by David Lehman
This we entreat, implore, beseech
Whose miseries are too deep for speech.
from Rattle
ROBERT CORDING
* * *
Toast to My Dead Parents
My parents worshipped at the altar
of the present, each moment
an opportunity for bickering,
for one of them, in their elaborate game
of cat-and-mouse—Didn’t you say
it was going to rain today?
Who put the salt and pepper here,
it’s gone in the cabinet above the stove
for sixty years—to gain a slight advantage.
They were entertaining, their fights
like tickets to the Amusement Park
we could never afford.
My father, who liked wordplay,
said they were keeping things fresh.
They said good morning
in myriad phrases—the eggs are dry,
you burnt the English muffin again,
where did you put my pills?
That got the morning going like the cuckoo
popping out of the Black Forest
kitchen clock to jeeringly announce
the hour that was an hour too late,
each blaming the other for oversleeping.
It was, I guess, in its sad, crazy
destructive way, a form of communication.
My brothers and I never understood
their day-long bickering, nor that
nagging devotion to each other,
one of them unfailingly present
at the other’s bedside in sickness.
They never complained about money,
lived happily by the house rule of enough,
as in whatever we have is enough,
yet seemed always to be in need
of something that wasn’t to be had—
something intangible they wanted
to hold with their hands, or be
able to say with the fluency of words
which never came, or came
garbled and incompletely, or twisted
whatever they were looking for
into another insult.
Their bickering grew less playful,
more cat batting a half-dead mouse
back and forth between its paws,
as they tried to ward off
the clock-tick of dying’s boredom.
They certainly kept things fresh,
the freedom of destruction, I guess,
better than some quiet descent
into death. And so, dear parents, I toast you,
toast all those words volleyed back and forth,
the two of you filled with some great need
that could never be fully met,
true believers in all that might be
that never was, hopeless
romantics to the bitter end.
from The Sewanee Review
CYNTHIA CRUZ
* * *
Artaud
At age five, with his sister Marie-Ange.
Around 1920 at age twenty-four.
Around 1920 at his sister’s wedding.
As Cecco, in Marcel Vandal’s film Graziella (1926).
As Gringalet, in Luitz-Morat’s film Le Juif errant (1926).
As Marat, in Abel Gance’s Napoléon (1927).
As Marat.
As the Intellectual, in Léon Poirier’s film Verdun, visions d’histoire (1928).
As the monk Massieu, in Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928).
As the father in his play, Les Cenci, produced in 1935 by the Theater of Cruelty.
On the grounds of the asylum in Rodez, with Dr. Ferdière in May 1946.
Self-portrait (December 17, 1946).
His room in the clinic in Ivry-sur-Seine.
In his room, shortly before his death.
from Bennington Review
DICK DAVIS
* * *
A Personal Sonnet
How strange this life is mine, and not another,
This jigsaw . . . each irrevocable piece.
That bad, unfinished business of my brother,
Dead at nineteen; my gadding years in Greece
And Italy; life lived, not understood;
A sunset in Kerala, when it seemed
The sun had risen on my life for good.
All this was real, but seems now as if dreamed.
The presences I’ve loved, and poetry—
Faces I cannot parse or paraphrase
Whose mystery is all that they reveal;
The Persian poets who laid hands on me
And whispered that all poetry is praise:
These are the dreams that turned out to be real.
from The Hudson Review
WARREN DECKER
* * *
Today’s Special
Today’s special is all-natural rage,
Grilled on a smoldering fire.
Its powerful flavor made subtle with age,
Today’s special is all-natural rage.
Domestically raised in a comfortable cage,
And fed only free-range desire,
Today’s special is all-natural rage,
Grilled on a smoldering fire.
from Think Journal
SUSAN DE SOLA
* * *
The Wives of the Poets
All poets’ wives have rotten lives,
Their husbands look at them like knives
—Delmore Schwartz
The wives of the poets,
they never complain.
They know they are married
to drama and pain.
They know they are married
to more than their man.
They know there are others—
young lovers he can
fend off from the marriage
that keeps him afloat,
for rail as they may,
he won’t rock that boat.
She won’t read the poems
he’s written for her;
the poems for lovers
will cause no great stir.
He knows she won’t read them,
because her concern
is life (and not words)
but both feel the burn
of the daggers they throw,
the sharp looks that show
the rot in the lives
of poets, and wives.
from The Dark Horse
DANTE DI STEFANO
* * *
Reading Dostoyevsky at Seventeen
In those days, my dreams always changed titles
before they were finished and I wanted
only to love in that insane tortured way
of poor dear Dmitri Karamazov.
Suddenly, I was speaking the language
of lapdog and samovar. This is
the ballroom, the barracks, the firing squad.
This is the old monk with the beard of bees.
This is the orange lullaby the moon
of the moon will sing you when it’s grieving.
This is the province you escape by train,
fleeing heavy snow and eternal elk.
This is the part where I take your hand in
my hand and I tell you we are burning.
from Met Magazine
NAUSHEEN EUSUF
* * *
Pied Beauty
Is it not the beauty of the maculate?
The speckled, spotted, the rose now varicose;
the sky now gold and now a purple bruise;
the taint and sully of the soul’s caprice;
the fitful orisons of a restless hour;
the artful heart so fickle-quick to sour.
Whatever wavers with the changing minute:
the weather, the markets, the 401 and peace
of mind; what had been promised but never meant;
the youth and years that n
ow seem badly spent—
Accept it.
from Birmingham Poetry Review
JONATHAN GALASSI
* * *
Orient Epithalamion
for Barry Bergdoll and Bill Ryall
Fall will touch down in golden Orient,
where ospreys float and peace comes dropping slow.
There will be pumpkins by the ton at Latham’s.
The trees will re-rehearse their yearly show.
But now crepe myrtle ornaments the village,
rose of Sharon, autumn clematis.
The oyster ponds are dark and tranquil mirrors
basking in the sunlight’s brazen kiss.
On Skipper’s Lane, Sebastian and Sarah
have packed up with their brood, as one expects,
and Madeline and Chris, and Jane and Eddie.
No more artists! No more architects!
Just Miriam and Grayson, Sylvia and Freddie.
Gone: writers, agents, publishers, and all!
The real people, proudly holding steady,
will reap the blond munificence of fall.
Goodbye to the disturbances of summer,
when Stevie’s singers jazzed in Poquatuck
and a Supreme Court Justice read our rights out
to every citizen, man, doe, and buck.
Now egrets dot the marsh on Narrow River.
The swan is hiding till she nests next spring.
Virginia creeper reddens on the tree trunks.
Goldenrod envelops everything,
succeeding to swamp rose and honeysuckle
and all the weeds that came and went in waves.
The geese will soon be flying in formation
the way the Tuthill slaves sleep in their graves.
Near the monarch station, the Holzapfels
harvest their garlic. Milkweed is in flower.
Leslie’s pool is cooling down. The ferry
disgorges only fifty cars an hour.
It’s time for sweet bay scallops, now the jellies
have turned tail in the Sound and sped away.
The Bogdens lay their conch pots every morning,
and the water climbs in Hallock’s Bay.
Charles the First is staking lilies. Sinan
reduces his last oozings, hours by hours.
Karen surveys the still street from her study.
Charles the Second’s arms are full of flowers.
And the wild turkeys make their first appearance,
though Bay and Sound still glisten from the Hill.
The vineyard grapes hang blithe and ripe and ruddy.
Ann builds her house and Barry marries Bill.
Wreathe them with sea lavender and asters!
Sing for the joys and years they have in store.
Husband them; preserve them from disasters.
Let there be jazzing in the deep heart’s core—
and let the tide not overrun the causeway:
may Orient be theirs forever more!
from The New Yorker
JESSICA GOODFELLOW
* * *
Test
Mrs. Yeager’s handout of college prep vocab words
was meant as an onerous task for a neophyte, a germane lexicon,
but I ascertained first what had been my uncle’s initials: S A T.
I heard no more of the lecture, repeated silently his moniker.
Was this (a) auspicious; (b) ominous; (c) merely benign?
My mother’s only story: how my uncle, between all-
night shifts at the post office and arduous college courses,
used to rouse and feed an infant me, his hand to my mouth.
Otherwise she kept a silence in which I learned ambiguous,
lugubrious, and truncate. Through my uncle’s absence
I memorized doleful, evanescent, and curtailed by heart.
“Choose the best answer from the following.” The sentence suggests
there is a best answer for an empty mouth. Mortality is
(a) conditional; (b) congenital; (c) incompatible; (d) superfluous.
Death is (a) insatiable; (b) inexorable; (c) ineffable; (d) immutable.
I am (a) the niece of no body; (b) death’s little dilettante;
(c) consanguine with hoar frost; (d) kin to white noise.
from The Southern Review
SONIA GREENFIELD
* * *
Ghost Ship
I have been that young, that electrified
by the bohemian scene of a city spilling its lights
all around me. I have been to parties
in sketchy spaces where painters have work
on the walls that should be seen by millions
but is seen by the few of us figuring out
who we’re going to fuck after too much cheap wine
drunk from plastic tumblers, figuring out
how we’re going to make it a country’s width away
from families, struck out on our own
like explorers getting comfortable with being alone
in a wilderness that is actually just a room
rented in a house of strangers. I have been
that woman high on E, my eyes doll-dark, jaw
clenched, body ready to swallow pleasure
in a million lusty gulps. I know any space we inhabit
can become a ghost ship. I have read enough
to know stories of wildfires, of boats found
empty, of the soul yanked whole cloth from
its innocent wearer. But you can’t live in fear
of the apparition, the adventurers afloat on
their rickety structure and cast to a sea
of flames. It can happen at any time to anyone,
so when music flares up and takes a hold of you,
when a swirl of colored spotlights sets you
spinning, you have to dance as if
the very act of living depends on it.
from Rattle
JOY HARJO
* * *
An American Sunrise
We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves. We
were surfacing the edge of our ancestors’ fights, and ready to strike.
It was difficult to lose days in the Indian bar if you were straight.
Easy if you played pool and drank to remember to forget. We
made plans to be professional—and did. And some of us could sing
so we drummed a fire-lit pathway up to those starry stars. Sin
was invented by the Christians, as was the Devil, we sang. We
were the heathens, but needed to be saved from them—thin
chance. We knew we were all related in this story, a little gin
will clarify the dark and make us all feel like dancing. We
had something to do with the origins of blues and jazz
I argued with the music as I filled the jukebox with dimes in June.
Forty years later and we still want justice. We are still America. We
know the rumors of our demise. We spit them out. They die soon.
from Poetry
TERRANCE HAYES
* * *
American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin
The black poet would love to say his century began
With Hughes or, God forbid, Wheatley, but actually
It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors,
Poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset
Bridges & windows. In a second I’ll tell you how little
Writing rescues. My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not
Especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned,
And skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary.
What do you call a visionary who does not recognize
Her vision? Orpheus was alone when he invented writing.
His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent
His beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it.
He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant
I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.
from The New Yorker
ERNEST HILBERT
* * *
Mars Ultor
Before they had a fleet
Romans rowed on logs
As they prepared to meet
Carthage. Treaties, public
Or secret, do little when
The border of the republic
Is breached without notice:
More tug-of-war
Than elegant chess.
Some ask: Is virtù virtue?
After reconciliation, consensus,
Appeasement, the coup.
Some rely on law,
But law relies on guns,
Or must withdraw.
Brutes push their way to power,
But the muddiest barbarian
Also wants the throne an hour,
And dons a crown, marks affairs,
Nods under a golden branch until
A stronger one turns up the stairs.
from Academic Questions
R. NEMO HILL
* * *
The View from The Bar
So much of the coin of youth was spent,
while leaning here, with smoke and brew,
my back half-turned to face a view
beyond this room’s brief consequence.
So many nights washed up against
my eyes in their impassive mask
and touched this quadrangle of glass,
