by David Lehman
26. First and Tender Buttons
27. The White Chickens
28. What Narcissism Means to Pacman Jones
29. Projective Reverse
30. Tradition and the Individual TD
31. The Canterbury Tailbacks
32. The Ravens
from 32 Poems
MICHAEL COLLIER
* * *
Last Morning with Steve Orlen
“Last night I wrote a Russian novel or maybe it was English.
Either way, it was long and boring. My wife’s laughter
might tell you which it was, and when she stops,
when she’s not laughing, let’s talk about the plot,
and its many colors. The blue that hovered in the door
where the lovers held each other but didn’t kiss.
The red that by mistake rose in the sky with the moon,
and the moon-colored sun that wouldn’t leave the sky.
All night I kept writing it down, each word arranged
in my mouth, but now, as you can see, I’m flirting
with my wife. I’m making her laugh. She’s twenty.
I’m twenty-five, just as we were when we met, just
as we have always been, except for last night’s novel,
Russian or English, with its shimmering curtain of color,
an unfading show of Northern Lights, what you, you asshole,
might call Aurora Borealis.
So sit down on the bed with my wife and me.
Faithful amanuensis, you can write down my last words,
not that they’re great but maybe they are.
You wouldn’t know. You’re an Aurora Borealis.
But my wife is laughing and you’re laughing too.
Just as we were at the beginning, just as we are at the end.”
from The Greensboro Review and Poetry Daily
ALLISON DAVIS
* * *
The Heart of It All + A Free Beer
There are too many things set
in Ohio. There is even a river. For a while
all we had were couches and tongue rings.
Now, it’s over. All married. Each time you turned around
to face the Torah I hoped you were looking
at my ass. You weren’t, and your brother wasn’t looking
at my sister. We’ve recovered. She married.
In Youngstown when you marry there’s a cookie table.
Back home, having a long last name
is like having a big dick, is like having a nice
cookie table. My five aunts made hundreds
of Greek cookies for my sister’s wedding.
My mother would make them for school, at Christmas,
and I’d bring them in with her motherly note:
“Take out the clove! xo” After my sister’s wedding,
my mother packed up a box of cookies
and said, “Don’t share them with anyone
who won’t appreciate them.” My mother’s nightmare
is someone eating Greek food without having
an experience. Baklava is something she has left
of one experience. My cousin
cries about a guy, and I say, “Good, no one likes him
anyway.” No, I don’t. I say, “Find someone
who’ll treat it like an experience.” And if you do
and if he doesn’t, forget about the clove.
He’ll ask, “Was I supposed to swallow that?”
Answer, “That’s what she said.” My cousin
rolls her eyes, says I don’t
understand. The time spent convincing the heartbroken
you’ve been heartbroken. The last time I saw him
was in a Columbus library. We’d both left town,
yet there we were: the back of his neck
in Literature, D-F. “I could not speak, and my eyes failed,
I was neither living nor dead” are Waste Land lines
Pound wasn’t allowed to cut. A hallucination?
I emailed: it was him, he asked why I didn’t say
hello. Because it’s possible to stay too long
at the fair. Because aisles over in L
was the Lorca
I once watched a guy from Madrid
angrily re-translate in red ink. Even now, it’s there—
written and written
over. Even now, a Great Lake
and a river. Things are set in Ohio
because you’re allowed to stay too long
and call it love. Because there are no
regulations. My mother waits up
for my father who works at a motel
that never closes, that gives customers
the heart of whatever they’ve come for
plus a free beer with every room.
from Sycamore Review
OLENA KALYTIAK DAVIS
* * *
On the Certainty of Bryan
Bryan is very certain about the Ocean Park paintings of Richard Diebenkorn.
They are very good.
He does not have to say (or see) much more.
He especially likes the almost empty light blue one that is like an iceberg.
He also likes dense black-and-white photography, Japanese.
Not a soul, empty are the streets and houses he looks at/makes.
Yet people (have) live(d) there.
I guess I can see what he is not talking about (we can both smell Lyana’s super stinkyfeet), but I would be unsure or even left out without the certainty of Bryan. Bryan, should we have a drink?
Back in Alaska, I have opened the window to/on spring. New ideas are breezing in, like students. I am: like students.
Did you read Eileen Myles’s interview in that issue with the tongue
through/on the front? Despite my original skepticism, did she soothe me,
if only for a moment? I am completely unclear
on: my skepticism, ways, talents, dollars, “integrity,” days, art(s). My life, it felt hard, hard, hard, hard, a little easier, fucking unbearable, hard, but was it?
Someone pretty smart was crying.
I did not know what to do.
“Now I’m tired and confused,” I said, unable to tell what was going on
in someone (another someone) else’s loins.
Then, once or twice, scared all afternoon of something that ended up
tasting: like baby food. Bryan has a big house in Brooklyn, a big job downtown, a small child, a wife. His daughter goes to this little school in a basement in Chinatown. Eileen Myles might have passed them a year or two ago, on the way to fake beg.
Maybe if this was a short story the poignancy would hover in a short story atrium-y area,
maybe at the daycare/school and descend like light
on a certain mother or “wife.” She is now a few blocks away, catching
her own reflection in that worn warm mitt.
But why should I introduce any more characters?
We have Bryan, we have Diebenkorn, Myles,
There are mothers at the school and there are motherlikebutyounger teachers, but so far they all look the same. Yes, they have sick problems, but: This is not by Sam Lipsyte!
Oh, shit, Lydia Davis, yes, sure, if it’s you, come in. Come in. Translate something from Dutch. And BTW WTF did you learn to speak/translate from Dutch?
I always am afraid to say “Dutch” and “the Netherlands”;
never “Holland”; rarely “de Kooning,” and is that d fucking capital or what?
“One lip, tulips” and then they both laughed on my back deck cause
they liked each other s
o it was funny and of absolutely no interest to me, except here it is. somehow. again.
I have spent a month thinking about Bryan and his absolute certainty about certain paintings and photographs and how he matter-of-factly but quietly admitted that this certainty did not translate to his work. his life.
Do I know what I like
even a little?
I keep looking at the Diebenkorns online, maybe
wanting the book, which if I got I would forget to look at.
Supposedly he flew over a lot of stuff and liked how that looked.
Empty was the earth below, yet full of lots of people, no?
So I said/asked: “Bryan, I am thinking maybe of writing a poem
about your certainty. What was the title of that Diebenkorn that made you start to draw icebergs?”
Bryan says he will look it up after he gets home from work. He says:
“I hope it has a happy ending.”
“Oh, that was John Zurier’s ‘The Future of Ice.’ Never heard of him,” he says, absolutely unshaken.
Is there shit under my fingernail?
Is this meat I am feeding my children tainted?
When is the last time I had sex?
Meanwhile, Kary and I discuss the new New Yorker poem by Louise Glück.
She says: “I was waiting for you to love it to love it.” and “I like how she rhymed ‘precipice’ with ‘pillowcase.’ ”
“I didn’t notice (pang), but
I liked the relief tainted by the need to respond and I have also been meaning to say/ask:
that one The Cave Singers song about getting younger? and
are you still flirting with Peter Richards online, cause:
‘After a while I came to know that death was the hay . . .’ ”
Then, out of the blue, out of a southeast Alaskan clear blue-green pit,
actually, Dylan comes to visit, like some
traveling salesman of complexity. Jesus, he was
raised on a commune in Florida, he remembers the six buildings, the main dude who was some gay doctor, the way they had to sit and watch things burn, and he can see things before they happen
but what is happening that isn’t, that brings him here looking for a friend in
patient and kind yet so unwilling “me”?
patient and kind yet so unwilling, “I”
meant everything, my seventy-two hours of statements,
but:
so?
Back to nothing.
Suicidal panic.
I am broke and I am old.
Or I am still pretty
young and are these riches,
or fucking what?
and:
What did you think
of the poem with the mouse in it?
What did you think of the mouse?
from Alaska Quarterly Review
NATALIE DIAZ
* * *
How the Milky Way Was Made
My river was once unseparated. Was Colorado. Red-
fast flood. Able to take
anything it could wet—in a wild rush—
all the way to Mexico.
Now it is shattered by fifteen dams
over one-thousand-four-hundred-and-fifty miles,
pipes and pumps filling
swimming pools and sprinklers
in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
To save our fish, we lifted them from our skeletoned riverbeds,
loosed them in our heavens, set them aster—
’Achii ’ahan, Mojave salmon,
Colorado pikeminnow—
Up there they glide gilled with stars.
You see them now—
god-large, gold-green sides,
moon-white belly to breast—
making their great speeded way across the darkest hours,
rippling the sapphired sky-water into a galaxy road.
The blurred wake they drag as they make their path
through the night sky is called
’Achii ’ahan nyuunye—
our words for Milky Way.
Coyote too is up there, locked in the moon
after his failed attempt to leap it, fishing net wet
and empty slung over his back—
a prisoner blue and dreaming
of unzipping the salmon’s silked skins with his teeth.
O, the weakness of any mouth
as it gives itself away to the universe
of a sweet-milk body.
Just as my own mouth is dreamed to thirst
the long desire-ways, the hundred-thousand-light-year roads
of your wrists and thighs.
from American Poets
DENISE DUHAMEL
* * *
Humanity 101
I was on my way to becoming a philanthropist,
or the president, or at least someone who gave a shit,
but I was a nontraditional student
with a lot of catching up to do. I enrolled in Humanity 101
(not to be confused with the Humanities,
a whole separate department). When I flunked
the final exam, my professor suggested
I take Remedial Humanity where I’d learn the basics
that I’d missed so far. I may have been a nontraditional student
but I was a traditional person, she said, the way a professor
can say intimate things sometimes, as though
your face and soul are aglow in one of those
magnified ( 10) makeup mirrors.
So I took Remedial Humanity, which sounds like an easy A,
but, believe me, it was actually quite challenging.
There were analogy questions such as:
Paris Hilton is to a rich U.S. suburban kid
as a U.S. middle-class kid is to:
1. a U.S. poverty-stricken kid
2. a U.S. kid with nothing in the fridge
or
3. a Third World kid with no fridge at all.
We were required to write essays about the cause of war—
Was it a phenomenon? Was it our lower animal selves?
Was it economics? Was it psychological/sexual/religious
(good vs. evil and all that stuff)? For homework
we had to bend down to talk to a homeless person
slouched against a building. We didn’t necessarily have to
give them money or food, but we had to say something like
How are you? or What is your favorite color?
We took field trips to nursing homes, prisons,
daycare centers. We stood near bedsides
or sat on the floor to color with strange little people
who cried and were afraid of us at first.
I almost dropped out. I went to see the professor
during his office hours because I wanted to change my major.
He asked, “Is that because your heart is being smashed?”
He thought I should stick it out, that I could make it,
if I just escaped for an hour a day blasting music
from my earbuds or slumping in front of the TV.
I said, “But that’s just it. Now I see humanity everywhere,
even on sitcoms, even in pop songs,
even in beer commercials.” He closed his door
and showed me the scars under his shirt
where he had been stabbed. He said I had to assume
everyone had such a wound, whether I could see it or not.
He assured me that it really did get easier in time,
and that it was hard to break the rules until you knew
how t
o play the scale. He made me see
my potential. He convinced me of my own humanity,
that one day I might even be able to get a PhD. But first
I had to write, for extra credit, a treatise on detachment.
from The Southern Review
LYNN EMANUEL
* * *
My Life
Like Jonas by the fish was I received by it,
swung and swept in its dark waters,
driven to the deeps by it and beyond many rocks.
Without any touching of its teeth, I tumbled into it
with no more struggle than a mote of dust
entering the door of a cathedral, so muckle were its jaws.
How heel over head was I hurled down
the broad road of its throat, stopped inside
its chest wide as a hall, and like Jonas I stood up
asking where the beast was and finding it nowhere,
there in grease and sorrow I build my bower.
from The New York Times Magazine
CLAUDIA EMERSON
* * *
Cyst
She had once had an abortion, she said, and later
an affair with a married man,
then another, her solitude always
uneasy, her body
lonely for something nameless as they had been,
or as she made them.
She said it began as pressure not quite pain,
and they found it outside
the womb, clinging to an ovary, having
conceived of itself.
When they removed it, they told her she could see it
if she wanted to:
just a curiosity with teeth, hair, and nails. Odd
but benign, the doctor
said, most always benign, nodding toward it
as though it could agree
with him, as though that were the fact,
the whole of it: curious
mistake a body can make.
from Subtropics
MARTÍN ESPADA
