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On the 20th National Anniversary

On the morning of the 20th National Day my uncle came home and told us: “All our troops have got into position, for the Russians may throw an atom-bomb on us today.” After breakfast he returned to the headquarters, but I had to go to school and join the celebration. The fear oppressed my back like a bag of sand. I could not raise the little triangle flag in my hand, nor could I shout slogans with my classmates. During the break I called together my best friends and told them what would occur on this day. Benli said, “I must go home and tell my dad to kill all our chickens.” Qingping said, “I must tell my aunt not to buy a sewing machine. Who would care about clothes if that happens.” Yimin and I said nothing, but we knew what we were going to do. We decided to go to the army, for we did not want to be roasted at home like little pigs.

Ha Jin

Coming of Age,War & Conflict

Hello, Baihua Mountain

The sound of a guitar drifts through the air. Cupped in my hand, a snowflake quivers lightly. Thick patches of fog draw back to reveal A mountain range, rolling like a melody. I have gathered the inheritance of the four seasons. There is no sign of man in the valley. Picked wild flowers continue to grow, Their flowering is their time of death. Along the path in the primordial wood Green sunlight flows through the slits. A russet hawk interprets into bird cries The mountain's tale of terror. Abruptly I cry out, "Hello, Bai—hua—Mountain." "Hello, my—child," comes the echo From a distant waterfall. It was a wind within a wind, drawing A restless response from the land, I whispered, and the snowflake Drifted from my hand down the abyss.

Bei Dao

Landscapes & Pastorals

Declaration

for Yu Luoke Perhaps the final hour is come I have left no testament Only a pen, for my mother I am no hero In an age without heroes I just want to be a man The still horizon Divides the ranks of the living and the dead I can only choose the sky I will not kneel on the ground Allowing the executioners to look tall The better to obstruct the wind of freedom From star-like bullet holes shall flow A blood-red dawn

Bei Dao

Death,Crime & Punishment

Black Map

in the end, cold crows piece together the night: a black map I've come home—the way back longer than the wrong road long as a life bring the heart of winter when spring water and horse pills become the words of night when memory barks a rainbow haunts the black market my father's life-spark small as a pea I am his echo turning the corner of encounters a former lover hides in a wind swirling with letters Beijing, let me toast your lamplights let my white hair lead the way through the black map as though a storm were taking you to fly I wait in line until the small window shuts: O the bright moon I go home—reunions are one less fewer than goodbyes

Bei Dao

Travels & Journeys

The Good Provider

The best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact. My mother took my heart out. She banked it on top of her stove. It glowed white. She put it back in my chest. Tita knew that overseas workers often had affairs. He licked me and I pretended it pinged through my body like a swift idea That I wrote about and considered like a bell of good craftsmanship. He also knew that their kids ate better He said your belly is like a cat’s. He said with his bowl up to his chin More please. At night the fireflies come out. They flock to my window. I put my hands up against the screen. I think how fragile it is to be inside a house. They say I want permission I paint my face. I say—just take it. Easy. If equally matched, we can offer battle. If unequal in any way, we can flee from him. Deprived of their father while sustained by his wages. I thought a lot about walking around at night. By myself. Just to think. But I never did. I thought I could just flick a switch. When I was born, my mother and father gave me a gardenia like personal star. Don’t you hate it when someone apologizes all the time? It’s like they are not even sorry.

Sarah Gambito

Home Life,Animals

Getting Used to It

She brightens at the evidence. Like a strong appliance. You can make it hot. Grown ass people having tantrums. I’m unbought, unheated. Like a perfectly square morsel of lasagna. A wrathful rubics cube. To realize, I wish to ridicule people interested in martial arts. That I’m not getting better. My uncle would prank call my father, “Immigration!” He’d crow. And my father would fall to silence. No matter the heavy accent. No matter the voice he’d known unto boredom. One wing swigging out to its brother on the other bird. I measured this silence when I was a girl. The quality of the joke and how it rested on the bad stomach of a tensile citizenry. The joke was that, in an instant, We Lost Everything. It is important to remember who would laugh first— the perpetrator/uncle/jokester or the assailed/father/feather. Or maybe, it isn’t. Maybe what you should know is that they told this joke over and over and ever. My uncle crowed. My father disbelieved. We lost everything. And then, the svelte, sweet brier laughter.

Sarah Gambito

Family & Ancestors,Humor & Satire,Race & Ethnicity

Rapproachement

The art of war teaches us to rely not on the chance of the enemy not attacking but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable. —Sun Tzu My father called me a chink so I’d know how to receive it. So I wouldn’t be surprised. Therefore the good soldier will be terrible in his onset and prompt in his decision. In the wall, I bricked up my secret. So it would gush forth. I did this for effect. So you would know me. On the day of battle your soldiers might weep bedewing their garments. But it grew like a bullet loving its flowerstain. It happened nonetheless. But let them at once be brought to bay. Because you are simply my medic watching me. I’m a poem someone else wrote for me. All of the characters “beautiful and flawed.” When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far. My sister said, you can forget our way of life? I said yes and was annoyed. She ran away and I was desperate for her. I was screaming into the mindspeaker. When far away, we must make him believe we are near. I said, Christine, christine, christine.

Sarah Gambito

Home Life,Race & Ethnicity

Immigrant Song

All birds—even those that do not fly —have wings A constant confession Admission of omission This is your punctuated equilibrium And everything in between Slow it down The moment of extinction The death of the last individual of a species (Let’s put it aside for now) Stay with it This is our gene flow How do you like our genetic drift A riff, a rift, a raft… Too rough for the second half Take us under, take us downhill Paint pangenesis all over your dancing body The new party god Keep the beat going, don’t stop, you can’t stop Crick & Watson Evo-devo This is your mother’s local phenomenon If this is racial hygiene Why do I feel so dirty? Microcosmic soul It’s an involutionary wonderland This living matter A modern synthesis 4.6 billion years of biology Can’t stop the ideology Graduate from meet/mate To fitness landscape of sexual selection From land over sea It’s a hard lyric The impression of a key in a bar of soap A transitional fossil Keep camping Plant the flag Bury the burial mound Put the pop in popular And the sigh in science

Sun Yung Shin

Family & Ancestors,Animals

Over the Course of Several Decades Following the Korean War, South Korea Became the World’s Largest Supplier of Children to Developed Countries

Some(where a) woman wears the face once given. Possessions scarce we go halves on slant of eye & span of palm with cousin & other ghosts. Where is the man with the face lent mother? Fathers rare; infant found at Shinkyo police station box—official shoes careened around fortune of Name & birth, pin & note. Elsewhere (Norway, Australia) another Korean National bears the imprint of my din. Cribs, nurse, hands, rice-milk powder, down & rocked—carefully dated checks. American/Father asks Why. We don’t speak. Years burn to decades, this permanent occupation.

Sun Yung Shin

History & Politics

(Riot Police)

This is you—Titanus giganteus, your maw snapping pencils in half and cutting through human flesh. My encyclopedia chokes on your bulk. My camera, timid, afraid to look, as if you’re naked—not one adult male, but millions. Few garments sound as fine as flak jacket, the best of the tagmata the thorax, more prime than brains as the body can keep mating, cracking its margins. Your shield like a wing, protects your bulletproof heart from the wind, your right arm black in the cloth of your brothers. Full face visor. Baby gladiator. Beyond the screen, memorized—jawbone like a scandal reflecting all the thieves and beggars. Insect lord, insect mind. This is my fear. You look like my brother, my son. You could kill me with your looks.

Sun Yung Shin

Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics

(Demilitarized Zone)

Like a wedding ring, or the bride’s green ribbon, you shelter me. No business but war. You remind me of a kind of heaven. A cairn of rocks casting shadows in the shape of a man. Thou art the table before me in the sight of my adversaries, thou dost anoint my head: oil and rain, thou art a ghost with a girl’s mouth, thou art not the making of my dreams—under water, under cliff, under this long suitcase of earth and bombs. More than any mortal could gather beneath the skirt of the sky. You are never eager, nor famished, nor pale with a craving for white clothes or my nocturnes. Let your lynx approach, even tiger, even its wild outline. You need no ferryman or the obolus of the dead. If I put a coin in my mouth I taste copper, not the corpse. They say that bodies fertilized the ground so well the trees grow bright and tall. The bones blur. We return alive.

Sun Yung Shin

War & Conflict

Return of the Native

Because of time being an arrow, I had to imagine everything. I had to fold the song with my mind because of the time being. Wash the rice here, in the present. Because of the arrow I pent up the fourth wall as though I were diapering my own newborn. I put time to the breast, though I feared it was not an arrow but an asp. Being time I kept that fear under my tongue like a thermometer. I felt its mercury rolling under my teeth, boiling like language. A deaf man, an old man, I am his hand, rough and gentle, an arrow here and then. Time, I can see what I feel. In the future even your future becomes my past. Arrow, I have died. There is peace. I pull it from me like a blanket. As in a dream, because of time being an arrow, I put on the dress of a young, lovely mother. Because of her, because of the time, here I am, always watching over you.

Sun Yung Shin

Time & Brevity

Seventh Sphere (Saturn: The Contemplatives)

No more hangings, no more gas chambers. No one allowed to remain in the center of the labyrinth, guarding their dna from the world, from the future. No more contemplation, no more waste. Everyone leaning toward paradise. Shields down and the word enemy will pass from memory. You are my kind.

Sun Yung Shin

History & Politics

His Mother's Hair

The last time he cut his mother’s hair the rude morning sun left no corner of her kitchen private, the light surgically clean where it fell on his scissors. Her hair fell in a blonde circle on the lake blue tile—smell of coffee and cinnamon; her laughing shook her head, Hold still, he said, his hands surfeit with the curl and softness of her hair. Three weeks after her death, a stranger entered the salon and settled in the chair. She had the color and shape of his mother’s hair, and when he sunk his hands in it, the texture, even cowlicks, individual as freckles—same. Twice he had to leave the room, and twice, he returned—still, when he touched her hair, it blurred.Hold still, he said, hold still.

April Ossmann

Sorrow & Grieving

Dust to Dust

Nevermind that keeping ashes on the mantel feels ghoulish, and comically impractical: not just another thing, a miniature memento urn, to dust, but dust to dust— I dread the conversational Hara-kiri, not, that’s what’s leftof my brother, but, he died of suicide: the chasm of silence following the leap— so the cremains stay in the office closet till they migrate through no will of their own to a moving box I haven’t unpacked and likely won’t.

April Ossmann

Death,Sorrow & Grieving

O, Chicago, O'Hare

One among the shifting mass of humanity intent on countless destinations, one hungry stomach and dry mouth among many, one brain dazed by the speed and altitude of flights unnatural to any animal, by herding, followed by waiting succeeded by rushing, waiting, herding— and more flight incomprehensible to any body contained in this seemingly unwieldy mass of metal lifting improbably over Chicago, where a misty orange aura hovers over the city’s brighter lights, as if its soul sought ascension it could only attempt, as if the aura might break free and follow us, wherever we might fly, wheresoever we may rest— one with the multitude of humans en route through mystery, to mystery.

April Ossmann

Travels & Journeys

A Wish

I wanted to give you something for your pain. But not the drug du jour or the kind word this side of cliché. Something you wouldn’t find on a talk show, in a department store or dark alleyway. I wanted to give you something for your pain but I couldn’t imagine what. Frankincense, myrrh—even gold seemed too plain (too plain and too gross). I needed something that wouldn’t have occurred to you or me, or even Nature: a creature more fabulous, more imaginary than you’d find in a rain forest or tapestry or pixel-loaded screen. Some exotic anodyne an alchemist or astrophysicist would be envious of: a chemical reaction, an astral refraction, an out-of-body, out-of-mind, one-of-a-kind transport from your pain, that would last longer than a day, go deeper than the past. I would have founded a whole new religion if I thought that would suffice. As for love—sacred, profane, or both— I wanted to give you something that didn’t arrive with a roll of the dice and was hard to maintain and had a knack for disappointing. I wanted to give you something for your pain that didn’t smack of a sorcerer’s trick, or a poet’s swoon, or a psychiatrist’s quip. Nothing too heavy or spacey or glib. I’d have given you the moon but it’s been done (and besides, its desolate dust and relentless tendency to wane might have only exacerbated your pain). If I could have given you something you could depend on, could always trust without a second thought, I would have. A splendid view, perhaps, or a strain of music. A favorite dish. A familiar tree. A visit from a genie who, in lieu of granting you a wish, would tend subtly to your every need, and never once tire, never complain. But when all was said and done (or hardly said, not nearly done) I was as helpless as you. Could you tell— or were you so overcome your pain was all that mattered? It seemed to me we were a kind of kin: willing the mind its bold suspensions, but the heart, once shattered, never quite matching its old dimensions. And yet you persevered in spite of pain, you knew to hold hope as lightly as you held my hand (a phantom grasp, a clasp that seemed to come from the other side). And your genial smile made it plain: you were pleased by my wish to please. And then you died.

Thomas Centolella

Death,The Body

View #45

after Hokusai and Hiroshige I dreamt half my life was spent in wonder, and never suspected. So immersed in the moment I forgot I was ever there. Red-tailed hawk turning resistance into ecstasy. The patrolmen joking with the drunk whose butt seemed glued to the sidewalk. A coral quince blossom in winter, pink as a lover’s present. And tilting my bamboo umbrella against the warm slant of rain, was I not a happy peasant crossing the great bay on a bridge that began who knows when, and will end who knows when?

Thomas Centolella

Life Choices,The Mind

The Orders

One spring night, at the end of my street God was lying in wait. A friend and I were sitting in his new sedan like a couple of cops on surveillance, shooting the breeze to pass the time, chatting up the daydreams, the raw deals, all the wouda-coulda-shoulda’s, the latest “Can you believe that?” As well as the little strokes of luck, the so-called triumphs, small and unforeseen, that kept us from cashing it all in. And God, who’s famous for working in mysterious ways and capable of anything, took the form of a woman and a man, each dressed in dark clothes and desperate enough to walk up to the car and open the doors. And God put a gun to the head of my friend— right against the brain stem, where the orders go out not only to the heart and the lungs but to consciousness itself—a cold muzzle aimed at where the oldest urges still have their day: the one that says eat whatever’s at hand, the one that wants only to fuck, the one that will kill if it has to… And God said not to look at him or he’d blow us straight to kingdom come, and God told us to keep our hands to ourselves, as if she weren’t that kind of girl. Suddenly time was nothing, our lives were cheap, the light in the car cold, light from a hospital, light from a morgue. And the moments that followed—if that’s what they were— arrived with a nearly unbearable weight, until we had acquired a center of gravity as great as the planet itself. My friend could hardly speak— he was too busy trying not to die— which made me chatter all the more, as if words, even the most ordinary ones, had the power to return us to our lives. And behind my ad-libbed incantation, my counterspell to fear, the orders still went out: keep beating, keep breathing, you are not permitted to disappear, even as one half of God kept bitching to the other half that we didn’t have hardly no money at all, and the other half barked, “I’m telling you to shut your mouth!” and went on rummaging through the back seat. And no one at all looking out their window, no one coming home or going out… Until two tall neighbors came walking toward us like unsuspecting saviors… And God grabbed the little we’d been given, the little we still had, and hustled on to the next dark street.

Thomas Centolella

The Body,Crime & Punishment

“In the Evening We Shall Be Examined on Love”

—St. John of the Cross And it won’t be multiple choice, though some of us would prefer it that way. Neither will it be essay, which tempts us to run on when we should be sticking to the point, if not together. In the evening there shall be implications our fear will change to complications. No cheating, we’ll be told, and we’ll try to figure the cost of being true to ourselves. In the evening when the sky has turned that certain blue, blue of exam books, blue of no more daily evasions, we shall climb the hill as the light empties and park our tired bodies on a bench above the city and try to fill in the blanks. And we won’t be tested like defendants on trial, cross-examined till one of us breaks down, guilty as charged. No, in the evening, after the day has refused to testify, we shall be examined on love like students who don’t even recall signing up for the course and now must take their orals, forced to speak for once from the heart and not off the top of their heads. And when the evening is over and it’s late, the student body asleep, even the great teachers retired for the night, we shall stay up and run back over the questions, each in our own way: what’s true, what’s false, what unknown quantity will balance the equation, what it would mean years from now to look back and know we did not fail.

Thomas Centolella

Love

Lines of Force

The pleasure of walking a long time on the mountain without seeing a human being, much less speaking to one. And the pleasure of speaking when one is suddenly there. The upgrade from wary to tolerant to convivial, so unlike two brisk bodies on a busy street for whom a sudden magnetic attraction is a mistake, awkwardness, something to be sorry for. But to loiter, however briefly, in a clearing where two paths intersect in the matrix of chance. To stop here speaking the few words that come to mind. A greeting. Some earnest talk of weather. A little history of the day. To stand there then and say nothing. To slowly look around past each other. Notice the green tang pines exude in the heat and the denser sweat of human effort. To have nothing left to say but not wanting just yet to move on. The tension between you, a gossamer thread. It trembles in the breeze, holding the thin light it transmits. To be held in that line of force, however briefly, as if it were all that mattered. And then to move on. With equal energy, with equal pleasure.

Thomas Centolella

Travels & Journeys,Landscapes & Pastorals

Anti-Elegy

for TNH There are those who will never return to us as we knew them. Who if they return at all visit our sleep, or daydreams, or turn up in the features of total strangers. Or greet us face to face in the middle of some rush hour street, but from a great distance—and not in the full flush of bodies that once wanted nothing more from us than the laying of our hands upon them, as a healer lays hands upon the afflicted. There are those who by their absence are an affliction. I imagine that sometimes in your dark bed you still want to know why. Why the man you were just coming to love, who liked you close as he raced through the city at night, why he had to swerve suddenly. Why he had to end up on an operating table, dead. Why you of all people had to live, to repeat this unanswerable question. I could tell you about a woman good at ritual who, hardly believing in herself, was good at making vows the two of us could believe. Then one day I had to drive her to an early flight. The dawn was blinding. She was off to look for the soul no one else could provide. But was this the way to do it? She didn’t know. She wanted me to tell her. Tears down her face. And I kept driving. I can look back and say: on that day, that’s when I died. Since then, you and I have had a hard time believing anything could bring us back. And yet your brown body breathes new life into a cotton print from the fifties, and picks parsley from the garden for spaghetti carbonara, and cues up Mozart’s French horn solo, and fills up the kitchen with the aroma of sourdough, and gets my body to anticipate the taste of malt as the tops of American beer cans pop: good rituals all, because they waited out our every loss, patient with the slow coming back to our senses, undeterred by our neglect. As if they knew all along how much we would need them.

Thomas Centolella

Sorrow & Grieving

Small Acts

Whitman thought he could live with animals, they were so placid and self-contained, not one of them dissatisfied. I have lived with animals. They kept me up all night. Not only tom cats on the prowl, and neurotic rats behind my baseboards, scratching out a slim existence. There were cattle next door in the butcher’s pen, great longhorns lowing in the dark. Their numbers had come up and they knew it. I let their rough tongues lick my sorry palm. Nothing else I could do for them, or they for me. Walt can live with the animals. I’ll take these vegetables on parade: string-beans and cabbage heads and pea brains, who negotiate a busy crosswalk and feel brilliant, the smallest act accomplished no mean feat, each one guiding them to other small acts that will add up, in time, to something like steady purpose. They cling to this fate, clutch it along with their brownbag lunches: none of us would choose it, but this is their portion, this moment, then this one, then the next. Little as it is, pitiful as it seems, this is what they were given, and they don’t want to lose it. The gawky and the slow, the motley and the misshapen… What bliss to be walking in their midst as if I were one of them, just ride this gentle wave of idiocy, forget those who profess an interest in my welfare, look passing strangers in the eye for something we might have in common, and be unconcerned if nothing’s there. And now we peek into a dark café, and now we mug at the waitress whose feet are sore, whose smile makes up for the tacky carnations and white uniform makes it easy to mistake her for a nurse, even makes it necessary, given the state of the world. And when the giant with three teeth harangues us to hurry up, what comfort to know he’s a friend, what pleasure to be agreeable, small wonders of acquiescence, like obedient pets. Except animals don’t have our comic hope, witless as it is. They don’t get to wave madly at the waitress, as though conducting a symphony of ecstatic expectations. If I turned and lived with animals I’d only be a creature of habit, I’d go to where the food is and the warmth. But I wouldn’t get to say to my troubled friend, “Your eyes are so beautiful. I could live in them.”

Thomas Centolella

Animals,Trees & Flowers

Mood Ring

Inside me lived a small donkey. I didn’t believe in magic, but the donkey was a sucker for the stuff. Psychics, illusionists, arthritics who’d predict the rainfall. That was the year I had trouble walking. I over-thought it and couldn’t get the rhythm right. The donkey re-taught me. “This foot. Yes, then that one. And swing your arms as if you’re going to trial to be exonerated of a crime you’ve most definitely committed.” Next, trouble sleeping because I’d need to crank the generator in my chest so frequently. Seeing I was overworked, the donkey finally hauled it out— it looked shiny and new, a silver dollar— and tossed it into a flock of birds who had to fly a long way to find safety. I knew then I was a large and dangerous man, what with this donkey living inside me, but felt futile. One day, during a final lesson on breathing, the donkey asked what kind of jeans I was wearing. I said, “The somber ones.” “Poor kid.” “So will you be staying on for a third year, donkey?” “No. I think I should be leaving soon. I think I should go and await your arrival beside the crumpled river.” “Yes, I suppose you have many important matters to attend to, but maybe one day I will come and join you for a drink or, perhaps, for a brief nap.”

Jaswinder Bolina

The Body,Animals

Operating Dictates for a Particle Accelerator

pulse light starts there starts getting smaller All that you can’t remember, Claire says. , With two glass eyes I’m wobbling down a walkway inflecting aloha no thumbtacks, attached no pins, To feel. Good by. among crimson and silver turnstiles, all the folks In orange, Silvery hats and thermal The madmen mad getting madder daisies all done Again me strolling, me fuming, slipping, the stream frozen. the matter of face. the quasars huffing on. In December no summery mask, No, just the shimmering scene, the firmament. a blackbird indicating, nods Maybe a change dust of a brick maybe I remember, I recall. a cyclotron. An ingenuous ramrod The flay of her hair fall sinking Rowboat turning to winter, rowboat, rowboat Chatter of the breakage iii. verb forms of a neutron bomb starts sloe gin over time Fermenting in the firmament red shifting with Claire waking with Claire, betweening and vaguing Claire the embassies exchanging airs. lily white, glittery photons , spark at the bottom working iamb iamb iamb iamb iamb Claire don’t care reminiscing Tuscaloosa in. A corner of the soiree. , standing so bluntly you resemble no one, Precisely, as if receding over a hill, you resembles everyone. corralling , the bulky idea of the hill into. an encampment, a tiny cranium. And it’s as if, Spying you through a whiskey on rocks. a mass hysteria I struttle along, Making commonplace. Ubnutterances, and guts your house is blue with two glass eyes iii. quantum entanglement starts with a single shot. fired not the year of my fathers. slow, death starts. year my mother goes terminal, The vacuous scene chattering, Like an elephant collapsing the animals fuming, weird winged bugs The serious business of. squishing them, they simply regroup. And reappear. , Claire. I’m stumbling down the thoroughfare. in a dark, Pinching what few glittering photons, I’m trolling. murky and building up. start at the bottom, working a way Upwards Evening, like a tumbler. folding. itself over Feeling contented all around. squinting, started clawing with two glass eyes feeling for thumbtacks. Among the broad vagaries. among the wild visions, Claire. . I say I know you better, , than. You could imagine, or some other, but you sock me. Hard. In the gut instead. i. aimed by magnets starts redundant Futile with a screwdriver, among the wrecks. , I am having a ball comma Describe the house comma paint the doorjamb end-stop these months spent a-chatter. the sidewalk spinal column of a mule that carries me. Through the broad making-world. one universe over, We are inseparable. And own many cats the city. Large. like viewing an egg, From the egg’s interior. I go about the serious business strolling, The firmament Claire. your pocket watch, A frayed yellow. T-shirt. on the narrative fringe. of the narrative, the weightless photons say Holding hands One universe over. You do not forgive me. , all that I can’t but Maybe a small change maybe something less than the sky, maybe something. More than the sky could conjure. ii. if this were a sonnet, I start with all that you can’t remember. The gutters Overloaded. the funky trinkets, Weird winged bugs on the sill. In the air, When I go about the business , strolling home Claire. riding the slipstream sloe gin. All drink and whiskey. the old ferry, a rowboat , in my gut. smooth as a mirror Every mad Artifact everyone I’ve ever met, resembling Claire dissembling My wintered axe. start at the bottom Work your way upwards. like a signature saying I’ve been here, strolling past, these fumes, on the air smell like a letter. All thermal , all water Quasars bleating, blackbird saying, The search light pauses Pluck The wings out one at a time. Chicago and blackbird, blackbird, I unaware. of ours, the recombinant bodies of the gods. i. focused by a lens starts with the scene starts. December, Smooth as a mirror Hard in the gut feels like a tumbler. Claire, inflecting good, by. walking. Claire. the scene of sparks. among the while, the fission The house is blue. with two glass eyes among the firmament no pins to pin you No, thumbtacks to hold you But photons and all the things that you can’t . Among the sloe gin, your frayed yellow T-shirt. I returned to you, but you wanting In a corner of the soiree. a corner of the prairie, more than the sky This is where the elephant toppled. when what you remember is Collided, with Often under the webbed foot Of my imagining, you are the entire throng. Wearing your face, Dust of a brick, what’s left is What when the particle accelerator paints its disastered portrait iv. scatter many phrases starts with shatter. , crossing the parking lot, my skin pixilated in the sodium light, harsh corundum skin a vapor trail edging the slipstream. Tidy up the floorboards. the wiggling infrastructure of a signature. says, I’ve been here before All airs as if a unified field. of night. of Claire. Collapse, arrangement of bones where the elephant toppled. spells are cast, Luster in clusters, stone I toss Chicago, the old ferry through the house’s eye, through the firmament Light bulbs wilting, carnations flickering, Like a cyst the crick dribbles outward toward a shore my lady trickles, my lady pours Give up give up, my sweet canteen Been taken to the forest. Honey. Among the wild fission.

Jaswinder Bolina

Employing My Scythe

I’m standing in field 17 of the long series, employing my scythe. Sometimes a conceptual dog bounds past me, though it’s never my conceptual dog. Occasionally future laureates gather for colloquium, though they’re rarely my future laureates. Thus, evening proceeds precisely the way the handbook describes it: as a proceeding: a runnel: shallow and babbling. Into it a stranger appears. He looks like my friend. I ask him, Are you my friend? Gravity telegraphs its heavy message through the lolling vines. The strangers says, I’ve sold all my clothes and am considering, for a career, perpetual suffering. The sun slides a tongue down the nape of the grain elevator. Lowing cattle. It’s the fourth of July. In Spain. I say, You are most vague and mysterious, friend. The dog paces. I set my scythe aside and tell him, I have employed this scythe mercilessly all my life and still everywhere these stalks extend. He says, Someone is always worse off than us even at our most pitiable. Yes, I say. I read it once in a magazine. And we laugh, let our enormous bellies jangle. It is good to laugh with my friend and let the scythe cool, I say. Yes, he says. Good.

Jaswinder Bolina

Jobs & Working,Travels & Journeys

Elephant Armageddon

NYTimes headline for September 4th 2012: Elephants Dying in Epic Frenzy As Ivory Fuels Wars and Profits They return to the site whence they came with eyes tearful, with psalms trumpeting the air. They stand ever so watchful; guarding the graves of their ghosts and their kind. They shall not forget. They shall not want. They lie down in green silky pastures and finding their way to the still waters. They restore and nourish their soul. They walk through the dark valleys; always the shadows of death lurking behind them. Always striding till they reach the comforting light. They fear no evil. Man fears. They forage for food and they eat amongst their enemies because they fear not. They are the happiest. The honey is under their tongue. The winter is past, the rain is over and gone. Their hearts awaken. They know no violence. Even in the waning light they tower over all else. They are the landscape. They are the trees. They throw up the dust in their dance. The skies become misty. They rise up and lead each other away into the dusk.

Gerard Malanga

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Animals,Religion,The Spiritual,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict

Real Complex Key Shifts

Toward summer or its dependence On demarcations in the sandy vial Some tree spelling astronaut onto a Planet’s arm, it stopped making sense. I am not an apothecary or a wave Or a dog by the 15th hole, I am not A light sparking a whole country’s demise. I will never be a towel holding someone’s Sunscreen while they wash it off in foreign Seas. My hair goes up and down, it’s true As it is I am not a bag of tea nor will I ever Be exceptionally happy. Let the director Know I was distressed by the construction Noise, that I had no known allergies that My parents convinced me I was wanted And why wouldn’t you believe them. If the earth when it opened dragged away Our sense of faith, doubt was an Invention I preferred to ignore in the Manner of solicitations by mail.

Amanda Nadelberg

Living,The Mind,Religion,Faith & Doubt

Mom Betty Addresses the Nature of Proportion

After “She was the song of my dark hour,” a photograph by Paul Tañedo I woke up and I was old— It’s hard to judge if this new country was worth its costs— Fil and Eileen educated themselves— They blessed me with their happiness— Roy and Glen lost themselves to a car accident and something worse (that I will not reveal even for a poem)— When I see myself reflected in a mirror I turn away to hide both my eyes, all of my self— when half of your children are destroyed the half who flourish cannot compensate exactly as if a heart breaksexactly down the middle.

Eileen R. Tabios

Living,Growing Old,Parenthood,Sorrow & Grieving,Love,Heartache & Loss,Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Memorial Day

All that's left is the shroud the back wings. Roaches scurrying in the kitchen. There’s no greater threat than this time at hand. Drunken cackles from the street. Still damp from 4 AM rain. I missed the instructions for this part. The trap. The deflate of dream. Utopia was always supposed to be right at hand. Right and left. Any which way we’d make of it. Marine layer won’t budge for the rumble under our feet. Sky tears open in the north. Sirens on high. A small pool forms in the buckle of asphalt. In its gentle tremble the reflection of the grey white mass overhead with a perfect seam of blue. The rift where the dead speak how-tos.

Sunnylyn Thibodeaux

Relationships,Home Life,Nature,Animals

All Kinds of Fires Inside Our Heads

The number of bodies i have is equal to the number of gurney transfers that are televised. If we’re all “just human” then who is responsible? A fire station drying out from addiction. outside the drizzling of firepower, lowballing suns it’s like a sauna in here. the strain of a charred bladder. bottled water bad wiring, that spark is no good come sit with me for a minute. my feet full of diluted axe fluid thought I heard you say everything is medicine but that’s just hearin what you wanna hear

Nikki Wallschlaeger

Living,Death,Health & Illness,Life Choices,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

Keough Hall

November 9, 2016 University of Notre Dame minutes felt like hours "deplorables knocking at your door" he shouted the day after—“build the wall— we're building a wall around your room!" minutes felt like hours "cowards!" you managed, catching a glimpse by cracking your door: there were three of them scurrying down the hall, their faces obscured… your back against the wall, you slid to the floor— "Hail Mary..." you began whispering to yourself and back they came their laughter louder minutes felt like hours and the thumping in your chest— his fist pounding the door for Gregory Jenn ('18)

Francisco Aragón

Activities,School & Learning,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity

Perihan

it doesn’t matter when I cross. two seconds and they’re gone. the ferry facing Ulus. the trees that spanked of green. the narrow bags of temples. beyond that – just – these Peri scenes when the human body sweats the skin produce an oil when Peri bodies sweat it does not produce the oil the ropes fall to the pavement their waters slap me still their green glow sweats into the pavement waters slap me still – I could curl among the roses I would make an aqualung we will reach the edge of this walk soon. all lights torn out for fuel. move my fingers in the dark awoke without a start. Peri here – my name is Peri – my name is Perihan

Sara Deniz Akant

Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

Book Review: The Mountain Lion by Jean Stafford

Spoiler alert: in this all-but-forgotten masterwork, Jean Stafford—who was once widely regarded as the leading novelist of her generation, and who wrote this perverse, short, lyrical novel, her second, during the flailing failings of her marriage to my hero Robert Lowell—kills Molly, her child-alter ego, a girl too unloved and unloving to survive puberty, too pure and awful—like Stafford, who died pickled and childish three decades later after winning the Pulitzer with her devastating, hurtfully compassionate Collected Stories—for this or any other world, especially the necessarily allegorical one of fiction. I am broken now, hopeless; hope is proved by this book to be a contrivance. I have just read the last pages in which Molly’s brother, Ralph—who, to live, cannot love either, has no spare love—shoots her, aiming for the wild mountain lion whose stuffed corpse was to be the triumph of his new manhood. I don’t hate Ralph—how can I, a boy, mistaken, like me? And can I hate Molly, who so needed Ralph and everyone, still young enough to savor the bittersweet of her anger? What about Stafford, who hurt herself, all our selves, with this ending, her classic tragedy, writing, decades later, Poor old Molly! I loved her dearly and I hope she rests in peace. Fuck insight and analysis: my heart is shot. Why did she have to die? Why does anyone? Why do you, do I? Because of what Ralph was feeling just before he accidentally slaughtered the future? This book must have ravaged the already sleepless poet Gregory Orr, who shot his brother, too, and suffers that endless error in poetry and prose. And because Molly refused everything, she stood between Ralph and tomorrow. But he grew, he changed. Confused? Read the book. In novels people die because of what they feel. In life, people die when their bodies conk out, exhausted machines that living expends. And what happens when people feel their feelings in life? Nothing? Anything? Brenda, dear Brenda, my love, nothing happens, I’m afraid. I’m sorry. And afraid. A small breeze born in the heart gently bends a blade of grass and no one hears a word. No one reads Stafford anymore—I asked on Facebook. Stafford died, her legacy gently dispatched into the low air. O, life is terrible, literature ridiculous. Stafford’s prose, teeming and rich as loam, could take Famous Franzen’s for a walk, feed it biscuits. But who cares? Who remembers? O, to have been Jean Stafford, in the past I idealize, when the world was less self-conscious, less precise. I could be dead already, warmish beneath a blanket of dust. Joyful are the faded, the once-greats whose afterlives slipped out a hole in posterity's pocket: they are loved poignantly by a needy few. O, to be kept cozy in the bosoms of those desperate and proud, forgotten for all the good I do. Love is sunlight streaming unevenly through the canopy of leaves overhead. We can only grow in the brighter patches below, fading where light is thin. Molly, we are with you, nowhere and gone. Mostly we are forgotten, too.

Craig Morgan Teicher

Coming of Age,Death,Reading & Books

Small Shame Blues

I live with the small shame of not knowing the multiple names for blue to describe the nightsky over New Mexico to describe the light in my lover’s eyes. It is a small shame that grows. I live with the small shame which resides in the absences of my speech as I pause to search for the word in Spanish to translate a poem to my Father who sits there waiting who scans my eyes to see what I cannot fully describe who waits for the word from me the word that escapes me in the moment the word I fear has never resided within me. It is a small shame that grows when indigo and cerulean are merely azul and not añil and cerúleo.

Dan Vera

Family & Ancestors,Language & Linguistics

Norse Saga

Let us praise the immigrant who leaves the tropics and arrives in Chicago in the dead of winter. Let us praise the immigrant who has never worn coats who must bundle up against an unimaginable cold. For they will write letters home that speak of it like Norse sagas with claims that if a frigid hell exists the entrance is hidden somewhere in this city. Let us praise the immigrant who fears the depths of the subway the disappearance of landmarks to guide them through the labyrinth. Let us praise the immigrant who dreams of the pleasures of sunstroke who wakes each morning to the alien sight of their breath suspended in the cold city air.

Dan Vera

Winter,Cities & Urban Life

Handsome Caudillos

Hatred as an element of the struggle; a relentless hatred of the enemy, impelling us over and beyond the natural limitations that man is heir to and transforming him into an effective, violent, selective and cold killing machine. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy. —Che Guevara Tengo una remera del Che y no sé por qué, I have a Che t-shirt and I don’t know why. —Contemporary Argentine saying I see the red shirt at the peace rally and think of my parents who left everyone and every thing they knew and loved save for the coin forgotten in my brother’s baby jacket. Men like me in Cuba failed the test of this symbol’s manhood, were called “Western perversions” were imprisoned and made to labor. Thousands, like these assembled, were rounded up in the middle of the night driven to the far countryside to cut sugarcane for a revolution’s economic quotas. Tio Alberto’s eyes go blank when he speaks of the price he paid: three years of forced hard labor to work like a dog in the sun for the privilege of leaving his own country. I think of the chain of caudillos that promised one thing and delivered another.

Dan Vera

History & Politics,War & Conflict

José Dominguez, the First Latino in Outer Space

In that very first episode the transmission is received on the starship Enterprise that Space Commander Dominguez urgently needs his supplies. Kirk tells Uhura to assure him that the peppers are “prime Mexican reds but he won’t die if he goes a few more days without ’em.”Calm down Mexican.You can wait a few more days to get your chile peppers. In the corner of my eye I see Uhura’s back hand twitch and though I never see him on the screen I image José giving Kirk a soplamoco to the face. But this is the year 2266 and there are Latinos in Outer Space! We never see them, but they’ve survived with their surnames and their desire, deep in the farthest interplanetary reaches, for a little heat to warm the bland food on the starbase at Corinth 4. As it is on earth so it shall be in heaven. Ricardo Montalbán will show up 21 episodes later to play a crazy mutant Indio, superhuman and supersmart who survived two centuries to slap Kirk around and take over his ship.

Dan Vera

Popular Culture,Race & Ethnicity

lucky number 7 (or indications that I’d be a lesbian)

when i was 7, i hoped rocks would whisper the secret to being hard. fascinated by Keisha’s skin so soft, i seduced her into humping even though she was five years my senior and my babysitter—click of the light covers snatched away like a magic trick reveal i could hear Keisha wail one floor up through the radiator pipes—i was the victim. at 7, i decided i should’ve been born a boy, a he, a him. blamed my mama for her mistake. prayed for a penis and practiced peeing standing up until it came: aim, angle of lean, and straddle were crucial. toilet seat up, knees clamping the cool rim i let go of the golden flow feeling the warm wet trickle down my legs darkening my dungarees a new shade of blue. at 7, i was never afraid of putting things in my mouth: i chewed my fingernails till they bled, chewed pencils till the yellow paint flaked me a crusty mustache, chewed pen caps into odd sculptures, chewed pens until the inky cylinders leaked a Rorschach on my face kids pointing as i ran to the bathroomoooh a butterfly! no, a thundercloud … i wore my iron-on Bruce Lee sweatshirt till his face cracked and faded invisible. still, i felt invincible when i wore it kicking lunch tables with my shins. karate-chopping pencils in two. forever trying to impress the skirts with my awkward brand of goof. punching my arm to make lumps rise out of the bony sinew. at 7, i knew how to make a girl cry.

T'ai Freedom Ford

Coming of Age,Gay, Lesbian, Queer

how to get over ["be born: black..."]

be born: black as ants on a chicken bone black as Nina Simone and Mahalia’s moan black as rock pile smile and resilience black as resistance and rhythm and Sonny’s blues black as no shoes and dirt floors black as whore and Hottentot foxtrot Lindy Hop and Watusi pussy and pyramids black as darkness under your eyelids black between your legs black as dregs of rum sugarcane summer plums holyghost hum black as bruised throat fieldholla wading in the shallow black as ocean river stream creek running black transparent translucent transatlantic slanted shanties planted in red clay black as funky chickens and chitlins and kinfolk sold away black as auction block and slop and hip-hop and rock and roll and chop shop and cop cars and parole and overseer patrols and one drop rules and pools of blood black as beige and good hair and sounding white and light-skindeded and my grandmamma is Cherokee, Iroquois, Choctaw black as pit bulls and lockjaw and rage and hoodies black eyes and black-eyed peas peasy heads and loose tracks black as trees and noose and hounds let loose in the night black as fist and fight Sojourner and Nat Turner and righteousness black as fuck and not giving a fuck mud-stuck and quicksand quick hand hustle thigh muscle and hurdle black as cotton and tobacco and indigo black as wind and bad weather and feather and tar and snap beans in mason jars black as nigga please and hallelujah black asses and black strap molasses and turn your black back on audiences black as banjo and djembe and porch and stoop and spooks sitting by the door black as roaches in front of company and lawn jockeys and latchkey kids and high bids and spades and shittalk black as cakewalk and second line and black magic and tap dance, lapdance and alla that ass black as jazz and juke and juju and spirit disguised as harmonica spit black as cast-iron skillets and grits and watermelon seeds flitting from lips black as tambourines hitting cornbread hips black batons splitting lips and Martin Luther King, Jr. boulevards and downtown beatdowns black sit-ins and come-ups and oops upside yo’ heads and we shall overcomes and get down on it black get into it black let’s get it on and get it while the getting is good black as white hoods and backwood revivals black as survival and Trayvon and Tyrone and Josephus and amen and Moses and Jesus and getting over black—

T'ai Freedom Ford

Popular Culture,Race & Ethnicity

how to get over ["when the poem flirts..."]

for those of us who can’t quite quit her when the poem flirts similes hugging her thighs like a tight skirt: consider the possibilities. if the poem follows you home, whiskey pickling her tongue: make her coffee, black. if the poem arrives dressed as metaphor, begging for candy: trick or retreat till the mask falls. should the poem slink outta panties, stand naked demanding touch: finger her lines till her stanzas beg for an encore: come again, explore, imagine odd positions of sweet revision. and whenever she whispers,stop: listen and leave her be.

T'ai Freedom Ford

Desire,Poetry & Poets

still life—color study

July 13, 2013 Saturday afternoon: in the driveway between buildings they blow up balloons—yellow, red, blue—for a 3-year-old’s party. The intermittent pops startle me like random gunfire—remind me of birthdays brown boys will no longer celebrate. The DJ, having set up the speakers, begins to play—the music, a rapid fire of bass thump, commandeers the apartment. We have no choice but leave. An art show: canvases colored with boxes and lines—a grid of red on a backdrop of yellow. We speak of the abstract with wine in our mouths. Meanwhile, in an antechamber, six are sequestered. They speak of mali- cious intent, blood, evidence, testimony—murder versus manslaughter. We arrive home to a throng of brown bodies, hands clutching red cups, and music: its insistent treble stabbing the ears. Inside, we slam all windows, but the music still blares as my niece shoots people on the video game—its sounds are too realistic to bear. Instead, the news, a verdict is in: not guilty. And everything is a blur of sound, my heart beating so fast I put a hand to my chest. I watch the TV screen: a collage of abstractions—spotlights, microphones, smiles, handwritten signs. I stare, as if it were a painting— a smear of twisted faces smothered in gesso and oil, a grid of red on a backdrop of yellow—to make sense of. The party continues. The 3-year-old probably in bed dreaming of melted ice cream, and I am tired of partying. There is a police station a half block away and I want it to burn. Instead, only the smoke of weed, the meaningless music droning on, the popping of balloons. Sunday morning, the birds are angry—their chirping a noisy chant: NO NO NO NO. Outside, the rubbery flesh of balloons color the driveway like splotches of paint. In an instant, those still lives of heave and breath—gone in a pop.

T'ai Freedom Ford

Birth & Birthdays,Crime & Punishment,Race & Ethnicity

Battleground

It showed the War was as my father said: boredom flanked by terror, a matter of keeping low and not freezing. “You wore your helmet square,” he said, not “at some stupid angle, like that draft-dodger Wayne,” who died so photogenically in The Sands of Iwa Jima. Those nights I heard shouts from the dark of my parents’ room, he was back down in his foxhole, barking orders, taking fire that followed him from France and Germany, then slipped into the house, where it hunkered in the rafters and thrived on ambush. We kept our helmets on, my mother and I, but there was no cover, and our helmets always tilted. He’d lump us with the ones he called “JohnDoes,” lazy, stupid, useless. We needed to straighten up and fly right, pick it up, chop chop, not get “nervous in the service.” We’d duck down like GIs where German snipers might be crouched in haylofts, their breaths held for the clean shot. “Bang,” my father said, “the dead went down, some like dying swans, some like puppets with their strings cut.” I wanted to hear more, but he’d change the subject, talk about the pennant, the Cards’ shaky odds, how Musial was worth the whole JohnDoe lot of them.

William Trowbridge

Home Life,War & Conflict

Please, Not That Again

How burdensome they seemed, wartime oldies that could drive our parents teary: “I’ll Be Seeing You,” with its hint of being swept off in a global riptide; or the shaky follow-up of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” followed by a shakier “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else But Me),” “Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer,” or “Ac- Cent-Tchu-Are the Positive.” We suffered them on the old cathedral radio, crooned by Crosby and Sinatra, had to watch them strangled on The Lawrence Welk Show or laced with Como’s heavy dose of sedative. Dad told us, “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” Mom hummed, “Keep the Home Fires Burning”—till our music cut the cord. Brash and free of corn, it hailed rock ‘n’ roll, caught Maybellene at the top of the hill, moaned “m’ baby-doll, m’ baby-doll, m’ baby-doll.” We played it loud and often, but they never understood.

William Trowbridge

Coming of Age,Music

Loud Looks

You better rap, my brother says—he can b-box his ass off. Got DJ scratches and spins, will drop it on the two and four, the three and four. Whatever you need. Me posing my bars: My flowsare second to none, come here,son. See how it’s done. Wanted to be a rapper? Check. Thought I was going to the NBA? Check. Father went to prison? Check. Brother too? Check. Mother died when I was eight? Check. Hung pictures of Luke Perry on my bedroom wall? What? Yep, give me a bit, and I’ll sprinkle some subjectivity on it. I loved that dude, his whisper-voice, his lean. Auntie worried on the phone:Girl, he got photos of some white boyall over his walls. Me rocking out to Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels.” Silent head nods do more than throw shade. All black people are fluent in silence. Mangled Baldwin quote? Let’s keep wrenching. Everybody’s fluent in silence. You know what a switchblade glare means. No need to read the look she gave me as I sang, Let me run with you tonight.

Douglas Manuel

Coming of Age,Music,Popular Culture

Washing Palms

When the junkies my father sold crack to got too close to me, he told them to back up six dicks’ lengths. This is the man who when I was seven caught me under the bed crying and said: Save those tears. You’ll need them later. The man who told me he smoked crack because he liked it, the man sitting on his couch now watching the History Channel, scratching the nub beneath his knee where his leg used to be, gumming plums, his false teeth soaking in vinegar on the table. I’m sitting across the room trying to conjure each version he’s shown of himself, trying to lie in water warm enough to soak away the switch he hit me with. To help me summon love for the man who just asked me if he can borrow 200 dollars, the man who once told me: Wish in one hand, then shit in the other,and see which one fills up the quickest.

Douglas Manuel

Family & Ancestors,Home Life

Heading Down

We shouldn’t raise mixed babiesin the South, Kay says as I drive up the crest of another hill on our way into Kentucky. The South, where humidity leaves a sweat mustache, where a truck with a Confederate flag painted on the back windshield skitters in front of us. In its bed, avoiding our eyes, a boy with blond hair split down the middle like a Bible left open to the Book of Psalms. His shirtless, sun-licked skin drapes, a thin coat for his bones, his clavicles sharp. I want to know who’s driving this raggedy truck. I want the boy to look at us. I want to spray paint a black fist over that flag. I want the truck to find its way into the ravine. I want to— Stepping on the gas, I pass the truck, Kay and I turn our heads. The boy smiles and waves. The man driving doesn’t turn his head, keeps his eyes on the road. Kay turns red as she draws her fingers into fists. I stare at the whites of her eyes.

Douglas Manuel

Men & Women,Race & Ethnicity

Testify

I swear on the melody of trumpet vines, ants feasting through animal crackers, Burt’s Bees, Tyler Perry movies, my daddy’s .38 slug, footie-socks inside high-top Jordans, disidentification, drag queens, blond dreadlocks, headstones salt-and-peppering the grass, vanilla wafers in banana pudding, Zeus-swan chasing, blunt-guts, sharp thumbnails, keloid scars, cash-only bars, R&B songs, on what the pot called the kettle. I put that on my mama’s good hair, on playing solitaire with a phantom limb, the white woman I go home to, my auntie’s face when she says: You knowhe always loved them pink toes. I put that on everything, on the signifiers I gobble up, candlesticks blown out by whistling lips. I put that on dervishing records scratched on down-beats, empty beehives, fresh-fade head-slaps, hand claps, bamboo shoots, liminality, mestizos, the purple-black crook of my arm, split sternums, on You can’t savehim now. I put that on skinny jeans, get rich quick schemes—Gotta get that C.R.E.A.M. Know whatI mean?—freckled black faces, leafless trees throwing up gang signs, phlegm hocked onto streets. I swear I catch more stones than catfish. I lose more collard greens than sleep. I think nothing is here but us darkies, high yellows, red bones, cocoa butters. Someone, no, everyone has jungle fever.Don’t touch my forehead. Blond as moonshine, mute trombone choking. I put that on Instagram. Post me to the endless chain of signifiers. Strawberry gashes on kneecaps, Let meget some dap, Newports, Kool’s, and folding chairs instead of barstools, that white drool caked on your face. Mommy please wipe awaythe veil. I thought I was passing into the eyeof the streetlamp. I swear. I promise on frondless palm trees, long pinkie nails, sixteen years, serve eight, and Miss Addie’s red beans and rice, Ol’ Dirty Bastard and the brother on the Cream of Wheat box. It don’t meana thing if it don’t buckle your knees. Open your hands. I’ll give you a song, give you the Holy Ghost from a preacher’s greasy palm—When he hit me, I didn’t fall, felt eyes jabbing me, tagging me. Oh no he didn’t!— give you the om from the small of her back. I put that on double consciousness, multiple jeopardy, and performativity. Please make sure my fettersand manacles are tight. Yea baby, I like bottomlessbullet chambers. I swear on the creation of Uncle Tom— some white woman's gospel. She got blue eyes? I loveme some—on Josiah Henson, the real Uncle Tom, on us still believing in Uncle Tom. Lord, have mercy! Put that on the black man standing on my shoulders holding his balls. Put that on the black man I am—I am not—on the black man I wish I was.

Douglas Manuel

Race & Ethnicity

His and Hers

She cannot imagine it otherwise. She wakes in the morning and twists her ring, loves how every night in their bed he lies breathing warm in the dark and never shies away. He lets her talk, he lets her sing. She cannot imagine it otherwise. One night she’s surprised how gently he tries to move her arm when he thinks she’s sleeping. In the night, in their bed, she sees he lies watching the ceiling long before sunrise. Too much coffee, too many late nights working. She cannot imagine it otherwise. He quiets. The more she worries and pries the less he tells her about anything. She’s sure every night in their bed he lies wanting a room beyond reach of her eyes. He sighs—she cries so much, Over nothing. She cannot imagine it otherwise: Every night in their bed, he lies.

Diane Gilliam Fisher

Heartache & Loss,Realistic & Complicated,Men & Women

First Divorce

There was a bucket, there was a wall, there was a woman and a man. The woman carried the bucket and the man was the wall. There was no place else to go. It was a long, long time for there was much to carry and there was much to wall. There was a path ran straight from the well to the hole in the wall. There was a path ran crooked from the well to the wood. There was something in the wood bigger than the bucket. Woe to the man, woe to the wall. Woe to the bucket at the edge of the wood.

Diane Gilliam Fisher

Break-ups & Vexed Love,Men & Women

Deed

Let it finally be Friday, let me drive downtown before five, park in the one space left open in front and feed the meter the exact change it needs. Let me go into the office, sit and nod, unfold my check on the table and sign. Let the line not be dotted, let it be solid. Let it be my name. Let it be final. Let me pull into the driveway while it is still light. It’s well past five and well into October and they are just about to change the time. Saturday night on the local news they’ll remind us all to Fall Back, but I make it in under the wire. There is still light. There is still time. I am up the back porch steps, under the awning, my hand on the back door lock the realtor left on. Let me remember rightly the numbers he gave me. Let this not be the dream of the high school locker with the Master Lock whose combination you forgot or fumbled, turning too fast, going too far, everything you’d locked up irretrievable, lost. Let the lock fall open, let me leave it on the steps for the realtor to pick up. Let him pull up the flimsy stakes of the sign in the yard that says I can be bought, let him drive away. Let no Master enter through my door. Let the house be a disaster, I don’t care. Let the smoke-framed blanks where another woman’s pictures marked the wall be the story of how my edges caught fire and the ash at last let me see where I stood. Let the cracked kitchen floor make a map to teach me where not to step, how not to fall through and break my very own back. Let the broken window be a way out, the broken door a way in. Let me go to the hardware store and buy the tools to take the chain off the bedroom door, let me paint the bathroom pink without asking, walk naked and unafraid through all my rooms. Let me pick up a broom and sweep nothing under the rug. Let me sweep it all into the light. Let me do it. Let there be time. Let there be light.

Diane Gilliam Fisher

Home Life

The Hope I Know

doesn’t come with feathers. It lives in flip-flops and, in cold weather, a hooded sweatshirt, like a heavyweight in training, or a monk who has taken a half-hearted vow of perseverance. It only has half a heart, the hope I know. The other half it flings to every stalking hurt. It wears a poker face, quietly reciting the laws of probability, and gladly takes a back seat to faith and love, it’s that many times removed from when it had youth on its side and beauty. Half the world wishes to stay as it is, half to become whatever it can dream, while the hope I know struggles to keep its eyes open and its mind from combing an unpeopled beach. Congregations sway and croon, constituents vote across their party line, rescue parties wait for a break in the weather. And who goes to sleep with a prayer on the lips or half a smile knows some kind of hope. Though not the hope I know, which slinks from dream to dream without ID or ally, traveling best at night, keeping to the back roads and the shadows, approaching the radiant city without ever quite arriving.

Thomas Centolella

The Mind

Namaste

The god in me does not honor the god in you. The god in you murdered me once, and once was more than enough. So the god in me, adept at keeping my nature warm and inspired to love the benign, now prefers the chilly air of indifference, something picked up like a virus from the most vicious of mortals. The god in me regards the god in you as suspect, though sad to say, it wasn’t always so. There were the generous days in the beginning, when every word was made flesh. In the beginning the gods in us were content to let us go on behaving like perfect mortals, which is to say imperfectly, which is to say with our tenderness fully intact: the good kind that let us gladly undress our trepidations, and pleasure our solitude into a blissful oblivion; and the bad kind— invisible woundings no compliment or hot kiss, no confession of the amorous could soothe for long. And then, when the mortals we were had done enough to remind us that to be mortal is to be susceptible to the secret agenda, the cruel caprice, the soft but eviscerating voice— “at the mercy of a nuance”— the god in you decided it was time to act. A dark god, in need of a human sacrifice, smoothly turning your back on the earnest and their pathetic pleas. So the god in me, no stranger to the aberrant and the abhorrent, now has no choice but to respond in kind. A pity, really, since it has been the dream of so many gods to find themselves in some quiet room, the burden of power slipped off and scattered like clothes across the floor, the light of late afternoon a kind of benediction, and everywhere the gratitude for the privilege of feeling almost human.

Thomas Centolella

God & the Divine,War & Conflict

Why I'm in Awe of the Spiral

When, in the science museum, I arrive at the overview of our galaxy, with its tiny arrow pointing to You are here (which really ought to be We are here), and see that the two to four hundred billion stars of our local cluster are drifting or chasing or dreaming after each other in circles within milky circles, I can’t help but think of those ancient paintings and rock engravings, discovered all over our celestial body, of that one line which begins at whatever point it can, then curls outward, or inward, toward nothing anyone can define—the oldest shape revered by Aborigine and Celt, by mathematician and engineer and Burning Man reveler alike, and even accorded a place of honor among the mess of thoughts on my desk, as a nifty paper clip of copper. But it’s already there in the florets of the sunflower crisscrossing with the precision of a logarithm, and in the pin-wheel shape of the Nautilus shell, and in the coiling neurons of the cochlea that let us tell Art Tatum from a three year old’s improvisation. Call it what you will—“God's fingerprint,” “the soul unfolding through time,” “the passageway into the Self”— I can’t help but admire, even fear, something as mundane as a flush of the toilet, when its swirling is a variation on our sidereal drift, our existential pain. And then there’s that famous falcon, “turning and turning in a widening gyre,” a portentous symbol of our own circling into some dread, some pernicious chaos we thought we had just escaped, one town burning a decade behind us, a millennium before that, and into next week, next year, next whenever. And when the two of us took that winding road an infinity of others had wound down before us and would wind down again, our spirits hushed by the crosses and bouquets at each dead man’s curve and just burning in the dry heat to touch each other, wasn’t that a wondrous and terrible turning?

Thomas Centolella

Stars, Planets, Heavens,Sciences

(“the unwritten volume”)

Elle’s writing her book of wisdom. She writes until she cannot hold her pen. The labyrinth miraculously is uncovered. An American woman’s progressing on her knees. She read something but not Elle’s book. No one will read Elle’s book. I walk the circular path, first the left side, then the right, casting petals to the north, east, south, and west (this intuitively). A diminutive prelate shoos me away. When he leaves, I return to the center. The organist, practicing, strikes up Phantom. Elle says she cannot hear him.Elle! I cry, I cannot see you.I had prayed Death spare you. Remember our meal among the termitesof Arcadia Street, that cottage of spiritswith its riddled beams and long veranda bordered by plantain trees, and the spiralyou traced for me on scrap-paper?I kept it for such a long time. The organist, of course, is playing Bach. A boy has scattered the petals I threw. Elle’s voice surrounds me. The quiet hills I lift mine eyes.

Cynthia Hogue

(“to label something something”)

There was an ancient well-site beneath the labyrinth I did not reach, the part underground, labeled (what else?) The Crypt. But labels always hide something about what they seem to define. They set the thing apart without disclosing why. Alive costs a pretty penny to see The Crypt now.

Cynthia Hogue

(“to walk the labyrinth is amazing”)

Everything looped, spiraled, circular (thought) But the labyrinth’s not a maze but a singular way to strike “the profoundest chord”across aspire Those who enter the labyrinth can leave (pilgrims sometime don’t) (Elle did not) Inside the largest circle (the labyrinth itself) splits into equal parts (demi-arcs or waves) No, silly, Elle whispers, petals If measured through the centre of the petals there should be two parts for each petal and one for the entry, but calculations from the measurements show that this is not so. The difference is about ½”. There is no way around this problem. We must seek a solution to the geometry of petals, the consequential mystery of Elle’s message: I was sick and am nothealed. I am not blindbut dead. I am not deadbut silenced. Alone, in love.

Cynthia Hogue

A Hymn to the Evening

Soon as the sun forsook the eastern main The pealing thunder shook the heav'nly plain; Majestic grandeur! From the zephyr's wing, Exhales the incense of the blooming spring. Soft purl the streams, the birds renew their notes, And through the air their mingled music floats. Through all the heav'ns what beauteous dies are spread! But the west glories in the deepest red: So may our breasts with ev'ry virtue glow, The living temples of our God below! Fill'd with the praise of him who gives the light, And draws the sable curtains of the night, Let placid slumbers sooth each weary mind, At morn to wake more heav'nly, more refin'd; So shall the labours of the day begin More pure, more guarded from the snares of sin. Night's leaden sceptre seals my drowsy eyes, Then cease, my song, till fair Aurora rise.

Phillis Wheatley

Flowers

This morning I was walking upstairs from the kitchen, carrying your beautiful flowers, the flowers you brought me last night, calla lilies and something else, I am not sure what to call them, white flowers, of course you had no way of knowing it has been years since I bought white flowers—but now you have and here they are again. I was carrying your flowers and a coffee cup and a soft yellow handbag and a book of poems by a Chinese poet, in which I had just read the words “come or go but don’t just stand there in the doorway,” as usual I was carrying too many things, you would have laughed if you saw me. It seemed especially important not to spill the coffee as I usually do, as I turned up the stairs, inside the whorl of the house as if I were walking up inside the lilies. I do not know how to hold all the beauty and sorrow of my life.

Cynthia Zarin

Home Life,Trees & Flowers

Summer

for Max Ritvo I Three weeks until summer and then—what? Midsummer’s gravity makes our heads spin each hour a gilt thread spool, winding through the second hand, gossamer fin de semaine,fin de siècle, fin slicing the water of the too-cold-to-breathe bay, molten silver, then receding as if we hadn’t seen it, sultan of so long, see you tomorrow. Dead man’s fingers, lady’s slippers, a seal who swims too close—too close for what? The needle swerves. Our element chooses us. Water fire, air, earth—the rosebush, Lazarus, hot to the touch, gold reticulate, is love’s bull’s-eye, attar rising from the rafters. II If I could make it stop I would. Was it the crocodile Hook feared, or was it time? The hour’s arrow never misses, the gnomon, glinting, cuts the Day-Glo sun to pieces. In the ultraviolet palace of the Mermaid King his girls wear scallop shells, one for each year on their turquoise tails. Even they have birthdays, why not you? Death, hold your ponies with one hand, and stay awhile. On my desk, the lion’s paw lamps scavenged from the winter beach, its poppy-colored shells like the lit scales of an enormous Trojan fish … teeth chattering, its metronome time bomb tsk tsk— when is giving up not giving in? III (child’s pose) When Alice pulled the stopper, did she get smaller, or did the world get larger? In the bath, your nose bleeds a bouquet of tissue roses, white stained red—adolescence is to overdo it, but really? Thirty stories up, our birds’-eye view is the hummingbird tattoo on your bare head, wings beating, too tiny and too big to see, your wire-thin profile drawn upright, bones daring the air, marionette running on the brain’s dark marrow, tungsten for the fireflies’ freeze tag. Due south, the Chrysler Building’s gauntlet holds a lit syringe. We do and do not change. Let me go from here to anywhere. IV That’s it for now. And so we turn the page your poems standing in for you, or—that’s not it, what’s left of you, mediating between what you’d call mind and body and I, by now biting my lip, call grief, the lines netting the enormous air like silver threads, the tails of Mr. Edwards’s spiders with which they sail from ledge to branch “as when the soul feels jarred by nervous thoughts and catch on air.” Pace. Your trousers worn to mouse fur dragging on the stoop, your hip prongs barely holding them aloft, the past a phaeton, its sunlit reins bucking at before and after, but there is no after. V Or is there? For once, when you rock back on the chair I don’t say don’t do that, forelegs lifting, hooves pawing the air— Every departure’s an elopement, the shy cat fiddling while Rome sizzles, spoon mirror flipping us upside down. Son of Helios, rainbow fairy lights blazing, when one light goes out they all go out. At the top of the dune, the thorny crowns of buried trees, their teeter-totter branches a candelabra for the spiders’ silvery halo of threads. What a terrible business it is, saying what you mean. Speak, sky, the horizon scored by talons.

Cynthia Zarin

Sorrow & Grieving

Japanese Poems

Between the bent boughs of the splayed sumac the silver owl rests his head. The perimeter left by your absence is long to walk in one day. The angel in her credenza of extreme beauty dogs swim the river I look for my heart by the lamp where the light is skitter in the wet black leaves

Cynthia Zarin

Sorrow & Grieving,Trees & Flowers

The Lucky Ones

Our labor realized in the crowns of marigolds, blue eyes of the hydrangeas, smell of lavender and late bloom of the hosta’s erect purple flower with its marvel of thick green leaves. In our twilight every year we trimmed back and the garden grew more lustrous and untamable as if the eternal woods and animals asleep at night in its beds were claiming it back. The water in the pool shimmered an icy Tuscan blue. When we arrived we swam until the stress from the grueling life in the city released our bodies. Later we sat under the umbrella and watched a garter snake slip into the water, careful not to startle its flight-or-fight response. Its barbed-wire coil. Comet of danger, serpent of the water, how long we had thwarted the venom of its secret lures and seductions. It swam by arching then releasing its slithery mercurial form. Through the lanky trees we heard the excited cries of the neighbor’s children—ours, the boy in our late youth, of our happiness and our struggles, the boy who made us whole and broken, was in his room perhaps dreaming of a girl and sleeping the long, tangled sleep of a teenager. It was a miracle, our ignorance. It was grace incarnate, how we never knew.

Jill Bialosky

Gardening,Animals

The Mothers

We loved them. We got up early to toast their bagels. Wrapped them in foil. We filled their water bottles and canteens. We washed and bleached their uniforms, the mud and dirt and blood washed clean of brutality. We marveled at their bodies, thighs thick as the trunk of a spindle pine, shoulders broad and able, the way their arms filled out. The milk they drank. At the plate we could make out their particular stance, though each wore the same uniform as if they were cadets training for war. If by chance one looked up at us and gave us a rise with his chin, or lifted a hand, we beamed. We had grown used to their grunts, mumbles, and refusal to form a full sentence. We made their beds and rifled through their pockets and smelled their shirts to see if they were clean. How else would we know them? We tried to not ask too many questions and not to overpraise. Sometimes they were ashamed of us; if we laughed too loud, if one of us talked too long to their friend, of our faces that had grown coarser.Can’t you put on lipstick? We let them roll their eyes, curse, and grumble at us after a game if they’d missed a play or lost. We knew to keep quiet; the car silent the entire ride home. What they were to us was inexplicable. Late at night, after they were home in their beds, we sat by the window and wondered when they would leave us and who they would become when they left the cocoon of our instruction. What kind of girl they liked. We sat in a group and drank our coffee and prayed that they’d get a hit. If they fumbled a ball or struck out we felt sour in the pit of our stomach. We paced. We couldn’t sit still or talk. Throughout summer we watched the trees behind the field grow fuller and more vibrant and each fall slowly lose their foliage— it was as if we wanted to hold on to every and each leaf.

Jill Bialosky

Parenthood,Sports & Outdoor Activities

Jane Austen

“A fine Sunday in Bath empties every house of its inhabitants, and all the world appears on such an occasion to walk about and tell their acquaintance what a charming day it is.” —northanger abbey I awoke from the tunnel to the fields of yellow rape, seventeenth-century buildings, and cobbled streets as she would have seen them. It was rainy; the rain came and went, came and went so that you could not escape its dampness. I understood the need for tea and the luxury of cremes and pastries and why the ladies longed for a strong shoulder to see them through the winter. The seagulls cried overhead, though there was no sea, only a muddy river from Bath to Bristol. The scavengers lived on the rooftops and if desperate enough would swoop down and take a sandwich from your hand. I secured my room at the Royal Bath Hotel. It was a hovel, really, with a carpet as old as the early century. Walking through the hotel, I sensed something lurid in the air, every eye upon me as if they knew I was a foreigner in a strange land. Over the bed, a burgundy bedspread dusty and faded as vintage wine, made me long for the bright color of red. In the next room, sleepless, I heard through thin walls the sounds of an un-tender coupling. I looked in the warped mirror and found myself ugly and when I turned from it, could not escape the vision. It lingered. The rain came and went, came and went. I took an umbrella and began my walk, hoping to come upon her quarters. I passed the Roman Baths, the statues not beautiful, but puckered and fossilled and the Pump Room where her protagonist, other self, doppelgänger, good, strong, loyal Catherine, longing for companionship, fell under the seduction of Isabella and her reprehensible brother. Even then her coming out seemed less magisterial, and Bath a representation of the emptiness and evils of society where a woman’s dowry might confine her forever, than a reprieve from country life. I gave up my search. Images were everywhere. And my mind had been made up. I perceived no romance in the wind, no comfort in the hard glances of strangers, girls with chipped nail polish, lads unkempt as if there were no hope of glory. The next morning I boarded the train to the modern world and it wasn’t until a sheet of blue slipped out like a love letter from its envelope of dark gray sky that I knew the journey had ended and, like Catherine, I was finally safe.

Jill Bialosky

Travels & Journeys,Reading & Books

Anne Frank Huis

Even now, after twice her lifetime of grief and anger in the very place, whoever comes to climb these narrow stairs, discovers how the bookcase slides aside, then walks through shadow into sunlit room, can never help but break her secrecy again. Just listening is a kind of guilt: the Westerkirk repeats itself outside, as if all time worked round towards her fear, and made each stroke die down on guarded streets. Imagine it— four years of whispering, and loneliness, and plotting, day by day, the Allied line in Europe with a yellow chalk. What hope she had for ordinary love and interest survives her here, displayed above the bed as pictures of her family; some actors; fashions chosen by Princess Elizabeth. And those who stoop to see them find not only patience missing its reward, but one enduring wish for chances like my own: to leave as simply as I do, and walk at ease up dusty tree-lined avenues, or watch a silent barge come clear of bridges settling their reflections in the blue canal.

Andrew Motion

War & Conflict

Passing On

By noon your breathing had changed from normal to shallow and panicky. That’s when the nurse saidNearly there now, in the gentle voice of a parent comforting a child used to failure, slipping her arms beneath your shoulders to hoist you up the pillows, then pressing a startling gauze pad under your jaw. Nearly there now. The whole world seemed to agree— as the late April sky deepened through the afternoon into high August blue, the vapour trails of two planes converged to sketch a cross on the brow of heaven. My brother Kit and I kept our backs turned to that except now and again. It was the room I wanted to see, because it contained your last example of everything: the broken metal window-catch that meant no fresh air; your toothbrush standing to attention in its plastic mug; the neutral pink walls flushed into definite pale red by sunlight rejoicing in the flowering cherry outside; your dressing-gown like a stranger within the wardrobe eavesdropping. That should have been a sign to warn us, but unhappiness made us brave, or do I mean cowardly, and Kit and I talked as if we were already quite certain you could no longer hear us, saying how easy you were to love, but how difficult always to satisfy and relax— how impossible to talk to, in fact, how expert with silence. You breathed more easily by the time we were done, although the thought you might have heard us after all, and our words be settling into your soft brain like stones onto the bed of a stream—that made our own breathing tighter. Then the nurse looked in: Nothing will changehere for a while boys, and we ducked out like criminals. I was ordering two large gins in the pub half a mile off when my mobile rang. It was the hospital. You had died. I put my drink down, then thought again and finished it. Five minutes later we were back at the door of your room wondering whether to knock. Would everything we said be written on your face, like the white cross on the heavens? Of course not. It was written in us, where no one could find it except ourselves. Your own face was wiped entirely clean— and so, with your particular worries solved, and your sadness, I could see more clearly than ever how like mine it was, and therefore how my head will eventually look on the pillow when the wall opens behind me, and I depart with my failings.

Andrew Motion

Death

A Moment of Reflection

28 June 1914 Although an assassin has tried and failed to blow him to pieces earlier this morning, Archduke Ferdinand has let it be known he will very soon complete his journey as planned along the quay in Sarajevo. For a moment, however, he has paused to recover his composure at the window of a private room in the Town Hall, after finding the blood of his aide-de-camp spattered over the manuscript of the speech he was previously unable to complete. And indeed, the prospect of an Austrian brewery in the distance is reassuring, likewise the handsome bulk of the barracks filled with several thousand soldiers of the fatherland. This is how those who survive today will remember him: a man thinking his thoughts until his wife has finished her duties— the Countess Chotek, with her pinched yet puddingy features, to whom he will whisper shortly, ‘Sophie, live for our children’, although she will not hear. As for his own memories: the Head of the local Tourist Bureau has now arrived and taken it upon himself to suggest the Archduke might be happy to recall the fact that only last week he bagged his three thousandth stag. Was this, the Head dares to enquire, with the double-barrelled Mannlicher made for him especially— the same weapon he used to dispatch two thousand one hundred and fifty game birds in a single day, and sixty boars in a hunt led by the Kaiser? These are remarkable achievements the Head continues, on the same level as the improvement the Archduke has suggested in the hunting of hare, by which the beaters, forming themselves into a wedge-shape, squeeze those notoriously elusive creatures towards a particular spot where he can exceed the tally of every other gun. In the silence that follows it is not obvious whether the Archduke has heard the question. He has heard it. He is more interested, however, in what these questions bring to mind: an almost infinite number of woodcock, pigeon, quail, pheasant and partridge, wild boars bristling flank to flank, mallard and teal and geese dangling from the antlers of stags, layer and layer of rabbits and other creatures that are mere vermin— a haul that he predicts will increase once the business of today has been completed.

Andrew Motion

Sports & Outdoor Activities,History & Politics

Losses

General Petraeus, when the death-count of American troops in Iraq was close to 3,800, said ‘The truth is you never do get used to losses. There is a kind of bad news vessel with holes, and sometimes it drains, then it fills up, then it empties again’— leaving, in this particular case, the residue of a long story involving one soldier who, in the course of his street patrol, tweaked the antenna on the TV in a bar hoping for baseball, but found instead the snowy picture of men in a circle talking, all apparently angry and perhaps Jihadists. They turned out to be reciting poetry. ‘My life’, said the interpreter, ‘is like a bag of flour thrown through wind into empty thorn bushes’. Then ‘No, no’, he said, correcting himself. ‘Like dust in the wind. Like a hopeless man.’

Andrew Motion

Poetry & Poets,War & Conflict

Laying the Fire

I am downstairs early looking for something to do when I find my father on his knees at the fireplace in the sitting-room sweeping ash from around and beneath the grate with the soft brown hand-brush he keeps especially for this. Has he been here all night waiting to catch me out? So far as I can tell I have done nothing wrong. I think so again when he calls my name without turning round; he must have seen me with the eyes in the back of his head. ‘What’s the matter old boy? Couldn’t sleep?’ His voice is kinder than I expect, as though he knows we have in common a sadness I do not feel yet. I skate towards him in my grey socks over the polished boards of the sitting-room, negotiating the rugs with their patterns of almost-dragons. He still does not turn round. He is concentrating now on arranging a stack of kindling on crumpled newspaper in the fire basket, pressing small lumps of coal carefully between the sticks as though he is decorating a cake. Then he spurts a match, and chucks it on any old how, before spreading a fresh sheet of newspaper over the whole mouth of the fireplace to make the flames take hold. Why this fresh sheet does not also catch alight I cannot think. The flames are very close. I can see them and hear them raging through yesterday’s cartoon of President Kennedy and President Khrushchev racing towards each other in their motorcars both shouting I’m sure he’s going to stop first! But there’s no need to worry. Everything is just as my father wants it to be, and in due time, when the fire is burning nicely, he whisks the newspaper clear, folds it under his arm, and picks up the dustpan with the debris of the night before. Has he just spoken to me again? I do not think so. I do not know. I was thinking how neat he is. I was asking myself: will I be like this? How will I manage? After that he chooses a log from the wicker wood-basket to balance on the coals, and admires his handiwork. When the time comes to follow him, glide, glide over the polished floor, he leads the way to the dustbins. A breath of ash pours continuously over his shoulder from the pan he carries before him like a man bearing a gift in a picture of a man bearing a gift.

Andrew Motion

Indoor Activities,Home Life

In My Little Room

In my little room, the emperor removes his robe and we chat about the mechanics of winning an election. “I came, I saw, I conquered,” he says. When the moon comes out above the dilapidated warehouse, he asks me the profundity of going to the moon and back again to the same ghetto room. If it pleases your majesty, I say, the gods make the ghettos. “I am King,” says the emperor, “I shall have no gods.” And he shakes, nearly spilling his oolong tea. When he has calmed down enough, I drop two lumps of sugar into his cup. He marvels at my calculus book and integration theory and digital watch. “Had I one of those,” he says, “I would have timed my crossing of the Rubicon at eighteen, and what barbarian woman would not have given herself for that!” He yawns imperially over my utensils, books, and cot and asks me to cross the Rubicon with him. And I nod while doing tax equations for his majesty because the hour is late. He is delighted with the hot chocolate that I make on a hot plate and, after making a rough estimate of the roaches on the wall, he sleeps on my cot as any sovereign would. I rattle my typewriter like a machine- gun all night, partly because it is my habit, and partly to protect my friend, the emperor. For though he has crossed the Rubicon with the bravest of men, he has yet to sleep a single night in the ghetto.

Koon Woon

Money & Economics

Let the Chinese Mafia Sleep Tonight

Let them sleep and dream the dream of lobsters; I am likewise at peace in my little cottage trying to become Mr. Five Willows. I figure a crabapple is useful to no one but itself, but my safety depends on having no place where death can enter and not acting on every rustling of the smallest branch. My abode is at the bank of a river, a river that comes out of the marsh where the river merchant’s wife has pined for her departed husband for the last 300 years. Beetles fight on a dung heap; that’s the essence of war. With axes and arrows, a superior force approaches my door; let them knock lightly, so as not to disturb the bird in the cage, which I am coaxing to sing, while the candle burns to illumine the midnight lore whose frayed texts drive me to the brink of insanity. Let them all sleep and dream that the God of War has brought them riches in the shape of gold nuggets only to find in the morning an empty store. You can be in my dreams if I can be in yours. In any case, let the Chinese mafia sleep tonight so I can be at peace and in the morning, open wide my door.

Koon Woon

Goldfish

The goldfish in my bowl turns into a carp each night. Swimming in circles in the day, regal, admired by emperors, but each night, while I sleep, it turns into silver, a dagger cold and sharp, couched at one spot, enough to frighten cats. The rest of the furniture squats in the cold and dark, complains of being a lone man’s furnishings, and plots a revolt. I can hear myself snore, but not their infidelity. Sometimes I wake with a start; silently they move back into their places. I have been unpopular with myself, pacing in my small, square room. But my uncle said, “Even in a palace, you can but sleep in one room.” With this I become humble as a simple preacher, saying, “I have no powers; they emanate from God.” With this I sleep soundly, Fish or no fish, dagger or no dagger. When I wake, my fish is gold, it pleases me with a trail of bubbles. My furniture has been loyal all night, waiting to provide me comfort. There was no conspiracy against a poor man. With this I consider myself king.

Koon Woon

Pets

How to Cook Rice

Measure two handfuls for a prosperous man. Place in pot and wash by rubbing palms together as if you can’t quite get yourself to pray, or by squeezing it in one fist. Wash several times to get rid of the cloudy water; when you are too high in Heaven, looking down at the clouds, you can’t see what’s precious below. Rinse with cold water and keep enough so that it will barely cover your hand placed on the rice. Don’t use hot water, there are metallic diseases colliding in it. This method of measuring water will work regardless of the size of the pot; if the pot is large, use both hands palms down as if to pat your own belly. Now place on high heat without cover and cook until the water has been boiled away except in craters resembling those of the moon, important in ancient times for growing rice. Now place lid on top and reduce heat to medium, go read your newspaper until you get to the comics, then come back and turn it down to low. The heat has been gradually traveling from the outside to the inside of the rice, giving it texture; a similar thing happens with people, I suppose. Go back to your newspaper, finish the comics, and read the financial page. Now the rice is done, but before you eat, consider the peasant who arcs in leech-infested paddies and who carefully plants the rice seedlings one by one; on this night, you are eating better than he. If you still don’t know how to cook rice, buy a Japanese automatic rice cooker; it makes perfect rice every time!

Koon Woon

Eating & Drinking,Class

Kamakura

I don’t recall when I first understood why you stiffen at the roar of low flying jets— Did you tell me, Mother, or did I just know? When you refused to show me the caves like eyes in the hills behind Bah-chan’s house— Did I only dream it, how when the sirens began the trains stopped dead in their tracks, unleashing a stream of thousands to rush blind and headlong toward those sheltering hills— The damp press of strange bodies in darkness rank with the stench of war’s leavings, only imagine a young girl’s cries drowned in the tumult, urgent groping of unseen hands— the bombs raining d0wn on Yokohama Harbor all through the night, hothouse blooms crackling in a seething sky, then hissing into a boiling sea— Was it a millennium that passed before the sirens ceased their wailing, only to be taken up again by the dogs and the dying? But you talk of none of this today. We walk slowly, saying little, as if less said will keep the heat at bay. The air is wet, heavy with summer smells carried aloft on the hypnotic drone of cicadas. You show me where as a girl you played in other summers, catching kabuto beetles and dragonflies in bamboo cages. What must go through you when we pass them at a distance, those black maws yawning out of the hillside, exhaling the unspeakable?

Mari L'Esperance

War & Conflict

Returning to Earth

When Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s defeat over national radio, his divinity was broken, fell away and settled in fine gold dust at his feet. His people understood the gravity of the occasion—a god does not speak over the airwaves with a human voice, ordinary and flecked with static. A god does not speak in the common voice of the earthbound, thick with shame. At the station, my mother, a schoolgirl, looked on as men in uniform lurched from the platform into the path of incoming trains, their slack bodies landing on the tracks without sound.

Mari L'Esperance

Disappointment & Failure,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Finding My Mother

Near dusk I find her in a newly mown field, lying still and face down in the coarse stubble. Her arms are splayed out on either side of her body, palms open and turned upward like two lilies, the slender fingers gently curling, as if holding onto something. Her legs are drawn up underneath her, as if she fell asleep there on her knees, perhaps while praying, perhaps intoxicated by the sweet liquid odor of sheared grass. Her small ankles, white and unscarred, are crossed one on top of the other, as if arranged so in ritual fashion. Her feet are bare. I cannot see her face, turned toward the ground as it is, but her long black hair is lovelier than I remember it, spilling across her back and down onto the felled stalks like a pour of glossy tar. Her flesh is smooth and cool, slightly resistant to my touch. I begin to look around me for something with which to carry her back—carry her back, I hear myself say, as if the words spoken aloud, even in a dream, will somehow make it possible. I am alone in a field, at dusk, the light leaving the way it has to, leaking away the way it has to behind a ridge of swiftly blackening hills. I lie down on the ground beside my mother under falling darkness and draw my coat over our bodies. We sleep there like that.

Mari L'Esperance

The Mind,Friends & Enemies

The Book of Ash

Near the end of my searching I came to a door. Entering, I found the story of her life, laid out like a cake on an ebony table, as if waiting there for the lost bride—pages flat and placid, blank as a lake asleep in winter. Hoping for answers, some knowledge of her, perhaps—I’m not sure what— I placed my palm upon the surface. It sank through and disappeared beneath a cloud of snowy powder.

Mari L'Esperance

Stepping Crow

Stepping crow. Moon at half mast. Dawn horse, horse, blanket and mule. The fool knows something you don’t. Stepping crow. Both feet in the boat. Books stacked up, and nowhere to store ’em. Decorum is spontaneous order. Stepping crow. Gone north of the Border. Magic in motion and magic at rest. Only divest, no need to announce it. Stepping crow. Locked in from the outset. Feet in the boat and we’re already rowing. I don’t like thinking, I like already knowing. Stepping crow. Take hammer to coin. Anvil to anvil, and figure to ground. Hateful, the sound of recriminations. Stepping crow. Uncountable Haitians. Hospital, barracks; Harvard and prison. Give the rhythm what it wants. And the people. Stepping crow. Horace primeval. Wrist-deep in sheep’s guts, breaking the set. But memory is the better poet. Stepping crow. Clogged is the conduit. Explain and explain, you try and get on with it: You just give ’em something to fight with. Stepping crow. Christian Enlightenment. A bubble, sluggish, in a carpenter’s level. But bad’s not the Devil. Bad can be good. Stepping crow. They misunderstood. Nobody rightly prefers a surprise. The wise like looking forward. Stepping crow. Don’t try to ignore it: The strain in the closet and school letting out. I doubt it’ll ever be casual. Stepping crow. I just happen to know. I don’t happen to trust the self I’m serving. This pleasure’s a lie, unless it’s permanent. Stepping crow. And thirteenth tercet. The place where the Wall tunnels into the sea. It’s not not me you’re aiming at. Stepping crow. Gotta add and subtract. I see now we have no choice but to leave The brutal honesty to the brutes. Stepping crow. I know it’s no use. The Sport of Kings and the Book of Love. They’re not above irregular perquisites. Stepping crow. Can never be sure of it. Blood orange, orange; persimmon and onion; And women are young men too … Stepping crow. Oh, say it ain’t so. A fist full of leaves and another of arrows: I’m setting the trap where the passage narrows.

Anthony Madrid

Maxims 1

The ampalaya, no matter how bitter, Is sweet to those who like it. The hardest person to awaken Is a lover feigning sleep. The basketball held underwater Wants violently to come up. Easily split asunder is that Which never was united. The water is cold at first, for it Takes time to heat the pipe. The kids run away from home, only to Sit through endless classes. You take the battery out of a watch, You turn it into a liar. You strip the sheet off a drinking straw And stab it into the scalp. The basketball held underwater Wants violently to come up. The one who reads the sutra is not The one who knows what is said. My life is as unchanging As the surface of the moon. And I give you the same reason: I have no atmosphere. El hacha ya está puesta A la raíz de los árboles, Y todo árbol que no produzca buen fruto Is hewn down and cast into the fire. You take a rose by the throat. How much blood comes out your hand Is how recklessly you took hold, Is how shamelessly. Who wants to be great or holy Has no lust for peace. For peace is a thread only spools on a thing That’s good for nothing else.

Anthony Madrid

Philosophy

Maxims 2

Has it coming, the pest. Gets irritated, the stuck up. Gets approval, the dimpled. Gets cold, the talk. The sidewalk separates from the curb. Frogs peek out there. There are passages there, channels. Gardens, orderly, get respect; no one hurts them. Only animals, insects, beings without comprehension. A house on a corner lot, good to look up at from the corner, compels. Branches of live oak reach across the way. There must be acorns, black, green, green with earth yellow. The wind cools the walker. There is nothing to stop the wind up. It finds every walker in its path, cools him, cools her. Director must direct and make decisions. Buildings on the edges of developments look out over edges. The other world never nearer. Between towns, roads are lonely. Lonely, too, who cannot bear being lied to. The angry become less intelligent. Do and undo, the day is long enough. Liars do not think they are lying; that’s how they do it. The nut gives way to the teeth; the teeth crush it. Smashed frog in the parking lot turns colors, becomes flat, extends its fingers, does not come back to life when it rains, yet disappears. Wonderfully, beliefs antedate evidence. Wonderfully, people seldom believe a thing unless they already wanted it. Many cry when signaled, not pursuant to cognition. What is offered as proof is suspect. Summer makes strategic. Strategy is a pleasure. Whatever people say, to obey, of itself, does not hurt. Stray feline must lie in shade, under tree, distrust her well-wisher first. Grackle must shelter under car, direct its thirsty attention to the water there. Cut of meat must lose its color on the fire, exchange it, be seasoned. To be accused, rightly or wrongly, feels the same. Old man must speak against his own best interests, for he cannot swallow his complaints, not all of them. Glassware touching glassware gets chipped, broken into triangles, in the move. Vital sheet of paper must sometimes be lost. Papers are many. The thing learned at length, the memorized rigmarole, must fade from memory, in time. The kind word given unexpectedly is good. The hearer must be relieved. The thought that nothing can ever go right again must depart for a time. The light must change. The waiting person wait longer. The walker must step out of the summer heat wet to the hair roots, the shirt wet. The sky is the same but seems grander where no buildings are. Colored clouds are remarked; white ones less. One’s looks, one’s skin color matter less if money has its feet in it. The hated one, the cheated many, are the poor. Lean grackle must stalk a branch, mouth open like scissors. Striped raptors, wings in fixed positions, must kite, must circle. Beautiful Soul wants a world in which he or she has no place. Godspeed, sweet intent. Love will creep where it cannot go. Stick-figure reptiles, black, must cross the sidewalk by the pool, dartingly. They weigh one paperclip. Beauty enslaves on contact. Better have it than hear of it. Sweet and cunningly seldom meet. In dragging a bamboo tree, one must snatch it by the eyebrows. The rusty sword and the empty purse plead performance of covenants. Even Graceful must sometimes, in putting on her coat, sweep everything off the table and into the floor. If many strike on an anvil, they must in meter. He, only, pursues honesty honestly, who has destroyed any possibility of good repute. Whether you boil snow or pound it, you can only have water out of it. Cities must have boulevards, vast channels not possible or dangerous to cross. There must be holes in the decomposing concrete, paint invisible at sunrise and sunset, guardrails, median strips, shrines. The student must wait to do the assignment, wait beyond the advisable point, stay up against a deadline. Must turn in a paper never read, not by the writer, not by the friend. Must muster, thunder, one or two times in a life, a sound to frighten the unfrightenable. Must pour, from the sky, rarely, chips and balls and coins and smooth clusters of partly white, partly clear ice. Some believe, helplessly. Others, less. Some count, tabulate, helplessly. They check calendars. They can’t shake it. Winter travels, hides, shelters. It pursues the lightly dressed into buildings during summer. It lies in wait in restaurants, miscalculates. The pill and its coating, obnoxious to the child, are welcome enough to the grown swallower. First deserve and then desire. Blow first and sip afterwards. The wise let it go a great deal. Sorrow is wondrously clinging; clouds glide. The friend who comes apologizing and promising must be received. He is sorry and not sorry and sorry. Courage comes up. Sacrifice, oftener. The disintegrating parking lot is witness to the exchange. Drugs are traded, caresses. The dog in its heavy coat must lie, half dead, on the porch. Eyes like a bear, tongue like a lion, lethargy. One must consciously retire. Comes off a train none but was on it. The heirloom ring, wrong-gendered, trash, gets rescued. When the spirit of praising is upon him, a man will judge linen by candlelight. Burr oaks yield fewer fruit, but bigger, shag-capped. One must consciously retire. A helve must fit its ax head. Most laugh before understanding. Fame is best.

Anthony Madrid

Philosophy

Through the Looking Glass

Mirror, mirror on the wall show me in succession all my faces, that I may view and choose which I would like as true. Teach me skill to disguise what’s not pleasing to the eyes, with faith, that life obeys the rules, in man or God or football pools. Always keep me well content to decorate attitude and event so that somehow behind the scene I may believe my actions mean; that one can exercise control in playing out a chosen role; rub clouded glass and then, at will, write self on it again. But if, in some unlucky glance, I should glimpse naked circumstance in all its nowhere-going-to, may you crack before I do.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Literary Historian

I remember them saying, these poems, their something for someone at sometime for me too, at one time. That got in the way; so I sent them away back into history— just temporarily. They won’t come back now. I can’t remember how the words spoke, or what they said, except: We are all dead

Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Poetry & Poets

The Hyphen

For the centenary of Girton College i hyphen (Gk. together, in one) a short dash or line used to connect two words together as a compound 1869- 1969 to connect Chapel Wing and Library. But also: to divide for etymological or other purpose. A gap in stone makes actual the paradox of a centenary. “It was a hyphen connecting different races.” and to the library “a bridge for migrations”. In search of an etymology for compound lives, this architecture, an exercise in paleography (Victorian Gothic) asserts the same intention. Portraits busts and books the “context in which we occur” that teaches us our meaning, ignore the lacunae of a century in their state- ment of our need to hyphenate.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Language & Linguistics

Not Pastoral Enough

homage to William Empson It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, Landing every poem like a fish. Unhuman forms must not assert their roles. Glittering scales require the deadly tolls Of net and knife. Scales fall to relish. It is the sense, it is the sense, controls. Yet languages are apt to miss on souls If reason only guts them. Applying the wish, Unhuman forms must not assert their roles, Ignores the fact that poems have two poles That must be opposite. Hard then to finish It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, Without a sense of lining up for doles From other kitchens that give us the garnish: Unhuman forms must not assert their roles. And this (forgive me) is like carrying coals To Sheffield. Irrelevance betrays a formal anguish. It is the sense, it is the sense, controls, “Unhuman forms must not assert their roles”.

Veronica Forrest-Thomson

Poetry & Poets

The Guardians

All day we packed boxes. We read birth and death certificates. The yellowed telegrams that announced our births, the cards of congratulations and condolences, the deeds and debts, love letters, valentines with a heart ripped out, the obituaries. We opened the divorce decree, a terrible document of division and subtraction. We leafed through scrapbooks: corsages, matchbooks, programs to the ballet, racetrack, theatre—joy and frivolity parceled in one volume— painstakingly arranged, preserved and pasted with crusted glue. We sat in the room in which the beloved had departed. We remembered her yellow hair and her mind free of paradox. We sat together side by side on the empty floor and did not speak. There were no words between us other than the essence of the words from the correspondences, our inheritance—plain speak, bereft of poetry.

Jill Bialosky

Homecoming

At the high school football game, the boys stroke their new muscles, the girls sweeten their lips with gloss that smells of bubblegum, candy cane, or cinnamon. In pleated cheerleader skirts they walk home with each other, practicing yells, their long bare legs forming in the dark. Under the arched field lights a girl in a velvet prom dress stands near the chainlink, a cone of roses held between her breasts. Her lanky father, in a corduroy suit, leans against the fence. While they talk, she slips a foot in and out of a new white pump, fingers the weave of her French braid, the glittering earrings. They could be a couple on their first date, she, a little shy, he, trying to impress her with his casual stance. This is the moment when she learns what she will love: a warm night, the feel of nylon between her thighs, the fine hairs on her arms lifting when a breeze sifts in through the bleachers, cars igniting their engines, a man bending over her, smelling the flowers pressed against her neck.

Dorianne Laux

What the Oracle Said

You will leave your home: nothing will hold you. You will wear dresses of gold; skins of silver, copper, and bronze. The sky above you will shift in meaning each time you think you understand. You will spend a lifetime chipping away layers of flesh. The shadow of your scales will always remain. You will be marked by sulphur and salt. You will bathe endlessly in clear streams and fail to rid yourself of that scent. Your feet will never be your own. Stone will be your path. Storms will follow in your wake, destroying all those who take you in. You will desert your children kill your lovers and devour their flesh. You will love no one but the wind and ache of your bones. Neither will love you in return. With age, your hair will grow matted and dull, your skin will gape and hang in long folds, your eyes will cease to shine. But nothing will be enough. The sea will never take you back.

Shara McCallum

Living,Coming of Age,Disappointment & Failure,Life Choices,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Social Commentaries

The Hot Dog Factory (1937)

Of course now children take it for granted but once we watched boxes on a conveyor belt, sliding by, magically filled and closed, packed and wrapped. We couldn't get enough of it, running alongside the machine. In kindergarten Miss Haynes walked our class down Stuyvesant Avenue, then up Prospect Street to the hot dog factory. Only the girls got to go as the boys were too wild. We stood in line, wiggling with excitement as the man talked about how they made hot dogs, then he handed us one, and Jan dropped hers, so I broke mine in half. This was the happiest day of our lives, children whose mothers didn't drive, and had nowhere to go but school and home, to be taken to that street to watch the glittering steel and shining rubber belts moving, moving meats, readymade. I wish I could talk with Jan, recalling the miracle and thrill of the hot dog factory, when she was alive, before it all stopped— bright lights, glistening motors, spinning wheels.

Grace Cavalieri

The Significance of Location

The cat has the chance to make the sunlight Beautiful, to stop it and turn it immediately Into black fur and motion, to take it As shifting branch and brown feather Into the back of the brain forever. The cardinal has flown the sun in red Through the oak forest to the lawn. The finch has caught it in yellow And taken it among the thorns. By the spider It has been bound tightly and tied In an eight-stringed knot. The sun has been intercepted in its one Basic state and changed to a million varieties Of green stick and tassel. It has been broken Into pieces by glass rings, by mist Over the river. Its heat Has been given the board fence for body, The desert rock for fact. On winter hills It has been laid down in white like a martyr. This afternoon we could spread gold scarves Clear across the field and say in truth, "Sun you are silk." Imagine the sun totally isolated, Its brightness shot in continuous streaks straight out Into the black, never arrested, Never once being made light. Someone should take note Of how the earth has saved the sun from oblivion.

Pattiann Rogers

Relationships,Pets,Nature,Animals,Stars, Planets, Heavens

History Textbook, America

I'd search for Philippines in History class. The index named one page, moved on to Pierce.The Making of America marched past my enigmatic father's place of birth. The week he died some man we didn't know called up. This is his brother, one more shock,phoning for him. "He died three days ago." The leaden black receiver did not talk. My uncle never gave his name or town, we never heard from him. Was it a dream? The earpiece roar dissolved to crackling sounds, a dial tone erased the Philippines. And yet my world grows huge with maps, crisscrossed, my History alive with all I've lost.

JoAnn Balingit

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

Proem

Not, in the saying of you, are you said. Baffled and like a root stopped by a stone you turn back questioning the tree you feed. But what the leaves hear is not what the roots ask. Inexhaustibly, being at one time what was to be said and at another time what has been said the saying of you remains the living of you never to be said. But, enduring, you change with the change that changes and yet are not of the changing of any of you. Ever yourself, you are always about to be yourself in something else ever with me.

Martin Carter

Life Choices,Language & Linguistics

Haiti

For the earth has spoken, to you, her magma Creole. Full-throated syllables, up- rising from deep down, an honest elocution — rudimentary sound: guttural nouns, forthright, strong, the rumbled conviction of verbs unfettered by reticence as the first poetry of creation. A secret has passed between you so wonderfully terrible, it laid your cities prostrate, raptured your citizenry. Now, we look to your remnant courtesy cable TV and garble theories thinking ourselves saved. Only the wise among us pin our ears to the ground, listening in hope of catching even a half syllable of the language forming like a new world on your tongue.

Jennifer Rahim

Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity

ain't that easy

when i look at my life i feel like bursting into tears marriage and mental illness vintage washed michael jackson graphic spiritual disco grieving ritual sell your body to your horse-eyed past little fictions somebody got to sing and somebody got to play the squaw last time i saw him last time i saw my honey buried your dead lack of afro exit wounds cut off whole limbs of generational desire the death of cleopatra hell or high water get some fucking love in your life girl ghost chant you’ve got to die if you want to live amidst and against the things we are
 rubbed into the cloth wrapped around their faces now white men are black men too the ways we can’t say no i call you queen not as a term of endearment but as a reminder our histories meet on the inside we all be black moses slave for the river same river twice sometimes have to emphasize the brown part hey there beautiful brown girl we don't usually change until things are so painful that we must

erica lewis

Living,Life Choices,Separation & Divorce,Sorrow & Grieving,Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Arts & Sciences,Music,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity

Between The Griffon and Met Life

I am totally enamored of every person passing in this unseasonably warm mid-March evening near 39th and Park The young women, of course, with their lives in front of them, and the young men too, just standing here as I am, checking it out, hanging out, talking But everyone here, every age, every type, is beautiful, the moment, somehow, the weather, has made them all real and for this moment, before it turns to night, they're all fantastic The light is such that I can see everyone and can imagine what they are imagining for the night ahead, what dreams, what fulfilled fantasies of togetherness And the two guys who were here a moment ago, paused, have moved on, and the light is deepening, every moment or so, actually falling into a deeper stupor, which is night But if I look south I still see the pink flush of desire there at the bottom, the southness of all our lives, and it's okay that it's darkening here, people accept it as they concoct plans for tonight, Thursday Soon I'll have to go too, lose this spot, this moment, but some we've met and some experience we had somewhere else is becoming ever more important

Vincent Katz

Living,Time & Brevity,Love,Infatuation & Crushes,Nature,Spring,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

Cold Sore Lip Red Coat

What if I ate too much food there being Not enough money immigranty And save all the ketchup packets George Carlin record on the record player saying how many ways you can curse and they are all funny (small brown bird with a black neck and a beak full of fluff for a nest) The old joke: “How many feet do you have?” Instead of “How tall are you?” This looks like joy a joke who looked at you and laughed Look at the map upside down so that south Is north and north is south it’s the other way around because it’s the commonly agreed to thing (visual language of the colonizer) or snowful awful tearful wishful

Hoa Nguyen

Living,Youth,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Relationships,Home Life,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Money & Economics

Imaginary Book

Imaginary book on Imaginary paper in Imaginary hands Imaginary dance on Imaginary floor in Imaginary lands Imaginary phone and Imaginary car Imaginary raising of Imaginary bar Imaginary kid Imaginary tree Imaginary you makes Imaginary three Imaginary soul Imaginary death Imaginary line Imaginary breath Imaginary neighbors with Imaginary friends Imaginary road with Imaginary bends Imaginary pot Imaginary beer Imaginary death Imaginary fear Imaginary love that stops you dead Imaginary bullet of Imaginary lead Imaginary day and Imaginary night Imaginary wind Imaginary kite Imaginary heat and Imaginary ice Imaginary toppings on Imaginary slice Imaginary Emerson meet Imaginary Poe Imaginary poet Imaginary crow 1-9-16

Julien Poirier

Living,The Mind,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books

The Lamp of Mutual Aid

Many nights while walking home after work, from downtown to an apartment below a market, I’d think of Alfred Espinas: “We do not get together to die, but to live and to improve life.” Sudden changes of weather and contagious diseases nearly broke the spirits of many friends that winter, but charmingly we made habits of dancing and sharing meals in our cramped rooms. Our landlords were thieves and our bosses were pessimists, yet we dreamed of a new phase of civilization, one of kindness and goodwill. “We need communes,” Oscar exclaimed. Silvia argued, “But islands are corpses, let’s think instead of syndicates.” Mondays we’d return to dirty dishes, copy machines, and dull knives, and we spent the next three centuries doing what we were paid to do.

Joshua Edwards

Activities,Jobs & Working,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Money & Economics

After Noise

and who are you now in this different blue space without pain remarking on chemtrails and snowmelt, misreading the “sea” whose letters cease to arrive remain transfixed in midflight turbulent coasts aloft as a principle of life-- count invisible clams under nameless sands cut apostrophes into the air announcements send far-flung greetings to strangers for days keep the magma enigma at bay daily joys effaced vaporous pale generous smoke rising so cling to the dark hand inside you its basalt fingers, rounded

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals

Relationships

Family, lover, colleague. Notions, veneers, nation. Teeth of no health insurance. A boom can be a microphone affixed to a pole and not an explosion. Shadows, we sweep at them constantly and on the table is chocolate, newspapers, commentary, and vastly different pay stubs. I lean in to you and wish to love you perfectly. Suffer, tumble, strive, the right shoes, and vacation. At the table, conference and always pretty, the fixed. Shimmer of repulsion or fairy tale of cleavage. I count pleasures like cream, sipping, speaking. I like fashion as well. All the hymns you and I know as his headboard knocks against our wall, the slap when he coughs, our neighbor. The most racist of all positions at the staff meeting is to tell us about your shocking talent if there is a most. A prayer dangles over this bitter. Looping coves of sympathy. How to history. My flat speech in variously adopted professional tones. Merger of you and me and take whatever you want. Her beautiful poetry face. His intellectual arms. I worry about the ferocious place in you while framing it. A person as diversion, a thing beautiful, a small green-blue egg in a spring next and now the field is gendered. Have you seen the moment of last light? It means something to me. Assuming my gender qualifies your hearing and therefore my speech, you overlap words with mine in what appears to be a neutral manner but your speech acts as solvent. Down the hall, high heels as metronome, watched. Out of our bodies comes speech as clouds, flag, windsock, bandage. Dear— You could make more money if you wanted to. Such as a day of beauty, persuasive levels of caring. For example: doing both brow and lip. Are you spending or quiet? Let’s go to lunch would mean exchanging speech and then carrying warm food in plastic bags. Coherence as my mother sleeps after a complicated surgery. And if I were, would you be generous with me as well? Race ran the organization which one. We socialize in this real estate of gerrymandered potlucks. I think there exists silence as a legitimate response and I will say that now. The caring for our souls by old black women in the narrative of a college president, passing. Excuse me for not knowing passing. You remember but only after the spine is broken. Something in chemistry called suspension equals your ghosts caught in my air. The Bronx is horning was a line they wrote where I was educated, teaching. Response to migration: the pullback of the form remains as a hum, a tongue.

Jill Magi

Lifting My Daughter

As I leave for work she holds out her arms, and I bend to lift her . . . always heavier than I remember, because in my mind she is still that seedling bough I used to cradle in one elbow. Her hug is honest, fierce, forgiving. I think of Oregon's coastal pines, wind-bent even on quiet days; they've grown in ways the Pacific breeze has blown them all their lives. And how will my daughter grow? Last night, I dreamed of a mid-ocean gale, a howl among writhing waterspouts; I don't know what it meant, or if it's still distant, or already here. I know only how I hug my daughter, my arms grown taut with the thought of that wind.

Joseph Hutchison