by David Lehman
from The Southern Review
JENNY JOHNSON
Aria
1.
Tonight at a party we will say farewell
to a close friend’s breasts, top surgery for months
she’s saved for. Bundled close on a back step,
we wave a Bic lighter and burn her bra.
At first struggling to catch nylon aflame,
in awe we watch as all but the sheer black
underwire melts before forming a deep
quiet hole in the snow.
Sometimes the page
too goes quiet, a body that we’ve stopped
speaking with, a chest out of which music
will come if she’s a drum flattened tight, if she’s
pulled like canvas across a field, a frame
where curves don’t show, exhalation without air.
Then this off-pitch soprano steals through.
2.
Then this off-pitch soprano steals through
a crack that’s lit. A scarlet gap between
loose teeth. Interior trill. We’re rustling open.
Out of a prohibited body why
long for melody? Just a thrust of air,
a little space with which to make this thistling
sound, stretch of atmosphere to piss through when
you’re scared shitless. Little sister, the sky
is falling and I don’t mind, I don’t mind,
a line a girl, a prophet half my age,
told me to listen for one summer when
I was gutless, a big-mouthed carp that drank
down liters of algae, silt, fragile shale
while black-winged ospreys plummeted from above.
3.
While black-winged ospreys plummeted from above,
we were born beneath. You know what I mean?
I’ll tell you what the girls who never love
us back taught me: The strain within will tune
the torqued pitch. In 1902 the last
castrato sang “Ave Maria.”
His voice—a bifurcated swell. So pure
a lady screams with ecstasy. Voce
bianco! Breath control. Hold each note. Extend
the timbre. Pump the chest, that balloon room,
and lift pink lips, chin so soft and beardless,
a flutter, a flourish, a cry stretching beyond
its range, cruising through four octaves, a warbler,
a starling with supernatural restraint.
4.
A starling with supernatural restraint,
a tender glissando on a scratched LP,
his flute could speak catbird and hermit thrush.
It was the year a war occurred or troops
were sent while homicide statistics rose;
I stopped teaching to walkout, my arms linked
to my students to show a mayor who didn’t
show. Seven hundred youth leaned on adults
who leaned back. We had lost another smart kid
to a bullet in the Fillmore, Sunnyside,
the Tenderloin. To love without resource
or peace. When words were noise, a jazz cut was steel.
I listened for Dolphy’s pipes in the pitch dark:
A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.
5.
A far cry. Epistrophy. A refusal.
A nightingale is recorded in a field
where finally we meet to touch and sleep.
A nightingale attests
as bombers buzz and whir
overhead enroute to raid.
We meet undercover of brush and dust.
We meet to revise what we heard.
The year I can’t tell you. The past restages
the future. Palindrome we can’t resolve.
But the coded trill a fever ascending,
a Markov chain, discrete equation,
generative pulse, sweet arrest,
bronchial junction, harmonic jam.
6.
Bronchial junction, harmonic jam,
her disco dancing shatters laser light.
Her rock rap screamed through a plastic bullhorn
could save my life. Now trauma is a remix,
a beat played back, a circadian pulse we can’t shake,
inherent in the meter we might speak,
so with accompaniment I choose to heal
at a show where every body that I press against
lip syncs: I’ve got post binary gender chores . . .
I’ve got to move. Oh, got to move. This box
is least insufferable when I can feel
your anger crystallize a few inches away,
see revolutions in your hips and fists.
I need a crown to have this dance interlude.
7.
I need a crown to have this dance interlude
or more than one. Heating flapjacks you re-
read “Danse Russe,” where a man alone and naked
invents a ballet swinging his shirt around
his head. Today you’re a dandier nude
in argyle socks and not lonely as you
slide down the hall echoing girly tunes
through a mop handle: You make me feel like. . . .
She-bop doo wop . . . an original butch
domestic. The landlord is looking through
the mini-blinds. Perched on a sycamore,
a yellow throated warbler measures your
schisms, fault lines, your taciturn vibrato.
Tonight, as one crowd, we will bridge this choir.
from Beloit Poetry Journal
LAWRENCE JOSEPH
So Where Are We?
So where were we? The fiery
avalanche headed right at us—falling,
flailing bodies in mid-air—
the neighborhood under thick gray powder—
on every screen. I don’t know
where you are, I don’t know what
I’m going to do, I heard a man say;
the man who had spoken was myself.
What year? Which Southwest Asian war?
Smoke from infants’ brains
on fire from the phosphorus hours
after they’re killed, killers
reveling in the horror. The more obscene
the better it works. The point
at which a hundred thousand massacred
is only a detail. Asset and credit bubbles
about to burst. Too much consciousness
of too much at once, a tangle of tenses
and parallel thoughts, a series of feelings
overlapping a sudden sensation
felt and known, those chains of small facts
repeated endlessly, in the depths
of silent time. So where are we?
My ear turns, like an animal’s. I listen.
Like it or not, a digital you is out there.
Half of that city’s buildings aren’t there.
Who was there when something was, and a witness
to it? The rich boy general conducts the Pakistani
heroin trade on a satellite phone from his cave.
On the top floor of the Federal Reserve
in an office looking out onto Liberty
at the South Tower’s onetime space,
the Secretary of the Treasury concedes
they got killed in terms of perceptions.
Ten blocks away is the Church of the Transfiguration,
in the back is a Byzantine Madonna—
there is a God, a God who fits the drama
in a very particular sense. What you said—
the memory of a memory of a remembered
memory, the color of a memory, violet and black.
The lunar eclipse on the winter solstice,
the moon a red and black and copper hue.
The streets, the harbor, the light, the sky.
The blue and cloudless intense and blue morning sky
.
from Granta
FADY JOUDAH
Tenor
To break with the past
Or break it with the past
The enormous car-packed
Parking lot flashes like a frozen body
Of water a paparazzi sea
After take off
And because the pigeons laid eggs and could fly
Because the kittens could survive
Under the rubble wrapped
In shirts of the dead
And the half-empty school benches
Where each boy sits next
To his absence and holds him
In the space between two palms
Pressed to a face—
This world this hospice
from Beloit Poetry Journal
JOY KATZ
Death Is Something Entirely Else
Department of Trance
Department of Dream of Levitation
Department of White Fathom
Department of Winding
Sometimes my son orders me lie down
I like best when he orders me lie down close your eyes.
Department of Paper Laid Gently
(Department of Sound of Sheets of Paper
he covers me with)
then sings
I like best the smallest sounds he makes then
Department of This Won’t Sting
Am I slipping away
Department of Violet Static
as if he were a distant station?
Department of Satellite
My child says you sleep
Department of Infinitely Flexible Web
and covers my face with blankness
Department of Tap-Tapping the Vein
Department of Eyelash
I can’t speak
or even blink
or the page laid over my face will fall
Department of Clear Tape in Whorls and Double Helixes on the Wall
He says mama don’t look
Department of You Won’t Feel a Thing
I cannot behold
Department of Pinprick
He will not behold
Department of Veils and Chimes
Lungs Afloat in Ether
I like this best
Department of Spider Vein
when I am most like dead
and being with him then, Department of Notes
Struck from Thin Glasses Successively at Random
I must explain to my child that sleep
is not the same as dead
Department of Borderlessness
so that he may not be afraid of
Department of Fingertips Lightly on Eyelids
so I can lie and listen
not holding not carrying not working
Department of Becalmed faint sound of him
I am gone
His song is the door back to the room
I am composed of the notes
from The Cincinnati Review
JAMES KIMBRELL
How to Tie a Knot
If I eat a diet of rain and nuts, walk to the P.O.
in a loincloth, file for divorce from the world of matter,
say not-it! to the sea oats, not-it! to the sky
above the disheveled palms, not-it! to the white or green oyster boats
and the men on the bridge with their fishing rods
that resemble so many giant whiskers,
if I repeat this is not-it, this is not why I’m waiting here,
will I fill the universe with all that is not-it
and allow myself to grow very still in the center of
this fishing town in winter? Will I look out past the cat
sleeping in the windowsill and say not-it garbage can,
not-it Long’s Video Store, until I happen upon what
is not not-it? Will I wake up and BEHOLD!
the “actual,” the “real,” the “awe-thentic,” the IS?
Instead I walk down to the Island Quicky, take a pound
of bait shrimp in an ice-filled baggy, then walk to the beach
to catch my dinner. Now waiting is the work
I’m waiting for. Now the sand crane dive-bombs the surf
of his own enlightenment because everything
is bait and lust and hard-up for supper.
I came out here to pare things down,
wanted to be wind, simple as sand, to hear each note
in the infinite orchestra of waves fizzling out
beneath the rotting dock at five o’clock in the afternoon
when the voice that I call I is a one-man boat
slapping toward the shore of a waning illusion.
Hello, waves of salty and epiphanic distance. Good day,
bird who will eventually
go blind from slamming headfirst into the water.
What do you say, fat flounder out there
deep in your need, looking like sand speckled with shells,
lying so still you’re hardly there, lungs lifting
with such small air, flesh both succulent and flakey
when baked with white wine, lemon and salt, your eyes
rolling toward their one want when the line jerks, and the reel
clicks, and the rod bends, and you give up
the ocean floor for a mouthful of land.
from The Cincinnati Review
NOELLE KOCOT
Poem
With deepest reverence,
I shop for bones.
And what is the candy
And the daylight
And the horse without hunger?
Too many ducts for us to think of,
And here we are punishing the
Lines above our faces.
Enormity is a hoof
With unanswerable sounds,
And the void is filled with fire.
My dream is to fall apart,
To cry for a century,
But I have not cried, not at all.
I keep my distance like the tines
Of a fork from one another,
Dressing, undressing the fabulous wounds.
But now, back to our story,
It has coffee in it, a naked river.
Blessed are we who rapture
An electric wire, blessed be
The falling things about our faces,
Blessed is the socket of an eye
That lights the body, because
In the end, in the very end, it’s
Just you. You and you. And you.
from New American Writing
MAXINE KUMIN
Either Or
Death, in the orderly procession
of random events on this gradually
expiring planet crooked in a negligible
arm of a minor galaxy adrift among
millions of others bursting apart in
the amnion of space, will, said Socrates,
be either a dreamless slumber without end
or a migration of the soul from one place
to another, like the shadow of smoke rising
from the backroom woodstove that climbs
the trunk of the ash tree outside
my window and now that the sun is up
down come two red squirrels and a nuthatch.
Later we are promised snow.
So much for death today and long ago.
from Ploughshares
SARAH LINDSAY
Hollow Boom Soft Chime: The Thai Elephant Orchestra
A sound of far-off thunder from instruments
ten feet away: drums, a log,
a gong of salvage metal. Chimes
of little Issan bells, pipes in a row, sometimes
a querulous harmonica.
Inside the elephant orchestra’s audience,
bubbles form, of shame and joy, and burst.
Did elephants look so sad and wise,
a tourist thinks, her camera cold in her p
ocket,
before we came to say they look sad and wise?
Did mastodons have merry, unwrinkled faces?
Hollow boom soft chime, stamp of a padded foot,
tingle of renaat, rattle of angklung.
This music pauses sometimes, but does not end.
Prathida gently strokes the bells with a mallet.
Poong and his mahout regard the gong.
Paitoon sways before two drums,
bumping them, keeping time with her switching tail.
Sales of recordings help pay for their thin enclosure
of trampled grass. They have never lived free.
Beside a dry African river
their wild brother lies, a punctured balloon,
torn nerves trailing from the stumps of his tusks.
Hollow boom soft chime, scuff of a broad foot,
sometimes, rarely, a blatting elephant voice.
They seldom attend the instruments
without being led to them, but, once they’ve begun,
often refuse to stop playing.
from Poetry
AMIT MAJMUDAR
The Autobiography of Khwaja Mustasim
I stood for twenty years a chess piece in Córdoba, the black rook.
I was a parrot fed melon seeds by the eleventh caliph.
I sparked to life in a Damascus forge, no bigger than my own pupil.
I was the mosquito whose malarial kiss conquered Alexander.
I bound books in Bukhara, burned them in Balkh.
In my four hundred and sixteenth year I came to Qom.
I tasted Paradise early as an ant in the sugar bin of Mehmet Pasha’s chief chef.
I was a Hindu slave stonemason who built the Blue Mosque without believing.
I rode as a louse under Burton’s turban when he sneaked into Mecca.
I butchered halal in Jalalabad.
I had been a vulture just ten years when I looked down and saw Karbala set for me like a table.
I walked that lush Hafiz home and held his head while he puked.
I was one of those four palm trees smart-bomb-shaken behind the reporter’s khaki vest.
I threw out the English-language newspaper that went on to hide the roadside bomb.
The nails in which were taken from my brother’s coffin.
My sister’s widowing sighed sand in a thousand Kalashnikovs.
I buzzed by a tube light, and three intelligence officers, magazines rolled, hunted me in vain.
Here I am at last, born in a city whose name, on General Elphinstone’s 1842 map, was misspelt “Heart.”
