Nayika at the crawfish boil

Kiran Bathca. 2021 (modern century)Along the butcher paper you’re spread. Licking your fingers. Cracking spines(dainty little things). Still, you know to shuck all their meat. Be as Southernand slack as he saw fit. And you kept spreading. Your smiles. Your rumor.Your circles of darlings, looped & braided your hair. Late skin atmosphere.Wet from the heat. New timbres and eves. You loved the hilly tongues of Carolinas.The ooze of Baton Rouge. You told jokes in shotgun kitchens. Basked in the GardenDistrict. Cocktails under Columns. Humming yourself drunk: like a Louisiana fairytale.You debuted so well. Sent boys chirping. City bright & blushing. Blue ghosts circlingyour show and tell cottage. There you hung dead flowers. Fanned and soaked for hours.Bronzed legs, the perfect sundress. Oh Nayika! you even served Creole for his guests.Bottles and biscuits, king cake and juleps. But darling, what of it? You spread yourself rich.Held every court of his. Heard of hidden women. Swore you were different. Roaring felinelaughter. You’ll plead with him after. For now, set down the flute. Panting to the Bayou,pride staggered, dress lifted. Face in the river. You’ll listen under pressure:God dammit! God eager! Takes lightning strikes to please. His wanton demands.Forget the title Nayika, chosen means damned. Undo the coronet braids, rein backwhat you can. All you’ve mistaken: Territory for home, throat for song, throws for jewels.Your type is the wretched. You won’t be defeated. You’ll reap what you choose.  Faustian bargain. Spiders in your garden. Pulling your ribbons tighter. You say prizedtrumps beloved. So long as you’re coveted. You’ll weather the storm and all that good brew:The spines that crack. The bolts that bruise. Rumors coming back to you.

Oldest Poem

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NATIONAL LIMERICK DAY

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NATIONAL GREAT POETRY READING DAY

"At the tail end of National Poetry Month, April 28th marks the observance of National Great Poetry Reading Day."https://nationaldaycalendar.com/celebrations/national-great-poetry-reading-day-april-28

Cynthia Wanders My Neighborhood

Thomas Centolella

with the shock of hospice behind her  

and her ashes scattered on her cherished Pacific.   

She’s flipped the hourglass and stopped it at 29,   

when her hair was still chestnut and waving  

to her waist. And because it’s November and nighttime  

she’s wearing one of those vintage wool coats,  

wide lapels, no buttons or belt, a blue nearly gray  

in the foggy noir light of the streetlamps.   

It’s cold enough she has to hold it tight   

against her body. Too cold for the emerald   

silk teddy, or her long tanned legs in b-ball shorts,  

ready for some serious one-on-one. I’m dying   

to stop my steep climb home, turn around and ask her   

if she’s really here, but Orpheus is in my ear,  

warning me not to make that old mistake.  

It’s about trust, I think. Keep moving  

through the gloom of a spinned myth:  

let those you’ve loved come back   

when they’re ready, when you’re ready,   

as if no one were lost to begin with.

End of the Comedy

Louis Untermeyer

Eleven o’clock, 

and the curtain falls.

The cold wind tears the strands of illusion;

The delicate music is lost

In the blare of home-going crowds

And a midnight paper.

The night has grown martial;

It meets us with blows and disaster.

Even the stars have turned shrapnel,

Fixed in silent explosions.

And here at our door

The moonlight is laid

Like a drawn sword.

NATIONAL POEM IN YOUR POCKET DAY

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NATIONAL HAIKU POETRY DAY

"Observed annually on April 17, National Haiku Poetry Day encourages all to try their hand in creativity."

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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