There are two men, carrying
guns. Adjust the crosshair above
the bodies. Fifteen seconds. Five
four three two one
zero. White fire
opens a seam in the map.
We nicknamed our eye in the sky
the Gorgon stare. I stare there,
right there: It turns
to a perfect not-
there.
III. Black
Walking through the park in Indian Springs. Watching
TV about what they did.
(When the rocks turn black: it has happened.)
Watching reflections
in the cloudy glass Liquefying
completely, like spring
snow like expiring
during sex.
(Rocks turning black: it has happened.)
Dreaming of those who hide
in caves. Watching TV about what they
did.
(The heart’s cavity held stone and clear, cold lakes)
Surely, the people wanted
(Lock up the target. Spin up
the weapon.)
Blacken did
the shrubs, the ridged
rock. Black go
Nevada
from Tahoma Literary Review
ADRIENNE SU
* * *
Peaches
A crate of peaches straight from the farm
has to be maintained, or eaten in days.
Obvious, but in my family, they went so fast,
I never saw the mess that punishes delay.
I thought everyone bought fruit by the crate,
stored it in the coolest part of the house,
then devoured it before any could rot.
I’m from the Peach State, and to those
who ask But where are you from originally,
I’d like to reply The homeland of the peach,
but I’m too nice, and they might not look it up.
In truth, the reason we bought so much
did have to do with being Chinese—at least
Chinese in that part of America, both strangers
and natives on a lonely, beautiful street
where food came in stackable containers
and fussy bags, unless you bothered to drive
to the source, where the same money landed
a bushel of fruit, a twenty-pound sack of rice.
You had to drive anyway, each house surrounded
by land enough to grow your own, if lawns
hadn’t been required. At home I loved to stare
of foil-wrapped meats, cakes, juice concentrate,
mysterious packets brought by houseguests
from New York Chinatown, to be transformed
by heat, force, and my mother’s patient effort,
enough to keep us fed through flood or storm,
provided the power stayed on, or fire and ice
could be procured, which would be labor-intensive,
but so was everything else my parents did.
Their lives were labor, they kept this from the kids,
who grew up to confuse work with pleasure,
to become typical immigrants’ children,
taller than their parents and unaware of hunger
except when asked the odd, perplexing question.
from Poem-a-Day
JAMES TATE
* * *
Dome of the Hidden Temple
People were going about their chores. Some were eating
lunch. Others, like me, were just standing around doing nothing,
just taking in the scene. I saw a dozen ducks fly over low
on their way to the pond. A policeman walked by swinging his
club. The firemen were washing their fire truck. Margie walked
out of a shoe store and saw me. She walked up to me and said,
“Have you heard the news? Rosie and Larry broke up.” “Why?
They were the best darn couple I knew,” I said. “I agree.
They had everything going for them,” she said. “Did you talk
to her?” I said. “She said he thinks he’s an armadillo. He
eats insects and mud and dug a burrow in the back of the house,”
she said. “He didn’t look like an armadillo. I thought he was
a very good-looking guy, always very nice to me,” I said. “Whatever
the case, I’ll miss their parties. They were always such fun,”
she said. “They were the best,” I said. “I’ve got to run, nice
to see you, Tim,” she said. I walked over to the drugstore and
bought myself some toothpaste. When I came out, a light spring
rain had started. The pigeons on the bank took off and flew in
circles around the town. A man walked up to me and said, “Do
you know where the Dome of the Hidden Temple is?” I said, “Yes,
but I can’t tell you. It’s a secret.” “But I’m supposed to meet
somebody there,” he said. “Then that person should have told
you how to get there,” I said. “I guess he thought I knew,” he
said. “Almost nobody knows,” I said. “Then why do you know?”
he said. “Because I am the Priest of Nothingness,” I said.
“Are you really?” he said. “No, I just made that up,” I said.
“Oh, so you’re a comedian,” he said. “Yes, I’m a comedian,” I
said. “Well, you’re not very good,” he said. “I know,” I said.
from jubilat
LEE UPTON
* * *
The Apology
Tonight outside the plate glass
each insect is made of a long tube of wood,
as if the insect had become a tree
to give the tree a voice.
And these pink spatters,
these crumbled parlor doilies,
these milkweed blossoms
fade as if antique,
the height of its flowers,
its life without bureaucracy,
nor does the lilac filtering the mentholated air,
or the bee drowsing on the sill
after straining through the broken window screen
like Rilke wheedling his way into a palace.
Or the brook that runs by the cabin
talking nonsense.
Or the willow that slouches as if it were in a classroom
where the teacher bores it.
So forgive me please already.
I am sorry for speaking for nature.
But it was asking for it.
from The New Yorker
C. K. WILLIAMS
* * *
Hog
In a certain town in New Jersey where now will be found malls car dealerships drive-throughs
highways with synchronized lights a motor-vehicle office a store selling discount something or other
I can’t remember what else but haven’t we all experienced such post-agrarian transmogrifications
In a certain town in New Jersey once was a farm farmed by a Jewish farmer a Jewish farmer
my goodness a notion I’d never entertained Jews were lawyers accountants doctors maybe salesmen
until a friend took me to meet one his uncle his mother’s brother who lived somewhere I’d never heard of
In a certain town in New Jersey not far from where I am now existed
a farmer who was also a Jew
who’d eluded the second war murders by leaving for the States with nothing in his wallet or satchel
but a hammer and saw and a handful of nails and worked his way through the shit-pit of Europe to here
where he went back with somebody else’s money some earlier escapee-arrival’s maybe his sister’s
to farming which had been his family’s trade for many generations in the old country he boasted
and there he was on his farm now with his chickens and corn and I saw three or four cows and some pigs
and on this day a dead hog that is to say a hog he’d only just slaughtered that hung upside down
from a hook in a rafter and a stout iron chain and which the farmer the Jewish farmer was flinging
boiling water against flinging and flinging so its bristles would soften which I could see they had
for then he was scraping the hog with a crescent-shaped length of steel and the bristles were loosening
and I gathered that when they were gone he’d be (how had the word ever found me) gutting the hog
there was a gleaming well-honed knife at the ready whose task I could tell was slicing you open
as you horribly swung there colorless gunk spooling out of your snout while the booted farmer
methodically effected the everlasting labor of farmers Jewish or not pulling you with his knotty arms
and leather gloves towards him to cut you apart and sell you I supposed is what would come next
In a certain town in New Jersey might anyone remain to ask forgiveness for the concrete and asphalt
the forests felled for McMansions the eternally lost corn and wheat fields and vanished orchards
might anyone recall the sweet stink of manure of tilled earth the odor even of fresh blood on a floor
and who besides me will remember the farmer so imposing in the masterful exercise of his calling
who with a snort and a clap on the back forgave me the gawk of my adolescence as imagining
the rest of what life would be bringing I knelt by a rusting soon to be scrapped hay rake and threw up
from The New Yorker
ELEANOR WILNER
* * *
To Think of How Cold
Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee
—Emily Brontë, “Remembrance”
To think of how cold in the earth—how cold
to have let her bury him, wrong, wrong, wrong . . .
wrong says the struck bell, the footsteps of bronze,
wrong says the path through echoing stones,
wrong says the cypress, casting a long
Tuscan shadow on Ohio ground, all wrong
to let him lie below the lawn where no one walks
with a light step, or a lifted heart—no one,
no one—the hawthorn trees are skeletal,
only the pines offer shelter to the silent wren,
but the bird has forgotten everything, its song, even
the shape of its nest, and the rest of it—
it paused too long on an angel of stone, only
those marble wings could bear the cold here;
cold in the earth—you imagine a room
carved from icy clay, roots dangling from its roof,
feeding a tree that he cannot see
from geometry’s hollow under the snow,
and cold, so implacably cold. Do not grow old,
as I grew old, says the ghost of Lear, for though
I am gone, and the stage grown dark,
I walk the heath and my mind conjures
an end to this cold, a funeral pyre—and look! Cordelia
coming at last, like a blazing torch,
in a heaven of heat and a roar of fire.
from New Ohio Review
AL YOUNG
* * *
The Drummer Omar: Poet of Percussion
Rhythm is the prime element of music—music is life.
—Omar Clay
In memory of Omar Clay (1935–2008)
We met when it was spring, before the heat
of life moved in. We met before blue summer
got us up running, racing to some beat
we couldn’t count on or off. You peeped it, Omar.
You showed up everyplace I turned—New York,
The Showcase, Mingus, Oakland, midnights, dawn.
You and Bob James: a silver spoon and fork
to match the knife-shy hush of Sarah Vaughan.
You aired the groove. Yes, you, Omar, you drew
all space between the beat into your lungs
in micro-breaths. All tempo burned in you.
“Omar,” it cried, “hear how my silence sings!”
We’ll meet again, I know. You loved to teach.
You’ll show me rhythm time can never touch.
from Brilliant Corners
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES AND COMMENTS
* * *
CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN was born in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1967. He is the author of three books of poetry: Eternity & Oranges (Pitt Poetry Series, 2016), Goat Funeral (Sheep Meadow, 2006), and After Greece (Truman State University Press, 2001). He has also written a book of travel writing, Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table (University of California Press, 2013), and he is cotranslator of The Lions’ Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (Truman State UP, 2006). A former Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bucharest, he teaches at Allegheny College and is director of Writing Workshops in Greece: Thessaloniki and Thasos.
Of “Sentence,” Bakken writes: “This poem was written during a very cold night at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. An ice storm arrived during my residency and the power went out—so we had no heat. I could see my breath inside my little studio, but words were coming to me and so I stayed put, layering on every item of clothing I had with me, and writing by flashlight at night. I’d been thinking about Greece, as I almost always am, specifically about the winters there, when tourists depart, and the rhythms of life and labor slow almost to a halt, and the Greeks are left to themselves.
“The encounter described in the poem was in part remembered from the winter of 1993, when I lived in Thessaloniki, a beautiful, haunted city, in the final decade of a brutal century—one that had brought to Thessaloniki the devastations of the Holocaust, not to mention more recent outbursts of xenophobia and violence. Just a few hours north, war was raging in a place that had once been called Yugoslavia.
“As the poem’s long, single sentence gathered momentum, bringing new things to bear upon the scene, the frozen priest arrived and I let him thaw.”
* * *
CATHERINE BARNETT is the author of The Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press, 2012) and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Alice James Books, 2004). She teaches at New York University, is a visiting professor in the Hunter College MFA program, and works as an independent editor. She has degrees from Princeton University, where she has taught in the Lewis Center for the Arts, and from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She has received a James Laughlin Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Whiting Writers’ Award.
Barnett writes: “Although I often think things are heading in the wrong direction, underneath I am what some people have called an enigmatic optimist. (‘Chronically hopeful,’ someone once said.) ‘O Esperanza!’ is a revision of several actual and imagined facts. I wrote the poem right after having had the good fortune to attend a three-hour clown class (who knew such a thing existed?) with the spectacular Sarah French. I’d been told that Sarah would simply lay a rope down on the floor and all we’d have to do to become a clown was step over it. I wanted to try it because I wanted to perform without performing. Something to do with Being and Time, I imagine. It was
one of the most difficult classes I’ve attended, which made me think of the philosopher Richard Rorty’s afternoon lectures, difficult in mostly very different ways. I was thrilled to discover his quote and wished I’d been able to understand more of what he was saying while he was standing right before my eyes. Like so many other poets, I’ve been well nourished on confusion and hope, both. And I have a habit of counting syllables (12 or 285 or 308, depending where you start and/or end).”
* * *
RICK BAROT was born in the Philippines in 1969. He has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall (2002), Want (2008), and Chord (2015). He lives in Tacoma, Washington, and directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University. He is the poetry editor of New England Review.
Barot writes: “I came across the story recounted in ‘Whitman, 1841’ in David S. Reynolds’s terrific book, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. Did the incident actually happen? Reynolds presents some riveting evidence that says so.”
* * *
JILL BIALOSKY was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She received her BA from Ohio University, an MA from the Johns Hopkins University, and an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has written three novels: House Under Snow (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002), The Life Room (Harcourt, 2007), and The Prize (Counterpoint Press, 2015). Her four volumes of poetry are The End of Desire (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), Subterranean (Knopf, 2007), Intruder (Knopf, 2010), and The Players (Knopf, 2015). She is the author of a memoir, History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life (Atria Books, 2011). She is coeditor, with Helen Schulman, of Wanting a Child (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). She lives in New York City.
Of “Daylight Savings,” Bialosky writes: “This poem was inspired by the first November afternoon after we’ve turned back the clocks and leave our offices to the shock of darkness. I began to ponder the idea of time passing and what is lost in that hour and of course, what we cherish.”