by David Lehman
they sing as they lope over bridges,
bums to the wind, ripping out throats
on footpaths, pissing off brokers.
Tomorrow they’ll be back
in their middle-management black
and Jimmy Choos
with hours they can’t account for
and first dates’ blood on the stairs.
They’ll make some calls: Good-bye.
It isn’t you, it’s me. I can’t say why.
They’ll dream of sprouting tails
at sales meetings,
right in the audiovisuals.
They’ll have addictive hangovers
and ruined nails.
from Freeman’s
CATHERINE BARNETT
* * *
Central Park
I’d like to buy one when I die,
one of the benches not yet spoken for,
not yet tagged with a small stainless plaque
and someone else’s name.
If they’re all gone, please
help me carry a replica
to the boat pond so I can sit
and watch the model boats get nowhere
beautifully, rented by the fixed hours
I’m grateful not to be out of yet.
Another flicker of love,
an updated Triple-A membership,
and a handful of Pilot G-Tec-C4 blue-black pens,
what else do I need?
Universe,
watch over us.
Boat, my poor faraway father says,
as if my mother has never seen one.
Boat, he says, and we say, Yes,
aren’t they beautiful.
Come winter,
the boathouse here is locked up,
the pond drained,
except one year it wasn’t
and my son and I convinced ourselves
his new Golden Bright
could sail across.
Merry Christmas, no one said
as I pulled the black plastic liner bags
from the empty trash cans
and stepped into them,
one for each leg,
and waded into the addled water
to salvage the present.
I think that moment is something to remember,
or something to remember me by,
brief, vivid, foolhardy—
even the revenants watching from the line of benches
said so:
thus have been our travels.
Oblivion, they said,
there’s no unenduring it.
from The American Poetry Review
JOSHUA BENNETT
* * *
America Will Be
after Langston Hughes
I am now at the age where my father calls me brother
when we say goodbye. Take care of yourself, brother,
he whispers a half beat before we hang up the phone,
and it is as if some great bridge has unfolded over the air
between us. He is 68 years old. He was born in the throat
of Jim Crow Alabama, one of ten children, their bodies side
by side in the kitchen each morning like a pair of hands
exalting. Over breakfast, I ask him to tell me the hardest thing
about going to school back then, expecting some history
I have already memorized. Boycotts & attack dogs, fire
hoses, Bull Connor in his personal tank, candy paint
shining white as a slaver’s ghost. He says: Having to read
The Canterbury Tales. He says: eating lunch alone. Now, I hear
the word America & think first of my father’s loneliness,
the hands holding the pens that stabbed him as he walked
through the hallway, unclenched palms settling
onto a wooden desk, taking notes, trying to pretend
the shame didn’t feel like an inheritance. You say democracy
& I see the men holding documents that sent him off
to war a year later, Motown blaring from a country
boy’s bunker as napalm scarred the sky into jigsaw
patterns, his eyes open wide as the blooming blue
heart of the lightbulb in a Crown Heights basement where he
& my mother will dance for the first time, their bodies
swaying like rockets in the impossible dark & yes I know
that this is more than likely not what you mean
when you sing liberty but it is the only kind
I know or can readily claim, the times where those hunted
by history are underground & somehow daring to love
what they cannot hold or fully fathom when the stranger
is not a threat but the promise of a different ending
I woke up this morning and there were men on television
lauding a wall big enough to box out an entire world,
families torn with the stroke of a pen, citizenship
little more than some garment that can be stolen or reduced
to cinder at a tyrant’s whim my father knows this grew up
knowing this witnessed firsthand the firebombs
the Klan multiple messiahs love soaked & shot through
somehow still believes in this grand bloodstained
experiment still votes still prays that his children might
make a life unlike any he has ever seen. He looks
at me like the promise of another cosmos and I never
know what to tell him. All of the books in my head
have made me cynical and distant, but there’s a choir
in him that calls me forward my disbelief built as it is
from the bricks of his belief not in any America
you might see on network news or hear heralded
before a football game but in the quiet
power of Sam Cooke singing that he was born
by a river that remains unnamed that he runs
alongside to this day, some vast and future country
some nation within a nation, black as candor,
loud as the sound of my father’s
unfettered laughter over cheese eggs & coffee
his eyes shut tight as armories his fists
unclenched as if he were invincible
from The Nation
FLEDA BROWN
* * *
Afternoons at the Lake
I would rather be trapped in an attic with rats than play Monopoly
all the afternoons it takes to lose the last of my money to the already
super-rich one-percent grandchild, to line up cheap green houses
on my low-rent Baltic and Mediterranean Avenues in a futile attempt
to collect enough to survive the next round of rent on Boardwalk
or Park Place, to feel pitiful gratitude when I Receive for Services
twenty-five dollars. Everything will be gone, save the smallest
denominations, the Asian crayfish will overrun the native,
the Autumn Olive will proliferate, the tallest thing will grow taller,
will be layered with gold, will turn to gold, will harden its gold heart.
It will squander, jet, pocket, dole, win past wanting to win, dig
the mineshaft, the ore, eat up the hillside the birds the whales,
crack the foundations of houses, force the defaulters into the street.
Dice will land as they will, will cause the tiny car to bounce
happily from St. James Place to Indiana Avenue, a galaxy of gobble,
will enable the placement of flamboyant hotels on the coast
where waters wash with exquisite music shoreward, all of it owned
by the God who dwells inside the winning, who has not said
otherwise yet, who owns Free Parking and Jail, who owns the treeless
board the classy neighborhoods as well as the ones with the rats
and smas
hed-out windows, the murderous scrawl of languages
on walls, the smiling God holding the center with top hat and cane,
as I at last step out on the dock with my coffee and say to myself
the lines where Keats rhymes “think” with “nothingness do sink.”
from The Southern Review
SUMITA CHAKRABORTY
* * *
Essay on Joy
When as a child my father deemed my weight excessive, the measure of which shifted according to whim, he would take his underwear off of his body and place it on top of my head. I was to run in circles around the house, wearing it, for a prescribed number of times. This was called “exercise.”
I am undertaking a new labor: I will imagine myself into deep, focused, and strange hatreds. Spinoza writes, He who imagines that what he hates is destroyed will rejoice. Some years ago, dozens of grackles fell dead from the sky in Boston, the cause unknown. And so I think: I detest grackles. I rejoice.
If asked, I would have explained the cause: somewhere in a level of atmosphere for which humans hold no keys lived a green-shining carrion crow. As her name indicates, she ate dead bodies. But nothing had died there, ever; and so, she was hungry. She was kept company by this lack.
Sometimes, I tell myself that I cannot think of a lover with terribly much feeling at all. But this is a lie. The absence of feeling is an assertion of a feeling, and it is a memory, or an exercise, of a kind of a joy I sometimes fear I have forgotten, because, as a lover, I have been slighted, and, as a child, often betrayed.
For some length of time that a crow considers painful and I cannot measure, she caressed her lack like a lover. But then she came to fear her lover, for it caused her pain, and she could not convince herself that she had no feeling for her lover. So she undertook an exercise of destruction and began to kill.
When as a child I turned to violence, my mother, who also feared my father and even more feared the thought that I might become him, tried to warn, A fist is always made with four fingers that point back toward you. This is the kind of thing a grackle would say, because on their feet is one toe that always points backward.
Then the crow’s fallow field of carrion was her new creation, and she had grown accustomed to hating the products of her own making. She ate some, and so she finally grew in size, and hated that, too. She who imagines what she hates is destroyed will rejoice. She opened a hole in the bottom of the atmosphere. Her kills fell.
from The Rumpus
VICTORIA CHANG
* * *
Six Obits
Friendships—died June 24,
2009, once beloved but not
consistently beloved. The mirror
won the battle. I am now
imprisoned in the mirror. All my
selves spread out like a deck of
cards. It’s true, the grieving
speak a different language. I am
separated from my friends by
gauze. I will drive myself to my
own house for the party. I will
make small talk with myself,
spill a drink on myself. When
it’s over, I will drive myself back
to my own house. My
conversations with other parents
about children pass me on the
staircase on the way up and
repeat on the way down. Before
my mother’s death, I sat
anywhere. Now I look for the
image of the empty chair near the
image of the empty table. An
image is a kind of distance. An
image of me sits down.
Depression is a glove over the
heart. Depression is an image of
a glove over the image of a heart.
Optimism—died on August 3,
2015, a slow death into a
pavement. At what point does a
raindrop accept its falling? The
moment the cloud begins to
buckle under it or the moment the
ground pierces it and breaks its
shape? In December, my mother
had her helper prepare a Chinese
hot pot feast. My mother said it
would probably be her last
Christmas. I laughed at her. She
yelled at my father all night. I put
a fish ball in my mouth. My
optimism covered the whole ball
as if the fish had never died, had
never been gutted and rolled into
a humiliating shape. To
acknowledge death is to
acknowledge that we must take
another shape.
Affection—died on November
12, 1978, the last picture I see of
my mother’s arms around me. At
the funeral, I never touched my
sister. When the room was
finally empty, she sat in the front
row with her spouse. I watched
his arm lift and fall onto her
shoulder. When my spouse’s
parents died, both times, he burst
into tears, inextinguishable tears
that quickly extinguished. The
first time, he hugged me and not
his family. The second time, he
hugged no one. When the nurse
called, she said, I’m sorry, but
your mother passed away this
morning. When I told my
children, the three of us hugged
in a circle, burst into tears. As if
the tears were already there
crying on their own and we, the
newly bereaved, exploded into
them. In the returning out of the
tears, the first person I dissolves
a little more each time.
Clothes—died on August 10,
2015. We stuffed them into lawn
bags to donate. Shirt after shirt,
button-down after button-down,
dress after dress, limb after limb.
A few leapt out to me like the
flame from a nightmare, the kind
of flame that almost seems
human in its gestures. I kept
those. I kept the hundreds of
pencils. I am writing with a
pencil from my mother’s drawer.
It says Detroit Public Schools,
where she taught. Each sentence
fights me. Once we rolled her
downstairs, played croquet and
putt putt golf. She sat and
watched, her vacant eyes not
seeing anything we saw. As if
she were looking beyond us,
beyond the sun. The days of
August already made a certain
way that she could see and we
couldn’t. I left her in the sun too
long. One child doing cartwheels
on the grass as my mother looked
on, wearing the white blouse
with the small pink flowers
swirling in a pattern. I kept the
stare. I kept the flowers. And I
donated the vacant shirt.
The Ocean—died on August 21,
2017, when I didn’t jump from
the ship. Instead, I dragged the
door shut and pulled up the safety
latch. The water in my body
wanted to pour into the ocean and
I imagined myself being washed
by the water, my body separating
into the droplets it always was. I
could feel the salt on my neck for
days. A woman I once knew
leapt out of a window to her
death. The difference was she
was being chased. Some
scientists say the ocean is
warming. Some say the ocean
has hypoxic areas with
no
oxygen. Even water has
hierarchy. A child’s death is
worse than a woman’s death
unless the woman who died was
the mother of the child and the
only parent. If the woman who
died was the mother of an adult,
it is merely a part of life. If both
mother and daughter die
together, it is a shame. If a whole
family dies, it is a catastrophe.
What will we call a whole
ocean’s death? Peace.
The Clock—died on June 24,
2009, and it was untimely. How
many times my father has failed
the clock test. Once I heard a
scientist with Alzheimer’s on the
radio, trying to figure out why he
could no longer draw a clock. It
had to do with the superposition
of three types. The hours
represented by 1–12, the minutes
where a 1 no longer represents 1
but a 5, and a 2 now represents
10, then the second hand that
measures 1 to 60. I sat at the
stoplight and thought of the
clock, its perfect circle and its
superpositions, all the layers of
complication on a plane of
thought, yet the healthy read the
clock in one single instant
without a second thought. I think
about my father and his lack of
first thoughts, how every thought
is a second or third or fourth
thought, unable to locate the first
most important thought. I
wonder about the man on the
radio and how far his brain has
degenerated since. Marvel at
how far our brains allow
language to wander without
looking back but knowing where
the pier is. If you unfold an
origami swan, and flatten the
paper, is the paper sad because it
has seen the shape of the swan or
does it aspire towards flatness, a
life without creases? My father is
the paper. He remembers the
swan but can’t name it. He no
longer knows the paper swan
