POETRY
ABOUT THE GUEST POETRY EDITOR
Olena Kalytiak Davis is the author of shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities (Tin House/Bloomsbury), a Spring 2004 Book Sense Poetry Top Ten Pick. Her first collection, And Her Soul Out of Nothing (University of Wisconsin Press), was selected by Rita Dove for the Brittingham Prize for Poetry. Davis’ work has been included in four Best American Poetry anthologies and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Among her awards are Guggenheim, Rasmuson, and Alaska State Council on the Arts fellowships.
* * * by Joshua Beckman
Lying in bed I think about you,
your ugly empty airless apartment
and your eyes. It’s noon, and tired
I look into the rest of the awake day
incapable of even awe, just
a presence of particle and wave,
just that closed and deliberate
human observance. Your thin fingers
and the dissolution of all ability. Lay
open now to only me that white body,
and I will, as the awkward butterfly,
land quietly upon you. A grace and
staying. A sight and ease. A spell
entangled. A span. I am inside you.
And so both projected, we are now
part of a garden, that is part of a
landscape, that is part of a world
that no one believes in.
* * * by Joshua Beckman
Beautiful arbitrary reflexivity (the night).
A fat baby smiling from its bucket (the day).
Before the room gets too small, let me remind you
that everyone with a window already jumped.
Our point is assertion, not seduction,
but this will do. Here, take what I wrote
and as I ride away on the pulled-apart bicycle
the bitter dog will jump out of the mailbox
and the belly, detained by the shirt,
as Chekov his nostalgic interpreters,
will fall out into the big world.
In German we will say
the word for sample is “ein exemplar”
and then run away – drink your coffee
and rue the day. When you return,
explain every humorous thing you can
about misinterpretation,
– an awkward smile, a boat for a candle –
I spent years preparing and then my feet began
to pound, I felt faint. In the most comforting way
you stood there behind me. I thought it then
and I think it even now: A weak woman
will never make you happy.
Joshua Beckman is the author of four books of poetry and the forthcoming book, Shake (Wave Books, 2006).
MILLEFIORI: THE HABITS OF BELIEF by Angus Bennett
: as in the autobiography of our sin : as in her skin.
Friday, cut by sight line – guylined trees, dark edges – tied
by angles to this terra firmer, binds up imagination.
then quick, quickly I note essential from every-
day, from the everyday you in the gasstationparkinglot to
the bottle shifting, spinning in exhaust like a tired dancer,
unmoored. you then gone and now delivered as the then diminishment
of afternoon. from the shoulder, hand, onetwo into the sleepwalk side-
step of love. it is night. she is bruising, her cheek, darker. twilit falling
inchoate and violet and liquid – a perfume of sweat and spit,
of a mouth, of left-wet marks, the indentandfinger in the split,
teeth against shoulder, shoulder against armrest, the brunt of it all
collecting in her collarbones, pooling. we are awake.
this is desire as desire was described to me : chemical :
as in : love is a reaction : as in love is what is
in the passing of genes : what is in the passing of jeans
over hips, over ankles? simply, the wrist catching. the rest getting
caught up in reflections where you, reader, will know my hand : as
if in my hands, her for you whomever you’ve wanted;
you will read another poem in the lines of sweat (watch watch)
tracking her collarbones : as in the path that the path does
not know : as in a bite on the shoulder, the roadwork pushing;
the mouthwork of blood and intensity; the underlying
under lying, the even more beautiful subterfuge laying under you :
the wind-wound dazzling: as in my gaze taking possession
with hurried movements: as in becoming, resurrection : as with
feet on glass, feet of glass stuck to. a dialogue of
fumbles, undone with words and so, then, quiet in heat.
zippers. elastic. ticking. buttonsandhooks. the rearview mirror.
cloud-stopped-sky quiet : as in the end of things : as in
the emphasis of things. in a breath : as in this bright fitting
Angus Bennett is currently pursuing a PhD in English at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. This is his first publication in a national literary journal.
AT ELMWOOD CEMETERY, MT. ELLIOTT AND LAFAYETTE, DETROIT by Laura Bernstein-Machlay
Nobody wears galoshes anymore
says Holly as the rain
unfurls like a carpet, dragging with it an early
twilight that scritch-scratches
across the sky. In a moment the grass
has matted to fishnet that catches at our feet.
All the markers have slicked
into stars. Zachariah Chandler’s 40-foot obelisk
winks like a radio tower while our teased,
Aqua-Netted hair melts into drizzle and mascara.
It is summer 1982. We are stupid
with cheap wine. We have lost
our way among acres of tombstones in this century-plus
year-old cemetery, the boys who brought us
lagging somewhere behind, camouflaged by row
after row of 19th century pragmatism – an angel ascending
the Chistol family monument insists She Hath
Done What She Could as though that is sufficient.
There is Richard Wheaton, Husband. Liduvania
Hetfield, Mother. Calab Blackburn, Typhoid Fever.
Annie Saulter, Cramps. Where are
the adjectives? Loving, Faithful, Awful?
Where are the boys meant to follow
us into the wet, boys whose faces have blurred
like carved inscriptions over decades?
A little spooked, maybe they’re rolling
joints in the dry car, wondering if it’s worth it,
two freaky chicks getting their kicks in the boneyard.
I know what Holly says, but what about
John Blessed, last stagecoach driver in the state, what
would he tell us, or Hiram Walker tut tutting
beneath the wind? I bet they knew enough
to wear galoshes when they came to make out
with girls in the cemetery, in the rain.
Even Merry Widow Juliet Hammond
would have chosen wiser than patent leather
stilettos, red for Holly, black for me,
that squiltzch every step in the mud.
But we are in high school, we are outcasts
only just come in to the power of our bodies.
We say fuck when in our hearts we’d like someone
to make love to us as in romance novels,
tenderly, without fumbling for caught zippers
or the crinkle of vinyl seats imprinted into our skin.
Like Rudolf Rogers’ bas-relief Veiled Lady, we can’t
see a damn thing in this fog.
We would like to float like her, diaphanous,
endless, somewhere
between Heaven and Earth, but our heelshave jammed us square in the dirt, in the jerky,
slo-mo patina of memory where I forever stumble
sideways into Parent’s Creek – Bloody Run
after Pontiac’s ambush of British soldiers
dyed it red for days. Where Holly kicks
off her shoes for good in the pebbly water
and like a looping movie reel, Zachariah, Richard,
Liduvania, Calab, continue chuckling to themselves;
Annie, John, Hiram, Juliet patiently
put on their galoshes, right foot, then left, set out
to rescue two silly girls gone
missing in the rain.
Laura Bernstein-Machlay’s poems have appeared in Georgia Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review.
EMBOUCHURE by David Biespiel
1
Here’s a peek-a-boo at my feather-light upkeep: I’m pickled as a lost keepsake –
And, dear, I say to myself, dear, you’re a sub-man, a busy mass.
You have a lush noose draped over your ears. Call it, field armor.
And the way you lord it on with your desperate scrub,
Chucked, mauled, like a morality play –
With your cluttered lookout and holy occult, pooled
For the next torment – is brighter than a groomsman’s hickey.
Where are the moors when you want to sprawl in your sore wreckage
And back into the gaffe of a good pint?
What’s the mileage on the inescapable ship in that bottle?
2
Now beneath winter’s dark pizzazz and beneath the few starlings’ zippered
reaction times,
Beneath the dewy light, and despite the beaten, months-old, “Merry Christmas” colors,
I stand and manage to hear the New Year’s geese
And notice the twin yellow roses over the fence.
I stand, meek and garbled, firing off my riffs.
And despite the unsureness of my chops, my head
Is no better for being stewed into the wee-er hours.
No better than being rebuffed by love.
(And the little uncertainties, hesitations, of my desire, and the enormous
uncertainties,
Like the interior, scaled-down cartography of a heart, these I’ve sought to stiff-arm and send off.)
I’ve met what was necessary, like a sentry for pinpoint sighing,
Met what was sensual in the muskegs, in the sedge and scummy bogs,
Met the crass and the dead and the orthodox pantheists
Who are impious and stammer
With their forgotten IOUs (they are so beautifully jowled, like Jews).
And I’ve met what was unnecessary: the smarmy master-at-arms,
The tarred-and-feathered trusts, the drawn bridges, the vacant party-boats.
There was no karmic trickster among that lot. –
And now as the wind picks up like a distant thought, I understand that what I once had –
Guts, for instance, or forbearance, rebelliousness –
Hasn’t come home in some time.
I know that before I discover such neat objects as better wine
And learn the sweeter tunes to blow over the tops of the three-quarter empty
bottles,
A lulling tune or a fleshy tune,
Tunes for the meeting houses and the strongest shoulders and the feet of the poor and the forgers and threaders,
Tunes for the darker brains and the rumpled beds of lovers
And the months of cursed rain,
Only then can I get back in shape, with the brunt of my corks trailing behind me.
David Biespiel’s books include Wild Civility (University of Washington Press, 2003) and Shattering Air (BOA Editions, 1996).
SITE-SPECIFIC ADAPTATIONS by Elizabeth Bradfield
This winter, I became a man.
It happened the first week of November
while my girlfriend guided
photo tours of polar bears.
For a week in Manitoba, she wakes,
eats, and rides the tundra buggies
with tourists over eskers, lending
story to what they see. Always hard
for certain husbands to hear a woman
tell them what they don’t know
about hibernation, diet, and climate.
Every trip she’s tested, the wives
rolling their eyes in sympathy
when the men can’t see, then
tucking into the crooks of their arms.
Leaning on them. This year, though,
another landscape competes
with what’s running the boreal
treeline: she and I
are on the ballot. Our home.
Our tax burden and hospital
visitation rights in eleven
states. She’s wary. Senses
chasms. Bans talk
of the election – a distraction
from what we’re here to see.
But still, to some of them
she looks suspect: short-haired,
short-nailed, with a walk
that’s wide and expects
to be made way for, as do
these husbands. Out on the tundra,
she tries to keep them focused –
Look at the fox digging
for his cache of meat. But, no bears
in sight, a wife, bored, turns
from the view saying, ‘So,
have you left anyone at home?’
My lover says, Look, a gyrfalcon.
Until the last few years, we knew
almost nothing of their nesting
habits. What she’d like to say
is that this place they’ve paid
to have her show them is in danger:
big cars, central air, long commutes
from master suite to corner office,
jets to distant locales. But that
could get into evaluation forms.
Could mean she’s not asked back.
It’s November 2. Four more days
with this group, seven with the next
then she’ll come home to me.
What weather they’re having –
mid twenties and clear, bears
at the bay’s edge in golden light
testing the new ice, hungry for seal.
Four more days in the buggy. Four more
dinners of careful talk. My husband
is a poet she finally says, for the first time
not risking this truth and hating
that what she loves
could bring her to this lie.
– November, 2004
Elizabeth Bradfield has recent poems in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and Field. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
MINNEAPOLIS by Joel Brouwer
New Year’s Eve in the city Berryman
exited as a fat drunk fish and God
he may as well have been there: you, your two
and a half schizophrenic friends, and me
maybe rounding it up to three lined up
on a moldy sofa like a row of empty
cages at an animal shelter sunk
in 3:00 p.m. dusk deep into a cold
case of High Life we didn’t even need
to refrigerate since yep, you guessed it,
the gas had been shut off the week before.
Don’t forget we were smoking meth then, too.
How did you know that! Which you are you! You
could see your breath in there if you were there
or you whose breath I had begun to mix
with mine like March rain raising the river
or ice cubes deliquescing in white wine?
Like like like like like like like like like like.
You you you you you you you you you you.
As opposed I guess to is and we. Fat
chance we is to be awake at midnight.
It can’t in fact have been 9:00 when we crashed
R’s parents’ party, bad off, where cousins,
neighbors, and her dad’s golf buddies said her
hair sure was something. Why did we go there?
Why ask me? Didn’t R need money or
to “check in” as agreed in counseling?
Did she want to try again to show her folks
she wasn’t so much a stray as a cage
from which one had escaped? You heard a lot
on TV in those days about checking in
and letting things out but not much about
what to do when these things called from Eau Claire
or jail and wanted you to get dressed right
then and drive down to Western Union, fast.
Hey you who said about the meth before:
were you checking in or letting things out?
Are you the you who sparked your love down dark
wires toward me? Is a money order
tunneling the prairie between us at
last as we speak? Are you speaking? Are we?
How thin’s the ice on the river tonight?
WHITE SUIT by Joel Brouwer
Still mixing up Catherine and Marie de’ Medici,
yet unsure whether St. Helena or Elba came first,
after four months in Paris we went to buy a book
to shelve among the onions by the stove and consult
when these contretemps broke out, as they always did,
in the kitchen. En route to Gilbert Jeune, walking
single-file down a narrow sidewalk thicketed
with scaffolding, we saw a Japanese camera crew
filming an actor bent intently over the gauges
of a giant purple motorcycle parked at the curb.
His white suit marked him as a star. The director
yelled and white suit sprang from the bike
toward a heavy wooden door, his face a blaze of fury,
though whether fueled by love or hate or both
we couldn’t know. At the director’s second shout
the passion fell away and white suit sauntered back
to his bike for another take. Passers-by, involuntary
extras, were at first confused, then figured it out,
tucked a curl behind an ear, stood straighter,
tightened neckties before passing the camera.
One woman – no joke – stopped and put on lipstick.
Aware of our imminent promotion from human
to silver screen Parisien, we wanted to look our best,
i.e., unlike ourselves. Even the taxis and scaly sycamores,
the scent of roasting chestnuts, seemed no longer
themselves but postcards, and even the actor, arriving
again and again at his destiny, where his girl was a prisoner
or his long-lost mother lay dying, where a nemesis
was about to kidney-punch his pal, could not cross
the threshold, tried again and again in vain
to be the thing he was but not yet well enough.
Joel Brouwer is the author of Exactly What Happened (Purdue University Press, 1999) and Centuries. (Four Way Books, 2003). His poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry.
GRID by Karen Chase
What are you putting in your mouth
you wonder one day as you lick a stamp.
What are you putting on your skin, what
are you breathing in? When did history start?
Dancers do positions one and two
in pink satin ballet shoes,
then pray on their knees.
Strauss composes a waltz.
Time’s mixed up above and beneath.
German planes drop maps of France
dotted with swastikas, drumming
fear into the English countryside.
“You are surrounded. Throw down your arms.”
Leaflets drift down in history’s whirlwind,
the helix goes round.
Today I hear a plane – plane! –
the word suddenly changed.
The pearlized sky is not natural,
nor is the ruby-washed sea.
I’m scared of fresh ruins.
Hopping on a plane, to love – what a luxury
that was – the dry Mayan ruins of Uxmal,
or Palenque, under the wraps of jungle.
The stagnant pond where sacrifices were made,
jewels buried in the black muck still.
Anghor Selinute Macchu Picchu Tikal –
to love fragments is no good now,
to let the mind roll free.
Nightfall has fluttered down
into graves that are stories-deep.
Who’s that little girl? All she wants
is to sprawl about on the grass.
All she wants is to curl up on the couch.
Suddenly thick clouds arrive.
But it’s just weather.
Wind corkscrews up like a helix, sucks fish
from the ocean, then drops the silver slivers down.
The ground’s in grand confusion.
The wind
or mind –
is it blowing now?
The mind blows the trees down,
knocks over manmade structures.
Crows caw through the yellowlit sky,
every birch rises blue and skyward –
a lash of red ribbons – flags slice the skyline,
eagles screech towards the light.
Me and my shadow stretch one finger out straight,
an effort so enormous, all that comes to mind
is nuclear reaction. In wormbound sadness, people
who disdain prayer hold up their palms.
Sides of buildings wear away and patterns begin.
The start of the past?
Land and home of the free and the brave,
the Cockpit of Europe, the Land of Regrets,
Bogland, Motherland, Land of the Midnight Sun.
The confused land the day maps fell on English fields,
the day fish fell from the sky, the day planes
hit the towers. Everything flew down in the wind
and broken glass, the grid of history, landed in Brooklyn.
Karen Chase’s first book of poems, Kazimierz Square, was published in 2000. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Yale Review, The Norton Introduction to Poetry and Billy Collins’ Poetry 180. Her new book of poems, Doing Time, will come out in 2007.
PART-TIME LAZARUS by Mark Conway
You were not born great
among the with-
holders, you learned to be great,
which gets you serious
traction, the law
of smalltown physics
absolute: the depth
of attraction is equal
to the draw of the object
that can’t be had,
a standoff that lasts
forever, or, right up
to the ignited, often
pharmaceutically-assisted
moment, then it’s, whoa, lordy,
not so slow – so,
you could be
had, yet you had, as Ray said,
standards,
just set astonishingly
low, absolutely not
nothing, so they could be lowered
still. When she . . . and who
was she? The daughter
of a Gnostic,
you came to her,
a parolee from the Second
Desire Wars, a non-
combatant with an aura
purchased at the local
spa, saintly kind of
down and damaged,
with the other-worldly sexy-feline
power of those risen
from the dead who say, please,
don’t touch me
so she gets the oils and considers history
an intermezzo. See, she’s
over there, chewing gum, getting lubed
with tears to wash you down,
look at her little head shine.
ZILCH by Mark Conway
That never happened. It did,
but it didn’t
matter, it happened
in the time of blotto,
of dust and nada, it was nothing
much, nothing
special –
– just the season before
the season of unknowing,
the era of the Over-Answer,
that everything came to
naught.
It was in that time
you were too
busy with your skull
getting shrunken by the Swiss
head-
man, Herr Kabesa, the
nocturnal European
pygmy, talking zeros in the tight
void of rien. Then you started
the old rumor Arabs
invented zero – what’s with you,
you never needed
help to come up
with nothing before.
Beneath the null
weight of nadir, of zip, of nil,
the contours of your negative
impression emerge – never &
never
more a touch, an easy
turning of the face,
everyone who dies adds
to the power
of zero.
In your personal
immensity, Employee
of the Year N, down
below you see it: us
like nothing in
the jostling light,
the routine dew
burned out in the yellow zigzag
track of the day-
drunk wasp.
Mark Conway’s book of poems Any Holy City came out in 2005. His work has appeared in Bomb, The Gettysburg Review, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner.
THE GRASP RELAXED IS NEITHER by Mark Cox
And so, Renaldo and Edwina unembrace,
Their ill-fated safari film backlit
By rapid-fire Swahili in a dilating dawn.
Ah, Trader Horn. Big game, savage bushmen,
Adultery, abortion, betrayal, and neurotic compulsion.
Welcome aboard!
Her steamer home sails straight
For Salt Lake City, two Mormon husbands,
And a stroke at a nursing home stove.
As for Renaldo, his wife in Hollywood
Is already tracking this game,
Her husband’s infidelity like spoor,
As she dials the INS, schedules
An audition for deportation.
Having overstayed his 90-day visa
By a decade, he’ll spend a full year off-shore,
Divorced and forbade to come aground.
In his binoculars, and over the horizon:
A presidential pardon and gaucho typecasting
For the rest of his career.
Is fulfilled too romantic a word
For what the lion and gazelle feel
When their noses first lift to the wind,
Each with its separate hope?
Or for two mascara-ed, rouged, Hollywood faces,
Relaxing above tea served in mosquito nets?
Maybe, maybe not. But clearly it seemed
Worth everything, to be, for one moment,
As the African sun set blush-red
Through their tent wall,
Swept away. To submit,
To manifest tangibly,
Their own scent on the air.
Mark Cox’s latest books are Natural Causes and Thirty-seven Years from the Stone, both published in the Pittsburgh Poetry Series.
ON TURNING 38 IN ROMA by Kevin Craft
Long ago you outlived Keats
and even your early reading of Keats.
Now if there were more than water
to your name
and nothingness to secure your fame,
you might sip a glass of claret
with the beggars in the streets.
Milestone or millstone? You decide.
Meanwhile, back to homicide
and another unsinkable comparison:
like la Barcaccia entered in regatta
33 came and went
without stigmata.
And this year in the Pantheon
you bent
over backwards respecting ocular heaven
and Raffaello of Urbino
who quit this earth at 37.
Now, here in the Campo Marzio
where soldiers lay their arms to rest
you try your chiaroscuro best
to outlive Caravaggio. No,
not with brush and not with gun
but in the glower of the sun
where worse than lizards have it made,
and you, fighting for a wedge of shade,
shouting, “Tennis anyone?”
TOWARDS A PHILOSOPHY OF EXTRAPOLATION by Kevin Craft
Night by a window, the shifting
surf, a wind trying all the latches.
If you listen closely,
you can hear the ground
glass of telescopes screeching,
ropes in the rigging
of a sloop drawn taut. They must
know the universe is constantly
expanding. It’s gritty inch-work
on the fast frontier. My watch
resembles nothing less
than the miracle of happenstance.
A gas pump gives its tacit approval.
Even at this hour
some kind of swimmer
detaches himself from shore.
As usual, the pebble beach
is seething. Darkness
on darkness, cold on wet –
I don’t know how he can take it.
Shutters strain against their
elaborate stays. The mirrors
of adolescent girls make it
look so easy – though hush-hush
as their casements swell.
Kevin Craft’s first book of poems, Solar Prominence, won the Samuel and Rhea Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books. His work has appeared in Poetry, Verse, Crab Orchard Review, and Southwest Review.
EVERY RIVER by Weston Cutter
The birds start the auction in trees decked with sex,
dawn is the moment another song begins on some
faraway stereo. It’s spring and the last time I
heard this song I wasn’t listening to California
train whistles but the brass peals of barge horns
groaning yellow through the dark like the unbuckling
belts of former lovers who don’t miss me. Her face
a blade behind my eyes so of course I can’t remember
the name of every river and lake I’ve offered my
body to. I’m awake tasting rust after a long night
spent licking the gray steel of distance and maybe
it’s not an auction they’re chirping out there: maybe
a show on the latest in featherware, strategic worm maps
for novitiates, serenades for the red hints hidden in the
green blasts tonguing from the tree’s ruddy brown skin.
Or revelry and regret sound similar at this hour and
I don’t mean a blade but something lightgrabbing and
with a ferocious taste for my Minnesota blood. The
photosynthetic fine print of the branches advertisements,
the birds selling melodies: how if you want to know
the whole story you have to cut the trunk right through
and start counting from zero? All anyone’s saying is
sing along, not even the birds know the next notes.
Weston Cutter has recent work in Delmar and Washington Square.
PLACE MAT by Jim Daniels
For her school’s Kwanzaa lunch
my daughter made a place mat
of our family sitting on the pink couch
reading: My son with Sports Illustrated,
my wife with The New Yorker. Me
with the newspaper, my daughter
with an untitled red book folded in her lap.
We’re smiling in our purple shoes.
And brown faces. She apologizes for making
my wife’s face too dark.
What’s too dark?
My friend Girma from Ethiopia believed fiercely
that spaghetti grew on trees. And he believed fiercely
in not returning to Ethiopia. His dark skin glowed warm
through heartless Michigan winters on a campus
with a dozen black students.
We don’t have dark skin or purple shoes.
Beyond the couch and coffee table,
the picture fades into a yellow haze.
I don’t remember ever drawing
a black person.
They changed the name
of the crayon that used to be called flesh.
In the big set of 64. I’m not sure which one
it used to be.
Our shoes are tied in giant bows
as if large buzzing insects will lift us up.
She’s drawn the blue vase full of bookmarks
so we will not lose our places.
If I saw Girma today,
I’d make him spaghetti. Maybe we’d have a good joke
about it. Maybe it doesn’t hurt so much now – exile.
I wouldn’t know.
The yellow haze around us
is my daughter’s future she’ll have to fill in.
All I can do is admire myself as a black man
reading the newspaper with my family.
Smiling, in love, bordered in safety.
OPIUM REMNANTS by Jim Daniels
Black tar ball burned
on the head of a pin
sweeter than pot,
lifting us off our chairs
at the kitchen table
with the subtlety
of an incoming tide.
I inhaled smoke
from under glass
intent on saving the world
in a ten-yard radius.
A passing comet whistled
in my ears, friends riding it,
waving. We’ll be back
for you, they said.
Aretha sang slow blues
over a skipping record
while we skimmed
Lives of the Saints
for the good parts.
Jim Daniels’ most recent book is Street, published in 2005. This is his third appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
PARKED by Christine Deavel
The great blue heron stood on the concrete,
I stood on the concrete,
sprung safety pins at balance we.
I ran across the park shaking my finger at everything.
Do it right, godammit.
This sunhat can’t keep the sun from me
and my face is aflame.
There’s a rookery in the trees by the grand walk
and I’m sorry I know it.
Every shrub, flower, and tree is labeled
and my exquisite job is to read them all aloud.
Over the day I sniffed four flowers:
honeysuckle (wild, with talons)
bearded iris (purple rushing falls)
a rose (climbing garish)
a rose (climbing weak, nose knocked petals, move on)
Flummoxed.
How to be in this public.
Park Ranger smiled at me.
Show me where to stand, sir.
Mine and not mine.
All the world.
The heron’s long breast feathers sifted and swept
and its helmet feathers were stiff
out the back.
Brown rats worked the rocks
when the tide went out.
You can’t possibly have been here.
You are impossibly here.
Christine Deavel’s chapbook, Box of Little Spruce, was recently published by LitRag Press. Her poems have appeared in Fence, Ploughshares, and The American Poetry Review.
PROFESSIONAL EXTRA by Michael Dumanis
Because I could spend twenty takes on a Ferris wheel.
On account of my jaundice. My thyroid condition.
I had a nice ass and the requisite body weight.
Knew how to walk through a door unobtrusively,
as if for the last time, but still, unobtrusively.
Could pass for whomever was passing through Fresno,
or carry umbrellas so as to conceal
any trace of a person conspiring beneath them.
Director said, Man on the edge of a platform
with a bouquet of nasturtiums and checking
his pocketwatch, fidgeting, like there is someone
he knows won’t arrive on the Eastbound sleeper.
First, I am skiing alongside the villain
in Ski Party Four: villain says to me, Gus,
or whatever they call you, move over, you’re standing
too much between me and the camera you’re blocking.
Later, I’m cast as a stiff in a coffin.
The reason they cut me: I can’t keep from trembling.
Whenever they call me, I find myself trembling.
Another occasion: I die with my boots on,
impaled on a pool cue. Once, die with no face on.
Director said, No, you’re a serial killer.
You’re a professional flasher. A wallflower.
The villain from Ski Party Four plays Robespierre
in the new costume drama Reign of Terror,
and I have been placed on an as-needed basis:
time will decide if history will have me.
The heart is a construct I cobble together
from outtake to outtake. It runs in the family.
For me, the sweet smell of periphery. Timid
and weird in my clothes, I do everything
poorly, but with great affection. I merge
with the traffic of every encounter, take care
not to exhibit too much character, lose sight
of being watched. To the premiere, I wear
whatever I had on the day before.
The Ferris wheels are suddenly, and everywhere.
Michael Dumanis is the coeditor of the anthology Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006). His poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Denver Quarterly, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and Verse.
I HAD A LATE NIGHT VISITOR by Bruce Farnsworth
July 8, 2002
I just finished reading
every Kenneth Koch poem
in the house.
I’m at my computer, all cried out for now.
He’s standing behind me, leaning against
the bookshelf, leering over my shoulder.
If I stand up now
I’ll slosh when I totter to bed
like a burlap bag full of wet clay.
If I sit here any longer
he’ll just mock me
and tell me to cry some more.
He moves like the dead,
at once light and heavy,
ponderous and free.
Yes, I’m dead, that’s why
you can see clear through me,
what’s your excuse?
Cry on the shoulder of your desk.
Cry on your own shoulder,
but leave me out of it.
That reading at the Gotham in ’74;
I saw you there,
your blinking eyes two film projectors.
Tat, tat, tat, I heard the reels spinning.
That insatiable, hypno-deep look.
You’d joined the mob that killed me.
Take the bloody poems.
Take whatever you need.
Just leave me out of it.
All of your eyes fired away with a gattling stutter.
All your quick-flashing lamps faded me,
washed me out of existence.
Why aren’t they home writing,
instead of sticking it to me?
I’m really not your anything.
Go to bed you gunny sack of clay.
Sleep a little death,
and tomorrow write your own bloody poem.
Bruce Farnsworth’s poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse and Ice Floe.
JESUS KNEW by Nick Flynn
unlike you and I jesus knew he’d die
some days a headache woke him it
lingered nothing terrible but the word
hung around his temples like this
soul everyone wants but can’t find jesus
knew he’d die he just didn’t know how
& that bothered him sometimes & then
he’d do one of his little bootleg tricks
what the hell didn’t hurt anyone
didn’t make anyone disappear for-
ever but the tricks stopped working he forgot
why he did them & what for he confused
a story about a guy named jesus
with a story about a father he never knew
& it all began to hang like a motheaten coat
pulled out of a trunk on shaky days hey let’s
return to the scene of the fucken tragedy at least
we all know how it turns out instead of this end-
less uncertainty hey let’s sell our souls a few
more times no one’s really counting (those
little papers you trade for your sins,
what do you call them? anyone? no?)
– anyway – jesus this jesus that
god of nickel god of dime
right, the real jesus he was lost he walked in-
to the desert not far really his friends his
disciples he told them he’d come back
like us he said this every time he left but jesus
never said wait never pointed to the sky
never claimed he’d rise again never asked us to eat
his flesh jesus never asked anything as far
as I can tell he got tired everyday & then slept
sometimes okay sometimes un-
bearable, the dreams, the father
pointing a finger at everyone a finger we can’t
even look at.
Nick Flynn is the author of two books of poetry, Some Ether, which won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and Blind Huber, both from Graywolf Press. His memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Norton, 2004), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award.
ANOTHER POINT by Mark Halliday
People say about Jabez Legend that he was sort of a jerk
with possibly a skin fungus problem and some bounced checks
and many quasi-friends developed reasons not to sit with him
in the Melrose Diner and there is probably a modicum of truth
to all this but is that really what we want to talk about?
I mean let’s keep a perspective. We are talking about the guy
who sat up very late one night in that town,
right there in that cramped and grease-specked apartment
on South Drumlin Street with a view of the dumpsters behind Shoney’s
and he composed the song “Lament for Lorna”. Not just, you know,
another version of “Barefoot Blues” but “Lament for Lorna”.
He did it! The song must have been waiting inside him,
a part of him all through whatever else he did or didn’t do
that summer in that town of cooked asphalt –
the song waited and then out it came pouring
into the space of the core of that one night;
and I just have to keep thinking how
all those sweaty days he might have seemed just, you know,
“some guy” mixing bourbon and Pepsi, “some guy with a guitar”
on hot nights when everybody’s mind was on
just pizza and chicken wings and Red Dog beer
in that town which you could call “just a town”
and yet in reality – I’m saying the truth is
he wrote “Lament for Lorna”. The guitar was there
and the notes were there waiting on any piano
but nobody else found them! That is a reality to keep in mind
when somebody says for example that Jabez Legend lost his job
for stealing stuff at the delicatessen that same week.
Which could be true or not, and somebody else has said
he was not trustworthy with a woman named Nancy
that same summer, supposedly he messed with her mind
in some disrespectful fashion and that is possibly
accurate as far as it goes but what I am saying –
my point is another point. My point is, hey,
who wrote “Lament for Lorna”? He did!
He took the pizza and the beer and the asphalt
and the sound of voices from a party a block away
and the stupidity on TV and the glow of the all-night Shell station
and a memory of some girl glancing out of a window
and he metamorphosed all that
into something else
which is “Lament for Lorna”.
The middle part in that song – on the record it’s just
a single violin – that part kills me. Which is to say
it puts me in another life. It takes my heart
and empties out some dark pool of trouble
and leaves my heart dry and quiet on a hillside
and the name of that hillside is Acceptance.
And I just want to say
that to be the guy who wrote that song
might not change whatever else he was
but whatever else he was was
whereas that song is, man, that song exists.
“Lament for Lorna”.
Unlike me and you, and unlike Jabez too
and unlike all the real-life human stuff we do
that song is not going away.
Mark Halliday’s books of poems are Little Star (1987), Tasker Street (1992), Selfwolf (1999), and Jab (2002). His study of Wallace Stevens, Stevens and the Interpersonal, was published by Princeton University Press in 1991.
THE FUTURE OF TERROR / 4 by Matthea Harvey
If there were gamebirds in our gables,
shouldn’t we shoot them ourselves?
Thus we went glass-faced into glory.
We had our hearts set on staying here,
so our steps seemed more hesitation
waltz than straight-ahead tango.
We danced the hokey pokey on holy days –
put your left arm in heaven, your right leg in hell
and in the hubbub of shake-it-all-about,
we didn’t hear the hoofbeats. Immediately
the illuminati included indoor inflorescence
in their predictions. They spoke to us over
the intercom and sometimes via interpreter.
Meanwhile we had iodine dribbling from
our wounds and itch mites in our blankets.
Ours was not a job to joke about.
In the lantern-light, the lawn speckled
with lead looked lovely. We would live this
down by living it up. My pile of looseleaf
was getting smaller – I wrote in margins,
through marmalade stains, on the backs of maps.
I put a piece of mica in the microwave and before
the explosion it made the mirage I’d imagined.
I was hoping for a noticeable increase in nutmeats
or a one night stand in the oubliette. I outwept
everyone at the pageant, even the children
from the poorhouse playing possum.
We studied the protocol for astronaut removal
the minute we saw his spit hit planet earth
on the spaceship window. But though the scandal
reverberated round-the-clock, we had to let it
slide. He was up there turning somersaults
while we spun ever-so-slowly below.
TERROR OF THE FUTURE / 4 by Matthea Harvey
Technically, “lonely me” was a tautology.
No one had ever stuffed carnations
in my tailpipe or planted a symbolic
lipsticked kiss on the swingdoor
to my kitchen. When you appeared,
I knew I was in a race against the sun
before they took you away on a stretcher.
I spruced up the counters with spit
and a sponge – I wiped my slot machine
mouth clean. I shut the door, locked it.
I shouldn’t have – you were just here
to shop – but I was way past worrying
about the seven deadly sins. In the show
about the sea lion and natural selection,
he got scratches from his lover too. Even
in rope restraints, you were a scorcher, sweetie.
The radio said we needed to repeople.
I should have given you a running start;
I gave you roses. I persevered – I professed
the principles of capillary attraction,
made you a plaster-of-Paris statue of a peacock,
wrote hundreds of haiku. The odds on you
loving me were a thousand to one, but there you were:
nibbling my toes in your nightshirt,
kissing me on the mouth in the mudroom.
My chest felt like it had undergone mitosis,
it ached so. I marvelled at the maple syrup moon –
it had a luster unlike any linoleum.
We watched the lake breeze lift the leaves
through the keyhole. Inventory was low
and we were out of holy oil. Helicopters
landed on the hospital roof
every hour then every half hour.
Matthea Harvey is the author of two books of poetry, Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form and Sad Little Breathing Machine.
HAPPINESS WRITES WHITE by Edward Hirsch
I am a piece of chalk
scrawling words on an empty blackboard.
I am a banner of smoke
that crosses the blue air, and doesn’t dissolve.
I don’t believe that only sorrow
and misery can be written.
Happiness, too, can be precise:
Doctor, doctor, I have a sudden throbbing
on the left side of my chest
and my ribs are wrenched by joy.
Wings flutter in my shoulders
and blood courses through my body
like waves cresting on a choppy sea.
Look: the eyes blur with tears
and the tears clear.
My head is like skylight.
My heart is like dawn.
Edward Hirsch’s most recent book of poems is Lay Back the Darkness (2003). A new prose book, Poet’s Choice, was recently published by Harcourt. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
HANGING, MYSELF by Cyphar Hopkins
I need to get stuck in an elevator,
so I can make myself consider, reconsider.
In sit-coms it’s the sure-fire way
personal disasters are averted, epiphanies netted.
Everyone turns out okay in comedies,
the worst damage: a deep wedgie, the sprained ego.
The beneficent powers that be step in,
cut off the power that is
just as the hero is off to see what he can trade for his soul.
I will try the emergency phone, made of shining red plastic.
Nothing but the hymn of silence
answers my “Hellos?”
I will convince myself,
that nobody knows where I am,
that the elevator could plummet any moment
(what with the power out) & though I am inconveniently encased –
it’s really the same as freefalling through 30 or 40 stories,
some of them my own,
& then it begins – mortality’s crusade of contemplation,
the patient arc of Death’s whetstone sliding along the scythe
(if you are reading this right now, Death, do I forgive you?).
I cannot forgive myself. Of course I’ll wonder:
did I say enough “I love yous” – no. & why
could I never remember the difference
between agrimony & acrimony?
I grew up in the shadows of the Cold War,
(they taught me to get under my desk in 4th grade)
but I am not so afraid of nuclear holocaust anymore.
There are deeper problems in my America,
we all want our fruit seedless. We have to stop
cutting the crust off of sandwiches. I think
anthologies are a necessary evil, though,
& I hate myself for that thought.
But am I the right one to say this America?
It will probably get hot in the elevator,
maybe I will think I am running out of air, & I will
take off my pants to cool down,
wad them up for a pillow & hope
that if they find me this way, my mom will forgive me.
& if after hours or days or minutes
some fireman forces the doors open
& I find myself
to have been dangling just inches above the bottom floor
where will my wrinkled pants & I go from there?
Cyphar Hopkins is an undergraduate student at Central Washington University. This is his first published poem.
THE BOMBARDMENT by Ilya Kaminsky
Stop talking while we are kissing!
you make me warm
with your big hairy body, put
your hand on my belly, my gorgeous wild he-goat.
my wife hangs her underwear to dry quickly
on the balcony as a helicopter circles
over the Perki square, circles
over the women running into the fountain, running
in cold water as if cold water
can protect the women running
under the colored umbrellas, under
the apricots – we are on the street, we are
in the apartment again. Here are my
clothes packed in the bag on the floor
where I sleep with my clothes on, I
feel footsteps, soldiers, thinking, soldiers, thinking, soldiers –
honey, she is mouthing, I don’t know
what to do, her hand touches my ear, touches
my ear. If you can’t stop these helicopters,
God of our brothers – helicopters
in sunlight, policemen
in sunlight – make them drink the sunlight
and make them choke.
Take your chair outside, Lord,
watch us run in the sunlight.
ALFONSO LOOKS OUT OF THE WINDOW by Ilya Kaminsky
– On the balconies, sunlight on poplars, sunlight, on our lips.
Today no one was shooting, there’s just sunlight and sunlight.
A girl cuts her hair with imaginary scissors –
a girl in sunlight, a school in sunlight, a horse in sunlight.
A boy steals a pair of shoes from an arrogant clerk in sinlight.
I speak and I say: sunlight, falling inside us, sunlight.
When they shot fifty women on Tejtat St.,
I sat down to write and tell you what I know:
a child learns the world by putting it in his mouth,
a boy becomes a man, and a man earth.
Body, they blame you for all things and they
seek in the body what does not live in the body.
Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004). He is a recent winner of the Whiting Writer’s Award.
from NOCTURNES by Deborah Landau
I.
I’m thinking
of you tonight
Philip Larkin
groping back
to bed
after a piss
and yes
the moon
so cold
through the bars
on the window
southward sky
emptier than ever
vast space
no winter moon
no matter how flaxen
gorgeous heartbreaking full
can fill
I spend more
and more time
thinking about the past
there’s so much of it now
and here in my narrow bed
all night
I have been
not sleeping
III.
Water falling over brick
water falling over bone
over Maiden Lane
and the New York Sports Club
and the South Street Seaport
and Wendy’s on Water Street
I have reached the room at the end of the room
I’ve left a sick print on the carpet
another year has passed
VI.
The moon might rise and it might not
and if it brings a ghost light we will read beneath it
whitely and if it returns to earth
we will listen for its phrases
and if I am alone at the bedside table
I will have a ghost book to refer to
and when I lie back I will see its imprint
beneath my blood-red lids:
not lettered ink
but the clean page
not sugar
but the empty bowl
not flowers
but the dirt they come in
Deborah Landau’s collection of poems, Orchidelirium, a National Poetry Series finalist, won the 2003 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her work has appeared in Barrow Street, Gulf Coast, and Prairie Schooner.
MONEY VARIATIONS by David Lehman
1.
Money is cock, said the professor.
We live in a phallic society.
Protesters were walking around
holding posters saying,
“Money rules,” and
“Money is the market,” and
“Money is nonjudgmental,” and
“Money is a kind of poetry.”
One heckler shouted,
“Where id was, shall money be,”
but the speaker had the wit to reply,
“Where is was, let ego go free.”
“Face it, we’re a nation of salesmen,”
said the bartender.
“I can’t change my fucking address
without someone trying to sell me
a variable annuity.”
“Are you changing your address?”
“Yes, but that’s not the point,”
he snarled.
“Can I buy you a drink?”
Meanwhile the bearded nebish next door
was playing James Taylor singing
“You’ve Got a Friend”
at top capacity and I went over to see
if I could get him to lower the volume.
“Or else,” he said.
“Or else,” I said,
“You’ve got an enemy.”
Ha! Show me the money!
2.
It’s money that puts the fannies in the seats.
It’s money that pays the bills,
Buys the drinks, pays for the pills,
Separates the good guys from the cheats.
It’s money that put the monkey on my back,
It’s money that can make my monkey fly.
Money is unsentimental and never needs to lie.
Money is that which we lack.
How to say this? Money is tits,
You either have them or you don’t.
Money doesn’t care if you will or if you won’t.
For money never calls it quits.
For money’s the honey that makes the babe talk
Money’s the bunny that sat in my lap
Money’s the flower that shut like a trap
Money’s no dummy that makes the babe walk.
It’s money for me and me for you,
It’s what we do after we screw,
If false to you, to none can it be true,
It’s you for me and money for you.
For money’s the color of my true love’s hair,
Money’s the smell of her in the dark.
In the foreign night where no dogs bark,
Money’s the flashlight that leads to her lair.
David Lehman is the author of six books of poems, most recently When a Woman Loves a Man (Scribner, 2005). He has also written, in collaboration with James Cummins, a book of sestinas entitled Jim and Dave Defeat the Masked Man, which SoftSkull Press published last year.
LAST BODY by Alex Lemon
Please me when I say take it
For a ride – make it a place others
Might understand. Let me explain –
A prairie puzzled apart by lightning
For example, the oak vamping de-limbed
In winter, or how each pair of tennis shoes is
Unwound from the powerline. But none of this
Shines like a rain of thumbtacks. For a mouth
Open is no different than frostbite or a bucket of bolts
Slopping into the sun’s bath. It is a barking animal
But do not say dog. I will check for the baby
Beneath my dress. Now, we have highways
& nothing seems far enough away. The way
Of holy eyes – morning & knife-in-the-box
That act of misunderstanding which is
Much more casual than a glass dusted in sunlight
& because we call it casual, or a glass in sunlight
It will not break or bleed. This is fundamental
& nothing came before. I adore you the blizzard
That going blank, that’s fine. A raccoon
Awake & thief-mouthed in the dumpster
The half-chewed chicken-bone is a truth
That little victim is suffer it & joy
Alex Lemon’s most recent poems are forthcoming in Tin House, AGNI, Artful Dodge, Bloomsbury Review, Gulf Coast, and The Journal.
WHAT TO USE TO MAKE A JUNCO by J. W. Marshall
Brown apothecary glass.
Fresh coconut meat.
Leaves of rust from an iron gate.
Wire from an orthodontia visit.
It’s not about who made thee.
That’s mutual with you and the bird.
J.W. Marshall is the author of two chapbooks, Blue Mouth (2001) and Taken With (2005). He has published poetry in Beloit Poetry Review, Field, Ploughshares, and Poetry.
CLOUD ELEGY by Cate Marvin
The world felt bad. Dolphins pressed
their beaks to the sea’s pillow and refused
to wake. Among the trees, the weeping
willow rose in popularity. Every leaf
looked like it needed a cigarette. Gutters
took the cups strewn at their lips, turned
them upright to offer tiny pleas for change.
Windows enacted a communal decision
to condense, despite the consistent lack
of rain. All lunged things, growing asthmatic,
did not know whether it was smog or sheer
anxiety rendering them unable to breathe.
No one could enter a classroom without
having an attack of the nerves! And doves,
those trusted symbols of fidelity, engaged
in tawdry affairs, could not have told you
where their hearts lay, even if you could
have pointed them out, say, in that ditch
over there. And though the sex was great,
being untoward and ill-conceived, the world
was relieved to get a prescription. The clouds
became patients, allowed their numb griefs
to occlude our skyline. Everything suddenly
looked so tame and placid outside the bleary
windows, and with just a pill, millions
of pills, the world didn’t mind how awfully
anxious and American everything had gotten.
So what if our lives were rotten? We were
ready, anesthetized, to face another century,
the clouds a little less gossamer, a little less
reminiscent of the shapes we wished to take.
Cate Marvin is the author of World’s Tallest Disaster (Sarabande, 2001). Her second book of poems, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, will be published by Sarabande Books in 2007. She is the coeditor of Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006).
A STRANGE FORBEARANCE by Davis McCombs
There were nights when the fire he’d light
at the pond’s rim hissed and recoiled,
as if whatever stalked its withering edge
drew close: sparks and the galaxy’s botched erasure,
snow dropping off a branch. He’d think
of his children then, asleep in their beds,
how their soft breath, when he tucked them in,
fogged the mirror his face made in theirs.
Who’s there? He’d crunch his stick in the coals.
What’s out there? and though nothing
ever answered, he’d know by the click of wind
in the black oaks, by the restlessness of snow,
that something was near, that only
by its strange forbearance was he kept there
staring into the flames, while the hunch
of a figure took shape at his back, a face
roughed out by the firelight’s glittering axe.
THE MIMIC BIRDS by Davis McCombs
To survive like the song
of some lost species
in the throats
of the mimic birds –
a sequence of notes
in the call of a jay,
a snatch of
a mockingbird’s
vast repertoire –
to live on like that
as something half-
remembered and
passed down was
all the afterlife
he could allow
himself to hope for:
a voice thrown
into a stone where
it stayed, a phrase,
a figment, dis-
embodied and residual,
among the bluffs
and trees he sang
of, haunted.
Davis McCombs’ first book, Ultima Thule, was chosen by W. S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Recent work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Missouri Review, Willow Springs, and Pleiades.
ZUGSZWANG by Jeffrey McDaniel
you are a locked car door closing
you are the key forgotten in the ignition
i am the person banging on the window
i am the fog on the glass
you are a wild dog limping up a highway embankment
you are a cactus with human fingertips
you are a tall tree with a scarf around one of the branches
you are a scuba diver looking down at his watch and realizing
you don’t have enough air to make it back to the surface
so you live down there among the spare tires
and the other things we do without
you are the loch ness monster
it’s been so long since you surfaced
no one believes you exist anymore
you are a submarine that has lost its power
you watch television through a periscope
you are a permanent bath robe
you are a cow poking her head through a barbed wire fence
you are a gambler an hour after squandering the rent
you are going over Niagara Falls in a giant pill bottle
you have a bruised throttle
you are a road trip that’s gone awry
you are a bird that stands on a railing
rubbing your wings together
then you climb back down
and you call that a try
you are a piece of chewing gum stuck on the back of a mirror
you are a bag of melted ice on a ballerina’s ankle
you are a camel with a straw sticking out of your hump
in your mind you climb onto the ledge
and you jump, you jump, you jump
JUST FOR THE RECORD by Jeffrey McDaniel
for binny
they found you in a parked car, a telescope
plunged into your forearm, head tilted back,
eyes bulging, as if you had just seen the greatest
constellation in the history of your bloodstream.
in the photograph the police took
you look like an unplugged pinball machine,
outside an arcade on the off-season boardwalk,
the cord wrapped around your ankle, as you wait
to be trucked to the factory to have your loose
flippers repaired, the sky communist gray,
the poured cough medicine of the jersey surf
almost audible in the distance.
Jeffrey McDaniel is the author of Alibi School, The Forgiveness Parade, and, most recently, The Splinter Factory. His work has appeared in The Best American Poetry series.
TIME NOT BEING HIGH by Heather McHugh
I expected to serve it (a gruff
sort of reaper) as plaything.
I took it for tall, from the blips
of report.
But I’ve grown up five storeys or decades – enough
to attest that its hauteurs are fake. Not for nothing
the lifts in the wingtips:
Time’s short.
AS YET BUT KNOCK by Heather McHugh
Stun guns save lives.
They incapacitate
the suicidal, for example. (The Lord
has a taser, I shall not want
to live too long
in the volley of mud, in the voltage of grime.
He made the gnus nuts, too-what
a hoot! Go ahead, big guy, if you have to
batter my heart; I knew an anima
would hurt an animal-too big a thing inside.
It hurts in three-four time.) We can’t get out
of our make-up fast enough (our Lily come
from Hokum, Rose
from Slime.)
Heather McHugh’s latest collection of poems is Eyeshot (Wesleyan). She has published a book of essays, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality, and her translations include Cyclops by Euripides and Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan (co-translated by Nikolai Popov).
ECSTATIC CLING by Susan Parr
You will singe your arm when you pluck him from the air
– Susan Stewart
Bitten by the electrician’s boy –
my shoulder drizzled in his spit, my soul
a porcupine – I stuck one little thumb
into his cheek (to get inside the den, to grab
the guilty tooth). He clobbered me. Oh and Ow
and No around the room – I fought with the son
until he’d charged into a static hug, we spun
as coupling cats become, too caught for giving up.
He lost his tooth, his tongue kept re-erupting
through the hole – against my neck I felt the nose
of something small and living, a wetter pocking
than my sweat against his shirt snaps. I fastened
to him, we burned against the rug until I dropped.
It hurt to hold the boy – though he was light enough.
EROS by Susan Parr
Yes needy – yes adolescent –
Eros blurts in his schoolbook
about a telegraphic eel.
One with a russet tracery
of scales that jolt
in magnetic radio-rime.
In his schoolbook, too, Eros
rides a hectic schooner.
Which nearly – no, clearly – flips.
MY AFFAIR WITH THE PHYSICIST by Susan Parr
At breakfast, peach vodka
veils the clock. I unravel him,
his eye black:
Slava, stay in bed. Just a butter block,
imperial on the table, the red salt dram
like a painted pail,
chunks of a ravaged loaf, his beloved
black-market cheese. I poke
their printed abdomens, check
the stunted fridge for eggs.
Find damp baklava in a pouch; fear
the miniature square
freezer’s icing up. I’ve slept in some
nucleus, not hearing when he fried
a big Dutch Baby
and wanting compote, scorched the pot –
my twenty Ukrainian strawberries burnt
to hemispheric birthmarks.
SWOOPING ACTUARIAL FAUNA by Susan Parr
They blow downwind.
Quivering bulletins,
Details in a coil,
A many-thing –
Chosen by by-paths,
Shadows, falling
To statistical stalls –
Whistling wherewithals.
Susan Parr’s illustrations have appeared in Portlandia Review of Books. These are her first published poems.
CLUTCH AND PUMPS by D. A. Powell
if I were in your shoes, you purse your mouth
but you were never in my shoes, chinaberry
nor I in yours: the cherry ash of fags
burns your path down the scatty streets
your smile wraps ‘round pumps with a smack
the mandible of a mighty red croc
who served up his behind to your toes
jagged bite marks: the hem of your frock
tombs, sister, you got vaulted tombs for hips
one chimney stack where a bbq pit should be
you say that I’m in janitor drag this year as last
do these tits go with these shoulders? why ask me?
but those talons you cultivate I do admire
the smooth cheeks the flirty lashes
I don’t want to live in a clutch purse town
you snap. and yet everything matches
D. A. Powell’s most recent book of poems, Cocktails (Graywolf, 2004), was a finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle Award.
WILL by Elizabeth Powell
1.
That the body became an icy blue water
so cold I knew I could never return, dive back into
that pooling of self and will.
I have made appropriate provisions.
I ask only a stunted singing.
Pay my just debts, my funeral expenses,
my debt to the stars.
Any power of appointment at the time of my death shall be
as the moth’s wings are, satiny, transparent.
The power full of the eating of wool and of cotton.
O November, you’re a cold one,
with your aluminum grayness,
your flat affections.
2.
A previous marriage ended in divorce produced
three children for which provisions were given
during my lifetime – skeletons
filled with tibia, scapula. Covered in silk, of dermis.
I have bequeathed to them each individually during my life-
time blood salt, blue-red.
3.
Even after death, I will still be
battleweary. This is the thing
between me and nothing.
The Governing Law of this document –
the pressure of my spirit pushing
away from body. The exchange of light
and dust. That go-no-go tango.
Once love I thought love was youth and spring.
But then the naphthalene smell
of heading off moths and rust consume,
of I had myself a wife of the frying pan, a fish wife –
administer and dispose of said rest –
these orphaned glimpses of the past –
the children clutching at my legs, walking
the dog down Jane Street, the gin smell
of the office, the lipstick of secretaries, the terror
of a certain blue sky, the falling of 6 pm.
Each time I thought my life was beginning again –
the three seconds it took to consider the terms and provisions thereof
as they may now complete the picture
from the kitchen window – the apple tree, the stone wall, then everything
else that can’t be seen – the slow torture of what will
never happen fading into white across the blue
of sky where a hawk takes flight into
the best of my knowledge of sane mind, under
no constraint or undue interference.
4.
O November death,
walk me now toward the stony Connecticut
where my little boat tethered
splashes against this
one last surging,
secession of winter, it’s
dreadful semi-colon.
It is raw here.
Soon I shall be beyond
the north wind.
Cut the line for me, as I cannot,
so my boat can steady and hold
what is left of the will
before it slips toward the other side –
I have set my hand and seal and swear
and like the falling leaves of autumn, no leaf
can unbrittle itself, once it has
been vain for that moment of
glory before the falling
and has subscribed –
our names as witnesses to the execution thereof.
Elizabeth Powell is the author of Republic of Self, selected by C. K. Williams for the New Issues Poetry Prize.
AUBADE, PANICKING by Paisley Rekdal
Having read that the average male lives three years less
than the average female, and I calculate,
again, the already inbuilt difference between us –
seven years – I grow overwhelmed
by the sudden rasp of the plum tree beating
outside my window, the wind’s vapid hiss enumerating
absence, the ways you or I will die before I’m ready
to forget how we’d ever been alone.
All I can think about is how to possess
those years you spend listlessly hanging around bar
stool, train station, classroom; the rock faces
you doggedly climbed or the bread loaves
you’d stolen from the French;
even the French you hope’s still lingering in your mouth.
I want to be as loose and intractable as middle age,
spinning out away from myself, a long
golden braid or intricate rug shaken down a hallway
in which I can only imagine
what I won’t get back while we both get older;
what I never possessed of you: those sweet,
secret desires you secretly indulged.
I’m one of those meals you didn’t eat.
I’m one of those countries to which you never traveled,
the book you didn’t think before to read and, reading now,
can’t finish. Or I can’t finish you:
somehow we’ll always be this distance,
myself clambering over the hood of the world
to know what it is you’ve known, to see you better
or just differently, become the drug you swore to take
before youth was over. The best I can do is leave my imprint
in the trill of a skirt; some strange, new scent dragged
across the privet hedge outside your doorway.
I wish I trusted time or the body.
I wish I could allow myself to disregard statistics; to believe
that some might actually be enough for me, even now,
telling you to leash your pulse and drive home slowly,
to reset the alarm, stay longer awake;
to reach across the indifferent and inevitable
and explain yourself; please; to just keep going.
Paisley Rekdal is the author of two books of poetry, A Crash of Rhinos (University of Georgia Press, 2000) and Six Girls Without Pants (Eastern Washington University Press, 2002), and a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee (Pantheon, 2000 and Vintage, 2002).
PASTED UP IN THE VICINITY OF THE SUN by David Rivard
Not to be infinite
Despite the child you once were,
Not to be every iota of every vengeful comedian in the world
And never to be the entirety of the trash fish
Never the claustrophobia of a stag
Never a molecular structure extant,
Never to be the nursery maid a-gossiping in bright light
Nor any one of the thirty-five specks of white flour,
And not to be everyone’s absolutely informed consent
And all the threads in every V-neck in the world
And likewise not to be all the raffia involved
In each & every sector of the planet’s raffia trade
And the bow wave from an aircraft carrier
And the superfluous pathos
Of the fleas hidden beneath a leaf,
Never to be a leaf fallen from a catalpa
Never the Aqua Velva girl
Never the scavenger gods
And my galley charging with forgetfulness
And the jury foreman’s veins
And a brace of well-oiled pistols
And Luahinawai Pond,
Never to be the mortally dark loves of a moat
And not one of the specks of flour
Thirty-five in all fallen from a loaf of sourdough
For the sole purpose
Of being identified in error as anthrax,
Never to be the anthrax spread atop a marble bank counter,
Never to be a scavenger god in Blue Hills, Maine,
Not to be David Rivard
Not to be Rachel Nardin
Never to be Tomaz Salamun (esp. because he has been fucked by the Absolute)
Never to be Mike Mayo
Never to be Monica Navarro
Not ever Solomon Burke
And in particular
Never ever to be Johnny Barrels;
Not to be infinite
But to struggle to flow through the lock like air
Instead of as a key.
BIRTHDAY by David Rivard
Squirrel’s nest high in the swacked bare tree,
Norwegian maple, I guess –
right! – & all those long dark daughter & wife hairs
clumped in our bathtub drain –
and in the mirror
this is me now, at 50 –
my face – tho it’s altered
into some mother’s father’s father’s, my
mother’s, in fact – big forehead
now that you mention it.
My face was licked at birth,
a long time back.
But what to ask of the world today?
Lost time will not come again.
Summer-sunned-on, tanned faces
will come, of course,
but so will Joan’s dim & rainy June –
What to ask for then?
I hope for
no jeopardy, especially the cold kind of my own making.
Occasional clarity
would be nice too, even if it isn’t always
of my own mind’s
motion. Not to be baffled
by thinking power is real. Mostly,
I hope to keep my arms & legs strong
(so as to hold on to certain lovely others) –
hello, Michaela & Simone!
David Rivard’s new collection is Sugartown. His previous books include Bewitched Playground (Graywolf, 2000), and Wise Poison (Graywolf, 1996), which won the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
AN AMERICAN COMET by Mary Ruefle
They said the baby was slow
so, being the baby myself,
I became slow real fast.
It took me ten years
to straighten out.
My whole family was refreshed.
With a little more know-how
I’ll be able to speak on any subject
until my mind runs out.
Now I will speak for two seconds about Hamlet.
I am afraid of mint, actually.
If my present condition does not unfold
I will want a triangular coffin.
I CAME ACROSS THE LIVING ONE NIGHT by Mary Ruefle
I came across the living one night
moving in files through the forest.
I came across the living one night
in a double swarm of snow.
When they stopped to eat the charred lump of a log
I noticed they were wearing scarves on their feet.
As far as I could tell there weren’t any real leaders
but staring at a rock they formed decisions
and when asleep one would very often suddenly
wake at the edge of dawn,
cry out like a bird
then sob like a human.
And always the intent to live. And speak if they could.
Sad kids with no toys but each other,
they lived for a few days more
resembling something important,
more likely to emit –
I hadn’t thought of them in years
but last night
when I followed the snow on the back of your neck
as you walked down the dark sidewalk
then ducked into a lighted door
a moment of pine came over me
and I followed the emptied streets
knowing I could not take a wrong turn
if I tried.
Mary Ruefle is the author of Tristimania and seven other books of poems. This is her second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
TOWARD THE CLEAR BLUE WATER by Ksenia Rychtycka
On this island the streets run crooked
as old women, their smiles cracked – broken
bits of tooth and gaps that stop no one,
only entice you closer
until you see the curves of their backs
have taken on the geography
of their locale
like the misshapen tree
left standing in the wake of a thunderstorm
and in the clear morning after
as debris lines the sides of the road –
stubs of doll arm, leg, glossed-over smiles
stick out from the shards.
It’s not your fault
these women’s hands are gnarled
as the paths crisscrossing this island,
their worn smiles stuck to the skin.
They’ve seen hundreds like you
stomp past their doorsteps
toward the clear blue water and sand
glowing so brightly you don’t notice
the old women’s hands circling,
yarn so pliant in their touch, soft
as the sun’s descent.
Ksenia Rychtycka’s work has appeared in Foliage, Short Story Quarterly, Hedge Apple, The MacGuffin, and Emergence.
DIES IRAE by Ira Sadoff
I suspect it’s the Dies Irae that gets me going, shaking a fist
at the gathering storm clouds I use as a symbol
of The sky’s a rotten apricot in my pocket.
Just because the Gods made us weave through traffic,
my fellow countrymen think it’s fine to turn the oak
into a parking lot, to turn a hillside to a dog on a leash.
The requisite trumpets take me to the War now,
though really, delight in music
is unspeakable, the way it drills little spells inside you:
the Vienna woods are there, a shabby apartment in Prague
with a wooden slab for a bed and a giant cockroach
to sing to. So why do I need words too, a garbled shoebox
of sentences to poke through, a few figurines
that sit on the side of the bed
injecting me with their panic attacks? There they are,
cutting themselves in the mirror, singing
an aria from Don Carlos, and if you don’t know
what they do to each other, look it up, look into their faces.
ID by Ira Sadoff
It comes from that voice dogs can hear, the glass-
breaking high C that makes life sylph-like.
Of course sylph-like’s
for pussies. If I say I want a dancer’s body,
I don’t want to dance: I want to be lithe,
lasting a little longer to take in
the traffic jams. I don’t want to look inward,
reflect on, stare at my reflection, nail
another deer on the mantle. Be indelible –
all cobble and boarded-up windows.
Dear reader, I left cupboards open
for your perusal. So trespass my secrets:
I have never cast the petulance aside,
not even just sat with that humlessness.
Can I call that my own personal abyss?
I’m not exempt, I’m no special case, I won’t
go around with scissors and razor blade,
cutting into things, inspecting, shutting down
the operation. I don’t want to say nimbus
when I mean shotgun. Or be my friend
when I mean slip it in. Penthouse,
when I mean pent-up house.
Ira Sadoff is the author of Barter and five other poetry collections. His poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, The Nation, Esquire, and The Partisan Review. This is his second appearance in Alaska Quarterly Review.
AUTUMN POEM by Amelia Salisbury
at school we pledged allegiance
to the buck head again, but again
because our town was bled
for love on knuckles. at home
we made stone soup, kept
our worms, kept some orphaned trees,
a page for broken oars. our yard
of monument, a junk box
with word of boys, some words
of girl they named balloon.
yet how pieces of the former years
were always gone. we once caught
river shrimps. the doorman
played accordion. the jangle of our county
as it beat its rusted knees.
we had true barbeques. Bri got rashes
from the swamp. Bri got rashes too,
from Johnny. and we all ate jelly-tubes,
children of chicory and other untold
weeds. our water-can mother
in lip sheer, our father of coma,
our father. but when the cops
brang polish music how the old man’d
juggle whisky. the way his veins
grew dark come evening. we would
have to pull our hoods off, even took
apart our collars. it was easier
to feel the night without them.
Amelia Salisbury is an undergraduate student at The University of Wisconsin, Madison. This is her first publication in a national literary journal.
ON HEARING A CLOCK CHIME ONCE WHILE LISTENING by Frances Sjoberg
One knows that one has heard something.
Certainly it is not nothing – not anything, really, either,
but with certainty it is not nothing. One thing leads to
something more or something being struck.
One thing at present, one thing at hand. At hand
there being here and now and there and then, there
being distance among them all. As for you,
being not there, or not then there, but rather
now, there is one thing about you. One thing
barely, barely something,
exceedingly close to
too.
SELF MY WITH IS by Frances Sjoberg
See you my too
(conflict) more back
cries the heart.
Strength in dignity
more myself. Steel
me to tell my head,
“Live we which in the
would, in that for
place or time.” No
there’s that my fear is
if you can. Listen,
tender, please, be.
Frances Sjoberg has poems in Sonora Review, Forklift, Ohio, Spork, and Barrow Street.
WHAT HER DOOR SAID by John Surowiecki
After Catullus
She left with someone you weren’t smart
enough to suspect: most liars are bad liars
but good liars like her, because they shine
so brilliantly, also give themselves away.
What you thought was delight was only unrest.
She’s thinking of going back to school.
She’s thinking of losing weight.
She doesn’t think of you.
Outside her new door is a vietnam
of dragonflies; maples have turned yellow,
goosenecks orange-soda orange. Stuck
in her vanity mirror is the image of a saint
who washed her skin with lime because
her beauty was too terrible to behold.
She’s already dumped him and while she’s
pregnant by you, she won’t be for long.
John Surowiecki’s chapbook, Further Adventures of My Nose: 24 Caprices, was published by Ugly Duckling Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Wisconsin Review, Folio, Xanadu, and Gargoyle [#50].
HALLOWMAS by Michael Theune
In cloud-chambers, un-
rest, unmask,
unharm,
un –
Time spreads, a stain, twelver, twelvest –
The burning room
goes dark, the rose-
candle, unlit,
and the others –
Some were killed and some with good reason –
Graces,
Furies, wings
where
should have been eyes –
Inside a broken code’s betrayal-portal, inside –
No one could blame
the moon that night
her misgivings
and no one did –
Some fell asleep, some fell in love, some fell –
SOME CONSIDERATIONS OF (UNTITLED) by Michael Theune
Lines 1–9, The Period after Parentheses
No voice from heaven but whisperings
And the sense of plans
Being made without you.
At the grave of the Image,
The mourners peek at their watches.
A supposition breaks down
Into certainty.
O something about the fortune-telling gore –
O something like never being naked enough –
Lines 10–14, Transcendence as Interruption
The world is a whetstone –
The world is a whetstone.
The world is a whetstone (and its blade
˝ ˝ ˝ ˝ ˝ ˝ ˝ ˝
a poem titled accordingly
Line 15, The Captain of Thieves Keeps His Hands in His Sleeves
(I have used all the words in this poem.)
Lines 16–23, A Landscape, Broken, Turned-Into
Aware of it only
When it wasn’t happening,
I spurred on the word for
Horse which died
Beneath me
And rode on, I
The High, Via
Aurelia, l’Rue de Condor.
EUROPE by Michael Theune
The cobblestone street that went nowhere: the wall, the sky –
And the perfume we bought to remember it by.
Michael Theune’s work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Pleiades, Verse, The Chicago Review, The New Republic, and American Literary Review.
LESSON by Jonathan VanBallenberghe
A is for absurdity. Not the absurdity of six hundred dollars in $5 tokens and slot machines that play television songs and centenarians with oxygen tanks frowning at their wallets, but the absurdities which made me gamble in the first place. In the rearview mirror I saw a cat’s face before the truck ran over it. I watched a documentary on war. But most of all, an injection, something the doctor prescribed to boost my wife’s immune system after her second chemotherapy. We had faced the possibility of her death. But she didn’t die. Death wasn’t the absurdity. We drove together to the pharmacy and read fishing magazines while waiting, and when tired of stories about ice fishing we listened to the customers being told not to drive or operate heavy machinery. “What about my blender?” a frail old woman asked. “I’ve got to make my grandson’s birthday cake.” Finally it was time to pay for the shot: twenty-six hundred dollars. We knew about that. They had told us beforehand. Like death, we managed to accept it. But then we read the directions. They said to dispose of the syringe if, when we put it in her belly, we hit a blood vessel. Buy a new one, they said. I laughed an absurd laugh. I would have used it even had I hit bone. If the needle fell in the kitty litter I still would have used it.
RETREAT by Jonathan VanBallenberghe
It was nice of my boss to think of me fitting the climate of his stone house twenty miles out on a dirt road the city never maintained, with my Dostoevsky, country roots, and how I always appeared horny for solitude. Yes, I would be honored to housesit. That first night he called me from Florida to see if the dogs were eating, his way of checking on me. Understandable. He built the house himself with rocks he wheelbarrowed from the dry river beds around the property. And I did seem to fit the place. In the morning I planned how to be peaceful, and peacefully I lit my pipe and skipped along the old cattle fence looking for tortoise shells, mountain lions, and coins cowboys might have dropped, or doubloons in a pile by some conquistador’s bones. I loved the echo of my own words off the mountain mountain mountain. After lunch it was wonderful fun snooping through his drawers. I had power now; to the women at work I could describe the features of his vibrator and the pearl inlays on his loaded pistol. I found several half-smoked joints and what might have been the stem of a magic mushroom. But I didn’t touch those things. I used the movies and the vodka he said I could use. What a sanctuary! I had been craving it since I was in the fifth grade. It was peaceful and profound, and exciting, too. While I read Crime and Punishment a rattlesnake licked the window beside my chair. So of course there are some questions. Why didn’t I eat the venison he left for me? Why instead did I drive two hours, risking a flat tire, to eat a hot dog at the casino?
Jonathan VanBallenberghe’s work has appeared in Fence, Colorado Review, Iowa Review, and Harvard Review.
MRS. OTHMAR, MON AMOUR by G. C. Waldrep
Mercury poisoning, wicker baskets on the hills above Baltimore,
the doctor is IN but who is listening, who will approach, who among men
will pay her fee, is one tract as good as another,
what is the original currency of salvation, cowrie shells might do
except that once too they were living creatures, or housed them, steep she plies
and rough the leather garment, the friction of hard-packed snow,
she brushed the blood from her hair and walked back from the park
to the house, alone, in this way her presence amplified space,
she arrived as the mill whistles were blowing, she was not dreaming
of Baltimore, no one dreams of Baltimore, anymore,
revenge was inappropriate so there had to be some sort of recipe
to cover, to elide, some furious cooking,
she placed the strand of beaded shells around her neck
while in the kitchen someone was served, or someone was serving,
another elision, else vengeance, she wrote very clearly and in
what our ancestors called a strong hand,
she earned her booth at the county fair, if one tract is as good as another
Take mine, she said, and some took, and some did not,
as some wore hats, and some did not, as some checked their watches
or calendars, obsessively, another defeat in the news,
another corpse in the parlor, is one death as good as another,
if not why not, The math of heaven will be very elegant she said,
by-blow cherries at the sideboard, or oils thereof, a kind of shorthand
for appetite, tell me doctor how many horses, how many whistles
do you hear, in the wake of a concussion the patient should not be allowed
to give in to the very natural urge to slumber, two doctors
being better than none and both of them
IN, so very IN, alas the economies of late capitalism conspire
to undermine the one at the other’s expense, identically coifed, veiled
as if for Carnival, all charges of plagiarism
withdrawn, or dismissed, those who qualify for a blind date will have their fee
reduced, No one goes on blind dates anymore I said, that’s why it’s best
to set a clime, a trace, doctor, what will you be wearing, doctor,
what then is truth’s tangent, doctor, where in Baltimore shall I meet you,
on the hills above town, on the dark hills above this dark town?
G. C. Waldrep’s books of poems are Goldbeater’s Skin (winner of the 2003 Colorado Prize) and Disclamor (forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2007).
FLU SONG IN SPANISH by Kary Wayson
God of the bees, God of Gold keys, God of all in-
famous noses, I folded our total
in two today – I drove alone
and I walked away (as if each mile up your hill
were a letter in a word I’m inventing).
So I stuck my head in a hole and stood.
So far so. So far
good. Now I wear that hole like a hood
in a house
of inscrutable signals.
God of the guess, god of the gap
mind if I make you a martyr?
If the sky says anything, it’s everything! at once!
(Nor did you answer my question.)
So I stick my head in a hole and stand. So far
so far. So far, grand. Sand in my pants and ants
in the box, I wish there were bells
for when I should stop. Show me the bell for when I should stop!
(Not that I’d know
when to ring it.)
Grant me the grace and I’ll fix it. Shit.
My Father (that bitch!) he hides
at the head
of his third wife’s table.
The man says something then it’s nothing
for months (though I’ve always been
welcome to dinner).
But I stook my head in a hole instead.
So far: slow car: sofa bed. A brick in the back
where he buries the dead. His task is her
two daughters.
God of the aster, God of disaster, God of
charisma and risk: if the word and the wing
are the same stringy thing
then what in the world will I say?
The sign means so much: you translate
my hunch (there’s no chance
in hell today). So I stick my head in a hole and drown. So far
lost, so far
found: a bone-cutter’s house in a blood-lit town – I swear
I’ll tear your eyes away.
ECHOLOCUTION by Kary Wayson
I am at home. I am interviewing
the telephone. She says hello
when I say hello. Hello.
The front doorknob fits against a gauge in the wall.
I cough and stop and scratch and stop
and listen. When I listen for long enough I’m lost.
Voices of men recite the radio news. Time
is a travel advertisement.
I hang on to the telephone like a handle.
Fastened to the wood wall of a boat.
She says what I say while I say it.
When I listen for long enough I’m lost.
The light’s got rice in it, like after a wedding.
Me in my ambulance: you in yours.
Kary Wayson’s chapbook, Dog & Me, was published in 2004 by LitRag Press. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Northwest, The Nation, and FIELD.
UNBIDDEN by Katharine Whitcomb
bridge of my chest labors whenever I relive it
phone clicks quiet battens down batters nothing
bumping into nothing clicks off
clicks out
shhhh
to think on it rips another dress from the nail
looses long stitches shoulder to shoulder
snags the snarled sleeves until I can’t feel my hands
how then will I circle the seam left
how will I reason the chafe and age left
whenever I relive it phantom seizes on each curved ribridge
this is at least not confused with god this is at least not conformed
to good this is not at last confirmed
by anyone
only lashed breath
from the cringe of my hips to the cage of my head
a sheet around my legs in an undressed room
whenever I relive it phone snickers off flickers out
how then do I crack the spine of silence
how will I sleep with those peeled miles unspooling hour after hour
unmarked
unwed in the heaved blank air
whenever I relive it weight cracks the violet space above my clavicle
to think on it spills the sand from a buckling cliff where the trail curls back on
itself
the way smothered over the day blundered over
my wariness snared a bloody bearing off the compass
a floating needle torn out
how then will I take another boned blow
another borderless everafter how will I fold myself
ungloved into the netherworld
whenever I relive it phantom muzzles his six-eyed dog
phone winks phone sinks
this is at least not salvation this is not the next mud-caked companion
but a burrow lined with torn paper
a wall scrawled with chalk in the handless black
whenever I relive it
WORLDS by Katharine Whitcomb
& the wind stripped the petals
from the rose; those days the light slid
down, darkness surged
with surprising vengeance.
The existence of the dark not a question,
no, still it came so numbingly
strong & strange. The journey back
to life lasts longer than the longest
leave-taking, back to words & faces
& love, those who find
& keep one; they circle with linked arms, hold
in her nightingales: she, a prodigal
daughter, lost wife – &
the last songs, secret & difficult music
though these lovers attend it;
their hope & good dreams the softest
manacles; birds netted, yes, hooked here,
at the end of the turning year. He,
husband, brother, heartsease . . . such
heavy worlds to move through. Hostage
rose tapped the window blown bare:
Katharine Whitcomb is the author of Saints of South Dakota & Other Poems. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, and The Yale Review.
DIFFERENT PEOPLE FEEL DIFFERENTLY by Rebecca Wolff
Everything makes a little noise
(sense)
Suddenly, there was a ball in the box
More purposeful now than before
the ninth of ten boxes
it rolls because it’s round
it doesn’t have any corners
concentric – but not circular.
A really decisive move: He found
my poems in a box
before I was dead.
Here is a feather.
It’s how birds
move around. (One
in a million – part
of many parts.)
He feels just the same as I do,
about everything.
SOTTO VOCE by Rebecca Wolff
I have never been a “thinker”
but still I require time alone
with my thoughts
Listening at the elbow of the great poet
I can feel a heart beating
inside me
a faster heart.
Oh!
I do not have to be a teacher
I can be the student
but never will I return to school.
No, not in this rainmaker costume.
Rebecca Wolff is the author of two books of poems, Manderley (University of Illinois Press, 2001) and Figment (W.W. Norton, 2004).
TWELVE EXERCISES by Franz Wright
The Work
I did it, in the end
I have always done it
to prove they chose the wrong child to
torment, I
guess
who knows
And that I too was worthy of love, the
slow
but unhesitating underlining
finger in the texts of light, oh
vapor trail at dawn, green
Venus
uranium pearl in my palm
Crow at top of swaying pine conversing
of the unseen
sun
Now it will soon be done. (No I.)
And it alone remain.
*
Home For Christmas
And to think the drive took only thirty years.
The sky’s blue beginning to brighten, to snow.
The old toll booth keeper still here, although
she’s blown her brains out, and can’t break a five
or provide me with directions anymore,
I am sorry to say, with the blizzard
approaching faster now across the endless gray
and homeless fields with not a light in sight.
*
At Fifty
How do I feel? I feel
like I am one hundred years old
and get a beating every morning
instead of breakfast;
in a minute
I will be twelve, and it
will be a most perfect June morning
and all my boys will be there,
the whole eternal golden day for raising hell stretching
ahead. Then
I will just be me again, alone and very close
to this vast knowing: Joy
is surely as pitiable as grief.
*
To a Critic
Blind men cause themselves
and everyone a grave
embarrassment,
denying
light exists.
*
Calling
Was it all the ego’s doing, that whore –
all done for the sake
of publication, money (sure)
or a number of sad entertainments
of a sexual nature, awards, or
friends, jobs, fame
or praise?
Or for the transfiguring experience itself
like the one hopelessly longed for
and wept for, desired
beyond any desire
by that fifteen-year-old boy
I so look up to now –
the child whom I love
even more, now,
than I despised him then.
*
The Question
My full name is spoken
over the water,
the black lake’s still cumulus surface:
it comes across the field and bends the wheat
in this utterly calm
voice neither threatening nor intimate: more
like a question being posed.
Just so.
And I stop in the road listening for a long instant
and recognize the simple and familiar
two-word sentence, asking
once. It’s only going to say it once,
apparently; for now
it is just wind.
(Northern Ohio, summer 1975: LSD)
*
F
Leafing through an old notebook
abruptly I cease
at a page that’s entirely taken up
with a large capital “F”
composed in what’s clearly dried
blood. Yes, here
it is at last: my grade
in life, my
name.
*
The Second Body
The fools think that because they can see me
I am always there.
It was futile to imprison me
in solitary here
in this tiny space, this
room of solid mirror.
Granted, it took thirty years;
now, though, it is a simple thing
for me to work with my eyes closed, and travel
freely anywhere I like –
in fact, as I write
I am wearing this cell like a diamond on my right hand.
*
Waiting To See the Hawk
Rustling nocturnally at noon
my oak on the vast golden hillside,
the very wind golden. The body so heavy
with sorrow and guilt
at its own decrepitude, why?
The heart hasn’t failed – at these feet
in the yellow grass
the sunlight comes and goes . . .
I think it is time to rejoice. Lift this head
and rejoice at the privilege of suffering the
translation from seeing to
being the radiant
wind in the hawk’s high blue hill.
(Clearlake, California)
*
First
Intertwining, caducean
and incomprehensibly
wielded, we cling
with molten
bones
To be near you body
and soul, mirror
and fire –
*
The Attempt
One morning, a week or so after you were released, I stood at the window and noticed you in the back yard holding and closely examining, on its slim leafless branch, a cocoon.
From the window I could see you, silent, gazing down, wandlike branch in your hand, eyes closed, the oxygen-mask covering your face, people in white coming and going, breathing, breathing in the thought of your own absence which unfolds before you like a bandage of road you walk with one arm outstretched, weightless, breathing.
*
The Kiss
(After Char)
Massive languor, languor hammered;
Human languor, languor debated;
Deserted languor, return to your fires;
Holy languor, arise from love.
The wood-owl has come home.
Franz Wright’s last collection, Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, received the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His new book, God’s Silence, was published by Knopf earlier this year.
JANUARY by Matthew Zapruder
The small cities touch each other with snow.
There’s no any longer to miss, only this shadow
phonograph still running its shadow needle
over and over that after the record static,
making an aftersound cave I love to sit in
and listen to part of me scaring that part of me
willing to crawl just a bit further out onto
the sound of ice long after I hear it cracking.
For a time in January letters to pharmaceutical
companies didn’t seem even a little contrived,
I was genuine and grateful and wanted
to thank them for I thought I could hear
them saying thank you and though you may
for weeks feel a frozen lake on a public access
station inside you reading a list
of cloud cancellations, the window will turn
surely neutral, shortly you will begin to bump
as if with helium filled along from room
to room, picking up and holding you to your ear,
saying you sound like a program
about calm parts of the ocean caught
by bunny ears loosed from a seventies zenith.
You sound like you think by rhythmically limping
to help the empty apartment below
compose an overture to a symphony known
as science of eluding. Nobody wanders
along the strings. In such a thought
one could be beautiful, like a ballet
starring a naked but for a half-dressed in pink
tulle she once wore mirror holding
a shard of spring. During reacclimation to time
we recommend you keep on doing that
science of eluding thing, don’t look too hard
for the manual, allow some things to leave you
unfinished, walk on leaking, stray always
a left behind bird asleep on the science
of patience shall always elude you wire.
Is that you? Some trees we have built
cast meaningful shadows, they misinform you
warnings from the other side of the veil
will if you do just a little more good than
you’re able be brought you. You are a coast
that drifts towards able to wake
to holding those one or two moments
she let you sleep in her lap.
Those one or two moments january me now,
but only for one or two moments
LAZY COMET, HURRY by Matthew Zapruder
At the party to celebrate the party everyone
so slowed down and pretending to look
like they never once knew how just to like
tonight with more than a feeling she
comes how deep is your landslide or each
other as easy as you and I wireless live
from inside the lotus reporting this party
is not fine without us even this party
would have us believing a hotel is mostly
a place to rest a talent for situations
such as these sleepy day elevators never
reproach they forgive me strobing a front step
superflower time of waiting no wannabe
sorrow to brush my reverie I am wind
up a dress and so many questions like what
color tanktop and isn’t always the oldest
thing somewhere on earth and who knew
why baltimore had a coast slaves did say
would it be too extreme to say I’m a slave
to the question what kind of music
would ever dare leave you I am a dress
you are not in saying where do you want me
supine I spun you then over then stunned
american poetry is thinking of you
do you wish I would come back and leave
you alone or take you first roughly then
to the movies in the half functioning I think
might have witnessed my first kiss with its posing
half mannikins mall or into the driveway
pulling abstracted luscious leaking the
question into my mouth how many hours
can watch me brushing the seventies
back from your secrets without me share them
only I know where you’ve been blazing
Matthew Zapruder’s second collection of poems, The Pajamaist, will be published by Copper Canyon in fall 2006.
from ROCHE LIMIT by Andrew Zawacki
must be nearer
nearer to us
as a hemisphere
or as rings
“shadow sees shadow”
attracting an edge
outer shade insist
the inner brink
zinc yellow : you
chased metal : you
once upon a
window clear who
the impresario and
who the ingénue
* * *
the engine to
what further shore
cannot stay still
a vacuum cantata
and angular as
the angels try
lost among the
white from waiting
not withstand the
mute spaces the
astral night unravel
a blue and
a beveled eye
indigo violet cyan
* * *
a veiled scene
coral of gravity
quarrel of gray
verges on our
echoes off our
opens upon upon
a glass flower
spectra aurora “bone
answers bone” answers
zero rotation frequency
neither itself nor
neither its neither
or it ruins
or it rains
Andrew Zawacki is the author of two poetry books, Anabranch (Wesleyan, 2004) and By Reason of Breakings (Georgia, 2002), and a chapbook, Masquerade (Vagabond, 2001).