but I see you have already given me all that you can.
Those clear eyes are ancient; you’ve done this with billions of others,
but you are my first life, Life; I feel helplessly young.
I’m a kid checking mail, a kid on his cell with his questions:
are we in love, Life, are we exclusive, are we forever?
from The Yale Review
PATRICK ROSAL
* * *
At the Tribunals
Once, in a brawl on Orchard I clocked a kid
with a ridgehand so hard I could feel
his top teeth give. His knees buckled
and my homeboy let loose a one-two
to finish the job. I turned around
to block a sucker punch that didn’t come.
We ducked under the cops’ bright red
hatchets that swung around the corner.
I never saw the first kid drop. He must
have been still falling when I dipped
from the scene and trotted toward
Delancey. He was falling when I stopped
to check my leather for scuff marks.
He was falling when I slipped inside
a dive to hide from a girl who got ghost
for books. He was falling when I kissed
the Santo Niño’s white feet and Melanie’s
left collarbone and the forehead
of one punk whose nose I busted
for nothing but squaring off with me,
his head snapped back to show his neck’s
smooth pelt. Look away long enough
and a boy can fall for weeks—decades—
even as you get down on one knee
to pray the rotting kidneys in your mom’s
gut don’t turn too quick to stone.
I didn’t stick around to watch
my own work. I didn’t wait for
a single body to hit the pavement.
In those days, it was always spring
and I was mostly made of knives.
I rolled twenty-two deep, every
one of us lulled by a blade
though few of us knew the steel note
that chimed a full measure if you slid
the edge along a round to make it
keen. I’ll tell those stiffs in frocks
to go ahead and count me among
the ones who made nothing good
with his bare hands. I’ll confess,
I loved the wreckage: no matter
the country, no matter the machine.
from New England Review
DAVID ST. JOHN
* * *
Vineyard
You see a man walking the lanes & aisles
of his vineyard & now
The spring tendrils stretch beyond his reach
& you see too there’s a black dog
Beside him a blissful Lab who slices across
a horizon still white with dawn
You see this landscape is the landscape of
my valley the one I remember
Out of the plunder that is the swollen glow
of reflection & so to you I’ll say
That a man is walking & I’ll tell you now he’s
an older man & do you see his son
Behind him only nineteen or twenty no more his
wool sweater wrapped
Around him the color of the dust at his feet
a rich gold without equal
& now the sun begins to rub itself across
the sky & this is the dog’s life
Yet also the man’s as well & he knows soon
this boy will be leaving the valley
With a girl even younger than his son
in a silver Pontiac LeMans
North along Highway 99 north all the way
until they cross into Canada
Where anyone who wants to send his son
to die won’t be able to find him
& so there among the aisles & lanes & heavy
grapes the father stops & the dog
Stops to turn & face the boy who drags a hand
slowly along the Lab’s silky head
& quietly wraps his skinny arms around his father
& in the vineyard dust that’s all
from The Southern Review
BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY
* * *
But I’m the Only One
who’ll walk across the fire for you,
growled Melissa. That song
blared out from all four of
our bedrooms’ tape decks,
that song was the only one
we all loved, the only one we
could agree on that summer
in the dyke loft, just when it
all started to change. Catherine
was moving out, to SoHo to
live with Melanie. So Shigi’s
girlfriend DM took her room.
But not for long; they broke up
and Michelle moved in, shortly
after Cynthia came. Tonight you
told me that you ache for something
new. This was way before we’d
even dreamed we’d have to rent
out Shigi’s office to Erin as a fifth
bedroom. Without Catherine we
couldn’t afford the loft, but we
didn’t know that yet. At the time
we thought everyone was poor
like us—we weren’t the only ones.
We all smoked constantly, anyone
could afford to smoke back then.
Catherine bummed my last butt
but I know I saw her new carton
in the freezer. She didn’t want
to open it yet, was trying to
cut back. This was before we
almost got the gas cut off, before
we lost electricity the first of
many times. After Justine had
been bullied out with her three
cats but Kristen—whom we
suspected was asexual and not
really lesbian—was still hanging
on even though she adopted yet
another cat into the loft without
asking. It was only one more,
she reasoned, but we already
had Seether, Amber, Balzac,
Gigli, and now Eva Luna.
Anna and Jackie came by,
they were friendly to me, but
Tjet and Julie weren’t. T and J
were Clit Club. A and J were
literary. Then Michelle and
Shigi secretly slept together,
a disaster, and Cynthia got
kicked out for being bi and
then bringing a guy to the loft,
but that summer before all that,
just after I’d been dumped by
the girl I’d moved to NYC
to be with, and just after I’d
invited my first college girl-
friend to come visit me
(not sure what I expected
but she was the only one
who was willing to fly out)
but before I met Natira.
Our month-long affair
wasn’t great but still pretty
damn good, she was the only
one I’d liked in a long time. I
hadn’t met Sayeeda yet, at
Jackie’s book party—Jackie
and Anna I think were broken
up by then. After Stefanie
but long before Tina, before
Jamie had even met Tina,
this song played everywhere,
every day, ceaselessly, so it
started to seem that we were
Melissa, that Cassandra,
foretelling in a ragged voice:
“And I�
�m the only one who’ll
drown in my desire for you.”
We meant that we too were
willing to do anything to
prove we were the only one
for someone that one summer.
from The Literary Review
ANYA SILVER
* * *
Maid Maleen
After seven years of damp walls, entombed, no more food,
she and her servant knife their way through the stone tower.
Their first glance outside, a shock. All has changed.
The country’s burned and smashed, the banners rent.
No one alive in the castle or village, the farms just soot.
No alarms warned them: abandoned by her own father,
the king who walled his daughter up and forgot.
Eventually, the tale will be made right again.
A prince will fall in love with Maid Maleen, she will prosper
in her gold necklace and never want for food or home.
Rip out the last pages. There will be no wedding today.
The sulfurous fields don’t lead to paths or healing rivers.
Never safety again. Once the smoke’s in one’s lungs,
it remains forever. The charred trees. The murdered bodies.
from Harvard Review
TAIJE SILVERMAN
* * *
Grief
Let it be seeds.
Let it be the slow tornado of seeds from the oak tree
by the gates to the playground in May wind.
Today is Mother’s Day and someone said it is almost impossible
to remember something before you know the word for it
and the babies in their mothers’ arms
stare at the seeds and they don’t know
the word for falling. Nor the word for sudden or whirling.
Let it be something that doesn’t last, not the moon.
Let it not be the rooftops that are so quiet.
Let it come to the white doorstep like rain and slide
onto the sidewalk not knowing. What is gentle if not time
but it’s not time that is gentle, what will happen in the future
does not matter. Cicadas underground are called nymphs
and their wings look like tree seeds. Trapped under skin
and as soft as the dirt that surrounds them.
Teneral is a word for the days between
when the cicada digs its way out of earth and begins to sing
and when its self and shell are still
a single, susceptible thing. It is impossible
to remember. Let it be the years
underground, molting nymph skin
and moving in the soil without sound.
It’s not time that is gentle but what unknown sign,
a method of counting each spring through the roots of a tree.
How they learn from the taste of a root’s juice the moment
when in one rush they should push up to earth.
Teneral, meaning not yet hardened, a sense before a memory
of the shell. Let it be the sign in the cells
of the blind safe skin, the limbo of gold
walling here and there, where the baby waits
between a mother’s body and the air’s tears, he came
to my breast and rested, there was no before.
Let it be the gold room with its lack of door, that time
of day, cicadas will wait until sunset to break through the dirt.
Where did he go while I pushed?
We stood in the tunnel of seeds, windmills, a tree
had come to make promises. Rain to stone, rain to street.
They seemed while they fell to be lifting and we waited, watching,
the baby without words for what we were seeing.
Seeds pushing roots, brick, and dirt don’t say
what they know about time. Rise. For days the whole town will sing.
from The Massachusetts Review
TOM SLEIGH
* * *
Prayer for Recovery
The cursor moving back along the line erases what was was.
What was keeps existing under Edit so that all you need to do is
click Undo. So much of time gets lived out that way—
at the momentary center of the line erasing.
When I push my IV pole down the dark, glass hall, the droplets’
atavistic sheen drips into my veins with an absolute weight as if
the bag of potassium chloride, hanging in sovereign judgment
above my head, assures me that justice, death or life,
will be done. And though it’s not for me to understand,
when I cross the beam that throws open the door so silently
and swiftly, it makes me want to think that like these rivets fastening
glass to iron, some state of me that was will go on,
either as the will of some will that isn’t mine, or out of mercy,
or from the contract between the rivet gun and some unseen hand.
from Raritan
A. E. STALLINGS
* * *
Alice, Bewildered
Deep in the wood where things escape their names,
Her childish arm draped round the fawn’s soft neck
(Her diffidence, its skittishness in check,
Merged in the anonymity that tames),
She knits her brow, but nothing now reclaims
The syllables that meant herself. Ah well,
She need not answer to the grown-up beck
And call, the rote-learned lessons, scolds and blames
Of girlhood, sentences to parse and gloss;
She’s un-twinned from the likeness in the glass.
Yet in the dark ellipsis she can tell,
She’s certain, that her name begins with “L”—
Liza, Lacie? Alias, alas,
A lass alike alone and at a loss.
from Virginia Quarterly Review
FRANK STANFORD
* * *
Cotton You Lose in the Field
Some bad whiskey
I drink by myself
just like you
when this wind
blows as it does
in the delta
where a lost hearing aid
can be taken
for a grub worm
when the black constellations
make you swim backwards
in circles of blood
stableboys ruin their hands
for a while
and a man none of us
can do without
breaks his neck
jumping over some hill
chasing the fox
of a half-pint
and a fine-blooded horse
is put out of its misery
even the young sisters
of the boys we run with
we would give our fingers
to touch them again
but this war
seeps back into us
little insecticide
and the white cricket of those days
drags itself off the hook
there are no more fish
there is no more bait
the rivers are formed by the tears of sports fans
we try to pour a trail of salt
as if making a long fuse
with a gunpowder keg
we try to swim away from the gym
like slugs with gills
the girls from the other school
step off the bus
the clouds are weighed in at the gin
there is a pattern to all this
like a weave of a skirt
we all go crazy from looking
from Poem-a-Day
SUSAN STEWART
* * *
What Piranesi Knew
as he drew the silhouettes
against the vast
machinery, suspending them,
haggard, bent
in a direction that was not
a direction,
for the stairs and bridges, ladders and catwalks
swaying
over danger,
over chasm and
damage, had in truth
no exit or entry.
Those beings embodied
the thrown existence
of the living in an iron world.
Who, then, can say we should lift
our faces to the light’s
slow filter,
and trace the funnel back to its fiery
source and be
glad, and be glad?
from The Paris Review
NOMI STONE
* * *
Drones: An Exercise in Awe-Terror
Pilot, Creech Air Force Base; Indian Springs, Nevada
I. The Imagination Cannot
A sea of, a drowning of—everything seems
to be red rock. Prickling of dust and salt.
Seething, the sun between
the shrubs.
Rocks are pocked with
gorges to the core. Something
bad in there, in each
one, every cave caves into
more caves than seconds
in which a man can yes
can die. They
told me there’s a place like
that, and I am actually in
it (changing
it) (right now)
II. When Reason Came
Across this gray terrain: North
South East West. “Your enemy
doesn’t wear a uniform. Find him. Find
his patterns of life. There’s no place
in this country where we cannot see him.”