by David Lehman
heroic men, self-sacrificing saintly women
holding granite babies to their breasts.
Not changeable, she said, like human beings.
I gave up on them, she said.
But I never lost my taste for circular voyages.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
Above our heads, the cherry blossoms had begun
to loosen in the night sky, or maybe the stars were drifting,
drifting and falling apart, and where they landed
new worlds would form.
Soon afterward I returned to my native city
and was reunited with my former lover.
And yet increasingly my mind returned to this incident,
studying it from all perspectives, each year more intensely convinced,
despite the absence of evidence, that it contained some secret.
I concluded finally that whatever message there might have been
was not contained in speech—so, I realized, my mother used to speak to me,
her sharply worded silences cautioning me and chastising me—
and it seemed to me I had not only returned to my lover
but was now returning to the Contessa’s Garden
in which the cherry trees were still blooming
like a pilgrim seeking expiation and forgiveness,
so I assumed there would be, at some point,
a door with a glittering knob,
but when this would happen and where I had no idea.
from The Threepenny Review
R. S. GWYNN
* * *
Looney Tunes
for John Whitworth
It begins with the division of a solitary cell,
Carcinogenetic fission leading to a passing-bell,
Lurking far beneath your vision like a pebble in a well—
Then it grows.
Soon enough there comes a scalpel that is keen to save your life,
Crooning, “All things will be well, pal, if you just survive the knife,
But to climb the tallest Alp’ll be much easier. Call your wife.”
Then it grows, grows, grows. Then it grows.
Say you can’t remember Monday night when Tuesday rolls around.
Does it mean they’ll find you one day blind and frothing on the ground?
Is it ominous that Sunday sermons make your temples pound?
(How it shows!)
You may take the pledge, abstaining, thinking you can lick it all.
But it’s hard when, ascertaining how diversions may enthrall,
You’re still standing there and draining one well past the final call:
How it shows, shows, shows. (How it shows!)
You may lose a set of car keys and mislay a name or face.
Does your mind demand bright marquees where each star must have its place?
It’s like diving in the dark. It’s less a river than a race.
And it flows
Like the coming days of drivel, like the dreaded days of drool
When the very best you give’ll prove you’re just an antique fool,
And your thoughts will be so trivial as to lead to ridicule—
And it flows, flows, flows. And it flows.
Do you want to be a burden? Can you stand to be a drag?
Make your mind up, say the word and do not let the moment lag.
When you go to get your guerdon let them see your battle flag!
So it goes.
There’ll be many there who’ll miss you and a few to lend a hand,
There’ll be boxes full of tissue, lots of awful music, and
Lissome maidens who won’t kiss you as you seek the promised land.
So it goes, goes, goes. So it goes.
from Able Muse
MEREDITH HASEMANN
* * *
Thumbs
Tuck a severed thumb into a paper towel
and place it in a plastic bag on the window sill
to sprout a new one. Hydroponic tomatoes
don’t taste as good as the ones on a vine.
It’s a completely controlled environment
that has nothing to do with authenticity.
He made me a promise at our shotgun wedding.
He would take my thumbs if I ever slept
with another man. If you’re on the train
to Cleveland, it’s okay to get off at a whistle stop
but if you don’t have a ticket, you have to say so.
Just say what you mean. I couldn’t say I didn’t love him.
In the little flash of a threat when you know you’re going
to get hurt, you have to live up to it one way or another.
It’s about listening, but the ear is one of the weakest
muscles in the body. Ten years after the promise
I slit my hand open on a bottle of wine over steak
with a man I thought I could love. The female cuckoo bird
does not settle down with a mate. Now we make her
come out of a clock. I sound like a local
when I give directions. I’m getting the hang of it.
If you have no ticket, say it. It’s about knowing
where you want to put the stone in the wall.
You might need to cut that up for me,
since I have no thumbs. When he met the next man
I could love, he mentioned the promise.
It’s difficult to go back to the land of the paved road.
Once the thumb-sprouts root, plant them.
When they sex themselves, you have to split them
so they don’t contaminate each other.
from The Southampton Review
TERRANCE HAYES
* * *
Antebellum House Party
To make the servant in the corner unobjectionable
Furniture, we must first make her a bundle of tree parts
Axed and worked to confidence. Oak-jawed, birch-backed,
Cedar-skinned, a pillowy bosom for the boss infants,
A fine patterned cushion the boss can fall upon.
Furniture does not pine for a future wherein the boss
Plantation house will be ransacked by cavalries or Calvary.
A kitchen table can, in the throes of a yellow-fever outbreak,
Become a cooling board holding the boss wife’s body.
It can on ordinary days also be an ironing board holding
Boss garments in need of ironing. Tonight it is simply a place
For a white cup of coffee, a tin of white cream. Boss calls
For sugar and the furniture bears it sweetly. Let us fill the mouth
Of the boss with something stored in the pantry of a house
War, decency, nor bedeviled storms can wipe from the past.
Furniture’s presence should be little more than a warm feeling
In the den. The dog staring into the fireplace imagines each log
Is a bone that would taste like a spiritual wafer on his tongue.
Let us imagine the servant ordered down on all fours
In the manner of an ottoman whereupon the boss volume
Of John James Audubon’s Birds of America can be placed.
Antebellum residents who possessed the most encyclopedic
Bookcases, luxurious armoires, and beds with ornate cotton
Canopies often threw the most photogenic dinner parties.
Long after they have burned to ash, the hound dog sits there
Mourning the succulent bones he believes the logs used to be.
Imagination is often the boss of memory. Let us imagine
Music is radiating through the fields as if music were reward
For suffering. A few of the birds Audubon drew are now extinct.
The Carolina parakeet, passenger pigeon, and Labrador duck
No longer nuisance the boss property. With so much
Furniture about, there are far fewer woods. Is
furniture’s fate
As tragic as the fate of an axe, the part of a tree that helps
Bring down more upstanding trees? The best furniture
Can stand so quietly in a room that the room appears empty.
If it remains unbroken, it lives long enough to become antique.
from The New Yorker
REBECCA HAZELTON
* * *
My Husband
My husband in the house.
My husband on the lawn,
pushing the mower, 4th of July, the way
my husband’s sweat wends like Crown Royale
to the waistband
of his shorts,
the slow motion shake of the head the water
running down his chest,
all of this lit like a Poison video:
Cherry Pie his cutoffs his blond hair his air guitar crescendo.
My husband
at the PTA meeting.
My husband warming milk
at 3 a.m. while I sleep.
My husband washing the white Corvette the bare chest and the soap,
the objectification of my husband
by the pram pushers
and mailman.
My husband at Home Depot asking
where the bolts are,
the nuts, the screws,
my god, it’s filthy
my husband reading from the news,
my husband cooking French toast, Belgian waffles,
my husband for all
nationalities.
My husband with a scotch, my husband
with his shoes off,
his slippers on, my husband’s golden
leg hairs in the glow of a reading lamp.
My husband bearded, my husband shaved, the way my husband
taps out the razor, the small hairs
in the sink,
my husband with tweezers
to my foot,
to the splinter I carried
for years,
my husband chiding me
for waiting
to remove what pained me,
my husband brandishing aloft
the sliver to the light, and laughing.
from Court Green
JANE HIRSHFIELD
* * *
A Common Cold
A common cold, we say—
common, though it has encircled the globe
seven times now handed traveler to traveler
though it has seen the Wild Goose Pagoda in Xi’an
seen Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto in Monterchi
seen the emptied synagogues of Krasnogruda
seen the since-burned souk of Aleppo
A common cold, we say—
common, though it is infinite and surely immortal
common because it will almost never kill us
and because it is shared among any who agree to or do not agree to
and because it is unaristocratic
reducing to redness both profiled and front-viewed noses
reducing to coughing the once-articulate larynx
reducing to unhappy sleepless turning the pillows of down,
of wool, of straw, of foam, of kapok
A common cold, we say—
common because it is cloudy and changing and dulling
because there are summer colds, winter colds, fall colds,
colds of the spring
because these are always called colds, however they differ
beginning sore-throated
beginning sniffling
beginning a little tired or under the weather
beginning with one single innocuous untitled sneeze
because it is bane of usually eight days’ duration
and two or three boxes of tissues at most
The common cold, we say—
and wonder, when did it join us
when did it saunter into the Darwinian corridors of the human
do manatees catch them do parrots I do not think so
and who named it first, first described it, Imhotep, Asclepius, Zhongjing
and did they wonder, is it happy sharing our lives
as generously as inexhaustibly as it shares its own
virus dividing and changing while Piero’s girl gazes still downward
five centuries still waiting still pondering still undivided
while in front of her someone hunts through her opening pockets for tissues
for more than one reason at once
from The Threepenny Review
BETHANY SCHULTZ HURST
* * *
Crisis on Infinite Earths, Issues 1–12
I.
I’m at a poetry convention and wish I were at Comic Con. Everyone is wearing boring T-shirts.
When I give the lady my name, she prints it wrong onto the name tag. I spell it and she gets it wrong again. Let’s be honest: it’s still my fault.
II.
Japanese tsunami debris
is starting to wash up
on the Pacific shore. At first,
they trace back the soccer balls,
motorcycles, return them
to their owners. That won’t last.
There are millions more tons.
Good news for beachcombers,
begins one news article.
III.
In the ’30s, William Moulton Marston invented the polygraph and also Wonder Woman. She had her own lie detector, a Lasso of Truth. She could squeeze the truth right out of anyone.
Then things got confusing for superheroes. The Universe accordioned out into a Multiverse. Too many writers penned conflicting origin stories. Super strengths came and went. Sometimes Wonder Woman held the Lasso of Truth, and sometimes she was just holding an ordinary rope.
IV.
Grandma was doing the dishes
when a cockatiel flew in the open window
and landed on her shoulder.
This was after the wildfire
took a bunch of houses.
Maybe the bird was a refugee,
but it shat everywhere
and nipped. She tried a while
to find to whom it belonged,
finally gave it away.
Then she found out
it was worth $800.
V.
Yeah, so there are a lot of birds
in poems these days.
So what? When I get nervous
I like to think of their bones,
so hollow not even pity or
regret is stashed inside,
their bones like some kind
of invisible-making machine.
VI.
Is that black Lab loping down the street the one someone called for all last night?
Phae-ton, Ja-cob, An-gel, or Ra-chel, depending on how near or far the man dopplered to my window.
VII.
I can’t decide which is more truthful, to say I’m sorry or that’s too bad.
VIII.
One family is living in a trailer
next to their burned-out house.
It looks like they are having fun
gathered around the campfire.
The chimney still stands
like something that doesn’t
know when to lie down.
Each driveway on the street
displays an address on a
large cardboard swath, since
there’s nowhere else to post
the numbers. It’s too soon
for me to be driving by like this.
IX.
Crisis on Infinite Earths (1985) cleared up 50 years of DC comic inconsistency, undid the messy idea of the Multiverse. It took 12 issues to contain the disaster. Then surviving superheroes, like Wonder Woman, relaunched with a better idea of who they were. The dead stayed dead.
Now the Universe is divided neatly into pre- and post-Crisis.
X.
I confess stupid th
ings I’m sorry for:
• saying that mean thing about that nice teacher
• farting in a swimming pool
• in graduate school telling everyone how delicious blueberry-flavored coffee from 7-11 was
• posing for photographs next to beached debris.
How didn’t I know everyone liked shade-grown fair-trade organic?
XI.
I wish I could spin around so fast that when I stopped, I’d have a new name.
XII.
Here’s a corner section
of a house washed up
on the shore, walls still
nailed together. Some bottles,
intact, are nesting inside.
I wasn’t expecting this: ordinary
things. To be able to smell
someone else’s cherry-flavored
cough syrup. There is
no rope strong enough
to put this back together.
To escape meltdown
at Fukushima-1, starfish
and algae have hitched rides.
They are invasive. What if
they are radioactive? Thank
goodness for the seagulls,
coming to peck out
everything’s eyes.
from New Ohio Review
SAEED JONES
* * *
Body & Kentucky Bourbon
In the dark, my mind’s night, I go back
to your work-calloused hands, your body
and the memory of fields I no longer see.
Cheek wad of chew tobacco,
Skoal-tin ring in the back pocket
of threadbare jeans, knees
worn through entirely. How to name you:
farmhand, Kentucky boy, lover.
The one who taught me to bear
the back-throat burn of bourbon.
Straight, no chaser, a joke in our bed,
but I stopped laughing; all those empty bottles,
kitchen counters covered with beer cans
and broken glasses. To realize you drank
so you could face me the morning after,
the only way to choke down rage at the body
sleeping beside you. What did I know
