On Peripheries
First, I was on an island, a surface
retreating from its sense of edge
I accumulated myself to confront
the cosmos. My thought makes me
reel. All those other trees are walking.
In the context of the world
shrinking, an airplane hurries
the shoulds toward sounds.
I Smile Unknowingly Like Air
The efforts of the phenomenal universe
and our bodies shine forth not unpleasantly.
I like air anyway and I can see from inside
my head darkness is silence faking out
the landscape. For example, my ancient
worries make beautiful promises.
They explode next to other possible views.
It is a difficult and strange phenomenon
how even now I’m plucking details from
what is, as if a sky could discard small portions
of itself aptly shaped for being lost. A fragment
of air collides with its counterpart.
A gateway-spark wishes to glitter and scatter
like instances of thought.
After Traveling Across a Blankness in the Imagination
A mind of trees streams voluminously. The same
orange light approaches a stone wall. Detached
thoughts travel rapidly. I can’t split longing
from the water it moves in me, grieving the leaves’
lost veins. Landscape is mind with persistent voice.
Small, unmarked roads, blank backdrop of tumbleweed
and emaciated antelope. No word for dirt.
Green is the Main Thing
Some worlds are flat. When I reach
out into space, I stretch the seam
where air touches my center
of gravity. I cultivate my own
texture of grass, at a distance.
Wind fans the sides
of buildings.
My answers tucked in my wing pits
my rule, keep moving. I no longer
read or write, higher than I have
the means to rise. I have only been
a bird this long, since I left my
first ground.
Future
Another door closing.
Inside my head
a steam radiator
the whine of metal spitting heat
toward a view of a courtyard.
So grand and nostalgic a city rises
to clouds no one
gathers to greet.
Who remembers this?
Sheila Murphy
from Ghazals
111/
Afterglow is ex post facto fiction.
Listen to me resisting your new myth.
This moment of not wanting you equals
my not being wanted, losing myself.
Litmus test n’existe pas, criteria
for ears merely threatening to absorb.
Oak leaves must not be left to dry on lawns.
I would solo skate across that crispness.
Autumn’s sadness resurrects feeling loss.
School books fall to powder between my hands.
114/
Cantabile equals me when with you
the sea the scene the sequel to in-love.
Modesto early evening post light,
slight earnestness residual comme ça.
Eventness matters forthrightly as time’s
harsh retaliation blands us homeward.
Wallace blithely sandwiches himself in
claustro quarters, filaments of land mine.
Home hums ho ho heavely just like mother
in a state of delusion deluging.
116/
I breathe a windfall for you and you a-
lone wolf wandering beneath these full trees.
Happy gratitude day of rust colored
feathers, white and dark meat on a platter.
Revere the earned status of a fallback
position for theme and variations.
Minted facial features at last relax
into a smile versus surface tension.
I will sit with you and forget myself
to find a subtler self tucked in beneath.
118/
He wore bicycle clips on his trousers
in the house, on the walkway, confident.
Modesty condones keeping the head down.
Free of forecast, one deeply inhales light.
Chastity can’t be rehearsed easily.
She lifted the veil that her face might breathe.
Choice aspires to individual noblesse
usually found in its infancy.
Veer away from pawn shop spiritual
gleanings now a fraction of their value.
Edward Mayes
Say We’ve Reversed Ourselves for the Umpteenth Time
Say we’ve reversed ourselves for the umpteenth time
And, even that, while driving under our own influence
Or sharpening our horns against any available
Fence, even then, if freedom’s just another
Noun looking for the wayward verb, and even
Though, Paolo Uccello may have felt ubiquitous,
To the extent that the vanishing point was something
Undiscoverable, a table on which to place
An empty glass, even when, the juncture loss
Of noumpere, becoming umpire, becoming
Ump, and even if, the IUD lost that
Night in the SUV, the umbrage, the uh-oh,
And even if this verse is that
River we’ve stepped in twice, in our blush
And blunder, in our question, “What’s
So uppity about that?” and then, even up,
Getting the synchronized to organize, to screw
And unscrew, to ululate into the night
About what’s better left unsaid, even if
The Saying of the Day, as luck would
Have it, even that the navel is considered the hub
Of a wheel and we’re spinning, pining
For nostalgia and ubiety, so rash we
Are, even when, especially when we go from
Uh-huh to uh uh so quickly, some um, yes, and
An uh or two, and that’s how we make up our minds.
U; DUI, IUD, DIY, YID, SUV, BTU, UFO; uke, nuke; ubiety, the condition of being located in a particular place, AHD; who, whether, either, when, which, whence, whither, whether, neither; exuberate, from breast, fertile; UGT, urgent; ugh; uh-oh, alarm; uh-huh, agreement; uh-uh, disagreement; uh, hesitation; um, doubt; ukulele, flea jumping; Walter Ulbricht ordered the building of the Berlin Wall, 1961; ululate, to howl, wail; navel, hub of a wheel; nombril; umbra; umbrage, resentment or a hint or a shadow; ump; juncture loss/false splitting, noumpere became umpire; reverse is nickname, an eke name, newt, aneute; umpteen; ump is a dash in Morse code; all the un- listings!; a book of contrasts
In This Version, the IV and the Collapsed Veins
In this version, the IV and the collapsed veins
And the card tables we folded up, the metal chairs
Hinging not on vacancy but on someone actually
Sitting down, but not for long, never for
Longer, not with the valediction wrapping up as
It is, all of our valuables in our valise,
And if we ever become desperate enough to steal
Or plunder, or even rob a convenience store,
The Sweet Buy & Bye, for example, where they
Sell flowers that will never amount to anything,
Where the coffers sit in their valleculae,
The end of commerce, the end of the send-out
Or the take-away or the take-out or even the delivery,
Right to our very door, and we will peacefully
Keep the cat’s bowl topped up with milk,
Loving the lapping, lappings for lapping’s
Sake, and think of all the lumens sluiced
Through with blood, neither vocal nor
Bucolic, as if we’re like vagabonds with a vascular
Bundle on a stick, beards of burnt cork,
Our heads full of rags and vol-au-vents,
Because we want to go somewhere where we
Haven’t been before or after, find the vamoose
Trail, abhor all the vacua, count our lucky saccades,
As if we could stop awhile at heaven,
Skimming in on the vulgar, red with blood.
V; vaccine, from cow, vacca; cowpox, smallpox; vacua/vacuum; vade mecum, go with me; vagabond, a rover, vagile, sheath; vague, wandering; vagus nerve; vale, to be strong, farewell; valediction; Rudolph Valentino, taxi dancer; Rodan, 1956; Paul Valéry; valise, valigia; vallecula, shallow grave, vamoose; screen presence; variety meats; condensation/con trail; vroom, varoom; varmint; vascular bundle; vatic; vates, prophet, poet; fate, infant, banish, symphony, coffer, blame; aphasia, prophet of; vulgar, Bulgaria, bulgur; see vulm; vocaholic, vocalic, bucolic, colic; vibrissa, long stiff hair on a cat’s brow, whiskers; poem with pronunciation guide; a lumen is the space inside a vein; saccade, eye movements, etc.; cat’s tongue lapping; swisher sweets; to beat the band at what
If We Could Only Whistle War
If we could only whistle war
Since we had long ago forgotten the words,
Along with our noms de guerre, along with
The what of it, the what what what of
It, whether we were fighting with Frenzy or
Fighting with Furor, whether the madness
That ignited in us had a mixture much
Too lean to take us to the end or where
We needed to go, or whether war gave us
Our walking papers, and we eventually
Found out that there was no Wazoo River
To go up, or if we just bolted, tried
The walk on water thing, or even slept
Through the wake-up call, or woke up to
Our wad of troubles, since who of us can
Really draw a blank, who of us can really
Do without grace or some singular obeisance
To beauty and beauty only, for if
The disfiguration is upon us at all times, if
The secrets the dead take with them cut
Both ways, if we weave anger into the cloth
That covers the wounded, and if it’s the wagon
Wheel that makes the ox wheeze, wagon full of
Toys and bones, and if it’s the caul covering us
At birth, to protect us from drowning, from going under,
Hands out, not empty, not without something else to say.
W; wacky, w/o, wah-wah; wacko from Waco; wad of troubles; wade, waddle; waft, wafter, convoy ship; wag, wagon; wake-up call; Potsdam Conference; walnut, the foreign nut; walking papers; woe be gone; lytta, strip on underside of a dog’s tongue, thought to cause madness; Lyssa, Frenzy (Greek); Maniai, goddess of mania/madness (Latin), ira, furor, rabies; wazoo; drew a blank; crwth, crowd, Celtic stringed instrument; war and sausage, confusion, mix up; chambered pith of walnut wood; nom de guerre
You Be My Xylem and I’ll Be Your Phloem
You be my xylem and I’ll be your phloem
Or you be my phloem and I’ll be your xylem—
We who love the versa–we who love the vice—
We who love the fragment of the chamfered
Columns—the what that is holding the what up—
At the crosswalk, we see someone with Xs
For eyes—not I’s as in egos, neither
I go, nor you go—nor venting, nor
Opening the door to the coal bin, nor
The warmth, nor the burn that gives the warmth—
When we take the up elevator—at the treetop,
At the new leafing, at the cloud cover,
And at the rainfall, and at the root, sucking
Up, carrying water in a cup, one brother
To another brother, one sister to another sister—
What we risk spilling—what the clock
Of it all chimes, carries up to us—now
And at the hour when the beehive is full
Of honey—as if we can ward off apical
Dominance—the spread of branches over us,
The shade, the last word falling and then raked
Up and then burned—the bees that carry Cs and
Ds and Es with them on those windy days when
They’re lost among the wildflowers—delirious
And joyful—the going up and the coming down—
These we know—this where we wrote the x, the treasure.
X; xwalk, crosswalk; xylem, woody tissue; phloem (like poem); x-ray, unknown ray; Xanadu; xanthous, yellow; Xerxes; xmas, from x, Greek letter chi, first letter of Greek Khristos, Christ, ΧριστΟϛ, like Xtian; xyz, examine your zipper; xylophone, telephone, megaphone, microphone; phone, sound, voice; pith, to pith, pithy, pith helmet; root pressure, surface tension, transpirational pull, secondary growth, cohesion-tension theory; vascular bundle
Why We Never Returned Old Yeller to the Library
Why we never returned Old Yeller to the library
May not be the question we originally intended
To ask ourselves this morning, nor whether
We could tell a Doric hoplite from an Ionian
Hoplite, imagining, just imagining the chafing
Of heavy armor on the scapulas of vast
Armies, our Bronze Age giving over to our Iron,
Without which the wrinkles in a pair of
Pleated trousers, so unwarlike, yclept peaceable,
Until death parts us, ripping us out of our
Earth as if we were mandragoras, whether
We might want to say recrudesce, if only for
The pleasure of this rag of a word, whether we
Could imagine the devil’s foot uncleft, whole
Hoof, something that might not even elicit
A yoicks from the you-uns in the room,
But we go back to the question, “what is the rule,”
That we want to live in ylem land, the mandrakes
Giving off their scent, the ylang-ylang’s perfume
That might make us forget “why day is day,
Night is night, and time is time,” or how Carl Yastrzemski
Managed in 1967 to be the last Triple Crown winner
In batting, as we wonder under the shade branches of
The Yggdrasil, roots holding hell as well as heaven, how
We can’t change something that is written, whether about
The end of a rabid dog, or a color that we could only call yellow.
Y; y’all, you guys; y chromosome; yackety-yak; wave-hopping; yin (moon, shade, female element); yang (sun, light, male element); yare, agile; yawp; yclept, past participle of clepe, to call, name, from cry out; yean, sheep and goats bearing young; yearling; yech; yoni, Shakti; yob=boy; yoicks, yogh, ME letter ȝ; youse (you+s); Yiddish, Jewish; yester; yes man; yikes, mandragora sends out its scent; “why day is day, night is night, and time is time,” Hamlet; orto from horto, horticulture; Yggdrasil, from Norse; ylem, the primordial matter of the universe; creatine, creosote, pancreas, ecru, crude; died after eating a dessert prepared with spoiled cherries; broad beans and ceci in the Iliad; what is a rule; power, rod, regula, realm, straight; when I have tears that I might beastly flee
We Had Another Catch and Release Dream, the Zs
We had another catch and release dream, the zs
Of sleep inchoately interrupting rapture,
The turnstile all dreams go through to take
Their own metro, the metro of feeling,
The metro of happiness, or that other long
Train always late that takes us from the prediction
Of the Fall of Babylon in 539 B.C. to Thomas
Aikenhead, 18, hanged for blasphemy
In 1697, or to the aftermath of the Franco-
Prussian War, the year of taking genocide
Tea, being fired upon with both barrels,
And pleading, we will always have pleading,
With those eager enough among us
To want to fall off any appropriate edge
Into any appropriate sea, into the zero-sum,
Into the brokenness, into those blasphemed upon,
Shall we say zounds, shall we say ods
Bodikins, or something new, a zillion
Zut, zut, and zuts, cliffhangers for all of those
Who are running scared from what can only
Be someone else’s death—which
We will not speak about again nor dream
About again, nor write about again, and
For this we are through, through, and
Through, this needle pulling that thread,
And we will wear well what we have written.
Z; catch and let go; the z; zander, pike-perch; za, to sit down; zen, silent meditation; zeal, zebrine, zecchino, zed; Zeitgeist, Time/Spirit; Zeno, zephyr; zero-sum; zeugma, syllepsis, talking together; ziggurat; zillion; zipper, a B.F. Goodrich trademark and invention; zounds, God’s wounds; Thomas Aikenhead, aged 18, hanged in Edinburgh for blasphemy in 1697; ods bodikins: God’s body, nails
Peter Leight
When I Need to Calm Down
I cover myself up,
wrapping my arms
around my body
and covering
my head to cover up
what’s in my head,
as when there isn’t anything
to conceal at the same time
there isn’t anything that’s not concealed,
I mean it’s not a documentary.
Pulling the covers over me,
as if it’s too much trouble,
lifting my head
and letting it drop down
at the same time,
covering my eyes
at the same time,
as if the calmness is a blindfold,
at the same time covering my mouth,
as if the calmness is a silent auction,
honestly I’m just as calm
as anybody else,
just about the calmest person I know,
I think it’s soothing.
Not lifting the covers
to look under them
or peeking inside,
not even moving
around under the covers,
of course there are times when you tell yourself to calm down
when you don’t really mean it,
is it too much trouble?
When I’m calm I take
out my needles
and knit a quiet scarf,
not even a peep,
it’s kind of soothing.
Wrapping my throat
and pushing my hair
over my face
to improve the coverage,
pulling up the covers
and not letting anything out,
like the cover of a book
you don’t even know
by the cover.
I Don’t Know How Many Times I’ve Been Around the Block
of course it’s a stress test,
I’m taking a couple
of aspirins first,
putting down my toes
when I lift my heels,
as if I’m walking on one foot,
I’m not proud of my block
I’m not saying
it’s a comfortable block,
I’m not even thinking about my block,
as when you’re walking
on one of those thick carpets
and you don’t even feel your footsteps,
I mean there are so many things
we don’t know how to deal with
it isn’t a good example.
Not raising my hands
or reaching for anything
I’m not even holding onto,
honestly it’s disturbing when people
reach for more of what
they already have enough of,
this is one of the most disturbing ideas,
although for the most part it’s not ideas that are disturbing
but people with ideas
if we’re being completely honest with ourselves,
I mean people are a problem
when you’re close to people you need
to protect yourself from,
one problem is there’s nobody
to replace them,
if we’re being completely honest with ourselves,
honestly the only way
to protect yourself from
people you’re close to
is to move away from them—
I don’t even know how many times I’ve been around the block,
I’m not even lifting my hands,
it’s not a roadblock:
when it’s especially disturbing
I take my dog with me
around the block,
as long as she’s with me
I’m lifting up my head
and keeping my head up,
I call my dog Blockhead when she helps me
get my head around the block.
Standing on the Edge I’m Not Inconstant,
Not sliding onto one side or the other
or leaning one way
or the other,
although nothing is preventing me:
centered between my shoulders
like a zipper zipping up:
it could go either way,
like an anchor that adds to my unsteadiness,
I mean a person’s innocence needs to be disproved.
To be honest I’m not even concerned
about the accuracy of the edge,
sometimes I think it’s the kind of confidential edge
I don’t even know anything about
or one of those temporary pop-up edges
that edges away:
holding onto the edge
like a piece of fabric you rub
between your thumb and first finger
to see what it feels like,
is it any consolation?
Not renovating the edge
or remodeling the edge,
or stepping over the edge,
although nothing is preventing me:
personally I think it’s the kind of edge you stand on
when you don’t know anything
about the rest of your life,
okay?
Holding on with one hand
and lifting the other straight up in the air,
as if I’m reaching for something
I’m not even aware of,
not hiding behind the edge
or straightening out the edge,
or stepping on the cracks
which is something I’ve always never done
in my whole life.
When We Turn Around It’s Not the End of the World
When you turn away
I turn away at the same time,
like a form of displacement,
not even taking turns,
I actually think it’s important for people not to be unhappy
at the same time they’re not happy—
okay it doesn’t matter if we’re face to face
or even if we’re turning the same way,
either way
it’s not the end of the world.
Opening my mouth
to make it easier on my lips,
I mean everybody wants to be needed,
like a book that opens to the place
where you stop reading,
do you need me?
Do you need anything about me?
When I turn around
there’s space for my retrospective,
and some space to reach into,
if it’s not the end of the world
I’m not even saying so long,
when you turn away
it doesn’t matter which way you’re facing,
not even turning the other way
like a kind of reciprocity—
I’m opening my mouth
and leaving my lips alone,
if it’s not the end of the world
is it the end of something else?
Keeping my hands behind my back,
as when you’re holding onto something
for as long as it takes
to let go:
I actually think it’s important for people not to be unhappy
when they’re not happy,
turning without backing up
or backing off,
it’s the kind of displacement
that makes you want to host something.
Tony Kitt
Among Plants
Plants have nowhere to go. They emit
signals and symbols, elements of energy.
They are the guilty consciousness
of thermodynamics. Their
absent-minded leaves draw skeletons
on every retina. A tree is a hieroglyph;
a man, eighty pages of astronomy.
Who wears an itinerary
to the feast of the non-calculable?
A thousand ears ago any bush
could hear, but how green was the music
on their iPods? An eye is the house
of a flower where the future snores
wholeheartedly. Petals and shutters
can fly you home.
The Cave of Forgotten Books
The soil in which light
has been planted; the snow of doves
reduced to silent syllables…
We are here, in this silken circle.
There’s no past, no future, only
wave after wave of black’n’whiteness.
Don’t marvel, my swimming heart!
Two clouds:
one iridescent (irreducible?),
the other knows points of view.
The echo, segmented
in its dying explications…
Hands and icicles.
Yonder
This brook
dancing you breathless…
Your paths are your veins;
your skull reveals your roots.
The feelings of a field; a colloquy
of farms…
A short swoon
and a long one.
Where did you go having divorced
the trouble?
Crickety
This air-coloured confusion
on both sides of nothing… Look around:
all the songs are grass-green.
One cannot leap twice
with the same (fe)male.
There’s always a two-finch gap
between a possibility
and an approach.
The bone thing:
be boneless (in a rigid way).
Don’t let your compound eyes
migrate south
or multiply in blending.
Each stove has music.
A bicycle squeak.
An Appalachian buzzer.
The voice is a gyro pilot,
it knows the way.
Brian Johnson
Stillborn
The road to the summit is faint. But you can see it. Like something black, near black.
A silhouette loves the rain, and is loved by it. Neither is merciful. I witnessed this in London and further up the Thames.
A wall, a bridge, a night, a city. The intersection of cries, smells and their evacuation. The neat forms of senselessness.
They moved into a highrise, beyond the meadows, hills and fires. It was the most Ethiopian paradise yet.
When we push open the double-glass doors, we get the morning in Pompeii. Tar everywhere and a few feathers.
As an adult, I stand up in a great noisebath, straining for the truth. As a child, a second crayon was enough.
Meandering in a city of squares, transfixing the old river, distancing the shoplights. I love, and lose all bearing in the world.
Once upon a time, at a blind corner, two blind fish. It was raw and sweet. Two fish. And the blind hereafter.
He climbed out of bed and shuttered the moon. But a car passed the window again and again. He read, the dreamless man.
The neighborhood was held together by noises, and by colors touching and resembling one another. Morning before you knew it.
Trip
They drive by night and reach the city. It’s still sunless, not-yet.
At a corner, lost, unkempt: a pair in their time.
The tail-ends of words are broken. A cab with darkened glass. A second.
To the theatre district, world-famous, a mile away. The night overwritten by arm’s-length letters.
This one’s famished. That one’s stuffed. Shadowy tables, and strangers in a line.
They happen to feel—not during the photograph, not in it, but outside afterward—the grief.
(She) How green was my valley? (He) How black is my hair? Buttoning up.
Tacit the sex, the dayblind pining for it, for the mooncrowned moonbit scape of it, their second home.
Trapped in the shops, held by the gilt-edged street, they will yet make it to the light, and the light after that.
Some Movement
A wind slipped through the trees, made light of their muteness. A hand restored it.
The door is always furnished, a bed inside and darkness outside. The leagues between them, the late hesitations.
Ladybug on the knee, on the arm twisting in the sun, in the place of departure.
Night, gravel-stir. The heads in a window, their torsos side by side, making sounds.
Into the sea falls sloe-black. Into the pond goes snow-white. Into the waters no one can sleep.
They all took benches, reading, watching the see-saw, crossing their legs. It was a park, and twilight. Nearly time.
A parade circles back, and trains return,—but a man runs away, scurrying, as if the horizon owned him.
The Location
People stared: a body was interrupting the road. Just dead, out of place, waiting on a name.
In a row of storefronts, in a string of lights, the one that saves is seldom found.
Roman heads, the heads of girls, at a windowpane. Cameos. Pangs memorized by the hand.
Around eight that evening, the house still warm to the touch, a cry flew out.
Face-up in the garden. Mouth open but obscured by trees. North of the corner used as a bus turn.
Judy Halebsky
Fwd: The Problem
is
not
your
body
\your
body
is not
a problem
|radiated oceans
redwoods burning|
these are problems
/living on credit
is a concept
not a problem
|except that ideas
manifest
physically|
\a credit card
can buy peanut butter
milk
is real
credit
less so\
your body
is / not an idea
which
can
change
or
break
or
sing
someone
else
to
sleep
Thoughts on Myself While Traveling
June – August
// I’m in bed beside a sleeping toddler / my dear husband, in the kitchen, slips back off level, brittle, bemoaning spilled coffee / I’m naked with a sponge in the dark before dawn, cleaning the coffee while he tells me not to and cries // yesterday, walking the trails above Pacifica, fog moving in layers with patches of sun, he picks up snail shells, small, tiny beads in the palm of his hand, he asks me to notice the coils, one flat and coiling outward, the other taller, coiling up / we need ways to tell different kinds of shells apart so we know which family of snails live here and if there are more or less since the drought. if there are more, it’s because something else died to make way for them.
***
I heat leftovers and put them into Tupperware. boil corn and put it in a plastic bag. bring forks.carry the heavy basket along the shore. we find stones to throw in the water and a pink balloon in the grass. soon we find a thin rope in the dunes. her father gets a stick and ties the balloon to the stick and now we have a toy that will blow in the wind and is pink. I know we’ve taught her to love pink, but I don’t know how. it’s like an animal got into the house. we know what it’s looking for, but we don’t know which door we left unguarded.
***
I didn’t write back because the daycare closed for a week and then we gave up and went to Davis, and even though my DH only worked for a couple hours each day, I was doing childcare. When he was out running before dawn, I was getting her back to sleep by holding her in my arms. Once she was asleep, I knew it was too close to morning to put her down. I thought of the many things I could be doing. I noted which of my limbs were most likely to lose circulation, I thought about sleeping sitting up, which is possible, even unavoidable sometimes. There’s a person I could have been, and that person would have written back to you.
***
if I don’t write this part, nothing else will make sense / that day, we were getting on bikes to meet friends at the playground / he didn’t want to go but maybe felt like he had to / so instead of not going, he was complaining and picking fights, and then we were outside the garage with our helmets waiting for him while he was inside thrashing things and breaking them, and I didn’t want Jojo to see and I was angry, so I slammed the door, hard. which knocked things off the shelf, including glass jars that shattered. we stood looking at the closed door, hearing the sharp, high-pitched crinkling of the shards sprinkling across the concrete floor. a chiming flourish slowing, fading out. this broke his rage. calmed him completely. he opened the door. we lifted the bikes over the broken glass. he said to Jojo, let’s go to the swings, and we went.
***
my mother’s house has lush grass for blocks and blocks and is a plane ride away from the DH and everything that I’m trying to keep secret / do I want someone to tell me when to leave? / my mother’s saying, good morning sweet pie, the way she has all of my life. she’s saying, the cicadas never came down from the trees, later, Maya explains, they came, it just wasn’t the way she remembered // breathe in the air on the porch / be right here with this little girl splashing in a tub on the patio / walking across the grass, my mother telling me, she’s darling.
Matter of Accident n. /ˈmædər əvˈæksədnt/
a commodity chosen as the equivalent for all other commodities/ he explains, I got me a laying hen (a girlfriend with an income) (it doesn’t matter what kind) Abdi visits our house, asks the DH, how’d you get her to move in with you, didn’t you have to offer her family three cows or something? joking (mostly) part of her illness means losing her job, no longer being able to put those two boys through school. so now there’s two unfurlings. the one and then the other. a matter of accident, what we use as money, how we count and are counted
Navigating by Stars v. /ˈnævəˌɡeɪt baɪ stɑː/
an umbrella open in the house is bad luck /but I let her play with it anyway /let her sleep in her clothes /let her fall asleep on top of me / waiting for her breath to level before I can roll out from under her /decide to sleep or join her father /from this warm bed to his abyss /the boat is wood so it floats /even in the storm /even with some water seeping in/ there’s a current. dawn comes. the hydrangeas open. the hummingbird hums so quietly we don’t even hear it
Matthew Cooperman
from Capitals and Cranes
Capitals
A husband and wife move about a kitchen, making lunch for themselves. Kids off to school, a surprise reprieve, the house yawns, midwinter. What to do about the furnace, how much for camp this year, and what about the roof? Sitting down to lunch, they eat their sandwiches happily, wonder what silly video to watch for a few minutes. But first a few ads, some excellent deals on HELOCs, and there it is, new roofing sales at HomeDepot! Yes, they think with hunger, renewed clarity. “It’s the roof honey, let’s do the roof,” and she nods “I was thinking that too.” They have given their money to the microphone.
Cranes
Set the scene, the world, the dream. Sunday: a studied bowl abjures the impulse to recollection for a woman, stands in its long gold bloom, alone, its own jar of air, inviolate and supreme, or so it seemed. How was it this and not that? she thought. Where was the bowl entirely? She lay awake at night scheming how to wrest the bowl from contemplation. Hers. No grace or flight goes finished
Cranes
All along the western seaboard dams are becoming unstuck by riparian consciousness. Creaks, cracks in the foundation, assumption. The water begins to flow seaward, uninterrupted for the first time in a century. Silver fish fight the fresh riffles upstream. The wetlands rest, recover. The atmospheric river was a well, is. A field of new green rice glistens in the sun, the gathering salt of gathering egrets
Capitals
Now Selling New Communities the sign says driving by
at dusk on the Gulf the gulf of where or whom flamingoes
mingle with the derricks for awhile the money will be spent
Gillian Conoley
It is just as hot as in the age of the great religious wars
In the beginning the lyre had only one string
wind gone cello deep storm
Diane Von Furstenberg who created the wrap dress
has a buzzer beside her to call
her assistants a diamond necklace that says
“I am in control”
“Sex-positive” a phrase Diane learns
in her interview and immediately adheres to
Sex-positive I am reading on my phone
Missing the
black smudged ink on my fingers from coated paper
A tinge of excitement in my feet the brief ache
flu-like in my ankles
one of the not-covid viruses the allergy clinic says are
“very around” The peonies have blurred into beauty
I am lucky to live in a light-filled house
And with the people I love the exquisite nearness
of DM-ing my friends in New York
when did I come to prefer this my friends
just across the bridge the street I would walk
across to see if I could bring myself
over the glittering waters
before they DM me I wonder if they
have read the Diane Von Furstenberg
in its entirety in The New Yorker
or seen the decapitated head
if they kept scrolling, clicked the link to allow it
or not
decay is a world where one is in demand
to bring oneself
and be among other’s others, ghosts in our pockets,
ancestors, strangers alike share recipes
how much cold butter in the piecrust
the world does not say what to ignore
the world is internally cognating
Chicago Manual of Style
Our presidents circle one another displacing dates, times, legalities
great swathes of 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st
century prose, the presidents in a rotunda
continue to embarrass us all
each one gets an aphorism a piece
the Earth is complacent sometimes
you have to pay the hand
that shakes yours inhale the heat
Discovery the dark shadow the hand makes across paper
in dappled light from the summer walnut tree
what is the evolutionary need for a convulsion
before being fed
the starving die upon eating
if not given sugar water first
addicts shit their pants in anticipation
Diane Von Furstenberg’s mother 19 months in Auschwitz
Salads for the resistance!
Ghosts suggest new dresses this time over pants,
Vibrating spiderwebs a single white flower bodice
I love that Pasolini loved Marianne Moore
People rush to swarm in their mysteries
The ghosts who accompany them
are made of flint and chalk they stir a hot bath with your hand
A war abroad is like sitting alone outraged in a room invisible to everyone else
Athena coming in on a wind her gold gown falling out of a cloud
Athena pulling Achille’s hair back in her fist exposing his neck
whispering stop this into his ear
As he was getting far too into it with Agamemnon
If the rules of battle are not followed
massacre replaces battle
It’s an old story, one found floating in ether
an inked blank corner clipped from the half-title leaf
Diane Von Furstenberg giving birth to Anderson Cooper
before she flew back into sky
—(later founded as The Royal Humane Society, 1774)
Like the fog
most people drift more than can be seen.
We were rolling in vast turbines
out to sea. Either the night air
was drunk, or we were, what was clear
was we could not see
past the dashboard
and you yelled “we’re flying” end to end the car an excalibur
through fields as if mid- air was no way to stop so we kept driving.
Like love that draws humors from the body
the feminine of fog is youngest leaf.
Vats of cornpone fry in stately ship.
We licked the language of the country
into pure atmosphere
like a silk lining torn away, that which disappears does not talk falsely.
Red, wet, a rose about to go opens so wide to stay
a little longer,
lies love war
more than rumor, time,
memory, often moist
as to evaporate fully, gunshots on the outskirts, crappy ashen pistols thrown to grave.
Icy boots trade in shadow
as if a history to tell. At another gas station as if with soft chalk I send a loving message
to invisible friends
who nevertheless I knew were there.
Cigarettes you kept wanting one a film rolling in one’s hands
or wired around in one’s headphones. Daylight forth and forewarding,
I am loving you our hands have not curled like this since babes.
End to end you yelled “we’re flying” I love you in the wave come to taunt you
At your throat. Hiss, mist.
Fuse the other, why loathe
When we can spit our breath
out so hard
we have the rain.
Pluralistic pink umbrella is every human tongue.
War 10
Running into the enemy, in the middle of the night,
one on one, all alone, without any others around
in mud, grass — but it is not the time for anyone’s death yet —
the fates in a busy, suspended void
Withdrawn commanders and their charges sleeping it off somewhere in separate
bunkers, on opposite outskirts of the city, where the fennel keeps its sightlines
messy, smelling of sweet anise.
We can begin again. Take off our sincere
uniforms, link arms, thighs touching, and regenerate.
Like newborn mammals born blind we are,
but we are not deafened —
We stumble, paw, and miss, we have the immobilities of newness,
We cannot yet show our love too passionately.
Andrew Zawacki
from These Late Eclipses
Manufactured Housing
These Fugitive Apparitions—
pale in the argentine cast of midair—and how we came under their riverine spell, arriving at figurations wherein a trace conceals, or cancels out, the whole. My wife lies down at nightfall: leonine. As an arc of slow light. Breathless in the sharded dark, I read her arousal like braille.
Breech Baby
I remember the doctor tried to flip my younger daughter over—one part primitive wrestling match, his forearms greased to knead the womb, and one part sci-fi shadow play, tectonic on a screen: she wouldn’t budge. We worried then she’d be insolent, hard. Now I think: good.
Verkhoyansk, 100.4º F
A surveying crew is out measuring a fraction of a / fraction of a fraction / of the earth. Case numbers over 14 days are trending +52% +65%. Having shucked the sweetcorn, I chuck the husks at the brink of the woods, as dark is swooning in. The forecast calls for air conditioning.
Droste Effect
Inflicted, inflected: a scar cemented in air. Scare quotes blight my cornea: phosphor luminance, after-eclipse. World not long for this world. Under a hematoma sun, everyone I know’s been broken down, like a cardboard box. My demons hounded by demons of their own.