by David Lehman
The story of my
Indigenous history shared
With audience after audience
Burnt into my memory
We’ve been here since time immemorial
It means—time, so long ago
That people have no memory
Or knowledge of it
Filling out my law school application
How long has your family lived in Saskatchewan?
I pause for a moment
Then write
Since time immemorial
What would have been other options?
Since Saskatchewan became a province
Before Saskatchewan was, we were
I was stumped but,
I got in anyway and nobody questioned my answer.
from Alaska Quarterly Review
YESENIA MONTILLA a brief meditation on breath
i have diver’s lungs from holding my
breath for so long. i promise you
i am not trying to break a record
sometimes i just forget to
exhale. my shoulders held tightly
near my neck, i am a ball of tense
living, a tumbleweed with steel-toed
boots. i can’t remember the last time
i felt light as dandelion. i can’t remember
the last time i took the sweetness in
& my diaphragm expanded into song.
they tell me breathing is everything,
meaning if i breathe right i can live to be
ancient. i’ll grow a soft furry tail or be
telekinetic something powerful enough
to heal the world. i swear i thought
the last time i’d think of death with breath
was that balmy day in july when the cops
became a raging fire & sucked the breath
out of Garner; but yesterday i walked
38 blocks to my father’s house with a mask
over my nose & mouth, the sweat dripping
off my chin only to get caught in fabric & pool up
like rain. & i inhaled small spurts of me, little
particles of my dna. i took into body my own self
& thought i’d die from so much exposure
to my own bereavement—they’re saying
this virus takes your breath away, not
like a mother’s love or like a good kiss
from your lover’s soft mouth but like the police
it can kill you fast or slow; dealer’s choice.
a pallbearer carrying your body without a casket.
they say it’s so contagious it could be quite
breathtaking. so persistent it might as well
be breathing down your neck—
from Poem-a-Day
KAMILAH AISHA MOON Irony
It would be now when you feel
want is no longer your enemy,
that your body & soul would kneel.
O it would be now, when you feel
you’ve culled joy, seized a new zeal
that Death grabs you, fingers icy.
It would be now, when you feel!
“Want” is no longer your enemy.
from The American Poetry Review
STANLEY MOSS A Smiling Understanding
There is an understanding,
a smiling understanding,
between orchards and orchestras.
Jazz and Bach are fertilizers,
something extra. Trees are much older than music
and poetry. They have bodies and souls,
godlike identities. Trees are choirs,
basso profundos, coloraturas, mezzo sopranos.
I live with music and trees, orchards of music,
woodwinds and sextets. I sing
the “I don’t lie to myself” blues.
I learn from my suffering to understand
the suffering of others. I climb musical scales.
Trees have an embouchure. I’m a sapling.
Breath and wind blow through me.
This winter is a coda of falling leaves,
sequoias and maples Louis Armstrong.
I have a band of tree brothers and sisters,
we are not melancholy babies.
I age like a rock, not a rocking chair.
A rock does not wear spectacles, hearing aids,
or use a walking stick. It is dangerous
for anyone to call me “young fellow.”
from The Nation
DG NANOUK OKPIK When White Hawks Come
I dreamt the spirit of the codfish:
in rafters of the mind;
fly out into the winter’s
blue night;
mirth off alder tendrils sashay;
while I set up
my winter tent;
four panels long—beams suspend
I sit & pull blubber strips aged in a poke bag;
I’m shadowing the sun as a new moon icicle
time melts when white hawks come.
from Poem-a-Day
CECILY PARKS December
It was never supposed to snow
here, and yet
it was snowing, big flakes tearing down
over the Edwards Plateau like the sky
had crumbled. My friend and I drank
cold wine while our children played
inside with masks
on a big white bed. Another afternoon,
my daughters sang a song about lords
and camp that I didn’t
understand, but they didn’t like me
to ask what it meant, and
instead of answering rolled down the hill
in their pajamas. Their
first secret. Then:
first bright-red manicure, first
chipped nail, first note taped to the door
saying don’t come in. I went
to the museum instead
and stared a long time
at the draft on which Anne Sexton
had scrawled “At last I found you, you funny
old story-poem!” and felt a happy
envy, happy for her
but not for me.
Then: first time on ice skates,
chick-chicking around the rink, a string
of beads draped over one daughter’s head
and my gold necklace still tangled
by the sink. Snow
rolled over the prairie and held
the fence shadows when we threw
golden hay to the ponies who lived outside
all winter. The black-and-white barn cat
was still alive
and ate nervously in the garage,
where snow chains glittered on the floor. One night
I told a restaurant it was my husband’s birthday
and they gave us a sundae. It was
his birthday, and at this point
we were far from the Edwards Plateau.
I can’t remember when we left for that trip but I know
on the last day of December we had to go home
and in the airport, waiting for the plane, I arranged
our winter coats so that mine
was holding everyone else’s.
from The New Yorker
PATRICK PHILLIPS Elegy with Table Saw & Cobwebs
Rummaging the wood-rack
I pull a cracked
old shingle off the stack:
a scrap
on which at
some point, with his flat
knife-whittled pencil,
my old friend Ollie scratched
5/32 + 1/2—
a kind of riddle now, a workman’s
artifact,
unnoticed since that
year the cancer cells attacked—
since whatever it
once meant,
whatever part it
played in some project,
went wit
h him
into the flames
& ash.
Friends,
we die like that:
the whole starry sky goes black
while these little
nothings last,
while these spiders in the rafters
go on clutching
their white sacks:
whispering & yet & yet
& yet & yet
until I dust the fading rune
& put it back.
from New England Review
ROGER REEVES For Black Children at the End of the World—and the Beginning
You are in the black car burning beneath the highway
And rising above it—not as smoke
But what causes it to rise. Hey, Black Child,
You are the fire at the end of your elders’
Weeping, fire against the blur of horse, hoof,
Stick, stone, several plagues including time.
Chrysalis hanging on the bough of this night
And the burning world: Burn, Baby, burn.
Anvil and iron be thy name, yea though ye may
Walk among the harnessed heat and huntsmen
Who bear their masters’ hunger for paradise
In your rabbit-death, in the beheading of your ghost.
You are the healing snake in the heather
Bursting forth from your humps of sleep.
In the morning, your tongue moves along the earth
Naming hawk sky; rabbit run; your tongue,
Poison to the filthy democracy, to the gold-
Domed capitols where the Guard in their grub-
Worm-colored uniforms cling to the blades of grass—
Worm on the leaf, worm in the dust, worm,
Worm made of rust: sing it with me,
Dragon of Insurmountable Beauty.
Black Child, laugh at the men with their hoofs
and borrowed muscle, their long and short guns,
The worm of their faces, their casket ass-
Embling of the afternoon, left over leaves
From last year’s autumn scrapping across their boots;
Laugh, laugh at their assassins on the roofs
(For the time of the assassin is also the time of hysterical laughter).
Black Child, you are the walking-on-of-water
Without the need of an approving master.
You are in a beautiful language.
You are what lies beyond this kingdom
And the next and the next and fire. Fire, Black Child.
from Poem-a-Day
ED ROBERSON For Air
There is a place in me for air as part
of me of a piece with how I live.
And I am in it making sense like a cart
we are each other’s horse before. given.
loaded with flowers. Both
our breaths a fragrance of sound wave and beat.
word of the heart. The music goes
on to explain it is moved by the feet
taking the place apart into other places to see.
where is the surface the air impresses upon
what forms bounce into shape and form
patterns of doing. the way they do that they be.
themselves ourselves scattered across the drumhead
shod with a vibration of the unsaid.
geometries of air shod with a vibration
of the unsaid dance out their ordered sentences
to freedom the felt articulated into action
a balletic leap that seeing trails resemblances
of not knowing to knowing of silence
to song of being bound to flight.
A place in the air achieved space—
not even aware the speaking might
be music. Or that the place of air in us
might be singing the fragrance of the flowers
already worded in stone the airy cupolas
of temples lifted off into the idea of showers
of bubbled light and the poem as the champagne
of what the body has bottled in its strain.
from Poetry
MARGARET ROSS Blood
Thirty white people wearing white and posing
by the sea. Actually, two of them
wear blue, one of the brothers’ wives
who’s always trying to distance herself
from the family, and one of her daughters.
It will ruin the picture but better to pretend
nobody notices. First the group shot
then the turns for individual families
who can choose to sit together in the sand
or jump over the surf in unison, grinning.
Every other year, this reunion. All my life.
The same photographer shoots it
wearing her son’s old cargo shorts.
Something bad had happened to her, maybe
I wasn’t told. And it made her
not as you’d expect a tragedy would
make someone but cheerful, capable.
Last year, she got married.
Last year, whatever I was doing
on the beach, I was thinking
about a man. When he was
with me, he was cheating on the woman
he was cheating on his girlfriend with.
But the woman was going to
have a baby and he told me he
was leaving me and the girlfriend both
to be with her, it.
The little cousins walked
the sand at night with flashlights
to detect the crabs they shoveled
into plastic pails they’d carry out as far
as they could walk, then dump there.
The one aunt who was single
would describe herself as married
to Christ. “And we have fights
like any couple.” When a cousin
turned thirteen, she took them
on a beach walk to explain chastity.
She was a Shakespeare scholar
who discovered in the tragedies
some details at the ends which indicated
wretched characters were born again.
Some things everyone agreed on, like
you had to justify a garment praised
by saying how cheap it was.
In other cases, no one felt the same.
When giving punishments, for instance,
whether somebody who’d been bad
should sit alone reflecting in a room
or apologize to the group and whether
or not to soothe somebody
who had torn their clothes off, sobbing.
The cottages we rented on the shore
weren’t part of any family’s real life.
They were designed to feel
they had no history. It was comfortable.
Even the plates and cups we used
were all disposable, though the silverware
was metal. Bright flags of beach towels
draped over the porch railing.
Standing by them, you could barely see
the water for the roofs of other rentals.
When they were sunburned,
the aunts drove to a market
selling handmade soap and straw hats, delicate
cheap jewelry. An uncle said
the site had been a slave market.
His wife said please don’t tell the kids that.
They lived, like most of us, in the middle
of the country, two days drive away.
He brought from home a giant pool float
so we could ride the ocean. Over and over, waves
shot it forward and you fell off screaming
or kept clinging to it somehow, screaming.
We called it Party Barge and marveled daily
at its not puncturing.
Each year, the pictures taken on the beach
would turn out brighter, more
garish than the twilit shore
remembered. Inland, one year
hung beside the other, framed, detached,
as if history were comprised of do-overs.
The dress code always white, white
and tan, and some of the same
shirts and dresses would appear again.
Before the reunion, I was
with the man at my parents’ apartment
on a bed that used to be my sister’s.
Next to it, the built-in shelves
still crowded with dolls she liked
to line up on the floor and count.
When I got home, he said
the woman lost the baby
so he felt free to love me.
from The Yale Review
ANGBEEN SALEEM brown and black people on shark tank
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