Supercell by Ange Mlinko

Supercell

I’m waiting for this shrub to sew itself back in its soil.

Hearing its roots rip when I transplanted it made me ill

(though a cress or a lettuce remains my most favorite food).

A wind tore it up again, or it was undermined by flood.

 

Through the sorghum fields between Victoria and Lavaca,

a supercell, spurting electricity, smothered the ton of lava,

mounted in the sky, that characterizes sunset there.

But the tapestried sorghum fields created an atmosphere

 

that defied the monotony I associate with agriculture.

Planting, for me, means flowers, fitting embouchure

for birds; or aloes, answering to a sculptural imperative

 

to induce repose, and not just keep us, Lord, alive.

This hardy Duranta attracts hummingbirds and butterflies.

May it thrive, and sew itself in as the soil dries.

 

Between Victoria and Lavaca, in my mind’s eye

I saw a thousand Comanche in cumulonimbi

racing thirty hundred stolen horses over the prairie

to the sea. When the sorghum field, that tapestry,

 

was little more than “Chocolate Swale” (a sign stuck in the silt,

née swamp), official history passed the bolus of guilt

back and forth, from the Comanche, who kept back captives,

to the Texans, who (in what may have been an interpretive

 

blunder) slaughtered the chiefs, back to the Comanche,

who torched their captives in revenge and went on “an orgy

of horse-thieving.” While at night Comanche jump

 

on Texas with a thump, the dream of one Buffalo Hump

results in enough calico and ribbon to get lost in

(as I sew myself into this clay) riding back to Austin.

 

Too late. Juliet Constance managed to get her hem wet

but they seized her and stripped her down to the whalebone corset

—flummoxed. While the townspeople watched from dinghies offshore,

on that hand-over-hand surf, helpless, they later swore

 

her whalebone corset wouldn’t budge. They saw the town burning,

the warehouses looted; and in the smoke’s going and returning,

Comanche donning the top hats and pigeon-tailed coats.

Adorned with all the brass buttons a merchant ship could float,

 

and twirling their parasols and festooning each his horse

with ribbon, the Comanche rode off. In the cumulonimbus

of their dust, they took our bibelot Juliet.

 

Buffalo Hump, meet Whalebone Corset!

For a gold watch her young husband perished. El Dorado:

where there’s pyrite in the piranha, gilt in the sweet potato.

 

Gold in the sorghum tassels, gold in the sargassum weed

strewing the shore where they put Juliet on a stolen steed.

Gold when wet, that is; rust-brown when dry; furring the coast,

drying at different rates in the sun, so gold and rust co-roast.

 

It seemed a herd of buffalo was barbered by some god at first.

But in these alien bouquets tossed from the largest sea on earth,

and bounded by no lands, live animals find harbor.

Exquisite minnow worlds of crabs, shrimp—sheer automata—

 

crawfish cling to the tangle and grape (cf. “sargasso”).

I’ve seen the gulls in their tuxedo’d appetite clothed go

pecking there. Meanwhile, into an upended frisbee’d

 

world my kids shake the bundles of sargassum seaweed,

collecting their own marine menagerie for observation.

The liverish waves play on, sunlight doled out in rations

 

from grape-stained clouds to whiten froth exploding in our ears.

A sulfurous wind blows in, then as suddenly disappears.

The deep-blue, upended frisbee looks like nothing less

than a saucer of primal soup from Genesis,

 

the first meal of the first day. By the seventh all Creation and we

were invited to the feast of ourselves, into perpetuity.

She was saved a second time, that Juliet,

when a crop of arrows foundered on her whalebone corset.

 

Saved, then, with nothing more than a sunburn. And still

nothing more than a stone commemorating Linnville

between new tract housing and the littoral.

 

Calico of wildflowers sewing themselves to the soil,

and a man licking his arrowhead, that his DNA be

shot through the heart that pins her to the ponderosa tree.

  

The Sea is History by Derek Walcott

The Sea is History

 

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?

Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,

in that grey vault. The sea. The sea

has locked them up. The sea is History.

 

First, there was the heaving oil,

heavy as chaos;

then, like a light at the end of a tunnel,

 

the lantern of a caravel,

and that was Genesis.

Then there were the packed cries,

the shit, the moaning:

 

Exodus.

Bone soldered by coral to bone,

mosaics

mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow,

 

that was the Ark of the Covenant.

Then came from the plucked wires

of sunlight on the sea floor

 

the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage,

as the white cowries clustered like manacles

on the drowned women,

 

and those were the ivory bracelets

of the Song of Solomon,

but the ocean kept turning blank pages

 

looking for History.

Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors

who sank without tombs,

 

brigands who barbecued cattle,

leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore,

then the foaming, rabid maw

 

of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal,

and that was Jonah,

but where is your Renaissance?

 

Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands

out there past the reef's moiling shelf,

where the men-o'-war floated down;

 

strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself.

It's all subtle and submarine,

through colonnades of coral,

 

past the gothic windows of sea-fans

to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed,

blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen;

 

and these groined caves with barnacles

pitted like stone

are our cathedrals,

 

and the furnace before the hurricanes:

Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills

into marl and cornmeal,

 

and that was Lamentations—

that was just Lamentations,

it was not History;

 

then came, like scum on the river's drying lip,

the brown reeds of villages

mantling and congealing into towns,

 

and at evening, the midges' choirs,

and above them, the spires

lancing the side of God

 

as His son set, and that was the New Testament.

 

Then came the white sisters clapping

to the waves' progress,

and that was Emancipation—

 

jubilation, O jubilation—

vanishing swiftly

as the sea's lace dries in the sun,

 

but that was not History,

that was only faith,

and then each rock broke into its own nation;

 

then came the synod of flies,

then came the secretarial heron,

then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote,

 

fireflies with bright ideas

and bats like jetting ambassadors

and the mantis, like khaki police,

 

and the furred caterpillars of judges

examining each case closely,

and then in the dark ears of ferns

 

and in the salt chuckle of rocks

with their sea pools, there was the sound

like a rumour without any echo

 

of History, really beginning.

Not Even This by Ocean Vuong

Not Even This 

 

Hey.

 

I used to be a fag now I’m a checkbox.

 

The pen tip jabbed in my back, I feel the mark of progress.

 

I will not dance alone in the municipal graveyard at midnight, blasting sad

songs on my phone, for nothing.

 

I promise you, I was here. I felt things that made death so large it was

indistinguishable from air—and I went on destroying inside it like wind in

a storm.

 

The way Lil Peep says I’ll be back in the mornin’  when you know how it ends.

 

The way I kept dancing when the song was over, because it freed me.

 

The way the streetlight blinks once, before waking up for its night shift, like

we do.

 

The way we look up and whisper sorry to each other, the boy and I, when

there’s teeth.

 

When there’s always teeth, on purpose.

 

When I threw myself into gravity and made it work. Ha.

 

I made it out by the skin of my griefs.

 

I used to be a fag now I’m lit. Ha.

 

Once, at a party set on a rooftop in Brooklyn for an “artsy vibe,” a young

woman said, sipping her drink, You’re so lucky. You’re gay plus you get to

write about war and stuff. I’m just white. [Pause.] I got nothing. [Laughter,

glasses clinking.]

 

Unlike feelings, blood gets realer when you feel it.

 

Because everyone knows yellow pain, pressed into American letters, turns

to gold.

 

Our sorrow Midas-touched. Napalm with a rainbow afterglow.

 

I’m trying to be real but it costs too much.

 

They say the Earth spins and that’s why we fall but everyone knows it’s the

music.

 

It’s been proven difficult to dance to machine gun fire.

 

Still, my people made a rhythm this way. A way.

 

My people, so still, in the photographs, as corpses.

 

My failure was that I got used to it. I looked at us, mangled under the TIME

photographer’s shadow, and stopped thinking, Get up, get up.

 

I saw the graveyard steam in the pinkish dawn and knew the dead were still

breathing. Ha.

 

If they come for me, take me home take me out.

 

What if it wasn’t the crash that made me, but the debris?

 

What if it was meant this way: the mother, the lexicon, the line of cocaine on

the mohawked boy’s collarbone in an East Village sublet in 2007?

 

What’s wrong with me, Doc? There must be a pill for this.

 

Too late—these words already shrapnel in your brain.

 

Impossible in high school, I am now the ultimate linebacker. I plow through

the page, making a path for you, dear reader, going nowhere.

 

Because the fairy tales were right. You’ll need magic to make it out of  here.

 

Long ago, in another life, on an Amtrak through Iowa, I saw, for a few blurred

seconds, a man standing in the middle of a field of winter grass, hands at his

side, back to me, all of him stopped there save for his hair scraped by low

wind.

 

When the countryside resumed its wash of gray wheat, tractors, gutted

barns, black sycamores in herdless pastures, I started to cry. I put my copy

of Didion’s The White Album down and folded a new dark around my head.

 

The woman beside me stroked my back saying, in a Midwestern accent that

wobbled with tenderness, Go on son. You get that out now. No shame in

breakin’ open. You get that out and I’ll fetch us some tea. Which made me

lose it even more.

 

She came back with Lipton in paper cups, her eyes nowhere blue and there.

She was silent all the way to Missoula, where she got off and said, patting my

knee, God is good. God is good.

 

I can say it was beautiful now, my harm, because it belonged to no one else.

 

To be a dam for damage. My shittiness will not enter the world, I thought,

and quickly became my own hero.

 

Do you know how many hours I’ve wasted watching straight boys play video

games?

 

Enough.

 

Time is a mother.

 

Lest we forget, a morgue is also a community center.

 

In my language, the one I recall now only by closing my eyes, the word for

love is Yêu.

 

And the word for weakness is Yếu.

 

How you say what you mean changes what you say.

 

Some call this prayer. I call it watch your mouth.

 

When they zipped my mother in a body bag I whispered: Rose, get out of there.

Your plants are dying.

 

Enough is enough.

 

Body, doorway that you are, be more than what I’ll pass through.

 

Stillness. That’s what it was.

 

The man in the field in the red sweater, he was so still he became, somehow,

more true, like a knife wound in a landscape painting.

 

Like him, I caved.

 

I caved and decided it will be joy from now on. Then everything opened. The

lights blazed around me into a white weather

 

and I was lifted, wet and bloody, out of my mother, screaming

 

and enough.

 

Man Eating by Jane Kenyon

Man Eating

The man at the table across from mine

is eating yogurt. His eyes, following

the progress of the spoon, cross briefly

each time it nears his face. Time,

and the world with all its principalities,

might come to an end as prophesied

by the Apostle John, but what about

this man, so completely present

to the little carton with its cool,

sweet food, which has caused no animal

to suffer, and which he is eating

with a pearl-white plastic spoon.

American Wedding by Essex Hemphill

American Wedding

 

In america,

I place my ring

on your cock

where it belongs.

No horsemen

bearing terror,

no soldiers of doom

will swoop in

and sweep us apart.

They’re too busy

looting the land

to watch us.

They don’t know

we need each other

critically.

They expect us to call in sick,

watch television all night,

die by our own hands.

They don’t know

we are becoming powerful.

Every time we kiss

we confirm the new world coming.

 

What the rose whispers

before blooming

I vow to you.

I give you my heart,

a safe house.

I give you promises other than

milk, honey, liberty.

I assume you will always

be a free man with a dream.

In america,

place your ring

on my cock

where it belongs.

Long may we live

to free this dream.

  

Poetry, a Natural Thing by Robert Duncan

Poetry, a Natural Thing

 

Neither our vices nor our virtues   

further the poem. “They came up   

      and died 

just like they do every year 

      on the rocks.” 

 

      The poem 

feeds upon thought, feeling, impulse, 

      to breed    itself, 

a spiritual urgency at the dark ladders leaping. 

 

This beauty is an inner persistence 

      toward the source 

striving against (within) down-rushet of the river,   

      a call we heard and answer 

in the lateness of the world 

      primordial bellowings 

from which the youngest world might spring, 

 

salmon not in the well where the   

      hazelnut falls 

but at the falls battling, inarticulate,   

      blindly making it. 

 

This is one picture apt for the mind. 

 

A second: a moose painted by Stubbs, 

where last year’s extravagant antlers   

      lie on the ground. 

The forlorn moosey-faced poem wears   

      new antler-buds, 

      the same, 

 

“a little heavy, a little contrived”, 

 

his only beauty to be   

      all moose.

Young Relics by Emma Hine

Young Relics

They broke into houses,

my sisters. The empty ones,

just built, where nobody had yet

tried to sleep. Little mounds

of sawdust still in the corners,

no floorboards loose.

I imagine them being the way

I’ve seen them be with horses,

hands gentle on the walls—after all,

a house must learn to hold a family

with all its quivering systems

of energy and grief. I once saw Sierra

with a colt that wasn’t ready

to be ridden. She stood in the stall

and talked until his heart rate slowed.

All through our neighborhood

new houses were dark and panicking.

Enter sisters.

Bringing comfort where it wasn’t

supposed to be, no key for entry,

no light allowed, just a ritual gift

for the rooms alone to remember:

hands on their painted flanks.

Voices in the eaves.