Sixfold Poetry Summer 2015

by Sixfold

  to seal a kiss around his open, trembling mouth,

  and blow the ashes from his lungs.

  Fishing

  To feel without seeing

  the force that pulls against us,

  thrashing out its strength

  beyond our measure, guess its weight and beauty,

  and then to know, be certain: this is fishing.

  Tradition took me to a secret pond,

  taught me to bait a hook and cast a line,

  to wait, relaxed, but ready for the strike,

  ready to set the hook beyond the barb

  deep in the creature’s mouth, and not let go.

  I felt the nibble first, a spasming

  Did you imagine that?

  then the plunge of the line and the whine of the reel,

  the strain of a living thing bowing the rod

  beneath the mystery of calm, dark water;

  then above, writhing on my line,

  suspended from somewhere in its gut,

  the swallowed hook catching and shredding there,

  much heavier in thin air, swimming still,

  fighting the thing inside it

  past all victory and wonder.

  I dropped it, rod and all, into the boat.

  What kind of fisherman was I

  to fear the blood-gilled bass dying in bloody flops,

  its belly bulging for the knife,

  working its mouth and lying still at last?

  Hospital at Night

  Something about the background quiet here.

  The hum and clank of dinner on the roll,

  a next-door neighbor rinsing out the fear

  in something shallow, some event or bowl.

  Beside each bed, a white contraption hums,

  and suddenly a disembodied cough

  erupts, but every separate sound becomes

  a part of it: this hush you can’t turn off.

  The doors are all ajar, as if to keep

  a child from being frightened of his sleep.

  The doctors come and go as darkness falls,

  and weary nurses, not one beautiful,

  move in a chapel calm down long white halls,

  turning off and on smiles like light snowfall.

  Wolf Hunting

  Like some old fossil on the Isle of Wight,

  some baron with a number in his name,

  my grandfather kept a stable of hounds.

  Like him, the dogs were poor Americans

  descended from a place they’d never been,

  a little taller than their counterparts

  in Wales and England, built for taller game

  and more wide open range, but with the same

  look about them, sad but clean, saddlebacks

  of black and lemon, spots of black and tan,

  comical floppy ears and short rough coats:

  not beautiful in any special way.

  And on a weekend night, or any night,

  since they were both retired old men by then,

  he and his longtime sidekick used to wait

  for nightfall, then sink slowly back in time.

  They didn’t go on horseback, and a kill

  was rare as murder. They’d just drive around

  and talk and listen, breathing in the stars.

  Maybe a little whiskey in a sack,

  or maybe not—I never saw the stuff

  in action, just the bottles in the fridge

  on the back porch, there with the silty brew

  that tasted like a cellar, and the wine

  as sickly-sweet as Kool-Aid.

                                                   But those dogs,

  you could hear them far off, their voices wild

  but somehow mournful, like the highway sound

  that drifted through the window late at night,

  a faraway life. My grandfather claimed to know

  what they were after by the sound they made—

  a rabbit had a certain sound, a coon—

  as if the soul of the quarry had entered them

  and all they did was give it back again.

  What they were after were the little wolves

  called coyotes, mostly scavengers, that stayed

  and flourished when the bison disappeared

  and deer were hunted down. The greater wolves

  were all long gone by then, they’d blown away

  with the dustbowl, or about that same time,

  after a hundred years of poverty

  and degradation. But to a young boy

  they were still there—everything was still there,

  it was just hidden. And none of those good dogs,

  or even three or four, would have a chance

  in hell against it. Something engineered

  and driven in the blood might chase it down

  and corner it, but then they’d have to fight,

  and out of nowhere others would appear,

  the rest of it. It would be like a bunch

  of prep school boys against a prison gang.

  They’d all go down like lambs.

                                                      Which never happened,

  of course. It couldn’t happen. Now and then

  a bitch went missing or a wound appeared,

  but there’d be no deep mystery in that.

  The countryside itself could slash and tear.

  Each year the busy highway took its share.

  And then—a fact you wouldn’t so much see

  as hear, when you remembered afterward—

  their bodies had this tendency to turn

  on one another, out there in the dark

  they had no business in but still longed for,

  with nothing left to guide them but the moon.

  Sighting

  The deer, a buck and doe,

  appeared and stood

  on the stage of the road,

  and my father slowed

  the Oldsmobile, then stopped it

  completely, to wait them out.

  Noble, aloof, undeniably

  beautiful, like swans with hooves,

  they craned their necks

  and turned their gazes on us,

  patiently, without apparent

  curiosity. What did they see?

  Two fully grown men

  with boys in their eyes,

  a father and son,

  an old couple of sorts?

  Or was it only distance,

  something else, a thing to be

  appraised and moved away from

  carefully, without words

  or thought, at a gingerly trot?

  Look, the moment said,

  receding all around us

  like the future after love.

  And then they leapt inside it,

  fleeing, tender white bellies

  over tightly-strung thorns.

  Rachel Stolzman Gullo

  Lioness

  When my man stood in the morning kitchen

  His shadow cast an exact likeness.

  Brown flecked yellow linoleum, his soot profile

  Not a husband, round forehead, swollen lips, wandering eye.

  In 1950, they call him Negro, they call me Jewess.

  If he knew what I was carrying, would he have

  sat at my table nine months?

  A Jewess and a Negress both carry nine months.

  Would anyone believe that in 1950?

  Yes, a woman with child knows the turn of a day.

  A Jew has nowhere to go on Sunday morning.

  My man ducked his hard head out the door a June Sunday.

  In January the shadows are short.

  There were no shadows in the room when we glimpsed the crown.

  I took her from them, we locked eyes

  already familiar her h
eart smell

  I could have licked her clean.

  On berries, squash, ripe bananas, milk bottles with honey she grows.

  There is heat on her belly when I put our skin to skin

  There is a sun inside.

  I know how to calm a tidal wave

  I can put a hurricane down for a nap.

  In 1954 my kitchen is set for a party.

  All of our guests bring sunflowers

  we have honey cake, four beeswax candles

  All around I hear the buzzing of a hive.

  I lean down to peer into her eyes,

  golden, they are happily distracted.

  “Mommy, look at me next to you!”

  I scoop her up and our shadow is an unrecognizable animal.

  At night in my clean house when I try to think,

  the street noise through the window distracts me.

  Out there the language hasn’t changed,

  but through a mere pane of glass it loses all meaning.

  I step inside her room.

  Her mane on the pillow thrills me

  her eyelids gently lowered over a dream

  lashes brush the night air.

  I bend my mouth to her ear and carefully, “Lioness.”

  Her mouth curves into a tender smile at the sight of herself.

  The Diviner

  When you cried for the first time, my new love

  the stars skittered off the night’s face

  and I braced my arms

  To keep the cloth on the table.

  Then I understood

  how a mere wall of stone

  held back the crusaders

  at the shore of Rhodes.

  A salmon can press

  through nine hundred pounds of river

  upstream, to its birthplace, lay eggs

  like thousands of pin-pricks.

  A man with eyes closed

  guided by a forked branch

  can dig two stories, underground, with a shovel

  to draw water for a herd of sheep, lying down.

  I can fathom these powers,

  I knew you enough.

  What shocked was the strength

  I’d never known—in crying.

  The Eighties Were Different

  If your best friend was a child actress, you went on auditions with her.

  And if you were sitting in a waiting room, and fourteen, you had a chance to audition too.

  Once I almost got a Doritos spot

  because my teeth were better than hers.

  I bit into six Doritos for the camera

  and I never felt more semitic.

  But her everything else was better than mine, and neither of us got it.

  When she landed a role on Charles in Charge, I spent the week on set with her.

  The cast and crew treated us both like new friends.

  The Eighties were more innocent, even when they were so gritty.

  I asked Ricky Shroder what he wanted for his birthday.

  He told me a box of condoms.

  At the tender age of fifteen she lost her virginity to an overweight boy in the bedroom of a party.

  She regretted it within minutes.

  It was my brilliant idea that we tell him she was a prostitute and that he owed her a hundred bucks.

  We both liked this idea.

  We did it, but he didn’t pay.

  Yana Lyandres

  New York Transplant

  I was born of the sound rain doesn’t make

  but masquerades,

  of fleeting glances

  across subway platforms

  for my voice is too weak

  to make thoughts collide with air

  in the sex of speech

  but the eye can’t help but look.

  I don’t know how I got from trains 1 to 3 to E

  from smoking in high school

  parking lots to New York City

  or what about taking headache pills

  makes me wish for the headache back

  but stop signs are the reds of Valentines

  if you let them be

  and flipping through old diaries

  is a requiem

  for relationships passed on.

  Eleven years ago, in class, we tore up squishies,

  the earthworms we kept like pets,

  in the name of science

  and I’m still shedding tears over their

  shiny intestines exposed, embarrassed

  for their vulnerability.

  I harden my insides with cigarettes

  so when these city streets break me

  and they finally get to cut me up,

  there will be no wet-looking pink, blue, grey sunsets

  for them to write poems about

  and the black that envelopes them

  will mask the wounds of the scalpels I swallow daily.

  The only thing they’ll find

  is what I want them to: the love letters

  tucked away like children in the protection of my veins—

  to the rat I saw scampering down east 10th street,

  to the punk girl I met at the bodega who

  thought I was the one who’s cool,

  to all the people leftovers that still live inside me,

  taking up space, not letting me leave.

  Procession of Late Night Confessions

  Sometimes coffee spilled over all

  the pages, post-its of my thoughts—

  soaked-through milky smell

  concealing tears felt—

  is a ritual cleansing,

  like baptism, spring cleaning

  purging of sin.

  I won’t send a plague on this house,

  I’m sorry, this house is not a home

  rain-streaked windows

  make this place more livable.

  We like to talk of christenings

  in lieu of baptisms in blood

  I am not a martyr, I know I am not a martyr.

  I know not who I am

  but I know 5 AM

  and its cousins—hunger sans appetite,

  dry heaving over toilets, the silence

  like scalpels, silence like UV rays

  burning my skin with the lights turned off;

  silence—

  you wouldn’t believe me if I told you how

  5 AM is a scalding cup of chamomile

  I pour down my throat every night

  and every time I’m still surprised

  when it burns.

  Cut Me Open, Make It Hurt

  For Nancy Spungen

  You cut up your arms with

  love bite-heroin injection cocktails

  but if you ask me about these markings

  on my skin, I will bear my teeth.

  This is not self-harm like my mother

  tells me—it is survival.

  Some people use the backs of their hands, veins—

  feet because they’re easy to cover—

  as a sketchbook, the medium—dad’s

  toolbox nails, razors left in the med cabinet—

  please

  cut me open to prove

  there is blood in these veins

  instead of strings of copper, zirconium—

  I don’t hide hi-tech electronic tendrils

  of synapses under my hair.

  I can’t tell you how to love your scars, Nancy—

  like ones Barbie doesn’t have—

  but mine are my art history,

  and if this sharp linework and shadings,

  teacup, clover, fadings in the letters

  reminds you of addiction—I’d say,

  Hell yeah, these beauty marks—not scars—

  chart my path through self-deprecation, hatred,

  crises of identity I metaphorically injected

  into my veins every day for the past eight years—

  yet reveal, on close inspection,

  a faint floor plan back


  to self-love.

  I gladly go under the needle,

  pour ink into my skin

  to be less human—

  not bionic but stronger

  than bones and teeth.

  Nancy, close-read yourself, study

  the patchwork quilt you wrote

  on your own body—I don’t talk smack.

  What kind of love is this,

  if you don’t come back.

  Coast to Coast

  I could not tell you why

  I’ve never had the taste for Earl Grey tea

  or why I’ve been craving shrimp lately

  or why my little brother’s hands

  tightening reflexively around my wrists

  makes me think

  of low-tide wanderings,

  hermit crab-chasings,

  lobster rolls with Cape Cod chips

  and sweater sleeves hanging limp past my fingertips

  but home is bus windows looking out

  onto the calm roads of Cambridgeshire,

  friends who wander with you along shorelines

  past town limits ‘til you couldn’t know what would follow

  or if you would be swallowed up

  by seaside winds and unsaid hope-filled mementos

  of future meetings, hints of which wafted toward you

  from the ocean depths.

  I cannot say I have much to be proud of lately,

  but last week I went to bed before 11 three nights consecutively,

  didn’t miss my stop on any of the trains I took,

  and feasted on a love expressed in crêpes with jam

  in a seaside town in Suffolk.

  MD’s Nu descendant un escalier n° 2

  Cubist-Futurist Modernist classic

  can’t take my eyes off

  that stroboscopic-, stop-

  motion photography

  those curves and lines

  browns and ochres. Can this simply be

  a dissection

  of movement, human like a machine?

  Faceless, emotionless

  someone, teach me

  how not to feel

  give me a new word

  for fucked-up hurting

  instead of “broken”

  there is a certain strength

  in getting out of bed.

  Can’t walk

  down a staircase right,

  watch these Iron Man legs

  and shapely thighs,

  curvaceous ass like 3-D disks—

  I trip over stairs that aren’t there.

  I’ve been told to stay away from

  empty calories,

  feminist arguments,

  to keep my clothes on,

  I drink my coffee black.