from River Styx
LINDA GREGERSON
* * *
Font
At the foot of the download anchored
among
the usual flotsam of ads,
this link: to plastics-express.com who for
a fraction
of the retail price can
solve my underground drainage woes, which
tells me
the software has finally
run amok. Because the article, you see,
recounts
the rescue from a sewage
pipe of Baby 59, five pounds,
placenta still
attached, in Zhejiang
Province, where officials even as I read
are debating
the merits of throwing
the mother in jail. Communal
toilet. Father
nowhere to be found.
The gods in their mercy once
could turn
a frightened girl to
water or a shamed one to a tree,
but they
no longer seem
to take our troubles much
to heart.
And so the men with
hacksaws do their gentle best—consider
the infant
shoulders, consider the lids—
and this one child among millions,
delivered
a second time to what
we still call breathable air, survives
to pull
the cords of sentiment
and commerce.
Don’t make the poem
too sad, says Megan,
thinking at first (we both of us
think) the child
must be a girl or otherwise
damaged, thus (this part she doesn’t
say) like her.
Who is the ground
of all I hope and fear for in the world.
Who’ll buy?
Or as the hawkers
on the pavement used to put it, What
d’you lack?
The download comes with
pictures too. Of workmen, wrenches,
bits of shattered
PVC, and one for whom
the whole of it—commotion, cameras,
IV needle in the scalp—
is not more strange
than ordinary daylight.
Welcome, Number
59. Here’s milk
from a bottle and here’s a nearly
human hand.
from Raritan
JENNIFER GROTZ
* * *
Self-Portrait on the Street of an Unnamed Foreign City
The lettering on the shop window in which
you catch a glimpse of yourself is in Polish.
Behind you a man quickly walks by, nearly shouting
into his cell phone. Then a woman
at a dreamier pace, carrying a just-bought bouquet
upside-down. All on a street where pickpockets abound
along with the ubiquitous smell of something baking.
It is delicious to be anonymous on a foreign city street.
Who knew this could be a life, having languages
instead of relationships, struggling even then,
finding out what it means to be a woman
I went to distant cities, it almost didn’t matter
which, so primed was I to be reverent.
All of them have the beautiful bridge
crossing a gray, near-sighted river,
one that massages the eyes, focuses
the swooping birds that skim the water’s surface.
The usual things I didn’t pine for earlier
because I didn’t know I wouldn’t have them.
I spent so much time alone, when I actually turned lonely
it was vertigo.
Myself estranged is how I understood the world.
My ignorance had saved me, my vices fueled me,
and then I turned forty. I who love to look and look
couldn’t see what others did.
Now I think about currencies, linguistic equivalents, how lopsided they are,
while my reflection blurs in the shop windows.
Wanting to be as far away as possible exactly as much as still with you.
Shamelessly entering a Starbucks (free wifi) to write this.
from Poem-a-Day
MARK HALLIDAY
* * *
Doctor Scheef
Doctor Scheef you probably tried hard
in 1971 at your clinic in Bonn
I assume you tried hard to save my mother
with your regime of enzyme injections
and 30 million units of Vitamin A
but you did not save my mother—
at best you gave her a little hope for a while
though I suspect she was too skeptical even for that
though she tried to believe for my father’s sake;
Doctor Scheef you needed to be a historic genius
but you were not!
And so my mother went on hurting
month after month with cancer in her vertebrae and her spine
and she died after three more years of hurting
since you were not a historic genius Doctor Scheef
—and you must be dead by now too
and forgiving you would make sense no doubt
but I’m not ready, maybe I am not yet tired enough
so I prefer to name you here sternly
rather than settle for the letting go in forgiveness
as I am still in the non-genius condition of wanting
targets for complaint therefore I say that in 1971
you should have been a hell of a lot smarter Doctor Scheef.
from Copper Nickel
JEFFREY HARRISON
* * *
Afterword
The maple limb severed
by a December storm
still blossoms in May
where it lies on the ground,
its red tassels a message
from the other side,
like a letter arriving
after its writer has died.
from The New York Times Magazine
TERRANCE HAYES
* * *
Barberism
It was light and lusterless and somehow luckless,
The hair I cut from the head of my father-in-law,
It was pepper-blanched and wind-scuffed, thin
As a blown bulb’s filament, it stuck to the teeth
Of my clippers like a dark language, the static
Covering his mind stuck to my
fingers, it mingled
In halfhearted tufts with the dust. Because
Every barber’s got a gift for mind reading in his touch,
I could hear what he would not say. He’d sworn
To never let his hair be cut again after his daughter
Passed away. I told him how my own boy,
His grandchild, weeps when my clippers bite
Behind his ear, but I could not say how
The blood there tastes. I almost showed him
How I bow my own head to the razor in my hands,
How a mirror is used to taper the nape.
Science and religion come to the same conclusion:
Someday all the hair on the body will fall away.
I’m certain he will only call on me for a few more years,
The crown of his head is already smoother
Than any part of his face. It shines like the light
In tiny bulbs of sweat before the sweat evaporates.
from The New York Times Magazine
TONY HOAGLAND
* * *
Bible Study
Who would have imagined that I would have to go
a million miles away from the place where I was born
to find people who would love me?
And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people?
In the dream JoAnne was showing me how much arm to amputate
if your hand gets trapped in the machine;
if you act fast, she said, you can save everything above the wrist.
You want to keep a really sharp blade close by, she said.
Now I raise that hand to scratch one of those nasty little
scabs on the back of my head, and we sit outside and watch
the sun go down, inflamed as an appendicitis
over western Illinois—which then subsides and cools into a smooth gray wash.
Who knows, this might be the last good night of summer.
My broken nose is forming an idea of what’s for supper.
Hard to believe that death is just around the corner.
What kind of idiot would think he even had a destiny?
I was on the road for so long by myself,
I took to reading motel Bibles just for company.
Lying on the chintz bedspread before going to sleep,
still feeling the motion of the car inside my body,
I thought some wrongness in my self had left me that alone.
And God said, You are worth more to me
than one hundred sparrows.
And when I read that, I wept.
And God said, Whom have I blessed more than I have blessed you?
And I looked at the minibar
and the bad abstract hotel art on the wall
and the dark TV set watching like a deacon.
And God said, Survive. And carry my perfume among the perishing.
from Poetry
CYNTHIA HOGUE
* * *
The Unwritten Volume
In memory of L.W.
from In June, the Labyrinth
[The] narrative is genealogical but it does not simply amount to an act of memory. It witnesses, in the manner of an ethical or political act, for today and for tomorrow.
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death
Elle’s writing her book of wisdom.
She writes until she cannot hold her pen.
The labyrinth miraculously is uncovered.
An American woman’s progressing on her knees.
She read something but not Elle’s book.
No one will read Elle’s book.
I walk the circular path, first the left side,
then the right, casting petals to the north,
east, south, and west (this intuitively).
A diminutive prelate shoos me away.
When he leaves, I return to the center.
The organist, practicing, strikes up Phantom.
Elle says she cannot hear him.
Elle! I cry, I cannot see you.
I had prayed Death spare you.
Remember our meal among the termites
of Arcadia Street, that cottage of spirits
with its riddled beams and long veranda
bordered by plantain trees, and the spiral
you traced for me on scrap-paper?
I kept it for such a long time.
The organist, of course, is playing Bach.
A boy scattered the rose petals I cast
all over. Elle’s voice surrounds me.
To quiet hills I lift mine eyes.
from Prairie Schooner
GARRETT HONGO
* * *
I Got Heaven . . .
I swear that, in Gardena, on a moonlit suburban street,
There are souls that twirl like kites lashed to the wrists of the living
And spirits who tumble in a solemn limbo between 164th
And the long river of stars to Amida’s Paradise in the West.
As though I belonged, I’ve come from my life of papers and exile
To walk among these penitents at the Festival of the Dead,
The booths full of sellers hawking rice cakes and candied plums,
All around us the rhythmic chant of min’yō bursting through loudspeakers,
Calling out the mimes and changes to all who dance.
I stop at a booth and watch a man, deeply tanned from work outdoors,
Pitch bright, fresh quarters into blue plastic bowls.
He wins a porcelain cat, a fishnet bag of marbles,
Then a bottle of shōyu, and a rattle shaped like tam-tam he gives to a child.
I hear the words of a Motown tune carry through the gaudy air
. . . got sunshine on a cloudy day . . . got the month of May . . .
As he turns from the booth and reenters the River of Heaven—
These dancers winding in brocades and silk sleeves,
A faith-lit circle briefly aswarm in the summer night.
from Miramar
ERIN HOOVER
* * *
Girls
The point not that so-called ugly girls
get laid on HBO, but their mishaps, that if
the single one is funny, a slew of them looks
downright ambitious. They’re the bitches
nobody liked in high school, smudge-eyed
and trussed up in complicated skirts,
queuing outside the club with their amber
vials of blow. Our kind of fucking up is Y,
less Millennial, more perpetual, because
we too called ourselves journalists,
wrote for weeklies nobody read. We too
got swept into green rooms on a glance,
our stupid luck that a drummer sized up
my platinum, six-foot, Australian friend
and invited us backstage. Instead, she ended up
with the frontman singing to her outside,
as the drummer droned on about offbeats
to me, his dark foil whinging about desire,
thinking, maybe, she’s a little bit fat.
Even before he pushed a shrink-wrapped
CD like bus fare into my palm, I knew
our hook-up wouldn’t do me any good—
my nights were transcendent in their flaws.
Earlier, when my friend pulled him off me,
her what were you thinking draped between us
like garlands at an anti-award ceremony,
I wanted to be a woman who could Take Back
Some Night Somewhere, hang with those bad
bitches at Seneca Falls. But I kissed a drummer
from Staten Island because he wanted
to kiss me. Does it get any less complicated
than one passed-over object burying itself
in another? To those who would say Girls
is the third wave finding
itself, who speak
from the absurd position of having been found,
I offer this grounded but ahistorical Fuck You,
I swear our girlish centers burn white-hot
as surely as nothing burns there. It was last call
five minutes ago. Somebody, turn up the lights.
from Crab Orchard Review
RICHARD HOWARD
* * *
85 Off & On
“When, my dears, is the right age to die?”
Our hostess, the centenarian
Dorothea Tanning, saw herself
out of the running, but enjoyed
hounding her guests (and herself)
with this mean stickler—it was as if
one of the Fates was questioning us:
“David Alexander, I think you’re
the youngest artist at this table:
how old would you decide one must be
to claim a Deathbed of Distinction?”
“Ninety?” David’s scared digits seemed to
please Dorothea and the others . . .
Everyone but me. Count up the facts:
for the last sixty years of my life
I’ve attempted to do what I could
by way of poems, but it appears
that an alarming proportion of
Contemporary American Poets,
whose lives and works I believe I shared
in poetic and in social terms,
were having none of it: their lives ended!
Ammons Wright Plath Warren Bishop Rich
Roethke Clampitt Van Doren Van Duyn
Ginsberg Rukeyser Dugan Lowell
Finkel Simpson Hollander Merrill
Justice Nemerov Creeley Hugo
Hecht O’Hara Kizer Kunitz Koch
Ransom Moss Kinnell (and this week!) Strand.
It would be all too easy to fill