Tag: Poetry

Periphery

by Bradley Clompus

As though stuck at thirteen,
as though mother were
fixed in mid-forties. Beside,
an uncomposed demolition
of sounds, iron ball slowly
arcing into the top level ruins,
muddled whump of impact, girders
shearing, tumbling, concrete fists,
shoulders, joints staggering
down to cutters and torchers,
massed pushers, haulers. Building
guts spilling from pre-crash fruition
of 1920s: lawyers, insurance agents,
accountants pale from overwork, hopeless
hoarding of others’ assets, plaster
a sickly mint green granulating
from every exposed, torn off
room, secrets mixed with
unaccustomed white, newly
opened to wind, to light.

From one of those half
de-created spaces, floor jigsawed,
dust billowing, paint chips mothing
down, a thin object falls, twists
while falling, hits ground
noiselessly, lost behind a drift
of debris. I say Something just
fell from a building. Mother
doesn’t answer, keeps walking.
Next day the news allots
a name, a past, a truncated
present. He was working
the 11th floor, wore a yellow
hard hat. If we stayed, we might
have seen a crowd assemble,
a few lance-like arms pointing.
There could have been a subsonic
hum of frightened bees, a plea
for reckoning. Try to remember
this, I remind myself. Mother says,
not to me, not to the watchers,
That poor guy, that poor, poor
guy. Rubble is piling on the ground,
a minor mountain, its peak unstable,
sloughing off the hard and soft
stuff we’ve made, the brownish
scarlet rusts, dirty beige, broken
Wedgewood blues. The man waits
for his pickup, his arrangements.
Verging toward mourning,
the crowd might have huddled
a bit, leaned in tentatively,
sheltering an absent core.
And two of us who’d partly
seen, partly known, left it
all behind, kept walking.

Two Poems by Miranda Field

Birth Mark

In my ninth month I ached for the savor of black-currants — a fruit out of season, a fruit of elsewhere — and since his birth he’s carried a map of that place on his instep. A place more private than the sex of a boy, which he can never quite hide. I thought my craving signified the daughter whose dresses I store. Which, when I have a second son, I’ll bury. A summer frock writhes on the line in the wind, a white and blue grid with one small as aphid inside each square — as in a glass specimen box, a room you can look into from all sides. My ‘Book of God-fear’ warns of good women who love to account for every defect in their children by the doctrine of longing…. but my boy’s sex is no defect. And the mark on his foot is only my burden if my fault, only my fault if you can blame me. There was a mother whose huge desire  for oysters she couldn’t satisfy. And when her child came with rough scurf on his hands and feet that mimicked the shells of those so-wanted morsels, something foreign fled from her, slipped into the night and locked the door behind it. Should she go after it? Well my daughter knows to run from me, to leave her clothing empty. I’d gorge on any rare commodity to bring her forth. I’ll travel to the shore and trawl until the sea-muck makes a mountain on the sand and gives to this bad hunger a body.

---

Cock Robin

Not eat the thing you took. Not pluck its feathers, peel its skin. 
Not kiss your own face on the mouth after imagining 
the tasting. Nor bury the thing you bring down from the sky. 

Not interpret the meaning of its cry. Not clothe the cooling thing 
in woollens. Not reel it in. Not wind it while it writhes. 
Not breathe hard while you work, not speak of it, not burrow in. 

But barely look upon the garden where the weight fell, sudden. 
Where the falling broke it open. The plummet stopped.
Where the rain falls down in dying angles and damage blooms. 

Not touch the entry wound. Not stitch it up. Nor enter . 
Not with a finger. Not the viking eye. Not wonder. 
But leave be what you took. But let what spills congeal. 

And wager everything you own the grass grows over it in time. 
It will not rise again. The sky assists this with its rain. 
And the garden, and the mind.

From I Spy: Prose Poems

by Elizabeth Powell

12. District Courthouse, Divorce Court, White Plains, New York

His wedding ring shimmered like an inviting lake. His height was like a diving board, something she wanted to accomplish. She would perfect the three step approach before the bounce and lift off, before she’d let go into her swan dive. For now, her divorce papers in hand like an edict, proclamation of having a broken meter reader. Of course, she knew this man, handsome in his friendliness, following the elevator to the top—small claims—could never deliver what he’d promise as they made their way skyward, amazed at their similarities.

Her friends would eventually have their thesis statements and favorite words ugly as burnt casserole—weasel, just run, you’re fucked. Indeed, he was a nuisance, but she didn’t know that yet. But that was what made him so appealing.

She could only see the way the elevator light lifted them heavenward, not to doom; himself the sky father, herself the earth mother. She was letting a silly school girl hope boa feather seduce her again.

Yes, he was a sociable sort, raised on cocktail parties and good manners. Yes, he was just like his father, her father, her husband, that tired repetition of plot and narrative. To the invisible undercurrent of evidence he would plead to her— nolo contendere. Cheating would be his secret religion, his iron clad non-disclosure agreement, and she? She would be called simply, the bitch, all her vulnerabilities on paper once again, a writ of habeas corpus, a kind of toxic tort that read good in bed, to just this kind of man.

The Wife Notebooks – 1. Apocalyptic Wife

But why compare?
I’m wife! Stop there!
– Emily Dickinson

I married the apocalypse, I adored

The way he rode his white horse through the door, the way

My mother abhorred him, his hot sun

Eclipsing me there with its permanent stare.

We had meant to live modestly until our time drew near,

But I became unsanitized, compromised from clipping coupons,

Swatting winged houseflies. I prayed twice a day

For a kind a comfort I knew did not exist, except in England at tea,

But knew that was no place for me. He had a director’s voice

Deep and unqualified, madmen with arms listened,

And so did I. Nothing to do now. Except watch

The black flies bow their heads to winter, toward his dull light

Of what’s to come, how sometimes I think the end will smell of him,

The moist stench of rafters, wood and old tin.

Dora Malech: Two Poems

Face For Radio

As usual I am unusually tired.
All night my fingers double-crossed me,
tangled up in someone else’s hair.
Breakfast is sand with a promise of pearls.
If I were an operation, I’d be fly-by-night
and very bloody. If I were a sow,
I’d be hog-tied. I was born under
the sign of the toy breed, the yapper,
if you will—and I will—on the cusp
of bikini season. Somersaults,
cartwheels. Call me poorly executed.
Call me late for dinner and a regrettable
houseguest, wet towel on the bed.
Call me go-getter, meaning going going gone.
If anyone needs me I’ll be at the arcade
across from the fire station, shooting
the teeth off the cardboard clown.
If you give me a dollar I’ll take
my top off and let you see my heart.

Quick Study

Put a hold on the have and to hold’em’s a game,
bets half-cocked at the big dogs, one shoe
on and running, chicken’s a nickname
and nick’s just a cut. Let me get you

where you want me, paint on some tight pants
and varnish the town. Call means I’ve got
your number. Fold means no chance,
each night cut from the same bolt

of cloth. Never say never mind,
never turn your back to back or show
your hand in mine. What’s mine
is minor but it still feels good to know

you and I could be big blind and small blind,
Adam and odds and even Eden this time.

Two Poems by Wang Jiaxin
(translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell)

Glenn Gould

by Wang Jiaxin (translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell)

A pair of hands invisibly
touch the keyboard, and slowly
you step into Canada’s knee-deep snows.
I’m listening: is this still the vast winter day of North America?
No, the scope of silence itself, the music
peacefully rising, entering my body
the moment it stops for breath.
This is the rhythm
set by your trek, each step
longer than a man’s life. This the song
to ears inaudible; only the skull can hear.
A murmur rolling toward us,
played by you, irresistible,
carried off on the fitful shadows of these notes.
Between us, an immense sheet of snow outstretched;
on the scores, your scrawls illegible.
Back from a noisy party, I think of you
in the deepest solitude, not ready yet
to listen. Jammed on a Beijing bus,
or standing forever in a foreign twilight,
wanting to go home,
not knowing how,
you come to me. Who can say
what music’s sought me always?
I hold back, knowing what took you
in the end takes me. Not ready
for death, I hold back as you did,
my angel on its stool, counting silence,
yet still I’m ecstatic, loving life
yet alone. Now that I sit
at last in darkness, is it you there
playing Bach’s fugue—
yes, no, yes,
yes, no.
Such moments startle me,
as if someone uttered “hush”
while the piano’s black bird vanishes, you vanish,
the road to winter vanishes.
This in the end is the music I hear,
arriving like gray hair, or a child born at dawn.
This is winter’s vault, rising in magnificence,
a mother’s love sculpting fog in bitter cold,
a landscape glimpsed en route to the sea and a dead volcano,
the story that begins after all stories end.
This is the pulse of joy,
the forehead burnished by death.
This is the endless telling—you find at last
the one to whom you’ll speak.
This is hymn, in silence the song
loud and resonant,
how I enter a future suddenly broad, open,
crossing the deep snows of time.

---

Meeting Rain, Wutai Mountain

by Wang Jiaxin (translated by Diana Shi and George O’Connell)

After five hundred li of dusty road,
we drove through a red canyon
as thunder boomed over the mountain,
rain right on our heels.
Mist rose,
the mountaintop temple veiled in the shower.
It came so indulgently, luxuriously,
my teeth chattered.
I recall my parched thirst on the way,
and later, the strange wooden fish in the monk’s hand,
in my dreams a rush
of streaming water.
Awake, last night’s fruit pits tossed out the window
already beaten into muddy earth.
Rain clears, the day’s trees,
the rocks, the temple shining.
Then morning’s windchime,
and across the mountain slope,
a drift of chanted sutras.

A Hunger So Honed
by Tracy K. Smith
from Post Road 7

Driving home late through town
He woke me for a deer in the road,
The light smudge of it fragile in the distance,

Free in a way that made me ashamed for our flesh–
His hand on my hand, even the weight
Of our voices not speaking.

I watched a long time
And a long time after we were too far to see,
Told myself I still saw it nosing the shrubs,

All phantom and shadow, so silent
It must have seemed I hadn’t wakened,
But passed into a deeper, more cogent state of dream–

The mind a dark city, a disappearing,
A handkerchief
Swallowed by a fist.

I thought of the animal’s mouth
And the hunger entrusted it. A hunger
So honed the green leaves merely maintain it.

We want so much,
When perhaps we live best
In the spaces between loves,

That unconscious roving,
The heart its own rough animal.
Unfettered.

The second time,
There were two that faced us a moment
The way deer will in their Greek perfection,

As though we were just some offering
The night had delivered.
They disappeared between two houses,

And we drove on, our own limbs
Sloppy after that, our need for one another
Greedy, weak