These poems trip through Afghanistan, Tokyo, and Mozambique. These poems journey with turtledoves, trout, the pages of a book and a soldier on leave. Poems that shop, bush walk, slumber in utero, visit with Jesus, King William, Andrew Jackson, and hawks. These poems ride on the spine of a pit bull, on torpedoes and a black river, on trains and the subway. Here's a sweet bite:
The Girl Fighting Back Tears on The Subway During Morning Rush Hour by Stacey Harwood
She is lovely in her despair.
If I were a poet, she would become my poem.
If I were Billy Collins, she would inspire me to describe
the way she looks, sitting there in her new outfit from H & M
using every ounce of will to keep the tears from spilling
out of her eyes and ruining her makeup. She is thinking
about the fight she had with her boyfriend, and praying
that he is not, at this very moment, packing his belongins
and moving out of their studio apartment, which she cannot
afford without him. Yes, she's had her doubts,
but she doesn't want to be alone in this city, working
at the crummy job she took just to be near him
when she could have gone to grad school or roomed
for a year with her best friend, in Madrid.
Billy Collins would observe her pink-rimmed eyes
and inflamed nostrils, how she presses her fingertips with their
ragged fingernails to her forehead as if to banish thoughts
that will bring on more tears. He knows more than she
does about why she is crying: Her tears are not just over
her boyfriend, who she is certain will leave her, but
about everything she has lost in her twenty-two years,
and her uncertain future. Billy Collins would write this
poem in a way that is sympathetic and funny, too, so that
when she reads it many years hence, she recognizes
something of herself and remembers how foolish she once was
though she can no longer recall his name, the boy who
made her so miserable on the long ago morning.
If I were another poet, I might be inspired to write about
the metaphorical distance between us, she at the beginning
of life, full of hope and possibility, and I only with the past,
and all of its inevitable disappointments...
*To read the rest of the poem, click on the cover image above and flip to page 23. OCHO: The Travel Issue features work by Steve Almond, Ed Ayres, Grace Cavalieri, Denise Duhamel, Susan Elbe, Michael Hettich, Stacey Harwood, Jen Karetnick, Alexandra Lytton Regalado, Jesse Millner, Nikki Moustaki, Geoffrey Philp, and Jacob Saenz. Cover art by Didi Menendez. A GOSS183 publication.
