30TH ANNIVERSARY POEMS
Part One - Jane Hirshfield, Guest Editor
ABOUT THE GUEST POETRY EDITOR
Jane Hirshfield is the author of seven books of poetry, including the recently published Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011) and a now-classic collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (HarperCollins, 1997). She has also edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets of the past. Her sixth poetry collection, After (HarperCollins), was named a best book of 2006 by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times, and was a finalist for England’s T. S. Eliot Prize; her fifth, Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. An introduction to Basho and haiku, The Heart of Haiku, was named an Amazon Best Book of 2011, and her co-translation of the poems of the two foremost classical-era Japanese women poets, The Ink Dark Moon, received Columbia University’s Translation Center Award. Hirshfield’s other honors include The California Book Award, The Poetry Center Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Academy of American Poets. In 2012, she was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Hirshfield is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
ABOUT MY FATHER by Robert Bly
The salty stars experience the ruin of the world.
My father was a nomad on the Mongol plains.
Each day he fed a thousand Astrakhan lambs.
He knew when the dangerous winter would come.
He knew a lot about calving in January,
And how to keep the new lambs from dying.
I couldn’t tell you about the calves lost at birth,
Nor the lambs who stood around on wobbly legs,
Nor the ewes who went on eating anyway.
He knew how to put small pins into those farm wagons
In danger of falling apart. He had the gift
Of trying to hold the world together.
I knew how often he had saved other farmers
When times were bad, and kept them from ruin.
He kept a hundred sorrows alive in him.
It’s hard to know what to say about Jacob.
I know that he was always fair to Esau.
If you see Jacob, tell him I am his son.
Robert Bly’s most recent book of poems, Talking into the Ear of a Donkey (W. W. Norton, 2011), contains many examples of his American version of the Mideastern ghazal. He has also recently published his translations (with Leonard Lewisohn) of Hafez, The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door (HarperCollins, 2009).
DAY SOUNDS by Billy Collins
Whenever I pause during the day –
my silvery pen suspended
over the page like a dental instrument –
I hear the sounds of a house
being framed down where the lawn
meets the reedy margin of the bay –
the shiny hammering of nails,
the sharp crack of a board being broken,
then a deeper thumping as on a tub,
and the rasp of the edge of a shovel
being driven into a pile of dry, loose stones –
sounds ringing out like ripples
on the water of the day
whenever I pause to wait for a line
or set the pen down on the desk just to listen.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins’s latest poetry collection is Horoscopes For The Dead (Random House, 2011). Collins is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
ALASKA AUBADE (SUMMER) by Olena Kalytiak Davis
although ’twas very late when someone took
the truth and dared to touch what untouched
belonged only to another
o teeth and flash
once skinflint sun fingered
the summer flesh of the unfamiliar
thigh wellmet thigh and sigh
sent sigh searching for what yet could be
uncovered: (o to die into this life
this light)
the truth took time
night never fell and now and still
the willow cleanly crying in the window
that refused the lullaby abides
unmet unsatisfied stay
atop the white white covers
more and so much (endless) light by which to see
your lover
Olena Kalytiak Davis has published three books of poetry, and is working on another, entitled The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems. Her honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Davis is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
LYRIC POET DISEASE by Stuart Dischell
Yesterday I fell in love eleven times –
With my son’s teacher, two joggers,
Three dog-walkers, the pharmacist’s
New assistant, the latte girl at
The coffee shop, a Lesbian
Couple, and my ex-wife –
But today I did not fall in love at all.
Tomorrow I’m planning to marry –
I’m going to feast in the groves and kiss a tick,
I’m going to camp along a river/on a mountain
And build my own fire, I’m going
To ask out the latte girl with foam on her lips
And we will pitch a tent on a bed near the sea.
Stuart Dischell is the author of Good Hope Road, a 1991 National Poetry Series Selection, Evenings & Avenues (1996), Dig Safe (2003), and Backwards Days (2007), all published by Penguin. Forklift, Ohio published a new chapbook, Touch Monkey, in 2012. Dischell is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
POMADE by Rita Dove
She sweeps the kitchen floor of the river bed her husband saw fit
to bring home with his catfish, recalling
a flower – very straight,
with a spiked collar arching
under a crown of bright fluffy worms –
she had gathered in armfuls
along a still road in Tennessee. Even then
he was forever off in the woods somewhere in search
of a magic creek.
It was Willemma shushed the pack of dusty children
and took her inside the leaning cabin with its little
window in the door, the cutout magazine cloud taped to the pane
so’s I’ll always have shade. It was Willemma
showed her how to rub the petals fine
and heat them slow in mineral oil
until the skillet exhaled pears and nuts and rotting fir.
That cabin leaned straight away
to the south, took the very slant of heaven
through the crabgrass and Queen Anne’s Lace to
the Colored Cemetery down in Wartrace. Barley soup
yearned toward the bowl’s edge, the cornbread
hot from the oven climbed in glory
to the very black lip of the cast iron pan . . .
but Willemma stood straight as the day
she walked five miles to town for Scotch tape
and back again. Gaslight flickered on the cockeyed surface
of rain water in a galvanized pail in the corner
while Thomas pleaded with his sister
to get out while she still was fit.
Beebalm. The fragrance always put her
in mind of Turkish minarets against
a sky wrenched blue,
sweet and merciless. Willemma could wear her gray hair twisted
in two knots at the temples and still smell like travel.
But all those years she didn’t budge. She simply turned
one day from slicing a turnip into a pot
when her chest opened and the inrushing air
knocked her down. Call the reverend, I’m in the floor
she called out to a passerby.
Beulah gazes through the pale speckled linoleum
to the webbed loam with its salt and worms. She smooths
her hair, then sniffs her palms. On the countertop
the catfish grins
like an oriental gentleman. Nothing ever stops. She feels
herself slowly rolling down the sides of the earth.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove has published nine poetry collections (her most recent, Sonata Mulattica, in 2009), a book of short stories, a novel, and a play. She edited The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry in 2011. Her honors include the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the National Humanities Medal, the Heinz Award and the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal.
PESCADERO by Mark Doty
The little goats like my mouth and fingers,
and one stands up against the wire fence, and taps on the fence-board
a hoof made blacker by the dirt of the field,
pushes her mouth forward to my mouth,
so that I can see the smallish squared seeds of her teeth, and the bristle-whiskers,
and then she kisses me, though I know it doesn’t mean “kiss,”
then leans her head way back, arcing her spine, goat yoga,
all pleasure and greeting and then good-natured indifference: She loves me,
she likes me a lot, she takes interest in me, she doesn’t know me at all
or need to, having thus acknowledged me. Though I am all happiness,
since I have been welcomed by the field’s small envoy, and the splayed hoof,
fragrant with soil, has rested on the fence-board beside my hand.
Mark Doty’s Fire To Fire: New and Selected Poems won the National Book Award in 2008. He edited The Best American Poetry 2012.
IF A CLOWN by Stephen Dunn
If a clown came out of the woods,
a standard looking clown with oversized
polkadot clothes, floppy shoes,
a red, bulbous nose, and you saw him
on the edge of your property,
there’d be nothing funny about that,
would there? A bear might be preferable,
especially if black and berry-driven.
And if this clown began waving his hands
with those big, white gloves
that clowns wear, and you realized
he wanted your attention, had something
apparently urgent to tell you,
would you pivot and run from him,
or stay put, as my friend did, who seemed
to understand here was a clown
who didn’t know where he was,
a clown without a context.
What could be sadder, my friend thought,
than a clown in need of a context?
If then the clown said to you
that he was on his way to a kid’s
birthday party, his car had broken down,
and he needed a ride, would you give
him one? Or would the connection
between the comic and the appalling,
as it pertained to clowns, be suddenly so clear
that you’d be paralyzed by it?
And if you were the clown, and my friend
hesitated, as he did, would you make
a sad face, and with an enormous finger
wipe away an imaginary tear? How far
would you trust your art? I can tell you
it worked. Most of the guests had gone
when my friend and the clown drove up,
and the family was angry. But the clown
twisted a balloon into the shape of a bird
and gave it to the kid, who smiled,
letting it rise to the ceiling. If you were the kid,
the birthday boy, what from then on
would be your relationship with disappointment?
With joy? Whom would you blame or extol?
Stephen Dunn is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently Here and Now. Among his awards are the Pulitzer Prize, an Academy Award in Literature from The American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement.
RAVENSWOOD by Stuart Dybek
Pigeons fold their wings and fade
into the gray facades of public places;
flags descend from banks, silk slips
floating to beds. Hips thrust
like those of lovers, as workers crank
through turnstiles, and waiting
for the Ravenswood express at stations
level with the sky, they shield their eyes
with newspapers against a dying radiance;
that lull between trains
when stratified fire is balanced
on a gleaming spire. Night doesn’t fall,
but rather, all the disregarded shadows of a day
flock like blackbirds, and suddenly rise.
Stuart Dybek’s most recent book of poems is Streets in Their Own Ink. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). His fiction includes Childhood and Other Neighborhoods, The Coast of Chicago, and I Sailed With Magellan, a novel-in-stories. Dybek’s work has won numerous awards, among them a Lannan Prize, a PEN/Malamud Award, a Whiting Writers’Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Rea Award for the Short Story, and numerous O. Henry Prizes. His work has also appeared in both The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Poetry. Dybek is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
SAD BEAUTY by Nancy Eimers
At twilight, when I walk the neighbor’s dog
through fields of mangled cow-shit blossoms
down to the sea, the bushes jump at our approach,
a hare leaps out and sprints away,
vanished almost before the leap begins
to register. This happens again and again.
And every time it does I can believe
in the changing light, trust
passage is that easy, things begin
and end in each other wholly and naturally,
bush to rabbit, rabbit to air,
and thus fulfill themselves.
A process with no memory of beginning and end.
But this shy old gentleman greyhound knows
something still partly rabbit in the air,
tastes or smells some trace of blood or breath . . .
and yearns against obedience
into an even longer, thinner dog –
wanting so hugely to be gone,
he’s not that much a dog as a flickering.
A dog that doesn’t need a leash.
You can tell he was beaten by somebody habitually –
the way he’ll visit, suddenly just there,
having stepped inside your door
and standing now with four white paws
exactly on the rug, irresolute, a glide
about to rush back out or stretch
his legs into a lying down that ends
just where your patience ends.
Begins with this dog
and ends at such sad beauty.
Basho found it
in the morning glory
even when it’s painted badly.
Today a mist hangs low over the world
from my cottage window, Bronze Age stone walls
crisscross up and over the hills
and I wonder where they are taking us.
Forward or back?
Curves of the road from Zennor to St. Ives
that show up in the mist
are getting nowhere, one by one – no bus on Sunday.
So many people live here without cars,
no one getting anywhere,
the story stays exactly where it was
on dreary days
three or four thousand years ago.
The Bronze Age. Yellow flowers
bloom across the moors
and shine even through mist,
as if the sun could force its way to earth
through dark green, sharp-tongued gorse.
A little frightening, that passage into speech,
the yellow
not acting docile as it would
on sunny days. Yesterday it was sunny –
from this porch I could see
practically to infinity, where, on a hill,
a tiny coffee-colored cow, cut out
exactly with a pair of manicure scissors,
grazed on a field of golf-course green.
Sometimes I wonder about those
Bronze Age Sundays, or days when nothing helps,
and you know the gale winds and standing stones
are interchangeable,
call and response, whisper and listening,
and you know the end’s the beginning,
a pair of crows
atop the first stone wall –
the first and last thing you can see from here.
The intermingling and the passage.
Nancy Eimers’s fourth poetry collection, Oz, was published by Carnegie Mellon in 2011. She is also the author of A Grammar to Waking (Carnegie Mellon, 2006), No Moon (Purdue University Press, 1997) and Destroying Angel (Wesleyan University Press, 1991). She has been the recipient of a Nation “Discovery” Award, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Eimers is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
SMALL HUT by Tess Gallagher
I know you only in echo,
as your parents confide – the wound of it
borne as if grief were life’s only message
when you have one son
who takes his life
from his life, their lives.
Your mother says she can’t see you
past your knees. Hard to know you as you
in your afterlife where she tries to follow
in mind to see are you all right there.
She feels cheated, unable
to see your face which
you obliterated, taking yourself
out of here.
You’d tried before, then promised
to get help, go to AA, find
a sponsor; and you meant to, but
for reasons you kept from them,
and maybe even from yourself,
could not. We lose humanity
if we miss knowing
the full range of choices
that might have led you from harm
did not open to you in that deadly hour.
With non-specific pain
all doorways must seem very specifically
shut. We sit together with your “maybes”
which outlive you. Those who love you
are stuffing you with intentions.
The good woman who left you, she
left just in time not to be
the assumed reason
you succeeded this time in putting the world
to sleep.
Hearing on Irish radio of another man whose son
was beaten to death, then thrown
onto the railroad tracks when the murderer
wanted to hide his deed – how that father knew
where the un-convicted killer lived and would stand
at intervals in the night before the house
and howl: You murderer! You
killed my son! over and over,
I wish I could build a small hut, a wailing hut
where your father could stand similarly and cry
against the facelessness of loss incubating its ‘whys’.
And even if the killer never comes out
to face his accusers, it’s a brand
on the communal heart to have one father cry like that
with his whole being,
trying to make a rectitude with only his voice
and his love raking the night.
If the door of this hut opened, and
the murderer stepped out, it would be easier
to see this was not your son, and the grief
would bear two forms – the desperate one
who took him, and the one we love
when love asks everything.
But did the father go home?
He went home.
What did he there?
He sat with his wife and they drank together
peppermint tea, calming themselves.
They had to make dinner.
They had to see to things.
But beyond that
they found themselves in love in an entirely
new unspeakable way
with each other
and with their ever prodigal son.
for Russell Guthrieand his parents Ann and Jim
Tess Gallagher’s ninth volume of poetry, Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems, was published this year by Graywolf Press and is forthcoming from Bloodaxe Press in England. Her other poetry collections include Dear Ghosts, Moon Crossing Bridge, and Amplitude. With Adam Sorkin, she translated Liliana Ursu’s A Path to the Sea in 2011.
HEALED BY FASCINATION by Patricia Hampl
to the memory of Josef Sudek, photographer
If a man loses an arm
in a war, he must
find it.
He goes to Italy:
Italy has had wars.
In Tuscany the color
of rock surprised him,
he had forgotten
anything else had bones.
And this is only the beginning
of his new life
of complete attention.
He is astonished
by the prodigality of trees
in the matter of arms.
He takes pictures
of the rocks, of the trees.
Arms lead to fingers,
the shapes of more leaves
than he’d ever imagined.
Leaves fall,
fingers point, and each thing leads
him to another.
He goes, effortless,
through landscape.
People are amazed
at the grace
of the one-armed tourist.
In Italy he finds
everything he sought.
He hardly raises his head –
he’s discovered daisies now
and lupine are beyond, blue.
The arm is gone for good,
the war is going;
even Italy, as he climbs
the white hills,
is diminishing,
disappearing fast.
Patricia Hampl’s most recent books are the memoirs The Florist’s Daughter and Blue Arabesque. She first won recognition for A Romantic Education, her memoir about her Czech heritage. She is also the author of two collections of poetry, as well as Spillville, a meditation on Antonin Dvorak’s 1893 summer in Iowa, and Virgin Time, an inquiry into contemplative life. Her essay collection, I Could Tell You Stories, was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Hampl is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
AS THE ROOTS PREPARE FOR LITERATURE by Brenda Hillman
Sound, what is your muse? Just now,
we found a meaning but too soon –
cckkcckk . . . Dawn sprinklers start &
crickets wheel, they go down-down, dippy
down-down. Smell of toast in the suburbs.
The West is burning. Our little mother
prays in her sleep, our father rests
under his new big scar like America.
Ancestors step through flame to get to them.
Beyond air, the galaxies whirl ceaselessly
as picnic salt –
Our childhood sight
hath gathered multitudes . . . On streets
named for forts or saints, news is brought
to foreclosed houses. The medicated grasses wait.
In other deserts, soldiers kill other people’s
parents. Here the unemployed wear boots
in cafés near terrifying pies
piled high with cream. Wrens make nests
in cholla. Cylindropuntia fulgida. Spirits
stand round in the bodies of doves.
Do you remember learning to spell?
It’s best to bring words slowly into English;
wrad (the root of root) shines
for centuries underground. It’s not
for nothing the shadows are lit when children
are called to literature. Now word
has gone out that you are here.
Paper lanterns glow & sleepers curve
their heat-shapes to the ground. Hard
for you to keep steady, i know. The roots
of your words can see fire, though.
Brenda Hillman is the author of eight collections of poetry, all published by Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Cascadia (2001) and Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), which received the William Carlos Williams Prize for Poetry, and Practical Water (2009). With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003).
THE STONE OF HEAVEN by Jane Hirshfield
Here, where the rivers dredge up
the very stone of Heaven, we name its colors –
muttonfat jade, kingfisher jade, jade of appleskin green.
And here, in the glittering
hues of the Flemish Masters, we sample their wine;
rest in their windows’ sun-warmth,
cross with pleasure their scrubbed tile floors.
Everywhere the details leap like fish – bright shards
of water out of water, facet-cut, swift-moving
on the myriad bones.
Any woodthrush shows it – he sings,
not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
But the world does not fill with us,
it spills and spills, whirs with owl-wings,
rises, sets, stuns us with planet-rings, stars.
A carnival tent, a fluttering of banners.
O baker of yeast-scented loaves,
sword dancer,
seamstress, weaver of shattering glass,
O whirler of winds, boat-swallower,
germinant seed,
O seasons that sing in our ears in the shape of O –
we name your colors muttonfat, kingfisher, jade,
we name your colors anthracite, orca, growth-tip of pine,
we name them arpeggio, pond,
we name them flickering helix within the cell, burning coal tunnel,
blossom of salt,
we name them roof-flashing copper, frost-scent at morning, smoke-singe
of pearl,
from black-flowering to light-flowering we name them,
from barest conception, the almost not thought of, to heaviest matter,
we name them,
from glacier-lit blue to the gold of iguana we name them,
and naming, begin to see,
and seeing, begin to assemble the plain stones of earth.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of seven books of poetry. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, Orion, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and seven editions of The Best American Poetry. She has served as a guest editor of Ploughshares, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and two previous issues of Alaska Quarterly Review. Hirshfield has been featured in two Bill Moyers PBS documentaries and her work appears frequently on National Public Radio. Hirshfield is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
WHAT THE LIVING DO by Marie Howe
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss – we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Marie Howe is the author of three volumes of poetry, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008), The Good Thief (1998), and What the Living Do (1997), and is the co-editor of a book of essays, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994).
SPRUNG RHYTHM OF A LANDSCAPE by Yusef Komunyakaa
Charles, I’m also a magpie collecting every scrap
of song, color, & prophecy beside the river
in the lonesome valley, along the Trail of Tears,
switchbacks, demarcation lines & railroad tracks,
over a ridge called The Devil’s Backbone,
winding through the double-green of Appalachia
down to shady dominion & Indian summer.
I don’t remember how many times,
caught between one divine spirit & the next
detour, I wanted to fly home the old way,
around contours of doubt, tailspins
I’d learned to gauge so well, voices
ahead, before, not yet born, & beyond,
doubling back to the smell of magnolia.
Whatever it was in the apparitional light
held us to the road. But your early sky
was different than mine, as I drifted up
from bottomland, snagged by grab-vines
& bullfrog lingo in a bluesy grotto. One way
or another, a rise & fall is a rise & fall, a way in
& a way out, till we’re grass danced-down.
I, too, know my Hopkins (Lightnin’ & Gerard Manley),
gigging to this after-hour when all our little civil wars
unheal in the body. I shake my head till snake eyes fall
on the ground, as history climbs into the singing skull
to ride shotgun. Our days shaped by unseen movement
in the landscape, cold-cocked by brightness coming
over a hill, wild & steady as a runagate palomino
spooked by something in the trees unsaid.
The redbud followed us into starless cities
& shook us out like dusty rags in a dizzy breeze.
But we’re lucky we haven’t been shaken down
to seed-corn in a ragged sack, looped & cinched tight,
lumps of dirt hidden in our coat pockets.
Charles, we came as folksongs,
blues, country & western, to bebop & rock ‘n’ roll,
our shadows hanging out bandaged-up & drawn
on a wall easing into night melody of “Po’ Lazarus”
at the top & the bottom of day. Each step taken,
each phrase, every snapped string, fallen arch
& kiss on a forgotten street in Verona or Paris
transported us back – back to hidden paths,
abandoned eaves & haylofts where a half century
of starlings roosted, back to when we were lost
in our dream-headed, separate eternities,
searching till all the pieces fit together,
till my sky is no bluer than your sky.
Yusef Komunyakaa is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently The Chameleon Couch (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award. He has been the recipient of multiple fellowships and his awards include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
ELEGY BEGINNING WITH HALF A LINE FROM BEN JONSON by Maxine Kumin
Dry, bald, and sere
my old college roommate dead of cancer
keeps walking into my midnights where
we’re heading north again from White River
two girls thumbing by the highway never
molested not even propositioned by delivery-
men who stop to ask us where the hell we’re going
– to her parents’ place – and next we’re galloping
her mother’s horses one hot yellow afternoon
until their flanks lather and their nostrils flare
we swim them right into the cobblestoned river
nevermind soaking the expensive British leather
cool now drinking spiked punch at the college Jolly-Ups
we’re proud of getting seasoned making out among the wraps
on someone’s Ash Street bed the sun’s eclipse
through smoked glass smoking Parliaments and pot
we are forming our selves – what tamed us? not
the KGB the CIA the FBI but time that cat
burglar it’s dawn I curse your cunning stalker cancer
four five six chemos carry off your zest your hair
radiation strips your frame nevermind you swear
even morphined that you’ll beat him all hollow
and then you swim your sweaty horse up to Valhalla.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Maxine Kumin’s 17th poetry collection, Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010, published by W. W. Norton, received the L.A. Times Book Award for 2011. Kumin is a winner of the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Prizes, and is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
JUNEAU SPRING by Dorianne Laux
In Alaska I slept in a bed on stilts, one arm
pressed against the ice feathered window,
the heat on high, sweat darkening the collar
of my cotton thermals. I worked hard to buy that bed,
walked towards it when the men in the booths
were finished crushing hundred dollar bills
into my hand, pitchers of beer balanced on my shoulder
set down like pots of gold. My shift ended at 5 am:
station tables wiped clean, salt and peppers
replenished, ketchups married. I walked the dirt road
in my stained apron and snow boots, wool scarf,
second-hand gloves, steam rising
off the backs of horses wading chest deep in fog.
I walked home slow under Orion, his starry belt
hung heavy beneath the cold carved moon.
My room was still, quiet, squares of starlight
set down like blank pages on the yellow quilt.
I left the heat on because I could afford it, the house
hot as a sauna, and shed my sweater, my skirt,
toed off my boots, slung my damp socks
over the oil heater’s coils. I don’t know now
why I ever left. I slept like the dead
while outside my window the sun rose
low over the glacier, and the glacier did its best
to hold on, though one morning I woke to hear it
giving up, sloughing off a chunk of antediluvian ice
that sounded like the door to heaven opening
on a bad hinge. Those undefined days
I stared into the blue scar where the ice
had been, so clear and crystalline it hurt. I slept
in my small room and all night – or what passed for night
that far north – the geography of the world
outside my window was breaking, changing shape.
And I woke to it and looked at it and didn’t speak.
Dorianne Laux’s most recent collections are The Book of Men and Facts about the Moon. A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Oregon Book Award and The Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, Laux is also author of Awake, What We Carry, and Smoke from BOA Editions. Laux is a contributing editor to Alaska Quarterly Review.
HIDDEN HEARING by Li-Young Lee
God slips His likeness of me under His pillow.
Morning grows cloudy, the house darkens,
and I know what the rain at the sill is saying:
Be finished with resemblances. Your lamp
hides the light. A voice, being a voice and not the wind,
can’t carry anything away. And yet,
it makes any land a place, a country of the air,
and laughter its seventh day.
Last night I dreamed of voices in a grove.
Ladders reaching from the ground into the branches.
I was mending my children’s shirts,
worrying if the light would last
long enough for me to thread the needle.
Now I’m nodding with the trees in the wind,
counting seconds between the lightning and the thunder,
deaf to former things, unencumbered of things to come,
and leaving God to recoup
a human fate.
God snores, His sleep immense
and musty with the season’s litter.
God rolls over in His sleep
and churns the sea-bed
to dislodge many buried keys.
Outside, a bird is telling time’s green name.
It stops when I stop to listen,
and starts again as soon as I give up
holding my breath to hear it,
as though whole-hearted listening intrudes
where hearing ajar makes room for singing
so tender my attention snuffs it,
or else so brimming
my ear’s least turning spills it.
God takes out again that portrait
he makes of me each day, now adding, now erasing,
and time is a black butterfly, pinned
while someone searches for its name in a book.
Li-Young Lee is the author of five books of poetry and the memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance.
CREOLE by Robert Pinsky
I’m tired of the gods, I’m pious about the ancestors: afloat
In the wake widening behind me in time, the restive devisers.
My father had one job from high school till he got fired at thirty.
The year was 1947 and his boss, planning to run for mayor,
Wanted to hire an Italian veteran, he explained, putting it
In plain English. I was seven years old, my sister was two.
The barbarian tribes in the woods were so savage the Empire
Had to conquer them to protect and clear its perimeter.
So into the woods Rome sent out missions of civilizing
Governors and invaders to establish schools, courts, garrisons:
Soldiers, clerks, officials, citizens with their household slaves.
Years or decades or entire lives were spent out in the hinterlands –
Which might be good places to retire on a government pension,
Especially if in those work-years you had acquired a native wife.
Often I get these things wrong or at best mixed up but I do
Feel piety toward those persistent mixed families in Gaul,
Britain, Thrace. When I die may I take my place in the wedge
Widening and churning in the mortal ocean of years of souls.
As I get it, the Roman colonizing and mixing, the intricate Imperial
Processes of enslaving and freeing, involved not just the inevitable
Fucking in all senses of the word, but also marriages and births
As developers and barbers, scribes and thugs mingled and coupled
With the native people and peoples. Begetting and trading, they
Needed to swap, blend and improvise languages – couples
Especially needed to invent French, Spanish, German: and I confess –
Roman, barbarian – I find that Creole work more glorious than God.
The way it happened, the school sent around a notice: anybody
Interested in becoming an apprentice optician, raise your hand.
It was the Great Depression, anything about a job sounded good to
Milford Pinsky, who told me he thought it meant a kind of dentistry.
Anyway, he was bored sitting in study hall, so he raised his hand,
And he got the job as was his destiny – full-time, once he graduated.
Joe Schiavone was the veteran who took the job, not a bad guy,
Dr. Vineburg did get elected mayor, Joe worked for him for years.
At the bank an Episcopalian named John Smock, whose family owned
A piece of the bank, had played sports with Milford and gave him a small
Loan with no collateral, so he opened his own shop, grinding lenses
And selling glasses: as his mother-in-law said, “almost a Professional.”
Optician comes from a Greek word that has to do with seeing.
Banker comes from an Italian word for a bench, where people sat,
I imagine, and made loans or change. Pinsky like “Tex” or “Brooklyn”
Is a name nobody would have if they were still in that same place:
Those names all signify someone who’s been away from home a while.
Schiavone means “a Slav.” Milford is a variant on the names of poets –
Milton, Herbert, Sidney – certain immigrants used to give their offspring. Creole comes from a word meaning to breed or to create, in a place.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky recently published his Selected Poems. His CD with pianist Laurence Hobgood, PoemJazz, appeared in February, 2012.
IN GENERAL by Pattiann Rogers
This is about no rain in particular,
just any rain, rain sounding on the roof,
any roof, slate or wood, tin or clay
or thatch, any rain among any trees,
rain in soft, soundless accumulation,
gathering rather than falling on the fir
of juniper and cedar, on a lace-community
of cob webs, rain clicking off the rigid
leaves of oaks or magnolias, any kind
of rain, cold and smelling of ice or rising
again as steam off hot pavements
or stilling dust on country roads in August.
This is about rain as rain possessing
only the attributes of any rain in general.
And this is about night, any night
coming in its same immeasurably gradual
way, fulfilling expectations in its old
manner, creating heavens for lovers
and thieves, taking into itself the scarlet
of the scarlet sumac, the blue of the blue
vervain, no specific night, not a night
of birth or death, not the night forever
beyond the frightening side of the moon,
not the night always meeting itself
at the bottom of the sea, any sea, warm
and tropical or starless and stormy, night
meeting night beneath Arctic ice.
This attends to all nights but no night.
And this is about wind by itself,
not winter wind in particular lifting
the lightest snow off the mountaintop
into the thinnest air, not wind through
city streets, pushing people sideways,
rolling ash cans banging down the block,
not a prairie wind holding hawks suspended
mid-sky, not wind as straining sails
or as curtains on a spring evening, casually
in and back over the bed, not wind
as brother or wind as bully, not a lowing
wind, not a high howling wind. This is
about wind solely as pure wind in itself,
without moment, without witness.
Therefore this night tonight –
a midnight of late autumn winds shaking
the poplars and aspens by the fence, slamming
doors, rattling the porch swing, whipping
thundering black rains in gusts across
the hillsides, in batteries against the windows
as we lie together listening in the dark, our own
particular fingers touching – can never
be a subject of this specific conversation.
Pattiann Rogers has published eleven books of poetry, two prose books, and a book in collaboration with the artist Joellyn Duesberry. Her most recent books are The Grand Array: Writings on Nature, Science, and Spirit (Trinity University Press, 2010) and Wayfare (Penguin, 2008). Rogers is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Literary Award in Poetry from the Lannan Foundation, and five Pushcart Prizes. Her work has appeared twice in The Best American Poetry, and four times in The Best Spiritual Writing. Rogers is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
PENTIMENTI by Kay Ryan
“Pentimenti of an earlier position of the arm may be seen.”
– Frick Museum
It’s not simply
that the top image
wears off or
goes translucent;
things underneath
come back up,
having enjoyed the
advantages of rest.
That’s the hardest
part to bear, how
the decided-against
fattens one layer down,
free of the tests
applied to final choices.
In this painting,
for instance, see how
a third arm –
long ago repented
by the artist –
is revealed,
working a flap
into the surface
through which
who knows what
exiled cat or
extra child
might steal.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan is an Academy of American Poets Chancellor and a fellow of the MacArthur Foundation. Her most recent book, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press), received the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
THE DOG by Michael Ryan
The neighbors’ baby died age one month
so they’re off to Big Sur “to celebrate her life”
and I stupidly agreed to feed their dog –
a twelve-year-old wire-haired mix, half blind,
half dead itself, its gum lines receded to a rictus grin.
What was I supposed to say when the husband asked?
“Your baby’s dead, but I can’t be bothered.
I don’t really know you. Ask someone else.
I don’t like your dog. I think it’s hideous.
What if it dies while you’re away?
I’m supposed to call and tell you that?
I don’t want to touch it.
What if your misfortune is contagious?”
But I said “Be glad to,” and he embraced me,
this Kurt or Kirk, I’m not even sure which.
“Siobhan” – that’s his wife – “can’t stand to kennel her,”
he sobbed into my shoulder, his eye rims moistening
behind his clownish owlish oversized glasses
he knocked askew against my clavicle.
It startled me so much I couldn’t guess
who “her” referred to until I got he meant the dog.
All her’s: the dead baby, the wife, and now the dog.
I don’t like the dog. It stinks. It needs a bath.
Who washes a dog during a month like that?
But I’ll be damned if I’m going to do it –
dried dogshit or worse matted in hair
the color and texture of rusted wire
caked with rotted moldy drywall.
The dog howls all day – and I mean all day –
as if these were the feelings left inside the house.
From outside all month the house had been silent
except the one time early on the paramedics came
so the neighborhood knew a disaster was happening.
I never doubted for a moment there was wailing inside,
including the baby’s, which must have been constant.
But the dog didn’t howl until everyone was gone.
Siobhan has to be forty-something –
They supposedly did a doula water birth at home,
her husband assisting, no doctor, no amnio,
no genetic testing – I think they belong
to some megachurch where the pastor
the size of a fish stick from the bleacher seats
projects fifty feet high with his bleached teeth
and they sing-along upbeat Christian music
ten thousand strong, as loudly as they can.
“To celebrate her life”: the pastor’s phrase, I bet.
If that helps them bear it, fine.
All I know is I have their dog to deal with.
One thing I’m not doing besides wash it
is walk it, so I called a franchised service
that sent a Belarusian with a crescent nose stud
(God knows what his story is)
who rang my doorbell after half an hour.
“I can’t walk dog,” he said. “It won’t go.
It won’t leave house. I think it sick.
You better take it to vet.” So I did.
Again I picked one from the phonebook,
who charged me eighty bucks to find a loose tooth,
although he offered a thousand dollars worth of tests.
“The dog is old,” he said. Oh. Thanks.
Then I tried at home pretending the dog was mine,
actually petting it (a bit) and talking in goofy baby tones
while giving liver chips and buddy biscuits and playing fetch,
but, while I napped, it scratched off the front door paint
and started gnawing its way out.
After I gated it back in the neighbors’ kitchen
with its blanket and bowls and dried bull pizzle,
it began howling again, which is what it’s doing now.
Maybe there’s something in the house still.
Maybe tiny syringes and bandages upstairs
the dog smells. It would be too odd to go up there
where the baby was, into the baby’s room,
with the neighbors’ hopes there as furniture,
pink bunny or smiley angel or kiddie Bible wallpaper.
It would be like being inside their privacy,
their intimacy, their monthlong nightmare.
Maybe I have to call them after all.
I hate to call them – they should have peace
to grieve enough to live again in a house
that no matter what they believe or understand
will never be for one moment as they thought.
I don’t know what else to do but call them.
Their dog – their ugly old dog – is howling for them
and will not stop.
Michael Ryan is the author of five books of poems, an autobiography, a memoir, and a collection of essays about poetry and writing. The Lenore Marshall Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award are among many other distinctions he’s received for his work. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published his latest book of poems, This Morning, in 2012. Ryan is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor
LONG BEFORE WE GOT HERE, LONG AFTER WE’RE GONE by Peggy Shumaker
In the season blue-white sun
barely lifts above the ridge,
limps along the horizon
then dives out of sight,
we’re changed each day by light.
Someone who’s gone before
broke trail, set tracks.
With the right kick wax,
we make our way among birch
breathing hard rare frosted light.
We make of light arpeggio crystals,
caribou dance fans, shush
of bristles. One moment made
alive, human, unafraid.
All that’s lost not gone.
Peggy Shumaker’s most recent book of poems is Gnawed Bones (Red Hen Press). Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally (Bison Books). Her new book of poems, set in Costa Rica, will be published in 2013 by Red Hen Press. She is the editor of Boreal Books and the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press. Shumaker is an Alaska Quarterly Review contributing editor.
INDEPENDENCE DAY by Gerald Stern
There were packs of dogs to deal with and broomsticks
whacking rubber balls and everyone stopping for
aeroplanes and chasing fire engines
and standing around where sidewalks on hills turned almost
level, and horses and horseshit, and ice in the cellars;
and Saturday I wore a dark suit and leaned
against my pillar and Sunday I put on a necktie
and stood in front of a drug store eating a Clark Bar.
The 4th of July I stayed in my attic resting in
filthy cardboard and played with my bats, I stretched
their bony wings, and put a burning match
to the bundle of papers, especially to the ropes
that held them together and read the yellow news
as it went up in smoke and spoke for the fly and raged
against the spider, say what you will, and started
my drive to Camden to look at the house on Mickle Street
and walked – with him – down to the river to skip
some stones, since Ty Cobb did it and Jim Thorpe did it
though it was nothing compared to George Washington
throwing silver dollars, and for our fireworks
we found some brown beer bottles and ran down Third Street
screaming, but he had to go back home and sit
in his rocking chair for there was a crowd of Lithuanians
coming and he was a big hit in Vilnius
the way he sat in his mound of papers and gripped
the arms, though I was tired of Lithuanians
who didn’t know shit, not to mention Romanians,
to pick a country out of a hat – or I was
just tired and Anne Marie was right, I shouldn’t
be driving at night, I should be dead, I don’t
even know how to give instructions, I don’t even know
my rabbi’s name – she and her motorcycle –
imagine them speaking Babylonian over
my shoe-box – imagine them throwing flowers – fleabane,
black-eyed Susans, daisies – along with the dirt.
Gerald Stern’s latest book of poems, In Beauty Bright, was published by W. W. Norton in 2012. Trinity University Press published his newest book of prose Stealing History in 2012. Stern’s Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992 was published by W. W. Norton in 2010.
THE SCATTERED CONGREGATION by Tomas Tranströmer
I
We got ready and showed our home.
The visitor thought: you live well.
The slum must be inside you.
II
Inside the church, pillars and vaulting
white as plaster, like the cast
around the broken arm of faith.
III
Inside the church there’s a begging bowl
that slowly lifts from the floor
and floats along the pews.
IV
But the church bells have gone underground.
They’re hanging in the sewage pipes.
Whenever we take a step, they ring.
V
Nicodemus the sleepwalker is on his way
to the Address. Who’s got the Address?
Don’t know. But that’s where we’re going.
– Tomas Transtömer, translated by Robert Bly
Tomas Tranströmer received the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature.
IN THE ELECTRICITY OF LOVE, ITS LIGHTNING STRIKE by Jean Valentine
In the electricity of love, its lightning strike
or in its quiet hum in the thighs
like this little icebox here
not knowing any better
or in the dumb hum of the heater going on
little stirs in the room-tone
I rush outdoors into the air you are
Lucy
and you rush out to receive me
At last there you are
who I always knew was there
but almost died not
meeting
when my scraped-out child died Lucy
you hold her, all the time.
Lucy is the name given a female skeleton approximately 3.2 million years old, found in Ethiopia in 1974.
Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her 11th book of poetry is Break the Glass, just out from Copper Canyon Press. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.
THE DEATH OF THE MAGICIAN by David Wagoner
He found coins in our ears
and picked flowers from our hair.
He turned nothing to something and
nearly anything to nothing.
His assistants all changed places.
His animals disappeared,
and though we didn’t believe
in what he’d done before
our very eyes could look
in the right direction, we
had learned to love his tricks.
Then suddenly he vanished.
We’re all sitting here hoping
he’ll reappear some day
from a locked box or a cage
or from behind the scenes.
We don’t want to trust our eyes
or have to deceive ourselves.
We want him to saunter down
the aisle with his arms outstretched
for applause and leap onstage,
spot-lit, as brilliant as ever,
in charge of all we see,
and fool us over again.
David Wagoner has published 19 books of poems; most recently Copper Canyon Press published After the Point of No Return in 2012. He has also published ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Lilly Prize in 1991, six yearly prizes from Poetry, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011. He was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for 23 years and edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to 2002.
BEING AS I WAS, HOW COULD I HELP . . . by Eleanor Wilner
It was the noise that drew me first,
even before the scent. The long water
had brought something to my den, spilling
its banks, leaving the hollow pod
of reeds in the cool mud. Whatever it was,
it cried inside, and an odor rose
from it – man-smell but sweeter.
Two small hairless cubs were in it, pink
as summer oleander, waving
the little worm-like things they had
instead of paws. Naked like that, they
made my blood go slow, my dugs
begin to drip. I tipped the pod, they slid
into the ferns, I nuzzled the howling
pair, they found my side, they suckled
there and drank their fill. That night
the red star in the sky was bright,
a vulture’s eye that waits
with a patience that I hardly understand.
The twin cubs slept in their shining
skin, warm at my side. I dreamed:
The trees were falling, one by one,
the sound deafening, the dust that rose
from one a mist to hide the felling
of the next. The mountains were
cut in two; great stones were rolled
and piled like hills until the sky
was shut; where the trees
had grown, pillars of stone rose
high, the birds circled, but
their skulls struck the sky.
Teeth chewed the earth; our den fell in
like a rotted log when weight is
added to decay; nothing to eat, the cubs
howled, the flesh fell from our bones,
we ran under a strange sky whose light
was wrong: it rose from the city walls,
bounced off the leaden heaven – flat
as the sound of a stone striking mud.
One of the brothers killed the other.
Blood poured where the streams had run.
Nowhere to drink, we slink from one rock
to the next, hunger drives us to the walls
where, sharp as the eyes of men, death
waits with its thousand iron thorns.
But the warm sun woke me. I forgot.
The twins were all I saw, for days
we lay together by the den, the river
ran beside us like a friend; they drank
and laughed at the morning light
that played in the shelter
of the leaves. Forgive me,
I was wolf, and could not help
the love that flowed from me to them,
the thin sweet river of milk.
Even now, though the world has come
to match the dream, I think
I would give it again.
Eleanor Wilner’s most recent books of poems are Tourist in Hell (The University of Chicago Press, 2010) and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon, 2004).
GRAVITY by Kevin Young
I have tried telling this before –
how the light stabbed its way
out of the clouds, rays
aimed everywhere –
no, it was the earth that day
drawing light out of the sky,
heavy, gravity pulling
the light to rest on its chest,
a ladder leaning –
in the valley north of the City
of Angels, mountains around us,
my passenger a twin, one
half of two, their mother
killed a year
or so before, helicopter
catching a power line –
gone – and I, knowing nothing
then, or too much, said
little, maybe sorry
which isn’t all
you can say, but mostly –
though I didn’t know that then –
and we were fighting
with my warbling tape deck,
no doubt, when we saw it –
tumbling, end
over end across the highway,
a car flipping and spitting up
dust and God knows
what else – midair –
and almost before I could reach
the shoulder, my friend out
across the lanes, racing
to the crumpled car,
to his mother – even then
I knew it was her he hoped
to meet – instead, in the scorched
grass of the median, a spare
or spared shoe, books flapping
their wings and a man, dazed, somehow
thrown clear –
kneeling. We were not
the first, already some off-duty nurse
or Samaritan beside him, within
seconds, asking
what I should have – are you
alright? He held
no answers, no language
for where he had just
been, almost stayed, the car turtled
over on its back, its brokenness
that could be
our bodies, not yet
our lives – or his – and my friend
the twin almost there in time,
me slow behind, the last
of the first – scared to see –
looking on in horror
and wonder, clothes tossed
everywhere now no one would wear –
the broken mirrors missing
bodies they once
were conjoined to –
closer than they appear –
a blinding, splintered sky
helpless we soon would turn
and sail off under.
Kevin Young is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (2011), and the editor of six other poetry anthologies, including The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief and Healing and The Best American Poetry 2011. Graywolf Press published Young’s collection of essays, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, in 2012.
POEM FOR DELKASH by Matthew Zapruder
when I held the envelope
I knew the time
a little harmless
loneliness would guide
my hand holding
the circular
polycarbonate plastic
disc with the blue
letters spelling her name
into the machine
had come
and I heard
her voice in Persian
inside me make
deep ancient canyons
only sunlight
has ever known
some time passes
I suddenly notice
it is afternoon
I am standing
in the kitchen
holding a broom
she stops singing
alone for a while
the music wanders
then her voice returns
she says a word
it sounds like glacier
I’m pretty sure
the song describes
how it feels when
something important
does not happen
most of the afternoon
still listening I think
beautiful old stove
many people
we will never know
placed their hands
on your dials
hoping things
would never change
I cannot imagine
what it is like
for those who know
they must stand together
thinking for too long
we have waited
for fear which is not
a guest to leave
they might shoot us
but we will stay
here in the street
until we are all
at last older sisters
to each other
Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry. His most recent book, Come On All You Ghosts (Copper Canyon), was selected as one of The New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2011.
Part 2 - Todd Boss, Guest Editor
ABOUT THE GUEST POETRY EDITOR
Todd Boss is the author of the poetry collections published by W. W. Norton, Yellowrocket (2008) and Pitch (2012). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The London Times, The Best American Poetry, and on NPR. In 2009, Virginia Quarterly named Yellowrocket one of the ten best poetry books of the year, and awarded Boss the Emily Clark Balch Prize. Yellowrocket was also selected as the Midwest Bookseller Association’s Honor Book for Poetry and was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award. Panic, Boss’s verse retelling of Knut Hamsun’s 1894 novella Pan, will premiere as a one-man opera in late 2013, arranged by Boston Conservatory’s Andy Vores. Boss is the founding co-director of Motionpoems, a poetry film initiative now collaborating with Copper Canyon, Milkweed, Graywolf, Ecco, and other literary presses.
FOR AN OLD RUNNER by Todd Boss
The last time I was out to the old farm,
I found a timber sleigh runner, banded in iron,
rusting in the machine shop under the granary.
It was my father’s father’s father’s father’s,
and I know I had no business bringing it home
without asking Donny – my second cousin, who
owns and farms the land around the abandoned
farmstead now – but here it hangs, cross-wise
on a wall in my study. Its blunted nose 21 hands
high, it arcs above my head, and when I reach
to touch it – as for want of the feel of old wood I
will from time to time – I might as well be handling
one of the horses that hauled it, its neck a rough
relic, so rough as to be smooth with roughness,
its whole body – in the wall beside me imaginary –
haunch-heavy but simultaneously holding
weightlessly still for me, eyes steady, ears keen,
and ready the way horses are always ready, even
stolen horses, even horses one has never driven,
never even seen.
Todd Boss is the author of the poetry collections published by W. W. Norton, Yellowrocket (2008) and Pitch (2012). His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The London Times, The Best American Poetry, and on NPR.
I DON’T SUPPOSE WE HAVE US by Jennifer Denrow
I touch what I can, knowing
it isn’t any more than what’s
there. I touch what I can, leaving
out what it is until each thing
I touch is the same.
I touch my whole life, being here.
I touch your knees.
I come home to a different house
and go to sleep there.
I don’t suppose we have us
or are had by anything
that’s here. I swim in lithium.
I stand in gulls waded
out from snow. A forestry
to startle us. A nature
of people held to one another.
I almost keep going through
the window.
Jennifer Denrow is the author of California (Four Way Books, 2011). She co-edits Horse Less Press and serves as reviews editor for the Denver Quarterly.
THE WHY by Alex Dimitrov
for Marie Howe
I want to be in rooms full of people I love.
The world goes white then green again
like the mind telling the body it is not alone.
The body saying something I can almost hear
above the sound of a dog barking
because he feels himself tied and tremendously alone.
Who would you believe?
I walk the great streets of New York City
where many great people have lived
and think how great it is to live and die on earth
even if it means having known nothing
of the why. Nothing of the why.
Alex Dimitrov’s first book of poems, Begging for It, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in early 2013. He is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize for younger poets from The American Poetry Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Kenyon Review, Yale Review, Slate, Tin House, and Boston Review.
TWO STORY by Jill Alexander Essbaum
They lock the door and then repair
to sovereign floors of the house they share
split by a flight of stairs.
In the kitchen, a kettle airs its grievance
with a know-nothing wheeze
as he steeps a green tea blackly.
The agony, it’s called, when leaves unclench
like fists post-punch. He can’t recall
when last they kissed. Or touched.
Above, she drubs the windowpane
again and again and again and again
as if to weaponize her doom.
A mood bleeds through the room
like oil through gauze.
But every story has two sighs,
and nine wrecked hours of night
remain to reckon. She sleeps
in the attic because it beckons.
He paces the basement, blue
as a fuse. Resistor? Breaker?
No matter. The aftermaths match.
And his room’s roof is her
foundation. A margin splits
the situation. Steps are taken
but none are brought back.
The edifice lists on an axis of lack.
They peer at each other with spiraling stares.
The fulcrum of their house is tiers.
Jill Alexander Essbaum is the author of Harlot (No Tell Books, 2007) and The Devastation, a single-poem chapbook (Cooper Dillon Books, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The New York Times, and The Best American Poetry.
PHONE CALL FROM MY SISTER, WHO BELIEVES SHE’S REACTIVATED A VANISHED TWIN IN HER JAWBONE by Anna Journey
My sister’s jaw is no longer
symmetrical – one side’s widened
to a slow curve while the other bone holds
its shape. She’d been up late
reading on the internet about irregular
growth spurts – how a doctor once cut open
a man’s swollen ankle and unraveled
a knot of auburn hair,
three baby teeth. He’d absorbed
his twin’s small body in utero. My sister’s
warped jaw must unhinge to bite an apple,
like a python. She hits its gap
shut with her palm. Because her teeth
don’t meet she hangs
all her wall-mirrors low so they stop
at the throat. I say
it’s not that noticeable. She says
the birth control pills she began
to take at nineteen triggered the old twin’s
DNA – sizzled its ghost-
helix with hormones until it grew a face
inside the sickle of her jaw. One June
in childhood I raised her pointer finger
to trace the waning gibbous for the eyes,
the nose, the mouth of the man
in the moon. Soon, we’d found
Orion’s belt fastened over the tip
of a cedar. She’d asked, What happens
when it comes undone? I don’t know
what to tell her two thousand
miles away, years later,
over the telephone. I mouth the Latin
name for the syndrome I can’t
pronounce but imagine
flattened itself to her cells: fetus papyraceus:
paper-doll fetus: paper-like baby.
Maybe her twin’s written her a letter
that now unrolls its ancient
scroll – hip by hip by half-erased
face that juts into this new
dimension – whose invisible
ink’s just begun to turn blue.
Anna Journey is the author of the collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting (University of Georgia Press, 2009), selected by Thomas Lux for the National Poetry Series. She recently received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
NEWLY ARRIVED IN THE WORLD by Athena Kildegaard
Once I ate a marigold, just the flower,
a peppery firework. And once I stashed
grey kangaroo droppings in a desk drawer.
It was a secret place, like the granite boulder
in the eucalyptus grove where we listened
to kookaburras and once a huge grey stopped
feet away, his ears gnomons in the shade.
Once I bit my daughter’s fingernails rather
than chop at them with tiny clippers.
I stroked a nurse shark, smooth this way,
sharp as a day-old-beard that way. I chewed
the Coulter pine’s resin, licked the kitten
newly arrived in the world because the cat did,
drank nectar from Doryanthes excelsior, pulled down
the red chalices on their six-foot stems.
Just then I might have been an insect, the world
said to me, I might have been an explorer,
a botanist, a fox carrying a limp vole into her den,
I might have loped off beyond eucalyptus.
Athena Kildegaard is the author of three books of poems: Rare Momentum (Red Dragonfly Press, 2006), Bodies of Light (Red Dragonfly Press, 2011), and Cloves & Honey (Nodin Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared in such journals as Malahat Review, Tar River Poetry, Mid-American Review, Cream City Review, and Faultline.
HITHER-AND-YON by Rickey Laurentiis
New Orleans, LA, August 2005
Thereable
in a cool mason jar
is light.
Is jumpable,
hither-and-yon, as a tumbleweed
trapped in wind.
Or
is it light? Or
a moth chasing it? Wings – not like
the fruit meant there,
but the honey that replaced it –
her wings stretching back –
as the jar’s cap is bent
for a breathe-hole, a drown-hole,
as water rushes in, fills in
– and back
onto that wet surface:
what the moth mistakes for, believes as, – (O Lord) –
this mirrored light.
Rickey Laurentiis has published poems in Indiana Review, jubilat, Knockout Literary Magazine, Ganymede, and Callaloo.
O2, NORTH GREENWICH by Lorraine Mariner
There is much to be thankful for
in this part of town, not least
those times at North Greenwich station
when you might be going down
and they are coming up the escalators
in their hundreds, to a concert,
some looking fabulous, some
in identifying t-shirts, and you can
almost touch the expectation
and good feeling, for how could they not
be happy surrounded by those
who love what they love?
Lorraine Mariner is the author of the collection Furniture published by Picador in 2009 and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Seamus Heaney Centre Poetry Prize. She has a poem in the Salt anthology The Best British Poetry 2011.
I WAS FLYING by Malena Mörling
I was flying
on a piece of paper
in a dream once –
And just now
when a deer ran
in front of my bicycle,
I was flying
as I came down hill
around a bend
in the woods –
And for a fraction
of a second,
one of its hind legs
touched my front tire
after which,
as you can imagine
the deer was flying –
with its white
upturned tail
headlong in among the trees –
weaving and darting
in between them
as if it were trapped
if only for a moment
in a house of mirrors –
before it vanished,
into a fold
in the dusk,
the deep autumn dusk,
lit only by the last
of the yellow leaves.
Malena Mörling is the author of two books of poetry, Ocean Avenue and Astoria. She has translated several Swedish poets and is editing the anthology, Swedish Writers on Writing. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007 and in 2010 she received a Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship.
BEFORE THE BOAT IS A BOAT by Matthew Neinow
it is constellation, is
gridwork, a pencil-line frame
on the floor, points nailed
into door skin around which a batten
is wrapped, around which the eye
also bends, until the line is made fair,
which means sweet, which means true,
which means the eye
is still the most right tool.
All this from numbers alone,
measurements to be drawn
in four perspectives, but not so darkly,
as any star can be wrong, yet still
righted, this work of nails and arcs
from which the boat rises,
its pencil sheer and tumblehome,
the architecture of the backbone – everything
erased at least once, every line redrawn.
Matthew Neinow’s most recent chapbook is The End of the Folded Map (2011). Individual poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI online, Indiana Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
FROM by Jill Osier
Sometimes the light
as we all sat down to supper
was, briefly, the very blue
of our collars.
We took this in every weather
as warmth.
Later I felt us pulling
something up against the wind
of those who seemed to know
an easier way.
Jill Osier’s work can also be found in Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Subtropics, and Versal.
from BIZARRE Nathaniel Perry
So let’s stop and think about mystery. One night
this summer, smoke from a fire in the Dismal
Swamp drifted here to Cumberland County. Evening
disappeared into the evening. Light
sliding from gold to grey, we said it seemed
unnatural (though there certainly was a time
when fires were natural, before the human world
decided that it was the only one that dreams
and eats and runs and thinks and breathes and burns
and knows what forests need), and before we went
inside to check the internet we all
could smell the faintest trace of smoke, sent,
we guessed, by lightning and flame, but didn’t know
from where. We breathed the disappearing air.
We stared everywhere there was to stare. Our chickens
hid beneath the porch stairs. The smoke we shared
thickened in our eyes, and we wondered about
the wonder of living, how we rise like smoke from fire
and drift in the wind, even when it seems
there is no wind, or there’s been no wind, and we doubt
our direction, and we’re sure that we are ash,
not smoke and what seemed like drifting is falling back
into the fire, but instead we fall forever
in the wide glares of summer and in the quick black
of winter, which is another way of saying
you’ve drifted and you’re drifting, and the fire
is as far beneath you as your own feet feel
when your child is born, like the air your head (and the wheels
inside your head) exists in is leaving the ground
in a slow balloon. We were in a cocoon and didn’t
like it, so we went inside to find the fire.
The Dismal Swamp is one hundred and fifty hidden
miles from here, the flames were only eight
days old and the smoke a sky blanket, cloud cover
hovering over the August gardens. So young
to be so far from home. We stayed up late
and smelled the smoke as it came inside, together.
We thought about the kids, and how already
easily they drift from their first flames
in our world, where what is smoke can seem like weather.
Nathaniel Perry is the author of Nine Acres (American Poetry Review/Copper Canyon, 2011). He is the editor of the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review.
WITH AN OLD OAR, LIGHT TURNING THE FOG by Gretchen Steele Pratt
Someone has rearranged the stepping stones
Out into the bronze pond’s hallways.
At midnight, maybe, their clothes thrown
In the trees and forgotten, they erased
The old way in. This island will unsay
Us. Against my ankles, once more,
Let me feel the water your body displaced.
That small rise in shore.
Gretchen Steele Pratt is the author of one book of poems, One Island, chosen by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the 2009 Anhinga Prize for Poetry. Her poems have recently been published in The Best American Poetry 2011, Witness, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review and Ninth Letter.
THE ONE WE’RE FALLING INTO by Derek Sheffield
When Mount St. Helens
blew that
May day in the last millennium,
my father steered us through ash dropping like snow,
wipers ticking past another empty car.
Where did they go?
And here I am,
driving a mute blast of sunlight
with friends, asphalt and what’s left
of the woods, something like flagpoles
bristling on something like
Ground Zero
even as we begin to see
a gritty soil. Where smoke
once curled from chimneys, a glistening rain
of spiders led to lark and elk, swallow
and salamander. No more cabins
or dinner bells, but so much lupine
you’d swear volcanoes exult in violet.
Even this pumice crunching under every step
won’t sink. So much life,
we say, hiking back
to the car. Cheryl hopes for a Dairy Queen,
and Simmons clicks through a thousand photos
as we coast the curves toward sea level, tired bodies
swaying together in time.
Across the lake
to our left, a thousand trunks still float
like sticks in a game.
Then the future comes up,
the one
we’re falling into, and Jean-Paul says,
Sure as shit wouldn’t bring kids into this
world, in a way that chills my groin.
And Elizabeth observes, a stone
in her lap the size of a skull,
This is young enough to be my child.
Derek Sheffield’s A Revised Account of the West won the Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Georgia Review, Orion, and The Southern Review.
LIGHTNING CONDUCTOR by Jon Stone
You can imagine, if you like, your city as orchestra pit,
the clouds as a great haul of squid – hoisted, swaying,
drizzling madly from their many punctures.
There’s a man on the roof – a tall man, delicate boned,
production line looks. He raises his baton very slowly,
like the tiny brain of a thermometer.
He waits, soaked to the tails. Waits. Waits. There –
your glass that is blooded with dark
was just then nerved with light.
Jon Stone’s debut collection, School of Forgery, was published by Salt in April 2012 and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in the United Kingdom.
Part Three - Camille Dungy, Guest Editor
ABOUT THE GUEST POETRY EDITOR
Camille T. Dungy is the author of three books, including Smith Blue and Suck on the Marrow, and the editor of anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. Dungy’s honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, two NAACP Image Award nominations, two Northern California Book Awards, and a 2011 American Book Award.
SONG: RUNNING AWAY by Dan Bellm
When he was three he said,
tearful and sweet,
that he would run away from home
but for the dread
of having, all on his own,
to cross the street.
When he was four, and a sophisticate,
by then no mere beginner
at leaving,
casually he asked one evening,
would it be O.K.
if he ran away,
oh, right after dinner?
Practical fellow,
he had packed his little
lamb and dog, for his head
one pillow,
a toy telephone,
and set off alone.
Where did he imagine he was going?
No way of knowing.
Every few weeks, months,
years since then,
he runs away again,
and so far
without consequence;
gets halfway down the block,
or around one corner,
and relents.
Eighteen now, hand
on the door,
operatically heartsore,
far bolder
at bitching,
at overreaching,
heavy pack
at one shoulder,
where he’s bound
or when or whether he’ll come back
he still can’t say.
I’ve stopped beseeching,
and I’ve started itching
to let him run away.
Dan Bellm has published three books of poetry, most recently Practice (Sixteen Rivers Press), winner of a 2009 California Book Award.
from ROCKET FANTASTIC by Gabrielle Calvocoressi
One day a girl wakes up
so tired of Pasadena
that each white house
makes her cry as she drives
herself to school. Her father
says, “Buck up” or “Here,
go buy yourself something nice.”
But really, how many dresses
can one girl have and anyway
there’s a war outside somewhere
to think of. One day a girl
wakes up and the green
of the trees seems like some story
she’s been told over and over:
the boy with his buzz cut
sneaking his hand up her
shirt then missing the point
once he gets there. Oh the
boredom of beautiful men
you’re meant to marry: Sam
and Michael, Bob Jr.
with his perfect white shirt
and pressed chinos, who
looked so surprised when
you caught him in the
pool house with Jasper
kneeling before him.
One day a girl wakes
up and there’s a war
outside and $30 in her pocket
and Jasper calls on the
powder blue phone and talks
to her mother. “That Jasper
is such a nice boy.”
He says he’ll meet her
out front in the Alfa Romeo.
Pasadena. It’s place a girl
can’t go back to or won’t
at least not if Jasper
is driving the car.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (Persea, 2005) and Apocalyptic Swing (Persea, 2009), which was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her poems have been featured in literary journals and The Washington Post and on Garrison Keillor’s Poet’s Almanac.
NOCTURNE IN THE SHADOW OF A DORMANT VOLCANO by Oliver de la Paz
And again the hogs are rooting at the edges of the fence
with such discriminant tastes. The soldiers sit on crates
laughing as they file down their bullets. A late rain
issues steam from the bonfire, and the timbers
plucked from the siding of the barn relinquish
carpenter ants in lazy apostrophes. Between patrols,
the wait is filled with heavily salted meats bubbling from
the mouth of a can over a fire’s hiss. The soldiers,
with their spoons, catapult hunks of fat into the sty
and the hogs lunge at one another, mad with hunger
and smoke. The enigmatic volcano’s cap abducts the sky.
Snow still afflicts the peak, and the remote experience
of winter surrounds this summer scene with cold. The last
eruption sheared the mountain of half its trees. Now it is
a parenthesis of death. The deer at the periphery of the farm
start at the small cracklings of burning insects. The soldiers
glow in the fire’s irreverent discourse. The silence of the volcano,
a promenade of ghosts. Above the scene, the timbers
cannibalize their own corpses while here, winged ants rise and spark
in their ecstatic deaths. The filings from the coppery tips
of bullets fall at the boots of soldiers in thin helixes. And the night
devours everything in its algorithmic tolerance.
Oliver de la Paz is the author of three books of poetry: Names Above Houses, Furious Lullaby, and Requiem for the Orchard. He is the co-editor of A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry.
[eh-met tilz feys] by Samantha De Trinidad
[eh-met tilz feys] Noun, 1. Insufficient, as in, unrecognizable or maimed, as in, never enough. 2. Lacking the faculty of speech, as in, a boy needs both his eyeballs to prove who he is. Adjective, 1. The ability or tendency to float, see: hover, linger, feather gently across the surface of water. 2. Given free as a gift, courtesy or souvenir, example: we was doing Miss’sippi a favor. Verb, 1. To recall to mind or memorize. 2. Eject from the stomach through the mouth, as in, spew, also sputter or mumble, usually in one’s sleep; (used with object), see: a blown-out tire; black rubber pulled from the fan blades of a cotton gin, swollen like the Tallahatchie, lit by a gray summer glow, bruised shades poured over broken porcelain.
Samantha De Trinidad’s poetry has been published in Transfer and Cipactli Journal for Latino/a Art and Literature.
GLACIAL ERRATICS by Camille T. Dungy
There are people who, when they go, shift
the meaning of words we use each day.
Down goes Frazier,
we used to joke, when sleep knocked our daughter out.
Now Frazier’s dead,
and Megan’s mom is dying of the same cancer.
On the phone last night, Megan was a baby.
So many new words
she needed to say, but no better way to speak than by crying.
A wrack of grief we used to say,
meaning shipwreck,
souls sunk, lost
fortune, meaning ruin.
Though wrack can also mean seaweed, vegetation,
can mean what grows up from what has fallen.
A whale fall can support life for over seven decades.
The grotesque
and beautiful blooming
off a mortal behemoth.
Bone-rooted worms
waving like marsh grasses.
Hagfish, all saw-mouth and mucous.
Brittle stars.
When she got her words again, Megan said the worst of it
was that her mother was still driving her crazy.
I want to kill her.
Does she always have to be so controlling?
The morning she chose to join us, my daughter pushed against me.
My whole body, becoming a mother,
squeezed, trying to help push her along.
And what could she do
but push against me again?
Down goes Frazier, we joked
because she worked so hard to be alive she hated ever to leave us.
Once, my whole body, becoming a mourner, had to push my girl out,
to let her go.
We’ll be pushing each other like this until one of us is finally done.
Camille T. Dungy is the author of Smith Blue (Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), Suck on the Marrow (Red Hen Press, 2010), and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison (Red Hen Press, 2006).
THE WHALE by Aracelis Girmay
Or, see, beneath the water’s blue mark,
the whale, built out of density, & time. Mammalian
through the black corridors of buried light,
to me, anonymous, in the ageless sea,
moving beneath the century of industry
& war, the whale, who lurks in flat line
below our deaths, our walking & language,
the procession of days & the names
we gave them. Thursday, for the whale, is
Thursday without sugar or hills, without
rain & roads, the funniness of palms, &, closer,
the flirtations of boys, big-toothed, carrying frogs,
Thursday without public records, or juries,
without gardens & peppers, neither the countryside
ruffled by the hot mouths of bougainvillea,
neither the brown fields, nearly black with rain –
the bare feet of children, goats, gulls,
but, surely, the systolic & slow beauty of jellies
hauling their trillion agonies, back
& forth to the three worlds of lightlessness
& light, circling the sea with that common lot,
that burning. & below, below, the whale,
who, having left the sea & gone back, is
neither citizen nor exile, at home everywhere,
whose eyes we borrow now, whose ears
we give our own ears to that we may hear
the metallic flutter of mackerels, near
the wreck, the mess of limbs, to see
the ones who slipped beneath
the sea’s blue sheet. The whale,
whose body is stanzaic, whose
color rhymes with the sea, whose
chest rhymes. Who lives in the catalogue
of your eye? Who dies?
Which of our lost do you repeat
as you move in the blue dimension of our history?
Aracelis Girmay’s most recent poetry collection, Kingdom Animalia, was published by BOA in 2011. She is also the author of the collage-based picture book changing, changing, and the poetry collection Teeth, for which she was awarded a Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award.
ANABERTO SKYPES WITH HIS MOTHER by Rigoberto González
He in Manhattan, she in Michoacán,
standing in the kitchen he abandoned
every day of his youth. How terrible
her cooking, her hand always heavy on
the salt. Each pot a story running out
of breath long before the finish. He hides
the truths from her – behind him a table
like a gem display: croquettes of steaming
amber, rubies on the salad, a string
of onion pearls flung into the omelette.
His prowess in the culinary arts
a desire he fulfilled one thousand
meals apart from his beloved mother,
whose taste buds had been dulled to senselessness.
Nonetheless he loved her, wouldn’t offend her
by admitting to the craft he practiced
in New York – a joy he didn’t have at home.
How thin my son without my stews, she cries,
how lonely and neglected he must feel
without a woman in this place he shares
with another boy, another orphan
from God-knows-where. “How is he, anyway?”
she asks, and then a second face appears,
pretty and golden as her son’s. The young
man smiles, an odd expression that suggests
he isn’t going hungry. He seems quite
happy in the country that her son had
fled to, she always knew, for God-knows-what.
Rigoberto González is the author of ten books and the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Four Way Books will publish his fourth poetry collection Unpeopled Eden in 2013.
BEFORE BLOOD AFTER HONEY by Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Give me a tongue that cannot translate memory. Narrative is no enemy of bone. This is the story mud has learned. The eye laves red. And the ear waits like a crow, its abyss of black opening in air. I am giving you the picture of our insides splayed in gaslight, quietude of coil. I am giving you the opposite of negative, which is fire. The alphabet of teeth grazing what we cannot imagine. What we must wound. For a moment, the story is anonymous as a child’s head rolling like an olive in the vineyard. For the length of the sky a city eats every citizen. In the next instant we brace only for the shatter of the instrument, it is the bowl of wine or tears, the justice of pressure. I am behind the rows of women who will be opened and burned like letters. And so the flesh rolls against splendid sweetness. The lexicon of exile walks the blind passage of my eyes. In the body we have known a sunken garden of miracles. The amber smoke from centuries. Our scale is set and armed for oblivion. I wait for you. Light happens finally beneath the skin. I wait and you remember I am the marrow.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is the author of Miracle Arrhythmia (Willow Books), The Requited Distance (Sheep Meadow Press), and Mule & Pear (New Issues Poetry & Prose).
GLOBAL STUDIES by James Hoch
Where the hell are we one wonders
when one has spent the night meandering
the blind alleys of some ancient city
where you wake vertiginous, not knowing
what where means, let alone the you
you left in the streets. It’s an old scene
playing on the television– a man wakes
just after dawn and lingers at the railing
of a hotel balcony overlooking a piazza.
And when the shot demands a profile,
it pans, turns the protagonist urn-still,
and the sea suddenly appears behind him.
Beautiful toomuchness is one way of
describing the cinema of the mid-century,
though one could say the same for early
cartography. Is this lost on you, alien?
Are you lost in a volute of talking?
I am speaking to you, little stink bug,
etching the silo cell of a milk glass.
You don’t seem to worry your home;
lethal, though, to not know how it works,
how this glass was once some earth.
Yes you, lover of filth, draining the simple
thing you need, This is no way to live,
I shout from my manufactured shore.
It’s me, your beloved Eye-Baller.
There’s Rome, Bilbao, Secaucus.
You haven’t even learned yet how to read
the semiotics of dying. But you shrug
in your bug shruggery way, stuck-in,
seeing-through, trying to skirt under
the heavy rim, dreaming scat and sun.
And even in your dream, shrewd whim,
which I have placed between us, a field
between two stones, where window
and sewage are the mucky regulars
of entry and decay, where someone’s
pranked the field with one-way signs
every which way, there’s nothing
I want more than to trespass, and nothing
you want more than to traverse the face
of a world that will not let you be,
and looming behind us the sea
the vast improbable common sea
blue and black as any hour of the sky.
James Hoch is the author of two poetry collections, Miscreants (W.W. Norton, 2007) and A Parade of Hands (Silverfish Review Press, 2003). His poems have appeared in Slate, Kenyon Review, Gettysburg, Carolina Quarterly, and Virginia Quarterly Review.
THE LABOR OF STAGGER LEE: LION by Douglas Kearney
bad Stagger Lee’s bad song a whorehoused toast about killing a pussy.
dead Billy Lyons’ dead song a falsetto in the cathouse. don’t take my – .
Stagger bad Lee’s hard- bad rock song bang Lyons a wet hole,
bodies him with a pistol’s hot tip. Stagger put in that work.
what a man what a mighty badman. Hercules! Hercules!
Hercules the badman kill the lion and skin him for to wear him.
Stagger wore that pussy out. took it
like a husband’s name.
Stagger Lee. Lion.
seems cats see Lyons anywhere but mirrors,
we take Stagger’s smokehouse lips,
his song in our mouths,
a bad man’s tongue, a slick low note. he make men out us.
Douglas Kearney’s second manuscript, The Black Automaton, was chosen by Catherine Wagner for the National Poetry Series and published by Fence Books in 2009. His newest chapbook is SkinMag (A5/Deadly Chaps).
THE ORIGIN OF FEATHERS IN MY WINDSHIELD by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
The pelicans dip their brilliant and sloppy bills
into their tired shoulders and there is a certain bridge
in Florida where you have to be careful not to hit them
as they fly across windshields. I lost the only picture
of me taken by a man who used to be the boy I loved
when I was fifteen. When this man last visited me,
all the pretty rivers in town were tannin-stained
from a certain oak and chestnut mess. We walked
carefully through glass galleries and a little bakery
that sold a single gold-dipped strawberry. I was the girl
whose hands gave up chewing through a dahlia long ago.
Even he has crawled too far across soil to turn back now.
And truth be told, so have I. I am like a man who prefers
the taste of his own tongue instead of the lips of summer.
My shadow and the shadow of sunflowers are the same.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of three books of poetry, most recently, Lucky Fish, from Tupelo Press. Awards for her writing include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Pushcart Prize.
WISH by Patrick Rosal
for Remi and Milo
If the engineers manage to crunch another
hundred billion digits in their niftiest chipset yet
and craft their swiftest killing missile to date
then congratulate each other with the tiny chimes
of their slender perfect flutes, if they are paid well
and sleep well for the coming schedules of doom
and the designs down to the very joule
are symmetric and beautiful, the way hills
in the distance are sometimes symmetric
and beautiful – split down the line (from birdseye)
that the hillcrests make – and the laser sights’ path
sweeping along them reminds us
of a spine’s precision too, if the same hills
are walloped by carpet bombs, so the goats
kicking their way up the hillside are roasted
by the explosion, if this still goes on
as it often does with schoolchildren
with their hands on their ears and their heads
between their knees or one hand on a rope
leading a billie goat to a patch of grass
as the rockets streaks down to make war
a kind of weather, if this triple sorrow
like points of a tyrant’s compass, if this battlemind,
if this Fuckyou I’m dreaming of figs, if this crate
pushed out the back of a truck or dropped from
low-flying planes or copters, if the children of my brother,
nonetheless, have their way with singing
and their singing means they haven’t been asked
to pledge allegiance to fires by plucking
the fires’ embers from their tongues, if this war,
I mean, this one that follows the one before it, persists . . .
let me not be the last to scoop
two small children, blindsided, into my arms
and feel their awkward bodies squirming
to be free, one sticking a desperate pinky up my nose
to make some space for his escape, the other, flipped
upside down, kicking me in the chin, let me
know their hip bones through
their polar bear pajamas in summer
and their little teeth cracking me
on the side of the head breaking a bit of skin
above my ear as they cackle away tickled
by their unshaven lunatic uncle weeping
with joy when he finally sets them
loose on to the hardwood floor where
they tumble and wriggle like a couple ugly
fish until they grow human legs and scramble
to their brand new feet and scoot to the room
where there is a piano for them to bang on
where they can make an afternoon music
to piss their pops off mid-nap – where
they may craft the kind of nonsense
to teach kings what wicked screaming
– hoot and demonhowl and caterwaul –
two big-lunged munchkins can even make
with just their little mouths
like the sound of jet engines
winding their last time down.
Patrick Rosal is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Boneshepherds, My American Kundiman, and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive.
VIVARIUM by Natasha Sajé
Seattle
a tree’s life does not end once it falls to the forest
floor, another life begins in the nurse log
when insects hone in, with stress chemicals, leaf litter, humus
any place we are is alive
with our breath, as in this antidote
to mausoleum, mortuary, nihilarium
the sturdy western hemlock felled by snow
teems again, with ferns, spores
and microbes – the circle renewed
as when I imagine you, ineluctably
vivid, a seeing
I render as faithfully as I can
in the same way that I’ve rendered fat from a goose
and my life through the lens
of solipsism – looking into the pool of memory
I see love’s avidity multiplied
by us together, laboratory cum sculpture
our bodies encased in time, we need
oxygen, water, green things
our exhalations absorbed by other spirits living
in our enclosures, voices buried
by the luxurious feel of moss
as I remember the next passing sadness
air condensed into droplets on glass
Natasha Sajé is the author of three books of poems: Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994), Bend (Tupelo Press, 2004), and the forthcoming Vivarium (Tupelo Press, 2013).
SOTTO VOCE: OTHELLO, UNPLUGGED by Tim Seibles
Iago, it was not Desdemona but myself
I loved too much. So many battles found me
unharmed, but the want of beauty struck
like a kind of death. My rank only served
to wound my head with bigger dreams.
Didn’t I deserve better than the tricks
every season brings? All my years
had stumbled into shadow: my own
dark face, harder and harder to find
in this cold kingdom. You knew my soul
ached for a woman who could conduct
my blood – that I might be in love alive
with the sharp sublime flinting
her eyes. All mine! My heart nearly
doubled until you made me doubt –
not so much Desdemona as my own
worthiness: if what I was couldn’t make love
faithful I thought better to be done with
her than to know myself a smaller man.
Tim Seibles is the author of several books of poems including Hurdy-Gurdy, Hammerlock, and Buffalo Head Solos. Etruscan Press released his latest collection, Fast Animal. He is a former National Endowment for the Arts fellow and his poetry is featured in anthologies such as Manthology, Black Nature, The Autumn House Anthology of American Poetry, So Much Things to Say and The Best American Poetry 2010.
occi-moron by Evie Shockley
they come black and petty || hardened and smooth || known and suspected || convicted and unrepentant || dangerous and wanted || stupid and feared || local national and international || courting bars || they come alleged and experienced || famous and infamous || ruthless and violent || creative and cyber || in collars as snowy as doves || corporate and deported || former and future || real and rehabilitated || habitual and potential || with sticky green-stained fingers || they come chinese and jewish || career and juvenile || notorious and digital || environmental and celebrity || tight-lipped and patriotic from the ranks of generals admirals and commanders-in-chief || they come professional and desperate || young and latino || bungling and uncommon || born and accused || undocumented and invisible || armed female and hiv-positive || but the white comes hesitantly || weighted || ties the tongue || feels foreign || tastes strangely freshly strange || names a commonplace hidden in plain sight among the chimeras
Evie Shockley has published two books of poetry, the new black (2011) and a half-red sea (2006), and a book of criticism, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (2011).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“About My Father” by Robert Bly was reprinted from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey, Norton, 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Day Sounds” by Billy Collins appears with permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Alaska Aubade (Summer)” by Olena Kalytiak Davis was reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Lyric Poet Disease” by Stuart Dischell was reprinted from Backwards Days, Penguin, 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Pomade” by Rita Dove was first published in Poetry magazine, Vol. CXLIV, No. 6 , Sept. 1984. The first book publication was in Thomas and Beulah, Carnegie-Mellon University Press, 1986. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Pescadero” by Mark Doty first appeared in The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“If a Clown” by Stephen Dunn first appeared in The New Yorker, and in Here and Now, Norton, 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved
An earlier version of “Ravenswood” by Stuart Dybek was first published in Witness. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Sad Beauty” by Nancy Eimers was first published in No Moon, Purdue University Press, 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Small Hut” by Tess Gallagher was first published in the online magazine Plume; it also appears in Midnight Lantern, New & Selected Poems, Graywolf Press, 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Healed by Fascination” by Patricia Hampl first appeared in Sing Heavenly Muse, written in 1978. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“As the Roots Prepare for Literature” by Brenda Hillman was first published in Clade Song. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“The Stone of Heaven” by Jane Hirshfield first appeared in The Paris Review, then in The October Palace, HarperCollins, 1994. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“What the Living Do” by Marie Howe is from What the Living Do, Norton, 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Sprung Rhythm of a Landscape” by Yusef Komunyakaa first appeared in Northwest Review. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Elegy Beginning with Half a Line From Ben Jonson” by Maxine Kumin first appeared in The Atlantic. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Juneau Spring” by Dorianne Laux was previously published in Orion Magazine and The Book of Men, W. W. Norton, 2011. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Hidden Hearing” by Li-Young Lee first appeared in The Harvard Divinity Bulletin. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Creole” by Robert Pinsky first appeared in Poetry. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“In General” by Pattiann Rogers first appeared in The Georgia Review and subsequently in Generations, Penguin, 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Pentimenti” by Kay Ryan first appeared in The Best of It: New and Selected Poems, Grove Press, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“The Dog” by Michael Ryan first appeared in The American Poetry Review, later reprinted in This Morning, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Long Before We Got Here, Long After We’re Gone” by Peggy Shumaker was first published in Copper Nickel, posted on Verse Daily, and included in the book Gnawed Bones, Red Hen Press, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Independence Day” by Gerald Stern was first published in The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“The Scattered Congregation” by Tomas Tranströmer was reprinted from The Half-Finished Heaven, Graywolf Press, 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“In the Electricity of Love, Its Lightning Strike” by Jean Valentine is from the sequence, Lucy, first printed as a chapbook by Sarabande, later appearing in Break the Glass, Copper Canyon, 2010. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“The Death of the Magician” by David Wagoner is from The Bellevue Literary Review. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Being As I Was, How Could I Help” by Eleanor Wilner originally appeared in Otherwise (Phoenix Poets), The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Gravity” by Kevin Young first appeared in The American Poetry Review. Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.
“Poem for Delkash” by Matthew Zapruder appears with permission of the author. All rights reserved.