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Abandoned Homestead in Watauga County

All that once was is this, shattered glass, a rot of tin and wood, the hum of limp-legged wasps that ascend like mote swirls in the heatlight. Out front a cherry tree buckles in fruit, harvested by yellow jackets and starlings, the wind, the rain, and the sun.

Ron Rash

Living,Time & Brevity,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Trees & Flowers

Eureka

Here was no place for illumination the cotton dust thick window-strained light. The metal squall drowned what could not be shouted everything geared warping and filling. Though surely there were some times that he paused my grandfather thinking This is my life and catching himself before he was caught lost wages or fingers the risk of reflection. Or another recalled in those reckoning moments remembering the mountains the hardscrabble farm where a workday as long bought no guarantee of money come fall full bellies in winter. To earn extra pay each spring he would climb the mill's water tower repaint the one word. That vowel heavy word defined the horizon a word my grandfather could not even read.

Ron Rash

Living,The Mind,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Town & Country Life

Helen Betty Osborne

Betty, if I set out to write this poem about you it might turn out instead to be about me or any one of my female relatives it might turn out to be about this young native girl growing up in rural Alberta in a town with fewer Indians than ideas about Indians, in a town just south of the 'Aryan Nations' it might turn out to be about Anna Mae Aquash, Donald Marshall or Richard Cardinal, it might even turn out to be about our grandmothers, beasts of burden in the fur trade skinning, scraping, pounding, packing, left behind for ‘British Standards of Womanhood,' left for white-melting-skinned women, not bits-of-brown women left here in this wilderness, this colony. Betty, if I start to write a poem about you it might turn out to be about hunting season instead, about 'open season' on native women it might turn out to be about your face young and hopeful staring back at me hollow now from a black and white page it might be about the 'townsfolk' (gentle word) townsfolk who 'believed native girls were easy' and 'less likely to complain if a sexual proposition led to violence.' Betty, if I write this poem.

Marilyn Dumont

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Gender & Sexuality,Race & Ethnicity

How Soon

The story goes from in a rainfall to sister walking a field browned autumn. And when she arrives winter has come, so the old man rises from his chair, picks up matches, pipes and tools, and walks out to begin again. The sculptures grow by the day, birds in ice, recognizable eagles, a bear who began as a man in a moment of dance. He does this in ice, all winter carving at dawn, carving at dusk. And sister after walking a field browned autumn, arrives, watches from the east window, waits, goes out to him in spring, taps him on the shoulder and points to the pools of water he's standing over.

Gordon Henry Jr.

Living,Time & Brevity,Nature,Spring,Winter,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture

Cut Lilies

More than a hundred dollars of them. It was pure folly. I had to find more glass things to stuff them in. Now a white and purple cloud is breathing in each corner of the room I love. Now a mass of flowers spills down my dining table— each fresh-faced, extending delicate leaves into the crush. Didn't I watch children shuffle strictly in line, cradle candles that dribbled hot white on their fingers, chanting Latin—just to fashion Sevilla's Easter? Wasn't I sad? Didn't I use to go mucking through streambeds with the skunk cabbage raising bursting violet spears?—Look, the afternoon dies as night begins in the heart of the lilies and smokes up their fluted throats until it fills the room and my lights have to be not switched on. And in close darkness the aroma grows so sweet, so strong, that it could slice me open. It does. I know I'm not the only one whose life is a conditional clause hanging from something to do with spring and one tall room and the tremble of my phone. I'm not the only one that love makes feel like a dozen flapping bedsheets being ripped to prayer flags by the wind. When I stand in full sun I feel I have been falling headfirst for decades. God, I am so transparent. So light.

Noah Warren

Love,Desire,Romantic Love,Nature,Trees & Flowers,Religion,God & the Divine

The Hands of the Taino

I. ADMIRAL Laid out on vellum, the past is a long wound. It unfolds five centuries later, beneath the heavy pens of scholars. The world shifts and spins as the Admiral's bronze astrolabe measures the paths between stars. The sky is written in the sea's uneasy mirror, and mermaids comb their hair in the distance.They are not, he writes, so beautifulas I have heard. He dreams of his own circuitous route to the Heavens. God and the Crown. Both want too much. II. GOVERNOR At Guanahani, they swam to the caravel bearing parrots and balls of cotton thread, these people so unlike him they could not not be saved. Too angry to sleep, the Governor haunts every room in his castle. The servants whisper in their own tongue. The severed hands of the Taino wave in clear salt water, in pink-tinted water. They wave as the gold mines dry up, as the Governor leaves Hispaniola in chains. Mermaids, dog-headed men and women with breastplates of copper— They draw their bows, and arrows cover the shore of Columbus's dream. No, not the Taino, whom he once called in dios. They touch his white skin. They have the faces of Christian angels.

Janet McAdams

Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity,War & Conflict

Leaving the Old Gods

I. The people who watch me hang my coat on a peg at the office don't even know about that other life, the life when there was you, it, however briefly. To them my body is a fact casual as the weather. I could tell them: That day it rained the way it rains in the New World. Leaves struck the window like daggers. I didn't think about God but the ones we used to worship the ones who want your heart still beating, who load you with gold and lure you to sleep deep in the cenote. II. A girl, he said, and I nodded though we couldn't have known. I would have left him then for ten thousand pesos. I don't know what world you inhabit, swimming there, baby, not-baby, part of my body, not me, swept aside like locks of hair or toenail parings. It's ten years today and you who were never alive pull a face in the leaves of jacaranda, the only tree that lives outside my window. It must be your voice whistling through the office window, though I can't understand your words. Comfort or accusation, I can't understand your words.

Janet McAdams

Living,Life Choices,Parenthood,The Body

Anasazi

How can we die when we're already prone to leaving the table mid-meal like Ancient Ones gone to breathe elsewhere. Salt sits still, but pepper's gone rolled off in a rush. We've practiced dying for a long time: when we skip dance or town, when we chew. We've rounded out like dining room walls in a canyon, eaten through by wind—Sorry we rushed off; the food wasn't ours. Sorry the grease sits white on our plates, and the jam that didn't set— use it as syrup to cover every theory of us.

Tacey M. Atsitty

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

Dismantling

Be willing to dismantle for the purpose of rebuilding on more solid structure. —Horoscope First you must lift the idea (be careful it may be heavy) and haul it out to the dumpster. Next locate the meaning—it may not come easily, though if you have the right tools and they are good tools you should have no difficulty. Now it is the sentences' turn: take each one strip it of grammar (you may need abrasives here) and hang them all on a line. When thoroughly dried, lay each one down on the grass or if you live in the city, the sidewalk will do. The point is, make sure you put them in harm's way, wherever you are. Don't try to protect them. It may be they will go to war, or wander the desert or haunt the streets like beggars or run from the police or suffer loneliness and despair. Remember: they must make their own way. The best you can do is to stay out of theirs and take them back in if they return.

Merrill Leffler

Living,The Mind,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics

Under a Full Moon at Midnight

This is a paean to relief and ecstasy. A man's poem of course—the electric ah! in the long stream arcing a rainbow under the spotlight moon, a covenant between mv body and the earth's. I think of Li Po smiling silently on Green Mountain and can hear Rumi drunk on rapture—drink my brother he calls to me, think of the elephant loosening a great ebullient stream that floats a river past your house and drop turds so immense you could build a hut from them along the shore to shelter your children. What release! Think of your child pedaling under your hand and of a sudden—it just happens—you let go and he's off on his own, free for that first time— the achieve of, the mastery of the child. See the stalwart trees in their silence the stones resting in the driveway, the cat curled asleep on the front porch, the smear of blood on the lion's mouth sitting over his fresh gazelle the morning paper and its stories shouting for attention. The plenitude of it all. And perhaps somewhere a friend is dreaming of me, or someone a stranger is peeing ecstatic under the same moon. A covenant then between us. True or not. It is no matter.

Merrill Leffler

Living,The Body

First Blues

That summer night Was hot Steaming like a crab Luscious under the shell Televisions gone bleary Blinked In front of men In undershirts drinking beer Wives upstairs took showers Caught A glimpse of their backs In hallway mirrors I sat in the dark Invisible On the backporch Drinking in the night And it tasted good So good Going down And somebody like me Blew night through an alto sax Blew and blew His cooling breath His hot cool breath on me— And I came alive Glowing In the dark Listening like a fool

Saundra Rose Maley

Love,Desire,Nature,Summer,Arts & Sciences,Music

The House May Be Burning

But keep writing. Write by the glow of the windows, the roof alight like a red-haired girl, you in the back yard, safe. The ladybug's flown away. Recall her flit and armored crawl. To the last breath of summer. Upon the circular of winter. The man may have left. This doesn't stop the writing. Between the pages, a slight blur. The man may have been old and ill, or young who stopped trying to be with you. Ghost days. You're swimming across a deep lake with a soul you're making. You save the swimmer, the sailor, the drowned, the damned and the beloved.

Margaret Hasse

Living,Separation & Divorce,Love,Heartache & Loss,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

Hinterlands

My ancestors were not diligent and so they lived beside the fort that's neither on the maps of Heaven, Nor of Hell. In these lands, there is no difference between a star and thrown car keys. Chicken nuggets hatch from the eggs of eagles. I grow dirty while bathing in bottled water. My bed comforter is a wet parking lot, I wrap myself up in. If I eat in the morning, there's nothing left in the evening My dish of grass and cigarette butts topped with expired coupons. Stir all I like; I never swallow it down. All the while, my rabbit's foot runs about from Las Cruces to West Memphis searching for flawless luck. The more one cries, the more one prospers . . . O' ancestral demon, may my lamentation become verbal sorcery.

Sy Hoahwah

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics,Mythology & Folklore,Ghosts & the Supernatural

Taken Care Of

I come from Inuit oil money, From instruments of chance and divination. The most loose, shut in, wavering mind, Recording my day with recitations, antennae, Narration and figure, my phone might die. I'm walking dirty. Shop and mob cops, not to touch my mother's breast Or the queen's royal crown signature Izzy Juju—hijacked, forsaking all others. The untamed scotch is mine. It cost the picture a fortune To say nothing of my turban, costume copies Of topaz bracelets, the umpteenth translation. Did you ever know Micah, Gay Sunshine, Grace Cathedral, Coconut? I went from heels at Barneys to the depths of the bins. Who could be like dropping in? I'll fold both my hands In gloves and wait, Hope Diamond peeking out.

Cedar Sigo

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

[photos of her father]

photos of her father in enemy uniform— the taste of almonds

Sandra Simpson

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Friends & Enemies,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

War Bonds

It was wartime Daisies and Maisies in overalls Worked in factories Snapping gum in their teeth Ration spunk To keep them going Through weekend tours At the local USO Or late nights Checking hats For the Willard rooftop garden It was rough Making ends meet While their men were at war In radio worlds And newspaper print Nights at home were spent reading Letters over and over Like prayers Mouths shaped To the words And Hershey bars Melted on radiators

Saundra Rose Maley

Living,Separation & Divorce,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality,War & Conflict

Spring Training

I carry my spikes and step on the field an hour ahead of the others. Last day of March with April offering tickets for the new season. I'm full of sun on wet grass, in love with blistered benches.A sparrow sits on the backstop, watching, ready to dart if I catch its eye. I drop my bag on home plate and swirl my foot in the dust the way my cousin does with his fingers on the skin of a drum head. Next yearhe'll be released with the others who spent mornings breaking windows and trashing vacation homes like drunks in the right field bleachers. Here, I'm alone with a sparrow and the smell of a baseball morningsettling around me like a comforter. I start trotting to first base, the ankles loosening, then the knees, as the dust begins to lift into the breaking light. Around second and third I stretch my armsin a rotary motion ready to fly. A hand waves back from a passing car, someone who knows me or remembers rising one morning when the game of who you are is played out in your mind,and around you a stadium full of fans begs youto do what you usually do in the clutch. The bat I pullfrom the bag for the first time is my father's Louisville Slugger, thirty-three inches, wood barrel.I thought enough time had passed, the attic dust hard in the grooves. I stroke it slowly like a weaponyou love to touch but would never use. He hit .304at Omaha the season he was drafted, all-starrookie-of-the-year. He said we'd join him soon.Then that other draft. He would have been here.I swear he would. The silence feels oppressive now.I dig for a scuffed ball and throw it up, shoulder high,but let it fall. A natural hitter, my father said, holdingmy hands. I grip the tar-stained handle. Tears blurthe wall that's so far away it looks warped. I aimfor marrow deep inside, April hungry for the kill.

Philip Raisor

Living,Death,Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

The Street of Heavens

Tell me how you die and I will tell you who you are. Octavio Paz I stand in line. The woman ahead of me, blowzy-haired and angry, is told that grace is the act of restraint and road-kill is not a sport. She can choose to wait or test the judgment at another entrance. I know that morality, penance, a kind heart don't matter, nor the faith I embraced or didn't, the people I saved. I know the key is where I land on the scale of commitment.Earnhardt, Sr., died for the game, and got in. Many ancient Egyptians buried juggling balls with them, as though endless practice and craft were their gifts to the next world. They entered. I ask if I can peek in, maybe stand on the edge and look into the vast canyon of pits, arenas, fields, fairways, pools, rings, tables, tracks, courts, beaches, forests, mountainswhere war is forbidden. Here is what I bring for review: a nasty fastball, a runner-up ring, individual initiative, a contrary attitude, the heart of a poet. I bring a willingness to run like an outlaw, honor the Greeks and Makahiki, invent new games, practice past dusk, play on the second squad, and keep score until I can get in the game with eternity left on the clock. I hope it is enough.

Philip Raisor

Living,Death,Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities

Three Women and a Man

Mary Magdalene Virgin Mother Mary, Sister of Martha

Raina J. León

Living,The Body,Love,Desire,Religion,Christianity,God & the Divine

Addict

Mahogany maple syrup runs in spider web lines.My father never uses the stuff, heeats pancakes, powdered, butter moist.When I was a child, he knew more of straightness. Lines and razors were friends.One night he tried to die by his hand. A girljumped before he walked to the ledge.Her mangled body wore the rails like a girdle,her limbs so thin they became a blood putty. Angel,her name. They had to lift the train to take her out.

Raina J. León

Living,Death,Life Choices,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Scenes in the life of a lesser angel

I. I borrow wings from other angels, coastthe streets to find feathers loosely attachedto slender silver ties. With care, I close the catchand fasten cardboard stiffened form so closeI cannot breathe or fly for the airpushed out into a world in masquerade.I am African. I am goddess with flaresounding the trumpets. I call out God.Meaning changes like sea water in storm.I part the crowds until, beaten, my wingsfly, fall, litter the streets. I cradle the newborntwins and realize that I am fallen,a lesser angel, wingless and depressed.I am seductress unpetaled, undressed.II.dress her navel in lotus flowersto swim in the pool of her abdomentwine orange blossoms in her hairand smell the scent of oils and natural perfumekiss her nipples so that they become pyramidswet from a summer rain of tonguepress her down into soft linens with hardbody folding into hers like tributary waterswarm her hands against heated chestthat covers drum rhythms resoundingmen, worship your women this waywomen, flush at the adorationand you will know how I feelwhen he touches my hand

Raina J. León

Love,Desire,Romantic Love,Religion,The Spiritual

Apologies

I.The time has come for the nation to turna new page by righting wrongs of the past.We apologise for laws and policies that inflictedprofound grief, suffering, and loss and for the removalof children from families, communities, and country.For the pain of these, their descendants, and for familiesleft behind, to mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters,for indignity inflicted on a proud people, we say sorry.We resolve that the injustices of the past must never,never happen again and look to a future based on mutualrespect, where all, whatever their origins, are equal partners.Spoken by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd,introduced in January and delivered November 29, 2008,the day after he was sworn into office

Karenne Wood

Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

The Naming

Some nights we feel the furred darknessof an ancient one's breath and are trappedin awakening, dismemberedby events we no longer recall.We can touch the windowsill,where October air gathersas hours slip past in thin robes,the forest a concert of voices.The last crickets let go of their songs.The land speaks, its language arisingfrom its own geography—the mountains' hulked shapesare blue whales, rememberingwhen they were undersea ridges,and rivers are serpentine strands hammered from silver, and dark treestalk to the wind—weaving mortal lives,drumbeats, pillars of smoke,voices wavering into updraft,the storyteller shifting the present.

Karenne Wood

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals

One in Three or Four

There are too many of us for youto believe you are either alone or responsible. No woman asks for this. Some are children. Some areboys. Every one of us should havebeen heard. This is for Anna, age 17,who was then beaten and left to die;for Nathan, who at 11 admired the basketball coach; for Rosaline, whosees in her baby the face of a rapistand who finds that face difficult tolove; for sisters when soldiers came,mothers imprisoned among guards,for aunties grandmas daughters sons,for one who was tied and one who triedto scream, one whose husband watched,one violated time after time, one tornapart, who called the police whodid not call her back, who went tothe clinic where there were no kits,who numbed her shame with drugs,who could not drink enough to forget,who took her life, who believed shewas an object, who said nothing, whoknew no one was there and that no one would ever be there. Know this: thereare so many that if we could speak,our voices might spread like floodwatersover their boots and swell past securitystations; that if we cried out togetherwe might finally understand it as anassault on all people, all creation, andmaybe then there would be justice inthis war to claim yourself, a strugglemapped all over the flesh of every womanor child who has known what it is to be used, as you were, your sacred body.

Karenne Wood

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Gender & Sexuality

Abracadabra, an Abecedarian

All this time I've been looking for words for certain difficult womenbecause they aren't able to speak for themselves, and now theClinton Foundation has come up with a brilliant campaign—theydecided, for International Women's Day, through digital magic to erase women on the cover of Condé Nast, posters, billboards, thosefigures replaced by empty space because women have not yet achievedgender equity, as noted on a website, not-there.org, and they're right. Wehaven't. But when I read about not-there.org and saw its flashy graphics,I wasn't thinking about how women are not-there-yet, metaphorically, I just thought about women who are really not there, women and girls whokeep disappearing (not from magazines, who don't make news in Manhattan)like they've evaporated, like illusions, hundreds in Juárez, twelve hundred missing and murdered Native women across Canada. The hands of men.Now you see her. Not. Not-there. Not here, either,or anywhere. Maybe only part of the problem is the predatory perpetrator-prestidigitator who more often than not knows her, knows how to keep herquiet, who may claim to love her, even, maybe getting even—or the serialrapist-killer in the bushes who bushwhacks her in the dark. You're always safe,says the forensic psychiatrist, unless a monster happens to show up, andthen you're not. Not-there. Maybe a lonely mandible, maxilla, fibula, or ulna shows up, or a bagged body gets dragged from the river. Or not. Is this thevalue we permit a woman's life to have (or not-have) throughout a wrongworld, a global idea of her as disposable parts? In the end, this is not a xenophobic poem, not specific—it's everywhere. Not-there. Right here.Yes, the sun rises anyway, but now the parents are staring past each other, thatzero between them like a chalked outline in their family photograph. Or not.

Karenne Wood

Living,Death,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,Gender & Sexuality,Race & Ethnicity

Guide to Avian Architecture

What we built to hold us, the year's memory,menus and daytrips, after a whilecame loose. Those nightswe balanced on each other's mistakes,cradling our wine:twigs those branches now.Who knew what lived there?She she she called one bird.What lived there knew its place.Another bird splits its nest wide,hinges the gap with spider silk, learningto give, to give, to give until breaking. Only then—either one gives until breaking or one does not.

Megan Snyder-Camp

Living,Life Choices,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Nature,Animals

Ozette

After a while the 500-year-old village became a secret,carved into the wall of the forest where it met the Pacific,eleven long houses and their racks of drying fish, theirdogs. No roads to this town, only boats and the memory ofboaters. Blankets made from woodpecker feathers, cattailfluff, cedar bark and dog hair woven into a plaid pattern.At least that's what I remember of the museum's diorama.When the mud came down the mountain and covered the village, no one had lived there for years. It was a boaterwho remembered, after a while, that the village was gone,and also that it had once existed. Archaeologists broughtgarden hoses to wash the mud off and hooked the hoses upto the sea. Some of what had been preserved in the mudwas destroyed that day by the water pressure, and then latermost else was ruined by the wind and rain, but at least fora few weeks they could hold the bones in their hands. Thearchaeologists brought their dogs, they lived there a while.

Megan Snyder-Camp

Living,Death,Time & Brevity,Arts & Sciences,Sciences

Dear Proofreader

You’re right. I meant “midst,” not “mist.” I don’t know what I was stinking, I mean thinking, soap speaks intimately to my skin every day. Most days. Depending if darkness has risen to my skull like smoke up a chimney floe. Flue. Then no stepping nude into the shower, no mist turning the bathroom mirror into frosted glass where my face would float coldly in the oval. Picture a caveman encased in ice. Good. I like how your mind works, how your eyes inside your mind works, and your actual eyes reading this, their icy precision, nothing slips by them. Even now I can feel you hovering silently above these lines, hawkish, Godlike, each period a lone figure kneeling in the snow. That’s too solemn. I would like to send search parties and rescue choppers to every period ever printed. I would like to apologize to my wife for not showering on Monday and Tuesday. I was stinking. I was simultaneously numb and needled with anxiety, in the midst of a depressive episode. Although “mist” would work too, metaphorically speaking, in the mist of, in the fog of, this gray haze that followed me relentlessly from room to room until every red bell inside my head was wrong. Rung.

David Hernandez

Living,The Mind,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics

The Ecology of Subsistence

No daylight for two months, an ice chisel sliversfrozen lake water refracting blue cinders.By light of an oil lamp, a child learns to savor marrow:cracked caribou bones a heap on the floor.A sinew, thickly wrapped in soot, threads throughthe meat on her chin: a tattoo in three slender lines.One white ptarmigan plume fastened to the lip ofa birch wood basket; thaw approaches: the plume turns brown.On the edge of the open lead, a toggle-head harpoonwaits to launch: bowhead sings to krill.Thickened pack ice cracking; a baleen fishing linepulls taut a silver dorsal fin of a round white fish.A slate-blade knife slices along the grain of a caribouhindquarter; the ice cellar lined in willow branches is empty.Saltwater suffuses into a flint quarry, offshorea thin layer of radiation glazes leathered walrus skin.Alongside shatters of a hummock, a marsh marigoldflattens under three black toes of a sandhill crane.A translucent sheep horn dipper skims a freshwater stream;underneath, arctic char lay eggs of mercury.Picked before the fall migration, cloudberriesdrench in whale oil, ferment in a sealskin poke.A tundra swan nests inside a rusted steel rum;she abandons her newborns hatched a deep crimson.

Cathy Tagnak Rexford

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Nature,Animals,Landscapes & Pastorals,Winter

Baleen Scrimshaw as 16mm Film

Shoot in 16 mm film, capture her sitting underan olive-green archway. Loop the sound of steel striking glass. When you blink, the camera captures the frame of her kin, walking upside down. Loop the sound of tundra grass sprouting.Her hairline marks her shift from caribou to woman. Standing in front of three white spotlights the silhouette of five black arrowheads departs from her lips. Splice together her eyelashes and frozen lids exaggerate the strain of her freckles coiled into song.Inukshuks tumble from the tips of her fingernails guiding the landing strip for twin otters; they watch their children travel to the moon, or perhaps they erase our oiled webs. Chart sixteen luminaries into the Beaufort Sea. Wait. Wait. Wait. The shutter will remember their white crested etchings.They resurface in the lyric of your documentary.

Cathy Tagnak Rexford

Living,The Body,Nature,Animals,Arts & Sciences,Photography & Film

All-American

I’m this tiny, this statuesque, and everywherein between, and everywhere in betweenbony and overweight, my shadow cannot holdone shape in Omaha, in Tuscaloosa, in Aberdeen. My skin is mocha brown, two shades darkerthan taupe, your question is racist, nutmeg, beige,I’m not offended by your question at all.Penis or vagina? Yes and yes. Gay or straight?Both boxes. Bi, not bi, who cares, stop fixating on my sex life, Jesus never leveledhis eye to a bedroom’s keyhole. I go to churchin Tempe, in Waco, the one with the exquisite stained glass, the one with a white spirelike the tip of a Klansman’s hood. Churchescreep me out, I never step inside one,never utter hymns, Sundays I hide my flesh with camouflage and hunt. I don’t huntbut wish every deer wore a bulletproof vestand fired back. It’s cinnamon, my skin,it’s more sandstone than any color I know. I voted for Obama, McCain, Nader, I was tooapathetic to vote, too lazy to walk one block,two blocks to the voting booth For or against a women’s right to choose? Yes, for and against.For waterboarding, for strapping detainees with snorkels and diving masks. Against burningfossil fuels, let’s punish all those smokestacksfor eating the ozone, bring the wrecking balls, but build more smokestacks, we need jobshere in Harrisburg, here in Kalamazoo. Againstgun control, for cotton bullets, for constructing a better fence along the border, let’s raise concrete toward the sky, why does it needall that space to begin with? For creatingholes in the fence, adding ladders, they’re nothere to steal work from us, no one dreamsof crab walking for hours across a lettuce fieldso someone could order the Caesar salad. No one dreams of sliding a squeegee downthe cloud-mirrored windows of a high-rise, but some of us do it. Some of us sell flowers. Some of us cut hair. Some of us carefullysteer a mower around the cemetery grounds.Some of us paint houses. Some of us monitor the power grid. Some of us ring you up while some of us crisscross a parking lotto gather the shopping carts into one long,rolling, clamorous and glittering backbone.

David Hernandez

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

We Would Never Sleep

We the people, we the one times 320 million, I’m rounding up, there’s really too many grass blades to count, wheat plants to tally, just see the whole field swaying from here to that shy blue mountain. Swaying as in rocking, but also the other definition of the verb: we sway, we influence, we impress. Unless we’re asleep, the field’s asleep, more a postcard than a real field, portrait of the people unmoved. You know that shooting last week? I will admit the number dead was too low to startle me if you admit you felt the same, and the person standing by you agrees, and the person beside that person. It has to be double digits, don’t you think? To really shake up your afternoon? I’m troubled by how untroubled I felt, my mind’s humdrum regarding the total coffins, five if you care to know, five still even if you don’t. I’m angry I’m getting used to it, the daily gunned down, pop-pop on Wednesday, Thursday’s spent casings pinging on the sidewalk. It all sounds so industrial, there’s nothing metal that won’t make a noise, I’m thinking every gun should come with a microphone, each street with loudspeakers to broadcast their banging. We would never sleep, the field always awake, acres of swaying up to that shy blue mountain, no wonder why it cowers on the horizon, I mean look at us, look with the mountain’s eyes we the people putting holes in the people.

David Hernandez

Living,Death,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,History & Politics

When in 2009 the G20 Summit Convened in Pittsburgh

Look who’s whistling through bleached teeth now, one hand on svelte hip, one fist pumping the air– Pittsburgh–once that madcap & zany joke factory now chosen for her fetching comeback tale & her earth-sheltered welcome center & her Warhol & her Tropical Forest Conservatory & her Rosemont, working farm of the moguls of ketchup. Rarely since the global credit crisis do Pittsburghers cross bridges or rivers or the thresholds of stunningly profitable ventures. Yet tonight, as global output contracts at a pace not seen since the 1930s, as the French president proposes reform of the International Monetary Fund & the US president delights in the local crepes with crispy edges, & as Greenpeace commandos drape a WHAT THE FUCK? banner from the deck of the West End Bridge (above which Chinook & Black Hawk helicopter hover), & as police use the LRAD sound cannon on protesters for the first time in the United States or Canada– a Pittsburgh Pirate homers into the Allegheny River & sets the esplanade ablaze with the flash & fizzle of fireworks launched at the flat lozenge of the moon, a ghostly azure, suspended low above the sweep of the cantilevered roofs on the opposite shoreline–the poured concrete, the glass towers, the obelisks–a costly parody of bygone days when confidence in the future, evinced by our sixty miles of integrated mills, was illustrated by a time capsule, a chamber “hermetically” sealed in Steel City alloys, bicentennially filled with newsprint & artifacts of 1958 Pittsburgh to be cracked open & savored in some distant epoch, an idea first embraced by Esarhaddon, son of Sennacherib, king of Assyria, Babylonia, & Egypt, & reenacted now in waves of sound & light–the roar of fireworks night for a losing franchise, the hoarse voices of Pittsburghers– wafting into the void, accelerated by Jupiter’s pull, & then hurled by Jupiter out of the solar system, yet another urban missive from a noisy planet, a comingling of mathematics and human music, charming & powerful, a murmur preserved of our city-state that once flourished–before its citizens dispersed to other lands, to greater deeds on the blue Earth.

Peter Oresick

Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics,Money & Economics

My Father

My father was four years in the war, and afterward, according to my mother, had nothing to say. She says he trembled in his sleep the next four years. My father was twice the father of sons miscarried, and afterward said nothing. My mother keeps this silence also. Four times my father was on strike, and according to my mother; had nothing to say. She says the company didn’t understand, nor can her son, the meaning of an extra fifteen cents an hour in 1956 to a man tending a glass furnace in August. I have always remembered him a tired man. I have respected him like a guest and expected nothing. It is April now. My life lies before me, enticing as the woman at my side. Now, in April, I want him to speak. I want to stand against the worn body of his pain. I want to try it on like a coat that does not fit.

Peter Oresick

Living,Coming of Age,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

At a Jewish Cemetery in Pittsburgh

Someone is looking for us. I sensed it earlier at the creek while floating on my back, and again on Route 8 near Brookline. So we’ve detoured to this hillside eroding and crazy with markers. We’re looking for row mm or nn or something like that. I lug the baby; my wife runs ahead. This neighborhood knows her– she passes so easily between stones. She finds the grave, her father dead ten years now. In the time it takes to say kaddish the sun’s dropped. I set down my son and he crawls in the dimness, pulling himself up on the headstone. How delicately he fingers the marble. Quickly he rounds its corner. Vanishes. I’m thinking: grass, stone, quiet– then babbling from another world.

Peter Oresick

Living,Death,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Religion,Judaism,The Spiritual

Marking Him

Does my little son miss the smell of his first mother? I wonder as the mewl of his mouth opens toward a plastic bottle that is not her breast. Sudden new mother, I bury my nose deep into his skullcap of ringlets, his starry cheesiness. In her good-bye letter to him sealed in his album with a birth certificate, which now list my name as Mother, his first mother writes she nursed him briefly after he emerged into the second room of his world. I think of milk, volcanic and insistent, answering the newborn’s gigantic thirst, a primal agreement between generosity and greed. Sometimes I press my nose to the glass of that place where a mother and my child belong to each other; I cannot imagine coming between them. But then I want to lick him all over with a cow’s thick tongue, to taste him and mark him as mine so if the other mother returns, she will refuse her handled calf smeared with my smell.

Margaret Hasse

Living,Infancy,Parenthood,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

First Day of Kindergarten

The bus steps are high, but William clambers up gamely. Doors shut. He peers out a print-marked window. From the street corner, I wave, wistful as a soldier’s bride as his bus pulls away and turns a corner. At noon the yellow bus returns him to the same place where I’m standing again. He thinks I stood there all day, waiting in his absence. When he finds out I left to play tennis, his forehead crumples like paper in a wastebasket. Now he knows I can move on my own without him. Tears drawn from the well of desertion form in his eyes. I’m his first love and his greatest disappointment.

Margaret Hasse

Living,Parenthood,Activities,School & Learning,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Radiance

The Roman candle of a yard light caramelizes the old snow. The glow trespasses the dark hold of December, dimming the view of the night sky with its winter triangle a boy strains to see through the haze, as he lets his jacket hang open, unzipped to the cold. He knows to return through the black cleft between buildings, below electric wires that seem to carry a little train of snow on their slim rails, where he throws the switch that shuts off the bulb on its pole, that opens the dome to a blast of stars in outer space, to the pinpoint of Jupiter, to the constellation of Orion hunting the Great Bear that the boy follows to find a smudge of gray–he can gaze through that peep hole to another galaxy also spangled with radiance from stars that traveled two and a half million light years before appearing as a signal in the rod cells of his eyes that pass impulses through neurons and nerves to his brain that creates images. He draws in a sharp breath, the high voltage power box of his chest hot and humming.

Margaret Hasse

Living,Youth,Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens,Winter

Sex, Night

Once again, someone falls in their first falling–fall of two bodies, of two eyes, of four green eyes or eight green eyes if we count those born in the mirror (at midnight, in the purest fear, in the loss), you haven’t been able to recognize the voice of your dull silence, to see the earthly messages scrawled in the middle of one mad state, when the body is a glass and from ourselves and from the other we drink some kind of impossible water. Desire needlessly spills on me a cursed liqueur. For my thirsty thirst, what can the promise of eyes do? I speak of something not in this world. I speak of someone whose purpose is elsewhere. And I was naked in memory of the white night. Drunk and I made love all night, just like a sick dog. Sometimes we suffer too much reality in the space of a single night. We get undressed, we’re horrified. We’re aware the mirror sounds like a watch, the mirror from which your cry will pour out, your laceration. Night opens itself only once. It’s enough. You see. You’ve seen. Fear of being two in the mirror, and suddenly we’re four. We cry, we moan, my fear, my joy more horrible than my fear, my visceral words, my words are keys that lock me into a mirror, with you, but ever alone. And I am well aware what night is made of. We’ve fallen so completely into jaws that didn’t expect this sacrifice, this condemnation of my eyes which have seen. I speak of a discovery: felt the I in sex, sex in the I. I speak of burying everyday fear to secure the fear of an instant. The purest loss. But who’ll say: you don’t cry anymore at night? Because madness is also a lie. Like night. Like death.

Alejandra Pizarnik

Living,The Body,The Mind,Love,Desire

After the Deindustrialization of America, My Father Enters Television Repair

My hands hold, my father’s older the wires– picture rolls once, then steadies… an English castle! A voice-over drones about Edward I, who, to subdue the Welsh, built castles. Some sixty years, dozens of engineers, the masses conscripted from the villages. My father moves on to a Zenith with a bad tuner. TVs interest him, not English with their damp, historical programming. * * * Here there were Indians, mound builders. Here, an English fort, a few farmers. And here the industrialist settled his ass, John Ford on the river dredging sand for making glass. Plate glass. (Why should America buy from Europe?) Some half dozen years, German engineers, and hundreds of Slavic peasants. Grandfather sat on his samovar warming himself and making excuses, but finally, he set off. Got a room, became a shoveler. Got a wife, a company house. Ford City: a valley filling with properties. No one got along– Not Labor and Capital, not Germans and Slavs, not husband and wives, for that matter. * * * Edward’s castles were ruins by the fifteenth century. Not from Welsh armies, but the rise of the middle class. The towns around a castle thrived: tailors, smithies, cobblers, coopers. Drawing in the Welsh peasants. And what with intermarriage and the rise of capitalism… a castle grew obsolescent. I turn off the set. My father hunts cigarettes at the Kwik-Mart on the corner. Overhead, my mother’s footsteps, the tonk of bottles, the scraping of plates. * * * During Eisenhower’s reign my grandfather retired and mowed his lawn until I took over. He primed the filter, set the choke, then we took turns pulling till the sputtering engine caught. (“Somanabitch,” he spit) And watched me as I mowed back and forth for two dollars. Once in the garage he showed me a scythe. He mowed hay in the old country, and the women would follow, raking it in windrows. * * * The factories today are mostly closed down, or full of robots or far off in Asia. Ford City lives through the mail: compensation, a thin pension, and, of course, Social Security. I always drive along the factory, windows rolled down; I want my kids in the back seat to see. Seven or eight, probably pensioners, congregate on the corner, each man dressed quite alike: Sears jacket, cigarette, salt-and-pepper hair. “Honk the horn,” my oldest begs. He waves and waves zealously until a man turns–a man with my face, but full of sweetness now, silence and clarity.

Peter Oresick

Activities,Jobs & Working,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Money & Economics

[All night I hear the noise of water sobbing.]

All night I hear the noise of water sobbing. All night I make night in me, I make the day that begins on my account, that sobs because day falls like water through night. All night I hear the voice of someone seeking me out. All night you abandon me slowly like the water that sobs slowly falling. All night I write luminous messages, messages of rain, all night someone checks for me and I check for someone. The noise of steps in the circle near this choleric light birthed from my insomnia. Steps of someone who no longer writhes, who no longer writes. All night someone holds back, then crosses the circle of bitter light. All night I drown in your eyes become my eyes. All night I prod myself on toward that squatter in the circle of my silence. All night I see something lurch toward my looking, something humid, contrived of silence launching the sound of someone sobbing. Absence blows grayly and night goes dense. Night, the shade of the eyelids of the dead, viscous night, exhaling some black oil that blows me forward and prompts me to search out an empty space without warmth, without cold. All night I flee from someone. I lead the chase, I lead the fugue. I sing a song of mourning. Black birds over black shrouds. My brain cries. Demented wind. I leave the tense and strained hand, I don’t want to know anything but this perpetual wailing, this clatter in the night, this delay, this infamy, this pursuit, this inexistence. All night I see that abandonment is me, that the sole sobbing voice is me. We can search with lanterns, cross the shadow’s lie. We can feel the heart thud in the thigh and water subside in the archaic site of the heart. All night I ask you why. All night you tell me no.

Alejandra Pizarnik

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,The Mind,Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love

Post Office

The wall of identical boxes into which our Aunt Sticky sorted the daily mail was at the far end of her dining room, and from the private side looked like a fancy wallpaper upon which peonies pushed through a white wooden trellis, or sometimes like crates of chickens stacked all the way to the ceiling. I'd learned by then – I was a little boy – that a thing can look like one thing on one day and another on another, depending on how you might be feeling. There were times when we were there, having our coffee and sweet rolls, when some woman on the lobby side would with a click unlock her box and leaning down, peer inside to see if she had mail, and see us at the table, Mother and Father, my sister and I and our postmistress aunt, and call out, "Yoohoo, Sticky! I see you have company!" and waggle her fingers, waving hello.

Ted Kooser

Covering the Mirrors

After a funeral, they were covered with black cloth, some draped with shawls like a scalloped valance. Leftover sewing scraps, wool, linen, synthetic, anything to shroud the odd-shaped mirrors, though sometimes a corner was exposed like a woman whose ankle peeks forbidden from under a long skirt. A mourner must shun vanity during shiva, focusing inward but as a child I wondered if this were to avoid ghosts, for don't the dead take their time leaving? I'm of a generation where grandparents disappeared, great aunts with European accents, rarely an explanation provided to us children. My mother died too young. With a baby in arms I couldn't bear to fling that dark cloth over the glass. After all she had come back from the dead so often, even the doctors could not explain it. Each time I looked in a mirror my mother gazed back. I could never tell if she were trying to tell me something or to take the baby with her.

Carol V. Davis

Sleeping With the Chihuahua

In the evening she comes to me like a child ready for bed. She slips under covers, curls into my curves or stretches against my spine. Some have said they fear I might crush her, but we're a tender pair, each aware of the warmth and the other. I knew a woman once who kept an orphaned antelope, let it roam her kitchen, sleep in her bed, musky scent and hooves. This dog looks like a small deer, poised and silent in the lawn, but at night, she is a dark body, lean and long against the lavender cotton of my summer sleeping. We are bone and bone, muscle and muscle, and underneath each surface a quiet and insistent pulse.

Tami Haaland

The decade the country became known throughout the world

The ground cracked like the rough pit of a peach and snapped in two. The sun behind the mountains turned into an olive-green glow. To niña Gloria this was home. She continued to sell her bowl of lemons, rubbing a cold, thin silver Christ pocketed in her apron. Others like Lito and Marvin played soldiers in the ruins of a school, running around mounds of bricks, shooting chickens and pigs. No one knows exactly how a light film of ash appeared on everyone’s eyelids early in the morning or how trout and mackerel plunged from the sky, twitched, leaped through the streets. Some say the skin of trees felt like old newspaper, dry and yellow. Others believe the soapsuds washed aside in rivers began to rise in their milk. One Monday morning, a rain fell and the cemetery washed into the city. Bones began to knock and knock at our doors. Streets became muddy rivers waiting for bodies to drop among piles of dead fish. In a year, everyone stabbed flowers on a grave. This explains why women thought and moved like lizards under stones, why men heard bees buzzing inside their skulls, why dogs lost their sense of smell sniffing piles of rubble to get back home. In a few years, no one cared about turtles banging their heads against rocks, bulls with their sad, busted eyes, parrots that kept diving into creeks, the dark swelling of the open ground or at night a knife stained the kitchen cloth. Instead, niña Gloria swept the ground, the broom licking her feet at each stroke. At the bus station, Marvin shined military boots, twenty-five cents a pair, reduced his words to a spit, a splutter of broken sentences on shoe polish, leather. In the evenings, he counted coins he’d tossed in a jar, then walked home, one step closer to the cracked bone clenched in the yellow jaw of a dog.

William Archila

Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Self-Portrait with Crow

As I punch the time-clock, I know men will be gunned down at dawn in a distant continent, someone will dart into a café with a bomb nestled in the belly, by the roadside a woman will moan over the body of a man, shrunken, stretched on the earth, that God will finger the forehead of a dying country, all of it funneled through the news on TV. But tonight, instead of tuning in, I’m going to kneel beside the window, recognize myself in the croak of the crow, high above the black tree of winter, claws hooked and rough, wings swept back and hunched, face masked with exhaust. I’m going to try, even if I fail, to see myself whole, complete in the cry, in the beak of the crow.

William Archila

Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

The Art of Exile

On the Pan American Highway, somewhere between the north and south continent, you come across a chain of volcanoes, a coast with a thick growth of palm trees, crunching waves of the sea; an isthmus Neruda called “slender earth like a whip.” When the road bends, turns into a street, the walls splattered with “Yanqui Go Home!!!” you see a boy fifteen years old, barefoot, sniffing glue in a small plastic bag. An old woman in an apron will step out, say, “This is the right street.” In the public square, there will be no friend from school to welcome you, no drive to Sonsonate, city of coconuts, no one to order cold Pilseners, oyster cocktails, or convince the waitress into dancing a cumbia or two with you. Instead, at the local bar, you’ll raise a bottle next to strangers, stub your cigarette out on the floor. You’ll watch a country ten years after the civil war: an old man sitting on the curb, head between knees, open hand stretched out. Everything will hurt, your hair, your toenails, even your shoes. You’ll curse dusty streets, demented sun slowly burning the nape of your neck, stray dogs following you to the park. By nightfall, you drag yourself back to the bars, looking for a lost country in a shot of Tíc Táck. Against the wall, three men with their guitars. When you lie on a hotel bed, too tired to sleep, when you feel torn, twisted like an old newspaper, blown from city to city, you have reached the place. You have begun to speak like a man by the side of the road, barefoot.

William Archila

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Cows

After seven lean years we are promised seven fat ones, if the cows do not die first. Some care must be taken to prevent their demise in the scrub or the slaughterhouse. There must be enough bones to throw and to bury. The skull of a cow, I put it on. There are many strewn in the field, there has not been much rain. I look through the eyes, that is, my eyes replace the eyes that death has taken. I can see out or through. It is not a bad fate to be a cow, to be, at once, so awkward, so full of grace, so full of milk. Everywhere the udders are full, the teats are ready, the mouth of the calf is soft and deep. I would thrust my hand in it for the wet joy of being so used. My own breasts are marked from the time the milk came in too fast; I did not have time to grow to the moment of giving. It is fitting that beauty leaves such scars. Milk has passed through my fingers, has spurted through my fingers, but not once during these seven lean years.

Deena Metzger

Living,Parenthood,The Body,Time & Brevity,Nature,Animals,Religion,Faith & Doubt

Silence for My Father

This is the silence around the poem of the death of my father. This is the silence before the poem. While my father was dying, the Challenger was exploding on TV Again and again. I watched it happen. In his hospital room, I followed his breath. Then it stopped. This is the silence in a poem about the dying of the father. We’re burning the earth. We’re burning the sky. Here is another silence in the middle of the poem about the immolation of the Fathers. The pyres of bodies in Saigon. The burned air The charred limbs. Ash. Rancid flames. Heat Light Fire We turn away. Here is another silence within the poem about the burial of the fire. When my father died, the rains poured down the moment I picked up the shovel of earth. I staggered under the weight of the water. Another silence please. I have always wanted to be a woman of fire. I will have to learn how to rain. Gently, I will learn how to rain. I have set fire to your green fields, May I be water to your burning lands. Please join me in this last silence at the end of the poem of fire.

Deena Metzger

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Religion,The Spiritual,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Thorn

Everything dies. Without you I saw one million flamingos ignite a lake in Africa. The same darkness descended everywhere. When you dropped your body, I hoped you would tremble for the beak of God. Why did we wash you three times tearing off the girl’s white dress to swaddle you in an austere shroud? Some say, dying, not death, teaches. You gained nothing from that reduction. Months in the narrow foxhole of disease– you dug it; we filled it in. My father is thin as you were in his hospital bed, both of you let everything go, care for nothing except that barbed hook– life. It grabbed you like a thorn until you begged me, “Pull it out.”

Deena Metzger

Living,Death,Health & Illness

Something in the Belly

I wanted to have a poem and I was pregnant. I was very thin. As if I’d lived on air. A poet must be able to live on air, but a mother must not attempt it. My mother wanted me to buy a set of matching pots, Wearever aluminum, like the ones she had. They were heavy and had well fitting lids so my suppers wouldn’t burn. My husband wanted me to give dinner parties. John F. Kennedy was running for office. I sensed danger. Kennedy wasn’t against the Bomb or for nuclear disarmament. I joined SANE at its inception. Also Concerned Scientists. I spoke with Linus Pauling and encouraged my husband to help his partner organize Physicians for Social Responsibility. There was a baby in my belly. I wanted to write poems. I had a crazy idea that a woman could write a real novel, the kind that shook the world. I hallucinated that a woman could be a poet, but she would have to be free. I couldn’t imagine that freedom for myself even though I could see it in Isla Negra when I followed Pablo Neruda. I could see it in the way he walked. Even if he were walking inside a dictatorship, among guns, soldiers and spies, there was nothing between him and his vision. Anything he saw, he was able to take into himself–there was no sight, no image, no vision to which he didn’t feel entitled. In his heart, everything–everything–belonged to him. Pablo Neruda was–more than anything–a poet, and so he was an entitled man. I was a woman and entitled to nothing. I had nothing except a husband, a rented house, a set of pots, living room furniture, a frenzy of obligations, credit cards, anxious relatives, too many acquaintances, a gift of future diaper service, two telephones, no time to read, a plastic wrapped cookbook of recipes gleaned from the pages of the New York Times, and a hunger, a terrible hunger for the unimaginable, unlimited freedom of being a poet, and a baby in my belly. I would have called Pablo long distance if I had the courage, if I had the ability to speak Spanish fluently, if we had ever talked about real things. But, what would a man know about a baby in the belly? And what did it matter if there were to be one poet more or less in the world when so many in his country were dying? I woke up one morning and thought–I can’t have this child. My husband said, “You’ll have to get a job after it’s born so we can buy a house. You’ll need an advanced degree so you can do something.” I thought, I can’t. I have to write poems. My mother found a crib. Someone painted it white. A friend sent a pastel mobile with tame wood animals. I thought about blue curtains, making bedspreads, and abortions. Pablo was silent. He was walking so far from me, I couldn’t hear him. My husband objected to donating more free medical care to the Black Panthers. I tried to make dolmades from scratch and located grape leaves preserved in brine at the Boys’ Market twenty miles away. I organized a write-in campaign for peace to challenge JFK. My husband thought it would be nice to have teatime with the children and romantic dinners by ourselves. The new formula bottles lined up on the sink like tiny bombs. The U.S. was pursuing over ground testing; I was afraid the radiation would cross the milk barrier. I had a poem in me howling for real life but no language to write in. The fog came in thick, flapping about my feet like blankets unraveling. I became afraid to have a daughter. I called Pablo Neruda in the middle of the night as he walked underwater by Isla Negra. He moved like a dream porpoise. He seemed pregnant with words. They came out of his penis in long miraculous strings. The sea creatures quivered with joy. I said, “Pablo, I want to know how to bear the child in my belly onto this bed of uranium and I want to know if a woman can a be a poet.” He was large as a whale. He drank the sea and spouted it in glistening odes, black and shiny. I said, “I can’t have this child,” and he laughed as if he had never done anything but carry and birth children. So I packed my little bag as if I were going to the hospital and I left a note and the Wearever pots and sterilized nipples upon the glass missiles, and took the cradle board than an American Indian friend had given me for the baby and that had made my husband snort– “You’re not going to carry the thing on your back, are you?” I took some money, the car, some books, paper and pens, my walking shoes, an unwieldly IBM electric typewriter, my pregnant belly and a dozen cloth diapers, and I went out. I knew how to carry a baby and how to carry a poem and I would learn how to have a baby and even how to have a poem. I would have enough milk for both. I would learn how to walk with them. But I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know, how to have a husband and a matched set of Wearever pots.

Deena Metzger

Living,Life Choices,Parenthood,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality,History & Politics,War & Conflict

An Old Story

We were made to understand it would be Terrible. Every small want, every niggling urge, Every hate swollen to a kind of epic wind. Livid, the land, and ravaged, like a rageful Dream. The worst in us having taken over And broken the rest utterly down. A long age Passed. When at last we knew how little Would survive us—how little we had mended Or built that was not now lost—something Large and old awoke. And then our singing Brought on a different manner of weather. Then animals long believed gone crept down From trees. We took new stock of one another. We wept to be reminded of such color.

Tracy K. Smith

Living,Time & Brevity,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

Oh Great Spirit

In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake. Who have taught us. Who have guided us. Who have sustained us. Who have healed us. Please heal the animals. In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake. Whom we have slaughtered. Whom we have feared. Whom we have caged. Whom we have persecuted. Whom we have slandered. Whom we have cursed. Whom we have tortured. Protect the animals. In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake. Whose habitat we have stolen. Whose territory we have plundered. Whose feeding grounds we have paved and netted. Whose domain we have poisoned. Whose food we have eaten. Whose young we have killed. Whose lives and ways of life we threaten. Restore the animals. In the name of Raven. In the name of Wolf. In the name of Whale. In the name of Elephant. In the name of Snake. Forgive us. Have mercy. May the animals return. Not as a resurrection but as living beings. Here. On earth. On this earth that is also theirs. Oh Great Spirit. Heal the animals. Protect the animals. Restore the animals. Our lives will also be healed. Our souls will be protected. Our spirits will be restored. Oh Spirit of Raven. Oh Spirit of Wolf. Oh Spirit of Whale. Oh Spirit of Elephant. Oh Spirit of Snake. Teach us, again, how to live.

Deena Metzger

Nature,Animals,Religion,The Spiritual

Garden of Eden

What a profound longing I feel, just this very instant, For the Garden of Eden On Montague Street Where I seldom shopped, Usually only after therapy Elbow sore at the crook From a handbasket filled To capacity. The glossy pastries! Pomegranate, persimmon, quince! Once, a bag of black beluga Lentils spilt a trail behind me While I labored to find A tea they refused to carry. It was Brooklyn. My thirties. Everyone I knew was living The same desolate luxury, Each ashamed of the same things: Innocence and privacy. I'd lug Home the paper bags, doing Bank-balance math and counting days. I'd squint into it, or close my eyes And let it slam me in the face— The known sun setting On the dawning century.

Tracy K. Smith

Living,Time & Brevity,Religion,The Spiritual

Wade in the Water

for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters One of the women greeted me. I love you, she said. She didn't Know me, but I believed her, And a terrible new ache Rolled over in my chest, Like in a room where the drapes Have been swept back. I love you, I love you, as she continued Down the hall past other strangers, Each feeling pierced suddenly By pillars of heavy light. I love you, throughout The performance, in every Handclap, every stomp. I love you in the rusted iron Chains someone was made To drag until love let them be Unclasped and left empty In the center of the ring. I love you in the water Where they pretended to wade, Singing that old blood-deep song That dragged us to those banks And cast us in. I love you, The angles of it scraping at Each throat, shouldering past The swirling dust motes In those beams of light That whatever we now knew We could let ourselves feel, knew To climb. O Woods—O Dogs— O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run— O Miraculous Many Gone— O Lord—O Lord—O Lord— Is this love the trouble you promised?

Tracy K. Smith

Love,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Religion,Christianity,Arts & Sciences,Music,Theater & Dance,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Declaration

He has sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people He has plundered our— ravaged our— destroyed the lives of our— taking away our­— abolishing our most valuable—and altering fundamentally the Forms of our—In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned forRedress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigrationand settlement here. —taken Captive on the high Seas to bear—

Tracy K. Smith

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

The United States Welcomes You

Why and by whose power were you sent? What do you see that you may wish to steal? Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies Drink up all the light? What are you demanding That we feel? Have you stolen something? Then What is that leaping in your chest? What is The nature of your mission? Do you seek To offer a confession? Have you anything to do With others brought by us to harm? Then Why are you afraid? And why do you invade Our night, hands raised, eyes wide, mute As ghosts? Is there something you wish to confess? Is this some enigmatic type of test? What if we Fail? How and to whom do we address our appeal?

Tracy K. Smith

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity

Dusk

What woke to war in me those years When my daughter had first grown into A solid self-centered self? I’d watch her Sit at the table—well, not quite sit, More like stand on one leg while The other knee hovered just over the chair. She wouldn't lower herself, as if There might be a fire, or a great black Blizzard of waves let loose in the kitchen, And she'd need to make her escape. No, She'd trust no one but herself, her own New lean always jittering legs to carry her— Where exactly? Where would a child go? To there. There alone. She'd rest one elbow On the table—the opposite one to the bent leg Skimming the solid expensive tasteful chair. And even though we were together, her eyes Would go half-dome, shades dropped Like a screen at some cinema the old aren't Let into. I thought I'd have more time! I thought My body would have taken longer going About the inevitable feat of repelling her, But now, I could see even in what food She left untouched, food I'd bought and made And all but ferried to her lips, I could see How it smacked of all that had grown slack And loose in me. Her other arm Would wave the fork around just above The surface of the plate, casting about For the least possible morsel, the tiniest Grain of unseasoned rice. She'd dip Into the food like one of those shoddy Metal claws poised over a valley of rubber Bouncing balls, the kind that lifts nothing Or next to nothing and drops it in the chute. The narrow untouched hips. The shoulders Still so naïve as to stand squared, erect, Impervious facing the window open Onto the darkening dusk.

Tracy K. Smith

Living,Coming of Age,Parenthood,The Body,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Advice from the Lights

If you don't get too close to people you can't disappoint them, which would be so much worse than letting them disappoint you. To the extent that you gain a perch that means other people look up to you, to just that extent you can never tell them how you feel. You can warble, or follow a siren, or a Shenandoah vireo, into the shade, or take advice from the lights: be a child, or be like a child. You will want for nothing, and you will never be heard.

Stephanie Burt

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Youth

Advice from Rock Creek Park

What will survive us has already begun Oak galls Two termites’ curious self-perpetuating bodies Letting the light through the gaps They lay out their allegiances under the roots of an overturned tree Almost always better to build than to wreck You can build in a wreck Under the roots of an overturned tree Consider the martin that hefts herself over traffic cones Consider her shadow misaligned over parking-lot cement Saran Wrap scrap in her beak Nothing lasts forever not even the future we want The President has never owned the rain

Stephanie Burt

Living,Time & Brevity,Nature,Animals,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

A Covered Bridge in Littleton, New Hampshire

I can remember when I wanted X more than anything ever—for X fill in from your own childhood [balloon, pencil lead, trading card, shoelaces, a bow or not to have to wear a bow] and now I am moved to action, when I am moved, principally by a memory of what to want. The point is to be, in your own eyes, what you are, or to keep your own tools, so that you can pretend. And so it was no surprise, to me at least, when Cooper, who is two, collapsed in fortissimo fits when he could not have a $20, three-foot-long stuffed frog in the image of Frog from Frog and Toad, since he is Toad. That morning, needing a nap, he had thrown, from the third-story balcony of Miller's Cafe and Bakery, into the whistling rapids and shallows of the Ammonoosuc River, with its arrowheads and caravans of stones, his Red Sox cap. His hair was shining like another planet's second sun, as he explained, looking up, "I threw my hat in the river. I would like my hat back now."

Stephanie Burt

Living,Life Choices,Youth,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Inside Outside Stephanie

1 I made myself. Mommy and Daddy were proud, in that order. I didn’t mail myself like a letter some other kids already knew. I learned to use stamps. They stuck to my thumb without any glue. I didn’t have any permission. 2 There was a snowstorm that lasted three days and a cavern of monochrome memory. There were board games, and a pencil-and-paper game where the object was to figure out the object of the game. There was a stack of broad-rule writing paper, and a stapled calendar, and a 64-pack of sparkly rainbow crayons, to make each week look different since they all started out black and white, and all the same. 3 O grapefruit (as color and flavor). O never quite rightly tied laces. O look, up there on the uneven climbing bars, too hot to touch where the sun touches, now that it’s spring, the shadow of a tarp, like a sail between sailors and thin swings that make no decision, like weathervanes. O think of the lost Chuck Taylors. The lost Mary Janes.

Stephanie Burt

Living,Youth,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

The Inside Out Mermaid

The Inside Out Mermaid is fine with letting it all hang out–veins, muscles, the bits of fat at her belly, her small gray spleen. At first her lover loves it–with her organs on the outside, she's the ultimate open book. He can pump her lungs like two bellows and make her gasp; ask her difficult questions and study the synapses firing in her brain as she answers to see if she's lying; poke a pleasure center in the frontal lobe and watch her squirm. No need for bouquets or sad stories about his childhood. He just plucks a pulmonary vein and watches the left ventricle flounder. But before long, she starts to sense that her lover, like all the others before him, is getting restless. This is when she starts showing them her collections–the basket of keys from all over the world, the box of zippers with teeth of every imaginable size–all chosen to convey a sense of openness. As a last resort, she’ll even read out loud the entries from her diary about him to him. But eventually he’ll become convinced she’s hiding things from him and she is. Her perfect skin. Her long black hair. Her red mouth, never chapped from exposure to sun or wind, how she secretly loves that he can’t touch her here or here.

Matthea Harvey

Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Relationships,Men & Women,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

My Wolf Sister

When my hole-punch drizzles tiny paper circles onto the carpet, my wolf sister moans and bites it, covering her ears with her paws. I think she’s tired of the moon. She takes a stack of dinner plates from my cupboard and slinks off to the park to break them. Our brother shows up a week later, collapses on the sofa like a fur throw. Why have they come here when everything I do is wrong? They howl in the shower together but the water doesn’t mask the sound. I go in afterwards with paper towels to mop the droplets–I know there’ll be water all over–but the room is bone dry. Maybe this time things will be different. I hide the home movies in case they ask for them. In the one I always watch, there’s some wobbly footage of the sky, then my father lowers the camera’s eye to mother teaching my sister and brother to “tell time.” They’re following a mother hare on her sunset rounds–one leveret mouthful at 12 o’clock, another at 3, 6, 9. Then the camera zooms in on me–I’ve spat out my pacifier made of fur and I’m on the porch surrounded by bonsai trees, killing or saving Barbie.

Matthea Harvey

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

Zuihitsu

Sunday, awake with this headache. I pull apart the evening with a fork. White clot behind the eyes. Someone once told me, before and after is just another false binary. The warmed-over bones of January. I had no passport. Beneath the stove, two mice made a paradise out of a button of peanut butter. Suffering operates by its own logic. Its gropings and reversals. Ample, in ways that are exquisite. And how it leaves—not unlike how it arrives, without clear notice. These days, I've had my fill of Chinatown and its wet markets. Gutted fish. Overcooked chattering. The stench making me look hard at everything. Summer mornings before the heat has moved in. Joy has been buried in me overnight, but builds in the early hours. My attention elastic. The babbling streets of Causeway Bay, out of which the sharp taste of the city emerges. Nothing can stay dry here. The dark cherries of eyes come and go, as they please. Let there be no more braiding of words. I want a spare mouth. My father taught me wherever you are, always be looking for a way out: this opening or that one. Or a question. Sharp enough to slice a hole for you to slip through. Long car trips where I sat in the back of our family's used Nissan. The stale odor of plush seats and sun-warmed cola. My parents' and my words do not touch. I grow adept at tunneling inward, a habit I have yet to let go of. I am protective of what eyes cannot pry open. The unannounced. The infinite places within language to hide. A Zen priest once told me that without snagging on a storyline, the body can only take loss for ninety seconds. The physical body has its limits, is what I heard. The imagination can break through them. Boiled peanuts. Leather of daybreak. Cotton thinning out into thread. Dried vomit. Ice water from the spigot. The sacred and profane share a border. In the desert, small droppings of unknown origin. Even when I was young, I loved peering at faces in films. The pleasure of watching and of not being watched. Black koi fish open their mouths at the skin of the pond for oxygen. At the edge of the water, I hold two lines from Ikkyū in my mouth. Make my way slowly. Nights when I shared a bed in a small room. Another’s body to the left, hooked by a heavy dream. Funny, the way we come to understand a place by wanting to escape it. I can shake out the imprint of my body on the sheets each morning. But the mind–the mind is a different matter. When I was four, I ate spoonfuls of powdered milk straight from the canis- ter. The powder was sweet. There wasn't enough money for fresh milk. Seven hundred years ago, Chang Yang-hao wrote, All my life seems / like yesterday morning.

Jenny Xie

Living,The Mind,Time & Brevity

Chinatown Diptych

I. The face of Chinatown returns its color, plucked from July's industrial steamer. Dry the cup! So we do. Four noodle shops on East Broadway release their belches collectively. They breed in me a hankering for family life. Here, there's no logic to melons and spring onions exchanging hands. No rhythm to men's briefs clothes-pinned to the fire escape. Retirees beneath the Manhattan Bridge leak hearsay. The woman in Apartment #18 on Bayard washes her feet in pot of boiled water each evening before bedtime. But every handful of weeks she lapses. I lean into the throat of summer. Perched above these streets with whom I share verbs and adjectives. II. Faces knotted, bangs softened with grease. The East River pulls along a thread of sun. While Sunday slides in. Again, in those plain trousers. How the heat is driven off course. How one can make out the clarified vowels of bridges. Who’s keeping count of what’s given against what’s stolen? There's nothing I can't trace back to my coarse immigrant blood. Uncles tipple wine on the streets of Mott and Bayard. Night shifts meet day shifts in passing. Sweat seasons the body that labors. And in each noodle shop, bowls dusted with salt.

Jenny Xie

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Jobs & Working,Nature,Summer,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

Long Nights

Ice, entire cakes of it. Crows feed on sand. So poor is this season the ground steals color from the tree-shadows. • Can it be that nothing is as far as here? Just look! How much past we have to cover this evening– • Come to think of it don't forget to pick off this self and that self along the way. Though that’s not right– you spit them out like pits. • If there is a partition between the outer and inner worlds, how is it that some water in me churns between the mountain ranges? How is it we are absorbed so easily by the ground— • Long nights for simple words. • Slant rhyme of current thinking and past thinking. A chewed over hour, late. Where the long ago past and the future come to settle scores. • Traveling and traveling, but so much interior unpicked over by the eyes. • Nothing is as far as here.

Jenny Xie

Living,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Religion,The Spiritual

Wife

I’m not yet comfortable with the word, its short clean woosh that sounds like life. At dinner last night my single girls said in admonition, “It’s not wife-approved” about a friend’s upcoming trip. Their eyes rolled up and over and out their pretty young heads. Wife, why does it sound like a job? “I need a wife” the famous feminist wrote, “a wife that will keep my clothes clean, ironed, mended, replaced if need be.” A word that could be made easily into maid. A wife that does, fixes soothes, honors, obeys, Housewife, fishwife, bad wife, good wife, what’s the word for someone who stares long into the morning, unable to even fix tea some days, the kettle steaming over loud like a train whistle, she who cries in the mornings, she who tears a hole in the earth and cannot stop grieving, the one who wants to love you, but often isn’t good at even that, the one who doesn’t want to be diminished by how much she wants to be yours.

Ada Limón

Living,Marriage & Companionship,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

The Contract Says: We'd Like the Conversation to be Bilingual

When you come, bring your brown- ness so we can be sure to please the funders. Will you check this box; we’re applying for a grant. Do you have any poems that speak to troubled teens? Bilingual is best. Would you like to come to dinner with the patrons and sip Patrón? Will you tell us the stories that make us uncomfortable, but not complicit? Don’t read the one where you are just like us. Born to a green house, garden, don’t tell us how you picked tomatoes and ate them in the dirt watching vultures pick apart another bird’s bones in the road. Tell us the one about your father stealing hubcaps after a colleague said that’s what his kind did. Tell us how he came to the meeting wearing a poncho and tried to sell the man his hubcaps back. Don’t mention your father was a teacher, spoke English, loved making beer, loved baseball, tell us again about the poncho, the hubcaps, how he stole them, how he did the thing he was trying to prove he didn’t do.

Ada Limón

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

Late Summer after a Panic Attack

I can’t undress from the pressure of leaves, the lobed edges leaning toward the window like an unwanted male gaze on the backside, (they wish to bless and bless and hush). What if I want to go devil instead? Bow down to the madness that makes me. Drone of the neighbor’s mowing, a red mailbox flag erected, a dog bark from three houses over, and this is what a day is. Beetle on the wainscoting, dead branch breaking, but not breaking, stones from the sea next to stones from the river, unanswered messages like ghosts in the throat, a siren whining high toward town repeating that the emergency is not here, repeating that this loud silence is only where you live.

Ada Limón

Living,Health & Illness,The Mind

The Leash

After the birthing of bombs of forks and fear the frantic automatic weapons unleashed, the spray of bullets into a crowd holding hands, that brute sky opening in a slate metal maw that swallows only the unsayable in each of us, what’s left? Even the hidden nowhere river is poisoned orange and acidic by a coal mine. How can you not fear humanity, want to lick the creek bottom dry, to suck the deadly water up into your own lungs, like venom? Reader, I want to say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish comes back belly up, and the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing? The truth is: I don’t know. But sometimes, I swear I hear it, the wound closing like a rusted-over garage door, and I can still move my living limbs into the world without too much pain, can still marvel at how the dog runs straight toward the pickup trucks break-necking down the road, because she thinks she loves them, because she’s sure, without a doubt, that the loud roaring things will love her back, her soft small self alive with desire to share her goddamn enthusiasm, until I yank the leash back to save her because I want her to survive forever. Don’t die, I say, and we decide to walk for a bit longer, starlings high and fevered above us, winter coming to lay her cold corpse down upon this little plot of earth. Perhaps we are always hurtling our body towards the thing that will obliterate us, begging for love from the speeding passage of time, and so maybe, like the dog obedient at my heels, we can walk together peacefully, at least until the next truck comes.

Ada Limón

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Pets,Nature,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict

A New National Anthem

The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets red glare” and then there are the bombs. (Always, always, there is war and bombs.) Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw even the tenacious high school band off key. But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call to the field, something to get through before the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps, the truth is, every song of this country has an unsung third stanza, something brutal snaking underneath us as we blindly sing the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the flag, how it undulates in the wind like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled, brought to its knees, clung to by someone who has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon, when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can love it again, until the song in your mouth feels like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains, the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright, that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on, that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit in an endless cave, the song that says my bones are your bones, and your bones are my bones, and isn’t that enough?

Ada Limón

Arts & Sciences,Music,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,War & Conflict,Mythology & Folklore,Heroes & Patriotism

Houdini

There is a river under this poem. It flows blue and icy And carries these lines down the page. Somewhere beneath its surface Lying chained to the silt Harry holds his breath And slowly files His fingernails into moons. He wonders who still waits at the dock If the breasts of those young girls Have developed since he sank. He thinks of his parents Of listening to the tumblers Of his mother's womb Of escaping upward out of puberty Out of the pupils in his father's eyes And those hot Wisconsin fields. He dreams of escaping From this poem Of cracking the combinations To his own body And those warm young safes Of every girl on the dock. Jiggling his chains Harry scares a carp that circles And nibbles at his feet. He feels the blue rush of the current Sweeping across his body Stripping his chains of their rust Until each link softens And glows like a tiny eel. And Harry decides to ascend. He slips with the water Through his chains And climbing over and over His own air bubbles He waves to the fish To his chains glittering And squirming in the silt. He pauses to pick a bouquet Of seaweed for the young girls on the dock. Rising He bursts the surface of this poem. He listens for shouts. He hears only the night And a buoy sloshing in the blue.

Robert Hedin

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

How did you meet your wife?

Swimming the English Channel, struggling to make it to Calais, I swam into Laura halfway across. My body oiled for warmth, black rubber cap on my head, eyes hidden behind goggles, I was exhausted, ready to drown, when I saw her coming toward me, bobbing up and down between waves, effortlessly doing a breaststroke, headed for Dover. Treading water, I asked in French if she spoke English, and she said, “Yes, I’m an American.” I said, “Hey, me too,” then asked her out for coffee.

Richard Jones

Living,Marriage & Companionship,Love,Romantic Love,Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

The Bell

In the tower the bell is alone, like a man in his room, thinking and thinking. The bell is made of iron. It takes the weight of a man to make the bell move. Far below, the bell feels hands on a rope. It considers this. It turns its head. Miles away, a man in his room hears the clear sound, and lifts his head to listen.

Richard Jones

Living,The Mind

Life after Death

What I envy in the open eyes of the dead deer hanging down from the rafters, its eyes still wet and glassy, but locked now into a vision of another life, is the way it seems to be staring at the moment when it died. The blue light falling through the window into this smoke-filled room is the same color as the mist coming down off the mountain that morning: the deer sees men with guns but also sees, beyond them, the endless mountains.

Richard Jones

Living,Death,Nature,Animals,Religion,The Spiritual

The Hearing Aid

My mother–half-deaf, a small metal box pinned to her blouse, and beneath the gray locks the hidden earphone, the wire running across her heart to its home in her ear–can barely hear me anymore. I’m just someone’s voice lost years ago, trying now to make myself clear, deliberately now, so she will see how hard the words come. Bent to her breast, I speak to the heart, almost hopeless, where hardly anyone is ever heard.

Richard Jones

Living,Growing Old,Health & Illness,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Are there poems you won't publish?

Even C.P. Cavafy– cynical, ascetic, unknown in his day– printed at his own expense poems no one would publish, poems intimate, personal, to share with readers he called friends. But I have hundreds of poems hidden away in a box. Even when I know Cavafy once wrapped verse with black and gold ribbons to give away as a gift.

Richard Jones

Living,Life Choices,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

Double Doors

Valentine’s Day breakfast at Baker’s Square: Laura drinks coffee while I watch Andrew, who refuses to sit but chooses instead to stay in the restaurant’s vestibule where he opens and closes the big double doors over and over again, as if he’s practicing a grand entrance–entering, crossing the threshold, and letting the doors close behind him. I’m thinking, it wasn’t so long ago I carried my tiny son piggyback through the woods to a waterfall; wasn’t long ago I kissed Laura for the first time; wasn’t long ago I lived in the house with my dog and sat with my notebook at the kitchen table on Sunday morning after working all night– sipping burnt coffee and scratching out lines, lighting my hundredth cigarette, starting over again, determined to write a love poem.

Richard Jones

Living,Marriage & Companionship,Parenthood,Time & Brevity,Love,Romantic Love,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Valentine's Day

Will They Believe

Will the children forgive the generation that’s trampled by horses of war, by exile and preparation for departure? Will they think of us as we were, a bunch of ambushes in ravines we’d shake our jealousy and carve trees into the earth's shirt to sit under, we, the factional fighters who’d shoo the clouds of war out of their vehicles and peer around our eternal siege or catch the dead like sudden fruit fallen on a wasteland? Will the children forgive what we were, some missile shepherds and masters of exile and frenzied celebration, whenever a neighboring war gestured to us we rose to set up in its braids a place good for love and residence? The bombing rarely took a rest the missile launchers rarely returned unharmed we rarely picked flowers for the dead or went on with our lives If only that summer had given us a bit of time's space before our mad departure Will they believe?

Ghassan Zaqtan

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

Calm Day

No dead on the streets today is a calm day, traffic is normal, there's ample room for the procession of yesterday's dead, room to add a dream, an idea, a little boy, an extra push for the beloved boat, a nom de guerre for the cell, a rose for a new love, a hand to a comrade Some room to stay alive for some time, enough time to shake your hands and reach the sun Today is a calm day, a pedestrian day in Beirut dancing in the streets, obstructing buses and not buying newspapers: the newspapers already went out to offices and the dead are resting on the Pavement of Martyrs at the outskirts of Sabra A calm day, our neighbor will step out in her nightgown to hang some sleepiness around us, some sluggish waking she's too lethargic to gather letters into words Where is life on this vast sauntering morning? We won't leave Out of the whiteness of her gown a reason will come to carry us down to the streets dead in her "Good morning"

Ghassan Zaqtan

Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

Three Intentions

1 I will cry to regret and slaughter my heart on a desolate rock in the steppe and run in the wilderness run in their illusions in the mirrors of bullets while shooing victory and defeat and also the dead with war's twig 2 I will arch my back like a noble wolf and howl in the plains until the plains go mad and the god of soldiers spots me lifeless in war's meanness I'd be pleased yet angry and forlorn of seas that have tolled for thirty centuries they come and go 3 I call to my friend and leave him standing in speech I call to my lover and leave her insomniac

Ghassan Zaqtan

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

Khalil Zaqtan

And I will bend down to smell his desire his tomb's flowers and marble his wilting joy his swapping temptation for content And I will keep him from the cold, visitors, oleander, and the sons of bitches and say: No one will resemble me like my father his white stumbling and the illusion that plucks words A shout that walks on two feeble legs eyes me with the summer of discontent and sprinkles me with water, turns me green before it shakes the bitter dirt off its fingers … that's my father he cried from a darkness in the grave And I will gather the house of your chucked absence as if we were alone on Earth … you die so I can fold the falcon's wings after its departure and believe the silence that remains

Ghassan Zaqtan

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

Also the House

Near the camp was a river and in our house were absentees and hands that will one day wake us in vain I had just turned seven while he was sitting in the shade ironing his clothes the blue jacket sagging over his shoulders I paid no attention to the road or the three steps and didn't notice the carpet I don't remember who was it that said to me or to another "When you grow up poetry will become your house" The dust that eats the memories always distances those folks yet their chairs appear from afar, from behind the hills and over the houses, to hang in an air of summer and holm oak, those shaded chairs that reach the heart on shoulders topped with five flowers Which flowers are speech which flowers are silence? And I can't remember whether it was my uncle who stood at the door, whether we had palm and lotus trees in our house in Karameh, whether my mother who gave birth to me on the shelf was folding our clothes behind our father's back so he could sleep The watchdogs used to cry from the heat, and poetry, Husseini of Jerusalem, and Khidr the mystic were all in our house as was my uncle who came from a pond within Hebron's walls Twenty years would pass before a photo could tell us we have grown older and that's that My father used to discompose his friends with his days, and women with the thread of seduction in his voice as he would sprinkle chatter in their rivers while walking about here or there with a lilt, he'd let his days fall off him and let others gather them as he walked on gold that came only for him And I can't remember: in our courtyard there were holm oaks, a fountain, a tiled floor by a huge door, we were confused and in a hurry The closet that faced us in the second room had a mirror the mirror we now seek And my father was standing alone in the hall that led the stairs to the roof thanking his days or preparing for Wednesday's nap or Thursday's morning as he left, among the things he'd leave, the water can full of water while around his chairs our Saturdays rose My father didn't want too much from life: a house, five boys who don't mess with his papers, which were already chaos, and two girls so that braids could float all around the house

Ghassan Zaqtan

Living,Youth,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life

Not This

my god all the days we have lived thru saying not this one, not this, not now, not yet, this week doesn’t count, was lost, this month was shit, what a year, it sucked, it flew, that decade was for what? i raised my kids, they grew i lost two pasts–i am not made of them and they are through. we forget what we remember: each of the five the fevered few days we used to fall in love.

Olena Kalytiak Davis

Living,Time & Brevity,Love,Romantic Love

My Love Sent Me a List

O my Love sent me a lusty list, Did not compare me to a summer's day Wrote not the beauty of mine eyes But catalogued in a pretty detailed And comprehensive way the way(s) In which he was better than me. "More capable of extra- and inter- Polation. More well-traveled -rounded multi- Lingual! More practiced in so many matters More: physical, artistic, musical, Politic(al) academic (I dare say!) social (In many ways!) and (ditto!) sexual!” And yet these mores undid but his own plea(s)(e) And left, none-the-less, the Greater Moor of me.

Olena Kalytiak Davis

Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Romantic Love,Relationships,Men & Women,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

Poem

If you can make a poem a farmer finds useful, you should be happy. A blacksmith you can never figure out. The worst to please is a carpenter.

Olav H. Hauge

Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

Remedy

When I was young, exorcisms were quite common, a remedy not unlike ice baths. Plus, devils were shorter in those days just as people were. They hadn't eaten enough fruits or vegetables, and lacked essential vitamins and iron, grew thin and pale, fell easily into brooding depressions. They looked more like deer than sheep, and when they possessed you it was usually because they were fleeing from someone else and didn't realize where they were until it was too late. It was more a question of giving directions than driving them out. "Turn right at the hairdresser's, go straight until you get to the abandoned schoolhouse, then turn left. You should see the exit from there." "Thank you. I was completely lost." "You're welcome. Good luck." "You too, and thanks again."

Dag T. Straumsvåg

Religion,The Spiritual,Mythology & Folklore,Ghosts & the Supernatural

Origins of Violence

There is a hole. In the hole is everything people will do to each other. The hole goes down and down. It has many rooms like graves and like graves they are all connected. Roots hang from the dirt in craggy chandeliers. It's not clear where the hole stops beginning and where it starts to end. It's warm and dark down there. The passages multiply. There are ballrooms. There are dead ends. The air smells of iron and crushed flowers. People will do anything. They will cut the hands off children. Children will do anything— In the hole is everything.

Jenny George

Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

The Sleeping Pig

It is easy to love a pig in a nightgown. See how he sleeps, white flannel straining his neck at the neckhole. His body swells and then deflates. The gown is nothing to be ashamed of, only the white clay of moonlight smeared over his hulk, original clothing, the milk of his loneliness. The flickering candle of a dream moves his warty eyelids. All sleeping things are children.

Jenny George

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Animals

The Dream of Reason

I Self-Portrait A house with three stories. In the basement, monsters. The upper floors were empty. No furniture, nothing. I had a magic pebble that I needed to hide. But where? Woke in a room with the bed breathing. Each day the same scandal—this body. These teeth and hands. 2 The Miniature Bed A miniature bed, and in it two tiny people not sleeping, not able to sleep because a small lie has flowered between them, fragile as a new, white crocus. The miniature bed holds them like a miniature boat making its slow, true course to morning. These tiny people, thoughts thrumming like mice, are quiet as the lie blooms over them in the night, fanning its moth petals, becoming to them like a moon hovering over their bed, a moon they might almost touch with their miniature hands, if they weren't certain that one wrong gesture might break the spindles of their small world, if their hearts were not drops of trembling quicksilver, if they were brave, if they could see that small is no smaller than big, that thimbles are deep as oceans for any god, they might even touch each other then, opening the dark, like a match, the sun's flaring. 3 Harvest The fields are a book of uses. Near the house a combine takes the corn down in long rows. Dust rises up and replaces itself. A quick net of starlings drops to the furrows and sunshine pours like polished grain onto the feeding earth, this country. In the kitchen, milk streams from the gallon thin and fresh as luck. We flourish. All around us, things flourish. Cows strain the fence with their abundance. The herd makes a sound like swelling. Out in the cut field birds clean the fallen cobs into sets of teeth. 4 Sonnet for Lost Teeth The combines were tearing off the field’s clothes. It was August, haying season. My tooth was loose, a snag in the clam of my mouth. I worked it like a pearl. I'd been out of school for sixty days. In the sweat of the barn I watched him shoot the calf in the head. He wiped the hide gently, like cleaning his glasses. Overnight, I grew a beard so I wouldn't have to get married. I let my feet go black from burned grasses. It never gets easier he said, kicking straw over the blood patch. She went down so quiet it was almost sad. Later, when my tooth fell out, I buried it under my pillow and it grew into money. 5 Talisman Waiting for the school bus you find the femur of a baby animal on the ground. You carry that femur in your pocket the entire morning and touch it secretly through the cloth. When the teacher asks a question you don't raise your hand but quietly wrap your fingers around the thin shape, that bone without a mother. 6 On Waking Half of everything is invisible. A river drifts below the river. A gesture lost in the body. Wind moves through the open windows of the trees. Beyond the day, another day. Dreamed I was drowning my mother's silk laundry in the river, kneeling on the wet rocks. Back and forth I drowned it in the gray clouds... 7 Eros Each year fish run the green vein of the river. The bones of skunks lie buried in the riverbank upside down, waiting for rain. From a fragment of a Greek statue you can tell the posture of the whole god. A skeleton has the same intelligence. So that when a girl discovers it, loosened by summer rain, surfaced like a white instrument in the grass, she suddenly knows how to take it up and shake the strange rhythms from it like castanets. 8 A Childhood The horse had been beaten and flies crawled excited on the beat marks. He held still in the sunblazed pasture. For a few minutes I stood at the wire fence. He was aware of me, but he did not turn— except his eye, slightly. He listened through the many ears of the grasses. A jay made a hole in the air with its cry. Everywhere, invisible as heat, the gods married each other and went to war. The excitement of it vibrated in the flies. As if we both were standing still inside some greater, more violent motion.

Jenny George

Living,Death,The Mind,Youth,Nature,Animals,Mythology & Folklore,Greek & Roman Mythology

Lemon and cedar

What is so pure as grief? A wreck set sail just to be wrecked again. To lose what’s lost–it’s all born lost and we just fetch it for a little while, a dandelion span, a quarter-note. Each day an envelope gummed shut with honey and mud. Foolish to think you can build a house from suffering. Even the hinges will be bitter. There will be no books in that house, only transfusions. And all the lemon and cedar in the world won't rid the walls of that hospital smell.

Melissa Stein

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Time & Brevity

Seven Minutes in Heaven

It’s all the rage to sport waxed moustaches and cure your own sausages in some mildewy basement that formerly would have hosted convulsively awkward parties with spin the bottle and seven minutes in the dark and terrifying closet (aka heaven) but now boasts soppressata strung on repurposed vintage drying racks and fat clay pots of kombucha and curdling hops. Personally I've never recovered from the sex-shaped void left in those closets by all the groping that should have occurred to me but didn't: right under my nose kids my age were creeping into adulthood one clammy, trembling palm on one breast at a time. There was also the horror of not being chosen in gym. It is conceivable that learning intricately how to butcher an entire hog and render every morsel might give one a feeling of mastery one lacked in childhood.It is the greatest immaturity to believe sufferingentitles you to something someone wiser and grayer than I once said. But in those basements and carpools and playgrounds as I assassinated one by one clandestinely my torturers abandoning their foul normal bodies to compost the astonishing tedium of the wending suburban lanes, I was transubstantiating to supernal fame and beauty and such eerie genius that entire books were written about my books. In fact it takes a long time to realize your suffering is of very little consequence to anyone but you. And by that time the future is already happening and you're pickling okra and starfruit and foraging for morels in urban forests and suspending artisan mozzarella in little wet nets and crafting small-batch, nitrite-free data and maybe even thinking about having children, which you swore in a million billion years you would never do.

Melissa Stein

Living,Coming of Age,Disappointment & Failure,Love,Desire

Slap

I want to write my lover a poem but a very bad one. It'll include a giant squid and some loose change and cuff links and two blue ferries chugging headfirst on the East River at twenty-six knots and only at the last minute averting disaster through quick thinking and sure reflexes. Also a bow and arrow and glossy red apple I perch in front of my heart. To be honest my lover doesn't really like poetry, which I guess is why I plan to write such a bad one, so he can feel right and strong and good in his beliefs. Tonight when I go see my lover he’ll hold me as I've never been held except by him and then I'll have to give him back. When you get new things you treat them like glass for a while and then get used to them and manhandle them like everything else. I don't want to give him back but partly it's not up to me and partly I don't want to be his old sofa. I want to radiate and gleam arrestingly until the certain, premature end. You can compose a whole life out of these rollercoasters. You can be everywhere and nowhere, over and over life slapping you in the face till you’re newly burnished flat-out gasping and awake.

Melissa Stein

Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Relationships,Men & Women,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets

What Is June Anyway?

After three weeks of hot weather and drought, we've had a week of cold and rain, just the way it ought to be here in the north, in June, a fire going in the woodstove all day long, so you can go outside in the cold and rain anytime and smell the wood smoke in the air. This is the way I love it. This is why I came here almost fifty years ago. What is June anyway without cold and rain and a fire going in the stove all day?

David Budbill

Nature,Summer,Weather

A Poem about Pain

I can feel myself slipping away, fading away, withdrawing from this life, just as my father did. When the pain you're in is so great you can’t think about or pay attention to anything but your own pain, the rest of the world and all other life don't matter. I think about my friends with dementia, cancer, arthritis, and how much more pain they are in than I am, but it does no good, their pain is not mine, and therefore, no matter how magnanimous I might want to be, their pain is not as important to me as my own.

David Budbill

Living,Health & Illness,The Mind

An End to It

When I came to this mountainside almost fifty years ago it never occurred to me that there would be an end to it. I went along never thinking about the time when I would have to quit. I imagined—I guess — all this would last forever, if I imagined it at all. Now I'm in my seventies and all I can think about is the time when my life will be here no more. For example, I love being in the woods felling and bucking hardwood trees, stacking and covering the blocks, then a year or two later, hauling them to the woodshed where I stack them again, and split them all winter long into the right size for the weather—then bring them into the house. Now this chore I love so much is seriously painful, and I can see, now, an end to it.

David Budbill

Living,Death,Growing Old,Health & Illness,Activities,Jobs & Working

“I’m Stepping Up in Singing Sandals, No Use For”

The eye’s desire for relief. I’m the tiger lily bobbing in the heat. And also the neighbor, shaved bald and lifting weights on the balcony. Each petal is the receipt of a shameful dream— a thought we hadn’t wanted to incorporate lolling from my parted mouth. But you know it’s mistakes that make life happen. A cardboard suitcase of beer for the traveler. And if we get too close to the words on this page they soften and warp into an animal lace, some net whose logic won’t reveal itself. I pull our eyes back because I love you. But then you draw them back further still because that sounds like an excuse. The whiny version of Love Hurts loops and curls like ribbon through a scissor, being pulled across the blade. The money in this poem’s easy, if you don’t mind having no thoughts and sitting in one place, while your body changes shape.

Bridget Talone

Living,The Mind,Love,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics

Poem

For js You were laughing no you weren't she was she was she wasn't These aren't the right words The people are waiting on the platform and the decisions are being themselves as usual You could take this silver cord and wrap it around all of your ideas You could you could What is the way to make meaning You're less busy than the machine has time for I poured the world in for you All the sun on that block Or at least I wanted to: Everyone is leaving but this would be an arrival your torso is a drum people come through and then they die you see the obituary in passing as the man next to you folds the paper and all these people at all these parties that cannot be the answer but what Back above ground and it's the same sun different block same world different world Your friend is lying down with the thing he is carrying Everybody is somebody's family you think you forget the sun keeps going still you keep going the world rearranges itself just so False alarm you say and then you don't know what to say you wrap yourself in the future you wrap yourself in the past the woman gets in the taxi just in time Everybody is it's not an easy thing to understand False alarm you say and then you don't know what to say the sun keeps going.

Claudia La Rocco

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

Where Do You Come From?

I come from the nether regions They serve me pomegranate seeds with morsels of flying fish From time to time I wear a crown of blood streaked grass. Mama beat me when I was a child for stealing honey from a honey pot It swung from the rafters of the kitchen. Why I stuffed my mouth with golden stuff, no one could tell. King Midas wore a skin that killed him. My nails are patterned ebony, Doxil will do that They made a port under my collar bone with a plastic tube that runs into a blood vessel. I set out with mama from Bombay harbor. Our steamer was SS Jehangir, in honor of the World Conqueror — They say he knelt on the battle field to stroke the Beloved’s shadow. The waves were dark in Bombay harbor, Gandhi wrote in his Autobiography Writing too is an experiment with truth. No one knows my name in Arabic means port. On board white people would not come near us Were they scared our brown skin would sully them? Mama tried to teach me English in a sing song voice. So you can swim into your life she said. Wee child, my language tutor muttered ruler in hand, ready to strike, Just pronounce the words right: Pluck, pluck Suck, suck Duck, duck Stuck, stuck. May 12 - July 4, 2018, NYC

Meena Alexander

Living,Youth,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity