STRANGE GOSPELS by Cynthia Cruz
I was locked in the linen closet, lost
In ruffles of gingham tatters and my sky
Bleached hair. I wore the
Paper crown. I wore the flimsy red
Tiara. I let them
Pin them wings on me.
The palace, I say, is burning.
And snipers masked in mandarin felt masks.
In my room, I can hear them
Breaking off of daddy’s ancient CB:
One day she’ll be a looker.
Someday, a knockout.
But all I see when I look in the mirror
Is a bright blue sky filling with F16s.
Listen to Cynthia Cruz’s reading of “Strange Gospels” below…
THE ANGELS by Maria Hummel
They have not come for you. They will not blister
the day with light and swords. The room remains
a room, and not a portal. The syringes
hold no messages, not even plain
emptiness. The food trays, when you eat food,
rattle if I move them, and, if left alone,
sink beneath the ice of grease. The good
doctor is pregnant, and strokes her own
belly when she speaks. In a thousand years
no one will remember any of this.
The hospital will be a ruin. Your
tubes twisted in a dump, or burned. But if wrists
are stumps, hands are trees; I lift yours to learn
how the wind moves. Hold them to know where it turns.
DEAR SUBURB, by David Roderick
Some blunt hammering set me off,
that and the teeth of a saw.
I left behind my sweater,
the remains of a sandwich, my camera,
some paperweights, my lament. I left behind
a few weak coals I’d blown alive.
This happened somewhere
off one of your forgotten roads,
just past a farm stand where customers leave
a little corrugated shed
with the smell of rotting corn-silk in their clothes.
The important fs are focus, flatness, and frame.
As I walked toward a harvest
of photographs you vanished
in the pinhole just beyond
my reach, like an owl in its darkest seat.
Listen to David Roderick’s reading of “Dear Suburb,” below…
AUBADE IN PIECES by Victoria Lynne McCoy
Even as I deliver my body
to the subway’s tenebrous mercy,
I cannot un-know this:
each time daylight invades
our limbs, the sun marching
its restless armies up the sheets,
my love will put entire states between us
and there’s no telling
when the map will tesseract
itself to bring him back.
~
Always his breath that first
breaks me. His chest a hum
of lightning bugs. Lethal
little darlings. His fingers
swarm my thighs. He leaves
teeth prints to miss him by—
Praise this skin
its miracle cells, their blessed
forgetfulness.
~
Under my pillow, a mason jar
where I collect my name
each time it burns his mouth
open, fireflies
in the summer porch of him.
I pin their wings down.
I sing to them of the hour
before the wolf comes.
Listen to Victoria Lynne McCoy’s reading of “Aubade in Pieces” below…
MAP (7) by Ye Chun
7. Olympia, Washington
The Pacific Ocean shovels coals in the distance.
My drunk friends drop pebbles at me as I lie
on the couch losing water. Be happy, be happy, be happy.
I’m trying to see spring sprout, mountain that smells like green apple,
grass younger than me, to see the pink sweater
I wore when the sun sprinkled pink dust and I practiced
xiang gong to make my body fragrant,
not the speeding lines of the steel tunnel,
a hand gridding its fingers on my ribs.
I’m trying to breathe, to reach water or an address.
In the white house
with white windows
who spends the night?
The dead say: don’t
talk so loud
I can hear you
even before the words are said
In the woods
there is a bird
whose feathers
have every color
in the world
You’ve seen it
You’ve gathered
every name of it
in your throat
MAP (5) by Ye Chun
5. Lhasa
Seeds tier in a pomegranate.
Sweat beads convex-mirror corners of a night.
You pick up a piece of coal from roadside,
wrap it in a blue and green checked handkerchief
and give it to me: What makes you feel warm?
In the Himalayas, a snow leopard
spins gold in early morning. I tie a prayer flag
to a balloon and let go. Its little feet step through clouds
and rain falls on the white stupas, the hind-scalps
of prostrating pilgrims who say: om mani padme hum, om
mani padme hum, om mani padme hum…
Buddhakapala
(Skullcup of Buddha)
presides over
twenty-five deities
two hands
holding his consort
(Citrasena)
four hands
his skullcup
chopper
ceremonial staff
and drum
In the dancer’s pose
(ardhaparyanka)
he stands on a corpse
supported by a lotus
MAP (4) by Ye Chun
4. Shenzhen
Streetlamps imitate stars.
Stains on a hotel ceiling imitate mountains, boats and ruins.
…either do great good or great evil,
the journalist, 23, says. We walk
along the low brick wall into a park. A palm tree
stops us and deepens the ocher of our faces.
A stone bridge shapes an ellipse with its shadow. We
don’t have much to do so we press each other’s body.
Is a compass a moon bringing a finger to its lips?
A mosquito net
with a crimson mosquito
A roach crawls beneath the net
onto her right leg
My leg feels odd
she says
It’s broken
her algebra teacher says
It’s broken
her chief-editor says
It’s broken
the legless beggar says
It’s broken
the manager of Human Resources says
It’s broken
her snoring lover says
On the wall a map
of cherries and water paths
MAP (3) by Ye Chun
3. Zhongzhou, Luoyang
This area is between brown and purple.
All the apartment buildings look the same.
I need to lie down, call out
your name to one of the black-barred
windows. In the most crowded market,
my classmate is selling embroidered pillowcases and lingerie.
If you appear, I’ll make you look at me balancing
the sick little invisible animal
on my head. I love the sweet numbness of dusk—
we glow before vanishing.
Lay out the grid
of roads and wards:
Align the northern part
of the western wall
the middle stretch
of the eastern wall
and a road that comes
in Gate VII
turns west
and heads south
nearly reaching
the course of the Luo
Align the other roads
the southern part
of the western wall
most of the northern stretch
and the surviving part
at the southern end
of the eastern wall
MAP (1) by Ye Chun
1.Niujie, Beijing
When the earth shakes, hunching grandma
picks me up, cousin’s uneven leg shadow-puppets
the window. The sky lowers like father’s raincoat
till the old lady carried out by her son
drums on his head: Let me die at home, let me die.
We live in a tent, eat government bread
and play on a monkey-hill. The world stays
a cotton ball in big sister’s bleeding nose.
Worms swim in my belly, warm air rubs my soles.
Elizabeth Schoyer, Napoleon’s Collection, 2005
Oil on canvas and mixed media
“The image of spider web and cocoons in ‘Niujie, Bejing’ came
from Napoleon’s Collection, painted by Elizabeth Schoyer, whom
I studied with at the University of Virginia. In fact, the poem
sequence grew out of an art exercise for her class. For the exercise,
we made a map of the place we grew up. In the sequence, each
poem is a place and consists of two stanzas — the one on the left
pockets traces of experience; the one on the right serves as sort of
notes on the experience. Together they work like lines of latitude
and longitude to locate the experience.”-Ye Chun
Draw a spider web
with small cocoons
Draw one cocoon
of hymenoptera
one of polyp
of cynodont
one with a man inside
the man with a bird
in his belly
(its singing is its gyration)
with a bomb in his head
(its ticking its nutrition)
Ye Chun’s “MAP”, continued…
FOR BLOCKED AFFECTIONS by Sarah Johnson
A cold flux of the humors can produce heaviness in the tissue, which leads to a blocked affection. The resulting fluids pool in the feet, causing sluggishness. The effect of spirits and devils on this disorder cannot be overlooked. Their natures are various, and their motives obscure. I had a spirit who gave me good dreams and stomach-worms.
A blocked affection makes a man tedious. He is driven to decode his friends’ addresses, convinced of the malice behind each ciphered word and look. A cache of innuendo shines in the light of his diseased fancy. Odd items become significant. Some patients can’t endure mention of a wet towel or a ribbon, from a secret antipathy.
Hooked on the barb of this distemper’s devil, the suffering man must heed its muttering. He shuns company and hoards his pleasures, fearing others’ mockery of his chosen amusements. He suspects even his doctor wishes him ill. He avoids medication on a pretext, being wary of arsenic.
The treatment shouldn’t fully clear the distempered humor. As in bloodletting, draining too much of its chill vitality will worsen the imbalance. Suspicion has sometime a good cause. (Wasn’t my friend a swindler after all?) Anyone may develop blocked affections. If you clasp someone’s hand and his fingers are cold, suspect him of it.
Listen to Sarah Johnson discuss “For Blocked Affections” below…
Sarah Johnson’s work was influenced by Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1621.
MR. BOSWELL PEELS AN ORANGE by Sarah Johnson
My wife’s marmalade is the best I’ve had. She peels and crushes
the oranges herself, and for days
the house smells of oranges’ beaten golden pulp. Under her persistent hands,
the fruit submits. It becomes a vivid concentrate,
textured with rind. Stored in jars,
it will keep for months.
Johnson used to make a drink for himself
at our Club, with water and muddled oranges. With a spoon he crushed the segments
down in the glass. Fishing out the peels, he put them quickly
in his pocket—it seemed he didn’t want to be discovered, though his dirty coat
smelled guilty as oranges. I made a bet with a lady,
who didn’t think me man enough
to ask him why he kept the pieces. It was one of his obscure compulsions.
My store of notes was still growing
in those days, rising in ragged pillars in my stonewalled study, away in Scotland
where I’d compile them. Johnson’s voice, unmistakable, kept sounding
through me. When he died, I was in Edinburgh. He left me nothing.
On the morning I dared
to ask him, I stood over his writing-desk, my pen ready. I saw the peels
in a neat stack atop his diary. Under pressure, my friend admitted
his great liking for orangepeel. I noted down his strange unwillingness
to answer freely. Each peel was scraped and dried,
and cut into thin pieces. What he did with them next, he could not be prevailed upon
to tell. Firmly as always, he pressed my expression into vigor
and correctitude: he could not be prevailed upon,
even by his dearest friends, to tell. My pages smell of citrus, still.
Listen to Sarah Johnson discuss “Mr. Boswell Peels An Orange” below…
THE PRINTER by Jenny Doughty
All day he labours, polishing the plate
(small, nondescript, whose eyes illuminate
his workman’s face), picks up the burin, starts
to etch out in reverse all but the heart
of what he sees, carves worlds in words,
carves tigers, devils, chimney-sweeps and birds.
Varnish and ink and acid-bath stand by,
then, day’s work done, he walks in Peckham Rye
and sees the new-leaved trees through tired eyes,
each leaf a green-winged angel on the sky.
William Blake’s print of “The Tyger,” one of the works that inspired Jenny Doughty’s poem. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.