by David Lehman
represents an animal swan. His
brain is the water the animal
swan once swam in, holds
everything, but when thawed, all
the fish disappear. Most of the
words we say have something to
do with fish. And when they’re
gone, they’re gone.
from The Kenyon Review
CHEN CHEN
* * *
I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party
In the invitation, I tell them for the seventeenth time
(the fourth in writing), that I am gay.
In the invitation, I include a picture of my boyfriend
& write, You’ve met him two times. But this time,
you will ask him things other than can you pass the
whatever. You will ask him
about him. You will enjoy dinner. You will be
enjoyable. Please RSVP.
They RSVP. They come.
They sit at the table & ask my boyfriend
the first of the conversation starters I slip them
upon arrival: How is work going?
I’m like the kid in Home Alone, orchestrating
every movement of a proper family, as if a pair
of scary yet deeply incompetent burglars
is watching from the outside.
My boyfriend responds in his chipper way.
I pass my father a bowl of fish ball soup—So comforting,
isn’t it? My mother smiles her best
Sitting with Her Son’s Boyfriend
Who Is a Boy Smile. I smile my Hurray for Doing
a Little Better Smile.
Everyone eats soup.
Then, my mother turns
to me, whispers in Mandarin, Is he coming with you
for Thanksgiving? My good friend is & she wouldn’t like
this. I’m like the kid in Home Alone, pulling
on the string that makes my cardboard mother
more motherly, except she is
not cardboard, she is
already, exceedingly my mother. Waiting
for my answer.
While my father opens up
a Boston Globe, when the invitation
clearly stated: No security
blankets. I’m like the kid
in Home Alone, except the home
is my apartment, & I’m much older, & not alone,
& not the one who needs
to learn, has to—Remind me
what’s in that recipe again, my boyfriend says
to my mother, as though they have always, easily
talked. As though no one has told him
many times, what a nonlinear slapstick meets
slasher flick meets psychological
pit he is now co-starring in.
Remind me, he says
to our family.
from Poem-a-Day
LEONARD COHEN
* * *
Drank a Lot
i drank a lot. i lost my job.
i lived like nothing mattered.
then you stopped, and came across
my little bridge of fallen answers.
i don’t recall what happened next.
i kept you at a distance.
but tangled in the knot of sex
my punishment was lifted.
and lifted on a single breath—
no coming and no going—
o G-d, you are the only friend
i never thought of knowing.
your remedies beneath my hand
your fingers in my hair
the kisses on our lips began
that ended everywhere.
and now our sins are all confessed
our strategies forgiven
it’s written that the law must rest
before the law is written.
and not because of what i’d lost
and not for what i’d mastered
you stopped for me, and came across
the bridge of fallen answers.
tho’ mercy has no point of view
and no one’s here to suffer
we cry aloud, as humans do:
we cry to one another.
And now it’s one, and now it’s two,
And now the whole disaster.
We cry for help, as humans do—
Before the truth, and after.
And Every Guiding Light Was Gone
And Every Teacher Lying—
There Was No Truth In Moving On—
There Was No Truth In Dying.
And Then The Night Commanded Me
To Enter In Her Side—
And Be As Adam Was To Eve
Before The Great Divide.
her remedies beneath my hand
her fingers in my hair—
and every mouth of hunger glad—
and deeply unaware.
and here i cannot lift a hand
to trace the lines of beauty,
but lines are traced, and beauty’s glad
to come and go so freely.
and from the wall a grazing wind,
weightless and routine—
it wounds us as i part your lips
it wounds us in between.
and every guiding light was gone
and every sweet direction—
the book of love i read was wrong
it had a happy ending.
And Now There Is No Point Of View—
And Now There Is No Other—
We Spread And Drown As Lilies Do—
We Spread And Drown Forever.
You are my tongue, you are my eye,
My coming and my going.
O G-d, you let your sailor die
So he could be the ocean.
And when I’m at my hungriest
She takes away my tongue
And holds me here where hungers rest
Before the world is born.
And fastened here we cannot move
We cannot move forever
We spread and drown as lilies do—
From nowhere to the center.
Escaping through a secret gate
I made it to the border
And call it luck—or call it fate—
I left my house in order.
And now there is no point of view—
And now there is no other—
We spread and drown as lilies do—
We spread and drown forever.
Disguised as one who lived in peace
I made it to the border
Though every atom of my heart
Was burning with desire.
from The New Yorker
LAURA CRONK
* * *
Like a Cat
You want a dog
but you are like a cat,
though you hate cats,
which is a very catlike
position. I want a cat
but you’re allergic
so we’ll get a dog
who will be like me.
Besides, I realize that,
having you, I already
have a cat. You have
intense fixations, like
a cat. Though you’re
tall and strong, you walk
lightly on the balls
of your feet, like a cat.
You’re good at
everything you ever
try to do. In your
reticence you’d rather
not be written about or
analyzed, like a cat.
But you are very good
to look at, to study,
in your many moods
and attitudes, like a cat.
And your affection
is sudden and real,
radiating mystery
and heat beside me,
like a cat.
from STAT®REC
KATE DANIELS
* * *
Metaphor-l
ess
The dryness dead center
Of deep pain. The bone on
Bone grinding that goes on
For months preceding
The surgery—that’s the way
The parent whose child is using
Heroin again feels in the middle
Of the night unable to sleep, standing
At the bedroom window, looking out
Just barely conscious of what the moon
Looks like—drained, gray. The moon
Is a popular literary image—solipsistic
Misery, misplaced love. Whatever.
Tonight, it’s nothing but a source
Of milky light, swinging high up in the sky
Shining weakly on the bleakness inside
And the bleakness outside that has
No other meaning but the cold
Un-crackable rock of itself.
from Five Points
CARL DENNIS
* * *
Armed Neighbor
I don’t want to deny him the right to turn
His homestead into a fortress better prepared
For a siege than the Alamo. But I do wish
I could persuade him no columns of federal marshals
Are preparing to march from town to convert his property
Into a dark-site prison or a welfare hotel
For a mob of migrants too lazy
To make a homestead of their own.
I do wish I could persuade him he’s lucky
That we live in an era where foot-thick walls
And narrow slits for windows have gone the way
Of the moat and drawbridge, an era when many neighbors,
Instead of hardening their perimeters,
Are blurring the boundaries between inside and outside
With elaborate decks and porches.
If safety is his concern, I’d like to convince him
He’d be better off investing in burglar alarms
And in cameras programmed to keep a record
Of all the cars that park near his property, so if
A couple of burglars wait till he leaves for work
To break in and steal his gun collection
He could give the police all the clues they needed
To solve the case in less than a day.
As for the pistol he’s been taking to work for years
In a holster that isn’t hidden, I don’t accuse him
Of trying to mask with a symbol of power
A deep-seated feeling of insignificance.
I believe what he claims, that he hopes to save
Some fellow workers one day from a maniac
Running amok with a gun on the factory floor.
But I wish I could convince him it’s just as likely
That one day a maniac will snatch at his gun
As he walks alone after work to his car,
That the gun will go off in the struggle
And the bullet, if it doesn’t undo him, may undo a girl
Who happens that very moment to be playing hopscotch
Across the street in front of her tenement.
No doubt if I persuade him to leave his gun
At home, at least for a trial period,
On his usual foot patrol after supper
Around the neighborhood, he’ll feel enfeebled,
Powerless to protect a neighbor from a menace
Should any creep near as night comes on.
But I’ll assure him he may still be able
To offer assistance in emergencies.
Say he spots a glow in the sky
And follows it to a house in flames.
A gun would only get in the way
Of his dashing in to wake any sleepers
And carry a child out to a neighbor’s lawn.
And if the parents carry the children
While he’s left with a hamster cage or a fish bowl,
I’d like him to feel the task isn’t beneath him.
Lending a hand, I’d tell him, is always dignified,
While being a hero is incidental.
from New Letters
TOI DERRICOTTE
* * *
An apology to the reader
Let me first say that I regret sending the document out into the world. And I regret that (it having fallen into your hands) I am asking you to read it. However, having—by turns—abandoned and revised it for years, I decided it should be—even must be—given space.
I do this not as a performance of brutality to which I need your witness. I do it because it must exist as a reflection of its contrary. In my body the memories are lodged. The writing is a dim bulb on a black cord in the examiner’s room.
I prefer you do not attempt to read it. I cannot help but feel responsible for your discomfort, so, as you read, you may feel me tugging at your fingers. The revelations are relentless, without a whisper of hope. (Without hope, what gives the poet permission?)
Completing a work of art necessitates a struggle to create balance and symmetry. I have been hampered by an idea of perfection. I have struggled to please one who mirrors back my unworthiness. But poetry is visceral; it re-creates the most primal sense of entitlement to breath and music, to life itself.
I have fixed together an internal form, like a tailor’s bodice. I wear it as a self, stiff but useful, stitched together from scraps.
from Prairie Schooner
THOMAS DEVANEY
* * *
Brilliant Corners
for Jennie C. Jones
The magic parts before they were burned-up and vacuumed.
A sound so light as if no one was there at all.
Your body a buffer between the same word said at the same time and other hyper jinx chances.
The dustup made the light look more grey than green.
Time was opened-up wider then, so wide in fact that even now it isn’t all the way shut.
Horns, sirens, acoustic panels, plenty of three people can keep a secret, if two are dead stories to go around.
A late and great string quartet playing in the next room.
I couldn’t tell where the music was coming from, and I didn’t care.
I was back in high school practicing a clarinet concerto.
And for months, upended by the harp on the headphones in the Chopin waltz.
Walkman freewheeling Sony Walkman—
And only one other person in the world.
It does not matter where we fell in, we did.
What she called AC/DC I called AC/DC. Though Monk wasn’t Monk, he was MONK: avuncular, like an uncle with no glass in his glasses, poking his fingers in to show us.
Not silence, but the stillness of the world; and yet even being still didn’t mean you couldn’t scratch your nose.
How you once heard the sound of water running under a heavy manhole cover. The Great Spirit echoing in the old city pipes; the ghost river running under Allegheny Avenue.
Not sound, but the fact of sound.
Not sound or the fact of sound, but the fact of sound after the sound was gone.
from The Brooklyn Rail
NATALIE DIAZ
* * *
Skin-Light
My whole life I have obeyed it—
its every hunting. I move beneath it
as a jaguar moves, in the dark
liquid blading of shoulder.
The opened-gold field and glide of the hand,
light-fruited, and scythe-lit.
I have come to this god-made place—
Teotlachco, the ball court—
because the light called: lightwards!
and dwells here: Lamp-Land.
We touch the ball of light
to one another—split bodies desire-knocked
and stroked bright.
Light reshapes my lover’s elbow,
a brass whistle.
I put my mouth there—mercy-luxed, and come, we both,
to
light. It streams me.
A rush of scorpions—
fast-light. A lash of breath—
god-maker.
Light horizons her hip—springs an ocelot
cut of chalcedony and magnetite.
Hip, limestone and cliffed,
slopes like light into her thigh—light-box, skin-bound.
Wind sways the calabash,
disrupts the light to ripple—light-struck,
then scatter.
This is the war I was born toward, her skin,
its lake-glint. I desire—I thirst.
To be filled—light-well.
The light throbs everything, and songs
against her body, girdling the knee bone.
Our bodies—light-harnessed, light-thrashed.
The bruising: bilirubin bloom,
violet.
A work of all good yokes—blood-light—
to make us think the pain is ours
to keep, light-trapped, lanterned.
That I asked for it. That I own it—
lightmonger.
I am light now, or on the side of light—
light-head, light-trophied.
Light-wracked and light-gone.
Still, the sweet maize—an eruption
of light, or its feast,
from the stalk
of my lover’s throat.
And I, light-eater, light-loving.
from Poem-a-Day
JOANNE DOMINIQUE DWYER
* * *
Decline in the Adoration of Jack-in-the-Pulpits
The bijou Jack-in-the-Pulpit plant
looks like it’s kneeling in dirt on dragon
knees in comparative darkness; conjures
a frocked man propagandizing at an altar;
if ingested raw its hooded bloom is poison—
Even so it’s a part of paradise that won’t survive behind glass.
What happens will go down in history as fable.
No one takes baths in the placid dark anymore.
There are too few hatmakers left.
Almost no silence to be found.
