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Three Poems by Collier Nogues

Thursday, 15 May 2014 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. 

 

From On the Other Side, Blue (c) 2011 by Collier Nogues.
Reprinted with permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
“The First Year in the Wilderness” was first published in Pleiades.

 

 

  

On-the-Other-Side-Blue-Cover

“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

Read more at Four Way Books

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ELEGY WITH SHOTGUN by Anna Claire Hodge

Tuesday, 15 April 2014 by Anna Claire Hodge

Once you warmed the shower wall with water
              before pressing me against it. Some nights,
the bed was feverish heat. You, a man

burning, as the sheets twisted into peaks
              not from our lovemaking, but nightmares.
So similar to the snakes in mine: centipedes,

the threat of their endless segmenting. Breaking
              apart like mornings you left me for food or family,
the wife and daughters towns away who will never

know my name, theirs on your lips in a way
              that gave me pause, that their conjured bodies
might leave the room first, let me have you fully,

before I leaned to kiss you. Tomorrow, I will drive
              to the ocean, past the fish camps and souvenir
shacks, to the town where soon my sister will be wed.

She will tell me that she, too, once loved a man
              whose brain burst into lace as he vowed himself
to trigger, hammer. She will turn as I enter the room,

careful not to shake loose our mother’s veil
             bleeding from her blonde hair, same as mine.
And if I must look away, it will be to the grey

of our wintry piece of ocean, as I imagine a swim
              so far from land I might find you whole
and floating, no barrel poised in your gorgeous mouth. 

 

 

Issue 5 Contents                                       NEXT: Wrong About That by Paul Beilstein

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WRONG ABOUT THAT by Paul Beilstein

Tuesday, 15 April 2014 by Paul Beilstein

I thought my sadness was a moron’s elbow.
Thought I could offer it a salve,
or the comfort of a well-worn arm-chair.
I thought I could buy a corduroy shirt
and wash it the exact right number of times.
I hope you have better ideas about yours.
Maybe yours is the referee
of the driveway free-throw drill
I practiced evenings after dad’s no-chop dinners.
Back then, he had a rule for keeping things simple,
but lately I’ve seen him take knife to carrot,
tomato. Maybe yours is the referee,
who helped me count how many
out of one hundred I had made.
It is hard to make friends with the pinstriped,
but I have seen signs on television.
Maybe your sadness is the small belly
peeking through the misty t-shirt
of the early morning jogger, increasingly
invisible to all but the most unkind.
Maybe you are the master of sadness and yours
is the beagle’s drooped ears,
or the quadriceps of the bicycle commuter,
or the tear in the beagle’s owner’s tights,
which must be too comfortable to discard
for such a slight disfigurement.
After each miss, the referee stood under the hoop
unwilling to chase the ball, but after a make,
he gathered it, spun it in his hands as if
examining it for disqualifying flaws,
then snapped a chest pass back to me
with the form my youth team’s coach
must have dreamt of while his wife sat up
watching him whimper and squirm.
I caught the ball, with a developing sense
that something was horribly wrong.
I focused, made eight in a row.
I wanted to know more.

 

 

Issue 5 Contents                                       NEXT: Two Poems by Jane Wong

Four Way ReviewPaul BeilsteinWrong About That
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TWO POEMS by Jane Wong

Tuesday, 15 April 2014 by Jane Wong

DIVING

To become a world      carry your wounds with you:
bright plums          split on a dish                

a scattered alchemy in the limbs           metal upon heart upon glint
could you ever               leave?  Steal this

in passing, in looking sideways:             an owl, a doorway
ever-crooked      I have no use for perfect vision

walking downhill always means                                     hold on
to me like a rush of insects ringing                    heavy in the bells

in a key of light                         dive bombing outside my window, alight –
my advocate of world-making              I assume that you can hear me           

tapping along the wall testing                               poetry or
the solidity of my name                         language has nothing to do with what I want

these heaps of words, stone upon stone                           cairn to mark the way above a tree
line, pointing                              think of the wound instead – 

the units of the wound, these lake-worthy moments 
the boarded –               up houses we sleep in

 

 

BREAKER-OF-TREES

My mother cuts the legs
off a moving crab. 

The legs curl in a bucket
washed to garbage

to sea. When I come home,
I tread water on the carpet

and hang my head low.
Guillotine of the heart,

the wind causes trouble
between two trees.

The trouble causes splinters
enough to build a forest

in just one hand.
What can we learn

from disaster if not
the familiar angles of a face?

How I can touch yours and say Paul.
I crack open a geode

as a reminder of grace.
From the crystal center,

yolk splinters, pours.

 

 

Issue 5 Contents                                       NEXT: Two Poems by Gregory Pardlo

DivingFour Way ReviewJane WongTrees
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TWO POEMS by Gregory Pardlo

Tuesday, 15 April 2014 by Gregory Pardlo

25. Ellison, Tony Samuel, et al. Photograph Album. Twenty-two Albumen Prints: Life in the Louis Armstrong Houses with Views of Marcy Ave. Brooklyn, circa 1986.

A quaint example of urban pastoralism typical of an age when public policy and planning isolated urban poor like so many shepherds on a hill, these images capture a distant and harmless charm. A city block is cordoned for a riverless baptismal, for example; the skin of churchwomen in white linen buffs brown and brightens in sunlight beneath the spectrum shimmering from a fire hose, a curious counterpoint to hoses of Birmingham, these aimed skyward as if to cleanse the undercarriage of every chariot in heaven. In a style that marries Edward S. Curtis and Walker Evans, these images witness conflicting efforts to ennoble a stigmatized community. Of note is how the boom boxes of the youths, their fat shoelaces and hair-styling rituals obscure more complex, personal rites that would otherwise lift them one by one from the muck of type. Yet there is joy; the face of the bodega’s happiest man alive is carved from laughter and a lifetime of tobacco use. Carved deep like the rivers. Sentimental and simplifying, these images highlight the ease by which other can conceal a verb.

Oblong quarto, period-style full green morocco gilt; 22 vintage albumen prints, each measuring 8 by 10 inches; mounted on heavy card stock each measures 10 by 14 inches. $7500.

Original photograph album of Urban America circa 1986, with 22 splendid exhibition-size albumen prints

 

__________

 

837. Wilson, Shurli-Anne Mfumi. Black Pampers: Raising Consciousness in the Post-Nationalist Home. Blacktalk Press, Lawnside, NJ, 1974. 642 pp., illustrator unknown. 10 ½ x 11 7/8”.

Want tips for nursery décor? Masks and hieroglyphics, akwaba dolls. Send Raggedy Ann to the trash heap. This tome is a how-to for upwardly mobile black parents beset with the guilt of assimilation. Revealed here are the safetypinnings of the nascent black middleclass, their leafy split-level cribs and infants with Sherman Hemsley hairlines. Of interest are bedtime polemics on the racist derivations of “The Wheels on the Bus.” Chapter headings address important questions of the day: How and how soon should you intervene if you suspect your child lacks rhythm? When do you prepare your little one for the historical memory of slavery? And the two cake solution: one party for classmates, and another one you can invite your sister’s kids to. Indispensible to collectors for whom Aesop’s African origin is no matter of debate, a more appropriate title for this book might nonetheless be, “What to Expect When You’re No Longer Expecting Revolution.”

Usual occasional scattered light foxing to interiors; contemporary tree calf
exceptional. About-fine condition. $75.00

 

 

Issue 5 Contents                                       NEXT: The Rabbit by Sarah Huener

Four Way ReviewGregory PardloTwo Poems
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THE RABBIT by Sarah Huener

Tuesday, 15 April 2014 by Sarah Huener

Last night I dreamed you gave me a rabbit.
It is time, you said, then extended your hands,
the rabbit unfolding slowly from your chest,
trembling. The rabbit was white with dark eyes,
which I have never seen in waking life,
and lighter than rabbits I have held before.
One of its ears slipped between the buttons
of my shirt and touched my stomach. I tried to think
of what the soft ear felt like on my stomach,
but as I did you disappeared. The rabbit
became an enormous white dandelion.
I breathed on the dandelion and feather-seeds
scattered above my head before becoming
teeth that fell to the ground in sharp rain.

 

 

Issue 5 Contents                                       NEXT: Bicycling Home At Dusk I Closed My Eyes 
                                                                                & Let Go & Saw The Rabbits 
                                                                                by John Paul Davis

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BICYCLING HOME AT DUSK I CLOSED MY EYES & LET GO & SAW THE RABBITS by John Paul Davis

Tuesday, 15 April 2014 by John Paul Davis

The headwind runs cool fingers
through my hair. The opal

of rain clouds & the treeline
lit up like the eyes of a woman

& I am drunk, pedaling faster
than I am dying. The divorce

getting smaller & smaller behind
me but still big enough I know

when it’s breathing. Drunk & fast,
I’m a procession of heartbeats

somewhere between where I’ve come from
& where I’m going. Long before

I met her, when I was still a child
the great bird of loneliness

came to roost in me. I didn’t want
to drink it to sleep tonight. I let go,

first my wedding hand, sinister hand,
certain hand, then the other, divorce hand,

love hand, writing hand. The frogs
purring in the creek & I close my eyes

as a way to hear everything
better. I pray

out loud because I’m the only human
creature there. I want to be a glad

man. I want to go up singing.
Forgive my hands, false

& true hands, fail & try hands
that each release so easy

let me be an animal
that believes again

& I hear them first, urgencies
of fur over the pavement

then open my eyes & I
see the rabbits

little arcs of their leaping
taking the shape of rainbows,

& disintegrating as quickly,
dozens of them, bolts

of brown & iron light
a promenade before the quivering

of my front wheel as if to say
this is a new road, it is the same

road but it is a new road, the rabbits
the rabbits & then it is night

& they are gone & I am alone
in my humming & burning,

the stars throwing
light from before the age

of vertebrates across space at me.
I saw the rabbits. I said

amen & I am still
saying it. I go home with dust

on my ankles. The rabbits
flashed east & west

in front of my face splitting
the air into two fists of turbulence,

roads often & less taken
& this burned me, eternally

the way music can burn
& home, at the river

my bicycle fluttering
against the house

from the ride & I stand
at the kitchen door hearing

what the current & the trees
have to tell me & I am rabbit,

I am furry-souled now, I have now a heart
with the hocks & long hind

legs of a rabbit, my deepest self
long-eared & listening

I have now a way to kick & sprint,
& a way of knowing the wind

& its fickle cousin the river,
I have two new hands.

 

 

Issue 5 Contents                                       NEXT: Two Poems by Simone Muench

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TWO POEMS by Simone Muench

Tuesday, 15 April 2014 by Simone Muench

WOLF CENTO

I dream you into being—mongering wolf
who stands outside the self, makes
its way through the transparent world
& its motions, its laughter & quarrels,
its rows of teeth, its tears, its chiming of clocks.
The pages turn. Words often fall between
the rising walls where your shadow
draws to an end.

In some region of vellum & toccatas,
it will be as it is in this life, the same room,
simple rural day, & the cinema of sleep.
Stories one has never read.
More & more I see the human form,
a nothingness which longs to be the sea.
Lives infinitely repeated down to atomic thinness
like footfalls in a strange house. If need
be from nothingness, let today
froth from your mouth.

Sources: Jules Supervielle, Maxine Kumin, Yves Bonnefoy, Robert Fitzgerald, Tomas Transtromer, Pierre Reverdy, Sandor Csoori, Alain Delahaye, O.V. de L. Milosz, Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Eugene Guillevic, Miklos Radnoti, Boris Pasternak

 

 

WOLF CENTO

Cripple of light opening against my back.
The summer like blood clots.
Silences crowd here, inhuman & abandoned—
wide-mouthed red flowers whose sweat reminds us
of approaching war. Unsure between two borders,
on this deep trajectory, my body in a sea-gull
line behind me like smoke, frail
flicker in the wolf-howling to the west,
& secrecy, the human dress.

We still live in another world
& what is empty turns its face to us.
Night in all things: in corners, in men’s eyes–
bees in a dried-out hive. Thus we forget
that only words still stand like tar fires in the woods
with a strange animal smell, phosphorus
peeled from old bones. Country
of anonymous pains, to die means leaving
all these things unsolved—arrow, flower, fire.

Sources: Anne Marie Rooney, Sandor Csoori, Lucian Blaga, Tomas Transtromer, Angel Gonzalez, Paul Engle, Sara de Ibanez, William Blake, Philippe Jaccottet, Joseph Brodsky, Nikolai Gumilev, Rolf Jacobsen, Gottfried Benn, Oswald de Andrade

 

 

Issue 5 Contents                                       NEXT: Bathing With Frida by Wesley Rothman

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BATHING WITH FRIDA by Wesley Rothman

Tuesday, 15 April 2014 by Wesley Rothman

With a cigarette between my fingers
and flowers bound up in her hair

dry morning bathes us
in the claw-foot tub. Asphyxiation

by drowning. This dawn welcomes us
to another side. Every bird lies

belly up while critters walk the wire
between worlds. The cracked abalone

gives its water. So floats the lone skiff,
her satin dress. Ashore, bodies bait the sun.

And if this afterworld could turn us
back, resurrection might seem less

magnificent. Like impossible succulents,
meaty vines, we soak in every drop.

And intricate systems pump life
through arterial hoses, strain veins

to their splitting point. And our hearts
bloated with intuition and lava

burst from the surface. All that ash
and pitiful flame. All our parched bits

smothered by smoke. Bury us
in this world after. Lock us into lucid rock

and porous memory, capturing
heat, old worlds, and mineral.

 

 

Issue 5 Contents                                       NEXT: How to Eat Dragonfruit by Sarah Sweeney

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HOW TO EAT DRAGONFRUIT by Sarah Sweeney

Tuesday, 15 April 2014 by Sarah Sweeney

Let your lover fish pesos from his pocket
            to buy you one bright pitaya—dragonfruit—
pink as your bra strap, with yellow, inedible
            nipples. You’ll want to devour it then,
thirsty as you are, dizzied from the heat
            and his hand on your thigh, the other steering
cracked highways, radio hissing faraway norteño
            with every right turn.

Forget the fruit in each hotel he brings you to.
            It’s buried beneath wet clothes, a baggie
with toothbrush and soap. Let him peel you
            with his mouth, scoop you with his hands
to each hard bed, every rough maroon comforter
            that dissolves you like sugar. Let him call you
sweet in an accent that hurries your kisses
            across his skin like water.

It’s best eaten cold, he’ll tell you in the morning.
            Dream of its taste like his flesh,
if he disappeared tomorrow. Dream of its color
            like heirloom suns flaring above Coba, Tulum,
baking your shadows in ruins. Leave it firming
            in the fridge, but have him steady your hand
when you’re ready, the shaking blade splaying
            its center: two ice-white glaciers.

He will offer its seeded belly with a spoon—  
            he’ll feed you all of it, tickling
your throat like goodbye, all instantaneous melt.  
            How could you ever depict its flavor?  
Call it a doorway—you will never again return
            to the pale, misspent girl; the you before dragonfruit.
Now you carry the tart pucker of those exotic husks,
            now you’ve crossed over.

 

 

 

 

Issue 5 Contents                                       NEXT: Three Poems by Leah Silvieus

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THREE POEMS by Leah Silvieus

Tuesday, 15 April 2014 by Leah Silvieus

HALLA-SAN
            Jeju Do [1]

Stone flung to crater: we gather what we can of the dead, but they remember us in our entirety, filling our pockets with bones and pink rhododendron.

We pass the pavilion, toward the wooden skiff, its nets suspended in loam. You winnow through the ruin of porous shore, your hands murky with sea urchins, palms stung with their dying stars. The basalt gods gaze on, graved full of moon. They eclipse dark at dusk. They are not our gods.

You move among them, a constellation of absence threaded through the fractured lights


[1] Jeju Do is the name of an island located off the southeast coast of South Korea. Hallasan is the name of the volcanic mountain on the island.

 

STILL LIFE WITH FALLEN GAME
            For (and after) J

At the edge of want, everything is cast
            into ebbed relief; not only each

waxed and gorgeous object,
                          but the distance between:

boar-shadow and bloodied quail, which is to say,
                          the negative space that desire is:

between what we want and what we are capable of,  
overripe peach as slow eclipse ::: lover

                          turning afield – praise be
hunger and fear, the brutal devotions
                                                    that will lean us out
praise be            to what this dark bounty
             would hallow us into

 

EPITHALIUM WITH SPIDER AND SPARROW

See what our bodies make
of each other, my seraph sung
from reed and seeding stalks;
my blue-mouthed beauty –
see what ellipses we
spin and snare, radiant
of limb and muddied wing.

 

 

Issue 5 Contents                                       NEXT: Two Poems by Gina Vaynshteyn

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TWO POEMS by Gina Vaynshteyn

Tuesday, 15 April 2014 by Gina Vaynshteyn

NO BODY, NO TOWN

Whiskey, my father said, can live
in an oak barrel for seventy years. As for me,

I shed skin, and every year I am a new
girl. I need no time to marinate.

It is said that I ruined my body with butter,
Midwestern comfort, and boys

who say, “Missour-ah” loud and benevolently
as they knock back a beer with a twang.

They gather me and drink; their hangovers kill.
The cashiers stare when I need soap

and a crate of apples; they forget
to give me change. They fumble,
mistaking a five for a twenty.

Green eyes, my mother said, are a sign
of an incurable meanness. She always knew

this is no country for women.

 

AN INTERVIEW

Q.

When making a fruit salad, does he leave you
the mango pit to suck on?

Do the sweet strings get stuck in your teeth
until you swear off palpable love forever

as though it were a bad habit, a perpetual
scowl.

Do you love a man’s body or do you prefer
the softness of a woman’s, an apricot

that is dull enough to adore, but quickly
tart and sharp in the back of your mouth?

When I say the word “resentment” 
who do you think of first?

When I ask you how many times you had
to cut your own hair with a butcher knife

don’t tell me this was done in your sleep.

A.

He hands me the mango pit, but only
as a replacement for his finger tips, which

are unavailable, forlorn and usually out
of reach physically and spiritually.

The only sweet strings are the ones I pull,
a craft learned in college and in bed.

I love how hard a man’s body can be;
it can cut through tomato skins and muffle

screams like chloroform can. A woman’s
body is lethal in different ways,

like how children can pluck legs off unsuspecting
spiders and leave them dying on the playground.

When you say the word “resentment”
I think of my mother, for she only taught

me to love men who didn’t need women. 
And I would never deny sheering off

the one thing that made me beautiful;
but the thing about hair, is that the second

time it grows back, it devours. 

 

 

Issue 5 Contents                                       NEXT: Kirti by Shruti Swamy

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