The Best American Poetry

Anniversary of Walt Whitman's Death [Terence Winch]

131 years ago today, Walt Whitman died at age 72. 

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Here is one of his most famous exhortations, from the preface to Leaves of Grass:

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

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Many years ago, I worked at the Smithsonian's American Art Museum, located in the historic Patent Office Building in D.C., the very same place where Whitman himself tended to wounded Civil War soldiers. You could sense his presence there. The museum owns the 1875 chalk on paper drawing, shown above, of Whitman by Thomas Wilmer Dewing. The drawing is not often on display, but I would regularly ask the curators to retrieve it and let me have a look. I've never known another drawing to have such life to it. 

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For a reading of the above text, watch this video:

 

Maurice Manning: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Steve Cody

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The Slate

 

Way back, the men had funny names

like Tiny, who was anything

but small, and Tiny’s son was called

Tiny Too or Double T,

and Tiny’s wife who was big and mean

was known as Honey, and everybody

called Honey’s sister, Birdie, and Birdie,

who couldn’t talk much less whistle,

was beautiful but touched in the head,

so Birdie lived with them way down

in Fog Town Holler, beside

the green waters of Shoestring Branch,

and only the land was rightly named,

for it was foggy half the day down there

and the branch was skinny and whipped across

the mossy roots and rocks like a snake;

but by the time I came along,

Tiny and Honey were already planted

and Birdie was bent-over and old

and Tiny Too was getting on

and sleeping in the chicken coop

with fourteen chickens and a rooster

named Mister Sump, and Sump was short

for Something, and Tiny Too just said

he liked the company, and besides

he had to guard the chickens against

Redleg Johnny who was a fox,

because Mister Sump was only good

at making chickens, and Tiny Too

would have winked about that sort of thing,

and all of this—I learned it young,

when I was just a scratch of a boy

and I skipped down Shoestring Branch

to Fog Town Holler and found

Old Tiny Too, who told me where

I was from, and who my people were,

and how they named the world around them.

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Maurice Manning's eighth book of poems, Snakedoctor, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in 2023.  His fourth book, The Common Man, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize, and his first book, Lawrence Booth's Books of Visions, was selected by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.  A former Guggenheim fellow, Manning lives with his family on a small farm in Kentucky and teaches at Transylvania University.

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                      Angelo Maria Crivelli, Animals Scene. 17th-Century. Oil on canvas.

 

 

Joanna Fuhrman: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Poetry Reading

 

The mustached cowboy-hatted thrice-divorced

old-man poet famous for sleeping with flaxen-haired

(or was it flax-seed eating) quote-unquote

nubile graduate students is at the podium

reading his poem personifying a wedding dress—

how sad it is, all alone in a dusty closet, how

it longs to be laid on a funeral pyre or set ablaze

next to the replica of Plath and Hughes’ robin’s-

egg-blue Terra Cruiser gas range, or was it     

the neglected moonlit member of the old man

poet “breaking into blossom” or recoiling

from the memory of time passing faster than

the dust can settle on his brand-new Honda

Civic LX or ranch-style remodeled sunroom?

The audience is trying to remember what

ingredients they need to pick up for tomorrow’s

paella, what that email said about the time

of that meeting with Suzanne about assessment.

They are alternately trying to remember

if they remembered to order that Minecraft book

for a nephew’s 8^th birthday party and worrying

if their Facebook-level “friends” notice that

their purple cat socks clash with their scuffed

burgundy clogs, and at a certain point, the poem

has gone on for so long no one can tell if

the old-man poet is still personifying that

wedding dress or if a headless wedding dress

has taken his place at the podium. We look up

from the cell phones we are hiding in our laps,

and there it stands—smoky and lacy

in front of the glowing microphone

in the corner of the basement bookstore,

104 miles from the nearest artist colony,

the flaming dress is burning like a 12-hour

candle, or like the lost poetry of an elderly

Rimbaud written on the slats of sunken ships,

and the dress itself has grown a mouth

and in the middle of its flames its lips

belt out a new poem, about fake

cowboy poets, how sad they are, how alone.

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Joanna Fuhrman is an assistant teaching professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University, and the author of six books of poetry, most recently To a New Era. Her next book, Data Mind, a collection of surreal, darkly comic prose poems about the internet, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. After publishing with them since she was a teen, she recently became editor at Hanging Loose Press.

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                                          Lorette C. Luzajic, The Blood Jet Is Poetry---Sylvia Plath, acrylic, collage on canvas, 2022

Lawrence Raab: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Original Sin

 

That was one idea my mother

always disliked. She preferred her god

to be reasonable, like Emerson or Thoreau

without their stranger moments.

Even the Old Testament God’s sudden

angers and twisted ways of getting

what he wanted she could accept

as metaphor. But original sin

was different. Plus no one agreed

if it was personal, meaning

all Adam’s fault, or else some kind

of temporary absence of the holy,

which was Adam’s fault as well.

In any case, it made no sense

that we’d need to be saved before

we’d even had the chance

to be wrong. Yes, eventually everyone

falls into error, but when my sister and I

were babies she could see we were perfect,

as we opened our eyes and gazed up at her

with what she took for granted as love,

long before either of us knew the word

and what damage it could cause.

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Lawrence Raab is the author of ten books of poems, including Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (Tupelo, 2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and named one of the Ten Best Poetry Books of 2015 by The New York Times, and What We Don’t Know About Each Other (Penguin, 1993), a winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the National Book Award. His latest collection is April at the Ruins (Tupelo, 2022). [“Original Sin” appears in Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts].

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           Lucas Cranach the Elder, Detail of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, 1530, Oil on Panel, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

                                                                

Leah Umansky: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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In My Next Life, I Want to Be an Ad Man

 

I want to be donned in somehow. Donned in everything. Donned in

the forgotten and the ecclesiastics of sex. Drape me in the charged. Drape me

in the raptured. Drape me in meaning and keep it private. I want two

lives: one in the city and one in the country. Two women: a blonde and a

redhead. Drape me in wealth. Drape me in booze. Don me in diamonds

and fur. Drape a secretary, here, and then, there.

 

[Executive is the word that comes to the lips

and they smile for you, sister.]

 

Don me in designer suits. Don me in a new age. Don me in what’s coming.

Drape the future round my shoulders.  Drape the next life across my lap.

Drape me in the madness.  Don me in the twoness of passion. Don me in

pieces of last, of force; pieces of shaken and possible then drape me

in manhood.   Drape me in machinery and steel. Don me in utterly and plush

utterings and, [do I sound like I’m stuttering?] Make me look good; the

world is dangerous.

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Leah Umansky is the author of three books of poems, most recently Of Tyrant, forthcoming from The Word Works in 2024. She is currently working on a hybrid-memoir called Delicate Machine, an exploration of womanhood, hope, and heart in the face of grief and a global pandemic. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and has curated and hosted The COUPLET Reading Series in NYC since 2011. Her creative work can be found in such places as The New York Times, Poetry, The Bennington Review, and Guesthouse. She can be found at www.leahumansky.com or @leah.umansky on IG.

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                                                                                      Don Draper, collage by Borbay

 

Roger Reeves: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Cyclops and Balthazar

 

I was not a very good dog in my former life. I bit

My owner, James, often. When he prayed, I howled

His one eye opening. He said I sounded like a cyclops

That had fallen into a ravine. I heard raven.  As I said,

I was not a very good dog, more so a ravine

Bringing the howling darkness to my owner’s ears.

A raven that took flight only when watching the other ravens

Lift from the pines like scabs ripped open to reveal

What life runneth under. Towards the end of my life,

A donkey with a white flower and a crown of leaves

Befriended me at the edge of a field. At night,

His head moved “like a veil across the stars”

Revealing for me, for the first time, the stars.

Balthazar, the donkey, once, asked me if I ever thought

Of the consciousness of trees, their reflection

In the river. Or if there was an etiquette to dying.

I said, “stop that. You sound like a man

With his back to heaven.” He said, “someone will

Always have their back to heaven,” then walked

Into a pasture of sheep and died. “Goliath,

Goliath,” said the sheep’s bells around their necks.

“No,” I said. “Balthazar. It is Balthazar that has died.”

And when I called out to him behind the door of the house

Of the dead, the night called back in my own voice.

And I, like a good dog, ran toward it with both eyes closed.

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Roger Reeves is the author of King Me and the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a 2015 Whiting Award, among other honors. Best Barbarian, his second book of poems, was a finalist for the National Book Award. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin, Texas.

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                                        Olayanju Dada, At the Lagos Dog-Show, acrylic and oil painting on cardboard panel, 2015

Sarah Arvio: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sponge

 

Soul like a dirty sponge that soaked up all the dark bits

from yours   all messed up and mixed in

 

with the dirt of the days   the old hairs and hatefulness

Oh my god I knew there was hate in the human world

 

but I didn’t know it was the job of my soul

to clean it up   How can I clean it up if my soul

 

is the sponge sponging it up   In the end   it doesn’t

go anywhere except into my dirtier and dirtier soul 

 

And I say   well   crying will clean it up   but then I’m

bent over crying because my beautiful sponge of a soul

 

that lay in the depths of a cool warm aquablue tropical

sea with little fishes flitting about in their exquisite

 

jewel colors   and rays of sunshine raying through 

has been used to sop up an angry man’s leftover

 

cruelty   Yes   cruel does sound like jewel and there

should be a jewelty   How can I squeeze it out   I'll

 

need a new sponge   but I can’t throw out my soul and if

each tear is one drop of an aquablue tropical sea       

 

maybe I can cry back my sea   It’s not so easy

to clean a soul   some say weeks   and some say centuries

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Sarah Arvio’s new book of poems is Cry Back My Sea (2021), which has been called “an ode to love.”  Earlier books are Visits from the Seventh (2002), Sono: Cantos (2006), and night thoughts: 70 poems & notes from an analysis (2013), which is a hybrid of poetry, essay, and memoir.   Her translation of poems and a play by Federico García Lorca, Poet in Spain (Knopf, 2017) has been received to wide acclaim. Among her honors are the Rome Prize and fellowships from the Bogliasco and Guggenheim foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Poems have appeared in such places as Poetry, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and Boston Review, as well as in many anthologies, including two editions of The Best American Poetry.  A poem from Poet in Spain appears this winter in 100 Poems That Matter, curated by the Academy of American Poets.  Arvio worked for many years as a conference translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland.  A graduate of the Columbia School of the Arts and a lifelong New Yorker, she now teaches poetry and literary translation.

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Michael Mark: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Visiting Her in Queens Is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet

 

For the fourth time my mother

asks, “How many children

do you have?” I’m beginning

 

to believe my answer,

“Two, Mom,” is wrong. Maybe

the lesson is they are not mine, 

 

not owned by me, and 

she is teaching me about

my relationship with her. 

 

I wash my dish and hers. 

She washes them again. I ask why.

She asks why I care.

 

Before bed she unlocks and opens

the front door. While she sleeps

I close and lock it. She gets up. Unlocks it.

 

“What I have no one wants,” she says.

I nod. She nods.

Are we agreeing?

 

My shrunken guru says she was up all night

preparing a salad for my breakfast.

She serves me an onion.

 

I want her to make French toast

for me like she used to. 

I want to tell her about my pain,

 

and I want her to make it go away.

I want the present to be as good as

the past she does not remember.

 

I toast white bread for her, butter it,

cut it in half. I eat a piece of onion. 

She asks me why I’m crying.

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Michael Mark is the author of the chapbook Visiting Her in Queens is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet, which won the 2022 Rattle Prize. His poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, The New York Times, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, Southern Review, The Sun, and elsewhere. His two books of stories are Toba (Atheneum) and At the Hands of a Thief (Atheneum). [This poem originally appeared in The Sun.]

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              Attributed to Vincenzo Campi (1530-1591), Old Peasant Woman with a Distaff and Spindle

Bianca Stone: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Daniel Schechner

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Set Designer

 

Once, Mark Leidner talked me into doing set design,

unpaid, in the Poconos

where I would be forever traumatized

by the overpopulation of deer,

growths on their bodies and bald patches,

limping and scarred from being hit by cars,

and the one the crew called “jawbone”

that kept coming around

because its jawbone was hanging off, unusable, from its head

while the body wasted away

and I brought out mashed potatoes

that it lapped up with a long tongue.

 

We had to fire the creepy sound guy

who was clearly on drugs

and I found a big plastic gallon of Dewar’s                                    

in the Airbnb cupboard

and a guitar

and got drunk alone on the deck of the cabin

amazed no one would join me.

I woke in the middle of the night

for my usual routine of self-hatred

until I realized how excruciating it all was

and instead wrote down on the set schedule

“remember how good it feels to be good to yourself”

carrying it around with me ever since.

Hoping I will.

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Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections Someone Else's Wedding Vows (Tin House Book / Octopus Books, 2014), The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Nation. She hosts Ode & Psyche Podcast, and lives in Vermont.

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                                    Detail from the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries (medieval French; now hanging in the V&A, London)

 

Kaveh Akbar: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kaveh Akbar. Photo by Paige Lewis

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Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before

 

I can’t even remember my name, I who remember

so much—football scores, magic tricks, deep love

so close to God it was practically religious. 

 

When you fall asleep in that sort of love

you wake up with bruises on your neck. I don’t

have drunks, sirs, I have adventures. Every day

 

my body follows me around asking

for things. I try to think louder, try

to be brilliant, wildly brilliant. We all want

 

the same thing (to walk in sincere wonder,

like the first man to hear a parrot speak) but we live

on an enormous flatness floating between

 

two oceans. Sometimes you just have to leave

whatever’s real to you, you have to clomp

through fields and kick the caps off

 

all the toadstools. Sometimes

you have to march all the way to Galilee

or the literal foot of God himself before you realize

 

you’ve already passed the place where

you were supposed to die. I can no longer remember

the being afraid, only that it came to an end.

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Kaveh Akbar is the author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf 2021) and editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse (Penguin Classics 2022). In 2024, Knopf will publish Martyr!, Kaveh’s first novel.

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                                         Fiona Banner, Simpleton, Simpleton, Simpleton, oil on found painting, 77 x 127.5cm, 2021.

                              

 

Renia White: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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sometimes I flash forward and cry

 

I am afraid to have this thought.

a 1.5 bedroom apartment in a city I can bear,

metallic hangers and art featuring dark girls,
their faces obscured by large flowers
and overgrown fruit

a bed so heavy it startles the sinking hips

a man with my feet in his hands
who half-coos, “I bet you were hard
to find before I found you”

all the things glimmering,

the man’s eyes growling,

each fruit unripe

everything wishing
to be unfound

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Renia White is a poet and instructor originally from Maryland. Her first book, Casual Conversation, was named a BOA Editions, Ltd. Blessing the Boats Selection. She earned her BA from Howard University and her MFA from Cornell. She teaches writing in NYC, where she lives. Her work has appeared in publications such as The Recluse, Southern Indiana Review, Slice, and elsewhere. 

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                                              Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Drown, 2012, acrylic, colored pencil, and solvent transfer on paper. 

Daniel Wolff: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Drift of the World

 

You are not forgotten. How could so large a part of us ever be?

When you left this life, a marker dropped. Time swirled slowly past, and who

we remembered you as worked itself free. But even if current carried your memory

off, tide brought you back. We forgot a little, then remembered more. And through

that give and take, you stayed right here. The only thing that washed downstream

was the way we remembered you. All we need is to narrow our vision—

focus on what matters—and back you come, perfect, as if in a dream,

your one hand lifted in a wave. You remember us! And we have forgotten

nothing, nothing. How could we? If we forgot you, we would be lost. Never

mind that other shore—where we supposedly go and you are supposed to be

waiting. In this world, this world, we have to have you, have to remember.

Why won’t life stop? Why must it always pull everything, even you, away? We

stand right here where this all began and watch as the memory of you (who

we are – what else?) drifts. We do what we can: we keep forgetting you.

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Daniel Wolff's latest book of poems is More Poems about Money (Four Way Books, 2022). [“The Drift of the World,” written for poet William Bronk, first appeared, in a slightly different version, in The Literary Review.]

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                                               Daniel Leary, Bill in a Red Chair, monotype, 20 x 16, 1997. Portrait of William Bronk (1918--99).

Cathy Eisenhower: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Things to Do in a Post-Doug Lang DC

 

Be sad. Be very, very sad. Worry about Sandra, Phyllis, Terry, and Bernie. Worry about Rod

and Dan. DM Sandra. Text Phyllis. Text Tom. Cry while watching the crane a block away building a

Whole Foods where  Walter Reed used to be. Try to right a line about regret and fail. Text

Leslie. Walk down 9th street toward Dahlia and begin to cry. Drink tea. Drink seltzer. Drink red

wine. Drink coffee. Eat loads of dark chocolate. Cry in an ugly way with chocolate in your mouth.

 

Read aloud from dérangé with Ken, Lorraine, Ryan, Sasha, and Tom. Listen to Ethiopian jazz

with Ken, Lorraine, Ryan, Sasha, and Tom. Listen to Aldous Harding’s “Horizon” on repeat. Cross

Columbia Road on 18th wearing a thin coat against the cold. Imagine Doug standing outside

DCAC smoking a cigarette on the sidewalk. Hallucinate Doug smoking a cigarette on the

sidewalk. See Doug’s crinkly-eyed smile hovering over the landscape. Write a line about regret and erase it.

 

Feel depressed. Feel really fucking depressed. Sink into such a deep depression you don’t leave

the house and you consider starting a new political party called “Doug Lang’s Party for Psycho-

economic Derangement.” Try to remember if such a political party already exists. Listen to

Lemonade. Think about death.

 

Be full of dread

Be full of dread

Be full of dread

Be full of dread

 

Listen to jazz while full of dread

 

Walk through Rock Creek Park mumbling there’s nothing to be grateful for. Get weepy with

gratitude for the sky, telephones, and the scene in Mad Men when Don Draper barks at Peggy,

That’s what the money is for. Decide to pretend Doug has just moved back to Wales. Scroll

through facebook looking for posts about Doug. Click the thumbs up, click the heart, click the

crying yellow face. Become obsessed with the Real Housewives. Make soup. Make scrambled

eggs and eat them while watching the Real Housewives. Sleep. Toss and turn. Sleep some more.

 

Listen to Mulatu Astatke with Ken. Hold Monkey and cry. Consider tying a bit of rag to a metal

nut and throwing it ahead of you to navigate all the way from Takoma to Adams Morgan, like

they do in Stalker. Sip two double Johnny Walker reds and have a great time with the poets.

Down two double Johnny Walker reds and leave before they hit.

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Cathy Eisenhower lives and works as a psychotherapist in Washington, DC, and is the author of Language of the Dog-heads (Phylum 2001), clearing without reversal (Edge 2008), would with and (Roof 2009), distance decay (Ugly Duckling 2015), and animalitos (Primary Writing 2017). She has translated the selected poems of Argentine poet Diana Bellessi and co-curates a reading series at Rhizome DC. Her work has appeared in The Recluse, Aufgabe, West Wind Review, The Brooklyn Rail, and Fence.

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                                                  Tom Green, Corpus, 1994

Tom Mandel: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Between Past and Future

 

I. (In the academy: a conversation between master and student)

Rabbi, when will the Messiah come?

 

Why do you ask me? Go ask him.

 

But Rabbi, how will I find the Messiah?

 

No problem. He sits among the sick and homeless at the

gates of the Pentagon.

 

But Rabbi, by what sign will I recognize the Messiah?

 

Look among the “lepers” (those afflicted with AIDS). You

will see him untying and retying his bandages one by one.

“I may be summoned,” he thinks; “let me not be delayed by

these bandages.”

 

 

II. (At the gates of the Pentagon)

 

Peace upon you, my Master and Teacher.

 

And upon you, son of Levi. What can I do for you?

 

When will you come, Master?

 

Today, my son. I will come today.

 

 

III. (Back in the academy)

 

So, out with it. What did the Messiah say to you?

 

Rabbi, he lied. He said he would come today. But Rabbi,

the Messiah has not come.

 

Here is what he said to you: “Today, if only you hearken

to His voice.” (Ps. 95:7) Ears open, my son; it’s always today,

and never for long.

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Tom Mandel’s many books include Letter to Poetry (Chax, 2022), To the Cognoscenti (Atelos, 2007), Prospect of Release (Chax, 1996), Letters of the Law (Sun & Moon, 1994), and Realism (Burning Deck, 1992). He is a co-author of The Grand Piano, a ten-volume experiment in collective autobiography. Mandel’s work is widely anthologized, including In the American Tree, The Norton Anthology of Post-Modern Verse (1st Edition), multiple volumes of Best American Poetry, and 49+1: Poètes Americain. Born in Chicago, Tom Mandel was educated in its jazz & blues clubs & at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. He has taught at three universities & worked as a consultant to UNESCO, acquisitions book editor, door-to-door salesman, network technology consultant, & short order cook. For two decades, he was a serial technology entrepreneur, pioneering the development of social software on the Web. He has lived in New York, Paris, San Francisco, and Washington DC. At present, he and his wife, the poet Beth Baruch Joselow, reside in a small town on the Atlantic Coast.  [This poem is the author's version of an old rabbinic tale from the Talmud (Sanhedrin 98A)].

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                                                    Maurycy Gottlieb, Jews Praying in Synagogue on Yom Kippur, 1877.

                                                  

Janet Hamill: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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When It Snowed

 

It was almost holy when it snowed

waiting to see Santa at Sears

for a photo in a plaid coat & mittens

the real one was at Macy’s in Herald Square

 

Waiting to see Santa at Sears

Daddy took us to pick out the tree

the real one was at Macy’s in Herald Square

topped with an angel’s folded feather wings

 

Daddy took us to pick out the tree

I need a two-gun holster & a saxophone

topped with an angel’s folded feather wings

our house   Silent Night & blue lights

 

I need a two-gun holster & a saxophone

when we finish caroling on Ryeside

our house   Silent Night & blue lights

it was almost holy when it snowed

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In May of 2022, Janet Hamill was inducted into the Inaugural 100^th Anniversary Hall of Fame of her hometown of New Milford, NJ, in the category of Arts & Letters.  She is the author of ten books, most recently A Map of the Heavens: Selected Poems 1975-2017 (Spuyten Duyvil, NY, 2020) and Baby Parade (Vehicle Editions, NY, 2022), and the recipient of Publishers Weekly Book of the Year and the Pushcart Prize. Hamill has collaborated with poets and musicians Bob Holman, Maureen Owen, Patti Smith, Lenny Kaye, and Moving Star, artists/photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, Ken Tisa, and Michael Sypulski. Surrealist-influenced, Hamill has been an active member of the Seligmann Committee, which seeks to make the Swiss-American surrealist’s home in Sugar Loaf, NY, a protected site.

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                              Robert Henri, Snow in New York, 1902. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art (Wash. DC)

        

 

Pilgrims on the Ocean [by Terence Winch & Eileen Estes]

 

    Terence Winch & Billy McComiskey, 2016                                                        Eileen Estes, Susan Campbell, & Chérie Campbellcat

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Last year I collaborated with one of my all-time favorite singers, Eileen Estes, on a song called “Pilgrims on the Ocean.”  Eileen wrote a beautiful air to my lyrics, and late last year we recorded the song at Blue House Productions in Silver Spring, Maryland, with Jeff Gruber at the controls. We asked our friend Billy McComiskey, the great Brooklyn-born button accordion player now at the center of Baltimore’s Irish music scene, to lend a hand. For an outro to the song, Eileen had the very good idea to have Billy go into a tune by the legendary Clare fiddle player Junior Crehan. The tune has a number of names, all variations on “With Her Long Dark Hair Flowing Down Her Back.”

The lyrics are below, and the song can be heard by clicking

Pilgrims on the Ocean

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Pilgrims on the Ocean  

 

There’s an awful thing that happens when the people go out marching.

There’s a sad but true confusion when the walls come tumbling down.

When the emcee takes the microphone and shoves it in our faces

and the castles feel the tremors shake, and crumble to the ground.

 

We were stumbling in the darkness when the houses caught on fire.

We were eating late-night dinners when the cops came cruising by.

But we sold our books and diamonds and stripped off our posh attire

and surrendered to the gender squad when they all began to cry.

 

[bridge]

Where the mountain meets the lake

where the lovers hearts all break

in the greening without meaning

when the give all turns to take

 

We’re the pilgrims and the children all forsaken on the oceans

where the storms divide and waves collide and we’re about to drown.

That’s what it’s like down here tonight drenched in our emotions

but swimming for the sunlight and the sight of higher ground.

 

©words Terence Winch/music Eileen Estes

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                                                                                        Junior Crehan

Paul Tran: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Lipstick Elegy

 

I climb down to the beach facing the Pacific. Torrents of rain

shirr the sand. On the other side, my grandmother sleeps

soundlessly in her bed. Her áodài of the whitest silk.

My mother knew her mother died before the telephone rang

like bells announcing the last American helicopter leaving SàiGòn.

Arrow shot back to its bow. Long-distance missile.

She’d leap into the sky to fly home if she could. Instead she works

overtime. Curls her hair with hot rollers. Rouges her cheeks

like Gong Li in Raise the Red Lantern. I’m her understudy. Hiding

in the doorway between her grief and mine, I apply her foundation

to my face. I conceal the parts of me she conceals, puckering my lips

as if to kiss a man that loves me the way I want to be loved.

I speak their bewitching names aloud. Twisted Rose. Fuchsia in Paris. Irreverence.

I choose the lipstick she’d least approve of. My mouth a pomegranate

split open. A grenade with a loose pin. In the kitchen,

I wrap a white sheet around my waist and dance

for hours, mesmerized by my reflection in a charred skillet.

I laugh her laugh, the way my grandmother laughed

when she taught me to pray the ChúĐại Bi, when I braided her hair

in unbearable heat, my tiny fingers weaving the silver strands

into a fishtail, a French twist. Each knot a future she never named, buried

in the soil of her, where she locked away the image of her sons and daughters

locked away. I’m sorry, mother of my mother, immortal bodhisattva

with a thousand hands, chewing a fist of betel root, your teeth black as dawn.

No child in our family stays a child their mother can love.

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Paul Tran is the author of the debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin, 2022). Their work appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize, as well as fellowships from the Poetry Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts, Paul is an Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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                     Man Ray, A l’Heure de l’Observatoire les Amoureux (Observatory Time: The Lovers), 1932–4.

Ann Pedone: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Third Poem

 

1          A month after I quit grad school, I got a birth control patch.

            Two days later, I met my ex-boyfriend

 

1.1       An alphabet emerges

 

1.11     Aggressions, chicken bones, young boys with long index fingers

 

1.12     I often wonder how much I should withhold in my

            writing. Or should I confess

 

1.13     In A Lover’s Discourse, Barthes states, “where there

            is a wound, there is a subject.”

 

1.14     I told myself, being a student of semiotics, that he was a

            site of continuance

 

1.15     Of course I ignored the fact that he was married

 

1.16     That woman, the one over there,

             who’s eating a Chinese egg tart with both hands

 

1.17     I was taught to have no sympathy for metaphor in poetry

 

1.18     Turtle soup, Calabrian olives, Hippodrome

 

1.19     He was a mouth breather, yes; but it was gargantuan

 

2          I am always ready to pick up codes

 

2.1       Punched holes in a piece of paper, Courbet

            in search of pomegranates

 

2.11     That weekend we went to his mother’s house in Palm Desert,

            I let him ass-fuck me out in the pool house.

 

2.12     Or what I meant to say, I always try to surround myself

            with as much irony as possible

 

2.13     Not all husbands have read Moby Dick

 

2.14     You don’t need to take your clothes off

            to find the spot where lust takes root

 

2.15     When he texted me to say that his wife had filed, I was

            at the hardware store buying turpentine and hand soap

 

2.16     Turn the fax machine off, I screamed inside his mouth

 

2.17     Since childhood I have suffered from somatic omissions

 

2.18     Dark blue taffeta, cold liquid warmed between a woman’s legs

 

2.19     Maybe the trouble was, for the 18 months we

            were together, I let him convince me

            that I was the punctum

 

2.20     A man who stutters, later Wittgenstein,

            the way a woman becomes her own cunt

 

2.21     Last night I dreamt that I saw David Reiff at a bar in Westchester.

            He was drinking a vodka gimlet. There was a ukulele in his lap.

            His hands coiled around it like a snake.

 

2.22     When I went over to say hello, he pretended to know my sex,

            and photographed it.

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Ann Pedone is the author of The Medea Notebooks (spring 2023, Etruscan Press), The Italian Professor’s Wife (Press 53), as well as the chapbooks The Bird Happened, perhaps there is a sky we don’t know: a re-imagining of sappho, Everywhere You Put Your Mouth, Sea [break], and DREAM/WORK. Her work has recently appeared in The American Journal of Poetry, Chicago Quarterly Review, The Louisville Review, Gigantic Sequins, New York Quarterly, Narrative Magazine, and Conduit. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net.

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                                     Gustave Courbet , Still Life with Apples and Pomegranates, 1871. Oil on Canvas, National Gallery, London

Benjamin Garcia: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Le Daría Mis Pulmones

 

Toward the end, she could only

lift a cup of coffee. Closer still,

even that became too much for her,

my mother. A sponge, then,

I’d dip in coffee, or dip pan dulce,

and put that to her lips to suck. That

was all the cancer let her manage.

 

The IV was her sugar water, and she

the hummingbirds she loved to watch,

busy at the red and yellow feeder.

Those plastic flowers welded on

were poor excuses, but they worked. Whatever

 

worked, I guess, my mother thought,

lived. On the bed in the living room,

her body of sleeping birds, her dream

of a thousand green wings shimmering like

shreds of aluminum, that could, at any moment,

unloose on the wind. Toward

 

the end, the sponge and the coffee, the cancer.

She couldn’t smoke anymore either, of course,

because even drawing her own drag: impossible.

So she had me smoke for her—nine years old—

I was her lungs. I blew the smoke right in her face, right

in her face. Just like that, over and over:

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Benjamin Garcia’s first collection, Thrown in the Throat, won the National Poetry Series and the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, in addition to being a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He works as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where he received the Jill Gonzalez Health Educator Award recognizing contributions to HIV treatment and prevention. A CantoMundo and Lambda Literary fellow, he serves as core faculty at Alma College’s low-residency MFA program. His poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in: AGNI, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. His video poem “Ode to the Peacock” is available for viewing at the Broad Museum’s website as part of El Poder de la Poesia: Latinx Voices in Response to HIV/AIDS.

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      Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital (la camo volando), 1932. Collection of Dolores Olmedo Mexico City, Mexico.

Kathleen Rooney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Western

 

My favorite flavor of Western is revisionist; my second favorite flavor, spaghetti.

Unforgiven is the best Western of all time; don’t at me.

An acidic landscape, accelerated, unstructured. How long before no vestiges of wild country remain?

The Best Western motel chain began in California in the 40s, but can now be found all around the nation.

I really liked The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, but I could not stop thinking how all three of those guys needed to drink a lot more water. The sun above a red-hot poker, stoking greed, stoking wrath.

One of Custer’s many nicknames was Old Iron Butt.

Fistful of dollars, fistful of fists. The best revenge is not living well; it’s simply not wanting revenge to begin with.

“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” said a minor character in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Entertaining for sure, but bad for democracy.

The noun meaning “a book or movie about the Old West” is first attested from 1909.

I like when a character lays his ear to the rail to listen for the heartbeat traversing the train tracks.

Bemused fatalism may be the most effective bravado.

The sun may be unforgiving because we are unforgivable.

According to Evan S. Connell, the early Mandans believed “there was not only a benevolent spirit but an evil spirit which came to earth before the good spirit and whose strength was greater.” Seems pretty accurate.

Abolish the Second Amendment.

For the notorious Mexican standoff scene in the cemetery, Leone told Morricone to compose a track “like the corpses were laughing from inside their tombs,” and that’s what it sounds like. It sounds exactly like that.

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Kathleen Rooney is a founding editor of Rose Metal Press, a publisher of literary work in hybrid genres, and a founding member of Poems While You Wait, a team of poets and their typewriters who compose commissioned poetry on demand. She is the author, most recently, of the novels Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey. Her latest collection Where Are the Snows, winner of the XJ Kennedy Prize, has just been released by Texas Review Press and her next novel, From Dust to Stardust, will be published by Lake Union Press in Fall of 2023.

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Mountain Chief, Blackfeet War Leader by Terrance Guardipee, Siksika (Blackfeet), 2008