Mercy, Mercy, Me by John Murillo

Mercy, Mercy, Me 

Crips, Bloods, and butterflies.

   A sunflower somehow planted

in the alley. Its broken neck.

   Maybe memory is all the home

you get. And rage, where you

    first learn how fragile the axis

upon which everything tilts.

   But to say you’ve come to terms 

with a city that’s never loved you

   might be overstating things a bit.

All you know is there was once

   a walk-up where now sits a lot,

vacant, and rats in deep grass

   hide themselves from the day.

That one apartment fire

   set back in ’76—one the streets

called arson to collect a claim—

   could not do, ultimately, what

the city itself did, left to its own dank

   devices, some sixteen years later.

Rebellions, said some. Riots,

    said the rest. In any case, flames;

and the home you knew, ash.

   It’s not an actual memory, but

you remember it still: a rust-

   bottomed Datsun handed down,

then stolen. Stripped, recovered,

   and built back from bolts.

Driving away in May. 1992.

   What’s left of that life quivers 

in the rearview—the world on fire,

   and half your head with it.

  

Red by Mary Ruefle

Red

I fucking depended on you and

you left the fucking wheelbarrow

out and it's fucking raining

and now the white chickens

are fucking filthy 

Uncredited by Boris Dralyuk

Uncredited

 

No breakout leads—a prisoner of reruns

on local stations high up on the dial:

a stray recurring role, a guest appearance

on Perry Mason. Later, Rockford Files.

 

Her second act? Pure dullsville in Van Nuys.

Chablis with ice. A Chevy dealership

gone belly up. Her paunchy husband’s lies:

a broken marriage. Then a broken hip.

 

None of that matters, if you ever catch her

singing “How High the Moon”—silvery, misty—

on that one show… She isn’t any match for

the stainless Julie London or June Christy,

 

but through her gauzy voice, as through a sieve,

spare notes of heaven reach you from afar.

For those two minutes, she’ll make you believe:

Somewhere there’s music. It’s where you are.

Caw by Atsuro Riley

Caw

 

Whose branch this is I think you know.

By how my (question-marks as) claws inscritch the bark.

How my worry-work along this bough

runs back and forth (and copper-keen) and evermore;

I got mocked and nicked No-Fly Bird

 

 

not for nothing.

 

 

Not for nothing have I picked this oak.

Though not thicktrunk-ancient as some angel-oak,

it’s sure the highest of our high so suits my lack.

—Charred wings won’t lift; I’ve got no glide

nor span to speak of. Ain’t this my beat : my usual limb.

Ain’t this pecking (carking) pulse

 

 

my far and wide.

 

What Happiness Looks Like by Marge Piercy

What Happiness Looks Like 

Some things are ordinary but perfect:

drinking coffee on summer mornings

with you as the cats laze about, fed,

on you or on me or curled together

in the bay window on a sunny pillow.

Outside the weeping beech stirs

in the wind, leaves hanging down

like just washed long tresses.

We talk softly of the pending day.

This is all I would need of heaven

that I don’t believe in, but this

I believe.

Against Hell by Kaveh Akbar

Against Hell

 

With sensitive enough instruments even uprooting a shrub

          becomes a seismic event. So much of living is about understanding

scale—a tiny crystal dropped in a river turns the entire river 

 

                    red. The hands that folded me into my body were not punishing me

          nor could they ever be punished, while the hands of the idol sculptor

                    were cut off and tossed to the dogs. This is proof of something,

 

but what? Maybe that retribution has grown vulgar, with sin now

          inevitable as summer sweat. Most days I try hard to act human, to breathe like a human and speak with the same flat language, but often

 

                    my kindness is clumsy—I stop a stranger to tie his shoe and

          end up kissing his knees. I believe in luck and am barely troubled

                    by its volatility. I remember too well the knife held to my gut, the beehive

 

I once spat at for hours without getting stung. The charm of this

          particular dilemma: faith begins where knowing ends. The undertaker

spills his midday latte on a corpse, a chariot wheel flies off

 

                    and kills a slave, and nobody asks for a refund. The unexpected

          happens, then what? The next thing. I feel most like a person when

                    I am forcing something to be silent, holding a rat underwater or twining

 

shut the jaw of a lamb before it’s roasted on the spit. It’s only natural to smell

          smoke and feel hungry, to lean into the confusion of tongues. If I am

to be punished for any of this, it will be thousands of years too late. 

Brussels in Winter by W. H. Auden

Brussels in Winter

Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,

Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,

Its formula escapes you; it has lost

The certainty that constitutes a thing.

 

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled

Keep at this temperature a sense of place,

And in their misery are all assembled;

The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

 

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night

Where isolated windows glow like farms,

A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

 

A look contains the history of man,

And fifty francs will earn a stranger right

To take the shuddering city in his arms.