by David Lehman
with the left. Before a doctor shot light
into the twitching thing, before I realized
how little light I could handle, I never
thought much of the boy who clawed up at me
from beneath my punches, how a fingernail scraped
the eye, or how it closed shut
like a door to a room I could never leave.
••
I could see the reflective mesh of his shoes,
the liquor bottle tossed in an arc
even before it shattered at my feet, and I am embarrassed
at how sharp my eyes were, how deft my body,
my limbs closing the distance—how easily
I owned his face, its fear, and fought back tears—
all of it mine. I don’t want to remember the eyes
that glanced over shoulder just before
I dragged him like a gazelle into the grass
that was a stretch of gravel and glass
outside a liquor store. How easily this becomes that.
••
On a suspension bridge I close my bad eye
and it’s like aiming through a gunsight;
even the good eye is only as good as whatever glass
an optometrist can shape. I watch sundown
become a mouth. Broad and black-throated,
it devours the skyline and every reflection.
Horns sprout from the head of my silhouette
rippling dark, dark, dark against the haze of water
and I try to squint that monster
into the shape of a man.
from Ploughshares
SHARA MCCALLUM
* * *
Parasol
You could still become a queen.
When, a slip of a girl,
you directed trees
to lower their limbs,
neither fire ants nor sap
could stop your climb,
nor rain that lightly fell,
misting leaves.
Inside a story’s spell,
you find your way back,
where a stone on a path waits
for you to stumble.
Like the kaleidoscope’s contents,
time is jumbled, opening at will.
Now: a too-bright sun and you,
teetering on a wall,
parasol clutched tight as you tumble.
This parasol is, for a moment,
everything you’ve lost
and all that can console.
from The Southern Review
MARTY MCCONNELL
* * *
vivisection (you’re going to break my heart)
the frog ready for inspection, skin flaps
opened and pinned back, organs
arrayed for the taking—this is how
I approach you. and you. here, my spleen
for the squeezing. my intestine
to be strung out, perhaps wrapped
around the neck like a lariat. not
for the squeamish, my heart thudding
to be plucked out with a delicate thumb
and forefinger, dinner for the willing,
and beautiful, and broken. I am not smart
about love, is what I’m saying. not even
smart about whose face I will take
in my hands and press against my face
until we are a single organism. the mouth
is not an organ but I give it to you
anyway, I give it all away is what
I’m saying. I’m easy to adore. my torso
a life raft strung with Christmas lights
and full of all your favorite things, beer
and expensive cheese and songs
about leaving. I’m so beautiful
splayed out on this tray full of tar
and entrails. I’m so useful
I could be a meal for an army
of traumatized surgeons, I’m full-time
at this job of bleeding, my esophagus
a stripper pole or cocaine straw.
when I say eat me I mean
suck the bones clean, leave nothing
for the waiting, nothing for the vultures
or the travelers to come.
from The Carolina Quarterly
VALZHYNA MORT
* * *
Sylt I
Lie still, he says.
Like a dog on the beach
he starts digging
until the hole fills up with water.
He has already dug out two thighs of sand
when she finally asks, what’s there,
convinced there’s nothing.
There’s nowhere he can kiss her where she hasn’t already been kissed by the sun.
Every evening she goes to the ocean with her three sisters and their old father.
They strip in a row,
their bodies identical as in a paper garland.
Bodies that make you think of women constantly chopping vegetables
—it is like living by the train station,
their father swears—
and always putting the last slice into their mouths.
For her, there is not even a knife left in the whole house.
The sound of a cuckoo limps across the dunes.
She takes a beam of sunlight sharpened side by side with stones
and cuts with it
and you can tell her vegetables from the others’
by how they burn.
By now they already stand wrapped in cocoons of white towels,
her teeth, crossed out by a blue line of lips, chatter,
scratching the grains of salt. Her bitten tongue
bleeds out into the mouth a red oyster,
which she gulps, breathless.
Their father turns away to dry his cock,
but the girls rub their breasts and crotches openly,
their hands skilled at wiping tables,
their heads as big as the shadow of the early moon,
their nipples as big as the shadows of their heads,
and black so that their milk might look even whiter.
She, too, is rough and indifferent toward her full breasts,
as if she were brushing a cat off the chair
for her old father to sit down.
They drink beer in the northern light that illuminates nothing but itself.
Sailboats slip off their white sarafans
baring their scrawny necks and shoulders,
and line up holding on to the pier as if it were a dance bar.
It bothers her, what did he find there after all?
So she touches herself under the towel.
It is easy to find where he has been digging—
the dug-up spot is still soft.
The water is flat like fur licked down by a clean animal.
A bird, big even from afar,
believes the ocean is its egg.
So the bird sits on the ocean patiently
and feels it kick slightly now and then.
from New Letters
HARRYETTE MULLEN
* * *
Selection from Tanka Diary
I’m seeing lots of dead zebras lately
on floors of elegant homes pictured in
interior decorator magazines.
WE PROUDLY HARVEST RAINWATER—a sign
in a neighbor’s yard. With a deep barrel
I could humbly and thankfully harvest rain.
Several homeowners organize a neighbor-
hood watch patrol after discovering used
rubbers discarded on their lawns.
Folded cardboard tent-shaped trap
hanging among dark leaves of the lemon tree
to capture the galling Mediterranean fly.
A profusion of oleanders—to beautify
the freeway and filter the air, though
leaf, stem, and blossom are all poison.
Dried-out snake on
the road
I brought as a curiosity to the child—
who insisted we give it a proper funeral.
Urban tumbleweed, some people call it,
discarded plastic bag we see in every city
blown down the street with vagrant wind.
from The Harvard Review
EILEEN MYLES
* * *
Paint Me a Penis
If the best thing the world discovered today is that at the inside
of the universe is a cat
I love your braids; I love your peaceful eating
I hate that the sum total effect of the schedule
was sadness. Do you read the schedule. Nope.
I’m jealous. If he used the same words
over and over in plays and movies and commencement
addresses is that wrong. Is it wrong. What if art is wrong.
Is there only one sun. Some planets have two.
When the rain was pouring I wanted to be in there
silent with you. In the dog’s beady black gaze. In the room
with the sleeping dog. With you leaving the room.
I’ve stopped the rain, I’ve silenced you.
I think the story was that one woman had gotten
the painting from the other and they were dating
but she never paid for it and then she moved out.
The painting sat in the second floor window and the painter
saw it and demanded it back. No. So the painter wrote
Marie O’Shea give me back my painting and put
it in the window opposite. She’s a mess. We call her
cunt face. Twat. When it blasted I asked you to put
your headphones on. The dog’s wheezing. I think
smack in the middle of that time was a virus
and it gave itself to everyone freely. We learned that
everything was related to everything else. Just as everything
was getting more separate and no longer a simple bowl
of fruit everyone was dying of the same thing. Not everyone.
Later when they hit the buildings it was just like everyone
in the city felt it. Not the same. We felt the shake. The request
in the air was how are we all feeling it now. It wasn’t the same.
It was like you kept breaking off another square of the
bar and tasting it. He came running back into the room.
He was moaning. And now he just stares. And the rain
starts up again. I’ve never been invited to one meeting.
Do they have them. I remember the time I was invited
and we went around the room saying how we came
to be here. I was invited and everyone
stared and they never let me know when they were
meeting again. She wore a yellow dress. Everyone’s watching you. He stands
in the doorway watching you eat. It stopped.
I want the painting in the window. Yeah. And you can
really ask her questions when you get her alone. And you were reading all the
time. And you said it a lot, that you wanted one which
you don’t remember. I guess I wanted one. Now some
people in that mysterious time there it goes again
decided to in a very dedicated way begin talking about it
because there wasn’t enough of that. That part had waned. Otherwise
you could just take it off the walls, you could go to funerals
and get fucked. You could recite it so that all they saw
was you. Huge numbers of them banded together marching
slowly into the room. There’s footage of us dancing. I wouldn’t ask
the stars to be quiet but I’m closer to them now. She was so
smart. I’m serious. I bet she’d make a good one. Since I didn’t grow
my own I’d like to see what she’d make me. If he demands that no
one tells theirs at the breakfast table I think he probably pulls
it out of his pajamas and slaps it on the table. Dreams to me are
always receding. It’s the only perfection: it’s vanishing, stoking my
appetite so I’m drawing it for you as it becomes less the experience
that just happens as I’m resurrecting it for you. I’m making it
for you. I’m asking her. Make it for me. I’d like that. I’m putting it
in real deep. Out there, where everyone is.
from Green Mountains Review
D. NURKSE
* * *
Release from Stella Maris
“So you’re saying there is no self?” I asked the doctor.
“Well . . .” he said. He took off his glasses and breathed
on the lens—for a moment an extraordinary radiance
hardened there, then he flicked it with his cuff.
He coughed, painfully, and swallowed hard.
At once you heard the other patients bickering
along their waxed corridors, and I counted myself
lucky to be alone with the master surgeon,
the one whose lab coat bulges with key rings.
Perhaps this I who still speaks
was just the experience
of watching snow fly in a dim window?
That might be a great happiness.
When the head rose, I rose also, when he pulled on
his gray calfskin gloves, I rubbed raw knuckles,
braced for the wind that blows from the mind itself.
from FIELD
SHARON OLDS
* * *
Stanley Kunitz Ode
Ninety-five years before he died,
Stanley found an abandoned kitten
in the woods of Worcester. Stanley’s father
had drunk Drano in a public park, while
Stanley had still been turning, a nebula
slowly taking human form
inside his mother. And when he found
the lost cat, he took it home
and gave it a box in the attic, under
the stars where his father was wheeling, and he raised
his feline companion—I don’t know girl
or boy—without his mother much noticing,
hard as she worked, silent as she kept.
And his pet grew, and when they got to the woods he would
take off the collar and leash and they would
frolic together, she-he/he-she would
teach Stanley, already sinuous,
to slink and hunt. And I don’t know who it
was who suddenly saw that Stanley’s
companion, growing stronger and bigger and
lither, was a bobcat, and none of us
was there the night Stanley released her-him
or there when it rose in him, the desire
to seek a feline of his own species.
And when he was 98, and Elise
had gone ahead, leaving her words and
images behind her, casting the skin of them,
I saw, in a city in Ohio, an elegant
shaving-brush-soft replica bobcat,
and brought it back to West 12th, along with the
usual chocolates, and flowers, and a demo of my
latest progress toward a model’s sashay on the catwalk.
And after that, when I’d come over, in those
outfits I wore then, Diana-ing
for a man, Stanley would be holding the stuffed
animal, and petting it,
nape to rump, nape to rump,
stub of the bob tail—98,
99, 100, those huge old beautiful
hands, stroking the world, which hummed when Stanley stroked it.
from The Harvard Review
GREGORY PARDLO
* * *
Wishing Well
Outside the Met a man walks up sun
tweaking the brim sticker on his Starter cap
&n
bsp; and he says pardon me Old School he
says you know is this a wishing well?
Yeah Son I say sideways over my shrug
at the limpid smooth as spandex behind me.
Throw your bread on the water.
I tighten my chest wheezy as Rockaway beach
sand with a pull of faux smoke from my e-cig
to cozy the truculence I hotbox alone
and I am at the museum because it is not a bar.
Because he appears not to have changed
them in days I eye the heel-chewed hems
of his pants and think probably he will
ask me for fifty cents any minute now wait
for it. A smoke or something. Central Park exhibits
the frisking transparency of autumn. Tracing
paper sky, leaves like eraser crumbs gum
the pavement. As if deciphering celestial
script I squint and purse off toward the roof
line of the museum aloof as he fists two
pennies from his pockets mumbling and then
aloud my man he says hey my man I’m going
to make a wish for you too.
I am laughing now so what you want
me to sign a waiver? He laughs along ain’t
say all that he says but you do have to
hold my hand. And close your eyes.
I make a sabbath of my face before
he asks are you ready. Yeah dawg I’m ready.
Sure? Sure let’s do this his rough hand
in mine inflates like a blood pressure cuff and I
squeeze back as if we are about to step together
from the sill of all resentment and timeless
toward the dreamsource of un-needing the two
of us hurtle sharing the cosmic breast
of plenitude when I hear the coins blink against
the surface and I cough up daylight like I’ve just
been dragged ashore. See now
you’ll never walk alone he jokes and is about
to hand me back to the day he found me in
like I was a rubber duck and he says you got to let
