Prizewinners
$7,500
Kelli Russell Agodon of Kingston, Washington for Mirror Beetle; Ode to Snow in April; Early Morning.
Srinjay Chakravarti of New Delhi, India for Ikebana of the Blind.
Danielle Cadena Deulen of Madison, Wisconsin for How to Pray; Speak X.
Jeannine Hall Gailey of Redmond, Washington for Dogwood; Turning Back; He Makes Dinner.
K.A Hays of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania for Marta in Miasino.
Dove Rengger-Thorpe of Coffee Camp, New South Wales, Australia for Thelonius Monk; Hollow; Green Hope.
Rachel Richardson of Greensboro, North Carolina for Light; Spring; Mississippi.
Avery Slater of Seattle, Washington for Butterfly; Train Between Cities; That near.
Gillian Wegener of Modesto, California for Letter to My Husband Far Away; Madame Curie at Work; Confession.
$5,000
Craig Arnold of Laramie, Wyoming for Consider with Plato how; A Ubiquity of Sparrows.
Nicole Beauchamp of Wales, Wisconsin for Phillip; Lucia; Africa's Children.
Robin Ekiss of San Francisco, California for Still Life: Girl with Vase and Flowers; Looking at (and Beyond) Monet's Water Lilies; Anniversary Poem.
Miriam Bird Greenberg of Austin, Texas for West of Rovaniemi, North of Alta; Indian Summer; Translation.
Mihan Han of Richmond Hill, Ontario, Canada for All that Remains; Spring in the tundra.
Rebecca Lindenberg of Salt Lake City, Utah for The Imminent Sweetness of His Return; An Appetite for Rain; In Circles.
Tod Marshall of Spokane, Washington for Whan that Aprill with its Shoures soote; Conversion; Marrow.
Sara Michas-Martin of San Francisco, California for Sunset in the Desert; Encounter; Stalling in Maine.
Nancy K. Pearson of Provincetown, Massachusetts for How the Heart, Too; Elsewhere; String Theory.
Elizabeth Percer of Redwood City, California for Einstein's Bath; Miracle; Eve.
Felicity Plunkett of Wooloowin, Queensland, Australia for Articulate; Stitching the Night; Learning the Bones.
Eleanor Stanford of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania for Parsnips; Invention for Cavaquinho and Pedal Steel; The Mangrove.
Melissa Stein of San Francisco, California for Hinges; Trout.
Sridala Swami of Hyderabad, India for How Do You; After Twenty Years.
Rhett Iseman Trull of Greensboro, North Carolina for Heart by Heart the House; Sonogram on the Way to Earth; Human Resources.
Amanda Turner of Portland, Oregon for The Nest; In the End; Of Nectar.
$2,500
Marla Alupoaicei of Frisco, Texas for Ode to the Theory of Everything; Prodigal the Prodigal; The Cutting.
Timothy Bradford of Paris, France for Sea Voyage Instructions; Ophelia's Dream; At the Window; Before We Knew.
Temple Cone of Annapolis, Maryland for Starlings; Salve; When I Picture the Beginning of Time.
Keith Ekiss of San Francisco, California for Above Muir Beach; The Cemetery at Hall; Thunder, Range, Lightning.
Ari Finkelstein of Astoria, New York for After the Fall; The Pivotal Moment; Triolet.
Tess Jolly of Hove, East Sussex, England for Sewing Machine; Overdose; Labour.
Jennifer Key of Dallas, Texas for The Sick Dog ; West Virginia; Autumns.
Karen Llagas of San Francisco, California for Archipelago Dust; Open; Manananggal.
Idra Novey of New York, New York for About a Field; Seated Nude X; The Sonatas.
$1,000
K.B. Ballentine of Dayton, Tennessee for Countdown; The Gloaming.
Susan Briante of Dallas, Texas for Peachtree; Windows Wood Roof; And Suddenly it's the First of the Month.
Chad Davidson of Carrollton, Georgia for Anthem; Take Care; Astronomy.
Katy Didden of Columbia, Missouri for On Hearing of the Trend for Sexy Chamber Music Trios; Ode to the Ear; Planetarium(s).
Brieghan Gardner of Nottingham, New Hampshire for Studies in Yellow and Blue; Clutch.
Henrietta Goodman of Missoula, Montana for Solution; This Is How You Can Tell; Thermodynamic Elegy.
Alisa Gordaneer of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada for cicada; acolyte; saving summer.
Heather Hartley of Paris, France for To My One Love's Letter; Une Voix Céleste - at an Organ Concert; Epithalamium.
Kristen Henderson of Red Hook, New York for Poems Everywhere.
Catherine Hope of Mt. Waverley, Victoria, Australia for Autumn, Winter ... and Spring.
Nina Lindsay of Oakland, California for Fortune; Mondays are like this.
Jenna Martin of Austin, Texas for The Origin of the Swallow; I've; Friends.
Valerie B. McKee of New Haven, Connecticut for Grappling ; Last Will and Testament; What Stays.
Michelle McLean of New Brunswick, Canada for Sunflowers; Gardening Notes; Degrees of Separation.
Alexis Orgera of Santa Monica, California for From the Field of Disquiet; The Elderly Mohave Finally Speaks Her Mind.
Lisa Ortiz of San Francisco, California for Astronaut; To be Happy; Why You Can't Sleep.
Joshua Rivkin of San Francisco, California for Psalm; The Snap; Winter House, Galveston Island.
Emily Rosko of Columbia, Missouri for Vehicle; (How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love) Central Pennsylvania; Legends from a Dead-End Street in West Virginia.
$250: Honorable Mention
Allen Braden of Lakewood, Washington for Anniversary Card; Postcard Beginning with a Line from Dafydd Ap Gwilym; Birthday Card from an Escalator.
Joshua Edwards of Brooklyn, New York for Walking the Road to Cuajimoloyas; Adversus solemn neloquitor; Sonnet for Summer Winds.
Chloe Green of Clagiraba, Queensland, Australia for A meow in the morning.
Jennifer Grotz of Greensboro, North Carolina for The Sidewalk; Rescue; The Umbrella.
Gwenda Hague of Nundle, Australia for Secrets.
Matthew Ladd of Columbus, Ohio for For My Sister on Her Birthday; Two Trees.
Christopher Locke of Miami, Florida for No Siesta; Open; End of American Magic.
Joan T. Miles of Eupora, Mississippi for Anticipating Twilight.
Beverly Monestier of San Antonio, Texas for A Czech Woman Hears a 1721 Stradivarius in Dvorak's "American"; Who Owns These Words; Journey.
Kristi Lynn Moos of San Francisco, California for A Hat for Natalie.
Vivian Nguyen of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia for Eulogy for Vincent Van Gogh; The Expedition; Classroom walls.
Steve Norwood of Lewisville, Texas for the effort; resurrect; vein and cleft.
Allison Seay of Greensboro, North Carolina for Concerning the Incident at the Busstop, 1985; Dear Sleepwaker; Letter to the Artist: Mother and Daughter.
Alison Stine of New York, New York for The Magician's Wife; Our Three; Observation Unbelieving.
Kristen Tracy of Kalamazoo, Michigan for Tree Turning Red; Awake.
Shoshanna Wingate of St. John's, NL, Canada for Neighbors (Chapel Hill, North Carolina).
Our
thanks to everyone who entered and
congratulations to our winners!
Kelli Russell Agodon
If one could conclude as to the nature of the Creator from a study of this creation
it would appear that God has a special fondness for stars and beetles.
-J.B.S. Haldane, British geneticist 1892-1964
Because I tried to reflect
on what was, a mirror beetle
appeared in my garden.
I opened my hand and the beetle
flew my palm, a miracle
beneath wing-coverings.
As I passed the bamboo,
I discovered a universe
in a web, a red spider nebula,
a Beehive Cluster circling above.
Sometimes I looked to Scarabaeus,
the beetle made from stars,
because it seemed easier to trust
a constellation.
Insects disappeared, came and went
with the seasons, but stars circled
a dependable dance on the ceiling.
I'm learning how life's created
from a galaxy of surprise
occasions - wind chimes playing a concerto for moths,
a damselfly sewing
the last stitch of summer
to August's fallen hem.
And when the mirror beetle arrived,
I felt the cocoon I was wearing
begin to unravel while Betelgeuse
brightened Orion's shoulder.
And here on earth,
I trusted chance a little more
and the glow mirrored in my hand.
-for Peggy Shumaker
I offer praise for dirt,
for snowflakes, for fingernails
digging deeper, holey
garden gloves, holy
tulips surviving a surprise
snowfall in spring.
This is not life
according to Western Garden,
unexpected weather,
weathered blooms on a cold cold day.
I told you once I'd make choices
from compassion
and I became the Golden Artist,
the Mona Lisa, a Blushing Lady
with roots weaving
beneath the hyacinths.
Our rice-paper gardens,
where a pagoda of snow
can cover a Concerto, a Sunset Carpet.
I broke through a fence
of icicles to walk the melting path
below, I found evidence
of belonging - two pairs of footsteps
remaining in the last patch of snow.
Note: Golden Artist, Mona Lisa, Blushing Lady, Concerto and Sunset Carpet are names of different types of tulip varieties.
While others drift through dreams,
I taste juneberries still cool
from the night air.
This new world, blooming
with high rises of evergreens,
an eagle's penthouse view,
I move like a traveler
from berry to perfect berry.
As the sunrise begins,
the sky suggests that time may be
the color of peaches.
This neighborhood rising,
children wake, eat breakfasts
of figs and toast.
The farmer has opened
the barn doors, tossed hay
to the horses out in the fields.
What do we need except this
morning where waxwings
appear like blessings?
How can we forget
that even morning glory
can be beautiful
as it wraps itself
around our fences to hide
what separates you from me,
my house from yours.
Srinjay Chakravarti
He picks up vowels and consonants,
shape and form as the subject
of his fingers: dexterous
and facile, exploring
the impossible fragrances
of jasmine or lily.
He starts with the white nouns,
the basic folds in his alphabet;
then come the verbs
rustling in blue pleats,
and the adjectives forming
themselves into pink creases.
Working with his second
sight of crisp movements,
the grammar of touch and feel
harmonizes textures into rhythm
with his color schemes of thoughts,
perfumed with imagination's pollen.
Stretching a point too far -
on a flat sheet, he crinkles
compound curves out of its locus;
spiral gerundives of yellow,
vertexes twisted gently
into cutting edges, visualized
in the blackness of permanent night
into cascades of flowers: buds and blooms
of rose, lotus, gladiolus.
In his hands blossom the ritual
petals of inflexions and hyperboles:
curving branches, scattered leaves,
patterning an illusion of foliage.
Wildflowers, captured manifold
in squeeze and press, squash and push -
Saburo Kase's nostrils
still tingle with the blossoms
he had smelt as a child
on the mountains near his home,
when vision was not yet lost.
Now it is origami's paper magic
that parses down his constructions,
that eternizes them into immortelles
in his fingers' vernacular.
Living in the moment, still
center of the now, an old man
always in the dark,
but never without light;
his hands always redolent
of beauty.
Saburo Kase (b. 1926): one of the world's greatest origami artists.
Danielle Cadena Deulen
Almond branches, wilting over the girl, look as if
they are bowing, and the line of her neck follows -
or perhaps - it might be too much to say - they follow.
She's only a girl, after all, walking without permission
beneath a dangerously dim sky, in a grove large enough
to lose a girl in - a girl's body in - the roadside fruit stands
shut up and emptied by now. Only a few cars heading home.
It's 1964 in southern California and my mother's run away.
She's packed two pears, her new white dress, and a bible
in the basket at the head of her bike, ridden until the lots
stretched so vast they couldn't be contained by fences,
the sidewalks sprawling into gravel alongside the highway,
She's gone looking for Canaan, or someplace closer
to promise than Orange County, a dirt backyard enclosed
by cyclone fences, her tanned brothers brooding
on the back porch, their large, dark eyes already done.
She wants an angel to arrive. She wants sleep without
the dream of a distant house on fire, across a narrow valley,
smoke rising so quickly it blackens the sky. She can't yet
read the gathering clouds, the fever of consummation.
In the almond orchard, her head bowed, wilted
blossoms scent her long, dark hair, her damp skin.
My mother doesn't know how to pray for what she wants,
only to imitate the wind in her breath. Irrigation ditches
draw long, dry sighs. The blooms threaten to catch fire.
Between rows, dirt is mapped with tiny tributaries - not
the lines that lead to Canaan and its burdens - not water,
but a promise of water. Where water will run when it rains.
She taught me how to say hello and goodbye in Khmer -
sounds I no longer remember the feel of in my mouth,
like the broth she once poured over my tongue, something
of salt, spice, heat, or the incense she burned each night
before a small brass god whose many arms gestured toward
many exits, or points of arrival, the places I'd never been:
Here, she said, dropping her finger on a globe to a country
of blue and green, its hills warming beneath her hesitation
before - all the way to here - sliding over mountains, oceans,
memory, to the classroom we shared for hours each day,
waiting for bells to ring us home. In Cambodia, January
is a dry season , she once said of our birthday month,
and in summer monsoons make floods . I imagined blue sky
soaking up green fields, the sun an orange fingerprint
blotted in the air, like the small, round scars on her belly
that she saw me see when we undressed to dress for bed.
Cigarette burns , she admitted, once we turned out the light and
our four arms rested beneath her thick blankets, but I was small ,
my Mother says nothing to ... but she finished the sentence in Khmer,
a language, and also a word meaning speak x and I love you ,
depending on how your tongue hits the consonants and where
the vowels are placed: above, below, in front of, after.
In English, her last name was Oak, spelled like the tree.
Her first name, the memory of flight.
Jeannine Hall Gailey
I grew up with the uneven petals
of dogwood.
Spring for me was not the pink faces
of cherry blossoms,
not the wide white faces of magnolia,
not skunk cabbages or plum.
The tough and twisted branches
grafted last winter on the dogwood
lifted me up.
And you wonder
how I grew this knotty,
beauty burned at the edges,
blooming before my leaves
even caught the light.
You can't go home again,
because the house you grew up in has been razed,
along with the rose garden and oak trees and fossil rocks.
You keep touching the place like a scar,
trying to figure out what was lost. You try rebuilding,
stone upon stone, a little ghost in the window and a cat on the lawn.
What were you looking for? Here, the mountains don't have any trees,
and that sound you hear is the ocean.
One by one you take out the chairs, the books, the bats from your hair.
Artifacts you remember your life by.
So many pages with worn-out handwriting,
and a phone number of someone you've forgotten.
You turn around and it's burning outside;
maybe it's the moon, blood-red over the city lights, or the angry maple leaves,
or a fire made of leaves and the severed limbs of trees and roots,
or just the mist around a ship that's gone astray on the harbor.
Honeymoon, a circle of vessels to keep your spirit in. Those bird calls a map,
that last broken branch a totem, a path to guide you home.
The thick knife gleams
under your sinewed hands,
slicing carrot, onion, garlic, pepper,
scattering slivers into the air,
staining your fingers
with their gold juices.
You chop so quickly the definite line
between "hand" and "knife"
dissolves. You strew pine nuts
into the skillet, listen for the right sting
and sizzle of oil and wine,
waiting to feed me the work
of your hands, your broken finger,
the tiny cuts and burns
that lace and scar your surfaces.
K.A.Hays
Outside of Miasino, the cows mingle
with the flies and the Miasino churchbells fold
into the cowbells' clangs, the music having given way
to sound, the street to weed and broken stone.
Like rain in tin buckets, the bells keep panging dully
from the necks of cows. They say, for the cows,
Still here.
And Marta, it is a fight: even the fresco
on the roadside shrine is bleached, rubbing out
the people painted there, saints maybe,
whom someone hoped to make immortal.
Still here, they once said, you can be sure.
Even the flies hum it as they fly.
Marta, in Miasino this morning, you were yelling
and holding out your arms, running ahead
of your mother, who called,
Piano, Marta, piano!
Look at the grass, how it puckers, flips up,
bends down, and is soon threshed for hay.
Marta, you will hear piano always.
The churchbells, cracking, hear it,
and the cows that lie down in the meadow.
A room will say it, and the night, and the body,
aging. Even, at times, the mind.
I am telling you, Marta: you must be as ornery
as the flies, as stubborn as the bells,
calling over the shrines, over the whited-out saints,
over even your lovely mother when she goes -
when the sky has gone green.
When the day lifts a hand over you,
ready to swat , to come down,
Marta, run ahead. Still here.
Hold out your arms.
Dove Rengger-Thorpe
Jazz oozes from the stereo
and mingles with a cicada's percussion
on a late night in early autumn.
Thelonius Monk in a mellow light,
the piano, the saxophone, the trumpet
move slowly, one, two, three.
The lamp's yellow glow lights the rug,
the wooden floor gleams and
all is easy on the couch.
The shaker and cymbals collide
softly with the keys, while gentle fingers
of brass probe the air, leaving me tender,
barely breathing after a long trickle of notes
tickles my ear and then dies away.
The cicada remains, its midnight music
suddenly centre-stage.
Echo
comes back to me
hollow
with the sound of loss.
The way a shell
mourns the ocean
you mourn
for me.
The small patch of green hope has dried up
leaving withered stalks
shuffling sere, dry scraping on the wind.
Deep below the worms turn and spin, swallowing
and shitting dirt,
churning the past into the future.
I am faithless. Heart worn.
The worms know
the grass will grow again.
Rachel Richardson
The light touches everything.
No, my daughter sees:
the light touches anything
that sticks out its hand to be touched.
Here, on the jutting corner of wall
in her bedroom, it pleats in rectangles,
making moving, overlapping chunks
from the hard edge of window,
bending around corners
as if they weren't there, as if it could
reach everything.
Here, on the top dresser drawer,
half open with socks
and nightgowns, white
pushed around in drifts of fabric,
it smears worn and soft, following
the wood's grain, working its way
into her bedclothes.
On the sill, it gathers and sparks,
bounces off her little glass creatures,
glinting, reflecting from their backs
as if they're sunning: a tiger
lounging, outstretched; an elephant
marching in the heat.
From her bed, she watches it slip closer.
Here, she holds out her hands. Land here .
Water hasn't been this high in years. New ponds swamp
the roads; pines sink in mud. Crawfish burrow
in ditches, crawling out to the street, one after another smashed.
I know the way water ruins - I've mourned
the tall emaciated stalks and sculpted cypress stumps
that stud our lakes. But I can't banish the rain -
it fills the yard, puddles in low places, pings
into a bucket left out. I'll wait for what I know
is coming: the purple sky blazing, cracked
straight through, and another day ravaged. Green.
I'm going to tell it like this:
the river's brushed
silk, its boats cradled, cattle calm on
banks, a synchronicity
of water wheels. I'm a child and
you're one too, and
cotton fields are opening before
us. This wailing unwailed,
a photographic trick - sorrow's
no museum.
Unhinged bones rest safe inside coffins.
On the banks, rattling cane,
a cropduster's dive, the small-town
statued saint.
A pilot corrects the error in
a compass, they say; I'll
trace the river backward , to where
antiqued portraits
pose families on roofs. They're lovely,
since they're gone. No river
on fire, no gas lines snapped - none of it
today, unreach-
able for weeks. This is what I should
have said before: towns built
on mud, we love you. Bring back
the drought year blues,
old Pontchartrain bridge. Cover the dead
with lace. Here's a story
to send us off to sleep: let's say
the levees held,
say bread and sugar graced each table ...
Avery Slater
I stooped to the wings like roosting kites
to watch the pause in flight sip dust and shade
but found crushed innards dried and stuck
to gravel's schist and quartz. I took
its edge of wing by fingers, tip to tip.
Its amethyst, its blue and red, its furred face like a tiger:
what flower dreamed this camouflage
to eyelash-legs, neat lack of scent?
My fingerprint, left glistening with feldspar-talc:
a bruise-remaindered cosmos.
This hinge of what would seem too thin
for sides, in glyphs like clover leaves,
describes a labyrinth of stain;
the other side - beside its eye - grisaille.
Its penciled abdomen
was ghost already of a staircased
worm. Its death: less afterthought
than daring, in these cupping hands
haphazard gusts of air's applause
and all left-rushing wind to pick its lock.
Past the glass, the stationary green
of April blurs. We patiently head towards
our separate addresses, caught between
the drop of evening and our window seats.
Moving at a clip that stifles words,
we've brought ourselves to leave the sure
hospitables for this pane-shaking speed.
Life pools, renews, shore-held as any sea.
For every exit, entrance...but before:
spines ease into slump. We prop up feet.
Hearts leap through long goodbyes and corridors
where footsteps fade or near. Mean-times we lean
heads emptied by departure, having boarded.
There is the hope all ends will be afforded.
-the Etruscan tomb painted for "The Hunter"; Tarquinia.
Celebrating death has ended.
Parties of the mourners leave,
brave with shouts and narrowing music...
through the sapling-staked pavilion.
Trout-like, darkened lanterns nod
with wind-blown, rattling fabric.
Thinner than a laurel's bark,
than frost along a laurel branch -
paused mid-step, drawn by their exit -
one deer steps across
earth's tamped surface, and survives
as sketch, as painted shade. No moon
so tissue-fine: her pelt of light,
her hesitant, gloved bone.
She is the last alive. She hangs
her brow to dust, as brushed into
this final scene, a tempered hue.
Below the baking fields of grasses,
walls a bulb illuminates
are vivid, still. Through lightless acres
roots reach, unaware,
to thinnest edge:
she is that near...
She is the threshold where she waits,
dividing earth's long siege from air.
Missing bones; the hunter, taken.
Banners writhe and figure wind.
Depth, attending, crouches; holds
where one bright-painted gap in darkness
keeps the deer...
she is that touch,
that brushing near.
Gillian Wegener
The house is not empty without you.
It thrums and bumps, the walls relax and sigh.
The water heater dutifully comes on, rumbles
with heat, waiting for your shower to start.
How many times today have I heard
your truck in the driveway, the floor creak
with your step, felt your breath against
the back of my neck. At least that often,
I've turned to tell you something,
or hand you a piece of cheese or plum,
but it is two more days until you return.
It is just me in this room, with this plum,
with this good fortune, and the far flung love.
The ink runs across the cramped pages.
Paper can never hold every thought.
Light spills in around the door sill. What time
is it, she calls, is it morning?
She carries radium in her pocket sometimes,
malleable, vaguely warm, a whole world burning.
Words are nearly meaningless. Even formulas,
sprawling across the page like the dance-paths of bees,
cannot contain this newborn meaning.
Pierre brings the tea. They bend together over the work.
The tea gathers the chill of the murmuring room.
Pierre carries the stuff in his waistcoat, shows it to friends
for amusement. Marie keeps a few grains of radium at her bedside.
It makes a soft light, a private light, almost like the moon.
Pitchblende, radium, polonium -
the word radioactivity is hers.
She never realizes - the notebooks are dangerous,
ink glowing on each bright and terrible page.
I never know how to start a poem,
so I scan the first lines of other people's work,
a poetic peeping tom, wanting to see how
they find a way in. I climb in the window
after them to see how they do it, how they
become so intimate with words, how they
finger them and pick them up and put them
down and feint and fall and finally taste them,
first gingerly, then with the whole yearning body.
I mean no harm. And I don't stay long.
Just long enough to see their thrill
and then I'm back out the window,
dawn's poking at the horizon,
I'm heading down the sidewalk,
pencil in hand and a morning's work ahead.
Craig Arnold
the mind might be a cage
of birds would it be busy
a basket of caught starlings
jack-jacking away
or quiet a canary
under a velvet cozy
a parrot shabby gray
who has heard the same words
called out so many times
he is tired of answering
would it grow into its prison
as a half-pair of lovebirds
who headbutts his reflection
in the bell-jangled mirror
who after awhile alone
forgets how to sing
maybe a bird who needs
no cage who is his own
cage an owl in sunshine
a swan with a clipped wing
for Harvey
A certain traveler who knew many continents was asked what he found most remarkable of all.
He replied: the ubiquity of sparrows. - Adam Zagejewski
Sparrow who drags a footlong crust of bread behind him
across the floor of the Staten Island Ferry Terminal
Sparrow your speckled breast and the black beads of your eyes
your blue-gray cap and the sudden explosion of your wings
Sparrows dashing to any spot where sparrows are gathered
Sparrow whose head is pecked bald from so many quarrels
Sparrow hopping across the patio toes together
waiting for you to turn your back to plunder the table
Sparrow who cocks her head to one side as if doubtful
Sparrow beating her winds to haul off a half strawberry
Sparrow bandito with black mask and bandanna who robs her
Sparrow the poet's lover keeps close in her lap
to make him jealous nipping her finger hard harder
Sparrow who follows every flick of your hands moving
Sparrow chasing a papery butterfly flapping and snapping
the butterfly each time impossibly escaping
the sparrow savage the sparrow persistent is there no mercy
Sparrow who spies from far off the flag of a shaken tablecloth
Sparrow chick dropped on a lawn on a windowsill
hunched in its feathers not knowing enough to move
Sparrow roasted over a piece of bread to catch the entrails
Sparrow whose feet barely sway the twig of a willow
who leaps into the air with the smallest of leaf-shivers
Sparrow the color of dust and mud and dry grass-stems
Sparrows kept on the wing by farmers banging saucepans
kept flying until they drop a soft heap of bodies
Where are the sparrows when next spring comes in a cloud of locusts
Sparrow who says cheap sparrow who says Philip Philip
Sparrow who keeps the secrets of wistful men and women
Sparrow shot by a boy with a pellet gun brought down
but not quite killed sparrow under a boy's bootsole
crackles like brown October leaves a wing trembles
Sparrow whose fall from the sky is noticed by what god
Sparrow who squats in the bluebird nest in the martin houses
who moves in with a gang of thugs and there goes the neighborhood
Sparrow who shot Cock Robin and later was hanged like a thief
Sparrow astray in the airport tracked by the one-eyed guns
Sparrow said to have brought the English unto belief
Sparrow who flew through the king's hall as he sat to table
in winter a little life who fluttered out of the snowstorm
warm rambunctious scuffling under the high-pitched rafters
Sparrow who stumbled in one door and out of another
between two blind and endless corridors of nothing
the one forever before the one forever after
Nicole Beauchamp
Car rusting in the Namibian bush,
abandoned
like him
to numbing waves of sniffed glue,
swirling into a stupor in the stifling dark.
Police came with food
when they remembered the boy
left to live in the car.
They came only sometimes
because so many children live
in places like cars.
But by then he'd been there many years and
forgotten
his name and age,
dying because there wasn't much else to do.
How does God bear these things,
14 million times over?
Each morning now Phillip rolls off his mat on the tiles
and prepares the younger children
a mass of gray mahangu porridge,
which they eat with their fingers
in the cool slants of light.
He comes home from school
in a coarse blue uniform,
wipes the steaming dust off his shoes before lunch.
We ask him about his examinations,
friends and rugby matches,
and call him fourteen years old.
Sometimes Phillip has visions
of Jesus collecting grapes
gently into airy pockets,
storing them safely
like tears.
Dead unnamable things
live in her head and stomach.
All these words are only bruising
sound to a shaking girl, robbed
of all good things.
Speak into her.
Speak car
and red triangle and eiers ,
pencil and baaikostuum and music ,
lunch, seven eight nine,
do you want to go for a walk?
So loved the world.
Speak kaas and biltong and the sky is blue ,
speak throaty Afrikans and stunted English,
Let her mimic your holy words.
Speak healing through clay letters
rainbowed on a plastic tabletop
to spell out L-U-C-I-A and N-I-C-O-L-E.
Speak a Father who won't hurt
school
sweet dreams, Lucia
let's go home.
Speak to her, tenderly enough
to raise the dead.
We are many
calling for redemption
for family and sweet
crowing mornings of light.
We dance in sharp movements
of our hips, we smile wide.
We swell the continent
with life, much of it
happening in streets of dust.
We fight for a blanket
for food and life
for our little sister, who we'd carry
on our backs through the lonely bush
if she needed it. And she has.
We know Death.
It is a sluggish thief
grasping our mother piece by piece
as we smooth her hot skin
and try to keep the floor clean.
It wakes us up screaming
again.
But give us a voice,
and from our stomachs we'll sing
Hope, who is often
the only one remembering
our names.
We know how the ball of ginger sun
hangs in the arid stillness
of the melting day.
We sleep in the dust
under bold stars.
Robin Ekiss
The girl holds the empty vase,
but out the window
its emptiness is erased:
on the hillside, the grass bends
away from the wind
but does not break.
In the winter, it's green
buried beneath brown -
still there in the ground, though.
The world is amazing and amazed:
the gillyflower and the green almond
on its spare wrist of stem,
the sparrows circling
in the thin, high air,
and life there -
embarrassment of coins
at the bottom of a well.
What makes the water shine?
What fills her mind with such hope
not even birds can tell,
who sing their halo to the lamplight,
under which she waits
for Spring to break
this interminable hush,
to deliver something
as forgiving as a few petals
into her hands.
It's not about the water
or the flowers,
but the sky reflected in them,
only you must choose
to see the expanse of light
at the bottom of the lake
that makes the flat world
take its shape. On the surface,
one illuminates the other:
before there was day, night;
before water, light -
the pale peace of morning
in cloud cover, the promise
of one day stretched out
beside another. Beside me,
what washes over you
is river silt, returned to our bed.
In that mauve hour,
before the sun breaches sleep
and breaks the surface
of imagination, there's a joy
as hidden as the face of a fish
beneath a fern. Impermanent as words,
foreign-sounding as rain,
it is joy, after all - not a trick
of the eye, but the hard art
of looking away
from the darkness
that separates us
from each other.
Married to imagination:
you are the bright pole
I navigate toward
on wind-washed seas.
My trip-to-the-moon,
my immunity;
what is love, if not
terrific responsibility?
Beside you, I'm the bare root
of a flowering tree.
There's nowhere in the world
I'd rather be.
Miriam Bird Greenberg
What does it mean to move north, cant your whole body
toward the sea and burning , an entire matchbook
set aflame at once? Here, taiga grown wild
with rosehips, rock wall and traces of salt
on the sea stones at shoreline.
Map drawn across the body of a woman,
eighteenth century beauty
crinolined, leaning into some inner ocean
with her right hand raised: here, fields of rocks, the wind,
then liquor stores, fireworks, an unmanned crossing. Cross.
Hitching, a woman stops for us, rolling cigarettes one-handed; later
a carpenter; then a Sami radio journalist
turned math teacher. We drink the water here, icy, with our
cupped hands from the rivers.
The day luminesces; long past ten we are paused
on the roadside, waiting. The firth is cut with cragged
stones, small Sami houses shut up for the summer
and the branch A-frames for drying fishing nets empty.
Two degrees from a horizon on the Arctic ocean
I roll cigarettes one-handed, watch the spires of small boats
rise out of the ashlight at nightfall:
low-masted and white. What edge of land
have we come to, winter reindeer
foraging in the streets, low green hillocks birthed
spectral from the inlet? I squat, gutting fish with an antler-
handled knife, cut
so every bone , over the fire, pulls easily away. Even stopped,
I am moving: what I have been searching for,
if there is something,
has left. On the walls of our tent the moon through pines
is tracing a nest or cocoon in the shadows,
the wind - listen, hushing - is calling, in dark's early chill,
a name: but whose? Not mine.
Imagine this land gone back to green. A girl stands
ankle-deep in the dried grass, the tiny white stars of crocus
are mouths opening up around her through the thatch
of the yard, point six directions at the sky,
at the bellies of dogs, streets away, tangling and knotted
in weedy alleys. Shut up houses shift east down the slope
of streets toward silty ditches separating fields
of sorghum from cows facing into the wind. Clouds turn murky
under night, heat lightening low on a horizon of rooftops. The girl
opens her mouth, in the heavy air she sings a veil of gray
silk pluming like smoke in the wild traffic of starlings'
shrill cries, low voices of the fighting, teeth bared, of dogs
or men, or their ghosts. Here, night prizes every lock
and crevice. Here, she shifts in the wind, has stepped
through split window frames onto the porch dense
with wicker, wringer washing machines, the rot
and mold of old clothes. Then into the grass, she sings. Here,
dust devils whirl in the streets, flatter and rattle
the rusted hinges of mailboxes, break suddenly in the bramble
of yards gone to bloodweed. There in the grass, a girl sings.
"The meaning of a word is its use in the language." -Wittgenstein
In the third week of October, let the fresh prints of a fox on snow
remind you of a procession under willow trees
to the creek's edge. Let fabric scraps tied on the cedars beg
forgiveness for trespass beyond the yellow dust of the roads.
Let the low orange moon and its rabbit's body come to mean mortality,
yours and mine, a brief distraction. The scarved women
selling berries here walked miles in woolen stockings
through this forest, and double that last decade; the men selling old radios,
rusted mechanics' equipment and stray electrical wiring,
are gathered at this roadside to rid themselves of this unwilling gift
of the past.
This fading thread on the purple-papered branches,
let it serve as thanks for the orange moon, the slow forgetting
of these oxidized tools, these torn-out wires.
Mihan Han
There is a photograph
on the mantle above my fireplace.
My mother is standing slightly off
center on an egg-white smear of beach.
In the background there is a blur, sepia-toned:
an island with steep limestone cliffs.
Her expression is faded, unreadable.
I prefer to imagine her smiling though
she may well be grimacing (time is a thumb
smudging out the details).
One hand is on her hip, the other holding
my (impossibly small) hand.
Although you cannot see it
(the crux of our joined hands
obscures it) hidden in her pocket
there are pebbles.
This is all that remains:
a ghost on a beach behind glass and silver frame (lingering
on the mantle above my fireplace),
pebbles covered with dust like parchments of ancient skin.
How precise and knobbed as the small bones in her hand,
How scattered and unintentional as love.
How can hardened permafrost know
that life is germinating within
when frozen landscapes are white and
starched as the hospital linens before
she descended, abruptly as
spring in the tundra?
When melting snow perfuses
the swelling hills and creased valleys,
sprouting capillaries around glacial
till embedded like fibroids
in a womb,
when the blue people descend
from their distant mountains, hoisting the sun
to illuminate
crimson fields blossoming
between her legs,
the north wind is a newborn crying,
at last!
in my mother's arms.
Rebecca Lindenberg
"But I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty ..." Marcel Proust, Swann's Way.
Glass, he said, is like
hardened water. I replied, without
looking at him, Don't you mean ice?
He stared and answered,
Not at all. He was
governed by correspondences
I didn't understand -
The flight of water down stairs
had nothing to do with spoiled carpeting.
He stood ankle-deep in a flood of ruin,
grinning.
I remember, he told me once, the first time
I remembered you. Only he
could make that make sense.
That's how I knew I would come
to love you. He loved me.
Among other things.
We were in L'Aquila and it was raining
like it's raining now, only that rain
battered the pavement in whatever Italian is
for battered the pavement.
Some grace-note consonant combination
spa or sfu or gli, or it should be -
something that means both the sound
of rain ruining itself upon the ground
and the gleam of reflected half-light
in pools, trembling like a soul.
We went to see the fortress and the art
guarded therein, but I couldn't
bring myself to make room for those
in my mind. Instead, I let myself be
distracted by the luminescent green
grass around the fortress,
lining the moat like emerald felt.
The rain brought it forth, the rain
that soaked us, that pooled
in the corners of memory, seeped
into that deep aquifer so the grass,
when I go there, is eternally vivid.
We stood on the lawn, your son
hurling pinecones into the deep moat.
We stood side-by-side in the rain,
the green, the what is, the what ever is.
"la diritta via era smarrita"
Days, these days, are just
coffee breaks between
sleep and sleep -
daylight anemic compared
with the vivid wholeness
of dreams. I have been sorry
to open my eyes, to open
my windows and let in
the smell of wet leaves,
of another
world misting away,
and of forgetting.
I don't want to forget
a long bridge,
a wide churning river,
faces rising up into its surface,
what we feel in dreams
that life gives no occasion for.
In my dreams, I am guilty
of a thousand crimes. For lying,
I am sentenced to walk
in a circle until I die. I plead
with my sister to buy back my body,
not to let them throw me away.
An adulterous thought made
flesh bends over me, a seduction
amid curtains, curtains blown
open and only then do I recall
that I am married. Only then
do I wake with the smell of hyacinth
still burning in my nose.
I wish I had a voice
big enough for this much feeling -
panic let down like a veil
over the reasoning mind,
and suddenly I am floating in space
where is my insulin?
what is my blood sugar?
why is the moon so close?
Falling, falling
through a river full of monsters,
through exacted penance,
through a would-be lover's
protective embrace and back
into this world, shivering,
covers thrown off, aware
of skin laid bare, so much
I would never now unknow.
Tod Marshall
When the flute music arose from the back of the bus,
the man next to me fitfully slept,
thin snore drizzling from the corner of his mouth
to hang in air, shadow of a black bird, rocky caw
of lost hours and days, then gone.
He rode from Wenatchee to meet a sweetheart
in Seattle he'd emailed for months - a picture in his pocket,
crease right through her forehead
as if to announce everything divides into what was
and what could be. Earlier, the woman in front of us
juggled two babies in diapers,
and their beautiful energy wore her beautiful energy
to snappy exhaustion. I smiled at the oldest child's
white bloom of a tooth, played peak-a-boo
over the seat, and fell toward my own sleep
where dreams became a shudder awake
to lumbering bus noises
and that ever-present question, who am I?
No different from anyone: another pilgrim heading for home. And then
that first note rose
tingling in the air, catching crystals of frost on the windows,
hushing the hydraulic hiss of bus gears,
the shuffle of people
fidgeting in too-small seats,
salty smell of sweat
soaked into, through and beyond
the habit of fabric to take it all in: if I said
that these scraps of desire - the quiet torture of dreams
announced by the quiver of a slumping head, the faulty
twitch of shoulders clunking into another, the mouthy smack-smack
of jaws chewing some new hope for tomorrow - changed
into a misty shimmer the passengers wore
as they slowly rose to morning,
if I said that we awoke, some without eyes to see, some without ears
to hear, some without a single buck
or a clean change of clothes, no hope in the world
except to get off a cramped and musty bus,
would that be enough for you to hear the clear music of a flute?
I never saw the musician -
high school girl shuttling between parents, a young man
trying to remember a professor's lesson, shivering angel from Ellensberg only lonely for home -
but someone played those tender notes,
and the bus did what buses do,
climbed the pass, crested the pass, and descended, chased by dawn
into the mystical plunder of a new day.
Always the sunflowers open
toward light, smaller ones first,
and later, larger blossoms,
food that will feed sparrows
for weeks. In the back yard,
compost heats from the core,
banana peel, egg shells, and onion
skin mulched to mush. Rotten
tomatoes on the heap, shriveled
celery stalks. Coffee grounds
are fuel, a friend says. Some-
one else wonders about snakes
and rats. Raccoons. At night,
skunks pick through the pile.
Easy to scare away. Dutiful
steward with a shovel and rake,
sunburn on my neck and shoulders,
I hunch toward dirt and shadows
bind my body with birdsong
and bright yellow,
human bones only slowly
turning to meet the sun.
Swim in the lake,
seven hundred feet of glaciated cliffs
surrounding the shore.
Dry each other
slowly with pack towels
and slumber through the afternoon.
Stir first to catch cutthroat.
Skewer them with alder sticks,
rub oil and red pepper
in the gutted bellies
and roast the fish - even eat
crisp tails with sliced apples
and a sprinkle of cinnamon.
Burn heads and bones in the coals,
glowing skeletons that summon stars
to sleep in the water
near smoke and pines,
replaced in the sky
by your sparks, new constellations
that rise and drift into night.
Sara Michas-Martin
No birds have to lift from swaying palms,
sail through or touch down
in this poem.
Under the sky's
ripening pink sash, the city
doesn't need to be beautiful.
The night unfurls its cape
and the sweet music of cicadas
may or may not swell the silence.
When the moon, a polished ivory tusk
rises gently in our window
it need not ensnare our gaze -
with you, dear love
I'm happy
sipping tap water, opening our mail.
At the end of the show hundreds of lighters pierce the dark,
the crowd illuminates its self and I see someone I know -
his beard longer, his head blonder, waving a flicker of light
but I can't place him, only the image of lightning bugs swirling
when I was a kid in the car with my sister
and she tapped on the side of a jam jar full of them
to make them blink, and when they didn't blink
she unscrewed the top and shook them over my head.
This is how memory works sometimes, opening
at random all over you as you stare dizzy almost
at someone familiar and they stare back, and the tongue, frantic
hunts his name, not Mark, not Matt, and how
could I forget - our race up Mt. Cadillac to watch the sun
replace the moon, to watch it ease up from the Atlantic
waiting there at the top, in our soaked parkas, frozen
and finally, it comes, his name - out loud, I say it ... Ben?
After the toothbrush and the long johns -
the jammed zipper, a soft scarf
for the face, I blink out of a body
unwilling to move, The bathroom
is out behind the root tangle
and the chilled length of midnight;
the bucket, the other's answer
to inconvenience, is in the corner
behind curled book covers
and a bottle of soap called rain.
All day I drank water drawn
from the lake's insides. There were
four days under my nails
when I dug into the leather
of an orange peel. Remember
to order the glue and generic tea.
Remember Kate's letter, and
the ceiling drips in the pump house.
There are loons here, their sad pitch
skates on water and the moose
story - first thaw, Davis in a wet suit
lowered into a septic field
to rescue the animal half lodged
in ice. Look how my breath
flowers against the flashlight beam
and look at my small things:
pens, stained cups, a raincoat
on a hook What holds me to this bed
is made of gasoline, plastic food,
a checkbook that inspires
electricity - it's just a bucket. My sister
after thirty hours gave birth
to a quiet child named
Grace. I'll pray for her
to find a day emptied of clocks. A river.
Sticks to shape like boats. I'm going
to the bucket now, everywhere
dirt and needles I've loosened
from the ground. Under me
this thin rise of steam, this
little thunder. I am learning
again to be mortal.
There is just this.
Nancy K. Pearson
How he dragged himself across a two lane interstate,
through the tussle of marsh, past a coyote den littered
with fifty or so cat collars and laid himself under a gigantic clowning
hydrangea bush, how the wind unplugged the sand dunes, grain by grain
all day, how even the ponds lifted a little, un-anchoring
from the pink cords of lilies, the tacked down pods of rain, everything
rose up to meet him, I was crossing the street in a hurry late
for bussing tables, green bracts floated from a stem, I did not hear
his small mew darting up, a heart minnowing forward, how both hip bones closed
toward the center where a wheel crushed earlier that morning,
wings folded around a stomach, a song bird without hinges,
how he could not stand, how could he
and yet, later, how I found him on the bed curled beside the shivering dog.
That winter the wrapper leaves fell off every head of lettuce.
The cutters and packers worked all day, stooping
between the frozen rows, rising creaked and creased
in the gray sunlight, whole families bent at the waist,
broken midrib and pink-veined, the lettuce,
the slick lemon and orange trees smoking,
diesel smudge pots burning all night, steamed-up vans patrolling
the cities for homeless dogs or men, the benches
were empty, the blankets ran out, trains derailed
on Chickamauga lake, my brother drove his new Toyota in circles,
Holiday Bowl closed early, trees pulled open shingles, seeds scooted,
in the bathroom my mother stood over me squirting Nice n' Easy
in a line across my darkening part, her eyeliner wet, the yellow gone from everything now,
sons and daughters bent low in the crunchy loam,
flood lights rowing over the bald heads of lettuce,
over and over, together knife through root, the cold unlucky
miles of heavy lemons dropping elsewhere.
Tying leaves on a stick, all day
the fields rising yellow with sugar
the trees turning their unbound pages,
geese skimming wet chapters, crossing miles
over the midnight pixel, electric doo-dad highway
a son is driving, is saying, heavenly God, is saying,
heavenly God I cannot reach her from here, eight hundred miles away
his mother loses her eyebrows, her nose hair,
bobby pins un-open on a table, all night the unwieldy strings
of morphine vibrate, piano keys gather dust, crab grass dissects a bed
of roses, the moon orphans all the stars, somewhere
the red kilns glow, wet towels from the bedside exhale
on a hinge of sun, a namesake is lost, harvesters loop rough twine
around tobacco leaves, a life depends on gathering,
on pulling, one breath threading with another, can you hear it?
the assembly workers, a hand pushing a trowel, someone driving all night,
a cough, a gasp, all life's inhalations - miles away, the sea
weeding its million acres with only a sound.
Elizabeth Percer
What was it to him to remove his clothes,
To stand on a cold floor, lift one foot,
Ease himself into the water?
It has been said he was a poet -
Round shoulders, hands in the pockets,
The wrinkles of apology appearing in his face early on.
When he lowered himself into a standing bath,
He would have displaced a mere twenty gallons.
Did he bathe with consideration?
A dried cake of soap or the oils
Some woman had left on the porcelain's edge?
Pierre Bonnard spent a corresponding adulthood
Painting his wife, his nemesis,
The cruel, bird-like Marthe in her bath.
The images of bath and wife together
Remind some of the coffin, some of the womb.
But Bonnard's was an artistic brilliance, if that.
Surely the bath of the well-loved physicist
Should be seen in oppositional terms:
As a place where there is never rest,
Or a place from which there is no emergence,
Where life is indefinitely open, always fading.
Did the metaphors for space and time
Arrive as he passed a washcloth over his chest,
As humility gives way to brilliance,
Softening the channels?
And when did he consider himself dirty -
Daily? Weekly? After love?
Einstein's lovers are a complicated subject,
A tangle of questionable relevancy
Bearing an odd heaviness, as if in thinking of them
We must ourselves admit that occasionally
The notion of love itself might be irrelevant.
Perhaps it is no surprise that a man
Whose mind could not surpass color
Would become fixated on the mood
Of a woman's skin. The early, gay,
Yellow lover. The poor, pink Marthe
Villainized for hypertension -
Had she not made her husband so perfectly miserable,
Could he have dreamt of such soft, prismatic loveliness?
Mileva and Elsa seem inconsequential in comparison,
As if Einstein may very well have thought
Of everything physical and universal without them.
Yet when he was alone
Engaged in the act of cleaning,
It is tempting to imagine how in turning,
He might have floated for a moment,
How in coming to a stop
He might have run his hand idly through the bathwater,
How that hand might have been sometimes
Held and released, how we all somehow fail.
And so you persist,
Despite the balloons of fear, the wilting blooms
Of resistance. Here you come, up the walk,
Unseen, unheard.
How did you find your way here,
Your life not even in your hands?
Who can deny that a baby is a miracle
Especially in its presence, the awe of inhuman
Perfection, the magnificent need.
But who can see a miracle as keenly as it appears,
Welcome it as if it can be swallowed,
All star and bursting corners and confirmation?
Yet still you come, making your way
Through some fresh, muddy pond
As if awaking to such possibility
Is only a matter of the arrival
Of what we never thought
We could believe in and still be.
I find her before light,
before apples and Adam.
I haven't been there for long
before the weather begins to change
from black to gray, dry to wet.
It looks like she will dance.
I try to catch the rhythms,
though I can't make out the music,
She doesn't speak. I think it's before language.
My babies are sleeping in the next room,
their quick nostrils like gills.
Have I only imagined this privilege?
Babies will do that, make us feel omnipotent
after having them, though doing so
breaks us in two, like porcelain knocked,
the spiders in its side running along and flowering it.
Here we are, the first woman and one other.
Soon we will tire from this dream
and dancing. Soon we will sleep
and the winds will bring light.
Felicity Plunkett
An elephant's face emerged between his palms
its whimsical felt ears soon fell off
but driftwood bodied forth seven articulated vertebrae
whose limbs moved in ripples, until they were voiced with age
and careened towards oil in the rhythm of their soughing.
Wood-skin baked grey-dry after drowning:
burnished at four rolling haunches,
remembers the smoothing of his corrugated hands.
He must have sanded and sanded, alone in the summer dark
a line of bogong moths settling under the oil lamp,
the scrap of a cigarette forgotten at the side of his smile,
until each curve invited and repaid stroking;
Your wandering poet father
the teacher who came late and humble to love
from the wastelands of his philandering
from the continent of habitual pleasure
when your mother's fine cheekbones
and her flinching resolve
were softened by pain she could not hide,
when the long curls he had never woven through his fingers
clung to him, his fire flared and singed his netted fingers.
He made this one toy the way he made you
the son who survived it all
from nothing more than hope
from whatever, in the end, was to hand
when he looked to the receding coast
from the small conjugal vessel he had fashioned
and set afloat on these late gilded joists, his radial creation.
Night stitches black along the sky's burnt hem,
dissolve into a slow drip of morning birdsong
that picks at your veins, accelerates and is complex
as the fingers of a seamstress,
the intricate gestures of a conductor's wrists.
You close your eyes and trace
harmonies of point and counterpoint
into the gordian school of mourning
where you have enrolled; chosen
death as your special subject, your major
arcana: radial, bridal, electrifying.
Morphine's steady eye regards you
as you find and relinquish these last generosities:
the gold pocket watch of the dandy
to gild a grandson,
the wooden elephant your father crafted
for the unborn child, the evasive face
whose burgeoning you celebrate
though its prolepsis shows you
vitality's amnesia, its infidelity.
Still, now, you find in mobility
something that opens in your face like some mythical gate
a poise before your graduation, delighting
in the onward sewing, in what can be made
from a fabric in its afterlife.
As a young country teacher, your hobby was Latin.
Its symmetry dazzled you, its skeleton was loved:
lines of nouns like the bones in a hand radius, ulna, carpal
and verbs like lamps illuminating sentences.
You sat patiently with the poets, working through the Aeneid,
your annotations penciled into sharp relief.
Years later, a student of Latin, I scanned pages for anarchy:
craving an ancient voice, my translations of Catullus were approximate,
I heard the whisperthrill of conflict in the dark: odi et amo.
I opened myself to the multivalent, rereading what I loved.
Now, slow in my appreciation for order, I still prefer the ragged, the soft:
the dative: to, for.
In Latin
you repeated a last phrase, approaching death, watching its steady advent.
Had you followed the crumbs of syllables back to the words of the Latin mass,
or accepted death's poor offering
of poetry's eucharistic paper
the wafer of someone else's words in your mouth?
I had a vision of you crying out with formal passion: confiteor
your fleshless hands open, stretching out to touch what fled.
One doctor at the hospice knew the language,
but he was not on shift, so what you said was lost.
The loneliness of death declaimed itself.
When I thought of you, reciting Latin, or deep in composition
abandonment, finality wrung itself into a knot
I could not untangle. The syntax of my feelings made no sense.
My hands writhed, alive - a tangle of nervous verbs,
untranslatable, escaping both catechism and parsing
until a hand stopped a hand, and they were still.
Eleanor Stanford
Late sown, they grow
thrifty; in this narrow
rowhouse kitchen,
we set their two-pronged
hearts in jars of water
on the window sill.
We have little sun,
less earth, and yet
I want my sons to know
that what feeds them
grows from light.
October's glint is mordent, already long in the tooth. Ornamental kale
all that's left in the garden. Study is useless. For forty years
my father's fingers have stumbled over the same notes on the piano.
Wednesday nights we take up our instruments. Jew's harp,
lyre, pedal steel. The gourds that swelled all summer and dried up.
Ezra, awake past bedtime in his houndstooth suit,
strums his small guitar and sings. We play from memory.
At twelve I ran through the woods
in racing flats, memorizing momentum, how it took me
down the hills and then back up, mud-splattered grace notes
on my calves.
At twenty, I sat on a flat cement roof, the hill a sharp
mile above the sea, shelling peas. The parched earth, steep ravines,
clouds passing below us. Girl whetting a machete. Man knocking out a beat
on a Fanta bottle's ribs. And the bones visible through my skin,
elbow's tuning peg, clavicle's awkward ornament.
Memory practices on us: mortar, pestle, fire kindled
in the wrist's stone cup. Celestial storehouse, where the boxes
of yellowed photos pile up -
The years of lessons, practice sheets filled in, initialed.
My flute in its black case, banging against my knees.
I learned to mime the stops: sleeves of my white shirt raised,
close together, the way a moth lands, with its wings closed.
I was such a serious child.
Whatever hour the school bus left us at the corner, late fall,
dark falling, we found my mother on her knees,
spade in hand, turning the soil. The white fence posts
glowed. Spirit burial ground, where under leaf cover, the worms
move like silent tongues, compost's shadow notes,
diminuendo.
I sit down on a wooden bench to nurse the baby
and the mosquitoes descend on their lithe legs.
His word for food is the same name
he calls me by: A-ma. A-ma.
The sharks circle in their small tank.
The blind drivers are guiding their Lexuses
down A1A and Spanish River.
My grandmother, who remembers little, recalls
telling the story of Passover to a preschool class.
Now we are free, she said, and one girl retorted,
No we are not. We are free and a half.
I can't sleep here, in this mutinous state, this brackish peninsula.
Dawn, dusk, the old people are out walking their small dogs
around the driveways of the complex. Beyond,
animals shelter in the mangal:
Peregrine falcon, American coot, rattlesnake.
Tangled footweb of the intertidal zone. The baby's need
a drift net, cast wide and indiscriminate: tug of hunger
that catches at my breast.
Sea star. Propagule.
Black bee on a mangrove blossom.
When my grandmother woke
from the twilight sleep of giving birth, she saw
the nurses trying on her nightgowns, giggling.
The mangroves lift a lacy hem
of sea foam, their roots impenetrable.
Not two, not three.
We are free and a half. And each
elliptical leaf illuminated.
Melissa Stein
You opened this door. Forced it back
on its hinges, drove in the thin wedge, saying
"I may need to enter at a moment's notice."
But don't you know that metal has memory, alive
the way rising dough resists a probing finger,
or trodden grass springs up against the foot's imprint.
Even flesh that retains the rare bloom of a bruise
soon lets it go. You keep these iron plates apart
so long they rust apart, flaking
into the slightest breeze, and still,
they remember what it means to rest
against each other, folded like wings.
Two fish - nearly washed up, in the warmer shallows,
tiger trout, mouths gaping, gills going, strung together
on a chain. I stroke the taut skin, mottled like a snake's,
stroke the firm length of their bodies, heavy
and real. The chain's hanging off a rowboat
plowed into the sand, half in half out, dragging
that beauty with it, those bodies shining out of the water,
out of meaning, shining -
Cold and clear: wading in,
I can see straight down to my white toes, and I'm wondering
about the bodies of fish, their flicker and slide, whether
they prefer warm currents or cold, and what their naugahyde
skins look like from under the water, those darting slashes
from above, those exclamation points -
It's another life, this place
where fishermen troll the lakes in rubber floats, flippered
feet as rudders, legs shrouded in neoprene, looping
their fishing lines left and right in lazy figure 8s
that are anything but lazy: graceful arcs like flight
paths of insects, translucent, white -
Giddyup
I say to see how it feels in my mouth, because I want to,
because I've hiked my skirt around my thighs as high
as I can get away with and I'm up past my knees
in the chill, wading in deep as I dare, sending out ripples
toward the center of the lake, such thin legs
but such wide ripples, and I begin to understand
the impact of small actions -
Light strikes the corner of my eye,
someone's caught a fish away across the lake, and I watch
the clumsy capture, what I can see of it: the fisherman
working furiously and the fish swinging madly
in what almost looks like joy, a wider arc that uses
the full weight of his body, the power in his tail -
Sridala Swami
An Encyclopedia of Unanswerables
Shuffling the Pack
Wipe the guilt from his face
When you've caught him hanging up
On a call he shouldn't have made
As easily as he has wiped
That smile from your lips?
Conduct a lunchtime conversation
With a table full of men
&nb