by David Lehman
Dad explains: Claire’s photos won because
Claire’s photos were best. It’s that fair, the big gray
hair of a tufted chicken, the mascaraed rabbit that
no one gets are supposed to mold you from the fantastic
to the rational: I would like to thank God for this medal.
Down at the midway end past the chainsaw bears,
the Old People Tap Dance Show, and the bee man
in the ag tent, madly pointing at the holes
in his rigged up hive, Mom inspects busted latches
and the blanks between boards and wires,
the scuffed blue of the Tilt-A-Whirl’s shelf; on which
is the kind of fair you could get used to;
all places being equal to the blast of bad rock
and the rust metal floor; a flat coke no one would want;
ordinary; just one boy’s or one girl’s sweaty hands
on offer, unspecial.
from Seneca Review
RAE ARMANTROUT
Accounts
for Brian Keating
Light was on its way
from nothing
to nowhere.
Light was all business
Light was full speed
when it got interrupted.
Interrupted by what?
When it got tangled up
and broke
into opposite
broke into brand-new things.
What kinds of things?
Drinking Cup
“Thinking of you!
Convenience Valet”
How could speed take shape?
*
Hush!
Do you want me to start over?
*
The fading laser pulse
Information describing the fading laser pulse
is stored
is encoded
in the spin states
of atoms.
God
is balancing his checkbook
God is encrypting his account.
This is taking forever!
from Poetry
JULIANNA BAGGOTT
For Furious Nursing Baby
Frothy and pink as a rabid pig you—
a mauler—
a lunatic stricken with
a madness induced by flesh—
squeeze my skin
until blotched nicked. Your fingernails
are jagged
and mouth-slick. Pinprick scabs
jewel my breasts.
Your tongue
your wisest muscle
is the wet engine
of discontent.
It self-fastens by a purse-bead of spit
while your elegant hands
flail conducting
orchestral milk
and sometimes prime the pump.
Nipple in mouth
nipple in hand
you have your cake and eat it too.
Then when wrenched
loose you’ll eat sorrow loss—
one flexed hand twists
as you open your mouth
to eat your fist.
from The Cincinnati Review
DAVID BAKER
Outside
Stevie lives in a silo.
A silo lives where, mostly, Stevie is
or is not. Tipped over—a hollow vein.
The silo, I mean. For here home is out
there on the grass. If you want a drink or wash
your hands, just dip into that trunk, hot and cold
running branches feeding down. It’s startling.
But sense is startling, too. See how those boots
flip skyward? Tongues lapping up dew on his
mâché dandelions. This is Stevie’s dream
miniacreage on the family’s old spread.
He’s all spread out; he’s humming when he makes
a working thing—he won’t let you inside.
“So,” he says. Today he’s stacked two propane
tanks and ovens—two-burners—under a
red maple, and when you open a door
there’s mismatched silver and hatchets and things
he’s made to eat and art with. Studio
as wherever-you’re-itching-at-the-time:
boards with big nails banged in and from the nails
hang gourds, baby-sized cups speckled yellow
(is that old egg?), a hundred kinds of who
knows what, the center being where you are
and are not. “I stay dry,” he says. “No bugs.”
Says, “Why do walls want windows?” He’s put glass
around his trees instead, head-high, to look
at trees from outside out. One chair, sleeping bag
—what he keeps inside the wild corn bin—
plus a getaway, by which he means a tunnel.
“Oh oh,” he says, “they coming.” He can worm
his way all the way to the apple trees,
he trenched it out last fall, and lights the route
with flashlights and tinfoil clipped to clothesline.
That’s a trip. And that’s a curvy planter full
of nursery nipples and hand-dipped Ken dolls.
If you want to see an art made wholly
in an outside mind, come see Stevie’s crib.
That’s his ten-foot pink polyvinyl penis
teeter-totter beside the birdcage
for potatoes. “Take a ride,” he says. All eyes—.
from The Southern Review
RICK BAROT
Child Holding Potato
When my sister got her diagnosis,
I bought an airplane ticket
but to another city, where I stared
at paintings that seemed victorious
in their relation to time:
the beech from two hundred years ago,
its trunk a palette of mud
and gilt; the man with olive-black
gloves, the sky behind him
a glacier of blue light. In their calm
landscapes, the saints. Still dripping
the garden’s dew, the bouquets.
Holding the rough gold orb
of a potato, the Child cradled
by the glowing Madonna. Then,
the paintings I looked at the longest:
the bowls of plums and peaches,
the lemons, the pomegranates
like red earths. In my mouth,
the raw starch. In my mouth, the dirt.
from Memorious
REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS
At the End of Life, a Secret
Everything measured. A man twists
a tuft of your hair out for no reason
other than you are naked before him
and he is bored. Moments ago he was
weighing your gallbladder, and then
he was staring at the empty space where
your lungs were. Even dead, we still say
you are an organ donor, as if something
other than taxes outlasts death. Your feet
are regular feet. Two of them,
and there is no mark to suggest you were
an expert mathematician, that you were
the first runner-up in debate championships,
1956, Tapioca, Illinois. From the time your body
was carted before him, to the time your
dead body is being sent to the coffin,
every pound is accounted for, except 22 grams.
The man is a praying man & has figured
what it means. He says this is the soul, finally,
after the breath has gone. The soul: less than
4,000 dollars’ worth of crack—22 grams—
all that moves you through this world.
from New England Review
FRANK BIDART
Of His Bones Are Coral Made
He still trolled books, films, go
ssip, his own
past, searching not just for
ideas that dissect the mountain that
in his early old age he is almost convinced
cannot be dissected:
he searched for stories:
stories the pattern of whose
knot dimly traces the pattern of his own:
what is intolerable in
the world, which is to say
intolerable in himself, ingested, digested:
the stories that
haunt each of us, for each of us
rip open the mountain.
*
the creature smothered in death clothes
dragging into the forest
bodies he killed to make meaning
the woman who found that she
to her bewilderment and horror
had a body
*
As if certain algae
that keep islands of skeletons
alive, that make living rock from
trash, from carcasses left behind by others,
as if algae
were to produce out of
themselves and what they most fear
the detritus over whose
kingdom they preside: the burning
fountain is the imagination
within us that ingests and by its
devouring generates
what is most antithetical to itself:
it returns the intolerable as
brilliant dream, visible, opaque,
teasing analysis:
makes from what you find hardest to
swallow, most indigestible, your food.
from Salmagundi
BRUCE BOND
Pill
Say you are high all the time save those moments
you take a sobriety tablet and so descend
the nerves of the heart, thinking straight,
they call it, as if the mind were an arrow
shot from the eye into the eyes of others,
the ones you wronged, the ones you never knew
you love or do not love, the black fathoms
of their pupils deepening as your eyes close.
And sure it hurts, how something dead walks out
your sleep, how it goes from blue to red
like blood. And yet the stuff keeps calling you
in a father’s voice. You loved your father,
so it’s more than bitter seeds you swallow.
It’s quiet pleasure within the limitations
of one life, until the great space of a day
gets wider, brighter, as if you were slipping
into summer with its giant measures
of desire, the way just sitting makes it rise.
And yes, with each dose comes the gravity
and boredom, the slow crush of August heat,
though you are learning to live here, in a town
with one good street to speak of, one flock of trees
to storm the night. In time you are addicted.
And it takes more of the drug to get you back
to the world, where morning swallows flit
in last night’s rain. In time you tell yourself
you are the age you are: the little pains
inside your arms, your legs, they are just that:
the pinch that says you are not asleep,
that the compulsion you feel is the pull
of the planet you walk, alone. And the dawn,
however deep you breathe, is everyone’s now,
everyone’s breath in the sky above you,
everyone’s sun aching into layers
of mist, spitting fire in the eye,
its one black star dissolving, like a pill.
from Colorado Review
STEPHANIE BROWN
Notre Dame
I was staying in an apartment near Notre Dame.
There was a park for the kids to play.
Roller skaters in front of the cathedral in the evening, and my older son joined in.
We shared the floor of the apartment.
Too many family members of mine sleeping there.
One morning I woke up and in the instant
Before my full vision came back I saw or apprehended or felt or however
You want to call that almost-seeing that happens—
Two angels hovering: one was male and one was female.
They were there to be with my younger son, protecting him or visiting.
The male especially was there to care for him.
They were checking on him as he slept.
I had interrupted by seeing them and so they had to leave.
In fact, the male angel stayed maybe a moment too long
And the female was communicating this message like, “Hurry up, come on!”
It was known to me that I wasn’t supposed to see them.
They were annoyed with me.
After waking, fully, and lying on the floor before everyone else stirred,
My mind wandered over to Notre Dame:
My parents made a pilgrimage every year, just to be near it.
I loved the thoughtful gargoyle up at the top.
Inside the human souls came to visit out of pain or tourism
Or death approaching, or craving union,
Out of loneliness and sickness. Out of boredom.
Candles burned their prayers for someone.
What had I seen? Anything? You always doubt something like that.
How could that be real? And yet
It was a terrible summer, and it required angels, real or dreamed,
With my father losing his mind, getting lost;
My mother losing the ability to walk,
A sister comforting me as I lamented and talked
My sad story while our children played together at the playground
At the Tuileries. Later, when I could laugh again
And tell the summer as a tale, I said that
It’s sad to walk around the Seine when you are getting divorced while everyone else
Is kissing and filming their honeymoons or new loves. Even
My husband, after we got back together, laughed at that.
Because he, too, had been heartsick on another part of the planet.
from The American Poetry Review
ANNE CARSON
Sonnet of Exemplary Sentences From the Chapter Pertaining to the Nature of Pronouns in Emile Benveniste’s Problems in General Linguistics (Paris 1966)
This time I forgive you but I shall not forgive you again.
I observe that he forgives you but he will not forgive you again.
Although I eat this fish I don’t know its name.
Spirits watch over the soul of course.
I suppose and I presume.
I pose and I resume.
I suppose I have a horse.
How in the world can you afford this house I said and she said
I had a good divorce.
Strangers are warned that here there is a fierce, fast dog.
Whores have no business getting lost in the fog.
Is it to your ears or your soul that my voice is intolerable?
Whether Florinda lays a hand on his knee or his voluble, he pleads a headache
and the narrator concludes, The problem is insoluble.
from The Nation
JENNIFER CHANG
Dorothy Wordsworth
The daffodils can go fuck themselves.
I’m tired of their crowds, yellow rantings
about the spastic sun that shines and shines
and shines. How are they any different
from me? I, too, have a big messy head
on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind.
I flower and don’t apologize. There’s nothing
funny about good weather. Oh, spring again,
the critics nod. They know the old joy,
that wakeful quotidian, the dark pl
ot
of future growing things, each one
labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang.
If I died falling from a helicopter, then
this would be an important poem. Then
the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore
declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous
youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren’t you
meat? But I won’t be another bashful shank.
The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre,
the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop
interrupting my poem with boring beauty.
All the boys are in the field gnawing raw
bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who
the hell are they? This is a poem about war.
from The Nation
JOSEPH CHAPMAN
Sparrow
St. John of the Cross
On the oil spot,
in the Municipal Parking Garage, I am a garden
closed up
& a fountain sealed. In the folds of my habit;
in the wings of my rib cage;
I hold nothingness like a black jewel.
Fountain of Self, Fountain of the Interior.
I strip to my skin. Dark clouds illuminate me.
Moths fly around;
I am puzzled by the light.
Withdraw your eyes. These steel cables are flesh.
This elevator’s silver car is holy.
And the floor numbers—strung up like lanterns
on the boat of the dead.
I’m half-life. I’m already words
& the Sparrow.
Listen for me in your throat when I’m gone.
from The Cincinnati Review
HEATHER CHRISTLE
BASIC
This program is designed to move a white line
from one side of the screen to the other.
This program is not too hard, but it has
a sad ending and that makes people cry.
This program is designed to make people cry
and step away when they are finished.
In one variation the line moves diagonally
up and in another diagonally down.
This makes people cry differently,
diagonally. A whole room of people
crying in response to this program’s
variations results in beautiful music.
