Three Poems by Collier Nogues
MISSISSIPPI
I know forgetting myself is a good thing, the best loss.
The trees look soft in the fog’s distance, egg-colored light
all over them. Even the sheep,
eggy.
The earth dries in ribs the rain has drawn on it.
Trees here grow up out of the water. Too little light
to tell what color but the ground that isn’t shining is made of leaves.
So these pools are mirrors:
were it on earth as it is in heaven,
blue land of we-will-all-meet-at-the-table,
I could be for other than myself successfully
without first having to lose someone I love.
THE FIRST YEAR IN THE WILDERNESS
i. Spring
My friend’s little daughter was pulled
under.
What began as a single
instance of labor became
circular:
the child’s mother on her hands
and knees, pushing
floor wax into tile grout
across the emptied house.
ii. Summer
Every window
hung with stained glass crosses
casting rainbows,
coloring
the throw rug and the wall.
Men. Silence,
great crashes of noise at long intervals.
The cat sacked out on the floor.
iii. Fall
Her prayer:
My preparations have outlasted
your stay,
so I have not only
the afterglow of you but also
little signs still
that you are bound for me.
iv. Winter
The only place open after midnight:
tall-stalked bar stools,
the valley laid into the wood
of the wall.
We stayed up
with the lottery sign’s crossed fingers,
while the animals
lay down in the field.
EX NIHILO
The beginning is spring.
The lanes are lined with poplars who lose their leaves to winter
but to whom nothing further wintry happens.
I design it so the marriage lasts as long as the lives,
and the children outlive their parents.
They are all startlingly easy to make happy. They recover
from unease like lightning.
When it falls apart my frustration is like a child’s,
unable to say, unable to make something
happen by saying.
To speak in someone else’s voice is a pleasure, but not a relief.
My tongue burns in its cavity.
My recreation of us is unforgivable
in the sense that I am the only one here to forgive it.
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“Collier Nogues is a rare poet in the contemporary landscape. Her work is rife with the quick jump-cuts and fragments many young poets favor, but there’s no cynical irony for irony’s sake in her poems. This is poetry that earnestly engages with life’s big questions….A poet is, among other things, a protector of thoughts, a kind of police officer of the inner world. Nogues… makes it a little safer to think, a little less frightening and lonely.” — Craig Morgan Teicher from “Introducing Collier Nogues” in Pleiades, Volume 30 Number 1, 2010 |
- Published in Featured Poetry, home, Poetry, Series
Three Poems by Melissa Ginsburg
THE JOB
Not being stupid
I took what was offered: the job
was waiting and I did it
with sand and mirrors, in glitter
while I paced. I waited, I fell
in love with waiting
covered in jewels washed
in from the sea. Summer
kept me in sugared fruits,
shiny shells, mother-of-pearl.
My job was undressing
the sea, what it wanted, shovel
and droplet turned sun to roving dots.
Waiting threw its necklace back,
was work, was softened glass.
BIRTHDAY
I dug a shallow wide hole in the yard
for a tree that might grow or an animal’s grave.
Dog in the hole, white fur and fill dirt.
Better to bury it. It was my birthday.
A dogwood in winter has berries the birds like.
A winter rose in the window. A sugar
rose. We will take it in the snow. We’ll fill
a hollow log with heated rocks.
It is my birthday. It keeps on, it occurs.
For my birthday I am given a window.
By you I am given. A view, a gift, a tree, a dog,
a stone. Everything I have I give to winter.
MERMAID
Flood deeps the shallows.
The rivers get covered.
We difficult our dinners.
In times of hunger, if only
a rock on which to perch.
In sleep we choose a dream:
lure a gull and water lock it,
meet a boy and get feet.
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“Like syntactical pinwheels, Ginsburg’s word choice disorients then reorients the reader in a new, slightly off-kilter universe. Like a perennial Alice through the looking glass, for the speaker, seeing the world, let alone being in the world is not a habit. The speaker sees the world in its particularity: birds animate cables; light, dust and shadow are caught in the dearth of a moment. Ginsburg’s vision—embracing everything and refusing nothing—gives the collection its spine.” ~ Review by Amy Pence, online at The Rumpus |
- Published in Featured Poetry, home, Poetry, Series
Two Poems by Yona Harvey
GINGIVITIS, NOTES ON FEAR
I hesitate invoking that doubled emptiness: open—
my daughter’s mouth in the bathroom mirror—
not her first vanity but first blood inkling
she tastes & smoothes with her tongue. She turns
her chin this way & that, anticipating her future: new
bones replacing the fallen. If the body survives,
it repairs itself: two pillars—wider, stronger
forming new words: adolescent declarations
brushing past seasoned gums
What is the tongue- span
between trauma & terror?
Incident & accident?
Think on these things.
There is so much to fear. How will we fear it all?
& now my second-born, my son: If I don’t
brush, he says, a disease will attack my gums.
When God says, “Meet me tomorrow
at the corner of Seventh Day & Salvation
just as the sun before nightfall strikes
the fender of a red hatchback parked
outside Worldwide Washateria,” you
wait there
fitted in a dress the color of cloud-cover
& hold a feathered hat
to your delicate hair, newly picked &
haloed with a small brim. &
like a fleck of Antique Black in a gallon
of European White, you make everything
around you
more
like itself, which means you
appear
more
eloquently than the lampposts
boasting their specters of light,
or the woman
clutching her daughter’s shirt
above a basket, the sedative twilight
of the gods trapped momentarily
in the pane, which separate
the woman
& you
steadfast against the wind picking up,
the men desiring your attention,
the traffic held
in the ceaseless straight ahead.
Concrete barriers, a few
lopsided cones, abiding
highway hieroglyphs
are all that separate
onward & stalled, here & gone.
Not even this poem
can move you, or change
the motion of your scarf—
that furious red flag—
or the stilts—your legs.
Your lips
don’t move—you
do not mutter or
complain or ask directions.
Why don’t you?
Your autograph haunts
the covers of books
across town:
I know who I am I know who I am I know who I am
You,
Black-winged bird,
you’ve become
lyrics layering air:
1—
Describe the sound of His voice.
2—
To walk the black, wired bars
3—
is to follow a sound
1—
so peculiar you
2—
hardly notice
3—
the ink gone out.
1—
2- 3- 1- 2- 3- 1- 2- 3- 1-
Your stilts on the ground.
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Channeling the collection’s muse—jazz composer and pianist Mary Lou Williams—Hemming the Water speaks to the futility of trying to mend or straighten a life that is constantly changing. Here the spiritual and the secular comingle in a “Fierce fragmentation, lonely tune.” Often mimicking fairy tales or ancient fables, Yona Harvey inhabits, challenges, and explores the many facets of the female self—as daughter, mother, sister, wife, and artist—both on a personal level (“To describe my body walking I must go back / to my mother’s body walking”) and on a cultural level (“A woman weighs the price of beauty—”). |
- Published in Featured Poetry, home, Poetry, Series
ANTIPHON FOR THE OFFICE OF THE DEAD by William Kelley Woolfitt
a powder box and swans-down puff
her limp stocking, a green satin fan
spangled with dragonflies, curling-tongs
small muslin bags, a pumice stone
bits of skin, cut-glass bottles, cuticle
knife, a darner, nail powder, sealing wax
spirals of her hair, glove buttoner
orangewood stick, gauze balls, shoe lift
velvet brush, rabbit’s foot, pots of rouge
lip salve, cold cream plumbed by her
tired fingers, silver trays of hatpins
hairpins, safety pins, to hold, to prick
foxtail scarf with chain, scrimshaw
manicure box with sweet pea vines
carved in the whale-bone lid, hand-mirror
holding her breath, a smudged cloud
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Aaron Blum, “Bittersweet.” (Photograph)
William Kelley Woolfitt chose this original photograph by Aaron Blum to accompany his poem. The poet explains: “I gave this poem its current title after reading Traci Brimhall’s wonderful ‘Dirge for the Idol.’ I had imagined an altar-like dressing-table laden with the dead parts of humans and other animals; naming the poem ‘Antiphon for the Office of the Dead’ was my way of naming that table a place of commemoration and lament. I see another kind of altar in Aaron Blum’s photograph ‘Bittersweet,’ a suggestion of mourning and mending, with a lamp that may burn for the lost and the quilt-like table runner that may gather pieces of the old and put them together again.”
- Published in Featured Poetry
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
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