This program is designed to make such
beautiful music that it feels like at last
they have allowed you to take the good canoe
into the lake of your own choosing
and above you the sky exposes one
or two real eagles, the water
warm or marked with stones,
however you like it, blue.
from The New Yorker
HENRI COLE
Broom
A starkly lighted room with a tangy iron odor;
a subterranean dankness; a metal showerhead hanging from the ceiling;
a scalpel, a trocar, a pump; a white marble table; a naked, wrinkled
body faceup on a sheet, with scrubbed skin, clean nails,
and shampooed hair; its mouth sewn shut, with posed lips,
its limbs massaged, its arteries drained, its stomach and intestines emptied;
a pale blue sweater, artificial pearls, lipstick, and rouge;
hands that once opened, closed, rolled, unrolled, rerolled, folded, unfolded,
turned, and returned, as if breathing silver, unselfing themselves now
(very painful); hands that once tore open, rended, ripped,
served, sewed, and stroked (very loving), pushing and butting now
with all their strength as their physiognomy fills with firming fluid;
hands once raucous, sublime, quotidian—now strange, cruel, neat;
hands that once chased me gruesomely with a broom, then brushed my hair.
from The Threepenny Review
BILLY COLLINS
Delivery
Moon moving in the upper window,
shadow of the pen in my hand on the page—
I keep wishing that the news of my death
will be delivered by a little wooden truck
or a child’s drawing of a truck
featuring the long rectangular box of the trailer,
with some lettering on the side,
then the protruding cab, the ovoid wheels,
maybe the inscrutable profile of a driver,
and of course puffs of white smoke
issuing from the tail pipe, drawn like flowers
and similar in their expression to the clouds in the sky only smaller.
from Subtropics
PETER COOLEY
More Than Twice, More Than I Can Count
Down here, with my long wait for wings to grow
I’m slow accepting the stars’ chart for me,
the blind track written in my sky at birth.
I have my glimpses, terrible and deep,
moments when I can see a kind of plan,
and more than twice tracing the lineaments
in one of the live oaks in City Park
New Orleans legend says were born with Christ,
or in the face of a beautiful child
or yes—why not say it—a flowering light
hibiscus blossoms open and then close
in sunlight’s entrance, exit through the cloud—
say it: I’ve seen, head-on the face of God
cracked, fractured, splintered, never what I want
but mine, nevertheless and, yes, these wings’
sutures, at more than half a century
with me almost immeasurable in light,
itch and lift me here where blue ground meets sky.
For a few seconds I am only blue.
I have my little time in Paradise.
from Harvard Review
EDUARDO C. CORRAL
To the Angelbeast
for Arthur Russell
All that glitters isn’t music.
Once, hidden in tall grass,
I tossed fistfuls of dirt into the air:
doe after doe of leaping.
You said it was nothing
but a trick of the light. Gold
curves. Gold scarves.
Am I not your animal?
You’d wait in the orchard for hours
to watch a deer
break from the shadows.
You said it was like lifting a cello
out of its black case.
from Poetry
ERICA DAWSON
Back Matter
Semantics 2.0,
Daughter, still, of absurdities,
I like “street-talker” now. Yes, please.
Breathless with ghetto woe
(“. . . and his mama cried”) I’d call
Me too American, too black,
Too Negro dialect. My back
Is to your front. I’m all
Set with my Nikes on.
*
Back: as in “go,” sound on the tongue
Articulated, clean, clearly hung
In the aft of the mouth.
*
Back: dawn
As near is to December. I
Walk in the flakes as doctors try
To drink their coffee, yawn
In mittened hands while they
Cross MLK and I decide
To take the hill, walk farther, ride
It out this Saturday,
Cold, cocked, nothing.
And Back:
Pertaining to support; to cause
To move backward; hems, haws,
But strength, effort; no lack-
Luster labor.
*
I put
My back into it, start to sweat
And feel the Sempiternam, wet,
There in the skin afoot,
All itchy, from the needle
(Wednesday’s fresh ink). I turn and head
For red EMERGENCY—
hot bed,
A microcosm, beetle
Of Cincinnati streets
Where pigs have got a man spread-eagle,
Cuffed to a gurney with the legal
Miranda said, the beats
Of EKGs, the blood
Of GS to the chest,
STAT angiectomy,
last rites,
Urban Gethsemane, left bites
Of Jell-O.
*
Back: to rest;
Arrears or overdue;
Belonging to the past like back
In the day.
*
The once-crazy could crack—
*
The defending player who,
Behind the other players, makes
First contact—
*
Streets are talking, rakes
Catcalling, and the new
Sky’s crisp as all the streams
Of frozen runoff.
There’s no help
For me, just voices: barest yelp,
Incessant chatter, screams;
It’s my emergency,
My good-luck charm, my fetish carved
In brain waves; and, I’m fucking starved
For more synecdoche—
More forms: the water-trickle
When it melts in spring, the med(evac!),
A glass door sliding off its track—
A million worlds to tickle
My fancy.
“Ma’am, you next?”
I leave the hospital and walk
For milk, though I need none. I stalk
A flying flier, text
Muddied by snow and now
Unreadable.
*
Back is the how
You know where you have been; the Tao;
“What up”; instead of “ciao,”
“Peace”; “One”; a vision too
Damn visible in memory.
*
Only I have to listen. See?
I’m still the jigaboo.
Don’t see me as I butt
In highs and lows and every nome
And phoneme while on my way home
To lay back in the cut.
from Barrow Street
STEPHEN DUNN
The Imagined
If
the imagined woman makes the real woman
seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in
gracefulness and intellect and pulchritude,
and if you come to realize the imagined woman
can only satisfy your imagination, whereas
the real woman with all her limitations
can often make you feel good, how, in spite
of knowing this, does the imagined woman
keep getting into your bedroom, and joining you
at dinner, why is it that you always bring her along
on vacations when the real woman is shopping,
or figuring the best way to the museum?
And if the real woman
has an imagined man, as she must, someone
probably with her at this very moment, in fact
doing and saying everything she’s ever wanted,
would you want to know that he slips in
to her life every day from a secret doorway
she’s made for him, that he’s present even when
you’re eating your omelette at breakfast,
or do you prefer how she goes about the house
as she does, as if there were just the two of you?
Isn’t her silence, finally, loving? And yours
not entirely self-serving? Hasn’t the time come,
once again, not to talk about it?
from The New Yorker
ELAINE EQUI
A Story Begins
The same as other stories, but we follow along in case something different might happen.
Just one different thing. It leads us to a ledge and pushes us over.
Every story has a climax in a way life doesn’t.
It puts us back where it found us. It opens our eyes which weren’t closed, but felt that way because what we saw was happening inside the story.
We are the excess of the story—that which it cannot contain.
Washed ashore.
What was the story about?
I can’t remember. A dwindling, dim-witted tribe.
Every month when the moon was full, they’d sacrifice another virgin, but could never figure out why the crops still wouldn’t grow.
from New American Writing
ROBERT GIBB
Spirit in the Dark
What to make of the night we sat up late,
Listening to Beethoven’s Ninth
In that otherwise darkened apartment?
The New York Philharmonic
Was gathering together the fragments
At the fourth movement’s start—
Momentum they’d ride like a wave
Through the fanfare and final chorus—
When we felt something else enter the air,
A front in the weather of the room.
It sat us upright on the edge of our chairs
While it tracked toward the record
And hung suspended for a measure or two
Above the still point of the stylus.
Then, just as steadily, it withdrew,
A patch of fog that had been burned off . . .
The look the dead raised on your face
Must have been the same on my own.
“What was that?” our expressions asked.
Decades later, I’d still like to know.
And what changes, if any, were played
Upon us? And did any of them take?
“Be embraced,” the chorus sang,
And then the crescendo and kettledrums,
The whole Ninth welling before us
Before fading as well from the room.
from Prairie Schooner
KATHLEEN GRABER
Self-Portrait with No Internal Navigation
Have you ever been arrested? The pigeon arrests me.
No, not the wing but the sturdy round body & the sheen
of the throat, like the interior of a snail’s shell or the bruise
of spring—think of the lilac blistered with blossoms,
of the burned grouse moor’s sudden eruption into heather—
a beauty we expect only from what’s broken. Have you ever
gone too far? Last week, I overshot the same junction twice
along a simple stretch of country road. And Philippe Petit
crossed eight times between The Towers. This is what
the officers at the station told him later when he was through.
He had no idea how long he’d hovered, how many times
he reversed himself, passing onto something almost
like earth beyond the far guy-wire, only to pivot back again—
lying down even, one leg dangling—above loose, swaying
space. I worry about the pigeons beginning today to roost
on the ferry that shuttles back & forth between two capes.
A pair of pigeons mates for a lifetime, produces, at most,
two squabs each year. They have chosen this spot because,
centuries ago, they were domestic—the words are coop
& columbarium—because they still love, past reason,
the swift tides of our voices, are drawn to the chattering crew
even as it swats at them now with brooms & paints
the sooty pipes above the car deck with a chemical tar
concocted to burn the birds’ feet. Once my husband chose
to step out into open air. He fell but was somehow returned
to me. Feral cousin of the carrier & racer, the rock dove steers
with a certainty we cannot imagine. Still, what if one flies
into the marsh for reeds for the nest just as the boat sets sail?
How will it know to simply sit & wait? And what of the panic
of the one departed? The one who has left without leaving.
from Mead: The Magazine of Literature and Libations
AMY GLYNN GREACEN
Helianthus annuus (Sunflower)
Irrational you may be, in the way
That mathematicians mean it. But you’re all
About efficiencies, optimizations.
From apex to primordia, you spiral
Into control, girasole, you flower
Of the golden mean, the gyre, the twist, the curve.
Triumph of coincidence, master of packing
Density, attentiveness to detail.
And all this from a flower no one planted,
Arisen from last year’s spillage from the birdhouse,
Two thousand seeds for the one that engendered you.
Weary of time? I think not. Object lesson
For adepts of the trigonometries
Of Fibonacci—you are time, a living
Sundial, tireless tracker of the light’s
Trajectory. You know, you flaming thing,
You august standard-bearer for the skies
In their last and greatest clarity before
The cloudy season, you know there is nothing
Random in the way a space is filled.
Nothing ever doesn’t make sense. We
Can do the math: each thing will always be
The sum of things that came before it. Write
This message in the borders of the garden:
Phi, the symbol of the mean you mean,
The disc atop the slim stalk. Yes, and fie,
By the way, on any and all who’d think to call
You weary of time, who’d wrongly reify
Those bending rays, that reverent chin-to-chest
Kowtow. You know of mortal gravity,
Sun-worshipper, you pythia of pith
And oil, you oracle of harmony,
Order and reason. Of course you bow to it.
from New England Review
JAMES ALLEN HALL
One Train’s Survival Depends on the Other Derailed
after Susan Mitchell
In a bar in Chicago like a bar in New York, the anthems hang
in the jukebox air: I Will Surviv
e, Maybe This Time,
the bartender’s nipple ring catching the discoball’s shrapnel light,
on a night which begins in wan November, dancing
with a chestnut-haired Aries, the scorch of us hurtling like a train
I want to step in front of. He takes my hand when we leave the bar,
we walk a greasy sidewalk to a private courtyard, he kisses me
and the world goes magnolia, quick white flash back
to the garden I hid in as a boy, interred in a noiseless mangle,
the tree’s opalescent sepals masking my upturned face
as I imagine a real life GI Joe come to the rescue, smiling down
into the plot, shovel in hand. He kisses me on a night
so rinsed in purity it begs for its own ending.
The night’s begging lodged in me. We’re parallel trains
lurching forward, jaunting windows jaggedly aligned.
Don’t love the train, it craves to be emptied.
When we part, a February starfield blooming above us
in the dead of winter, he’s wiping the kiss off his lips.
Don’t miss me, he says, hailing a cab, paying the driver,
saying goodbye with a sterile hug. I miss the stars,
which had leaned in close. In November, I could die
happy, his saliva drying on my neck, the breeze
violining its song along the sloped avenue.
The song expires on the radio of an overheated car
speeding eastward into the night after the secret courtyard,
after the snow lowered its gentle hammer on the skulls
of lovers, the night I know in my sudden blood
I am going to kill myself. Don’t miss me,
the discoball moon says to the lake. Don’t miss me
says a boy to the plastic partition, the snow melting
down his face in tracks, in February, on a night
stricken at last of starlight, shocked dumb,
night with its shovel and its covering dark.
from New England Review
TERRANCE HAYES
The Rose Has Teeth
after Matmos & M. Zapruder
I was trying to play the twelve-bar blues with two bars.
I was trying to fill the room with a shocked and awkward color,
I was trying to limber your shuffle, the muscle wired to muscle.