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Diorama

The Blue Hole Summer Fair, set up and spread out like a butterfly pinned down on paper. Twin bright-lit wings, identically shaped (and fenced) and sized. This side holds the waffled-tin (and oven-hot) huts of the Home Arts Booths and Contests, the hay-sweet display-cages for the 4-H livestock, the streamer-hung display-stages where girl-beauties twirl and try for queen. There's rosette-luster (and -lusting), and the marching band wearing a hole in Sousa. And (pursed) gaggles and clutches of feather-white neighbor-women, eyeballing us like we're pig's feet in a jar. I wonder does her boy talk Chinese? You ever seen that kind of black-headed? Blue shine all in it like a crow.

Atsuro Riley

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

Heat Wave

Sheets entangle him Naked on his bed Like a toppled mast Slack sails bedeck At sea, no ballast For that even keel He cannot keep— No steering wheel As he falls asleep

Samuel Menashe

The Body,Nature

The Stars Are

The stars are Although I do not sing About them— The sky and the trees Are indifferent To whom they please The rose is unmoved By my nose And the garland in your hair Although your eyes be lakes, dies Why sigh for a star Better bay at the moon Better bay at the moon . . . Oh moon, moon, moon

Samuel Menashe

Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire

Incubus

The chain uncouples, and his jacket hangs on the peg over hers, and he's inside. She stalls in the kitchen, putting the kettle on, buys herself a minute looking for two matching cups for the lime-flower tea, not really lime but linden, heart-shaped leaves and sticky flowers that smell of antifreeze. She talks a wall around her, twists the string tighter around the tea bag in her spoon. But every conversation has to break somewhere, and at the far end of the sofa he sits, warming his hands around the cup he hasn't tasted yet, and listens on with such an exasperating show of patience it's almost a relief to hear him ask it: If you're not using your body right now maybe you'd let me borrow it for a while?

Craig Arnold

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Life Choices,Marriage & Companionship,Love,Activities,Indoor Activities,Relationships,Men & Women,Social Commentaries

Aperture

Open the window and you want to fly out, though you never actually do— I think I see you, still there on the ledge, where I've left you. How pulled-awake and flung can one life be? Again I thought, It will end. Again I promised and clung. I learned there that to cling was in my nature. I think I see you, though you flash quickly through the shutter. I think I hear you, though I sleep. Remember this as a bolero, a finite flaring— both the tulip tree burning in full bloom and the weeping silver birch.

Jennifer Tonge

Love,Break-ups & Vexed Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Nature,Trees & Flowers

On Munsungun

My father in the aluminum stern, cursing another fouled blood-knot: all the shits and fucks as integral to the art of fishing as the bait-fish, little silver smelts I sewed like a manual transmission, the same inbred order and precision needling the leader through the ass, out the mouth, through the jaw, out the nostril and back down—suffering as my father suffered the bastard no-see-ums and the guttering Johnson the obligatory dud, orange egg-pearls ballooning from its bust underside, hundreds of duds like every shit-luck setback that drove us on, fed by the huge image of everything we'd never caught, moving in joint blindness under Munsungun. And whatever it was it was the fight that delivered us—a tension like a sequestered muscle, the line spooling, unspooling, the holy-shit- litany pulled from our awed mouths contracting with distance until a whole silence surfaced, the viscid, slapping body absorbing and reflecting raw light like the bit of cornea above a pupil. And then his tremendous, decent hands brandishing an oar-butt; the brilliant lace of the gills, their crumpled hinge flaring in bilge water; and the line, whipping and shuttling, feeding invisibly back, moving on on Munsungun, sons survived by the same damn hunt they heired.

Ethan Stebbins

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Activities,Sports & Outdoor Activities,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Animals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

You Can't Buy Shoes in a Painting

You can't even buy a soda. You can only see these things, see a mother steer her son to the car, his head cocked licking his ice cream. Earlier, driving, trying to keep between two cornfields, I couldn't see myself into a map, couldn't be anywhere in it, though I knew all the patient states between us. Pigeons sit high on a mill's peaked roof, spaced even as beads. They can stand that close to each other, but looking at them you wouldn't know it. Would you.

Jill Osier

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture

Descent

My father drummed darkness Through the underbrush Until lightning struck I take after him Clouds crowd the sky Around me as I run Downhill on a high— I am my mother's son Born long ago In the storm's eye

Samuel Menashe

Relationships,Family & Ancestors

Captain, Captive

Of your fate Fast asleep On the bed you made Dream away Wake up late

Samuel Menashe

Apotheosis

Taut with longing You must become The god you sought— The only one

Samuel Menashe

Religion

Humidifier

—After Robert Pinsky Defier of closed space, such as the head, opener Of the sealed passageways, so that Sunlight entering the nose can once again Exit the ear, vaporizer, mist machine, whose Soft hiss sounds like another human being But less erratic, more stable, or, if not like a human being, Carried by one, by my mother to the sick chamber Of my childhood — as Freud said, Why are you always sick, Louise? his cigar Confusing mist with smoke, interfering With healing—Embodied Summoner of these ghosts, white plastic tub with your elegant Clear tub, the water sanitized by boiling, Sterile, odorless, In my mother’s absence Run by me, the one machine I understand: what Would life be if we could not buy Objects to care for us And bear them home, away from the druggists’ pity, If we could not carry in our own arms Alms, alchemy, to the safety of our bedrooms, If there were no more Sounds in the night, continuous Hush, hush of warm steam, not Like human breath though regular, if there were nothing in the world More hopeful than the self, Soothing it, wishing it well.

Louise Glück

The Modern Pastoral Elegy

A Tick-Where-Appropriate Template It begins with unspecified “you” and “we” raising fists of defiance to the void, the morning we opened the obituary, a pun on “decompose” you’d have enjoyed. These crocodile tears shed in rhyme, in an age too commercial to care, recall how we met the first time and the feisty old trooper you were, you were, what a feisty old trooper you were: the snook you cocked at convention; writing only when the muse was near your solitary published collection, Parnassus—A Calling Not a Career, we reviewed and/or said we admired: its allusions to myth, its classical power we found “inspiring” if not “inspired” and “important” as a euphemism for “dour,” for “dour,” important to find euphemisms for “dour”; your committee work; your taste in shoes; your alcoholism and/or love for jazz; your appetite for social issues that none of the young crowd has; your impatience with those smart alecks who expect to have and eat their cake, and some daringly inverted syntax the occasional end-rhyme to make, to make, occasionally an end-rhyme you’d make; your insistence upon a thing called “craft” (perhaps you meant margarine); how establishment critics originally laughed at your pamphlets from the Slovene; how you very nearly popped your clogs as we fought to get your name cleared; you were our stag set upon by dogs, indestructible in duffel coat and/or beard, your beard, the indescribable duffel coat and/or beard; your years of silence and/or second wife whose whereabouts remain uncertain; a paean to your flowering late in life in some council flat in Suburbiton and your dab hand with a hoover seasoned with the odd gratuitous clue (much as we champion your oeuvre) that we’re better writers than you, than you, we’re better writers than you; the valedictions when last we met— “Shut the door, comrades, adieu”— however innocuous when said, now seem prophetic: you knew; your despair and/or your courage; a warning for our planet and times culminating with a rhetorical flourish that pans out along these lines, these lines, that pads out along these lines: Something something something world, something something something grope. Something something something unfurled, something something something hope. Something something something dark, something something something night. Something something something lark, something something something light.

Conor O'Callaghan

Living,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries

Chicken Pig

It’s like being lost in the forest, hungry, with a plump live chicken in your cradling arms: you want to savage the bird, but you also want the eggs. You go weak on your legs. What’s worse, what you need most is the companionship, but you’re too hungry to know that. That is something you only know after you’ve been lost a lot and always, eventually, alit upon your bird; consumed her before you’d realized what a friend she’d been, letting you sleep-in late on the forest floor though she herself awoke at the moment of dawn and thought of long-lost rooster voices quaking the golden straw. She looks over at you, sleeping, and what can I tell you, she loves you, but like a friend. Eventually, when lost in a forest with a friendly chicken you make a point of emerging from the woods together, triumphant; her, fat with bugs, you, lean with berries. Still, while you yet wander, you can not resist telling her your joke: Guy sees a pig with three legs, asks the farmer, What gives? Farmer says, That pig woke my family from a fire, got us all out. Says the guy, And lost the leg thereby? Nope, says the farmer, Still had all four when he took a bullet for me when I had my little struggle with the law. Guy nods, So that’s where he lost his paw? Farmer shakes it off, says, Nah, we fixed him up. A pause, guy says, So how’d he lose the leg? Farmer says, Well, hell, a pig like that you don’t eat all at once. Chicken squints. Doesn’t think it’s funny.

Jennifer Michael Hecht

Relationships,Pets,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire

On the Metro

On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside her to make room for me; she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in front of her, and barely looks up as she pulls them to her. I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptation to Exist—and notice her glancing up from hers to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms herself physically,” that is, becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before: though she hasn’t moved, she’s allowed herself to come more sharply into focus, be more accessible to my sensual perception, so I can’t help but remark her strong figure and very tan skin—(how literally golden young women can look at the end of summer.) She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away; she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive, achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known. I understand that in no way is she offering more than this, and in truth I have no desire for more, but it’s still enough for me to be taken by a surge, first of warmth then of something like its opposite: a memory—a girl I’d mooned for from afar, across the table from me in the library in school now, our feet I thought touching, touching even again, and then, with all I craved that touch to mean, my having to realize it wasn’t her flesh my flesh for that gleaming time had pressed, but a table leg. The young woman today removes her arm now, stands, swaying against the lurch of the slowing train, and crossing before me brushes my knee and does that thing again, asserts her bodily being again, (Gombrowicz again), then quickly moves to the door of the car and descends, not once looking back, (to my relief not looking back), and I allow myself the thought that though I must be to her again as senseless as that table of my youth, as wooden, as unfeeling, perhaps there was a moment I was not.

C. K. Williams

Living,Growing Old,Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Unrequited Love,Relationships,Men & Women,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

Conches on Christmas

Diluvian, draggled and derelict posse, this barnacled pod so pales next to everything we hear of red tides and pilot whales that a word like “drama” makes me sound remiss except that there was a kind of littoral drama in the way the shells silently, sans the heraldry of bells, neatly, sans an astrological affair, and swiftly, sans a multitude of feet, flat-out arrived— an encrusted school of twenty-four Gabriellan trumpets at my beach house door and barely half-alive. Oh, you can bet I picked them up, waded right up to my ankles in there among ’em, hefted ’em up to my ears to hear the din of all things oceanwise and wet, but every of the ancient, bearded, anthracite, salt-water-logged spirals, every of the massive and unwieldy, magisterial mollusks shut tight— no din, no horns roaring reveille, no warning, no beat, no taps, no coral corpus, no porpoise purpose except it was a secret purpose kept strictly under wraps. A fine Christmas gift indeed, this obscure migration, this half-dead conch confederation which would have smelled yon tannenbaum like fish— a fine set of unwrappable presents and no receipt by which I could redeem them. I lifted one up by its stem and thought of how, by increments, all twenty-four must have lugged those preassembled bodies here sans Santa, sleigh, and eight little reindeer, to my drasty stretch of shore. And, no other explanation being offered for the situation, I thought that I might understand how one could argue that the impulse driving them to land was a sort of evolutionary one— misguided, yes, redundant, a million years too late, a needless, maybe rogue and almost campy demonstration of how history, even in the world of the invertebrate, repeats itself—breaker crashing down on breaker in the Gulf, Gulf War coming after Gulf War. O Maker, there is so much slug inside these shells, here, at the end of December, at the edge of a world I couldn’t blame if you did not remember. Miracles sell well, but Lord, it can be numbing to a people who cannot tell between a second nature and a second thought, a second chance, or a second coming.

Mike Chasar

Nature,Animals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Winter,Religion,Christianity

Address: The Archaeans, One Cell Creatures

Although most are totally naked and too scant for even the slightest color and although they have no voice that I’ve ever heard for cry or song, they are, nevertheless, more than mirage, more than hallucination, more than falsehood. They have confronted sulfuric boiling black sea bottoms and stayed, held on under ten tons of polar ice, established themselves in dense salts and acids, survived eating metal ions. They are more committed than oblivion, more prolific than stars. Far too ancient for scripture, each one bears in its one cell one text— the first whit of alpha, the first jot of bearing, beneath the riling sun the first nourishing of self. Too lavish for saints, too trifling for baptism, they have existed throughout never gaining girth enough to hold a firm hope of salvation. Too meager in heart for compassion, too lean for tears, less in substance than sacrifice, not one has ever carried a cross anywhere. And not one of their trillions has ever been given a tombstone. I’ve never noticed a lessening of light in the ceasing of any one of them. They are more mutable than mere breathing and vanishing, more mysterious than resurrection, too minimal for death.

Pattiann Rogers

Arts & Sciences,Sciences

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse A persona che mai tornasse al mondo, Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse. Ma percioche giammai di questo fondo Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero, Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo. Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question ... Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes, The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes, Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening, Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains, Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys, Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap, And seeing that it was a soft October night, Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. And indeed there will be time For the yellow smoke that slides along the street, Rubbing its back upon the window-panes; There will be time, there will be time To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet; There will be time to murder and create, And time for all the works and days of hands That lift and drop a question on your plate; Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea. In the room the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo. And indeed there will be time To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?” Time to turn back and descend the stair, With a bald spot in the middle of my hair — (They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”) My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin — (They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”) Do I dare Disturb the universe? In a minute there is time For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. For I have known them all already, known them all: Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons; I know the voices dying with a dying fall Beneath the music from a farther room. So how should I presume? And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, Then how should I begin To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? And how should I presume? And I have known the arms already, known them all— Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!) Is it perfume from a dress That makes me so digress? Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. And should I then presume? And how should I begin? Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ... I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully! Smoothed by long fingers, Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers, Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me. Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet — and here’s no great matter; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid. And would it have been worth it, after all, After the cups, the marmalade, the tea, Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me, Would it have been worth while, To have bitten off the matter with a smile, To have squeezed the universe into a ball To roll it towards some overwhelming question, To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”— If one, settling a pillow by her head Should say: “That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.” And would it have been worth it, after all, Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor— And this, and so much more?— It is impossible to say just what I mean! But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all.” No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous; Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; At times, indeed, almost ridiculous— Almost, at times, the Fool. I grow old ... I grow old ... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach? I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me. I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black. We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

T. S. Eliot

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Growing Old,Time & Brevity,Love,Classic Love,Desire,Heartache & Loss,Realistic & Complicated,Unrequited Love,Relationships,Men & Women,Religion,Faith & Doubt,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life

The Miscarriage

Some species can crack pavement with their shoots to get their share of sun some species lay a purple froth of eggs and leave it there to sprinkle tidepools with tadpole confetti some species though you stomp them in the carpet have already stashed away the families that will inherit every floor at midnight But others don’t go forth and multiply as boldly male and female peeling the bamboo their keepers watching in despair or those endangered species numbered individually and mapped from perch to oblivious perch For weeks the world it seemed was plagued with babies forests dwindling into cradles rows of women hissing for an obstetrician babies no one could feed babies received by accident like misdirected mail from God so many babies people hired women to hold them babies babies everywhere but not a one to name When we got home the local news showed us a mother with quintuplets she was suckling them in shifts a mountain of sheets universally admired a goddess of fertility her smile could persuade the skies to rain Her litter slept ointment-eyed in pink wool caps while Dad ran his hand through his hair thinking maybe of money as he stood surveying his crowded living room his wealth of heartbeats Pizza and pop that night and there unasked inside the bottlecap was Sorry—Try Again you set it down and did not speak of it the moon flanked by her brood of stars that night a chaste distracted kiss goodnight that night your body quiet having spilled its secret your palms flat on your belly holding holding Forgive me if I had no words that night but I was wondering in the silence still begetting silence whether to console you if I consoled you it would make the loss your loss and so we laid beside ourselves a while because I had no words until our bodies folded shut our bodies closed around hope like a book preserving petals a book we did not open till the morning when we found hope dry and brittle but intact

Amit Majmudar

Living,Parenthood,Sorrow & Grieving,Relationships,Men & Women

Novelette

With her one horrid eye persistently unfastened, a vigilant bird watched my grandfather during the Great Depression use each evening of one whole year to wander his corn fields knowing this world is just one pig after another in one pen after another. Therefore, the bird heard him suppose, shouldn’t he with his best gun, machete, Buick, or rope terminate his acquaintance with the tiresome setup of breakfast-lunch-dinner-dawn-dusk-fall-winter-spring-summer- blah-blah-blah? But his girls were good-looking and made such fine pies, so the bird watched him live wretchedly until he died more naturally of cancer too soon to see his people become the dopefiends, doctor-haters, masturbators, insomniacs, sleep fanatics, shut-ins, and teetotalers the bird knew they would become, for the purpose of girls is to just ruin everything with wanton reproduction so that now now now it’s really relentless—how heavy his people got in their limbs and how torrential, thus, the frenzied wind, though beyond the eye of the bird is the small, ashen brain of the bird, and below that, a heart, I swear, through which come the iffy notes of this cruel song.

Adrian Blevins

Living,Disappointment & Failure,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life,Nature,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire

Human Hunger

I Comstock stands in the densely odorous kitchen sniffing Mrs. Yapp’s squab pies. His hunger makes him wide awake and he can imagine Mrs. Yapp twenty years ago when she was a bouncing Evelina and I delight to see them there, Comstock and Mrs. Yapp, in the creaking steaming kitchen of darkly scarred wood beside the great black doubtless clang of the stove being human, in 1836, in the sure conviction that the human had better be fed. The pies bubble up— apples, bacon, onions, brown sugar and breast of pigeon— “A cork’s no good without the bottle, Mrs. Yapp!” She grins and kicks his shin and I turn the page. II It’s actually not a very good novel— over-invested in local color... And the same may be said about thee and me, in 2036, by the Supreme Kakutani. III Oh, once there was a lad named Marky who loved on his bread excessive cheese; oh, to write bright comments in a book’s margins was for him quite larky and his daughter referred to an elephant when she heard him sneeze. Ah, he felt the human mattered keenly, all un-cut and un-dried, though to the gods our tumult may seem a paltry flap— it was a human, after all, wrote Hardy’s “Hap”... This Marky lived a while, my braves, a while and then he died! Honor the cork of Comstock and the pies of Mrs. Yapp.

Mark Halliday

Sparrow Trapped in the Airport

Never the bark and abalone mask cracked by storms of a mastering god, never the gods’ favored glamour, never the pelagic messenger bearing orchards in its beak, never allegory, not wisdom or valor or cunning, much less hunger demanding vigilance, industry, invention, or the instinct to claim some small rise above the plain and from there to assert the song of another day ending; lentil brown, uncounted, overlooked in the clamorous public of the flock so unlikely to be noticed here by arrivals, faces shining with oils of their many miles, where it hops and scratches below the baggage carousel and lights too high, too bright for any real illumination, looking more like a fumbled punch line than a stowaway whose revelation recalls how lightly we once traveled.

Averill Curdy

Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Animals,Mythology & Folklore

Salvation

Finally, I gave up on obeisance, and refused to welcome either retribution or the tease of sunny days. As for the can’t-be- seen, the sum-of-all-details, the One—oh, when it came to salvation I was only sure I needed to be spared someone else’s version of it. The small prayers I devised had in them the hard sounds of split and frost. I wanted them to speak as if it made sense to speak to what isn’t there in the beaconless dark. I wanted them to startle by how little they asked.

Stephen Dunn

Living,Religion,Faith & Doubt

Canada Anemone

I count nineteen white blossoms which would not be visible except for their wiry stems that catapult them above the grass like the last white pop of fireworks, a toothed blast of leaf below. It’s the Fourth of July on the bank of Hinkson Creek fifty years ago, the powder- bitterness, the red combustion, my life, sinceanemos means wind, means change, no matter that I’ve been held all along in this thin twenty miles of atmosphere. The wind’s disturbed the leaves, rolled the waves, convincing enough. Each star of a bloom is driven upward almost against its small nature. All it can do is hang on and die. Still, it did want to go as high as possible, for some reason, to sway up there like an art object.

Fleda Brown

Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Trees & Flowers,Independence Day

To You

Beginning on a line by Silvio Rodríguez How will it taste—the beer the gravedigger will drink after bestowing your dirt coat? What will he say—you keeled the outrigger too south, & when the breakers rolled, no boats heard your Mayday? & will he ask his friends at the bar—if someone calls a Mayday & there is no one at the other end of any radio, did Kevin A. González really exist? O second person, what would you do without you? Where would Kevin A. González hide? Our bond is over. The red of the rockets’ glare has faded. Your grave has been dug. Gone too are the days when I tried to speak through you.

Kevin A. González

Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams

The Guru

Here comes the wise man in the story of sick times, telling you how to find the passage of satisfaction. He is many million years old and has been walking many thousand miles, more miles, more lengths of road than the shrunk-up earth of these days possesses, to find you. He has a veda from before creation to sing you and, lo and behold, it is about you, it means everything to you. Though they’ve made a rope out of rough, heavy smoke, like a whale-thick hawser for a steamer of dead star, and pulled it through you from throat to crotch, from ear to ear, and hag-tied your hands and feet with the ends, though each of them has your own face molten with leprosy, though your brain makes the sound of crowded trains colliding in Kashmir and a stadium that roars hosanna, it is still possible now, in the next moment, to know God. That is, not die in confusion. But maybe, then, this guru is too soon. Maybe he hasn’t come from far enough. Maybe he’s still much too young. Maybe he’s never asked himself clearly what happens when someone like you hears that a lightning-opened living fig tree or a mountain and a blue sky can be lived in and sets out on the long road never moving from his realm in pain.

A. F. Moritz

Religion,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries

Poem of Disconnected Parts

At Robben Island the political prisoners studied. They coined the motto Each one Teach one. In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners Address them always as “Profesor.” Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say. Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination That calls boiled sheep heads “Smileys.” The first year at Guantánamo, Abdul Rahim Dost Incised his Pashto poems into styrofoam cups. “The Sangomo says in our Zulu culture we do not Worship our ancestors: we consult them.” Becky is abandoned in 1902 and Rose dies giving Birth in 1924 and Sylvia falls in 1951. Still falling still dying still abandoned in 2005 Still nothing finished among the descendants. I support the War, says the comic, it’s just the Troops I’m against: can’t stand those Young People. Proud of the fallen, proud of her son the bomber. Ashamed of the government. Skeptical. After the Klansman was found Not Guilty one juror Said she just couldn’t vote to convict a pastor. Who do you write for? I write for dead people: For Emily Dickinson, for my grandfather. “The Ancestors say the problem with your Knees Began in your Feet. It could move up your Back.” But later the Americans gave Dost not only paper And pen but books. Hemingway, Dickens. Old Aegyptius said Whoever has called this Assembly, For whatever reason—it is a good in itself. O thirsty shades who regard the offering, O stained earth. There are many fake Sangomos. This one is real. Coloured prisoners got different meals and could wear Long pants and underwear, Blacks got only shorts. No he says he cannot regret the three years in prison: Otherwise he would not have written those poems. I have a small-town mind. Like the Greeks and Trojans. Shame. Pride. Importance of looking bad or good. Did he see anything like the prisoner on a leash? Yes, In Afghanistan. In Guantánamo he was isolated. Our enemies “disassemble” says the President. Not that anyone at all couldn’t mis-speak. The profesores created nicknames for torture devices: The Airplane. The Frog. Burping the Baby. Not that those who behead the helpless in the name Of God or tradition don’t also write poetry. Guilts, metaphors, traditions. Hunger strikes. Culture the penalty. Culture the escape. What could your children boast about you? What Will your father say, down among the shades? The Sangomo told Marvin, “You are crushed by some Weight. Only your own Ancestors can help you.”

Robert Pinsky

Religion,Other Religions,The Spiritual,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Crime & Punishment,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Stomackes

We know far more about the philosophical underpinnings of Puritanism than we do about what its practitioners consumed at countless meals. —James Deetz 1 Yes. So we must reconnect ideas of God, and the definitions of “liberty,” and the psychology of our earliest models of governance, with oyster peeces in barley beer & wheet, chopt cod & venyson seethed in a blood broth, hominy pottage, also squirell. Their heads might well have brimmed with heaven and its airborne personnel, but still their mouths were a mash of white meat [cheese] and a motley collation of eel leavings, a fine samp, and a roast Fowl. Worshipp first, then after—butter Biskuits! David Ignatow: “seeking transcendence but loving bread” 2 And it is too easy to get lost in abstraction, as if smoke, and dream, and quantum ersatz-states are our proper environment... it’s easy to conceptualize in “politics” and not in the clack of the black or white dried bean we drop in the voting bowl. In some tribes, there’s a designated “reminderer,” and when the shaman novitiate—or sometimes simply a mournful family member—follows the star trail into the country of ghosts, and lingers there, this person tugs the wanderer back home: perhaps a light thwack with a broom-shock, or the rising steam of a broth that one can hungrily shinny down to Earth like a rope. In the Mesopotamian Inanna myth, it’s water and bread that resurrect the goddess and allow her to begin the long ascent out from the craters of Hell. We can spend all day, and many days, and years, in theorizing. “A Computer Recreation of Proto-Hominid Dietary Intake: An Analysis” ... we’ll float off, through these foggy lands of argot, in the way that someone else might dissolve in the blue cloud of an opium den... no wonder there’s such pleasure in uncovering the solid fossil record of those appetites, and in emptying out its evidence grain by grain, a stone piñata. How often the stories bring us back to that grounding! In 1620, a first exploratory party from the Mayflower went ashore on the northern Cape Cod coast. The weather was bad and disorienting: a half a foot of snow, in air so thick as to be directionless. But we sense they recouped their spirits that night, from three fat Geese and six Ducks whitch we ate with Soldiers stomackes. 3 And it is too easy to lose ourselves in cyberthink, untethered from the touchable, from even the cohesive force suffusing through one atom. “What we keep,” reports an archivist at the New York Times, “is the information, not the paper”... everything e-storaged now. A thousand years of pages, pffft: dismissiveness as obliterative as a bonfire, in the long run. Oh, yes, easy to cease to exist as an actual shape, inside the huge, occluding mists of legalese: we say “repatriation of native archeological remains,” and we mean human bones, that’s what we mean: hard and dear and contested. We say “ritual signifier of threat,” but what the Narragansetts sent to the colonists at Plymouth was a bundl of thair Arrows tyed about in a mightie Snake skin. I died. And I was stolen into a land of strangers—of not-the-People. I floated all day, many days. And here the ribs of my cage were empty: always I was hungry, for the things that People need. But this was not the sun, and this was not the soil, of the People; and I was restless, I had no one for between my legs, and no drum in my chest. There was much war from this: the People desired me back, they said “this one is part of many-ones,” and after words and words, their word was so. One day the breezes sent the fishes and savory beaver parts, and I knew at last that I was home: my mouth of my skull watered. 4 “When hegemonic identity-structures systemize cognition—” whoa. There are times I think my friends might flimmer away in that high-minded mush... and I concentrate, then, on the names of those people from 1621, names that are true, specific labor and specific, beautiful common things. Cooper. Fletcher. Glover. Miller. Glazer. Mason. Carpenter. Cheerfull Winter. Oceanus Hopkins. Lydia Fish, Nathaniel Fish and Steadfast Fish, of Sandwich. Zachariah Field, father, and daughter Dutiful Field. Pandora Sparrow. Who wouldn’t care to meet Peregrine Soule? And who could wish to let go of this life when faced by Countenance Bountie?

Albert Goldbarth

Activities,Eating & Drinking,Religion,Christianity,Other Religions,The Spiritual,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Mythology & Folklore,Thanksgiving

Poem on His Birthday [Facs. drafts]

Dylan Thomas

Country Songs

Ben Belitt

1 January 1965

The Wise Men will unlearn your name. Above your head no star will flame. One weary sound will be the same— the hoarse roar of the gale. The shadows fall from your tired eyes as your lone bedside candle dies, for here the calendar breeds nights till stores of candles fail. What prompts this melancholy key? A long familiar melody. It sounds again. So let it be. Let it sound from this night. Let it sound in my hour of death— as gratefulness of eyes and lips for that which sometimes makes us lift our gaze to the far sky. You glare in silence at the wall. Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all. It's clear that you are now too old to trust in good Saint Nick; that it's too late for miracles. —But suddenly, lifting your eyes to heaven's light, you realize: your life is a sheer gift.

Joseph Brodsky

Living,Death,Growing Old,Time & Brevity,Nature,Winter,New Year

1-800-FEAR

We'd like to talk with you about fear they said so many people live in fear these days they drove up all four of them in a small car nice boy they said beautiful dogs they said so friendly the man ahead of the woman the other two waiting in the drive I was outside digging up the garden no one home I said what are you selling anyway I'm not interested I said well you have a nice day they said here's our card there's a phone number you can call anytime any other houses down this road anyone else live here we'd like to talk to them about living in fear

Jody Gladding

Living,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

The Bean Eaters

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair. Dinner is a casual affair. Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood, Tin flatware. Two who are Mostly Good. Two who have lived their day, But keep on putting on their clothes And putting things away. And remembering ... Remembering, with twinklings and twinges, As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Living,Growing Old,Marriage & Companionship,Relationships,Home Life

The Spider

I The spider expects the cold of winter. When the shadows fall in long Autumn He congeals in a nest of paper, prepares The least and minimal existence, Obedient to nature. No other course Is his; no other availed him when In high summer he spun and furled The gaudy catches. I am that spider, Caught in nature, summer and winter. You are the symbol of the seasons too. II Now to expatiate and temporize This artful brag. I never saw so quieting A sight as the dawn, dew-clenched foot- Wide web hung on summer barn-eaves, spangled. It moves to zephyrs that is tough as steel. I never saw so finely-legged a creature Walk so accurate a stretch as he, Proud, capable, patient, confident. To the eye he gave close penetration Into real myth, the myth of you, of me. III Yet, by moving eyesight off from this There is another dimension. Near the barn, Down meadow to shingle, no place for spiders, The sea in large blue breathes in brainstorm tides, Pirates itself away to ancient Spain, Pirouettes past Purgatory to Paradise. Do I feed deeper on a spider, A close-hauled view upon windless meaning, Or deeper a day or dance or doom bestride On ocean’s long reach, on parables of God?

Richard Eberhart

Nature,Animals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Summer,Winter,Religion,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Poetry & Poets

The Distances

The accumulation of reefs piling up one over the others like thoughts of the sky increasing as the head rises unto horizons of wet December days perforated with idle motions of gulls . . . and our feelings. I’ve been wondering about what you mean, standing in the spray of shadows before an ocean abandoned for winter, silent as a barque of blond hair. and the way the clouds are bending, the way they “react” to your position, where your hands close over your breasts like an eyelid approving the opening of “an evening’s light.” parasites attach themselves to the moss covering your feet, blind Cubans tossing pearls across the jetty, and the sound of blood fixes our eyes on the red waves. it is a shark! and our love is that rusted bottle . . . pointing north, the direction which we turn, conjuring up our silver knives and spoons and erasing messages in the sand, where you wrote “freezing in the arctic of our dreams,” and I said “yes” delaying the cold medium for a time while you continued to “cultivate our possessions” as the moon probably “continued” to cradle. tan below the slant of all those wasted trees while the scent carried us back to where we were: dancing like the children of great diplomats with our lean bodies draped in bedsheets and leather flags while the orchestra made sounds which we thought was the sky, but was only a series of words, dying in the thick falsetto of mist. for what can anyone create from all these things: the fancied tilt of stars, sordid doves burning in the hollow brick oven, oceans which generalize tears, it is known to us in immediate gestures, like candle drippings on a silk floor. what are we going to do with anything? besides pick it up gently and lay it on the breath of still another morning, mornings which are always remaining behind for one thing or another shivering in our faces of pride and blooming attitude. in the draught of winter air my horse is screaming you are welcoming the new day with your hair leaning against the sand, feet dive like otters in the frost and the sudden blue seems to abandon as you leap. O to make everything summer! soldiers move along lines like wet motions in the violent shade’s reappearance. but what if your shadow no longer extends to my sleeping? and your youth dissolves in my hand like a tongue, as the squandered oceans and skies will dissolve into a single plane (so I’ll move along that plane) unnoticed and gray as a drift of skulls over the cool Atlantic where I am standing now, defining you in perhaps, the only word I can. as other words are appearing, so cunningly, on the lips of the many strips of light. like naked bodies stretched out along the only beach that remained, brown and perfect below the descending of tides.

Jim Carroll

0

Philosophic in its complex, ovoid emptiness, a skillful pundit coined it as a sort of stopgap doorstop for those quaint equations Romans never dreamt of. In form completely clever and discrete—a mirror come unsilvered, loose watch face without the works, a hollowed globe from tip to toe unbroken, it evades the grappling hooks of mass, tilts the thin rim of no thing, remains embryonic sum, non-cogito.

Hailey Leithauser

Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

!

Dear Writers, I’m compiling the first in what I hope is a series of publications I’m calling artists among artists. The theme for issue 1 is “Faggot Dinosaur.” I hope to hear from you! Thank you and best wishes.

Wendy Videlock

Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality

Tinder and Flint

Lew R. Sarett

Hospital Poems

Merrill Moore

Color of Dreams

Witter Bynner

By Way of Contrast

Babette Deutsch

("Your life, so rarefied...")

George H. Dillon

("I think you are closer to me...")

George H. Dillon

("Yours is the Attic and ambiguous...")

George H. Dillon

Questions and Answers

John Wheelwright

This Fountainhead

Ben Belitt

A Labyrinth of Being

R. P. Blackmur

Reflections

Norman Macleod

So Ordered

Merrill Moore

1 January 1965

The Wise Men will unlearn your name. Above your head no star will flame. One weary sound will be the same— the hoarse roar of the gale. The shadows fall from your tired eyes as your lone bedside candle dies, for here the calendar breeds nights till stores of candles fail. What prompts this melancholy key? A long familiar melody. It sounds again. So let it be. Let it sound from this night. Let it sound in my hour of death— as gratefulness of eyes and lips for that which sometimes makes us lift our gaze to the far sky. You glare in silence at the wall. Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all. It's clear that you are now too old to trust in good Saint Nick; that it's too late for miracles. —But suddenly, lifting your eyes to heaven's light, you realize: your life is a sheer gift.

Joseph Brodsky

Living,Death,Growing Old,Time & Brevity,Nature,Winter,New Year

1-800-FEAR

We'd like to talk with you about fear they said so many people live in fear these days they drove up all four of them in a small car nice boy they said beautiful dogs they said so friendly the man ahead of the woman the other two waiting in the drive I was outside digging up the garden no one home I said what are you selling anyway I'm not interested I said well you have a nice day they said here's our card there's a phone number you can call anytime any other houses down this road anyone else live here we'd like to talk to them about living in fear

Jody Gladding

Living,Social Commentaries,Popular Culture

The Death of Atahuallpa

William Jay Smith

Poet's Wish

William Jay Smith

0

Philosophic in its complex, ovoid emptiness, a skillful pundit coined it as a sort of stopgap doorstop for those quaint equations Romans never dreamt of. In form completely clever and discrete—a mirror come unsilvered, loose watch face without the works, a hollowed globe from tip to toe unbroken, it evades the grappling hooks of mass, tilts the thin rim of no thing, remains embryonic sum, non-cogito.

Hailey Leithauser

Arts & Sciences,Philosophy

!

Dear Writers, I’m compiling the first in what I hope is a series of publications I’m calling artists among artists. The theme for issue 1 is “Faggot Dinosaur.” I hope to hear from you! Thank you and best wishes.

Wendy Videlock

Relationships,Gay, Lesbian, Queer,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality