Origin Story by Jenny Xie

Origin Story

I was profligate like a floodlight to the sun.

Hoarded saccharine and toothmarks,

wanted only the thickest rhymes, two of each.

Full I was of promises I never intended to keep:

puckered laughter, lines to feast.

I let everyone who entered my life enter through me.

Demanded nonsense love and bodies that would ring.

Not to mention higher kilowatts

of creeping joy, more red in everything—

 

The Gift by Li-Young Lee

The Gift

 

To pull the metal splinter from my palm

my father recited a story in a low voice.

I watched his lovely face and not the blade.

Before the story ended, he’d removed

the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

 

I can’t remember the tale,

but hear his voice still, a well

of dark water, a prayer.

And I recall his hands,

two measures of tenderness

he laid against my face,

the flames of discipline

he raised above my head.

 

Had you entered that afternoon

you would have thought you saw a man

planting something in a boy’s palm,

a silver tear, a tiny flame.

Had you followed that boy

you would have arrived here,

where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

 

Look how I shave her thumbnail down

so carefully she feels no pain.

Watch as I lift the splinter out.

I was seven when my father

took my hand like this,

and I did not hold that shard

between my fingers and think,

Metal that will bury me,

christen it Little Assassin,

Ore Going Deep for My Heart.

And I did not lift up my wound and cry,

Death visited here!

I did what a child does

when he’s given something to keep.

I kissed my father.

 

4 1/2 by Tracy K. Smith

4 1/2

Morning finds her curled like a prawn

Around a stuffed blue Pegasus, or the smallest

Prawn-pink lion. Or else she's barging

Into my room, and leaning in close so

It's her hair I wake to—that coarse, dark

Heaven of knots and purple fluff. And

She's hungry, but first she has to pee—

"Pee! Pee!" she sings, hopping in place, trying

To staunch off the wild ravenous river

She carries, until I'm awake for real, saying

"Go! Go! Hurry before you wet the floor!"

And then she tries, and succeeds, or else stands

Bereft, relieved, as a pool trickles out

Around her feet. She's like an island

Made of rock, with one lone tree at the top

Of the only mountain. She's like the sole

Incongruous goat tethered to the tree,

Smiling almost as you approach, scraping

The ground with its horns, and then—

Lickety split—lurching hard, daring

The rope to snap. She's hungry. She wants

"Bread, toasted, with no skin." And enough butter

To write her name in. Or a bowl of cereal ("But

Not the noisy kind"). She wants a movie, or maybe

Just the tussle of her will against mine,

That scrape and crack. Horn on rock. Rope

Relenting one fiber at a time. "I want that," she says,

Punctuating what she just said she wanted.

 

Explorers Cry Out Unheard by Marie Ponsot

Explorers Cry Out Unheard 

What I have in mind is the last wilderness. 

I sweat to learn its heights of sun, scrub, ants,

its gashes full of shadows and odd plants,

as inch by inch it yields to my hard press. 

And the way behind me changes as I advance.

If interdependence shapes the biomass,

though I plot my next step by pure chance

I can’t go wrong. Even willful deviance

connects me to all the rest. The changing past

includes and can’t excerpt me. Memory grants

just the nothing it knows, & my distress

drives me toward the imagined truths I stalk,

those savages. Warned by their haunting talk,

their gestures, I guess they mean no. Or yes. 

 

My Father No Longer Knows Me by Adam Zagajewski

My Father No Longer Knows Me

 

My father no longer knows me. Not even

those sparks of consciousness

that cheered us not so long ago.

He lies submerged in darkness, sleeps, dozes,

as if he’d already taken leave.

There are still the brief moments, though,

when his real face is revealed.

(Translated by Clare Cavanagh)

 

As You Never Bothered to Return My Call by August Kleinzahler

As You Never Bothered to Return My Call

What I had wanted was to be chaste,

sober and uncomfortable

for a sprawling episode on a beach somewhere

dirty, perennially out of fashion;

let the smell of cocoa butter drive deep memory wild

as the sun went down, a parti-colored blur,

examined through a bottle of pop

some kid gave up on only half-way through

and left to go warm in the sand.

The train ride would be long and hot,

and you, you’ve had it with men.

Me . . .

        I’m sickened by the pronoun.

Tenderness seems as far away as Sioux City

and besides, it would have cost too much.

But you should have called,

if only since a preposterous little episode like this

is just the stuff to scare off extra friends,

like soaking their laps with corrosive fizz.

And us . . .

              What an impertinence, us.

We could have played gin rummy and taken a stroll

into town or along the boardwalk, maybe,

                                      with dear old Godzilla,

the first one, the best one, the 1954 one,

reprising his role this one last time, raising himself up

over the horizon at dusk,

and hurrying us to a place we never would have

dreamt of

             going.

 

Nothing’s a Gift by Wisława Szymborska

Nothing’s a Gift

 

Nothing’s a gift, it’s all on loan.

I’m drowning in debts up to my ears.

I’ll have to pay for myself

with my self,

give up my life for my life.

 

Here’s how it’s arranged:

The heart can be repossessed,

the liver, too,

and each single finger and toe.

 

Too late to tear up the terms,

my debts will be repaid,

and I’ll be fleeced,

or, more precisely, flayed.

 

I move about the planet

in a crush of other debtors.

Some are saddled with the burden

of paying off their wings.

Others must, willy-nilly,

account for every leaf.

 

Every tissue in us lies

on the debit side.

Not a tentacle or tendril

is for keeps.

 

The inventory, infinitely detailed,

implies we’ll be left

not just empty-handed

but handless, too.

 

I can’t remember

where, when, and why

I let someone open

this account in my name.

 

We call the protest against this

the soul.

And it’s the only item

not included on the list.

(Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanaugh)