by David Lehman
Tumbling through the
city in my
mind without once
looking up
the racket in
the lugwork probably
rehearsing some
stupid thing I
said or did
some crime or
other the city they
say is a lonely
place until yes
the sound of sweeping
and a woman
yes with a
broom beneath
which you are now
too the canopy
of a fig its
arms pulling the
September sun to it
and she
has a hose too
and so works hard
rinsing and scrubbing
the walk
lest some poor sod
slip on the
silk of a fig
and break his hip
and not probably
reach over to gobble up
the perpetrator
the light catches
the veins in her hands
when I ask about
the tree they
flutter in the air and
she says take
as much as
you can
help me
so I load my
pockets and mouth
and she points
to the stepladder against
the wall to
mean more but
I was without a
sack so my meager
plunder would have to
suffice and an old woman
whom gravity
was pulling into
the earth loosed one
from a low slung
branch and its eye
wept like hers
which she dabbed
with a kerchief as she
cleaved the fig with
what remained of her
teeth and soon there were
eight or nine
people gathered beneath
the tree looking into
it like a
constellation pointing
do you see it
and I am tall and so
good for these things
and a bald man even
told me so
when I grabbed three
or four for
him reaching into the
giddy throngs of
yellow jackets sugar
stoned which he only
pointed to smiling and
rubbing his stomach
I mean he was really rubbing his stomach
like there was a baby
in there
it was hot his
head shone while he
offered recipes to the
group using words which
I couldn’t understand and besides
I was a little
tipsy on the dance
of the velvety heart rolling
in my mouth
pulling me down and
down into the
oldest countries of my
body where I ate my first fig
from the hand of a man who escaped his country
by swimming through the night
and maybe
never said more than
five words to me
at once but gave me
figs and a man on his way
to work hops twice
to reach at last his
fig which he smiles at and calls
baby, c’mere baby,
he says and blows a kiss
to the tree which everyone knows
cannot grow this far north
being Mediterranean
and favoring the rocky, sun-baked soils
of Jordan and Sicily
but no one told the fig tree
or the immigrants
there is a way
the fig tree grows
in groves it wants,
it seems, to hold us,
yes I am anthropomorphizing
goddammit I have twice
in the last thirty seconds
rubbed my sweaty
forearm into someone else’s
sweaty shoulder
gleeful eating out of each other’s hands
on Christian St.
in Philadelphia a city like most
which has murdered its own
people
this is true
we are feeding each other
from a tree
at the corner of Christian and 9th
strangers maybe
never again.
from The American Poetry Review
EUGENE GLORIA
* * *
Liner Notes for Monk
“Monk’s Mood” [false start]
I had gotten off the bus too soon for my stop and so I had to walk a few
blocks in order to gain my bearings. Thelonious Monk said, “It’s always night/ or we
wouldn’t need light.” I read this in an essay. I wanted to have a conversation
with someone to lighten my load. I remember seeing a woman disembarking from the next
bus. Our gazes locked for a long second. [It is always night wherever you go.]
“Crepuscule with Nellie” [breakdown]
[Monk continues alone and quiet.] Northward leads to the river southward back to my hotel
room. An entire week had gone by and I hadn’t exchanged seven words with another
human. The sound of words directed at me would feel like a hand on my shoulder, an arm
brushing against my skin. It is always night when silence overcomes me, silence opening up
within me like a wound. Black keys, I’ve been told, have an ominous, mysterious sound.
“Misterioso”
[Monk conversing with water.] What we end up making, whether it’s something we do by
ourselves or with others is always a form of conversation. My presence is solid, but
others see me as a fishing weir, a foamless Mister So-
and-So, a scavenger for anything that would flatter his eyes. What I want is a garden that will not perish, a bed of imperial, white peonies.
from Tongue
RAY GONZALEZ
* * *
One El Paso, Two El Paso
Awake in the desert to the sound of calling.
Must be the mountain, I thought.
The violent border, I assumed, though the boundary
line between the living and the dead was erased years ago.
Awake in the sand, I feared, old shoes decorated with
razor wire, a heaven of light on the peaks.
Must be time to get up, I assumed. Parked outside,
Border Patrol vehicles, I had to choose.
Awake to follow immigration shadows vanishing inside
American walls, river drownings counted as they cross,
Maria Salinas’s body dragged out, her mud costume
pasted with plastic bottles and crushed beer cans,
black water flowing to bless her in her sleep.
Must be the roar of illegal death, I decided,
a way out of the current, though satellite maps never
show the brown veins of the concrete channel.
Awake in the arroyo of a mushroom cloud, I choke,
1945 explosion in the sand, eternal radioactive wind,
the end of one war mutating the border into another
that also requires fatal skills of young men because few
dream the atomic bomb gave birth in La Jornada,
historic trail behind the mountain realigned, then cut
off from El Paso, the town surrounded with barbed
wire, the new century kissing car bombs, drug cartels,
massacres across the river, hundreds shot in ambushes
and neighborhood soc
cer games that always score.
Wake up, I thought, look south to the last cathedral
in Juarez before its exploding bricks hurtle this way.
Make the sign of the cross, open your eyes to one town,
two cities, five centuries of praying in the beautiful dust.
from Barrow Street
KATHLEEN GRABER
* * *
The River Twice
The Love of Jesus is a thrift warehouse on the south side of town. Everything
inside is a dollar. On Mondays & Fridays, everything is fifty cents.
A stormy afternoon in June & I drift for hours down the aisles: bread machines
& coffee pots. Shirts
& shoes. Teetering stacks of mismatched dinnerware.
I am studying a cup whose crackled glaze is the pale blue-green of beach glass.
Two lions chase one another around its fragile eternity,
the way the lover pursues the beloved on the ancient urn, their manes & legs
washed in a preternatural purple & gold.
Behind me, a woman tells her son William
to get up from the floor so that she can measure him against a pair
of little boys’ jeans. When he doesn’t rise, she tells him she is going to start
counting. She says she is only going to count to two.
When I look over,
he is already on his feet at silent attention, his arms outstretched from his sides.
I live in an attic apartment above two women who have been unemployed
as long as I have known them.
This week the last of their benefits
has been unexpectedly terminated by the state.
A drop in the overall number
of jobless automatically triggers the cessation of extensions, the letter
that comes in the mail explains.
Outside, thunder cracks. Later, the streets
will be full of limbs.
Heraclitus believed that in the beginning
creation simply bubbled forth, an inevitable percolating stream—logos,
both reason & word—issuing from a source unseen. Sometimes
I feel a sudden sorrow, as though my own emotions were a room
I’d forgotten why I entered.
My mother struck me only once—
for refusing to put on my coat. I was four years old & she had been scrubbing
motel rooms all day.
I’d fallen asleep in the dark on a low shelf
in the linen closet beside the boxes of little pink soaps.
Today, that shelf
is gone & the great white polar caps
are melting. At Kasungu National Park
in Malawi, a drought has caused the lions to turn on the rangers
whose job it is to protect them.
Our skulls are chipped bowls, broken
globes, we plunge into the flow.
Heraclitus, whom the crash of time has left
in fragments, saw in the cosmos a harmony of tensions.
Imagine
the lyre, he wrote, & the bow. The store radio plays satellite gospel.
A hymn with the chorus Every moment you shall be judged is followed
by one in which the choir shouts Praise! Stand up and be forgiven.
from Painted Bride Quarterly
ROSEMARY GRIGGS
* * *
SCRIPT POEM
INT. APARTMENT/LIVING ROOM—DAY
SHE brushes her teeth next to the coffee table. The CAT sighs in the armchair. A CROW unseen cries outside the window.
CROW (V.O.)
Caw, caw, caw, caw.
EXT. MAILBOX—DAY
The MAILMAN hands her a brown package.
MAILMAN
It’s heavy.
SHE
I got it.
The mailman just came back from fighting in Iraq.
His large blue body hovers in the fog.
MAILMAN
Are you going away this weekend?
SHE
No.
Lightning bolts out of his eyes.
MAILMAN
It’s a holiday.
SHE
I know.
She looks away.
Sand pours out of her heart.
EXT. BUS STOP—DAY
She eats an apple.
INT. APARTMENT/BATHROOM—NIGHT
Pink and white tiles on the floor. She flosses.
SHE
(whispers)
I didn’t mean to shoot him at the temple.
Black wings flap and enfold her heart.
EXT. MAILBOX—NIGHT
The wind blows.
from MAKE
ADAM HAMMER
* * *
As Like
In times of the most extreme potatoes
My hair is very thin,
Almost ink-like.
Space is like an accordion,
Accordion-like.
But also, our fingers become accordions
And start dancing.
In times of the most extreme bossa nova
Your pants are very thin,
Almost transparent.
Space is very interesting to think about
But so are your pants.
But also, the wind is very cold
And we freeze, like accordions.
In times of the most extreme minnows
The windows are very dark,
Almost intransigent.
Water is harmonica-perforated;
The fish, of course, go back and forth.
But also, the little boats turn around
And around in the sink, like accordions.
In times of the most extreme unction
My name is very thin,
Almost zipper-like.
Space is very thin also;
And distance is that way too.
But also, the stars become very accordion-like
So we eat them.
In times of the most extremely long, emotional, blue lines
The rest of the lines
Get very thin,
Almost meaningless.
Vegetables arise out of nowhere and change.
But also, the letter V becomes invisible
And unpronounceable.
from Pleiades
BOB HICOK
* * *
Blue prints
Up and up the mountain, but suddenly a flat spot
exactly the size of the house they would build,
and when they went to dig for the foundation, the foundation
appeared, just as the beams for the floor, as they started
to set them in place, revealed they had always been there,
it was like coming into the room to find your diary
writing itself, she told the interviewer, who wanted to talk
about her paintings but she kept coming back to the house,
including the sky above the house, how it resembled
her childhood, forgetting how to rain
when it wasn’t raining, remembering blue
just when she needed to be startled most, don’t you think
it odd that my life has always had just enough space
for my life, she asked the man’s recorder
as much as the man, hoping the recorder
would consider the question and get back to her, then you moved
to Madrid, the interviewer was saying, and started painting
your invisible landscapes, I remember the first window
we lifted into place, she replied, that the view of the valley
it would hold was already in the glass when we cut the cardboard box
away, we just lined them up, the premonition
with the day, he had twenty more questions
but crossed them off, I have always wanted to build a room
around a painting, he said, yes, she replied, a p
ainting
hanging in space, he added, a painting of a woman
adjusting a wall to suit a painting, she said, like how the universe
began, he suggested, did it begin, she wondered, is that
what this is?
from The Believer
LE HINTON
* * *
No Doubt About It (I Gotta Get Another Hat)
after Chris Toll
in my head it was Vincent (not Boris)
who narrated the Who family fun
during Grinch-time in December
but then he clocked in for Sears
selling Rembrandts (not Lady Kenmores)
(clarity at 14)
why is he
in crèche
I met Santa
(who fingered a pocketful of poems)
on the corner of Saint Paul + No(wH)ere
four times maybe three
he passed out couplets to the crowd
a smile full of antlers
(Bullwinkle not Rudolph)
I know why Chris
is in Christmas
some gods play with clouds
like Play-Doh
(who forgot to wind the clock)
some poets cloud with play
like heart tracings
why is toll
in atoll
how does a poet
fall back into the sky
(what time is it)
I’m sure certain only twice each day
this is once
I know why he
is in ache
from Little Patuxent Review
TONY HOAGLAND
* * *
Write Whiter
Obviously, it’s a category I’ve been made aware of
from time to time.
It’s been pointed out that my characters eat a lot of lightly-braised asparagus
and get FedEx packages almost daily.
Yet I dislike being thought of as a white writer.
I never wanted to be limited like that.
When I find my books in the “White Literature” section of the bookstore,
dismay is what I feel—
I thought I was writing about other, larger things.
Tax refunds, Spanish lessons, premature ejaculation;
meatloaf and sitcoms; the fear of perishing.
