THE END OF LABOR by Al Maginnes
I stared through noon-shaded glass to see
how we are measured against our tasks.
My father and other men made sacraments
of sweat, days measured in squares of dirt, lengths
of wood, packets of seed. And tomato plants,
doghouses, leaf piles rose before them. Summoned
to apprenticeship, I labored and dreamed labor’s end,
my small hands once again soft fields.
In a city where I had never been, I had no math
to total the worth of the money in my pocket.
So I passed a woman kneeling on the sidewalk
as if she was a statue, monument to unending want.
Or I handed her all I carried and continued
down an alley echoed by strange words, smells
of fried meat, trees thick with unnamed fruit
bending over stucco walls to shade the ground,
the air cool with the symmetry that once came
after a day of building forms, pouring concrete,
when we turned from work’s closed world
and felt day settle across our shoulders,
our shadows skimming mud our feet dragged through.
In front of a Chinese restaurant, two boys,
skinny in their starched uniforms, faces lashed
by acne, stood with automatic rifles heavy
over their shoulders, protection for tourists
intent on moo shu pork or egg drop soup.
Their hands wove against the air as they talked,
illustrating stories of girls and back alley fights,
motion filled with the careless grace I saw
in the stride of a carpenter returning to work
after lunch, who walked from the elevator
on the unfinished slab of the fifth floor.
Minutes later he forgot to hook his safety line,
leaned back and kept falling, and I saw him
step again from the elevator, a moment
that deepened and widened until it was
something to be held, a coin, a bone
polished to the dull sheen of ivory,
as though a moment could be held inside an object,
sealed by something less changeable than language.
Shadows laid a dark weight across
suddenly unforgiving ground. Breath snarled knots
I knew from working with my father.
The building’s familiar shape held, lights
the shape of tears burning over each empty floor,
leaving us to weigh what we had to give
a job willing to consume us so completely.
Now the curved road into the city bends,
my eyes narrow against the light from buildings
I saw rising under the priestly dominion
of cranes, shadows climbing without language
or thought to gleam like small coins that tumble
into hands that hesitate, then close
to save the counting for later.
Issue 4 Contents NEXT: Three Poems by David Winter
THREE POEMS by David Winter
STORYBOARD
We spent her sixteenth, my seventeenth summer perched on a porch, talking out our love
for her man. I had little language. She was luculent. We worked back through wrong things, arriving
before him. Her mouth opened, black as a movie reel—I do not want to project. She storyboards:
her babysitter, ages seven to ten. He tells her not to tell. Years—her body becoming another body—pass.
She tells. There is a trial, but—
She finishes her cigarette. She is not asking questions. I cradle what she offers: a still shot
of suffering’s root, how survival begins with the seed’s rupture, soft flesh pressing through dirt—
these are not her words. I was raped, she says. And she sits, finishing
another cigarette.
Our conversation moves on.
ARCHIVED LIGHT
After Without Sanctuary, a collection of lynching postcards
Neither the number of photos, eighty-one, nor the races inscribed beside—all Black except
the Jew,
a few Italians—but the grain itself grates on my eyes. I came looking for lolling tongues, an
organic
thing cut and weighed for my righteous mouth. Instead, their faces barely break from sepia
night,
half their names absent from the weathered photos. Even the archived light of the one burnt
alive
has lessened. I could walk away, white man that I am. I wouldn’t have to walk far. Embers
flare
and cool in the hearth. I could sweep out the ashes, the teeth and chips of bone. Speak
politely
to our neighbors one more day.
N—
I learned from my mother which words were unspeakable, a lesson my older brother
promptly untaught. Dick. Shit. Fuck. I don’t remember where I first heard the banned word
for blackness, at what age it found its way into my mouth. Perhaps I asked at six, when dad explained
Dr. King and the end of segregation. Maybe not until, as a hirsute sixteen-year-old, I explored the world
with my mouth. Alcohol. Opium. Pussy. Amazing how rarely we white boys heard the word no
after our parents wore its power thin—that syllable paired with a fist or a badge became as precious
as a bag of pills. We baited each other like bears into the liquored dawn. I slurred because I knew
it was not right.
Issue 4 Contents NEXT: Self Portrait as Teenaged Boy Beating Swan by Colleen Abel
SELF PORTRAIT AS TEENAGED BOY BEATING SWAN
by Colleen Abel
Sometimes you have enough–
the cob, the pen twining
their necks to hearts,
all that fidelity.
The dank pond by the council
flats, like it’s bloody Windermere.
You only wanted to wreck
that love-shape they were making.
After, you sat, sad Zeus, and held
the one you’d caught,
stroking its feathered throat
as if to make it sing.
Issue 4 Contents NEXT: Two Poems by Danez Smith
TWO POEMS by Danez Smith
SLOW TWERK
or how to tame a brushfire
or how you get on his last nerve
& juke on it
or how he breathes while he dreams
of a mouth full
or how the war was won
when you got him limp
or how his eyes shut up
& bottom lip caught ‘tween teeth
or how you spell your name
or how to own his hands
maybe one palming a nipple
or what elastic was made for
or how to see him certain of tongue
& clumsy with his skin
or what makes those nameless muscles
clench, trying to save it for later
or the hymn written across his veins
or how he hopes the world ends
or his favorite kind of Sunday
or when he knew
he’d kill a nigga
for your sway
TWERKING AS A RADICAL ACT OF HEALING
when your song plays, steal your body
back out the gut of that brute/nigga/beast/boy.
sweat the bile off, unlearn the word acid,
dance until the only thing you’re sure of is the ache
in your thighs & your name as a metaphor for steam.
bend your knees because you want to,
not for any god or dirty nails in your shoulder.
go down knowing there is still a sky
to rise towards. give your scars to the strobe lights,
let them wash you in lightning, wait for whatever
kind of salvation a basement brings. twerk
& ain’t that the best prayer?
tonight, you left his ghost at home, left a note
for him to pack his ghost-shit & leave
by the time the sun soars in your honor. honey, you’re here
& that’s it’s own psalm. don’t let nobody look at you
& not know they looking at the risen. this how you write
free all over your bones & for the first time
you know free doesn’t mean how his hands mistook you
for somebody’s water, but how you were made to be
like wind, like a hawk, like a doe mid leap,
like a storm, like a child, like a song.
Issue 4 Contents NEXT: The City is a Body Broken by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
THE CITY IS A BODY BROKEN by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Most days, the light falls so thick
I don’t know what it is to be
without it. At night we lie
in bed away from each other,
the moon so bright it is a scrim
for the sun. When clouds come,
monsoons flood freeways, trap
old tires against barbed wire.
Your body, a victim of erosion,
turns bone. I jump from our chainlink
bridge and only break a foot.
Which of us has become
the natural disaster? In bed, I blame
the fever, the sores that line my mouth.
But it’s my foot that’s swollen. I wrap
it in custom’s forms. Will I ever know
where you hide my money, or
the mountains where I hide your guns?
Issue 4 Contents NEXT: Harbingers by Tory Adkisson
HARBINGERS by Tory Adkisson
There are kettles of vultures
resting on the stove.
Some apple cores
rotting in the trash.
Our home’s a monastery,
kestrels hang
from the ceiling like tiny
bells. You get angry
whenever I ask too many
questions, but my gullet
hangs open, thirsty
for answers.
Every day’s a black hole
with a pinprick of swallow
-tails at its center.
I’m so thirsty for answers,
when they start falling
I’m sure to drown
along with the turkeys.
You know I’m too impatient
to do other
-wise. I disregard
every tender gesture,
every kiss & caress,
dancing in a pirouette
of pink flamingoes, perfectly
en pointe & still reckless.
I don’t regret teaching
you how to hate
in articulated syllables—
when you call me a fucker,
I can’t help but smile
at my own voice parroted back.
If it weren’t for the cudgel
of larks lurking in your iris, I’d
wonder if your darkness
were different than mine.
Day after day of this heart
-ache & still you fly back
to me, puffing up
your chest, ostentatious, pea
-cocked & loaded. You don’t like it
when I burn the dinner,
or spill the tea, when
the porcelain
of my throat’s
too clotted with leaves.
You don’t like that I might
give away the future
if I speak. You never want to know
what’s coming;
you never want to think
about after. You’d rather
drink the future
& just as soon
forget it, whether jasmine
or mint, oolong
or honey. Meanwhile
I’m growing ever more
vestigial & ornery.
There’s just no saving us.
The ravenous woodpeckers
& twittering
sparrows watch from
the safety of the trees. They know
one day someone’s going
to shoot us down & all
this noise, all this rage
we harbor, will mean nothing
when we’re nothing
but a pair of omens
nestled in the dirt, waiting
without wings, to be savaged.
Issue 4 Contents NEXT: Autoimmune by Micaela Mascialino
AUTOIMMUNE by Micaela Mascialino
when she hears the word
she pictures a car
crashing into a column her spine
she’s told other words
invasion foreign attack
now missiles are guided
into finger joints
the left elbow a combat zone
like an allergy
to part of yourself
the doctor explains
her knees are sneezing
where she sees a stub
of pale thumb
something in her sees
not-body
she’s a girl inside
of another girl
a whole rejecting
its wholeness
something extra her body
insists keeps swelling
to point out the exact places
here right here
get rid of this
Issue 4 Contents NEXT: Barnstormers by Malik Abduh
TWO POEMS by Traci Brimhall
AFTER WAKING FROM A SEVEN-YEAR DREAM
It comes in my sleep and then it comes up the river,
a tiger shark with its young in its mouth
all singing the same commandment—Thou shalt kiss
thy mistress’ Song of Solomon thighs and belly
and the star tattoo on her left areola. I kiss the pear hanging
between her breasts and every link of the chain
that holds it there. I kiss ghosts in her ears, the ones
who whisper as she enters sleep, that last
wilderness, to escape my wrathful appetites. I tongue
the pillowcase, nibble the headboard, laugh
as I take each pair of panties from her drawer
and treat them to the most abiding pleasures.
I worship the shark until I’m no longer afraid of it,
pull out its teeth, carve my name into confessionals
and bathroom stalls. I kiss the teeth. I kiss my name.
I kiss every woman who accepts my last dream
as payment. We who are about to bind ourselves to trees.
I kiss doorknobs and empty soda bottles, trap
thunder in my mouth and give it to every child
I can catch. We who are about to see God’s wet hair.
I lick cobwebs beneath the saint’s skirt, kiss his legs free
of dust, slander his mortality with my tongue until
I come into the godscape, blind and spitting live flies.
SIBYLLINE TRANSLATION
Emergency, I’ll be your siren. Imagination, I’ll be your figment.
Fiction is one way of knowing. Dreams are another.
Meanwhile, the dead trample the psalmic grass as they line up
to ride bald angels like horses through the graveyard.
Lazarused but not yet rising, their bodies crowd the fence
waiting for news of the hereafter while the undertaker collects
a toll from pallbearers. Blame the congregation tithing
wisdom teeth, or the moon which has been full for weeks.
Lunacy, I’m already yours. I made my truth. Consequence,
I’ll be your whipping girl, your pulled hair and burning nerve.
I will help pry open the oracle’s casket. Out of her
whitening mouth, a bright nothing will aerialize, ascend.
Issue 4 Contents NEXT: The Kiss by Kurt Brown
THE KISS by Kurt Brown
for L.A.
That kiss I failed to give you.
How can you forgive me?
The kiss I would have spent on you is still
there, within me. It will probably die there.
But it will be the last of me to die.
__________
“After Kurt’s passing, I was asked by editors of literary reviews to send poems by him, so that they could publish some of his new work in memoriam. At the same time, Tiger Bark Press asked me for all of Kurt’s poems to start working on a collection entitled: I’ve Come This Far to Say Hello: New and Selected Poems by Kurt Brown. So I very reluctantly went into Kurt’s computer — something I never thought I’d have to do — in search of all those poems. In a file entitled “Almost Poems,” I found about fifty poems in different stages of completion, filed in alphabetical order by title. I read, and read those poems for a long, sad afternoon. Then, under the letter “T”, I found “The Kiss” — written a month and a half before he passed away.” ~ Laure-Anne Bosselaar
Issue 4 Contents NEXT: Could Be Worse by Scott Nadelson
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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