by David Lehman
everything in praise.
from The Volta
CATHERINE BOWMAN
* * *
Makeshift
From two pieces of string and oil-fattened feathers he made a father.
She made a mother from loss buttons and ocean debris.
Lacking a grave, they embottled themselves
in a favorite liqueur, the pyx and plethora of clouds—
with the heart striped and clear-cut, they rekindled the stars,
created a glossary of seeds.
Down the fire ladder, rung after fiery rung, they gather, salvage,
fiddle about, curse and root, laugh themselves silly,
en masse assemble a makeshift holy city. In the holy city,
makeshift, they assemble en masse, silly themselves,
laugh and root, curse the fiddle, gather salvage rung
after fiery rung as they ladder their fire down.
A glossary seeded creates stars, strips clear the diamond-cut heart.
They sold clouds, the plethora and pyx of liqueur. Favored themselves
embottled in grave lack, ocean debris, and loss buttons,
where Mother made a father who made feathers
from fattened oil and string pieces for two.
from The New Yorker
RACHAEL BRIGGS
* * *
in the hall of the ruby-throated warbler
Jenny, sunny Jenny, beige-honey Jenny
sings the parsley up from the topsoil, Jenny,
cool tabouleh, hot apple crumble Jenny,
alchemy Jenny
please, I whispered, teach me the secret whistle
help me coax the thistledown from the thistle
perch me on the branch where the goldfinch rustles
heedless of bristles
so she bore my heart to the eagle’s aerie
folded me like down in a twig-tight nestle
kissed me til my sinews leapt up, cat’s cradle
brain like a beehive
Jenny, downy Jenny, my treetop lover
from Able Muse
JERICHO BROWN
* * *
Homeland
I knew I had jet lag because no one would make love to me.
All the men thought me a vampire. All the women were
Women. In America that year, black people kept dreaming
That the president got shot. Then the president got shot
Breaking into the White House. He claimed to have lost
His keys. What’s the proper name for a man caught stealing
Into his own home? I asked a few passengers. They replied,
Jigger. After that, I took the red-eye. I took to a sigh deep
As the end of a day in the dark fields below us. Some slept,
But nobody named Security ever believes me. Confiscated—
My Atripla. My Celexa. My Cortisone. My Klonopin. My
Flexeril. My Zyrtec. My Nasarel. My Percocet. My Ambien.
Nobody in this nation feels safe, and I’m still a reason why.
Every day, something gets thrown away on account of long
History or hair or fingernails or, yes, of course, my fangs.
from Fence
RAFAEL CAMPO
* * *
“DOCTORS LIE, MAY HIDE MISTAKES”
—Boston Globe headline
That doctors lie, may hide mistakes
should come as no surprise. Of course
the body we must memorize
in fact cannot be trusted, breasts
embarrassing as cheese soufflés
that didn’t rise, scuffed knees as dumb
as grief. The very act of touch
is like a lie, the latex gloves
we wear in case of a mistake
protecting us from pulsing blood’s
blithe truths. We lie and hide from what
the stethoscope will try to say,
incapable of listening
itself: the heart, mistaken for
the place where the elusive soul
resides, in fact does not repeat
itself. Instead, it cries, “Of course
we must tell lies, and to be human
is this incalculable mistake.”
from upstreet
JULIE CARR
* * *
A fourteen-line poem on sex
1. On film I’m a sky or a swimmer
2. Red lightbulb
3. All those cross-legged girls
4. If I don’t write the word “rendered”
5. I will forget it by morning
6. Boys in black sing harmonies
7. She’s running a fever dressed like a Belgian
8. Can you smell her from here?
9. A mutating ghost
10. Once on a drive from Nashville to Asheville
11. I ran out of gas. I’d been watching the temperature gauge
12. Resolutely in the middle
13. I’d never run out of gas before
14. I didn’t know what was wrong with the car
from The Kenyon Review
CHEN CHEN
* * *
for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me
i pledge allegiance to the already fallen snow
& to the snow now falling. to the old snow & the new.
to foot & paw & tire prints in the snow both young & aging,
the deep & shallow marks left on cold streets, our long
misbegotten manuscripts. i pledge allegiance to the weather
report that promises more snow, plus freezing rain.
though i would minus the pluvial & plus the multitude
of messages pressed muddy into the perfectly
mutable snow, i have faith in the report that goes on to read:
by the end of the week, there will be an increased storm-related
illegibility of the asphalt & concrete & brick. for i pledge
betrayal to the fantasy of ever reading anything
completely. for i will do/undo what was done/undone to me:
to be brought into a patterned world of weathers
& reports. & thus i pledge allegiance to the always
partial, the always translated, the always never
of knowing who’s walking around, what’s being left behind,
the signs, the cries, the breadcrumbs & the blood. the toe-
nails & armpit hair of our trying & failing to speak
our specks of here to the everywhere. dirty snow of my weary
city, i ask you to tell me a story about your life
& you tell me you’ve left for another country,
but forgot your suitcase. at the airport they told you
not to worry, all your things have already been sent
to your new place by your ninth grade french teacher,
the only nice one. & the weather where your true love is
is governed by principles or persons you can’t name,
imagine. it is that good, or bad.
from PANK
SUSANNA CHILDRESS
* * *
Careful, I Just Won a Prize at the Fair
Don’t remind me
how insufficient
love is. You
threw quarters
into a bowl. We are bones
and need, all hair
and want: this fish won’t swim
in a plastic bag
forever. My makeshift
gown is a candle, my breasts
full of milk for our young—
whose flames
are these anyway?
from Columbia Poetry Review
YI-FEN CHOU
* * *
The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve
Huh! That bumblebee looks ridiculous staggering its way
across those blue flowers, the ones I can never
remember the name of. Do you know the old
engineer’s
joke: that, theoretically, bees can’t fly? But they look so
perfect together, like Absolute Purpose incarnate: one bee
plus one blue flower equals about a billion
years of symbiosis. Which leads me to wonder what it is
I’m doing here, peering through a lens at the thigh-pouches
stuffed with pollen and the baffling intricacies
of stamen and pistil. Am I supposed to say something, add
a soundtrack and voiceover? My life’s spent
running an inept tour for my own sad swindle of a vacation
until every goddamned thing’s reduced to botched captions
and dabs of misinformation in fractured,
not-quite-right English: Here sir, that’s the very place Jesus
wept. The Colosseum sprouts and blooms with leftover seeds
pooped by ancient tigers. Poseidon diddled
Philomel in the warm slap of this ankle-deep surf to the dying
stings of a thousand jellyfish. There, probably,
atop yonder scraggly hillock, Adam should’ve said no to Eve.
from Prairie Schooner
ERICA DAWSON
* * *
Slow-Wave Sleep with a Fairy Tale
I knocked out Sleeping Beauty, fucking cocked
her on the jaw. She fell into the briar.
Pussy. I found her prince. I up and socked
him, too. I called each one of them a liar.
I damned the spindle’s hundred years of sleep
because I rarely sleep. I cursed the birds
who took their heads from out beneath their heap
of wings. When lovers look, they need no words.
And when a hound came running after me,
a Redbone with a smile bearing its teeth
so white, I woke up with the majesty
of a princess who’s lying underneath
a spell of something better still to come.
My eyes were blurry, my mouth dry and dumb.
from Tupelo Quarterly
DANIELLE DETIBERUS
* * *
In a Black Tank Top
In a black tank top
my man can say
just about anything.
Stuff like, let’s watch
football, or this shrimp
is overcooked or see how many pull-ups I
can do. In a black tank top, he looks fifteen
years younger, looks like all those silly boys
I knew in school. When he gets home from
playing ball, I want to crawl inside the bed
of his parents’ beat-up red pick-up truck &
make out until his almost beard scratches
at me, leaves dappled marks on my cheeks
& throat for friends to stare at for days. In a
black tank top, I can watch him talk about
beams, joists, & trusses for hours cause the
shadows of his arm press against the ribbed
cotton like a boy presses a girl up against a
steely locker, hard before Mrs. Toner’s home
room. I want to shout, Damn son! Looking
like that should be illegal. And, Break me off
some of that. Instead I try to be the shy little
thing, smile & blush like the good girls do. In
a black tank top, though, my man always gets
me to offer a hand to pull it off. He trembles:
a boy undoing his first real belt.
from Rattle
NATALIE DIAZ
* * *
It Was the Animals
Today my brother brought over a piece of the ark
wrapped in a white plastic grocery bag.
He set the bag on my dining table, unknotted it,
peeled it away, revealing a foot-long fracture of wood.
He took a step back and gestured toward it
with his arms and open palms—
It’s the ark, he said.
You mean Noah’s ark? I asked.
What other ark is there? he answered.
Read the inscription, he told me,
it tells what’s going to happen at the end.
What end? I wanted to know.
He laughed, What do you mean, “what end”?
The end end.
Then he lifted it out. The plastic bag rattled.
His fingers were silkened by pipe blisters.
He held the jagged piece of wood so gently.
I had forgotten my brother could be gentle.
He set it on the table the way people on television
set things when they’re afraid those things might blow up
or go off—he set it right next to my empty coffee cup.
It was no ark—
it was the broken end of a picture frame
with a floral design carved into its surface.
He put his head in his hands—
I shouldn’t show you this—
God, why did I show her this?
It’s ancient—O, God,
this is so old.
Fine, I gave in, Where did you get it?
The girl, he said. O, the girl.
What girl? I asked.
You’ll wish you never knew, he told me.
I watched him drag his wrecked fingers
over the chipped flower-work of the wood—
You should read it. But, O, you can’t take it—
no matter how many books you’ve read.
He was wrong. I could take the ark.
I could even take his marvelously fucked fingers.
The way they almost glittered.
It was the animals—the animals I could not take—
they came up the walkway into my house,
cracked the doorframe with their hooves and hips,
marched past me, into my kitchen, into my brother,
tails snaking across my feet before disappearing
like retracting vacuum cords into the hollows
of my brother’s clavicles, tusks scraping the walls,
reaching out for him—wildebeests, pigs,
the oryxes with their black matching horns,
javelinas, jaguars, pumas, raptors. The ocelots
with their mathematical faces. So many kinds of goat.
So many kinds of creature.
I wanted to follow them, to get to the bottom of it,
but my brother stopped me—
This is serious, he said.
You have to understand.
It can save you.
So I sat down, with my brother wrecked open like that,
and two-by-two the fantastical beasts
parading him. I sat, as the water fell against my ankles,
built itself up around me, filled my coffee cup
before floating it away from the table.
My brother—teeming with shadows—
a hull of bones, lit only by tooth and tusk,
lifting his ark high in the air.
from Poetry
DENISE DUHAMEL
* * *
Fornicating
such a beautiful
day
and I’m not
fornicating
—Adília Lopes
I have goose bumps
from the breeze
coming into the window
which is a kind of fornication
but who am I kidding
a breeze is not even a kiss
especially a breeze
strained through a screen
I would have a better chance
out on the street
where I could perhaps meet
someone who wanted
to fornicate
with me or someone like me
and I could pretend
I suppose
even to be someone else
give a fake name
so the man would never
it is a little scary to say
to a stranger, Hey, do you
want to fornicate?
especially if you are a woman
and you want to fornicate
with a man
what kind of a man
would say yes to such a request
maybe a violent one
maybe no decent man at all
since the request is pretty bold
and I suppose I would
look crazy
men are leery of crazy women
and I can’t blame them
I could promise a man
that I wouldn’t
stalk him or call him ever
that I am just in it
for the fornication
but would he believe me
even I don’t really believe me
because what if the fornication
was a success and I woke up
the next morning
another beautiful day
and I wasn’t satisfied
with just the memory
of fornication
and wanted another round
or what if it was lousy
outside
and since I’d given a fake name
insisting I didn’t want to know his
I had to look for a new fornicator
this time while lugging an umbrella
this time I could look for a woman
with the same sad look I have
when I want to fornicate
and if she agreed
we could step out of the rain
into her apartment
it might not be as scary
as approaching another man
or as big a leap over a puddle
