poem name
stringlengths 7
245
| content
stringlengths 4
88.7k
| author
stringlengths 2
57
| type
stringlengths 4
411
⌀ | age
null |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Objects Used to Prop Open a Window
|
Dog bone, stapler,
cribbage board, garlic press
because this window is loose—lacks
suction, lacks grip.
Bungee cord, bootstrap,
dog leash, leather belt
because this window had sash cords.
They frayed. They broke.
Feather duster, thatch of straw, empty
bottle of Elmer's glue
because this window is loud—its hinges clack
open, clack shut.
Stuffed bear, baby blanket,
single crib newel
because this window is split. It's dividing
in two.
Velvet moss, sagebrush,
willow branch, robin's wing
because this window, it's pane-less. It's only
a frame of air.
| Michelle Menting | null | null |
The New Church
|
The old cupola glinted above the clouds, shone
among fir trees, but it took him an hour
for the half mile all the way up the hill. As he trailed,
the village passed him by, greeted him,
asked about his health, but everybody hurried
to catch the mass, left him leaning against fences,
measuring the road with the walking stick he sculpted.
He yearned for the day when the new church
would be built—right across the road. Now
it rises above the moon: saints in frescoes
meet the eye, and only the rain has started to cut
through the shingles on the roof of his empty
house. The apple trees have taken over the sky,
sequestered the gate, sidled over the porch.
| Lucia Cherciu | null | null |
Look for Me
|
Look for me under the hood
of that old Chevrolet settled in weeds
at the end of the pasture.
I'm the radiator that spent its years
bolted in front of an engine
shoving me forward into the wind.
Whatever was in me in those days
has mostly leaked away,
but my cap's still screwed on tight
and I know the names of all these
tattered moths and broken grasshoppers
the rest of you've forgotten.
| Ted Kooser | null | null |
Wild Life
|
Behind the silo, the Mother Rabbit
hunches like a giant spider with strange calm:
six tiny babies beneath, each
clamoring for a sweet syringe of milk.
This may sound cute to you, reading
from your pulpit of plenty,
but one small one was left out of reach,
a knife of fur
barging between the others.
I watched behind a turret of sand. If
I could have cautioned the mother rabbit
I would. If I could summon the
Bunnies to fit him in beneath
the belly's swell
I would. But instead, I stood frozen, wishing
for some equity. This must be
why it's called Wild Life because of all the
crazed emotions tangled up in
the underbrush within us.
Did I tell you how
the smallest one, black and trembling,
hopped behind the kudzu
still filigreed with wanting?
Should we talk now of animal heritage, their species,
creature development? And what do we say
about form and focus—
writing this when a stray goes hungry, and away.
| Grace Cavalieri | null | null |
Umbrella
|
When I push your button
you fly off the handle,
old skin and bones,
black bat wing.
We're alike, you and I.
Both of us
resemble my mother,
so fierce in her advocacy
on behalf of
the most vulnerable child
who'll catch his death
in this tempest.
Such a headwind!
Sometimes it requires
all my strength
just to end a line.
But when the wind is at
my back, we're likely
to get carried away, and say
something we can never retract,
something saturated from the ribs
down, an old stony
word like ruin. You're what roof
I have, frail thing,
you're my argument
against the whole sky.
You're the fundamental difference
between wet and dry.
| Connie Wanek | null | null |
Sunday
|
You are the start of the week
or the end of it, and according
to The Beatles you creep in
like a nun. You're the second
full day the kids have been
away with their father, the second
full day of an empty house.
Sunday, I've missed you. I've been
sitting in the backyard with a glass
of Pinot waiting for your arrival.
Did you know the first Sweet 100s
are turning red in the garden,
but the lettuce has grown
too bitter to eat. I am looking
up at the bluest sky I have ever seen,
cerulean blue, a heaven sky
no one would believe I was under.
You are my witness. No day
is promised. You are absolution.
You are my unwritten to-do list,
my dishes in the sink, my brownie
breakfast, my braless day.
| January Gill O'Neil | null | null |
Invisible Fish
|
Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk. Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the dying stone. Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers’ decendants, who are going to the store.
| Joy Harjo | Living,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Social Commentaries,History & Politics | null |
Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit
|
Don’t bother the earth spirit who lives here. She is working on a story. It is the oldest story in the world and it is delicate, changing. If she sees you watching she will invite you in for coffee, give you warm bread, and you will be obligated to stay and listen. But this is no ordinary story. You will have to endure earthquakes, lightning, the deaths of all those you love, the most blinding beauty. It’s a story so compelling you may never want to leave; this is how she traps you. See that stone finger over there? That is the only one who ever escaped.
| Joy Harjo | Religion,The Spiritual,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends | null |
The One Thing That Can Save America
|
Is anything central?
Orchards flung out on the land,
Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills?
Are place names central?
Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm?
As they concur with a rush at eye level
Beating themselves into eyes which have had enough
Thank you, no more thank you.
And they come on like scenery mingled with darkness
The damp plains, overgrown suburbs,
Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity.
These are connected to my version of America
But the juice is elsewhere.
This morning as I walked out of your room
After breakfast crosshatched with
Backward and forward glances, backward into light,
Forward into unfamiliar light,
Was it our doing, and was it
The material, the lumber of life, or of lives
We were measuring, counting?
A mood soon to be forgotten
In crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow
In this morning that has seized us again?
I know that I braid too much on my own
Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me.
They are private and always will be.
Where then are the private turns of event
Destined to bloom later like golden chimes
Released over a city from a highest tower?
The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you,
And you know instantly what I mean?
What remote orchard reached by winding roads
Hides them? Where are these roots?
It is the lumps and trials
That tell us whether we shall be known
And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star.
All the rest is waiting
For a letter that never arrives,
Day after day, the exasperation
Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is,
The two envelope halves lying on a plate.
The message was wise, and seemingly
Dictated a long time ago, but its time has still
Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited
Steps that can be taken against danger
Now and in the future, in cool yards,
In quiet small houses in the country,
Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.
| John Ashbery | null | null |
["Hour in which I consider hydrangea"]
|
Hour in which I consider hydrangea, a salt or sand plant, varietal, the question of varietals, the diet of every mother I know, 5 pounds feels like 20, I have lost … I have lost, yes, a sense of my own possible beauty, grown external, I externalize beauty. Beauty occurs on the surface of plants; the sun darkens the skin of my child, he is so small, he is beautiful (I can see; it is obvious) and everything about him is beautiful. His hand swells from the bite [spread?] of some insect[’s] venom because he is small. He appears to feel nothing. He smashes his skull against the floor. He screams. I hold him in my lap on the kitchen floor in front of an open freezer, pressing a pack of frozen clay against his forehead. He likes the cold. I see; it is so obvious. Hydrangea. When I move, when I walk pushing my child’s stroller (it is both walking and pushing or hauling, sometimes, also, lifting; it is having another body, an adjunct body composed of errand and weight and tenderness and no small amount of power), I imagine I can feel this small amount of weight, this 5 pounds like 20, interfering with the twitch of every muscle in my body. As an object, a mother is confusing, a middle-aged mother with little spare flesh, I feel every inch of major muscle pulling against gravity and against the weight of my child, now sleeping. This is the hour for thinking hydrangea. Let no man look at me. I stop to brush the drowsy child’s little eye. His face. He barely considers his mother. I am all around him. Why should he consider what is all around him? Perhaps what is missing is a subtle power of differentiation. I am in, therefore, a time of mass apprehensions.
| Simone White | Living,Parenthood,The Body,The Mind,Nature,Trees & Flowers | null |
Stung
|
She couldn't help but sting my finger,
clinging a moment before I flung her
to the ground. Her gold is true, not the trick
evening light plays on my roses.
She curls into herself, stinger twitching,
gilt wings folded. Her whole life just a few weeks,
and my pain subsided in a moment.
In the cold, she hardly had her wits to buzz.
No warning from either of us:
she sleeping in the richness of those petals,
then the hand, my hand, cupping the bloom
in devastating force, crushing the petals for the scent.
And she mortally threatened, wholly unaware
that I do this daily, alone with the gold last light,
in what seems to me an act of love.
| Heid E. Erdrich | null | null |
Nothing But Good...
|
I will not speak ill of Jack Flick.
I will rarely look
at the scar he made on my cheek
one summer at the lake.
I won't speak ill of Jack whose freckles
and gangly legs are gone.
So is the drained face I saw when he saw
what he'd done with a sharp rock
nonchalantly skipped.
I will speak well, for it was somewhat
sweet to lie on the dock while Jack
and his friends bent down
and wiped my face with a sandy towel.
I will speak well of them,
for most are gone
and the wound proved small.
I will speak well, for the rock
missed my eye. I can hardly find
the scar. Jack went into the air
corps, fought in one of the wars,
retired, and lived less than a year
before his tender heart gave out.
I will speak well of Jack.
| Sarah White | null | null |
How Quiet
|
How quiet is the spruce,
the wind twills
through the uppermost tier
of splayed leaves.
Now the song of a bird
like the squeaky lock
over a canoe's oar,
followed by startling chirps,
the sky pushing its clouds
like sailboats,
and I think, what kind of God
keeps himself secret
so that to find him out
we have to seek, as children do
for something like the beetle
scuttling between grass,
hidden in plain sight.
| Judith Harris | null | null |
Porcupine
|
You think we are the pointed argument,
the man drunk at the party showing off
his gun collection, the bed of nettles.
What we really are is hidden from you:
girl weeping in the closet among her stepfather's boots;
tuft of rabbit fur caught in barbed wire; body of the baby
in the landfill; boy with the shy mouth playing his guitar
at the picnic table, out in the dirt yard.
We slide into this world benign and pliable,
quills pressed down smooth over back and tail.
Only one hour here stiffens the barbs into thousands
of quick retorts. Everything this well-guarded
remembers being soft once.
| Kelly Madigan | null | null |
Summer Apples
|
I planted an apple tree in memory
of my mother, who is not gone,
but whose memory has become
so transparent that she remembers
slicing apples with her grandmother
(yellow apples; blue bowl) better than
the fruit that I hand her today. Still,
she polishes the surface with her thumb,
holds it to the light and says with no
hesitation, Oh, Yellow Transparent . . .
they're so fragile, you can almost seeto the core. She no longer remembers how
to roll the crust, sweeten the sauce, but
her desire is clear—it is pie that she wants.
And so, I slice as close as I dare to the core—
to that little cathedral to memory—where
the seeds remember everything they need
to know to become yellow and transparent.
| Cathryn Essinger | null | null |
Visiting the Neighborhood
|
The entrance at the back of the complex
led onto a road, where an upended couch
tilted into a ditch and a washing machine
gleamed avocado beneath pine needles.
From the end, you turned left and left again,
then cut a trail to find the cul-de-sac
of bright brick houses. We'd walk as far
as we dared before a man pushing a mower
might stop to ask, "whadda you boys need?"
That was a question we could never answer.
I loved the name of the place, White Hall,
imagined that each interior was a stretch
of marble perfect wall adorned by smiling
photos of the family. Our own halls
were brailled with nail holes of former
tenants, the spackled rounds of fists.
But doesn't longing clarify the body?
The boys I left behind: Tommy, wearing
the World War II trenching tool;
Danny, whose father, so much older
than the other parents, died in his recliner
one sunny afternoon while watching baseball;
Duke, who stole his mother's car and crashed
into a wall. Boys who knew when you were posing,
waiting for someone to say, "smile." Boys
who, on those latch-key days, held themselves
in narrow passages when no one
was there to show them what to do.
| P. Ivan Young | null | null |
scars
|
my father’s body is a map
a record of his journey
he carries a bullet
lodged in his left thigh
there is a hollow where it entered
a protruding bump where it sleeps
the doctors say it will never awaken
it is the one souvenir he insists on keeping
mother has her own opinionsbố cùa con điên—your father is crazy
as a child
i wanted a scar just like my father’s
bold and appalling a mushroom explosion
that said i too was at war
instead i settled for a grain of rice
a scar so small look closely there
here between the eyes
a bit to the right
there on the bridge of my nose
father says i was too young to remember
it happened while i was sleeping
leaking roof the pounding rain
drop after drop after drop
| Truong Tran | The Body,Family & Ancestors | null |
what remains two
|
it has long been forgotten this practice of the mother
weaning a child she crushes the seeds of a green
chili rubs it to her nipple what the child feels
she too will share in this act of love
my own mother says it was not meant
to be cruel when cruelty she tells me
is a child’s lips torn from breast as proof
back home the women wear teeth marks
| Truong Tran | Infancy,Parenthood,The Body | null |
West of Myself
|
Why are you still seventeen
and drifting like a dog after dark,
dragging a shadow you’ve found?
Put it back where it belongs,
and that bend of river, too. That’s not the road
you want, though you have it to yourself.
Gone are the cars that crawl to town
from the reactors, a parade of insects, metallic,
fuming along the one four-lane street.
The poplars of the shelterbelt lean away
from the bypass that never had much to pass by
but coyote and rabbitbrush.
Pinpricks stabbed in a map too dark to read—
I stared at stars light-years away.
Listen. That hissing? Just a sprinkler
damping down yesterday until it’s today.
The cottonwoods shiver, or I do,
every leaf rustling as if it’s the one
about to tear itself, not I.
Memory takes the graveyard shift.
| Debora Greger | Coming of Age | null |
Yes
|
Yes, your childhood now a legend of fountains
—jorge gullén
Yes, your childhood, now a legend
gone to weeds, still remembers the gray road
that set out to cross the desert of the future.
And how, always just ahead,
gray water glittered, happy to be just a mirage.
Who steps off the gray bus at the depot?
Sidewalks shudder all the way home.
Blinds close their scratchy eyes.
Who settles in your old room?
Sniffy air sprawls as if it owns the place,
and now your teenage secrets have no one to tell.
For the spider laying claim to the corner,
there is a stickiness to spin, that the living may beg
to be wrapped in silk and devoured,
leaving not even the flinch from memory.
| Debora Greger | Coming of Age,Youth | null |
Bounden Duty
|
I got a call from the White House, from the
President himself, asking me if I’d do him a personal
favor. I like the President, so I said, “Sure, Mr.
President, anything you like.” He said, “Just act
like nothing’s going on. Act normal. That would
mean the world to me. Can you do that, Leon?” “Why,
sure, Mr. President, you’ve got it. Normal, that’s
how I’m going to act. I won’t let on, even if I’m
tortured,” I said, immediately regretting that “tortured”
bit. He thanked me several times and hung up. I was
dying to tell someone that the President himself called
me, but I knew I couldn’t. The sudden pressure to
act normal was killing me. And what was going on
anyway. I didn’t know anything was going on. I
saw the President on TV yesterday. He was shaking
hands with a farmer. What if it wasn’t really a
farmer? I needed to buy some milk, but suddenly
I was afraid to go out. I checked what I had on.
I looked “normal” to me, but maybe I looked more
like I was trying to be normal. That’s pretty
suspicious. I opened the door and looked around.
What was going on? There was a car parked in front
of my car that I had never seen before, a car that
was trying to look normal, but I wasn’t fooled.
If you need milk, you have to get milk, otherwise
people will think something’s going on. I got into
my car and sped down the road. I could feel those
little radar guns popping behind every tree and bush,
but, apparently, they were under orders not to stop
me. I ran into Kirsten in the store. “Hey, what’s
going on, Leon?” she said. She had a very nice smile.
I hated to lie to her. “Nothing’s going on. Just
getting milk for my cat,” I said. “I didn’t know
you had a cat,” she said. “I meant to say coffee.
You’re right, I don’t have a cat. Sometimes I
refer to my coffee as my cat. It’s just a private
joke. Sorry,” I said. “Are you all right?” she
asked. “Nothing’s going on, Kirsten. I promise
you. Everything is normal. The President shook
hands with a farmer, a real farmer. Is that such
a big deal?” I said. “I saw that,” she said, “and
that man was definitely not a farmer.” “Yeah, I
know,” I said, feeling better.
| James Tate | Humor & Satire,History & Politics | null |
History
|
Of course wars, of course lice, of course limbs on opposing sides
to remind a body about ambivalence, of course orphans and empty beds and eyes
exiled for blinking in the harsh light. Of course Khrushchev gave Crimea
to the Ukraine in a blind drunk, and yes, land mines and burning skin
and of course organs, some members dismembered
to shake at strangers and their evil, and there is no way
to imagine that a man shaking a dried penis would ever utter the word darling.
Of course personal, add starch for pain, add bluing, of course hang
the laundry in the basement, there are thieves in the backyard, of course
departing trains, carload after carload of sorrow,
the man on top of a boxcar waving,
his rifle silhouetted against the white sky, its color draining
the way warmth left the Bosnian after he’d burned the last page of the last book,
knowing he had reached the end of something though it was not end enough.
Of course kisses, the stages of kissing like running borders,
endless conversations, stations of the cross, till even the promise of kissing bores you,
of course teeth gnashing, ethnic cleansing. The cynical will shrug off the past,
the future, the whole left hip of Ecuador slashed for six days of oil,
of course an X on the coats of the sick so they would stand apart
for deportation, of course rogue tumors over the body politic,
the same bodies that took Egyptian mummies and powdered them
to use as food seasoning, bon vivant cannibalism,
and yes civilized men tossed living penguins into furnaces to fuel their ships.
Of course partitions so that after the new territories were defined,
families had to line up on a cliff with bullhorns
to talk to their people on the other side,
of course courage, at times a weapon against yearning, surrender another,
a mother of course goes on setting the table, even if it’s with broken plates,
and a friend will say gently of course I want to ride with you to the funeral,
of course of course of course of course,
now then, negotiations, whatever,
palisades, the end of whimsy,
but then one evening though it is wartime,
a man climbs the hill to an amphitheater to play his cello at twilight
and history stops talking for a moment and sighs
while the melancholy of Albinoni
passes from heart to heart and each lifts a little,
the way passing a baby around a room can be sacramental,
and the memories of simple pleasures become more beautiful, the memory
of your joy on a highway to see in the next lane in a neighboring car
a clown take off his nose at the end of the day, the memory
of how your mother laid roses, sweetheart roses, on the cold grate of the fireplace,
and the sudden rain one afternoon in fall after you’d hiked far into the dells
and you huddled deep in your overcoat in the wet,
waiting out the storm with a sheep
that had come up to lean against your side
like a rock.
| Barbara Ras | History & Politics,War & Conflict | null |
What It Was Like
|
If they ask what it was like, say it was like the sea
rolling barrels of itself at you in the shadowless light of the shore,
say it was like a spider, black as night, large as a campesino’s hand,
a deepness that could balance a small world of dirt as easily as a gift
of gleaming red tomatoes held out to you eight at a time.
If they ask you how it felt, say solitary,
at first the ease of sleeping alone, warm without even a sheet,
then the nonchalance of a dirt road leading down the hill, its dust
raised and re-raised in plumes as each guest departed,
and later, say it was like the blind cat that came out of nowhere
to lie on your tile floor, lifting its face to stare with white marble eyes.
If they ask what you heard, tell them the single note of the watchman,
who coughed his one syllable when you went to bed,
and at the end of every dream when you woke with a simple plea—stay, go—again, the cough of the watchman.
If they ask about thirst, tell them no one could carry water as far
as it had to go, so that when it was time to rest,
people went to the spigot at the edge of the train tracks
and cupped their hands under the water, lowering their faces to drink.
Tell them a man could stand at noon in the park wearing nothing but underwear
and beg for hours with his cup empty.
Tell them you could sit quietly while phrases you didn't know you knew
rose up in the language there and on an undisturbed lake in your mind
you could back float—that weightless prayer that prays
Let me die with my toes pointing up at the sun.
When they ask what people will eventually get around to asking,
How was the food? Tell them batata, mamón, guanábana, maní,
indigenous crops exchanging places with hunger,
giving up to the dark store window whose inventory is one hand
of bananas sold one banana at a time, giving up to little pyramids of limes
by the side of the road and the kids who tend them, dreaming
of a few coins tossed down in the dirt.
| Barbara Ras | Money & Economics | null |
All
|
The prisoner can’t go any longer, but he does.
The beggar can’t go on begging, but watch—
Tomorrow he’ll be in the alley, holding out a bowl
To everyone, to even a young, possibly poorer, child.
The mother can’t go on believing,
But she will kneel for hours in the cathedral,
Holding silence in her arms.
The rain goes on, daily, sometimes, and we cry,
As often as not alone.
The fishmonger, the bell ringer, the cook, each
Can be corrupted in a less than dire way.
Nothing can replace the sea breezes you were born to.
Nothing can stay the shy ache in the palm
you hold out to the fortune-teller.
The concrete lions on her steps go on
Making bloodless journeys, they go on
Hunting in air longer than any of you will live to watch,
Hunting still after your futures become all irises
and blamelessness.
| Barbara Ras | Life Choices,Faith & Doubt | null |
Sleeping with Butler’s Lives of the Saints
|
After Octavio Paz
What’s most human must drive
an arrow to the heart.
Ghosts, too, must abide by this directive
& remain transparent,
going about their business in old houses.
Before I was an I, I longed to be ethereal.
Sprouting wings at will & gliding through
cul-de-sacs and malls around the valley.
My hands, too, would gradually disappear
followed by my arms, then neck & head
until my whole body was slight as allergen.
Before I was an I, I spoke an old language
that would return on drowsy afternoons.
Therefore I struggled to say
the simplest sentences. So much so
that the maligned semicolon
became an ardent ally, an island
of pause and the deep breath.
The comma, too, bless its tiny soul,
was the crumb which the god
of small favors multiplied
tenfold for my morning pie.
Before I was an I, knowledge
clung to me like burrs & hunger
guided my ship like the barefoot light on the sleeping land & sea.
| Eugene Gloria | Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets | null |
Hoodlum Birds
|
The fearless blackbirds see me again
at the footpath beside the tall grasses
sprouting like unruly morning hair.
They caw and caw like vulgar boys
on street corners making love to girls
with their “hey mama
this” and their “hey mama that.”
But this gang of birds is much too slick.
They are my homeys of the air
with their mousse-backed hair and Crayola
black coats like small fry hoods who smoke
and joke about each other’s mothers,
virginal sisters, and the sweet arc of revenge.
These birds spurn my uneaten celery sticks,
feckless gestures, ineffective hosannas.
They tag one another, shrill and terrible,
caroling each to each my weekly wages.
But they let me pass, then flit away.
They won’t mess with me this time—
they know where I live.
| Eugene Gloria | Animals | null |
Wilde's Tomb
|
But these, thy lovers are not dead.…They will rise up and hear your voice. . .. and run to kiss your mouth.
–The Sphinx
In the garden of Père Lachaise,
city of the dead, we passed angels
covering their faces in shame,
& nineteenth-century trees, with tops bowed
as if their only purpose was to grieve,
& crossed the Transversales to Wilde’s grave.
When lovers leave, they leave their kisses
glistening on the gray slab,
on impressions of lips themselves,
a tissue of strangers’ cells
the conservators cannot leave alone,
& scrub the graffiti, as the plaque decrees
by law, no one can deface this tomb,
& still the images of lips remain,
dark gray stains of animal fat
imprisoned in limestone.
Lips are pressed as high as lovers
climb, against the Sphinx’s ridiculous
headdress, on the carved trumpet
of fame, & on the cheeks of its voracious face
of mindless passion flying with eyes pinched tight,
that some farsighted lover tried to open
with lines from a red pen, like a blepharoplasty,
while others kissed its sybaritic mouth
to make a poem a prophecy.
So here is love alive
surviving the wreckage it survives,
a lipstick envelope of hearts on their flight
to some other place, less aware,
more receiving, a final Champ de Grâce.
| Michael Gessner | Poetry & Poets | null |
The Poem of Death
|
This is the poem of death.
There is only one
and no other.
Every one is an occasion,
one way or another,
and the last poem is this poem of death.
It is an occasion like no other.
I will no longer lope after elegance,
beauty’s body, or love’s wonder.
I will be sorry for everything
I was, and for everything I was not.
I speak to you as if you were my brother.
I will forgive everyone.
Death will make this possible.
There will be no other.
Death was in the mind
before thought or love,
in ourselves, and in our lovers.
The poem of death is speechless.
A companion will appear again
like another self, like your brother.
Enough now, enough has been said.
The spinning leaf will spin
like no other.
| Michael Gessner | Death | null |
The Innocents at Sandy Hook
|
Nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel,
or what life itself eventually reveals.
No more studies of kindness or courtesy,
nor grace or charity, all is needless now.
All is needless now, sky, world, family
grieving for their bundles of purity,
now beyond disgrace, failure, winter streets,
or whatever attacks, and then retreats.
Classrooms emptied of children’s things,
paper and paste, and love’s imaginings,
bundles of peace, Christmas-blessed
with the unborn and the dead at rest,
nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel
or what life itself eventually reveals.
| Michael Gessner | Sorrow & Grieving | null |
Fiddlers at the Desert Valley County Care Center
|
Among physicians rich in their death watch
In hallways crowded with locked wheelchairs,
Cradles of a century’s platitudes,
The stale air smelling of disinfectant
And weeping wounds enough to stupefy nurses,
Among the staring insomniacs of the day room,
The stroke victims on their rented gurneys,
Complaining orderlies and rattling carts
Among these in this place my father lay
At the end of everything
In the curved landscapes of white sheets
Abandoned finally by parents, his son,
The loyal company, old friends, his death
A sign of other deaths too soon to come
Unable to recall one life, his thoughts,
Features, he lay unknown to himself,
The tall hunter of pheasants out with his boy
In vellum corn and brassy orchards
In an autumn that never was, the proud
White-collared Ford employee lay on a bed
Too short for legs tattooed with red burn-rings
From daily syringes of Cytosar
Considered useless, still a requirement
For state funding for a body described
Leukemic waiting for Saturday's fiddlers
Who came to raise the spirits of the dead
With a music he never cared for turned
Suddenly attractive, he found genius,
Theirs or his like some lyrical phosphor
That shapes itself in the dry night air
To make a thing then make it disappear
He lay listening to the county fiddlers
At the end of every purpose, act and form
I leave you here, my father, in perfect accord.
| Michael Gessner | Death,Sorrow & Grieving | null |
Face
|
Imagine half your face
rubbed out yet
you are suited up
and walking
to the office.
How will your mates
greet you?
with heavy hearts,
flowers,
rosary beads?
How shall we greet
the orphan boy,
the husband whose hand
slipped, children
and wife swept away?
How to greet
our new years
and our birthdays?
Shall we always
light a candle?
Do we remember
that time erases
the shore, grass
grows, pain’s
modified?
At Hikkaduwa
in 1980 I wrote a ditty,
a sailor’s song
about rain
in sunny Ceylon.
I don’t know
what Calypsonians
would compose
about this monstrous
wave, this blind hatchet man;
don’t know
the Baila singers’ reply;
we are a “happy and
go” people
yet the fisherman’s wife
knows
that her grandfather
was eaten by the ocean—
fisher communities
have suffered in time
and what’s happened
now is just another feast
for that bloody,
sleeping mother
lapping at our island;
but what if the ocean
were innocent,
the tectonic plates
innocent, what if God
were innocent?
*
I do not know
how to walk upon the beach,
how to lift corpse
after corpse
until I am exhausted,
how to stop the tears
when half my face
has been rubbed out
beyond
the railroad tracks
and this anaesthetic,
this calypso come
to the last verse.
What shall we write
in the sand?
Where are gravestones
incinerated? Whose
ashes are these urned
and floating through a house
throttled by water?
Shall we build
a memorial
some calculated distance
from the sea, in a park,
in the shape of a giant wave
where we can write
the names of the dead?
Has the wave lost
its beauty? Is it now
considered obscene?
*
Yet tomorrow
we must go to the ocean
and refresh ourselves
in the sea breeze
down in Hikkaduwa
where it is raining
in sunny Ceylon.
Tomorrow, we must
renew our vows
at sunrise, at sunset.
Let us say the next time
the ocean recedes
and parrots gawk
and flee, and restless
dogs insist their humans
wake up, we will not peer
at the revelation
of the ocean bed,
nor seek photographs.
We will run to higher ground,
and gathered there
with our children,
our cats, dogs,
pigs, with what we’ve
carried in our hands
—albums, letters—
we will make a circle,
kneel, sit,
stand in no particular
direction, pray
and be silent,
open our lungs
and shout thanks
to our gods
thanks to our dogs.
| Indran Amirthanayagam | Sorrow & Grieving | null |
Order
|
Jesus did not ride that monstrous wave,
not Yahweh, Jah, Allah, none of the major
Gods or the minor ones, not even the godless
strode that bugger which sliced our lives
in two: the past where we danced ballroom
while the children played carom, and mangos
stained our lapels, and today, hobbling,
scavenging in ash heaps, how easy
the arithmetic, day and night, two by two.
Bring on the mind workers.
Let a thousand doctors bloom.
I lived right here on the x, my name
is blue: sea green blue blue green
I do not speak in tongues. I am not
disordered, a babbler. I did not lose
anybody close to me, just 30,000
fellow island bees, not to worry, machan,
old fellow, I will subscribe tomorrow,
the order of every day, skip and jump rope,
whistle, talk to aid workers, even swim.
| Indran Amirthanayagam | Faith & Doubt | null |
The City, with Elephants
|
The elephants of reckoning
are bunches of scruff
men and women picking up
thrown out antennae
from the rubbish
bins of the city
to fix on their tubular
bells and horn about
by oil can fires
in the freezing midnight
of the old new year
We ride by their music
every hour in cabs on trains
hearing the pit pat
of our grown-wise pulse
shut in shut out
from the animals
of the dry season
the losers and boozers,
we must not admit our eyes
into the courtyard
the whimsy of chance
and our other excuses—
dollars in pocket—
to write beautiful songs
is all I ask, God
to do right with friends
and love a woman
and live to eighty
have people listen
to the story of my trip to America
The elephants of reckoning
are beaten and hungry
and walk their solitary horrors
out every sunrise slurping
coffee bought with change
while in some houses
freedom-bound lovers
embrace late and read Tagore
about the people working
underneath the falling of empires.
| Indran Amirthanayagam | Travels & Journeys,Class | null |
Words for the Sri Lanka Tourist Office
|
The King Cobra slides
through our jungles,
and tucked in bushes
by the riverbanks
the grand Kabaragoya
holds court among lizards—
but if you want to swim
at Mount Lavinia, or fly kites
on Galle Face Green, or ride
horse carts in the Jaffna peninsula
of your ancestors, or bear a child
in Colombo General Hospital,
or sleep in Cinnamon Gardens
under a mango tree,
or beg in the Borella Market,
or ride for historical reasons
on patrol boats in the Bay,
or stilt-fish off Matara down South,
just remember here everywhere
there is only man burning
and woman burning
here everywhere
in shallow graves
in deep graves
floating out of salt water
washing down the sands
the dead have tongues
the dead have ears
tongues are speaking to ears
What are they saying?
What are they saying?
Tell us, brown bear
bolting out of your cave.
Tell us, leopard
leaning on your branch.
Tell us, flamingos.
Bend your necks
and pour wine pour wine
Hoopoes, kingfishers,
cranes, have you got your messages
on the bill, are you ready
to sing? Are you going to sing?
Monsoon.
Are you going to sing?
Monsoon.
Are you going to sing?
Monsoon. Monsoon.
| Indran Amirthanayagam | Weather | null |
Kiss
|
Kissing your lips
I try to forget roses
or the fruit of palmyra trees
sweet and strong
Tongue lolling upon tongue
heart beating
against heart beating,
these are my words
signifying our human bodies
which poetry does not capture,
the absolute desire I have
to kiss your lips
on this hot and sunny afternoon.
I do not know how much longer
I can walk about the garden
kissing roses,
or perambulate the toddy tavern of my dreams
where black faces and white toddy mix
in black and white memories
of Jaffna, Sri Lanka,
my Tamil countrymen
far away on an island across the sea.
Far away and far away
the palmyra fruit and your lips.
To drink toddy now.
To kiss your rosy lips now.
To uproot the roses in my garden
and offer them upon my tongue now.
To fly to Sri Lanka
and grab the last fruit on the tree
before history throws the Tamils into the sea
as is said it will do;
before all this and everything else,
before the apocalypse,
I do so sincerely wish,
though my words may not fit,
to rest my head in your hair
and kiss your lips.
| Indran Amirthanayagam | Realistic & Complicated | null |
hamsters are heads with little characteristics on the head, part one
|
in florida a giant hamster lays in bed worrying about its future
the hamster has bad eyesight
and many other problems
later that night the hamster drives its car around
listening to sad music; the master lightly drums its paws on the steering wheel
the hamster is alone
but not for long: at home three waffle friends wait
cooling inside a countertop oven in the kitchen
| Tao Lin | Pets | null |
hamsters are heads with little characteristics on the head, part three
|
in the evening the hamster sits at the computer
watermelon juice and coffee sit by the computer
the hamster drinks all of the coffee
after a few minutes the hamster drinks all of the watermelon juice
the hamster lays its paw atop a neatly folded to-do list; this is a resourceful hamster
with a strong will, a sincere and loving hamster friend, and a confident nature
we do not need to spend any more time or empathy on this hamster
| Tao Lin | Pets | null |
thirteen of twenty-four
|
notice how my forehead approaches you at a high speed
notice the contortions on my face; hear and feel the impact
of my forehead against your eyebrow
never get angry if someone doesn’t do things for you
react to disappointment by being quiet and nice
and alone, not by being confrontational or frustrated
in 1952 a DSM copy-editor removed ‘headbutting’
from the entry for ‘psychopathic behavior’
thereafter the headbutt has thrived
across all social, political, and elementary school gym classes
today the headbutt is a sign of friendship, stability, and inner calm
the exponential effect of your repeated lies makes me afraid what will happen
to us; ‘the perfect headbutt’ destroys both participants and impresses
even the severely disillusioned, and the phrase ‘giant poem’ reverberates
through my head with the austerity of ancient ruins, the off-centered beauty
of repressed veganism, and the lord of the rings trilogy
I forgot what this poem was about
| Tao Lin | The Body | null |
Turtle Came to See Me
|
The first story I ever write
is a bright crayon picture
of a dancing tree, the branches
tossed by island wind.
I draw myself standing beside the tree,
with a colorful parrot soaring above me,
and a magical turtle clasped in my hand,
and two yellow wings fluttering
on the proud shoulders of my ruffled
Cuban rumba dancer's
fancy dress.
In my California kindergarten class,
the teacher scolds me: REAL TREES
DON'T LOOK LIKE THAT.
It's the moment
when I first
begin to learn
that teachers
can be wrong.
They have never seen
the dancing plants
of Cuba.
| Margarita Engle | null | null |
Kinship
|
Two sets
of family stories,
one long and detailed,
about many centuries
of island ancestors, all living
on the same tropical farm...
The other side of the family tells stories
that are brief and vague, about violence
in the Ukraine, which Dad's parents
had to flee forever, leaving all their
loved ones
behind.
They don't even know if anyone
survived.
When Mami tells her flowery tales of Cuba,
she fills the twining words with relatives.
But when I ask my
Ukrainian-Jewish-American grandma
about her childhood in a village
near snowy Kiev,
all she reveals is a single
memory
of ice-skating
on a frozen pond.
Apparently, the length
of a grown-up's
growing-up story
is determined
by the difference
between immigration
and escape.
| Margarita Engle | null | null |
Ritmo/Rhythm
|
Mad has decided to catch a vulture,
the biggest bird she can find.
She is so determined, and so inventive,
that by stringing together a rickety trap
of ropes and sticks, she creates
a puzzling structure that just might
be clever enough to trick a buzzard,
once the trap’s baited with leftover pork
from supper.
Mad and I used to do everything together,
but now I need a project all my own,
so I roam the green fields,
finding bones.
The skull of a wild boar.
The jawbone of a mule.
Older cousins show me
how to shake the mule’s quijada,
to make the blunt teeth
rattle.
Guitars.
Drums.
Gourds.
Sticks.
A cow bell.
A washboard.
Pretty soon, we have
a whole orchestra.
On Cuban farms, even death
can turn into
music.
| Margarita Engle | null | null |
More Dangerous Air
|
Newsmen call it the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Teachers say it's the end of the world.
At school, they instruct us to look up
and watch the Cuban-cursed sky.
Search for a streak of light.
Listen for a piercing shriek,
the whistle that will warn us
as poisonous A-bombs
zoom close.
Hide under a desk.
Pretend that furniture is enough
to protect us against perilous flames.
Radiation. Contamination. Toxic breath.
Each air-raid drill is sheer terror,
but some of the city kids giggle.
They don't believe that death
is real.
They've never touched a bullet,
or seen a vulture, or made music
by shaking
the jawbone
of a mule.
When I hide under my frail school desk,
my heart grows as rough and brittle
as the slab of wood
that fails to protect me
from reality's
gloom.
| Margarita Engle | Coming of Age,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity,War & Conflict | null |
Napalm
|
I have come to realize the body is its own pyre, that degree
rises from within, the fatty acids a kind of kindling.
Like a scientist in a lab, this much I have established, blood jelled
like gasoline, the years spread before me like a map
pinned with targets, where I’m raging even now.
It works both ways. Clear the forests to see your enemies
and your enemies see you clearly. Like all effective incendiaries,
I won’t only bloom where I’m planted.
| Quan Barry | The Body | null |
vigil
|
And both the girls cried bitterly (though they hardly knew why) and clung to the Lion and kissed his mane and his nose and his paws and his great, sad eyes. Then he turned from them and walked out onto the top of the hill. And Lucy and Susan, crouching in the bushes, looked after him and this is what they saw.
—C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Tonight we will function like women.
The snow has gone away, the ice with its amniotic glare.
I clasp my sister’s tiny hand.
We will not turn away
Though spring, spring with its black appetite,
Comes seeping out of the earth.
The lion was sad. He suffered us
To touch him. When I placed the bread of my hands
In his mammalian heat, I was reminded
That the world outside this world
Is all vinegar and gall, that to be a young girl at the foot of a god
Requires patience. Timing.
The White Witch has mustered her partisans.
Because I am fascinated by her bracelets strung with baby teeth,
I will remember her as the woman
Who grins with her wrists. From my thicket of heather
I note that in her own congenital way
She is pure, that tonight she ushers something new into the world.
I cannot stop it. I cannot stop it just as in that other place
I could not keep the planes with their spiked fires from coming.
Though in this closed realm the smell of camphor is overwhelming
I have nothing but my hands to use
In ministering to the dead. Here too
My hands must suffice.
Hush now while I testify. They are shaving him.
The corona of his mane falls away
Like pieces of money. In the moon’s milk light
Her bangled wrists grin as she raises the blade.
Something is diffused. In whatever world he comes again
There will be women like us who choose to.
| Quan Barry | Animals,War & Conflict | null |
loose strife [Somebody says draw a map]
|
Somebody says draw a map. Populate it with the incidents
of your childhood. Mark the spot where the lake receded
after a winter of light snow. The stairs on which someone
slapped you. The place where the family dog hung itself
by jumping over the back fence while still on the dog run,
hours later its body like a limp flag on a windless day.
Draw a map, someone says. Let yourself remember.
In the refugee camp a hundred thousand strong
draw the stony outcrop from which you could no longer see
the plume of smoke that was your village. Draw a square
for the bathroom stall where Grandpa hid each day
in order to eat his one egg free from the starving eyes
of his classmates, an X for the courthouse where you and he
were naturalized, a broken line for the journey. Draw a map,
Jon says. Let it be your way into the poem. Here is where
that plane filled with babies crashed that I was not on.
Here is where I was ashamed. On the second floor
at Pranash University the people wait their turn. Have you
drawn your map, Jon asks. He has rolled up his sleeves.
Forty-five minutes to noon the Prince stands up and says
that the monks must be excused. We watch them file out,
saffron robes as if their bodies have burst into blossom.
Draw a map. Fly halfway around the globe. Here is the room
next to the library where you realize how poor your tradition is,
the local people with poetic forms still in use that date back
to the time of Christ. Tell us about your map. Explain
how these wavy lines represent the river, this rectangle
the school-turned-prison where only seven
escaped with their lives. This is my map. This star the place
where I sat in a roomful of people among whom not one
was not touched by genocide. Every last map resplendent with death
though nobody knows where their loved ones lie buried.
How many times can I appropriate a story that is not mine to tell?
The woman stands up and says she is not a poet, that she
doesn’t have the words. She points to a triangle on a piece of paper.
Here is the spot where she found human bones in the well
of her childhood home, and how her mother told herdon’t be afraid because it was not the work of wild animals.
| Quan Barry | Poetry & Poets,War & Conflict | null |
loose strife [Listen closely as I sing this]
|
Listen closely as I sing this. The man standing at the gate
tottering on his remaining limb is a kind of metronome, his one
leg planted firmly on the earth. Yes, I have made him beautiful
because I aim to lay all my cards on the table. In the book review
the critic writes, “Barry seeks not to judge but to understand.”
Did she want us to let her be, or does she want
to be there walking the grounds of the old prison on the hill
of the poison tree where comparatively a paltry twenty thousand
died? In the first room with the blown up
black-and-white of a human body gone abstract someone has
to turn and face the wall not because of the human pain
represented in the photo but because of her calmness,
the tranquility with which she tells us that her father
and her sister and her brother were killed. In graduate school
a whole workshop devoted to an image of a woman with bleach
thrown in the face and the question of whether or not
the author could write, “The full moon sat in the window
like a calcified eye, the woman’s face aglow with a knowingness.”
I felt it come over me and I couldn’t stop. I tried to pull myself
together and I couldn’t. They were children. An army of child
soldiers. In the room papered with photos of the Khmer Rouge
picture after picture of teenagers, children whose parents
were killed so that they would be left alone in the world
to do the grisly work that precedes paradise.
And the photos of the victims, the woman holding her newborn
in her arms as her head is positioned in a vise, in this case
the vise an instrument not of torture
but of documentation, the head held still as the camera captures
the image, the thing linking all their faces, the abject fear
and total hopelessness as exists
in only a handful of places in the history of the visible world.
For three $US per person she will guide you through what was
Tuol Sleng prison, hill of the strychnine tree.
Without any affectation she will tell you the story of how
her father and her sister and her brother went among
the two million dead. There are seventy-four forms
of poetry in this country and each one is still meant to be sung.
| Quan Barry | Poetry & Poets,War & Conflict | null |
loose strife [Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings]
|
Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings they were still there.
The upper portion of their faces long ruined but you could still see
the meaning in their hands,
palms once covered in gold. We knew better than to call them
by their names, Light that Shines Throughout the Universe
and His consort, but there were stories
of travelers lost in the foothills of the Hindu Kush and a distant
brilliance that led them home. The way a candle physically enters
your body after it has been
snuffed out. The pearly smoke suffused in the air. In one school
hundreds of miles away all the girls my age were poisoned,
and last week outside the capital
a woman like my sister was shot dead in front of a crowd by two men
who forced their bodies into her body and then judged her an infidel
so they could kill her
and be done with it. After the visitors were blasted I had a dream.
I saw a human man standing by a lake and no one was looking at him
directly. His image
on the surface of the water cleaner than anything in this world.
In my dream the man said, “Thousands of lifetimes ago
when my body was cut
into pieces by an evil king, I was not caught up in the idea of the self.”
Then in my dream someone picked up a rock and I woke up.
It took almost a month,
the great heads drilled with holes, then anti-aircraft tanks rolled in.
Each hundred-foot niche now empty but each cavity left shaped like us,
like a person. Before it happened
we talked about it. Grandfather said don’t they have a share in heaven?
Second Aunt said it was more realistic this way. God not in heaven
but in exile.
| Quan Barry | War & Conflict | null |
Craft [The first great poet]
|
The first great poet of
the crisis the one whose
generation was left as if
firebombed though if
you look back at the
seminal work you will
see that only a handful of
of the poems explicitly
touch on that dark time
the blood filling with
virulence and the night
always black and
spangled with stars says
when faced with
difficult material the
poet should begin
obliquely creeping in
from the edge a square
of light moving
imperceptibly across the
floor as the earth turns
and so I will tell you
that ever since I saw the
footage of the
journalists hiding in the
attic the rope ladder
pulled up after them
only the one with
foreign papers left to
stand her ground down
below the journalist at
first calmly sitting on
the couch but then
huddling in a cabinet as
the soldiers enter the
apartment next door,
the cries of the mother
floating through the
wall ib’ni ib’ni the
language ancient like
something whetted on
stone the way I image
language would have
sounded in the broken
mouth of King DavidAbsalom Absalom the
man-child hanging by
the shining black noose
of his own hair in the
fragrant woods of
Ephraim ib’ni ib’ni
next door the sound of
a body being dragged
from the apartment as
his mother wails
into the dark how
many mothers and how
many sons dragged out
into a night spangled
with stars where
everything is a metaphor
for virulence my son my son and ever since I
saw a clip of the footage
the foreign journalist
managed to smuggle out
of the country images of
the journalist herself
hiding in a space meant
for buckets and rags as
next door the soldiers
drag away a young boy
please hear it again a
child of no more than
twelve his mother’s
lamentations forever
seared in the blood of
this thing I call my life
but really what is it
what is this light I hold
so dear it wants to move
imperceptibly across the
floor as the earth turns
so as not to become
too aware of itself?
| Quan Barry | Sorrow & Grieving,War & Conflict | null |
Someone once said we were put on this earth to witness and testify
|
Nowhere in the Halakha’s five thousand years of rules
does it specifically state Thou shall not [ ]
but sometimes tradition carries more weight than law
and so for much of the past year we have not talked
about what will happen on Thursday, how the cervix
will start its slow yawn, the pelvic floor straining
as the head crowns, the fontanelles allowing
the bony panes of the skull to pass through
until, over the next 24 months, the five cranial plates
gradually ossify, the head forming its own helmet
as structures harden over the soft meats of the brain,
nor do we talk about the colostrum sunny as egg yolks
now collecting in your breasts, the thing’s first nutrients
already ready and waiting, the event just days away
and still we do not talk about it, the mass growing inside you
tucked up safe in the leeward side under the heart
because sometimes our god is a jealous god, the evil eye
lidless and all-seeing. Instead we will wait until it is done,
until the creature has been cleaned and wrapped in soft cloth,
the bloody cord that binds you severed. And maybe
you will name it Dolores, which means grief,
or perhaps you will call it Mara, the Hebrew name for bitterness
because this is how we protect what we love,
by hiding what it truly means to us, the little bag of gold
we keep buried in the yard, the thing we will do anything
to keep safe, even going so far as to pretend
it doesn’t exist, that there’s nothing massing in the dark
despite the steady light emanating from your face, a radiance
so bright sometimes I can’t look at you, the joy so overpowering
you want to shout it from the highest mountaintop
straight into God’s ear.
| Quan Barry | Birth & Birthdays | null |
crossing the South China Sea as analgesia
|
One day we will all be like this—the boat’s sickening pitch, & the delicateness
needless, consumable.
How everything here naturally passes into night, a room
w/o walls.
Could mindlessness keep us alive? Could bright colors?
Tonight I am thinking of the young woman who dreams of her father
being shot in the head. Imagine needing to believe the one you love
has been destroyed.
Now it is after midnight—the spindrift lunar & diaphanous. Here alone on deck
could I make peace w/it all in thirty seconds—the water’s inherent rising, the gasping
for air?
I have never seen such omnipresence, such vast dreamlessness—
but I too am such things.
What does it mean to be eroded? What would be the significance of slipping one leg
over the rail & straddling the indifference?
Yes. Once upon a time we spent three days on a boat out of Kobé, Japan.
All night the waves. All night the somnambulistic urges.
Or how as children we would swim in a hard rain—the lake’s surface ragged & torn,
but underneath
the roots of the water lilies like ladders
trailing down into the marvelous.
| Quan Barry | Travels & Journeys | null |
lion
|
Shagged-gold, at rest the great haunches
as if axled, fur sleeked like a butter rug.
In the Serengeti sun, the male’s harem
like a solar system, each lady kept
exclusive, her seasonal heat for him alone,
estrous belly pressed to the ground,
then the male’s riding her musculature—
throughout evolution the cat’s barbed penis
nicking his breached mate as he dismounts.
See the deliberate walk, cool as a criminal,
the multi-jointed forepaws placed consciously
even by the usurped king, his eye teeth blacked,
his tail rotted off, tired wag of a bloody stump
as he finally falls dying, the crucified face bedded
in its wheel of hair, the tawny miscegenated eyes
binocular in breadth. Shark in the long grasses.
Shark in the long grass. Smell everywhere, the gazelle
with its small-headed splendor gracing the plains
is ambushed, devoured, its horned bone rack
souvenired, the murderer’s ripping muzzle crimsoned.
In the despot’s sons’ palace of pure gold
the three in the iron cage lazing like statues.
When the American unlocks the hinged door
our shackled hearts contract. Unhooded and naked
we are pushed into their presence,
and for a shining moment the animals study us,
these fabulous aliens.
Here in a desert captivity
snatched from the baobab’s sour fruit,
their swagged bellies shifted, broken, and resignedly
the ancient drive rose up only in one—
its head wreathed beyond sorrow
as it slouched out of the habitual darkness,
the permanent rictus of its terrible mouth
pain-struck. The thing came toward me
with its ruined light, and I saw affliction in it.
Dream of mastery. Dream of being wholly consumed,
freed. I am the lion and the lion is me.
Then the American pulls us out.
| Quan Barry | Animals,War & Conflict | null |
Thanksgiving
|
Literally the thing has been gutted, a ragged gash
carved under its tail to midway up its chest, eyes
like stagnant water, horns intricate as a woodwind.
Where did the viscera go? Where do the viscera ever go?
I am in a car driving to the northernmost point
on this spit. Porte de Mort. Death’s Northern Door.
Literally where my grandmother lives. Her 89-year-old cousin
has just fallen out a window but is all right, the bruises
like stained glass. Enthusiasm. To be in God.
My grandmother says it is proof, and I nod my head
because I too would like to live in such a world
where an eighty-nine year old crawls out a window
and falls seven feet to the ground, in turn the miracle
of her body stained a deep blue, vitreous. In one room
of the unfinished mansion where we will celebrate the day,
the ninety-year-old matriarch sleeps in her four-poster bed
under the canopy of a wedding dress, its hundred eyelets
a fallacy. After dinner someone will hand around an indulgence
of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, the lady’s dark cheek
marred as if she has been scratched. Who at this table
fled the police? Who left that place in flames, the rubble
of infinite hearths? The deer’s eyes like perfect cataracts,
the evidence cooling. When I think of my room in the earth,
I can’t breathe. A friend of a friend recently hit a small bear
with his car. At the end of my favorite novel a bear
is dancing on a makeshift stage, the bear a grotesquerie
like the rest of us. No one stopped to help,
said my friend. Traffic barely slowed. I do not judge this,
or even the surreptitious footage of the workers
somewhere on the killing floor, stomping
the breast-heavy creatures with their rubber boots.
How we raise them not to fly, what should waft
gnostically through the air, the hollowness of evolving.
My heart is doing that thing again, saying climb the stairs
on your knees. I tell a friend a man halfway across the world
has been killed, torn apart by motorbikes, each limb
tied in a different direction. Could a universe be born this way?
One minute you are scarping the silvery bark off a birch
when it comes to you forever and there you lie
in the bed of a blood-smeared truck at a stoplight
on Highway 41 because this is the season of messages.
The man was a teacher. He taught girls.
When they came for him he told his children
not to cry. Then the men took out half his bowel,
the viscera steaming as they do, and they tied him
ingeniously in such a way that they tore him apart.
In that other place three million of us died. When I left,
I left them all behind. In the unfinished mansion
someone will ask me what I’m thankful for.
What to say? That one of the most beautiful things
I have ever seen was a paper nest secreted by wasps,
and that in the summer I would sleep under it,
the runnelled mass turning like a planet in the moonlight?
I will admit I was in favor of war and now look what’s happened.
At the end of the road the man driving the truck will eat
the deer. If I had to watch someone be torn apart by motorbikes
I would still be me, which is the horror of it all.
| Quan Barry | Family & Ancestors,War & Conflict | null |
Allowance
|
I am ten.
My mother sits in a black
rocking chair in the parlor
and tells stories of a country school
surrounded by ricefields
and no roads.
I stand in the kerosene light
behind her,
earning my allowance.
A penny
for each white hair I pull.
| James Masao Mitsui | Jobs & Working,Home Life | null |
Block 18, Tule Lake Relocation Camp
|
—for James I. Ina
1.
The emotion of trucks, buses & troop trains
brings them here,
to the wrong side of another state.
A woman at the Klamath Falls depot
calls it the wrong side of the ocean.
2
Crumbs hide around the table legs
in the mess hall,
dishes & silverware
clink a strange song.
Families talk across long tables.
Questions drop like puzzles
to the unfinished floor.
3
Blocks away from their new home
a woman finds a latrine
not backed up. Stands
in line, waiting her turn
in the wind. Down
the center of the open room:
12 toilet stools, six pair,
back to back. Sits down
and asks for privacy,
holding a towel in front of her
with trembling hands.
4
In a North Dakota prisoner-of-war camp,
surrounded by Germans & Italians,
a quiet man
hammers a samurai sword from scrap metal
at night in a boiler room.
A secret edge
to hold against the dark mornings.
He sends love notes to his pregnant wife
in Tule Lake
sewn in pants
mailed home for mending.
His censored letters
mention a torn pocket.
She finds the paper near the rip,
folded & secret in the lining.
White voices
claim the other side of the ocean
is so crowded
the people want to find death
across the phantom river.
Headlines shake their nervous words.
Out on the coast
beach birds print their calligraphy
in the sand.
It is such a small country.
| James Masao Mitsui | Realistic & Complicated,History & Politics,War & Conflict | null |
Painting by a Mental Patient, Weaverville City Jail, California, 1922
|
—displayed in the Weaverville Museum
It is the picture of a man who dreams
at night, his dreams a cartoon color
he can’t forget in his blue cell:
a fork chases a hard-boiled egg
across the smooth paper,
cheered on by an angry alarm clock.
The clock rings
and the artist knows it is morning
even though the iron cell
is in a basement with no windows.
In the center of the painting
the devil blows a whistle
and his pitchfork drips blood.
Above in the night
a man has taken off in a Buck Rogers spaceship
heading for a yellow one-eyed moon.
He grips the steering wheel in the open cockpit
and doesn’t look back.
In a lower corner
under a naked tree
a satyr sits and plays his pan-flute.
The notes weave all around the painting,
twist around a girl
dancing in veils.
The man who dreams all this
pulls at his covers,
drowses at the bottom of the painting.
The man who painted this
died in his dreams.
| James Masao Mitsui | Health & Illness,The Mind,Painting & Sculpture | null |
New Lines for Fortune Cookies
|
—after Frank O’Hara
You have been smiling across the table at your date
with a sesame seed stuck in your teeth.
You will gain sophistication, become accepted by Reader’s Digest, and retire in Puyallup.
In your next life you will be a teacher
and no one will ever call you by your first name.
After your next vacation you will come home
and discover that your neighbors have redecorated
in the style of Iowa trailer court.
If you feel like you’re getting old,
secretly plant zucchini in your neighbor’s flowerbeds.
Avoid people who iron their sheets
or roll their socks & underwear.
Painting and poetry and music will show us where we should
be going, not the senate or tv news.
The next thermos bottle you see will actually
be a listening device made in Korea.
All the people in this restaurant
are glad that they are not you.
| James Masao Mitsui | Eating & Drinking,Humor & Satire | null |
Spring Poem For the Sake of Breathing, Written After a Walk to Foster Island
|
The sky wants the water to turn grey,
but if I notice how waves
play with the clumps of yellow flags,
or the way turtles share logs,
or even try to understand a friend’s decision
to walk onto a glacier
and end her life—I will be ready
for any poems that have been waiting.
The horizon opens as I walk,
escorted by swans and Canada geese.
I need to stop backpedaling into the present.
In my old life people would straighten
the truth, but the river
flows in curves.
The names of my father and my mother
rest next to each other in Greenwood Cemetery.
The distance between me and the mountains
measures an uneven thought: I feel like an orphan.
An early moon is just a piece of change
in the softening sky.
Light is such an actress. Time to seek
Hopper’s wish to simply paint sunlight
on the wooden wall of a house. I am growing
older. Maru in Japanese means
the ship
will make it back home.
| James Masao Mitsui | Time & Brevity,Spring | null |
The Sweetest Oranges in Town
|
No, I am not deformed.
I wear these socks
Because I haven't any gloves,
And my fingers are bitten with frost.
They feel like stumps.
Luckily, I finished covering
The citrus tree with sheets of burlap.
Before darkness,
I will light a smudge pot
Near the mummified trunk,
Then anoint my hands in a blue salve.
Yesterday was cold
But the freeze is on now.
I must remind myself
Not to lick any cars.
Mr. Nishizawa, a house over,
Told me his nephew
Lost a fourth of his tongue
For that reason. Years ago,
The rosebushes were ruined to a freeze
And have never come back.
If needed, I will stay up all night
And pray, will let the hoarfrost
Burn in my chest. My grandfather
Ate the yield from this tree
After he died. I saw him.
| Rick Noguchi | Health & Illness,Winter | null |
The Breath-Holding Contest
|
That boy, the champion breath holder,
Kenji Takezo, lost his title
This year to Mack Stanton
A retired truck driver
New to the area.
Held in the town swimming pool
Thirty-five participants inhaled
Deeply all at once
Submerged the depth.
The contest went on into twilight.
One by one each person
Came up sucking air.
Kenji was the town favorite.
We wanted him to win again.
He trained so hard,
It was the only real talent
He had
Other than surfing and making
Trouble. When he surfaced
Second to last
Gulping the night
Then vomiting water,
We were disappointed.
He was doing so well.
He had his lucky twenty-pound brick
Cradled in his lap.
It kept him down.
But that trucker Mack was too good.
He read
Comic books, aloud, underwater.
We watched from the bleachers
His laughter bursting above him.
Kenji saw this too.
He never had anybody
Read to him
Not even his mother,
And he wanted to hear
What was being read
What his opponent found so funny.
| Rick Noguchi | Sports & Outdoor Activities | null |
The Ocean Inside Him
|
After Kenji Takezo fell from a wave,
The turbulence of whitewash confused
His sense of direction.
He breathed in
When he should have
Held tight. By accident, he swallowed
The Pacific. The water poured down his throat,
A blue cascade he could not see.
He felt in his stomach
The heavy life of the ocean.
It wasn’t funny, but he giggled
When a school of fish tickled his ribs.
He went home, the surf not rideable,
It was no longer there,
The water weighted in his belly.
That night, while he slept, the tide moved.
The long arms of the moon
Reached inside him pulling the Pacific free.
When he woke the next morning,
He lay in a puddle of ocean that was his.
| Rick Noguchi | Seas, Rivers, & Streams | null |
October, Remembering the Ride No One Saw
|
Steel horses nodding
In the petroleum field are beasts
That suck
The crude of earth.
They have lived here for as long as I
Remember. This moment,
I smell wild incense:
Heather, abducted by a desert wind.
Its growth hides
The rain-carved ribs of the foothills.
Evening swallows
The city fasting on late fall.
Years ago, after hearing the story
About a boy who lost
Both legs while playing on an oil pump,
I was dared to straddle one.
All my friends were there to watch
The Pacific behind me burning with dusk.
The brute lifted me to the sky,
Where I merged with the twilight,
A warm breeze embracing my back.
None of them noticed
The world stopped to breathe.
When I looked, they disappeared.
Nearby in pink-flowered bushes
Someone found
The girl who’d been missing for weeks.
They stood in awe, the body
Decomposing, while I rode
The slow bucking animal.
Two months later, off the same pump,
A man dove,
An imperfect swan into night.
He landed in the dirt gully
Breaking the soft, white wings
He never had.
Today, I catch in my hand
An insect charged with lightning.
It tickles
The obscure scoop of my palm
As I hold it to my mouth and explain
A wish so simple
By morning I will have forgotten it.
I release
The bug to a desert wind
That is racing toward the sea,
A brutal dryness in its wake.
Fire in the hills everywhere.
| Rick Noguchi | Landscapes & Pastorals,Money & Economics | null |
Human Knowledge
|
About the only thing I thought I knew
was that nothing I’d ever know would do
any good. Sunrise, say, or that the part
of the horse’s hoof that most resembles
a human palm is called the frog;
certain chords on the guitar of no mercantile use;
the abstruse circuitry of an envelope
quatrain; even the meaning of horripilation.
Sometimes on a flatland mound the ancients had made,
I took heart in the pointlessness of stars
and lay there until my teeth chattered.
I earned my last Boy Scout merit badge
building a birdhouse out of license plates
manufactured by felons in the big house.
No more paramilitary organizations for me,
I said, ten years before I was drafted.
I had skills. Sure-footedness and slick
fielding. Eventually I would learn to unhook
a bra one-handed, practicing on my friend,
his sister's worn over his T-shirt (I took
my turns too). One Easter Sunday I hid
through the church service among the pipes
of the organ and still did not have faith,
although my ears rang until Monday.
I began to know that little worth knowing
was knowable and faith was delusion.
I began to believe I believed in believing
nothing I was supposed to believe in,
except the stars, which, like me,
were not significant, except for their light,
meaning I loved them for their pointlessness.
I believed I owned them somehow.
A C major 7th chord was beautiful and almost rare.
The horse I loved foundered and had to be
put down. The middle rhyme in an envelope
quatrain was not imprisoned if it was right.
In cold air a nipple horripilates
and rises, the sun comes up and up and up,
a star that bakes the eggs
in a Boy Scout license plate birdhouse.
God was in music and music was God.
A drill sergeant seized me by my dog tag
chain and threatened to beat me
to a pile of bloody guts for the peace sign
I’d chiseled in the first of my two tags,
the one he said they’d leave in my mouth
before they zipped the body bag closed.
Yet one more thing I’d come to know.
He also said that Uncle Sam owned my ass,
no more true than my ownership
of the stars. I can play a C major 7th chord
in five or six places on the neck of a guitar.
A stabled horse’s frog degrades; a wild horse’s
becomes a callus, smooth as leather.
Stars are invisible in rainy weather,
something any fool knows, of course.
| Robert Wrigley | Coming of Age,Stars, Planets, Heavens | null |
Unfunky UFO
|
The first space shuttle launch got delayed until
Sunday, so we had to watch the shuttle’s return
to Earth in class instead—PS113’s paunchy black
& white rolled in, the antennae on top adjusted
sideways & down for better reception. That same
day, Garrett stole my new pencil box. That same
day, Cynthia peed her jeans instead of going
to the bathroom & letting Garrett steal her pencil
box. Both of us too upset to answer questions about
space flight, so we got sent to the back of the class.
I smelled like the kind of shame that starts a fight
on a Tuesday afternoon. Cynthia smelled like pee
& everyday Jordache. The shuttle made its slick way
back to Earth, peeling clouds from the monochromatic
sky & we all—even the astronomically marginal—
were winners. American, because a few days before,
a failed songwriter put a bullet in the president
in the name of Jodie Foster. The shuttle looked
like a bullet, only with wings & a cockpit, & when
it finally landed, the class broke into applause
& the teacher snatched a thinning American flag
from the corner, waved it back & forth in honor
of our wounded president & those astronauts.
| Adrian Matejka | School & Learning,Stars, Planets, Heavens | null |
Illinois Abe Lincoln’s Hat
|
blacks painted onto bricks & split vinyl on the East Side,
jaws as tight as window locks with the curtains drawn
& behind that diligent fabric: blacks already tucked
into homemade forts—folding chairs, wobbly backbones
& the whole, snowy world waiting outside like ghost
stories whispered around the last sputtering match. & later,
top sheets pulled up over heads from fear of mirrors
at midnight or some backfired beater’s rusty pop pop pop
after the key twists at the edge of the week. No doubt:
Tuesday is the scariest day in Section 8, but Friday is right
after it in the suburbs. & after those trembling weekdays,
even more blacks with money disappearing & reappearing
as unexpectedly as poltergeists inside of TVs & haunted
trees with fast fingers in West Side yards. & still not
a wavelength of any kind for a black to put in the bank.
The inks in everybody’s hatted & contracting checkbooks
don’t change black. Some front-row architecture might.
Some guns, too, & their loud, colorful opportunities:
whatever version of black is inside a fist around a grip.
Not a color, really—more like the face a man makes in
the glinting face of a gun pointed at him every single day.
| Adrian Matejka | Cities & Urban Life,Race & Ethnicity | null |
Collectable Blacks
|
This is the g-dropping vernacular
I am stuck in. This is the polyphone
where my head is an agrarian gang
sign pointing like a percussion mallet
to a corn maze in one of the smaller
Indiana suburbs where there aren’t
supposed to be black folks. Be cool & try
to grin it off. Be cool & try to lean
it off. Find a kind of black & bet on it.
I’m grinning to this vernacular
like the big drum laugh tracks a patriotic
marching band. Be cool & try to ride
the beat the same way me, Pryor,
& Ra did driving across the 30th Street
Bridge, laughing at these two dudes
with big afros like it’s 1981 peeing into
the water & looking at the stars. Right
before Officer Friendly hit his lights.Face the car, fingers locked behind
your heads. Right after the fireworks
started popping off. Do I need to call
the drug dog? Right after the rattling
windows, mosquitoes as busy in my ears
as 4th of July traffic cops. Right before
the thrill of real planets & pretend planets
spun high into the sky, Ra throwing up
three West Side fingers, each ringed
by pyrotechnic glory & the misnomer
of the three of us grinning at the cop’s club
down swinging at almost the exact same
time Pryor says, Cops put a hurting on your
ass, man. & fireworks light up in the same
colors as angry knuckles if you don’t
duck on the double. Especially on the West
Side—more carnivorous than almost any
other part of Earth Voyager saw when
it snapped a blue picture on its way out
of this violently Technicolor heliosphere.
| Adrian Matejka | Cities & Urban Life,Crime & Punishment | null |
from Stone: 24
|
Leaves scarcely breathing
in the black breeze;
the flickering swallow
draws circles in the dusk.
In my loving
dying heart
a twilight is coming,
a last ray, gently reproaching.
And over the evening forest
the bronze moon climbs to its place.
Why has the music stopped?
Why is there such silence?
| Osip Mandelstam | Stars, Planets, Heavens | null |
from Stone: 98
|
The clock-cricket singing,
that’s the fever rustling.
The dry stove hissing,
that’s the fire in red silk.
The teeth of mice milling
the thin supports of life,
that’s the swallow my daughter
who unmoored my boat.
Rain-mumble on the roof—
that’s the fire in black silk.
But even at the bottom of the sea
the bird-cherry will hear ‘good-bye’.
For death is innocent,
and the heart,
all through the nightingale-fever,
however it turns, is still warm.
| Osip Mandelstam | Time & Brevity,Animals | null |
from Stone: 103 The Twilight of Freedom
|
Let us praise the twilight of freedom, brothers,
the great year of twilight!
A thick forest of nets has been let down
into the seething waters of night.
O sun, judge, people, desolate
are the years into which you are rising!
Let us praise the momentous burden
that the people’s leader assumes, in tears.
Let us praise the twilight burden of power,
its weight too great to be borne.
Time, whoever has a heart
will hear your ship going down.
We have roped swallows together
into legions.
Now we can’t see the sun.
Everywhere nature twitters as it moves.
In the deepening twilight the earth swims into the nets
and the sun can’t be seen.
But what can we lose if we try one
groaning, wide, ungainly sweep of the rudder?
The earth swims. Courage,
brothers, as the cleft sea falls back from our plow.
Even as we freeze in Lethe we’ll remember
the ten heavens the earth cost us.
| Osip Mandelstam | History & Politics | null |
from Stone: 122
|
Let me be in your service
like the others
mumbling predictions,
mouth dry with jealousy.
Parched tongue
thirsting, not even for the word—
for me the dry air is empty
again without you.
I’m not jealous any more
but I want you.
I carry myself like a victim
to the hangman.
I will not call you
either joy or love.
All my own blood is gone.
Something strange paces there now.
Another moment
and I will tell you:
it's not joy but torture
you give me.
I'm drawn to you
as to a crime—
to your ragged mouth,
to the soft bitten cherry.
Come back to me,
I'm frightened without you.
Never had you such power
over me as now.
Everything I desire
appears to me.
I'm not jealous any more.
I'm calling you.
| Osip Mandelstam | Realistic & Complicated | null |
from Poems: 140 1 January 1924
|
Whoever kisses time’s ancient nodding head
will remember later, like a loving son,
how the old man lay down to sleep
in the drift of wheat outside the window.
He who has opened the eyes of the age,
two large sleepy apples with inflamed lids,
hears forever after the roar of rivers
swollen with the wasted, lying times.
The age is a despot with two sleepy apples
to see with, and a splendid mouth of earth.
When he dies he’ll sink onto the numb
arm of his son, who’s already senile.
I know the breath growing weaker by the day
Not long not till the simple song
of the wrongs of earth is cut off,
and a tin seal put on the lips.
O life of earth! O dying age!
I’m afraid no one will understand you
but the man with the helpless smile
of one who has lost himself.
O the pain of peeling back the raw eyelids
to look for a lost word, and with lime
slaking in the veins, to hunt
for night herbs for a tribe of strangers!
The age. In the sick son’s blood the deposit of lime
is hardening. Moscow’s sleeping like a wooden coffin.
There’s no escaping the tyrant century.
After all these years the snow still smells of apples.
I want to run away from my own doorstep,
but where? Out in the street it’s dark,
and my conscience glitters ahead of me
like salt strewn on the pavement.
Somehow I’ve got myself set for a short journey
through the back lanes, past thatched eaves, starling houses,
an everyday passer-by, in a flimsy coat,
forever trying to button the lap-robe.
Street after street flashes past,
the frozen runners crunch like apples;
can’t get the button through the button-hole,
it keeps slipping out of my fingers.
The winter night thunders
like iron hardware through the Moscow streets.
Knocks like a frozen fish, or billows in steam,
flashing like a carp in a rosy tea-room.
Moscow is Moscow again. I say hello to her.
‘Don’t be stern with me; never mind.
I still respect the brotherhood
of the deep frost, and the pike’s justice.’
The pharmacy’s raspberry globe shines onto the snow.
Somewhere an Underwood typewriter’s rattled.
The sleigh-driver’s back, the snow knee-deep,
what more do you want? They won't touch you, won’t kill you.
Beautiful winter, and the goat sky
has crumbled into stars and is burning with milk.
And the lap-robe flaps and rings
like horse-hair against the frozen runners.
And the lanes smoked like kerosene stoves,
swallowed snow, raspberry, ice,
endlessly peeling, like a Soviet sonatina,
recalling nineteen-twenty.
The frost is smelling of apples again.
Could I ever betray to gossip-mongers
the great vow to the Fourth Estate
and oaths solemn enough for tears?
Who else will you kill? Who else will you worship?
What other lie will you dream up?
There’s the Underwood’s cartilage. Hurry, rip out a key,
you’ll find a little bone of a pike.
And in the sick son’s blood the deposit of lime
will melt, and there’ll be sudden blessèd laughter.
But the simple sonatina of typewriters
is only a faint shade of those great sonatas.
| Osip Mandelstam | History & Politics | null |
from Poems of the Thirties: 286 [The Stalin Epigram]
|
Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.
But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,
the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.
Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.
One whistles, another meouws, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.
He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.
He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.
| Osip Mandelstam | History & Politics | null |
Love Letters
|
Many months have passed
since the diagnosis,
and you’re still grieving for her.
She’s not dead yet.
But she’s lost, like a child is lost—
her mind the ocean floor,
where she kicks up sand
and churns in the water.
Al, we call it, or AD—
never by its real name
as if mentioning the word would bring bad luck—
the need to cross one’s self across the heart,
throw back to the ocean half of one’s catch,
turn three times and pray to the East.
Papa’s and her letters,
written during their courtship,
are tied with a faded, red ribbon
and sunk in a safe deposit box at Bishop Trust.
Long ago, she gave them to you
for safekeeping. At the time
she exacted a promise from you,
that you would not read them
until she was dead.
We twist down the spiral staircase
curled like a strand of seaweed
into the cold room of vaults,
the heavy thud of door distinct as your sadness
following us everywhere. There,
you turn over the bundle of letters
in your hand like unbelievable money.
“I’m so tempted to read them,” you say.
You want her back,
the feisty and independent one,
the one who could, at eighty,
do ten knee bends in aerobics class,
dance a smooth jitterbug
and shuttle like the tide
to and from the house about her business.
Not this Elizabeth you mourn,
the one who can no longer reason,
who points and giggles at fat people
and smells, sometimes, like the ocean.
Time slides like Dali’s clock.
Elizabeth is surprised
that she once was married and had a husband,
that she once gave birth to sons.
| Juliet Kono | Growing Old,Health & Illness | null |
Shower
|
In her illness
Elizabeth believes we do this deliberately,
the washing of her body.
She blames me,
her Japanese daughter-in-law
for having made keeping her clean a fetish.
Angry, she says we do this to torment
her soul, the shower a hot
spray of needles we subject
on her moon-colored skin.
She hates it even more
if I’m there to wash her.
She wants her son,
the person she thinks of these days
as her lover, or husband, or father.
Memory and privacy,
she cries at their loss
as I soap her down like an old car.
What protestations!
And as I listen to her,
I think of these bodies
we have given so freely to men,
yet feel ashamed of
when in the eyes of another woman.
How she fawns
when she thinks a man’s around.
Today, she bangs the walls.
“I hate you! The water’s too wet!”
Hanging onto the safety bars,
she pitches back and forth
like a child,
wanting to be let out at the gate.
I wash her back.
She spins around
in my soap-lathered hands,
and loosening her face in mine,
she glares.
She sticks out her tongue,
and biting down on it, she squeals,
jowls swinging, arms jiggling.
Then, in a dive of both hands
between her legs,
she drops to a semi-squat, simian posture
and thrusts her pelvis bones forward
like mountains in an antediluvian upheaval.
In a gesture of obscenity,
she unfolds her petals
and displays her withered sex to me—
the same way boys moon, flip the bird
or grab their crotch and waggle their tongues—
the profane she feels but can’t articulate.
| Juliet Kono | Growing Old,Health & Illness,The Body | null |
Womanhood
|
When I was three,
a tsunami hit town.
“Daddy, Daddy, save me,
don’t let me drown.”
He saved me
and my common-type dolls.
When I was sixteen,
another tsunami hit town.
I cried to my daddy,
“Daddy, Daddy, please save me,
don’t let me drown!”
But he let go of my hand!
I still dance
to what broke on my life.
| Juliet Kono | Sorrow & Grieving,Family & Ancestors | null |
Homeless
|
My son lives on the streets.
We don’t see each other much.
Like a mother who puts white lilies
on the headstone of a dead child,
I put money into his bank account,
clothes into E-Z Access storage
and pretend he’s far away—
at a boarding school, or in a foreign country.
Nights, I dream fairy tales about him.
I dream he becomes a prince,
scholar or warrior who rescues me
from sorrow, the way he rescued me
when he was a child and said,
“Mommy, don’t cry,” and brought tea
into the room of his father’s acrimony—
brave, standing tall in the forest
fire of his father’s scorn. I wake
to the empty sound of wind in the trees.
He says he wants to live with me.
I say I can’t live with him—
boy whose words crash like branches in a rain storm.
Nothing can hold him in,
the walls of a house too thin.
Back home, I had seen
the “study-hard-so-you-don’t-become-like-them”
street bums on Mamo Street,
and he’s like them.
These days, in order to catch a glimpse of him,
I circle the city. One day,
I see him on his bike.
People give him wide berth,
the same way birds avoid power lines,
oncoming cars or trees.
I park on a side street.
Wild-eyed, he flies the block
as if in a holding pattern.
Not of my body, not of my hopes,
he homes in on what can’t be given or taken away.
| Juliet Kono | Parenthood,Home Life | null |
Bees Were Better
|
In college, people were always breaking up.
We broke up in parking lots,
beside fountains.
Two people broke up
across a table from me
at the library.
I could not sit at that table again
though I did not know them.
I studied bees, who were able
to convey messages through dancing
and could find their ways
home to their hives
even if someone put up a blockade of sheets
and boards and wire.
Bees had radar in their wings and brains
that humans could barely understand.
I wrote a paper proclaiming
their brilliance and superiority
and revised it at a small café
featuring wooden hive-shaped honey-dippers
in silver honeypots
at every table.
| Naomi Shihab Nye | null | null |
Burning Monk
|
From the remains
of his cremation,
the monks recovered
the seat of Thich Quang Duc’s
consciousness —
a bloodless protest
to awaken the heart
of the oppressor
offered
at the crossing of
Phanh Dinh Phung
& Le Van Duyet
doused in gasoline &
immolated by 4-meter
flames the orange-robed
arhat folded in
the stillness
of full lotus
his body withering
his crown blackening
his flesh charring
his corpse collapsing
his heart refusing to burn
his heart refusing to burn
his heart refusing to burn
| Shin Yu Pai | Life Choices,Social Commentaries,History & Politics | null |
Model Minorities
|
in the shooter’s
face, she recognizes
her sibling’s coarse
unforgiving hair,
his yellow skin,
& vacant stare,
the year her brother
broke down, she was
still in high
school, seventeen —
w/ a taste for cutting
not class but hands
& arms any outlet
to escape
this “community”
denies illness,
a family reacts —
against crying out loudlet it be some other Asian
in the shooter’s
face, I recognize
my sibling’s coarse
unforgiving hair,
his yellow skin,
& vacant stare,
the year my brother
broke down, I was
still in high
school, seventeen —
w/ a taste for cutting
not class but hands
& arms any outlet
to escape
this “community”
denies illness,
a family reacts —
against crying out loudlet it be some other Asian
| Shin Yu Pai | Family & Ancestors,Crime & Punishment | null |
A Day Without an Immigrant, Dallas, Texas
|
At Pearl Street station,
two brown-skinned men
in painter’s pants stand
out in a sea of white
I am just one more face
sticking out in a crowd
& it is my privilege
that prevents me from
understanding why
the workers want to know
how to buy one-way trips
the automated machine
sells only one roundtrip fee,
back to where you came from
he isn’t asking me for change
says it clear enough so that
there can be no mistakeSí. Yo sé.
But a dollar fifty is a lot of money.
| Shin Yu Pai | Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity | null |
Search & Recovery
|
For James Kim (1971 — 2006)
it could have
happened to any
of us
a wrong turn
down a logging road
tires tunneled
into snow
a man’s undying
love for his children
moves satellites
maps aerial images
eighteen care packages
dropped over 16
miles of the Siskiyou,
bearing handwritten
notes from a father
to his son
the signs
you left for those
who came after you
a red t-shirt
a wool sock,
a child’s blue skirt
layers of a life,
stripped down to
a family’s fate —
the weight of being
unseen — to travel
a path back to
what you knew
at birth, the warmth
of being held close
brought home
| Shin Yu Pai | Parenthood,Travels & Journeys | null |
from What the Heart Longs For When It Only Knows Heat ["We spend the afternoon together watching a docudrama..."]
|
We spend the afternoon together watching a docudrama about wild horses that roamed the ancient Arctic Circle. Surprisingly sleek, built for speed and not the weather, they were remarkable for their recklessness. They careen headlong down ice bluffs to fall into a broken heap. We can hear the small, tinny sounds of their terror as they plunge across vast, glowing glacial faces. All of this takes place alongside an abstractly relentless gunmetal sea. I can feel you turn to me, wetness marking the corners of your lips and eyes. I, too, am mesmerized, my vision limited to a sense of motion on the peripheries. Later, I am summoned for an impromptu scan and, miraculously, I pass.
| Sueyeun Juliette Lee | Animals,Photography & Film | null |
from Solar Maximum ["My skin crawls at odd hours of the day..."]
|
My skin crawls at odd hours of the day, a residual effect of my recent radiation therapies, how they inadvertently synced me to coronal flares. During my morning tea, at the gym, during the drive back home. A simple turn transforms into an avalanching pinprick of tremors one millimeter thick. I’d have preferred a suppurative response—one that collects under the skin—to this invisible, blistering, cracklesome lightning scar. One can’t choose the mood that gathers, the body’s response.
The brightest moments of the day rarely correlate to a discharge. Gray sky or blackness, a foggy haze aswirl between stars and nothing halts. Some moments tear my teeth.
The news feed portends rolling blackouts across the state. I read over the last of my messages: A blanket request for a plasma donation, Sasha asking if I want a ride to the wake.
| Sueyeun Juliette Lee | Health & Illness,The Body | null |
from Solar Maximum ["How much chemical disorder..."]
|
How much chemical disorder
can be survived depends on medical technology.
A hundred years ago, cardiac arrest was irreversible.
People were called dead
when their heart stopped beating.
Today death is believed to occur 4
to 6 minutes after the heart stops beating
because after several minutes it is difficult
to resuscitate the brain.
However, with new experimental
treatments, more than 10 minutes of warm cardiac
arrest can now be survived without
brain injury. Future technologies
for molecular repair may extend the
frontiers of resuscitation beyond
60 minutes or more,
making today’s beliefs about
when death occurs
obsolete
merely transitory evidence a stray boundary between
a much longer-lasting (invisible opposite polarities
feature the fields annihilate
the field tries to one another
repel the intruder rapidly
velocities directly shine in emission
visible shortly
in terms of before
brightness totality
| Sueyeun Juliette Lee | Health & Illness,The Body | null |
Three Blue Butterflies
|
I. MORPHO MENELAUS
Foiled acqua-
moiré wings the
butterfly’s beauty-
mark hydraulic in its
purposes his
hair’s flame lifts
you snarls you
II. MORPHO ACHILLES
Sea-bed in semaphore / an
eyepiece wing-span
delft dye vat-dipped shingle
scintilla : truant
and acclimate enfold
or infuriate: SOS:Don’t surroundDon’t surroundyourself with yourself
III. MORPHO RHETENOR HELENA
Neon heather sky-
lit bluer than moiré:
inseam of street
trash lush mask-
contour soul-
strait fungible
as raiment in the
crawlspace radiating
amatory birds’
egg bulls-eye
| Christina Pugh | Animals | null |
["Something I learned about agape when I was young..."]
|
Something I learned about agape when I was young: the Iliad tells
us fellow-feeling is finite in communities. Brotherly love becomes a
number that has to be divided among persons—so if you’re too kind to
others, that might explain your neighbor’s graft. I sometimes wonder if
perception is the same; if the quantity of percepts, or our trove of eidetic
things, is not limitless but rather constant: the measure, say, of a sunlit
field. So if we dip like deep-sea divers to the world, we’ll have to use a
purse-seine to sieve our sense impressions. We’re hoarding the image
at our peril. That bluest scilla smeared by a finger writing in the grass?
Endangered. Poetry’s work is not to ravish, but diminish.
| Christina Pugh | Poetry & Poets | null |
The German word for dream is traume.
|
The coal-dust hushed
parameters of the room.
Outside, my mother stitched
whole dresses for $3.00 a piece.
I slept in a bedroom
which faced the street.
A cheerleader was killed
in a drive-by that year.
She died in her sleep.
I watched the headlights
sweep overhead.
*
It felt like skin.
It did not
feel obscene.
When that boy
tongue-kissed me
and wiped
his mouth,
it was a coming
into knowledge.
*
When my mother whispered,Has anyone touched you there?
I had to pick.
Alan, I said.
I was seven.
The training wheels
were coming off.
Between the couch
and wall, the ceiling was white
with popcorn bits. The boys stood
and watched. I lay there,
my eyes open like a doll’s.
Someone said, Let me try.
He pulled down his pants
and rode on top,
then abruptly stopped.
The boys laughed,
said Shhh
and stood me up.
| Cathy Linh Che | Coming of Age,The Body | null |
Split
|
I see my mother, at thirteen,
in a village so small
it’s never given a name.
Monsoon season drying up—
steam lifting in full-bodied waves.
She chops bắp chuối for the hogs.
Her hair dips to the small of her back
as if smeared in black
and polished to a shine.
She wears a deep side-part
that splits her hair
into two uneven planes.
They come to watch her:
Americans, Marines, just boys,
eighteen or nineteen.
With scissor-fingers,
they snip the air,
point at their helmets
and then at her hair.
All they want is a small lock—
something for a bit of good luck.
Days later, my mother
is sent to the city
for safekeeping.
She will return home once,
only to be given away
to my father.
In the pictures,
the cake is sweet
and round.
My mother’s hair
which spans the length
of her áo dài
is long, washed, and uncut.
| Cathy Linh Che | Men & Women,War & Conflict | null |
["My father does his own dental work"]
|
My father does his own dental work.
A power drill and epoxy
and steady hands—
On Christmas Day, he mistook
the Macy’s star
for the Viet Cong flag.
While watchingForrest Gump, he told me
how he too carried a friend.
He squeezedaround my throat so tight,I thought I’d die with him.
| Cathy Linh Che | Home Life,War & Conflict | null |
My Mother upon Hearing News of Her Mother’s Death
|
She opened her mouth and a moose came out, a donkey, and an ox—out of her mouth, years of animal grief. I lead her to the bed. She held my hand and followed. She said, Chết rồi, and like that, the cord was cut, the thread snapped, and the cable that tied my mother to her mother broke. And now her eyes red as a market fish. And now, she dropped like laundry on the bed.
The furniture moved toward her, the kitchen knives and spoons, the vibrating spoons—they dragged the tablecloth, the corner tilting in, her mouth a sinkhole. She wanted all of it: the house and the car too, and the flowers she planted, narcissus and hoa mai, which cracked open each spring—the sky, she brought it low until the air was hot and wet and broke into a rain—
the torrents like iron ropes you could climb up, only I couldn’t. I was drowning in it. I was swirled in. I leapt into her mouth, her throat, her gut, and stayed inside with the remnants of my former life. I ate the food she ate and drank the milk she drank. I grew until I crowded the furnishings. I edged out her organs, her swollen heart. I grew up and out so large that I became a woman, wearing my mother’s skin.
| Cathy Linh Che | Sorrow & Grieving | null |
The Properties of Light
|
Mid-October in Central Park, one of the elms
has changed early, burning with a light
grown accustomed to its own magnificence,
imperceptible until this moment when it becomes
more than itself, more than a ritual
of self-immolation. I think of sacrifice
as nourishment, the light feeding bark and veins
and blood and skin, the tree better off
for wanting nothing more. I used to imagine
the chakra like this—a hole in the soul
from the top of the head, where the light of knowing
can shimmer through. In the summer of 1979
I saw that light shoot from my brother’s forehead
as we sat chanting in a temple in Manila.
He didn’t see it pulsing like a bulb in a storm,
but he said he felt the warmth that wasn’t warmth
but peace. And I, who have never been
so privileged, since then have wondered
if we believed everything because not to believe
was to be unhappy. I’ve seen that light elsewhere
—on a river in Bangkok, or pixeled across
the shattered façades of Prague—but it is here
where I perceive its keenest rarity, where I know
it has passed over all the world, has given shape
to cities, cast glamour over the eyes of the skeptic,
so that it comes to me informed with the wonder
of many beings. I can’t begin to say how infinite I feel,
as though I were one of many a weightless absence
touches, and out of this a strange transformation:
the soul ringed with changes, as old as a tree,
as old as light. I am always learning the same thing:
there is no other way to live than this,
still, and grateful, and full of longing.
| Eric Gamalinda | The Body,The Spiritual | null |
Zero Gravity
|
The dry basin of the moon must have held
the bones of a race, radiant minerals,
or something devoid of genesis, angel-heavy,
idea-pure. All summer we had waited for it,
our faces off-blue in front of the TV screen.
Nothing could be more ordinary—two figures
digging dirt in outer space—while mother repeated
Neil Armstrong’s words, like a prayer
electronically conveyed. The dunes were lit
like ancient silk, like clandestine pearl.
In the constant lunar night this luminescence
was all we hoped for. A creature unto itself,
it poured into the room like a gradual flood
of lightning, touching every object with the cool burn
of something not quite on fire. If we stepped out
Manila would be blank ether, way station,
a breathless abeyance. It didn’t matter,
at that moment, where our lives would lead:
father would disown one brother,
one sister was going to die. Not yet unhappy,
we were ready to walk on the moon. Reckless
in our need for the possible, we knew
there was no turning back, our bags already packed,
the future a religion we could believe in.
| Eric Gamalinda | Stars, Planets, Heavens,Sciences | null |
Factory of Souls
|
It takes just two people to bring the world
to ruin. So goes the history of love.
At the end of the day we tally the casualties
of war, victory for the one who gets wounded
the least. You say it’s time for a change
but I don’t know to what end, change being
just the skin of some incandescent creature
whose grotesque beauty is what we adore,
whom some people call love, whom we
venerate because it consumes us, slim pickings
for its huge soul. My people say, don’t look
or you’ll go blind. You say the end was always
just around the bend. I say all we have
is unconditional surrender to the future.
So unreliable is the past that I feel compelled
to leave unmourned the blind, relentless loves
that may have scorched into our hearts
the way the saints accepted stigmata. My people say,
look back or lose your way. Or, walk backwards,
if you can. So I found myself on a bus to New York City
to lose myself completely. Past Hunters Point
we hit the factory of souls—a thousand tombstones
from which a silk-like canopy of smoke rose to meet
God knows what—a spacious emptiness, the end.
I’ve heard the world’s never going to end.
I’ve heard it will go on and on, and we will be
as nebulous as Nebuchadnezzar, our live
not worth a footnote, our grandest schemes
no more than feeble whispers, all memory
shifting like the continental plates. In the future,
all science will finally come around; genetic
engineering, I’ve been told, will be all the rage,
and we will be a super race in a world
infallibly perfected, where trains run on time,
love never dies, and hope can be purchased
by the pound. It’s called immortalization
of the cell lines. We will choose what will survive.
Our destiny made lucid, we will find the world
contemplating itself, like the young Narcissus,
one hand about to touch the pool, his body
lurched towards that marvelous reflection.
I suppose we’ve always felt compelled
to desensitize our failures. My people say,
to go unnoticed, you play dead. I myself
may have chosen to forget a face, a name,
some cruel word uttered carelessly, but not,
after all the harm is done, intending any pain.
And many others may have chosen to forget me.
It works both ways. My people say, nasa huliang pagsisi: regret is the final emotion.
It’s what you see when you look back.
It’s what’s no longer there.
| Eric Gamalinda | Realistic & Complicated,Sciences | null |
The Opposite of Nostalgia
|
You are running away from everyone
who loves you,
from your family,
from old lovers, from friends.
They run after you with accumulations
of a former life, copper earrings,
plates of noodles, banners
of many lost revolutions.
You love to say the trees are naked now
because it never happens
in your country. This is a mystery
from which you will never
recover. And yes, the trees are naked now,
everything that still breathes in them
lies silent and stark
and waiting. You love October most
of all, how there is no word
for so much splendor.
This, too, is a source
of consolation. Between you and memory
everything is water. Names of the dead,
or saints, or history.
There is a realm in which
—no, forget it,
it’s still too early to make anyone understand.
A man drives a stake
through his own heart
and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia
begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves
and the leaves take over
and again he has learned
to let go.
| Eric Gamalinda | Heartache & Loss,Fall | null |
the luams speak of god
|
If there is a god, let it be the hyena
who plunges her mouth into the river after eating
our grandfather’s poisoned bait, who,
dark with thirst, poisons the river
unbeknownst to both of them.
Her ghosts stand in the street where we are called
already through “time” out of our houses. She tells
her stories. We tell her ours. We all clean our teeth
with what is sharp. She asks, Will you add this story to your stories of history & land & peace?
Yes, we will add this story. We ask her,Will you add these poems to your repertoire of songsabout hunger & thirst & fur? & she, being wiser than we,
says, Yes, I will sing them ifyou grant me your permissionto turn them into poems abouta mercy.
| Aracelis Girmay | Family & Ancestors,Animals | null |
Second Estrangement
|
Please raise your hand,
whomever else of you
has been a child,
lost, in a market
or a mall, without
knowing it at first, following
a stranger, accidentally
thinking he is yours,
your family or parent, even
grabbing for his hands,
even calling the word
you said then for “Father,”
only to see the face
look strangely down, utterly
foreign, utterly not the one
who loves you, you
who are a bird suddenly
stunned by the glass partitions
of rooms.
How far
the world you knew, & tall,
& filled, finally, with strangers.
| Aracelis Girmay | Youth | null |
from The Black Maria
|
after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden
Planetarium, born in 1958, New York City. In his youth, deGrasse Tyson was
confronted by police on more than one occasion when he was on his way to
study stars.
“I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium...So I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions. & all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was, hands down, the path of most resistance...Anytime I expressed this interest teachers would say, Don’t you want to be an athlete? Or, Don’t you wanna...I wanted to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of the people in power.
And I look behind me and say, Well, where are the others who might have been this? And they’re not there. And I wonder, What is the [thing] along the tracks that I happened to survive and others did not? Simply because of the forces that prevented it. At every turn. At every turn.”
—NdT, The Center for Inquiry, 2007
Body of space. Body of dark.
Body of light.
The Skyview apartments
circa 1973, a boy is
kneeling on the rooftop, a boy who
(it is important
to mention here his skin
is brown) prepares his telescope,
the weights & rods,
to better see the moon. His neighbor
(it is important to mention here
that she is white) calls the police
because she suspects the brown boy
of something, she does not know
what at first, then turns, with her looking,
his telescope into a gun,
his duffel into a bag of objects
thieved from the neighbors’ houses
(maybe even hers) & the police
(it is important to mention
that statistically they
are also white) arrive to find
the boy who has been turned, by now,
into “the suspect,” on the roof
with a long, black lens, which is,
in the neighbor’s mind, a weapon &
depending on who you are, reading this,
you know that the boy is in grave danger,
& you might have known
somewhere quiet in your gut,
you might have worried for him
in the white space between lines 5 & 6, or maybe even earlier, & you might be holding
your breath for him right now
because you know this story,
it’s a true story, though,
miraculously, in this version
of the story, anyway,
the boy on the roof of the Skyview lives
to tell the police that he is studying
the night & moon & lives
long enough to offer them (the cops) a view
through his telescope’s long, black eye, which,
if I am spelling it out anyway,
is the instrument he borrowed
& the beautiful “trouble” he went through
lugging it up to the roof
to better see the leopard body of
space speckled with stars & the moon far off,
much farther than (since I am spelling The Thing
out) the distance between
the white neighbor who cannot see the boy
who is her neighbor, who,
in fact, is much nearer
to her than to the moon, the boy who
wants to understand the large
& gloriously un-human mysteries of
the galaxy, the boy who, despite “America,”
has not been killed by the murderous jury of
his neighbor’s imagination & wound. This poem wants only the moon in its hair & the boy on the roof.
This boy on the roof of this poem
with a moon in his heart. Inside my own body
as I write this poem my body
is making a boy even as the radio
calls out the Missouri coroner’s news,
the Ohio coroner’s news.
2015. My boy will nod
for his milk & close his mouth around
the black eye of my nipple.
We will survive. How did it happen?
The boy. The cops. My body in this poem.
My milk pulling down into droplets of light
as the baby drinks & drinks them down
into the body that is his own, see it,
splayed & sighing as a star in my arms. Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars.
Maybe he will be (say it)
the boy on the coroner’s table
splayed & spangled
by an officer’s lead as if he, too, weren’t made
of a trillion glorious cells & sentences. Trying to last.
Leadless, remember? The body’s beginning,
splendored with breaths, turned,
by time, into, at least, this song.
This moment-made & the mackerel-“soul”
caught flashing inside the brief moment of the body’s net,
then, whoosh, back into the sea of space.
The poem dreams of bodies always leadless, bearing
only things ordinary
as water & light.
| Aracelis Girmay | Stars, Planets, Heavens,Race & Ethnicity | null |
Something Something Something Grand
|
I adore you: you’re a harrowing event.
I like you very ugly, condensed to one
deep green pang. You cannot ask the simplest
question, your hold is all clutch and sinker.
Cannibal old me,
with my heart up my throat, blasting on all sides
with my hundred red states. Hidden little striver.
How not to know it, the waist-deep trance of you,
the cursing, coursing say of you. Embarrassing today.
Curiouser and curiouser,
your body is a mouth, is a night of travel, your body
is tripling the sideways insouciance. The muscle
in you knows gorgeous, in you knows tornadoes.
In an instant’s compass, your blood flees you like a cry.
You put on my heat,
(that’s the way you work) I’m a bandit gripping
hard on the steal. The substitutions come swiftly,
hungering down the valley, no one question to cover
all of living. I arrange myself in the order of my use.
You’re wrong and right
at the same time, a breathless deluxe and a devouring
chopping down the back door. You slap my attention
all over the dark. What’s in me like a chime?
Sometimes, sometimes, I come to you for the surprise.
| Sandra Lim | The Body | null |
Pantoum
|
Taking on an aspect of the Orient,
Skies full of hatchets and oranges
Love, uninvited, hangs in the blood:
But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor?
Skies full of hatchets and oranges
Keep the birds singing, sorrows fresh—
But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor,
As the nights grow steadily into mountains.
Keep the birds singing, sorrows fresh—
The princess braids these into a necklace
As the nights grow steadily into mountains,
Why, even regrets recede unexpectedly.
The princess braids these into a necklace:
Roads and rivers that lead away from the palace.
Why, even regrets recede unexpectedly
In a solitude full of wars and songs.
Roads and rivers that lead away from the palace
Never converge in that vast landscape;
In a solitude full of wars and songs,
The words remain light and fugitive.
Never converge in that vast landscape
In the way that stars keep their distance.
The words remain light and fugitive
In an anticipation crossed with absence.
In the way that stars keep their distance,
Love, uninvited, hangs in the blood
In an anticipation crossed with absence,
Taking on an aspect of the Orient.
| Sandra Lim | Realistic & Complicated,Stars, Planets, Heavens | null |
Just Disaster
|
We stopped to watch the accident.
Fire! It had finally come to pass.
Just as surely as I was a coward
carrying a wolf. It stepped out from me,
it was paradise leaving me, running towards
the giant idea of that melting house.
So often you don’t think,
“Little nicks of monstrosity, I shall be splendid in it.”
| Sandra Lim | null | null |
Lucky Duck
|
Be large with those small fears. The whole sky
has fallen on you and all you can do about it is
shout, dragging your fear-ettes by their pinked ears.
They dance a number now: consequence without
sequence. Lovingly broadminded in their
realization and ruin, expert at the parting shot.
Not so small after all, we micro to
macro, swelling to the horror shows
lifted from the sly ways of life.
You, both scorched and shining in the terror
of the equivocal moment, its box of cheeky
logics rattling cold certainties out of bounds
and into the plaits of a girl’s desirous ends.
A little debauched, the flirt in a freckling,
wondering spun to falling comes to this
pert contract of a paradox: saying things
because they will do no good, ringing change
in frumpy mono-determination, fruity and fruitless.
Exploded out of shelter, the tides come roaring in.
Let in the hoarse Cassandras and the dull pain of the
storyteller. You’ve needed those eyes all along.
We thought them disconcerting at first,
but it’s the only way. You live here now
having exchanged etiquette for energy.
Don’t be clever, don’t be shy! Participate today.
Yesterday you say everything for their own sake,
and soon enough, tomorrow, you learn a lot from them.
| Sandra Lim | Life Choices | null |
End of preview. Expand
in Dataset Viewer.
This file contains nearly all poems from the Poetry Foundation Website.
Content All poems have a title and author. Most poems are also labeled with the tags as available from the Poetry Foundation Website. The word cloud above shows the most used tags!
Inspiration This dataset can be used for a variety of tasks related to poetry writing.
- Downloads last month
- 36