Miss you. Would Like to Take a Walk With You by Gabrielle Calvocoressi

Miss you. Would Like to Take a Walk With You

Do not care if  you just arrive in your skeleton.

Would love to take a walk with you. Miss you.

Would love to make you shrimp saganaki.

Like you used to make me when you were alive.

Love to feed you. Sit over steaming

bowls of pilaf. Little roasted tomatoes

covered in pepper and nutmeg. Miss you.

Would love to walk to the post office with you.

Bring the ghost dog. We’ll walk past the waterfall

and you can tell me about the after.

Wish you. Wish you would come back for a while.

Don’t even need to bring your skin sack. I’ll know

you. I know you will know me even though. I’m

bigger now. Grayer. I’ll show you my garden.

I’d like to hop in the leaf pile you raked but if you

want to jump in? I’ll rake it for you. Miss you

standing looking out at the river with your rake

in your hand. Miss you in your puffy blue jacket.

They’re hip now. I can bring you a new one

if you’ll only come by. Know I told you

it was okay to go. Know I told you

it was okay to leave me. Why’d you believe me?

You always believed me. Wish you would

come back so we could talk about truth.

Miss you. Wish you would walk through my

door. Stare out from the mirror. Come through

the pipes.

Improv by Sharon Olds

Improv

 

On the morning of the drive from sea-level

to the mountain, I asked if we could stop for melted

cheese! at the Mexican place in Truckee.

Then I worried, does Bob think I’m a diva?

Am I always asking for things? And I thought of Toi’s letter,

and I know she is the locus of a gift—

and I am too, a spiral of energy, a genie, a dust-devil,

I was born with it, a life force,

it does not belong to me, or to anyone else,

I’m the container of it, the guardian.

And I love to let it out toward people—

nectary nosegay gusts of it.

My mother would ask me to rub her back,

she said that I had Vivian Hands,

like her college best friend’s—

the palms of my hands would listen for what

my mother’s muscles wanted—as now,

I seem to be writing, but I’m listening for what you want,

it would be my joy to give it to you.

There is so much joy on the earth even as it is being dis-inhabited

by the other animals, and over-inhabited by us—as it is being

knocked off course and smoked and drowned.

While we have food, let us share it and eat it.

There is so much action required of us now.

And pleasure is required of us.

O my darlings, so much pleasure is required of us.

After Summer Fell Apart by Yusef Komunyakaa

 After Summer Fell Apart

 

I can’t touch you.

His face always returns;

we exchange long looks

in each bad dream

& what I see, my God.

Honey, sweetheart,

I hold you against me

but nothing works.

Two boats moored,

rocking between nowhere

& nowhere.

A bone inside me whispers

maybe tonight,

but I keep thinking

about the two men wrestling nude

in Lawrence’s Women in Love.

I can’t get past

reels of breath unwinding.

He has you. Now

he doesn’t. He has you

again. Now he doesn’t.

 

You’re at the edge of azaleas

shaken loose by a word.

I see your rose-colored

skirt unfurl.

He has a knife

to your throat,

night birds come back

to their branches.

A hard wind raps at the door,

the new year prowling

in a black overcoat.

It’s been six months

since we made love.

Tonight I look at you

hugging the pillow,

half smiling in your sleep.

I want to shake you & ask

who. Again I touch myself,

unashamed, until

his face comes into focus.

He’s stolen something

from me & I don’t know

if it has a name or not—

like counting your ribs

with one foolish hand

& mine with the other.

 

In A Dark Time by Theodore Roethke

In A Dark Time

 

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;

I hear my echo in the echoing wood—

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.

That place among the rocks—is it a cave,

Or a winding path? The edge is what I have.

 

A steady storm of correspondences!

A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,

And in broad day the midnight come again!

A man goes far to find out what he is—

Death of the self in a long, tearless night,

All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

 

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.

My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,

Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?

A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.

The mind enters itself, and God the mind,

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

Slant by Kay Ryan

Slant

 

Can or can’t you feel 

a dominant handedness 

behind the randomness 

of loss? Does a skew 

insinuate into the 

visual plane; do 

the avenues begin to 

strain for the diagonal?

Maybe there is always 

this lean, this slight 

slant. Maybe always 

a little pressure 

on the same rein, 

a bias cut to everything, 

a certain cant 

it’s better not to name.

My Crush Walked into the Library with a Woman on His Arm and I Almost Lost My 4-Year Chip Over It by Nicholas Goodly

My Crush Walked into the Library with a Woman on His Arm and I Almost Lost My 4-Year Chip Over It

I know how hysterical it sounds

I can’t convince you of the chase,

the sore run in the dark, you can’t know

how deep a thought will take you. I bet

Judas Iscariot was a generous lover,

would screw you within an inch of your life.

I’d invite this into my home,

a madness I could dance to.

We all want the same thing. A man

says Sylvia Plath was a handful.

I am her scorpion twin. If this is not

about desire, what is it? I am scared

to put my finger on it. You have it too,

not the reason you married him,

but the reason you won’t leave.

Vigil by Camille Rankine

Vigil

Long day’s night, the endless dream.

Hot night on the veranda, frog chirp, cicada scream.

Sharp night, a naked light, your voice come back over and over.

Howl shaking loose night’s woven threads.

Dog day’s night, cloudburst, rumble.

Night lifts its head.

Sloe night, lip sweat, steeped indigo.

Bright night’s incessant afterglow, and the day won’t take me back.

Twilight, not awake, not asleep.

Night the sky collapsed.

Solstice night hour after hour.

Waking and it’s still night:

Quarter to three, night’s heavy limb across my chest.

Night closing its capacious robes over me.

Unremembered night, the night I loved you best.

Nightingale’s song, your damp curls against my neck.

Night they put you in my arms.

That winter night, the early dark, your breath marking the air.

Night’s whispered name.

Night of helicopter’s drone and a punishing rain.

Night’s redaction, and a home turns ash and grave.

Watchful night, hand in hand, faraway pinprick of flame.