by David Lehman
now, with no wall of water behind them?
How will Over Niagara Falls in a Barrel
marry Across Niagara Falls on a Tightrope?
Over the Falls would have worn a veil,
Across the Falls would have tied a tie,
hand in hand they would have poured
down the aisle to the sound of rustling
silks. Later they would narrow
to a lovely neck, later they would make
a gentle elbow in the water, later
they would pour into a still round pool,
and dance for three minutes to what they
called music. Niagara Falls is a family
member. He is drunk for the first time
in a hundred years. “I don’t call that music
I call that noise,” would have screamed
Niagara Falls, right through his aquiline
family nose. All of Niagara’s ex-lovers
are here. The World’s Steepest Dive
stands up and says, “I’ve been diving
so long now, and when will I hit?
When will you be there for me, Niagara?”
First Woman Behind the Falls stands up
so everyone can see her, so everyone
can see what has happened to her looks.
“You took the best day of my life,
Niagara.” The World’s
Longest Breath-Hold stands up,
she loves him, she drew in her breath
the first time she saw him and never
breathed out again, not ever. The furious
waterfall without water he punches her
into tomorrow; the World’s Longest
Breath-Hold is longer now and she calls
to him from the future, “You’re here,
you’re roaring again where I am,
Tomorrow.” Finally his first love the U-
Shape stands up. Stands up and she says,
“Niagara.” The sound curves down and up
again, even the shape of her voice is a U.
“I don’t call that music I call that noise,”
says the furious waterfall without water,
trembling at the very lip, unable to contain
himself, and there he goes roaring
back into her arms.
from A Public Space
DORA MALECH
* * *
Party Games
Might night right sight?
—Andrew Joron
The first thing she did after we blindfolded her
and turned her in circles by her shoulders
was lunge
for where she thought her target hung
and hit tree trunk instead, with one strike
against it split the stick
in half to jagged dagger
in her
fists. The donkey gently swayed
within reach, barely grazed
and staring straight ahead with the conviction
inherent to its kind at the horizon
that a gaze
implies,
paper mane fluttering in the breeze of a near miss,
belly ballasted with melting chocolate kisses,
drawn grin belying its
thingness, rictus
of ritual and craft. She’s grinning
too, and laughing, regaining
her balance,
planting her feet in a samurai stance.
She brandishes her splinter.
There’s no harm in letting her
take another turn
without turning
her around again.
We think we know how this ends,
how good it feels to play at this,
violence and darkness,
the beast
that harbors something sweet.
from The Hopkins Review
DONNA MASINI
* * *
Anxieties
It’s like ants
and more ants.
West, east
their little axes
hack and tease.
Your sins. Your back taxes.
This is your Etna,
your senate
of dread, at the axis
of reason, your taxi
to hell. You see
your past tense—
and next? a nest
of jittery ties.
You’re ill at ease,
at sea
almost in-
sane. You’ve eaten
your saints.
You pray to your sins.
Even sex
is no exit.
Ah, you exist.
from Poem-a-Day
AIREA D. MATTHEWS
* * *
If My Late Grandmother Were Gertrude Stein
I. Southern Migration
Leech. Broke speech. Leaf ain’t pruning pot. Lay. Lye. Lie. Hair straight off. Arrowed branch and horse joint. Elbow ash. Row fish. Row dog. Slow-milk pig. Blue-water sister. Hogs like willow. Weep crow. Weep cow. Sow bug. Soul narrow. Inchway. Inches away. Over the bridge. Back that way. Fur. Fir needles in coal. Black hole. Black out. Black feet. Blame. Long way still. Not there. There. Here. Same.
II. Feed the Saw
Old Crow. Liquor. Drink. Drunk. Girdle. Grits. Grit. Tea. Grit tea. Tea git. Get shaved. Shook. Shucked. Shit. Flour. Flower. Lard and swallow. Hardedge chew. Chipped tooth bite. Tool chip. Bite. Bloat. Bloat. Bloat. Blight seat. Blight sit tea. Be light city. Down town dim. Slight dark. Old Arc. New Arc. New Ark. New work. Newark. Lark-fed. Corned bread. Bedfeather back. Sunday-shack church fat. Greased gloved. Dust-rubbed. Love cheap-heeled shoes. Window seat. Mirror eye. Window. I. Window. Window. When though. When though. Wind blow. November. December. No cinder. No slumber. No summer. Branch. Branched. Blanched. Fried. Freed. Fly. Want. What. Want. What. Graves want.
III. Miscegenation
Good. Smooth. Curly-haired baby. Baby rock-a-bye. My baby. Mama rock-a-bye that baby. Wrestle the earth, baby. No dirt. No. Dirt-shine. Shine. Shine-neck. Porcelain. Tin. Tarnish. Powder milk. Pout her. Milk. Powder-silk inheritance. Front the washtub. Top the bed. Bin. Leaky numbers run in. Run in. Run on. Red fevers hold your palm. Sweat it out. Hot. Hot. Heat the rest. Pretty melt that wax. Wide flower. Ellis-Island daddy. O, Daddy’s bar. Banned. Mongrel hum. Come. Come now. Little bones bend. Old crack. Creak. Crank. Crick. Curly-Q. Fuck. Them. Then fuck them. You hear me. Walk through good-haired baby. Half of you. Belong.
IV. Gertrude Stein
Who. Bills mount. Picasso. Who. Matisse. Who. Mortgage. No currency canvass. Pay brushes. Stroke. Stroke. Bridge. Brittle. Blend. 10 miles daybreak. 10 miles they break. They broke. No brick. Widgets in the envelope. No railroad green. Agriculture. Pea snap. Earth under nails. Spine and stilt woman. Roach-kill heel woman. Roaches in the crawl. Woman, creep. Keep 5th grade. Every where. Wear every where. We’re every. Where. Any. How. We sacrifice and hammer. They sacrifice the hammer. Never. Ax and hatchet make callous. Hard hand. Prison-pen privilege. Prison. Privilege pinned. Bar-thorn pinned. Pine cross. Crown. Weight. Wait. Iron is harder. Chicken fat can is full of spark. Spark kill. Ore. Sparkle. Or. Spark cull. Spark. Cull. Hoe. Heave. Heave-holy. Heavy. Heavy. Heavy lights genius. That is that Gertrude. Who.
from Kinfolks Quarterly
JAMAAL MAY
* * *
There Are Birds Here
for Detroit
There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between fences
and buildings. No.
The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,
I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not
the confetti
a tank can make out of a building.
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about,
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
their neighborhood is not like a war zone.
I am trying to say
the neighborhood is as tattered
and feathered as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying
how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be in your birdless city.
from Poetry
LAURA MCCULLOUGH
* * *
There Were Only Dandelions
And the boy.
Everywhere, sound. Here: sirens. There: sirens.
And the crying
[because one woman’s husband
doesn’t love her anymore
and wants to go to medical school,
now, after so many years of lawyering;
because another one woke up one day,
told her husband, I don’t think I ever want
to sleep with you again, meaning sex,
and then he learned it meant not
even the sleeping, the spooned, belly loose
intimacy of howler monkey night;
because the dandelion blew
into a million parachuting seeds.]:
Pre-dandelions floating everywhere, to every continent.
There, too, screaming, just like sirens,
and everywhere in between, each anniversary of the living.
My boy is in college now, one says,
but that day of the bombing,
when they called, I stopped at the 7–11
to buy bags to bring the body parts home in.
He was one of only four that survived.
[Whose baby, anonymous, in the trash heap
Whose boys aiming, aiming, falling in love
with the fear they won’t ever outrun?
Whose child that one,
without an arm, a knife in the other?]
They’re not all white faces, and this poem
is not a public poem.
Not all poems are meant to entertain,
like Jericho said, named
after that city by that river
in the hot place so many people
have lived in, so many hostages
been taken in, so many,
so many—whose offices I can’t name or know—
no, not entertain, but sing just the same,
a polyphony of song
birds in the morning,
snow geese aflight, guns rocketing,
barrel out, sound through
the beating blood,
bleating animals, beseeching
all those river gods
for some respite from this suffering.
[Each a lawn weed having grown
up in some crevice,
against the wall of each life,
flowering heads all in all
and each in one, this explosion
on the seed-headed planet,
fractal imagining, and this
is my imagining, this declaimed I]
Though some of you—
even though this is not a public poem—
will say the I is dead; there is no self;
no things but in ideas
dead, yet no ideas in things either;
and then the accumulation
of linguistic artifacts heats up like a
like a like a
lava lamp.
[All Spencer’s Gifts’ glow and thrift store chic.]
And you will not be warmed by it,
but who is this you?
Because if there is no I,
there can be no we,
and I am not willing to surrender to that.
[to no us-ness, to you not being
one sole being on the other end
of this this-ness, but only part
of some conglomerate, corporate
entity called nothing-we-can-comprehend.
I am unwilling;
I am a dissenter.
I am.]
Which renders the corporation something
more than they,
which is almost always paralytic or amoral,
certainly unsympathetic and unsympathizable,
something approaching evil.
Just you. And me. Please.
First, I claim this I, that only has this
language(s), technology(s), space,
time, sex, gender, religion
or lack thereof,
sensibility, sense,
a body, a body in time,
in sex, in faith and betrayal
and reason and reasoning:
out of this great unsynthesized manifold,
all penetration and penetrating.
[Like a seed head blown apart,
all pollination and flowering
and dried and falling away
and lifting and airborne and borne
away from each other to land
and germinate and survive
in the meagerness of conditions,
the little dying, the little survivals.]
An image, Williams said; an idea, said Stevens,
ancestors we think of: lion’s teeth leaves, prickly
and persevering, no things but in ideas, really?
So much depends upon this small boy
who doesn’t look like any small boy you know;
he is my small boy—the I of this this-ness—
with small bones and wide dark eyes,
hair as straight and black as spun obsidian.
So much depends upon a child like him, this one I love,
sitting in calf-high grass, so new-green, the edges
blaze white, and the dandelions all sprung overnight,
one night in this boy’s newborn awareness,
as new as any child’s, burying his face in the common
and undervalued florets, eyes blazing with YELLOW!!
Mind cracking—everywhere this cracking—a portal
into a new way of being, the dancing around him,
the buzz of new insects, the spray of misting winds;
it is all so amazing, this world of wonder.
from Verse Daily
RAJIV MOHABIR
* * *
Dove
bichwa ke mare ordhniya ke torde,
tohar najariya jaherile jaherile
A scorpion stings me; its toxins swim my veins,
one ill prick from you and I writhe in your fever.
I dream I cough up a songbird I release to the sky,
you board a plane to take you across the desert.
I will tie messages to the feet of doves,
set them to sail at dusk with a map to your country.
Dizzy with thirst they fall, raining, from the sky,
their dried meat hardening in tawny feathers.
I throw stones at planes’ shadows, cursing iron
to crash, to burn in serrated-leafed cane fields.
So my skin never blisters with your desire,
in birdbaths I empty vials of avicide.
The scorpion’s sting tears my veil,
the glance from your poisonous eyes.
from Prairie Schooner
AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL
* * *
Upon Hearing the News You Buried Our Dog
I have faith in the single glossy capsule of a butterfly egg.
I have faith in the way a wasp nest is never quiet
and never wants to be. I have faith that the pile of forty
painted turtles balanced on top of each other will not fall
as the whole messy mass makes a scrabble-run
for the cr
eek and away from a fox’s muddy paws.
I have been thinking of you on these moonless nights—
nights so full of blue fur and needle-whiskers, I don’t dare
linger outside for long. I wonder if scientists could classify
us a binary star—something like Albireo, four hundred
light-years away. I love that this star is actually two—
one blue, one gold, circling each other, never touching—
a single star soldered and edged in two colors if you spy it
on a clear night in July. And if this evening, wherever you are,
brings you face-to-face with a raccoon or possum—
be careful of the teeth and all that wet bite.
During the darkest part of the night, teeth grow longer
in their mouths. And if the oleander spins you still
another way—take a turn and follow it. It will help you avoid
the spun-light sky, what singularity we might’ve become.
from Poem-a-Day
D. NURKSE
* * *
Plutonium
after Richard Rhodes
1
A man stood beside the gate
with his severed eyeball
in the palm of his hand.
The empty socket stared at me
with a shy creeping fire
or so I imagined in my pride.
So I said, “I can undo this.”
2
We watched the blast through welder’s glass
and a tinted lens, from twenty miles east
in the Sierra Oscura. We slathered ourselves
with suntan lotion. Serber peeped
with a naked eye, and was blinded
for ninety seconds—when he could see again,
just chaparral and nine scrub pines.
The light had bounced off the moon.
3
Neils Bohr recites in his soft rapt voice: I divide myself into two persons, one of whom tries to fool the other, while a third, who is in fact the same as the other two, is filled with wonder at this confusion. Thinking becomes dramatic, and quietly acts the most complicated plots with itself and for itself; and the spectator again and again becomes an actor.
