in its annulated core

       under the cut of my name.

Father wherever you are

     I have only three throws

        bless my good right arm. 

In the haze of afternoon,

    while the air flowed saffron,

       I played my game for keeps—

for love, for poetry,

    and for eternal life—

       after the trials of summer.

4

In the recurring dream

    my mother stands

       in her bridal gown

under the burning lilac,

    with Bernard Shaw and Bertie

       Russell kissing her hands;

the house behind her is in ruins;

    she is wearing an owl’s face

       and makes barking noises.

Her minatory finger points.

    I pass through the cardboard doorway

       askew in the field

and peer down a well

    where an albino walrus huffs.

       He has the gentlest eyes. 

If the dirt keeps sifting in,

    staining the water yellow,

       why should I be blamed?

Never try to explain.

    That single Model A

       sputtering up the grade

unfurled a highway behind

    where the tanks maneuver,

       revolving their turrets.

In a murderous time

    the heart breaks and breaks

       and lives by breaking.

It is necessary to go

    through dark and deeper dark

       and not to turn.

 I am looking for the trail.

    Where is my testing-tree?

       Give me back my stones!