what the living do

Marie Howe's 1998 poetry collection What the Living Do is a favorite of mine.  Her reading of this moving poem at last night's Wilde Boys gave it a sudden immediacy.  It's addressed to her brother who died of AIDS.


What the Living Do


Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.


- Marie Howe

terroir

It was fitting to take Robert Morgan's new collection of poems, Terroir, with me to the "soft mountains" of Blue Ridge Virginia.  He describes the locale as "softness only in the face, / deceptive to the look as steel / encased in velvet."  This could also describe Morgan's lovely, pastoral poems which are both accessible and resonant but also like nature itself: a little offbeat and somewhat off-key.

Morgan's poems have many acute observations of beauty and recklessness in the natural world.  One of the strongest works in the collection ("Loaves and Fishes") describes in gritty detail a dead deer on the side of the road ("dead / and bloated so its legs shoot out / like barrels of some obscene bagpipe,") and its decay ("sinking out of sight in flood / of rising weeds and goldenrod").  Nature poems often struggle to contain the wildness of the wilderness through succinct articulation (Thomas Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" is a renowned example).  Perhaps that's why Morgan's use of form and imagery (the containment and manipulation of water in "Squirt Gun") is often appealing.  Even if he can get carried away sometimes by lines like "the first fire / when darkness wept the stars and time began" he grounds it in the chemical, bland "Smells of a Closet."  It helps too that Morgan, as a well-established novelist, is able to write so eloquently about people.  In a distinctly southern voice,  the people presents are blended into the natural setting and sometimes struggle and resist it; the palms of his grandfather are callused from growing and selling produce door to door.

I keep tripping up the title of Morgan's book which basically means soil but carries on larger meanings  ("so close to terror you'd confuse / the two, as if the finest and / the rarest blend would come with just / a hint of fear or pain, the sting / and shiver of revulsion with / the savor of the earth and sun,").  In a decade saturated with images of natural destruction, Morgan's poems are sonorous.  Stuck in a Roanoke airport due to weather, I read Morgan's poems on the page, looked up past the angry, stranded passengers on their cell phones, and then out at those scenic, "soft mountains," and I felt myself in the trap of it all.

poetry stamps!

How fun!  Coming in 2012.

3 poems in NAP

Three of my poems ("Disco Demolition," "Midnight Cowboy," and "The Pastor") are in the latest issue of NAP.  It's a really cool little journal.  Check it out!

a fast life

I attended one of the best poetry readings I've ever been to last night at St. Mark's Church. It was a tribute to Tim Dlugos. I wonder if other writers have felt this way when every once in a while you discover a writer whose odd brain you feel a certain kinship with. I included some previously unpublished poems of his in the last issue of Clementine. From time to time poets have told me to read his work, but much of it was elusive. That's why it's so exciting to have his poetry compiled in an extraordinary book, A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos, beautifully published by Nightboat Books and meticuously and lovingly edited by one of my favorite poets David Trinidad.

"sadly, i disappoint them"

So another National Poetry Month goes by. Thanks to everyone who shared their amazing work.


Sheep in Fog


The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells -
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.



-Sylvia Plath

a poem by michael montlack

Venus Doesn’t Glitter When She Stands Next to You


And she knows it.
So she keeps a mercurial distance, arranging and re-arranging
her crown of coreopsis before the powder room vanity—
where Mother Earth chain-smokes and chats with a pock-marked cousin
(you know, the pasty one who always follows her around)—
a grand entrance planned for quasi-twilight when (she knows) you’ll slip away
to another soiree just getting started on the other side of town.
Where does she get the energy? Pluto asks.

Mars, already bored without you, issues a trademark barb:
I’ve heard she’s a fiend: coke, meth, diet pills …
Nonsense, blurts tipsy Jupiter. Jealous gossip amongst the lesser stars.
It’s like this all night.
With poor Venus in her polished rhinestones
vying to be their diamond center.




-from Michael Montlack's collection Cool Limbo forthcoming from New York Quarterly Books. Check it out here.

Michael Montlack is the author of the poetry collection Cool Limbo (New York Quarterly Books, 2011) and the editor of the Lambda-nominated essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin, 2009). He splits his time between New York City, where he teaches at Berkeley College, and San Francisco. Currently he is at work on his first novel.

a poem by aaron jorgensen-briggs

Enigma machine



A cloud inside the patina’d warehouse,

the arrogant song of the ice cream man.

Kids with their small, legitimate demands,

buds on the trees like tiny fists.



What followed me home in the sooty light

was the sketch of an animal, the mere idea

of hunger. Can’t find it now, but sometimes I feel

my hair lift in the dark.



I saw a magician vanish

a whole airplane once, but later found out

that he had just turned us

into the kind of people who wouldn’t notice.



I heard the GOP has got a plan, a kind of breathing

machine. The song it plays

is positively amniotic, even at the highest

setting, you’ll hardly notice—you’re soaking in it!



As for me, I’m required to sleep

all day, like a sheet of tin in the sun.

Like a girl in a yellow school bus

with glossy hair that reminds me of horses



and a sad, pink shirt. One day she’ll know.

Someone stares out of every window. Everyone follows

the long shadows

into the afternoon, the golden hour.




Aaron Jorgensen-Briggs lives in Brooklyn. Sometimes he puts stuff on the internet - http://flotson.net

a poem by rickey laurentiis

Mood Indigo


1.

How is it out? Is, from the sky,
water still coming?

Are trees out? Do you hear
their argument? Do you know

it for an argument: how to manage
(they are yelling) this weather?

Where are birds? Why are they made
clairvoyant—flitting off, fluttering

like leaves on a single branch: they know
to evacuate, to separate from the living

world, about to be changed, world,
and the trees—?

2.

Though I cannot see you
still I know it is

you: man with the hard
kiss, the touch of Scorpion in his blood.

That means life for you is absolute.
There is either hunger

or no hunger. There is either a body pleased—.
You ain’t been blue, no, no, no: the radio’s

dim utterance—the sole utterance.
This dark house. The way we move,

aimless—is that an utterance? The dishes
slowly washed: ignorance or utterance?

The weather outside, weather,
and the trees—.

3.

They are still trees, right, slamming the roof-tiles?
They are trees—the world not yet totally remade?

4.

There is either a body pleased—
or no body. Violence

or there is creation. How are they out?
Not palmetto. I mean, oak. I mean, magnolia.

Aren’t they lonely? Don’t they feel somehow
cheated, somehow violated? Here is my body

for you to use and also to protect—that
was their contract with the birds, who are gone,

who didn’t tell us they were gone. Are you listening?
Can you tell me where they went?

Tell me of their solitude. How they share it.
Tell me how to be that alone

(here is my body, Scorpio, won’t you top it?)
—together and alone.

5.

Is the body responsive?—your question.
But don’t you feel me? My body’s tremor?

My legs? My back-in-an-arc? Each trembling as if
each the alcove for where the birds go?

6.

Splinters are not trees. Trees are not
flesh. Here is the scene:

Two men. Blacked-out. Half-embracing.
As, from the sky, falls the still-coming water.

Life is absolute. There is either danger
in this house or there is love. Either fear

in the radio’s voice (your arrogance will not
protect you) or there is love. Where are the gods

now, prophecy in a hard beak? Let them say:
Your body will not be spared. Let them say: Your life

is not recyclable like the trees.




"Mood Indigo" originally appeared in Ganymede Unfinished and PANK.


Rickey Laurentiis was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. His manuscript, One Country, received an honorable mention for the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, judged by Claudia Rankine, while his other honors include a 2010 Pushcart Prize Nomination, and first- and third-runner up in the 2009 International Reginald Shepherd Memorial Poetry Prize, selected by Carl Phillips. The recipient of fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Rickey's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in several literary journals, including Indiana Review, jubilat, Knockout Literary Magazine and Vinyl.

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths.

a poem by sommer browning

Acts of Misinterpreted Surrender


From a car a woman yells: Pick a lane, bitch—
and thusly, you are welcomed to the jungle.

A kind of chosen birthday
with no perfect pianoness, a kind of chosen Milwaukee,
with no abyss.

The instant becomes funny & numerous
beyond the lake’s glassier, exacting mirror,

as if of a note’s three parts,
you chose the middle eternal.

Take away a thinker’s thuses and her mouth
lacks giving, take her contradictions

and she lights up like the fire climax pine.
And this whole time, did you notice, the little, tired flea?

His grain of rice is raised;
what a gorgeous way to say bless you.



Sommer Browning is the author of Either Way I'm Celebrating (Birds, LLC; 2011), a book of poetry and comics. With Tony Mancus, she founded Flying Guillotine Press. She enjoys things in Denver.

a poem by marin sorescu

Perseverance


I shall look at the grass
Till I obtain the degree
Of Doctor of Grass.

I shall look at the clouds
Till I become a Master
Of Clouds

I shall walk beside the smoke
Till out of shame
The smoke returns to the flame
Of its beginning.

I shall walk beside all things
Till all things
Come to know me.


-Marin Sorescu


Translated by D.J. Enright and Joana Russell-Gebbett; from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry

a poem by yehuda amichai

Love is Finished Again


Love is finished again, like a profitable citrus season
or like an archaeological dig that turned up
from deep inside the earth
turbulent things that wanted to be forgotten.

Love is finished again. When a tall building
is torn down and the debris cleared away, you stand there
on the square empty lot, saying: What a small
space that building stood on
with all its many floors and people.

From the distant valleys you can hear
the sound of a solitary tractor at work
and from the distant past, the sound of a fork
clattering against a porcelain plate,
beating an egg yolk with sugar for a child,
clattering and clattering.


-Yehuda Amichai


from The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, translated by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell

a poem by anne sexton

The Truth the Dead Know


For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959


Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.


-Anne Sexton

a poem by wislawa szymborska

Teenager


Me — a teenager?
If she suddenly stood, here, now, before me,
would I need to treat her as near and dear,
although she’s strange to me, and distant?

Shed a tear, kiss her forehead
for the simple reason
that we share a birthdate?

So many dissimilarities between us
that only the bones are likely still the same,
the cranial vault, the eye sockets.

Since her eyes seem a little larger,
her eyelashes are longer, she’s taller
and the whole body is closely sheathed
in smooth, unblemished skin.

Relatives and friends still link us, it is true,
but in her world almost all are living,
while in mine almost no one survives
from that shared circle.

We differ so profoundly,
talk and think about completely different things.
She knows next to nothing —
but with a doggedness deserving better causes.
I know much more —
but nothing for sure.

She shows me poems,
written in a clear and careful script
that I haven’t used for years.

I read the poems, read them.
Well, maybe that one
if it were shorter
and fixed in a couple of places.
The rest do not bode well.

The conversation stumbles.
On her pathetic watch
time is still cheap and unsteady.
On mine it's far more precious and precise.

Nothing in parting, a fixed smile
and no emotion.

Only when she vanishes,
leaving her scarf in her haste.

A scarf of genuine wool,
in colored stripes
crocheted for her
by our mother.

I've still got it.



-Wislawa Szymborska


Originally appeared in Granta and in Szymborska's collection Here.

Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak

a poem by woody loverude

Have You Seen This Man? This Blue Box?


Of us all, the mannequins look healthiest rioting down Bowery
in their three piece suits and pocketed dresses,
the occasional hollow limb flexing the grid.

We'll never be doctors, are no longer students,
& when asked about our apartments, mutter
It's bigger on the inside.

There are cracks in the sidewalk. Cracks in the walls.
For a moment, silence barrels down the avenues
and our friends and neighbors are forgotten. Never were.

The world is stranger than we expected.

We had so little time with our mothers (gone, gone)
who supplied us with food mill and money clip
until our hairless selves grew rich & fat & loved.

We can’ t remember the books they read us as we slept.
There was something about a god & something about an angry boy
& something about a machine & something about a lightning storm.

It made sense, then. Our mothers said they named a month
after us, but we would only know which when we grew up & married.
Now we’ re adults & it’ s November. Our mothers are far away.

Now we open the refrigerator to applesauce & chutney.
We remember there’ s a war or two.
On the ceiling, we hear the ghosts of our fathers’ footfalls.
We turn the music louder.



Woody Loverude's favorite Doctor is David Tennant & his favorite companion, Donna.

a poem by christopher roberts

The Highrise Is Planted in the Years


i. When Godfrey and Linda Fall Back into the Quarrel

How can these two lovers snagged in the mesh
of their contended past, continually, be never spent,
still squabbling, still mired in this tireless endeavoring
to take some dumb gibe back? They keep trudging back,
and what could we expect?—harm out-running harm
in piled-on replies, then Godfrey’s eyes gone
the beamed-glass blanks of grease-thumbed specs
as Linda hoists last night’s bottle overhead,
last drops drizzling her arm—

Caught up in this charged, over-trampled bickering
they could do anything. There’s no place left to go.
And this blanched, flimsy leeway vertigo
Godfrey feels within himself, bristling, may grow,
spanning out until he could, if indeed he would,
hoist the spindled chair and hurl it through the glass!
He digs a heel into his calf to clench it up
and flicks a wicker trivet from the counter to the floor.

Neither’s gonna talk about this matter later on—
wet grounds spilling from the filter cone,
muffin crumbs and CD sleeves and ice cubes from a cup,
all tidied back later till there’s nothing but to scatter
the last ridge of dust at the dustpan’s lip
and swab the spackled wall where the red sauce drips
where the flung bowl struck:

Neither’s gonna relent, or wholly break the sense
of being riled in the tiff, both bearing back
some dumb rebuff, the stiffened jaws of stifled yawns—
but there for a time the catastrophe stumps,
where a popsicle is running in the sink
and the overboiled vermicelli clings
cooling in the pot to a sticky knotted clump.


*


Come time packed down we press on
    Our aged demure appraisal of the years
We scrape up: For we have stalked
    The quick protrusion of a bright hotel
Over land pressed and tucked into a faultless verge:
    And we’ve been hoisted on a surge
Of air and dust to rooms we hoard inside the years.
    And finding nothing left of us
To occupy the rooms, how long will we last
    Tarrying in bearings we are unprepared to pass,
All our lagging trails gathering in hotels lunging
    Bright up through the gust?



Christopher Roberts grew up in New Hampshire, received his MFA from New York University, and currently lives and teaches in Lafayette, Indiana. His poems have appeared in Cimarron Review and Clementine.

a poem by jameson fitzpatrick

Ode to Paul Newman as Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof


Blue eyes bore me, baby, but not yours,
blue as your bathrobe, bluer even, blue as
your convertible’s long blue body, wet with rain.
The only pair pretty enough to stare into Liz Taylor’s
and refuse her.

What is it about a man with a glass of whiskey in his hand?
What is it about a crutch, silk pajamas, a broken ankle?
I’m not even into feet, really, but the toes peeking
out from the white mass of cast, if they aren’t
the most beautiful toes

in the whole history of film—the big toe,
especially. All through the movie, Poor Liz struggles
to pronounce your name: Brig, Brig! she keeps insisting,
as if a soft terminal consonant is the only trick
to sounding Southern.

Me, I’m from New England; I like the ck
hard in my mouth. Why do you wear your wedding ring
on your pinky, Brick? Are your fingers too fat from the booze?
I’d jump out a hotel window over you. Wouldn’t it be funny
if that was true.


Jameson Fitzpatrick is an editorial assistant at Barrow Street and a poetry editor for LambdaLiterary.org. He lives in New York.

a poem by sasha debevec-mckenney

A Half Black Girl’s Guide to White Guilt


I can’t stop imagining
what never happened to my father;
sometimes I forget
he grew up black in Georgia, born
to a Town Clerk’s Office that left
the date on his birth certificate blank,
that the stories he told me
are more real than the things I know,
that our past hangs at the back of my neck—
a knot that doesn’t loosen.


Sasha Debevec-McKenney lives in Wisconsin and was a National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts youngARTS finalist. Her poems have appeared in the Oregon Literary Review and were featured in Lambda Literary's Poetry Spotlight. In 2008 she was a featured reader at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival Night of Fresh Voices. She is currently working on a series of poems about the Presidents of the United States of America.

two poems by rachelle cruz

Scratching Jesus


It began with an innocent nick
from the crown of thorns.
Then our fingernails
brimmed with blue paint
and his invisible left eye
laid broken in my hand.
In my parents' bedroom,
the statue stood between
two mirrors over false
wooden drawers,
his hands heavy with air.
Every day, after school,
a scratch from his callused
feet, a comb of fingers
over the grooves of his hair.
My sister and I couldn't
explain the rainbows
of archeological dust
on our cheeks.
Even after our mother spanked us,
(the Slipper or the Belt?)
we swiped tiny curls
from the sacred heart, burning.
We wanted to dig for the fire
that made the heart beat.
Our hands open to the beauty
of ruin.







After Sylvia Sukop’s I forget myself (I forget you)


Walking to the office, a man forgets his leather
watch, his valise and climbs inside a billboard,
stapled with night sky and stars. He is tired
of losing. The stars are lined up, ready for
their labor of dark, aching. There’s no moon
here to guide them, some romantic notion.
They’ve punched their gas, their glint like nails
through a tin lightbox. Outside, the day is hotter,
brighter, and the man notices his hands
for the first time. His body unknotting from
the concrete, then nothing, nothing. Air.




Rachelle Cruz is from Hayward, California (in the Bay Area). She has taught creative writing, poetry and performance to young people in New York City, the Bay Area and Los Angeles. She hosts “The Blood-Jet Writing Hour” Radio Show on Blog Talk Radio. An Emerging Voices Fellow and a Kundiman Fellow, she is working towards her first collection of poems. Please check out her blog here.

a poem by holly mitchell

Transfusions End, July, 1995


The marrow came
from my hip. It was the blood.
They gave Guy his old blood and it ate
my marrow. I wish
she had told us. It was a morphine drip.
I feel bad singing that song
Morphine, morphine, she’s the gal for me.
If that woman of his hadn’t been--
You hear who she’s with.
Mom didn’t tell us he would be emaciated.
The worst was when we couldn’t see him
for weeks. They locked him in
a sterile room. It was like something
from Fringe. We went all the way
to Texas. Why did I come back?
There will be no whiskey.
Nobody thought he’d survive except him and Mom.
You’ve got the future in your arms. I want to go
home. I’ve forgotten which kind
of blood. John Harder took Dad’s sample.
I didn’t know. Guy played basketball
with this man. He apologized for the preacher
not mentioning us. Mom was still
pregnant. You were three. I wasn’t ready.
I knew it was going to be okay
when he came home from Houston.
Went back the next day, and he died.
I felt that he needed me to come.
He waited for him. My morphine
be the death of me. We’re all going
to miss Stork. You’re not about to drink that.
My arrival allowed him to
release the grip
on life he held so
tenuously. This is called
the intermittent casket.


Holly Mitchell has lived in Kentucky for most of her life. Currently, she is a student at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. Her poems can be found in Verbosity and The Quick Brown Fox.