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My Mother's Penmanship Lessons

In her last notes, when her hand began to tremble, my mother tried to teach it the penmanship she was known for, how to make the slanted stems of the p's and d's, the descending roundness of the capital m's, the long loops of the f's crossed at the center, sending it back again and again until each message was the same: a record of her insistence that the hand return her to the way she was before, and of all the ways the hand had disobeyed.

Wesley McNair

The Air Smelled Dirty

Everyone burned coal in our neighborhood, soft coal they called it from the mountains of western Pennsylvania where my father grew up and fled as soon as he could, where my Welsh cousins dug it down in the dark. The furnace it fed stood in the dank basement, its many arms upraised like Godzilla or some other monster. It was my job to pull out clinkers and carry them to the alley bin. Mornings were chilly, frost on windows etching magic landscapes. I liked to stand over the hot air registers the warmth blowing up my skirts. But the basement scared me at night. The fire glowed like a red eye through the furnace door and the clinkers fell loud and the shadows came at me as mice scampered. The washing machine was tame but the furnace was always hungry.

Marge Piercy

[I would drive to your grave]

I would drive to your grave but your grave is the crash the froth foam pebbles small rocks the sand smoothed soothed each rising each leaving tide you lie in the ocean the water in the waves your home the stern the back the wake of a boat those curled white lines of leaving I would visit your grave but your grave is a single blue afternoon of passing isles the green and granite shores I would come to your grave but your grave is the fire oh mother it is cold tonight and I have no heart for this burning for the fine sift of ash which is all that comes back all that comes after I would visit your house but your things are missing are missing your touch as your eyes failed I brought you lights and I would see again that brightness I would drive to your grave but I am your grave your marker oh mother I am your stone

Leslie Harrison

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

[Wilt thou play with him as with a bird]

For I have loved the blade with all my crippled with all my awkward soul loved it for the shine sheen for the ease and grace of doing what it was made to do for I have loved the stubborn womb its beloved intent have loved the hope and then learned to love the lack for I have loved the water the way it comes to me comes for me in all its liquid mystery for I have loved what the water loves its myriad vessels sky basin runnel channel and vein for all it claims and contains for I have loved its muscular flex its rise coil and fall so like Leviathan's mighty desperate heart for I have loved Leviathan for being only for being exactly what god hated and what he made for being water's own knife this wild unholy blade

Leslie Harrison

Love,Heartache & Loss,Religion,Christianity,Faith & Doubt

[Stutter]

I said love because it came closest said leave because you did we do this peeling off each from each each from suddenly other said come back but meant don't go I said dead and meant every one of those instances of vanishment how the dead swim away from us in time their tide their closed wooden boats I said tide but tide was never right said tide because we have no word for that kind of unforgiving away I said tether when I meant anchor when I meant stay but when I said stay one thing I meant was against confusion against yet another loss I meant two-faced Janus January's god of fallen gates of trying to look both ways and when I said farewell I meant again don't go but it was too late I was here in the hall this tunnel full of mirrors glass and strange made-up faces and when I thought funhouse I meant its opposite I meant this rusty carnival town the men so sad they paint their smiles in place they paint their faces white paint their eyes wide and full of crying

Leslie Harrison

Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Relationships,Men & Women,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics

[That]

That this is the morning in which nothing much that the sky is still there and the water dresses accordingly that only at night does the water rest vanish from sight that the stars are too small too far to register there that all our names too are writ invisibly on water that abiding requires more hope than I can possibly acquire that hope is not a thing with feathers that hope is a thing with a fist a thin crust sketched over oceans that hope is what despair uses for bait come in hope says the water's fine that hope is the blood with which you write letters that start dear sea dear ocean stop asking so fucking much that hope is a telegram delivered by men in pairs men in uniform a telegram that says missing stop that says once again presumed lost stop

Leslie Harrison

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving

Coquí

One tiny tree frog with big eyes sings happily, “Kokee! Kokee!” His brother comes to bother. Coquí doesn't push him. Coquí doesn't bite him. Coquí tells him, “Kokee-Kee! Kokee-Kee!” Two tiny tree frogs with big eyes sing happily, “Kokee! Kokee!”

Carmen Bernier-Grand

Nature,Animals

The Vanity of the Dragonfly

The dragonfly at rest on the doorbell— too weak to ring and glad of it, but well mannered and cautious, thinking it best to observe us quietly before flying in, and who knows if he will find the way out? Cautious of traps, this one. A winged cross, plain, the body straight as a thermometer, the old glass kind that could kill us with mercury if our teeth did not respect its brittle body. Slim as an eel but a solitary glider, a pilot without bombs or weapons, and wings clear and small as a wish to see over our heads, to see the whole picture. And when our gaze grazes over it and moves on, the dragonfly changes its clothes, sheds its old skin, shriveled like laundry, and steps forth, polished black, with two circles buttoned like epaulettes taking the last space at the edge of its eyes.

Nancy Willard

God, God

We dressed for church. I had a white hat and white gloves when I was fifteen, no joke. You had to do that to show God you cared. God's eyes were stained glass, and his voice was pipe organ. He was immortal, invisible, while my panty-hose itched and my atheist father chewed his tongue and threatened to run out the door but didn't for my mother's sake, and she swallowed her fate, this marriage, like a communion cracker, and my brain- damaged brother lurched around the church nursery, and my sweeter sister watched me with huge brown eyes to see what I'd do next. My God, why did I turn my eyes upward when we were all there, then, in the flesh? I am so sorry about God, sorry we fastened that word to the sky. God's not even legal in Hebrew. If you get the vowel caught between the two consonants of your lips, it can carry you dangerously up like a balloon over what you'd give anything to be in the middle of, now.

Fleda Brown

For Elizabeth, Who Loved to Square Dance

I wore Grandma Liz's pearls for play, a plastic strand long enough to pool on the carpet over my stubbed toes. When I pull them over my head now, I smell phantoms: cigarettes, Esteé Lauder. I don't smoke or spritz on perfume. I don't layer polyester or perm my hair. I've slipped off my wedding ring as she did, signed divorce. What advice would she offer for life between husbands? Wear redlipstick and always leave it behind.

Christine Stewart-Nuñez

Midnight Snow

Outside in the creek that feeds the lake and never freezes, an otter slaps the water with his paw to feel the current's pulse—Slip in, lie back. Slip in, lie back. He shuts his eyes and obeys, knowing the layers of hair and underfur will warm him while he floats on a faith we wish could carry us. The sound of his splashing fades, but not his joy in being pushed, light as driftwood, back to the mouth of the den I have seen carved out beneath the roots of a fallen fir now packed with snow and lined with leaves that promise his sleep will be deep. Because no dreams wait softly for me, I open the woodstove and strike a match, hold the bloom of the flame to kindling that catches quick as my wish: To be that slick body sliding into the lake that holds the moon, bright portal to glide through without so much as a shiver, no doubt about where I'm going, how to get there.

James Crews

Aquarium

The fish are drifting calmly in their tank between the green reeds, lit by a white glow that passes for the sun. Blindly, the blank glass that holds them in displays their slow progress from end to end, familiar rocks set into the gravel, murmuring rows of filters, a universe the flying fox and glass cats, Congo tetras, bristle-nose pleocostemus all take for granted. Yet the platys, gold and red, persist in leaping occasionally, as if they can't quite let alone a possibility—of wings, maybe, once they reach the air? They die on the rug. We find them there, eyes open in surprise.

Kim Addonizio

From where I stand

at the third floor window of the tenement, the street looks shiny. It has been washed and rinsed by rain. Beyond the silver streaks of the streetcar tracks a single streetlight stands in a pool of wet light. It is night. St. Louis. Nineteen forty-seven. I have just come home from the orphanage to stay. Years later, I will be another person. I will almost not remember this summerónot at all. But for nowówith the streetlight reflecting an aura on the wet sidewalk, with dark behind me in the dirty two rooms we call home, for now, I see it all. Tomorrow I will begin to try to forget. But in this moment everything is clear: who I am, where I am, and the clean place that I have left behind. As clear as the streetlight: how distinct its limits in the vast dark and the rain.

Pat Schneider

Monopoly

We used to play, long before we bought real houses. A roll of the dice could send a girl to jail. The money was pink, blue, gold, as well as green, and we could own a whole railroad or speculate in hotels where others dreaded staying: the cost was extortionary. At last one person would own everything, every teaspoon in the dining car, every spike driven into the planks by immigrants, every crooked mayor. But then, with only the clothes on our backs, we ran outside, laughing.

Connie Wanek

Final Shirt

After my father died, my mother and my sisters picked the shirt, the tie; he had just the one suit. I left them to it, I didn't want to choose, I loved him all those years. They took a shirt from the closet, I don't remember which one, I'm sure he had worn it to church and hung it up again. They held a tie against the cloth of the shirt. They decided, finally. It's like that. Things come down to the pale blue or the white, or some other. Someone buttoned it over him, those buttons he had unbuttoned.

Marjorie Saiser

The Day

We walked at the edge of the sea, the dog, still young then, running ahead of us. Few people. Gulls. A flock of pelicans circled beyond the swells, then closed their wings and dropped head-long into the dazzle of light and sea. You clapped your hands; the day grew brilliant. Later we sat at a small table with wine and food that tasted of the sea. A perfect day, we said to one another, so that even when the day ended and the lights of houses among the hills came on like a scattering of embers, we watched it leave without regret. That night, easing myself toward sleep, I thought how blindly we stumble ahead with such hope, a light flares briefly—Ah, Happiness! then we turn and go on our way again. But happiness, too, goes on its way, and years from where we were, I lie awake in the dark and suddenly it returns— that day by the sea, that happiness, though it is not the same happiness, not the same darkness.

Peter Everwine

An After Hour

When one thing is becoming another, when writing is morphing, when the writing of an hour becomes the desire to write at all hours and into the night, fueled on caffeine or wine and desiring instruments of writing; typewriters, even a nib and ink well, and considering all the ways of stretching a space, digital or hard copy; hard copy, an ugly expression for printed matter, and for that matter, printed matter is efficient but lacks beauty. Page, a soft and elongated word; page, an extension at the end of my fingers; page, a screen that holds dreams and desires; the page of legal document that bind. The page is a promise. I read all sides, turning the page counterclockwise and turning the page over for what I may have missed. Desire is a stick for scratching words into the dirt and for chiseling stone until the words become solid. The pen is a body, an anatomy, not an earthworm with indecipherable ends; the pen has a head and tail, and inky guts. And the brain of the pen belongs to the maker of marks. later hours/another hour/late hours/early hours/happy hour/visiting hours. All the elements of the dying hour surround my laptop, in the dying blades of cut grass and in the dying battery. Finches continue their making of a nest of twigs and grasses, but I know the nest is early paper, the raw ingredients and pulp. I know the world is a page turner, a paper globe, and I know that the birds are the great writers of the sky.

Brenda Coultas

Living,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Relaxing or Voluntarily Having Dumb, Unpleasant Experiences

Some people like to relax and kick back with their friends just talking and having a drink which is obviously highly pleasurable. Some people like to be entertained by music or a movie; some people like to make some jokes with people they like, maybe at a bar or at someone’s house. Some people like to lay around with another person, just touching, or to prepare food, alone or with others while listening to music that they feel a particular affinity for. But sometimes people like to thrust themselves into the howling wind and snow, arms tied behind their backs. I prefer to open my mouth wide open knowing what will happen if I’m just holding my mouth open, ready to respond or yell or whatever seems appropriate. You know, I keep my mouth at the ready to make a lot of noise. And sometimes it becomes filled with hard packed snow or with sand, sand being more of a problem, since, you know, it won’t melt.

Marie Buck

Activities,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Graduation Day

Drawn by ceremonial obligation up from sleep I woke and stepped into the borrowed black robes all ghost bureaucrats trained to redirect dreaming pretend we do not like to wear. I drove my black car to the stadium to sit on stage and be watched watching young expectant spirits one by one with dread certainty pass before me, clouded in their names. Then listened to no one in their speeches say you’re welcome for allowing us not to tell you it’s already too late to learn anything or defend whatever accidental instrument in us causes all these useless thoughts. Like if you walked for hours through the vast black avenues of those server farms all of us with our endless attention built, you could almost feel the same peaceful disinterest as when your parents talking and smoking raised their heads for a moment to smile and tell you go back upstairs and read the book you love about myths that explain weather and death. Now it is almost June and they are finally the children they always were. So more precise than anyone has ever had to be, go forget everything we told you so you can fix what we kept destroying by calling the future.

Matthew Zapruder

Living,Coming of Age,Youth,Activities,School & Learning,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Graduation

Picking up Your Spilled Pills off the Floor Is Briefly Humbling

I was humbled when my boss mocked me for calling from vacation I’m broke again until Friday from my bed I see the lights, I see the party lights it’s torture a post-Fordist allegory? I appropriated a corporate apology and saved it in case something happened but my end date came and my vacation days paid out I bought pills from the intern I’d hired on my way out by the seaport I texted you we made plans to drink I like your poochie print workout clothes the credit card you keep for emergencies I bought a book from Strand Annex though the poetics weren’t to my taste later the author died I was nervous in those days always in need my dark heart, my secret poetry, my drug-filler cut into my life and love that it and I may last

Ben Fama

Activities,Jobs & Working,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

Your Kingdom

if you like let the body feel all its own evolution inside, opening flagella & feathers & fingers door by door, a ragged neuron dangling like a participle to hear a bare sound on the path, find a red-eye-hole rabbit, fat of the bulbous stalk pecked out to the core so you can bore back to the salamander you once were straggling under the skin grope toward the protozoa snagging on the rise toward placental knowing who developed eyes for you agape in open waters the worm that made a kidney-like chamber burrows in directing your heart leftward in nodal cascade, slow at your hagfish spine who will bury your bones investigate a redwood rain or tap the garnet of your heartwood, bark, put your flat needles on dry ice to inquire after your tree family, father or mother in the fairy-ring next to you, find you are most closely related to grass your hexaploid breathing pores gently closing at night, when did you begin your coexistence with flowering plants from which arose the bee before the African honey badger but after the dark protoplanetary disk of dust grains surrounding the sun become the earth you had no nouns, did you

Eleni Sikelianos

Living,The Body,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Animals,Trees & Flowers,Arts & Sciences,Sciences

At the Other End of a Wire

When he called, there were 261 emotions at play. I thought there were only wistfulness, humiliation, and mere bitterness left, but lo, I see now the brilliance in the numbers. Emotions 75 and 78 made me happy just to know they existed. I felt less alone, more impervious. I was emboldened by the existence of 152. Though, how was I supposed to accept 9, 14, and 179? We deserved better, distress and indigence aside. Something about 260 broke the spell inside me and offered up a tiny shift: I opened my eyes in the fog and tore off the surfaces of 261 and 4 with a great shout.

Sandra Lim

Living,The Mind,Relationships,Men & Women

Amor Fati

Inside every world there is another world trying to get out, and there is something in you that would like to discount this world. The stars could rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts, and you would not know if you were ruining your life or beginning a real one. You could claim professional fondness for the world around you; the pictures would dissolve under the paint coming alive, and you would only feel a phantom skip of the heart, absorbed so in the colors. Your disbelief is a later novel emerging in the long, long shadow of an earlier one— is this the great world, which is whatever is the case? The sustained helplessness you feel in the long emptiness of days is matched by the new suspiciousness and wrath you wake to each morning. Isn’t this a relationship with your death, too, to fall in love with your inscrutable life? Your teeth fill with cavities. There is always unearned happiness for some, and the criminal feeling of solitude. Always, everyone lies about his life.

Sandra Lim

Living,The Mind,Time & Brevity

Certainty

Perhaps you can tell children that the world is always a more beautiful place than you can suppose, and then you release them into their future, the black row of trees in the distance. She died suddenly in midwinter, in the same bed in which her husband died years earlier; it still sagged on his side. Her second husband remained in Japan with his first family. She used to say, what my three girls do when they are on their own is unimaginable to me. My mother is the middle daughter, a garden of inaudible tunes. The four of them lived in a mean house in Seoul. One yellowing picture of my grandmother remains, and her face turns away from the camera, as the rabbit senses the hound; she was said to be a solitary eater, an inner thing. What did she promise the world that she wasn’t able to make good on? A child who abruptly feels the frontiers of experience assert themselves in her: at the funeral my mother cries so hard she can’t feel her hands for days, it explains how she scratches herself raw, meaningless. You have always believed these are your themes: fate, the negative pleasures of dipping oneself in acid. You think it will rescue you from your simplicity, remarks my mother from the doorway, but art is never the ace in the hole. I am not a stupid child. I am not even a child any longer, with her hesitant, then terrible certainty, that loss is tragic, not only pointless. When she is lonely, my mother cooks; and when she is happy, she knows to hide it.

Sandra Lim

Living,Coming of Age,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

"You hear the sun in the morning"

You hear the sun in the morning through closed shutters. As you sleep the early sky is colored in fish scales, and you open your eyes like a street already lined with fruit.

Daniel Nadler

"A lamb blinking over a patch of earth"

A lamb blinking over a patch of earth does not know what you have done. Feed it, and it will eat from your hand as if you wore the skin of a washed grape.

Daniel Nadler

Nature,Animals,Religion,Christianity

"Your husband is stretched out on the ground"

Your husband is stretched out on the ground as if he were listening for something. Ask him to come back to the table. Whatever was there is now here.

Daniel Nadler

Living,Marriage & Companionship

We Are Not Responsible

We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives. We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions. We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations. In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on. Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments. If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way. In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself. Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we are unable to find the key to your legal case. You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile. You are not presumed to be innocent if the police have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet. It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color. It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights. Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude. You have no rights we are bound to respect. Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible for what happens to you.

Harryette Mullen

Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,History & Politics

Promise

I try not to cast too much shade. Sin would be to use the excuse of her growth in my womb, to imagine her as a limb of myself. She is her own tree, late-winter’s indomitable shoot. She takes cupfuls of sun. I stand well clear as the branches stretch like flutes playing allegros. Not for anything would I poison her with an act of possession, conceal her from the woodsman whose task is to make room for all.

Mary O'Donnell

Living,Parenthood,Nature,Trees & Flowers

Unlegendary Heroes

'Life passes through places.' –P.J. Duffy, Landscapes of South Ulster Patrick Farrell, of Lackagh, who was able to mow one acre and one rood Irish in a day. Tom Gallagher, Cornamucklagh, could walk 50 Irish miles in one day. Patrick Mulligan, Cremartin, was a great oarsman. Tommy Atkinson, Lismagunshin, was very good at highjumping—he could jump six feet high. John Duffy, Corley, was able to dig half an Irish acre in one day. Edward Monaghan, Annagh, who could stand on his head on a pint tumbler or on the rigging of a house. –1938 folklore survey to record the local people who occupied the South Ulster parish landscape. * * * Kathleen McKenna, Annagola, who was able to wash a week’s sheets, shirts and swaddling, bake bread and clean the house all of a Monday. Birdy McMahon, of Faulkland, walked to Monaghan for a sack of flour two days before her eighth child was born. Cepta Duffy, Glennan, very good at sewing—embroidered a set of vestments in five days. Mary McCabe, of Derrynashallog, who cared for her husband’s mother in dotage, fed ten children, the youngest still at the breast during hay-making. Mary Conlon, Tullyree, who wrote poems at night. Assumpta Meehan, Tonygarvey, saw many visions and was committed to the asylum. Martha McGinn, of Emy, who swam Cornamunden Lough in one hour and a quarter. Marita McHugh, Foxhole, whose sponge cakes won First Prize at Cloncaw Show. Miss Harper, Corley, female problems rarely ceased, pleasant in ill-health. Patricia Curley, Corlatt, whose joints ached and swelled though she was young, who bore three children. Dora Heuston, Strananny, died in childbirth, aged 14 years, last words ‘Mammy, O Mammy!’ Rosie McCrudden, Aghabog noted for clean boots, winter or summer, often beaten by her father. Maggie Traynor, Donagh, got no breakfasts, fed by the nuns, batch loaf with jam, the best speller in the school. Phyllis McCrudden, Knockaphubble, who buried two husbands, reared five children, and farmed her own land. Ann Moffett, of Enagh, who taught people to read and did not charge.

Mary O'Donnell

Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality,History & Politics,Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism

Present Tense IV 

We Had Stalked the Doe Commerce. Production. Consumption. Who makes? Who takes? It's useless to give up cashmere shawls, gold armatures, SUVs, furs and silks to achieve cross-cultural pollination or transcendence. Since we've ceased to celebrate works-in-progress or cutting-edge sound bites, we photo commodities to provide a permanent record of desire in the grass and under the elms. Turkey on the chairlift. Rooster in the coop. Testimony is a cryptic relic deformed by the violence of authority. We recall the limited palette of ashen tones when we drove through Eastern Europe. Billboards, even in Estonia, summoned up fascinations with dieting, alcoholism and psychotherapy. Should we have eaten those salads of language? Should we have risked teased hairstyles and gained weight? Should we have giggled amidst severest woe? Mimicry, idolatry, fanaticism, greed. Oh, fervid tangled brushwork, what can we do to hold you at bay? I am old. I am old. The good day grows cold.

Anna Rabinowitz

Living,Growing Old,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

Notes: Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources

HOW TO SUCCEED IN TORTURE WITHOUT REALLY TRYING 1. FIRST THINGS FIRST: Surprise, catch your source off balance when he least expects it: At the moment he opens his eyes in the morning While he shits on the can. Detain and confine, quickly, quickly ​cut him off from the known. Plunge your source into the strange, the invisible wells gone dry in his bones Drained by his eyes He’s in occupied territory— he could walk a long time and find nowhere, nothing, nada no doors, no tunnels, windows 2. KEEP IT SIMPLE: Familiar clothing reinforces identity. Replace the source

Anna Rabinowitz

Living,The Mind,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment

Flores Woman

A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago. . . . Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people . . . made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area. —Nature, October 2004 Light: lifted, I stretch my brief body. Color: blaze of day behind blank eyes. Sound: birds stab greedy beaks Into trunk and seed, spill husk Onto the heap where my dreaming And my loving live. Every day I wake to this. Tracks follow the heavy beasts Back to where they huddle, herd. Hunt: a dance against hunger. Music: feast and fear. This island becomes us. Trees cap our sky. It rustles with delight In a voice green as lust. Reptiles Drag night from their tails, Live by the dark. A rage of waves Protects the horizon, which we would devour. One day I want to dive in and drift, Legs and arms wracked with danger. Like a dark star. I want to last.

Tracy K. Smith

Living,The Body,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

Parturition

I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations Or in contraction To the pinpoint nucleus of being Locate an irritation without It is within Within It is without The sensitized area Is identical with the extensity Of intension I am the false quantity In the harmony of physiological potentiality To which Gaining self-control I should be consonant In time Pain is no stronger than the resisting force Pain calls up in me The struggle is equal The open window is full of a voice A fashionable portrait painter Running upstairs to a woman’s apartment Sings “All the girls are tid’ly did’ly All the girls are nice Whether they wear their hair in curls Or —” At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization The conception Brute Why? The irresponsibility of the male Leaves woman her superior Inferiority. He is running upstairs I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony Incidentally with the exhaustion of control I reach the summit And gradually subside into anticipation of Repose Which never comes. For another mountain is growing up Which goaded by the unavoidable I must traverse Traversing myself Something in the delirium of night hours Confuses while intensifying sensibility Blurring spatial contours So aiding elusion of the circumscribed That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast Comes from so far away And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth Is no part of myself There is a climax in sensibility When pain surpassing itself Becomes exotic And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation Uniting the opposing and resisting forces In lascivious revelation Relaxation Negation of myself as a unit Vacuum interlude I should have been emptied of life Giving life For consciousness in crises races Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes Have I not Somewhere Scrutinized A dead white feathered moth Laying eggs? A moment Being realization Can Vitalized by cosmic initiation Furnish an adequate apology For the objective Agglomeration of activities Of a life LIFE A leap with nature Into the essence Of unpredicted Maternity Against my thigh Tough of infinitesimal motion Scarcely perceptible Undulation Warmth moisture Stir of incipient life Precipitating into me The contents of the universe Mother I am Identical With infinite Maternity Indivisible Acutely I am absorbed Into The was—is—ever—shall—be Of cosmic reproductivity Rises from the subconscious Impression of a cat With blind kittens Among her legs Same undulating life-stir I am that cat Rises from the sub-conscious Impression of small animal carcass Covered with blue bottles—Epicurean— And through the insects Waves that same undulation of living Death Life I am knowing All about Unfolding The next morning Each woman-of-the-people Tiptoeing the red pile of the carpet Doing hushed service Each woman-of-the-people Wearing a halo A ludicrous little halo Of which she is sublimely unaware I once heard in a church—Man and woman God made them— Thank God.

Mina Loy

Elegy

I saw you fall to the ground. I saw the oaks fall. The clouds collapsed. I saw a wildness twist through your limbs and fly off. The river fell, the grasses fell. The backs of six drowned cattle rose to the surface ice—nothing moved. But a wind touched my ankles when the snow began. You left that night and we stayed, our arms braced with weight. What power there was was over. But I switched on the light by the porch to see if anything was falling— and it fell, a few glints in the air, catching sun although there was no sun, and the long descent over hours, all night, seemed like years, and we buried our faces in what came to rest on the ground or moved our feet over it, effortless, as nothing was in our lives, or ever will be.

Joanna Klink

Living,Death,Health & Illness,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Nature,Weather

Let Me Explain

after Neruda Go ahead, ask: where are the pomegranates, the dates, the girls with skin brown as hash, the hash? Listen to what’s happening One morning bonfires began to leap from the earth, devouring human beings, lit by matches flicked across the sky with joysticks. And from then on fire, from then on burning hair, from then on limbs and meat. Invisible bandits, pickpockets from ten-thousand feet, faceless, thoughtless, dumb except for humming, bandits marked with tiny flags, controlled from continents away by children, child bandits with letter jackets left hanging in their girlfriends' closets, child bandits with bibles thumbed and highlighted, spear missiles through the sky to kill other children and the blood of children runs through the streets, neither seen nor heard, obedient, simply, like children's blood. Ask away: why doesn’t his poetry describe our urban loneliness, the body drenched in metaphor? There’s nothing to see here, nothing to see, just blood in the sand, blood in the streets, nothing to see.

David Shook

Living,Death,Youth,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

The Demon

This is a demon that can take a grown brain and squash it to sponge. There is no loving the state of a decrepit mind that encourages a decrepit body. Is he sleeping or just not there? States of awareness flicker inside a gauzy lens. We’ve seen this before—in a film, the man disappearing as he stands right there, his body stolid. Let’s say this man worked as an Assistant Principal and admired his own IQ. Let’s say this man had a brutish body but was not a brute. All of this becomes portraiture but there can be fractures of truth. Looking at him you think: Am I in this film or is this a vapory memory?

Jennifer Firestone

Living,Death,Health & Illness,The Mind,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Religion,The Spiritual,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics

No People in It

for JA I flutter in order to enter the phrase’s silver. Jackdaws have launched nearby this time, silk green and ripped, the movement a kind of chafing thinking. Oh he’s marking terrain right there— right there with his unmade song. The shadow kids whip fronds, froth air up into heat, pure and simple “violence of the eye.” Wild iris ink, wet in the margin’s stage. Well, hadn’t this testament begun to carry its chime in stripes? That’s when I knew he was going away from me, towards the sound. Like the ring on the table it can’t be decentered. Rim around the recent. Ashes, ashes, A bright tangled seeming.

Emily Skillings

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

The Thin Man Goes Home

You are as even tempered as a frying pan In a sudden downpour
 A campsite in disarray
 A long time coming Laughter from two yards over
 The neighborhood a claim on space Involving multiple parties It must be Father’s Day
 Judging by the heightened attentions of daughters and sons
 Thus a man enjoys solitude, stillness, pink petals of the carrier rose And in a certain light
 The sonic continuum of tires against the road
 The sensation of being carried along toward the end of a sentence After the disappearance of the period Air to breathe, water to drink
 The suggestion box is empty
 Obsolete equipment piles up in nooks and crannies This is all wrong, that’s messed up
 We go on in and make ourselves comfortable
 The movie has just begun
 It’s Nick and Nora Charles and their little dog Asta They’re visiting Nick’s parents in the suburbs
 He’s on the wagon and trying to keep a low profile
 But of course she brags about him to the local paper
 And soon he’s embroiled in detective work despite himself There is crime everywhere, even here in the suburbs
 It must be human nature Desperate characters on the loose “Yoke yourself to your strongest conviction” Was a piece of advice derived from the Y in JOY But Pam doesn’t buy that
 And I say it sounds too slavish
 Remember the Groucho line
 “These are my principles If you don’t like them I have others” When the pen runs out of ink
 You simply replace the cartridge
 And continue writing
 To the sound of jet planes overhead
 It’s time to revive the typewriter
 For the benefit of kids
 Now entering the ranks of the scribe force Sliding the paper under the roller
 Striking the surface with heavy metal blows
 History curls right into the future
 A Möbius strip
 That brings bygone media around and back
 With all the drama, character, sound, light and destiny Alive in an imagination of living

Kit Robinson

Living,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Man In Boat, 1998

It’s unbearable to shadowdrift along the seabed. It’s unbearable to grieve when sleeping is more important. The boat is a hammock without strings. As the body is a sleeve not strung to the soul. The boat is chained to the shadow; when the shadow drifts, the boat drifts too. Is it at sea? Or is it just in air? Can a boat live on air alone? The man’s back bleeds. This is all expected of creatures who sacrifice their nudity for solitude and immortality. The flesh is eager to float, fully captivated by the impulse to preserve an array of stillness. The horizon is not skirring and nothing can move on that river made of air. This boat. This boat. This boat that the horizon can’t coat with its own monolithic entreaty. The man bathes in all blemishes of the moon. The man’s body can take imperfection, as he feels complete. His white-grey hair is a type of condensed cloud he can rest his head on. If he must commit suicide, he knows he will rest on a very comfortable pillow, one that he grows from the ovoid base of his skull. It’s good to get all the hard work done first and then unbutton one’s corporeal flesh calmly before the undiluted enterprise of air. His penis is one finger pointing to the line that separates his thighs. Everything is hidden deliciously inside his pituitary gland.

Vi Khi Nao

Living,Death,The Body,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture

[I have become wealthy in a foreign land]

I have become wealthy in a foreign land gravity makes me sick in my slippery throat the devil makes me lousy with summer like I'm buried in the sun in its sounds with my mother there's something about having a heart beat like traffic like wind I did it afterall: I had a sweaty body in Berlin it was all right I'm taking some time out from being alive with daughters It's OK I'm impersonating a kiss of lilacs a murder of crows are settling over my corpse the dust covers my photographs I only ever write about childhood because that was before I died and now the devil has brought me back to Berlin in summer in Stockholm I'm starting to make sense of my body which is becoming buried in pop music and now ooh-ooh I have to rebuild the wall an erotics based on occupation I write you a letter ett brev about my body as if it were split between foreign words whispered by stringy angels and soldiers who march in through the eye of a needle I write my body with the eye of a needle with nålen I write when I'm sick with gravity in summer in summer I'm sick in light summer light musical light from hell and you dare call it heaven my body you dare to call it heaven

Johannes Göransson

Living,The Body,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Summer,Religion,The Spiritual

One Bite

Miracle fruit changes the tongue. One bite, and for hours all you eat is sweet. Placed alone on a saucer, it quivers like it's cold from the ceramic, even in this Florida heat. Small as a coffee bean, red as jam— I can't believe. The man who sold it to my father on Interstate 542 had one tooth, one sandal, and called me "Duttah, Duttah." I wanted to ask what is that, but the red buds teased me into our car and away from his fruit stand. One bite. And if you eat it whole, it softens and swells your teeth like a mouthful of mallow. So how long before you lose a sandal and still walk? How long before you lose the sweetness?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Activities,Eating & Drinking

The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer

Fredonia, NY Of course I regret it. I mean there I was under umbrellas of fruit so red they had to be borne of Summer, and no other season. Flip-flops and fishhooks. Ice cubes made of lemonade and sprigs of mint to slip in blue glasses of tea. I was dusty, my ponytail all askew and the tips of my fingers ran, of course, red from the fruitwounds of cherries I plunked into my bucket and still—he must have seen some small bit of loveliness in walking his orchard with me. He pointed out which trees were sweetest, which ones bore double seeds—puffing out the flesh and oh the surprise on your tongue with two tiny stones (a twin spit), making a small gun of your mouth. Did I mention my favorite color is red? His jeans were worn and twisty around the tops of his boot; his hands thick but careful, nimble enough to pull fruit from his trees without tearing the thin skin; the cherry dust and fingerprints on his eyeglasses. I just know when he stuffed his hands in his pockets, saidOkay. Couldn't hurt to try? and shuffled back to his roadside stand to arrange his jelly jars and stacks of buckets, I had made a terrible mistake. I just know my summer would've been full of pies, tartlets, turnovers—so much jubilee.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Desire,Nature,Summer

Hell Pig

To keep me from staying out late at night, my mother warned of the Hell Pig. Black and full of hot drool, eyes the color of a lung—it'd follow me home if I stayed past my curfew. How to tell my friends to press Pause in the middle of a video, say their good-byes while I shuffled up the stairs and into my father's waiting blue car? How to explain this to my dates, whisper why we could not finish this dance? It's not like the pig had any special powers or could take a tiny bite from my leg—only assurances that it was simply scandal to be followed home. When my date and I pull into my driveway and dim the lights, we take care to make all the small noises that get made in times like these even smaller: squeaks in the seats, a slow spin of the radio dial, the silver click of my belt. Too late. A single black hair flickers awake the ear of the dark animal waiting for me at the end of the walk. My fumbling of keys and various straps a wild dance to the door—the pig grunting in tune to each hurried step, each of his wet breaths puffing into tiny clouds, a small storm brewing.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Living,Coming of Age,Love,Desire,Nature,Animals,Mythology & Folklore,Ghosts & the Supernatural

Baked Goods

Flour on the floor makes my sandals slip and I tumble into your arms. Too hot to bake this morning but blueberries begged me to fold them into moist muffins. Sticks of rhubarb plotted a whole pie. The windows are blown open and a thickfruit tang sneaks through the wire screen and into the home of the scowly lady who lives next door. Yesterday, a man in the city was rescued from his apartment which was filled with a thousand rats. Something about being angry because his pet python refused to eat. He let the bloom of fur rise, rise over the little gnarly blue rug, over the coffee table, the kitchen countertops and pip through each cabinet, snip at the stumpy bags of sugar, the cylinders of salt. Our kitchen is a riot of pots, wooden spoons, melted butter. So be it. Maybe all this baking will quiet the angry voices next door, if only for a brief whiff. I want our summers to always be like this—a kitchen wrecked with love, a table overflowing with baked goods warming the already warm air. After all the pots are stacked, the goodies cooled, and all the counters wiped clean—let us never be rescued from this mess.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Love,Realistic & Complicated,Activities,Eating & Drinking

from Aurora Leigh, First Book

In those days, though, I never analysed Myself even. All analysis comes late. You catch a sight of Nature, earliest, In full front sun-face, and your eyelids wink And drop before the wonder of ‘t; you miss The form, through seeing the light. I lived, those days, And wrote because I lived–unlicensed else: My heart beat in my brain. Life’s violent flood Abolished bounds,–and, which my neighbour’s field, Which mine, what mattered? It is so in youth. We play at leap-frog over the god Term; The love within us and the love without Are mixed, confounded; if we are loved or love, We scarce distinguish. So, with other power. Being acted on and acting seem the same: In that first onrush of life’s chariot-wheels, We know not if the forests move or we. And so, like most young poets, in a flush Of individual life, I poured myself Along the veins of others, and achieved Mere lifeless imitations of life verse, And made the living answer for the dead, Profaning nature. ‘Touch not, do not taste, Nor handle,’–we’re too legal, who write young: We beat the phorminx till we hurt our thumbs, As if still ignorant of counterpoint; We call the Muse ... ‘O Muse, benignant Muse!’– As if we had seen her purple-braided head. With the eyes in it start between the boughs As often as a stag’s. What make-believe, With so much earnest! what effete results, From virile efforts! what cold wire-drawn odes From such white heats!–bucolics, where the cows Would scare the writer if they splashed the mud In lashing off the flies,–didactics, driven Against the heels of what the master said; And counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumps A babe might blow between two straining cheeks Of bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh; And elegiac griefs, and songs of love, Like cast-off nosegays picked up on the road, The worse for being warm: all these things, writ On happy mornings, with a morning heart, That leaps for love, is active for resolve, Weak for art only. Oft, the ancient forms Will thrill, indeed, in carrying the young blood. The wine-skins, now and then, a little warped, Will crack even, as the new wine gurgles in. Spare the old bottles!–spill not the new wine. By Keats’s soul, the man who never stepped In gradual progress like another man, But, turning grandly on his central self, Ensphered himself in twenty perfect years And died, not young,–(the life of a long life, Distilled to a mere drop, falling like a tear Upon the world’s cold cheek to make it burn For ever;) by that strong excepted soul, I count it strange, and hard to understand, That nearly all young poets should write old; That Pope was sexagenarian at sixteen, And beardless Byron academical, And so with others. It may be, perhaps, Such have not settled long and deep enough In trance, to attain to clairvoyance,–and still The memory mixes with the vision, spoils, And works it turbid. Or perhaps, again, In order to discover the Muse-Sphinx, The melancholy desert must sweep round, Behind you, as before.– For me, I wrote False poems, like the rest, and thought them true. Because myself was true in writing them. I, peradventure, have writ true ones since With less complacence. But I could not hide My quickening inner life from those at watch. They saw a light at a window now and then, They had not set there. Who had set it there? My father’s sister started when she caught My soul agaze in my eyes. She could not say I had no business with a sort of soul, But plainly she objected,–and demurred, That souls were dangerous things to carry straight Through all the spilt saltpetre of the world. She said sometimes, ‘Aurora, have you done Your task this morning?–have you read that book? And are you ready for the crochet here?’– As if she said, ‘I know there’s something wrong, I know I have not ground you down enough To flatten and bake you to a wholesome crust For household uses and proprieties, Before the rain has got into my barn And set the grains a-sprouting. What, you’re green With out-door impudence? you almost grow?’ To which I answered, ‘Would she hear my task, And verify my abstract of the book? And should I sit down to the crochet work? Was such her pleasure?’ ... Then I sate and teased The patient needle til it split the thread, Which oozed off from it in meandering lace From hour to hour. I was not, therefore, sad; My soul was singing at a work apart Behind the wall of sense, as safe from harm As sings the lark when sucked up out of sight, In vortices of glory and blue air. And so, through forced work and spontaneous work, The inner life informed the outer life, Reduced the irregular blood to settled rhythms, Made cool the forehead with fresh-sprinkling dreams, And, rounding to the spheric soul the thin Pined body, struck a colour up the cheeks, Though somewhat faint. I clenched my brows across My blue eyes greatening in the looking-glass, And said, ‘We’ll live, Aurora! we’ll be strong. The dogs are on us–but we will not die.’

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Relationships,Men & Women,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

from Aurora Leigh, Second Book

'There it is!– You play beside a death-bed like a child, Yet measure to yourself a prophet's place To teach the living. None of all these things, Can women understand. You generalise, Oh, nothing!–not even grief! Your quick-breathed hearts, So sympathetic to the personal pang, Close on each separate knife-stroke, yielding up A whole life at each wound; incapable Of deepening, widening a large lap of life To hold the world-full woe. The human race To you means, such a child, or such a man, You saw one morning waiting in the cold, Beside that gate, perhaps. You gather up A few such cases, and, when strong, sometimes Will write of factories and of slaves, as if Your father were a negro, and your son A spinner in the mills. All's yours and you,– All, coloured with your blood, or otherwise Just nothing to you. Why, I call you hard To general suffering. Here's the world half blind With intellectual light, half brutalised With civilization, having caught the plague In silks from Tarsus, shrieking east and west Along a thousand railroads, mad with pain And sin too! ... does one woman of you all, (You who weep easily) grow pale to see This tiger shake his cage?–does one of you Stand still from dancing, stop from stringing pearls And pine and die, because of the great sum Of universal anguish?–Show me a tear Wet as Cordelia's, in eyes bright as yours, Because the world is mad? You cannot count, That you should weep for this account, not you! You weep for what you know. A red-haired child Sick in a fever, if you touch him once, Though but so little as with a finger-tip, Will set you weeping! but a million sick . . You could as soon weep for the rule of three, Or compound fractions. Therefore, this same world Uncomprehended by you must remain Uninfluenced by you. Women as you are, Mere women, personal and passionate, You give us doating mothers, and chaste wives. Sublime Madonnas, and enduring saints! We get no Christ from you,–and verily We shall not get a poet, in my mind.' 'With which conclusion you conclude' . . 'But this– That you, Aurora, with the large live brow And steady eyelids, cannot condescend To play at art, as children play at swords, To show a pretty spirit, chiefly admired Because true action is impossible. You never can be satisfied with praise Which men give women when they judge a book Not as mere work, but as mere woman's work, Expressing the comparative respect Which means the absolute scorn. 'Oh, excellent! 'What grace! what facile turns! what fluent sweeps! 'What delicate discernment ... almost thought! 'The book does honour to the sex, we hold. 'Among our female authors we make room 'For this fair writer, and congratulate 'The country that produces in these times 'Such women, competent to ... spell.'' 'Stop there!' I answered–burning through his thread of talk With a quick flame of emotion,–'You have read My soul, if not my book, and argue well I would not condescend ... we will not say To such a kind of praise, (a worthless end Is praise of all kinds) but to such a use Of holy art and golden life. I am young, And peradventure weak–you tell me so– Through being a woman. And, for all the rest, Take thanks for justice. I would rather dance At fairs on tight-rope, till the babies dropped Their gingerbread for joy,–than shift the types For tolerable verse, intolerable To men who act and suffer. Better far, Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means, Than a sublime art frivolously.' * Then I spoke. 'I have not stood long on the strand of life, And these salt waters have had scarcely time To creep so high up as to wet my feet. I cannot judge these tides–I shall, perhaps. A woman's always younger than a man At equal years, because she is disallowed Maturing by the outdoor sun and air, And kept in long-clothes past the age to walk. Ah well, I know you men judge otherwise! You think a woman ripens as a peach,– In the cheeks, chiefly. Pass it to me now; I'm young in age, and younger still, I think, As a woman. But a child may say amen To a bishop's prayer and see the way it goes; And I, incapable to loose the knot Of social questions, can approve, applaud August compassion, christian thoughts that shoot Beyond the vulgar white of personal aims. Accept my reverence.' There he glowed on me With all his face and eyes. 'No other help?' Said he–'no more than so?' 'What help?' I asked. 'You'd scorn my help,–as Nature's self, you say, Has scorned to put her music in my mouth, Because a woman's. Do you now turn round And ask for what a woman cannot give?' 'For what she only can, I turn and ask,' He answered, catching up my hands in his, And dropping on me from his high-eaved brow The full weight of his soul,–'I ask for love, And that, she can; for life in fellowship Through bitter duties–that, I know she can; For wifehood ... will she?' 'Now,' I said, 'may God Be witness 'twixt us two!' and with the word, Meseemed I floated into a sudden light Above his stature,–'am I proved too weak To stand alone, yet strong enough to bear Such leaners on my shoulder? poor to think, Yet rich enough to sympathise with thought? Incompetent to sing, as blackbirds can, Yet competent to love, like HIM?' I paused: Perhaps I darkened, as the lighthouse will That turns upon the sea. 'It's always so! Anything does for a wife.' 'Aurora, dear, And dearly honoured' ... he pressed in at once With eager utterance,–'you translate me ill. I do not contradict my thought of you Which is most reverent, with another thought Found less so. If your sex is weak for art, (And I who said so, did but honour you By using truth in courtship) it is strong For life and duty. Place your fecund heart In mine, and let us blossom for the world That wants love's colour in the grey of time. With all my talk I can but set you where You look down coldly on the arena-heaps Of headless bodies, shapeless, indistinct! The Judgment-Angel scarce would find his way Through such a heap of generalised distress, To the individual man with lips and eyes– Much less Aurora. Ah, my sweet, come down, And, hand in hand, we'll go where yours shall touch These victims, one by one! till one by one, The formless, nameless trunk of every man Shall seem to wear a head, with hair you know, And every woman catch your mother's face To melt you into passion.' 'I am a girl,' I answered slowly; 'you do well to name My mother's face. Though far too early, alas, God's hand did interpose 'twixt it and me, I know so much of love, as used to shine In that face and another. Just so much; No more indeed at all. I have not seen So much love since, I pray you pardon me, As answers even to make a marriage with, In this cold land of England. What you love, Is not a woman, Romney, but a cause: You want a helpmate, not a mistress, sir,– A wife to help your ends ... in her no end! Your cause is noble, your ends excellent, But I, being most unworthy of these and that, Do otherwise conceive of love. Farewell.' 'Farewell, Aurora, you reject me thus?' He said. 'Why, sir, you are married long ago. You have a wife already whom you love, Your social theory. Bless you both, I say. For my part, I am scarcely meek enough To be the handmaid of a lawful spouse. Do I look a Hagar, think you?' 'So, you jest!' 'Nay so, I speak in earnest,' I replied. 'You treat of marriage too much like, at least, A chief apostle; you would bear with you A wife ... a sister ... shall we speak it out? A sister of charity.' 'Then, must it be Indeed farewell? And was I so far wrong In hope and in illusion, when I took The woman to be nobler than the man, Yourself the noblest woman,–in the use And comprehension of what love is,–love, That generates the likeness of itself Through all heroic duties? so far wrong In saying bluntly, venturing truth on love, 'Come, human creature, love and work with me,'– Instead of, 'Lady, thou art wondrous fair, 'And, where the Graces walk before, the Muse 'Will follow at the lighting of the eyes, 'And where the Muse walks, lovers need to creep 'Turn round and love me, or I die of love.'' With quiet indignation I broke in. 'You misconceive the question like a man, Who sees a woman as the complement Of his sex merely. You forget too much That every creature, female as the male, Stands single in responsible act and thought As also in birth and death. Whoever says To a loyal woman, 'Love and work with me,' Will get fair answers, if the work and love Being good themselves, are good for her–the best She was born for. Women of a softer mood, Surprised by men when scarcely awake to life, Will sometimes only hear the first word, love, And catch up with it any kind of work, Indifferent, so that dear love go with it: I do not blame such women, though, for love, They pick much oakum; earth's fanatics make Too frequently heaven's saints. But me, your work Is not the best for,–nor your love the best, Nor able to commend the kind of work For love's sake merely. Ah, you force me, sir, To be over-bold in speaking of myself,– I, too, have my vocation,–work to do, The heavens and earth have set me, since I changed My father's face for theirs,–and though your world Were twice as wretched as you represent Most serious work, most necessary work, As any of the economists'. Reform, Make trade a Christian possibility, And individual right no general wrong; Wipe out earth's furrows of the Thine and Mine, And leave one green, for men to play at bowls; With innings for them all! ... what then, indeed, If mortals were not greater by the head Than any of their prosperities? what then, Unless the artist keep up open roads Betwixt the seen and unseen,–bursting through The best of your conventions with his best The unspeakable, imaginable best God bids him speak, to prove what lies beyond Both speech and imagination? A starved man Exceeds a fat beast: we'll not barter, sir, The beautiful for barley.–And, even so, I hold you will not compass your poor ends Of barley-feeding and material ease, Without a poet's individualism To work your universal. It takes a soul, To move a body: it takes a high-souled man, To move the masses ... even to a cleaner stye: It takes the ideal, to blow a hair's breadth off The dust of the actual.–ah, your Fouriers failed, Because not poets enough to understand That life develops from within.–For me, Perhaps I am not worthy, as you say, Of work like this! ... perhaps a woman's soul Aspires, and not creates! yet we aspire, And yet I'll try out your perhapses, sir; And if I fail ... why, burn me up my straw Like other false works–I'll not ask for grace, Your scorn is better, cousin Romney. I Who love my art, would never wish it lower To suit my stature. I may love my art, You'll grant that even a woman may love art, Seeing that to waste true love on anything, Is womanly, past question.'

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Relationships,Men & Women,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

from Aurora Leigh, Third Book

Why what a pettish, petty thing I grow,– A mere, mere woman,–a mere flaccid nerve,- A kerchief left out all night in the rain, Turned soft so,–overtasked and overstrained And overlived in this close London life! And yet I should be stronger. Never burn Your letters, poor Aurora! for they stare With red seals from the table, saying each, 'Here's something that you know not.'

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Relationships,Men & Women,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

down like a shot

falling into unearthed light or something like that is who I was last night. you brought me a drink you didn’t know the name of & told me I could get it. you not the drink which I downed even though it was my 9th of the night the drink not you. dancehall. always dancehall. a manner of movement learned & not easily lost so I wind my hips anyway & something is happening to you. you bout to startsome shit & I say good. not because it would be. I haven’t been touched in a while.don’t start something you can’t finish is maybe the worst advice I’ve ever heard as you drop a handful of my ass thudding down a small flight of stairs. that’s what I am. a small flight of stairs, a small flight, down.

Aziza Barnes

Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated

alleyway

As fresh garbage is. As dirt sucked out of a fingernail. As a wall clean of prostitutes. When I am this I am at the mercy of my nakedness. A pillar of undress whose power I do not know how to wield. I watch porn. I study the geometry of limbs splayed. Not the moan but the angle of a moan. I swallow. In this way I am a thief. Sometimes I forget my body & go untouched until I am touched & scream. Sometimes I want to eat my breasts down to their bitter rind & spit them out. I want to be the bitter rind without suck and easily thrown. Easily thrown I want to be the pebble thumbed & wished upon before enveloping the lake I sink in. I sink in you the lake & by lake I mean gutter a water that does not hold me well. Here we are not the bodies our mothers made. If you are to hold me hold me as a gun. Grip me & profit the dark. The unattended purse. The pair of heels darting from us in dull claps sharpening against the concrete as teeth against a stone.

Aziza Barnes

Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated

my dad asks, "how come black folk can't just write about flowers?"

bijan been dead 11 months & my blue margin reduced to arterial, there’s a party at my house, a house held by legislation vocabulary & trill. but hell, it’s ours & it sparkle on the corner of view park, a channel of blk electric. danny wants to walk to the ledge up the block, & we an open river of flex: we know what time it is. on the ledge, folk give up neck & dismantle gray navigation for some slice of body. it’s june. it’s what we do. walk down the middle of our road, & given view park, a lining of dubois’ 10th, a jack n jill feast, & good blk area, it be our road. we own it. I’m sayin’ with money. our milk neighbors, collaborate in the happy task of surveillance. they new. they pivot function. they call the khaki uniforms. i swift. review the architecture of desire spun clean, & I could see how we all look like ghosts. 3 squad cars roll up at my door & it’s a fucking joke cuz exactly no squad cars rolled up to the mcdonald’s bijan was shot at & exactly no squad cars rolled up to find the murders & exactly no one did what could be categorized as they “job,” depending on how you define time spent for money earned for property & it didn’t make me feel like I could see less of the gun in her holster because she was blk & short & a woman, too. she go, this your house? I say yeah. she go,can you prove it? It say it mine. she go ID? I say it mine. she go backup on the sly & interview me going all what’s your address—don’t look!& hugh say I feel wild disrespected. & white go can you explain that? & danny say how far the nearest precinct? & christian say fuck that. & white go can you explain that? I cross my arms. I’m bored & headlights quit being interesting after I called 911 when I was 2 years old because it was the only phone number I knew by heart.

Aziza Barnes

Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Race & Ethnicity

The Poet Contemplates the Nature of Reality

On the side of the road a deer, frozen, frigid.Go back to your life, the voice said.What is my life? she wondered. For months she lost herself in work—Freud said work is as important as love to the soul—and at night she sat with a boy, forcing him to practice his violin, helping him recite his notes. Then the ice thawed and the deer came to life. She saw her jump over the fence, she saw her in the twilight, how free she looked. She saw her eyes shiny as marbles, as much a part of this world as the fence a worker pounds into the earth. At night she still sat with the boy. He’s learning “Au Claire de la Lune.” Do you know it? He has established a relationship with his violin. He knows that it takes practice to master it: the accuracy of each note, to wrestle his feelings to the listener. But he’s impatient. Sometimes what he hears and feels are not always the same. Again, the poet says. She knows if he tries to silence his fervor, he might not ever know who he is. The poet contemplates whether a deer can dream. Rich blood-red berries on a branch, pachysandra in the garden. A soft warm bed in the leaves.

Jill Bialosky

Living,Parenthood,Nature,Animals,Arts & Sciences,Music

In Syrup

In syrup, in syrup, In syrup we drown, Who sell ourselves With a sparkling smile. Padded with pathos Our winding sheet. The bomb bounded By buxom beauties. Horror gelded By the happy ending. How can we swim Who hold to our haloes? Down we go, down In syrup, in syrup.

Naomi Replansky

Ring Song

…When that joy is gone for good I move the arms beneath the blood. When my blood is running wild I sew the clothing of a child. When that child is never born I lean my breast against a thorn. When the thorn brings no reprieve I rise and live, I rise and live. When I live from hand to hand Nude in the marketplace I stand. When I stand and am not sold I build a fire against the cold. When the cold does not destroy I leap from ambush on my joy…

Naomi Replansky

Living,Time & Brevity

Wind in a Box

—after Lorca I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanket of leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice. I want to learn to walk without blinking. I want to outlive the turtle and the turtle’s father, the stone. I want a mouth full of permissions and a pink glistening bud. If the wildflower and ant hill can return after sleeping each season, I want to walk out of this house wearing nothing but wind. I want to greet you, I want to wait for the bus with you weighing less than a chill. I want to fight off the bolts of gray lighting the alcoves and winding paths of your hair. I want to fight off the damp nudgings of snow. I want to fight off the wind. I want to be the wind and I want to fight off the wind with its sagging banner of isolation, its swinging screen doors, its gilded boxes, and neatly folded pamphlets of noise. I want to fight off the dull straight lines of two by fours and endings, your disapprovals, your doubts and regulations, your carbon copies. If the locust can abandon its suit, I want a brand new name. I want the pepper’s fury and the salt’s tenderness. I want the virtue of the evening rain, but not its gossip. I want the moon’s intuition, but not its questions. I want the malice of nothing on earth. I want to enter every room in a strange electrified city and find you there. I want your lips around the bell of flesh at the bottom of my ear. I want to be the mirror, but not the nightstand. I do not want to be the light switch. I do not want to be the yellow photograph or book of poems. When I leave this body, Woman, I want to be pure flame. I want to be your song.

Terrance Hayes

Love,Desire,Religion,The Spiritual

The Blue Terrance

If you subtract the minor losses, you can return to your childhood too: the blackboard chalked with crosses, the math teacher’s toe ring. You can be the black boy not even the buck- toothed girls took a liking to: this match box, these bones in their funk machine, this thumb worn smooth as the belly of a shovel. Thump. Thump. Thump. Everything I hold takes root. I remember what the world was like before I heard the tide humping the shore smooth, and the lyrics asking: How long has your door been closed? I remember a garter belt wrung like a snake around a thigh in the shadows of a wedding gown before it was flung out into the bluest part of the night. Suppose you were nothing but a song in a busted speaker? Suppose you had to wipe sweat from the brow of a righteous woman, but all you owned was a dirty rag? That’s why the blues will never go out of fashion: their half rotten aroma, their bloodshot octaves of consequence; that’s why when they call, Boy, you’re in trouble. Especially if you love as I love falling to the earth. Especially if you’re a little bit high strung and a little bit gutted balloon. I love watching the sky regret nothing but its self, though only my lover knows it to be so, and only after watching me sit and stare off past Heaven. I love the word No for its prudence, but I love the romantic who submits finally to sex in a burning row- house more. That’s why nothing’s more romantic than working your teeth through the muscle. Nothing’s more romantic than the way good love can take leave of you. That’s why I’m so doggone lonesome, Baby, yes, I’m lonesome and I’m blue.

Terrance Hayes

Living,Coming of Age,Disappointment & Failure

For Robert Hayden

Did your father come home after fighting through the week at work? Did the sweat change to salt in his ears? Was that bitter white grain the only music he’d hear? Is this why you were quiet when other poets sang of the black man’s beauty? Is this why you choked on the tonsil of Negro Duty? Were there as many offices for pain as love? Should a black man never be shy? Was your father a mountain twenty shovels couldn’t bury? Was he a train leaving a lone column of smoke? Was he a black magnolia singing at your feet? Was he a blackjack smashed against your throat?

Terrance Hayes

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Class,Race & Ethnicity

Jumping Jack: The M16 Mines

In standing position with arms to the side, jump while spreading the legs and lift arms above the head. Jump back into standing position and up again, spreading the legs and lifting the arms above the head. Repeat When a M16 landmine is triggered, it will spring into the air and explode with a capacity to level everything in a 150 metre radius. Deadly shrapnel spreading a further 350 metres. Metal casings from an unexploded bomb can fetch 25,000 Vietnamese dong or $1 for a poor family in Vietnam. Men comb the forests and beaches of Quang Tri looking for the metal that will feed their family, risking their lives. Children working in the fields think it’s a toy they’ve found. Nguyen was hoeing a small piece of land his parents gave him when an unexploded U.S. military bomb was triggered and blew off both his hands.

Teresa Mei Chuc

Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Pencil

"In spite of everything I shall rise again: I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing."—Vincent Van Gogh A missile is shaped like a pencil— its long, slender body and pointed end creates history. A girl walking down the street a few steps ahead of her sister and friend, two medics who were trying to help injured people, the parked ambulance— all were annihilated by the same weapon. Above, drones—silent, unmanned planes. A metal, predatory bird that shoots a missile with precision, identifying the colors of a shirt, the features on a face—the shape of a nose, the color and length of a mustache. In a room far away, in another country, a man sits at a desk and looks at a screen; he strokes his thick, dark mustache as he carefully contemplates, then pushes a button. There is a charred hole in the ground where the girl once stood. There are pencils that write and erase, write and erase, so that there is nothing to be read on the page. The page blank as the desert sky, blank as the smooth shell of a drone. There is a family drinking mint tea in a living room. The man holds a cup to his lips, the glass touches his mustache. A silent bird hovers above. In a split second, everyone is dead, the house is in rubbles—arms, legs, splattered organs among broken concrete. Soon, there will be no trace.

Teresa Mei Chuc

Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

Rainforest

I close my eyes so that I can see it. What we so freely eliminate. Who is not guilty of it? We reek of paper. Everywhere we go is paper. Our hands are stained with paper. Walls. What echoes from our walls. The sweet whisper of rainforest— even the name makes the sound of rushing water or perhaps it’s a ghost that haunts us. They say the dead that did not die a peaceful death are doomed forever to wander the earth. But perhaps this earth is for them already a cemetery—stacks and stacks of flesh on a desk. Which one belongs to which tree? Already, we’ve traded oxygen for so much.

Teresa Mei Chuc

Nature,Trees & Flowers

Names

I am tired of having five different names; - Having to change them when I enter A new country or take on a new life. My First name is my truest, I suppose, but I Never use it and nobody calls me by this Vietnamese Name though it is on my birth certificate— Tue My Chuc. It makes the sound of a twang of a String pulled. My parents tell me my name in Cantonese is Chuc Mei Wai. Three soft bird chirps and they call me Ah Wai. Shortly after I moved to the U.S., I became Teresa My Chuc, then Teresa Mei Chuc. “Teresa” is the sound Water makes when one is washing one’s hands. After my first Marriage, my name was Teresa Chuc Prokopiev. After my second marriage, my name was Teresa Chuc Dowell. Now I am back to Teresa Mei Chuc, but I want to go way back. Reclaim that name once given and lost so quickly in its attempt to become someone that would fit in. Who is Tue My Chuc? I don’t really know. I was never really her and her birthday on March 16, I never celebrate because it’s not my real birthday though it is on my birth certificate. My birthday is on January 26, really, but I have to pretend that it’s on March 16 because my mother was late registering me after the war. Or it’s in December, the date changing every year according to the lunar calendar—this is the one my parents celebrate because it’s my Chinese birthday. All these names and birthdays make me dizzy. Sometimes I just don’t feel like a Teresa anymore; Tue (pronounced Twe) isn’t so embarrassing. A fruit learns to love its juice. Anyways, I’d like to be string... resonating. Pulled back tensely like a bow Then reverberate in the arrow’s release straight for the heart.

Teresa Mei Chuc

Living,Life Choices

Hoping to Hear from a Former Friend

Is it you on the other end of the line hesitant to speak to me, pausing for a moment to register my hello so you know my number stayed the same, my last name remains mine? Though my voice isn’t young as when we last spoke, don’t you hear a familiar timbre? Still you hesitate so as not to startle me after all this time. Dots string out like an ellipsis in the endless sentence of your absence. I hear static-filled ticking, then a friendly stranger mispronounces my name. Recognizing a pitch to sell something and feeling foolish, I hang up quickly. Won’t you ever break your long silence? Sorrow and anger keep my line open to you.

Margaret Hasse

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Friends & Enemies

Come Home, Our Sons

Come home, our sons, young drivers, tell us you’re safe, not detained again by police for your dark color, sprocketed hair and a crime you didn’t commit. Maybe your car’s the wrong make or rusty in a neighborhood where cars park in garages at night. Once, when you saw a squad car you remembered Officer Smiley and his dog that did tricks in read-aloud books at J.J. Hill School. Now, as you reach for your license with shaking hands, tension raises the chance something will go wrong. This poem is for you, sons, and for everyone who is afraid— citizens of police, police of citizens. It’s for Philando Castile, a black school lunch supervisor in an inner city school who memorized children’s names and their food allergies. And it’s for the policeman who stopped a car with a damaged taillight. After he used his gun, his voice broke like a frightened child’s. Come home, sons, to mothers like me, alert at night waiting for car lights to beam in front of our house, for the car to belong to our sons, and our sons to still belong to the world.

Margaret Hasse

Living,Parenthood,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Race & Ethnicity

Day after Daylight Savings

Blue numbers on my bedside clock tell I forgot to change the hour. This sets routines on haywire. Like a domestic goat staked to its circle of earth. I don’t do well untethered. I have no hunger for early dinner, become confused by the sound of children who seem out too late for a school night. They’ve found an extra helping of daylight to romp on new grass and can’t contain themselves, strip off jackets, scatter like a rag of ponies. Whatever time says, their joy insists on springing forward.

Margaret Hasse

Living,Time & Brevity

After His Diagnosis

Weeks after ice-out, last fall’s leaves make a pathway to the lake, radiant blue and still deathly cold. I press my hot forehead to the window, smudging it. Blow and the glass steams. As if looking at a photo through parchment, I’m detached, the way I saw his body in the CAT scan from a foggy distance. I’d like to open the window, release a wounded bird nursed to health. Wiping the glass with my sleeve I see white pelicans wheel and flash in the sky.

Margaret Hasse

Living,Health & Illness,Love,Heartache & Loss

Be More Like Sputnik Monroe

It's hard to be humble when you're 235 pounds of twisted steel and sex appeal with a body women love and men fear. —Sputnik Monroe When my father died, he left me a trove of video tapes, a warped memorial for those men he watched with my mother before she left for parts unknown, for those fights he relived once he was laid off from the plane yards. We watched men like Sputnik Monroe bleed the hard way, shook our fists as he broke rules against guys who were easier to cheer. He was a bad Elvis, greased-back hair with a shock of white, Sputnik Monroe mixed it up everywhere, a rodeo fistfight, a henhouse tornado. My mother picked a fight in an Idaho truck stop once, stabbed a man’s chest with her middle finger, then stepped to one side so my father could fight him in the parking lot. Afterwards, my mother was silent all the way back to Seattle, her disgust with him—the way he wrapped his arm around her shoulder, guided her to the car, and sped back to the freeway—hanging between them from that point forward. Sputnik Monroe clobbered men wherever he went, sneered at those fists raised against him in Memphis. Some nights, as my wife sleeps upstairs, I watch my father’s video tapes and imagine what I would have done that day if I knew that my marriage depended on what I did with my hands.

W. Todd Kaneko

Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Men & Women

Selected Legends of Andre the Giant

13. After the dinosaurs fell asleep, after those terrible lizards began their slow decay into mythology, Andre the Giant was there to cradle their bodies in his soft hands and weep. 24. Andre the Giant wrestled the Earth into a globe, carved his name into the ocean floor with his pinky to remind the whales who taught them to sing. 32. Andre the Giant was a village. Then he became a dragon. Then he became an army. Then he became a king. Now, he is the wind. 40. A man can’t bodyslam Andre the Giant unless he’s worthy of slaying a monster, unless the giant decides it’s time to lie down. 58. Andre the Giant stole fire from Heaven, hid it in his mouth, fed it to monkeys one lick at a time until they learned to pronounce his name. 67. Before there were boys with magic beanstalks, with slingshots or singing swords, Andre the Giant brawled with sooty angels, volcanoes spouting from where he buried their hearts 75. Andre the Giant scaled the Empire State Building with Marilyn Monroe in one hand, Cleopatra in the other. They marveled at how small we are. 81. Andre the Giant once cracked the sky’s ribs. Then he was thunder churning like trout. Then he was an avalanche of fists and knees. Then he was a fire burning through the forest. Then he was a tidal wave seething offshore. Now, he will not be a metaphor. 93. When Andre the Giant pitched a man over the top rope and out into the crowd, he aimed at the moon. 100. A man never tells a lie, always treats a promise like his mother’s name. Andre the Giant once threw a silver dollar across the Potomac, hit a buffalo in the eye and killed it as it grazed. 116. Andre the Giant drank three bottles of whiskey and grappled with the Devil in a bingo hall in Memphis. Then he invented the blues. 125. On television, Andre the Giant grinned with a mouthful of shark’s teeth. He devoured mortal men ten-at-a-time, laughed and spit their bones into our living rooms. 137. Andre the Giant was a Frenchman. Then he became an ogre. Then he became a movie star. Now, he is the constellations. All of them.

W. Todd Kaneko

Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

You Cannot Stand Against Giant Baba

1. A man can stand with both feet touching the ground until his legs no longer reach that far, until the ground disappears. 2. Giant Baba stands six feet ten inches tall, taller in Japan. It doesn’t matter how tall you are. 3. A man can hold a woman, can’t stand to lose her to the heart’s wreckage. His body will fall apart one day—a rock crab’s chassis stripped clean by seagulls, a dandelion gone to seed. 4. Giant Baba stands over seven feet tall. When he lifts you over his head, you will be eight and a half feet above the ground. 5. A man can stand for anything when seen from below—fatherhood, majesty, satisfaction after conquest. In the end all men are seen from above—patch of lawn, chunk of stone. 6. Giant Baba towers above your house, dangles you by the ankle. Your life looks so small from the sky. 7. A man and a woman can wrestle together in the same bed. A man and a woman and a marriage can brawl all night. 8. Giant Baba looms dark against the stars, back blotting out the Milky Way, arms cradling you and your family history. Listen to his mammoth heartbeat, war drum, earthquake. Just listen. 9. A man can stand naked in a foreign country, can search for meaning in strange tongues. He tries to find himself in stories about famous battles, about giants. It doesn’t matter where he stands. 10. Giant Baba’s body is made of girders and mastodon bones. When you stand outside to look at your house from new angles, when you think of how your father died, the giant will be there to catch you.

W. Todd Kaneko

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Men & Women,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

Returning

When I open the door and reach to the light switch the world opens as it did each time. The garlic jar on the ledge, the ceramic cup holding cheese cutters and paring knives. Outside a branch from the ash tree worries the window. It was a place where I knew the drawer pulls, the feel of steps to the basement, the smell of cool cement. If I open the middle cabinet, the linen is there as you left it, well-ordered, none of it fine.

Tami Haaland

Laundress

Given over to love, she un-balls the socks, lets fall debris of days, leaf litter, sand grain, slub of some sticky substance, picks it all for the sake of the stainless tub of the gleaming new front loader. Given over to love long ago, when her own exasperated moan bounced off the quaint speckled enamel of the top loader vowing: she'd do this always and well. She fell in love then, she fell in line— in a march of millions, you pair them, two by two, you marry the socks.

Heid E. Erdrich

Naming the Heartbeats

I've become the person who says Darling, who says Sugarpie, Honeybunch, Snugglebear—and that’s just for my children. What I call my husband is unprintable. You’re welcome. I am his sweetheart, and finally, finally—I answer to his call and his alone. Animals are named for people, places, or perhaps a little Latin. Plants invite names for colors or plant-parts. When you get a group of heartbeats together you get names that call out into the evening’s first radiance of planets: a quiver of cobras, a maelstrom of salamanders, an audience of squid, or an ostentation of peacocks. But what is it called when creatures on this earth curl and sleep, when shadows of moons we don’t yet know brush across our faces? And what is the name for the movement we make when we wake, swiping hand or claw or wing across our face, like trying to remember a path or a river we’ve only visited in our dreams.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

When Lucille Bogan Sings "Shave 'Em Dry"

I blush quicker than a school of blue jack mackerel arranging itself into an orb of dazzle to avoid nips and gulps from the dolphins who’ve been silently trailing them, waiting for them to relax. When I hear her growl—her scratch-thirst and giggle when she drops swear words pressed to wax—I can’t even look him in the eye when I ask him to give it a good listen with me. But he does, ever patient, and we both get a light bless of sweat on, a bright address that still maps us to each other after all this time. When I read him the lyrics, the pink of my cheeks is like the pink of an orchid mantis. Just when you least expect it, the pretend flower will reach out and snatch a butterfly from the air. When I say flower I mean how her song blooms in the cicada-electric Mississippi night. When I say pink I mean nectar I mean a long kiss good and sweet.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Love,Romantic Love,Arts & Sciences,Music

On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance

Breathe deep even if it means you wrinkle your nose from the fake-lemon antiseptic of the mopped floors and wiped-down doorknobs. The freshly soaped necks and armpits. Your teacher means well, even if he butchers your name like he has a bloody sausage casing stuck between his teeth, handprints on his white, sloppy apron. And when everyone turns around to check out your face, no need to fush red and warm. Just picture all the eyes as if your classroom is one big scallop with its dozens of icy blues and you will remember that winter your family took you to the China Sea and you sank your face in it to gaze at baby clams and sea stars the size of your outstretched hand. And when all those necks start to crane, try not to forget someone once lathered their bodies, once patted them dry with a fluffy towel after a bath, set out their clothes for the first day of school. Think of their pencil cases from third grade, full of sharp pencils, a pink pearl eraser. Think of their handheld pencil sharpener and its tiny blade.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Activities,School & Learning

Cardinal Sin

I don't love my son the way I thought my mother should love me so I handed him a shoe box to put the dead bird in and shut the door. It was a mistake, not to be sure he buried it, not to grab the children gathered at my back door by their shoulders to push them into a half-circle and a prayer. Should have made them take turns digging the hole, each one of their pudgy hands finger stiff red's box to lower it to the ground. It wasn't my place to teach other women's children about death, so my own son snuck the shoe box into his backpack, dead-eyed bird rolling like a plastic prize ball, told the principal this cold puff of field bird had been his pet. See him clutching a coffin the size of his feet, eyes wide over a pout, giving a man a reason good enough to hold him. after Louise Glück

Jonterri Gadson

Living,Death,Parenthood,Nature,Animals

Glossary of Selected Terms

What is skin, if not a taut swaddle loosening, body if not a warm swaddle cooling, blood if not thread in a swaddle made of body, horizons if not lines where sky swaddles Earth. See father.Stars, if not swaddled matter emitting light. See spirit.Wind, if it does not trace paths around bodies. See blood.Universe, if not outermost concentric circle. See mother. A kiss, if not mouths pressed into wet twists, taste if not flavor swaddling tongue, father if not the option to swaddle, spirit if not the smallest unit of the swaddled, mother if not hips swaddling womb. See skin. See body. See wind. See universe. See blood. ​after Nin Andrews

Jonterri Gadson

Living,The Body,Religion,The Spiritual

Girl, 11

A mouth is a sideways woman, her curves and dips, the way she opens, how her hollow center can sing. Mother, your mouth is a fallen cello, your husband's hands— a casket. Full of me.

Jonterri Gadson

Living,Coming of Age,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Patricide Epistle

II. The first time I had you killed I made you a hero of the Vietnam War. The third grade social studies textbook said young foreign boys hid grenades during corner games, seamstresses doubled as spies. Why wouldn't you have died on those streets, clutching my mother's photo with your thumb pressed cold against her belly, wishing you'd had a chance to propose, hoping for a girl? But that war ended before I was born. Next, I had a drunk driver end you. Said I visited him in prison to spit in his face. Forgave him for a speech during health class. In eighth grade, I made you die young of natural causes, so I could teach a grieving classmate the proper way to mourn.

Jonterri Gadson

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

The Bomb Shelter

When bombs are exploding outside, it means that there are implosions. Vibrations travel through air and liquid. My amniotic fluid is imprinted with airplanes dropping bombs and screams and fire. In the bomb shelter in Saigon, my father teaches my two-year-old brother French. "Je m'appelle Chuc Nai Dat." "Je m'appelle…"

Teresa Mei Chuc

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

Not Worth a Bullet

A bullet is made of copper or lead. Gunpowder is poured into the case. The firing pin hits the primer at the back of the bullet which starts the explosion. Altogether, the bullet and the case are typically about two inches in length and weigh a few ounces. My father said that the Vietcongs told him and the other prisoners while in "re-education" camp that they were not worth a bullet. They would work for the Vietcongs and then die. A bamboo tree is smooth, long with roots that hold the earth with the strong grip of green knuckles and fingers. They are used to build houses, fences, etc. A bamboo tree can weigh sixty pounds or more and be twenty feet tall. The prisoners were forced to walk barefoot up the mountains and carry bamboo back to the camp. Due to the weight of the bamboo, they were only able to carry one at a time.

Teresa Mei Chuc

Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,War & Conflict

Chinese Female Kung-Fu Superheroes

are real. They jump from roof-top to roof-top, do a backward flip down to the concrete floor and land perfectly on two feet. The metal of swords clang, the body moves with the precision of a praying mantis striking its prey. Their dresses are colorful, long and lacy, billow and flair with each turn and twist. Jewelry in the hair dangles and sparkles. Chinese female kung-fu superheroes are smart, fight bad guys, do good deeds, and risk their lives. They appear when least expected. Chinese female kung-fu superheroes never give up. They travel often alone by foot through mountains. They work hard training to master various martial arts forms. They do not care about Barbies, those plastic dolls of only one hair color that just looked pretty in the 80's. They aren't impressed; they do not want a boring life. Chinese female kung-fu superheroes venture out and save cities against villains. They steal into the night in their black ninja-like suits, soundlessly through a house to recover a magical sword and to release a prisoner, knowing exactly where to press with their two fingertips to freeze the guards and to accomplish their mission. After Jeannine Hall Gailey's

Teresa Mei Chuc

Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism

My Doggy Ate My Essay

My doggy ate my essay. He picked up all my mail. He cleaned my dirty closet and dusted with his tail. He straightened out my posters and swept my wooden floor. My parents almost fainted when he fixed my bedroom door. I did not try to stop him. He made my windows shine. My room looked like a palace, and my dresser smelled like pine. He fluffed up every pillow. He folded all my clothes. He even cleaned my fish tank with a toothbrush and a hose. I thought it was amazing to see him use a broom. I’m glad he ate my essay on “How to Clean My Room.”

Darren Sardelli

Living,Youth,Activities,School & Learning,Relationships,Pets

The Letter A

The letter A is awesome! It simply is the best. Without an A, you could not get an A+ on a test. You’d never see an acrobat or eat an apple pie. You couldn’t be an astronaut or kiss your aunt goodbye. An antelope would not exist. An ape would be unknown. You’d never hear a person say “Afraid” or “All Alone”. The A’s in avocado would completely disappear and certain words would be forgot like “ankle”, “arm”, and “ear”. Without the A, you couldn’t aim an arrow in the air. You wouldn’t ask for apricots or almonds at a fair. Aruba and Australia would be missing from a map. You’d never use an ATM, an apron, or an app. The arctic fox and aardvark would be absent from the zoo, and vowels, as you know them, would be E, I, O, and U. There wouldn’t be an A chord on the instruments you play. Let’s appreciate, admire, and applaud the letter A!

Darren Sardelli

Recess! Oh, Recess!

Recess! Oh, Recess! We love you! You rule! You keep us away from the teachers in school. Your swings are refreshing. Your slides are the best. You give us a break from a really hard test. Recess! Oh, Recess! We want you to know, you’re sweeter than syrup, you’re special like snow. You don’t assign homework. You make the day fun. You let us play kickball and run in the sun. Recess! Oh, Recess! You’re first on our list. We’d be in despair if you didn’t exist. We’re happy we have you. You’re awesome and cool. Recess! Oh, Recess! We love you! You rule!

Darren Sardelli

Living,Youth,Activities,School & Learning

Our Grandma Kissed a Pumpkin

Our grandma kissed a pumpkin on a Friday afternoon. She also kissed a crayon and a giant red balloon. I saw her kiss a chipmunk eating cookies with a queen. She kissed us in these costumes at our house on Halloween!

Darren Sardelli

Halloween

The Silliest Teacher in School

Our teacher gave detention to the fountains in the hall. She handed extra homework to the artwork on the wall. We saw her point a finger at a banner and a sign. She said their bad behavior was completely out of line. The principal approached her and said, “What is all this fuss? I heard you tried to punish all the tires on a bus. “You’ve made the teachers angry by disrupting all their classes, so if you want to keep this job, you have to wear your glasses!”

Darren Sardelli

Living,Youth,Activities,School & Learning

Saving Nails

I strip the porch roof, pick out the used nails, and toss the shingles down onto a drop cloth, remembering when I shingled my grandmother's roof fifty years ago: the tar smell, the brackets, planks, and ladders all the same, but level now with hemlock limbs instead of locust. I lug four shingles up the ladder, kneel and drive the old nails home, slide another shingle into place, pound, toes bent, knees creaking. Miserliness, a friend jokes about the nails, but I call it caring, thinking of the man who gave us this land on the cove, the cottage, the boat- house full of boats. The only time I saw him he was at his work bench, a rich man straightening nails, moving from the bent can to the anvil to the straight.

Thomas R. Moore

Bird

For days now a red-breasted bird has been trying to break in. She tests a low branch, violet blossoms swaying beside her, leaps into the air and flies straight at my window, beak and breast held back, claws raking the pane. Maybe she longs for the tree she sees reflected in the glass, but I'm only guessing. I watch until she gives up and swoops off. I wait for her return, the familiar click, swoosh, thump of her. I sip cold coffee and scan the room, trying to see it new, through the eyes of a bird. Nothing has changed. Books piled in a corner, coats hooked over chair backs, paper plates, a cup half-filled with sour milk. The children are in school. The man is at work. I'm alone with dead roses in a jam jar. What do I have that she could want enough to risk such failure, again and again?

Dorianne Laux

Fund Drive

She could be a Norman Rockwell painting, the small girl on my front porch with her eager face, her wind-burned cheeks red as cherries. Her father waits by the curb, ready to rescue his child should danger threaten, his shadow reaching halfway across the yard. I take the booklet from the girl's outstretched hand, peruse the color photos of candy bars and caramel-coated popcorn, pretend to read it. I have no use for what she's selling, but I can count the freckles on her nose, the scars like fat worms on knobby knees that ought to be covered on a cold day like this, when the wind is blowing and the trees are losing their grip on the last of their leaves. I'll taketwo of these and one of those, I say, pointing, thinking I won't eat them, but I probably will. It's worth the coming calories to see her joy, how hard she works to spell my name right, taking down my information. Then she turns and gives a thumbs-up sign to her father, who grins like an outfielder to whom the ball has finally come—his heart like a glove, opening.

Terri Kirby Erickson

from Rider: ["The boy's name was Warren. He was an orphan."]

4But you had the sense that he was always competing with your father for your affection. Not only my father. He didn’t understand my need to develop ties in these new worlds. He tried to legislate over my feelings. He was subject to extraordinarily inappropriate fits of jealousy. How are you the judge of that? Many small incidents. Such as… * The boy’s name was Warren. He was an orphan. As we pulled into the weed lot of the camp in the uncertain March air and patented silence, I could see him peeking down at us from a second story dormer window, like someone who had been dreaming of escape from the run-down resort: torn up turf; dirt basketball court, net hanging for its life by one thin strand of rope; horseshoes, shuffle board; musty, mildewed cabins with wet bedding; the stars pressing too hard against our faces in the catastrophic silence of the nights… I’d never been left so happily alone, alone, that is, in Warren’s wonderful company. His talk mimicked the cadence of the stones he kicked. Warren showed me the mica glow in the arrowheads and quartz-tipped spears he'd unearthed. Warren's cigar box overflowed with other people's souvenirs, miniature monuments, key chains, lighters, and initialed items like cuff links and bracelets. He scoured the corners of the rooms of the departed while his “mother,” slip of the tongue there, vacuumed. “People always leave something behind,” he said. I knew what he meant: taking their clothes on and off so many times something had to go. I wanted an initial bracelet even with someone else’s initials. The kids at summer camp in the Poconos all had initialed bracelets, except for me, but who among them had been west of the Mississippi? Warren wanted a home. I didn’t know what I wanted. I asked to bring Warren home and give him a home. “That’s ridiculous, he has a home here. Besides, you only just met.” My mother lamented his stick-thin, soot-blackened frame, the smell he gave off and his yellow teeth, his urchin eating with his hands, his short and choppy hair, his blousy shirt and baggy fatigues that gave him a bulk, a volume, he didn’t otherwise possess. What about his fits of giddy delight? As the days passed I forgot myself. I became more and more like Warren. I would brook no insults about my brother. It would no longer be me, but me and Warren. I’d share my meals with Warren, and my desk at school. Warren could stay and I would just—slip away. Next to Warren, I felt like I was on a clipper ship lifted out of the water by the powerful wind-breath of my two distant coastal families; my warring mother and “blood” father, her lovely companionable family in Los Angeles and Manhattan; his friendly, compliant relations in Manhattan and Bensonhurst… I dreamt both families were jammed on the deck of the ship, waving, gesticulating, shouting, and that I clung to a raft’s rope as a great wave flung me back and back, but the truth was I wasn’t sure I wanted to be near. I wanted to fly apart—in the nowhere—. When our two-door Chrysler Windsor edged off the gravel onto the highway I thrust my head right where the plush fabric of the front seat parted like the Red Sea, and said to my new dad. “You know what. I love Warren more than I love you.” “You don’t know what you’re saying,” he snapped. “He’s just a little putz, and I can get rid of him with a snap of my fingers. Presto. See. Now—where is he?” The seat beside me was empty. I was empty. And my heart pounded in wild longing for its fullness lost. I should have kept my mouth shut but I thought my heart would burst with that secret locked in it: why doesn’t he understand? It wasn’t that I loved him less than I had but that I loved Warren more. He had the same reaction several years later, in Chicago, when I announced my love for Carol, a round-faced, soft spoken blond girl I’d brought home to play with my electric trains and drink hot chocolate one brutal winter afternoon. I loved her and I kissed her in the elevator on the way up. I wanted him to say: I’m so happy for you,let’s put on some 45’s and dance. He said, “You don't know what love is.” And for the first time slapped me in the face. I wrote my “blood” father of my love and he wrote back he was glad I was “making friends out there.” Why didn’t these men understand, I know what words mean, by love I meant love, however transitory. One word, two fathers, two red stone faces, unblinking, dismayed.

Mark Rudman

Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

from Rider: [8. Dropouts]

Dropouts Mace had the kind of courage you could easily mistake for brawn. I don’t know why I call it courage. Sure, he stood up to greasers. And didn’t visibly fret on the days when his report card made hard fact of what was already apparent from his absences. Yet Mace was gifted with an uninflected quickness, a fine intelligence of his own despair, a knowledge— as he gunned the engine of his once white ’58 Chevy, with a four-on-the-floor he’d installed himself, to climb higher into the hills above the city— of where nowhere was… Light shadow cutting brusquely across the canyons— * Like everyone else in our class, Mace was a year older than me. He had stubble on his chin. I dragged a razor up and down my cheeks to inspire fast, early growth. “Don’t shave your jowls,” friends warned, knowing I overdid everything, “or you’ll grow hair there later.”Later was a word I disdained, its insistence on the future tense, postponement— life on the back burner. * Mace seemed incapable of worry. His coolness and insouciance made girls stare. He was always brushing back the shock of raven- black hair that fell over his right eyebrow. The same teacher who sent me lickety split to the principal’s office would lean over Mace’s desk and whisper warmly, compassionately in his ear. They would nod together. I could fill in every blank. “What’s the matter Richard?” “Nothing.” “If you’re having trouble,” this is where the whispering grew most intense, “I want you to feel you can talk to me as a friend. Your work in class is so good, you have so much ability, Richard…” Mace would never protest, never defend himself. Indignation was a country where he’d never been. “You may hate me,” I thought, praying she would not double the insult of the absence of her concern for me with a glance in my direction, “but deep down Mace and I are the same.” * Mace and I were running into the same problem at the same time. Mathematical wizards that we were we couldn’t solve advanced algebraic equations in our head; we were vexed by an added integer. We had gotten this far without lifting a pencil. History was being sold to us as a dead language of fixed events and we wouldn’t buy. What is a fact, I wondered, and I could see the same question wrinkling Mace’s brow. * Mace’s problems weren’t academic. His disgust thrummed like telephone wires in the wind, even his saturnine presence was deceptive, like his beat-up Chevy with its secret store of power concealed under the hood. Mace too began the year in the front row, placed there on the strength of pure ability. He sank slowly, buoyed as I was, by the one assigned book we read, Great Expectations. Mace attended to his tasks in the classroom. I dreamt of escape via the window’s easy access. There were unknown roads to be driven, gulleys to be plumbed; girls: a world of lovely distractions. * For all the years I lived in Salt Lake City I can’t remember seeing a single bird. I felt watched in Salt Lake City ever since that first day when the old geezer stepped out of the shadows, on a street vast and empty and without verticals, to reprimand my Double- mint gum wrapper for lighting in the gutter. But only around the time of Hitchcock’s The Birds did I start to withdraw from sight. I was keen to see The Birds the Wednesday afternoon it opened and I wanted the other—“good”—“Mark R.,” the irreproachable blond Mormon angel everyone loved, to join us. Our growling engine brought his mother to the porch. The sun glared on her helmet of curlers. Mark had “homework and chores,” she said, he “can’t come down.” But he had already descended. And stood framed in the doorway. I couldn’t get accustomed to the light in the trampled meadows around his house, the glow of dandelions, thistles, weeds. Mark’s red cheeks reeked of aspiration and I could read his thoughts: why couldn’t I wait until night?Why was I dragging myself down? Why skip history and rifle assembly?The movie would wait. But I would not. I was keen, and, seeking a purging terror to cleanse me of my dread, I sat alone with Mace in the vast empty theater alive to each click and flicker in the projection room, and the radiant impalpable dust caught in the unstinting beam; released from the limits of our world until the screeching stopped and, looked at askance by strangers, we stepped into an iron dark which held no trace of the light we’d left. * I forked over whatever change I had to fuel each day’s free-wheeling splendor. One morning, knowing Mace was down to smoking butts, I brought a pack of my mother’s Kents as an offering. Mace scorned them. He only smoked Marlboros. Yet later, desperate and broke in the maze of roads through the hills overlooking the city, he broke off the filters and smoked in silence. I was used to doing the talking for the two of us but this was different. He pulled up besides a long driveway. A vaulted roof jutted above columns of tall firs. This was where he lived. He’d be “a sec”—he had “some smokes” stashed in a drawer. I followed him past the plaster jockey and the massy trees toward an opulent, utterly contemporary house, fronted by oak door and gold bell-knocker, angular, white, high-ceilinged, skylit… Our apartment could have fit into the living room… Now I understood: Mace lived in the clouds. Though I couldn’t see beyond the back yard through the landscaping I knew what the view must be like: that was the reason to live there; for the nights, when the city, innocent as it was, still blazed through its grid of interlocking lights. * On May Day, Mace and I, long ago tossed out of R.O.T.C. for “insubordination,” but required to attend the final show-of-arms sat together in the bleachers, in splendid isolation, and watched as the rule-followers—led by the many-striped, other Mark R.— in their woolen khaki uniforms, shouldering their M 1 rifles, dropped like flies in the insuperable heat.

Mark Rudman

Living,Coming of Age,Activities,School & Learning,Relationships,Friends & Enemies

On Reflection

because a box is a box: humans are cultivated into said box without choice or clarification, specimens only existing—as in: (you—i—us). flesh & frame— restricted bone matter comprising a box reluctant not to be a box. but nurtured inside the box, let’s say form which is shaped by & indigenous, to, the box & the creator of the holy box—only leading to another question about, of course, the infamous box—form turns deceitful inside the box like any [thing] caged, leaning to a non-empathetic approach steeped in revolt —is judas in waiting. note: the box is not universal nor the universal. whatever hopes of otherworldliness lies in the box itself. the box will not elongate, dissolve or vanish without reaction to an action & here within lies problem of perspective as in—there is none—zero. along time’s continuum, color, too, is encouraged for the sake of the construction of the box, which is precious as flickering light, but cannot be verified since darkness is the original concept of all things human.

Randall Horton

Living,Life Choices,The Mind,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

Dear Margaret Cho [korea might be gay but I do not think you are.]

korea might be gay but I do not think you are. korea is a peninsula. you and I are people meaning that we have hair we comb and things to look at. our lips pout and take on the fullness of an adopted meaning. the fact of the matter is that relentlessness is a hand- shake, a limp fish or glass of lukewarm tea. the fact of the matter is that standing on a stage everything is comic, meaning small and memorable, of the insubstan- tial "universe," a minor disaster or floating chord. the darkness is outside when I see you, not in. I laugh when the funny thing gets said, and mostly I laugh inside. on the inside is without curves and artifi- cial spaces, many of them not gay or korea. but when I see you they all run and speech is maybe stammer, sometimes slur. margaret cho, your tongue might wreak more havoc than in speaks, outside being from the vantage point of escalating stairs, from dark glasses and escapades. the vantage being from a great height, a lighter space on the inside that was formerly before the dark and laugh. we really wait for the funny things before they are said and let go for ever after. margaret, there are many funny sisters and there are many porn stores. I too think woo lae ok is really petri- fied of its own fish. that there are babies and there are dykes, that this little piggy has something, that a pubic mound transforms into a public space, not being gay or with outstanding curves, prayerful and abashed, facing the tide, grown over, rediscovered in the woods by strangers and haunted for years and years.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

Daniel Dae Kim

a perfect symmetry of both parts animal, feline and quizzical, and man, made (undone) sworn in stormed again electric, transmitted from the foreground into appropriate weather the skin being elastic cause for several considerations contrite ((argued over) aren't we of beautiful tangents beautiful ox blood, black sand morning from small wire filigree, a gesture

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

Dear Margaret Cho [we aren't differentiable with bangs and hooded lids.]

we aren't differentiable with bangs and hooded lids. I know the likeness doesn't stop right there. what's so great about being horny? the joke is insatiable. it rips and roars between and through. we both have found our mother's jewels. buried in closets, rolled in silk thread and bunting. done in scarlet, fortunately found, never for the men in sharing. these are our secrets. our punch lines and couplets. I went to bed thinking "pixies." the bliss and after- math of a spiritual kiss. how you resonate without rooms, maintaining perfect valences. where is the disaster at the end of this dread? in my dream state you were queen, a reigning bodhisattva without a sprig. I climbed inside your belly. punched inside you laughed and laughed, converting persimmons into a freedom jelly. Slathered all over, I found us exuberant, happy to swing or go both ways.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Love,Desire

from Rider [II]

And yesterday something shattering happened. Not yesterday, but several (that’s becoming a favorite word) weeks ago I came across Kitaj’s The Jewish Rider and wept: there he was in the very image of my stepfather; the pate where a few strands of hair still frolic, the same skinny legs, the same misguided attempt to dress in a sporty way (who’s watching?), the same abstractedness, the same shlumpy—boneless—posture, gazing not at the landscape flashing past with wires lashed to the treetops as if with one tug the countryside would vanish, or listening to the tick of the rails, but fixed—distractedly—on his lower extremities, white loafers and the crease in his pants and nylon socks to see whether or not he should roll them up … ; no: looking both beyond and through physical space into an inner dark. Why else draw the eyes as shadows? It’s his glimpse into another world. * My mother’s father hunted and rode. My father rode and fished. My stepfather never budged from his Barca Lounger once the amber liquid began to pour. He had a spiritual life and a social life and no physical life. But he liked it that I was always outside: maybe that’s why he never got on my back about grades; he might have thought that this boy has to be outside at this time in his life. Maybe it’s more important that he roam the canyons and the hills that he know the streets that he come home covered with leaves and bark and mud, than that he sit there like a good young scholar like I was, a Rabbi at twenty giving money home to my parents in their cabbagy tenement in the Bronx. This is a boy who needs space. One time— I think I had my learner's permit— he rented a Mustang convertible in L.A. and for several days I drove around past the long rows of used car lots and the bruised facades of restaurants digging up relatives, my hoarse-voiced arthritic aunt in the shadows of her goldenrod colored ranch house, limping like Ruffian after her last run in the wet dirt at Belmont Stakes. * But I’ve said nothing about what made me weep. It's in the contrast between Kitaj's alter cocker seeking comfort on a train, and Rembrandt’s taut youth setting off into the rampant amber on horseback; it’s in the image of active life juxtaposed with the image of sedentary contemplation— though no one travels on horseback now and heroism has become attending AIDS patients or sheltering the homeless. The raw youth’s feet are planted lightly yet firmly in his stirrups. His coat glows with many colors. Not so The Jewish Rider. And yet—there's something more. * Michael Hoffman writes that New York is not what it was when I was too young to have marked the existence of The Blue Note, but I can pick up this trail by walking across the park to the Frick. And Barbara Hershey wouldn’t have been at the Frick in 1959 (they don’t allow children under sixteen) in black skin tight pants, black sweater, (the female uniform of our generation whose male version substitutes black jeans, baseball hat, and bomber jacket— though who knows what decorous garments she’d checked in the cloakroom), and white boots with plenty of Elizabethan ruff at the edges, pausing to look at The Polish Rider while I scribbled notes. Her white boots stood out against the dominant dark like the Jewish Rider’s white loafers. And that was good because the light in the painting is brief whatever the time of day, sunrise or sunset, and the rider’s gaze, looking out over unknown space, is inward. I followed his eyes through the archway toward canvases where clouds roll over harbors against the whiteness of sails or toward gilded robes and velvet-hung rooms, then back to meet wisdom’s bared breast in Veronese’s Wisdom and Strength… (Why didn’t Veronese have the nerve to call his painting Woman With Bare Breasts, like Tintoretto? Why an allegorical title when the bare flesh and bones and sinew would have done?) He spends his life looking not at far off hills or citadels or the lights in the village below: he has no choice but to fix on her one bared breast, her swelling nipple. I can’t figure out what landscape he might be facing in the painted world. The clatter of rocks and hooves echoes over the stony plain. * I was no rider, but a pretend horse and rider always rode beside my train window—at a canter no matter how fast the rails clicked by— and though he wore a bandana and leaned slightly forward in the saddle to pull himself aboard, his gaze, wide-ranging yet intent, was like the Polish Rider’s. Even as an only child I was never lonely. My mother's father rode until he was old and on a narrow pass his horse jammed him up against rockface. In his narrative of his life this collision marked the ruin of his hip the rise of his cataracts. My father rode “every morning before work.” I never witnessed that, but at a ranch in upper New York State while I bloodied my hands tugging the reins of a frothing giant who would not budge from a weedpatch, I watched him disappear in his black polo shirt and khaki jodhpurs as he galloped over a far off hill: more at ease in the saddle—in the air— than I’d ever seen him in civilian life. My woman friend in El Paso lives to ride. Only the Jewish Rider and I do not ride! * That’s the stuff of events. What about the signature inscribed by the sun, the dark clouds sinister in just being there; thresholds, exchanges going on in the village below, candles lit in the deep interiors, bread, wine, the plate making its way around the table; what about— leaping centuries ahead— the energy from generators blazing like auras through the clouds the scattered lights, the rotating tops of ambulances; the tuna casseroles and macaroni and cheese making the rounds, apple sauce passing from high chair to bib, the Wonder Bread on a calcified plate, children eating, heads down, in silence, communicating through eye movements, the mother wiping her lips, the father grinning stupidly and drooling; the television quacking in the background, the perfect suburban night unfolding in bedroom and drive-in and den, the sprinkler system ticking. The snipers in the tower—. This is what the riders, guests everywhere and nowhere, say goodbye to as their horses break into a canter as night comes down. And last night, driving to Connecticut, I understood that the Polish Rider gleans the permutations of light after dusk, that its olive-gray smudges reflect the absence of pitch-darkness. I was wrong about the Polish Rider all along: he doesn’t depart at nightfall, he stops for a moment crossing difficult terrain (anticipating rockslide?) in the night, because, as the faint light rimming the edges of the sky makes clear, night is not absolute black, but rough-hewn and curious. The rider lives in order to depart. The Woman Who Rode She hitched her horse to the gateposts of my house. Bare trees, frost, the whole bit. I wanted our lives to be like that: as rife with silences as a Quaker meeting. She came to me in her stride. Dropped her crop on the chair. Peeled off her britches and boots; crawled under the covers. Her hour in the saddle had “made her ready.” I felt like an accessory. The wound was open. Drowsily I rolled onto her, no longer caring if she was using me. As the new year wore on and black ice made riding a fast track to certain death or paralysis, she grew tense. Came to me now with clinical terms, “schi” words I worked hard to break down. The good news was she was not a true “split personality”—the glitch that “she was divorced from herself, and could not love or care.” * The light in her house was like the light before dawn. On the last of my rare visits her mother jarred preserves while we watched instant replays of Robert Kennedy die and die. Her father skulked upstairs, perhaps testing gadgets; or wishing me off his daughter; or taking precautions I would not overhear what words were ricocheting on his “hot line” to the patent office. * Any objective observer standing back from the distraction of the impinging present could see that her torment overleapt any visible signs and that she was— as a WASP “rider”—the wrong person for the place she was in. Her resilience could not be in question. She lived to stray from known paths to leap stone fences and break into open fields. When her horse went down in an Irish bog and she was trampled—hooves branding her cheek— the next day she up and mounted him again. * When she came to me in the dream last night her smile had loosened. How lovely she looked in her blue silk blouse. How well it lit up the colors of her hair.

Mark Rudman

Living,Life Choices,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Religion,Judaism

poem for bruce

Under the roof is the empty room papered in requiem blue. Partiers crowd the burned kitchen, gold fixtures hook to cheap lath. What is it they can tell you about absence how it abates, takes names Becomes a wall with windows faced on a formal garden, content To accept the thin rain. The syllable forgives the words that need it, a sentence Badly written, epigraphs scrawled thoughtlessly in books. Book where the hero confronts a dark riddle, book where the suitors stand at the gate and are stumped. What force brought them forward stooping at the lintel, up the chipped steps To the blue door in the unbuilt tower, half-built, the new stone.

Rodney Koeneke

Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Reading & Books

Carpet Bomb

I can’t get rid of useful things and nobody wants to pick them up, I keep forgetting where I lay my umbrella. I don’t leave footprints in the snow anymore, we haven’t had a war on domestic soil in so long I wonder if I still got it. Because once I had it. I heard about a boy who once tied a string to his brother, he tied his brother to the ocean and the ocean to the blackbird— from the ground all the birds look like blackbirds from the ground a Stealth Bomber looks like a spaceship. The aliens are coming, they walk through birthday parties and basically go unnoticed. And this is kind of how I go through life, once I heated up a spoon in the microwave the fish have so much mercury in them they spark. I was handed a bayonet from the Civil War and a copper penny corroded with rust. When they take the Statue of Liberty apart to clean her her neck explodes with a million little spiders. Meanwhile in a forest somewhere someone cut open my grandmother’s belly and filled it with bricks something is coming soon I keep a bucket of lambs blood by the front door.

Kenyatta Rogers

Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Antarctica

Like nights we knelt on the dirt floor of a dugout, leaned our heads back, eyes twitching gone, and popped nitrous canisters into the communion shapes of our mouths, slipped inside where everything seemed to be falling snow, ice, the time split between chasing flies through a darkened park and sprawling in sycamore bark—how clean that abyss we drifted in, like dew, more like pollen, on our skins; and, beneath, a want for touch, a kiss, a return. Like nothing back then, to break an arm latching on to the bumper of an Impala, or settling back as the car took us as far as the salted bridge, before letting the ride go with a mitten caught behind the chrome waving from the other side of the river. Like this, you said, sliding a needle, watching dope plunge, the body's rush and tow until you felt something like an angel hovering above, but it was only pigeon feathers deviling the air. Those friends are gone: some dead, dying, locked up or jailed in themselves; and when I see some kids running in the heat of a taillight swirling behind them, I remember we wanted only to quiet our bodies, their unnatural hum, a vague pull inward, some thin furrows gliding over the snow.

James Hoch

Living,Coming of Age,Life Choices,Religion,God & the Divine

Teenage Riot

All of us were boys only some were taller or already in high school, and almost nothing else mattered but to learn some new trick, to pull off something we saw in a skate video, wind cutting around our bodies when we flew off the lip of a ramp, grabbed the board and twisted into a 180, kicking a leg out and landing it, the only way to run through the neighborhood was to run through it together, flipping off cops and skinheads, I almost don't even remember girls but a vague sense of the taste of bubble gum and how they smelled so different from us, sitting in some kid's basement drinking his parents' vodka, we grew out our bangs, moved in a pack, jumped in when some one of us got jumped, so when a man we had never seen before came up and started beating on Simon, one of us dropped his skateboard, walked over to the man like someone walking into a bank and stabbed him. The man, startled, sat down, right there on the asphalt, right in the middle of his new consciousness, kind of looking around.

Matthew Dickman

Living,Coming of Age,Youth,Relationships,Friends & Enemies

Minimum Wage

My mother and I are on the front porch lighting each other's cigarettes as if we were on a ten-minute break from our jobs at being a mother and son, just ten minutes to steal a moment of freedom before clocking back in, before putting the aprons back on, the paper hats, washing our hands twice and then standing behind the counter again, hoping for tips, hoping the customers will be nice, will say some kind word, the cool front yard before us and the dogs in the backyard shitting on everything. We are hunched over, two extras on the set of The Night of the Hunter. I am pulling a second cigarette out of the pack, a swimmer rising from a pool of other swimmers. Soon we will go back inside and sit in the yellow kitchen and drink the rest of the coffee and what is coming to kill us will pour milk into mine and sugar into hers.

Matthew Dickman

Love,Realistic & Complicated,Activities,Jobs & Working,Relationships,Family & Ancestors