How Good

JULY

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz



The figs we ate wrapped in bacon.

The gelato we consumed greedily:

coconut milk, clove, fresh pear.

How we’d dump hot espresso on it

just to watch it melt, licking our spoons

clean. The potatoes fried in duck fat,

the salt we’d suck off our fingers,

the eggs we’d watch get beaten

’til they were a dizzying bright yellow,

how their edges crisped in the pan.

The pink salt blossom of prosciutto

we pulled apart with our hands, melted

on our eager tongues. The green herbs

with goat cheese, the aged brie paired

with a small pot of strawberry jam,

the final sour cherry we kept politely

pushing onto each other’s plate, saying,

No, you. But it’s so good. No, it’s yours.

How I finally put an end to it, plucked it

from the plate, and stuck it in my mouth.

How good it tasted: so sweet and so tart.

How good it felt: to want something and

pretend you don’t, and to get it anyway.

Which wife?

Witch-Wife

Edna St. Vincent Millay - 1892-1950


She is neither pink nor pale,

 And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale, 

 And her mouth on a valentine. 

She has more hair than she needs; 

  In the sun 'tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads, 

 Or steps leading into the sea. 

 She loves me all that she can, 

  And her ways to my ways resign; 

 But she was not made for any man, 

  And she never will be all mine.

Writing in a time of Cholera

This is Just to Say

I have written

a page

of words

despite

toddlers torn

the wall, funded

federal death penalty

Forgive us

my words

so cold

and so still

We are what we repeatedly do

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

Blurred

The Forest

José González

Why didn't you tell
Why didn't I know
Landscapes blurred by rain
Mountains covered in snow

Why didn't I see
The forest on fire behind in snow

Why didn't I feel
Why didn't you show
The cracks under the bridge
The gaps along the road

Why didn't I see
The forest on fire behind the trees

Why didn't I see
The forest on fire behind the trees

https://youtu.be/FBqYsRdglnY

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.

Sidewalk Concert

Leo: sings "Harmony" at full volume in ascending tones
Friend: "I don't think you know what 'harmony' means."
Me, grabs air mic and announces: "Ladies, today Leo B will be playing the role of Annoying Little Brother and perform the amazing feat of singing solo harmony! #posterity The Humor Code

Notes on a Book Club Evening

From Rebecca Solnit's 2015 essay, "80 Books No Woman Should Read,"

"There are good and great books on the Esquire list, though even Moby-Dick, which I love, reminds me that a book without women is often said to be about humanity, but a book with women in the foreground is a woman's book. And that list would have you learn about women from James M. Cain and Philip Roth, who just aren't the experts you should go to, not when the great oeuvres of Doris Lessing and Louise Erdrich and Elena Ferrante exist."

which gave me the courage, together with my own reading of Erdrich in 2006, to suggest "The Master Butcher's Singing Club," by Louise Erdrich for our founding meeting.

It's an imperfect or inconsistent novel, which makes it easy to dismiss in frustration and also easy to forgive and enter into its magical moments--Eva's kitchen, in flight with Franz and Eva, beneath the earth with Marcus, standing on a street selling all your sausages with Fidelis. All of the characters revolve around Delphine. She is a fine woman from whom to learn about women. She creates herself and her story, never compromising what she sees as truth and also bearing the knowledge that at the heart of every person lives a secret, either one they hold or one that is withheld from them.

This first of book club meetings I hosted and prepared a feast. In fine form, I did not inform the guests that dinner would be served. Having eaten with their families at home, or eaten on the fly commuting to my home, they persisted to dine, nevertheless. Duck fat spread on thick, white bread with salt and red onion, and sausages (nod to the butcher, Fidelis), and ratatouille and salad (nod to Eva's garden, where I want to live forever). Chocolates and red wine, nod to our own desires.

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

tweet

when instead of asking, "Is that a man or woman," I said, you should have asked, "What pronouns do they prefer?" And he said, "Why are you making this difficult?" (Why are you disrupting my funny anecdote?) Snap. I felt firm in my role as a feminist killjoy thanks to @SaraNAhmed 

Absolute

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent


Stunning.

View all my reviews

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.