by David Lehman
In one of China’s great cities, before dawn.
Forever I miss my Arab father’s way with mint leaves
floating in a cup of sugared tea—his delicate hands
arranging rinsed figs on a plate. What have we here?
said the wolf in the children’s story
stumbling upon people doing kind, small things.
Is this small monster one of us?
When your country does not feel cozy, what do you do?
Teresa walks more now, to feel closer to her
ground. If destination within two miles, she must
hike or take the bus. Carries apples,
extra bottles of chilled water to give away.
Kim makes one positive move a day for someone else.
I’m reading letters the ancestors wrote after arriving
in the land of freedom, words in perfect English script . . .
describing gifts they gave one another for Christmas.
Even the listing seems oddly civilized,
these 1906 Germans . . . hand-stitched embroideries for dresser
tops. Bow ties. Slippers, parlor croquet, gold ring, “pretty
inkwell.”
How they comforted themselves! A giant roast
made them feel more at home.
Posthumous medals of honor for
coming, continuing—could we do that?
And where would we go?
My father’s hope for Palestine
stitching my bones, “no one wakes up and
dreams of fighting around the house”—
someday soon the steady eyes of children in Gaza,
yearning for a little extra electricity
to cool their lemons and cantaloupes, will be known.
Yes?
We talked for two hours via Google Chat,
they did not complain once. Discussing stories,
books, families, a character who does
what you might do.
Meanwhile secret diplomats are what we must be,
as a girl in Qatar once assured me,
each day slipping its blank visa into our hands.
from Fifth Wednesday
SHARON OLDS
* * *
Rasputin Aria
I wish I did not think of Rasputin
so often. To have been born with a penis which in
manhood would be said to be,
erect, 14" long,
some said 18"
organ which he used in brutal
acts, penetrating helplessness,
and then, at the end of his life, to be taken
from behind, raped, then castrated,
penis and testicles, harps of the nerves,
gone—and then to be killed one way,
and it did not take, and then another,
then stabbed and drowned in a sack—
though all that was found was the skein of burlap
bitten and torn open and washed up—
a cruel male leader, a brigand,
law unto himself, taken, the shock of it, the
disbelief, the poor anus from the
worldwide family of anuses,
the species’s helpless O, and the poor
penis, brother to the poor sister
vagina—tis of thee I think
when I think of my country rendering,
and being rendered, when I think of our body
politic, its head of wrath
with an orange flame for hair.
from The Southampton Review
MICHAEL PALMER
* * *
Nord-Sud
That day when I thought of Pierre Reverdy
for the first and final time
I counted the butterflies in Rome.
In Rome I counted the butterflies.
There were always three,
three on Trajan’s blood-stained column,
three within the Memoirs of Hadrian,
three alight on the Virgin’s left thigh,
three perched amidst the eternal dust.
(I counted to three because I felt I must.)
Electric blue were these creatures of air
born of the mind of Pierre Reverdy
mourning the death of a violin by fire.
The Tiber is flowing somewhat lazily today
past a distant echo of Pierre Reverdy,
past the burning manuscripts of Pierre Reverdy
lighting the banks not of Tiber but of Seine.
I counted the butterflies in Paris then
as they caught fire one by one,
one by a lock at the Quai de Valmy,
one by the dying guillotine
on the Place de la Cloche Vide
where three last songs could be heard.
You waved graciously and sang along
as poetry, that blind ballerina in flames,
bid you farewell while taking one last bow
with no regrets other than a few.
The earth is perfectly still
and the butterflies have ended their day
in the north and in the south.
Listen, Pierre, the hands on the clock
point towards the snows of yesteryear.
Pierre, you died as we were about to meet.
This poem is to be continued indefinitely.
from Harper’s
MORGAN PARKER
* * *
The Black Saint & The Sinner Lady & The Dead & The Truth
For one thing, I hate stillness. On the front porch,
waiting, I see an animal I don’t recognize:
feet of a bird, wings of a leaf. The grotesqueness
of attachment, the loudness of the woods, I knew it
when I was dead before. I died for my sins
and because of this, I am in the woods now,
aching. It is June. I am used to being
a certain kind of alone. Soon my photosynthesis
will be complete, and I will be the gap
between Angela Davis’s teeth. Do you ever
love something so much, you become it?
Like how when hard rain comes, you learn
quick. You straighten your shoulders and hope
this is better than touching.
I say casual death, and the half-moon
is my enemy, an uncertain white girl.
I wish I didn’t care. I am myself
shaking hands, so subtle no one notices.
Sometimes, it’s my ribcage, or my throat
does the same damn thing as my skull,
the little bear inside it. Please
don’t make me repeat myself.
from Harper’s
WILLIE PERDOMO
* * *
Head Crack Head Crack
Zoo Bang
Auld Lang
Brick City
Fly Ditty
Drug War
Street Noir
War Fat
Bank That
Sneaker Box
Check Account
Get Fresh
Stay Fly
Night Pool
Old School
Stash House
Corner Store
We Cool
No More
Smoked Out
Player’s Ball
Okey Doke
Flat Broke
Hang Out
No Doubt
Black Out
Death Count
Dwight Gone
Tone Gone
Petey Gone
Chino Gone
Body Shot
Chop Shop
Black Hole
Myths Sold
Break That
Like This
Black Cat
Death Kiss
Power Move
Move That
Krush Groove
Dope Shit
Step Back
Get This
from Green
Mountains Review
CARL PHILLIPS
* * *
Star Map with Action Figures
More dark than gray, but not yet quite dark
entirely, the stories keep ending as if there were
a limit to what any story could hold onto, and this
the limit, the latest version of it, looking a lot like the sea
meeting shore.
To constellate, the way desire
does, sometimes, with fear, or anger—both, occasionally—
and there’s been gentleness, too, I’m here, I’ve
always been here . . .
Maybe between mystery
and what little we can say for sure
happened, lies a secret even
memory itself keeps somewhere
hidden because for now
it has to.
Less like wishing too late, I mean,
for a thing to be otherwise than like fire closing in
so absolutely, it can almost seem intimacy
had yet to be invented, and here’s the fire,
inventing it: Constellate,
with me—
Look at the field,
studded with the blue-black eyes of broken heroes.
One of the eyes is moving. It can still see. What does it see?
from Virginia Quarterly Review
ISHMAEL REED
* * *
Just Rollin’ Along
Louis Charles (L. C. “Good Rockin’ ” Robinson (born Louis Charles Robinson; May 13, 1914–September 26, 1976) was an American blues singer, guitarist, and fiddle player. “He played an electric steel guitar. Robinson was more than just a storyteller. He was one of the Bay Area’s most significant blues artists, . . . who helped shape what’s come to be known as West Coast Blues. When Robinson died in 1976, [Ron] Steward recounts, the influential bluesman was near penniless and friends had to pass a hat around at his funeral.”
—Jim Harrington
It was ’34 Oklahoma and L.C. was doing a gig
People were doing the Texas Two Step
And greasing on the pig
There were mounds upon mounds of ice cream
The pies were crusty and fine
The following story is true and I ain’t lyin’
Good Rockin’ Robinson was packing them in
But the noise of a Ford sedan disrupted the
Din
A woman and a man
The man had a grin
They were
Just rollin’ along
Just rollin’ along
Her lap held a Thompson
The barrel was long
“I’ll give you 12 silver dollars,” she said
“If you play our song”
“I’m sitting on top of the world”
“I’m sitting on top of the world”
They were Just rollin’ along
Just rollin’ along
They paid Good Rockin’ and
Were on their way
Very few in the crowd will forget that
Day
The policeman pulled up
He was all out of breath
“Did you see a couple in a Ford
Come this way?
She was dapper,” he said
“He wore a Newsboy cap
And a pistol on his side”
Good Rockin’ asked who was
In that ride
The policeman said
“It was Bonnie and Clyde”
The policeman said
“It was Bonnie and Clyde”
They were
Just rollin’ along
Just rollin’ along
from Black Renaissance Noire
PAISLEY REKDAL
* * *
Four Marys
—Madonna del Parto, 1460, Piero della Francesca
Are the drapes drawn open, or being closed?
Each of the heavy, velvet wings is clasped
in the hands of a little angel, a little man really,
in shades of plum and mint green that frame
the birthing tent’s opening for a girl
who retreats into or emerges from the dark.
It isn’t clear: the perspective is such
that if I cover the painting’s
top half with a hand, Mary steps forward;
if I cover the lower, she shrinks back,
her blue bodice split at the bulging seams
to show the pear-white cut of her linen shift,
the great weight of the child she is about to bear
and later bury. And even if I didn’t believe
the child would rise again, I would believe the artist
had seen such fear paint a girl’s face
when the eldest women in the village
are called for help, and fresh straw brought in
if there isn’t a bed, and hot water, and rose oil to rub
over the hips, and vinegar and sugar water
to drink, and hog’s gut and a thick needle
to sew her up with later. Even if I did not believe
in Mary’s joy, I would believe in her pain, the quick flick
of her thoughts turning to the sister, or the cousin,
or to her own mother who died giving birth,
the baby too not making it, for the birth
was in winter: ice so clogged the village’s
deep ruts that the midwife’s cart slipped
into the soak dike, splitting the wood wheel
in two, and by the time the woman could walk
the steep hill up to the villa, the mother had torn,
and in the rush to save her, no one worked
quick enough to cut the cord wrapped
around the baby’s throat. Or the baby came out
strong and fine, but died two years later
when it stumbled into a fire, or was bitten by a rat
and sickened and starved, or caught the fever
that spread through town when all the animals
were stabled inside the houses for winter.
So many people died, so many people
were supposed to die, it’s hard to conceive
of how the mothers survived their grief,
and how they named their next, living baby
after the dead one, because the name, at least,
was good. It’s hard to know if I should read
the deepest grief or resignation or both in the line
from Mary Shelley’s 1818 notebook, the year
her daughter, Clara, died, two weeks
after Mary had given birth to her. Woke this morning.
Found my baby dead, all the little black scratching pen
could add to paper, and the rest was blank,
and then there were months, and then
there was Frankenstein. Piero della Francesca
painted an embroidery of pomegranates
into Mary’s birthing tent, symbol of fruitfulness
and of the underworld, of a mother’s grief
and of her rage to get her child back, the daughter
both dead and alive to her, as Mary knows her own child
is both dead and alive to us. A winter fruit
for the winter birth of a rich woman
whose house wanted to ward off a grueling
delivery, and so whose midwife would feed her
pomegranate seeds to sustain her, a fruit
the midwife herself would eat only once, as payment
from the duke for the son she finally ushered
for him into the world. Such a strange, leathery
skin, though the color was bright
as blood on fresh linen, and who could have expected
those glistening cells packed inside, wet prisms
in the ruby eye of a ruby insect, or the heart
of a god who takes what he wants
and never gives it back. The midwife
took the fruit home
and split it with her husband, and tried not to think
of the bed of the girl she’d just left, its stains
that looked almost black in the dawn light,
and how the girl’s skin had turned bluish, the fragile spring
she’d require to spend alone in bed away from the duke
and healing. How can Mary not look
downcast before these curtains that threaten
to close on her, to open? I have no doubt
of seeing the animal today, Mary Wollstonecraft
Godwin, Mary Shelley’s mother wrote,
meaning birth, meaning Mary, the little animal
she never saw grow up, because Wollstonecraft
died of an infection days after giving birth.
But before that was told she could not nurse
her infant daughter for fear the corruption
would spread through her milk, though she stayed
at Mary’s bedside the final three days of her life.
And Godwin beside her, who, because he loved
his wife, believed her genius could survive
any truth, and so published a memoir later
detailing everything: Wollstonecraft’s affairs,
her daughter’s illegitimacy, attempts at suicide, so that
in 1798 the index of the Anti-Jacobin Review would publish,
under the heading “Prostitution,” See Mary
Wollstonecraft. Two towns over from his Madonna,
in a church in Arezzo, Piero della Francesca
painted a fresco of Mary Magdalene, her curled hair wet
with the tears she used to bathe Christ’s feet,
her body a swollen green swathe of dress, the red cape
folded so as to accentuate the pendulous belly
and thick thigh, the Magdalene bristling
between arch columns that frame her, one
painted slightly forward, the other behind
her body, so that we do not know in which direction
Mary is headed, nor what she is, really,
her almond eyes glittering out at us, halo chipped,
over centuries, away. It is wonderful
when time accentuates something of the truth
