LOW FLYING PLANES [From metal and yellow underneath the tire]

Hajjar Baban

From metal and yellow underneath the tire flattening I couldn’t decipher the bird or the material which my mother would leave me through, in. I, missing everything, had to turn, believe in reason. Because my mother decided to name me after flight I abandoned rocks I left countries. Emerald that could never be blue and lavender rose. I’ve forgiven every danger just to sleep with no stone in my mind. I kept thinking of my father when his mother passed. When my brother made someone die. So I could tear, beyond imagining what above would fly.

You! Inez!

Alice Dunbar-Nelson

1875 –1935

Orange gleams athwart a crimson soulLambent flames; purple passion lurksIn your dusk eyes.

Red mouth; flower soft,

Your soul leaps up—and flashesStar-like, white, flame-hot.

Curving arms, encircling a world of love,You! Stirring the depths of passionate desire!

Unity

Pablo Neruda

1904 –1973

There is something dense, united, settled in the depths,

repeating its number, its identical sign.

How it is noted that stones have touched time,

in their refined matter there is an odor of age,

of water brought by the sea, from salt and sleep.

 

I’m encircled by a single thing, a single movement: 

a mineral weight, a honeyed light

cling to the sound of the word “noche”:

the tint of wheat, of ivory, of tears,

things of leather, of wood, of wool,

archaic, faded, uniform,

collect around me like walls.

I work quietly, wheeling over myself,

a crow over death, a crow in mourning.

I mediate, isolated in the spread of seasons,

centric, encircled by a silent geometry:

a partial temperature drifts down from the sky,

a distant empire of confused unities

reunites encircling me.

For My People

Margaret Walker

1915 –1998

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs     repeatedly: 

their dirges and their ditties and their blues      and jubilees, 

praying their prayers nightly to an     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an     unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years,

 to the     gone years and the now years and the maybe years,    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending    hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching    dragging along never gaining never reaping never    knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama    backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor    and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking    and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss    Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn     to know the reasons why and the answers to and the    people who and the places where and the days when, in    memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we    were black and poor and small and different and nobody    cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to    be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and    play and drink their wine and religion and success, to    marry their playmates and bear children and then die    of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox    Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New    Orleans,

lost disinherited dispossessed and happy    people filling the cabarets and taverns and other    people’s pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and    land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time     being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when     burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled     and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures     who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in     the dark of churches and schools and clubs and     societies, associations and councils and committees and      conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and     devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,     

preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by     false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,    

trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,    

all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless    

generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. 

Let a    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now     rise and take control.

Nothing Twice

Wisława Szymborska

1923 –2012

Nothing can ever happen twice.

In consequence, the sorry fact is

that we arrive here improvised

and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,

if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce,

you can’t repeat the class in summer:

this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,no two nights will teach what bliss is

in precisely the same way,

with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tonguementions your name by accident:

I feel as if a rose were flunginto the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you’re here with me,I can’t help looking at the clock:

A rose? A rose? 

What could that be?

Is it a flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day

with so much needless fear and sorrow?

It’s in its nature not to stay:

Today is always gone tomorrow.

With smiles and kisses, we prefer

to seek accord beneath our star,

although we’re different (we concur)just as two drops of water are.

America

Walt Whitman

1819 –1892

Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,

All, all alike endear'd, grown, ungrown, young or old,

Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,

Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,

A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,

Chair'd in the adamant of Time.

The Dead Layer

Arielle Hebert

Ten years after Florida and I can still remember that girl,

burning in alchemical fire, 

joy hungry. She never dreamedshe’d outlive leaving home. But here I am.

In oil painting, you must first paint the dead layer.

Unseen foundations, lumps and scrapes for depth and texture.

And I took such care with my dead layer, thoughtI’d live my whole life there. 

But it’s been ten years.

My winter skin has lost its tolerance for sun.

Visiting home is a training exercise in breathing underwater,

and I was never the strongest swimmer. 

Meanwhile, I’ve met mountains. Seasons. 

True hearts.

I curve the palette knife loaded with paint, layer after layer.

For pines and hemlocks, for diving into the Eno quarry sinkholeand floating down the Haw River with my love.

For October’s pumpkin patches and February’s daffodils.

Summer’s green veiling our nearest neighbor.

Now I know. The chroma, the brilliance.

None of it could have happened without rowing in the channelunder the one-lane bridge at Blackburn Point, without Banyan treesor hibiscus flowers, without those early parties on 39th Streetand the fights at Bayshore, without chain smoking griefaway in the side yard, and loving people at the wrong time,without sunburns and oranges, all the blue hours,low tides, crushed white moonshells underneath.

Hurricane Blues

Arielle Hebert

People couldn’t help but give them names,

to tell one from another.Some seasons exhaust the alphabetnaming violences.

Six months of repeated beatings,lightning strikes and heat waves.

One hurricane can alter a coastline, a life.

Ours is a culture of disaster.Entire families board up the windowsthen go surfing. Sandbag the foundationthen jetski the drowned streets.

Kids get out kites and canoes.Even if there’s no powerand the bottled water’s running out.

This is how we grew up, taking paradisetides one day at a time, holding handsat three funerals my senior year alone.

We tossed in our handful of dirt.

We hugged the mothers of the dead.

After parties became hereafter parties.

We danced in our funeral clothes,

kept late night vigils,

post-apocalyptic parties,under-the-sea parties,

no-tomorrow parties.

We treaded grief like water,

missed hurricanes in the off season,

when chaos ebbed enoughfor us to see clearly, all the damage.

Stonewall to Standing Rock

BY Julian T. Brolaski

who by the time it arrived had made its plan heretofore stonewall   it had not a penny thats not true it had several pennies   can you make a sovereign nation a national park how condescending instead just tell them to honor the treaty   what can poetry do it cant not not do nothing it must undulate w/ the 2:30 pm dance music the sole patrons at stonewall   there was a shooting in ohio today the music made me feel a little anxious it was hard thumping dance music a notch upwards of 100 bpm notoriously the beat of life the optimum tempo for cpr I consider downloading a metronome real quick to test it to tap it out but I don’t want to be ‘anywhere near’ my phone meaning it’s in my bag on the stool 2 feet from me   there is an amy winehouse video on no sound at least I think it is amy winehouse she is at a funeral black and white there is a stuffed bird slightly obscuring my view of the tv it looks like a kind of tall pigeon w/ mottled brown and russet with a white ringlet necklace and black dots is it a carrier pigeon I wonder I sent a text to jocelyn at standing rock several texts   are you still on the road ariana and i r gonna go out there in december sending love to you tried calling bt yr mailbox is full send a sign when u can xoxo howdy.  thinking of u w love. hope all is well.  send smoke signal telegram carrier pigeon  send love to my twospirits at the winyan camp.   last night we prayed for her and for zephyr and l. frank & the twospirits especially at standing rock there’s no sign of that struggle here but they are selling tshirts      commemorating the other and the six days of riots led by transwomen of color they later tried to whitewash in that      terrible movie like it was all these hot angry upright downright forthright white gays       so ready for the revolution  and now people are treating standing rock like burning man   a drink called goslings videos by the pigeon misaligned with the music the smell of booze in the air made both of us recoil slightly I saw or felt it   I’m here to make a poem I was already paid for when I had less than $2 in my bank account (and I joked I would go right to the bar and buy every- body drinks ) not even enough for a subway ride and I used the 58 cents I’d gotten for busking for the first time alone in the long hallway between the library at bryant park and the orange line trains by the ovid quote ‘gutta cavat lapidem’ water (or a drop of water really) hollows out a stone.   lapidum a stone or rock ariana once described cd wright’s style      as ‘lapidary’ I loved this as a description of writing like the hieroglyphics are literally lapidary and I told my grandmother about it as we were driving from mescalero to albuquerque she knew all about the plants and the names for all the rockforms mesas or buttes or ziggurats and I said how do you know all these she said by long observation and I used to study geology in college I wanted to major in it but they wouldn’t allow women to major in the hard sciences then so she began to study religion tho she already had medicine   ricky martin on the beach or is it someone younger sexier the grand canyon splitting apart is it an ad is it a video even the sands at the beach are bouncing with the beat the tempo has stayed very similar this whole time a tick up I suspect from 100bpm

Meditatio

Ezra Pound

When I carefully consider the curious habits of dogs,

I am compelled to admit

That man is the superior animal.

When I consider the curious habits of man,

I confess, my friend, 

I am puzzled.

Summer Night riverside

Sara Teasdale

1884 –1933

In the wild soft summer darkness How many and many a night we two together Sat in the park and watched the Hudson Wearing her lights like golden spangles Glinting on black satin. The rail along the curving pathway Was low in a happy place to let us cross, And down the hill a tree that dripped with bloom Sheltered us, While your kisses and the flowers, Falling, falling, Tangled in my hair.... The frail white stars moved slowly over the sky. And now, far off In the fragrant darkness The tree is tremulous again with bloom For June comes back. To-night what girl Dreamily before her mirror shakes from her hair This year’s blossoms, clinging to its coils?

Strawberrying

May Swenson

1913 –1989

My hands are murder-red. Many a plump head

drops on the heap in the basket. Or, ripe

to bursting, they might be hearts, matching

the blackbird’s wing-fleck. Gripped to a reed

he shrieks his ko-ka-ree in the next field.

He’s left his peck in some juicy cheeks, when

at first blush and mostly white, they showed

streaks of sweetness to the marauder.

We’re picking near the shore, the morning

sunny, a slight wind moving rough-veined leaves

our hands rumple among. Fingers find by feel

the ready fruit in clusters. Here and there,

their squishy wounds . . . . Flesh was perfect

yesterday . . . . June was for gorging . . . .

sweet hearts young and firm before decay.

“Take only the biggest, and not too ripe,”

a mother calls to her girl and boy, barefoot

in the furrows. “Don’t step on any. Don’t

change rows. Don’t eat too many.” Mesmerized

by the largesse, the children squat and pull

and pick handfuls of rich scarlets, half

for the baskets, half for avid mouths.

Soon, whole faces are stained.

A crop this thick begs for plunder. Ripeness

wants to be ravished, as udders of cows when hard,

the blue-veined bags distended, ache to be stripped.

Hunkered in mud between the rows, sun burning

the backs of our necks, we grope for, and rip loose

soft nippled heads. If they bleed—too soft—

let them stay. Let them rot in the heat.

When, hidden away in a damp hollow under moldy

leaves, I come upon a clump of heart-shapes

once red, now spiderspit-gray, intact but empty,

still attached to their dead stems—

families smothered as at Pompeii—I rise

and stretch. I eat one more big ripe lopped

head. Red-handed, I leave the field.

Summer Stars

Carl Sandburg

1878 –1967

Bend low again, night of summer stars.

So near you are, sky of summer stars, So near, a long-arm man can pick off stars, Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl, So near you are, summer stars, So near, strumming, strumming,                 

So lazy and hum-strumming.

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

1935 –2019

Who made the world? 

Who made the swan, and the black bear? 

Who made the grasshopper? 

This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

The House on the Lake

Philip Metres 1970 

How a house is a self & else, a seeping intoof light deciding the day. A house so closeit breathes as the lake breathes. 

How a lakeis a shelf, an eye, a species of seeing,

burbling of tongues completing the shore.

How a loon is a probing, a genus of dreams,

encyclopedia of summer. Unsummable houseby the lake, generous hinge opening us. 

I loved,in folds of sleep, to hear the back door’s yawn& click. 

You gliding down toward shore& dawn, beyond all frames, reconciling yourself tobracing Long Lake. Into its ever-opening, you—

Summer Morn in New Hampshire

Claude McKay1889 –1948

All yesterday it poured, and all night long    

I could not sleep; the rain unceasing beat

Upon the shingled roof like a weird song,    

Upon the grass like running children’s feet.

And down the mountains by the dark cloud kissed,    

Like a strange shape in filmy veiling dressed,

Slid slowly, silently, the wraith-like mist,    

And nestled soft against the earth’s wet breast.

But lo, there was a miracle at dawn!    The still air stirred at touch of the faint breeze,

The sun a sheet of gold bequeathed the lawn,    

The songsters twittered in the rustling trees.

And all things were transfigured in the day,    

But me whom radiant beauty could not move;

For you, more wonderful, were far away,    

And I was blind with hunger for your love.

Erie Waters

Emily Pauline Johnson

A dash of yellow sand,

Wind-scattered and sun-tanned;

Some waves that curl and cream along the margin of the strand;

And, creeping close to these

Long shores that lounge at ease,

Old Erie rocks and ripples to a fresh sou’-western breeze.

A sky of blue and grey;

Some stormy clouds that play

At scurrying up with ragged edge, then laughing blow away,

Just leaving in their trailSome snatches of a gale;

To whistling summer winds we lift a single daring sail.

O! wind so sweet and swift,

O! danger-freighted gift

Bestowed on Erie with her waves that foam and fall and lift,

We laugh in your wild face,

And break into a race

With flying clouds and tossing gulls that weave and interlace.

My Dream

Han Yong-un1879 –1944translated from the Korean by Younghill KangWhen you go walking through the clear dawn in the shade of trees,  my dream will become the few little stars     that are staying on over your head.When during summer days you are sleeping a daytime sleep  unable to conquer the heat, my dream will become the clear winds     that are floating about your vicinage.When in the still Autumn nights, you sit alone reading books,  my dream will become the voice of the cricket, crying     under your table, “chirrup, chirrup.”

Summer in the South

                 The oriole sings in the greening grove                                           As if he were half-way waiting,                                           The rosebuds peep from their hoods of green,                                           Timid and hesitating.The rain comes down in a torrent sweep             And the nights smell warm and piney,The garden thrives, but the tender shoots             Are yellow-green and tiny.Then a flash of sun on a waiting hill,             Streams laugh that erst were quiet,The sky smiles down with a dazzling blue             And the woods run mad with riot.

Deep Lane

 [June 23rd, evening of the first fireflies]Mark Doty1953 –June 23rd, evening of the first fireflies,we’re walking in the cemetery down the road,and I look up from my distracted study of whatever,an unfocused gaze somewhere a few feet in front of my shoes,and see that Ned has run on aheadwith the champagne plume of his tail held especially high,his head erect,which is often a sign that he has something he believes he is not allowed to have,and in the gathering twilight (what is it that is gathered,who is doing the harvesting?) I can make out that the long horizontalbetween his lovely jaws is one of the four stakes planted on the slopeto indicate where the backhoe will dig a new grave.Of course my impulse is to run after him, to replace the marker,out of respect for the rule that we won’t desecrate the tombs,or at least for those who knew the womanwhose name inks a placard in the rectangle claimed by the four polesof vanishing—three poles now—and how it’s within their recollection,their gathering, she’ll live. Evening of memory. Sparklamps in the grass.I stand and watch him go in his wild figure eights,I say, You run, darling, you tear up that hill.Copyright © by Mark Doty. Used with the permission of the author.

A Poet to His Baby Son

By James Weldon Johnson

Tiny bit of humanity,

Blessed with your mother’s face,   

And cursed with your father’s mind.

I say cursed with your father’s mind,

Because you can lie so long and so quietly on your back,   

Playing with the dimpled big toe of your left foot,   

And looking away,

Through the ceiling of the room, and beyond.

Can it be that already you are thinking of being a poet?

Why don’t you kick and howl,   

And make the neighbors talk about   

“That damned baby next door,”   

And make up your mind forthwith   

To grow up and be a banker

Or a politician or some other sort of go-getter   

Or—?—whatever you decide upon,   

Rid yourself of these incipient thoughts   

About being a poet.

For poets no longer are makers of songs,   

Chanters of the gold and purple harvest,   

Sayers of the glories of earth and sky,   

Of the sweet pain of love

And the keen joy of living;

No longer dreamers of the essential dreams,   

And interpreters of the eternal truth,   

Through the eternal beauty.

Poets these days are unfortunate fellows.   

Baffled in trying to say old things in a new way   

Or new things in an old language,   

They talk abracadabra

In an unknown tongue,

Each one fashioning for himself

A wordy world of shadow problems,

And as a self-imagined Atlas,

Struggling under it with puny legs and arms,   

Groaning out incoherent complaints at his load.

My son, this is no time nor place for a poet;   

Grow up and join the big, busy crowd   

That scrambles for what it thinks it wants   

Out of this old world which is—as it is—

And, probably, always will be.

Take the advice of a father who knows:   

You cannot begin too young   

Not to be a poet.

After

Mark Bibbins

Who wouldn’t have preferred a longer June; ’thoughthis seems trivial now in these milk-white lights. With Junecomes Folsom East and Pride and waking up in someoneelse’s bed and I am not really good at telling you these liesso I will explain my sadness here; try to come clean. One June,the rain fell nightly; felt like everyone had died. I understandSexton now, though I pretended I did before, tried tograsp onto grief like a child holding onto their mother’sthumb. It can be hard to wake in the middle of someoneelse’s leaving. Impossible even to carry that burden.

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

"The researchers in Ireland looked at their computer screen, marveling at a medieval book tracked down in a Roman library."https://apnews.com/article/old-english-manuscript-poetry-bede-caedmon-hymn-latin-italy-106769c014901cf06d8a56839d56ac90?utm_source=join1440&utm_medium=email&utm_placement=newsletter&user_id=66c4c92f5d78644b3ac5d5b4

NATIONAL LIMERICK DAY

"Observed annually on May 12th, National Limerick Day celebrates the birthday of English artist, illustrator, author, and poet Edward Lear (May 12, 1812 – Jan. 29, 1888)."https://nationaldaycalendar.com/celebrations/national-limerick-day-may-12

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

"During National Poetry Month in April, National Poem in Your Pocket Day shares the way poetry brings joy by simply carrying one in your pocket."https://nationaldaycalendar.com/celebrations/national-poem-in-your-pocket-day-last-thursday-in-april

NATIONAL HAIKU POETRY DAY

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

https://nationaldaycalendar.com/celebrations/national-haiku-poetry-day-april-17

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