These Hills

J. Scott Brownlee

What they do not tell you about being a son

is that someday you’ll lift your mother out of necessity

& not know how to answer the deep ache in her

that refuses to leave from the botched surgery

on her four neuromas. They won’t mention the graft

of your skin on her skin you would give if it meant

her nerve cells might repair instead of defeat her

—their synapses flooded by the twice-daily pill

with a lyrical name that has strewn only wreckage

across her psyche for two decades so damaged

Achlys wouldn’t want them. Yes, a body can fade

& fragment in these hills like the green-veined

granite tumoring toward blossom, or a bloody

membrane between weeds & cedars. Hope was

a scalpel once. I could slide it across anything & be

healed completely was a dream she told me

repeats in her REM sleep. How do you

give someone who is burning permission

to vanish? Will she reincarnate as a gull

or the gray wave of foam a rogue hurricane

heaves up the local river with a serene quiet

worse than any crashing? How long have I been

still enough to witness it? This is grief. This is seeing your mother suffer, & a wound made memory.

This is flame transforming: not a prayer but a fire

unquenchable covering our hands, our feet,

the neuromas clinging to our metatarsals

with a persistence so complete we feel no pain

stepping into the mansion in the sky

midnight is preparing. I collect every match

in its kitchen cabinets—scatter them

throughout each inch of this house

& its dry acreage in a dead galaxy

of black hole-filled pastures. I hear

a mockingbird calling her name as I strike

the first one & watch as it consumes the two

closest to it until there is a circuit of fire

connecting my lit skin to hers. Where a son

grieves a mother: a constellation. Where two bodies

meet failure: one crippling brilliance. I brighten 

where she does & darken where she does until

we cool to quartz, feldspar, mica, the bedrock

of this firmament no god could have sculpted

or made more imperfect, which is me holding her.

I speak with the future.

Jane Hirshfield

We sit on our skeletons’ bones. 

We hear with our skeletons’ bones.

We speak of beauty by moving our jaws and our teeth.

The original meaning of Paradise: a place, 

a walled garden. 

Our lives, our stories, this hour inside one.

A staircase from Piranesi. A hummingbird drinking.

Outside it, vanishing species and rivers.

Outside it, Nanjing, Ninevah, Dresden.

Outside it, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, Kyiv. Here.

The world starts and ends, starts, ends, ends again,

restarts. 

A kalpa is brief, and wall-less.

Unborn ones, take nothing for granted.

Not nectar, not thirst.

May your lives be uneclipsed, your failures be passing.

May you have your portions of beauty, of grief, 

in a garden whose plants and birds I cannot imagine. 

Precious

Kira Tucker

Copper keeps life from my womb; aluminum  fills my pores, silver my teeth. My blood won’t hold iron, so I take it daily. Food brings a sickness I can’t measure under my tongue, only on my waning waist. Some metal belongs in the body. The day a grate raised my skirt on the street, I noticed only one rush of air between ore and whore. The boy who learns to caress his face with a blade will grow into a man I’ll pay to slice my skin with steel. Beauty is no alchemy: it merely means making space for more things that shine. Like the ancient statues men scrapped for daggers. Like powder packed into bullets, their touch so intimateit kills. Like any body in this millennium, I’ll survive in silicon chips after death. Until then, lead me somewhere precious. Guide me with ungloved hands.

Peonies

Danusha Laméris

What are these strangers sitting on the table in their ruffledcollars. 

They open, close, open,

emit the scent of cracked pepper and honey. Magenta punctuation marks at which to pause. Pink commas against the green scrub. I would trade ten goats for one whiff of peonies opening in a vase. An ancient proverb says you should not let a woodpecker see you plucking a peony lest it peck out your eyes. We are afraid of happiness. Peonies are to loneliness what wind is to the trees. Are they animal? Mineral? Vegetable? They move as the sun moves. When I brought them home they were dark. Now, a whisper, balletic tulle. They are not diminished even as they turn to smoke. 

Parting

"Stay and sweet and do not prize,

And the light that shines comes back to my eyes,

As day breaks hard,

It is my heart,

Because of you and I might part.

Stay anywhere else my choice will guide."

The Collector

Season 1

Episode 3

The Sign as You Exit the Artist’s Colony Says “The Real World”Aliki Barnstone

Quiet is not silence. Silence is absolute like never and forever. Quiet invites attention to cicadas, the warbling vireo on the wire, the cardinal’s whistle as it wings its brightness over the horizon of the Blue Ridge Mountains, then disappears amid the crape myrtles’ baroque blossoms.It almost speaks to me. / Then as Horizons step, I take a photograph of artists chatting on the gravel path that opens to the studio barn silos.The rabbit lets me come close—It waits upon the lawn / It shows the furthest tree—before it leaps into tall grasses, shelter for fireflies.The limestone statue of the cherubic naked boy smiles down at butterflies and bees feeding on zinnia pollen. Good are those who plant flowers to save our pollinators.Yet I mourn. The air conditioning kicks in. I examine the light on the drainage bed of small stone—a narrow beach outside my glass door—and listen to the distance, the highway sounds rising and falling like wind in spring.A quality of loss / Affecting our content, Emily Dickinson wrote.Before bed, sitting beneath the gazebo’s white dome where there’s cell reception, I talk to my love. We’re interrupted by the long train passing by. Is it nostalgia to love the sound of trains? Is it forward-thinking looking back?A fascist is president: infection in the sentence breeds. We can’t help talking about him.The comedian says people can’t think when they’re afraid. Satire makes them laugh, forget their fear, so they can think, a little newer for the term / upon enchanted ground.Every day more evil against the Earth, the hate cult shouting epithets, hoarding their guns. As Trade had suddenly encroached / Upon a Sacrament.When the artists gather for meals, they ask “How was your day?” which means, “Did you travel in your studio?” which translates into resistance beyond the borders of this quiet estate.

News

Yahya Frederickson

Before breakfast, we drive into town   to buy a Star Tribune for my father,   who usually rides along, but today sleeps late.   From the passenger seat, you stuff  my mouth with a saucer peach. For energy,  you say, my fog before food well-known.   The beige flesh tastes like jasmine.   Honey. A Persian fairy tale.   In his La-Z-Boy near the big window,   my father will read a section, nod off,  wake, read another, all afternoon.   You and I no longer bother—every day   the same: people killing, being killed.   Instead, we cook, clean. We look   after my father, keep our kids busy.  At the One-Stop, I take a copy  off the dwindling stack, set my father’s exact   change into the cashier’s tattooed hand—   my daily deadline met. Heading home,   you spot it first, uphill, in a birch,  glowing, a blue pilot light. A flaming   blue arrow shooting toward us. I can’t   stop, can’t swerve, it strikes our windshield.   I see it in the rearview mirror glance   onto the shoulder. Maybe it’s still alive,  you pray. Maybe we can put it in a box   until it’s well. So I reverse, hope it flies away.   Could I mercy-kill it under a wheel?  Standing by, we watch a wing flail once,   an eye shut, the end. Even a little death  sucks out our air. Where it hit gravel,   one feather sticks up. Such color!   Lapis-and-turquoise filigree.   We kick a shallow grave with our heels,   and deliver my father the news.

Enter Terror

Dalia Taha

translated from the Arabic by Sara Elkamel There is no gift we can unwrap without you.  You are what we need   to make out the trees,   spot an opponent,  or take a stroll through someone’s heart.  Without you, no one would read the same sentence   a second time, breathless,  before setting the book aside  to pace from one room to the next.  And without you, there would be no lines to draw  under striking lines in the books of poetry and philosophy   that now rest serenely by your bed,  after having moved universes;   after changing worlds.  Without you, no one would look anyone else in the eye;   hands would not meet.  No one would photograph the waves that plow into fences,   the snow-capped mountain peaks,  the smiles of children.  Without you, love stories would suffer a deficiency,   and without you  people would not gather on pitch black nights;   they would not light candles or invent lullabies.  Without you, no one would ever know   that stories told in whispers  are the only way to contend with night.   They would have tried swords,  grenades, soaring fences, and surveillance cameras—all this nonsense.  Without you, libraries would not stop us   dead in our tracks,  nor would a flower.   Rocks would be dull.  And without you, massacre victims would not remain alive   to stare us in the eyes.  O terror, without you, poetry would steer us towards nothing.   Without you, we could not fathom the abyss that surrounds us: the universe.  We would never be moved   by its menacing beauty.  O terror: You are the singer’s voice   that travels clearly across the borders   in the Golan Heights.  You are the prisoner; strapped, and mighty   in the morning.  You are the beloved’s name  lighting up, suddenly, the screen in our hand.  There is no gift  we can unwrap without you.