POETRY
THE ONE LOOKING TO BE BORN by Colette Inez
Across the courtyard a straggle
of friends home from school.
The one looking to be born listens
to these voices, the gab and squeal
before silence, and afterwards, the exhaled
breath and breaking apart under stone.
Somewhere through the city a doorway
pronounces a name and the one looking
to be born pushes towards a girl who enters
and leaves, her words bolting
up and down stairs.
Maybe that girl in a box-pleated skirt
will ask isn’t it beautiful,
this lamppost, manhole cover, hexagonal stone?
She’ll ask what kind of lights –
sodium, incandescent – before she french kisses
a boy in an illegally parked car and the one
looking to be born jumps in to serenade them.
MORNING, THE COUPLE by Colette Inez
The man and woman sleep until the light
of late morning.
This is the hour when anything might occur:
a small fight over a real or imagined
toucan in their courtyard.
“A delusional pigeon,” he says.
She turns the pages of the Sunday papers,
he repairs a broken shoelace, pays a bill,
reads an ad promoting a cure
for mononucleosis which neither have.
“Not yet,” he offers his sly
hypochondriacal smile.
They trust each other not to let things
get out of whack.
The super invites them to walk on his stilts.
They dance the tango under a sun
neither too hot nor too cool
to deeply bend their knees
or stiffen their spines in a waltz.
They dine on grilled nectarines,
syncopating towards an island of sleep,
above them transmissions of music
thrumming from a satellite
a thousand miles away.
Colette Inez’s most recent collection of poetry is Spinoza Doesn’t Come Here Anymore. She is the recipient of numerous awards for poetry, including two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes.
DEMOGRAPHIC by Dorianne Laux
It’s time for me to walk to the bus stop
and sit down among them, the man
tied into his wheelchair, the woman
with the humped back, time for me
to kneel and hold his cup while he adjusts
his books and his pack, look up at her
flowered blouse, his scratched glasses.
There’s a sky full of rain that won’t
come down, pigeons asleep on the lawn,
and across the street pumpkins piled high
in front of the market, Xeroxed flyers
stapled to the telephone pole. To the east
a day moon above the bridge, cars
filing under like a school of fish,
and if I look down at my feet I won’t
knock over the plastic dish the blind man
has filled to the brim for his dog. It’s time
to go to work, to wait while they gather
their belongings, while the metal mesh
platform unhinges and bangs down,
time to nod to the driver as he pulls
back on the lever and a man lifts
into the air, to cup her elbow, a thin wing
sharpened by suffering, to enter
the threshold and stand among them,
listen to their murmurs, the news
of the day, to slip my hand through
the frayed canvas noose and hold on.
Dorianne Laux is a contributing editor of Alaska Quarterly Review. She is the author of four collections of poems: Awake (1990), What We Carry (1994), and Smoke (2000), all from BOA Editions, and Facts About the Moon (W. W. Norton, 2005). Among her many awards are a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
THE ONLY SOBER LOVER by George Looney
Much of the sorrow of being
aware is that
memory has no suburbs;
it just ends abruptly with the last
lighted house before
the blank dark of fields. Still,
we can remember long after remembering
gets us anywhere.
Other times, it happens we can’t
remember another’s touch, despite
every effort,
some night we need to. Forget
is what the locals have named
the main street
in town, and it leads out
to uncultivated fields full of
a flower no one
remembers the name of. Burning
in sunlight, this wild yellow
flower can’t forgive
anyone. Any confession made
to these blazing fields is burnt
by the saying,
so charred it’s unrecognizable.
Locals sip beer and throw back shots
in lawn chairs
on their porches. They say
there’s only one dentist in town,
and he suffers
from insomnia. They hear drilling
all through the nights, no one
in the chair
waiting to spit. Passion doesn’t
have dental records. Its charred body
remains a mystery,
unidentified. Buried without ceremony,
some say it haunts them. Woken
by the sound
of the drill, they want to find
a stone carved only with dates
and cover it
with wild flowers they picked
in a field at the edge of town.
Grills send up smoke
from backyards where children
play ghost. They can’t remember,
sometimes, the name
they’re supposed to be, and so lose
themselves in the game and go home
with drunk parents,
lineage an often tricky question.
The warranties have run out
on everything
in town. The repair shop
has odd hours, its shelves always
loaded down
with things people need that need
to be fixed. The dentist, drunk,
has been seen
pressed against the store-front
glass, seeming to salute
whatever it is
that’s his on the shelves. Always
at dusk, a fragile moon reflected
even fainter in
the glass that has taken on
the illusion of darkness, the result
of the confluence
of different light. Sorrow is
more than thin smudges of smoke
rising, reflected,
toward the moon in the glass
of the repair shop’s store-front,
more than any
faint resemblance to a salute
could account for. It’s our name
for the vague sense
of loss even the children
feel here. It’s worst for lovers
like the dentist
or the repair man, or the old
drunks watching everything go by
from their porches,
almost but never quite sleeping.
There have been rumors for years
construction is about
to begin in the fields that blind
anyone heading out of town, rumors
of new houses
and streets laid out so straight
no one could get lost. Listening
to rumors only
makes it harder to remember
what has to be done. The flowers,
wild, a kind of
light in those untouched fields,
are also a kind of memory,
always out there.
It’s said at dusk they glow,
letting off what they’ve taken in
all day. Which
are picked and which are left
to reproduce is a question of
chance, not design.
And every confession whispered to
the flowers finally makes it
back to town,
to hover at the edge
of seeing, caught sometimes in
the quick turn
of a head, in the corners
of eyes. The optometrist is
the only sober
lover in town. He goes home
every night to a woman whose name,
when he says it,
makes him do a little dance
and start to hum a love song
the radio has
long since forgotten. Every day
he brings her a bouquet of
flowers that glow
and light their house all night.
George Looney’s third book, The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels, has won the tenth annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize. This is his fourth appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
NO MORE by Liz Rosenberg
I can see you
no more
than I can visit my beloved dead,
and less,
since I’ve built a small twenty-first-century shrine
to grandmother, best friend, dead first husband
and no one can say no
to that, but you.
No more of this. No more of that.
Who fell at my feet weeping
with your kissing mouth.
Swore never, no,
no matter what, swore never to deny,
refute, betray.
Sweetheart, you must be calm,
and kind. That great love
we had, the only love
between us –
will never come again.
It cannot harm us anymore.
Or anyone.
WANDERER by Liz Rosenberg
Here at the ragged edge of November
witches swing in the bitter breeze
and pumpkins blacken on the porch.
A young blonde stands on the corner of Beethoven
and Mozart Street, hearing no music but the wind.
Her mother has asked her to move out
for the sake of the second marriage.
The girl has no place to go.
Itchy in her woolen sweater, she can sneak home
to shower and pet her dog, then wander
the streets where everything looks like it’s on tv.
Here it is, a new century,
the start of another thousand years. She kicks leaves
with the toe of her foot.
Cars stream by in the river of time,
invisible plumes of gas shoot high
into a frail blue shell. The girl
wishes to cross Beethoven Street. Her future,
her past, stretch all around her.
But she is stuck here, in the black wind
of now, a crow with no mouth,
laughing in the teeth
of her time. For all the good
it has ever done her.
Liz Rosenberg is the author of the novel Heart and Soul, and numerous prize-winning books and anthologies for young readers. Her four collections of poems include The Fire Music, Children of Paradise (both from University of Pittsburgh Press), These Happy Eyes (Mammoth), and I Just Hope It’s Lethal, forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin. Rosenberg’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, and The Paris Review.
LETTER TO STATE HOSPITAL by Joseph Millar
You’ve told me the light you will read this by
creeps like a lit fuse down from the crack
in the hospital drapes at sunrise,
that sometimes it washes the table like foam
those days-in-a-row when you’ve managed
to avoid swallowing your lithium.
Remember your girlfriend’s blue Grand Prix
we drove down to Mardi Gras and parked
next to the train tracks by the brown river?
Never mind the violence festering under the next
ten years like a plague: riots in North Philadelphia
and Watts, Che Guevara’s death in the hills. Kennedy’s
opulent new frontier opened itself at our feet:
cinders, creosote, blossoms of rust
growing wild down the boxcars’ flanks,
swamp moss, yarrow stalks brushing our knees
and the feverish woman in the long overcoat
who swore she was King Herod’s mother. She
argued nightly for his salvation with the gap-toothed
angels who suffered our presence, shouldered
around their barrel fire, so long as we brought
some wine: “Anyone could see he was just
afraid. My son wanted to protect his kingdom.”
The moon dragged its soft light away to the swamp,
blind veil uncovering the gray face of Lent,
which began unnoticed its ominous vigil
over the rice fields of Asia.
We wandered back to the Pontiac, perched
like an abandoned boat on the levee
smelling of reefer and transmission fluid.
We would not pass this way again, dreaming
of rapturous flight, two fleas curled up in the fur
of the beast, untroubled by fire or blood
Joseph Millar’s poems have been published in Shenandoah, DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, and Manoa. His first book, Overtime (Eastern Washington University Press), was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
MY FATHER WITH ALZHEIMER’S: FIRST FALL by Jeff Worley
Mother found you at 2 a.m.
on the faded sprawl of oil
in the garage.
She couldn’t lift you,
couldn’t wake you.
So she listened to you
breathe, the sibilance
between your lips,
and she heard your brain
firing off another dark
aurora borealis.
Were her words
like soft thunder? Did the cushions
she slipped under your skull
take their place in whatever
dream you were having?
She stayed, sunsets bursting
from the Papago blanket pulled
tightly around her. I have to think
she cursed you:
your brain crumbling, the brittle
scaffolding of your legs.
“What do you do with an old man
like me?” you had said
at dinner, oddly lucid, swirling
the mashed potatoes on your plate.
And there on the floor, under
the bright galaxy
of punch pliers and tin snips
and calipers in their appointed
places, she saw the future
spark and sharpen around you.
Jeff Worley is the author of the poetry collections A Simple Human Motion (Larkspur Press, 2000) and The Only Time There Is (Mid-List Press, 1995), and two forthcoming collections, Happy Hour at the Two Keys Tavern (Mid-List Press) and Leave Time (a chapbook from Finishing Line Press). This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
MOTHER FILLS OUT THE RESTRAINING ORDER by Christine DeSimone
Please state your relationship to the Respondent.
At our wedding in 1974, one of his sisters sang a Roberta Flack song.
Our friends decorated the car with tin cans and shaving cream.
While away on honeymoon, our garage caught on fire,
and my new yellow Corolla was burned to a shell.
Please state the act(s) of domestic or family violence or stalking
which the Respondent has committed.
It’s been 24 years and he chews gum like a cow, mouth open;
he spits when he bellows, particles flying in claps. He uses a fist,
a belt, a shoe, even once a telephone receiver to get
my attention, though it’s more for pleasure than reason these days.
Describe what happened in each of the above incidents,
including the date(s), place(s) and witnesses to each incident.
I was surprised that a desk calculator
could smash an entire glass table, the shards
pointed like stars, glittering like swords. I sobbed no
low and soft, a silhouette. It was Christmas morning.
The children opened their gifts carefully to save wrapping paper.
Describe any injuries and any history of abuse.
Messy bruise on the thigh blooms like thunder. The soul
so easily agitated, the heart the color of plum wine.
But the mornings after hurt the most: the hesitancy
of another day, the jagged pause between each breath
cutting into my skin.
Please state the relief you are asking the court to order.
Look at these papers, imperfectly folded in leaning stacks,
all so important men can stand and button their coats
in a trained gesture. Tonight a firefly wings its body
into song, a pinpoint of light I don’t recognize
except to know that I am going toward it.
Christine DeSimone’s poems have appeared in Gargoyle, Phoebe, Poet Lore, and Chiron Review.
AFTER THE BRIDE PONDERS HOW SAD THE DEAD GRANDMOTHER’S MARRIAGE MUST HAVE BEEN, THE DEAD GRANDMOTHER SPEAKS TO THE BRIDE A SECOND TIME by Debbie Urbanski
“There you go again.
You sound like the pigeons
at which we’d throw stones:
‘poor old oh poor poor oh – ’
I never confessed
to any loneliness.
I said contented
and wore the bright house dresses
of joy – can you not picture
a happiness more complex
than your little myth
where I can’t find one difference
between the wife and man?
God dropped a marriage
in my lap, it had a glittering
sharpness – it was all I was given,
so with my eyes open – will you listen –
I learned to want what I didn’t
and him, adrunk in my arms,
was in my arms.
This bores me, your fumbling
to set me free
from my wedlock
that wasn’t even a lock
but a piercing through,
which I asked him for:
right here your spread-eagle love
pinning me down.”
AFTER THE BRIDE WONDERS IF SHE WANTS CHILDREN, THE DEAD GRANDMOTHER SPEAKS TO HER AGAIN FROM THE OLD WEDDING PHOTOGRAPH by Debbie Urbanski
“I was gazing at –
what should I call it,
the disappointment
of this garden
where you’ve created
your lack –
the pink beds
of annuals, wilted
like consolations
no lady would want to win.
Do you think I dreamed
only of laboring
like a barnyard animal
in a perennial
heat? I hadn’t your talent
at preventing
blessings from striking root.
You have done what with my dirt
but cultivated a hole –
dear, what woman chooses,
like you, to bear nothing
worth repeating?”
Debbie Urbanski’s poems have appeared in Born Magazine, Natural Bridge, Lyric, and Sonora Review.
WHEN THE DEAD COME BACK IN DREAMS by Peter Cooley
When my dead come back, I would have it my way.
First shot: Mother and Dad, in that photograph
from 1929: Zelda and Scott, pre-Crash,
they beam, clutching the rail of their honeymoon steamer,
Dad derbied, Mother in fox fur and cloche.
Their lives are all before them at the camera’s flash.
Fast forward: in sepia, I am three.
Between them, their sole attention, I am lifted up
to stare down, transfixed, at my favorite beast,
the tapir, circling his island at the Detroit zoo.
But when the dead come back they are old and cross.
My father stretches out, diapered in his bed.
He does not want changing. My mother cries.
She tells me she wants to die right now.
She keeps repeating she will not be x-rayed,
she has nothing more to say to me. In that dream I argue.
I argue too much when the dead come back, forgetting
it would be better to let them have their say,
their stay. After all, they have to be back,
wherever it is they came from, come morning.
Peter Cooley’s seventh collection of poetry, A Place Made of Starlight, was recently published by Carnegie Mellon. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
AFTERLIFE by Carol Quinn
It would have to be a red house,
the kind Jimi Hendrix sang about,
or the common forest cottage that
gets rented on a weekly basis
in Sweden. Brief and mysterious,
the night would bring no dreams except
its own: distant cities, radiant heat.
The door would not keep out the breeze.
Fittingly, the cabinets and walls would be
unfinished pine. TV would hint
at human forms through blowing snow. The bed
would have too many quilts, and there’d be
a guest book by the door where someone wrote,
I waited here for you as long as I could.
Carol Quinn’s poems have appeared in Verse, The Oklahoma Review, California Quarterly, and Puerto del Sol.
THE WAY OF ALL FLESH: PATTERNS BURNT BY AN ATOMIC FLASH ONTO DESERT STONE by Christien Gholson
The tourists head to Roswell, looking for UFO’s. They pass right through this town without seeing it, without seeing any of us. Reverend Jones thinks everyone’s on the road looking for God.
Mercy Pendleton doesn’t want anyone to stop, doesn’t want anything to happen here, wants her Georgia O’Keeffe dream. She’s only been here five years. Came from Chicago “to paint the light.” That’s okay, but the rest of us need work.
Jones saw a meteor drop out of the blue sky when he was collecting scrap metal out on the missile range. Said the impact threw him to the ground. When he thought it’d cooled off, he went up to the hole, examined the contents. He collected some of the smaller rocks and set up a stand along the highway to sell them to the UFO freaks. “Aren’t you afraid of contamination?” I asked him. He laughed, said “Are you kidding? There’s enough radiation out on the range to last through God’s next breath.” I told him I was talking about something a little more quick. A virus, maybe. “Anything that made it through the burn into our atmosphere,” he said, “deserves to kill us all off.”
Mama said the Reverend came here from Philadelphia, after the riots. Said he was a preacher there. I remember, when I was in fifth or sixth grade, seeing him stand in front of Martinez’s liquor store window, staring at his reflection like he didn’t know who it was.
The liquor store’s long gone. Mama’s gone to cancer. The Reverend’s bald. But the thing is, if he came by my trailer tonight, I’d let him in. It’s getting that quiet.
Christien Gholson’s poems have appeared in Hanging Loose, Blue Mesa Review, ACM, Big Scream, and The Sun. Hanging Loose Press will bring out a book of prose poems in spring 2006.
THE LARGEST CIVIL WAR MONUMENT by Joanna Osborne
His forty years as a physician’s son prepared him for the Union soldiers
he was commissioned to mold, knowing the size of a human knuckle,
even when it swelled and rose around the metal trigger
or a slender waist. He only flinched once in the twenty years
spent with Grant, six of those days recovering the nick he left
on one of the equestrian kneecaps. Because horses are difficult
to sculpt, and he wanted to be certain each shoeless split
hoof showed the simple pain of pebbles and broken muskets beneath
ankles twisted in the proper angles and the men, disguised
as soldiers, clenching arms around the horses’ necks,
burrowing fingers into the skin as if they were their mothers
or wives, he would drag horse corpses across
the living room floor. Their slack jaws snagging on the carpet,
bloated stomachs rippling over furniture.
With handfuls of flesh, he would pose
the limp figures into battle, draping one carcass upon another
until the scene came alive. And there he would sculpt his monument,
through the formaldehyde and bronze. Each tail length measured
like a ration of bread, sweeping fear across the soldiers’ chiseled faces and
every chipped incisor tailored finer than uniforms whose buttons refracted
bullets and light when hit at faithful angles. It was the horses
that took him so long, their phantom breaths through rotted nostrils
and flared curious forms beneath men who would be nowhere.
So that now, when we gaze up at Grant and his soldiers,
high upon their platforms and mounts, our necks may twitch once.
And when we turn to look behind our pride and shoulders
we will find the horses’ faces in front of us, nuzzled to the ground.
This is Joanna Osborne’s first published poem in a national literary magazine.
PIGEONS by Danusha Laméris
PIGEONS
Because they crowd the corner
of every city street,
because they are the color
of sullied steel,
because they scavenge,
eating every last crust,
we do not favor them.
At night, do they dream
of turquoise feathers
tail plumes long as flutes
a voice lovely as the nightingale’s?
They raise their young
huddled in awnings
above the corner liquor store
circle our feet, pecking at crumbs
pace the sidewalk
with that familiar strut.
None will ever attain greatness
though, I suppose,
they suffer and know beauty
not unlike us.
But every once in a while
in a tourist’s blurry snapshot
of some great cathedral
startled, perhaps, or driven
by some other, sudden thirst,
they rise, all at once,
sheltering the pale gray sky.
Danusha Laméris has published poems in Lyric, Crab Orchard Review, El Andar, and Water-Stone.
FORGIVENESS by George Burns
Could he survive at 30 miles an hour
onto black pavement?
– That’s fast.
Now, many years later,
I stop the car,
listen to the small crinkly sounds
from the engine cooling in the fog.
It could have been here,
by these dunes.
I don’t know what happened.
Maybe there was a smell.
He just jumped.
Did he stand on shaky legs
waiting for us to return?
My mother and her boyfriend,
in a fog of alcohol, drove on.
In the distance, the shaggy white surf
paws at the land.
I let all the windows down
and the night comes in.
Start the car, drive slow.
Not looking in the back seat,
I can feel the night’s
black nose,
cold and wet,
pushing against my neck.
George Burns won first prize in the 2004 Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation poetry contest, selected by Billy Collins. His poems have appeared in Blue Unicorn, Bellowing Ark, Mind in Motion, Willow Review, and Mid American Review.
TORCH by Shelley Puhak
1.
Human torches in newsreel black and white:
Monk Quang Duc, the unflinching lotus,
aflame, on the busy streets of Saigon.
A Quaker father from my hometown,
aflame, outside McNamara’s window at the Pentagon.
Jan Palach flailing, running, falling,
aflame, through Wenceslas Square.
And now, the boy’s smile splits open the tv camera:
I hope at 14 or 15 to explode myself. I will make my body a torch.
2.
Torch,
from the Old French torche
bundle of twisted straw
from the Latin torquere
to twist, to bend
from the habit of twisting the tow at the end of the wood
before setting it ablaze.
Torch shares its root with
torture
to twist the body
retort
to bend words back
extort
to twist the will
distort
to twist apart
and nasturtium.
3.
The boy isn’t aspiring to a lone death,
the single body flaring up in protest.
There are other bodies
twisting
bending back
and out
in this equation.
4.
Torchbearer,
someone in the forefront
of a crusade.
When his face is painted on cement block
and his name flares up on the front page,
the switch he will flick,
the sound that will tear,
starts to be called
a torch.
5.
Torch,
any various portable devices for emitting
an unusually hot flame.
The boy is nameless until he twists up into the air,
bends the sky out of focus.
Then he becomes an arching blur of orange,
a hail of ash and pebbled bone,
that somehow begins with the nasturtiums trailing
their flame across my yard.
Shelley Puhak’s poems have appeared in New Delta Review, The Nebraska Review, and The Ontario Review.
HULLING RICE by David McElroy
At two a rooster crows and all hell breaks loose
in brilliant moonlight. All creation’s cocks
wake up hysterical in false dawn and shout
hallelujah hallelujah. I curl tighter
in my bag. This can’t be the first full moon
in these parts. Soon good chicken sense
prevails, and we all settle down.
At five thirty, moonlight still, one then two
then more crow with better historical reason.
Somewhere across the creek a slow thump,
thump, thump draws me out. In shadows
by a house on stilts on a sloping yard
kept clean by livestock, a woman works
a big log lever with one foot hulling rice.
The far end of the log fits at right angles
into another log, larger around but short.
This hammer is round where it pounds rice
in a hollow stump. Her silhouette steps and steps
on the moonlit log. The rice jumps and jumps,
sliding back for pounding and pounding
in the hard old elegant design for breakfast.
She scoops kernels and hulls onto a bamboo
tray then flips the contents three moonlit feet
into the mountain breeze flowing across
the Golden Triangle. Kernels fall to the tray for us.
Hull chaff floats to a mat, is swept into a trough,
stirred with water from the creek, and fed
to clucking chickens and a magnificent black pig.
The long trek home begins uphill on trails
small men in black pajamas use to carry
hill rice to market in 50 kilo sacks.
At home when I eat rice, I think of the woman
in the morning moon, her magnificent black pig,
and excitable chickens. So as not to spill one grain
I bow down to fork and bowl wide awake.
David McElroy is the author of Making It Simple, a collection of poetry from Ecco Press.
MEAL MOTH by Jere Odell
Ours, a sweet
unseeming symbiosis,
your fat leavens
the crackers, your
rice candy webs
the cupboards,
your dear honest
maggots ration
the once had,
hoarded manna.
And the near one-
hundred seventy
parts insect
per common loaf
of bread, clogging
the automated, mechanized
bakeries, granaries,
and mills – mostly
yours and your snout-
mouthed kin:
pyralidae.
At the first
festival of booths,
co-present.
And prime-native
of Neolithic pane-
gyrics (good
as gold) and
doctrine, of
metaphor, made
supper, your
little lambs, flesh
made bread
made flesh.
At maturity, then
you take chaff
as costume,
powdered ink
and oat-hull
copper, wheat-hull wings –
all is to fall
your way upwards
in translation.
Back to heaven
or swat, cabinet
icons, pantry
martyrs in
minutiae
of oil and ash.
Label: plodia
interpunctella.
But more, the three
to four hundred eggs
per female
in my driest
sealed cornmeal,
the “do not rinse”
of enriched rice,
the bit of color
in my hominy
grits, though
as often left
out of recipes,
acknowledgments,
art and mind, besides.
And as such,
you’ve kept me
true – not once
a vegetarian,
pacific, nor
beyond (yours)
the body –
see my writing
this, as if yours
was the commission.
Jere Odell’s poems have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, Notre Dame Review, Mudfish, and The Possibility of Language, an anthology of seven young American poets (Samizdat Editions, 2001).
3 POEMS FOR MY COLON CANCER by John Glowney
1.
What grew sank no roots in ache.
Slow as a river, with a river’s
desire to possess
whatever it can suck in, whatever
it can worry
in its endless mouthing of stones,
grit, sand
with its slobbery lips,
with its murmur of
never says, never says, never says.
When they showed me
the photograph of the tumor
it was not black
as I had imagined
all such truly evil things were,
but white, a swirl
of pinkish-white,
a color you would expect to find
in a little girl’s party dress.
* * *
2.
The surgeons, flesh-mechanics, open me up
with sharp, deliberate knives
and take what they want,
and I just lie there, serene, cold,
emptied of dreams,
the columns of flesh quieted,
the 10,000,000 cells
as still
as water lilies
covering a shaded lake
or plowed furrows
far from the lights of town,
the long scars of soil dark and tranquil.
The doctor’s words: bad cards
explaining the gamble of all flesh.
* * *
3.
You know you are returning
because your whole body lights up
as if someone threw a switch . . .
Pain after surgery is a chorus of nerve-endings
each one singing out of tune with the next,
a battalion of colicky babies crying,
a mob of marching bands,
cymbals crashing –
You begin sewing yourself
back together
with each nerve lighthouse
blinking its beam
through the fog of anesthesia, each breath
a kite
you can’t see
jerking
at the other end of its long tether. . . .
Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah.
Button-holes of pain
for wearing the shirt of another day alive.
John Glowney is the author of the chapbook Swimming Lessons (Juniper Press, 1998). His poems have appeared in Antaeus, The Ohio Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Poetry Northwest, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. He was the recipient of the Richard Hugo Prize (1999) and the 2002 Robert Winner Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
DARWIN IN THE ANDES by Emily Raabe
All day today I’ve felt lucky – time is nice
instead of a yawning tunnel, the dog sighs
in her sleep at my feet, food is warm and eaten
off the good plates. I know I will pay
for this abundance when afternoon looms
like a bony forearm thrown across
the beginning of the moon, ill portent,
animal dead in the road
no matter. This morning in my reading
Darwin found the Andes, climbed higher
than his shipmates to the fossils of the sea things
in the cliffs, lifted his face to blue
and did not panic, as I believe he will
in later days, journey over and infirmities
besetting him, God too close to be forgotten
and the creatures in a museum
in London, packed in cotton and smelling of rot.
Let Darwin have his day
in the Andes, the first flush of freedom
from salvation upon him, the world revealing
its face in the thin air like green over the choppy sea.
Let me have my small pleasures; love
in the afternoon, the dog who cries to go out
and is let out, the words who arrive
like mysteries, like the gift of a bone-white
shell in rock four thousand feet above the sea,
silence leading into silence, the Englishman
who slips his god from the Ark
and senses only that the wind is fresh
and up today, and feels only the weigh
of the spiraled things in his hands
and the ache in his legs from climbing so far.
Emily Raabe’s poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Crab Orchard Review, Antioch Review, Agni Online, and Brooklyn Review.
FLOATER by Andrew Merton
It happens as you get older –
something breaks loose from a retina.
Close your eyes,
turn your face toward the light
and there it is, a dark speck
swirling through your field of vision,
an amoeba gliding across a slide,
a plane flying loop-the-loops,
a dancer enjoying her last moments
on the stage.
Andrew Merton’s work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Yankee, Boston Magazine, and The Boston Globe. He is the author of Enemies of Choice: The Right-to-life Movement and Its Threat to Abortion (Beacon Press, 1981) and the anthology In Your Own Voice: A Writer’s Reader (HarperCollins, 1995).
Ritual by Ellen Bass
for my mother
I had watched as the blood receded,
her nail beds whitening, then
her fingers and hands. There was no
dramatic closing of the eyes –
they were mostly shut already.
But I did smooth the lids
and tried to close her mouth that had hung
gaping for days, exposing the thick, dry tongue.
Her favorite Dove soap, a new bar, floated
a child’s boat in the basin of water
as I washed her face, the smooth skin
of her muzzle like the pale center
of the faces of apes. I sponged under her arms,
spare hairs hanging limp and colorless,
lifted the slack breasts
and soaped her belly, quilt of scars,
barnacled legs, gnarled feet.
The sharp smell of urine that clung
to her bald vulva and the transparent stain
of liquid shit, I sponged away,
rinsing her flattened buttocks until,
when I bent to smell her,
she would have been satisfied.
Like setting the Passover table
with matzoh and morror, bitter herbs,
salt water, shank bone of lamb;
like casting crumbs into the sea
on the first afternoon of Rosh Hashana;
or the groom breaking a glass at his wedding,
the bride circling him seven times,
this too had its precise commands –
and I had done everything wrong:
Only later I learned the purification
of Taharah requires
windows to be open, the deceased
lowered to a sheet on straw, washed
right side before left, then lifted
so twenty-four quarts of water can flow
over the crown and down the body,
cascading in one continuous stream,
rinsing away all sin. The shroud
must be white linen, hand sewn,
no buttons, no pockets for worldly goods
to be carried to the grave; each tie
must be twined with four knots,
the head of each knot facing the heart.
But how could my mother care?
She spent her sabbaths with the god
of commerce, the god of feeding her children
and sending them off to college.
At precisely nine she’d unlock the glass door,
the phone came to life, customers entered.
Her hands were not yet smudged with newsprint,
her lipstick was still a clear strong red.
Greeting each patron by name, she would bag
a cold six-pack of Rolling Rock or a pint of Old Crow,
pressing coins into their open palms,
making sure to touch them.
Belief by Ellen Bass
If I could conceive of my mother
in an afterlife, I’d imagine her
dressed in a blue cotton housecoat
scrambling eggs, sipping black coffee,
her first cigarette of the day, the filter not yet stained
with the striated red of Cherries in the Snow.
And if I believed in such things
I’d sit my father in his naugahyde chair
slurping oatmeal. Maybe
I’d even tip-toe in myself, in that pink
Garland sweater and pleated skirt,
quickly eat the eggs, then rush
off to school, Maris’ father driving us,
leaning forward to squint
through the clearing he’d scraped,
so small I was sure he’d kill us.
But no. Better that I stay to the side
so I can keep watching my mother, see
how young she is, how easily she steps
from sink to stove, the effortlessness
of her joints, what plush cartilage
and plump muscle, walls
of the veins and arteries scrubbed slick.
Maybe today, when the dishes are stacked
I’ll have her recline on the porch
with a novel. Summer.
A breeze coming off the sea.
She could finish sewing one of those patterns
she’d always cut out and never get to,
a flared skirt, a shirtwaist dress.
Or perhaps pull on her boots
and walk down the shoreline,
collecting conches swept in from a storm.
I envy people who believe in heaven –
or even a neutral place – a kind of Switzerland
of the afterlife, somewhere we could
mail our letters and hope
for a reply. Maybe some words are blacked out,
or it’s in code: an old betting slip
or grocery list we find in the pocket
of a raincoat. Or even a worn matchbook
a packet of little phosphorous knobs
I could warm my heart at, a modest
flame I could cup my hand around.
Ellen Bass’s most recent book of poetry is Mules of Love (BOA Editions). Among her awards are the Lambda Literary Award and a Pushcart Prize.
WYCLIF PRACTICES THE ART OF DEFINITION WHILE WALKING TO HIS MORNING CLASS
“A definition is a concise statement setting forth the nature of the thing in question.”
– Saint John of Damascus, The Fount of Knowledge, Chapter VIII
A door is an opening one goes in
or comes out of. A street is a map
for the feet to follow. Snow is
moisture frozen in white clusters
and falling through clouds. Clouds are
white, gray, or black patches
sewn into the fabric of sky. The sky is
not visible today. Neither is the sun.
The invisible is the visible
temporarily concealed, as God is
and has been for thirteen centuries now,
although His light is the light we talk in.
Walking is a form of movement
peculiar to man and taking him
away from some objects and towards others.
Thus I am walking from Balliol Hall
to St. Mary’s Cathedral, which is
a building where mass is sung
and lectures are given. Both are
made out of words. A word is
(according to the saint from Damascus)
a door behind which
the Spirit of Truth waits. And a door
is an opening one goes in or comes out of.
Thom Satterlee’s poems about the life and times of John Wyclif, the fourteenth-century English theologian who inspired the first complete English-language translation of the Bible, have appeared in Crazyhorse, Roanoke Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Southwest Review, and West Branch.
THEN by Grace Paley
when she came to meet him at the ferry
he said you are so pale worn
so frail standing on her toes
to reach his ear she whispered
I am an old woman oh then
he was always kind
NIGHT MORNING by Grace Paley
To translate a poem
from thinking
into English
takes all night
night nights and days
English does
the best it can while
the mother’s tongue Russian
omits the verb to be
again and again and
is always interfering
with the excited in-
dustrious brain wisely
the heart’s beat asserts
control
also the newest English
argues with its old
singing ancestry
it thinks it knows best
finally the night’s
hard labor peers through
the morning window observes
snow birds the sun caught
in white and black winter
birches disentangles itself
addresses the ice-cold meadow
for hours on the beauty of
the color green
SIEMA VISITS THE OLD AGE HOME by Grace Paley
the very little girl looked at her grandfather
the way he was sprawled across his big wheelchair
his leg was crooked it was bent the wrong way she
watched his leg for two or three minutes sometimes
it tried to move itself it was interesting she
gave him a kleenex
then she wanted to see the important room all
the women and men in a half circle of wheelchairs
looking straight at the television some were
all right many were hunched over their heads
were twisted that way they could see the tele-
vision better sometimes people walked from
somewhere to someplace else right past the big
television faces only one person yelled out
hey you crazy? it was very interesting
on the way back to see her grandfather in
his window corner she stopped a man she’d seen
last week was bobbing his head and waving his
arms and shouting go away and stop it and go
to hell other words very loud no one came
she watched him for about five minutes then he
took a breath he was quiet she saw that he had
finished being interesting bye bye she said she
waved the man exhausted softly said bye bye
Grace Paley is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor. Best known for her fiction writing, her Collected Stories was a finalist for the 1994 National Book Award. She turned to poetry in the 1980’s and in recent years has been writing poetry almost exclusively. She is the author of three collections of poetry, including Leaning Forward and Begin Again: Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). She was awarded a Senior Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, in recognition of her lifetime contribution to literature. Grace Paley was appointed as the first New York State Author, 1986–1988, and as Vermont’s fifth State Poet in 2003.