FOUR POEMS by Rebecca Hazelton
HOMEWRECKERS
Say hi to California for me. Say hi to lovely weather.
I hear your movie is a good one. Your movie is a winner.
Say good morning to the good girl beside you. Say hello
to good decisions. The bread and the toast it becomes.
The sweet unction of jam and the dull knife that spreads it.
There are ratings for content and there are ratings
for effectiveness. Give this breakfast a thumbs-up, give this
daily bread an M for Mature. You are no longer the man
who wakes in his own sick. You are a clean and gleaming
example of the benefits of benefits, the outcome of income.
Hello car, hello driveway, my goodness it’s been
forever since we gridlocked together, since we were caught
in a pattern and sidelined. Hello burning vehicle. Hello
tire smoke. Use your turn signal when passing. Politeness
is a virtue is a virtuous man. LA is a town and LA is a set
piece for noir and incest. I hear you bought all
the orange groves. I hear you’re a pipeline and a girl
with a fresh nose job goodbye goodbye. You inhale
and she inhales the good day the good idea
and the smog isn’t smog it’s potential.
WHO SAYS SORRY
The habit of sealing up sweetness,
of saving but never
tasting, isn’t lost
when the drones disperse,
and the queen
is left to starve.
These uncapped frames
stamped
with ready-made cells
say there are six sides
to every argument
and there are six arguments
for abandoning your home,
but each can be built
upon and expanded.
Even when the chemicals
in our body smooth and the horizon blues
from contaminants,
there’s still a synapse
or two that crackles
with self-denial,
that prefers the look
of honey in a jar
left to darken unopened,
the comb floating
like a ruin.
EVEN THE NEWS
When Napoleon wrote
to Josephine, “Am returning in three days. Don’t wash,”
he wanted her
concentrated, the sweet and the rank
in the crevices
of her underarms, the accumulations
of perfume
dabbed over days
in negotiation with the stiffer perfume of her crotch,
which we call musk, which we describe as animalic,
acknowledging our flirtation
with the fecal and fecund,
the way we sniff, wrinkle our noses, and sniff again.
To reproduce
this aroma we’ve hunted musk deer, killed muskrats,
dried organs, ground them, tinctured the grains
and then anointed
our bodies with the complex
scent that attracts and repels
simultaneously.
Napoleon couldn’t know
this battlefield missive
would be passed on and repeated
in varying shades of admiration and disgust,
or that one day he’d be a synonym for a man
overcompensating. He was of average height for the period.
Upon Napoleon’s death,
the attending doctor cut off the corpse’s penis
and gave it to a priest in Corsica
like a relic,
which, improperly preserved, shrank
and thinned to a leather shoelace,
redolent of sandalwood,
tying us together
by what repels and binds.
SUMMERTIME SADNESS
Tomorrow there will be a better tomorrow
if we go to bed early if we say our prayers
there will be a cessation to this still weather
but not a tornado. Tomorrow the sprinklers
will click against the drought
during appointed times and the small pines
will stand stranded in red clay.
The bubble skylights of Walmart will aim
their security cameras to the heavens.
There will be cleanups on aisles five and six.
There will be returns. The hideous apings of sex
from our neighbors carrying across the asphalt
are not like our hideous apings of sex spilling over
the window frames. Ours call the world into new focus.
Tomorrow we will make promises. We will say our prayers.
We will go to a church recognized suitably Christian.
A hat will be passed though no one wears hats anymore.
If our prayers have answers they aren’t these children
bicycling in aimless circles in the parking lot, singing
the song of the summer. Someone like you. Someone like you.
EVEN AS YOU TELL ME OF THE HORSES by Ama Codjoe
The number of nights I’ve spent alone crowd
the grass like fallen green apples. They are years
spotted, bruised, and wasting. Not a spell or a season,
but a lifetime—a good life with a brick house,
libraries, a surprise party for my thirty-third
birthday, leather boots, Fela Kuti, and mercy dressed
in my mother’s terry cloth robe. I forget
the three meals I’ve eaten most days. Another
hunger gnaws at my restlessness.
Beside you, I am a ring or a moon, or you
are a ring or a moon. Or we are one planet
with moonlike names for the places our bodies
have yet to touch: Sea of Clouds, Sea of Ex-loves,
Sea of Rib Cage, Sea of Seas of Patience, Sea of Long
Islands, Sea of Ohio, Sea that has Become Known.
Awake, I recall the choreography—my arm
numb, turning to one side. Last night
you dreamt of saddled horses from a carousel
gorging on autumn apples. You say there was plenty,
and I believe you. I make my body a long neck
to reach for your face. The first time we kissed
was on a street corner waiting for the light
to change. We stepped from the curb
and rowed the air with our sleek bones,
the bones you hold me with now
in the almost-dawn. Inches from us
in a puddle on the floor is a flannel shirt—
the one she said brought out your eyes.
A touch is enough to let me know
you have not forgotten her. Forgiven her.
MRI by Leila Chatti
I wear a gown that ties in the back; this is how
I am sure I am sick. The nurse can’t be more
than a few years older than I, smiling
as if we’re friends while I grip closed
the gape of my frock. Laying down
on the narrow carriage, I think
it’s a bit like a grotesque sleepover,
me in my nightdress and the nurse
telling jokes, fetching me a blanket
to throw over my knees. I think
these things because I am young
enough to have slumber parties,
still young enough to feel entitled
to ease. And the nurse waves
to a technician behind the glass—a boy,
I mean a man—who coolly asks
what I’d like to listen to, the way a boy does
on a date, scanning the car radio,
or at a party where he knows everyone
will sing along, but I say nothing
as I slide in, arms by my side
as if I were slipping into the sleeve of a sleeping bag
and it were simply my friends whispering
in the next room, trying not to disturb me.
SUMMER TRIANGLE by M.J. Bender
Deneb in the Swan; Altair in the Eagle; Vega in the Lyre—he brought home a woman
at three in the morning and told me to get out of bed and go sit on the front porch.
I listened to her having an orgasm—
a chord, a jazz chord: three thirds on top of the root.
It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It’s not—it’s feeling.
Vega, in the Lyre of Orpheus, a double-double that looks like two stars but is four,
two and two. Diminished or augmented. The sheets were stained in the morning when I was
let back in the house. So I bought my own mattress and put it in another room. Lyric: one
strum over four strings vibrating simultaneously. One afternoon I took a walk
down the street to buy a half gallon of milk. When I came home I found him
with a new woman. Both were naked in my bed, on my mattress,
under my covers in my room that was separate from his. Of the first magnitude
or brighter or darker.
THE NATURE OF LOVE by Aaron Belz
I disagree with you about the nature of love
and by extension about art or rather
the role of form in art for while abstraction
can delight the senses it is not sustainable
or repeatable and what humans need is more
like a glass of water not only upon waking
but one at lunchtime and one later on
in the evening repeating like a clock
that doesn’t need winding but ticks along
uninspired unexploding with no mystery at all
that is simply there in its place so I suppose
I also disagree with you about life and its
purpose I mean can you imagine if breath
or pulse were to have an ecstatic epiphany no
there is no ecstasy no explosion no light
piercing darkness once and for all but just
this steady lighting of the lamps of progress
and of moving on and yes it’s predictable
and that’s not only its chief characteristic
but its crowning virtue so make your art
in form that iterates generally and gently
rather than in spasms that hate themselves
and in doing so you will find the love that
plods dully on and it will bear that weight
in you of course I say all this and want
to mean it but in fact I live in urgent sadness
TWO POEMS by Marlin M. Jenkins
DRINKING GAME
I.
When the pastor spits
while sputtering any
variation of God’s name.
***
When the swing of preacher’s
head streams sweat into the pews.
(House rules:
capture both spit and sweat
in the elder mothers’ hats.
Use it either as holy water
or anointing oil.)
***
When you realize the song
on the organ has looped.
***
When someone says catch
the spirit, as if the altar
is lined with bear traps.
***
When the AC gives out
or
when you realize
it was never on.
***
When sister Bernice’s baby
cries to see mother shuffle
feet like stomping a snake.
***
When sister Ruth steps on
your new white Nikes.
***
When the youth minister
runs out the front door.
II.
There are casualties in faith
If you become drunk
on the wine of sweat
and singing and prophecy
enough that the red
text of Gospels bleeds
indistinguishable from black,
from the white space,
from the thick air. Run
too.
Shout to the Lord.
Sing to Him a new song.
PSALM FOR GOING DOWN
Is this not praise? To relearn
speech with thighs
pressed to each ear, practice
the shapes of each soundless
letter against opening of flesh.
Is this how Adam formed
the first alphabet? Was this
the origin of speaking
in tongues? Jesus, I know you
too would open your mouth
and men would rise, would speak
into an opening and
a man would come
forth. I am resurrected
at each little death. I will not
deny the evidence of spirit,
a tongue of fire
descending onto head
from heaven.
TWO POEMS by Tyree Daye
SAME OAKS, SAME YEAR
My cousin kept me and his little brother
saved me from our uncle’s
pit bull, then spent seven years
in prison for his set.
Every other word
he said was
blood.
***
Uncle Nagee showed us
how to make a BB rattle
inside a squirrel.
Two small holes,
enter and exit.
All summer I wondered
what leaves the body?
GIN RIVER
If the Neuse River was gin,
we would’ve drunk to its bottom,
its two-million-year-old currents,
shad, sunfish, redhorse, yellow lance.
All the blood from the Tuscarora War.
We would have drunk it all,
aunts and uncles would have led us in Big Bill Broonzy’s
“When I Been Drinking,”
until everything inside us began to dance
and we all joined in,
silt around our ankles,
everyone kicking sand.
HURT MUSIC by Melissa Cundieff-Pexa
The bell’s emptied space
has no name. I would like
to call it my never-born.
I’m there and the metal clapper
and bowl are asleep.
My never-born is awake,
very quiet.
I don’t want to reach
for him. I don’t want to fall
from the rope’s fray or draw
nothing from the naming. I call,
can you hear me? All parts
of the bell rouse differently.
The clapper,
in deepest dream, says,
breathe me back, breathe
me back. My matted lungs
search for air—the bowl
wakes dazed. Hush now,
it drones, your hurt music.
Dizzied
me, dark-circle-eyed in the curve’s
continuum and orbit.
My unborn speaks
from inside his name, his last
wish reverberating:
Carry me in the bell, betrayer.
In the apogee of your voice
to my voice.
TWO POEMS by Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams
LETTER IN EXCHANGE FOR
Painting all the spines of the books blue,
for example. Tasting me so absolutely
as to know the monsoon of my sickness.
Licking my lips clean of disturbance
while hunting for the trees I want
at every window, that wanton green.
What if, in reciprocation, you gave me
every song you wrote for other women?
Only, be correct, change their hair to dark.
Wrapping a belt around the waist of all
clouds floating in my chemistry. Being
beautiful. Being exquisitely beautiful.
For example, not being a cloud floating
in my chemistry. For example, not misting
away, a ghostly disturbance in the atmosphere.
APOLOGY TO THE NARROW MOMENT
But my body is a narrow hull
of birds regretting the sky. Inside
you is a chasm of thrown things.
But my secret is a pond drifted
over with leaves, winter-cold
and reflecting my hands only.
But my yearning is a spray of stars
arrowing out of my fingertips,
falling on the dark lawn by the party.
But my nights are a thousand faces
turning away, sipping their drinks,
looking at someone they’ve just recognized.
TWO POEMS by Leslie Harrison
[No. 118]
How snow and distance equal absence the page untouched
the page a white blankness the way ink recedes from these
cold vistas its absence a kind of reverence how the moon
is also an absence untouched as if he knew it was beyond
mere wood mere blade how burdened the humans are
in their boats their roads and towpaths how there is always
something happening in the middle distance how there are
always mountains always rivers how the birds are a trick of
perspective some with wingspan like a temple’s curved roof
some reduced to black nicks in the empty sky how I too
have seen foxes in a grove under moon under stars though
mine breathed but carried no fire how I’ve longed for that
dark blue winter evening the night a pendulum the night
a fulcrum the year tips then slides across while in the sky
the stars light up as hundreds of foxes coalesce in the field
make their way toward a tree how they’re gathered there
in the winter night like candles how he must have known
the name of this how in this language we call them a leash
we call them the earth
(This poem references New Year’s Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, the 118th print of a series titled One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, by the 19th century woodblock printer Utagawa Hiroshige.)
[A PRAYER FOR OUR MORTALITY]
To begin think of wind river sand silk the various strands
currents how falling moving how leaving can be exactly
that benign a cessation of resistance a species of quiet
abnegation think then of a flame on its wick flickering
in the drift of air stubborn and still alight holding on
in the draft that sifts through a summer screen the leaves
greenly afire on their piers their waxy wicks the sleeve’s
small collapse against your arm in the breeze think
of the current of time how it too swirls eddies and then
abates as sticky afternoon slips into sticky dusk itself
slipping into moonrise into full dark think of the lit window
and you candled there you inside the moving the breaking
heart of this thing think of the glass doing its invisible best
the shell the egg of your dwelling the way it cradles you
how soft the body’s flesh how there are two of you
the unformed fetal you asleep innocent as weather and
the you that paces in all that yolk light the light that spills
thick and angular through screen and glass the light
that falls across the trimmed the orderly lawn the way
your shadow hushes the crickets afraid there in the sudden
dark the way it releases them as you vanish into song
MISSION CREEP by Jeffrey Morgan
How a groove is a prayer for a needle and a hollow
is a prayer for birds, how music fills a space
and makes you aware of emptiness,
somewhere my brother is
not where my brother is
supposed to be. I tell the sky how
and the sky replies in sunlight on the river
meaning walk the bottom wearing this
and you will know the answer.
I ask the bus dispatcher if she can ask the drivers
to ask the passengers and for once
there is no music to my holding,
just an approximation of silence and nothing
preceded by a click. I am sitting with the phone to my ear
and then I am standing with the phone to my ear
noticing my indentation in the couch disappear
maybe the way things do in my brother’s memory.
Now the sky is doing that
thing where it throws some of its light
down in lines like pikes
or stilts, as if to say climb up here
and you can see over the trees
all the way to the ocean, the mountains,
so many beautiful places
full of music and nothing and waiting,
and you can walk on this river
sizzling beneath you like a fuse,
sparks of light on the water.