by David Lehman
ready to die & go to hell.
Do you know the Egyptians
had temples filled with dog bones
stacked in rows along stone walls?
I can understand mummified
crocodiles predicting rainfall,
& even the sacred Nile ibis.
They’re speaking about time.
The gutted loot is long gone,
but the bones confess.
I still see Seneca ghosts
because under my feet
are talismans, blanched seeds
& bones of extinct species,
& paved-over shortcuts
around these glass vaults,
& you can forget the tab
I dropped with Burroughs
in ’79. They still believe
I’m a torchbearer for one
or the other, a tangle of thorns
for the breastplate. My brain
maybe lashed to the helm
but I am still my own man.
No one accuses me
of tying silver bells
on my hands & feet,
& I don’t need eyes
deliberately on me
to breathe or talk
with the crows
at dusk. That lost river
under a fallen bridge.
How many votes do you think
George Wallace received here
on our enlightened East Coast
stage? Not to ignore the South
or the Midwest. Here I am
talking history with you,
but I should just stand here
& gaze out this basement
window, counting the shoes
lamenting along the sidewalk.
Yeah, there’s a basic rhythm
in everything we do & think,
whether it’s buying & selling
magic, or talking a brother
or sister down from a roof.
Seldom a demigod wishes
for John Cage’s silence,
whether Germany or Alabama.
That’s why the avant-garde
blows against a void & nudges
gods awake, to give body
to soul as the highs & lows
come together. I’m tired
of questions accosting me
in the streets, because Wallace
still scares me in suburban light.
He’d strut upon a puckish set
of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
as Brutus, & leave as Hamlet
with a boy’s grin on his face.
He knew the rhythm of a day
could bring a crowd to its feet.
Sometimes people get tangled up
inside themselves over a single word—
noble or ennoble, whatever—a great
difference when it comes to life
or death. That pretty cashier
Camille at the corner bodega
she didn’t know a muskmelon
from a cantaloupe, & kept saying,
What do you call this so
I can put it into the computer
& it can tell us the price,
& I said, This is a muskmelon
darling, & she said, Well,
I never heard it called that
before, & don’t call me darling,
& that’s when I said, Okay,
to save your soul you can call
this a cantaloupe & let me
get outta here. You see
I know a muskmelon
by its rough skin, because
that’s what my daddy called it,
& I loved rubbing my fingers
over it before my mama
cut into it with a knife
pulling the sun into our window,
& she’d place the biggest slice
on my blue rooster plate.
from The American Poetry Review
DANUSHA LAMÉRIS
* * *
The Watch
At night, my husband takes it off
puts it on the dresser beside his wallet and keys
laying down, for a moment, the accoutrements of manhood.
Sometimes, when he’s not looking, I pick it up
savor the weight, the dark face, ticked with silver
the brown ostrich leather band with its little goosebumps
raised as the flesh is raised in pleasure.
He had wanted a watch and was pleased when I gave it to him.
And since we’ve been together ten years
it seemed like the occasion for the gift of a watch
a recognition of the intricate achievements
of marriage, its many negotiations and nameless triumphs.
But tonight, when I saw it lying there among
his crumpled receipts and scattered pennies
I thought of my brother’s wife coming home
from the coroner, carrying his rings, his watch
in a clear, ziplock bag, and how we sat at the table
and emptied them into our palms
their slight pressure all that remained of him.
How odd the way a watch keeps going
even after the heart has stopped. My grandfather
was a watchmaker and spent his life in Holland
leaning over a clean, well-lit table, a surgeon of time
attending to the inner workings: spring,
escapement, balance wheel. I can’t take it back,
the way the man I love is already disappearing
into this mechanism of metal and hide,
this accountant of hours
that holds, with such precise indifference,
all the minutes of his life.
from The American Poetry Review
DORIANNE LAUX
* * *
Lapse
Poem beginning with a line from Gwendolyn Brooks
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer. I
see the leaves turning on their stems. I am
not oblivious to the sun as it lowers on its stem, not
fooled by the clock holding off, not deceived
by the weight of its tired hands holding forth. I
do not think my dead will return. They will not do
what I ask of them. Even if I plead on my knees. Not
even if I kiss their photographs or think
of them as I touch the things they left me. It
isn’t possible to raise them from their beds, is
it? Even if I push the dirt away with my bare hands? Still-
ness, unearth their faces. Bring me the last dahlias of summer.
from Plume
PHILIP LEVINE
* * *
Rain in Winter
Outside the window drops caught
on the branches of the quince, the sky
distant and quiet, a few patches of light
breaking through. The day is fresh, barely
begun yet feeling used. Soon the phone
will ring for someone, and no one
will pick it up, and the ringing will go on
until the icebox answers with a groan.
The lost dog who sleeps on a bed of rags
behind the garage won’t appear
to beg for anything. Nothing will explain
where the birds have gone, why a wind rages
through the ash trees, why the world
goes on accepting more and more rain.
from The Threepenny Review
AMIT MAJMUDAR
* * *
Kill List
1. At a certain distance, it looks like a poem.
2. Transliterated, maybe, from the Arabic.
3. Short lined.
4. Short lived.
5. At a certain distance, it reads beautifully.
6. What its authors cultivate is anesthetic distance.
7. Don’t think wreckage, think Brecht.
&
nbsp; 8. Warfare is the theater of detachments.
9. At a certain distance, an angry emperor becomes a god.
10. Distances are more certain now, thanks to satellites.
11. From the desert here to the desert there: 7252.86 miles.
12. At a certain distance, wing lights look like stars.
13. Cars look like Hot Wheels.
14. A human body looks like the stick figure in a game of Hangman.
15. We guess and fill in the blank of each letter.
16. When we make mistakes, line by line we construct the hanged man.
17. The hanged man represents the guesser.
18. The word in question may remain unknown at the end of the game.
19. The word can be a thing or a place.
20. Or a name.
21. At a certain distance, a kill list could be any kind of list.
22. Grocery.
23. Things to Do.
24. Top Ten.
25. Bucket.
26. When hanging a man, any distance between his body and the earth will suffice.
27. Just so long as he cannot touch the ground by extending his feet.
28. Like a thief on tiptoe stealing into airspace.
29. The list is a poetic device much favored by the American poet Whitman.
30. Whitman was the first to establish that a body can be sung electric.
31. American prisons promptly switched to the electric chair.
32. This gave way in some states to the lethal injection.
33. Apparently, physicians wanted a piece of the execution business.
34. At a certain distance, it looked like vaccination.
35. In the same way two thousand volts looks like an orgasm.
36. Or a seizure.
37. Seizures, too, are of various kinds.
38. Drugs can be seized at the border.
39. Fugitives can be seized in motel rooms.
40. By the collar, or failing that, the throat.
41. Moments, too, can be seized.
42. I seized this one, for example, to prepare a kill list in the form of a poem.
43. A kill list, like a poem, bears the signature of its compiler at the bottom.
44. After its lines are revised away, that one name will remain.
45. Your eye, scanning from above, will focus on it.
46. You will make certain assumptions about my ethnicity, my religion, my politics.
47. At a certain distance, I admit, I do look like an Arab.
48. Your pupils will constrict, like a Predator’s faced with a flashlight.
49. I have been waiting here for you, on the floor of this room.
50. As-salamu alaykum.
from The Nation
JAMAAL MAY
* * *
Things That Break
Skin of a plum. Rotting tooth.
Switches cut down by a child
to lash a child’s legs.
A siege does something like this
against sturdy walls. The wrong rules.
A dozen angel figurines flying
from a balcony.
Flailing fist. Splint.
Forefinger and index,
dislocated (not broken). One points
to the left of a man
and the rubbery thing inside quivers
familiar. Raise your hand
if you know how to do this.
If enough hair fails to escape
the pull of a drain and the drain
sputters and fails to swallow water
we will likely say it’s broken.
Waves. Traffic lights.
The craven infantry
of roaches at the flick of a switch.
Will—A child in a shrinking living room
sitting more still than the father.
from Ploughshares
JUDSON MITCHAM
* * *
White
1.
Two years before I was born and less than five miles
from my grandfather’s farm,
somebody killed two women and two men,
filled them with so many rounds
the dead were hard to recognize—
young black men, one a veteran
just returned from the war,
and two young black women, shot to death
by a gathering of men
as white as the Georgia senate,
all persons unknown, or so testified
the single witness, also a white man.
Truman made a statement,
the FBI came down. After seventy years,
the case is still nowhere,
and surely the killers are dead.
But this is not about those who did it.
This is not about justice.
There will be no justice.
It’s about us, me and my friends,
the first generation raised white
in that town after the massacre,
allowed to cakewalk into adulthood,
self-assured, but as unaware
as cattle of what had happened. I didn’t know,
somehow, until I was forty-five years old,
and this is a poem
of dumb, sputtering astonishment
at the ignorance of our lives—we who went
to our churches and our homes
and our history classes, where no one said a word,
we who lived each day like blank pages,
mistake after mistake after mistake
in the history book.
2.
You think you so smooth, even blackface
is okay for you. Go on then, fool.
Look here: God is not mocked.
Ticket or not, you will be on that train, and soon.
And when you take that ride,
you better put on your face right,
wipe off the tarbaby
that came too easy. And how about the way
you talking right this minute?
You better let that go, but you won’t.
So keep it up, strut and hambone,
buck and wing, pick a bale of cotton.
You think you in the big house
for a reason, but son, sometimes
what looks like the sun coming up
is the sun going down,
the world has spun the other way.
There is nothing else to do then
but to turn your sorry ass around. You been going ahead
backwards.
3.
So now you have something to say?
You know who I mean.
Now, when there’s a street in every town,
often a back street that runs past
pawn shops and liquor stores—
named Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard?
Now you have something to say? That is mighty white,
now that nothing is required,
nothing at all, to have coffee at the old place
on the corner with the woman from Cameroon
who runs your office. No refusal of service,
no greasy crew crowded at the window
to beat you both bloody when you leave, no
proprietor with a pick handle
telling you to get out, no sham law
to look the other way, no church to preach
the curse of Ham, no slurs in th
e air
to keep you, too, in your place.
You know who I mean. Back then, you might have been
a frightened little white boy like me,
or you might have been as cool
as a ducktail—slow-riding by the café
to spit out the window, rolling past
in your glass-packed Chevrolet,
playing that race music loud on the radio.
4.
On the notes showing the provenance, you’ll notice,
only first names. That was the etiquette,
and we hold to the old ways
at the underground auction. This is the nose
of a Carlton, this is the eyetooth of a Lucille,
now a charm
for a girl’s bracelet.
What we have here, in the original jars,
are the knuckles and the genitals
of a William. This is the big-toe watch fob of an Odell.
Here is the polished kneecap
of a Randolph, a family keepsake
engraved with the date. Let me be clear, though:
To consider what any of this, or all of it,
might bring at auction
is evidence of a bad misunderstanding. When has anyone
paid a thing?
from Cave Wall
JOHN MURILLO
* * *
Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,
I think first of two sparrows I met when walking home,
late night years ago, in another city, not unlike this—the one
bird frantic, attacking I thought, the way she swooped
down, circled my head, and flailed her wings in my face;
how she seemed to scream each time I swung; how she
dashed back and forth between me and a blood-red Corolla
parked near the opposite curb; how, finally, I understood:
I spied another bird, also calling, his foot inexplicably
caught in the car’s closed door, beating his whole bird
