Of the Millennial Promenade Along the River
Vendors line along the promenade to serve passersby – they sell pinwheels, pancakes, and roast meats of all kinds, even sticks of prickly little sea horses. One female vendor keeps peeled apples under her armpit until they are saturated with her scent and then she sells them so customers can luxuriate in both the scent of fruit and her ripeness. Along the promenade, the rabble is enraptured by the new tower across the river but the vendors grumble of slow business. Officials installed cameras behind the vendor’s umbrella fringes to catch conspirators. Today, there is no drama so the vendors gossip.
It is true that the fried prawn vendor tilted his surveillance camera so it caught nothing but the sun. Officials executed him after they watched the useless footage of a sun bobbing up and down for 100 days. Why did he do such a stupid thing? He was a saboteur! said one. We should all destroy the cameras. Everyone knows about them and it takes away business! Said a third, It was for personal reasons. He was stupid in love and his lover walked out on him for – and the vendors stopped short for the cameras were recording.
Cathy Park Hong (2012)
Cry Break
The day the news rolled in that half of the world’s population had perished via an anticipated but still shocking chemical explosion, even the Country Music Station recanted on its promise: ‘All Country All The Time.’ Death on a large scale always takes precedence and allows one to act swiftly and without guilt. I kissed my brother-in-law at my mother-in-law’s funeral, the ill-fitted plank of his torso hewn to my grief, so that afterward it was easier to be around the happy stuff everyone seemed to remember. It was all very confusing, as the radio put it, ‘complete mayhem.’ I thought about going to the school early to pick up my daughter, but decided against it – all those children parroting sorrow, what did they know? Sure, a few of them had been slapped, spit upon, held down and raked over – some had been told the truth: YOU WON’T GO FAR, YOU WON’T GO ANYWHERE AT ALL. I love my daughter, the pale gloaming of her hair a minor song of my continuance. Unlike the Country Music Station, the day the news rolled in that half of the world’s population had perished, I did my chores as usual, putting the dirty clothes into the washer and removing the clean ones from the dryer as if the world could be soothed by the delicate cycle and the loving heat of my steady machine. It was as though I knew I was not going anywhere until an anticipated but still shocking chemical explosion allowed me to perish from my daughter, my swift, guiltless death an event that would bring context to her sorrow and allow her to remember, unbidden, the happy stuff, which I’m sure happened daily, like writing your name in the fog on the shower door, for example. I thought of the way the singers that particular station favored created a chest-pulse, commonly known as the cry-break in Country Music, and how I had, while doing the laundry or tending that which required my tenderness, until that moment, been really listening for it.
Paige Ackerson-Kiely (2012)
Short Prayer to Sound
Sound has the particular quality of being visible. It is the greater god. Vision, in evening’s fog, shows a man on the cycle with his newspaper bags, the threaded breeze of his hair, the holes of his eyes; yet, though riveting, vision knows nothing of his pain.
Sound does, for sound is pain, curled and garbled by the ganglia, stunned and suppressed, dim thundering from some secret window. Never regular, though it may sometimes seem so. Never present, though it may seem. Rivet of moment to moment. A sack on the face with holes to see.
Imprecise, as a world seen through cloth, ease of the friend that follows. Agony internal to the shape. The tinier holes through which a quality refines. A private lack, a riveting in some riveting act.
What does sound carry? It will not tell. It refuses to be known. So close to us, clinging, it will not tell. He wants to gather memories in its sack, as if memories in the brain’s shifting imagos had actually the tangible quality of being gatherable. Alas, sound is forgetting. It has already been forgotten. It is the hole into which all knowhow disappears. A hole we can only call: the future.
Yet, like peas in a pod, like arguments in the agora, it follows tracks.
Vivek Naryanan (2012)
Homeless Heart
When I think of finishing the work, when I think of the finished work, a great sadness overtakes me, a sadness paradoxically like joy. The circumstances of doing put away, the being of it takes possession, like a tenant in a rented house. Where are you now, homeless heart? Caught in a hinge, or secreted behind drywall, like your nameless predecessors now that they have been given names? Best not to dwell on our situation, but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing. Like a sideboard covered with decanters and fruit. As a box kite is to a kite. The inside of stumbling. The way to breath. The caricature on the blackboard.
John Ashbery (2012)
Black Sunlight
From amid a grove of poplars it appears – and perhaps this testifies to how uninspiring the late morning walk had been – a little aspen tree, shimmering in the heat. It was not so long before this that he had set out, with his boxes and pencils, eager to do some drawing. The sun had been scalding, but despite the heat transfixing him, gouging his forehead, the dusty cart road had been easy underfoot, fringed by oaks and box scrubs. It wasn’t long before he had come to a turn in the path and saw the tree: black, sickly, ancestral. By presenting itself in this way, close to the cattle wandering deep in the fields, straining to stand upright amid tightly spaced trees where shafts of light fell in a dense bluegreen, it was as if it were performing a courtesy for those passing through. And further; that it should form a stand in such a hot parched landscape suggested to him the most hopeful of signs – a circle of connection, a return. He decided to sit down and draw it. Beside him he placed a jug of water and a basket of strawberries. He felt content. Thoughts of restlessness abated; his mind grew rooted and still. It was as though something inside him were slowly uncoiling, wanting to burst forth into an act of pure attention. He felt himself recede into the present – as if hit by a sudden cold wave. As he begins to draw the tree seemed to arrange itself into an image of the eternity he craved rather than the brute emptiness he feared. But close up he saw something that clutches at his heart: something like a shadow, or a delayed pain, a gaze overflowing from the tree. He didn’t know what to do with that ardour overflowing from a tree. Or that gaze. Think instead of a mind trembling under its own weight, trying to glimpse its own undoing; then subtract the feeling of something formless surging on the forested floor; waiting to flow back to the source. Or you could imagine that the tree itself, trying to resist the forces that shaped it, had burrowed back into this black earth. As though it had given up on its treeness – tired at last of its offices, unwilling to be woven from the earth. As though it had misread its own nature, refusing the illusion of its own form. He had engineered the encounter. He had wanted to see the tree free from artifice, whatever that may be. But it did not. It wanted nothing. Nothing at all. Better stop here. Better to simply stand, serving your purpose, waiting for the world to appear elsewhere.
D. S. Marriott (2011)
Nightmare Pink
It’s raining. Here. There. Where you’re singing. Raining very hard. I’m sitting in the house in a deep swivel chair. It’s nighttime. I spin the chair around and listen to the rain. You’re singing. The rain is loud enough to hear. I listen. To the rain. Another person arrives. With a pink lampshade. Brand new. He switches off the light, unscrews the bulb, takes off the black shade, puts on the pink one, then switches the light back on. We sit bathed in pink light and talk about shades. Lampshades. I open the balcony doors. You’re singing. But the rain is louder. It comes into the house. Hits the lampshades. Knocks over the lights. Collides with reality. The cherry trees in the neighbor’s garden haven’t had fruit for years. Four men enter carrying sticks. They enter the neighbor’s garden along with the rain. They’ve come to discipline the trees and chop them down if they don’t blossom. I watch the men h
it the trees. I watch the rain hit the men.
Elena Penga (2011), translated from the Greek by Karen van Dyck
Conversations About Home (at the Deportation Centre)
Well, I think home spat me out, the blackouts and curfews like tongue against loose tooth. God, do you know how difficult it is, to talk about the day your own city dragged you by the hair, past the old prison, past the school gates, past the burning torsos erected on poles like flags? When I meet others like me I recognise the longing, the missing, the memory of ash on their faces. No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. I’ve been carrying the old anthem in my mouth for so long that there’s no space for another song, another tongue or another language. I know a shame that shrouds, totally engulfs. Allah Ceebta, I tore up and ate my own passport in an airport hotel. I’m bloated with language I can’t afford to forget.
*
They ask me how did you get here? Can’t you see it on my body? The desert red with immigrant bodies shot in the face for trying to enter, the Gulf of Aden bloated with immigrant bodies. I wouldn’t put my children on the boat unless I thought the sea was safer than land. I hope the journey meant more than miles because all of my children are in the water. I want to make love but my hair smells of war and running and running. Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with brown bodies broken and desperate. I’m the colour of hot sun on my face, my mother’s remains were never buried. I spent days and nights in the stomach of the truck, I did not come out the same. Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.
*
I know a few things to be true. I do not know where I am going, where I have come from is disappearing, I am unwelcome and my beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling cards, the immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun, or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my mouth.
*
I hear them say, go home, I hear them say, fucking immigrants, fucking refugees. Are they really this arrogant? Do they not know that stability is like a lover with a sweet mouth upon your body one second and the next you are a tremor lying on the floor covered in rubble and old currency waiting for its return. All I can say is, I was once like you, the apathy, the pity, the ungrateful placement and now my home is the mouth of a shark, now my home is the barrel of a gun. I’ll see you on the other side.
Warsan Shire (2011)
O Elegant Giant
And Jehovah. And Alzheimer. And a diamond of extraordinary size on the hand of a starving child. The quiet mob in a vacant lot. My father asleep in a chair in a warm corridor. While his boat, the Unsinkable, sits at the bottom of the ocean. While his boat, the Unsinkable, waits marooned on the shore. While his boat, the Unsinkable, sails on, and sails on.
Laura Kasischke (2011)
Via Negativa
My mother was not Christ, but she was spat at. My father was not Christ, but he didn’t always know this. The two of them met in a garden, but they were not Adam and Eve. And when my mother became pregnant, this was considered a miracle, and when pregnant again, this was nothing short of Blake’s sunflower vision. But we are none of these things. When my mother had an epileptic attack, she looked like a monster. Of course, she was not possessed, but as children we didn’t always know this. What she was, was spat at. Someone we didn’t know, who was more needle than skin, more threadbare than whole, turned his mouth to her as she fitted on the pavement; emptied his tongue, and told her to get up. Beside her, flowers shook their heads behind a newly built wall. She’d made the bricks bleed on her way down, and narrowly missed the plaque that named them the city’s best roses.
Jane Monson (2010)
The Experience
I hadn’t meant to go grave robbing with Richard Dawkins but he can be very persuasive. ‘Do you believe in God?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. He said, ‘Right, so get in the car.’ We cruised around the cemetery with the headlights off. ‘Here we go,’ he said, pointing to a plot edged with clean, almost luminous white stone. I said, ‘Doesn’t it look sort of …’ ‘Sort of what?’ ‘Sort of fresh?’ I said. ‘Pass me the shovel,’ he said. Then he threw a square of canvas over the headstone, saying, ‘Don’t read it. It makes it personal.’ He did all the digging, holding the torch in his mouth as he chopped and sliced at the dirt around his feet. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he shouted from somewhere down in the soil. ‘Eating a sandwich,’ I said. ‘Bacon and avocado. Want one?’ ‘For Christ sake, Terry, this is a serious business, not the bloody church picnic,’ he said, as a shower of dirt came arcing over his shoulder.
After about half an hour of toil I heard the sound of metal on wood. ‘Bingo,’ he said. Then a moment or two later, ‘Oh, you’re not going to like this, Terry.’ ‘What?’ I said, peering over the edge. Richard Dawkins’s eyes were about level with my toes. ‘It’s quite small,’ he said. He uncovered the outline of the coffin lid with his boot. It was barely more than a yard long and a couple of feet wide. I felt the bacon and avocado disagreeing with one another. ‘Do you believe in God?’ he said. I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Pass me the jemmy,’ he said. The lid splintered around the nail heads; beneath the varnish the coffin was nothing but clean chipboard. The day I found little Harry in the bath, one eye was closed and the other definitely wasn’t. Flying fish can’t really fly. With both feet on the crowbar Richard Dawkins bounced up and down until the coffin popped open. But lying still and snug in the blue satin of the upholstered interior was a goose. A Canada Goose, I think, the ones with the white chinstrap, though it was hard to be certain because its throat had been cut and its rubber-looking feet were tied together with gardening twine. Richard Dawkins leaned back against the wall of the grave and shook his head. With a philosophical note in my voice I said, ‘What did you come here for, Richard Dawkins?’ He said, ‘Watches, jewellery, cash. A christening cup, maybe. What about you?’ ‘I thought it might give me something to write about,’ I replied. ‘Well, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, we’ve got a murdered goose in a child’s coffin in the middle of the night, and mud on our boots. How would you finish this one?’ he said. I looked around, trying to think of a way out of this big ugly mess. Then I said, ‘I’ve got it. What if we see the vicar over there, under the yew tree, looking at us? He stares at us and we stare back, but after a while we realise it isn’t the vicar at all. It’s a fox. You know, with the white bib of fur around its neck, which we thought was a collar. A silent man-size fox in a dark frockcoat and long black gloves, standing up on his hind legs, watching.’
Simon Armitage (2010)
Folkways
My grandmother called me into the yard. She’d wrapped sacred seals around her head and was standing under the guava tree staring at the sky. Half the canvas had bled black tar with scattered beads of yellow, green and purple globularity. A hideous wound. Well, death groove my brush broom.
At alternate breaths I remembered the small supermarket where I packed brown paper bags. An old woman with bandaged glasses bought two pounds of birdseed, a soprano saxophone and two tins of fried chicken ice cream. Well, death groove my brush broom and I began to paint: Harmolodic portraits in oxides and oils.
Afraid to climb down now between Bermudez biscuit factory and the old rail line is a gutter. A deep stream of silt to hop over. And under: a bulbous snake. The old man was waiting on the other side with a strap soaked in cat piss an pepper and a bible in the other hand. Perched on a lime tree branch like a parrot; he’d done four weddings that day, all down backroads of the mythic.
Anthon
y Joseph (2009)
from Virtual Airport
1
And the moment it takes to blink your eyes and stare, and feel as if you recognise the place you are in, is just long enough for the air to cool off again or the lights to dim, and for the entire feeling of familiarity to drift away to nothing.
The public address plays a mumbling kind of music. The corridor becomes less crowded. A group of girls goes by.
The colour of the light is like new aluminium. A sugary orange-smell carries into the air.
2
The cups of weak coffee and the nylon-colour lighting, the noisy rows we go through and the drifting, hollow music.
4
There is a kind of completeness to these families camping out around the restaurant, altogether different from the completeness there is in the colour of the sun, and how it swims over the floor, shifting beyond the shadows of the stools and the chairs.
6
There is a sad kind of surprise in the way the steel-colour light takes up the space between the cafeteria and the corridor, giving an even emphasis to the low metal banisters, the pigeon-colour flooring, the wall lamps, the mirroring, the open double doors.
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem Page 7