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Objects Used to Prop Open a Window

Dog bone, stapler, cribbage board, garlic press because this window is loose—lacks suction, lacks grip. Bungee cord, bootstrap, dog leash, leather belt because this window had sash cords. They frayed. They broke. Feather duster, thatch of straw, empty bottle of Elmer's glue because this window is loud—its hinges clack open, clack shut. Stuffed bear, baby blanket, single crib newel because this window is split. It's dividing in two. Velvet moss, sagebrush, willow branch, robin's wing because this window, it's pane-less. It's only a frame of air.

Michelle Menting

The New Church

The old cupola glinted above the clouds, shone among fir trees, but it took him an hour for the half mile all the way up the hill. As he trailed, the village passed him by, greeted him, asked about his health, but everybody hurried to catch the mass, left him leaning against fences, measuring the road with the walking stick he sculpted. He yearned for the day when the new church would be built—right across the road. Now it rises above the moon: saints in frescoes meet the eye, and only the rain has started to cut through the shingles on the roof of his empty house. The apple trees have taken over the sky, sequestered the gate, sidled over the porch.

Lucia Cherciu

Look for Me

Look for me under the hood of that old Chevrolet settled in weeds at the end of the pasture. I'm the radiator that spent its years bolted in front of an engine shoving me forward into the wind. Whatever was in me in those days has mostly leaked away, but my cap's still screwed on tight and I know the names of all these tattered moths and broken grasshoppers the rest of you've forgotten.

Ted Kooser

Wild Life

Behind the silo, the Mother Rabbit hunches like a giant spider with strange calm: six tiny babies beneath, each clamoring for a sweet syringe of milk. This may sound cute to you, reading from your pulpit of plenty, but one small one was left out of reach, a knife of fur barging between the others. I watched behind a turret of sand. If I could have cautioned the mother rabbit I would. If I could summon the Bunnies to fit him in beneath the belly's swell I would. But instead, I stood frozen, wishing for some equity. This must be why it's called Wild Life because of all the crazed emotions tangled up in the underbrush within us. Did I tell you how the smallest one, black and trembling, hopped behind the kudzu still filigreed with wanting? Should we talk now of animal heritage, their species, creature development? And what do we say about form and focus— writing this when a stray goes hungry, and away.

Grace Cavalieri

Umbrella

When I push your button you fly off the handle, old skin and bones, black bat wing. We're alike, you and I. Both of us resemble my mother, so fierce in her advocacy on behalf of the most vulnerable child who'll catch his death in this tempest. Such a headwind! Sometimes it requires all my strength just to end a line. But when the wind is at my back, we're likely to get carried away, and say something we can never retract, something saturated from the ribs down, an old stony word like ruin. You're what roof I have, frail thing, you're my argument against the whole sky. You're the fundamental difference between wet and dry.

Connie Wanek

Sunday

You are the start of the week or the end of it, and according to The Beatles you creep in like a nun. You're the second full day the kids have been away with their father, the second full day of an empty house. Sunday, I've missed you. I've been sitting in the backyard with a glass of Pinot waiting for your arrival. Did you know the first Sweet 100s are turning red in the garden, but the lettuce has grown too bitter to eat. I am looking up at the bluest sky I have ever seen, cerulean blue, a heaven sky no one would believe I was under. You are my witness. No day is promised. You are absolution. You are my unwritten to-do list, my dishes in the sink, my brownie breakfast, my braless day.

January Gill O'Neil

Invisible Fish

Invisible fish swim this ghost ocean now described by waves of sand, by water-worn rock. Soon the fish will learn to walk. Then humans will come ashore and paint dreams on the dying stone. Then later, much later, the ocean floor will be punctuated by Chevy trucks, carrying the dreamers’ decendants, who are going to the store.

Joy Harjo

Living,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit

Don’t bother the earth spirit who lives here. She is working on a story. It is the oldest story in the world and it is delicate, changing. If she sees you watching she will invite you in for coffee, give you warm bread, and you will be obligated to stay and listen. But this is no ordinary story. You will have to endure earthquakes, lightning, the deaths of all those you love, the most blinding beauty. It’s a story so compelling you may never want to leave; this is how she traps you. See that stone finger over there? That is the only one who ever escaped.

Joy Harjo

Religion,The Spiritual,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends

The One Thing That Can Save America

Is anything central? Orchards flung out on the land, Urban forests, rustic plantations, knee-high hills? Are place names central? Elm Grove, Adcock Corner, Story Book Farm? As they concur with a rush at eye level Beating themselves into eyes which have had enough Thank you, no more thank you. And they come on like scenery mingled with darkness The damp plains, overgrown suburbs, Places of known civic pride, of civil obscurity. These are connected to my version of America But the juice is elsewhere. This morning as I walked out of your room After breakfast crosshatched with Backward and forward glances, backward into light, Forward into unfamiliar light, Was it our doing, and was it The material, the lumber of life, or of lives We were measuring, counting? A mood soon to be forgotten In crossed girders of light, cool downtown shadow In this morning that has seized us again? I know that I braid too much on my own Snapped-off perceptions of things as they come to me. They are private and always will be. Where then are the private turns of event Destined to bloom later like golden chimes Released over a city from a highest tower? The quirky things that happen to me, and I tell you, And you know instantly what I mean? What remote orchard reached by winding roads Hides them? Where are these roots? It is the lumps and trials That tell us whether we shall be known And whether our fate can be exemplary, like a star. All the rest is waiting For a letter that never arrives, Day after day, the exasperation Until finally you have ripped it open not knowing what it is, The two envelope halves lying on a plate. The message was wise, and seemingly Dictated a long time ago, but its time has still Not arrived, telling of danger, and the mostly limited Steps that can be taken against danger Now and in the future, in cool yards, In quiet small houses in the country, Our country, in fenced areas, in cool shady streets.

John Ashbery

["Hour in which I consider hydrangea"]

Hour in which I consider hydrangea, a salt or sand plant, varietal, the question of varietals, the diet of every mother I know, 5 pounds feels like 20, I have lost … I have lost, yes, a sense of my own possible beauty, grown external, I externalize beauty. Beauty occurs on the surface of plants; the sun darkens the skin of my child, he is so small, he is beautiful (I can see; it is obvious) and everything about him is beautiful. His hand swells from the bite [spread?] of some insect[’s] venom because he is small. He appears to feel nothing. He smashes his skull against the floor. He screams. I hold him in my lap on the kitchen floor in front of an open freezer, pressing a pack of frozen clay against his forehead. He likes the cold. I see; it is so obvious. Hydrangea. When I move, when I walk pushing my child’s stroller (it is both walking and pushing or hauling, sometimes, also, lifting; it is having another body, an adjunct body composed of errand and weight and tenderness and no small amount of power), I imagine I can feel this small amount of weight, this 5 pounds like 20, interfering with the twitch of every muscle in my body. As an object, a mother is confusing, a middle-aged mother with little spare flesh, I feel every inch of major muscle pulling against gravity and against the weight of my child, now sleeping. This is the hour for thinking hydrangea. Let no man look at me. I stop to brush the drowsy child’s little eye. His face. He barely considers his mother. I am all around him. Why should he consider what is all around him? Perhaps what is missing is a subtle power of differentiation. I am in, therefore, a time of mass apprehensions.

Simone White

Living,Parenthood,The Body,The Mind,Nature,Trees & Flowers

Stung

She couldn't help but sting my finger, clinging a moment before I flung her to the ground. Her gold is true, not the trick evening light plays on my roses. She curls into herself, stinger twitching, gilt wings folded. Her whole life just a few weeks, and my pain subsided in a moment. In the cold, she hardly had her wits to buzz. No warning from either of us: she sleeping in the richness of those petals, then the hand, my hand, cupping the bloom in devastating force, crushing the petals for the scent. And she mortally threatened, wholly unaware that I do this daily, alone with the gold last light, in what seems to me an act of love.

Heid E. Erdrich

Nothing But Good...

I will not speak ill of Jack Flick. I will rarely look at the scar he made on my cheek one summer at the lake. I won't speak ill of Jack whose freckles and gangly legs are gone. So is the drained face I saw when he saw what he'd done with a sharp rock nonchalantly skipped. I will speak well, for it was somewhat sweet to lie on the dock while Jack and his friends bent down and wiped my face with a sandy towel. I will speak well of them, for most are gone and the wound proved small. I will speak well, for the rock missed my eye. I can hardly find the scar. Jack went into the air corps, fought in one of the wars, retired, and lived less than a year before his tender heart gave out. I will speak well of Jack.

Sarah White

How Quiet

How quiet is the spruce, the wind twills through the uppermost tier of splayed leaves. Now the song of a bird like the squeaky lock over a canoe's oar, followed by startling chirps, the sky pushing its clouds like sailboats, and I think, what kind of God keeps himself secret so that to find him out we have to seek, as children do for something like the beetle scuttling between grass, hidden in plain sight.

Judith Harris

Porcupine

You think we are the pointed argument, the man drunk at the party showing off his gun collection, the bed of nettles. What we really are is hidden from you: girl weeping in the closet among her stepfather's boots; tuft of rabbit fur caught in barbed wire; body of the baby in the landfill; boy with the shy mouth playing his guitar at the picnic table, out in the dirt yard. We slide into this world benign and pliable, quills pressed down smooth over back and tail. Only one hour here stiffens the barbs into thousands of quick retorts. Everything this well-guarded remembers being soft once.

Kelly Madigan

Summer Apples

I planted an apple tree in memory of my mother, who is not gone, but whose memory has become so transparent that she remembers slicing apples with her grandmother (yellow apples; blue bowl) better than the fruit that I hand her today. Still, she polishes the surface with her thumb, holds it to the light and says with no hesitation, Oh, Yellow Transparent . . . they're so fragile, you can almost seeto the core. She no longer remembers how to roll the crust, sweeten the sauce, but her desire is clear—it is pie that she wants. And so, I slice as close as I dare to the core— to that little cathedral to memory—where the seeds remember everything they need to know to become yellow and transparent.

Cathryn Essinger

Visiting the Neighborhood

The entrance at the back of the complex led onto a road, where an upended couch tilted into a ditch and a washing machine gleamed avocado beneath pine needles. From the end, you turned left and left again, then cut a trail to find the cul-de-sac of bright brick houses. We'd walk as far as we dared before a man pushing a mower might stop to ask, "whadda you boys need?" That was a question we could never answer. I loved the name of the place, White Hall, imagined that each interior was a stretch of marble perfect wall adorned by smiling photos of the family. Our own halls were brailled with nail holes of former tenants, the spackled rounds of fists. But doesn't longing clarify the body? The boys I left behind: Tommy, wearing the World War II trenching tool; Danny, whose father, so much older than the other parents, died in his recliner one sunny afternoon while watching baseball; Duke, who stole his mother's car and crashed into a wall. Boys who knew when you were posing, waiting for someone to say, "smile." Boys who, on those latch-key days, held themselves in narrow passages when no one was there to show them what to do.

P. Ivan Young

scars

my father’s body is a map a record of his journey he carries a bullet lodged in his left thigh there is a hollow where it entered a protruding bump where it sleeps the doctors say it will never awaken it is the one souvenir he insists on keeping mother has her own opinionsbố cùa con điên—your father is crazy as a child i wanted a scar just like my father’s bold and appalling a mushroom explosion that said i too was at war instead i settled for a grain of rice a scar so small look closely there here between the eyes a bit to the right there on the bridge of my nose father says i was too young to remember it happened while i was sleeping leaking roof the pounding rain drop after drop after drop

Truong Tran

The Body,Family & Ancestors

what remains two

it has long been forgotten this practice of the mother weaning a child she crushes the seeds of a green chili rubs it to her nipple what the child feels she too will share in this act of love my own mother says it was not meant to be cruel when cruelty she tells me is a child’s lips torn from breast as proof back home the women wear teeth marks

Truong Tran

Infancy,Parenthood,The Body

West of Myself

Why are you still seventeen and drifting like a dog after dark, dragging a shadow you’ve found? Put it back where it belongs, and that bend of river, too. That’s not the road you want, though you have it to yourself. Gone are the cars that crawl to town from the reactors, a parade of insects, metallic, fuming along the one four-lane street. The poplars of the shelterbelt lean away from the bypass that never had much to pass by but coyote and rabbitbrush. Pinpricks stabbed in a map too dark to read— I stared at stars light-years away. Listen. That hissing? Just a sprinkler damping down yesterday until it’s today. The cottonwoods shiver, or I do, every leaf rustling as if it’s the one about to tear itself, not I. Memory takes the graveyard shift.

Debora Greger

Coming of Age

Yes

Yes, your childhood now a legend of fountains —jorge gullén Yes, your childhood, now a legend gone to weeds, still remembers the gray road that set out to cross the desert of the future. And how, always just ahead, gray water glittered, happy to be just a mirage. Who steps off the gray bus at the depot? Sidewalks shudder all the way home. Blinds close their scratchy eyes. Who settles in your old room? Sniffy air sprawls as if it owns the place, and now your teenage secrets have no one to tell. For the spider laying claim to the corner, there is a stickiness to spin, that the living may beg to be wrapped in silk and devoured, leaving not even the flinch from memory.

Debora Greger

Coming of Age,Youth

Bounden Duty

I got a call from the White House, from the President himself, asking me if I’d do him a personal favor. I like the President, so I said, “Sure, Mr. President, anything you like.” He said, “Just act like nothing’s going on. Act normal. That would mean the world to me. Can you do that, Leon?” “Why, sure, Mr. President, you’ve got it. Normal, that’s how I’m going to act. I won’t let on, even if I’m tortured,” I said, immediately regretting that “tortured” bit. He thanked me several times and hung up. I was dying to tell someone that the President himself called me, but I knew I couldn’t. The sudden pressure to act normal was killing me. And what was going on anyway. I didn’t know anything was going on. I saw the President on TV yesterday. He was shaking hands with a farmer. What if it wasn’t really a farmer? I needed to buy some milk, but suddenly I was afraid to go out. I checked what I had on. I looked “normal” to me, but maybe I looked more like I was trying to be normal. That’s pretty suspicious. I opened the door and looked around. What was going on? There was a car parked in front of my car that I had never seen before, a car that was trying to look normal, but I wasn’t fooled. If you need milk, you have to get milk, otherwise people will think something’s going on. I got into my car and sped down the road. I could feel those little radar guns popping behind every tree and bush, but, apparently, they were under orders not to stop me. I ran into Kirsten in the store. “Hey, what’s going on, Leon?” she said. She had a very nice smile. I hated to lie to her. “Nothing’s going on. Just getting milk for my cat,” I said. “I didn’t know you had a cat,” she said. “I meant to say coffee. You’re right, I don’t have a cat. Sometimes I refer to my coffee as my cat. It’s just a private joke. Sorry,” I said. “Are you all right?” she asked. “Nothing’s going on, Kirsten. I promise you. Everything is normal. The President shook hands with a farmer, a real farmer. Is that such a big deal?” I said. “I saw that,” she said, “and that man was definitely not a farmer.” “Yeah, I know,” I said, feeling better.

James Tate

Humor & Satire,History & Politics

History

Of course wars, of course lice, of course limbs on opposing sides to remind a body about ambivalence, of course orphans and empty beds and eyes exiled for blinking in the harsh light. Of course Khrushchev gave Crimea to the Ukraine in a blind drunk, and yes, land mines and burning skin and of course organs, some members dismembered to shake at strangers and their evil, and there is no way to imagine that a man shaking a dried penis would ever utter the word darling. Of course personal, add starch for pain, add bluing, of course hang the laundry in the basement, there are thieves in the backyard, of course departing trains, carload after carload of sorrow, the man on top of a boxcar waving, his rifle silhouetted against the white sky, its color draining the way warmth left the Bosnian after he’d burned the last page of the last book, knowing he had reached the end of something though it was not end enough. Of course kisses, the stages of kissing like running borders, endless conversations, stations of the cross, till even the promise of kissing bores you, of course teeth gnashing, ethnic cleansing. The cynical will shrug off the past, the future, the whole left hip of Ecuador slashed for six days of oil, of course an X on the coats of the sick so they would stand apart for deportation, of course rogue tumors over the body politic, the same bodies that took Egyptian mummies and powdered them to use as food seasoning, bon vivant cannibalism, and yes civilized men tossed living penguins into furnaces to fuel their ships. Of course partitions so that after the new territories were defined, families had to line up on a cliff with bullhorns to talk to their people on the other side, of course courage, at times a weapon against yearning, surrender another, a mother of course goes on setting the table, even if it’s with broken plates, and a friend will say gently of course I want to ride with you to the funeral, of course of course of course of course, now then, negotiations, whatever, palisades, the end of whimsy, but then one evening though it is wartime, a man climbs the hill to an amphitheater to play his cello at twilight and history stops talking for a moment and sighs while the melancholy of Albinoni passes from heart to heart and each lifts a little, the way passing a baby around a room can be sacramental, and the memories of simple pleasures become more beautiful, the memory of your joy on a highway to see in the next lane in a neighboring car a clown take off his nose at the end of the day, the memory of how your mother laid roses, sweetheart roses, on the cold grate of the fireplace, and the sudden rain one afternoon in fall after you’d hiked far into the dells and you huddled deep in your overcoat in the wet, waiting out the storm with a sheep that had come up to lean against your side like a rock.

Barbara Ras

History & Politics,War & Conflict

What It Was Like

If they ask what it was like, say it was like the sea rolling barrels of itself at you in the shadowless light of the shore, say it was like a spider, black as night, large as a campesino’s hand, a deepness that could balance a small world of dirt as easily as a gift of gleaming red tomatoes held out to you eight at a time. If they ask you how it felt, say solitary, at first the ease of sleeping alone, warm without even a sheet, then the nonchalance of a dirt road leading down the hill, its dust raised and re-raised in plumes as each guest departed, and later, say it was like the blind cat that came out of nowhere to lie on your tile floor, lifting its face to stare with white marble eyes. If they ask what you heard, tell them the single note of the watchman, who coughed his one syllable when you went to bed, and at the end of every dream when you woke with a simple plea—stay, go—again, the cough of the watchman. If they ask about thirst, tell them no one could carry water as far as it had to go, so that when it was time to rest, people went to the spigot at the edge of the train tracks and cupped their hands under the water, lowering their faces to drink. Tell them a man could stand at noon in the park wearing nothing but underwear and beg for hours with his cup empty. Tell them you could sit quietly while phrases you didn't know you knew
 rose up in the language there and on an undisturbed lake in your mind
 you could back float—that weightless prayer that prays
Let me die with my toes pointing up at the sun. When they ask what people will eventually get around to asking,
 How was the food? Tell them batata, mamón, guanábana, maní, indigenous crops exchanging places with hunger, giving up to the dark store window whose inventory is one hand of bananas sold one banana at a time, giving up to little pyramids of limes by the side of the road and the kids who tend them, dreaming of a few coins tossed down in the dirt.

Barbara Ras

Money & Economics

All

The prisoner can’t go any longer, but he does. The beggar can’t go on begging, but watch— Tomorrow he’ll be in the alley, holding out a bowl To everyone, to even a young, possibly poorer, child. The mother can’t go on believing, But she will kneel for hours in the cathedral, Holding silence in her arms. The rain goes on, daily, sometimes, and we cry, As often as not alone. The fishmonger, the bell ringer, the cook, each Can be corrupted in a less than dire way. Nothing can replace the sea breezes you were born to. Nothing can stay the shy ache in the palm you hold out to the fortune-teller. The concrete lions on her steps go on Making bloodless journeys, they go on Hunting in air longer than any of you will live to watch, Hunting still after your futures become all irises and blamelessness.

Barbara Ras

Life Choices,Faith & Doubt

Sleeping with Butler’s Lives of the Saints

After Octavio Paz What’s most human must drive an arrow to the heart. Ghosts, too, must abide by this directive & remain transparent, going about their business in old houses. Before I was an I, I longed to be ethereal. Sprouting wings at will & gliding through cul-de-sacs and malls around the valley. My hands, too, would gradually disappear followed by my arms, then neck & head until my whole body was slight as allergen. Before I was an I, I spoke an old language that would return on drowsy afternoons. Therefore I struggled to say the simplest sentences. So much so that the maligned semicolon became an ardent ally, an island of pause and the deep breath. The comma, too, bless its tiny soul, was the crumb which the god of small favors multiplied tenfold for my morning pie. Before I was an I, knowledge clung to me like burrs & hunger guided my ship like the barefoot light on the sleeping land & sea.

Eugene Gloria

Language & Linguistics,Poetry & Poets

Hoodlum Birds

The fearless blackbirds see me again at the footpath beside the tall grasses sprouting like unruly morning hair. They caw and caw like vulgar boys on street corners making love to girls with their “hey mama this” and their “hey mama that.” But this gang of birds is much too slick. They are my homeys of the air with their mousse-backed hair and Crayola black coats like small fry hoods who smoke and joke about each other’s mothers, virginal sisters, and the sweet arc of revenge. These birds spurn my uneaten celery sticks, feckless gestures, ineffective hosannas. They tag one another, shrill and terrible, caroling each to each my weekly wages. But they let me pass, then flit away. They won’t mess with me this time— they know where I live.

Eugene Gloria

Animals

Wilde's Tomb

But these, thy lovers are not dead.…They will rise up and hear your voice. . .. and run to kiss your mouth. –The Sphinx In the garden of Père Lachaise, city of the dead, we passed angels covering their faces in shame, & nineteenth-century trees, with tops bowed as if their only purpose was to grieve, & crossed the Transversales to Wilde’s grave. When lovers leave, they leave their kisses glistening on the gray slab, on impressions of lips themselves, a tissue of strangers’ cells the conservators cannot leave alone, & scrub the graffiti, as the plaque decrees by law, no one can deface this tomb, & still the images of lips remain, dark gray stains of animal fat imprisoned in limestone. Lips are pressed as high as lovers climb, against the Sphinx’s ridiculous headdress, on the carved trumpet of fame, & on the cheeks of its voracious face of mindless passion flying with eyes pinched tight, that some farsighted lover tried to open with lines from a red pen, like a blepharoplasty, while others kissed its sybaritic mouth to make a poem a prophecy. So here is love alive surviving the wreckage it survives, a lipstick envelope of hearts on their flight to some other place, less aware, more receiving, a final Champ de Grâce.

Michael Gessner

Poetry & Poets

The Poem of Death

This is the poem of death. There is only one and no other. Every one is an occasion, one way or another, and the last poem is this poem of death. It is an occasion like no other. I will no longer lope after elegance, beauty’s body, or love’s wonder. I will be sorry for everything I was, and for everything I was not. I speak to you as if you were my brother. I will forgive everyone. Death will make this possible. There will be no other. Death was in the mind before thought or love, in ourselves, and in our lovers. The poem of death is speechless. A companion will appear again like another self, like your brother. Enough now, enough has been said. The spinning leaf will spin like no other.

Michael Gessner

Death

The Innocents at Sandy Hook

Nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel, or what life itself eventually reveals. No more studies of kindness or courtesy, nor grace or charity, all is needless now. All is needless now, sky, world, family grieving for their bundles of purity, now beyond disgrace, failure, winter streets, or whatever attacks, and then retreats. Classrooms emptied of children’s things, paper and paste, and love’s imaginings, bundles of peace, Christmas-blessed with the unborn and the dead at rest, nothing can reach you now, not lead or steel or what life itself eventually reveals.

Michael Gessner

Sorrow & Grieving

Fiddlers at the Desert Valley County Care Center

Among physicians rich in their death watch In hallways crowded with locked wheelchairs, Cradles of a century’s platitudes, The stale air smelling of disinfectant And weeping wounds enough to stupefy nurses, Among the staring insomniacs of the day room, The stroke victims on their rented gurneys, Complaining orderlies and rattling carts Among these in this place my father lay At the end of everything In the curved landscapes of white sheets Abandoned finally by parents, his son, The loyal company, old friends, his death A sign of other deaths too soon to come Unable to recall one life, his thoughts, Features, he lay unknown to himself, The tall hunter of pheasants out with his boy In vellum corn and brassy orchards In an autumn that never was, the proud White-collared Ford employee lay on a bed Too short for legs tattooed with red burn-rings From daily syringes of Cytosar Considered useless, still a requirement For state funding for a body described Leukemic waiting for Saturday's fiddlers Who came to raise the spirits of the dead With a music he never cared for turned Suddenly attractive, he found genius, Theirs or his like some lyrical phosphor That shapes itself in the dry night air To make a thing then make it disappear He lay listening to the county fiddlers At the end of every purpose, act and form I leave you here, my father, in perfect accord.

Michael Gessner

Death,Sorrow & Grieving

Face

Imagine half your face rubbed out yet you are suited up and walking to the office. How will your mates greet you? with heavy hearts, flowers, rosary beads? How shall we greet the orphan boy, the husband whose hand slipped, children and wife swept away? How to greet our new years and our birthdays? Shall we always light a candle? Do we remember that time erases the shore, grass grows, pain’s modified? At Hikkaduwa in 1980 I wrote a ditty, a sailor’s song about rain in sunny Ceylon. I don’t know what Calypsonians would compose about this monstrous wave, this blind hatchet man; don’t know the Baila singers’ reply; we are a “happy and go” people yet the fisherman’s wife knows that her grandfather was eaten by the ocean— fisher communities have suffered in time and what’s happened now is just another feast for that bloody, sleeping mother lapping at our island; but what if the ocean were innocent, the tectonic plates innocent, what if God were innocent? * I do not know how to walk upon the beach, how to lift corpse after corpse until I am exhausted, how to stop the tears when half my face has been rubbed out beyond the railroad tracks and this anaesthetic, this calypso come to the last verse. What shall we write in the sand? Where are gravestones incinerated? Whose ashes are these urned and floating through a house throttled by water? Shall we build a memorial some calculated distance from the sea, in a park, in the shape of a giant wave where we can write the names of the dead? Has the wave lost its beauty? Is it now considered obscene? * Yet tomorrow we must go to the ocean and refresh ourselves in the sea breeze down in Hikkaduwa where it is raining in sunny Ceylon. Tomorrow, we must renew our vows at sunrise, at sunset. Let us say the next time the ocean recedes and parrots gawk and flee, and restless dogs insist their humans wake up, we will not peer at the revelation of the ocean bed, nor seek photographs. We will run to higher ground, and gathered there with our children, our cats, dogs, pigs, with what we’ve carried in our hands —albums, letters— we will make a circle, kneel, sit, stand in no particular direction, pray and be silent, open our lungs and shout thanks to our gods thanks to our dogs.

Indran Amirthanayagam

Sorrow & Grieving

Order

Jesus did not ride that monstrous wave, not Yahweh, Jah, Allah, none of the major Gods or the minor ones, not even the godless strode that bugger which sliced our lives in two: the past where we danced ballroom while the children played carom, and mangos stained our lapels, and today, hobbling, scavenging in ash heaps, how easy the arithmetic, day and night, two by two. Bring on the mind workers. Let a thousand doctors bloom. I lived right here on the x, my name is blue: sea green blue blue green I do not speak in tongues. I am not disordered, a babbler. I did not lose anybody close to me, just 30,000 fellow island bees, not to worry, machan, old fellow, I will subscribe tomorrow, the order of every day, skip and jump rope, whistle, talk to aid workers, even swim.

Indran Amirthanayagam

Faith & Doubt

The City, with Elephants

The elephants of reckoning are bunches of scruff men and women picking up thrown out antennae from the rubbish bins of the city to fix on their tubular bells and horn about by oil can fires in the freezing midnight of the old new year We ride by their music every hour in cabs on trains hearing the pit pat of our grown-wise pulse shut in shut out from the animals of the dry season the losers and boozers, we must not admit our eyes into the courtyard the whimsy of chance and our other excuses— dollars in pocket— to write beautiful songs is all I ask, God to do right with friends and love a woman and live to eighty have people listen to the story of my trip to America The elephants of reckoning are beaten and hungry and walk their solitary horrors out every sunrise slurping coffee bought with change while in some houses freedom-bound lovers embrace late and read Tagore about the people working underneath the falling of empires.

Indran Amirthanayagam

Travels & Journeys,Class

Words for the Sri Lanka Tourist Office

The King Cobra slides through our jungles, and tucked in bushes by the riverbanks the grand Kabaragoya holds court among lizards— but if you want to swim at Mount Lavinia, or fly kites on Galle Face Green, or ride horse carts in the Jaffna peninsula of your ancestors, or bear a child in Colombo General Hospital, or sleep in Cinnamon Gardens under a mango tree, or beg in the Borella Market, or ride for historical reasons on patrol boats in the Bay, or stilt-fish off Matara down South, just remember here everywhere there is only man burning and woman burning here everywhere in shallow graves in deep graves floating out of salt water washing down the sands the dead have tongues the dead have ears tongues are speaking to ears What are they saying? What are they saying? Tell us, brown bear bolting out of your cave. Tell us, leopard leaning on your branch. Tell us, flamingos. Bend your necks and pour wine pour wine Hoopoes, kingfishers, cranes, have you got your messages on the bill, are you ready to sing? Are you going to sing? Monsoon. Are you going to sing? Monsoon. Are you going to sing? Monsoon. Monsoon.

Indran Amirthanayagam

Weather

Kiss

Kissing your lips I try to forget roses or the fruit of palmyra trees sweet and strong Tongue lolling upon tongue heart beating against heart beating, these are my words signifying our human bodies which poetry does not capture, the absolute desire I have to kiss your lips on this hot and sunny afternoon. I do not know how much longer I can walk about the garden kissing roses, or perambulate the toddy tavern of my dreams where black faces and white toddy mix in black and white memories of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, my Tamil countrymen far away on an island across the sea. Far away and far away the palmyra fruit and your lips. To drink toddy now. To kiss your rosy lips now. To uproot the roses in my garden and offer them upon my tongue now. To fly to Sri Lanka and grab the last fruit on the tree before history throws the Tamils into the sea as is said it will do; before all this and everything else, before the apocalypse, I do so sincerely wish, though my words may not fit, to rest my head in your hair and kiss your lips.

Indran Amirthanayagam

Realistic & Complicated

hamsters are heads with little characteristics on the head, part one

in florida a giant hamster lays in bed worrying about its future the hamster has bad eyesight and many other problems later that night the hamster drives its car around listening to sad music; the master lightly drums its paws on the steering wheel the hamster is alone but not for long: at home three waffle friends wait cooling inside a countertop oven in the kitchen

Tao Lin

Pets

hamsters are heads with little characteristics on the head, part three

in the evening the hamster sits at the computer watermelon juice and coffee sit by the computer the hamster drinks all of the coffee after a few minutes the hamster drinks all of the watermelon juice the hamster lays its paw atop a neatly folded to-do list; this is a resourceful hamster with a strong will, a sincere and loving hamster friend, and a confident nature we do not need to spend any more time or empathy on this hamster

Tao Lin

Pets

thirteen of twenty-four

notice how my forehead approaches you at a high speed notice the contortions on my face; hear and feel the impact of my forehead against your eyebrow never get angry if someone doesn’t do things for you react to disappointment by being quiet and nice and alone, not by being confrontational or frustrated in 1952 a DSM copy-editor removed ‘headbutting’ from the entry for ‘psychopathic behavior’ thereafter the headbutt has thrived across all social, political, and elementary school gym classes today the headbutt is a sign of friendship, stability, and inner calm the exponential effect of your repeated lies makes me afraid what will happen to us; ‘the perfect headbutt’ destroys both participants and impresses even the severely disillusioned, and the phrase ‘giant poem’ reverberates through my head with the austerity of ancient ruins, the off-centered beauty of repressed veganism, and the lord of the rings trilogy I forgot what this poem was about

Tao Lin

The Body

Turtle Came to See Me

The first story I ever write is a bright crayon picture of a dancing tree, the branches tossed by island wind. I draw myself standing beside the tree, with a colorful parrot soaring above me, and a magical turtle clasped in my hand, and two yellow wings fluttering on the proud shoulders of my ruffled Cuban rumba dancer's fancy dress. In my California kindergarten class, the teacher scolds me: REAL TREES DON'T LOOK LIKE THAT. It's the moment when I first begin to learn that teachers can be wrong. They have never seen the dancing plants of Cuba.

Margarita Engle

Kinship

Two sets of family stories, one long and detailed, about many centuries of island ancestors, all living on the same tropical farm... The other side of the family tells stories that are brief and vague, about violence in the Ukraine, which Dad's parents had to flee forever, leaving all their loved ones behind. They don't even know if anyone survived. When Mami tells her flowery tales of Cuba, she fills the twining words with relatives. But when I ask my Ukrainian-Jewish-American grandma about her childhood in a village near snowy Kiev, all she reveals is a single memory of ice-skating on a frozen pond. Apparently, the length of a grown-up's growing-up story is determined by the difference between immigration and escape.

Margarita Engle

Ritmo/Rhythm

Mad has decided to catch a vulture, the biggest bird she can find. She is so determined, and so inventive, that by stringing together a rickety trap of ropes and sticks, she creates a puzzling structure that just might be clever enough to trick a buzzard, once the trap’s baited with leftover pork from supper. Mad and I used to do everything together, but now I need a project all my own, so I roam the green fields, finding bones. The skull of a wild boar. The jawbone of a mule. Older cousins show me how to shake the mule’s quijada, to make the blunt teeth rattle. Guitars. Drums. Gourds. Sticks. A cow bell. A washboard. Pretty soon, we have a whole orchestra. On Cuban farms, even death can turn into music.

Margarita Engle

More Dangerous Air

Newsmen call it the Cuban Missile Crisis. Teachers say it's the end of the world. At school, they instruct us to look up and watch the Cuban-cursed sky. Search for a streak of light. Listen for a piercing shriek, the whistle that will warn us as poisonous A-bombs zoom close. Hide under a desk. Pretend that furniture is enough to protect us against perilous flames. Radiation. Contamination. Toxic breath. Each air-raid drill is sheer terror, but some of the city kids giggle. They don't believe that death is real. They've never touched a bullet, or seen a vulture, or made music by shaking the jawbone of a mule. When I hide under my frail school desk, my heart grows as rough and brittle as the slab of wood that fails to protect me from reality's gloom.

Margarita Engle

Coming of Age,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity,War & Conflict

Napalm

I have come to realize the body is its own pyre, that degree rises from within, the fatty acids a kind of kindling. Like a scientist in a lab, this much I have established, blood jelled like gasoline, the years spread before me like a map pinned with targets, where I’m raging even now. It works both ways. Clear the forests to see your enemies and your enemies see you clearly. Like all effective incendiaries, I won’t only bloom where I’m planted.

Quan Barry

The Body

vigil

And both the girls cried bitterly (though they hardly knew why) and clung to the Lion and kissed his mane and his nose and his paws and his great, sad eyes. Then he turned from them and walked out onto the top of the hill. And Lucy and Susan, crouching in the bushes, looked after him and this is what they saw. —C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Tonight we will function like women. The snow has gone away, the ice with its amniotic glare. I clasp my sister’s tiny hand. We will not turn away Though spring, spring with its black appetite, Comes seeping out of the earth. The lion was sad. He suffered us To touch him. When I placed the bread of my hands In his mammalian heat, I was reminded That the world outside this world Is all vinegar and gall, that to be a young girl at the foot of a god Requires patience. Timing. The White Witch has mustered her partisans. Because I am fascinated by her bracelets strung with baby teeth, I will remember her as the woman Who grins with her wrists. From my thicket of heather I note that in her own congenital way She is pure, that tonight she ushers something new into the world. I cannot stop it. I cannot stop it just as in that other place I could not keep the planes with their spiked fires from coming. Though in this closed realm the smell of camphor is overwhelming I have nothing but my hands to use In ministering to the dead. Here too My hands must suffice. Hush now while I testify. They are shaving him. The corona of his mane falls away Like pieces of money. In the moon’s milk light Her bangled wrists grin as she raises the blade. Something is diffused. In whatever world he comes again There will be women like us who choose to.

Quan Barry

Animals,War & Conflict

loose strife [Somebody says draw a map]

Somebody says draw a map. Populate it with the incidents of your childhood. Mark the spot where the lake receded after a winter of light snow. The stairs on which someone slapped you. The place where the family dog hung itself by jumping over the back fence while still on the dog run, hours later its body like a limp flag on a windless day. Draw a map, someone says. Let yourself remember. In the refugee camp a hundred thousand strong draw the stony outcrop from which you could no longer see the plume of smoke that was your village. Draw a square for the bathroom stall where Grandpa hid each day in order to eat his one egg free from the starving eyes of his classmates, an X for the courthouse where you and he were naturalized, a broken line for the journey. Draw a map, Jon says. Let it be your way into the poem. Here is where that plane filled with babies crashed that I was not on. Here is where I was ashamed. On the second floor at Pranash University the people wait their turn. Have you drawn your map, Jon asks. He has rolled up his sleeves. Forty-five minutes to noon the Prince stands up and says that the monks must be excused. We watch them file out, saffron robes as if their bodies have burst into blossom. Draw a map. Fly halfway around the globe. Here is the room next to the library where you realize how poor your tradition is, the local people with poetic forms still in use that date back to the time of Christ. Tell us about your map. Explain how these wavy lines represent the river, this rectangle the school-turned-prison where only seven escaped with their lives. This is my map. This star the place where I sat in a roomful of people among whom not one was not touched by genocide. Every last map resplendent with death though nobody knows where their loved ones lie buried. How many times can I appropriate a story that is not mine to tell? The woman stands up and says she is not a poet, that she doesn’t have the words. She points to a triangle on a piece of paper. Here is the spot where she found human bones in the well of her childhood home, and how her mother told herdon’t be afraid because it was not the work of wild animals.

Quan Barry

Poetry & Poets,War & Conflict

loose strife [Listen closely as I sing this]

Listen closely as I sing this. The man standing at the gate tottering on his remaining limb is a kind of metronome, his one leg planted firmly on the earth. Yes, I have made him beautiful because I aim to lay all my cards on the table. In the book review the critic writes, “Barry seeks not to judge but to understand.” Did she want us to let her be, or does she want to be there walking the grounds of the old prison on the hill of the poison tree where comparatively a paltry twenty thousand died? In the first room with the blown up black-and-white of a human body gone abstract someone has to turn and face the wall not because of the human pain represented in the photo but because of her calmness, the tranquility with which she tells us that her father and her sister and her brother were killed. In graduate school a whole workshop devoted to an image of a woman with bleach thrown in the face and the question of whether or not the author could write, “The full moon sat in the window like a calcified eye, the woman’s face aglow with a knowingness.” I felt it come over me and I couldn’t stop. I tried to pull myself together and I couldn’t. They were children. An army of child soldiers. In the room papered with photos of the Khmer Rouge picture after picture of teenagers, children whose parents were killed so that they would be left alone in the world to do the grisly work that precedes paradise. And the photos of the victims, the woman holding her newborn in her arms as her head is positioned in a vise, in this case the vise an instrument not of torture but of documentation, the head held still as the camera captures the image, the thing linking all their faces, the abject fear and total hopelessness as exists in only a handful of places in the history of the visible world. For three $US per person she will guide you through what was Tuol Sleng prison, hill of the strychnine tree. Without any affectation she will tell you the story of how her father and her sister and her brother went among the two million dead. There are seventy-four forms of poetry in this country and each one is still meant to be sung.

Quan Barry

Poetry & Poets,War & Conflict

loose strife [Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings]

Say, when we woke those icy spring mornings they were still there. The upper portion of their faces long ruined but you could still see the meaning in their hands, palms once covered in gold. We knew better than to call them by their names, Light that Shines Throughout the Universe and His consort, but there were stories of travelers lost in the foothills of the Hindu Kush and a distant brilliance that led them home. The way a candle physically enters your body after it has been snuffed out. The pearly smoke suffused in the air. In one school hundreds of miles away all the girls my age were poisoned, and last week outside the capital a woman like my sister was shot dead in front of a crowd by two men who forced their bodies into her body and then judged her an infidel so they could kill her and be done with it. After the visitors were blasted I had a dream. I saw a human man standing by a lake and no one was looking at him directly. His image on the surface of the water cleaner than anything in this world. In my dream the man said, “Thousands of lifetimes ago when my body was cut into pieces by an evil king, I was not caught up in the idea of the self.” Then in my dream someone picked up a rock and I woke up. It took almost a month, the great heads drilled with holes, then anti-aircraft tanks rolled in. Each hundred-foot niche now empty but each cavity left shaped like us, like a person. Before it happened we talked about it. Grandfather said don’t they have a share in heaven? Second Aunt said it was more realistic this way. God not in heaven but in exile.

Quan Barry

War & Conflict

Craft [The first great poet]

The first great poet of the crisis the one whose generation was left as if firebombed though if you look back at the seminal work you will see that only a handful of of the poems explicitly
 touch on that dark time
 the blood filling with
 virulence and the night
 always black and spangled with stars says
 when faced with difficult material the
 poet should begin obliquely creeping in
 from the edge a square
 of light moving imperceptibly across the floor as the earth turns and so I will tell you
 that ever since I saw the
 footage of the journalists hiding in the attic the rope ladder pulled up after them only the one with foreign papers left to stand her ground down below the journalist at first calmly sitting on the couch but then huddling in a cabinet as the soldiers enter the apartment next door, the cries of the mother floating through the wall ib’ni ib’ni the language ancient like something whetted on stone the way I image language would have sounded in the broken mouth of King DavidAbsalom Absalom the man-child hanging by the shining black noose of his own hair in the fragrant woods of Ephraim ib’ni ib’ni next door the sound of
 a body being dragged
 from the apartment as
 his mother wails into the dark how many mothers and how
 many sons dragged out
 into a night spangled
 with stars where everything is a metaphor for virulence my son my son and ever since I saw a clip of the footage the foreign journalist managed to smuggle out of the country images of the journalist herself hiding in a space meant for buckets and rags as next door the soldiers
 drag away a young boy
 please hear it again a
 child of no more than
 twelve his mother’s lamentations forever seared in the blood of this thing I call my life but really what is it what is this light I hold so dear it wants to move imperceptibly across the floor as the earth turns so as not to become too aware of itself?

Quan Barry

Sorrow & Grieving,War & Conflict

Someone once said we were put on this earth to witness and testify

Nowhere in the Halakha’s five thousand years of rules
 does it specifically state Thou shall not [ ] but sometimes tradition carries more weight than law and so for much of the past year we have not talked about what will happen on Thursday, how the cervix will start its slow yawn, the pelvic floor straining as the head crowns, the fontanelles allowing the bony panes of the skull to pass through until, over the next 24 months, the five cranial plates gradually ossify, the head forming its own helmet as structures harden over the soft meats of the brain, nor do we talk about the colostrum sunny as egg yolks now collecting in your breasts, the thing’s first nutrients already ready and waiting, the event just days away and still we do not talk about it, the mass growing inside you tucked up safe in the leeward side under the heart because sometimes our god is a jealous god, the evil eye lidless and all-seeing. Instead we will wait until it is done, until the creature has been cleaned and wrapped in soft cloth, the bloody cord that binds you severed. And maybe you will name it Dolores, which means grief, or perhaps you will call it Mara, the Hebrew name for bitterness because this is how we protect what we love, by hiding what it truly means to us, the little bag of gold we keep buried in the yard, the thing we will do anything to keep safe, even going so far as to pretend it doesn’t exist, that there’s nothing massing in the dark despite the steady light emanating from your face, a radiance so bright sometimes I can’t look at you, the joy so overpowering you want to shout it from the highest mountaintop straight into God’s ear.

Quan Barry

Birth & Birthdays

crossing the South China Sea as analgesia

One day we will all be like this—the boat’s sickening pitch, & the delicateness needless, consumable. How everything here naturally passes into night, a room w/o walls. Could mindlessness keep us alive? Could bright colors? Tonight I am thinking of the young woman who dreams of her father being shot in the head. Imagine needing to believe the one you love has been destroyed. Now it is after midnight—the spindrift lunar & diaphanous. Here alone on deck could I make peace w/it all in thirty seconds—the water’s inherent rising, the gasping for air? I have never seen such omnipresence, such vast dreamlessness— but I too am such things. What does it mean to be eroded? What would be the significance of slipping one leg over the rail & straddling the indifference? Yes. Once upon a time we spent three days on a boat out of Kobé, Japan. All night the waves. All night the somnambulistic urges. Or how as children we would swim in a hard rain—the lake’s surface ragged & torn, but underneath the roots of the water lilies like ladders trailing down into the marvelous.

Quan Barry

Travels & Journeys

lion

Shagged-gold, at rest the great haunches as if axled, fur sleeked like a butter rug. In the Serengeti sun, the male’s harem like a solar system, each lady kept exclusive, her seasonal heat for him alone, estrous belly pressed to the ground, then the male’s riding her musculature— throughout evolution the cat’s barbed penis nicking his breached mate as he dismounts. See the deliberate walk, cool as a criminal, the multi-jointed forepaws placed consciously even by the usurped king, his eye teeth blacked, his tail rotted off, tired wag of a bloody stump as he finally falls dying, the crucified face bedded in its wheel of hair, the tawny miscegenated eyes binocular in breadth. Shark in the long grasses. Shark in the long grass. Smell everywhere, the gazelle with its small-headed splendor gracing the plains is ambushed, devoured, its horned bone rack souvenired, the murderer’s ripping muzzle crimsoned. In the despot’s sons’ palace of pure gold the three in the iron cage lazing like statues. When the American unlocks the hinged door our shackled hearts contract. Unhooded and naked we are pushed into their presence, and for a shining moment the animals study us, these fabulous aliens. Here in a desert captivity snatched from the baobab’s sour fruit, their swagged bellies shifted, broken, and resignedly the ancient drive rose up only in one— its head wreathed beyond sorrow as it slouched out of the habitual darkness, the permanent rictus of its terrible mouth pain-struck. The thing came toward me with its ruined light, and I saw affliction in it. Dream of mastery. Dream of being wholly consumed, freed. I am the lion and the lion is me. Then the American pulls us out.

Quan Barry

Animals,War & Conflict

Thanksgiving

Literally the thing has been gutted, a ragged gash carved under its tail to midway up its chest, eyes like stagnant water, horns intricate as a woodwind. Where did the viscera go? Where do the viscera ever go? I am in a car driving to the northernmost point on this spit. Porte de Mort. Death’s Northern Door. Literally where my grandmother lives. Her 89-year-old cousin has just fallen out a window but is all right, the bruises like stained glass. Enthusiasm. To be in God. My grandmother says it is proof, and I nod my head because I too would like to live in such a world where an eighty-nine year old crawls out a window and falls seven feet to the ground, in turn the miracle of her body stained a deep blue, vitreous. In one room of the unfinished mansion where we will celebrate the day, the ninety-year-old matriarch sleeps in her four-poster bed under the canopy of a wedding dress, its hundred eyelets a fallacy. After dinner someone will hand around an indulgence of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, the lady’s dark cheek marred as if she has been scratched. Who at this table fled the police? Who left that place in flames, the rubble of infinite hearths? The deer’s eyes like perfect cataracts, the evidence cooling. When I think of my room in the earth, I can’t breathe. A friend of a friend recently hit a small bear with his car. At the end of my favorite novel a bear is dancing on a makeshift stage, the bear a grotesquerie like the rest of us. No one stopped to help, said my friend. Traffic barely slowed. I do not judge this, or even the surreptitious footage of the workers somewhere on the killing floor, stomping the breast-heavy creatures with their rubber boots. How we raise them not to fly, what should waft gnostically through the air, the hollowness of evolving. My heart is doing that thing again, saying climb the stairs on your knees. I tell a friend a man halfway across the world has been killed, torn apart by motorbikes, each limb tied in a different direction. Could a universe be born this way? One minute you are scarping the silvery bark off a birch when it comes to you forever and there you lie in the bed of a blood-smeared truck at a stoplight on Highway 41 because this is the season of messages. The man was a teacher. He taught girls. When they came for him he told his children not to cry. Then the men took out half his bowel, the viscera steaming as they do, and they tied him ingeniously in such a way that they tore him apart. In that other place three million of us died. When I left, I left them all behind. In the unfinished mansion someone will ask me what I’m thankful for. What to say? That one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen was a paper nest secreted by wasps, and that in the summer I would sleep under it, the runnelled mass turning like a planet in the moonlight? I will admit I was in favor of war and now look what’s happened. At the end of the road the man driving the truck will eat the deer. If I had to watch someone be torn apart by motorbikes I would still be me, which is the horror of it all.

Quan Barry

Family & Ancestors,War & Conflict

Allowance

I am ten. My mother sits in a black rocking chair in the parlor and tells stories of a country school surrounded by ricefields and no roads. I stand in the kerosene light behind her, earning my allowance. A penny for each white hair I pull.

James Masao Mitsui

Jobs & Working,Home Life

Block 18, Tule Lake Relocation Camp

—for James I. Ina 1. The emotion of trucks, buses & troop trains brings them here, to the wrong side of another state. A woman at the Klamath Falls depot calls it the wrong side of the ocean. 2 Crumbs hide around the table legs in the mess hall, dishes & silverware clink a strange song. Families talk across long tables. Questions drop like puzzles to the unfinished floor. 3 Blocks away from their new home a woman finds a latrine not backed up. Stands in line, waiting her turn in the wind. Down the center of the open room: 12 toilet stools, six pair, back to back. Sits down and asks for privacy, holding a towel in front of her with trembling hands. 4 In a North Dakota prisoner-of-war camp, surrounded by Germans & Italians, a quiet man hammers a samurai sword from scrap metal at night in a boiler room. A secret edge to hold against the dark mornings. He sends love notes to his pregnant wife in Tule Lake sewn in pants mailed home for mending. His censored letters mention a torn pocket. She finds the paper near the rip, folded & secret in the lining. White voices claim the other side of the ocean is so crowded the people want to find death across the phantom river. Headlines shake their nervous words. Out on the coast beach birds print their calligraphy in the sand. It is such a small country.

James Masao Mitsui

Realistic & Complicated,History & Politics,War & Conflict

Painting by a Mental Patient, Weaverville City Jail, California, 1922  

—displayed in the Weaverville Museum It is the picture of a man who dreams at night, his dreams a cartoon color he can’t forget in his blue cell: a fork chases a hard-boiled egg across the smooth paper, cheered on by an angry alarm clock. The clock rings and the artist knows it is morning even though the iron cell is in a basement with no windows. In the center of the painting the devil blows a whistle and his pitchfork drips blood. Above in the night a man has taken off in a Buck Rogers spaceship heading for a yellow one-eyed moon. He grips the steering wheel in the open cockpit and doesn’t look back. In a lower corner under a naked tree a satyr sits and plays his pan-flute. The notes weave all around the painting, twist around a girl dancing in veils. The man who dreams all this pulls at his covers, drowses at the bottom of the painting. The man who painted this died in his dreams.

James Masao Mitsui

Health & Illness,The Mind,Painting & Sculpture

New Lines for Fortune Cookies

—after Frank O’Hara You have been smiling across the table at your date with a sesame seed stuck in your teeth. You will gain sophistication, become accepted by Reader’s Digest, and retire in Puyallup. In your next life you will be a teacher and no one will ever call you by your first name. After your next vacation you will come home and discover that your neighbors have redecorated in the style of Iowa trailer court. If you feel like you’re getting old, secretly plant zucchini in your neighbor’s flowerbeds. Avoid people who iron their sheets or roll their socks & underwear. Painting and poetry and music will show us where we should be going, not the senate or tv news. The next thermos bottle you see will actually be a listening device made in Korea. All the people in this restaurant are glad that they are not you.

James Masao Mitsui

Eating & Drinking,Humor & Satire

Spring Poem For the Sake of Breathing, Written After a Walk to Foster Island  

The sky wants the water to turn grey, but if I notice how waves play with the clumps of yellow flags, or the way turtles share logs, or even try to understand a friend’s decision to walk onto a glacier and end her life—I will be ready for any poems that have been waiting. The horizon opens as I walk, escorted by swans and Canada geese. I need to stop backpedaling into the present. In my old life people would straighten the truth, but the river flows in curves. The names of my father and my mother rest next to each other in Greenwood Cemetery. The distance between me and the mountains measures an uneven thought: I feel like an orphan. An early moon is just a piece of change in the softening sky. Light is such an actress. Time to seek Hopper’s wish to simply paint sunlight on the wooden wall of a house. I am growing older. Maru in Japanese means the ship will make it back home.

James Masao Mitsui

Time & Brevity,Spring

The Sweetest Oranges in Town

No, I am not deformed. I wear these socks Because I haven't any gloves, And my fingers are bitten with frost. They feel like stumps. Luckily, I finished covering The citrus tree with sheets of burlap. Before darkness, I will light a smudge pot Near the mummified trunk, Then anoint my hands in a blue salve. Yesterday was cold But the freeze is on now. I must remind myself Not to lick any cars. Mr. Nishizawa, a house over, Told me his nephew Lost a fourth of his tongue For that reason. Years ago, The rosebushes were ruined to a freeze And have never come back. If needed, I will stay up all night And pray, will let the hoarfrost Burn in my chest. My grandfather Ate the yield from this tree After he died. I saw him.

Rick Noguchi

Health & Illness,Winter

The Breath-Holding Contest

That boy, the champion breath holder, Kenji Takezo, lost his title This year to Mack Stanton A retired truck driver New to the area. Held in the town swimming pool Thirty-five participants inhaled Deeply all at once Submerged the depth. The contest went on into twilight. One by one each person Came up sucking air. Kenji was the town favorite. We wanted him to win again. He trained so hard, It was the only real talent He had Other than surfing and making Trouble. When he surfaced Second to last Gulping the night Then vomiting water, We were disappointed. He was doing so well. He had his lucky twenty-pound brick Cradled in his lap. It kept him down. But that trucker Mack was too good. He read Comic books, aloud, underwater. We watched from the bleachers His laughter bursting above him. Kenji saw this too. He never had anybody Read to him Not even his mother, And he wanted to hear What was being read What his opponent found so funny.

Rick Noguchi

Sports & Outdoor Activities

The Ocean Inside Him

After Kenji Takezo fell from a wave, The turbulence of whitewash confused His sense of direction. He breathed in When he should have Held tight. By accident, he swallowed The Pacific. The water poured down his throat, A blue cascade he could not see. He felt in his stomach The heavy life of the ocean. It wasn’t funny, but he giggled When a school of fish tickled his ribs. He went home, the surf not rideable, It was no longer there, The water weighted in his belly. That night, while he slept, the tide moved. The long arms of the moon Reached inside him pulling the Pacific free. When he woke the next morning, He lay in a puddle of ocean that was his.

Rick Noguchi

Seas, Rivers, & Streams

October, Remembering the Ride No One Saw

Steel horses nodding In the petroleum field are beasts That suck The crude of earth. They have lived here for as long as I Remember. This moment, I smell wild incense: Heather, abducted by a desert wind. Its growth hides The rain-carved ribs of the foothills. Evening swallows The city fasting on late fall. Years ago, after hearing the story About a boy who lost Both legs while playing on an oil pump, I was dared to straddle one. All my friends were there to watch The Pacific behind me burning with dusk. The brute lifted me to the sky, Where I merged with the twilight, A warm breeze embracing my back. None of them noticed The world stopped to breathe. When I looked, they disappeared. Nearby in pink-flowered bushes Someone found The girl who’d been missing for weeks. They stood in awe, the body Decomposing, while I rode The slow bucking animal. Two months later, off the same pump, A man dove, An imperfect swan into night. He landed in the dirt gully Breaking the soft, white wings He never had. Today, I catch in my hand An insect charged with lightning. It tickles The obscure scoop of my palm As I hold it to my mouth and explain A wish so simple By morning I will have forgotten it. I release The bug to a desert wind That is racing toward the sea, A brutal dryness in its wake. Fire in the hills everywhere.

Rick Noguchi

Landscapes & Pastorals,Money & Economics

Human Knowledge

About the only thing I thought I knew was that nothing I’d ever know would do any good. Sunrise, say, or that the part of the horse’s hoof that most resembles a human palm is called the frog; certain chords on the guitar of no mercantile use; the abstruse circuitry of an envelope quatrain; even the meaning of horripilation. Sometimes on a flatland mound the ancients had made, I took heart in the pointlessness of stars and lay there until my teeth chattered. I earned my last Boy Scout merit badge building a birdhouse out of license plates manufactured by felons in the big house. No more paramilitary organizations for me, I said, ten years before I was drafted. I had skills. Sure-footedness and slick fielding. Eventually I would learn to unhook a bra one-handed, practicing on my friend, his sister's worn over his T-shirt (I took my turns too). One Easter Sunday I hid through the church service among the pipes of the organ and still did not have faith, although my ears rang until Monday. I began to know that little worth knowing was knowable and faith was delusion. I began to believe I believed in believing nothing I was supposed to believe in, except the stars, which, like me, were not significant, except for their light, meaning I loved them for their pointlessness. I believed I owned them somehow. A C major 7th chord was beautiful and almost rare. The horse I loved foundered and had to be put down. The middle rhyme in an envelope quatrain was not imprisoned if it was right. In cold air a nipple horripilates and rises, the sun comes up and up and up, a star that bakes the eggs in a Boy Scout license plate birdhouse. God was in music and music was God. A drill sergeant seized me by my dog tag chain and threatened to beat me to a pile of bloody guts for the peace sign I’d chiseled in the first of my two tags, the one he said they’d leave in my mouth before they zipped the body bag closed. Yet one more thing I’d come to know. He also said that Uncle Sam owned my ass, no more true than my ownership of the stars. I can play a C major 7th chord in five or six places on the neck of a guitar. A stabled horse’s frog degrades; a wild horse’s becomes a callus, smooth as leather. Stars are invisible in rainy weather, something any fool knows, of course.

Robert Wrigley

Coming of Age,Stars, Planets, Heavens

Unfunky UFO

The first space shuttle launch got delayed until Sunday, so we had to watch the shuttle’s return to Earth in class instead—PS113’s paunchy black & white rolled in, the antennae on top adjusted sideways & down for better reception. That same day, Garrett stole my new pencil box. That same day, Cynthia peed her jeans instead of going to the bathroom & letting Garrett steal her pencil box. Both of us too upset to answer questions about space flight, so we got sent to the back of the class. I smelled like the kind of shame that starts a fight on a Tuesday afternoon. Cynthia smelled like pee & everyday Jordache. The shuttle made its slick way back to Earth, peeling clouds from the monochromatic sky & we all—even the astronomically marginal— were winners. American, because a few days before, a failed songwriter put a bullet in the president in the name of Jodie Foster. The shuttle looked like a bullet, only with wings & a cockpit, & when it finally landed, the class broke into applause & the teacher snatched a thinning American flag from the corner, waved it back & forth in honor of our wounded president & those astronauts.

Adrian Matejka

School & Learning,Stars, Planets, Heavens

Illinois Abe Lincoln’s Hat

blacks painted onto bricks & split vinyl on the East Side, jaws as tight as window locks with the curtains drawn & behind that diligent fabric: blacks already tucked into homemade forts—folding chairs, wobbly backbones & the whole, snowy world waiting outside like ghost stories whispered around the last sputtering match. & later, top sheets pulled up over heads from fear of mirrors at midnight or some backfired beater’s rusty pop pop pop after the key twists at the edge of the week. No doubt: Tuesday is the scariest day in Section 8, but Friday is right after it in the suburbs. & after those trembling weekdays, even more blacks with money disappearing & reappearing as unexpectedly as poltergeists inside of TVs & haunted trees with fast fingers in West Side yards. & still not a wavelength of any kind for a black to put in the bank. The inks in everybody’s hatted & contracting checkbooks don’t change black. Some front-row architecture might. Some guns, too, & their loud, colorful opportunities: whatever version of black is inside a fist around a grip. Not a color, really—more like the face a man makes in the glinting face of a gun pointed at him every single day.

Adrian Matejka

Cities & Urban Life,Race & Ethnicity

Collectable Blacks

This is the g-dropping vernacular I am stuck in. This is the polyphone where my head is an agrarian gang sign pointing like a percussion mallet to a corn maze in one of the smaller Indiana suburbs where there aren’t supposed to be black folks. Be cool & try to grin it off. Be cool & try to lean it off. Find a kind of black & bet on it. I’m grinning to this vernacular like the big drum laugh tracks a patriotic marching band. Be cool & try to ride the beat the same way me, Pryor, & Ra did driving across the 30th Street Bridge, laughing at these two dudes with big afros like it’s 1981 peeing into the water & looking at the stars. Right before Officer Friendly hit his lights.Face the car, fingers locked behind your heads. Right after the fireworks started popping off. Do I need to call the drug dog? Right after the rattling windows, mosquitoes as busy in my ears as 4th of July traffic cops. Right before the thrill of real planets & pretend planets spun high into the sky, Ra throwing up three West Side fingers, each ringed by pyrotechnic glory & the misnomer of the three of us grinning at the cop’s club down swinging at almost the exact same time Pryor says, Cops put a hurting on your ass, man. & fireworks light up in the same colors as angry knuckles if you don’t duck on the double. Especially on the West Side—more carnivorous than almost any other part of Earth Voyager saw when it snapped a blue picture on its way out of this violently Technicolor heliosphere.

Adrian Matejka

Cities & Urban Life,Crime & Punishment

from Stone: 24

Leaves scarcely breathing in the black breeze; the flickering swallow draws circles in the dusk. In my loving dying heart a twilight is coming, a last ray, gently reproaching. And over the evening forest the bronze moon climbs to its place. Why has the music stopped? Why is there such silence?

Osip Mandelstam

Stars, Planets, Heavens

from Stone: 98

The clock-cricket singing, that’s the fever rustling. The dry stove hissing, that’s the fire in red silk. The teeth of mice milling the thin supports of life, that’s the swallow my daughter who unmoored my boat. Rain-mumble on the roof— that’s the fire in black silk. But even at the bottom of the sea the bird-cherry will hear ‘good-bye’. For death is innocent, and the heart, all through the nightingale-fever, however it turns, is still warm.

Osip Mandelstam

Time & Brevity,Animals

from Stone: 103 The Twilight of Freedom

Let us praise the twilight of freedom, brothers, the great year of twilight! A thick forest of nets has been let down into the seething waters of night. O sun, judge, people, desolate are the years into which you are rising! Let us praise the momentous burden that the people’s leader assumes, in tears. Let us praise the twilight burden of power, its weight too great to be borne. Time, whoever has a heart will hear your ship going down. We have roped swallows together into legions. Now we can’t see the sun. Everywhere nature twitters as it moves. In the deepening twilight the earth swims into the nets and the sun can’t be seen. But what can we lose if we try one groaning, wide, ungainly sweep of the rudder? The earth swims. Courage, brothers, as the cleft sea falls back from our plow. Even as we freeze in Lethe we’ll remember the ten heavens the earth cost us.

Osip Mandelstam

History & Politics

from Stone: 122

Let me be in your service like the others mumbling predictions, mouth dry with jealousy. Parched tongue thirsting, not even for the word— for me the dry air is empty again without you. I’m not jealous any more but I want you. I carry myself like a victim to the hangman. I will not call you either joy or love. All my own blood is gone. Something strange paces there now. Another moment and I will tell you: it's not joy but torture you give me. I'm drawn to you as to a crime— to your ragged mouth, to the soft bitten cherry. Come back to me, I'm frightened without you. Never had you such power over me as now. Everything I desire appears to me. I'm not jealous any more. I'm calling you.

Osip Mandelstam

Realistic & Complicated

from Poems: 140 1 January 1924

Whoever kisses time’s ancient nodding head will remember later, like a loving son, how the old man lay down to sleep in the drift of wheat outside the window. He who has opened the eyes of the age, two large sleepy apples with inflamed lids, hears forever after the roar of rivers swollen with the wasted, lying times. The age is a despot with two sleepy apples to see with, and a splendid mouth of earth. When he dies he’ll sink onto the numb arm of his son, who’s already senile. I know the breath growing weaker by the day Not long not till the simple song of the wrongs of earth is cut off, and a tin seal put on the lips. O life of earth! O dying age! I’m afraid no one will understand you but the man with the helpless smile of one who has lost himself. O the pain of peeling back the raw eyelids to look for a lost word, and with lime slaking in the veins, to hunt for night herbs for a tribe of strangers! The age. In the sick son’s blood the deposit of lime is hardening. Moscow’s sleeping like a wooden coffin. There’s no escaping the tyrant century. After all these years the snow still smells of apples. I want to run away from my own doorstep, but where? Out in the street it’s dark, and my conscience glitters ahead of me like salt strewn on the pavement. Somehow I’ve got myself set for a short journey through the back lanes, past thatched eaves, starling houses, an everyday passer-by, in a flimsy coat, forever trying to button the lap-robe. Street after street flashes past, the frozen runners crunch like apples; can’t get the button through the button-hole, it keeps slipping out of my fingers. The winter night thunders like iron hardware through the Moscow streets. Knocks like a frozen fish, or billows in steam, flashing like a carp in a rosy tea-room. Moscow is Moscow again. I say hello to her. ‘Don’t be stern with me; never mind. I still respect the brotherhood of the deep frost, and the pike’s justice.’ The pharmacy’s raspberry globe shines onto the snow. Somewhere an Underwood typewriter’s rattled. The sleigh-driver’s back, the snow knee-deep, what more do you want? They won't touch you, won’t kill you. Beautiful winter, and the goat sky has crumbled into stars and is burning with milk. And the lap-robe flaps and rings like horse-hair against the frozen runners. And the lanes smoked like kerosene stoves, swallowed snow, raspberry, ice, endlessly peeling, like a Soviet sonatina, recalling nineteen-twenty. The frost is smelling of apples again. Could I ever betray to gossip-mongers the great vow to the Fourth Estate and oaths solemn enough for tears? Who else will you kill? Who else will you worship? What other lie will you dream up? There’s the Underwood’s cartilage. Hurry, rip out a key, you’ll find a little bone of a pike. And in the sick son’s blood the deposit of lime will melt, and there’ll be sudden blessèd laughter. But the simple sonatina of typewriters is only a faint shade of those great sonatas.

Osip Mandelstam

History & Politics

from Poems of the Thirties: 286 [The Stalin Epigram]

Our lives no longer feel ground under them. At ten paces you can’t hear our words. But whenever there’s a snatch of talk it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer, the ten thick worms his fingers, his words like measures of weight, the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip, the glitter of his boot-rims. Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses he toys with the tributes of half-men. One whistles, another meouws, a third snivels. He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom. He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes, One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye. He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries. He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.

Osip Mandelstam

History & Politics

Love Letters

Many months have passed since the diagnosis, and you’re still grieving for her. She’s not dead yet. But she’s lost, like a child is lost— her mind the ocean floor, where she kicks up sand and churns in the water. Al, we call it, or AD— never by its real name as if mentioning the word would bring bad luck— the need to cross one’s self across the heart, throw back to the ocean half of one’s catch, turn three times and pray to the East. Papa’s and her letters, written during their courtship, are tied with a faded, red ribbon and sunk in a safe deposit box at Bishop Trust. Long ago, she gave them to you for safekeeping. At the time she exacted a promise from you, that you would not read them until she was dead. We twist down the spiral staircase curled like a strand of seaweed into the cold room of vaults, the heavy thud of door distinct as your sadness following us everywhere. There, you turn over the bundle of letters in your hand like unbelievable money. “I’m so tempted to read them,” you say. You want her back, the feisty and independent one, the one who could, at eighty, do ten knee bends in aerobics class, dance a smooth jitterbug and shuttle like the tide to and from the house about her business. Not this Elizabeth you mourn, the one who can no longer reason, who points and giggles at fat people and smells, sometimes, like the ocean. Time slides like Dali’s clock. Elizabeth is surprised that she once was married and had a husband, that she once gave birth to sons.

Juliet Kono

Growing Old,Health & Illness

Shower

In her illness Elizabeth believes we do this deliberately, the washing of her body. She blames me, her Japanese daughter-in-law for having made keeping her clean a fetish. Angry, she says we do this to torment her soul, the shower a hot spray of needles we subject on her moon-colored skin. She hates it even more if I’m there to wash her. She wants her son, the person she thinks of these days as her lover, or husband, or father. Memory and privacy, she cries at their loss as I soap her down like an old car. What protestations! And as I listen to her, I think of these bodies we have given so freely to men, yet feel ashamed of when in the eyes of another woman. How she fawns when she thinks a man’s around. Today, she bangs the walls. “I hate you! The water’s too wet!” Hanging onto the safety bars, she pitches back and forth like a child, wanting to be let out at the gate. I wash her back. She spins around in my soap-lathered hands, and loosening her face in mine, she glares. She sticks out her tongue, and biting down on it, she squeals, jowls swinging, arms jiggling. Then, in a dive of both hands between her legs, she drops to a semi-squat, simian posture and thrusts her pelvis bones forward like mountains in an antediluvian upheaval. In a gesture of obscenity, she unfolds her petals and displays her withered sex to me— the same way boys moon, flip the bird or grab their crotch and waggle their tongues— the profane she feels but can’t articulate.

Juliet Kono

Growing Old,Health & Illness,The Body

Womanhood

When I was three, a tsunami hit town. “Daddy, Daddy, save me, don’t let me drown.” He saved me and my common-type dolls. When I was sixteen, another tsunami hit town. I cried to my daddy, “Daddy, Daddy, please save me, don’t let me drown!” But he let go of my hand! I still dance to what broke on my life.

Juliet Kono

Sorrow & Grieving,Family & Ancestors

Homeless

My son lives on the streets. We don’t see each other much. Like a mother who puts white lilies on the headstone of a dead child, I put money into his bank account, clothes into E-Z Access storage and pretend he’s far away— at a boarding school, or in a foreign country. Nights, I dream fairy tales about him. I dream he becomes a prince, scholar or warrior who rescues me from sorrow, the way he rescued me when he was a child and said, “Mommy, don’t cry,” and brought tea into the room of his father’s acrimony— brave, standing tall in the forest fire of his father’s scorn. I wake to the empty sound of wind in the trees. He says he wants to live with me. I say I can’t live with him— boy whose words crash like branches in a rain storm. Nothing can hold him in, the walls of a house too thin. Back home, I had seen the “study-hard-so-you-don’t-become-like-them” street bums on Mamo Street, and he’s like them. These days, in order to catch a glimpse of him, I circle the city. One day, I see him on his bike. People give him wide berth, the same way birds avoid power lines, oncoming cars or trees. I park on a side street. Wild-eyed, he flies the block as if in a holding pattern. Not of my body, not of my hopes, he homes in on what can’t be given or taken away.

Juliet Kono

Parenthood,Home Life

Bees Were Better

In college, people were always breaking up. We broke up in parking lots, beside fountains. Two people broke up across a table from me at the library. I could not sit at that table again though I did not know them. I studied bees, who were able to convey messages through dancing and could find their ways home to their hives even if someone put up a blockade of sheets and boards and wire. Bees had radar in their wings and brains that humans could barely understand. I wrote a paper proclaiming their brilliance and superiority and revised it at a small café featuring wooden hive-shaped honey-dippers in silver honeypots at every table.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Burning Monk

From the remains of his cremation, the monks recovered the seat of Thich Quang Duc’s consciousness — a bloodless protest to awaken the heart of the oppressor offered at the crossing of Phanh Dinh Phung & Le Van Duyet doused in gasoline & immolated by 4-meter flames the orange-robed arhat folded in the stillness of full lotus his body withering his crown blackening his flesh charring his corpse collapsing his heart refusing to burn his heart refusing to burn his heart refusing to burn

Shin Yu Pai

Life Choices,Social Commentaries,History & Politics

Model Minorities

in the shooter’s face, she recognizes her sibling’s coarse unforgiving hair, his yellow skin, & vacant stare, the year her brother broke down, she was still in high school, seventeen — w/ a taste for cutting not class but hands & arms any outlet to escape this “community” denies illness, a family reacts — against crying out loudlet it be some other Asian in the shooter’s face, I recognize my sibling’s coarse unforgiving hair, his yellow skin, & vacant stare, the year my brother broke down, I was still in high school, seventeen — w/ a taste for cutting not class but hands & arms any outlet to escape this “community” denies illness, a family reacts — against crying out loudlet it be some other Asian

Shin Yu Pai

Family & Ancestors,Crime & Punishment

A Day Without an Immigrant, Dallas, Texas

At Pearl Street station, two brown-skinned men in painter’s pants stand out in a sea of white I am just one more face sticking out in a crowd & it is my privilege that prevents me from understanding why the workers want to know how to buy one-way trips the automated machine sells only one roundtrip fee, back to where you came from he isn’t asking me for change says it clear enough so that there can be no mistakeSí. Yo sé. But a dollar fifty is a lot of money.

Shin Yu Pai

Money & Economics,Race & Ethnicity

Search & Recovery

For James Kim (1971 — 2006) it could have happened to any of us a wrong turn down a logging road tires tunneled into snow a man’s undying love for his children moves satellites maps aerial images eighteen care packages dropped over 16 miles of the Siskiyou, bearing handwritten notes from a father to his son the signs you left for those who came after you a red t-shirt a wool sock, a child’s blue skirt layers of a life, stripped down to a family’s fate — the weight of being unseen — to travel a path back to what you knew at birth, the warmth of being held close brought home

Shin Yu Pai

Parenthood,Travels & Journeys

from What the Heart Longs For When It Only Knows Heat ["We spend the afternoon together watching a docudrama..."]

We spend the afternoon together watching a docudrama about wild horses that roamed the ancient Arctic Circle. Surprisingly sleek, built for speed and not the weather, they were remarkable for their recklessness. They careen headlong down ice bluffs to fall into a broken heap. We can hear the small, tinny sounds of their terror as they plunge across vast, glowing glacial faces. All of this takes place alongside an abstractly relentless gunmetal sea. I can feel you turn to me, wetness marking the corners of your lips and eyes. I, too, am mesmerized, my vision limited to a sense of motion on the peripheries. Later, I am summoned for an impromptu scan and, miraculously, I pass.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Animals,Photography & Film

from Solar Maximum ["My skin crawls at odd hours of the day..."]

My skin crawls at odd hours of the day, a residual effect of my recent radiation therapies, how they inadvertently synced me to coronal flares. During my morning tea, at the gym, during the drive back home. A simple turn transforms into an avalanching pinprick of tremors one millimeter thick. I’d have preferred a suppurative response—one that collects under the skin—to this invisible, blistering, cracklesome lightning scar. One can’t choose the mood that gathers, the body’s response. The brightest moments of the day rarely correlate to a discharge. Gray sky or blackness, a foggy haze aswirl between stars and nothing halts. Some moments tear my teeth. The news feed portends rolling blackouts across the state. I read over the last of my messages: A blanket request for a plasma donation, Sasha asking if I want a ride to the wake.

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Health & Illness,The Body

from Solar Maximum ["How much chemical disorder..."]

How much chemical disorder can be survived depends on medical technology. A hundred years ago, cardiac arrest was irreversible. People were called dead when their heart stopped beating. Today death is believed to occur 4 to 6 minutes after the heart stops beating because after several minutes it is difficult to resuscitate the brain. However, with new experimental treatments, more than 10 minutes of warm cardiac arrest can now be survived without brain injury. Future technologies for molecular repair may extend the frontiers of resuscitation beyond 60 minutes or more, making today’s beliefs about when death occurs obsolete merely transitory evidence a stray boundary between a much longer-lasting (invisible opposite polarities feature the fields annihilate the field tries to one another repel the intruder rapidly velocities directly shine in emission visible shortly in terms of before brightness totality

Sueyeun Juliette Lee

Health & Illness,The Body

Three Blue Butterflies

I. MORPHO MENELAUS Foiled acqua- moiré wings the butterfly’s beauty- mark hydraulic in its purposes his hair’s flame lifts you snarls you II. MORPHO ACHILLES Sea-bed in semaphore / an eyepiece wing-span delft dye vat-dipped shingle scintilla : truant and acclimate enfold or infuriate: SOS:Don’t surroundDon’t surroundyourself with yourself III. MORPHO RHETENOR HELENA Neon heather sky- lit bluer than moiré: inseam of street trash lush mask- contour soul- strait fungible as raiment in the crawlspace radiating amatory birds’ egg bulls-eye

Christina Pugh

Animals

["Something I learned about agape when I was young..."]

Something I learned about agape when I was young: the Iliad tells us fellow-feeling is finite in communities. Brotherly love becomes a number that has to be divided among persons—so if you’re too kind to others, that might explain your neighbor’s graft. I sometimes wonder if perception is the same; if the quantity of percepts, or our trove of eidetic things, is not limitless but rather constant: the measure, say, of a sunlit field. So if we dip like deep-sea divers to the world, we’ll have to use a purse-seine to sieve our sense impressions. We’re hoarding the image at our peril. That bluest scilla smeared by a finger writing in the grass? Endangered. Poetry’s work is not to ravish, but diminish.

Christina Pugh

Poetry & Poets

The German word for dream is traume.

The coal-dust hushed parameters of the room. Outside, my mother stitched whole dresses for $3.00 a piece. I slept in a bedroom which faced the street. A cheerleader was killed in a drive-by that year. She died in her sleep. I watched the headlights sweep overhead. * It felt like skin. It did not feel obscene. When that boy tongue-kissed me and wiped his mouth, it was a coming into knowledge. * When my mother whispered,Has anyone touched you there? I had to pick. Alan, I said. I was seven. The training wheels were coming off. Between the couch and wall, the ceiling was white with popcorn bits. The boys stood and watched. I lay there, my eyes open like a doll’s. Someone said, Let me try. He pulled down his pants and rode on top, then abruptly stopped. The boys laughed, said Shhh and stood me up.

Cathy Linh Che

Coming of Age,The Body

Split

I see my mother, at thirteen, in a village so small it’s never given a name. Monsoon season drying up— steam lifting in full-bodied waves. She chops bắp chuối for the hogs. Her hair dips to the small of her back as if smeared in black and polished to a shine. She wears a deep side-part that splits her hair into two uneven planes. They come to watch her: Americans, Marines, just boys, eighteen or nineteen. With scissor-fingers, they snip the air, point at their helmets and then at her hair. All they want is a small lock— something for a bit of good luck. Days later, my mother is sent to the city for safekeeping. She will return home once, only to be given away to my father. In the pictures, the cake is sweet and round. My mother’s hair which spans the length of her áo dài is long, washed, and uncut.

Cathy Linh Che

Men & Women,War & Conflict

["My father does his own dental work"]

My father does his own dental work. A power drill and epoxy and steady hands— On Christmas Day, he mistook the Macy’s star for the Viet Cong flag. While watchingForrest Gump, he told me how he too carried a friend. He squeezedaround my throat so tight,I thought I’d die with him.

Cathy Linh Che

Home Life,War & Conflict

My Mother upon Hearing News of Her Mother’s Death

She opened her mouth and a moose came out, a donkey, and an ox—out of her mouth, years of animal grief. I lead her to the bed. She held my hand and followed. She said, Chết rồi, and like that, the cord was cut, the thread snapped, and the cable that tied my mother to her mother broke. And now her eyes red as a market fish. And now, she dropped like laundry on the bed. The furniture moved toward her, the kitchen knives and spoons, the vibrating spoons—they dragged the tablecloth, the corner tilting in, her mouth a sinkhole. She wanted all of it: the house and the car too, and the flowers she planted, narcissus and hoa mai, which cracked open each spring—the sky, she brought it low until the air was hot and wet and broke into a rain— the torrents like iron ropes you could climb up, only I couldn’t. I was drowning in it. I was swirled in. I leapt into her mouth, her throat, her gut, and stayed inside with the remnants of my former life. I ate the food she ate and drank the milk she drank. I grew until I crowded the furnishings. I edged out her organs, her swollen heart. I grew up and out so large that I became a woman, wearing my mother’s skin.

Cathy Linh Che

Sorrow & Grieving

The Properties of Light

Mid-October in Central Park, one of the elms has changed early, burning with a light grown accustomed to its own magnificence, imperceptible until this moment when it becomes more than itself, more than a ritual of self-immolation. I think of sacrifice as nourishment, the light feeding bark and veins and blood and skin, the tree better off for wanting nothing more. I used to imagine the chakra like this—a hole in the soul from the top of the head, where the light of knowing can shimmer through. In the summer of 1979 I saw that light shoot from my brother’s forehead as we sat chanting in a temple in Manila. He didn’t see it pulsing like a bulb in a storm, but he said he felt the warmth that wasn’t warmth but peace. And I, who have never been so privileged, since then have wondered if we believed everything because not to believe was to be unhappy. I’ve seen that light elsewhere —on a river in Bangkok, or pixeled across the shattered façades of Prague—but it is here where I perceive its keenest rarity, where I know it has passed over all the world, has given shape to cities, cast glamour over the eyes of the skeptic, so that it comes to me informed with the wonder of many beings. I can’t begin to say how infinite I feel, as though I were one of many a weightless absence touches, and out of this a strange transformation: the soul ringed with changes, as old as a tree, as old as light. I am always learning the same thing: there is no other way to live than this, still, and grateful, and full of longing.

Eric Gamalinda

The Body,The Spiritual

Zero Gravity

The dry basin of the moon must have held the bones of a race, radiant minerals, or something devoid of genesis, angel-heavy, idea-pure. All summer we had waited for it, our faces off-blue in front of the TV screen. Nothing could be more ordinary—two figures digging dirt in outer space—while mother repeated Neil Armstrong’s words, like a prayer electronically conveyed. The dunes were lit like ancient silk, like clandestine pearl. In the constant lunar night this luminescence was all we hoped for. A creature unto itself, it poured into the room like a gradual flood of lightning, touching every object with the cool burn of something not quite on fire. If we stepped out Manila would be blank ether, way station, a breathless abeyance. It didn’t matter, at that moment, where our lives would lead: father would disown one brother, one sister was going to die. Not yet unhappy, we were ready to walk on the moon. Reckless in our need for the possible, we knew there was no turning back, our bags already packed, the future a religion we could believe in.

Eric Gamalinda

Stars, Planets, Heavens,Sciences

Factory of Souls

It takes just two people to bring the world to ruin. So goes the history of love. At the end of the day we tally the casualties of war, victory for the one who gets wounded the least. You say it’s time for a change but I don’t know to what end, change being just the skin of some incandescent creature whose grotesque beauty is what we adore, whom some people call love, whom we venerate because it consumes us, slim pickings for its huge soul. My people say, don’t look or you’ll go blind. You say the end was always just around the bend. I say all we have is unconditional surrender to the future. So unreliable is the past that I feel compelled to leave unmourned the blind, relentless loves that may have scorched into our hearts the way the saints accepted stigmata. My people say, look back or lose your way. Or, walk backwards, if you can. So I found myself on a bus to New York City to lose myself completely. Past Hunters Point we hit the factory of souls—a thousand tombstones from which a silk-like canopy of smoke rose to meet God knows what—a spacious emptiness, the end. I’ve heard the world’s never going to end. I’ve heard it will go on and on, and we will be as nebulous as Nebuchadnezzar, our live not worth a footnote, our grandest schemes no more than feeble whispers, all memory shifting like the continental plates. In the future, all science will finally come around; genetic engineering, I’ve been told, will be all the rage, and we will be a super race in a world infallibly perfected, where trains run on time, love never dies, and hope can be purchased by the pound. It’s called immortalization of the cell lines. We will choose what will survive. Our destiny made lucid, we will find the world contemplating itself, like the young Narcissus, one hand about to touch the pool, his body lurched towards that marvelous reflection. I suppose we’ve always felt compelled to desensitize our failures. My people say, to go unnoticed, you play dead. I myself may have chosen to forget a face, a name, some cruel word uttered carelessly, but not, after all the harm is done, intending any pain. And many others may have chosen to forget me. It works both ways. My people say, nasa huliang pagsisi: regret is the final emotion. It’s what you see when you look back. It’s what’s no longer there.

Eric Gamalinda

Realistic & Complicated,Sciences

The Opposite of Nostalgia

You are running away from everyone who loves you, from your family, from old lovers, from friends. They run after you with accumulations of a former life, copper earrings, plates of noodles, banners of many lost revolutions. You love to say the trees are naked now because it never happens in your country. This is a mystery from which you will never recover. And yes, the trees are naked now, everything that still breathes in them lies silent and stark and waiting. You love October most of all, how there is no word for so much splendor. This, too, is a source of consolation. Between you and memory everything is water. Names of the dead, or saints, or history. There is a realm in which —no, forget it, it’s still too early to make anyone understand. A man drives a stake through his own heart and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves and the leaves take over and again he has learned to let go.

Eric Gamalinda

Heartache & Loss,Fall

the luams speak of god

If there is a god, let it be the hyena who plunges her mouth into the river after eating our grandfather’s poisoned bait, who, dark with thirst, poisons the river unbeknownst to both of them. Her ghosts stand in the street where we are called already through “time” out of our houses. She tells her stories. We tell her ours. We all clean our teeth with what is sharp. She asks, Will you add this story to your stories of history & land & peace? Yes, we will add this story. We ask her,Will you add these poems to your repertoire of songsabout hunger & thirst & fur? & she, being wiser than we, says, Yes, I will sing them ifyou grant me your permissionto turn them into poems abouta mercy.

Aracelis Girmay

Family & Ancestors,Animals

Second Estrangement

Please raise your hand, whomever else of you has been a child, lost, in a market or a mall, without knowing it at first, following a stranger, accidentally thinking he is yours, your family or parent, even grabbing for his hands, even calling the word you said then for “Father,” only to see the face look strangely down, utterly foreign, utterly not the one who loves you, you who are a bird suddenly stunned by the glass partitions of rooms. How far the world you knew, & tall, & filled, finally, with strangers.

Aracelis Girmay

Youth

from The Black Maria

after Neil deGrasse Tyson, black astrophysicist & director of the Hayden Planetarium, born in 1958, New York City. In his youth, deGrasse Tyson was confronted by police on more than one occasion when he was on his way to study stars. “I’ve known that I’ve wanted to do astrophysics since I was nine years old, a first visit to the Hayden Planetarium...So I got to see how the world around me reacted to my expression of these ambitions. & all I can say is, the fact that I wanted to be a scientist, an astrophysicist, was, hands down, the path of most resistance...Anytime I expressed this interest teachers would say, Don’t you want to be an athlete? Or, Don’t you wanna...I wanted to become something that was outside of the paradigms of expectation of the people in power. And I look behind me and say, Well, where are the others who might have been this? And they’re not there. And I wonder, What is the [thing] along the tracks that I happened to survive and others did not? Simply because of the forces that prevented it. At every turn. At every turn.” —NdT, The Center for Inquiry, 2007 Body of space. Body of dark. Body of light. The Skyview apartments circa 1973, a boy is kneeling on the rooftop, a boy who (it is important to mention here his skin is brown) prepares his telescope, the weights & rods, to better see the moon. His neighbor (it is important to mention here that she is white) calls the police because she suspects the brown boy of something, she does not know what at first, then turns, with her looking, his telescope into a gun, his duffel into a bag of objects thieved from the neighbors’ houses (maybe even hers) & the police (it is important to mention that statistically they are also white) arrive to find the boy who has been turned, by now, into “the suspect,” on the roof with a long, black lens, which is, in the neighbor’s mind, a weapon & depending on who you are, reading this, you know that the boy is in grave danger, & you might have known somewhere quiet in your gut, you might have worried for him in the white space between lines 5 & 6, or maybe even earlier, & you might be holding your breath for him right now because you know this story, it’s a true story, though, miraculously, in this version of the story, anyway, the boy on the roof of the Skyview lives to tell the police that he is studying the night & moon & lives long enough to offer them (the cops) a view through his telescope’s long, black eye, which, if I am spelling it out anyway, is the instrument he borrowed & the beautiful “trouble” he went through lugging it up to the roof to better see the leopard body of space speckled with stars & the moon far off, much farther than (since I am spelling The Thing out) the distance between the white neighbor who cannot see the boy who is her neighbor, who, in fact, is much nearer to her than to the moon, the boy who wants to understand the large & gloriously un-human mysteries of the galaxy, the boy who, despite “America,” has not been killed by the murderous jury of his neighbor’s imagination & wound. This poem wants only the moon in its hair & the boy on the roof. This boy on the roof of this poem with a moon in his heart. Inside my own body as I write this poem my body is making a boy even as the radio calls out the Missouri coroner’s news, the Ohio coroner’s news. 2015. My boy will nod for his milk & close his mouth around the black eye of my nipple. We will survive. How did it happen? The boy. The cops. My body in this poem. My milk pulling down into droplets of light as the baby drinks & drinks them down into the body that is his own, see it, splayed & sighing as a star in my arms. Maybe he will be the boy who studies stars. Maybe he will be (say it) the boy on the coroner’s table splayed & spangled by an officer’s lead as if he, too, weren’t made of a trillion glorious cells & sentences. Trying to last. Leadless, remember? The body’s beginning, splendored with breaths, turned, by time, into, at least, this song. This moment-made & the mackerel-“soul” caught flashing inside the brief moment of the body’s net, then, whoosh, back into the sea of space. The poem dreams of bodies always leadless, bearing only things ordinary as water & light.

Aracelis Girmay

Stars, Planets, Heavens,Race & Ethnicity

Something Something Something Grand

I adore you: you’re a harrowing event. I like you very ugly, condensed to one deep green pang. You cannot ask the simplest question, your hold is all clutch and sinker. Cannibal old me, with my heart up my throat, blasting on all sides with my hundred red states. Hidden little striver. How not to know it, the waist-deep trance of you, the cursing, coursing say of you. Embarrassing today. Curiouser and curiouser, your body is a mouth, is a night of travel, your body is tripling the sideways insouciance. The muscle in you knows gorgeous, in you knows tornadoes. In an instant’s compass, your blood flees you like a cry. You put on my heat, (that’s the way you work) I’m a bandit gripping hard on the steal. The substitutions come swiftly, hungering down the valley, no one question to cover all of living. I arrange myself in the order of my use. You’re wrong and right at the same time, a breathless deluxe and a devouring chopping down the back door. You slap my attention all over the dark. What’s in me like a chime? Sometimes, sometimes, I come to you for the surprise.

Sandra Lim

The Body

Pantoum

Taking on an aspect of the Orient, Skies full of hatchets and oranges Love, uninvited, hangs in the blood: But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor? Skies full of hatchets and oranges Keep the birds singing, sorrows fresh— But what is a kingdom to a dying emperor, As the nights grow steadily into mountains. Keep the birds singing, sorrows fresh— The princess braids these into a necklace As the nights grow steadily into mountains, Why, even regrets recede unexpectedly. The princess braids these into a necklace: Roads and rivers that lead away from the palace. Why, even regrets recede unexpectedly In a solitude full of wars and songs. Roads and rivers that lead away from the palace Never converge in that vast landscape; In a solitude full of wars and songs, The words remain light and fugitive. Never converge in that vast landscape In the way that stars keep their distance. The words remain light and fugitive In an anticipation crossed with absence. In the way that stars keep their distance, Love, uninvited, hangs in the blood In an anticipation crossed with absence, Taking on an aspect of the Orient.

Sandra Lim

Realistic & Complicated,Stars, Planets, Heavens

Just Disaster

We stopped to watch the accident. Fire! It had finally come to pass. Just as surely as I was a coward carrying a wolf. It stepped out from me, it was paradise leaving me, running towards the giant idea of that melting house. So often you don’t think, “Little nicks of monstrosity, I shall be splendid in it.”

Sandra Lim

Lucky Duck

Be large with those small fears. The whole sky has fallen on you and all you can do about it is shout, dragging your fear-ettes by their pinked ears. They dance a number now: consequence without sequence. Lovingly broadminded in their realization and ruin, expert at the parting shot. Not so small after all, we micro to macro, swelling to the horror shows lifted from the sly ways of life. You, both scorched and shining in the terror of the equivocal moment, its box of cheeky logics rattling cold certainties out of bounds and into the plaits of a girl’s desirous ends. A little debauched, the flirt in a freckling, wondering spun to falling comes to this pert contract of a paradox: saying things because they will do no good, ringing change in frumpy mono-determination, fruity and fruitless. Exploded out of shelter, the tides come roaring in. Let in the hoarse Cassandras and the dull pain of the storyteller. You’ve needed those eyes all along. We thought them disconcerting at first, but it’s the only way. You live here now having exchanged etiquette for energy. Don’t be clever, don’t be shy! Participate today. Yesterday you say everything for their own sake, and soon enough, tomorrow, you learn a lot from them.

Sandra Lim

Life Choices