by David Lehman
from The Antioch Review
TRACI BRIMHALL
Dear Thanatos,
I did what you told me to,
wore antlers and the mask, danced
in the untilled field, but the promised
ladder never dropped from the sky.
In the burned house strays ate bats
on the attic floor, and trotted out
into the dark with wings in their mouths.
I found the wedding dress unharmed,
my baby teeth sewn to the cuff.
There’s a deer in the woman, a moth
in the chimney, a mote in God’s one good eye.
The fire is on the table now, the bear is in
the cradle now, and the baby is gone.
She’s the box of bones under the bed,
the stitches in your lip, the moon and the hollow
in the geode, in peaches heavy with June.
If I enter the river I must learn how to swim.
If a wolf’s ribs are bigger than a man’s,
and if the dead float, then I am the witch’s
second heart, and I am the sea in the boat.
from FIELD
JERICHO BROWN
Hustle
They lie like stones and dare not shift. Even asleep, everyone hears in prison.
Dwayne Betts deserves more than this dry ink for his teenage years in prison.
In the film we keep watching, Nina takes Darius to a steppers ball.
Lovers hustle, slide, dip as if one of them has no brother in prison.
I dine with humans who think any book full of black characters is about race.
A book full of white characters examines insanity near—but never in—prison.
His whole family made a barricade of their bodies at the door to room 403.
He died without the man he wanted. What use is love at home or in prison?
We saw police pull sharks out of the water just to watch them not breathe.
A brother meets members of his family as he passes the mirrors in prison.
Sundays, I washed and dried her clothes after he threw them into the yard.
In the novel I love, Brownfield kills his wife, only gets seven years in prison.
I don’t want to point my own sinful finger, so let’s use your clean one instead.
Some bright citizen reading this never considered a son’s short hair in prison.
In our house lived three men with one name, and all three fought or ran.
I left Nelson Demery III for Jericho Brown, a name I earned in prison.
from The Believer
ANDREI CODRESCU
Five One-Minute Eggs
1. The Economy
We used to make things we didn’t understand (Marx), consumed by
people who didn’t understand us, and now we don’t even understand the
people who are making them, that is us. Our misunderstandings progress.
We consume things that are familiar, and the more familiar they get, the
less we know or sympathize with ourselves, the people who make them.
We are not familiar with the parts of these things that other people make,
but we love to use them. Technology is familiar, people are not. The
people who make TVs know us from TV better than we know them or
ourselves. When we are not on TV, we are waiting to slit our (their)
throats. The German economy thrives because Germans make “the thing
that goes inside the thing that goes inside the thing.”
Can you love people you don’t understand? With a blender and a mixer
and an iPhone.
The Jesuits would be pleased.
Why would God need to choose a people when there are all these
machines around.
What else would He do with the Salvation Army warehouses?
2. Pound in the Ozarks
5 time grimace:
pro patria
pro domo
pro usura
pro forma
pro pane
3. Expansive Song
Space is my Baby
Time is my Bitch
(with Vince Cellucci)
4. I Broker
“in this army you break down your body like a gun
ascertain its needs and reassemble it for action when they’ve been met”
The Manual
splitting hairs for commodities
the centrifugal force that dismembers matter into sellable minis
the broker broke down his body and ordered its needs from a catalogue
everything arrived by mail overnight and the broker reassembled
hermself
by the time the market opened
herm hoped to make enough to post a profit
on the increasing needs of herm body
“every day you don’t sell you buy”
herm ever-expanding ever-needy body
was an expense that had to be covered by greater profit
so when herm body incorporated the city the country and the globe
it had to be broken down and fed
by myriads of catalogues from outer space
whence the profits had to also eventually come
today herm franchised copper on mars and sold
the green algae noon meal of the cloned venus from last night
i went to sleep without a shower and woke up malcontent
but my daughters brought me time for breakfast
i was happy with the design
some retro some yet to be duplicated
what counts is attitude
5. San Michele
it’s got to be raining in Venice
to write like Henry James
was never your wish in even
the most twisted version of yourself
from House Organ
BILLY COLLINS
Foundling
How unusual to be living a life of continual self-expression,
jotting down little things,
noticing a leaf being carried down a stream,
then wondering what will become of me,
and finally to work alone under a lamp
as if everything depended on this,
groping blindly down a page,
like someone lost in a forest.
And to think it all began one night
on the steps of a nunnery
where I lay gazing up from a sewing basket,
which was doubling for a proper baby carrier,
staring into the turbulent winter sky,
too young to wonder about anything
including my recent abandonment—
but it was there that I committed
my first act of self-expression,
sticking out my infant tongue
and receiving in return (I can see it now)
a large, pristine snowflake much like any other.
from The Southampton Review and Slate
MARTHA COLLINS
[white paper 24]
The Irish were not, the Germans
were not, the Jews Italians Slavs and others
were not, or were not exactly or not quite
at various times in American history.
Before us the Greeks themselves
were not (though the weaker enemy
Persians were), the next-up Romans
themselves were not either.
And later the Europeans were not
until Linnaeus named by color,
red white yellow and black.
Even the English settlers were only
vaguely at first to contrast with natives,
but then with Africans, more and more
of them slaves to be irreversibly,
totally different from, they were.
Then others were not, then were,
or were not, but gradually became,
leaving only, for a time, blac
k
and yellow to be not.
Then there were other words
for those who were still or newly
(see immigrant, Arab) somehow not
the same and therefore not.
Thus history leaves us nothing
but not: like children playing at being
something, we made, we keep
making our whiteness up.
from Harvard Review
KWAME DAWES
Death
First your dog dies and you pray
for the Holy Spirit to raise the inept
lump in the sack, but Jesus’ name
is no magic charm; sunsets and the
flies are gathering. That is how faith
dies. By dawn you know death;
the way it arrives and then grows
silent. Death wins. So you walk
out to the tangle of thorny weeds behind
the barn; and you coax a black
cat to your fingers. You let it lick
milk and spit from your hand before
you squeeze its neck until it messes
itself, its claws tearing your skin,
its eyes growing into saucers.
A dead cat is light as a live
one and not stiff, not yet. You
grab its tail and fling it as
far as you can. The crows find
it first; by then the stench
of the hog pens hides the canker
of death. Now you know the power
of death, that you have it,
that you can take life in a second
and wake the same the next day.
This is why you can’t fear death.
You have seen the broken neck
of a man in a well, you know who
pushed him over the lip of the well,
tumbling down; you know all about
blood on the ground. You know that
a dead dog is a dead cat is a dead
man. Now you look a white man
in the face, talk to him about
cotton prices and the cost of land,
laugh your wide open mouthed laugh
in his face, and he knows one thing
about you: that you know the power
of death, and you will die as easily
as live. This is how a man seizes
what he wants, how a man
turns the world over in dreams,
eats a solid meal and waits
for death to come like nothing,
like the open sky, like light
at early morning; like a man
in red pinstriped trousers, a black
top hat, a yellow scarf
and a kerchief dipped in eau
de cologne to cut through
the stench coming from his mouth.
from The American Poetry Review
CONNIE DEANOVICH
Divestiture
Here’s your mistake back
you never made it
here’s the cushion
reshaping the couch
your shadow slips under the threshold
you never crossed it
private paradise
is just another storm splitting in space
the sheets you never crumpled
fold up again
the words you spoke
were never spoken
when I walk into the library
I’m not thinking of you
when my heart drains like sand from a shoe
I’m not thinking of you
something was having trouble ending
think of energy’s mutations not of you
yesterday I devirginized
my own story
stuck my fingers in and out of my own future
until I broke its promise
today I’m not thinking of you
but of a souvenir tossed on the compost
a smelly time unpetalling
blackening rain and garbage
from New American Writing
TIMOTHY DONNELLY
Apologies from the Ground Up
The staircase hasn’t changed much through the centuries
I’d notice it, my own two eyes now breaking down the larger
vertical distance into many smaller distances I’ll conquer
almost absently; the riser, the tread, the measure of it long
hammered into the body the way it’s always been, even back
in the day when the builders of the tower Nimrod wanted
rising up into the heavens laid the first of the sunbaked bricks
down and rose. Here we are again, I say, but where exactly
nobody knows, that nowhere in particular humming between
one phoneme and a next, pulse jagged as airless Manhattan-
bound expresses on which I’ve worried years that my cohort
of passengers’ fat inner monologues might manage to lurch
up into audibility at once, a general rupture from the keeping
of thoughts to oneself—statistically improbable I know but
why quarrel with the dread of it. I never counted my own voice
among the chaos, admittedly. I just figured it would happen
not with but against me. A custom punishment for thinking
myself apart from all the others. But not apart from in the sense
above but away from. Although to stand in either way will
imply nobility, power, distinction. As for example if you step
back to consider a sixteenth-century depiction of the tower
under construction, you rapidly identify the isolated figure as
that of the king, his convulsive garment the red of an insect
smitten on a calf, the hint of laughter on his face, or humming
just under the plane of his face, indicative of what you have
come to recognize in others as the kind of pleasure, no more
or less so than in yourself, that can only persist through forcing
the world into its service as it dismantles whatever happens
to oppose it, including its own short-lived impulse to adapt
by absorbing what opposes into its fabric. It will refuse to do that.
It will exhaust its fuel or logic or even combust before it lets
itself evolve into some variation on what it used to be instead
of remaining forever what it is until it dies, even when its death
comes painfully and brings humiliation down upon its house.
In the abstract, on and off—as when hurrying past the wrought-
iron fence some pink flowering branches cantilever through
or if pushed too relentlessly into oneself in public—it’s hard
not to admire the resolve in that. But there are pictures in which
there is no king. The tower staggers into the cloud cover as if
inevitably, or naturally, as if the medium of earth were merely
manifesting its promise. Often the manner in which it does so
reflects the principles of advanced mathematics, but it’s unclear
whether the relationship between the two might be more
appropriately thought of as one of assistance or of guidance.
This distinction is a matter of no small concern to me, actually,
because as much as I don’t want anyone’s help, I don’t want anyone
telling me what to do about ten times more, and if what it all
comes down to is that, there’s a far better than average chance
I’ll just end up devising some potentially disastrous third option
on the fly as I wait in line. Elsewhere we find teams of builders
at work among the tower’s open spaces with no one figure leaping
forward as king or even foreman, a phenomenon whose effects
include not only the gratification of our fondness for images
of protodemocracy but also the stimulation of our need to fill
whatever we perceive to be an emptiness, which in this instance
means electing ourselves into the very position of authority
we had been happy to find vacant. I myself would be happy
leaving every position vacant as an antique prairie across which
bison once roamed democratically, each denizen of the herd
voting for what direction it wanted to take off in with a nudge
of its quarter-ton head, but someone around here has to start
taking responsibility, and I don’t see any hands going up. So here goes.
Sorry. It was me. I built the Tower of Babel. What can I say?
It seemed like a good idea at the time. And a fairly obvious take-
off on what we were already doing, architecture-wise. All I did
was change the scale. I maintained the workers’ enthusiasm
with rustic beer and talk of history. Plus the specter of the great
flood still freaked the people out every heavy rainfall, so it felt
like good civic planning, too—but apparently the whole project
violated the so-called natural order of things. I’m still a little shaky
with the language in the aftermath, but my gut says that’s just
some dressed-up way of admitting I was really onto something.
from A Public Space and Poetry London
STEPHEN DUNN
The Statue of Responsibility
Imagine it’s given to us as a gift
from a country wishing to overcome its own hypocrisy.
I can see someone standing up at a meeting
and saying, Give it to the Americans, they like
big things for their people, they like to live
in the glamour between exaltation and anxiety.
Instead of an arm raised with a torch, let’s insist
they cement its feet deep into the earth, burden it
with gigantic shoes—an emblem of the inescapable.
We place it on land, across from Liberty
on the Brooklyn side. And I can see myself needing
to visit it regularly, taking the elevator up
to its chest area where I’d feel something
was asked of me. Near its heart, I’d paint
After the tyrants, there’s nothing as hateful
as the martyrs. And I’d stare at those words,