may i feel said he (16)

ee cummings

may i feel said he
(i'll squeal said she
just once said he)
it's fun said she

(may i touch said he
how much said she
a lot said he)
why not said she

(let's go said he
not too far said she
what's too far said he
where you are said she)

may i stay said he
(which way said she
like this said he
if you kiss said she

may i move said he
is it love said she)
if you're willing said he
(but you're killing said she

but it's life said he
but your wife said she
now said he)
ow said she

(tiptop said he
don't stop said she
oh no said he)
go slow said she

(cccome?said he
ummm said she)
you're divine!said he
(you are Mine said she)

The Boys I Mean Are Not Refined

ee cummings

the boys i mean are not refined
they go with girls who buck and bite
they do not give a fuck for luck
they hump them thirteen times a night

one hangs a hat upon her tit
one carves a cross on her behind
they do not give a shit for wit
the boys i mean are not refined

they come with girls who bite and buck
who cannot read and cannot write
who laugh like they would fall apart
and masturbate with dynamite

the boys i mean are not refined
they cannot chat of that and this
they do not give a fart for art
they kill like you would take a piss

they speak whatever's on their mind
they do whatever's in their pants
the boys i mean are not refined
they shake the mountains when they dance

You Don't Know What Love Is

by Kim Addonizio

You Don't Know What Love Is
but you know how to raise it in me
like a dead girl winched up from a river. How to
wash off the sludge, the stench of our past.
How to start clean. This love even sits up
and blinks; amazed, she takes a few shaky steps.
Any day now she'll try to eat solid food. She'll want
to get into a fast car, one low to the ground, and drive
to some cinderblock shithole in the desert
where she can drink and get sick and then
dance in nothing but her underwear. You know
where she's headed, you know she'll wake up
with an ache she can't locate and no money
and a terrible thirst. So to hell
with your warm hands sliding inside my shirt
and your tongue down my throat
like an oxygen tube. Cover me
in black plastic. Let the mourners through.

The Daughter Goes To Camp

by Sharon Olds

In the taxi alone, home from the airport,
I could not believe you were gone. My palm kept
creeping over the smooth plastic
to find your strong meaty little hand and
squeeze it, find your narrow thigh in the
noble ribbing of the corduroy,
straight and regular as anything in nature, to
find the slack cool cheek of a
child in the heat of a summer morning—
nothing, nothing, waves of bawling
hitting me in hot flashes like some
change of life, some boiling wave
rising in me toward your body, toward
where it should have been on the seat, your
brow curved like a cereal bowl, your
eyes dark with massed crystals like the
magnified scales of a butterfly's wing, the
delicate feelers of your limp hair,
floods of blood rising in my face as I
tried to reassemble the hot
gritty molecules in the car, to
make you appear like a holograph
on the back seat, pull you out of nothing
as I once did—but you were really gone,
the cab glossy as a slit caul out of
which you had slipped, the air glittering
electric with escape as it does in the room at a birth.

At Pegasus

by Terrance Hayes

They are like those crazy women
who tore Orpheus
when he refused to sing,

these men grinding
in the strobe & black lights
of Pegasus. All shadow & sound.

"I'm just here for the music,"
I tell the man who asks me
to the floor. But I have held

a boy on my back before.
Curtis & I used to leap
barefoot into the creek; dance

among maggots & piss,
beer bottles & tadpoles
slippery as sperm;

we used to pull off our shirts,
& slap music into our skin.
He wouldn't know me now

at the edge of these lovers' gyre,
glitter & steam, fire,
bodies blurred sexless

by the music's spinning light.
A young man slips his thumb
into the mouth of an old one,

& I am not that far away.
The whole scene raw & delicate
as Curtis's foot gashed

on a sunken bottle shard.
They press hip to hip,
each breathless as a boy

carrying a friend on his back.
The foot swelling green
as the sewage in that creek.


We never went back.
But I remember his weight
better than I remember

my first kiss.
These men know something
I used to know.

How could I not find them
beautiful, the way they dive & spill
into each other,

the way the dance floor
takes them,
wet & holy in its mouth.

Young Love (IX)

William Carlos Williams


What about all this writing?

O "kiki"
O miss margaret jarvis
the backhandspring

I: clean
clean
clean: yes..New York

Wrigley's, appendicitis, John Marin:
skyscraper soup--

Either that or a bullet!

Once
anything might have happened
You lay relaxed on my knees--
the starry night
spread out warm and blind
above the hospital--

Pah!

It is unclean
which is not straight to the mark--

In my life the furniture eats me

the chairs, the floor
the walls
which heard your sobs
drank up my emotion--
they which alone know everything

and snitched on us in the morning--

What to want?

Drunk we go forward surely
Not I

beds, beds, beds
elevators, fruit, night tables
breasts to see, white and blue--
to hold in the hand, to nozzle

It is not onion soup
Your sobs soaked through the walls
breaking the hospital to pieces

Everything
--windows, chairs
obscenely drunk, spinning--
white, blue, orange
--hot with our passion

wild tears, desperate rejoinders
my legs, turning slowly
end over end in the air!

But what would you have?

All I said was:
there, you see, it is broken

stockings, shoes, hairpins
your bed, I wrapped myself round you--

I watched.

You sobbed, you beat your pillow
you tore your hair
you dug your nails into your sides

I was your nightgown
I watched!

Clean is he alone
after whom stream
the broken pieces of the city--
flying apart at his approaches

but I merely
caress you curiously

fifteen years ago
and you still
go about the city, they say
patching up sick school children

Candles

Carl Dennis

If on your grandmother's birthday you burn a candle
To honor her memory, you might think of burning an extra
To honor the memory of someone who never met her,
A man who may have come to the town she lived in
Looking for work and never found it.
Picture him taking a stroll one morning,
After a month of grief with the want ads,
To refresh himself in the park before moving on.
Suppose he notices on the gravel path the shards
Of a green glass bottle that your grandmother,
Then still a girl, will be destined to step on
When she wanders barefoot away from her school picnic
If he doesn't stoop down and scoop the mess up
With the want-ad section and carry it to a trash can.
For you to burn a candle for him
You needn't suppose the cut would be a deep one,
Just deep enough to keep her at home
The night of the hay ride when she meets Helen,
Who is soon to become her dearest friend,
Whose brother George, thirty years later,
Helps your grandfather with a loan so his shoe store
Doesn't go under in the Great Depression
And his son, your father, is able to stay in school
Where his love of learning is fanned into flames,
A love he labors, later, to kindle in you.
How grateful you are for your father's efforts
Is shown by the candles you've burned for him.
But today, for a change, why not a candle
For the man whose name is unknown to you?
Take a moment to wonder whether he died at home
With friends and family or alone on the road,
On the look-out for no one to sit at his bedside
And hold his hand, the very hand
It's time for you to imagine holding.

The God Who Loves You

Carl Dennis

It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week—
Three fine houses sold to deserving families—
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and musi
c Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.

Coronary Artist (1)

I dream excess - high-speed vision. Snow falling upwards. The bed in a corner of the empty lot. Cut logs careening away from the saw. They know what's waiting for them. A line of introduction. Incomplete arc of contemplation. A family of clothes begging to be picked up. Chimneys at work carrying steam. Ingest coffee, loosen stuck bits of unvoiced flux loved for their silence.

All the great heroes slept late. The common folks get up early and fight for the victory. It takes a lifetime to be steered in this direction; snow is mounting form the sky down. I think the dirty clothes are crying and want to be washed. Piles of clothes begin to mount from the sky down. I would say no, except for the empty chair where taking off is perfected.

The left brin turns the other cheek. The right brain can't imagine it. To be bringing one's face into morning when it is barely light. To promote sunshine to my daughter while surviving my own ferocious will to sleep. This is the corner to turn to the bathroom. This is the sink. I look at myself in the mirror and see the person I might have been had I gotten more sleep. I step back into the world, it is warmer and moister than I thought. It is a whole world, with its own affections, anxieties, welcome.

Custom has it that a woman gets up first to solve the dilemma of the burning moment.

You can smell the smoke answering the alarm. And then you can't smell anything over the family sound track, putting everything on hold. One becomes an adult without knowing the details of how it was done, only knowing which team you're on, which hat corresponds to your glands. Already this is an extinct culture, a culture of giants prone to the vertigo of silent agreements and unenforceable contracts. The rocks in our beds belong to them. Their sexual politics get the better of us sometimes and we are left with dream transcriptions and delinquencies instead of passion outside the parentheses.

We make it to the crossroads only to come to a total stop. The idea we harbor is subversive. That there may be many moments in which we recognize the sources of our hunger, falling out of the sky, a complete thought in the center of our most visible selves.

(c) Erica Hunt, Arcade

Live at the Village Vanguard

Sebastian Matthews

Near the end of Bill Evans' "Porgy (I Loves You, Porgy)"
played live at the Village Vanguard and added as an extra track
on Waltz for Debby (a session made famous by the death
of the trio's young bassist in a car crash) a woman laughs.
There's been background babble bubbling up the whole set.
You get used to the voices percolating at the songs' fringes,
the clink of glasses and tips of silver on hard plates. Listen
to the recording enough and you almost accept the aural clutter
as another percussive trick the drummer pulls out, like brushes
on a snare. But this woman's voice stands out for its carefree
audacity, how it broadcasts the lovely ascending stair of her happiness.
Evans has just made one of his elegant, casual flights up an octave
and rests on its landing, notes spilling from his left hand
like sunlight, before coming back down into the tune's lush
living-room of a conclusion. The laugh begins softly, subsides,
then lifts up to step over the bass line: five short bursts of pleasure
pushed out of what can only be a long lovely tan throat. Maybe
Evans smiles to himself when he hears it, leaving a little space
between the notes he's cobbled to close the song; maybe
the man she's with leans in, first to still her from the laugh
he's just coaxed from her, then to caress the cascade of her hair
that hangs, lace curtain, in the last vestiges of spotlight stippling the table.

The Road Between Here and There

Here I have heard the terrible chaste snorting o hogs trying to re-enter the underearth.

Here I cam into the curve too fast, on ice, and being new to these winters, touching the brake and sailed into the pasture.

Here I stopped the car and snoozed while two small children crawled all over me.

Here I reread Moby Dick (skimming big chunks, even though to me it is the greatest of all novels) in a single day, while Fergus fished.

Here I abandoned the car because of a clonk in the motor and hitchhiked (which in those days in Vermont meant walking the whole way with a limp) all the way to a garage where I passed the afternoon with ex-loggers who had stopped by to oil the joints of their artificial limbs.

Here a barn burned down to the snow. "Friction," one of the ex-loggers said. "Friction?" "Yup, the mortgage, rubbing against the insurance policy."

Here I went eighty but was in no danger of arrest, for I was "blessed speeding" - trying to get home in time to see my children before they slept.

Here I bought speckled brown eggs with bits of straw shitted to them.

Here I brought home in the back seat two piglets who rummaged inside the burlap sack like pregnancy itself.

Here I heard on the car radio Handel's concerto for harp and lute for the second time in my life, which Ines played to me the first time, making me want to drive after it and hear it forever.

Here I hurt with mortal thoughts and almost recovered.

Here I sat on a boulder by the winter-steaming river and put my head in my hands nd considered time - which is next to nothing, merely what vanishes, and yet can make one's elbows nearly pierce one's thighs.

Here I forgot how to sing in the old way and listened to frogs at dusk make their more angelic croaking.

Here the local fortune teller took my hand and said, "What is still possible is inspired work, faithfulness to a few, and a last love, which, being last, will be like looking up and seeing the parachute dissolving in a shower of gold."

Here is the chimney standing up by itself and falling down, which tells you you approach the end of the road between here and there.

Here I arrive there.

Here I must turn around and go back and on the way back look carefully to left and to right.

For here, the moment all the spaces along the road between here and there - which the young know are infinite and all others know are not - get used up, that's it.

(c) Galway Kinnell, The Past

In The Park

by Maxine Kumin

You have forty-nine days between
death and rebirth if you're a Buddhist.
Even the smallest soul could swim
the English Channel in that time
or climb, like a ten-month-old child,
every step of the Washington Monument
to travel across, up, down, over or through
–you won't know till you get there which to do.

He laid on me for a few seconds
said Roscoe Black, who lived to tell
about his skirmish with a grizzly bear
in Glacier Park. He laid on me not doing anything. I could feel his heart
beating against my heart.
Never mind lie and lay, the whole world
confuses them. For Roscoe Black you might say
all forty-nine days flew by.

I was raised on the Old Testament.
In it God talks to Moses, Noah,
Samuel, and they answer.
People confer with angels. Certain
animals converse with humans.
It's a simple world, full of crossovers.
Heaven's an airy Somewhere, and God
has a nasty temper when provoked,
but if there is a Hell, little is made of it.
No longtailed Devil, no eternal fire,

and no choosing what to come back as.
When the grizzly bear appears, he lies/lays down
on atheist and zealot. In the pitch-dark
each of us waits for him in Glacier Park.

Shelter

by Kim Addonizio

It's noisy here. The kids run around, screaming, their mothers slap them and they cry. I have the bottom bunk, I hang a blanket from the bed above me for privacy. In the middle of the night it's finally quiet. I lie awake and thinkabout goals. Sheryl, the worker, says I need some. She says What do you want Rita? and I say peace and quiet, maybe someplace sunnier than here. I say I'dlike to have a dog. A big one, a retriever or shepherd with long soft fur. Whatelse? she says. I remember my dad's garden, how I used to like sitting with him while he weeded, putting my toes in the dirt. He grew tomatoes, corn, peas.There was a rosebush, too, once he let me pick a big rose and there was a spiderin it, I got scared and shook it and the petals went all over me and he laughed.He showed me how to put my thumb over the hoze nozzle so it sprayed. Sherylsays I could garden. I think about the coleus Jimmy and I had, how I would takecuttings, put them in water and they'd grow more flowers. But then they alldied. At night I listen to everybody sleep around me, some people snoring, some starting to say something and then stopping. It's pitch-dark behind the blanket. I try to see it sunny, a yard with a dog lying down under a tree. I try to smell warm tomatoes. Curl my toes in the sheets. Try to sleep.

The Landlady

by Margaret Atwood

This is the lair of the landlady
She is
a raw voice
loose in the rooms beneath me.
the continuous hen
yard
squabble going on below
thought in this house like
the bicker of blood through the head.

She is everywhere, intrusive as the smells
that bulge in under my doorsill;
she presides over my
meagre eating, generates
the light for eyestrain.
From her I rent my time:
she slams
my days like doors.
Nothing is mine.
and when I dream images
of daring escapes through the snow
I find myself walking
always over a vast face
which is the land-lady's, and wake up shouting.

She is a bulk, a knot
swollen in a space. Though I have tried
to find some way around
her, my senses
are cluttered by perception
and can't see through her.
She stands there, a raucous fact
blocking my way:
immutable, a slab
of what is real.
solid as bacon.

An Octopus (an Excerpt)

(by Marianne Moore)

of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat,
it lies “in grandeur and in mass”
beneath a sea of shifting snow-dunes;
dots of cyclamen-red and maroon on its clearly defined
pseudo-podia
made of glass that will bend—a much needed invention—
comprising twenty-eight ice-fields from fifty to five hundred
feet thick,
of unimagined delicacy.
“Picking periwinkles from the cracks”
or killing prey with the concentric crushing rigor of the python,
it hovers forward “spider fashion
on its arms” misleading like lace;
its “ghostly pallor changing
to the green metallic tinge of an anemone-starred pool.”
The fir-trees, in “the magnitude of their root systems,”
rise aloof from these maneuvers “creepy to behold,”
austere specimens of our American royal families,
“each like the shadow of the one beside it.
The rock seems frail compared with the dark energy of life,”
its vermilion and onyx and manganese-blue interior expensiveness
left at the mercy of the weather;
“stained transversely by iron where the water drips down,”
recognized by its plants and its animals.
Completing a circle,
you have been deceived into thinking that you have progressed,
under the polite needles of the larches
“hung to filter, not to intercept the sunlight”—
met by tightly wattled spruce-twigs
“conformed to an edge like clipped cypress
as if no branch could penetrate the cold beyond its company”;
and dumps of gold and silver ore enclosing The Goat’s Mirror—
that lady-fingerlike depression in the shape of the left human
foot,
which prejudices you in favor of itself
before you have had time to see the others;
its indigo, pea-green, blue-green, and turquoise,
from a hundred to two hundred feet deep,
“merging in irregular patches in the middle of the lake
where, like gusts of a storm
obliterating the shadows of the fir-trees, the wind makes lanes
of ripples.”
What spot could have merits of equal importance
for bears, elks, deer, wolves, goats, and ducks?
Pre-empted by their ancestors,
this is the property of the exacting porcupine,
and of the rat “slipping along to its burrow in the swamp
or pausing on high ground to smell the heather”;
of “thoughtful beavers
making drains which seem the work of careful men with shovels,”
and of the bears inspecting unexpectedly
ant-hills and berry-bushes.
Composed of calcium gems and alabaster pillars,
topaz, tourmaline crystals and amethyst quartz,
their den in somewhere else, concealed in the confusion
of “blue forests thrown together with marble and jasper and agate
as if the whole quarries had been dynamited.”

Safe Sex

by Donald Hall

If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;
if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another’s cry; if they employ each other
as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel—
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,
no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated
apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond’s edge

Monkey Mind

by Steve Orlen


When I was a child I had what is called an inner life.
For example, I looked at that girl over there
In the second aisle of seats and wondered what it was like
To have buck teeth pushing out your upper lip
And how it felt to have those little florets the breasts
Swelling her pajama top before she went to sleep.
Walking home, I asked her both questions
And instead of answering she told her mother
Who told the teacher who told my father.
After all these years, I can almost feel his hand
Rising in the room, the moment in the air of his decision,
Then coming down so hard it took my breath away,
And up again in that small arc
To smack his open palm against my butt.
I'm a slow learner
And still sometimes I'm sitting here wondering what my father
Is thinking, blind and frail and eighty-five,
Plunged down into his easy chair half the night
Listening to Bach cantatas. I know he knows
At every minute of every hour that he's going to die
Because he told my mother and my mother told me.
I didn't cry or cry out or say I'm sorry.
I lay across his lap and wondered what
He could be thinking to hit a kid like that.

Cherry Tomatoes

by Sandra Beasley


Little bastards of vine.
Little demons by the pint.
Red eggs that never hatch,
just collapse and rot. When

my mom told me to gather
their grubby bodies
into my skirt, I'd cry. You
and your father, she'd chide—

the way, each time I kicked
and wailed against sailing,
my dad shook his head, said
You and your mother.

Now, a city girl, I ease one
loose from its siblings,
from its clear plastic coffin,
place it on my tongue.

Just to try. The smooth
surface resists, resists,
and erupts in my mouth:
seeds, juice, acid, blood

of a perfect household.
The way, when I finally
went sailing, my stomach
was rocked from inside

out. Little boat, big sea.
Handful of skinned sunsets.

What My Father Believed

by John Guzlowski

He didn't know about the Rock of Ages
or bringing in the sheaves or Jacob's ladder
or gathering at the beautiful river
that flows beneath the throne of God.
He'd never heard of the Baltimore Catechism
either, and didn't know the purpose of life
was to love and honor and serve God.

He'd been to the village church as a boy
in Poland, and knew he was Catholic
because his mother and father were buried
in a cemetery under wooden crosses.
His sister Catherine was buried there too.

The day their mother died Catherine took
to the kitchen corner where the stove sat,
and cried. She wouldn't eat or drink, just cried
until she died there, died of a broken heart.
She was three or four years old, he was five.

What he knew about the nature of God
and religion came from the sermons
the priests told at mass, and this got mixed up
with his own life. He knew living was hard,
and that even children are meant to suffer.
Sometimes, when he was drinking he'd ask,
"Didn't God send his own son here to suffer?"

My father believed we are here to lift logs
that can't be lifted, to hammer steel nails
so bent they crack when we hit them.
In the slave labor camps in Germany,
He'd seen men try the impossible and fail.

He believed life is hard, and we should
help each other. If you see someone
on a cross, his weight pulling him down
and breaking his muscles, you should try
to lift him, even if only for a minute,
even though you know lifting won't save him.

Signs

Consider the bird.
Consider the dreamer who witnesses a bird flinging
into a church, the windows yawned open.
Consider whose death will follow.


Consider the flinging.


Consider the time between sign and dying, time nothing
to do with teh bird or the witness or the waiting.
Consider their congregation.
Consider the sermon near middle when the bird comes


Consider the bound ceiling, and the jerking bird zig-zagging about.


Consider that the death would be sudden.
Consider the old.
The funeral-tired, the hymn-weary, arm-weak.


Considering flinging.


Consider, congregation.
The hovering flutters stuck.
A promise.


Each, every proof.

(c) Forest Hamer, Middle Ear

Middle Ear

Say the moment crossing over isn't heard
Say the hammer-anvil-stirrup don't unfurl
Say the balance was upset

Say this balance was upset
Say the outside world doesn't ring

Say the mind's ear listening to an odd man singing
Say the moment crossing over starting somewhere out and in
Say the balance was upset

Say this balance was upset, and the singing falls faint
Say you turn yourself away from crowds of sound

Say the awed man singing sings to you

Say you don't know him. You don't.

And the balance is upset

Say the inside singing and the outside ringing and
the moment crossing over breathing in
Say the whisper of the man sieves through
Say the moment crossing over is a stranger wisp

And the balance is upset
And the balance is upset

Say the moment crossing over rights the left
Say the moment crossing over is the ringing ear writing
Say the moment crossing over ends hear

(c) Forest Hamer, Middle Ear

Sleeping with the Moon

homelessness: to be uprooted, to be without shelter or provisions; rare: affording no home

months after you left home, someone saw you on the bus, so quiet you sat, peaceful they said behind your horn-rimmed glasses, black against the blackness of your skin burnt from the dust of nightmares, peaceful they said and barefoot though the weather was not yet warm not cold, on morning someone saw you near the park walking past the statue of the city's great pioneers the founders of wide streets and homes fit for grand families while the rain fell in great swoops over and over and we dared to call it spring behind the safety of plate glass windows, wind blowing gauze white curtains roses and poppies in gleaming china vases - they said they knew you by your closely-cut hair, trusting eyes large behind oval black rimmed glasses your face grown dry mouthed and wary, the easy laughter burning inside what's left of your dreams after another night of sleeping rough with no house but the moon - someone said they saw you on the ferry heading west beyond the San Juans beyond the thirty mile limit, it must have been you they said the look so familiar they almost called you by name, i know you would not have answered i know i barely knew you myself glimpsed on the corner after the coldest night the weather offered, i knew you only by the tilt of your head the thin curtain of tears you kept from falling on your cheeks and i pulled to the curb and wept - don't worry you said this is my demon - and i wept for all the demons that haunt us and the little boy who trusted too easily, laughter your only addiction, and the way my arms ached to pull in the body trembling under that ragged sleeping bag, to rock you once more to read a favorite story and hold back the raw scrap of time as the world rushed into another day and i curled into myself and i wept


(c) Colleen McElroy, Sleeping with the moon

The Fire

That winter it seemed the city
was always burning - night after night
the flames leaped, the ladders pitched forward.
Scorched but alive, the homeless wailed
as they ran for the cold streets.
That winter my mind had turned around,
shedding, like leaves, its bolts of information -
drilling down, through history,
toward my motionless heart.
Those days I was willing, but frightened.
What I mean is, I wanted to live my life
but I didn't want to do what I had to do
to go on, which was: to go back.
All winter the fires kept burning,
the smoke swirled, the flames grew hotter.
I began to curse, to stumble and choke.
Everything, solemnly, drove me toward it -
the crying out, that's so hard to do.
Then over my head the red timbers floated,
my feet were slippers of fire, my voice
crashed at the truth, my fists
smashed at the flames to find the door -
wicked and sad, mortal and bearable,
it fell open forever as I burned.

(c) Mary Oliver, Dream Work

The chance to love everything

All summer I made friends
with the creatures nearby ---
they flowed through the fields
and under the tent walls,
or padded through the door,
grinning through their many teeth,
looking for seeds,
suet, sugar; muttering and humming,
opening the breadbox, happiest when
there was milk and music. But once
in the night I heard a sound
outside the door, the canvas
bulged slightly ---something
was pressing inward at eye level.
I watched, trembling, sure I had heard
the click of claws, the smack of lips
outside my gauzy house ---
I imagined the red eyes,
the broad tongue, the enormous lap.
Would it be friendly too?
Fear defeated me. And yet,
not in faith and not in madness
but with the courage I thought
my dream deserved,
I stepped outside. It was gone.
Then I whirled at the sound of some
shambling tonnage.
Did I see a black haunch slipping
back through the trees? Did I see
the moonlight shining on it?
Did I actually reach out my arms
toward it, toward paradise falling, like
the fading of the dearest, wildest hope ---
the dark heart of the story that is all
the reason for its telling?

(c) Mary Oliver, Dream Work

The fish

The first fish
I ever caught
would not lie down
quiet in the pail
but flailed and sucked
at the burning
amazement of the air
and died
in the slow pouring off
of rainbows. Later
I opened his body and separated
the flesh from the bones
and at him. Now the sea
is in me: I am the fish, the fish
glitters in me; we are
risen, tangled together, certain to fall
back to the sea. Out of pain,
and pain, and more pain
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.

(c) Mary Oliver, American Primitive

August

When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend

all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking

of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body

accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among

the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.

(c) Mary Oliver, American Primitive

i cannot love half-assed

i must love well
& intently
& creatively
or the forces within
me turn back upon themselves
and explode. (boom)

Do you want love,
or do you just want
someone to the drive the
loneliness from your life?

Do you want me,
or would anyone do?

Do you want to love in return,
or just respond?

I was not put upon this
earth to test your
reflexes.

Peter McWilliams, The Hard Stuff: Love

Meditation:

The Veil Between

That is, they with their backs to us, they with their hands
holding nothing, no mirror to see by, no one good cure.
Us then ourselves with none of our ills in great measure
bettered - still straits desperate and perilously
narrow, births especially dubious, mice, moles, false
witness, the chills, trouble of foot, ruptures bodily and
spiritual, doubt, palpitations, storm, stiffness of neck,
of heart, overly troublesome birds in too great abundance,
death sudden or too slow, quarreling, swine both real and
only seeming to be so, bruises, losing what we want most
not to, mad dogs, luck that is bad, visual soreness, shame
and the hands - because of it - folded, likewise flood
and nowhere a raft to sail on. And they not sad, apparently,
and not particularly waving. And just the wind for a sound:
cold, hollow. Us calling it song or saying No, it is grace.

Poem For The Young White Man Who Asked Me How I, An Intelligent, Well-Read Person, Could Believe In

The War Between Races

In my land there are no distinctions.
The barbed wire politics of oppression
have been torn down long ago. The only reminder
of past battles, lost or won, is a slight
rutting in the fertile fields.

In my land
people write poems about love,
full of nothing but contented childlike syllables.
Everyone reads Russian short stories and weeps.
There are no boundaries.
There is no hunger, no
complicated famine or greed.

I am not a revolutionary.
I don't even like political poems.
Do you think I can believe in a war between races?
I can deny it. I can forget about it
when I'm safe,
living on my own continent of harmony
and home, but I am not
there.

I believe in revolution
because everywhere the crosses are burning,
sharp-shooting goose-steppers round every corner,
there are snipers in the schools...
(I know you don't believe this.
You think this is nothing
but faddish exaggeration. But they
are not shooting at you.)

I'm marked by the color of my skin.
The bullets are discrete and designed to kill slowly.
They are aiming at my children.
These are facts.
Let me show you my wounds: my stumbling mind, my
"excuse me" tongue, and this
nagging preoccupation
with the feeling of not being good enough.

These bullets bury deeper than logic.
Racism is not intellectual.
I can not reason these scars away.

Outside my door
there is a real enemy
who hates me.

I am a poet
who yearns to dance on rooftops,
to whisper delicate lines about joy
and the blessings of human understanding.
I try. I go to my land, my tower of words and
bolt the door, but the typewriter doesn't fade out
the sounds of blasting and muffled outrage.
My own days bring me slaps on the face.
Every day I am deluged with reminders
that this is not
my land

and this is my land.

I do not believe in the war between races
but in this country

there is war.

Animal Farm, or Song of the Colonial Governor-General

Admit it. You hate the body
because it can be broken,
stabbed, shot full of holes.
And so you became a butcher.

Say the spirit cannot be broken.
Say you see better than anyone
how fiercely an ox, a hog, a cock
fights to stay alive, until the end.

You wonder how nothing seems
to stop this rat: sucking, gnawing
through cement walls to snatch
scraps of gristle---not knowing

what you need to kill, or why.
Beat it with a shovel: skin-slither,
pestle of skull and will. Admit
it shamed you to cover with dung.

Suji Kwok Kim, Notes From The Divided Country

Bag of Bones

What good luck!
She has found his bones.
The skull is also in the bag
the bag in her hand
like all other bags
in all other trembling hands.
His bones, like thousands of bones
in the mass graveyard,
his skull, not like any other skull.
Two eyes or holes
with which he listened to music
that told his own story,
a nose
that never knew clean air,
a mouth, open like a chasm,
was not like that when he kissed her
there, quietly,
not in this place
noisy with skulls and bones and dust
dug up with questions:
What does it mean to die all this death
in a place where the darkness plays all this silence?
What does it mean to meet your loved ones now
with all of these hollow places?
To give back to your mother
on the occasion of death
a handful of bones
she had given to you
on the occasion of birth?
To depart without death or birth certificates
because the dictator does not give receipts
when he takes your life?
The dictator has a heart, too,
a balloon that never pops.
He has a skull, too, a huge one
not like any other skull.
It solved by itself a math problem
That multiplied the one death by millions
to equal homeland
The dictator is the director of a great tragedy.
He has an audience, too,
an audience that claps
until the bones begin to rattle—
the bones in bags,
the full bag finally in her hand,
unlike her disappointed neighbor
who has not yet found her own.

(c) Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard

Autobiography of the Cab Driver Who Picked Me Up at a Phoenix Hotel To Catch a Four A.M. Flight and Began to Speak in (Almost) Rhyming Couplets

by Rebecca McClanahan

I got two problems. One,
I never see the sun
and two, if I did,
I couldn't take it, never could.
Now, my sister? Out one day
and brown the next. That's the way
my father was. We never
took vacations but he used to steer
on Sundays with one arm
out the window. Get dark as a black man.
Something in his blood, I guess.
Once I bought me a mess
of tanning cream, but something
kept me from using it.
He's been dead a whole year.
They say there's not a soul
on the streets this hour,
but the souls are just now rousing.
Yes Ma'am, when I see daylight I slide
into my coffin and close the lid.
Cooler that way. They say if you can survive
a summer in this heat, you're a native.
My brother's child? She claims to be one,
but I tell her she's got Made in Japan
stamped all over her keister.
Hey lady, you still on Eastern
time? You can have it. Yesterday
the TV reporter in Cincinnati
was three feet in snow. I phoned
my old drinking buddy back home
to rub it in. Lied and said I was out
today without a shirt. Barefoot.
He said you can keep those hundred
degrees. I said you don't have to shovel
a heat wave. Young lady, you okay?
Looks like you're fading. The longest day
I ever lived was the night
I left for Vietnam. What a sight,
would you look at that? Damn
jackhammers at three a.m.
They sure like to play in the dirt here.
Yes Ma'am. It's the same everywhere.
The shortest distance between
two points is always under construction.

The War Works Hard

TRANSLATED BY ELIZABETH WINSLOW

How magnificent the war is!
How eager
and efficient!
Early in the morning
it wakes up the sirens
and dispatches ambulances
to various places
swings corpses through the air
rolls stretchers to the wounded
summons rain
from the eyes of mothers
digs into the earth
dislodging many things
from under the ruins..
Some are lifeless and glistening
others are pale and still throbbing..
It produces the most questions
in the minds of children
entertains the gods
by shooting fireworks and missiles
into the sky
sows mines in the fields
and reaps punctures and blisters
urges families to emigrate
stands beside the clergymen
as they curse the devil
(poor devil, he remains
with one hand in the searing fire)..
The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets
it contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs
provides food for flies
adds pages to the history books
achieves equality
between killer and killed
teaches lovers to write letters
accustoms young women to waiting
fills the newspapers
with articles and pictures
builds new houses
for the orphans
invigorates the coffin makers
gives grave diggers
a pat on the back
and paints a smile on the leader’s face.
It works with unparalleled diligence!
Yet no one gives it
a word of praise.

(c) Dunya Mikhail, The War Works Hard

Grandfather Says

"Sit in my hand."
I'm ten.
I can't see him,
but I hear him breathing
in the dark.
It's after dinner playtime.
We're outside,
hidden by trees and shrubbery.
He calls it hide-and-seek,
but only my little sister seeks us
as we hide
and she can't find us,
as grandfather picks me up
and rubs his hands between my legs.
I only feel a vague stirring
at the edge of my consciousness.
I don't know what it is,
but I like it.
It gives me pleasure
that I can't identify.
It's not like eating candy,
but it's just as bad,
because I had to lie to grandmother
when she asked,
"What do you do out there?"
"Where?" I answered.
Then I said, "Oh, play hide-and-seek."
She looked hard at me,
then she said, "That was the last time.
I'm stopping that game."
So it ended and I forgot.
Ten years passed, thirtyfive,
when I began to reconstruct the past.
When I asked myself
why I was attracted to men who disgusted me
I traveled back through time
to the dark and heavy breathing part of my life
I thought was gone,
but it had only sunk from view
into the quicksand of my mind.
It was pulling me down
and there I found grandfather waiting,
his hand outstretched to lift me up,
naked and wet
where he rubbed me.
"I'll do anything for you," he whispered,
"but let you go."
And I cried, "Yes," then "No."
"I don't understand how you can do this to me.
I'm only ten years old,"
and he said, "That's old enough to know."

Ai, Dread

By the end

there will be nothing
of us above the border
but tallow on the burial stones
and the desiccated marigolds.

How fat the sharp-beaked
vultures grow on our backs
armoured by suffering.

Our daughters lay along the walks
or float in the streams smelling
sweet of rot, as babies sometimes do.

Our son's expressions wither into ours.

Some of us will go further south,
rather than bear the humiliations
of Protestants who yank
the head from the Virgin.

Others will stay with the gringos
who believe the distances between
brothers can be measured by shades.

(c) Vievee Francis, Blue Tail Fly

"Washing the Breakfast Dishes, I decide"

What noun
would you want
spoken on your skin
your whole life through?
-Mark Doty

Wren. I considered
open-mouthed words - love,
honor, even melancholy
for the sound of it -
afraid I might waste
this chance, like the one wish.
Then I remembered last Thursday's
small brown bird on the rail,
its head tilted back
in what I imagined sudden joy,
though I know its trill,
sweet and full,
rose from the breast of instinct,
the throat of an ordinary day.


(c) Susan Meyers, Keep and Give Away

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

by Robert Phillips

I, Rose Rosenfeld, am one of the workers
who survived. Before the inferno broke out,
factory doors had been locked by the owners,

to keep us at our sewing machines,
to keep us from stealing scraps of cloth.
I said to myself, What are the bosses doing?
I knew they would save themselves.

I left my big-button-attacher machine,
climbed the iron stairs to the tenth floor
where their offices were. From the landing window

I saw girls in shirtwaists flying by,
Catherine wheels projected like Zeppelins
out open windows, then plunging downward,
sighing skirts open parasols on fire.

I found the big shots stuffing themselves
into the freight elevator going to the roof.
I squeezed in. While our girls were falling,

we ascended like ashes. Firemen
yanked us onto the next-door roof.
I sank to the tarpaper, sobbed for
one-hundred forty-six comrades dying

or dead down below. One was Rebecca,
my only close friend, a forewoman kind to workers.
Like the others, she burned like a prism.

Relatives of twenty-three victims later
Brought suits.
Each family was awarded seventy-five dollars.
It was like the Titanic the very next year-
No one cared about the souls in steerage.

Those doors were locked, too, a sweatshop at sea.
They died due to ice, not fire. I live in
Southern California now. But I still see

skirts rippling like parachutes,
girls hit the cobblestones, smell smoke,
burnt flesh, girls cracking like cheap buttons,
disappearing like so many dropped stitches.

Not Words But Hands

for Yusef Komunyakaa


We have no words for you.

The poets hear the news,
this death unspeakable as the babble
of an auctioneer at the slave market.

There are no words in our language to say this.
We are singers who moan,
prophets with tongues missing
like the clappers of empty bells.

In your poems there are singers, prophets, slaves.
You hammered words for all of them.
But we have no words for you;
there is no name for the grief in your face.

We only have our hands, to soap your shirts
or ladle soup for you, grip your shoulder
or dim the lamp so you can sleep with visions
of the ball field by the lumber company
wars and wars ago.

And this, this poem,
this is my hand.


(c) Martin Espada, The Republic of Poetry

Poems that make you say "Damn"

Hey all. So I had this idea, right. I wanted to read a lot of poems by a lot of different people without spending all the money in the world, right? I wanted to read a lot of poems that you're reading without having to buy all the books, and looking for that one poem that makes you say "Damn". I wanted to have an online selection of the poems that do it for us. An online anthology, if you will.

Here's the catch: Tag your poems with the author and title of the poem and collection. No more than 3 poems from a collection, no matter who wrote it. Check to see if your "Damn" poem has been posted before posting it. So then, the challenge will become expanding, expanding without overlapping.

Hopefully it will turn out a beautiful thing.

Best,

DeLana.