PEOPLE OF NEW YORK by Sally Ball
I know you are dying
as always, even you big ones
from Queens, or from Nyack,
and I’m in the habit
of checking the clock,
midnight again. Again no
phone call, no lungs
expanding and contracting
with some machine
for a brain while the hospital
empties and a family consents
and either in person or over the phone
offers up the life left
in the life that is leaving them.
My father asleep in his bed.
People of New York
New Jersey Connecticut:
I was born there, and he was,
and we lived there and married
and drove to the sea.
They can come from as far
as South Carolina; the doctors
say motorcycle season
is often a good time of year.
Thank you, you bikers.
Be careful, be
careful—
We’re eighteen months into
the eighteen-month window.
They’re dying, I know it,
B+ tall guys
whose lungs vanish
into a furnace, into the ground.
People of New York:
I wish you long lives.
I have no sense of coming
before you, but I know
you are dying as always.
Can you please check the box—
through the DMV,
through the registries?
Have you said, Make me useful,
if the time comes? Dear?
Listen to Sally Ball’s reading of “People of New York” below…
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LETTER TO PHIL FROM MANITOU SPRINGS by George Kalamaras
for Philip Appleman
Did Darwin name the world, or did you, Phil, in creating him for us? I swear a Galápagos tortoise inhabits my sleep. A dream broth. A cup of Genmaicha tea containing roasted grains of brown rice. It lays its eggs across the coral reef of my brain. Blonde. Blind. Without fish-mouth or salt. The three readings for the day from the Church of Francis Ponge would most certainly be “The Oyster,” “The Mollusk,” and “Abode of the Gray Shrimp.” What am I looking for here in Manitou? Surely not a man. Or two. More like the primordial pulse of the manta ray let loose through the fossils of an ancient mountain pass. Imagine the ragged shore of the Baltic Sea and a big black wolf in 1835 that we believed was the other side of the world. Imagine Apollo, patron of shepherds, associated with wolves—though only out of fear of certain parts of ourselves that might never die. We kill hundreds of thousands of breaths, regularly, when we breathe mindlessly, without focus. A shaman in Siberia shakes his maraca, reaching into me, and holds my liver right there in a basket before me, telling how to track my past. How my mouth might finally be the beautiful, brutal slaughter of 4,000 geese in the spring hunt off Cape Krestovskaya. Your poems are more beautiful than the Crimean dead, than the Japanese glaze of a soap dish waiting to cleanse my mouth in the Manitou Crafts Co-op. I still remember your class. 1978. How Jennifer and I noticed the sweet peculiarity of your blue suede shoes. Did they evolve from the bellowing blast of yak leather? From the low vocabulary in the underbelly of an ox? How many people know that the musk ox is more closely related to the North American mountain goat than to the bison? How much chocolate can one possibly eat in this tranquil tourist town of Manitou without vomiting a goldfish, forcibly, all the way down from the watery restlessness of the brain? I keep returning to Stevens because I don’t understand, though I love the sound of his verbs. Come. Go. Stay. Be well, he seems to say. Even when sounding like the rarely glimpsed freshwater mountain shrimp of Borneo. Once, when writing about Vallejo, I quoted Stevens by mistake, saying, the ordinary of his commonplace. Once, writing you, I asked if you were a mirror of the purest milk, my most moist lice, or just my mouth, thirty years older than the rest of me.
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LIE DOWN WHERE THEIR FACES ARE by James Allen Hall
The woman across the street
on her knees again, shut out in the snow
by her husband. Every week, this ritual:
a man, a crying woman, the blue cold
earth that marries them. When he lets
her in, she lays in bed next to him.
He cries in her armpit. Even their
dog lays down, tree-chained heir,
his head between his paws. In the morning,
the woman is a satin worksong
torn by passing cars as it limps its hope
across the road to my ear. I want to stop
before I can be infected, I am humming
and counting out the pills I think of
as last. She sings to make her dress less
permeable to the snow. I want to know
the way to leave without leaving
soiled clothes behind. The song says
love will change the world, but spring is
a field of goldenrod, framed by thwarted
engines, rusting red in their back
yard, each empty socket eyeing its season
of repair. I can almost taste the weeds,
their waxy stems thick among the dented
fenders. So much land, every curse and love
too could be buried here. One night, late
March, the dog escapes into the forest.
Black fur a mangy blur against the trees.
They call for him all the next day.
The chain waits for him, its rusted collar
tight around my throat. If he returns,
he won’t be seen alive again. Fled,
he will live forever.
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DOLOROSA by Molly Rose Quinn
(The Chapel at St. Mary’s School for Girls)
where the pillar falls at the edge of morning the teachers
beg us to tug down our skirts they offer their palms
for our gumballs and your god is here to say that beauty
is easy like cutting teeth and your legs and your legs
and yours and I in the pew wish to scrape down
to nothing cuff myself kneel better and what could be
worthier hair voice and loudly I beg for ascendancy
dear classmates your legs in neat rows pray as you do
with fists up and the sun in here bare pray for safety
the teen saint she is the girl to win it all for I beg my
mariology as she sets the way that girl she never once
begged for sparing she begged for death like wine
she begged the best she supplicated she died this dying
begs for me I give it such pleasure and legs and the pew
and the alb and the bread and all other objects beg to be
candles when you are a candle you can beg to be lit
each of you in the pew you beg to be lit I’ll never shine
bigger as we know teenagers beg to be begged and we do
you girls you begged me to hold you begged me to take
what I took you beg bigger and better and for that
you’ll be queens the chimes chime and bells bell
and dear god I know I can be the greatest girl ever
by anointing all alone and being loved the very best
and she says what is so good about anger god killed
my son for himself I suppose and this halo it’s nothing
I asked for and of course she’ll be lying and your legs
and your legs and yours tanned and the best thing all year.
Listen to Molly Rose Quinn’s reading of “Dolorosa” below…
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Henry Darger, Sacred Heart. ©Kiyoko Lerner 2013 / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. (Click to enlarge.)
Molly Rose Quinn selected Henry Darger’s work to accompany her poem and explains: “The girls of Henry Darger’s epic novel, illustrated here in Sacred Heart and elsewhere, were closely derived from popular media (recall the ‘Coppertone baby’ or ‘Morton Salt girl’). The novel itself, undiscovered until Darger’s death, details the girls’ war against child slavery, neglect, and abuse. They are cartoonishly feminine in appearance, divine in their acts, and pure of moral being. The narrative weaves darkly into Christian mythology and Darger’s childhood experiences. My poem, using Mary as its vessel, hopes to crash together female adolescence and religious fundamentalism, therein the inherent mythologizing, fetishism, zeal, envy, lust. I am drawn to these images for their moralizing, their uncertain deviance, their mystic pity, and the great heart’s wink at the literal.”
Please note: Reproduction, including downloading of Henry Darger’s work, is prohibited by copyright laws and international conventions without the express written permission of Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
- Published in Featured Poetry, Issue 3
SPA CARE by Xenia Taiga
The spa was located in the hills, behind the town’s famous billboards.
“The farthest spot on known earth,” her husband said, looking over the brochures. “No fast foods for miles.”
Her husband helped her pack, while she stood to the side eating Dorito’s. The afternoon sun shone on her as she got in the car and slammed the door. Her husband waved. When she pulled out of the driveway, he called out to her. “Relax enough, so you can ovulate and then we can get back to business.”
The drive took an hour. The spa was a large white building with the mountain behind, hugging it. On the right side was a pool. On the left side was a room with bay windows overlooking the coast. In the middle, as she pushed through the revolving doors was the entrance and a table set up of fresh organic food and juices.
The women in white coats smiled and their voices sang like angels on acid, welcoming her to an experience that’ll transform her.
“Listen to your body,” they said as they showed her to her room. Her room held large windows that faced the mountain. The pine trees pressed against the glass, bits of sunshine filtered in.
She asked for coffee.
They looked at each other. “Why do you need coffee?”
“Because I’m tired.”
They smiled. “If you’re tired, then go to bed or rest in the sauna or go for a swim in the pool, perhaps.”
As she swam in the hot pool, swimming one lap after another, she could hear the wolves howling. She slept that night, hearing them whimpering and scratching her window.
Early morning, they gathered in the great room, prepping themselves for yoga. While they stretched and cried out to Mother Nature, she asked if anyone else was concerned about the wolves. Did the wolves ever pose a problem?
“Don’t listen to the wolves,” they told her. “Listen to your body.”
“But doesn’t anybody else hear the wolves?” She looked around at the other women in the room. Their eyes closed, deep in thought, deep in breathing; inhaling and exhaling.
The lady stood up and walked to her, placing her hands on her shoulders. “What is it your body’s saying? Listen deeply. What is it your body’s telling you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then on to the dogwood pose, shall we? On the count of three…”
On the third day, she asked for coffee. “Why do you need coffee?”
“I’m tired. I got a headache. It’s a caffeine withdrawal headache. I know it.”
“Don’t listen to your brain. That’s your brain talking. Listen to your body. What is your body telling you?”
“It’s telling me it wants coffee.”
They smiled. “No, it isn’t.”
At the five o’clock spiritual exercise, she stayed in her room. They came into her room, concerned. “I just don’t feel like it,” she said as she filed her nails and cut them into tiny perfect curves.
They gently took the items out of her hands. “Take a rest. Remember why you came here. You came to rest. You’re doing too much. What is your body telling you?”
She asked for a shaver. Her hair was growing back from the last wax and the shaver she brought had already turned rusty. They took the rusty shaver from her, threw it into the bin. “You don’t need to worry about things like that. That is not important. What is important is your body. What is your body saying?”
She sat on her bed’s clean white sheets, watching her nails grow long, curling inward. She watched the short bristled hairs on her legs grow. She gathered the tangled hairs on her head and twisted them up into a messy bun.
That night, it thundered. The wolves howled. The power and lights flicked off. They gave them candles and told them to rest, to call out to Mother Nature and to listen to the body. “What is it that your body is trying to say to you?” they asked, looking into her eyes.
She moved the dresser in front of the door and threw the heavy white candles thick as bricks through the windows. The glass shattered. The rain came in, filling the room. The pine trees tumbled forward, touching her feet.
The mice came, crawling up her body. Sparrows flew in. Together they poked and pecked into her tall matted hair that sat atop her head like a wobbly castle. She laid on the bed and opened her legs. The rabbits wet and white came into her vagina, burrowing and digging to keep warm. The wolves pranced in on tiptoes. They stepped over her body; stepped over the mice, rabbits, sparrows, and came to her neck. They snarled, exposing large teeth. They leaned forward, biting deep into her neck.
The women were outside, pounding on the door: “Listen to your body. What is it telling you? What is your body trying to say to you?”
She closed her eyes and listened.
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ROSA by Anne Germanacos
Just a name
Rosa, a girl in a story, a name I happen to like. She’s a girl with a father who follows her to the ends of the earth as she follows a story, a myth, an incantation.
She is trying to be a virgin and a diplomat, like Gertrude Bell.
She would also like to be a mad heroine, like Isabelle Eberhardt.
Her parents would like her to finish her homework.
Accoutrements
She covets the gypsy’s wide skirt, the nun’s collar, her mother’s braid.
Arrival
She rides up on a horse, plants her bloody hand on the wall of a church, makes her mark.
In the street, she breathes polluted air, lets her father, a man, buy her a drink made of almonds. Says merhaba, says teshekur ederim, turns away from her father. Wants a boy. Wants a penis.
Experiences a moment of 21st century doubt.
The blind doctor
She leans forward in her chair. Can he feel her movement?
She leans, examining him, sees waves break over his gentle face.
She sees him but he can’t see her.
She trusts his x-ray vision, a function of his heart.
Tells him what she wants: a boy, a penis, (a heart).
Naked
Her mother in a braid, her mother in pigtails.
Her brother, a genius or a fool.
They’re all fools.
She twirls in her skirt, her hands tilted toward god.
Naked beneath her skirt, she is breezy.
Questions
What would Gertrude Bell say?
Isabelle Eberhardt, where are you?
*
What does Rosa know about Gertrude Bell?
That she was a highly accomplished virgin, an adventuress, (never an adulteress), a linguist, a diplomat.
Bedouin boys
She’s in the desert, immaculate and alone:
She walks white sand until it’s in her throat and lungs. Coughs sand like granulated sugar, can’t stop rubbing her eyes.
The Bedouin boys appear and dance the depth-negating dunes.
Their bodies are short, wiry, powerful. (She realizes a new incarnation of her own every hour.)
In the almost-cold dawn, they offer her the thinnest version of bread she’s ever eaten, just-baked over hot stones. She takes the bread, aiming for diplomatic distance, can’t help but offer them a glimpse of her eyes, which sparkle.
Her head is covered in yards of white linen.
His heart, his eyes
The blind doctor leans; Rosa watches interest arrive on his face.
His heart is oval-shaped, with honeycomb compartments, each containing a patient, a little like her. She’s young; she lives on the bottom floor. (There’s an old man with a hack who lives above.)
She wants to touch his blind eyes.
Isabelle Eberhardt would do it; Gertrude Bell would not.
Timing
One of these days. In the meantime, bide your time.
(Isabelle Eberhardt is another type of desert woman entirely.)
Her notes:
Forgive my violent emotional weather!
If I’d travelled dressed as a man!
The land and I are one; one with the land.
Call me ……
Does the body answer to the soul?
That hero is long dead, but I’ve read the book.
Not sure I fully understand about soul, but bliss, I do.
I would not convert to Islam.
I do not have six languages at the tip of my tongue.
Refuse to go back to your civilization.
Is this confusion or wisdom, Dad?
This good horse, these camels.
Her life now, as I read it, is finished, closed. But her life as she wrote it is unfinished.
Let me have my unfinished life.
Freak or trouble-maker?
Where are the Bedouin boys?
Truth: layered
The blind therapist creates a gaze through modulation of voice . Without the distraction of sight, he tends not to be deceived.
His theory of truth: that it’s layered. He has a range of stylized sounds that act as his eyes and offer solace or neutrality.
Rosa, speaking:
Parker Williams, a boy in the ring.
I’ve caught a live bird in the hand.
Have you ever been to the Sahara? Walked a desert? Ridden a camel? Known anyone who’s worn a veil, died old, still a virgin?
Are these the wrong kinds of questions to be asking?
*
(What do you see?)
What is a genius?
He is silent.
All-seeing brilliance?
Rosa hides her smile behind her hand, unnecessarily.
She sees orange and red, the greens and yellows of fall harvest pumpkins: something from her childhood, intruding.
Her doctor can’t see. Does that mean he has no brilliance?
–Where are you now?
Like a window, he always knows when to ask.
Rosa wishes she were a doorman, but without having to open and close.
She wants to travel across the desert on a camel.
Her father could come and retrieve her, if he dared.
Her mother and brother would stay home, banned.
She watches the blind doctor navigate the glass of water; she watches the level of the liquid against clear glass.
She shifts in her chair, pretzels her legs beneath her.
She covets the bull’s-eye of genius but would be satisfied to look behind the doctor’s eyes, to see what he sees.
Would she trade her allegiance to the idea of Gertrude Bell for the talents of a Macedonian firewalker? Will she ever lose her virginity? (Is it negotiable?)
She has a friend who eats only white things.
She is unpoked, buttoned-up, all-one. A miserable donut (no hole). Without being punctured, how can she know her center?
His ears
When certain cars pass in the street, he is forced to lean in toward the patient and focus more intently to catch what is being said.
He is all ears.
The pores of the walls open, listening.
The layers of sound divide—he zeroes in on the layer that speaks to his heart: endless longing.
He leans forward, retreats, collects the room’s sounds in a basket in his head. The sounds run through, leave gold.
The child is running against time, her legs are tied to the moon’s shadow.
Someone presses hard on a horn. It floods the room.
*
She dreams she sees him on the street, walking quickly, with a stick.
She runs and catches him just as he turns into his building: Hi!
He knows her voice, turns toward it.
She leans toward his face, finds his hands on her eyes.
She fills his cups with tears.
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PERSONAL AD #1 (Pairs Only Matter In Poker) by Michael Schmeltzer
After C.D. Wright
I wear garish makeup and make faces in the mirror.
Which reminds me…do you want to hear
my favorite joke?
Two clowns walk into a bar:
one with a sad face, the makeup frown
thick and chalky as a hotdog bun; the other
no face whatsoever.
There never was a happy face.
Let me start over.
There are two expressions we carry like dumbbells
to balance ourselves in public.
People are often
two-faced and falling flat
on both of them. If you look carefully
I always lean to the left.
I love honesty
the way a lazy-eyed child loves playing pirate.
How far sunk do you think
a treasure must be
before we call it buried?
What about desires?
For reasons unknown I often find trouble.
My ex-lover phoned me
after an absence of six weeks, drunk and high on meth.
He always called it “Tina” or “Crystal”
as if a drug could wear jewels
or flaunt a slinky dress.
He added lime to his beer and dubbed it a cocktail.
Ever hear of heterochromia?
For a sucker like me it means exotic.
Plus, he was handsome. He had one
hazel and one blue eye.
They were both beautiful
but I never knew which color to trust.
My problem is whatsoever my right eye sees
my left ignores
so he got away with a lot.
His eyes glittered like Vegas
when all I needed was Branson.
By the end there was nothing left to gamble.
All I wanted then
was to slip a penny over each eye
and watch the world bury him.
Listen to Michael Schmeltzer’s reading below…
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THE CITY by Helwig Brunner, translated by Monika Zobel
Die Stadt zu Linien vereinfacht,
abgeschminkt das eigene Gesicht.
Häuser, Schritte und Gedanken
sind aus demselben Material,
Grafitstaub und Diamanten.
Die Zeit steht, senkt deine Lider,
um einmal jetzt zu sein, inmitten
der schlafenden Welt, hellsichtig
zugewandt den tappenden Fragen
der Somnambulen.
Helwig Brunner‘s work has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies in Europe and elsewhere, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008). Brunner has published eight books of poetry, most recently Vorläufige Tage (Leykam Verlag, 2011) and Die Sicht der Dinge: Rätselgedichte (edition keiper, 2012), as well as some novels, short stories, and essays. He has been the recipient of several literary prizes in Austria and Germany.
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The city simplified to lines,
makeup removed from your face.
Houses, footsteps, and thoughts
are made of the same material,
graphite dust and diamonds.
Time stalls, lowers your lids,
to be now for once in the midst of
a sleeping world, clear-sighted
turned toward the groping questions
of the somnambulists.
Monika Zobel‘s poems and translations have been published in Redivider, The Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Mid-American Review, The Adirondack Review, Guernica Magazine, West Branch, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. A senior editor at The California Journal of Poetics and recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, she currently lives in Vienna, Austria.
- Published in Issue 3, Poetry, Translation
ECHOLOCATION: AERIAL SCRIPT by Helwig Brunner, translated by Monika Zobel
Echolot. Luftlinienschrift
Die Fledermäuse, an ihre Laute gedacht,
unhörbar, das Horchen also hinein in eine
Stille, die keine ist; sie ziehn den Blick
in den Dämmerhimmel, das Zickzack ihres
Flatterfluges, samtpelzige Beinahvögel,
die mit den Ohren schaun: Bilder hören.
Wenig später sind sie entzogen, entflogen
hinter die schwarze Jalousie der Nacht,
gesättigt an den Blindstellen des Echos
und ich denke sehr banal, wie wenig ich
auslote mit Worten.
Helwig Brunner‘s work has been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies in Europe and elsewhere, including New European Poets (Graywolf Press, 2008). Brunner has published eight books of poetry, most recently Vorläufige Tage (Leykam Verlag, 2011) and Die Sicht der Dinge: Rätselgedichte (edition keiper, 2012), as well as some novels, short stories, and essays. He has been the recipient of several literary prizes in Austria and Germany.
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Echolocation: Aerial Script
The bats, reflecting on their sounds,
inaudible, thus eavesdropping on a
silence, which is none; they drag the gaze
through the twilight sky, the zigzag of their
flutter flight, satin-fur nearly birds
that see with their ears: listen to images.
A little later they diminish, vanish
behind the black blinds of night,
satiated by the blind spots of the echo
and I think how little I sound out
with trite words.
Monika Zobel‘s poems and translations have been published in Redivider, The Cincinnati Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cream City Review, Mid-American Review, The Adirondack Review, Guernica Magazine, West Branch, Best New Poets 2010, and elsewhere. A senior editor at The California Journal of Poetics and recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship, she currently lives in Vienna, Austria.
- Published in Issue 3, Poetry, Translation
THE SUPERINTENDENT by Justin Bigos
The air as still as bathwater, no breeze
from Sheepshead, we carry clear plastic bags
of empty bottles and cans, blue plastic bags
of plastic bottles and milk jugs, we squeeze
flattened boxes into open boxes, then tie
it all in twine – but do we cover it
in tarp in case it rains? He says, Forget-
about-it, just like on TV. (I’d died
a little when he asked me for my help
after mumbling something about the blacks
and Jews, this man who once refused to attack
his neighbors in Croatia, then fled that hell
– I’ve heard it said – with three-thousand cash
inside his socks.) And next we do the trash.
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DEVIL DANCER’S DAUGHTER by Laura Sheahen
What does your father do
Dance
Where in the jungle
The jungle
When
In the night
With feathers sharp feathers
To what sound
The beat from the heart of my mother
extracted
Where are the flames from
The devil
Where is the dance from
The devil
And the red mask from
The devil I hate the devil
And the knife moon from
The devil
Why is he dancing
To cure me
Listen to Laura Sheahen’s reading of “Devil Dancer’s Daughter” below…
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Gate Mudaliyar A.C.G.S. Amarasekara, The Devil Dancer’s Daughter. (Oil on canvas)
Laura Sheahen composed this poem in response to The Devil Dancer’s Daughter, a painting by the Sri Lankan artist Gate Mudaliyar A.C.G.S. Amarasekara (b. 1883 – d. 1983). The painting is housed in the National Art Gallery of Sri Lanka and is reproduced here with permission.
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