by David Lehman
Anne Sexton wrote
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself . . .
then Adília Lopes wrote
once I was beautiful now I’m myself
then I wrote
fornication is for all the beautiful
and unbeautiful selves
on both beautiful
and unbeautiful days
not that I knew what I meant
it’s just that sometimes
it’s easy to feel unbeautiful
when you have unmet desires
or embarrassed that you have
such desires at all
I once wrote about a lover
who would pet his cat
more than me
and my friend said
this poem is too vulnerable
I feel as though I should throw a coat
over this poem
she was right of course
and I tore it up
I only remember it today
because in her author’s photo
Adília Lopes holds a cat
I am allergic to cats
the lover had to wash his hands
those many years ago
before he could touch me
Kurt Vonnegut wrote
that every character needs
to want something
even if that something
is only a glass of water
I want to fornicate
I get up from my chair
and press my face against
the cool screen
until there is a dirty grid on my cheek
as though I’ve slept
in fifty tiny beds
from The Literary Review
THOMAS SAYERS ELLIS
* * *
Vernacular Owl
for Amiri Baraka
Old Ark,
how funky it was, all those animals, two of every kind,
and all that waste, the human shit somebody had to clean up.
Somebody, some love you hugged before fear,
the fear of an in-sani-nation, the No Blues, ruined your bowels.
Go devil.
Public programs
like
Race.
Dems a Repub
of dumpster molesters,
Congressional
whole-part bidders on your ugliest clown.
Left wing, right,
the missing moderates
of flightless fight.
Private
like
the Runs.
God evil.
Somebody had to clean that shit up.
Somebody, some love who raised you, wise.
Feathered razors for eyebrows,
alto,
tenor.
Wasn’t no branch.
Some
say
a tree,
not
for rest either.
For change.
When was we a wild life,
long-eared
and short. Prey,
some prayed for
the flood. And were
struck by floating,
corporate quintets
of Rocks and Roths,
assets bond Prestige.
First
Organizer
ever
called a
Nigga,
Noah,
but not
the last
Occupier of Ararat
. . . got thick
on
Genesis
and electric cello, cell phone shaped UFOs
fueled by
the damp, murdered clay
of divinity-based
Racial
Mountain
Dirt.
Somebody had to clean that shit up.
Some native body,
beside the smooth water,
like a
brook
Gwen say,
“I had to kick their law into their teeth in order to save them.”
Chaser if
you straight.
Ark Old
Ark New
Ark Now
Only Only
Sidney P Simple JessB
would would
___ Spencer T ___ Dizzy G
to turn to accent
the dinner the p’s
cheek not the “. . . nuts.”
Change the record, Record Changer.
Name
Change
the changing same.
Something only you could Art Messenger
& dig in any chord.
High water, like the woods of secrecy,
always a trail a ways a coming.
God evil.
Move the “d.”
Go devil.
The Mosque watchers know.
Also de wind, de wind
and de Word, spoken and written,
in hidden in love
with the intestines
of Testament.
Eyes like
a woman’s fist,
her hard facts––not the crying,
domestic consonants
“of non being.”
Soprano,
piano,
or the cultural cowardice
of class,
in any chord
of standardized “sheeit” music, lowcoup risks slit.
Though flawed, too,
by penetrable flesh,
some blue kind.
Unlike
a pretty shield,
loaded free.
Wasn’t just Winter
or lonely. Those.
Wasn’t just Sundays
the living did not return.
Crouch if you a bum or one of Mumbo Jumbo’s reckless,
poisonous reeds. A neck crow man ser vant n
a jes’ grew suit.
Us am,
an unfit
second
Constitution.
Us am, an ambulance full of . . .
broke-down,
as round as we bald.
Obeying
hawkish
eagles.
Why the young Brothers so big, what they eatin’,
why they blow up like that, gotta wear big white tees, gotta wear white
skin sheets, like maggots, like lard, like they the domestic oil of death
and klan sweat, “who . . .” blew them up, doctored, “who . . .” pickin’
them off like dark cotton, make them make themselves a fashion of
profitable, soft muscular bales, somebody got to clean this shit up.
All us, U.S. animals,
on one floating stage
we knew
was a toilet,
the third oldest in the nation, unreserved.
Wasn’t no bank
or branch.
Yes we Vatican, despite Alighieri’s medium rare, rate of interest.
It
was
confirmation.
Some say
black fire
wood.
Some love that changed our screaming
Atlantic bottoms
when all we
could be
was thin olive sticks,
with battered whore-ti-cultural beaks, and eastern screech.
Flushed, too, every time The Yew Norker
or one of Obi Wan Kenobi’s traitorous X Jedi Clampett hillbillies
fresh prince’d us . . .
The real religion,
our “individual expressiveness”
wasn’t dehuman-u-factured
by a Greek HAARP
in a Roman uni-dot-gov-versity.
Where we Away
our Steel, “flood”
means “flow.”
Where we Tenure
our Ammo, “podium”
means “drum.”
Flood,
flow.
Podiu
m,
drum.
Flood,
drum.
Podium,
flow.
Drum,
podium.
Flood,
flow.
Used to be a whole lot of chalk around the Ark,
then anger, then angels, rehabbed wings made of fried white dust,
fallen from when the board of knowledge was public and named
after a stranger or [rich] crook, an anti-in immigrant-can’tameter
stretched across the teepee-skin, chairs of class
where we clapped
the erasers,
fifty snows old,
like we were
the first Abraham,
where we clapped
the Race Erasers
and drove away
from K James V and K Leo PB
in shiny Lincolns,
sprinkling holy sheeple from the sky,
their
powdery
absolute
Rule.
Just add oil-water.
Belongs
to humanity.
Just add sugar-rubber.
Belongs
to civilization.
Gold.
Days.
Nights.
Ounces.
A forty.
Mules move.
A forty.
Move.
Move.
Move
mule.
Whatyoumaycall “how we here” and get no
response . . . how we . . . where we fear, how we hear how we sound and
how sometimes [time is some] even our own sound fears us, faults us,
and remembers the first us, confronting Columbus with thunderbolts,
when “was-we” not good-citizen sober, “was-we” voting and drowning,
and rotting like “we-was” the wrong targets of the armed guts of our
own young?
Now a daze,
tribe-be-known,
the devil
the best historian we got.
Anyhow.
from Poetry
EMILY KENDAL FREY
* * *
In Memory of My Parents Who Are Not Dead Yet
Is it harder for the bachelorette or her suitors?
The brown oyster mushroom
on her face is possibly the most perfect
nose I have ever seen. I think people
might actually win love. The funny guy always
appeared safe but later you saw him
in the dark green yard
puking, a thin
sweat on the back of his neck.
I want the air I breathe
to maintain my body’s
mystery. I worry I’ll run into you at a party
then I remember I don’t go to parties
so I’m safe. I have no godly discipline.
When someone yells I still huddle
under a want for ice cream.
How can you love people
without them feeling accused?
If I wanted to win
I would draw harder lines
and sit next to them, stay
awake, rattle the box of bullets.
When we touch my heart
gets green
and white, preppy, bordered,
oh! she says and perks up.
It hurts to not be everyone else. If love dies
it was already dead.
from Powder Keg
JAMES GALVIN
* * *
On the Sadness of Wedding Dresses
On starless, windless nights like this
I imagine
I can hear the wedding dresses
Weeping in their closets,
Luminescent with hopeless longing,
Like hollow angels.
They know they will never be worn again.
Who wants them now,
After their one heroic day in the limelight?
Yet they glow with desire
In the darkness of closets.
A few lucky wedding dresses
Get worn by daughters—just once more,
Then back to the closet.
Most turn yellow over time,
Yellow from praying
For the moths to come
And carry them into the sky.
Where is your mother’s wedding dress,
What closet?
Where is your grandmother’s wedding dress?
What, gone?
Eventually they all disappear,
Who knows where.
Imagine a dump with a wedding dress on it.
I saw one wedding dress, hopeful at Goodwill.
But what sad story brought it there,
And what sad story will take it away?
Somewhere a closet is waiting for it.
The luckiest wedding dresses
Are those of wives
Betrayed by their husbands
A week after the wedding.
They are flung outside the doublewide,
Or the condo in Telluride,
And doused with gasoline.
They ride the candolescent flames,
Just smoke now,
Into a sky full of congratulations.
from The Iowa Review
MADELYN GARNER
* * *
The Garden in August
1.
Afternoon brings my neighbor outside
in her florid pink nightgown,
exposed breasts like pendulums
as she kneels in the gravel
speaking to an empty planter. As the two of us
wait in the kitchen
for her children, it is clear
her thoughts float
from the back of the skull to the front.
Unstoppered bottles. Pills on the table:
blood pressure cholesterol diabetes arrhythmic heart
dispensed out of sequence
from the calendar of forgotten days.
2.
How resigned she seems
to the eviction notices her body is receiving,
the way a daughter sags against
the door jamb.
Family members speak in code
about selling the house.
3.
Because she is a system of bone and blood
Because her hands are rusted hinges
Because wisps of spiderwebs float behind eyelids
Because her heart leaks and something has palmed a piece of one lung
Because her body is a test tube
4.
Tomorrow she will be outside again, offering
up her sweat to the sun
as she tends the perennials and
sluices water, working her garden
which is purpose, which is happiness—
even as petal and pistil we fall.
from PMS: poemmemoirstory
AMY GERSTLER
* * *
Rhinencephalon
Your belly smells disheveled.
Your armpits smell like kelp.
Your genitals smell like lily flower soup
(no MSG, please). You claim weedy
scents of medicinal broth simmering
for sick infants emanate from my neck,
and that my recently doffed sox
smell of nothing but lust. Could we
sniff each other out, I wonder,
blindfolded, from among the massed souls
queuing up for free stew,
or being shoved into box cars,
or crouched under desks protecting
our necks in disaster drills,
or getting processed in tents at the edge
of a refugee camp? Do we really want
to pledge to enter heaven together
and to live on there forever
if heaven’s bereft of smell?
from The American Poetry Review
* * *
A Sharply Worded Silence
Let me tell you something, said the old woman.
We were sitting, facing each other,
in the park at ______, a city famous for its wooden toys.
At the time, I had run away from a sad love affair,
and as a kind of penance or self-punishment, I was working
at a factory, carving by hand the tiny hands and feet.
The park was my consolation, particularly in the quiet hours
after sunset, when it was often abandoned.
But on this evening, when I entered what was called the Contessa’s Garden,
I saw that someone had preceded me. It strikes me now
I could have gone ahead, but I had been
set on this destination; all day I had been thinking of the cherry trees
with which the glade was planted, whose time of blossoming had nearly ended.
We sat in silence. Dusk was falling,
and with it came a feeling of enclosure
as in a train cabin.
When I was young, she said, I liked walking the garden path at twilight
and if the path was long enough I would see the moon rise.
That was for me the great pleasure: not sex, not food, not worldly amusement.
I preferred the moon’s rising, and sometimes I would hear,
at the same moment, the sublime notes of the final ensemble
of The Marriage of Figaro. Where did the music come from?
I never knew.
Because it is the nature of garden paths
to be circular, each night, after my wanderings,
I would find myself at my front door, staring at it,
barely able to make out, in darkness, the glittering knob.
It was, she said, a great discovery, albeit my real life.
But certain nights, she said, the moon was barely visible through the clouds
and the music never started. A night of pure discouragement.
And still the next night I would begin again, and often all would be well.
I could think of nothing to say. This story, so pointless as I write it out,
was in fact interrupted at every stage with trance-like pauses
and prolonged intermissions, so that by this time night had started.
Ah the capacious night, the night
so eager to accommodate strange perceptions. I felt that some important secret
was about to be entrusted to me, as a torch is passed
from one hand to another in a relay.
My sincere apologies, she said.
I had mistaken you for one of my friends.
And she gestured toward the statues we sat among,
