Anna Bachtle, Ed Ochester
Of course she’s happy
in the kitchen
whose stone and metal
have been worn out by her flesh.
She’s smoothed the clean linen
for fifty years;
in fall she laughs like a slice of moon
as she peels warm apples
into the battered colander in the sink.
The heavy cloth, the scent of fruit,
are comfortable things.
She is no appendix to her daughter’s world.
Unless you escape in time,
she reviews forever the ancient pennants
on boats vanished from the river,
her first man’s name,
the umbrella trees she saw one time in Kingston.
Seemingly content with chores,
with trees beyond the window
spinning familiar cycles,
she unfurls the wash like banners.
Surely her work is useful.
She earns her keep.
She tells her daughter’s world as it runs
straight tracks toward its future,
“I am useful,
I am still here.”
Ever Want to Crawl, Nikki Giovanni
ever want to crawl
in someone’s arms
white out the world
in someone’s arms
and feel the world
of someone’s arms
it’s so hot in hell
if i don’t sweat
i’ll melt
Right Now, William Stafford
Tonight in our secret town
wires are down. Black
lights along the street blow
steady in a wind held still.
A deaf dog listens. A girl
retreats from her gaze: her eyes
go endlessly black, a spool of shadow.
Led by my own dark I go
my unmarked everlasting round
frozen in this moment: Now
smooths all the smother, held,
wild but still. I know
so well nothing moves, arrived:
my glimpse, this town, our time.
Birds, Indran Amirthanayagam
Birds that eat salt,
hand about cemeteries,
forage in abandoned lots,
civil war crows
fattened on carnage
from roadside bombs,
gorged vultures
loping from body
to body, picking
eyes clean
before clambering
up into trees
that have survived
hanging still
over the silent beach.
announcement
Sorry my posting has been erratic lately. Life problems/internet problems blah blah blah. Things should be back on track now.
Also, there are only SEVEN MORE DAYS until I start posting y’all’s original work! You can keep sending throughout the rest of the year but I will be starting with the other (“professional” or published) work again on the 1st of the year. I may have a month each year to post submissions. I’m not sure yet…we’ll see how things pan out! I’ve received a lot of great work so far but there’s still available space! Thanks to everyone who’s sent me stuff!
For Two Jameses, Nikki Giovanni
(Ballantine and Snow)
In iron cells
we all start
as a speck
nobody notices us
but some may hope
we’re there
some count days and wait
we grow
in a cell that spreads
like a summer cold
to other people
they notice and laugh
some are happy
some wish to stop
our movement
we kick and move
are stubborn and demanding
completely inside
the system
they put us in a cell
to make us behave
never realizing it’s from cells
we have escaped
and we will be born
from their iron cells
new people with a new cry
104: Tristia, Osip Madelstam
I have studied the science of good-byes,
the bare-headed laments of night.
The waiting lengthens as the oxen chew.
In the town the last hour of the watch.
And I have bowed to the knell of night in the rooster’s throat
when eyes red with crying picked up their burden
of sorrow and looked into the distance
and the crying of women and the Muses’ song became one.
Who can tell from the sound of the word ‘parting’
what kind of bereavements await us,
what the rooster promises with his loud surprise
when a light shows in the Acropolis,
dawn of a new life,
the ox still swinging his jaw in the outer passage,
or why the rooster, announcing the new life,
flaps his wings on the ramparts?
A thing I love is the action of spinning:
the shuttle fluttering back and forth, the hum of the spindle,
and look, like a swan’s down floating toward us,
Delia, the barefoot shepherdess, flying—
o indigence at the root of our lives,
how poor is the language of happiness!
Everything’s happened before and will happen again,
but still the moment of each meeting is sweet.
Amen. The little transparent figure
lies on the clean earthen plate
like a squirrel skin being stretched.
A girl bends to study the wax.
Who are we to guess at the hell of the Greeks?
Wax for women, bronze for men:
our lot falls to us in the field, fighting,
but to them death comes as they tell fortunes.
A Poem Without a Single Bird in It, Jack Spicer
What can I say to you, darling,
When you ask me for help?
I do not know the future
Or even what poetry
We are going to write.
Commit suicide. Go mad. Better people
Than either of us have tried it.
I loved you once but
I do not know the future.
I only that I love strength in my friends
And greatness
And hate the way their bodies crack when they die
And are eaten by images.
The fun’s over. The picnic’s over.
Go mad. Commit suicide. There will be nothing left
After you die or go mad,
But the calmness of poetry.
sent to Robert Blaser in Boston 12/2/56
Haikus, Jack Kerouac
The little sparrow
on my eave drainpipe
is looking around
The smoke of old
naval battles
is gone
Listen to the birds sing!
All the little birds
Will die!
Dusk—the bird
on the fence
A contemporary of mine
Emergence, Joy Harjo
It’s midsummer night. The light is skinny;
a think skirt of desire skims the earth.
Dogs bark at the musk of other dogs
and the urge to go wild.
I am lingering at the edge
of a broken heart, striking relentlessly
against the flint of hard will.
It’s coming apart.
And everyone knows it.
So do squash erupting in flowers
the color of the sun.
So does the momentum of grace
gathering allies
in the partying mob.
The heart knows everything.
I remember when there was no urge
to cut the land or each other into pieces,
when we knew how to think
in beautiful.
There is no world like the one surfacing.
I can smell it as I pace in my square room,
the neighbor’s television
entering my house by waves of sound.
Makes me think about buying
a new car, another kind of cigarette
when I don’t need another car
and I don’t smoke cigarettes.
A human mind is small when thinking
of small things.
It is large when embracing the maker
of walking, thinking and flying.
If I can locate the sense beyond desire,
I will not eat or drink
until I stager into the earth
with grief.
I will locate the point of dawning
and awaken
with the longest day in the world.
