Wonder

[ASKING]
By Barbara Reyes

there is ghazal swimming inside of her, wanting to be born. on the matter of foretelling, of small miracles, cactus flowers in bloom on this city fire escape, where inside your tongue touches every inch of her skin, where you lay your hand on her belly and sleep. here, she fingers the ornate remains of ancient mosques. here, some mythic angel will rise from the dust of ancestors’ bones. this is where you shall worship, at the intersections of distilled deities and memory’s sharp edges. the country is quite a poetic place; water and rock contain verse and metaphor, even wild grasses reply in rhyme. you are not broken. she knows this having captured a moment of lucidity; summer lightning bugs, sun’s rays in a jelly jar.

this is not a love poem, but a cove to escape the flux, however momentary. she is still a child, confabulating the fantastic; please do not erode her wonder for the liquid that is your language. there is thunderstorm in her chest, wanting to burst through her skin. this is neither love poem nor plea. this is not river, nor stone.

Barbara Jane Reyes, "Asking" from Poeta en San Francisco. Copyright © 2005 by Barbara Jane Reyes. 

Pass the Popcorn

HABITATION

Margaret Atwood

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert 
                    the unpainted stairs 
at the back where we squat 
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire 

“Habitation” excerpted from Selected Poems 1965–­1975 by Margaret Atwood. Copyright © 1987 by Margaret Atwood. 

https://poets.org/poem/habitation

bath water

"Soaping together

is sacred to us.

Washing each other's shoulders.

You can fuck

anyone---but with whom can you sit 

in water?"

Ilya Kaminsky

#DeafRepublic

Tiny Waves

Artichokes

by Bianca Stone


I bet I’ll never appear in a dream or a summer dress
or next door. Displaying on one hand my prowess, the other
my difficultness, I bet there will be just enough pain
to keep me alive, long enough for the moon to be mine,
just as the sea is of women: the cockle, the star,
and the movements of the earth. Just as
the whale, stuck in its baleen grin, climbs up
out of the depths and moves to its hidden
spawning grounds—

I don’t know. What is it to be seen? I can forget
it’s language I long for. Man and his ciphers
cannot save me. Meaning cannot not pile me up
with more meaning. I go off like a firework
in the yard. I take the limbs off myself
and club the air—for the dead women of television
displayed artistically in the woods, for the details
of their hair, for their pale skin, their now foul,
ravaged cunts—do you have to be thus
to be avenged? I don’t know.

I’ve seen the last of it: an ache.
To be saved. There are wildfires
switching course to worry about.
I take my daughter to the lake and watch her feel the tiny waves.
A seagull lifts a sandwich right from my hands.
I take out my tired breast. And of having felt
like a small event for so long—having felt
like an artichoke, scraped away at with the front teeth,
one scale at a time, worked down
to the meaty heart, but with the ultimate
disappointment of meagre flesh—
of being thus, I bet I will live again.
I bet I will appear in full gear, the armor
of ugly indefinite livability, the real body,
alive or in decay—I’ll appear
like a thundering, I’ll save
myself. And you. And you.









Bianca Stone is a poet and a visual artist.
Her most recent book is “The Möbius Strip Club of Grief.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/artichokes

What's Right With Kansas

Topography

After we flew across the country we
got into bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
burn above us, sealing us together,
all our cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

— Sharon Olds, The Gold Cell, Knopf (1987)

Inside Our Bodies

LOVE LIKE SALT


by Lisel Meuller

It lies in our hands in crystals
too intricate to decipher

It goes into the skillet
without being given a second thought

It spills on the floor so fine
we step all over it

We carry a pinch behind each eyeball

It breaks out on our foreheads

We store it inside our bodies
in secret wineskins

At supper, we pass it around the table
talking of holidays and the sea.






From "Alive Together: New and Selected Poems" (LSU Press, 1996)

Leaning Funny

from “Plan Upon Arrival”

Saretta Morgan

7. Letters arrived in intervals, as with everything else one might come, one might not regardless of whether there’d been a response. We prepared at all times. Bent over. We dreamed things would be different. Every time the door opened we each smiled in a way to make clear we’d never seen our own face. 

8. An appendix washed up, pages current-smoothed, leaning funny. We stood and watched the skin stretched and sewn. The so-called imaginary, so-called interior, so-called paradoxical private sphere. 

13. Dailiness was the anxiety through which we waited. Buttons undone, like clearance. Not what we wanted but what we didn’t know we had to have. Private acts to attempt in public. Productive relationships to sites of violence. Lace-fronts. A dollar to run to the store. 

19. However useful, the language was degrading, incompatible and lacked necessary verbs. The ability to compress, overflow and alter the landscape through a low swollen hum. To smell strongly in the morning, at the grocery or over the phone.

About This Poem   “‘Plan Upon Arrival’ is a book-length poem set in the landscape of my family’s farm of over eighty years in the Florida panhandle. I’m interested in the intimate accounting of rural black life as a means to register and transcribe the region’s physical transformations conditioned by indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery, anti-black resource management, the placement of a federal prison, and increasingly aggressive coastal storms.” —Saretta Morgan

Saretta Morgan is the author of Plan Upon Arrival, forthcoming from Selva Oscura/Three Count Pour in 2020, and Feeling Upon Arrival(Ugly Duckling Press, 2018), among other books. She teaches poetry at Arizona State University and lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

Hellbent

WHAT I DIDN’T KNOW BEFORE

by Ada Limon

was how horses simply give birth to other
horses. Not a baby by any means, not
a creature of liminal spaces, but a four-legged
beast hellbent on walking, scrambling after
the mother. A horse gives way to another
horse and then suddenly there are two horses,
just like that. That’s  how I loved you. You,
off the long train from Red Bank carrying
a coffee as big as your arm, a bag with two
computers swinging in it unwieldily at your
side. I remember we broke into laughter
when we saw each other. What was between
us wasn’t a fragile thing to be coddled, cooed
over. It came out fully formed, ready to run.

Midafternoon

HAPPINESS 

by Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,

or the way it turns up like a prodigal

who comes back to the dust at your feet

having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?

You make a feast in honor of what

was lost, and take from its place the finest

garment, which you saved for an occasion

you could not imagine, and you weep night and day

to know that you were not abandoned,

that happiness saved its most extreme form

for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never

knew about, who flies a single-engine plane

onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes

into town, and inquires at every door

until he finds you asleep midafternoon

as you so often are during the unmerciful

hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.

It comes to the woman sweeping the street

with a birch broom, to the child

whose mother has passed out from drink.

It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing

a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,

and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots

in the night.

                     It even comes to the boulder

in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,

to rain falling on the open sea,

to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/39190/happiness-56d21cb4b54e9

Just Ajar

The Bench

by Peter Schmitt



It's all like a bad riddle, our widow friend
said at the time.  If a tree falls in the woods
and kills your husband, what can you build from it?
That she was speaking quite literally
we did not know until the day months later
the bench arrived, filling that foyer space
in the house the neighbors pitched in to finish.
 
She'd done it, she said, for the sake of the boys,
and was never more sure of her purpose
than when they were off, playing in the woods
their father loved, somewhere out of earshot
and she would be struggling in with groceries.
For her, it was mostly a place to rest
such a weight, where other arms might have reached
 
to lift what they could.  Or like the time we knocked
at her door, and finding it just ajar,
cautiously entered the sunstruck hallway,
and saw her sitting there staring into space,
before she heard our steps and caught herself,
turning smiling toward us, a book left
lying open on the bench beside her.



http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org
column 707

Desirous

From the Manifesto of the Selfish

by Stephen Dunn

Because altruists are the least sexy
     people on earth, unable
to say "I want" without embarrassment,

we need to take from them everything
     they give,
then ask for more,

this is how to excite them, and because
     it's exciting
to see them the least bit excited

once again we'll be doing something
     for ourselves,
who have no problem taking pleasure

always desirous and so pleased to be
     pleased, we who above all
can be trusted to keep the balance.

My Apartment

This is Just to Say

by Erica-Lynn Gambino

(for William Carlos Williams)

I have just
asked you to
get out of my
apartment

even though
you never
thought
I would

Forgive me
you were
driving
me insane

I'm Alive

Indigo

by Ellen Bass

As I’m walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs
toward me pushing one of those jogging strollers
with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping,
which this baby is. I can just get a glimpse
of its almost translucent eyelids. The father is young,
a jungle of indigo and carnelian tattooed
from knuckle to jaw, leafy vines and blossoms,
saints and symbols. Thick wooden plugs pierce
his lobes and his sunglasses testify
to the radiance haloed around him. I’m so jealous.
As I often am. It’s a kind of obsession.
I want him to have been my child’s father.
I want to have married a man who wanted
to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much
that he marked it up like a book, underlining,
highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.
Not like my dead ex-husband, who was always
fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours
on his zafu chanting om and then went out
and broke his hand punching the car.
I imagine when this galloping man gets home
he’s going to want to have sex with his wife,
who slept in late, and then he’ll eat
barbecued ribs and let the baby teethe on a bone
while he drinks a cold dark beer. I can’t stop
wishing my daughter had had a father like that.
I can’t stop wishing I’d had that life. Oh, I know
it’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.
It took eight years for my parents to conceive me.
First there was the war and then just waiting.
And my mother’s bones so narrow, she had to be slit
and I airlifted. That anyone is born,
each precarious success from sperm and egg
to zygote, embryo, infant, is a wonder.
And here I am, alive.
Almost seventy years and nothing has killed me.
Not the car I totalled running a stop sign
or the spirochete that screwed into my blood.
Not the tree that fell in the forest exactly
where I was standing—my best friend shoving me
backward so I fell on my ass as it crashed.
I’m alive.
And I gave birth to a child.
So she didn’t get a father who’d sling her
onto his shoulder. And so much else she didn’t get.
I’ve cried most of my life over that.
And now there’s everything that we can’t talk about.
We love—but cannot take
too much of each other.
Yet she is the one who, when I asked her to kill me
if I no longer had my mind—
we were on our way into Ross,
shopping for dresses. That’s something
she likes and they all look adorable on her—
she’s the only one
who didn’t hesitate or refuse
or waver or flinch.
As we strode across the parking lot
she said, O.K., but when’s the cutoff?
That’s what I need to know.

• Ellen Bass is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University. Her most recent book is “Like a Beggar.”

Date Night

  

The Babysitter

by Sharon Olds

The baby was about six months old,
a girl. The length of her life, I had not
touched anyone. That night, when they went out
I held the baby along my arm and
put her mouth to my cotton shirt.
I didn’t really know what a person was, I
wanted someone to suck my breast,
I ended up in the locked bathroom,
naked to the waist, holding the baby,
and all she wanted was my glasses, I held her
gently, waiting for her to turn,
like a cherub, and nurse. And she wouldn’t, what she wanted
was my glasses. Suck me, goddamnit, I thought,
I wanted to feel the tug of another
life, I wanted to feel needed, she grabbed for my
glasses and smiled. I put on my bra
and shirt, and tucked her in, and sang to her
for the last time — clearly it
was the week for another line of work —
and turned out the light. Back in the bathroom
I lay on the floor in the dark, bared
my chest against the icy tile,
slipped my hand between my legs and
rode, hard, against the hard floor, my nipples holding me up off the glazed
blue, as if I were flying upside
down under the ceiling of the world.

Delicate

A Blessing

By James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, 

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.

And the eyes of those two Indian ponies 

Darken with kindness.

They have come gladly out of the willows 

To welcome my friend and me.

We step over the barbed wire into the pasture 

Where they have been grazing all day, alone.

They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness  

That we have come. 

They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. 

There is no loneliness like theirs.  

At home once more, 

They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.  

I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, 

For she has walked over to me  

And nuzzled my left hand.  

She is black and white, 

Her mane falls wild on her forehead, 

And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear 

That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. 

Suddenly I realize 

That if I stepped out of my body I would break 

Into blossom.

Small Answers

Under One Small Star

By Wislawa Szymborska

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity if I’m mistaken, after all.
Please, don’t be angry, happiness, that I take you as my due.
May my dead be patient with the way my memories fade.
My apologies to time for all the world I overlook each second.
My apologies to past loves for thinking that the latest is the first.
Forgive me, distant wars, for bringing flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
I apologize for my record of minuets to those who cry from the depths.
I apologize to those who wait in railway stations for being asleep today at five a.m.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing from time to time.
Pardon me, deserts, that I don’t rush to you bearing a spoonful of water.
And you, falcon, unchanging year after year, always in the same cage,
your gaze always fixed on the same point in space,
forgive me, even if it turns out you were stuffed.
My apologies to the felled tree for the table’s four legs.
My apologies to great questions for small answers.
Truth, please don’t pay me much attention.
Dignity, please be magnanimous.
Bear with me, O mystery of existence, as I pluck the occasional thread from your train.
Soul, don’t take offense that I’ve only got you now and then.
My apologies to everything that I can’t be everywhere at once.
My apologies to everyone that I can’t be each woman and each man.
I know I won’t be justified as long as I live,
since I myself stand in my own way.
Don’t bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.

Repeat

May Day

Phillis Levin

I've decided to waste my life again,

Like I used to: get drunk on

The light in the leaves, find a wall 

Against which something can happen, 

Whatever may have happened 

Long ago—let a bullet hole echoing 

The will of an executioner, a crevice 

In which a love note was hidden, 

Be a cell where a struggling tendril 

Utters a few spare syllables at dawn. 

I’ve decided to waste my life 

In a new way, to forget whoever 

Touched a hair on my head, because 

It doesn’t matter what came to pass, 

Only that it passed, because we repeat 

Ourselves, we repeat ourselves. 

I’ve decided to walk a long way 

Out of the way, to allow something 

Dreaded to waken for no good reason, 

Let it go without saying, 

Let it go as it will to the place 

It will go without saying: a wall 

Against which a body was pressed 

For no good reason, other than this.

From May Day by Phillis Levin. Copyright © 2008 by Phillis Levin.

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/may-day

Transfixed

Son

by Forrest Gander

It’s not the mirror that is draped but
what remains unspoken between us.  Why 

say anything about death, how

the body comes to deploy the myriad worm

as if it were a manageable concept not
searing exquisite singularity? To serve it up like

a eulogy or a tale of my or your own
suffering. Some kind of self-abasement.

And so we continue waking to a decapitated sun and trees
continue to irk me. The heart of charity

bears its own set of genomes. You lug a bacterial swarm
in the crook of your knee, and through my guts

writhe helminth parasites. Who was ever only themselves?
At Leptis Magna, when your mother and I were young, we came across

statues of gods with their faces and feet cracked away by vandals. But
for the row of guardian Medusa heads. No one so brave to deface those.

When she spoke, when your mother spoke, even the leashed
greyhound stood transfixed. I stood transfixed.

I gave my life to strangers; I kept it from the ones I love.
Her one arterial child. It is just in you her blood runs.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/son/amp

by John Loomis

At the Lake House

Wind and the sound of wind—
across the bay a chainsaw revs
and stalls. I've come here to write,

but instead I've been thinking
about my father, who, in his last year,
after his surgery, told my mother

he wasn't sorry—that he'd cried
when the other woman left him,
that his time with her

had made him happier than anything
he'd ever done. And my mother,
who'd cooked and cleaned for him

all those years, cared for him
after his heart attack, could not
understand why he liked the other

woman more than her,
but he did. And she told me
that after he died she never went

to visit his grave—not once.
You think you know them,
these creatures robed

in your parents' skins. Well,
you don't. Any more than you know
what the pines want from the wind,

if the lake's content with this pale
smear of sunset, if the loon calls
for its mate, or for another.
 

http://www.americanlifeinpoetry.org/columns/detail/659

brown girl dreaming

lessons

by Jaqueline Woodson

My mother says:

When Mama tried to teach me

To make collards and potato salad

I didn't want to learn.

She opens the box of pancake mix, adds milk

And eggs, stirs. I watch

Grateful for the food we have now--syrup waiting

In the cabinet, bananas to slice on top.

It’s Saturday morning.

Five days a week, she leaves us

To work at an office back in Brownsville.

Saturday we have her to ourselves, all day long.

Me and Kay didn't want to be inside cooking.

She stirs the lumps from the batter, pours it

Into the buttered, hissing pan.

Wanted to be with our friends

running wild through Greenville.

There was a man with a peach tree down the road.

One day Robert climbed over that fence, filled a bucket

With peaches. Wouldn't share them with any of us but

Told us where the peach tree was. And that's where we

wanted to be

sneaking peaches from that man’s tree, throwing

the rotten ones

at your uncle!

Mama wanted us to learn to cook.

Ask the boys, we said. And Mama knew that wasn't fair

Girls inside and boys going off to steal peaches!

So she let us all of us

Stay outside until suppertime.

And by then, she says, putting our breakfast on the table,

it was too late.