The Best American Poetry

Lyn Li Che: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sobriqu(i)ets 

 

On the corner of 12^th and Market, a man says

            Nihao, China and I’m in love,  

I just don’t know it yet. One day, I’ll love  

            the slant of my eyes, their slashing stare.

I’ll love the ching-chong clamour of the old country   

            and my grandfather’s names: both the one  

he was given and the one taken away   

            by the registrar’s pen. None of his siblings  

had the same last name but I’ll love them too:  

            the Che’s and Chen’s and Chong’s, all laid out  

like a racist’s naughty nursery rhyme.  

            I’ll be shook by my buck-toothed gook

reflection. I’ll be cool with my coolie shape  

            and my sideways drape, how easily   

my body zipperheads into anything else –  

            a container of chowmein, a coin slot  

cooter choking open. I’ll be someone’s 

            bamboo chink and kimchee kink, though bitch,  

I’m not even Korean. I’ll stan   

            my Jackie Chan doyenne Chinaman  

brand. I’ll idealize this Oriental disguise.

            I hope I just don’t know it yet.  

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Lyn Li Che was born in Malaysia. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Michigan Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast, Waxwing, PANK, Passages North, Tupelo Quarterly, BOAAT, River Styx, and others. A 2021 Kundiman Mentorship Lab Fellow, she currently lives in New York City, where she works in tech strategy.

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                Mohd Noor Mahmud, Siri Kala Kota Bharu series: Main Ayun, acrylic on wood, 2006

Geoffrey Himes: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Swimming Pool

 

The diver was a knife that slit the surface

with the merest sliver of a splash.

 

Her zaftig mother was a pudding oozing

through the poolside plastic webbing.

 

The diver's boyfriend was a mannequin

in bronze tan and vermillion trunks.

 

He ran past the mother, leapt, grabbed his knees,

and landed with a cannonball tsunami.

 

I was a chimera, dog's head and walrus body,

swimming laps through the chlorine blue.

 

I knew the mother and the boyfriend would tire of the sun

and leave the pool to me, the diver and the indigo dusk.

 

The diver bounced on the board, lifted off, hinged at the hips,

straightened like a blade and sliced into the bubbles.

 

I stayed in my lane, scooping with my hands,

swimming toward her, away, toward her, away.

 

Water was our world. Water was our language.

Water was our worship. Water was our embrace.

 

I could be the spoon to her knife.

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Geoffrey Himes’s poetry has been published by December, Gianthology, the Loch Raven Review, Survision, January Review, Salt Lick, the Baltimore City Paper, and other publications. His poems are included in the anthologies Singing in the Dark and Poet Trees: Poetry Hiding in Plain Sight. His song lyrics have been set to music by Si Kahn, Walter Egan, Billy Kemp, Fred Koller, and others.  His book on Bruce Springsteen, Born in the U.S.A., was published by Continuum Books in 2005. He has written about popular music and theater for the Washington Post, New York Times, Rolling Stone, Smithsonian Magazine, Paste, Downbeat, Sing Out, and the Nashville Scene since 1977.

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                      Paul Cézanne, Woman Diving into Water, 1870. Pencil, watercolor, and gouache on paper. National Museum of Wales, Wales, UK

 

Megan Falley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Telling Him I Kissed a Woman

 

I cut the pill of truth

with honey, promised,

We were drunk.

Said we were egged on

by barstools, wore dresses of gin.

 

Said I stumbled

onto her face, more so 

than an actual kiss.

 

Spun it as if cameras 

were rolling, an image he could beat

off to instead of curse. Said,

 

It meant nothing.

 

And how could it?

I was straight

as a wedding aisle.

I touched his beard. 

Begged him to stay. 

Insisted,

 

It was only a kiss,

and hoped he wouldn’t hear it

in my voice, how it sounded like,

 

It was only a decade.

It was only a war.

 

I didn’t tell him

there was no bar,

no audience 

 

except the magnetic poetry tiles 

falling to the floor as she pressed me

against the refrigerator, beaming.

 

I did not say I felt more in that 

one kiss than anytime he thrust

his tongue down my throat,

or wouldn’t get a condom,

or wanted it facedown. 

Swore instead,

It will never happen again.

He called me a whore.

I said,

I love you.

 

He called me a bitch.

I said,

 

Yes.

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Megan Falley (she/her) is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, most recently Drive Here and Devastate Me (Write Bloody Publishing, 2018). In 2019 she co-authored How Poetry Can Change Your Heart (Chronicle Books) with her poet and partner, Andrea Gibson. Falley's chapbook, Bad Girls, Honey (Poems About Lana Del Rey) was the winner of the 2015 Tired Hearts Chapbook Prize. Falley is both a National Poetry Slam and Woman of the World Poetry Slam Finalist and has performed her work on TV One's Verses and Flow and venues and colleges nationwide. In the last two years, since Falley began writing prose, one of her essays was the first place winner of the 2021 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Essay Contest, and another was the runner-up for Phoebe Journal's 50th Anniversary Nonfiction Prize as well as nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the creator of the online writing course, Poems That Don't Suck, which has been called "a degree's worth of education in five short weeks." Originally from New York, she now resides in Colorado where she is still awed by the mountains. 

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Dans le Lit, le Baiser (In Bed, The Kiss). Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, 1892.

 

Ron Silliman: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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You – I

for Pat Silliman

Hard dreams. The moment at which you recognize that your own death lies in wait somewhere

within your body. A lone ship defines the horizon. The rain is not safe to drink.

 

In Grozny, in Bihac, the idea of history shudders with each new explosion. The rose lies

unattended, wild thorns at the edge of a mass grave. Between classes, over strong coffee,

young men argue the value of a pronoun.

 

When this you see, remember. Note in a bottle bobs in a cartoon sea. The radio operator’s

name is Sparks.

 

Hand outlined in paint on a brick wall. Storm turns playground into a swamp. Finally we spot

the wood duck on the middle lake.

 

The dashboard of my car like the keyboard of a piano. Toy animals anywhere.

 

Sun swells in the morning sky.

 

Man with three pens clipped to the neck of his sweatshirt shuffles from one table to the next,

seeking distance from the cold January air out the coffee house door, tall Styrofoam cup in one

hand, Of Grammatology in the other. Outside, a dog is tied to an empty bench, bike chained to

the No Parking sign.

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Ron Silliman has published 40 books and had his poetry and criticism translated into 19 languages. Among his awards are the 2010 Levinson Award from the Poetry Foundation, a Pew Fellowship, a Kelly Writers House Fellowship plus fellowships from the Pennsylvania and California Arts Councils and the National Endowments for the Arts. Silliman has a plaque in the walk dedicated to poetry in his home town of Berkeley and a sculpture in the Transit Center of Bury, Lancaster, a part of the Irwell Sculpture Trail. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. [See also this link.]

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Thomas Kinsella, R.I.P. [ed. Terence Winch]

Renowned Irish poet Thomas Kinsella died today, 22 December 2021, in Dublin at the age of 93 (see this link.) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here is one of his best-known poems:

 

Mirror in February

The day dawns, with scent of must and rain,
Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.
Under the fading lamp, half dressed - my brain
Idling on some compulsive fantasy -
I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,
Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,
A dry downturning mouth.

It seems again that it is time to learn,
In this untiring, crumbling place of growth
To which, for the time being, I return.
Now plainly in the mirror of my soul
I read that I have looked my last on youth
And little more; for they are not made whole
That reach the age of Christ.

Below my window the wakening trees,
Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defaced
Suffering their brute necessities;
And how should the flesh not quail, that span for span
Is mutilated more? In slow distaste
I fold my towel with what grace I can,
Not young, and not renewable, but man.

 

Karyna McGlynn: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I Thought No One Would Ever Love Me

 

so I lay in my daybed at night

& fashioned myself a Future

Wife. Someone like the girl

up the street with the old tan

Volvo. The one with one foot

in volleyball & the other

in drama club. Maybe I hid

her bleach. Maybe I gave

her pearls & a satin-trim

robe. Maybe I cut her

diploma into fleur-de-lis

& dipped them in the dark

chocolate of my chintzy

desires. I installed My Wife

in a woody, masculine den

& made her whippet-willed

& full of brandy. I stole her

hairspray & gave her a letter desk

instead & an actual inkwell.

I gave her lockable, leather-

bound love. I imagined her parents

somewhere safe, warm & out

of the way. We summered in Monaco,

read nothing but Daphne du Maurier,

took our sun at the Top of the City.

She had a smile like a high-wire act

& a signature like a sigil. I never

stopped loving the way she slid

into day-old stockings like a snake

reassuming its shed. In truth?

Her name was Jill. She wore

athletic shorts & never spoke

to me. So I renamed her Miriam

de Havilland & had her

handle my correspondence.

We cohabitated fantastically.

I installed paintings throughout

our Morning Room: storm-

flecked seas, gold-framed

& foaming at the mouth!

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Karyna McGlynn is a writer, professor, and collagist. She is the author of three poetry collections from Sarabande Books: I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl, Hothouse—a New York Times Editor's Choice—and, forthcoming, 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Ninth Letter, The New England Review, Ploughshares, and The Kenyon Review. Recent honors include the 2020 Rumi Prize for Poetry, and the2020 Florida Review Editors' Award in Fiction. McGlynn is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Christian Brothers University in Memphis. [Find her at www.karyna.io or on instagram/twitter @karynamcglynn]

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Terrarium with Flaming Muse, collage by Karyna McGlynn

Gerald Fleming: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Brocade Dress

 

On the way back from the dance in the days of cars with bench seats, she slid over to you, put her hand on your thigh, said Shall we park? & she was dark & beautiful & now these many years later you see she was desperate for you & you for her & what did you say, Catholic boy? Oh, I’d better get home & fact was you could have said I’d love to, but I wouldn’t know what to do—and now you know that would have been OK, that she would have said I’ll teach you, then—she was kind that way—for she’d been taught & perhaps had taught others & for her this was not new, and what a lesson it would have been.

            Twenty years later you’re alone on an elevator in a department store, you’re going down & the door opens at a floor before the one you want & you see in the distance a gold brocade dress draped across an ornate chair & from hard right she steps into the elevator & you look at each other & you hear her quick intake of breath as she must have heard yours & she turns to face the door & at the ground floor the door opens & each of you walks away.

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Gerald Fleming’s most recent book is The Bastard and the Bishop, a collection of prose poems (Hanging Loose Press, 2021). Other titles include One (also HL), The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press), Night of Pure Breathing (HL), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore (Sixteen Rivers). Fleming taught for thirty-seven years in San Francisco’s public schools and has written various books for teachers, including Rain, Steam, and Speed (a title taken from the great Turner painting), which details an innovative process of intensive writing with adolescents—writing accompanied by outrageously loud, carefully curated instrumental music. He lives most of the year in the Far West and, when there’s no plague occurring, part of the year in Paris. Fleming’s poetry and prose poems have appeared widely in magazines over the past forty years.

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Denise Duhamel: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sex with a Famous Poet

 

I had sex with a famous poet last night

and when I rolled over and found myself beside him I shuddered

because I was married to someone else,

because I wasn’t supposed to have been drinking,

because I was in a fancy hotel room

I didn’t recognize.  I would have told you

right off this was a dream, but recently

a friend told me, write about a dream,

lose a reader and I didn’t want to lose you

right away.  I wanted you to hear

that I didn’t even like the poet in the dream, that he has

four kids, the youngest one my age, and I find him

rather unattractive, that I only met him once,

that is, in real life, and that was in a large group

in which I barely spoke up.  He disgusted me

with his disparaging remarks about women.

He even used the word “Jap”

which I took as a direct insult to my husband who's Asian.

When we were first dating, I told him

“You were talking in your sleep last night

and I listened, just to make sure you didn’t

call out anyone else’s name.”  My future-husband said

that he couldn’t be held responsible for his subconscious,

which worried me, which made me think his dreams

were full of blonde vixens in rabbit-fur bikinis,

but he said no, he dreamt mostly about boulders

and the ocean and volcanoes, dangerous weather

he witnessed but could do nothing to stop.

And I said, “I dream only of you,”

which was romantic and silly and untrue.

But I never thought I’d dream of another man--

my husband and I hadn’t even had a fight,

my head tucked sweetly in his armpit, my arm

around his belly, which lifted up and down

all night, gently like water in a lake.

If I passed that famous poet on the street,

he would walk by, famous in his sunglasses

and blazer with the suede patches at the elbows,

without so much as a glance in my direction.

I know you’re probably curious about who the poet is,

so I should tell you the clues I’ve left aren’t

accurate, that I’ve disguised his identity,

that you shouldn’t guess I bet it’s him...

because you’ll never guess correctly

and even if you do, I won’t tell you that you have.

I wouldn’t want to embarrass a stranger

who is, after all, probably a nice person,

who was probably just having a bad day when I met him,

who is probably growing a little tired of his fame--

which my husband and I perceive as enormous,

but how much fame can an American poet

really have, let’s say, compared to a rock star

or film director of equal talent?  Not that much,

and the famous poet knows it, knows that he’s not

truly given his due.  Knows that many

of these young poets tugging on his sleeve

are only pretending to have read all his books.

But he smiles anyway, tries to be helpful.

I mean, this poet has to have some redeeming qualities, right?

For instance, he writes a mean iambic.

Otherwise, what was I doing in his arms.

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Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021). Her other titles include Scald; Blowout; Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; and Kinky. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Duhamel teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

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Tamara de Lempicka, Sleeping Woman,1935.

Tim Dlugos [by Terence Winch]

The last time I saw Tim Dlugos was 30 December 1989. We met for dinner at Kramer Books & Afterwords, the first bookstore/café in the land (as far as I know). It’s one of the few independent bookstores still going strong in DC, but probably more because of the food than the books. Tim had been battling AIDS for a while, and I remember being a little apprehensive about seeing him, wondering to what extent the disease might have changed him. So his arrival came as a relief, a cause for optimism—he looked better than ever, and seemed full of energy and purpose.

Starting in the early 1970s, Tim and I were part of a group of poets who participated in an open reading every Monday night in a room over the Community Book Shop in Dupont Circle in DC. The readings, called Mass Transit, were started by Michael Lally in 1971.  Mass Transit was a poetry lab, where all experiments were welcome, or at least tolerated. Many poets came up through Mass Transit, and became friends—Ed Cox, Lee Lally, Beth Joselow, Tina Darragh, Pete Inman, Liam Rector, Lynne Dreyer, Phyllis Rosenzweig, and Bernie Welt, to mention a few. We hosted a reading series at the Pyramid Gallery, bringing poets like John Ashbery to town to read with local poets. We also started a publishing venture called Some of Us Press, bringing out chapbooks by everyone from Ed Cox to Bruce Andrews. Michael left for New York in 1975, and I think Tim left town around the same time. Fortunately, Doug Lang appeared on the scene and, in his capacity as manager of Folio Books, also in Dupont Circle, became the same kind of catalyst that Michael Lally had been. Doug’s Folio readings featured Ted Berrigan, Tom Raworth, Ray DiPalma, Barbara Guest, Maureen Owen, Susan Howe, Fielding Dawson, Ted Greenwald, and dozens of others, each usually paired with a DC poet. Doug, who started a small press called Jawbone and was part of another called Titanic Books, also hosted a number of workshops, whose participants included Diane Ward, Joan Retallack, and others.

In fact, Some of Us Press published High There by Tim in 1973, which I believe was his first book, and in 1977, Jawbone brought out Tim’s chapbook For Years. In New York, Tim seemed to flourish. He became editor of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project newsletter for a while, his magnetism and openness as a person always drawing people to him. He also partied hard in the big city. Later, in poems like “Powerless,” he would write with great passion about getting sober.

Tim’s masterpiece is the poem “G-9,” named after the AIDS ward at Roosevelt Hospital in NYC. I’m not an expert in the literature to come out of the AIDS epidemic, but it’s hard to believe there is anything in that body of work more vivid and powerful than this poem (here's the text of "G-9"). In November of 1989, Tim sent me a fat envelope of poems—“Here are the fruits of my hospital stay and my first week out.” I was blown away the contents, which included “Powerless” and “G-9.” He was doing his best work in his final year of life.  “G-9” was accepted by the Paris Review not long before Tim died, of complications from AIDS on December 3, 1990, at age 40. He never lived to see the issue (#115) come out, but he was delighted to know that it would be in the magazine.

The good news is that Tim’s friend, the poet David Trinidad, is working on the first complete poems of Tim Dlugos. I’ve looked at a chunk of this manuscript, and I very much believe its publication will be a landmark literary event, bringing back to public attention an amazing and important writer. Like Whitman, Tim, through his poems, seems to be with us still. (Wikipedia entry on Tim: click here.)

In his research, David came up with a poem by Tim that I had no memory of, but was very grateful to have. I think the poem is from 1973, when I was the poetry book buyer at a shop called Discount Books:

THINGS I MIGHT DO
for Terry Winch

Might write a letter to Jim Carroll
this p.m., I finally found his address.
Might get an answer; probably not.
Might start crying when Joey calls
tonight. Might wonder if he slept
with Michael; probably won’t ask.
Some time might remember the name of
the star that the statue on the fountain
at the Circle resembles: not Leslie Howard,
but that’s pretty close. Might quit
work today, might dream about my job
again tonight, the 4th night in a row.
Might lose something if I keep on
working. Might forget to cash my check
again. Might go out dancing
with Billy whom I might call this afternoon,
and might go to bed with when parents split
for West Coast in just two weeks. Might
look for an apartment. Might make
a tremendous break and move to New York City

Might do the streets. Might get crabs.
Might be missing the world’s most beautiful
boy by writing now. Might get a sunburn.
Might go bald. Might fall asleep on the bench
like some old bum. Might leave the Circle.
Might check the poems out at Discount Books,
find Joe Brainard, find Geraud. Might wave
to Terry as I just walk past, his waving back
a p.m. highlight and distinct possibility.

-- Tim Dlugos

-- Ed. note: Terry's post with Tim's poem was originally posted on July 28, 2008, which was John Ashbery's eighty-first birthday; Gerard Manley Hopkins, Marcel Duchamp, and Jackie Kennedy were also born on the 28th of July.

 

Reuben Jackson: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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November Poem

 

It’s the first cold November evening.

I am out driving

And there is a hitchhiker 

Bearing a sign

At a quiet intersection.

I ignore the Cecil Taylor on the radio

To read it.

Perhaps they are bound for some

Exciting destination,

Or a place that I have been.

 

As I drive closer, the words become legible.

DESTINATION, REUBEN JACKSON’S ARMS.

OH, HOW I MISS THEM SO.

 

I am jubilant, flustered.

I squeal to a stop. It’s Donna!

I thought she was married and happy in Philadelphia.

 

We do not speak, but embrace.

I produce tears, she produces a butcher’s knife

And quickly accomplishes her deed.

 

She is careful to wipe the blood

From the seat covers,

And places each finger in sanitary gauze.

I still love you, she cries.

A final kiss and that still potent smile.

 

She still loves me, I moan before dying.

She is still neat and considerate as ever.

My pupils lock on her lovely thumb pointing northward

Across the avenue.

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Reuben Jackson is the Archivist with the University of the District of Columbia’s Felix E. Grant Jazz Archives. He is the author of two volumes of poetry, Fingering the Keys (Gut Punch Press, 1991) and Scattered Clouds (Alan Squire Publishing, 2019). His poems have been included in more than 40 anthologies. From 2012 to 2018, he was host of “Friday Night Jazz” on Vermont Public Radio, and currently co-hosts “The Sound of Surprise” on WPFW in Washington, DC.

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Emily Jungmin Yoon: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Say Grace

 

In my country our shamans were women

and our gods multiple until white people brought

an ecstasy of rosaries and our cities today

glow with crosses like graveyards. As a child

in Sunday school I was told I’d go to hell

if I didn’t believe in God. Our teacher was a woman

whose daughters wanted to be nuns and I asked

What about babies and what about Buddha, and she said

They’re in hell too and so I memorized prayers

and recited them in front of women

I did not believe in. Deliver us from evil.

O sweet Virgin Mary, amen. O sweet. O sweet.

In this country, which calls itself Christian,

what is sweeter than hearing Have mercy

on us. From those who serve different gods. O

clement, O loving, O God, O God, amidst ruins,

amidst waters, fleeing, fleeing. Deliver us from evil.

O sweet, O sweet. In this country,

point at the moon, at the stars, point at the way the lake lies,

with a hand full of feathers,

and they will look at the feathers. And kill you for it.

If a word for religion they don’t believe in is magic

so be it, let us have magic. Let us have

our own mothers and scarves, our spirits,

our shamans and our sacred books. Let us keep

our stars to ourselves and we shall pray

to no one. Let us eat

what makes us holy.

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Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018), winner of the 2019 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and finalist for the 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and Ordinary Misfortunes (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize. She has also translated and edited a chapbook of poems, Against Healing: Nine Korean Poets (Tilted Axis, 2019). She is the Poetry Editor for The Margins, the literary magazine of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and a PhD candidate in Korean literature at the University of Chicago. 

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    Mansindo_(萬神圖), early 19th-c. Korean shamanic painting.

Jeffrey Cyphers Wright: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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“Gone”

 

“Irk” was one of my dad’s favorite words.

Mom liked to pick up on teen lingo.

She said “stuff” was “neat.”

She was a real people person.

She was chiffon and dad was concrete.

I walk in the valley where they met.

I walk in a “marijuana haze” (how

Dad put it) in New York City. He was

a quarter leprechaun. She was half elf.

I caused them both a lot of grief.

Had I shown more love, I’d be less bereft.

I walk in ghost shoes, my words

a threnody belonging to the throng.

My folks stay closer now they’re “gone.”

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Jeffrey Cyphers Wright is a publisher, critic, eco-activist, impresario, singer/songwriter, and artist, best known as a New Romantic, post-surrealist poet. He is author of 17 books of verse, including Blue Lyre from Dos Madres Press and Party Everywhere from Xanadu. Recent poetry is in New American Writing, Sensitive Skin, Stat-O-Rec, Posit, and Big City Lit. Wright formerly ran Cover Magazine for 15 years. He is a Contributing Editor to Local Knowledge Magazine and reading series. He has hosted numerous events in New York at La Mama, KGB Lit Bar, and Howl! Happening. Art and literary criticism appear most recently in ArtNexus and American Book Review. [See Jeffrey Wright's brilliant and silly Pandemic Puppet Jam!]

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                                                                                               R. Crumb. Stoned Agin. 1971  

Abena Busia: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Lamentation for Audre Lorde

(18^th February 1934 – 7^th November 1992)

 

Damirifa, Damirifa, Damirifa Due, Due, Due, Due,

Yebo afena kye wo Safohene, Safohene, Safohene.

 

Sister Outsider, whose name has many other spellings—hear us;

 

This is a song from sorrowing soldiers, as we lay our

    sister to rest;

A song of suffering sisters, as we lay our soldier to rest.

    Damarifa, DamrifaDue;

 

You who taught us, To stand eye to eye, Measure our fears,

     Channel our angers:

 

In this world of wailing women, now we lay our warrior

    to rest,

With these words of warriors weeping, as we lay our

woman to rest. Damirifa,Damirifa Due:

 

You who taught us: Dismantle Master’s house, Liberate his

    wives, Empower his slaves:

 

This is a song from sorrowing soldiers, as we lay our

    sister to rest;

A song of suffering sisters, as we lay our soldier to rest.

    Damarifa, Damrifa Due:

 

You who taught us: Celebrate our difference, Affirm our

    wellness, Unleash our erotic:

 

    Into this world of wailing women; now we lay our

                        warrior to rest,

    With these words or warriors weeping, oh we lay our

                        woman to rest. Damarifa, Damrifa Due

 

You who poured love in us: To transform our silences, Claim

    our languages, And Act:

 

    This is a song from sorrowing soldiers, as we lay our

        sister to rest;

    A song of suffering sisters, as we lay our soldier to rest.

        Damarifa, Damrifa Due:

 

Damrifa, Damrifa, Damrifa Due, Due, Due,

Yebo afena kye wo Safohene, Safohene, Safohene.

 

                                                  ⌂

Memorial Service, Rutgers University, November 1992.

Akan Proverb: Akofena Kunim ko a, woboafena kye no safohene — Meaning a retiring great warrior deserves a royal sword of rest.

Damrifa Due: An expression of sorrow and condolence, but addressed to the deceased, not the living.

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Ghanaian diplomat and internationally known poet H.E. Prof. Abena P. A. Busia, currently serving as her country’s Ambassador to Brazil, is a Professor in the Departments of English and Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.  She has published widely, lectured extensively, and taught workshops and master classes on curriculum transformation, around the world, in the areas of gender, race, and multi-cultural studies. She has received fellowships and awards from numerous organizations including the Rutgers University President’s Award for Distinguished Public Service.  She is a Founding Board member of several international organizations, including the African Women’s Development Fund [AWDF], for which she served as the founding Program Committee Chair, and AWDF-USA, for which she served as Board Chair.  She is also one of the three Project co-directors and series editors of the award winning four volume Women Writing Africa project, published by the Feminist Press (2002–2008).  ◊ Ambassador Busia has given numerous interviews and poetry readings on radio, performed and read at conferences, universities, churches, and poetry and Jazz festivals around Europe, North America, and West Africa, including the celebrated New Orleans Jazz Festival and the welcoming ceremonies for Nelson Mandela on the steps of City Hall, Los Angeles. First published by the late Chinua Achebe, her poetry has appeared in various anthologies and magazines on three continents, in West Africa, North America, and Europe. As a board member of the Women’s Learning Partnership, a South-South network of women’s organizations dedicated to women’s leadership and empowerment, she is the curator of “Lifelines: The Poetry of Human Rights” presenting readings annually at the UN Commission on the Status of Women and other NGO fora.  [“A Lamentation for Audre Lorde” appears in Busia’s collection Traces of a Life: A Collection of Elegies and Praise Poems, Ayebia Books: London, 2008.]

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                                  Audre Lorde

Hailey Leithauser: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hailey Leithauser. Photo by Sandra Beasley.

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Zen Heaven

 

No melon, no lemon, no scone, no crumb,

no tuns of gin or barrels of bourbon,

no chocolate chiffon, no filet mignon.

 

No bumped shins, no bunions, no rain-ached bones,

no lesions or abrasions, no spasms,

nothing swollen, fallen, rotten, or numb.

 

No courtesans or virgins, no woman

or man. No estrogen, progesterone,

not one lone hormone to scorn or condone.

 

No vision, or mission, or chosen son,

no inaction or action, no outcome

of passion, no function, done or undone.

 

No lesson at the end, no dead dial tone.

No one in the tomb, no tomb, no tombstone.

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Hailey Leithauser is the author of Swoop, winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Award, and Saint Worm. Her work appears regularly in journals such as 32 Poems, Agni, Cincinnati Review, Gettysburg Review, and The Yale Review.

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    Relief panel from Borobudur, the Buddhist temple built in the 9th century A.D. in Java, Indonesia.

In memoriam Dennis O’Toole (1946--51) [Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dennis O'Toole, Bridie (Flynn) Winch, Terence Winch. Rockaway Beach, NY, August 1948.

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When I was five I was involved in an accident that has affected me deeply for the last 70 years. My best friend was a boy named Dennis O'Toole, who lived in the building next to mine on Daly Avenue in the Bronx. One summer day in 1951 the two of us filled up our water guns in my family's apartment & headed out to play. I remember that my mother was ironing & cautioned us to be careful as we ran out of the house.

But we weren't careful. I was about a foot in front of Dennis as we tore across the street, shooting our guns in the air & laughing. Then, suddenly, I sensed something had changed.

When I turned around, I saw that Dennis had been knocked back to the other side of the street, where he was propped up against the tire of a parked car. It was a ghastly scene. There was vomit coming from his mouth and his forehead appeared to be missing. To my left was a black truck. Clearly, I had very narrowly escaped my friend's fate. My memory of all this has always played in my mind without any sound, a silent movie. I think I was in shock. 

Since that terrible black truck ran into my interior life, not a day has gone by when I haven't re-lived this experience. Part of me has always felt that one of my assignments was to live life for both of us. 

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Survivor

 

I imagine you are just now settling down

for the night, your bed as white as mayonnaise,

which some people apparently prefer to ketchup

or even mustard. I don’t know what you would

have liked, but I pretend that you are exactly like me,

that you have lived on inside my body, my psyche

and have done so since that day you died.

 

I see you as you start to drift off, up there

amid the clouds shaped like clusters of forbidden

fruit, dressed in your flour-white communion suit

and short pants, never to be seen again, never

to attend the Friday night dance at St. Helena’s,

never to get drunk with me on blackberry brandy

in the boys’ bathroom, your absence looming

over the history of the world as I’ve known it.

 

It couldn’t be prevented. The sudden rip

that took you on your trip to the beyond,

while I stayed right here, forever wondering

what hit you on the street that summer day

but failed to take me away as well. I am bereft

of you. I am all now that is left of you.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________                    

                         Terence Winch, James (Jesse) Winch, Dennis O'Toole. Rockaway, NYC. August 1948.

 

Reginald Dwayne Betts: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reginald Dwayne Betts. Photo by Mamadi Doumbouya

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Blood History

 

The things that abandon you get remembered different.

As precise as the English language can be, with words

like penultimate and perseverate, there is not a combination

of sounds that describe only that leaving. Once,

drinking and smoking with buddies, a friend asked if

I’d longed for a father. Had he said wanted, I would have

dismissed him in the way that youngins dismiss it all:

a shrug, sarcasm, a sharp jab to stomach, laughter.

But he said longing. & in a different place, I might

have wept. Said, once, my father lived with us & then he

didn’t and it fucked me up so much I didn’t think about

his leaving until I held my own son in my arms & only

now speak on it. A man who drank Boone’s Farm and Mad

Dog like water once told me & some friends that there is no

word for father where he comes from, not like we know it.

There the word father is the same as the word for listen.

The blunts we passed around let us to abandon the English

language. Not that much though. But what if the old

        head knew something? & if you have no father, you can’t

hear straight. Years later, that same friend asked about

longing, wondered why I named my son after my father.

       You know that’s the kind of shit turns the rest of your life

into a prayer no dead man will answer.

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Reginald Dwayne Betts is the founder and director of the Freedom Reads. A poet and lawyer, he is the author of four books. His latest collection of poetry, Felon, was awarded the American Book Award and an NAACP Image Award. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and a Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. [For more about Reginald Dwayne Betts, click here.]

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                                                     William H. Johnson. Man in Vest. Smithsonian American Art Museum

 

Greg McBride: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sizes

 

My sister found our father’s ring,

turquoise faded, sullied silver-plate.

 

It stopped my breath. Thirty years ago

I took it from his cold hand.

 

A big man, he never took it off,

not when he dug or swung or swam,

 

or smeared on huckleberry jam,

or held a cribbage peg, or gripped

 

a favorite pitching wedge, then fudged

his score again. With feeling,

 

she placed it on my palm,

we his keepers. I slipped it on.

 

It hung, slack, wanting more.

It stung. Once, the shoes. Now this.

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Greg McBride spent a year as an Army photographer in Vietnam, then thirty years practicing law in Washington, DC, before discovering contemporary poetry in his fifties. It changed his life. In 2005 he became founding editor of the Innisfree Poetry Journal. At the age of 63, he won the Boulevard emerging poet prize. His book Porthole won the Liam Rector First Book Prize. ["Sizes" first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review.]

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Mickey McBride and his son Greg, ca. 1984.

Jane Clarke: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Blue Cards

 

Winter mornings he was gone before dawn

to fairs in Ballyhaunis, Claremorris, Ballinrobe.

He came home with muck on his coat,

smelling of Shorthorns and Herefords.

 

Sometimes he told us who he’d met,

the blind man who knew each of his cows

by their lowing, the widow who bargained

harder than any dealer. But mostly he sat

 

distracted by prices, cigarette smoke

spiraling to the kitchen ceiling, blue cards

spread around the table. Today, when everyone

else was away, I wrapped him warm,

 

pushed his wheelchair through the haggard,

up the yard to the sheds. The cattle lifted

doleful eyes from heaps of silage.

Hello lads, he said.

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Jane Clarke is the author of two poetry collections, The River and When the Tree Falls, as well as an illustrated chapbook, All the Way Home, (Smith|Doorstop 2019). Jane’s awards include the 2016 Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry and the 2016 Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year. Originally from a farm in Co. Roscommon, Jane now lives with her wife in Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow, Ireland.  [“Blue Cards” is from Where the Tree Falls, published by Bloodaxe Books, 2015 & 2019; a blue card is a bovine animal passport.]

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                                                              Frank McElvey (1895--1974), Fair Day. Oil on canvas.

Anne Sexton: On the Anniversary of her Death [ed. Terence Winch]

 

The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

 

The end of the affair is always death.   

She’s my workshop. Slippery eye,   

out of the tribe of myself my breath   

finds you gone. I horrify

those who stand by. I am fed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

Finger to finger, now she’s mine.   

She’s not too far. She’s my encounter.   

I beat her like a bell. I recline

in the bower where you used to mount her.   

You borrowed me on the flowered spread.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

Take for instance this night, my love,   

that every single couple puts together   

with a joint overturning, beneath, above,   

the abundant two on sponge and feather,   

kneeling and pushing, head to head.   

At night alone, I marry the bed.

 

I break out of my body this way,   

an annoying miracle. Could I   

put the dream market on display?   

I am spread out. I crucify.

My little plum is what you said.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

Then my black-eyed rival came.

The lady of water, rising on the beach,   

a piano at her fingertips, shame   

on her lips and a flute’s speech.

And I was the knock-kneed broom instead.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

She took you the way a woman takes   

a bargain dress off the rack

and I broke the way a stone breaks.

I give back your books and fishing tack.   

Today’s paper says that you are wed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

 

The boys and girls are one tonight.

They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.   

They take off shoes. They turn off the light.   

The glimmering creatures are full of lies.

They are eating each other. They are overfed.   

At night, alone, I marry the bed.

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 Anne Sexton studied with the poet Robert Lowell at Boston University and also worked as a model and a librarian. Although she had written some poetry in childhood, it was not until the later 1950s that she began to write seriously. Her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in 1960. The book won immediate attention because of the intensely personal and relentlessly honest self-revelatory nature of the poems recording her nervous breakdown and recovery. Their imagery was frequently brilliant, and their tone was both sardonic and vulnerable. Her second book of poems, All My Pretty Ones (1962), continued in the vein of uncompromising self-exploration. Live or Die (1966), a further record of emotional illness, won a Pulitzer Prize and was followed by, among others, Love Poems (1969), Transformations (1971), The Book of Folly (1972), and The Death Notebooks (1974). Sexton taught at Boston University in 1970–71 and at Colgate University in 1971–72. She also wrote a number of children’s books with her close friend, poet Maxine Kumin.  Sexton died by her own hand on Oct. 4^th, 1974. The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), 45 Mercy Street (1976, edited by her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton), and Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978) were published posthumously. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, edited by Lois Ames and Linda Gray Sexton, was published in 1977 and No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose in 1985.      [from the Encyclopaedia Britannica]

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Bill Zavatsky: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bill Zavatsky. Photo by Nora Howard

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104 Bus Uptown

 

How bad can it be,

dear wacky New York City,

when the first twelve lines

of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

blink down at me

from a poster on this bus

brought to us

courtesy of the MTA

and the Poetry Society of America

(of which, incredibly, I am a member!)

and, to its right, above the rear door,

another poster: Charles Reznikoff’s little poem

about how “the lights go out—”

in the subway

“but are on again in a moment,”

a poem I will be teaching to my students

in a few weeks’ time.

And perched in the center back seat

(she got on at Seventh Avenue and 42^nd Street),

sitting all alone, as if on a little stage

lit by the bus-window daylight of midtown New York,

the beautiful actress Beverly D’Angelo

whom I can’t bring myself to ask

if she is Beverly D’Angelo, except that I

recognize the perfection of her charming overbite

as she chews gum like mad over wild blue eyes agog,

behaving as if she’s never sat on a bus before

or as if she expects a passenger to leap up

at any moment and cry, “Action!,”

with the cameras rolling like the eyes in my head

as I turn now and again to look at her

in her white jacket and skirt that don’t

quite match, a silk turquoise blouse

that color-keys her enormous eyes

(which just got off with the rest of her

at 57^th and Eighth), and I’m lucky

enough to have been handed this

piece of paper twenty minutes ago

by someone on the street who must be

a secret agent for poetry, though it seems

to be merely an advertisement flyer

for 45^th Street Photo, on the back of which

I’ve just written this poem  

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Bill Zavatsky has published two full-length books of his own poetry, most recently Where X Marks the Spot (Hanging Loose Press), three chapbooks, and two books of co-translation (Earthlight: Poems by André Breton, with Zack Rogow; and The Poems of A. O. Barnabooth by Valery Larbaud, with Ron Padgett). His poems have appeared on CDs by Bill Evans and Marc Copland. He has been teaching since time immemorial, most recently a poetry workshop via Morningside Poets in Manhattan. [For more information on, and poems by, Bill Zavatsky, check this link.]

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                                Beverly D’Angelo