by David Lehman
We’d skip lunch, drink Sego (“good for your ego”). Last year I drank gin
and called her ex. “She passed,” he drawled, like it was the weather. We
tried powdered donuts with the Sego, sweated to the Beatles and jazz.
Her whole life was beginning. We moved away from there one June,
Mississippi tight-mouthed as a lid on fig preserves. And we—
we white girls—knew nothing. The fire-bombed store, the owner who died
for paying his friends’ poll taxes. Anorexia would be famous soon.
from The Georgia Review
AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER
* * *
City of Eternal Spring
My mind rises up as the silos of interchanges,
streams, passages of myself in floating layers
so nothing can connect, and I dream emptiness
on ships sailing to new places for new names,
this ship my hands cupped in front of me,
a beggar’s bowl, a scooped out moon, a mouth
opened to make noiseless screams, to arrange,
to begin, to break through to stop my arrogance,
believing what I touch, see, feel, hear, taste make
a case for being alive, so I can stop believing what
happens when a caterpillar dreams itself beautiful.
What cannot be is suddenly what I was made
to believe can never be, fibers growing in illegal
spaces between layers of who I am and I wake
from nightmares that come at night or in the day,
memories of being betrayed gathering like iron
threads to make a prison where fibers of a miracle
of light crack open in a seed inside love to let me
dream a body inside this body with structures
that breathe and know one another so I rise
from thought to be being beyond thought
with energy as breath, a world with eyes
opening inside the light, inside knowing,
inside oneness that appears when the prison
frees me to know I am not it and it is not me.
from The Rumpus
CANDACE G. WILEY
* * *
Dear Black Barbie
I made you fuck my white Barbie
even though I knew you didn’t want to.
There were no whips or chains,
this was a different kind of plantation fantasy.
I didn’t have a Ken doll, so I made you the man.
Not knowing what fucking looked like
I just rubbed you against each other and made you kiss.
I kept you barefoot like you came
three worlds later or fifty years earlier,
but I had Nicki Minaj dreams for us:
bleached brown skin, long stringy yellow hair,
God-blue eyes, lips pink as a Cadillac. Only then
could you wear the best dress and the one pair of pumps.
My dear black Barbie, maybe you needed a grandma
to tell you things are better than they used to be.
There was a time when you didn’t exist at all.
from Prairie Schooner
TERENCE WINCH
* * *
Subject to Change
Let us shove the last 73 minutes down the garbage
disposal and vacuum up all traces of the past 17 years
and stuff them in a plastic bag and be done with them.
Let’s scrape our alternative versions of everything
we have learned since 1981 off the ground and flush
them all down the toilet. I’m worn out by my misdeeds.
My hands hurt, my fingers won’t curl anymore.
I’m in the emergency room at Holy Cross hoping
all is not lost. I have no one to pray to, just the vast
empty sky, the black hole inside the black hole
that swallows up everything whole. They make
me lie down on the blank slate. Dr. Baker is running
late. Then the nurse lifts the curse and Baker says
you’re a lucky man. It could have been worse.
from Beltway Poetry Quarterly
JANE WONG
* * *
Thaw
The trees glowed in water
I had half an ice arm
I waved at the sun for warmth and connection
This melting chandelier of mine
A fever grew from my ankles up
A planet fell out of my mouth
My organs bloomed, parachutes in the night
Snowbells rang along my teeth
My verbs were all in disagreement
Swallowed up in the turbulence
In the rotten rumble of boiling eggs
I held the cold along the eyelashes of cows
I held my rosehip head, splitting in two
To remain perpetually aware
A feather suspended itself in air
The fish sitting too long in the sun melted
Into a sea, cell after cell
My prized imperatives, my root words: gone
Long live the day
from Birdfeast
MONICA YOUN
* * *
March of the Hanged Men
1.
hyperarticulated giant black ants endlessly boiling out of a heaped-up hole in the sand
2.
such a flow of any other thing would mean abundance but these ants replay a tape-loop vision
3.
out of hell the reflexive the implacable the unreasoning rage whose only end is in destruction
4.
the way the dead-eyed Christ in Piero’s Resurrection will march right over the sleeping soldiers
5.
without pausing or lowering his gaze for he has no regard now for human weakness
6.
since that part of him boiled entirely away leaving only those jointed automatic limbs
7.
that will march forward until those bare immortal feet have pounded a path through the earth
8.
back down to hell because there is no stopping point for what is infinite what cannot be destroyed
from The Paris Review
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES AND COMMENTS
* * *
SARAH ARVIO was born in 1954. She grew up not far north of New York City and lived in the Village for thirty years. She has published three books of poetry, Visits from the Seventh; Sono: cantos; and night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis, which is a hybrid of poetry, essay, and memoir (all from Alfred A. Knopf). She has won the Rome Prize of the Academy of Arts & Letters and fellowships from the Bogliasco and Guggenheim foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her translation of poems and plays by Federico García Lorca is forthcoming from Knopf. For many years a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she has also taught poetry at Princeton. She lives in Maryland by the Chesapeake Bay.
Arvio writes: “I was writing fast, full of emotion, when I found the words ‘Buddhist’ and ‘nudist.’ Many words in the poem spring from the sounds of those words. I loved seeing ‘nudist’ become ‘neurosis’ and then ‘new roses,’ ‘Buddhist’ become ‘rosebud,’ and ‘bodhisattva’ find ‘body’ and ‘fatwa.’ I think of Rushdie when I hear the word ‘fatwa’: his death decree. ‘Ring around the rosy’ is also a reference to death, it turns out—all fall down—a song of the plague. ‘Nobis pacem’ is my shorthand for Dona nobis pacem (Give us peace), the words of a song (from the Latin Mass) that peace activists sang around our fireplace! Beyond invoking the pleasure of peace, the poem seems to say that although lovelessness is death, love is a kind of dying. After writing the poem, I learned that the Bodhisattva is on a path toward compassion and enlightenment. Like love—when it does the right thing.”
DERRICK AUSTIN was born in 1989 in Homestead, Florida. He earned his BA in English and writing from the Universi
ty of Tampa and recently received his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan. He is a Cave Canem fellow. His work has appeared in New England Review, Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion, Crab Orchard Review, The Paris-American, and Memorious.
Austin writes: “The first drafts of ‘Cedars of Lebanon’ were written in early 2013, during my first Michigan winter. I’d lived in Florida for a decade before moving up north and, despite childhood stints in North Dakota and New Jersey, I’ve never acclimated to winter. I’m not made for snow boots and subzero temperatures. As a result, most of my poems exist in a perpetual summer. So, the poem is strongly influenced by my responding to my new environment: the flattening and disorienting effect of snow, icy distortions, and the alienating, seemingly perpetual darkness. In certain ways, winter is the hardest season to write poetry about—all the metaphors and images it seems to inspire move toward sleep, dormancy, isolation, and inevitably death, points of stasis. I wanted energy and movement, for desire to travel through violence and dominance and open, hopefully, into tenderness.”
DESIREE BAILEY was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1989. She grew up in Queens, New York. She studied English and African Studies at Georgetown University and is currently an MFA fiction candidate at Brown University. She has received fellowships from Princeton in Africa, the Norman Mailer Center, and the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. She is also a recipient of the Poets and Writers’ Amy Award. She is currently the fiction editor at Kinfolks Quarterly.
Of “A Retrograde,” Bailey writes: “This poem rose up out of the histories, experiences, and ideas to which I constantly return: the maroon communities of the Caribbean and Brazil that challenged the dominance of the plantation slavery system, the psychic trauma of a severed lineage, the historical violence that often resides in beautiful landscapes, the passing down of folklore, rites, and ways of seeing, the ocean as a mother, the ocean as a city of ancestors or as a balm.
“I pose questions in this poem: Is the liberation of the body tied to the liberation of the land? What happens to the mind when the land is warped? And vice versa? What are the consequences of cultural amnesia? How do we close the distance between the past and the present? How can we open multiple ways of seeing?”
MELISSA BARRETT has received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, a Tin House writer’s scholarship, a Galway Kinnell scholarship from the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, and a national teaching award from Building Excellent Schools. Born in Cleveland in 1983, she teaches writing at an urban middle school and lives in a century-old home in Columbus, Ohio.
Of “WFM: Allergic to Pine-Sol, Am I the Only One,” Barrett writes: “An old boss of mine used to tell me stories about her daughter, who suffered from chronic congestion for most of her childhood. Years later, she discovered that she was allergic to Pine-Sol, which her mom (my boss) sprayed around the house every day. The story stuck with me because I liked the odd personal detail of knowing my boss loved Pine-Sol, and—living in the Sinus Belt and being allergic to dust—I could empathize with someone who had her fair share of runny noses. ‘WFM: Allergic to Pine-Sol, Am I the Only One’ was born from this story.
“It’s a found poem, sourced mainly from Craigslist personal ads (though part of the title and the poem’s first line come from a medical message board). I changed, added, or deleted words here and there, but the poem was pieced together almost verbatim from Craigslist. I found the writing there to be lively, honest, and genuine. Some posts were very direct, while others were more flowery—but nearly all of them hooked me with their desire to connect with another person (or persons, in some cases). I copied down my favorite bits, and began to edit them together.
“After mashing up the lines, I didn’t think I had a poem—I considered it more of an exercise. But a few months later, I found myself still thinking about ‘WFM.’ The idea of recording and making permanent lines from the world’s largest classifieds site (over eighty million classified ads are posted to the site each month!) drew me in. And connecting the various authors (many of whom were, um, pining after a ‘missed connection’) was a nice bonus.”
MARK BIBBINS was born in Albany, New York, in 1968, and has lived in New York City since 1991. He is the author of three books of poems, most recently They Don’t Kill You Because They’re Hungry, They Kill You Because They’re Full (Copper Canyon Press, 2014). He teaches in the graduate writing programs of The New School, where he cofounded LIT magazine, and Columbia University. His poems have recently appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Volt, and The Literary Review. He edits the poetry section of The Awl.
Of “Swallowed,” Bibbins writes: “When Melissa Broder’s last book came out, she invited a pack of us to write poems inspired by the seven deadly sins and seven heavenly virtues. I was assigned gluttony, which accounts for Ciacco’s appearance—readers of Dante’s Inferno might remember him from the third circle—although one or two other vices also banged up against the poem.”
JESSAMYN BIRRER was born in Falls Church, Virginia, in 1975. She lived and worked in Idaho and Washington before moving to her current home of Klamath Falls, Oregon, where she is an autism advocate, stay-at-home parent, and technical writing instructor. Her poems have recently appeared in Illuminations and in Ninth Letter.
Of “A Scatology,” Birrer writes: “Antonin Artaud said, ‘Where there is a stink of shit there is a smell of being’; Salvador Dalí, that given that our ‘highest mission is to spiritualize everything, it is [our] excrement in particular that needs it most.’ Though I am neither French nor particularly surreal, my experience of being is no less a central concern, no less a thing both narrated and dictated by the body. I may feel as though my inward self were secret and hidden away in the closed systems of my anatomy, but in fact the body is not a closed system—in fact, we are all constantly and literally open to the world, human tunnels for food, air, and experience. We take the world in through the mouth, let it wind its way through the soft doughnut of the body, then let it go. This poem came from wanting to explore those voluntary and involuntary practices that make each of us no more and no less than any other creature. I wanted to write a love poem to being—to the anus, the alimentary canal, the body as practical and full of dirt. I wanted to revere the body.”
CHANA BLOCH was born in New York City in 1940. She is professor emerita of English at Mills College, where she taught for over thirty years and directed the creative writing program. From 2007 to 2012 she served as the first poetry editor of www.persimmontree.org, an online journal of the arts by women over sixty. Her Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980–2015, published by Autumn House Press, contains new work as well as selections from her four earlier collections—The Secrets of the Tribe (Sheep Meadow, 1980), The Past Keeps Changing (Sheep Meadow, 1992), Mrs. Dumpty (University of Wisconsin, 1998), and Blood Honey (Autumn House, 2009). She is cotranslator of the biblical Song of Songs (Random House, 1995; Modern Library Classic, 2006), The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (Harper, 1986; rev. University of California, 1996), Amichai’s Open Closed Open (Harcourt, 2000), and Hovering at a Low Altitude: The Collected Poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch (W. W. Norton, 2009). She has written a critical study, Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible (University of California, 1985).
Of “The Joins,” Bloch writes: “Two works of art and an argument—the materials for a poem. Whatever the argument was about, my husband and I had repaired the damage before I left for a month at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California. On the way there, I was thinking about a ceramic cup I had seen online, a deep crimson, its surface lit by brilliant zigzags that seemed at first like a design element—a beautiful example of kintsugi (‘golden joinery’), the art of repairing broken pottery with a lacquer resin laced with gold. This practice honors the history of a broken cup or bowl instead of attempting to disguise it; the repaired vessel is often more beautiful for having been broken.
“In the meadow at Djerassi I found myself drawn to a scul
pture by a visiting artist: two conical structures, twenty feet tall, made of slender redwood branches wired together. The two stood side by side, joined at mid-height by crisscrossing branches that made a little roof overhead as you moved from one to the other. The sculptor was a German artist, Roland Mayer, who had named it, appropriately, Dialog. I walked in and around and between the two parts, experiencing their connection. The ‘web’ of branches that linked them got me thinking about the ways lovers are—and aren’t—connected. Although it didn’t become part of the poem itself, the time I spent with Dialog belongs to its prehistory, a generative experience that is stored in the body gathering energy until it can find its way into words.
“T. S. Eliot wrote that a poet’s mind is ‘constantly amalgamating disparate experience,’ ‘forming new wholes.’ The Japanese art of kintsugi and Roland Mayer’s Dialog joined with my memory of an argument to form a new whole, a poem celebrating the beauty of imperfection in human relationships as in art.”
EMMA BOLDEN was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1980. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and received her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Maleficae (GenPop Books, 2013) and medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press, 2015). She has written four chapbooks of poetry: How to Recognize a Lady (part of Edge by Edge, Toadlily Press, 2007); The Mariner’s Wife (Finishing Line Press, 2008); The Sad Epistles (Dancing Girl Press, 2008); and This Is Our Hollywood (in The Chapbook, 2013). She has also written a nonfiction chapbook, Geography V (Winged City Press, 2014).
Of “House Is an Enigma,” Bolden writes: “If language is the house in which we all dwell, this poem provided me with a key. I wrote it in the midst of a situation that I’d been told, in so many ways, that I wasn’t supposed to talk about. So let me talk about it here, and plainly, and publicly, for the first time: I was about to have a total hysterectomy. For twenty-some years, I’d struggled with endometriosis and a host of other so-called ‘female problems’ so rarely spoken about, publicly or privately, that they’re known as silent epidemics. I was single and childless and thirty-two years old. I was furiously silent and furious with silence. I was also furious with language. I faced the biggest decision of my life and even the physician charged with helping me to make this decision spoke in metaphors, which invariably referenced houses. ‘I don’t think,’ he would say, ‘that your womb could viably house a fetus.’ On a long and rambling drive through long and rambling rural Georgia, I noticed that I’d started to notice houses: row after row of them, all settling into their foundations with increasingly unsettled faces. After passing one particularly angry house, it occurred to me that perhaps the house was every bit as angry as I was with the metaphor my doctor used to talk about my situation. I began to write a poem in which the house talked about its frustrations with language and, through its doors, I began to settle my own frustrations and dwell more comfortably—and honestly—in the house that is my body.”
