by David Lehman
cat and mouse of masters and skeletons laid to rest at last.
The heartless turnkey, the nerveless safecracker, the latch-key kid
scared shitless, the relentlessly dauntless escape artist
trussed in shackles and manacles in shot after shot: who among us
could even make up stuff so specious, so spurious?
No cutpurse to fleece us, no jackboot to roust us, no half-assed excuse
to detain us, remand us, debase us, reform us,
no iron fist or invisible hand to quash or unleash us, no righteous
crusade to destroy us to save us: just us, just us.
All of us no longer shiftless, feckless, careless, faithless: no losses to cut,
no charges to press, nothing to witness, nothing to confess,
no one to cast into the wilderness, no caste to dispossess, no shamefulness,
no shamelessness, no cease and desist, no underhandedness
under duress, nothing to peer into or peep at with a flickering eyelash,
each cloudless passing hour lusting after less and less.
Should be, so be it: so trustworthy, so noteworthy, so rock-steady,
so truth-hungry, so war-weary, so far from foolhardy,
so otherworldly already, no guest or ghost would guess that any of us
were ever less than blameless, faultless, spotless, blessed.
Needless, useless, pointless, crap: the polygraph, the wiretap, the clink of cuffs,
the accordion gate, the ankle bracelet, the honeycombed spy-cams,
the blueprints for the deluxe panopticon, all that superfluous refuse shipped off
to the pawn shop, the swap meet, the flea mart, the boundless
county dump, the bottomless dustbin of clueless things past, all dead as
the doornail that held fast against the hopeless crush of us.
No senseless wishfulness, no useless ruthlessness, no goods to get on us
to bust or traduce us, no clauses to bind us, no cause
for redress, no one on the loose, on the make, on the case, nothing for us
to jimmy or pick, nothing gone missing, not a thing amiss,
no No Tell Motel, no Big House, no Pale beyond us, no tragic chorus in a rumpus
over the worst in us getting the best of us in spite of us,
just all of us lapsing less and less regardless how rootless, witless, gutless, pissed,
all that thankless cussed nonsense now behind us: just us, just us.
from The American Scholar
DAN BEACHY-QUICK
* * *
Apophatic
for Peter Gizzi
nothing changes nothing
grows wild nothing grows
tame nothing bends weird
the mind-space into shape
of tether and memory of
ankle gone lame the whole
hurt song called irony can-
not know how chaos aches
beneath the facts it wears
for a face the fact of a
blank page being a form
of a map that is a kind of
mask missing a mountain
or a mouth or a marble
pedestal from which the riddle
pours down and you know
a man is the answer a man
but nothing changes nothing
bends absence bright into a
silence called paper white
sun circle or solar sail or lonely
wind across vast despair or
blank hope bearing small repair
that this finger I point at
myself answers the question
what is not is everywhere
from Harvard Review
BRUCE BOND
* * *
Homage to a Painter of Small Things
for Matthew Cornell
Begin, not with home, but with one home
among the tiny many you will paint,
each consumed in silence, its obsessions,
its hunger for the small within the small,
the eye that pins a window to the world.
Begin with a broken cubicle of light,
the green hush that makes a cricket sing,
each brushstroke concealed in the next,
wave on wave, until the last one sinks
beneath the blue crush of all those hours.
And if you must begin, begin again
somewhere in the middle, with a boat
just beneath a radium of porch light,
leaned the way a chill leans against
the glass to press a child to the fire.
Start with a home that is not your home.
No home is. And so they all might be.
All return you to the smallness of one,
the ache a lantern casts across an alley.
So close these walls, so reticent the dark
proximities that tempt a boy to look.
The painter knows. A pupil threads needle
after needle, untouched by what it sees,
let alone what it will not. Night falls so
slowly it feels like stillness coming down.
Ask the boy he was if he must invent
the lives of the strangers to find his place.
Does he slouch like a microscope,
the scholar of a solitude that has no end.
Twilight puts its pressure to the stars.
Begin here, with the sound of dishes,
the wind-chime of the sink. Begin with hands
one never holds, a radio that plays just
one station, broken since the 1950s.
Begin with the music of that station,
with a black sedan out back that runs fine
and goes nowhere, though it is good to think
it could, any day now you could pick up,
leave, begin again. You could, echoes the song
you cannot hear. Believe me, love, you could.
from Raritan
JOHN BREHM
* * *
Intrigue in the Trees
Horse-collared by the high heat
of mountainous afternoons,
dogged by furious
dissatisfactions,
snakebit, buffaloed,
bird-brained. Thank you,
animals, for giving us so many
useful metaphors, and forgive
us for disappearing you,
daily and eternally.
Often I wonder:
is the earth trying to get
rid of us, shake us off,
drown us, scorch us
to nothingness?
To save itself and all other
creatures slated for destruction?
The trees around here
seem friendly enough—
stoic, philosophically inclined
toward non-judgmental
awareness and giving
in their branchings
perfect examples
of one thing becoming two
and remaining one—
but who knows
what they really feel?
Just last night I was walking
to my favorite café,
The Laughing Goat,
when I saw a murder of crows
circling raincloudy sky,
arguing, speaking strangely,
suddenly alight on
a maple tree, dozens of them
closing down their wings
like arrogant, ill-tempered
magistrates. Everybody
was looking up and
watching. Some kind of
consultation was happening there
(animals think we’re crazy
for thinking they can’t think),
and I said to a woman
pa
ssing in the crosswalk:
I wonder what they’re
planning. She laughed and
kept right on going,
happy as a lark.
from The Sun
JERICHO BROWN
* * *
Bullet Points
I will not shoot myself
In the head, and I will not shoot myself
In the back, and I will not hang myself
With a trashbag, and if I do,
I promise you, I will not do it
In a police car while handcuffed
Or in the jail cell of a town
I only know the name of
Because I have to drive through it
To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,
But I promise you, I trust the maggots
And the ants and the roaches
Who live beneath the floorboards
Of my house to do what they must
To any carcass more than I trust
An officer of the law of the land
To shut my eyes like a man
Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet
So clean my mother could have used it
To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will kill me
The same way most Americans do,
I promise you: cigarette smoke
Or a piece of meat on which I choke
Or so broke I freeze
In one of these winters we keep
Calling worst. I promise that if you hear
Of me dead anywhere near
A cop, then that cop killed me. He took
Me from us and left my body, which is,
No matter what we’ve been taught,
Greater than the settlement a city can
Pay to a mother to stop crying, and more
Beautiful than the brand new shiny bullet
Fished from the folds of my brain.
from BuzzFeed
NICKOLE BROWN
* * *
The Dead
It was the ones no one remembered who pulled at me.
—Dorothy Allison
So tell me, who remembers Topa, her daddy, his face marked with smallpox
or his two sisters, one that died one day, the otheren the next?
Who remembers quarantined houses marked with a red card, the brain
fevers and blood fluxes, or the uncle who found a rafter in the tobacco barn
for his neck? And wasn’t there a second cousin
who phoned his brother before making a confetti
of his own brains? Or that other young uncle—a good-looking
son of a bitch—who, face down in the river, took mud
into his handsome lungs? Or the babies—Jesus, always the babies—
drowned in washtubs or bit by brown recluse, or Claire, a girl born
four months early, small enough to crib in a shoebox
and thrived, but her brother—full-term, healthy as a horse—
who was sleeping sound on his second day when he
just died?
And who remembers Yael but me, that girl with the name so pretty
I could taste the syllables—Yah Elle—
and called her again and again? She was only
seven, her blood a sandstorm of cells, at war with itself.
Or my soft-spoken cousin, that kid
surfer who thought he could crush time-
release painkillers with his teeth and
live? Does anyone remember how impossible
death seemed in Florida, how like a sun-scorched
fern his hands curled, two black fiddleheads, the foam at his mouth
when all his chickenshit friends left him
for dead? On the way to his funeral, Fanny got after us for wearing black:
All you young girls always wearing dark, dark, dark, she said. You need to put on a bright
and purdy color, something that don’t make you look so depressed all the fucking time.
We laughed, reminded her where we were going, but who can say
her fussing was a joke—her amnesia seemed
fender-struck, a switch flipped
off inside a woman who couldn’t take no more.
Later that day we walked to church under mangroves swarmed
with the bright green fluster of wild parakeets.
I can’t say I remember much more than my aunt, how she looked
up into the trees, said, Oh, little birds, don’t you know?
And the birds, briskly chittering back, answered her:
No.
from Cave Wall
CYRUS CASSELLS
* * *
Elegy with a Gold Cradle
Now that you’re forever
ministering wind and turquoise, ashes
eclipsed by the sea’s thrust
and the farthest tor
(I know you were always
more than my mother)—
giveaway flecks tipped and scattered
from an island palisade;
now that you’re a restless synonym
for the whistling fisherman’s
surfacing mesh,
the alluring moon’s path and progress
through a vast chaos
of unrelenting waves,
let me reveal:
in the at-a-loss days
following your scattering,
in my panoramic hotel, I found
a sun-flooded cradle—
so pristine, so spot-lit, and sacramental
beside my harbor-facing bed,
I couldn’t bear to rock
or even touch it, Mother:
I marveled at the gold-leafed bars
and contours—the indomitable,
antique wood beneath, an emblem
of unbeatable hope
and prevailing tenderness—
then, for a crest-like, hallowing hour,
listen, my mourning was suffused
with the specter of your lake-calm
cascade of hair, inkwell-dark
in the accruing shadows,
your rescuing, soothing contralto,
and oh yes, Isabel,
the longed-for fluttering
of my nap-time lids:
entrancing gold
of the first revealing dawns,
the first indispensable lullabies—
from AGNI
ISAAC CATES
* * *
Fidelity and the Dead Singer
for Michael Donaghy
If I set a new stylus on an old record—
my mother’s teenage single of Roy Head and the Traits,
a second-hand Howlin’ Wolf, the B-side of Hey Jude
I played until I couldn’t hear it—it’s the same catch,
same scratch, same scratch again, same clouds
of static subsiding into soft focus. The first beat
brings it all back home, the dead singer’s voice
alive like a recurring dream, or like a ritual
as a ritual wishes it could be, unreeling perfectly
over rhythms cherished to the point of sanctity.
Not so for poems. The blank before the words
has no voice of its own, and when the verbs
unfurl they change a little every time
—not in errors of transcription but in changes
of the throat the poem courses through:
grown lazy, gruff, impatient through the years,
or passing from your mouth to mine like a flu
then passing limply through a stranger’s lips
incognito, stumbling, in strange accents.
If only you were in the words, or between them.
I want to hear them again the way you said them:
the pauses, in accordance with your wishes;
the full stops, rough with markings for your breath.
from The American Scholar
ALLISON COBB
* * *
I Forgive You
I forgive you fingers. I forgive you wrists and palms. I forgive you web of veins, the nameless knuckles, twenty-seven bones, the nails and moons below. I forgive you feet, the toes and toenails, metatarsals arching up, cuneiform, the cuboids, and navicular. I forgive you sole of foot, fibrofatty pressure chambers, dense packed nerve and tissue, the spring ligament. I forgive you ankle, lovely with twin bone swells. I forgive you calf abundant, knee cap, knee joint extra complex and temperamental. I forgive you bone and sinew, blood vessel and braid of muscle. I forgive you tidal lymph. I forgive you skin, the coast on which all washes up. I forgive you thigh and buttock, anus, vagina, clitoris, urethra, mons a rounded mass of fatty tissue, inner and outer lips, the smooth stretch of perineum. I forgive you sacroiliac, the bone wings laced with tendon, the pelvic inlet and the brim. I forgive you coiled intestines lined in tissue soft as velvet, the uterus and eggs inside of ovaries, the fluting tubes Fallopian, the docile stomach sack. I forgive you my esophagus, moist mucosa, heart and lung lobes, liver, kidneys, pancreas and gall bladder, the spleen—all the inner organs curled together in the dark and muttering like clocks, like memories of clocks. I forgive you. I forgive you breasts, your lobes and lobules, ducts and alveoli rising to the darkened areola and the nipple passage outward. I forgive you golden seams of fat in semi-liquid state, encasing in your oily cells the poisons of the world. I forgive you mouth, the teeth and budded tongue, the epiglottis, pharynx and the tough-ringed trachea, the larynx with its cords for making sound. I forgive you nasal cavity and sinuses, the ear canal and clear-walled eyeballs—all the head holes opened to the rain of light, the floating atoms of the air, the jacked together molecules of the stupid human world. I forgive you ropey muscles of the neck and face, so overstrained from constantly composing mirrors. I forgive you brain, three pounds of convoluted meat plastered with grey nerve cells, wrapped in blood-rich tissue, floating in your own sweet bath of fluid. I forgive you spinal column sprouting from the brain stem, flaring wires to spark electric charges through dumb tissue. I forgive you glands, both tubular and alveolar, releasing streams of chemicals and mucus, sweat and milk and oil. I forgive you every hair bulb, constantly dividing, pressing hardened protein shafts up toward the light. I forgive you cells, all one hundred trillion, the inner ocean that has ebbed and flowed across three million years. I forgive you every part performing all the intricate and simple tasks that make this mass alive. I forgive you all for already having died.
