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W is for Walt Whitman's Soul

One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: "loot." WILLIAM DALRYMPLE It sits with a fork made from a lotus on an ivory chair eating an elephant steak in the company of bears and feral nautch girls on a monsoon evening incandescent with an appetite as mighty as railroads spann’d across seas and reclines, its cheeks burnished, its ass varnished by suns setting on bronze and sugared with saltpetre, its torso a tableaux for the annals of rectitude, the theatre for roiling or robust passage, a veritable Suez Canal towards missionary victories which thrust from such bejeweled and oiled loins anointed by coin— that emission of plump plums, lump sums into the Ganges, that coiling coy virgin maiden winding her languid locks, batting her lashes to its lashes— its spine a gentle wire. Supine, its belly swells with salt and figs with meat and treaties, it corks open a profound song— itself it sings into books heavy with truths on the chair dressed with leather and raw hides kissed by ox blood smeared with beef dung lined with raw silk woven from worms plucked from boughs basted across its pious beaming eyes its spidery ghosted lids, and its byzantine glance unmoors from its Chinese porcelain and crosses the ebony table polished with lac secreted from the cloaca of the kerria lacca set with glazed cakes eaten by pinked mouths wearing crimson robes, to its guests polished and glossed and stained by the ooze drawn to color the uncolored raw linen, the wood, the human. Then its wrist cuffed by gold and cowries and studded with coral draws a whisper- thin muslin veil dyed carmine— sucked from crushed scale of cochineal boiled in ammonia and bled into curds and rouge glinting sanguineous and turbid between bug and rug snug a thug in redcoat or a turncoat carrying urns of this stuff— from estates of cocoa coconut calico— across its face while soft éclairs of chocolate bumble out from its plumed rump choked with gum and linseed flax and cassia cinnamon and pepper like so many lines of blood underwriting the mutton and not the goat so it can sell them with a name of a place like scarves or garlanded whores moored to wharves suckled by mother of pearl or teas named after Earls and they with whole scores to settle settle for homemade cures nettles ginger turmeric— a paste or to taste—and it steals and seals in letters scented with sandal sent abroad waxed and pressed with cornelian gems honed from ground it owns and makes stone from their flesh ekes ink from their sweat soaks indigo in lye fermented with time and makes color so it can bid for its own passage, the passage, O of this soul, to India!

Divya Victor

Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity

J is for Jarasandha

There once lived a great king whose twin wives could bear him no children. A wandering sage saw the king’s grief and offered him a magical mango. She who ate the mango would be with child. As he had two wives, the king cut the mango into two perfect halves and offered one half to each wife. After nine months, each wife gave birth to one lifeless half. Horrified, the king ordered these clots of flesh to be left in the forest. A wandering demon found the two lifeless halves and cupped one in each palm. When she brought them together, the two halves fused and a whole child was made in front of her eyes—the demon named the child Jarasandha. Years passed by and this child grew to be an intimidating and invincible warrior. In a fight with Bhim, an equally invincible warrior, Jarasandha was ripped in half by his enemy. But, each time he was ripped apart, his halves found a way to meet up and become whole. Krishna, who witnessed how Jarasandha’s flesh found its own way back to flesh, motioned to his own cousin with his fingers: toss the halves of his body in opposite directions, he suggested. So, when Bhim ripped Jarasandha apart once again, he swung his left half to the right side of the arena and his right half to the left. And his body found no way to return to itself. In the Toronto airport, where I’ve arrived for a conference, I watch an older Punjabi lady—made to sit in a wheelchair behind two lines of customs officials, a security guard, a translator, and a service-staff member—scream that her son is outside the airport may she please just go tell him she is here she is here she is here please. I stand there holding her hand, my own luggage reluctantly traveling in loops on the belt. Beta—child— she says to me: please tell them my son is here and I am here what is the problem let me go let me go to him.

Divya Victor

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

M is for Michael Jackson and Malcolm X

In the epilogue to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Alex Haley recounts meeting a pensive Malcolm at the Kennedy airport, watching newly immigrated children “romping and playing” in their sudden home. “By tomorrow night,” Malcolm says to Alex, “they’ll know how to say their first English word—nigger.” Before cable television arrived in India, America was a white nation. I imagined New England snows dusting California and Miami’s beaches stretched across Appalachia. America was a papier-mâché parody patched together by a cheaply hired prop maker. Geographic accuracy was sacrificed to the interpersonal dramas of Betty and Veronica, and the American banquet was limited to the malted and fried offerings in Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe, where the Riverdale gang solved the real geopolitical problems of how to get Reggie off Moose’s back with the help of Archie’s fumbling charms. Here, class warfare came with a side of fries. There were rumors of distant family members “settling” in “North Dakota” or “Oklahoma”—names that put themselves together like Lego castles: hard-edged and jutting out with an abrupt L or a particularly pokey K. Blackness was just a rumor too. Blackness flickered in the background of photographs they sent back from these mysterious locations: here’s an uncle waving at us from a glittering Times Square (Los Angeles); here’s an aunt waving at us mid-way through the soft-focus neon breakfasts with Aunt Jemima’s maple syrup (made from maple leaves); here’s a nephew waving at us next to the poster of a red and white Michael Jordan in a quilted bedroom, his rotund brown body snuggled in tie-dye and tucked into tartan flannel sheets. Blackness was a rumor, that is, until Michael Jackson’s Bad ripped into our consciousness and suddenly, knobby-kneed pre-teens found a way to make stringy curls with coconut oil stolen from their mothers’ kitchens and started moonwalking backwards into my Social Studies classrooms, all snappy crotch and jaunty limbs. We girls rolled our eyes but we kept on watching. It wasn’t long before Jackson’s unsparing gaze, draped in slick black leather, began replacing the glowing pastel Ganeshes and Saraswatis hanging above study desks. But replacing an elephantine god’s soft paunch with lean, mean celebrity did not save us from our own ignorance of how blackness and brownness were connected through a struggle for economic self-realization and human rights. While kids in Chennai were rehearsing Michael Peters’ signature choreography for “Thriller” and pretending to be zombies—little exemplary half-dead spectacles—Union Carbide was industriously shirking responsibility for the Bhopal Tragedy, which choked thousands of Indians to death, and black mortality was spiking in violent, homicidal protest of the US DEA’s drug buys and cocaine busts. In other words, Tamilians blinked away Michael Jackson’s blackness. We kept the heat and thunder of his fat synth bass, which found its way into Ilayaraaja’s electric disco in films of the late 1980s like Vetri Vizha and Agni Natchathiram. We kept the ebullient automation of his moves, which became a muscular theme in Prabhu Deva’s blend of baggy breakdance and whimsical terukoothu folk dancing in the 1990s. But we forgot his blackness. In time, the lightning of his presence was replaced by the grey hum of CNN, Cops, Law & Order, and the dull horror of handcuffs on dark wrists. Posters yellowed, cassettes spooled out, and my moonwalking classmates found their scientific calculators and study guides again. But the rumors of racial difference in George Bush Sr.’s America continued to bloom and wilt in morose cycles in my childhood homes into the 1990s. In damp clusters, it grew like moss under rocks. Rootless, it stretched its stringy arms and held us by the ankles; it grew like mold between bathroom tiles; it spun itself fine and strong, webbing into corners where our brooms couldn’t reach. In time, the mossy rocks lined our after-dinner walks past the hibiscus bushes. In time, a grandmother slipped on the bathroom tiles and stayed in bed, fed conjee by a fatherless girl brought in from the village and the moss grew between her toes and drew her into the earth where they buried the nameless pets and tossed the chicken feathers. In time, the spiders hung so low they fell into pickle jars every time a child fished for a gooseberry or a slice of stony green mango from the brine. And from this brine, in time, we learned to believe that it existed. And as Tamilian families began drifting from the flashy monsoons of India to the June gloom of the California bay or to the sharp wet summers of the Keys, they carried the damp and stench in suitcases and buried it in hushed conversations. They made a poultice of moss and spider web and lodged it in the prayer books, hung it around the children’s necks like a talisman, and they said—as long as she doesn’t marry a black man.

Divya Victor

Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity

How It Worked

It was hard to sit there with my father, watching one of my sister's girls playing a set of tennis against my son or daughter because he'd forget himself and with a groan of disappointment or a grunt of sympathetic exertion make it clear that he was rooting for my sister's child and against mine. There was no use calling him on it, because he'd deny it and get angry. So I would get angry but try not to show it, until I couldn't stand it any longer and would get up and walk away. That was how it worked between us, the unspoken building up like thunderheads above the tennis court, where the kids played on, not caring who won and hardly noticing the sky had darkened.

Jeffrey Harrison

In Memory of My Heavy Metal Years

There goes the aluminum, the antimony, the arsenic the barium, the cadmium, the cesium, the gadolinium the lead the mercury the nickel, the thalium, and the tin. There goes that job spraying lawns with chemicals, driving the Merc three-quarter ton with a tank on the back and no brakes through West Vancouver, bouncing the wheels against the curb to stop and on the steep majesterial streets that afford such views that they could hire two talentless dickbrains to weed and feed front and back and back again in two weeks. That was a heavy metal job that probably killed a lot of salmon too. There goes the shotgun pellets from the pheasants we shot out in Abbotsford and Langley plucked and hung in the concrete basement in New Westminster fresh with the stink of pheasant guts. Oily, delicious pheasants roasted always with a little buckshot after a day off. There goes those summers painting houses with my brother wire-brushing off the old paint, breathing it in on the wooden ladders white guys working on a tan and saving up for the Peugot ten speed. There goes the seventies out from my body. Led Zep Humble Pie Burning Spear, and Marley too, adidas, big E Levis from Lee's Men's Wear on Sixth Street there goes that brown house paint, broken down and pissed out. There goes those years beachcombing along the Fraser from New West to Lulu Island pulling out cedar blocks that had floated free from the shake factory booms. Pulling the blocks out of that industrial muck grey green and foamy down near Scott Paper, the mill that Larry worked in until it moved production south. Then stacking and drying the blocks to split them into shakes with a birchwood hammer and an adze. There goes that industrial mix from the Fraser from the riverbank from the bars by the river. There goes sucking on a hose to get some gas into that golden sixty-six Valiant convertible with the leaky roof and the 273 and putting it right into the carb to sputter the piece of shit to life Again. Still, pretty great to have a convertible with a radio (turn the radio on roadrunner roadrunner!) and a five-gallon gas can and a piece of garden hose and a mouthful of Regular, a mouthful of Regular Leaded from the Chevron in the strip mall across Tenth Ave. There goes working on a printing press under the sidewalk of the storefront at Cambie and Hastings that was later the Caribbean place and is now going to be gentrified. There goes that time. There goes all the shitty renos on Broadway, on Hastings, on Commercial Drive, there goes the dust from that wall Mike took down with a chain saw when Talonbooks was above the foundry and there goes the foundry dust and the sweep of chemicals that would take your head off like six beers later at the Waldorf. There goes the mystery unmarked jars of cleaners and solvents and grease that Larry nicked from the mill and we used on the cars and bikes and on our hands. There goes that job at the self-serve Shell with a car wash across from the college when it was in temporary trailers just to show that education for the masses was taken seriously. And there goes, hopefully, the dust and everything from that week in September when what was stored in the three buildings of the World Trade Centre was pulverized and burnt Into the air and Nancy and I stayed in the apartment with t-shirts tied over our mouth and nose and didn't go out until we went to Milano's where the Fireman drank for free with the IRA guys leaning at the bar. There goes that time. There goes the Aluminum, the antimony, the arsenic the barium, the cadmium, the cesium, the gadolinium the lead the mercury the nickel, the thalium, and the tin. Broken down pissed out. There goes those jobs, those times there goes those relations of inside and outside, of work and nerves and fat and soft tissue and synapses. There goes that set of relationsinside and outside. There goes that body that use and surplus

Jeff Derksen

Living,Coming of Age,The Body

The Wall

Someone has opened a giant map and with the tips of our fingers, each of us suddenly blind, we track the black cold of this monument for names we know like finding a route home. Lost here this damp spring morning, the cherries exploding like the fourth of July, we wonder how many maps of Viet Nam sold those years, so many strange sounding places. One of us holds a magnifying glass to McCarroll, McMorris, McNabb, small print in the polished stone, the way a neighbor, say, in Neoga, Illinois might have done, late at night searching that faraway land on his kitchen table, hearing again the morning paper thump against the front door, that boy on his bike in the dark grown and gone—what was his name,that kid from down the block?— Khe Sanh, Da Nang, Hanoi. --for PFC William "Willie" Searle

Bruce Guernsey

Strict Diet

Though the doctors said no salt, salt was all my father craved. His body bloated, skin water-logged and gray, still he wanted potato chips, honey-baked ham, greasy slabs of Polish sausage from Piekutowski's. He begged for pepperoni pizza, garlic butter, ribs slathered in sauce. But when I did the shopping, I searched only for labels that saidlow sodium and no preservatives, instead bringing home heads of broccoli, turkey burgers, shredded wheat. And when he died anyway, guilt gnawed me like an ulcer— how could I have denied him his few final pleasures?— until I found Big Mac wrappers stuffed under the car seat, jars of pickles in the hall closet, and hidden among wads of tissues near the night stand, his stash— a half-used canister of salt. I sat down on his sagging mattress now stripped of stained sheets and studied that blue label with the girl in the yellow dress holding her umbrella against a rain of salt still falling from the sky.

James Crews

First Fall

I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark morning streets, I point and name. Look, the sycamores, their mottled, paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves rusting and crisping at the edges. I walk through Schiller Park with you on my chest. Stars smolder well into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks, the dogs paddling after their prized sticks. Fall is when the only things you know because I’ve named them begin to end. Soon I’ll have another season to offer you: frost soft on the window and a porthole sighed there, ice sleeving the bare gray branches. The first time you see something die, you won’t know it might come back. I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.

Maggie Smith

Living,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Fall

You Could Never Take A Car to Greenland,

my daughter says. Unless the car could float. Unless by car you mean boat. Unless the ocean turned to ice and promised not to crack. Unless Greenland floated over here, having lifted its anchor. Unless we could row our country there. Our whole continent would have to come along, wouldn't it? Unless we cut ourselves free. What kind of saw could we use for that? What kind of oars could deliver one country to another? She asks, Why is Greenland called Greenland if it’s not green? Why is Iceland called Iceland if it’s greener than Greenland? Unless it’s a trick, a lie: the name Greenland is an ad for Greenland. Who would go promised nothing but ice? Who would cut her home to pieces and row away for that?

Maggie Smith

Living,Youth,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Parachute

Because a lie is not a lie if the teller believes it, the way beautiful things reassure us of the world’s wholeness, of our wholeness, is not quite a lie. Beautiful things believe their own narrative, the narrative that makes them beautiful. I almost believed it until the new mother strapped her infant to her chest, opened the eighth-floor window, and jumped. My daughter tells me, after her preschool field trip to the Firefighter Museum, about the elephant mask, its hose like a trunk, and the video of a man on fire being smothered in blankets. She asks me if she knows anyone who got dead in a fire, anyone who got fired. When will I die? she asks. When I was a child, I churched my hands, I steepled my hands, and all the people were inside, each finger a man, a woman, a child. When I die, will you still love me? she asks. The mother cracked on the pavement— how did the baby live? Look, he smiles and totters around the apartment eight stories up. Beautiful things reassure us of the world’s wholeness: each child sliding down the pole into the fire captain’s arms. But what’s whole doesn’t sell itself as such: buy this whole apple, this whole car. Live this whole life. A lie is not a lie if the teller believes it? Next time the man in the video will not ignite. The baby will open like a parachute.

Maggie Smith

Living,Death,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

What I Carried

I carried my fear of the world to my children, but they refused it. I carried my fear of the world on my chest, where I once carried my children, where some nights it slept as newborns sleep, where it purred but mostly growled, where it licked sweat from my clavicles. I carried my fear of the world and apprenticed myself to the fear. I carried my fear of the world and it became my teacher. I carried it, and it repaid me by teaching me how to carry it. I carried my fear of the world the way an animal carries a kill in its jaws but in reverse: I was the kill, the gift. Whose feet would I be left at? I carried my fear of the world as if it could protect me from the world. I carried my fear of the world and for my children modeled marveling at its beauty but keeping my hands still— keeping my eyes on its mouth, its teeth. I carried my fear of the world. I stroked it or I did not dare to stroke it. I carried my fear of the world and it became my teacher. It taught me how to keep quiet and still I carried my fear of the world and my love for the world. I carried my terrible awe. I carried my fear of the world without knowing how to set it down. I carried my fear of the world and let it nuzzle close to me, and when it nipped, when it bit down hard to taste me, part of me shined: I had been right. I carried my fear of the world and it taught me I had been right. I carried it and loved it for making me right. I carried my fear of the world and it taught me how to carry it. I carried my fear of the world to my children and laid it down at their feet, a kill, a gift. Or I was laid at their feet.

Maggie Smith

Living,Life Choices,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

The First Woman

She was my Sunday school teacher when I was just seven and eight. He was the newly hired pastor, an albino, alarming sight with his transparent eyelashes and mouse-pink skin that looked like it might hurt whenever she caressed his arm. Since Eva was her name, to my child’s mind it made great sense that she should fall in love with him. He was Adán. Before the Fall and afterward, her invert twin. And she, Eva, was blonde as well, though more robust, like Liv Ullmann. I loved her honey hair, her full lips; her green eyes a nameless sin. (Not that I worried all that much— the church was Presbyterian.) In Sunday school, her way to teach us kids to pray was to comment on all the beauty we could touch or see in our environment. My hand was always in the air to volunteer my sentiment. Since other kids considered prayer a chore, the floor was usually mine. My list of joys left out her hair but blessed the red hibiscus seen through the windows while others bowed their heads. Her heart I schemed to win with purple prose on meringue clouds. —For who was Adán, anyway, I thought, but nada spelled backward? While hers, reversed, called out, Ave! Ave! The lyric of a bird born and airborne on the same day. But it was night when I saw her outside the church for the last time: yellow light, mosquitoes, summer. I shaped a barking dog, a fine but disembodied pair of wings with my hands. She spoke in hushed tones to my parents. The next day I would find myself up north, in a strange house, without my tongue and almost blind, there was so much to see. This caused Cuba, my past, to be eclipsed in time, but Eva stayed, a loss. Ave, I learned, meant also this:Farewell! I haven’t seen her since.

Aleida Rodríguez

Living,Coming of Age,Youth,Activities,School & Learning,Religion,Christianity

History

In art, politics, school, church, business, love or marriage—in a piece of work or in a career— strongly spent is synonymous with kept. —Robert Frost She taught me the names of flowers: calendula, ranunculus, Iceland poppy. And the medicinal uses of herbs: Fenugreek opens up a stuffy head; goldenseal lubricates the cracked mucous membranes. Over a circa 1820 American dropleaf table, she told me asparagus was the broom of the kidneys. I hadn't understood at first and thought she'd used a German word I pictured as brüm and not as the little stalks standing on their heads, sweeping out the impurities. I learned to make the perfect roux for soufflé and became her efficient assistant in the kitchen—dicing and chopping, she once told me, with unparalleled patience. Then one day she began to accidentally break my Depression glassware, and I recalled how she'd giggled when she told me that in two years of marriage she had single-handedly decimated her husband's glass collection dating from 1790 to 1810, including a rare wedding goblet. In the doorway to the back porch she stated simply that my presence made her feel strangled, it was nothing I was doing or could do. We saw a therapist for six years, while my collection dwindled then became memory. With unparalleled patience I jumped through hoop after burning hoop, the therapist pointed out, but I heard that as praise for my prowess and continued to balance Bauer plates on my nose on command; hold growling tigers off with Windsor dining room chairs; juggle career, job, hope, and nightly tempests with unparalleled dexterity. I could reassemble anything: shattered pictures of us crossing the street with canes in the future, my hand under her elbow. My heart. But what I lacked, I can see now, was the ability to dissemble. Finally, she brought home a Cuisinart food processor, and I started hearing the minutes slicing away with ferocious velocity, time doing its soft-shoe faster and faster like Fred Astaire on amphetamines. Memories of flowers and herbs were sacrificed to the angry god of its vortex. Your voice is like acid on my skin, she said after twelve years, then grabbed her Cuisinart and left me behind like so much history.

Aleida Rodríguez

Living,Marriage & Companionship,Separation & Divorce,Love,Heartache & Loss,Realistic & Complicated

Little Cuba Stories/Cuentos de Cuba

V. A. There are no doors between the rooms. The archways bore through the house like a tunnel through a mountain. The room one falls into after my parents’ is the largest and serves as two bedrooms divided by an invisible wall. Half of it is my brother’s and the other half my sister and I share, but not at first. Earlier, I have a bed to myself on the side of the room nearest the kitchen. My bed is low and on one side a wooden rail can be dragged up noisily and clicked into place. It is here my little goat wakes me, grabbing the covers off me with her teeth. We play in the empty pig shelter at the far end of the patio while my mother washes clothes in a palangana and throws the soapy water across the concrete, where it steams. But my father is a butcher by profession, and my family has other plans for my goat: a Sunday picnic at the zoo in Havana. The day is huge and blue and breezy. My sister teases me for not eating and says my goat is delicious. I stray away to watch the monkeys. I give one of the monkeys near the fence my banana. As it finishes peeling it meticulously, another monkey appears behind it and shoves the banana into its own mouth. The first monkey turns around, slaps it in the face with the empty peel, but that monkey isn’t sorry and starts jumping and screeching and showing its yellow teeth. For many years, those monkeys are all I can remember about the picnic at the zoo. B. Later, when my sister and I share a bed on the other side of the room, I can see the tall narrow cabinet right inside my parents’ room. My father always puts his hat on top of it as he walks in. And at night, through the mosquito netting, it is a tall thin man wearing a straw hat, lurking just outside the door, watching me in a sinister way. The dead weight of my sister’s habitual leg thrown across my body is no talisman. I have to keep waking myself up, sweaty and tense, to make sure he hasn’t moved any closer.

Aleida Rodríguez

Living,Youth,Nature,Animals

The Invisible Body

Regla lesbia: Flexible rule that may be adjusted to any body to be measured. Compare regla fija: standard. —The Velázquez Dictionary I. In the garden, it’s there. Even when you’re inside you feel it, as though it were you standing naked among the weeds, the tips of the bougainvillea bursting into flame, your nipples ruffled like the skin of a lake by a breeze. You worship the invisible body like an old-fashioned lover, from afar, loving the specificity of space between you. Sometimes at night it stretches out on the empty side of the bed, stares at you with the length of its invisible surface. Every contour of your body not filled by you is molded by the attentiveness of the invisible body, whose breath surrounds you. It’s more than prayer it wants—more than language, with its conditions. The invisible body demands you invent new senses to receive it, new places on your body to marvel at its subtlety, like the eyes of the deaf percussionist that perceive sound. II. The invisible body wants you to become a satellite dish, tuned to what exists only because your body calls to it. Like the woman who had her kitchen remodeled to make room for the microwave she’d entered a contest for. Then won. III. When asked whether falling in love was about acquisitiveness, about the ego, the seventy-five-year-old poet responded that the ego had nothing to do with it; it was the need for union with the beloved. Rumi asks, Who is it we spend our entire lives loving? IV. How, then, do you measure the invisible body, which resists commitment but is faithful? Is it clear who the beloved is, when no clear body exists that can be measured against a standard? V. The invisible body sometimes acquires a body—it’s so convincing, it takes you a while to figure out it’s really the invisible body. Like someone who has been reading your journal, it has decoded from your petty, daily complaints the open sesame that slides the stone from the hidden cave’s opening and cleans you out while you sleep, leaving a sarcastic note. It wants you to know it was doing you a favor, besides, how else did you think you’d discover the cave’s precise location? When Aphrodite sharpens you, you sacrifice a little of yourself, willingly, as a knife does, so that you may become better at it. VI. This is the point at which the invisible body speaks in italics, the Ouija board of poetry. In my mind, says the invisible body, that time capsule shuttlingthrough space, I hold, in all the languages of the world, your love, rushed like holographic platters to a table,steaming into the future long after you’ve ceased to shine, the silver faces of your beloved bobbing out of the darkness,the black velvet pillow of your life on which you offer them for view. VII. The invisible body is created out of your longing, your longing compressing invisible molecules together into an absence you recognize. That is the way one blind man sees the world—after the fact, in photographs he took, once he had passed through it.

Aleida Rodríguez

Living,The Body,Love,Desire

Trying to See Auras at the Airport

Recycled over and over people born look like parents, grandparents, sister or brother, or perhaps a throwback from an earlier ancestor, the hawk nose, a hard ridged forehead, the cleft in the chin or a blue birthmark on the arm, the stomach, the dainty fresh bum of a newborn each unique like a snowflake never can you guess what’s on their mind sometimes I can feel what they’re feeling detect it like hairs on the back of my arms, together we live, talk, walk the same sidewalks, to die buried in a foreign cemetery for others to sit upon ponder their own light, why am I free, what must I do, does someone love me like I do, new skin gives way to wrinkles, hair fades to gray, bones grow strong then decay, strength seeps every time one pees, sleeps, ages, loves, muscles grow then shrink the body a temporary vessel destination unknown. April 28, 2002

Angela C. Trudell Vasquez

Living,Growing Old,The Body,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Mark Twain

If the ashes of Mark Twain lie in the Mississippi River then I’m sure he does rise up some days emerge from dark polluted depths to walk over water to land and scans the horizon for change being a curious sort, he sees the crisis rise again another war on the horizon and shakes his craggy head to say no not again he hopes truth-sayers still exist who don’t have to wait until their dead. December 2002

Angela C. Trudell Vasquez

Mythology & Folklore,Ghosts & the Supernatural

[A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing]

A blue anchor grains of grit in a tall sky sewing I inch and only sometimes as far as the twisted pole gone in spare colors Too late the last express passes through the dust of gardens

John Ashbery

Ilulissat

Outside outside myself there is a world, he rumbled, subject to my incursions —William Carlos Williams, Paterson i. impossible. sterile extrusion the rigour of its beauty its crumpled geometry worked to defeat. light, stopped. locked in its form shuttered and windless in dry rifts, split, furrowed, mottled, creased. ii. trundling bulging from behind, its too heavy body its natural carapace shelving green, sinking the sea beneath it the difficulty piling up, rising to the surface. iii. swirling backward on blue flowering currents rolling up sudden, in spray and mist —like the turning of a page that leaves us blinded for a second— unlocked in a milky scum half hid, long on its axis growing open wounds of violet, emerald, silver. a point of astonishment. lapses of silence. air.

Lesley Harrison

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

Nude

from Pia Arke's exhibition Arctic Hysteria at Greenland's National Museum & Archives, Nuuk, 2010 i. I am in my body. I am here, in front of you. I am the temperature in this room. I am undressed in my nudity; I am the light and shade you feel. I am more like other people than like you. I have before and after. I am my self, entirely and only. My outside and inside are continuous. I am muscle, organ, fluid, bone. I am monumental. You are the only one who sees me. ii. I am not naked as I am; I am naked as you see me. I am transparent, almost visible. I have a time and a place. I am tribal and exotic. I must always carry objects. You are heroic. I am a complete museum, the story of my own making. I am a mirror to you; you are reflected in the looking at me. At best, I mimic you. You write me. When you leave, I will no longer exist. iii. I am a single conscious point. I am indifferent. I am unself, like a photogram. I am prehistoric, before definition. Your body falls over me. I have depth and luminescence. I am neither here nor there; I have infinite extension. I live inside the lived world, the light and dark inside my head like dream substance. I am camera obscura, the room itself. I both adore and resist.

Lesley Harrison

Desire,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

Eday, North Isles

GUITH a greylag morning, the sea a conscious blue. CALF SOUND orca in a sea blue room, breathing pearls that rise to the surface. GROATHA the plenum of the shed: every part infilled with flutter, glass, sheep turd, gusts of damp. GREENTOFT gunshot punctures a field of geese, their clackety rise a flock of helicopters. THE SETTER STONE an old man steps out of the ground all lines and angles, sun snagged in his beard. MILLCROFT a tree softened house: red willow, alder, pine, eucalyptus rooting. WARNESS a stream hole a pure, dense fall; one ocean falling into another. PLANTATION wren, silver lark, crow woody snipe, curlew, hen hawk day owl, starling. SOUTH END the Varagen, beaded with spotlights curves through the dark round great holes in the sea WARD HILL climbing with the moon, the wind blowing round my mouth— a low note, like an owl.

Lesley Harrison

Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

In an Artist's Studio

One face looks out from all his canvases, One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans: We found her hidden just behind those screens, That mirror gave back all her loveliness. A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, A saint, an angel — every canvas means The same one meaning, neither more or less. He feeds upon her face by day and night, And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, Fair as the moon and joyful as the light: Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright; Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.

Christina Rossetti

A Triad

Three sang of love together: one with lips Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow, Flushed to the yellow hair and finger tips; And one there sang who soft and smooth as snow Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show; And one was blue with famine after love, Who like a harpstring snapped rang harsh and low The burden of what those were singing of. One shamed herself in love; one temperately Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife; One famished died for love. Thus two of three Took death for love and won him after strife; One droned in sweetness like a fattened bee: All on the threshold, yet all short of life.

Christina Rossetti

From the Antique

It's a weary life, it is, she said: Doubly blank in a woman's lot: I wish and I wish I were a man: Or, better then any being, were not: Were nothing at all in all the world, Not a body and not a soul: Not so much as a grain of dust Or a drop of water from pole to pole. Still the world would wag on the same, Still the seasons go and come: Blossoms bloom as in days of old, Cherries ripen and wild bees hum. None would miss me in all the world, How much less would care or weep: I should be nothing, while all the rest Would wake and weary and fall asleep.

Christina Rossetti

Winter: My Secret

I tell my secret? No indeed, not I; Perhaps some day, who knows? But not today; it froze, and blows and snows, And you’re too curious: fie! You want to hear it? well: Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell. Or, after all, perhaps there’s none: Suppose there is no secret after all, But only just my fun. Today’s a nipping day, a biting day; In which one wants a shawl, A veil, a cloak, and other wraps: I cannot ope to everyone who taps, And let the draughts come whistling thro’ my hall; Come bounding and surrounding me, Come buffeting, astounding me, Nipping and clipping thro’ my wraps and all. I wear my mask for warmth: who ever shows His nose to Russian snows To be pecked at by every wind that blows? You would not peck? I thank you for good will, Believe, but leave the truth untested still. Spring’s an expansive time: yet I don’t trust March with its peck of dust, Nor April with its rainbow-crowned brief showers, Nor even May, whose flowers One frost may wither thro’ the sunless hours. Perhaps some languid summer day, When drowsy birds sing less and less, And golden fruit is ripening to excess, If there’s not too much sun nor too much cloud, And the warm wind is neither still nor loud, Perhaps my secret I may say, Or you may guess.

Christina Rossetti

No, Thank You, John

I never said I loved you, John: Why will you tease me, day by day, And wax a weariness to think upon With always "do" and "pray"? You know I never loved you, John; No fault of mine made me your toast: Why will you haunt me with a face as wan As shows an hour-old ghost? I dare say Meg or Moll would take Pity upon you, if you'd ask: And pray don't remain single for my sake Who can't perform that task. I have no heart?—Perhaps I have not; But then you're mad to take offence That I don't give you what I have not got: Use your common sense. Let bygones be bygones: Don't call me false, who owed not to be true: I'd rather answer "No" to fifty Johns Than answer "Yes" to you. Let's mar our pleasant days no more, Song-birds of passage, days of youth: Catch at to-day, forget the days before: I'll wink at your untruth. Let us strike hands as hearty friends; No more, no less: and friendship's good: Only don't keep in view ulterior ends, And points not understood In open treaty. Rise above Quibbles and shuffling off and on: Here's friendship for you if you like; but love,— No, thank you, John.

Christina Rossetti

A Study (A Soul)

She stands as pale as Parian statues stand; Like Cleopatra when she turned at bay, And felt her strength above the Roman sway, And felt the aspic writhing in her hand. Her face is steadfast toward the shadowy land, For dim beyond it looms the light of day; Her feet are steadfast; all the arduous way That foot-track hath not wavered on the sand. She stands there like a beacon thro' the night, A pale clear beacon where the storm-drift is; She stands alone, a wonder deathly white; She stands there patient, nerved with inner might, Indomitable in her feebleness, Her face and will athirst against the light.

Christina Rossetti

Negative Space

1. I was born on a Tuesday in April. I didn't cry. Not because I was stunned. I wasn't even mad. I was the lucky egg, trained for gratitude inside the belly for nine months straight. Two workers welded bunk beds at the end of the delivery room. One on top of the other. My universe might have been the white lime ceiling, or the embodiment of Einstein's bent space in the aluminum springs of the bed above that curved toward the center. Neither cold, nor warm. "It was a clear day," my mother told me. It's hard to believe there were a few romantic evenings when I was conceived, a buzz in the retina and red-laced magma decadently peeling off a silver candlestick. Infants' cries and milk fever turned to salt from the stench of bleach— abrasive, unequivocal. With a piece of cloth wrapped on the end of a stick, the janitor casually extends the negative space of the black-and-white tiled floor like a mouth of broken teeth, a baleen of darkness sieving out new human destinies. 2. 1968. At the dock, ships arriving from the East dumped punctured rice bags, mice and the delirium of the Cultural Revolution. A couple of men in uniform cleared out the church in the middle of the night. The locals saw the priest in the yard wearing only his underwear, shivering from the cold. Their eyes, disillusioned, questioned one another: "Wasn't he the one who pardoned our sins?" Icons burned in front of their eyes, icons and the holy scriptures. Witnesses stepped farther back, as if looking at love letters nobody dared to claim. Crosses were plucked from graves. And from each mouth spilled irreversible promises: mounds of dirt the rains would smooth down sooner or later. Children dragged church bells by the tongue. (Why didn’t they think of this before?) Overnight, the dome was demolished, instantly revealing a myriad of nameless stars that chased the crowd like flies on a dead horse. And what could replace Sunday mass now? Women brought cauldrons into the yard. Men filled up their pipes; smoke rose into the air, against gravity's pull. Nails in worn out shoes exposed stigmata that bled in the wrong places— a new code of sanctification, of man, by man. 3. "Read!"—I was told. Who said that? Angel Gabriel, or my first-grade teacher who had dark roots underneath her bleached curls? Language arrived fragmentary split in syllables, spasmodic like code in times of war. "Continue where your classmate left off!" A long sentence tied us to one another without connotation as if inside an idiom. Someone would get to read the noun, another the verb, a third one a pronoun. . . I always got the exclamation mark at the end— a mere grimace, a small curse. A tall cast-iron stove below the portrait of the dictator, puffing smoke from its temples, enough heat for everyone. On the blackboard, leftover diphthongs from yesterday or the day before rubbed against one another like kittens. After dusk, I looked for another language outside the window, my eyes glued to a constellation (they call these types "dreamers") my discovery possibly a journey into the past, toward a galaxy already dead, nonexistent, the kind of news that needs millions of years to reach me. "Read!"—the angel shook me for a third time her finger pointing to an arbitrary word a million light years apart from its object. (It didn't matter who was first). Negative space sketched my onomatopoeic profile of body and shadow in an accidental encounter. 4. Language is erosive. It makes us recluses, a wind through the canyons carving our paleontological eras for everyone to read. Under the revised testament of my skin bellows a gold-cast bull, an alluring object, a need for attention. Then comes the unleavened bread and a last supper, which, remarkably, is repeated several times between ice ages. Lower yet, Sodom. I recognize it from the stench of sulfur. I hold my nose. Freud would have done the same. And then Cain, a crow taught him how to bury his own brother. . . And at the bottom, Adam’s gentlemanlike sin under which scientists discover earlier epochs of famine. Between unidentified layers, wanderings in the sand, the search for a new prophet. . . I try to understand my people. Their language is plain. Some words, were actually never uttered, like pages stuck together in a book fresh off the press and long after it sits on a shelf. This, too, lives inside me within insidious bubbles of air, negative spaces where I can find little historical rest, but also where utter ruin may originate. 5. Little left of the snow three days ago. Its blanket ripped away, exposing dog shit and the bruises of routine. Negative space gives form to the woods and to the mad woman—a silhouette of the goddess Athena wearing a pair of flip flops, an owl on her shoulder. It’s minus zero. The factory’s gate gnashes its teeth behind the back of the last worker. Blowing noses, shivering, mucus. . . A virus circulates through the workplace, secretly, intimately touching one person after another, a current of sensuality. It softens the tone. But nothing unites them more than their frailty, The one-sizes-fits-all shoes you must grow accustomed to By filling the extra space with cotton, Or curling your ill-fitting toes. 6. In Halil’s yard, rules were sacrilege. His eight children entertained themselves by carrying famine on their shoulders, recalling St. Bartholomew’s flayed skin. Starving, filthy, hazel-eyed— three qualities that unexpectedly coalesce in the bright light, strung together like sneezes. One’s famine was another’s consolation. “Look at them! It’s a sin for us to complain. They’re even worse off than us!” But even Halil found his own consolation in the old woman Zyra, “barren and paralyzed,” the root origin of despair. This was our highlands landscape, hierarchical, where each family would make out a different expiration date on the roof below their own. Schadenfreude was the only river that could turn mills. But if this hierarchy shifted, and our roof gave signs of ruin, my mother would plant tulips in the garden, white tulips, our false image, a scarecrow to keep predators away. 7. Nearly nothing was mentioned in the letters he sent from prison, just two lines, on top of the page: “I am well. . .” and “If you can, please send me a pair of woolen socks.” From them, I learned to read between the lines: negative spaces, the unsaid, gestures, insomnia that like a hat’s shadow fails to shade your chin and ears. And in the photographs’ white background, acrophobia adds to the color of their eyes: blue, green, gray, and ultimately, chesnut brown, as, earthward, we lower our gaze. I learned to read the empty spaces the dead left behind—a pair of folded glasses after the reading’s done and discourse commences. Or the musical chairs game called "love," where there are less empty seats than people. If you don’t want to be the last one standing you must predict when the music will stop. (Who, though, has really succeeded?) Perhaps a little practice can be useful in this case. I don’t mean squatting, jumping, stretching, but listening to the same music every day from the start, the same miserable vinyl record so that you’ll recognize its cracks before it recognizes yours. 8. Midnight. Snoring, meaningless sounds that stain the side of the wall that belongs to no one. So where are we? What dimension? Who foots the bill at a time like this without lambs or sinners, when even angels record nothing? The street’s clearly visible under the neon 24-hour-service sign above the funeral home. There was a music shop next to it that closed down a few months ago; the shop shared a wall with the funeral home, shared the same water pipes and the same gate to heaven. But the coffins won, the wide-shouldered coffins that narrow down in the shape of a mummy, not a human. Wood of the highest quality, swears the owner, and pure silk inside, pleated like a stomach that can digest even a bulldozer. When asleep we're simply five limbs. Starfish. If you cut one limb, it will grow back. Even a single limb could recreate us from the beginning, a single hope. Negative space is always fertile. 9. No one knows if it was simply a matter of mixed or some other reason why I used to see what I wasn't supposed to see— the ending of things. It wasn’t a mystical gift, but like a blood clot in the darkness of a vein, I held on to reason, as it circulated from the bottom up and not the other way around as we were told. I used to start from the edges and with my left hand or a croupier’s stick gather the balls and dice from the corners and then watch the bettors as neither a winner nor a loser. There's nothing sillier than watching a film in reverse where after the climax, the protagonists are replaced by circumstances, and circumstances replaced by minor characters, their tongues plastered behind a single, fatal smirk Life and my short lunar calendar slipped away like carbon paper sending off as much light as necessary, skipping the details, the contrast and sharp colors. Lunar time is short. Until the actual end, there are years enough, the negative spaces. What to do with them when the verb has already been uttered, a conclusive sentence with Latin syntax, or more than that: didactic.

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Living,Coming of Age,Religion,Faith & Doubt,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Via Politica

I grew up in a big house where weakness and expressions of joy deserved punishment. And I was raised on the via politica with the grease of yesterday’s glories, a thick grease collected under arctic skies. I was lit up. My notebooks, my hair, my heart reeked of smoke. That’s when we saw each other clearly. Or rather, what remained of us. Damaged like lottery numbers scratched away with a blade. How different we were! Those with round faces were righteous; those with narrow faces were cautious. One listened secretly to Puccini, another to silence, the music’s music. The oldest one declaimed monologues inside a ten-by-ten-foot cell he had built for himself. And the mysterious one simply had diabetes. But how similar we were in severe circumstances! Alarmed like a flock of magpies that the smallest stone sends into the sky toward the mouth of the abyss. Then it became obvious there wasn’t enough space for everyone. We separated. Some went on living in via verbum, telling of what they knew, what they witnessed, and so, through their narrative, creating their own grease. The others crossed over the ocean. And those in particular who went farthest away never speak of their annoying history of wretched survival, burying it in the darkest crevices on their being. Unfortunately, as with perfume, its scent lingers there for much, much longer.

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Acupuncture

Among the personal objects inside a 2100-year-old Chinese tomb, archaeologists found nine acupuncture needles, four gold and five silver. Long before knowing why, ancient doctors knew that pain must be fought with pain. It’s quite simple: an array of needles pricking your arm for a properly functioning heart and lungs. Needles in the feet to ease insomnia and stress. Needles between your eyes to fight infertility. A little pain here, and the effect is felt elsewhere Once, a group of explorers set out to plant a flag on the South Pole, a needle at the heel of the globe, in the middle of nowhere. But before the mission was completed a new world war had begun. The impact of the needle was felt in the world’s brain, in the lobe responsible for short-term memory. When Russia used ideology as acupuncture—a needle over the Urals— it impacted the pancreas and the control of blood sugar: America paid tenfold for whiskey during Prohibition, and at post offices, copies of Joyce’s “immoral” Ulysses were stored for burning. The universe functions as a single body. Stars form lines of needles carefully pinned to a broad hairy back. Their impact is felt in the digestive tract, each day a new beginning. How can you begin a new day not having fully absorbed yesterday’s protein? I was a child when my first teacher mispronounced my last name twice. That pricked me like a needle. A small needle in the earlobe. And suddenly, my vision cleared— I saw poetry, the perfect disguise.

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Homo Antarcticus

"The wild will keep calling and calling forever in your ears. You cannot escape the 'little voices.'" —Frank Wild 1. Here I rest, in South Georgia. A few feet of evolution away lie the graves of whale hunters, pointing north. A white fence shields them from elephant seals and their apocalyptic screams that each day warn of the end of the world, or maybe the beginning. . . I survived five expeditions to the Pole. The one before last, “Imperial Trans-Antarctica,” nearly killed me. For two years I put up with the ice—no man can reap or sow these fields. And, unlike farmers, I didn’t even need to ask God for rain, because ice is sated and more desolate than the Sahara. I survived distance. Wrote one message after another beginning with a capital letter and a "PS." at the end. My own personal post office under my pillow closed for two years already, on holiday. I survived six month-long polar days and nights; to this day, I don't know which one was worse. My epitaph is simple. Carved in granite: FRANK WILD 18 April 1873 19 August 1939 “Shackleton’s Right Hand Man” From those cast away here by a defect in the engine of the ship or nostalgia of the womb. 2. Ah yes. . . in the beginning was the ship. The ship stuck in ice. Endurance. Ships are women. They prefer soft seas. In the best-case scenario, she’s called La Santa Maria and she throws you, like Columbus, on some foreign shore. But if you get too close to her. . . The very day after we washed her deck with warm water and soap, warmed her arteries with gin, stroked her lower back with our surrogate songs, shaved our beards and exposed the illiterate lines on our faces, she took off. And from the shore, we saw how she broke her ribs, sinking, aft first, so fast we didn’t even have time to pray, leaving behind her ash-tree fragrance and faux pearls on the water. “Such a woman!” someone laughed bitterly, “She knows when to leave so as not to be forgotten.” 3. A woman, naturally, has no business there. Antarctica is a masculine continent— male penguins keep the eggs warm, the moon stands up on the street to urinate after being kicked out of the tavern, the cold like a cut-throat razor, dulled for three thousand years, and the sled dogs, the Huskies, we kill with a single bullet so they won’t starve to death. In this way we instill a little character into the new land before the arrival of Conquistadors, thieves, assassins, missionaries, prostitutes, the first invading army of every continent. Antarctica is a man’s continent, because only a man chooses to break into the darkness of the mind by conquering the body, as Amundsen and Scott did, their glory reaching to the apex of ecstasy. Zero degree of geographical latitude, utter collapse. 4. Hunger is overestimated. The stomach functions much like the brain: when it has nothing to think about, it feeds off memories. It can last three days just thinking of a single biscuit. But those who have a better memory, meaning a much stronger acidity, can go on for months remembering a slice of prosciutto, two fried eggs, sweetly folding their eyelids like napkins after a meal. Then hallucinations begin. Banquets. Easter supper. Feet move impatiently under the table; the scent of rosemary wafts from a platter and two clean serving hands with burns here and there. That's when you feel grief-stricken and you attack the seals and penguins with your alpine knives and shoes like a madman in an empty amphitheater. Or is this, too, a hallucination, and in this case not ours but Antarctica's? And when clarity finally returns, both stomach and brain notice only their own deep wrinkles. 5. Blubber, blubber, seal's blubber. Blubber that keeps your spirits alive, rendering it for fuel, for light, blubber to mask the body's foul odor, —a mixture of doubt, hope, and ammonia. And if you have nothing better to do, think of a cow's thigh hanging at the butcher's, its delicate streak of fat like a silk ribbon. I survived even this sarcasm. And every night, before bed, we read recipes to each other one of a few things we secretly rescued from the ship before she sank, as if these items were her lingerie. What a show it was! What pathos in pronouncing prosciutto, sugar, omelet! What sensuality in milk, parsley, cinnamon! We made these words up ourselves. Nothing exists until its moment of absence. But first, in order to warm up our mouths like actors before going on stage, we'd repeat mechanically, palates dry, "Bless us, O Lord, and this food we've received through your mercy.” 6. It was the Romans who spoiled the word studying rhetoric before anatomy and mathematics:Vir bonus dicendi peritus “The good man skilled in speaking" (Marcus Porcius Cato) But in Antarctica, words are measured differently: by calories! With a simple greeting you lose five calories, just as many to keep a fire burning for a full minute. And a Ciceronian argument can consume a whole day’s nutrition; think carefully before you open your mouth. The word is overestimated. Sometimes it’s enough to avert your eyes from your shoes to imply “gangrene”; and a vague exchange of glances between men is enough to understand that the ice is cracking beneath your feet and death is closer than your fingers. 7. Stretched smooth from end to end—such is Antarctica. In fact, even a baby’s skin looks withered by comparison. No emotions. No regrets. No warnings. Either fight or die. My father was like this more or less. A teacher at a village school. In classrooms that smelled of sheep-wool pullovers drying on the body. And eyes that moved freely in their hollows, like toes inside an older sibling’s shoes. Unlike the Romans, my father preached about justice and honor his hands folded behind his back. His shoulders seemed twice as wide as his worn jacket. I inherited his sharp, gray gaze and his soft voice. Eyes that say “Go” and a voice that says “Stay.” You never know which one to trust. 8. And mother? Oh, she was simply Captain Cook’s niece, —the great James Cook— from morning to night when she washed, swept, dug potatoes from the garden, fixed her husband’s tie on Sundays even from her bed, while in labor. She never spoke of this. As it wasn’t necessary. People speak of what they have, not what they are. She was a tailor. Measured everyone's perimeter with a glance; erred only on the width of one’s neck, an unknown strength. Her large scissors followed the white chalk line on the cloth so precisely. "Snip!" She said little. Her silence followed the white outlines of another tailor, over a fabric much older than she was. But now that I think of it, how did the poor woman respond to her friends asking, "Where is your son?" "He's exploring the world." "And what does he bring back from there?" "Himself, alive, I hope." "What's the point of returning empty-handed after two years?” Was she at least a little proud of me? Of her Frank? Certainly not. She was Captain Cook's niece. The past always conquers. 9. I was the first of thirteen children. And as a rule, each of them eyed one of my belongings. One eyed my bed near the window that overlooked the water where frogs lived and asparagus grew on the shore. Another eyed my green jacket bought with borrowed money, poker cards, a fishing net, my wicker chair with the damaged back. Another whistled my favorite tune: "What Will We Do with a Drunken Sailor?” without reaching the refrain. And yet another envied the basement —that place I occupied in my father’s heart— with its elm door hanging by a single hinge. But the time hasn't come to leave home just yet, until your own brother begins to use your shaving kit and dreams of the same girl. 10. What shaving kit? Antarctica makes you grow a double-beard as if you were a hundred-year-old grave. And, while you remember wasting time waiting in line at barber's another beard grows, a red one. Here, each body part works for itself: the stomach, hands, intestines, eyes. . . The unity of the body is overestimated, too. Only skin pulls everything together like a sled. The skin? Which skin? Man loses his first skin to his first love, like the snake early in spring on a thorn-apple bush that blocks the way. From that point on he stops counting the rest. 11. I don’t know why it was named “Elephant Island,” when it answered the ocean with the cries of a she-wolf. We could only make out her sly teats under her belly. After some time, if she didn’t kill us first, we’d begin to cry like wolves ourselves. Twenty-two people. Packed next to one another under two inverted boats like notes in Bach’s “Come, Sweet Death, Come Blessed Rest,” with more pauses, a dramatic suffocation between breaths. A dry, calcic cough was a sign of life. Or the delirious mutterings of someone dreaming aloud of “ice” in the middle of ice, after they had cut off his toes. But the hardest moment arrives in the morning, when, with shut eyes and plugged nostrils, as if drinking your own urine you recycle the same lie for four months straight: “Men, pack up your stuff! The boss might arrive today!” And they obeyed me. Packed carefully each day from the start, leaving nothing shap in the folds of their bags, nothing that would spoil the line between fact and fiction. It was a time when routine grew more powerful than hope. 12. Fish in the ocean toyed with our citizenship. On the seventh mile, we left our medals behind, class ranks, along with the dogs, potatoes, and a camera. We made fire out of money and kept only a single metal coin each so that archaeologists might trace us more easily centuries later. On Elephant Island, we had to bid farewell even to tobacco, tobacco which reminded us of village alleyways and walks home after midnight. Time glided above us without touching a single strand of our hair— nonexistent, as if gliding above ancient cities, exposing the solemnity of our white bones and crickets on absent walls. That’s when the ten commandments deserted us: “Do not steal,” “Do not lie,” “Do not covet,” “Honor your parents”. . . save one of them perhaps, the one about the holiness of Sunday. We already had nothing. We belonged to no one. An entirely new species: HOMO ANTARCTICUS. A scientific proof that “forgotten” and “free” mean the same thing. 13. Two years after returning from the world of the dead, you find your house taken over by another tenant and the rent tripled, the commemorative plaque nailed to the gate: “Here lived F.W.” And your lover, or better, ex-lover, for the same reason, in the arms of another three times more handsome. You see your own image sold at an auction. Artifact. Original. “Brrramp. Sold!” The price so high you can’t afford it. But even if you could, you're an illegal customer, holding a death certificate in your hand. And you find your parents turned into winter trees their eyes fixed on a large cloud of plaster. They don’t expect visitors. Best not disturb them. Let their leaves fall quietly where they will let the crow's nest remain in the armpit of a branch, where it has always been. Perhaps you should take a shortcut, start over. Or you know what? There’s a war going on nearby, they say. Go there instead! But this time die better. 14. War’s never satisfied with flesh; Fresh, branded, smoked, with or without blood blue blood, dark, thick, whatever kind. And frozen blood like yours could store at minus 40 degrees Celsius, viruses from 1914 unscathed, and the map of the old Empire and Scott's hurt ego and old coins minted with the head of Edward VII, and Browning’s poetry and the epic of the unknown, like an envelope inside an envelope, all making you the ideal candidate. Back on the ship, ammunition everywhere, sailing through the cold Northern seas where you had to learn a new language. A new language is like a fish: first, you need to remove its spine in order to chew it. Unlike in Antarctica, one’s purpose in war is clear: kill or be killed, though sometimes it’s the same difference. Baltic nights gave you what Antarctica refused you: the other half of the celestial sphere. You meet Vera, the widow of a tea plantation owner, a character out of a Baroque novel, her pupils blurred with dusk, and the ritual of mourning fitted perfectly to her body like a final journey. 15. A man charmed by a glacier, who knows too well the flawless forms of her body, feels her eavesdropping gaze even when asleep, her clean and distant breath and her heart, a piece of ice, that melts inside a cigarette case heated for drinking water, finds it difficult to marry a real woman, to marry Vera. And Africa. I bought land. Barren. Hundreds of acres. In Zululand. I didn’t fare well with tobacco. Planted cotton instead, chose bodily peace rather than meditation. My nearest neighbor lived 45 miles away. White, of course. And my fate, never blended with the blacks, those beautiful statues, wrapped in straw. I heard them nod off during lunch break, like the oars of a boat, in complete sync. They knew where they were heading. But I didn’t. And I was right. It didn’t take long before drought, floods, worms destroyed everything. The bank left me only my own beard and the malarial shadow of a baobab. Apart from other things, Vera filled out divorce papers. The woman in the yellow dress, yellow as quinine, yellow as the sigh of a hinge at dusk, the woman married to the hero who now can’t even manage a small plot of land. 16. The man in front of me —my master I call "Boss"— is newly shaved, and dressed in a striped tie and jacket as if the Prince of Wales or Fred Astaire, a style that arrives here two years late. He asks me to serve whiskey to clients at the bar and chat them up using their jargon, gestures, sentences uninterrupted by mosquitoes, and the abstract rhetoric of the Depression years. And, to be frank, he pays me for the latter. But what do I know, what does a survivor know about the art of living, for which new instincts are needed, new muscles and other kinds of heart valves? Furthermore, how can I obey such a spick-and-span boss, having known the smoky gods of Antarctica who recognize each other solely by the nose and can end rebellions with a glance and count the deaths as members of the crew? How can I take orders from a boss whose name isn't Shackleton? 17. "Second in command,” “Lieutenant,” “Shackleton’s right hand” What did she see so clearly in me, my drama teacher in elementary school when she'd always assign me the role of Father Joseph, of Gaspar the Magi offering Jesus frankincense, or of John the Baptist always there to clear the path? What did she see in my metallic pupils, baritone voice, infrequent speech as if scissors, bandage, and iodine inside a first aid kit? Under Antarctica's naked sky, each of us followed his own star. Even the carpenter, his own heraldic calling. You didn’t need much to feed them; just a few crusts of insomnia and the tents' punctured holes. My star was weak; you could hardly see it hidden behind another larger, troubled star like a calm valley that appears behind jagged peaks more attractive when absent. 18. What happened afterward can be told in a few words: I worked in a mine; earth’s warm heart, happened to be crueler than her frozen brain. I laid railroad tracks South, always toward the Unknown. It was like playing only two strings on a violin: joy and sorrow, fatefully blending at the horizon. I repaired houses. Another waste of time. I never understood their weak points, just as you can't make out eyes from genitals or mouth in some underwater creatures. And when I was left penniless, I gave lectures about Antarctica, water gurgling in my gullet every five words, for those few who listened patiently to an adventure of survival. Then Bea arrived. Or sweet Beatrice. It was easy to grant her what I had left in my heart —that set of heavy museum keys— with no fear she might lose them. Tired lungs and liver could barely follow my split image of bust and bottle of booze. Like a prophet in the last circle of Dante’s Inferno, I carried my own decapitated head in hand. My ashes were lost at the base of a church. No one thought of them. It was a time of war. Another world war. The second one not knowing what to do with her own ashes either. 19. Some of us died in the war. Others took to the sea again, the gray, cracked waters of the South, decks perspiring fuel and alcohol. Our random itineraries. Full-time melancholics. For months in Antarctica, we waited for our shadow to return and consumed that question you ask yourself only once in your lifetime, the way one consumes chickenpox. And the rest of the time, we counted the scars left on our faces, with a gesture you could call indifferent and epic, or childlike.

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Living,Death,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism

All the Dead Boys Look Like Me

Last time I saw myself die is when police killed Jessie Hernandez A 17 year old brown queer // who was sleeping in their car Yesterday I saw myself die again // Fifty times I died in Orlando // & I remember reading // Dr. José Esteban Muñoz before he passed I was studying at NYU // where he was teaching // where he wrote shit That made me feel like a queer brown survival was possible // But he didn’t Survive & now // on the dancefloor // in the restroom // on the news // in my chest There are another fifty bodies that look like mine // & are Dead // & I’ve been marching for Black Lives & talking about police brutality Against Native communities too // for years now // but this morning I feel it // I really feel it again // How can we imagine ourselves // We being black native Today // Brown people // How can we imagine ourselves When All the Dead Boys Look Like Us? // Once I asked my nephew where he wanted To go to College // What career he would like // as if The whole world was his for the choosing // Once he answered me without fearing Tombstones or cages or the hands from a father // The hands of my lover Yesterday praised my whole body // Made angels from my lips // Ave Maria Full of Grace // He propped me up like the roof of a cathedral // in NYC Before we opened the news & read // & read about people who think two brown queers Can’t build cathedrals // only cemeteries // & each time we kiss A funeral plot opens // In the bedroom I accept his kiss // & I lose my reflection I’m tired of writing this poem // but I want to say one last word about Yesterday // my father called // I heard him cry for only the second time in my life He sounded like he loved me // it’s something I’m rarely able to hear & I hope // if anything // his sound is what my body remembers first.

Christopher Soto

Living,Death,Love,Desire,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment

Heartbeats

Work out. Ten laps. Chin ups. Look good. Steam room. Dress warm. Call home. Fresh air. Eat right. Rest well. Sweetheart. Safe sex. Sore throat. Long flu. Hard nodes. Beware. Test blood. Count cells. Reds thin. Whites low. Dress warm. Eat well. Short breath. Fatigue. Night sweats. Dry cough. Loose stools. Weight loss. Get mad. Fight back. Call home. Rest well. Don't cry. Take charge. No sex. Eat right. Call home. Talk slow. Chin up. No air. Arms wide. Nodes hard. Cough dry. Hold on. Mouth wide. Drink this. Breathe in. Breathe out. No air. Breathe in. Breathe in. No air. Black out. White rooms. Head hot. Feet cold. No work. Eat right. CAT scan. Chin up. Breathe in. Breathe out. No air. No air. Thin blood. Sore lungs. Mouth dry. Mind gone. Six months? Three weeks? Can't eat. No air. Today? Tonight? It waits. For me. Sweet heart. Don't stop. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Melvin Dixon

Living,Health & Illness

The Lord's Prayer

You can't fake it. You know when I fail to achieve the expected: palm the becoming- comatose bullfrog, legs collapsing as they may, and chuck it (we used to say) high as you can. Let it fly stone-like to the skylight in the low dome of fog—another requirement of the game: a foggy day and a bullfrog and you, Vincent. The old code goes back and forth between us as we take our turns, childhood pals, engaged by the game we once called Kamikaze—now, a nameless ceremony. Nameless not because a boy's play calcifies in a man's conviction; not because, despite our promise, you've become a mid-rank fighter pilot, and I a minor poet; and not because it's too unpleasant to name what brings to hand that astonished muscle only to leave it, later, sprawled on the current. The perfect toss sends the critter shattering for an instant, beyond fog, into the invisible. Disappearance is success. Once you said, "My insides tickle whenever it happens," and so I know you've been tickled five times, and I three. That's the score; the score matters little. The name is gone because we're from here, and, being native, cannot visit how it is that an urge to which we tend tends to us— how we are cruel, inscrutable, indefensible, yet holy. How we send up bodies of praise from our right hand, only to gather eventual elegies— flesh stunned still as words—in our left. Once again the center of the heavens is earth. We've thrown as high as we can for as long as we can remember, only to await some return: a revelation, plummet, explosive splash. So it is that two grown men may stand again in stillness, awaiting word, friends who glimpse for seconds at a time earth as it is in heaven, ankle-deep in Rowan Creek with eyes uplifted, reflecting the fog to the fog itself.

Anthony Carelli

Living,Youth,Nature,Animals,Religion,Christianity,The Spiritual

I Look for You

I look for you early, my rock and my refuge, offering you worship morning and night; before your vastness I come confused and afraid, for you see the thoughts of my heart. What could the heart and tongue compose, or spirit’s strength within me to suit you? But song soothes you and so I’ll give praise to your being as long as your breath-in-me moves.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol

Religion,God & the Divine,Judaism,Yom Kippur

Send Your Spirit

Send your spirit to revive our corpses, and ripple the longed-for land again. The crops come from you; you’re good to all— and always return to restore what has been.

Solomon Ibn Gabirol

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Religion,God & the Divine,Judaism,Passover

Lord,

all my desire is here before you, whether or not I speak of it: I'd seek your favor, for an instant, then die— if only you would grant my wish. I'd place my spirit in your hand, then sleep—and in that sleep find sweetness. I wander from you—and die alive; the closer I cling—I live to die. How to approach I still don't know, nor on what words I might rely. Instruct me, Lord: advise and guide me. Free me from my prison of lies. Teach me while I can bear the affliction— do not, Lord, despise my plea; before I've become my own burden and the little I am weighs on me, and against my will, I give in as worms eat bones that weary of me. I'll come to the place my forefathers reached, and by their place of rest find rest. Earth's back to me is foreign; my one true home is in its dust. Till now my youth has done what it would: When will I provide for myself? The world He placed in my heart has kept me from tending to my end and after. How could I come to serve my Lord, when I am still desire's prisoner? How could I ask for a place on high, when I know the worm will be my sister? How at that end could my heart be glad, when I do not know what death will bring? Day after day and night after night reduce the flesh upon me to nothing. Into the winds they'll scatter my spirit. To dust they'll return the little remaining. What can I say—with desire my enemy, from boyhood till now pursuing me: What is Time to me but your Will? If you're not with me, what will I be? I stand bereft of any virtue: only your justice and mercy shield me. But why should I speak, or even aspire? Lord, before you is all my desire.

Yehudah Halevi

Living,Death,Religion,God & the Divine,Judaism,Yom Kippur

At the Hour of Closing

Lord of wondrous workings,grant us understanding— now at the hour of closing. A chosen few are called, their eyes toward you lifting— they stand exalted in their trembling now, at the hour of closing. They pour forth their souls; erase, then, their straying— and grant them, Lord, your absolution now at the hour of closing. Be a shelter for them through all their suffering; consign them only to rejoicing now, at the hour of closing. Show them your compassion, in your justice turning on all who brought oppression to them— now at the hour of closing. Recall their fathers’ merit and count it as merit for them; renew their days as once they were, now, at the hour of closing. Call for the year of grace— the remnant flock’s returning to Oholìbah and Oholàh— now at the hour of closing.

Moses ibn Ezra

Religion,Judaism

Prayer

For all the pain passed down the genes or latent in the very grain of being; for the lordless mornings, the smear of spirit words intuit and inter; for all the nightfall neverness inking into me even now, my prayer is that a mind blurred by anxiety or despair might find here a trace of peace.

Christian Wiman

Living,The Mind,Religion,The Spiritual

[the target is a record of the past history of the target]

the target is a record of the past history of the target or forever hold your or told you so complacent mention repeats numerous trills in memory sugar and spice in the bag suppressed supposedly on an axis allow for the idea to rest

Jen Hofer

[a bullet has passed through]

a bullet has passed through spent the time elsewhere to need, tenderly, potential does not need to be bought, cannot in fact refute the cause, rather catches

Jen Hofer

Waiting For a Poem

I’m waiting for a poem, something rough, not elaborate or out of control, something undisturbed by curses, a white raven released from darkness. Words that come naturally, without aiming at anything, a bullet without a target, warning shots to the sky in newly occupied lands. A poem that will well up in my chest and until it arrives I will listen to my children fighting in the next room and cast my gaze down at the table at an empty glass of milk with a trace of white along its rim my throat wrapped in silver a napkin in a napkin ring waiting for late guests to arrive. . . .

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

Prisoners

Prisoners guilty or not always look the same when they are released— patriarchs dethroned. This one just passed through the gate head bowed despite not being tall his gestures like a Bedouin’s entering the tent he carried on his back all day long. Cotton curtains, stone walls, the smell of burnt lime take him back to the moment the cold war ended. The other day his sheet was hung up in the courtyard as if to flaunt the blood stain after a wedding night. Faces tarnished by sun surround him, all eyes and ears: “What did you dream of last night?” A prisoner’s dreams are parchment made sacred by its missing passages. His sister is still discovering his odd habits: the bits of bread hidden in pockets and under his bed the relentless chopping of wood for winter. Why this fear? What can be worse than life in prison? Having choices but being unable to choose.

Luljeta Lleshanaku

Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment

We Lived

We lived in the long intolerable called God. We seemed happy. I don’t mean content I mean heroin happy, donkey dentures, I mean drycleaned deacons expunging suffering from Calcutta with the cut of their jaws I mean the always alto and surely anusless angels divvying up the deviled eggs and jello salad in the after-rapture I mean to be mean. Dear Lord forgive the love I have for you and your fervent servants. I have so long sojourned Lord among the mild ironies and tolerable gods that what comes first to mind when I’m of a mind to witness is muriatic acid eating through the veins of one whose pains were so great she wanted only out, Lord, out. She too worshipped you. She too popped her little pill of soul. Lord if I implore you please just please leave me alone is that a prayer that’s every instance answered? I remember one Wednesday witness told of a time his smack-freaked friends lashed him to the back of a Brahman bull that bucked and shook until like great bleeding wings the man’s collarbones exploded out of his skin. Long pause. “It was then,” the man said, “right then…” Yes. And how long before that man- turned-deacon-turned-scourge-of-sin began his ruinous and (one would guess) Holy Spirit-less affair? At what point did this poem abandon even the pretense of prayer? Imagine a man alive in the long intolerable time made of nothing but rut and rot, a wormward gaze even to his days’ sudden heavens. There is the suffering existence answers: it carves from cheeks and choices the faces we in fact are; and there is the suffering of primal silence, which seeps and drifts like a long fog that when it lifts leaves nothing but the same poor sod. Dear God—

Christian Wiman

Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine

The Second O of Sorrow

Somehow, I am still here, long after transistor radios, the eight-tracks my father blared driving from town to town across Ohio selling things, the music where we danced just to keep alive. I now understand I was not supposed to leave so soon, half a century a kind of boulder that I’ve pushed up the hill & now for a moment, like Sisyphus I watch it roll. I walk through the snow. I breathe the dirty East Side wind pushing past the Russian church, the scent of fish & freighters & the refinery filling the hole in my chest—how many years have piled since I last stumbled out onto the ice & sat down to die. Only to look up at the geometry of sky—& stood to face whoever might need me—

Sean Thomas Dougherty

Living,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Biography of LeBron as Ohio

When is a poem one word? Even at 17 he was Baraka on the court, Coltrane gold toned, a kind of running riff, more than boy-child, man-child, he was one word like Prince. How back in those drunken days when I still ran in bars & played schoolyard ball & wagered fives & tens, me & my colleague the psych-prof drove across Eastern Ohio just to see this kid from powerhouse St. Vincent, grown out of rust-belt-bent-rims, tripped with the hype & hope & hip hop blaring from his headphones, all rubber soled & grit as the city which birthed him. We watched him rise that night scoring over 35, drove back across the quiet cut cornfields & small towns of Ohio, back to the places where we slept knowing that Jesus had been reborn, black & beautiful with a sweatband crown rimming his brow. He was so much more than flipping burgers & fries, more than 12-hour shifts at the steel plant in Cleveland. More than the shut-down mill in Youngstown. More than that kid selling meth in Ashtabula. He was every kid, every street, every silo, he was white & black & brown & migrant kids working farms. He was the prince of stutter-step & pause. He was the new King. We knew he was coming back the day after he left his house in Bath Township. He never sold it. Someone fed his fish for years. Perhaps our hope? Fuck Miami. Leave Wade to wade through the Hurricane rain. LeBron is remembering that woman washing the linoleum floor, that man punching his punch card. He drives a Camaro, the cool kid Ohio car driving through any Main Street. He is the toll-taker, & he is the ticket out. He keeps index cards documenting his opponents’ moves. One leans forward before he drives. One always swipes with his left hand. The details like a preacher studying the gospel. He studies the game like a mathematician conjugating equations, but when he moves he is a choreography, a conductor passing the ball like a baton. He is a burst of cinders at the mill. He is a chorus of children calling his name. The blistered hands of man stacking boxes in Sandusky, the long wait for work in Lorain. A sapling bends & reaches in all directions before it becomes a tree. A ball is a key to a lock. A ball is the opposite of Glock. America who sings your praises, while tying the rope, everyone waiting for Caesar to fall, back-stabbing media hype city betrayed by white people with racist signs. I watch the kids play ball in the Heights, witness this they say. We will rise. I watched LeBron arrive & leave, I walked, I gave up drinking as he went off & won a ring. The children’s chorus calls out sing brother, sing. Everything is black. Storm clouds gather out on Lake Erie. But the old flower-hatted women at the Baptist church are heading out praise cards, registering teenagers to vote. To turn a few words into a sentence. He is a glossary of jam, & yes he is corporate chugging down green bubbly Sprite, running in Beats head phones, he is Dunkin his donut, he is Nike, witness, ripped. On a spring day in Akron a chorus of children is chanting his name on the court by the chain-link fence. He is forged steel, turning his skinny body into muscle, years of nights lifting, chiseling, cutting, studying. Watching the tape. To make a new kind of sentence. He is passing out T-shirts, this long hot bloody summer he was returned to the rusted rim along the big lake. He is stutter-step. He is spinning wheel. He has a cool new hat. He is speaking of dead black children. He is giving his time. To make the crowd sway like wind through a field of corn. Does LeBron think of dying? Does the grape think of dying as it withers on the vine by the lake? Or does it dream of the wine it will become? He is wearing a shirt that says I Can’t Breathe. They said he was arrogant. I said he was just Ohio. He married his high school sweetheart. Bravado laid out on the court. No back down, he is Biggie with a basketball inside of a mic, no ballistics, just ballet. He is Miles Davis cool, quietly cerebral, turning his back, tossing up chalk like blue smoke, blue notes, blues. He is Akron, Columbus, he is heart & Heat turned to lake effect blizzards, freighters frozen in ice, looking for work & no money to eat. He is Ashtabula & Toledo. He is carrying so many across the river, up through Marietta. The grapevines are ripe in Geneva. He returns, Man-child, Man-strong, Man-smart, Man- mountain, Mansfield to East Akron, minus into Man, or should we say Mamma raised? Single mother fed, shy child, quiet child who grew, who suffered & taught his body to sing, his mother worked how many shifts, doing this, doing that, never gave up for her son. He is third shift at the rubber plant in winter, he is farm hands & auto parts piecework & long nights the men at the bar, eyes on the television. The lake tonight is black as newly laid asphalt. There are no ellipses. He is turning paragraphs into chapters. Long ago the hoop Gods made this deal at the crossroads, Old Scratch is flipping the pages of his program & waiting high in the stands—to belong to a place most people would call nowhere, to show the world how tough we truly are, twelve-hour shifts at the Rubber plant in Akron. How he is, how he is a part of this asphalt court we call Ohio, & how we suffer, & how we shine.

Sean Thomas Dougherty

Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity,Town & Country Life

The Welty Tour

In the next room, Peter’s gloved hands crack cordoned-off spines: he has been granted permission, his agent’s call his pedigree. So the tour itself is only the docent and me. He is docile, eager to please, leads me up the stairs and takes me to the bed.The coverlet is authentic, he says. He lectures me on the heating system, offers an anecdote of a broken casserole, recites all of the Welty lore he has rehearsed. She taught him when he was young, and now he serves her legend, lets me lean in toward the books—I cross the line of what’s allowed, never touching. He shows me photos—two loves lost, one a married man—then on the way down, pauses before a feather in a box, reciting Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.” He begins to weep at Let her drop, adds,Like Welty’s loves! Now I stop— is he comparing her to the god, or Leda? He cannot bear her, her Unfulfilled Love. I cannot bear this either—how dare he conjure up for her such disappointment, such wasted longing? I want to be the mirror of her photographs, to be her figure of my own conjuring. I want to believe I, too, could be happy here, in this solitary house, in this small town, amidst the rows and stacks of books. Untouched.

Rebecca Morgan Frank

Love,Unrequited Love,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

The Moon’s Magnetic Field Once Came from an Asteroid

When you walked in it was like recognizing the moon when he returns. His lover bites his cheek; she has no choice. All we see is the dissolution, then await the reconstruction. Each time, the sky yanks her into his orbit. I want to say I’m sorry. I want to sayYou win. Our bodies are like the confessional booth these poems are stuck in. Even the priest can see that sin. You’ll be all spit and honey— or maybe I’m the poisoned flower gnawing on its own lip because it has no hands to reach for you. Only words that are as useless as the pollen for saying anything. I continue to serve them even with your hands around my throat from across the room. Your voice is home, I answer it like a bat guided across the atmosphere. This is a narrative that cannot end well but wants to, but must. I’ll continue to go down kicking and you’ll be sweet as anything until you bite back. No, it can’t end here—we won’t let it. Billions of years have passed since an asteroid last hit the moon: clearly some magnetic fields can be sustained.

Rebecca Morgan Frank

Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Relationships,Men & Women,Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens

Postscript from Mississippi

When you asked if it rained bees or poison you were asking the wrong question. Again. You still didn’t understand the difference between hurricanes and flooding. Thus between gods and humans. Between your slum- lordy digs and the shacks I pass that cling to old boards and huddle around each family. The yards marking the care of home. Everywhere something is falling on someone and I watch like an autumn tourist tripping through the Berkshires. I reach to catch a leaf. I try to straighten a Pisa-like sapling. The wind wraps around us both like a question mark and leaves me standing, the sole witness on this end. I’m telling you about a place of silence. You want it all to be a metaphor. I’m watching a front porch crumble. Still, someone sits there.

Rebecca Morgan Frank

Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life

Being Serious

I. Serious smiles a lot. At least that’s what they say, His Mum and Pop Trying to be proud As all the nurses gather round To squint into the cloud Of little Serious on the ultrasound.It’s likely just the way he’s bent, The head nurse finally thunders Into the awe and argument Swirling through the crowd Where someone mutters half-aloudIn all my years… Serious never hears. Serious spins and spins With his dumb dolphin grin In the best bed there is, Where there’s no guilt and no sin, No child more inner than this; Nothing to will And nothing to want, No body you both are and haunt; No drug of disappointment Or feeling that there’s never now (Or do these seep in somehow?); No suffering the world’s idiocy Like a saint its pains; No traffic and no planes; No debts, no taxes, No phones and no faxes; No rockslide of information Called the Internet. Serious isn’t. Yet. 2. Serious hears a sound. Not unusual, in itself, nothing to be concerned about. Here and there there’s been a shout, A song he seemed to be inside, The weird whale-calls of her gas. This, too, shall pass. Then it comes again, And with a far-off force Which a shrink less serious than he Will have him dream is a drain That all his impurity Is slowly drifting toward(Down, Serious says, down!) Beyond which he’ll be clean, Feel no pain… Then the dark erupts in a rain Of blood and muck He seems to mostly be, Holding on for all he’s worth, Which isn’t much, finally, Little wizened thing Plopping out to an earth Where cries of agony Dwindle to equivocal joy(It’s, it’s…is it a boy?) And some clear world lies Just beyond the eyes You can’t quite open; And everything is wet, And loud, and broken; And all of life is one huge tit You’re meant to somehow suck. Serious staggers to his feet, Slaps himself harder than the doctor did And says, I’m fucked. 3. Serious is learning silence In the way most children learn to speak.Poshlust! He gasps after his first feeding,Götterdämmerung in his first dusk, His whole body writhing with a kind of violence As if the world had wounded him, Words his bleeding. Anomie, Deus absconditus Drift into the air above his crib;Accursed progenitor, quintessence of dust Dribble with the pap onto his bib; As day by day, and week by week, Serious wrestles with this difficult gift, Forgetting, which, it seems, he is on this earth to do. Boob, ass, oaf, Riving out of him like greatness going off;Ninny, crackpate, clunkhead, gorm, Leaving him gasping and bent;fragments, sheep, rabble, All falling, falling from him Backwards into babble... Finally Serious lies there, spent, Language like some immense ghostly mobile Bobbing just above his bed, All power of movement gone as well: Useless little buglike arms, buglike little fingers, This heavy, heavy head. And now if there’s something Serious can’t quite taste, Or if he feels too acutely his own waste, Or knows too acutely what he can’t tell, He screams and screams Until the world knows what Serious means. 4. Serious goes to school.Just try it, his Mum says As she lets go his hand And wipes a last glaze Of doughnut from his nose, And Serious, insofar as Serious can, Does give it a good try, Though it’s hard to understand Why they keep taking a break From taking breaks, or why They can’t simply walk In line down the hall, Or what, finally, is at stake In a game of kickball. It’s time to draw a tree. What a relief to work alone, Serious thinks, as he picks a scab For just the right tinge of sky, Breaks his sugar cookie To make a place of stone, And fashions out of bread A man with a huge head And huge, ruined wings, Gasping at all the ruined things To which he’s tumbled. And calls it: Cookie, Crumbled. Oh my, the teacher says When she walks by,Those are interesting trees. Serious closes his eyes and sees As in a vision of doom Himself drowning in schools, A whole ocean of fools Nipping, nipping at him With their tiny, tiny teeth. And Serious sighs With a prophet’s wisdom As he climbs up into his seat, Stares out across the room And like a prophet cries:You’re all going to die! The class is a tomb. Serious, rigid, waits. A girl in pigtails giggles, Then another near the back. And as if along a fuse The giggling goes Up and down the rows Till someone makes a crack About his coat and tie And the laughter detonates. Serious climbs slowly down Into that inferno of sound Which the teacher’s shouts Are only driving higher, Packs up his lunchbox, his dignity, And his copy of Sartre, And strides with a prophet’s gaze Through all that derisive fire. Only once does he turn, Briefly, to look back through the blaze At the iron fact of his art, Smaller from here, but unburned. 5. Serious loves his Mum. And then he doesn’t, quite. It’s that way with everything— Baths and plums, The blessèd silence of night. Would you like to help with this? His mother asks As she rolls out biscuit dough And cuts it with a glass Or folds the clothes Still warm from the sun. But Serious knows He was born with a task, And though he touches the clothes And tastes the dough, Serious says, No. Serious stays in the bath Until his skin is shriveled and cold, Eats himself sick on plums, Feels in the dark The dark he becomes, And cries out in the night for his Mum. 6. Serious is older now. He just is.Thank God, Serious says, For whom childhood, that stupid carousel that never stops, Always had an element of disingenuousness: The tristesse of lollipops, The sham of naps; Fools dandling you on their laps So you can play horsey, which damn sure isn’t serious; And all that endless business Of pretending to be curious About the most obvious things: What’s night? Where’s Mama-Cat? What’s wrong with Pop? Can God die? Why, why, why? To hell with that, Serious thinks, as he sits incinerating memories One by one, Saying their names as he feeds them Like photographs to a fire: Here he is in a baseball uniform Squinting back the sun; Here in a blue tuxedo with a ruffled front; And here, Lord, with pimples. He pauses a moment. Do memories have names? And what, exactly, are these flames? To hell with that! Done. Serious owns a car, pays taxes, Contemplates a pension, Has a crease of gray along his temples, But he is young, young. He develops headaches, begins sleeping badly, and relaxes, You might say, into the constant tension That he really always was, With far, far too much to do To look anywhere but onward, Or to answer the questions of a child With anything true. 7. Serious isn’t Stupid, Though they go to the same gym. Serious sees him dropping weights Or picking his butt and thinks, At least I’m not him. Nor is he Mean or Vain, Those chiseled twins With matching boots and belts, Nor Smug who notes their sins, Nor Shallow noting something else; He isn’t useless Timid Who no matter what won’t complain, Nor fat-assed Nice sweating honey On all the machines, Nor Self-Loathing who smudges mirrors, Nor Whacked who licks them clean. Serious isn’t Funny. Serious spreads his towel on the bench, Sits down in front of his own image, And Serious strains at a serious weight. And never, not once, when he’s seen In myriad mirrors around the room That everyone else is straining too, Has he caught himself too late And finished with a roar And more strength Than he’s ever had before:I AM NOT YOU! 8. Serious has a date with Doom. It’s not the first, and seems unlikely to be the last, For they get on quite well, Doom and he, Share similar pasts And similar ideas about what life should be. It seems, in fact, that this might just bloom. And what a relief. After Morose and Mad and Neurotic; After almost falling for Grief, Who was so exotic She made all the others seem tame. Then to discover she even lied about her name. And to sleep with another Serious! That was odd, Like wrestling with an angel, Though it was hard to tell from that rough unsated tangle Which one was Serious, and which one God. But how easy it is to be himself with Doom, Serious thinks, as he puts the wine in to chill And sets two glasses on a tray, Who always wants whatever Serious wants And always agrees with what he has to say; Who doesn’t need to hear that whole spiel About “going too fast” or “needing more room”; And who doesn’t probe and pry that long needle into his brain —What do you feel? What do you feel?— Until it’s all Serious can do not to stand up and scream: Pain! Lucky to be alive. And if he still has no clear idea where she lives, And never knows quite when she’ll arrive, Still, something about Doom feels right To Serious, and he looks forward to their dates. He checks himself in the mirror, dims the light, And waits. 9. Serious is a traveler. “Traveling broadens the mind,” The man beside him says, His tray table down and seat reclined Even as they're taking off, And Serious, who has his eyes closed So he can do what Serious does, Begins to cough. What do they say, what do they fear, Is this song joy or grief? This is a man, this is a god. Who are you and why are you here? To leave, to leave. The meal is over, Which Serious declined. In the shell-roar of the cabin He eases somewhat, is surprised to find He could almost drift away. “What line of work are you in?” He hears the man beside him say, And Serious begins coughing wildly again. What is that smell, what was that sound, Isn’t that ice on the wings? This is the air, there is the water, But what do you do on the way down? You scream, you scream. How far they must have gone by now, That old familiar world miles behind, The man eats an orange, And now he eats the rind. He eats his plate, his plastic fork, chews With animal relish his Styrofoam cup, Leans over to eat bittersweet Serious too, Who startles and wakes up. Look at the desert, look at the green, Is there an end to that ice? Here is a place, and here is a place, But what is the space between? It’s life, it’s life. 10. Serious is married. What a weird wind this is, He thinks, so still at times, Then stinging the eyes to tears. And how he seems both more and less Himself, and how it seems at once all of loneliness And something he can hold. Or is it he who's being carried? He shivers, and reaches out for her again. Or is it she who reaches, she who's cold? What is this wind? Where are these years? 11. Serious experiences loss. Just like that. Flat. Serious experiences loss, As if he’d come to some sheer cliff There was no way around, No way to cross, And found, On the other side Of a deep canyon, himself, Experiencing loss. Serious, when the man is gone, Tells himself that he tried, Tells himself that he cried and cried For all he was worth To the man sitting on the other side Experiencing loss, Who one day simply vanished, or moved on, Or slipped off the edge of the earth And died. 12. Serious doesn’t speak French. This embarrasses Serious, Because insofar as he lives anywhere, Serious lives in Paris. He feels the city stare, Feels himself sweat, and shake, as he tries to wrench The little that he’s gleaned Into the lot that he desires; Feels shopkeepers look at him as if he were a liar, Waiters as if he were unclean; And feels, in truth, not at all serious, As if he had a huge balloon for a head And helium squeaks for a voice, As if gravity could be merely a choice He were making, and he might instead Simply stop, let go, and drift away. Finally Serious, opposed to epiphanies, Has one he can’t resist. He is Serious, and to be Serious Is to know something utterly or not at all, And to know, moreover, That as you let your half-knowledge fall From you, it does not exist. Just like that Serious is himself again, Saying weighty things About the flowers in the stalls, Pondering a splendid mirage Called the Seine. And if he wakes saying fromage, Or in some shop feels Right on the verge of translating please, Serious knows it’s a dream, And knows from childhood what to do. Point and scream Until the damn fools give you cheese. 13. Serious has some culture. He knows some things. And if, as he begins to speak, He should feel the immense wings Of ignorance shadowing him, that dirty vulture That squawks in drawl and drips tobacco juice, Serious knows what shelter to seek. Pick a name and Bach is better. Modernism was powerful but diffuse. Life’s drained out of pictures since the Renaissance. Technique! Technique! Technique! And about all that spastic flatulence Called contemporary art, Well, Serious hardly knows where to start. Serious sits through opera without a yawn, Chews up books on which weaker teeth would shatter; He can tell you where one brushstroke lies, List the reasons courtly love is gone, Pluck the speck of subject matter From Henry James. Serious knows some things. He thinks and thinks and thinks Until his ignorance shrinks To the tiniest of flies Alighting somewhere in the Louvre. Carefully, carefully, Serious creeps With his massive swatter, Saying, Don’t move. Don’t move. 14. Serious believes in nothing. It’s a nice day, what should we do? What are you thinking? What’s been bothering you? What’s that you’re drinking? Serious spreads the paper on his lap To confirm what’s new under the sun, Hears a tap, tap, tap Against the windowpane. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, Floats up from childhood like a bit of ash, And Serious, pausing, can almost see His old preacher, that atom bomb of idiocy Who every Sunday would explode. Still, Serious thinks, there’s a truth to set you free. But who could survive the blast? Tap, tap, tap. Serious skims the sports pages, Reads about a storm that rages Far out at sea. Some talking dog is taking office, Some country wiping out monuments, expunging its past. Tap, tap, tap. Goddammit, Serious says, midway through a war, And thinks again of that old bore Who talked and talked and talked Until you felt your head loll and sway Like some huge flower on a tiny stalk That one good breeze would break; And how you’d see him afterwards eating chicken fried steak, Chicken fried man, With a tiny transistor radio in his hand So he could listen to the football game; And how his face seethed and writhed with what seemed pain If he saw you coming to his booth, And he stared off as if some great truth Were finally, finally coming clear in that chicken fried brain And like a prophet he was going to stand up and shout— Until what plopped innocuously out Was your own name. Tap, tap, tap. Serious puts aside the news of the day And walks to the only window there is. But there’s no wind, not even the grass stirs. And anyway, there’s no tree. Serious shrugs and turns away. Must just be me. 13. Serious sees a child In the playground across the street, Sees his huge stupid head and huge stupid feet As he tries to keep up with the games, And hears his sonar screams Of delight amid the other children's screams, And hears his timid weeping when they call him names. Serious sees the child standing apart sometimes Driveling to himself in silly rhymes, And sees him pretend to look intently at the sky If Serious walks by, Or sees him simply stop and stare. Gradually Serious starts seeing the child everywhere, In a store standing in an aisle, In the subway while Serious is trying to work on the way home, Or laughing with his family in a restaurant Where Serious eats alone. Serious knows the truth. This child wants something, his whole nature is want. And it begins to be annoying, This novice cringing, all the imbecilic and cloying Tactics of being cute, The whole hangdog way he has of panhandling pity With his freckles and his missing tooth, Sitting all fidgety in his Sunday suit Or babbling happily as he’s leaking snot; And then the air he suddenly puts on of being serious When it’s so obvious he’s not. Serious sees the child in the playground Standing to the side, Sees his face whiten and his eyes go wide As Serious crosses the street and strides Until his shadow swallows the child And leans down close enough for them to kiss.I don’t have time for this, Serious says,I’ve got too much to do. And the child says, Who are you? 16. Serious kills himself.No, no, Shivering out of a dream, Starlight and the hard glitter Under the bridge’s beam, Serious, Serious, Don’t go. Serious crawls out of bed, Feels the cold in the floor And thinks, suddenly, of lovely Mad (Where can she be?) Who’d bolt out of sleep and screamFarmers get up at four! It’s three. Serious makes himself a cup of coffee, Which he doesn’t drink; Tries and fails to read, Tries and fails to think. Serious sits, and holds himself still, Minute by minute; Until the dawn finally comes And he is in it. 17. Serious lives alone. It’s better this way, he tells himself, As he takes a pan from the pan shelf, A spatula from the spatula drawer, And fries two eggs the way he likes them: Yolks of stone. No more gnats of chatter over breakfast. No more breakfast. It’s noon. No one prancing by with only panties on When he’s almost, almost broken through, Or singsonging outside his doorSerious, O Serious, where are you? No more! But what, finally, does Serious do? He sits, ignores the ringing phone, Looks at a wall On one of the last warm days of the year, And settles back into the lifelong call Of being serious, Which is to see, within that whiteness, Leaves being gently blown, And to feel their colors as they fall. 18. Serious gives a speech. He sets his papers on the podium, His glass within easy reach,Tap, tap, taps the microphone. How vast this venue is. How absolute this darkness. To be serious is to be alone! Serious cries out with a triumphant look on his face, Waiting for the echoes to end Out there in all that space, Which the words at once define and extend. It takes a while, but they do die. The spotlight lasers in. He blinks hard, starts again. To know in every hand another’s touch, To hear a silence words only intensify, To feel not too little but too much This attenuated world— Serious begins to sweat, Feels the back of his shirt grow wet; Looks down to see his papers swirled And scattered, the glass on the floor, broken. What’s with this fucking light, he thinks, Or was it spoken? He glares out at the dark, impassive crowd And as if by force he could make them wake Hears his voice growing loud: Whatever you most treasure you will break, Whatever you hold closest you will let go, There is no place that you will not leave! But to be serious— Serious says, Quietly now, because he has them, they are his— To be serious, to be truly serious, is to know That what you call your losses you cannot grieve, For it was never quite these things that you wanted—This treasure, this touch, this one place—But by such life to be haunted. Brilliant! No notes, no flaws. Serious stands back and waits for applause. The hall is silent, utterly silent, The heat tropic. Serious looks around, confused, Turns to the man who introduced him Then can’t remember being introduced; And even given his credentials, This suddenly seems a most unlikely topic. Serious tries to get out of the light, But the light goes where Serious goes. He blunders to the edge of the stage, A cliff Breaking off into a dark in which there's no movement, no voices, not one sigh. Serious feels the rage Draining out of him, and feels a chill, and whispers,Where am I? 19. Serious nears an end. It’s cold and getting colder, And Serious, older, Sits outside thinking of his good friend, Who like so much of Serious is gone, And thinking of that godforsaken dawn After the one night of his life he spent outdoors. Tell me, His good friend said When Serious staggered out to the fire,Which form would you say is higher,Tragedy or comedy? And Serious, who had stumbled full-bladdered In the night from a dream of bears, Then dreamed himself the object Of a dozen hungry stares, Who had swiveled, pissed into the tent, And sworn such things it would take a life to repent, Serious, exhausted Serious, Was silent. Because it’s been troubling me,Serious, that the answer can only be tragedy.To be conscious is to be conscious ofLosing whatever it is that you most love,And thus an art that's truly greatWill always have one deepest truth to tell,Which is, my friend, this life is hell. Serious looks at the sky. It’s late. A small wind blows The trees, and Serious, shivering, knows He should head inside, That he is not well. But sitting here, letting his eyes close, Serious can almost see that lake Aflame with the early sun, and smell The sweet burn of that wood, And feel the way it seemed his heart would surely break Were it not for the strange lightness in his head As his friend smiled and said,But maybe earth is the heaven of the good. 20. Serious talks to God. There’s no one else left. His mind is mash, His world is ash, And Serious occasionally forgets himself, Though he is not, not Bereft, That sniveling idiot two doors down Who sits up late With only ashes in the grate And talks to God. See? Serious says. See?Nothing. Serious spreads his arms magnanimously As if to give God the floor. God declines.Thou know’st the first time that we smell the airWe wawl and cry, Serious says, louder than before.And then we wawl and cry some more,And then we die,And then we rot! Again he waits in case There’s disagreement. There’s not. Serious scoffs, goes to brush his teeth, Forgets briefly to avert his eye From the mirror’s glare And finds his father there, That gentle baffled man Who, when there was no hope, When he couldn’t even stand, Carved from a piece of soap A silly yellow duck And set it in a little yellow dish. Serious feels a tingling in his hair And mutters something close to a prayer,I wish, I wish... The lights go out.Goddammit, Serious shouts As he trips and falls To his knees on the floor, Banging his head on the door As he tries to rise.GodDAMMIT! Serious cries. The lights come on. His father’s gone, But there, at the edge of the sink, Balances the little duck in the little dish No serious person would ever keep. Serious tries to think, Steadies himself as if at some brink, Decides he needs sleep, That’s what he needs, Crawling fully clothed into his bed And pulling the covers to his chin Because, it seems, there’s some strange wind That’s somehow gotten inside. So unlike Serious, To leave a door unclosed. Yet here it is, gathering strength As it blows his books On the floor and it blows Right through his body and it blows Behind and below and above And out of the whirlwind a voice cries Love What? Serious says, as he tries To sit upright and looks Wildly around him, Raising his fist in the air.The things...I have lost— Immediately he is tossed Back against the wall By the force of a storm That has no source, no form, And hears again the call Out of nowhere: Love My God! Serious screams, Unable to help himself,What maundering politician,What decerebrated pop star, What stupid puling poet Couldn’t tell me that? Struggling to get out of bed He starts to cough, then choke, A riot in his heart, A riot in his head As he falls off the edge to the floor.Who do you think you are, He gasps. Is this... Is this some sort of JOKE? Suddenly the strange wind is quiet, But no less strange the calm that comes after. I’m serious, the voice says. And Serious dies of laughter. EPILOGUE The dead man’s famous. No one now remembers him alive, Or knows his name, or anything he did. Still, a few stories survive After all this while Of a weird-looking man With a weird-looking smile That had, it’s said, Almost a kind of life to it, Though the man was seriously dead. And some remember how all the flies Vanished for miles; And some say no, no, but the buzzards had weird smiles As if they knew something. And some tell of an old woman Who would come and whisper in the dead man’s ear, And smooth the dead man’s hair, And if the door opened, disappear. There are even stories of that grim mortician Who thought the smile undignified And tugged and tugged so hard He slipped and fell inside Right on top of the dead man, Whose lips, he swore, seemed to soften, Seemed to somehow kiss. And some remember this: Before the lid was sealed on that coffin And the nails driven, There were on that face real tears. And some say he smiled like a man forgiven. The dead man never hears. The dead man spins and spins With his dumb dolphin grin Through all the places where he is When people talk of him again: In classrooms or in planes, In boredom or in pain; In front of screens Or in the spotlight’s glare; In days too mild to bear And in the long nights where The dark grows steep, The wind wild, And a mother rises from her sleep To calm her serious child.

Christian Wiman

Living,Life Choices,Love,Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine

Decline

It is not pain that holds me back, but time With its sad prefigurations and smell,­­­ Its flowers and echoes, rivers and crime. Even now, without a future, I tell Myself lies in future tense. As my hair Thins, I collect combs. When clocks chime, I groan. The falling world finds pleasure in despair Because to suffer means to be alone, And I suffer through all the accidents Of change as though I were settling a score, As if to disinvent what death invents. I once built a castle, now I do chores. To pass the time I rearrange my things. To fall asleep I recite names of kings.

Joshua Edwards

Living,Growing Old

Leviathan

Love of air and water Joined in apprehension, Perhaps you know what's there By way of fear, for while Living in pursuit of And going always forth Toward something that trembles. Its knowledge is your mind. What do you think about The great ocean's sullen Aristocrats—these small Headaches and dark affairs That bathe themselves in your Staging grounds, where you go To contemplate how what You want became your mind? The black oblivion Offers no reprieve for You, hunter—in its keep Your ears have grown too sharp, So sharp you almost hear Your own heartbeat over The subtle whispers of Water’s dismal gardens. Everything about you Is overblown, even Your mouth is uniquely Talented at its tasks, Gathering for slaughter Animals in their sleep, Speaking without a sound. Noah had seven laws, You have only one—eat To build life out of death, Survive above all things. The fatalistic moon Filtered down upon you Seems an imitation Of lives you will not live. Would you be its hero? Would you call out against The morning’s weaving light That shames the night before The passing of its cool? Would you be at the beach When the invisible Becomes a glow, to surprise? Inland, workers dreaming Of unitarian Proposals lose no sleep To fear about your mouth. It is their wayward friends, Who wandered too far west Into fevered chaos, That wake up with your name As screams exploding dreams. The inland ether holds Clouds in your dismal shape. Lucky are those who know Nothing, who cannot see Hell outlined in vapor. Somewhere a piano Plays a sorrowful song Half-written by the hate That a grieving loved one Would stick into your heart. Such are the arts of men. Beware. Your time is near. Someone has learned lessons You didn’t mean to teach. A crowd is gathering. Your skull is their kingdom.

Joshua Edwards

Nature,Animals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

Dissimilations

You hold onto life like a hostage. You're deeply embedded. You're an actor slipping into a new script. You're a comma Whose purpose is to mark the moment when prose is suspended, Where begins a poem's pensive silence or some dark drama. You're a Charles Dickens character in the opium den Of a long life. All you want is to sleep through the nights after Satisfying intercourse, but your mimesis may have been Caught by sexually transmitted diseases. Disaster Is an evening when you're so hungry every apple core Evokes grocery stores. Being the only one and only, They can't clone or disown you. The only thing you lack is your Adult teeth, beneath the rotten teeth of what makes you lonely. And the truth is that devolution concurs with disposal Till it emerges, when entourage lobbies for Decalogue, And hype is the new preparation before its proposal, Calling for the removal of all shoes, shirts, and demagogues, And the zealous anti-Orientalists who refuse to Use anyone's last names first when denying them service at The sperm bank, where the preferred euphemism is "super glue." Remember the joke about the butcher who couldn't get fat? Rejuvenated vaginas and enhanced penises squeak Thanks to Puritanism gone gaga vis-à-vis bling-bling À la bada bing. People piled up form a sexual peak. Two condoms put up their dukes inside a contraceptive ring. Champagne is the new organizer for your political Campaign to conceive something tantamount to FASD Of the spirit. Were you surprised or did you wax critical When you emerged from the driveway to your domesticity Without any disease but your family's questionable Cultural history? Is it such a mystery that your Mediocrity's latently poised to emerge? That you're full Of traditional vulnerability? You'll pace the floor Until you face (at a number of paces proportional To the gravity of the insults that have been thrown your way) Yourself dressed like a clown. Your brain will halt to urbanely sprawl And then catapult your past beyond your future like a clay Pigeon across a clear blue sky, toward a lemonade stand At which the theory of other minds attempts to explain Why petroleum prices fluctuate with body count and Meaningful relationships end in kaleidoscopic pain.

Joshua Edwards

Living,The Body,Time & Brevity,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

What Space Faith Can Occupy

I believe that witness is a magnitude of vulnerability. That when I say love what I mean is not a feeling nor promise of a feeling. I believe in attention. My love for you is a monolith of try. The woman I love pays an inordinate amount of attention to large and small objects. She is not described by anything. Because I could not mean anything else, she knows exactly what I mean. Once upon a time a line saw itself clear to its end. I have seen the shape of happiness. (y=mx+b) I am holding it. It is your hand.

TC Tolbert

Love,Romantic Love,Religion,Faith & Doubt

Thaw

You said I will pull you out of my body in 237 ways. What you wanted was beautifully to sever things. Here love: the same things. changed. Finally: a taxonomy of afterthoughts. As though you were the one who was sleeping. Breathing in the marrow of would. You, who are a valley of no, I hear the music leaking. (How she. How she. How I.) You say low key and I do not believe you. I forgive everything: the perseveration of skin. My hands that are a chopping block and I cannot touch him. I cannot touch him without not touching me. Because if you leave, and you are already leaving, there are three. But you say less than three. And the couch, in your absence, is crenellated. And who is going to watch us as we leave. To add to the list of changing things: life preservers are no longer about preservation. They have become less holy. P F D = personal flotation device. Endlessly possible. Unlike wood. Stacey May Fowles wants a lover who will hit her. (I do not believe in submission.) I want you to erase me. This is a kindness. A kindness you tell me. A kindness I do not deserve. On the floor. By the bed. Hotel Congress. March 19, 2005. Room #23. We are a long way from disintegrated. You said Now. Look at me. And I did. And you bloomed. (When my mother died, I will say. Many years after my mother has died. But I will not believe her. I'll be like my grandmother who despite my parade of girlfriends and her profession that nobody should be mean to them, stilldoesn't believe in being queer. I don't believe in being dead, I'll tell my dead mother. And just like you she'll repeat herself. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. Happy New.) I expect there will be a morning when you walk up to this very gate while I am sitting here. I know this. I know you less each time I see you. I know this like I know you are more lonely than glass. To your languishing. To your bubbly. To your recent. To your hologram. To your desperately. To your seeking. To your dictaphone. To your you. Neuromuscular facilitation is just another way of saying Vancouver. Always is yet a matter of roller derby. Just in love with you. You, more than sleep. In the top drawer is a photograph of them touching. It is not so much that it is a photograph. It is that it is a depiction of what. not could. I want to tell you about my body. About testosterone as unwitting art historian. About recovery. Me(n). What it feels like underneath there. The part you cannot know. but should. Either way. It's a house. It's a house like everyone else has. I take things away. I don't take them for good. How delirious must we sound when we are falling.I miss you, you can't even imagine. And how bad at math. Less than three. Less than three. Less than three. And what if. I completely remember it wrong. What if I remember there were two of us. And then what if. there was only one death. I do not believe in the existence of holes that lead to nowhere. Muscle memory remains an enigma. Still, you can touch her. You cannot touch her without not touching me. (And still) you are not not a part of me. The world is uncharacteristically unresponsive. I could thank you. You stay with me. like grass.

TC Tolbert

Living,The Body,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer

Beg Approval

Because the only view we have is the one that looks down on the knees. Praise perspective. Praise shared disdain. Praise space made by connective tissue; the synaptic cleft; elbowroom at the dinner table; polite conversation; lies you push through your teeth. Because dissecting a dog's heart won't change the way it thinks. Praise redirected traffic. Praise the gnarled lip that defends the gentle bones. Because your mother was a seahorse. And to think of her thin is to empty all the ice from the tea glasses; to strain the soup by driving it through your hand. Praise tablecloths; sway-back chairs; the plastic folds that protect slice after slice of cheese.

TC Tolbert

Religion,Faith & Doubt

Into the Racism Workshop

For Alma Banda Goddard my cynical feet ambled prepared for indigestion & blank faces of outrageous innocence knowing I'd have to walk over years of media declaring we're vanished or savage or pitiful or noble My toes twitched when I saw so few brown faces but really when one eats racism every time one goes out one’s door the appeal of talking about it is minuscule I sat with my back to the wall facing the door after I changed the chairs to a circle This doesn't really protect me but I con myself into believing it does One of the first speakers piped upI'm only here because my friend is Black & wantedme to do this with herI've already done300 too many racism workshops Let it be entered into the Book of Stars that I did not kill her or shoot a scathing reply from the hip I let it pass because I could tell she was very interested in taking up all the space with herself & would do it if I said a word They all said something that I could turn into a poem but I got tired & went to sleep behind my interested eyes I've learned that the most important part of these tortures is for them to speak about racism at all Even showing up is heresy because as we all know racism is some vague thing that really doesn't exist or is only the skinheads on a bad day or isn't really a crucial problem not as important certainly as queers being able to marry or get insurance for each other When they turned to me as resident expert on the subject which quite honestly I can't for the life of me understand or make any sense out of I spoke from my feet things I didn't know I knew of our connections of the deadly poison that racism is for all of us Maybe some of them were touched but my bitch voice jumps in to sayNOT MUCH! I heard back that someone thought I was brilliant Does that mean that I speak well Or that she was changed It's only her change I need

Chrystos

Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

Sometimes I Feel Like All Indians

For Kelly Morgan ever do is die Her brother was thrown out the window by Black men he was drinking with His cousin was stabbed near the store She got shot Nobody knows where he ended up She hasn’t heard from her brother in 17 years He killed himself when his wife left Her son was hit by a car of drunk whites Her uncle went off a cliff in the dark Her grandmother died in the hospital because they gave her the wrong medicine Her baby was born addicted & died My brother died as a baby Her mother died of an overdose She doesn’t know how her mother died but no one has seen her for a long time She was put in foster care because her parents died in a car wreck I close my eyes & keep praying sometimes there’s nothing to do but brush back the tears & keep on folding the laundry

Chrystos

Living,Death,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity

Sweet Scent

I can smell the sweet scent of my own sweat as I blow high with the breeze and swing, I pump my legs like a child again my skinny kid’s butt holds me down, keeps me grounded when adults threaten to pull me off. My chain breaks as I tempt to kiss the sun, my knees have a life of their own bending as if my very existence depended on it, and it does, for I’d rather be a nut flying high over people’s heads than on the ground dying touching the earth, staining the water with my unclean mind, my hands washing red off the money so I can sleep off my power trip and back stabbing toys. I was an old soul at five spouting off about the filth of my generation. I knew greed was the root of all evil, competition in close cousin. I had my doubts about civilization as I found it and convinced my sister Tricia to wear flannel jammies zipped to the throat in the summer to protect us from the babysitter’s bloodsucking husband while our parents went out for supper. July 2, 1998

Angela C. Trudell Vasquez

Living,Coming of Age,Youth

Identity

White-Mexican looks like a Latina, not my label a question from a Guatemalan student who's come undone in my ESL class, doesn't get my kind I try to describe how I grew up in Caucasian corn country surrounded by houses on cul-de-sacs that all looked the same, how we were alone in a town of 5000, one black family, one Indian family, one Asian family, and one household of Mexicans, no two, us and the Renterias to whom we were related by marriage before and after my divorce, and they were mixed; still, it was a good living, happy in our cocooness, our oneness, separated by money one direction color on the other: classes, classes, classes, day and night we took lessons: piano, jazz, tap, ballet, the dance team, trumpet, trombone, tennis, Finishing School, and one awful summer golf; Christened, Confirmed, Cathechismized; it all cut me in several places, molding of head and heart making me ultrasensitive, then and now, an observer of the outside, an outsider among my own kind, my very shade, mysterious aloof black haired beauty who can't speak Spanish, living among blue eyed dyed blond bombshells, who held up her head higher because she's shy not stuck-up, understood, undenied, sacrificed to at any price by my beloved little brown parents who taught me well gave up so much so their daughters could shine and they'd swell with pride at the life they had given us, on Sundays we basked in mutual admiration after mass singing our church songs while making breakfast, according to the unspoken doctrine in our house of: fast first eat later after communion, we intruded with our Mexican music bellowing out the open windows the smell of bacon frying, pancakes baking, coffee and eggs scrambled to order it wafted out on beautiful summer mornings out of our house in Pleasant Hill, Iowa, perched on the highest spot one could reach on the East Side of the street for first and second generation immigrants. January 25, 2001

Angela C. Trudell Vasquez

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

Something is Coming Toward Us

Flaunting in the atrium, ostentatious at the gates I saw a shooting star thru a window on Alcatraz Ave & cladding struck up against those who demand We stomach the stick and tend the commode They're selling trees in the paint store! trees in the paint store Datebook chips in the soft skin of our wrists On NBC, CNN, and NPR broken windows are weeping We'll have 35 apples and shrieking in the thickets Aloft in the air golden and golden the dial among the mounds So much is stunted in understanding of what a light can be They storm the scrimmage line and clear-cut bran and germ We want the petal unto itself, the unalterable vessel The arc end of the precipice grows 1.9% annually What was popular music like before the crisis?

Alli Warren

Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

A Better Way to Zone

Habits accrue in circular pattern and living occasion swollen among what the dead have to teach us So, ear, be an instrument for thought Tide, bring some little green thing to dust behind my eyes Touch the hotpoint and drag the tongue over the fat belly of a flapping fish Sticker book of farm animals Sticker book of ole timey cats What is life and how shall it be governed? With blind devotion and endurance in the impossible for guts in everything for roots in plain sight Share a lung Accumulate none Say hello to the crow There are certain chord progressions one should avoid

Alli Warren

Living,Life Choices,The Mind

I Want to Thank the Wind Blows

Sound of the rain so I know there's constraint sound of the train so I know commerce has not come to a standstill now they raise the barrier now they set it back in place What coats the bottom of the surface of the sound when the swifts come in when the clerks come home who will bathe the children who will bake the bread when the luff is tight when the mainsheet starts the boat underway whatever you do don't let the tongue slip from its moorings what's that song? love lift us up where we belong I ate the pill and the pill was real

Alli Warren

Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

Whole 30

After a winter of gluttony & grief I'm back on plan for good this time. I’ve ballooned to a specific kind of ugly the kind you hope to hide with body spray. But it gets worse after a winter of gluttony & grief. I’ve shown up for meatballs. For lemons whipped to weeping. Now I land my balloon for the specific kind of ugly salad oil is. Happy date night, darling. Happy coconut water + nutritional yeast. After this winter of gluttony & grief spring comes, stabbing her hard stem of anger in the throat. Even garlic scapes are flat balloons, their ugliness specific as my penmanship: green tubes of spice & hate. My body speaks the ugly testament that took all winter. It says: Gluttony & grief balloon, darling. Only kindness is specific.

Kiki Petrosino

Living,The Body,Activities,Eating & Drinking

Thigh Gap

It's true: I have it though I hardly approve of anything it does. Supposed bend of light or smudge where two odd angles cross. I hardly see— can hardly do a thing with it. White zone of no flesh pressing into no. So low, I can’t scale or measure it. I used to think: OK! A clean sharp place to keep. Or: I'll growa thing! to keep, for me! But no. It's just a ward to mark & mount, a loop I lope around with, so I count myself a realm of realms. I vote & vote. Turns out, we agree with everything we do, almost. We sweep the precincts of ourselves: the rooms between each rib & under them till we reach the fat red condo where our blood leans in. We live here now. Half heart, half townhouse. Come on down. Turn on that sweet TV. Our mise en place, our rugs & nooks: we’re full of stuff. We paint the furniture we couldn’t live without. It’s true at last: we have it all though we hardly know what any of it does.

Kiki Petrosino

Living,The Body

Witch Wife

I’ll conjure the perfect Easter & we’ll plant mini spruces in the yard— my pink gloves & your green gloves like parrots from an opera over the earth— We’ll chatter about our enemies’ spectacular deaths. I’ll conjure the perfect Easter dark pesto sauce sealed with lemon long cords of fusilli to remind you of my hair & my pink gloves. Your gloves are green & transparent like the skin of Christ when He returned, filmed over with moss roses— I’ll conjure as perfect an Easter: provolone cut from the whole ball woody herbs burning our tongues—it’s a holiday I conjure with my pink-and-green gloves wrangling life from the dirt. It all turns out as I’d hoped. The warlocks of winter are dead & it’s Easter. I dig up body after body after body with my pink gloves, my green gloves.

Kiki Petrosino

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Gardening,Nature,Spring,Trees & Flowers,Religion,Christianity,Easter

Wheels

how can I tell you baby, oh honey, you'll never know the ride the ride of a lowered chevy slithering through the blue dotted night along Riverside Drive Española poetry rides the wings of a ’59 Impala yes, it does and it points chrome antennae towards ’Burque stations rocking oldies Van Morrison brown eyed girls Creedence and a bad moon rising over Chimayo and I guess it also rides on muddy Subarus tuned into new-age radio on the frigid road to Taos on weekend ski trips yes, baby you and I are two kinds of wheels on the same road listen, listen to the lonesome humming of the tracks we leave behind

Levi Romero

Love,Romantic Love,Activities,Travels & Journeys

Woodstove of My Childhood

woodstove of my childhood where potatoes cut like triangle chips were fried in manteca de marrano woodstove of lazy autumn smoke swirling away to nowhere woodstove of December evacuating the cold chill at sunrise woodstove of celebration and mourning of post-World War II Korea y Vietnam woodstove corner that kept vigil over drunken nodding remembrance woodstove corner where uncles primos compadres gathered on visits from Califas woodstove corner with a warm ear for nostalgia where Mama Ane stirred the atole and wrung her hands thumb over thumb praying for her children's children's children woodstove that witnessed six decades washing its face at the vandeja that saw western swing dancing in dim lantern flame that watched Elvis come in from across the llano strumming a mail-order Stella and singing in Spanish woodstove of the feast lamb tied up under the crabapple tree of early sour cherries ripening above the cornstalk horizon of neighbors bartering a cup of sugar in exchange for mitote and conversation woodstove of rain tenderly pouring into the afternoon and salt sprinkling onto the patio from the mouth of the porch woodstove of the nighttime crackling softly of harmonious harmonica medleys blowing before bedtime prayer woodstove facing John F. Kennedy's picture on the wall woodstove of Protestant Sundays ringing without bells woodstove of dark earth fat worms and acequias woodstove of 1960s propaganda and all the rich hippies knocking poorly at the screen door woodstove of private crazy laughter of woodpeckers pecking through rough-hewn barn timbers only to meet the sky of rabbits nervously nibbling evening away in the arroyo of the water bucket banging and splashing all the way home woodstove of the water drop sizzle of buñuelos and biscochitos and flour on the chin of chokecherry jam dropping out from the end of a tortilla woodstove that heard Mentorcito's violin bringing in the new year that saw Tío Eliseo bring in an armload of wood that heard Tío Antonio coming down the road whistling a corrido and swinging his cane woodstove of the blessed noontime and Grandma Juanita heating up the caldito woodstove of the sanctified and untamed holy spirit of the dream awake dreamers prophesizing in the beginning how the end would come of creaking trochil gates left open forever of twisted caved-in gallineros rocking in weeping April wind of abandoned orchards waist deep in desánimo of teardrops that held back the laughter of the penitente procession moving through the hills for the soul of the village woodstove of the wounded faithful proudly concealing their scars woodstove of armpit farts and bedtime giggles of pitchforks and axes under the bed in case of intruders of coffee cans filled with everything but coffee of ten cents for a cream soda at Corrina's of strawberry Nehis and a bag of chili chips at Medina's of a handful of bubble gum acá Santos's woodstove of genius wisdom dressed up as the village idiot of hand-me-down stories locked away in the dispensa of bien loco local heroes cracking homeruns Saturday afternoons en la cañada woodstove of all that and more of all that disappearing as children played hide 'n' seek in that abandoned goodtime feeling while stumbling on the footsteps of tradition woodstove that heard the fall of a people rising in silence that died of a loneliness without cure that cured itself in the company of the so many more lonely woodstove of my childhood

Levi Romero

Living,Youth,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life

The Composing Room

I still see those men haphazardly standing around the comps’ floor, mostly silent, lost in their latest urgent jobs, looking up and down as if nodding yes from what they call their composers’ sticks as they set inverse words and lines of each page that could be taken for Greek scripture, declaring: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was made cold type and the Word was coldness, darkness, shiny greyness and light—and the Word dwelt amongst us. * Oh, I know these men would laugh this off. They’d say, if they simply didn’t throw their eyes to heaven, that they were just ordinary characters trying to keep the devil from the door, and with luck have enough left over each week to back a few nags, and go for a few jars. But they can’t say anything or set anything now. They are scattered from that place that’s not the same any more and many have left any place we know of in this life, calling to mind the old names for printing:The Mysterious Craft or simply The Mystery. * I set them up in another city, another country that’s as far away in distance from that city as it’s far in time. But they are still composing, cracking the odd joke above their sticks and galleys on some floor of some building that is eternally busy inside me even when I’ve forgotten that I’ve forgotten them; forgetting the world behind the word— every time I read the word world I wonder is it a typo and should I delete the l. * Now again I hanker to know the quality of each letter: the weight, the texture, the smell, the shiny new type, the ink-dark shades of old, the different types of type, the various sizes within the same font, the measures in ems, picas, points and units. I’d set the words up, making something out of all this that stays standing—all set as masterly as the words those men set that reveal something of the mystery behind and within these letters and the wonder and the darkness, but with the lightest touch. * And the umpteen ways things can foul up are beyond telling. Maybe the type is off, or the typesetter may not be up to the work, if only out of a hangover setting an ! where there should be a ? or a b where there should be a d, or miss aspace or a line or dingbat. And the proofreaders don't catch the error, passing the copy on as clean, or the make-up man fouls the assembly page, or the stoneman errs as he fastens the page of cold type and furniture with the chase, turning the quoin’s key. * Not to speak of the evil eye cast by fellow composers ready to knock the words of others, or the bosses writing on the composition: Kill. Old Shades, keep my words from such eyes and fretting about that pied world and let me go on regardless. And even if I foul up and the stewards are right to set Kill on my last page and my words are distributed and thrown in the hellbox, the real achievement will be that I tried to set the words right; that I did it with much labor and not without a font of love. But that said, * grant me the skill to free the leaden words from the words I set, undo their awkwardness, the weight of each letter of each word so that the words disappear, fall away or are forgotten and what remains is the metal of feeling and thought behind and beyond the cast of words dissolving in their own ink wash. Within this solution we find ourselves, meeting only here, through The Mystery, but relieved nonetheless to meet, if only behind the characters of one fly-boy’s words.

Greg Delanty

Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets

The Alien

I’m back again scrutinizing the Milky Way of your ultrasound, scanning the dark matter, the nothingness, that now the heads say is chockablock with quarks and squarks, gravitons and gravatini, photons and photinos. Our sprout, who art there inside the spacecraft of your Ma, the time capsule of this printout, hurling and whirling towards us, it’s all daft on this earth. Our alien who art in the heavens, our Martian, our little green man, we’re anxious to make contact, to ask divers questions about the heavendom you hail from, to discuss the whole shebang of the beginning and end, the pre-big bang untime before you forget the why and lie of thy first place. And, our friend, to say Welcome, that we mean no harm, we’d die for you even, that we pray you’re not here to subdue us, that we’d put away our ray guns, missiles, attitude and share our world with you, little big head, if only you stay.

Greg Delanty

Living,Birth & Birthdays,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Sciences

My Last Résumé

When I was a troubadour When I was an astronaut When I was a pirate You should have seen my closet You would have loved my shoes. Kindly consider my application Even though your position is filled. This is my stash of snow globes This is my favorite whip This is a picture of me with a macaw This is a song I almost could sing. When I was a freight train When I was a satellite When I was a campfire You should have seen the starburst You should have tasted my tomato. I feel sorry for you I’m unqualified This is my finest tube of toothpaste This is when I rode like the raj on a yak This is the gasoline this is the match. When I was Hegel’s dialectic When I was something Rothko forgot When I was moonlight paving the street You should have seen the roiling shore You should have heard the swarm of bees.

Joseph Di Prisco

Activities,Jobs & Working

Reasons Nobody Ever Called a Good Book of Poems a Page-Turner

Your first dog is ever your one dog And no story has a happy ending anymore. We have all wasted lives, sometimes we waste Our own. Some nights are long ones, some Never end at all. I don’t know how we canfall in love, which implies landing, Whereas love promises everything but. That’s why I like to listen to birds call At dusk to each other from the acacias But then I recall it’s still daylight and I Hear them in the absence of the trees. When I am traveling by train over mountains All I think of is the sea. My father was Never quite so alive until he died and now He’s immortal. Somebody must do the calculus, Somebody must work out the logic of the logic Of this spectacle because spectacle’s the last Word anyone would use for dreams that don’t cease, For the sound of weeping coming from the next room, Only there’s no next room and we’re the only ones There, though just for a moment and a lifetime more. Listen, I will tell you a secret, the secret you told Me once on the train into the mountains On the journey to the shore, a time long ago when We spoke and never met. That secret, which is ours. Some nights are so long the old dog comes home To us who remain there waiting and waiting Even if we’ve never been here before, where we are.

Joseph Di Prisco

Living,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

Emperor with No Clothes

If you care about yourself at all, come to your own aid while there's still time. Marcus Aurelius 3.14 Citizen of Rome, you are the center of the universe. Problem is, circumference is—take a guess—me. “Some things are impatient to be born While others are impatient to die.” Don’t say I did not warn you. Next time they swear Shit happens, pop them square in the nose. This will not help anybody, but helping is The farthest thing from my imperial mind. If you keep your spirit blameless and pure People will drape you with laurels but No one will have sex with you in backseats Or marble mausoleums or anywhere else, A small price to pay for honor and respect Though not for me, being an emperor with no clothes. Just pretend today is the last day of your life And act accordingly—not that such strictures Apply to Yours Truly, sports fans. The forces of evil march on the fortress Of your self. I wish I could explain why. But what if evil did not exist and what if Your self was no fortress, see what I mean? Stoics get a bad name. Not in touch with feelings. Too rigid. Know-it-all cocksure mothers. So the Stoics retain PR firms, don’t tell a soul. If you really knew what was good for you, And you do, why do you care I’ll flail you alive? True, pissing off your emperor is a poor plan, Even one like me mounted bare-assed on a steed. Once upon a time, children…The story peters out. Circus revels and gladiatorial raves— Seen one, seem them all. Life is tiresome, When will it end and will we ever notice? I wish I knew. Really, I wish I cared. My pal, Marcus Aurelius, natters day and night: “Living is more like wrestling than dancing.” Guess he never saw me take Molly at the club. And he says we always have the option of Having no opinion. Right. Like he knows. OK, then, where did I put my pants?

Joseph Di Prisco

Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

from From "Brief Biography of an Imaginary Daughter"

#1 [COLLEGE] We packed your satchel with sweatshirts, Soccer equipment, and The Elements of Style, Loaded up the Hum Vee, a sad drive to JFK And the cross-country flight to starting college, where fortunately due to Advanced Placement Courses you’ve already been awarded your MFA And published your first book. As we pulled out of the driveway, I slammed On the brakes, and not on account of Jubilation, The neighbor’s cat. “Stacey,” I said, “we have jumped the gun.” “I didn’t know we had a gun, Pops,” you said. “This is a figure of speech, a melonaphore. But you can’t go to college yet, Stacey, you’re barely by my count five years old.” “That’s all right, Daddy-O, nice try. But my name’s not Stacey.” #2 [PUPPY] Love this puppy and your love will be repaid. I can’t stress how little this will teach you about life. Which it will. Which is a lot. Sometimes, when you’re sad, I won’t know what to say. Desire will cut into the bone. So much we need to cover before you’re on your own. This is a tea kettle, where goldfish won’t feel at home. When I was your age, before you were born, A war was almost certainly about to break out. The Russians turned out to be just like us, Only worse drivers, which is a lot like us, too. I had a pet once, too, you know. An accordion. Very tough to train, stained with fluids as it was About which nothing further need be said. Your questions matter. No, they really do. I have no clue as to the white carnations, No reason to suppose the stars were not meant for you. #3 [FISH] “Do fish sleep?” I am so glad you asked. Once Upon a time fish did not even catnap. Childhood has reached a certain point. More specific than that, I cannot be, Or less. When you drive to Chartres You can see it coming at you far away. Never pass up a cathedral if you can. Drink lots of water with the strawberries. Leap before you look too hard, which makes Things swim in your head, like fish that never sleep. #4 [BIRDS…] “Time’s come to talk to you about the birds.” “And the bees?” “What do you know about the bees?” “Was just asking.” “A falcon is one bird you can’t keep in a cage, I can’t explain why, though I might point To history for many instructive precedents.” “You have trouble explaining, Dad.” “Anyway, what I like about birds is, they’re much Like dreams—they fly in through a window Where you didn’t know there was a window before.” “I get it. We open to the known and discover Mysteries left in their place, like putting under the pillow A tooth that fell out and you come up with the cash When you need it in the morning, for school.” “Let’s stay focussed, Amy.” “Sure, Reginald.” “I mind it that you call me Reginald, who’s he?” “Someday, Dad, I may fall in love.” “Let’s go back to the birds. I don’t want to say Love is for the ornithologists, though such thoughts occur. Maybe the real topic is experience.” “I knew that.” “When?” “You told me.” “I never.” “Didn’t have to.” “That’s how, you just know?” “Life’s a vale of tears, Pops, except when it’s not.” “Hence, sweetheart, some birds thrive in cages.” “Name three.” “I want you to try on some wings. I want you to take flight. Like the day I gave birth…” “What?” “The day I gave birth to you was the day of days.” “You feeling OK?” “The epidural worked like a charm, I felt like I was swimming in air.” “I think you’re confused.” “I wouldn’t be the first, but when they handed you to me You nursed till you fell asleep.” “You’re talking about love.” “And some bees sting.” #5 [BOND] Once we had a bond, a sacred trust. I carried you on my shoulders, we watched The finches dart and feed, I read The Odyssey To you, which OK was a stretch, but who cared You did not exist? Certainly, not me. But take the example of Homer. Would you just give me a chance? There’s an old dog called Argus Who waits for the hero to show before he dies. I’m getting to the point. If we never had a dog I would wait for you to arrive from a journey Forced upon you by chance and fate. You see, the whole thing’s about waiting. There you are off-stage readying yourself For a grand entrance into a life none of us Heretofore presumed. I myself ache Barometrically in concert with the coming storms. If you never are, I have something left over Even if it’s only me, watching you wade in, as if You were a great swimmer and this world another shore.

Joseph Di Prisco

Living,Life Choices,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Animals

Care Package, With Riddle As Missive

I found my father’s favorite Swiss army knife in a box he sent me with no note, just James Bond videos, nothing else. What was the message? The message was there wasn’t one. This world violent, full of sex, the movie’s zeitgeist, era after era, a new Bond double-o-seven-ing in. Divorced dad Sundays at The Greenwich watching the British Secret Service save the world. I thought he sent the knife inadvertently, but now I see it was code— he was boxed in without a knife to cut himself out.

Elizabeth A.I. Powell

Relationships,Family & Ancestors

from From "Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances"

The goal of the Meisner acting technique has often been described as getting actors to "live truthfully under imaginary circumstances." Here are some acting games we have found useful. I. THE REPETITION GAME: The Moment is a Tricky Fucker

Elizabeth A.I. Powell

Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Theater & Dance

from From "Willy Loman's Reckless Daughter"

Prologue Willy Loman’s reckless daughter flies quietly,fluttering like a silk-moth behind me blocking my life, my scenesin whichever stage direction she wants. Sometimes at night I can feel her dialing into me,her ringing calls like an imperial decree. When she sleeps she crashes, like a carinto the guardrail of my ambition. Her curse like a poison I cannot smell,an asphyxiation of the self by the self, that hell and hard sell. Split personalities, we dream through the night,of our merger and acquisition, in her half-moon light, Not even my husband can feelher there between us—a secret contract under seal. When I awaken, her irises touch mine;an awful, indecipherable fault line. She’s a character in search of an author, a devotee,trying to recount her history through me, until I channel her. She’s like a phantom limb,hymn to the invisible. Her shameless whims, the subtext of my lies. Under her tinted hairthe forest murmurs, becomes a thought, or prayer. Until her thoughts tumble into mine;colors bleed. In the morning, I’m overwrought— My patrilineal kin, she begins to wear thin,when she undoes hospital corners I’ve tucked so gently in. Her cool white rising is meringue completing—the high-pitched silence of our congealing. She was always ceremonially unfoldinghis white shirts, unpressing the folds in my circumstance. I did and didn’t want her. I kepttrying to catch her, then let her slip. Any intent to have her near made her more invisible. Her electricbreasts overfilled my brassieres. An interaction, our dialectic— She never removes her hat upon entering the doorto my personality. Ma semblable, ma soeur!

Elizabeth A.I. Powell

Luna

lunatuna fluttering below belly pasiones swooping down deep gathering storms treasuring rainergías pacíficas marítimas, montañescas abotona tu vientre, maja easles b ready to capture flight entre tus aguas claras allow flow …reflect… clama la milpa eye your center cherish thigh hug torso b one with duende within discover sun risa raza roja

Alurista

Living,The Body,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

Pa' Césary Corky

what for the rush and bloody pain what for the blooming and the rain what for the quest and odyssey what for the swimming and the sea, see there b no shore or beach that anyone can reach and breathe, inhale, exhale, and love all seems to ooze the stress that greed has carved in us surely our species should be meek before our motherearth’s volcanoes storms and huracanes tornadoes, floods and tremors and there we b secreting poisons for all leggeds, wingeds, fish and even trees what for the rush and bloody pain we’ll surely die, but then we dig deeper in our heartmindspiritbody and nurture glow and warmth and light and peace and patience and gladness and gardens and gather all in oneness and end the pain and bloody rush desiring naught expecting naught missing naught simply being being we truly have no choice…though we imagine, dream, hope, want being all that we are we are all that is and that is all there b césar and corky this b my writ to chávez y gonzález carnales de las sonrisas grandes de las carcajadas llenas de murales de cuadros, ensayos matadors de pendejadas terminators of guandajos and juanabees hermanos, jefes your “death” is but our “birth” porque amasteis entregasteis y hoy, como siempre, sois imprescindibles

Alurista

Activities,Jobs & Working,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity,Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism

The Unfastening

As the father turns away from the thought of his failure, the hands remove his glasses and rub his eyes over and over, drying the nonexistent tears. Unknown to the one who is troubled about losing his hair, his fingers stroke his baldness as he speaks. The body, our constant companion, understands the loneliness of the hostess in her dark driveway, embracing herself after the guests who promised more and soon have gone, and even visits the old schoolteacher who reads the same happy ending to each new class, working her toes in her shoes. How could the people of the kingdom not have known the curse of sorrow was nothing more than a long sleep they had only to wake from? In dreams the body, which longs for transformation too, suddenly lifts us above the dark roofs of our houses, and far above the streets of the town, until they seem like any other small things fastened to earth.

Wesley McNair

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Growing Old,Life Choices,The Body

The Poem

In the apparent vacancy beyond each line, you might sense the poem waiting to think itself. Imagine the surface of a twilight pond in wind, shifting and changing the sky, then going still as a concentrating mind, the far trees deepening in its reflection. Like the poem the pond’s alive— its beauty (the sudden scintillation of a hundred thousand wavelets) and music (the percussion of a beaver’s tail) arising from what is. And when the pond accumulates the darkness, which it loves, it challenges your eyes to find the light that without darkness you could not see. Wild campsites you never noticed now appear along the far shore. It’s not only itself the poem waits for moving line by line into its own dark. It waits for you.

Wesley McNair

Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

Losses

It must be difficult for God, listening to our voices come up through his floor of cloud to tell Him what’s been taken away: Lord, I’ve lost my dog, my period, my hair, all my money. What can He say, given we’re so incomplete we can’t stop being surprised by our condition, while He is completeness itself? Or is God more like us, made in His image—shaking His head because He can’t be expected to keep track of which voice goes with what name and address, He being just one God. Either way, we seem to be left here to discover our losses, everything from car keys to larger items we can’t search our pockets for, destined to face them on our own. Even though the dentist gives us music to listen to and the assistant looks down with her lovely smile, it’s still our tooth he yanks out, leaving a soft spot we ponder with our tongue for days. Left to ourselves, we always go over and over what’s missing— tooth, dog, money, self-control, and even losses as troubling as the absence the widower can’t stop reaching for on the other side of his bed a year later. Then one odd afternoon, watching something as common as the way light from the window lingers over a vase on the table, or how the leaves on his backyard tree change colors all at once in a quick wind, he begins to feel a lightness, as if all his loss has led to finding just this. Only God knows where the feeling came from, or maybe God’s not some knower off on a cloud, but there in the eye, which tears up now at the strangest moments, over the smallest things.

Wesley McNair

Living,Growing Old,Sorrow & Grieving,The Body,Religion,God & the Divine

Parse

Dawn marks the wall a thin flange of off-blue An imagined silence Always an imagined silence The speed at which sleep’s fogged dialogue withers into the present noun-scape This rift valley A volley of seasonal beacons Window where mind finds orbit + All a world can do is appear The window intones A room whose walls warp with sun What’s seen is dreamed We think ourselves here

Joseph Massey

Living,The Mind

A Title for the Haze

In a patch of sunlight a decapitated grasshopper twitches. The sunlight twitches. Sky the size of a sky imagined. Squint to see the quarter moon —shallow gash on blue horizon. Squint to hear beyond windows wafting muzak. I’m half-awake in this field of turned-on particulars. A wreck of yellow blossoms under a barn-door window. A barn door without the barn.

Joseph Massey

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals

Illocality

To imagine a morning the first sounds from the street and the house, its halls scarifying consciousness Antique glass smudges limbs (more blue than green) flared out over a roof To imagine the raw circumference of a field as it wakes what we make of it where our senses send us Gray oscillates gray and the mountain a line lodged within it gone slack at the end No need to mention weather The yard— the measure An unkempt garden bed convulses synchronous with traffic flashing through the fence Stone bench in a ring of weeds Shadows ring— a sound Bees doused in viscous sun, erased

Joseph Massey

What I've Come to Discuss

What I’ve come to discuss is mostly about shadows and the airs left behind in caring, discarding, the long inhibitions of whereso and when. Alabaster, a dark quire, in its many pages and premises the maze, from which move tendrilled purples and contusions, magnificent fuchsia receivers of false content, the splayed flower, arterial, like the premise of a door is where it leads to or from. Communication of vessel, vial, capsule, hull, a tiniest nil fires the neurons from their swooning stall, is not a healing but adaptation to same a quickening in deleting of sensation a prior sizing. Stacked leaves (green shadows) are givens in the columned garden, what work is needed to determine that shape? Some hysteric trope of repetition, rage for accretion, dazed by its own mute replication, like the minute lines of a hand. They are its cries (writes Ponge, among others), the tongue inseparable from its utterance (langue). We weep to hear it, a language forgot. I was saying I keep speaking from some chamber sound deleted, which is why I never call or write. In that theatre are many eclipses and moons refracted in pinholes and wheels wherein revolve astonished birds, and the Queen of Night sleeps a rest restorative and profitable, and andante allegro, the dead ships never sail.

Karen Volkman

Nature,Trees & Flowers,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics

Bridge

1. Bridge’s absence gave the creek a new aspect. Uncrossable, irascible. Crosser stems on the bank with her will and form, extension “Phantom of incapacity which is me.” Bright roar of water, x of indomitability. 2. The bridge is not an x. It bridges nothing. The turmoil is only a portion. 3. Bridge on the grass is brideless. Tufts of terra like a bloom in air. Rational slats, a surface’s accretion, slat system. Grass tints it, heliotropic emanation, sharp, up, or complex occupation in shiving rain. 4. Creek’s uncrossability, a new beauty. “It looked like the process of a thinking, deep run.” It became the suffering of form and mute suggestion. The syllables were not perennial. They broke and grew. 5. The blue pants of the crosser were neither sky nor water. They orient to the body as form and boundary. The crosser’s green shirt neither grass nor leaf-thought. Desire to not get wet, another hurt. 6. “Glamour of limit, where the rocks just slant” down the bank, in a wet stratification, and the creek spills blows and goings and is omniform leaving, a prime of seem. 7. High water as a contour of relation swells, hurls. The creek which was other but not antipodal, or refusal. “The wish to touch it with my phenomenal hand” loves it as material. 8. The bridge made the force containable. Bridgeless the crosser sits, and very still. “My phenomenal body crosses and longs.” Ceaseless body of the audible.

Karen Volkman

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

Washing the World

with a mournful but driving feel, in Bm, 2/2 time in the dark, in the bitter wind listen to a dream grandmothers stand shoulder to shoulder, on the rim of a hill bend as one, and grasp one thing together ask them, in the dream world, why do they cry? they will show you in reply their shawls of many colours, spread these wings sweep you in, teach you how once a year, in the dark of the year we wash the whole world in a day—for one day, we cry until they're home, until they all are home from one dawn to the next mourning for the broken wailing for regrets love lost, wrong words, wrong actions unbalanced moments and all the cracks between heart and heart, parent and child lover and beloved friend, nation and nation creature, and creature of another kind for what we choose and what we neglect to choose for what we wish we'd known for each hand unclasped tongue unbridled one whisper falling short of hearduntil they're home, until they are all home the bread far from the hunger the apology the confusion the broken road these things we gather in this blanket bone and sand and sage we wash the world, between us hold this blanket, fill it with our tears and when we have cried from one dawn to the next then we will rise, and we will dance until they're home, until they all are home lay your hands upon the truth of beauty's loss heavy, soft as moss, this blanket full of tears and dust and dying becomes ocean cradle, healing, dark the promise, washed clean by our sorrow today crying out, as we're birthing tomorrow not so much redemption as the law of moon and season calls for justice one day, the lawmakers must exit their echoing halls, fall in with the grandmothers dancing carry it cry it clean until they're home, until they are all home until light through their bodies translates to rainbows hung over the land until light through their bodies translates to rainbows strung over this land until light through our bodies translates to rainbows shining over our land until we're home, until we all are home

Anna Marie Sewell

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Gender & Sexuality

from The Splinters

(Skellig Michael) does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world…then (heading back) we were pursued by terrors, ghost from Michael… George Bernard Shaw I The ferry furrows the foam, leaving a wake that quickly settles and forgets us, as it has forgotten all those who’ve opened these waters: fisherman, monk, pilgrim and pagan, some foundering here. Our mainland world diminishes. There is respite. A cloud engulfs us out of nowhere as if the miraculous were about to appear. The veil lifts to reveal the small Skellig and Skellig Michael rising like chapel and cathedral. II We forget speech, hypnotized by the climb, concentrating on narrow, rock-hewn steps that spiral up like the gyres of the Book of Kells, whirling in labyrinths of knowledge, turmoil and eternity. They lead to the beehive huts and oratories packed with a congregation of sightseers who whisper in disbelief and reverence at how those sometime monks lived in this wind-tugged cloister of shells. We browse in each dome’s live absence and picnic above the graveyard that’s no bigger than a currach with a crucifix for helmsman navigating his crew to the island of the dead. We’re eyed by the staunch, monkish puffins. Our tongues loosen, but, in keeping with the somberness of this sun-haloed place, we chat about the world with an earnestness that would embarrass us on the mainland. You tell of medieval monks charting world maps with countries drawn as humans gorging upon each other’s entangled bodies. We go on to the lands and demons of the world of poetry. I’m flummoxed when you ask what poetry is. I recall how the earliest musical instruments were hewn out of bones, and that poets carve their words out of those gone before. They are the primitive musicians who beat and blow words back to life. More than that I don’t know. III […] That dusk at Dún an Óir we slaughtered even the pregnant, whimpering women methodically while a bloodstained sun drowned in the ocean. Each fetus struggled in the belly of each slain mother as desperately as a lobster dropped in a boiling pot. Had shed blood been ink, I could still be quilling The Faerie Queene, but I did not allow a drop to blot a mere sonnet that you, trapped in complicity, can never quite break free of. Admit it, hypocrite! In your time few are not guilty of slaughter. Even the page you’ll pen this upon is of pine that Amazonians were shot for. I could go on. (Edmund Spenser) I lifted the pitch of my grief above the storm-lashing waves for my world breaking on the reefs of foreign, land-grabbing knaves, who ignore dependence upon the lowliest plants and creatures as the hermit crab and cloak anemone depend on one another. But no matter what, you must keen for the world’s theft as I keened mine, despite knowing soon no one may be left. (Aodhagán Ó Rathaille) Lend an ear to one of your own kind and do not let yourself be caught by the winds of lust, like Dante’s starlings blown this way and that by every gust. I myself was borne on this wind as I rode across country, always wary that around the next bend my life would catch up with me. My rakish ways squandered energy that I should have instilled in song, more worthy of the muse-gift given to me than my odd aisling, Pay particular heed to me, especially since your word-talent is less than mine. I’m still too bushed to eke out a last line. (Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin) Sing up front, cold-shouldering the fashionable low key of your time, closed, cautious and crabbit as a farmer. Sing as open-throated as my curlew keen. I supped the red wine of Art’s blood as he lay slain, already becoming Cork mud. Sing as full-throated as my unmatched plaint; matching my words to his cold body that would never again rouse to my touch. My hands wept that day’s icy rain as I swore to undo that kowtowing dribble of a man who slew my Art of the winged white horse. The spirit of that mare I rode fleeter than any hare, fleeter than any deer, fleeter than the wind through Munster’s open country. Sing your provenance, our elder province. (Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill) I sang not for my own or for beauty's sake as much as to keep our spirits fired, knowing as long as we sang we'd not break, refusing to allow the country be shired. But it was too much when even our lands turned hostile and drove us like lapwings in the hard winter, together in dying bands, our swollen bellies pregnant with nothing. Even the birds seemed to give up singing. So I lay down and relinquished song. But I should have kept up my amhrán-ing, adapting and transmuting their tongue. Transform the spirit of where you belong, make something right out of what's wrong. (Tomás Rua Ó Súilleabháin) Tell of those weather-sketched Attic islanders who half-tamed their school of rocky Blaskets, water spouting from the blowholes of cliffs. Tell how they were forced from their Ithaca, still dreaming in the surf-rush of Irish, the inland longing for the lilt of the sea. In them uncover the destiny of everyone, for all are exiled and in search of a home, as you settle the eroding island of each poem. (Robin Flower) […] The islands' standing army of gannets fiercely snap, stab and peck one another. Few could match the spite I unleashed on any who encroached into my territory. I spat with petrel accuracy. I should have had the wisdom of the sad-eyed puffins who let everyone come close, sensing few mean hurt, though when forced to tussle they'll show their worth. So learn from me. When I come to mind don't recall how, feisty, I knocked nests of words over the edge, splattering on the rocks the crude squwaks of other ravaging, wing-elbowing birds; rather think of the winged poems I hatched, seen, regardless of time and place, gliding and gyring with their own grace. (Patrick Kavanagh) Life when it is gone is like a woman you were glad to be quit of only to find yourself years later longing for her, catching her scent on a crowded street. Tell us of the seagull plundering your picnic before it wakes you. Tell us of the rain tapping a pane while you're ensconced by the fire cradling a pregnant brandy glass. (Louis MacNeice) Can you still hear a distant train whistle blow? Wet my whistle with a slug of Guinness. What is the texture of fresh-fallen snow? Do girls still wear their hair in braid? What's tea? What's the smell of the sea? Tell me. Tell me. I am beginning to fade. (Dylan Thomas) IV The alarming, silhouetted bird has a preternatural quality as it flutters about my head, drawing me from sleep's underworld. I resist its pull. Everything turns into dream's usual montage. Another figure emerges but says nothing, as if that's what he came to say. His face merges into one of a gagged female. She shimmers and vanishes. Dolphins break beyond Blind Man's Cove, returning the dead to Bull Island, transmitting their encrypted, underwater Morse. The savant local ferryman informs us that Skellig Michael was once a druidic site. His oil-wrinkled hands tug the engine cord, coaxing our boat out of the cliff-shaded cove. We withdraw into the distance, leaving a disgruntling sense that we've only touched the tip of these dark icebergs.

Greg Delanty

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

In the Next Next World

That sound Arvo Pärt does with one piano note stars split, fade, wander in cosmic expansion— First responder’s genesis and torch of metadatacrunch tumbling in a burnt and weedy churchyard equal parts Lethe and lithe— Grass, is it hollow, hallow to wake no longer among mortals? The woman her dress flowered from a blown ceiling silver-rosed— Flat plasm’s archangel coming clear out of sheetrock and screen shield and spear in hand let us do all the cooking if she will lead the pack, remember the route, read the waters— After the great fire we tread river’s late cream and flare. We woke in a city. Where who slew us into portions on a block out of earth gathered our limbs and we were allowed to continue unhunted. If “if” is the one word one is given with God to explain how one survived. Oh. Ah. Siren, white cockatoo meets deep blue. Fog. Pour ammonia on coyote scat.

Gillian Conoley

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Time & Brevity,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

The Present

It was a vertical time. It was the expression, a spirit giving way onto an electric barren. We circled and were encircled and had no cause. It was a time of the self come on in a field of apparatuses. It was vignetted by sleep, and the sleep was in its center breached. Cold moving through the smell of gas. The big-leafed enclosure. It was a time that clattered at the horizons, whose recounting was already foreclosed, as in a numeral smudged in powder, as in a thin water making of the atmosphere a disc. It was a time of guzzling. A time amid what has been kept, a time of calendered trust, repeated appeal, erasures of flight. We begin with a weedy stem drawn against the winter sky. Dear hierophant, our decision initialed. The muffled sound of the closet and the machine.

Ryo Yamaguchi

Living,Time & Brevity,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Money & Economics

The bottoms of my shoes

The bottoms of my shoes are clean From walking in the rain

Jack Kerouac

Nature,Weather

In my medicine cabinet

In my medicine cabinet the winter fly Has died of old age

Jack Kerouac

Living,Death,Time & Brevity,Nature,Animals

Useless! Useless!

Useless! Useless! —heavy rain driving into the sea

Jack Kerouac

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Weather

Answer

I broke at last the terror-fringed fascination that bound my ancient gaze to those crowding faces of plunder and seized my remnant life in a miracle of decision between white- collar hands and shook it like a cheap watch in my ear and threw it down beside me on the earth floor and rose to my feet. I made of their shoulders and heads bobbing up and down a new ladder and leaned it on their sweating flanks and ascended till midair my hands so new to harshness could grapple the roughness of a prickly day and quench the source that fed turbulence to their feet. I made a dramatic descent that day landing backways into crouching shadows into potsherds of broken trance. I flung open long-disused windows and doors and saw my hut new-swept by rainbow brooms of sunlight become my home again on whose trysting floor waited my proud vibrant life.

Chinua Achebe

Living,Life Choices,Relationships,Home Life,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

NON-commitment

Hurrah! to them who do nothing see nothing feel nothing whose hearts are fitted with prudence like a diaphragm across womb’s beckoning doorway to bar the scandal of seminal rage. I’m told the owl too wears wisdom in a ring of defense round each vulnerable eye securing it fast against the darts of sight. Long ago in the Middle East Pontius Pilate openly washed involvement off his white hands and became famous. (Of all the Roman officials before him and after who else is talked about every Sunday in the Apostles’ Creed?) And talking of apostles that other fellow Judas wasn’t such a fool either; though much maligned by succeeding generations the fact remains he alone in that motley crowd had sense enough to tell a doomed movement when he saw one and get out quick, a nice little packet bulging his coat pocket into the bargain—sensible fellow. September 1970

Chinua Achebe

Religion,Christianity,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Flying

(for Niyi Osundare) Something in altitude kindles power-thirst Mere horse-height suffices the emir Bestowing from rich folds of prodigious turban Upon crawling peasants in the dust Rare imperceptible nods enwrapped In princely boredom. I too have known A parching of that primordial palate, A quickening to manifest life Of a long recessive appetite. Though strapped and manacled That day I commanded from the pinnacle Of a three-tiered world a bridge befitting The proud deranged deity I had become. A magic rug of rushing clouds Billowed and rubbed its white softness Like practiced houri fingers on my sole And through filters of its gauzy fabric Revealed wonders of a metropolis Magic-struck to fairyland proportions. By different adjustments of vision I caused the clouds to float Over a stilled landscape, over towers And masts and smoke-plumed chimneys; Or turned the very earth, unleashed From itself, a roaming fugitive Beneath a constant sky. Then came A sudden brightness over the world, A rare winter’s smile it was, and printed On my cloud carpet a black cross Set in an orb of rainbows. To which Splendid nativity came–who else would come But gray unsporting Reason, faithless Pedant offering a bald refractory annunciation? But oh what beauty! What speed! A chariot of night in panic flight From Our Royal Proclamation of the rites Of day! And riding out Our procession Of fantasy We slaked an ancient Vestigial greed shriveled by ages of dormancy Till the eyes exhausted by glorious pageantries Returned to rest on that puny Legend of the life jacket stowed away Of all places under my seat. Now I think I know why gods Are so partial to heights—to mountain Tops and spires, to proud iroko trees And thorn-guarded holy bombax, Why petty household divinities Will sooner perch on a rude board Strung precariously from brittle rafters Of a thatched roof than sit squarely On safe earth.

Chinua Achebe

Religion,Other Religions,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

Itinerary 

I don’t mind the ring roads or the strange intersections, filled in with radio music tarmac skirting streetlight and the dissolving moon. Wing mirrors tell of running trees. My heart races in the heave of the wind. In the pivot of glass everything is so small and manageable. I think of an old song, of purple cows in far fields, I wonder what it’d take to cover miles and miles with no maps or destination. It is not easy anymore to forget or be free of the bear that roams the place where I come from.

Jennifer Wong

Activities,Travels & Journeys

Koi

Among heart-shaped leaves the white fish gleams, red tail. Soft lotuses sleep.

Jennifer Wong

Nature,Animals

Gift

''At one time, I dreaded everything I was making.' Yayoi Kusama (Winter 1999) First it is just a measling of the tablecloth but soon it spills in all colours, all gaiety: desk floor lamp flowers tatami, my underwear then dares to paw across Mother’s face, so smilingdelirious. Twenty years in a twelve square metre room with the thuds of tennis balls the only music tells me that suffering is necessary and more powerful than healing and I wish to cover all territory for once—hospital beds, chinaware, bed linen, your bland skin with the pattern and fear of all my dots— by the old wharf on Naoshima I make my yellow wartime pumpkins. I know my home is not a country anymore, just a festering colony of the mind: these shuddering trees that come and talk to me each night, the whispers of the white nurses and the star-dances of my Japanese kaleidoscope. Come haunt me still. Do what you may. I won’t return. I’m not afraid.

Jennifer Wong

Living,Health & Illness,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Home Life