The Best American Poetry

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Rebecca Lindenberg

from Love, an Index

A

Abandon, what I did when you touched me
            that winter with an ungloved hand.
Ache, the heal of broken things: bones, disappointments. 
Allegories 
    of Love, Fragonard’s babycolored paintings,
            Ovid’s pursuers and storied looms, his Atalanta 
            her golden balls. The longing to know 
            how things become what they weren’t always.
    of Death, skulls, as in depictions of the penitent
            Magdalene. What should knowing we’ll die
            elicit? What does salvation have to do
            with being safe?
Angelbones, you alone
            have them. Where the wings came off. Where the wings belong.
Apartments, 
    Brooklyn, its winding stair reminding me
            of Yeats: “all men rise to greatness by..”
            A bicycle chained there. 
    South Dakota, we gave your son the only bedroom,
            woke early to salted baguette and snow.
    Salt Lake City, a porch ghost, a view
            of the valley’s glittering grid, my sister, your
            poor broken friend, we grilled squid 
            on the Smokey Joe. Tripod. Carpet. Halloween.
    Laramie, a basement, a stoveless kitchen,
            toaster-roasted eggplant, baseboard
            heat and sex in woolen socks.
    Rome, 5B, stone floors, white kitchen, white as the madness 
            I felt there, a bed that was twin beds held 
            together with so much duct tape, always 
            suggesting itself as metaphor;
Anger, 
    yours, with your father maybe, me maybe.
    mine, with you for finding expression of it 
            towards my family instead; there are other ways 
            of telling the story of our two angers, entwined 
            like bodies in the act of love. But in this one 
            I am not a villain.
Anne Carson, 
    the “Short Talks” from Plainwater, poolside 
            in Greece during an Easter Parade, clanking 
            in doorways for ouzo and bread; 
    The Autobiography of Red, in which Geryon 
            understood that people need
            acts of attention from each other.
Attention (see also: Anne Carson)
            “Geryon understood that people need acts of attention from each other.”

B

Binary, 
    code, allows a computer to represent text – b 
            is "000011110”. L-O-V-E too is a series 
            of 1’s and 0’s where 0 means “off” and 1 means “on”. 
    opposition, like presence-absence, male-female, love-
            innocence, love-hate, love-longing.
    star, two astronomical bodies orbiting each other 
            so closely they’re lost in each other’s light, and appear as one.
Bogota, city in the Andes surrounded by steep
            jungle. We did not fight in Bogota. Beaten 
            gold. White sanctuary. We love
            the Mexican restaurant full of wooden stairs
            overlooking vast expanses of Modernist architecture, 
            colonial plazaslit-up slums. La Candelaria
            is home to statues of ghosts, presence of absence. 
            Carts sell hot corn. We passed a woman
            laying on the sidewalk, pregnant a second time – 
            her belly swelled in half-globes around a dark scar
            like a peach around its deep groove. Storytellers 
            ride the busses, shattered petals and piles of thorns 
            and broad bruised leaves carpet the lot 
            where a flower market teems in the day. Sushi
            joint. Iranian embassy. A row of buildings trimmed 
            in tropical flowers and razor wire. Bookstore. We watched 
            Bollywood dubbed into Spanish on the old-fashioned TV 
            in your sublet apartment.
Bollywood, where love is an exhuberant fantasy
            of song. Many stories stop before they end.

C

Chopin
    etude. Major keys seem to have to do with light, minor
            keys with shadows cast by Major keys. 
    nocturne, an evocation of watchful owls, shimmer 
            of satin and violins. Or of a woman at a desk 
            with a glass of wine, trying to see through 
            her own reflection in the window.
    prelude, an introduction to the silence that follows it.
Comfort, erotic. (Example: Campion, “For when she comes 
            where comfort is she never will say no.”) 
Compromise, I will get up early with you 
            so long as there is coffee. 
Conversation
    about poems, you like “the sound of rice
            poured into a pan.” I like the bird 
            who rings like a wetted wine-glass rim, 
            and the bird who casts its shadow on the sea. I like
    poems, “held between two people, Lucky Pierre-style.”
            (See also: Frank O’Hara.) With Coleridge, when done reading 
            “I rise as though in prayer.” Such poems gather 
            everything into the now of the poem. I want to gather 
            everything into the now of this poem, but I can’t. 
            All is gloss (see also: Gloss).
Coquette, you called me once. Coy, you called me. I am
            neither. I am all candor and anxiety. But whatever
            I am, I am all for you.

D, E

Deadwood, ringing with slot machines. We drank pear wine
            in a cheap motel. I said “you take me
            to awll the noicest places” in a funny voice because
            it wasn’t true yet and I didn’t care. You funny-
            voiced me back, “Whaddya want? They got ice
            machines, they got HBO, dial up some
            va-va-voom.” We laughed. We showered 
            together and your peppermint soap gave me chills.
Desire, a chord played deep in the bass of the body. It’s good 
            to feel and to forget.
Divorce, far from a way you thought 
            you had of thinking of yourself. This story
            includes a divorce, which is how I come in.
D.H. Lawrence (see also: Desire), tells us “no, no, it is
            the three strange angels – admit them,
            admit them!” 


Emily, my sister, a wit and when asked what single thing 
            she’d bring to a desert island, she said: “a yacht.” 
            Like me, she fears to make mistakes.
Epithet, 
    Homeric, such as “swift-footed,” even when he’s sitting down,
            or perhaps “breaker of horses.” For women, “soft-braided” 
            or “glancing.” I have some for you, tall man, with your angelbones
            and your poppyred birthmark and your soft, soft hands
            and all those songs you made. My myth-maker. My great dark man.
Ex-, a prefix meaning “formerly and no more,” 
            connoting renunciation, affixed 
            to such nouns as lover and Catholic; 
            not likely to be placed before certain other 
            nouns, like sister or “breaker of horse” or bicycle.
Eye (not to be confused with I), in the Middle Ages
            (as recounted by Andreas Capellanus) it was thought 
            impossible to desire anything you’ve never seen, thus
            blind could not love. But there are other ways 
            of paying attention. (See also: Attention)

* * *

as originally posted, May 30, 2010:

Rebecca Lindenberg currently holds a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and is completing a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Utah.  No Tell Motel first published this poem in February of this year.  Rebecca wrote, "I wanted to give some of these poems a form that was more conceptual than metrical – hence “Love, a Footnote” and “Love, an Index” are both part of a series that uses scholarly apparatus to talk about passion, physicality, memory. I hope these forms will help reveal an underlying harmony between “eros” and “psyche,” two abstractions that sometimes seem superficially incompatible."

The Rivers Between Us: A Conversation Beginning in the Hudson River Valley with Claire Hero (Lea Graham)

The writer, Claire Hero, and I are neighbors here in the Mid-Hudson River Valley.  I live in Poughkeepsie and she, across the river, in Esopus.  We are also both transplants to the area.  We thought it would be interesting to begin a conversation about our sense of the river valley and see where it took us.  We were curious to find out how or if it had influence in our current writings.  You’ll find New York’s Hudson here, but our talk moves out to New Zealand, Northwest Arkansas, Minnesota, Chicago and Worcester, Massachusetts. We hope you’ll enjoy the ranging and exploratory nature of our talk as much as we did.

 

Claire Hero is the author of the chapbook, Dollyland (Tarpaulin Sky); Sing, Mongrel (Noemi Press) and two other chapbooks: afterpastures (Caketrain) and Cabinet (dancing girl press). Her poems have appeared in Black Warrior Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Handsome and elsewhere.

 

***

 

LG:  I have been thinking a lot about how much I love the Hudson—and the trains that come with it and how it ties me to my home geography on the Arkansas, but how so often I feel daunted by all that the Hudson River brings--the historical significance of it (the Half Moon, the Hudson River School of Painters, etc.) and the enormity of its geographical properties (the estuary itself and the canyons that exist within it).  Sometimes the information bundles that come with the river and this valley sort of stun me in my writing.  

 

Btw, I like the notion of the frozen river between us!  We are neighbors, for sure, but the river as some kind of division or organizing line is interesting.  I always love how people say to me:  "Oh...you really need to move to this side of the river."  What they mean is the political left-ness of the communities to the west of the river, but they use "this side of the river" as a metaphor to talk about it.

 

How does this particular geography affect you?

 

CH:  Stuns, yes. The Hudson River Valley reminds me so much of New Zealand. In part this is due to the silencing factor of the landscape. What is there to say about the sublime?  

But I also like the Hudson Valley, I think, because it has always been a shipping lane. A thoroughfare. The means of exploration. It's like a poetic line.

 

LG:  Yes, the sublime....  I think in some ways for me, the Hudson River Valley reminds me of a grander version of the Arkansas River Valley, partly where I grew up and where my paternal side of the family is from (originally, store owners and cotton farmers in the bottoms). We just didn't have that sense of grandeur.  I mean Arkansas is, after all, considered--or at least for me in my childhood—part of the raffish edges of America!  So in so many ways, it is easier to see it without the grandeur of early U.S. history and the connection to the ocean (hence, Europe) getting in the way.  One of the things that I learned years after I had left home which helped me to reverse this notion of my home place as "backwards" was to read that there were so many accessible rivers that crossed and connected in the state of Arkansas that there wasn't an immediate need for roads.  You could get anywhere more or less in the state on the waterways.  Roads have always been a sign of progress, a measure of how successful or progressive a community is and its desire to connect with the outside and exceed the parochial.  It was a kind of relief and delight to read that the delay in road building was at least in part because of the river roadways that naturally existed.

 

CH:  Rivers as roads.  The Hudson River has frozen this year, two feet thick in some places, but the shipping lanes continue.  Things - information - passes through the Hudson Valley.  We are a thoroughfare.  We are a destination and a means through.  We can stand on the Walkway and watch the river move through and some of us cross over and some of us jump.

 

In New Zealand I was intimidated by the landscape.  It was too sublime.  Either you call out your name and hear only echoes of your own mutilated voice, or you pass through areas so empty, so unfinished, that you realize your car could tip over the edge and no one would find you.  In New Zealand I had to focus on the animals, which were entirely prosaic: sheep, millions of them, bleating each spring into silence.

 

But in New York, everything is wild.  It bears the oldest marks of white colonization of any place I have ever lived; stone walls, like rivers, like arteries, pass information through the broken forests.  Yet it doesn't feel entirely settled yet.  Coyotes howl through the nights.  There are whispers of bears.   New York doesn't have billboards, not really, no signs to clutter up the view.  The landscape feels almost languageless, in a way, as though anything could be scrawled across it, yet it is so wild, so lush, that you know that any mark you made would be, within the month, eaten by weed or water.

 

LG:  Languageless.  I completely agree.  But here's the dissonance for me:  It looks wild, lush and all, but the knowledge of how long people have been here--and particularly, the Europeans--makes me feel like anything I think about this river, this valley has already been thought, already been written about, discovered, or rendered into art.  I especially think about the painters—Thomas Cole and the other Hudson River School.  Cole was thinking seriously about this place, its water and sky, or as he referred to it, “the soul of all scenery,” about 200 years ago.  While his concerns were mostly different than mine, I still find it daunting to think about the length of time people have been here and thinking hard on this place.

 

CH:  "Already been written about, discovered."  - To say that is to say we live in a fixed place, but the thing about places is that they are never fixed.  They bleed through boundaries.  Seeds, animals, humans: everything moves through, leaves traces, makes changes.  I'm thinking about the problem of this dissonance in two ways: palimpsest and translation.

 

Place names, stone walls, brass plaques: these are palimpsests.  I can see traces of the world that was here before, but somehow, I can't really touch it.  A mile and a half from my house is the church where Sojourner Truth's owners went each Sunday.  It's a museum now.  Inside, an older woman in a floral hooded sweatshirt will show you cases with wampum and bone fish hooks, moonshine bottles and an egg beater, the remnants of a sleigh factory destroyed in 1901.  None of these things help me understand where I have landed, yet somehow they congregate into an image.  A sentence.  A vocabulary for Esopus.  And there are other palimpsests: the bones of animals on the shoulders of the road, the wasp globes in the trees that winter reveals, the remains of someone's picnic washed up on the river bank.  In a poem like "reviving Coyote" I was trying to address such palimpsests: the coyote roadkilled at the end of my street growing through elements taken from women's Indian Captivity narratives.

 

 

reviving Coyote

 

Coyote slinks out of the road & into my hands. Out of my hands & into my mouth. With my teeth she bites the bark in two that binds her. With my tongue she licks the placenta off the words. Coyote steals out of my mouth & into my hair. Out of my hair & into my skin.  In my skin she drags the forest floor, looking for the bodies. In my skin she hacks back the dark. (& who are those masked that ring round the wood?—) Coyote sneaks out of my skin & into my lungs. Into my nose. With my nose the earth is clean as paper.  Coyote scrawls herself across it, crawls into my hands. With my hands she rends the voles in two. With my hands she opens a door. Inside I am waiting. Inside I offer her a kind of apple, some Indian cake, a bed of hides, & didn't we bed down, Coyote & I, in this shabby cave while the hunters searched for us in the vast boscage of the body? Didn't we couple in our fear? Coyote runs over my snowy terrain, marking my skin with her claws. How do I tell you that my body is the road upon which Coyote dies? How do I rear what births from my mouth?

  

CH:  Then there's translation. Recently I've been interested in bacteria, specifically in invasion and translation. Bacteria exchange DNA with members of their own and other species in three ways, but the most interesting to me is translation, whereby a bacteria cell can absorb naked DNA left by a dead cell and add it directly to its own. This leads to change, to adaptation. The “evolutionary butterfly effect,” as explained by the Italian biologist Telmo Pievani, is “the uncontrollable propagations of nonadaptive effects beginning from a functional modification.” Or, as Emily Dickinson would put it, “Infection in the sentence breeds.”

 

I am an invasive species. Anything I wish to say about the Hudson Valley has to pass through a mouth that has opened in many places. These places change my language, my hearing, my sense of how to name the world and what the world includes. I carry place in my accent, my mouth which refuses to give up the Minnesota O even after years away, and in my vocabulary, which swaps and absorbs new names for old things. To be transient is to be always translating, it seems, so there are gaps, but there is also that possibility of infection, of a new organ arising from a new combination. This is what I was getting at in a poem like “[Dredge up].”

 

 

DREDGE up

the earthwords,

hook them

onto your tongue –

 

*

 

these castings:

            the breakdown

of organic

matter

 

terraundeforming

 

*

 

& the slow

articulation

 

joint to joint

 

tongue to

whatever emerges

 

with various organs &.

 

 

 

LG:  The palimpsest and translation, yes.  As you talked about the church turned museum and all of the traces (moonshine bottles, egg beater, etc.) that are left from the turn of the century, I began to think of the various ways I’ve experienced that in all of the places I’ve lived.  Growing up for a time with my maternal grandparents on a large and working farm outside of Fayetteville, Arkansas, there were all kinds of traces of what had been there before.  One of the enduring images in my work is a toolbox stowed in the bathroom that was full of arrowheads, fishhooks, grinding stones, and Civil War cannon balls.  Each morning I would go into the bathroom and consider the mystery of that box containing the objects discovered from plowing.  These physical objects in this particular place connected with my learning Arkansas history:  my grandparents’ farm wasn’t so far off The Trail of Tears.  A few years ago, while visiting my father, who lives in the Arkansas River Valley area, I went to look at the gallows where Judge Parker, the “hanging judge,” presided.  I discovered not only that the names of those killed at the gallows were largely indigenous names, but that nearby was a bend in the river where you could have seen the tribes floating by on their forced relocation to Oklahoma.  The Trail of Tears happened in more ways than one.

 

When I moved to urban places, I found these remnants in different ways.  In Chicago, there are the storefronts and cornices that are left over from businesses long gone that you notice for their elegance and/or out of place-ness within the surroundings.  For about a year or so I worked at the Jane Addams Hull House Museum as a docent. The house is located on the University of Illinois-Chicago campus and was a pretty stark difference against the surrounding architecture.  To be sitting in this house that helped birth the Settlement House movement and early social work, but that was adjacent to the 1970s architecture of the campus, felt like a secret, in some ways.  I had a sense of that neighborhood before the university had arrived.  There was a quiet and solemnity among the 19^th century furniture and art that created an energy against Halsted’s traffic bustle, co-eds and Greektown up the street.  Teaching at the university when I was a grad student was a similar experience (though different sense of time) since we were teaching in classrooms with bolted down desks and these long, thin bullet-proof windows.  The university had been built around the time of the Chicago Riots and that history was built into its very rooms.  One of my early teaching tactics around analysis was to ask students why they thought their seats were bolted to the floor. 

 

When I moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, where I lived for eight years, I noticed the palimpsestic nature in the names of places.  When you talked to a Worcester native about Rizutti’s Goodnight Café burning down, he or she might say, “Oh, you mean what used to be Old Billy’s Lounge.”  There was even a certain pride among people who could name what the place had been called several businesses earlier.  And as you said, I wasn’t quite sure that it helped me understand where I was, but it did accumulate as image and tone of the place.  

 

I think you’re exactly right about translating.  The mouth that has opened in other places.  While the Mid-Hudson River Valley may seem overwhelming at times, I, too, think that I translate the place out of my various accumulations and sensibilities that come from elsewhere.  You with your Minnesota O, me with my love of double modals and slower, circuitous talking and walking.

 

CH: I envy you your toolbox of mystery!  My grandmother’s house was similar.  She was a hoarder, part of the generation that went through the Depression.  Everything, from button to jar, had value and a multiplicity of possibilities.  Like words, they accrued and offered.  They were for picking over and dreaming through.

 

You know, Lea, it’s funny that we’re both from river towns.  I grew up in a river town in southern Minnesota, and I have been wondering lately if living beside the river made me restless.  Is this why we are both so transient?  Oceans are grand but annihilating, and lakes are stable but stagnant, but a river is somehow always new.  It is passage and possibility.  It endures and erases and alters.  Often as a prelude to writing I go for a walk, and here in Esopus it means down the hill, past the overgrown orchard where the deer linger, to watch the Hudson.  And even better, the Hudson is tidal!  It moves both ways.  Like a poem,

Among the Post-Holes and Potsherds and Grave Goods: An Interview with John Glenday (Lea Graham)

I first met John Glenday in person while walking a portion of the Great Glen Way from Invermoriston to Drumnadrochit, Scotland in 2012.  We had only a single mutual friend and poetry in common as way of introduction.   After walking the fourteen miles along the gorse-studded trail, above the Loch Ness, I arrived to the Glenday household where John and his wife, Erika, had already prepared a sign that captured their lovely and playful hospitality: Quiet--American Poet Sleeping.  What followed were several days of lively and thoughtful conversation about poetry, place and our political landscapes. One of the many things that intrigued me in our conversation was the different sense of inhabiting land.  I have long thought about the way in which particular geography and language intersect.  John Glenday, as you will see, thinks seriously about this intersection without allowing it to limit his poetic range.

John Glenday was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1952.  He is the author of three books of poems, the most recent, Grain (Picador, 2009) which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for both the Ted Hughes Award and Griffin International Poetry Prize.  His second collection, Undark, was also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His first book, The Apple Ghost, won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award in 1989.  He was appointed Scottish/Canadian Exchange Fellow for 1990-91, based at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.  He lives with his lovely wife, Erika, and their children in Drumnadrochit in the Scottish Highlands.

***

LG:  To begin with a rather wide-ranging question: What kind of connection do you see between place and poetry?  Could you talk a bit about the link between your home geography and language?  Has the knowledge of your family residing in the same area for over 800 years had any impact on your writing?

JG: Poetry holds on to a place in the same way a plant does – it takes nourishment from the land it was rooted in – what else can keep a poem alive? But when I talk about place, it is irrespective of time. So for me the poem is also an archaeological examination – it digs down among the post-holes and potsherds and grave goods for evidence of how life was once lived. What else is poetry about? The fact that my name has been associated with the Scottish county of Angus for generations and generations accentuates this for me. It tells me that whatever I write casts a long shadow. But I am not territorial in my writing, so I’ve happily adopted Scottish Islands, mythology, non-existent places. They’re all grist to the mill. One of my earliest poems ‘The Apple Ghost’ is a simple description of a house in Nairn, Scotland, as I saw it at the time. The narrative of the poem was inherent in that house. All I needed to do was write it down.

***

The Apple Ghost

A musty smell of dampness filled the room

Where wrinkled green and yellow apples lay

On folded pages from an August newspaper.

She said:

‘My husband brought them in, you understand,

Only a week or two before he died.

He never had much truck with waste, and

I can’t bring myself to throw them out.

He passed away so soon…’

 

I understood then how the wonky kitchen door,

And the old Austin, settling upon its

Softened tyres in the wooden shed,

Were paying homage to the absence of his quiet hands.

 

In the late afternoon, I opened

Shallow cupboards where the sunlight leaned on

Shelf over shelf of apples, weightless with decay.

Beneath them, sheets of faded wallpaper

Showed ponies, prancing through a summer field.

This must have been the only daughter’s room

Before she left for good.

 

I did not sleep well.

 

The old woman told me over breakfast

How the boards were sprung in that upper hall;

But I knew I had heard his footsteps in the night,

As he dragged his wasted body to the attic room

Where the angles of the roof slide through the walls,

And the fruit lay blighted by his helpless gaze.

I knew besides, that, had I crossed to the window

On the rug of moonlight,

I would have seen him down in the frosted garden,

Trying to hang the fruit back on the tree.

                                    From The Apple Ghost (Peterloo Poets, 1989)

 

***

LG: You’ve talked to me about place as being connected to person and certainly, many of your poems seem to address a person or sentient being even as the poems are rooted largely in some kind of place.  Give us a sense of your own—and maybe the European—nexus of place and person.  Perhaps, you could also talk about names?  Given that Scotland is a country associated with clan names and places like Loch Ness (which you live near), do you think there is a special sheen in names and naming in your own work or that of other Scottish poets?

JG: I’m not sure, Lea. Names are such slippery things – remember what Paul Valery said: ‘to see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.’ Names can come between us and the world, they can delude us into categorizing instead of appreciating. But they also change me, I believe, from an innocent bystander into a material witness. They do this by forcing me to look in an analytical way rather than simply to see.  It is essential, as an artist of any kind, to look in a penetrating manner at the world; to question it by observing it. Most names cast long shadows too – Mine comes from a small glen in Angus which in Gaelic means ‘the Glen of the fast flowing water’. So I can trek up into the hills and look down on my surname. I do this in the poem ‘Glendye’ of course. There’s not much there now – sheep fanks, heather and gorse, a thread of water. I like to imagine they are in me too. I also have the same name as my father, which I viewed as a blessing, and then a curse, and then a blessing.

***

Glen Dye

by that flinch in the Water of Dye

where its wersh soul swithers

through the Bog of Luchray

and on towards the Dee,

there runs a certain gentleness

of ragged stonework in an old sheep fank,

where a flush of broom pushes out;

and if you happened to lie in its doubtful lee,

come early spring, you might just hear

the wind clambering through, fluting

a note or two from a threadbare melody,

for nothing but its own sake.

                                     --From Grain (Picador, 2009)

)

***

LG:  In your book, Undark, you have a series of poems about the U.S. Civil War.  Could you talk about the genesis of these poems.  I believe they come out of photographs?  Talk about the process of writing about place and subjects that aren’t “your own” and yet, are so much your own.  “Artillery Horses Under Fire” seems a poem that you are intimately connected with or at least, you’ve rendered it as such. 

JG: All the Civil War poems are shamelessly appropriated from Shelby Foote’s brilliant book, or form Whitman’s ‘Specimen Days’. I’m not worried by this. After all, you can usually tell from the title what a poem is not about.  All the detail of the world – the terrible events, the pointless waste of lives, the bravery and self-sacrifice are all just ways in which the world is telling us how we work. The world is always doing that. The poet’s duty is to appropriate fact and fiction for the benefit of poetry. So in the poem you mention, it was the way the artillery horses would stand firm in harness while they were being shot that troubled me; and then I remembered how Union soldiers, advancing into gunfire over open ground, would turn up their collars and hunch their shoulders, as if they were advancing through rain, rather than lead. It is this tiny detail of the world that tells us a little of the big workings of things. If we can focus on detail and describe that, we can say more about the horror than any mere accumulation of statistics can do. So, in summary, these are not poems that try to be ‘American’, they are poems trying to talk about people, and how they live. The world will carry on giving us the clues – remember what happened to the glass negatives taken by Brady and others during the Civil War? Remember this, along with the Crimea, was the first war documented in photography. Those glass plates were sold to nurserymen after the war – the people were sick of images of the killing, they had no stomach for them. Can you imagine greenhouses glazed with the inverted images of the dead? What is that saying to us about us?

***

4. Artillery Horses Under Fire

That slap the minie balls make when they strike

sickens the heart.  Sounds just like pebbles

smacking into mud.

 

Mostly they fall straight off, then struggle

up again, shivering and stiff, but strangely

quiet till the next round comes.

 

Some simply twitch their flanks or slash

their tails across the wound , staring ahead.

You’d think it was a blowfly at them,

 

nothing more.  I remember at Cold Harbor we watched

as the last from a team of six stood firm

in harness with five bullets in her side.

 

She toppled only when the sixth ball sheared

through bone.  Not one was spooked, nor ran;

but then, the living were left limbered

 

to the dead.  We could hear the rebels cheer

as horse after horse dropped through its traces,

kicking the caisson sides.

 

They hardly make no sound—that’s what I hate.

Die as they must, God damn them.

I don’t know.  Some beasts act more like men.

                                --From “Whitman's War" in Undark (Peterloo Poets, 1995)

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Bruce Covey

The Difference Between Toggle Bolts & Molly Screws

It's like the atlantic around here—jittery &
Full of waves, a desperate need for a horizontal
& vertical juxtaposition, a corner, a vantage point
A start. And if that weren't enough, this device

I found to fasten, without a clear understanding
Of what in the hell needs fastening. Except,
I do this: press gently through your center
Nestling, mixing into your microcosmic control,

Until its wings finally cross the cusp, detach,
Unfold again on the opposite side, drawing me
As close to you as relative density might allow,
Clinging from the rear of your ribcage

And imprinting according to this grid:
Every minus to crease a plus, every plus
To upend a many a minus. There's a message
Nestled in between us like a traffic signal

Composed of half a dozen buttons & a rook:
"Declining to hear the city's solving tools,
They, in a methodical approach to the construction
Of peculiar fields & frames, dusting full force, yield

Two outcomes, Phoenix on the left, trajectory
From concept to completion on the other,
Redirected to circles, one in my very backyard,
The other spread along every sort of continent."

The process of the phonologically sequenced paper,
Or your physical form, a thirdness, where order
The first, trace to follow up your spine & amidst
Your hair an intended & immediate kiss

Second & nonrepresentative because
The moment this is, it is, and then one more

* * *

Bruce Covey is the author of Glass Is Really a Liquid (No Tell Books, 2010) and Elapsing Speedway Organism (No Tell Books, 2006).  No Tell Motel first published this poem in September 2007.  Bruce wrote, "I believe these poems are reaching, attempting to celebrate the mysterious & magnificent something that's always beyond one's extended & stretching fingers. The space between what's "true" & what might have been. . . "The Different Between Toggle Bolts and Molly Screws" came from a challenge to write a poem centered around a piece of hardware."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Paige Taggart

from To People Who Sometimes Read

A female blue whale calf gains nine pounds an hour. Holy fuck! What a mammal. If only all females could see past their own insecurities, the fire would light a higher maternal flame. The deep sea is ridiculously blue. I’ve been caught in a wave twice and was pulled from its drowning. How high the feeling of being full of water can be, knocking the wind from your lungs, giving you no option but to swallow. That’s how to be in love, to swallow all your pride and let your body sink into its capsizing existence. The blue whale’s heart is the size of a small car.

* * * 

Paige Taggart is the author of Won't be a Girl (Scantily Clad Press). No Tell Motel first published this poem in January 2010. Paige wrote, "To People Who Sometimes Read is a series in which I attempt to make language my bitch. I had exhausted my previous mode of writing, coinciding with a need to change my life. It was time to admit my “soulshame,” to allow myself to be vulnerable and more declarative, a befitting circumnavigation with my lifestyle transition. I was influenced immensely by two poet’s correspondence of email-poems that were both extremely personal and had mastered a certain building format that I wanted to build-off of myself. At one point I didn’t even believe in editing. I had said it’s like trying to train a mule to talk. But I now realize that part of my dream is to begin without perfection, in fact, the more chaotic, the more likely I am to hone-in. Oftentimes, I felt like I was trapped in a cave that only allows exit when the sea is at low tide, and frequently the sea was at high-tide but with my one-good-eye I was able to scratch lesions into the walls. I found a dog that wasn’t mine but fed it anyway for four days, then I responded to the posters that had been duct-taped to tree trunks. The number put me on the phone with a sheriff. He was out for blood but when I told him my story, he let me go. I think I care about writing poetry more than anyone else in the world."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Alice B. Fogel

Variation 1:  Yhwh

Explode from the cauldron dark,

that’s what I’d do for them:  That in mind into self

and other I divided.  In and in I overlapped in density

and where I was gravid I breathed their breaths. 

With my body like a brine spiraling I stirred

the silence till it echoed apart from me, and where I

was deafened I hummed their frequencies. 

From a floating ground I fired rounds of clouds

flaming and where they burned I brewed the rutilated

light till it refracted in the wells between comets rocketing.

In and in through the ancient rooms I fell and where

there were thresholds I left them canyons gorgeous

and aggrieved.  Flung wide, electrified, I striated skies

with ellipsis, color, collapse, shot suns past

eclipse, blew the air for sound to sound

from touch, touched them till they cried in ecstacy:


Out and out and through the skin my sweat

ran and poured into hollows so where I emptied

they filled and though I encompassed

they merely contained.  Into the molten cavity I

dropped a stone, I lit the furnace, stretched a hide. 

I wielded the ragged white-veined ice and birthed

spinning galaxies in atoms, vital alluvium, the eternal

quest for me.   I remembered and made them

forget.  I raged and sweetened them.  Formless then

I dimensioned space, delineated them.  I swallowed

my own throat to feed them hungers delicious.

Where I could not pass I corridored their heavens.

Where I felt nothing I caused them passion and urge.

I watch them and they are blind to me.

I sleep, and they dream. 

I cry out to them, and they die.

* * *

Alice B. Fogel is the author of  Be That Empty: Apologia for Air (Harbor Mountain Press), Elemental and I Love This Dark World (Zoland Books).  No Tell Motel first published this poem in May 2005.  Alice wrote, “Var. 1: Yhwh” is based on the Kabbalah’s notion of the Zim-Zum, which is pretty much like the big bang theory in physics. I also thought of Francis Ponge’s “Kings do not touch doors,” or how lonely the powerful are. The way the universe is spinning in and out replicates the way Bach’s variations often climb up and down scales, sometimes involving the crossing over of hands."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Craig Santos Perez

from the ghost of the harvest madonna

Tears of the Madonna, the Hunger and Other Stories. “Madonna Rescues Malawian Child – only 12 Million to Go.” A boy with an allergy to ghosts has trouble with too-logical teachers who say ghosts don’t exist. To celebrate the autumn harvest, the boy claims he had seen his real father’s ghost. The father tells his son “your vitriol towards Madonna seems out of control.”

* * *

Craig Santos Perez is the author of from Unincorporated Territory (Tinfish Press) and from Unincorporated Territory [saina] (Omnidawn). No Tell Motel first published this poem in March 2007. Craig wrote, "These poems are from a prose poem manuscript titled "the ghost of the harvest madonna," which explores the possibilities of disjunctive allegory."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Joanna Ruocco

When I Worked for Madonna

The bodyguards wear white 
The bullets fly towards them 
The bodyguards are clouds 
The bullets do not penetrate 
Kaddafi. The bullets are precipitation 
After we drink coffee, we check 
the bird feeders. Kaddafi has purple 
martins on his shoulders. The bodyguards 
are snowy egrets. Forget 
in both directions from this moment 
I am right in front of you 
I have a rifle 
I am sexually wonderful 
like a horse

* * *

Joanna Ruocco is the author of Man's Companions (Tarpaulin Sky). No Tell Motel first published this poem in January 2009. Joanna wrote, "One time, my friend, Brian Conn, was waiting to cross the street and he saw a big squirrel standing next to him on the sidewalk. The big squirrel was standing quite still, holding a smaller squirrel in its mouth. Brian Conn watched the big squirrel and the big squirrel watched the traffic. Suddenly, the big squirrel ran into the street and threw the smaller squirrel under the wheels of a car. 
I didn't write these poems thinking about that story. However, I am very interested in animals, sudden death, and misapprehensions of all kinds. 

My father used to smoke cigars with a squirrel. This was in New York City. My father would lean out the window and the squirrel would balance on a branch of the sycamore tree and they would share Garcia Y Vegas. 

I don't know how to reconcile these two encounters with squirrels. Maybe a gap in the universe opens between irreconcilable encounters with squirrels, and this gap has something to do with poetry? 

All animals should wear orange in the woods and sing loudly."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Lauren Kizi-Ann Alleyne

On the day of your favorite color:

Here is the day of pumpkins,

their hollow heads lit and leering. Here

is the stripped sweetness of candy corn

cupped in my hands. Here is fall

swirling the leaves into a storm of red-

gold fire. Here is the sunset,

shorter now. And here is memory,

spilling from its orange coat:

your mandarin sheets, your russet

couch, kisses the color of burning.

Here is the day of heartbreak

ripened to glow. Here is the day of ghosts.

* * *

Lauren Kizi-Ann Alleyne is the author of Dawn In The Kaatskills (Longshore Press). No Tell Motel first published this poem in September 2009. Lauren wrote, [This poem is] "part of an ongoing obsession of mine with relationships of all kinds—between lovers and friends, between the past and the present, between the various aspects of our own selves. Because so much of who we are is tied up in the relationships we're in, we're always balancing how much we are willing to give or give up to establish, and maintain these bonds, and as they change, we have to reevaluate who we are. This is the experience that the poems and I keep coming back to..."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Cynthia Arrieu-King

Bird Studies Human Studies Bird

"Birds don't sing, they explain. Only people sing."
--Kenneth Koch

Mary Smith sings about how birds can punish us,
studies any in the context of diversion or patterns.
Birds that count are not really the ones inside humans'
heads. Mary Smith, however, is good at imagining
horribly uncommon woodpeckers, supposedly
extinct. If, in either case, dodo or ivory-billed
woodpecker, Mary Smith persists, what happens? At
first she may associate being in a city or in the yard
of a suburban house with being a common sparrow. She may,
in terms of the song in her mind sing to find nuthatch,
drawing sparrows out of the ginkgo, cardinals
aghast at her vibrato. Maybe she sees all birds
as basically the same type of bird, so the dodo
who never appears is as good as an absent robin.

You, on the other hand, have a set of elements
associated with Mary Smith in your head. Yet,
are you little and brown? Do you have a red breast?
Do worms dangle from your beak? Are you the
idea attractor of what is to be a robin? Or are you
a dodo trying to pass as normal? Do you gravitate
toward birds with social practices that push you away?
Do you chirp an explanation of why this branch,
why this final refusal to come back even as
idea, why you try to fit into patterns only
humans are part of? Even clouds in terms of song
are not songs but explanations formed long ago,
lines of thought that covered every path. Looped around,
cumulus bore down on grackle, squall line
mapping turkey before that animal was, before Start
of Our World. If you want to sing, don't be a robin. If you
want to explain the robins you have to admit

the patterns in your head about robins are wrong.
If you want to join the dodos you have to find one.

* * * 

Cynthia Arrieu-King is the author of The Small Anything City (Dream Horse Press) and People are Tiny in Paintings of China (forthcoming, Octopus Books). No Tell Motel first published this poem in February 2006.  Cynthia wrote, "I was reading James Paul Gee's, What Video Games Have to Teach us About Literacy and Learning. The book yields rich pedagogical lessons from a comparison between the landscapes of multi-player video games and composition classrooms. I was reading along merrily one night, when suddenly, Gee started analyzing the social matrix of birds, dodos, and the sentence "If, in either case, dodo or ivory-billed woodpecker, Mary Smith persists, what happens?" got stuck in my craw."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Steve Fellner

Ode To Matthew Shepard

Once I hit
someone I loved.

It wasn’t
very hard. But

I hit him. I
hit him

in the way you
hit someone

you need
to stop

loving you. I
can still

remember the way
the body looked

when I hit it.
It was ruined

with my knowing
you could hurt

a body and it
still needs

something
more than

your pain. 
Narrative is

as corrupt
as the thoughts


of the men who
murdered

you, Matthew.
Explanation never

satisfies. It 
always wants

something
like redemption.

* * *

Steve Fellner is the author of Blind Date with Cavafy (Marsh Hawk Press) and All Screwed Up (Benu Press). No Tell Motel first published this poem in May 2008. Steve wrote, "I believe in ghosts, and I hope these poems do not anger Matthew Shepard’s ghost. I do not mean any harm. I want to get at something, and this is the only way I know how."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Karl Parker

A Museum of Making Do

When all was said and done, the human parts were my favorites. 
Sun glints through glass roofs under which some move, irregularly 
ambulant. I’m glad we never make it to the mall, in the dream that ends 
the instant before we kiss. We kiss and kiss, pretty kissing. Parts move  
smooth, through the meanings.

* * *

Karl Parker is the author of PERSONATIONSKIN (No Tell Books).  No Tell Motel first published this poem in September 2004.  Karl wrote, "I'm delighted, especially when I let language, in other words my other words, do whatever they slash I want to do, person-ify spontaneously and not, at and because of particular contexts; it's that simple, that material, that literally performed for and of course by a shifting aeriallyrooted "me"-place within and established by various frames real and imagined--say, social and haunted, the extrapersonal. All the "fun" in the house's marking and remarking the semiviolent, sad, somnolent, laughing torn and so on human image, not via verbal photographia--more by way of, as if, hand-gesture-prints in flickered series, no, speechprints, movement-echoes of a voice doing voices, all including its chosen own. I say Take any and all liberties and socalled ha licenses with language in the furtherance of the invention and accretion of your own thought, your own signs, your own actual useable meanings in your time and place always."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Daniela Olszewska

Creation Myth/Golden Age

A god from the East and/or above and/or far far away
took to the notion to plant a fetal-curled seed by the banks
of a body of water. Four hundred thousand years of deity-
induced rain and sunshine caused the stone to sprout
into a city’s worth of architecture, gold-leafed astronomies,
and smiling, single-headed cows. 
The women’s eyes housed nine-pointed ceruleans
and children were taught at an early age the value
of aneroidical breathing. 
Monsters lived the whole of their lives in glass coffins,
surrounded by orange safety cones.
Old men would spend days on their backs,
watching clouds take the shape of semi-sapien eyeballs. 
Peopled by swallowers of burning tea leaves,
the inhabitors of this land lacked the mouth
mechanisms to make hissing sounds. 
Whenever they felt angry or threatened,
they had to resort to humming.

* * *  

Daniela Olszewska is the author of three chapbooks: The Twelve Husbands of Citizen Jane (Beard of Bees), The Partial Autobiography of Jane Doe (Dancing Girl Press) and Resort to Humming (Scantily Clad Press).  No Tell Motel first published this poem in April 2008.  Daniella wrote, "The myth poems are very loosely based on a now-lost book of Polish folk tales. Writing poems based on pre-existing narratives was a wonderfully frustrating experience. At times I felt as if the story limited the language available to me. This, of course, made me work that much harder to find words/images that: (A) excited me (B) stayed (more or less) true to the story. I highly recommend putting a myth-retelling prompt in your NaPoWriMo arsenal."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Fritz Ward

A ___ is a World, a Windstorm, a Love Letter Lost in the Breeze

Dear Seizure of Church Bells, there were eleven hours left till the end of Memorialist Day. I was kneeling again, ambushed by my own ardor. I was asking this She to be my garden of grief. And She said, Guess! Guess! Oh God, Guess!But the Marginalia was already drawing near, their pre-colonial boots shining funeral-black in the May-ish sun. We hurried down presidential streets, past soothsayers and witnesses, to the courthouse steps. We donned our simple smiles even as the echo of boots erupted around us. Only the crossing guard could stop them now, her one palm held high. As quick-quick as he could, the priest-like astronomer knocked on the door of his heaven. And with time for only one question, one answer, one rapture, we surrendered our Yes.

* * *

Fritz Ward's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Arts and Commentary, Agni Online, Swink, Salt Hill, Blackbird, Diagram, Small Spiral Notebook, and The Journal.  No Tell Motel  first published this poem in January 2009. Fritz wrote, "[this poem] was a result of reading too much science fiction and fantasy this summer while contemplating how to propose to the woman I loved—but I'm not quite willing to completely undress for you just yet. What fun is a one-sided seduction? Besides, I'm more interested in hearing your reactionary musings than listening to myself talk."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Evie Shockley

sagittarius

when time lavas the lungs
and you’ve begun to tack yourself
         like a hollywood voodoo doll
to your own promises

remember that you are an archer

you know how to get a wish
where it’s going      by aiming above
the gravity of a situation
let your arrow follow the path
         of the panicked cat’s back

when classmates or colleagues gobble at you
         in iron and mistletoe
until the red light between your brain
and your eyes begins to blink

remember that you are a centaur

you’ll never fit in with the bipeds
except those who’ve read their history
flaunt your naked torso      pat
         your own rump
and if you hear hissing      hoof it

* * *

Evie Shockley is the author of a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006), the new black (Wesleyan UP, forthcoming 2011), and two chapbooks.  No Tell Motel first published this poem in October 2007.  Evie wrote, "I have been in a life-long love affair – not deep, but meaningful – with astrology; my birthday is November 28th."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Rebecca Loudon

What I didn't say when the gasworks shook their iron tails
in my direction

There is a foot-shaped stain on the end of my mattress like Sibelius snapping a white tablecloth across the Baltic Sea inviting me to tea. Night Dog thumps his body against my door. I’ve cut my hair to fiery nubs my angel hair my blonde angel cluttersuit. I eat a bowl of marrow beans and pound my feet but too many hours in the swamp prying goathead burrs from my heel awakened more than triage more than language my caliche nerve. I don’t know how to do it. I stand on my hind legs and bark. I want more. I want more. I want more.

 

* * *

 

Rebecca Loudon is the author of Cadaver Dogs (No Tell Books), Navigate, Amelia Earhart's Letters Home (No Tell Books) and Radish King (Ravenna Press). No Tell Motel first published this poem in December 2008.  Rebecca wrote, "The poems from Cadaver Dogs explore the human wanting to be animal, the animal wanting to be human, and what happens when the change meets itself on the path toward recognition. Some of the poems, if not all, reflect the comfort animals give humans when we capture them as pets. The subtext of these poems addresses the peril of children living in a world where not animals, but humans, are the true danger." 

 

* * *

 

If you liked this poem, No Tell Books is offering a special sale this holiday weekend. Three titles for just $25 (plus shipping). That's up to $27 off the combined retail.  Any title from our catalog is eligible including books by your favorite authors: Jill Alexander Essbaum, Rebecca Loudon, Hugh Behm-Steinberg, Bruce Covey, Karl Parker, Laurel Snyder, Shafer Hall, PF Potvin, Ravi Shankar, Reb Livingston AND both Bedside Guides (hundreds of poets in there!)

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Suzanne Frischkorn

Great Lash

                        You wear too much eye makeup. My sister wears too much. 

                        People think she's a whore.

Our cornfields were paved in asphalt, sulfur 
lights snuffed our stars. When one of us had 
no shoes, we went barefoot, walking streets
laid with tar. First we coated lashes blackest 
black from tubes of green and pink, our eyes 
lined kohl. If it was Thursday we found
boyfriends and waited by the liquor store for
anyone to buy us Smirnoff. Anyone at all.
                We were not sweet girls.

                        ~

We were not sweet girls, yet we wore silver
chains with silver hearts & crosses, onyx 
rings, blush, lipstick, powder. Hair flipped
by vent brush before entering a night without
stars. Our parents were line dancing, were bank
tellers, were absent. We were a family that knew
                nothing about its members.

                        ~

We cut school and watched Foxes.
We cut school and drank vodka.
We cut school and got stoned, 
did our makeup, walked the streets.
One of us got out. One of us ran
into our connection working a shoe store,
one of us glimpsed another with a baby,
one of us marries her Thursday night
                boyfriend and shatters her image.

                        ~

We were not sweet girls, no. If there had
been corn, or stars? Maybe the deep
sweet girlness would have surfaced — dreamy
                fresh-faced girls — petals listening to rain.

* * *

Suzanne Frischkorn is the author of Girl on a Bridge (Main Street Rag, 2010) and Lit Windowpane (Main Street Rag, 2008). No Tell Motel published this poem July 2007. Suzanne wrote, "My current obsession with physical image — past, present and future — began the minute we had satellite television installed."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Jasper Bernes

Not This Mouth

Bigger & bigger, everything is so daddy today it cuts

No no no no, he repeats, doing it
anyway, pulling at the peril-colored outlet strip: 
bear baby bread bad

“If there’s a name for it, it isn’t what he wants” 

—which means bird but also (because
he’s pointing)

the withered trill of leaf
clicking shipwrecked in the fingers of a junk tree
thing-shaped names warmly swarm

and not the lumpen worldstuff
rising up to chew his untamed mouth

little Achilles, little engine that won’t.

Bird is no poem, but no bird is

it’s mere that makes dear reader 
spit out its poem about pig-iron and ergo

the argot of desire rips out
the dictionary pages, ugly that
the wounds vowel together: no no nono

don’t plug that body in there
don’t, gulp, unplug that mommy from the other, softer mommy

a bird in the bread & a baby in the hole 
in the head
                      a shine of home
buries sizzle in the smallest sign of wall

How much is us? Why shall we not
in such burning place live out our allotments?

nothing looks good on paper

if you can tame it, you can have it

* * *

Jasper Bernes is the author of Starsdown (ingirumimusnocteetcomsumimurigni, 2007).  No Tell Motel first published this poem in 2005. Jasper wrote, "'Not This Mouth' developed from an assignment my friend David Weiss gave to the both of us. We occasionally do this during the triage phase of the semester, as it tends to foreshorten the anxious thumb-twiddling stage of composition (at least for me). He e-mailed two quotes, the first from Randall Jarrell’s “A Sick Child”: “If I can think of it, it isn’t what I want.” The second was from D.W. Winnicott, who writes: “Animals can be tamed, but not mouths.” Both quotes seemed to speak directly to my experience of watching my son, Noah, enter into language, and with it enter into a contract with the world that was gradually separating itself from him. Noah would point at an object—a stuffed animal or ball—and utter its name, and then upon receiving it, express immediate dissatisfaction. As in Lacanian psychoanalysis, the object was a metonym, a vitiated substitution for what he really wanted, which could neither be named nor directly apprehended. I could relate."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Rauan Klassnik

That Morning

Normally you’d gather your things and leave in a shy panic, but this morning you slept in with me and we made love again. In town, by the old stone fountain, there’s a man with an 8-foot albino ball python snake and for five bucks you can get your picture taken with it— but we will not go down into town and I will not like Catullus snap thousands of pictures until we’re broke and then call up a whore to fuck me nine, yes nine times. I’m trying to get this absolutely right. The words “deer,” “clouds,” “trees,” and “it felt like it was raining,” have all been crossed out. And, so, here we are: in bed, together—— so nice, so white, and so happy.

* * *

Rauan Klassnik is the author of Holy Land (Black Ocean). No Tell Motel first published this poem in January 2008. Rauan wrote, "The heart, muscle and fluid in these poems were made over the summer, in bed, between 3 and 5 in the afternoon. How can I be so sure of these times? I am a creature of habit and I nap and/or daydream and scribble down airy notes between 3 and 5 every day. I’d lay about longer (into forever I’m sure) but when the light starts changing my birds start up an irresistible racket for food and a place by the railing. For whatever it’s worth: between 3 and 5, in bed this summer, I was by myself. Always. Sometimes it was raining."

Reb Livingston Presents a Poem by Tiffany Midge

The Monster’s Bride Questions the Motives of Her Creator

Those plugs jutting out from her neck:
she’s curious, what are they for?

The fiery thoroughfare of crisscrossing scars 
from temple to jaw, brow to ear:
should she look for something implicit there?

One eye brown, pilfered from an orange-haired
prostitute in Potter’s Field; the other fixed askew
in her head, a child’s like-new ornament:
is he a misogynist? Did his mother abandon him?

One arm, the muscular backhoe of a fieldworker’s
connected to the jagged star of a hand:
she wonders, is she expected to work?

The vagina, intact and as pretty as postcard sunset:
should she ruin it for him? 

The abdomen owns the legacy of multiple births,
a miller’s wife spitting out babes like peas:
is there room to grow more?

What hair that’s left is black as licorice,
sparse on her scalp like a locust-run crop:
does he secretly love his sister?

Her dresses, hung in the closet like sides of beef,
taffetas, crinolines, colors of esplanade sherbets:
should she dance for him?

At night, locked in her chambers, 
she hears desire’s low growl, smells iron, lust, rain:
what does it mean? Is it for her?

* * * 

Tiffany Midge is the recipient of the Diane Decorah Poetry Award from The Native Writers Circle of the Americas for her collection, Outlaws, Renegades and Saints: Diary of a Mixed-Up Halfbreed published by Greenfield Review Press. The chapbook, Guiding the Stars to Their Campfire, Driving the Salmon to Their Beds, was published in 2005 by Gazoobi Tales. No Tell Motel First published this poem in October 2009. Tiffany wrote, "Sketched during a particularly loathsome funk. How to make sense of rejection from one who was so revered? Adored as one would adore a creator—the creator of so much splendid exchange? Our heroes and gods are fallible and limited after all. To transcend the grotesquerie of one’s imperfections is bliss! And suddenly, the fall and disappointment from that transcendence, leading to doubts and wary interrogations."