The Best American Poetry

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

 

Wanda Phipps: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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Morning Poem #27

 

I should have stayed

here with the beautiful

strong cold Corinna Mae

I should have stayed here

all those years ago

with the known and familiar

I shouldn't have called so much

I shouldn't have been so callous

I should have stuck by you

after recovery

I should have moved to DC

when you asked me to

I should have taken that editing job

I should have taken that TV PA job

I should have gone through with

that graduate school acceptance

I should have loved you

when we first met

I should have been a performance poet

a spoken word artist

I should have gone every place

I was afraid to go

I should have helped you find an apartment

I should have been more interesting

and less the clinging vine

I should have protested loudly

about some things and not at

all about others

I should have learned Spanish and German

I shouldn't have been so easily discouraged

I should have listened to my mother

my life could have been so much better by now

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Wanda Phipps is a writer/translator and author of the books Field of Wanting: Poems of Desire and Wake-Up Calls: 66 Morning Poems among others. Her poetry has appeared in more than a hundred publications and has been translated into Ukrainian, Hungarian, Arabic, Galician, and Bangla. She's curated several reading/performance series at the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church and is a founding member of the theatre company Yara Arts Group.  She has received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Agni Journal, the National Theater Translation Fund, and the New York State Council on the Arts. Her third full-length book of original poetry, Mind Honey, was just published by Autonomedia.

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    Edward Hopper, Early Sunday Morning,1930.

Robert Pinsky: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Robert Pinsky, 2019. Photo ©Eric Antoniou.

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Poem with Lines in Any Order

 

Sonny said Then he shouldn’t have given Molly the two more babies.

Dave’s sister and her husband adopted the baby, and that was Babe.

You can’t live in the past.

Sure he was a tough guy but he was no hero.

Sonny and Toots went to live for a while with the Braegers.

It was a time when it seemed like everybody had a nickname.

Nobody can live in the future.

When Rose died having Babe, Dave came after the doctor with a gun.

Toots said What would you expect, he was a young man and there she was.

Sonny still a kid himself when Dave moved out on Molly.

The family gave him Rose’s cousin Molly to marry so she could raise the children.

There’s no way to just live in the present.

In their eighties Toots and Sonny still arguing about their father.

Dave living above the bar with Della and half the family.

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Robert Pinsky’s books include The Figured Wheel (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize); his translation The Inferno of Dante; and his Princeton Tanner Lectures, Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry. He founded the Favorite Poem Project, with the videos here. His honors include the Korean Manhae Award and the Italian Premio Capri. He has appeared on The Simpsons and The Colbert Report. [For more information on, and poems by, Robert Pinsky, click here.]

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Robert Pinsky: “The gangster sexual style of my grandfather, Dave Pinsky, underlies this poem. I am the boy he is holding in the first photo. In the photo on the right, he is with his beautiful first wife Rose—as the poem tells, when she died after childbirth, he came after the doctor with a gun.”

 

 

Erika Meitner: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Austerity

 

Go off the fiscal cliff with me, baby. I’m ready.

We can hold hands while we blow through

 

West Virginia quickly, since we’re halfway down

77 past Charleston already and I’m cranked on

 

Cherry Coke from Burger King, feet on the dash,

wondering aloud if they’ll cart sad Dick Clark out

 

again for TV New Year’s Eve while the car radio

plays Blue Öyster Cult (I’m burnin’ for you), then

 

world news: Putin says no Russian adoptions

to the US and you say Dick Clark’s a year gone

 

(heart attack) and the radio says a victim of

gang rape died in India, and that frenzied buyers,

 

fearful of a ban, are swarming gun stores after

Newtown to stock up on rounds of .223 bullets.

 

Home in the darkness. Home on the highway. Assault rifles

are sold out across the country. Across the country

 

we pass trailer parks along the river, empty parking lots

of long-shuttered store fronts, trees hobbled with ice,

 

and signs left over from Christmas: Happy Birthday

Jesus, and Mary Wrapped the Greatest Gift of All.

 

Congressional leaders are hopeful about a deal, but

I am not confident that anything will change this stretch

 

of desolate road, this altitudinous mountain we climb

in our four-wheeldrive vehicle. Most days it seems

 

we all might steer directly, without detours, into the white

and constant border. If you ask me if I’m anticipative,

 

I might say yes. West Virginia, you were Wild and

Wonderful, then Open for Business, but now you’re

 

Wild and Wonderful again because everything comes back,

even Dick Clark, with impaired speech, Beech-Nut gum

 

sponsorship long gone, to wish us a Happy New Year,

though now it’s followed by “Seacrest—out!”

 

With his perfect teeth and hair, Ryan ushers in

the year of austerity, the year when there was only

 

evening and morning, the bare trees,

their dark bodies, their bent limbs.

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Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010)—a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Her poems have been published most recently in Virginia Quarterly Review, Orion, The Believer, The Southern Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Meitner is currently a professor of English at Virginia Tech. Her sixth book, Useful Junk, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in April 2022.  (For more on Erika Meitner, click here.)      ["Austerity" is from Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018).]

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Indran Amirthanayagam: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Last Dance

 

I was setting aside a room in my mind to retire

with books and pens, memories and photographs,

table, chairs, sofa, bathroom attached, kitchenette

to boil water, make coffee, a self-sufficient pad

where I would receive visits, from the most dear,

children, friends, but I felt sadness still, solitude,

 

silence from across the water, wondering why

correspondence stopped, the post office closed,

but I cannot blame letter carriers or planes. Words

fly these days at the speed of light from Northern

tip to Southern floes. There is no excuse but

the oldest in the book, the heart exposed

 

day-in day-out will explode. The woman has

chosen the bread she will butter, flowers

to tend, friends to see as she grows older

and I must learn to walk away, to say I have

had my dance with the Muse and not regret

a minute or second or look back.

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Indran Amirthanayagam writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole. He has published twenty poetry books, including the newly released Blue Window (translated by Jennifer Rathbun), The Migrant States, Coconuts on Mars, The Elephants of Reckoning (winner 1994 Paterson Poetry Prize), Uncivil War, and The Splintered Face: Tsunami Poems. In music, he recorded Rankont Dout. He edits the Beltway Poetry Quarterly; curates the Allucionistas site; writes a blog; co-directs Poets & Writers Studio International; writes a weekly poem for Haiti en Marche and El Acento. He also hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube. Indran Amirthanayagam has received fellowships in poetry from the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The US/Mexico Fund for Culture, and the Macdowell Colony. He is a 2021 Emergent Seed grant winner. 

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                                                        Fernando Botero (1932--), Couple Dancing [unsigned; possibly an imitation of his work]

Teri Ellen Cross Davis: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: Mignonette Dooley

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Bad Girls Album Cover

 

By the time I was seven, I knew I would like sex, knew

I would be good at it. I practiced lying on my back,

 

knees bent, hairless prepubescent folds angled up to the air.

I knew nothing of actual sex. The only penis I had ever seen

 

was by accident—opening the bathroom door on my father’s

friend. But this was the time of Donna Summer. Under a

 

streetlamp’s maraschino cherry glow, she posed—wet black

ringlets framed her light brown-sugared face, pouting lips

 

slick in shiny scarlet gloss, high heel perched on the lamp’s base

plunging the slit of her dress back to reveal a black lace stocking

 

a garter as garnish—so naughty, so beautiful. Why wouldn’t I

want to be like her—up front about being wanted?    

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Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union (The 2019  Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize) and Haint (2017 Ohioana Poetry Award). She is the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize winner and the poetry coordinator for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.

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Nick Flynn: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Nick Flynn © ryan mcginley 2019

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Sleeping Beauty

 

When Sleeping Beauty finds the spindle

& pricks her finger & falls into her hundred-

year sleep, everyone around her falls as

well—her handmaids, her grooms, the cooks.

Dogs collapse in the courtyard, horses fold

in on themselves in the hay . . . . I’d forgotten

all that. Even the fire returns to embers—

fire’s version of sleep. In some tellings all

this sleep is a blessing, a solution to grief—

no one will miss her because they will sleep

as long as she sleeps & they will wake

when she wakes, no one having felt

a thing. Is this what we want, to take

everyone with us, to leave no one behind?

To find a way not to feel all the days you

are not here? Some days I wish I could

sleep for a hundred years, other days

I wonder if I’ve ever really been awake.

In one version the curse is uttered by

a crone, in another by a fairy. The castle,

in both versions, as everyone falls &

almost at once, becomes overgrown—

wild roses, thick with thorns, surround its

walls, so thick they will tear the flesh of

anyone who dares come close. When I

tell you I’m a wounded animal this is what

I mean—I am the thorn & I am the spindle

& I am the curse. No one will remember

the years they felt nothing. 

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Nick Flynn is a writer, playwright, and poet. His most recent books are This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire (2020), a hybrid memoir, and Stay: threads, collaborations, and conversations (2020), which documents twenty-five years of his collaborations with artists, filmmakers, and composers. He is also the author of five collections of poetry, including I Will Destroy You (2019).  He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and is on the creative writing faculty at the University of Houston. His acclaimed memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, was made into a film starring Robert DeNiro, and has been translated into fifteen languages.

["Sleeping Beauty" is from I Will Destroy You, Graywolf Press, 2019 ] 

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                      Pablo Picasso, Le repos, 1932

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Adultery

A room full of seven-year-olds

are memorizing the ten commandments.

They sit, eyes fixed on illustrated

poster-sized pages, bound

with thou shalts and

thou shalt nots printed

in black block letters.

 

Sister speaks, the class repeats,

“The sixth commandment is

Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

The class echoes back, as she rushes on,

but in the space between

I raise my hand and ask,

 

“Sister, what’s adultery?”

 Furiously flipping the page, she intones,

“The seventh commandment is…”

My cheeks burning, shamed and scarlet,

I study each word

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

 

I struggle toward a solid conclusion:

if adult means you are a grown-up,

adultery means you are

pretending to be a grown-up.

A commandment just for children.

 

With the realization of

my frequent sinning, I begin

examining my conscience:

How often have I played dress-ups?

or pretended to be a doctor,

a nurse, a teacher, a secretary?

 

Mental tally held

in my memory,

shaking and afraid, I join

my classmates filing into the church

lit only by the red flame

of the sanctuary candle

burning for our sins.

 

Forty second graders cram into four pews

silently waiting to seek

forgiveness in the

velvet-curtained confessional.

The murmurs of transgressions

like incense fill the air.

 

I kneel, make the sign

of the cross, then stammer, “Bless me, Father,

for I have sinned. This is my first confession

and I have lied to my parents about 20 times,

fought with my brothers and sisters about 17 times,

and committed adultery 35 times.”

 

After a brief silence punctuated by a sigh,

Father Riley assigns my penance,

two Hail Marys and one Our Father.

Leaving me to believe in

the truth of my innocence,

he forgives me all my sins.

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Ann Bracken has published two poetry collections, The Altar of Innocence, No Barking in the Hallways: Poems from the Classroom, and her third, Once You’re Inside: Poetry Exploring Incarceration, will be out in October of 2021.  She serves as a contributing editor for Little Patuxent Review, and co-facilitates the Wilde Readings Poetry Series in Columbia, Maryland.   Her poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Women Write Resistance, Mad in America, Fledgling Rag, and Gargoyle. Ann’s poetry has garnered two Pushcart Prize nominations, and her advocacy work promotes using the arts to foster paradigm change in the areas of emotional wellness, education, and prison abolition.  

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    Cranach, Lucas II. 1515-1586. Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery. After 1532. Oil on copperplate. 84 X 123 cm.

Robert McDowell: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Pissed at Bukowski

 

I woke up at 2 a.m. pissed at Bukowski.

I rolled over half expecting to find him there

Snorting with his deviated septum,

Farting louder than the floor fan,

 

And if I had I would have killed him.

But the bed was empty except for me,

And I remembered that the poor old guy

Was already dead. I thought of his smell,

 

Then, not now, and almost made myself

Sick with it—that old man stink. Of course,

Bukowski smelled like an old man in his crib.

He got a head start in the stink game.

 

Don’t cringe when you read this.

Bukowski wouldn’t. He loved talking about

Smells, the fouler the better.

He didn’t believe in limits and gardenias.

 

He loved his women insulting, stinging,

With beer breath and a three-day stink

All over them. In a dark bar

He always took the back booth,

 

The smelly one next to the john. 

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Robert McDowell directed Story Line Press for 22 years and is the author of two new books: Emily & Virginia, a novel, and Sweet Wolf: Selected & New Poems with Introduction by Chad Abushanab.         

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                                    Gabe Leonard, Hard Thing in a Simple Way.  Mixed Media on Canvas.

                                   “An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way, and an artist says a hard thing in a simple way” – Charles Bukowski

Yolanda Wisher: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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5 South 43rd Street, Floor 2

Sometimes we would get hungry for the neighborhood.
Walk up the sidewalk towards Chestnut Street.
Speak to the Rev holding the light-skinned baby,
ask his son to come put a new inner tube on my bike.
Cross Ludlow, past the mailbox on the corner,
Risqué Video, Dino's Pizza, and the Emerald Laundromat.
The fruit trucks tucked into 44th Street on the left,
house eyes shut with boards, fringes of children.
Once we went into a store sunk into the street,
owned by a Cambodian woman. She sold everything,
from evening gowns to soup. Over to Walnut and 45th,
where the Muslim cat sells this chicken wrapped in pita,
draped in cucumber sauce. The pregnant woman
behind the counter writes our order out in Arabic.
We grab a juice from the freezer, some chips,
eye the bean and sweet potato pies.

Back into the hot breath of West Philly, sun is setting.
The sky is smeared squash, tangerines in a glaze.
Three girls and one boy jump doubledutch. A white man
hustles from the video store with a black plastic bag.
We look for money in the street, steal flowers
from the church lawn. The shit stain from the wino
is still on our step. Mr. Jim is washing a car for cash.
John is cleaning his rims to Buju Banton.
Noel is talking sweetly to the big blue-eyed woman.
Linda, on her way to the restaurant. The sister
in the wheelchair buzzes by with her headphones on.

One night, a man was shot and killed on this block,
right outside our thick wood door. But not today.
Today is one of those days to come home from walking
in the world, leave the windows open, start a pot of
black beans. Smoke some Alice Coltrane. Cut up
some fruit, toenails. Hold on to the moment
as if time is taking your blood pressure.

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Philadelphia-based poet, singer, educator and curator Yolanda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro (Hanging Loose Press, 2014) and the co-editor of Peace is a Haiku Song (Philadelphia Mural Arts, 2013). Wisher was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania in 1999 and the third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia for 2016–17. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher was awarded the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change. Wisher taught high school English for a decade, served as Director of Art Education for Philadelphia Mural Arts, and founded and directed the Germantown Poetry and Outbound Poetry Festivals. She has collaborated with artists and organizations to create community-driven programs rooted in the practice of poetry as a public art, including a neighborhood poetry festival, literary takeovers of local museums, a series of poetry church services, and a poetic address to the nation. Wisher performs a unique blend of poetry and song with her band The Afroeaters and works as the Curator of Spoken Word at Philadelphia Contemporary. [pronouns: she/her/y'all]

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Matthew Zapruder: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ceasing to Be

 

The idea is simple. Lucretius wanted to rid 

the world of death fear by writing 

On the Nature of Things. He says we fear 

death only believing the mind somehow 

continues even after the skull that holds it 

is broken and harmless vapor leaks out 

into everything dissolving. It's

true I fear my death, but I fear 

the death of others more, because that's 

a death without death through which 

I must live. Or I fear my death 

for the death others will have to live through 

without me. That and probably pain 

are why people are afraid. Anyway a world 

without death fear would be even more scary. 

Not that it matters. Death and fear. One 

hand of steel, one of gold. Even you 

wouldn't know which to cut off or reach 

out for first Lucretius, because it is always 

very dark here in the future. 

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Matthew Zapruder is the author most recently of Father’s Day and Why Poetry. He is editor at large at Wave Books, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California. [For more poems by, and information on, Matthew Zapruder, click this link.]

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   Botticelli’s ​Primavera (Spring), 1482.  Lucretius’ “De rerum natura” (On the Nature of Things) is a first-century BC didactic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (c. 99 BC – c. 55 BC), whose goal was to explain Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. The work begins with a tribute to Venus (at the center of this painting), but very quickly shifts its focus to the philosopher Epicurus.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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God

 

Mary, my baby sitter, once took me on a bus

to her shabby boardinghouse in Jersey City

where she showed me a white plastic statue

of a bearded man wearing a bathrobe

who stood on her dresser among her dime store perfumes.

I remember Mary telling me “This is God.”

 

God was about the size of a bottle

of eau de cologne, light as a chicken bone.

I held Him in one hand, turning Him over,

the way you’d examine an object

you’d picked up off the ground, thinking it was

just a rock but a minute later discovering

it was a gold ring, and how lucky you were

finding a thing like that

when you weren’t even looking.

 

In Sunday school, the rabbi told us

that God was invisible. It was a sin

even to draw a picture of Him

or to say His name out loud.

If you did, you’d die on the spot.

But here I was, staring at God, holding God,

and I was still on this planet breathing.

My best friend, Janet Crosio, had the same

statue on a shelf in her living room:

I thought it was one of her mother’s knick knacks;

I never dreamed that it was God.

 

Mary told me God’s name—Jesus Christ—

and that his mother’s name was Mary, too.

But Mary—my Mary—was sixteen, Italian,

a high school dropout, a heavy smoker

who lived in a boardinghouse, alone.

Why my mother had hired her, I don’t know.

I quickly slipped God back to her.

And while I waited to be taken home,

still amazed that I’d seen God,

I stared out of the second-story window

at an ugly concrete yard below.

                                                                      

On the windowsill, Mary’s glass ashtray

overflowed with ashes and cigarette butts.

I wasn’t thinking, something came over me—

I blew into the ashtray, and ashes flew

into my eyes, a whirlwind of ashes

stinging and burning, gritting up under my eyelids.

Rubbing only made it worse.

I had to cry the ashes out, every last one—

tears like burning rain.

I had to be blind for the hour or so

until I could see again without hurting.

Since then, I often confuse revelation and pain.

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Jane Shore’s six books of poems have garnered the Juniper Prize, the Lamont Prize, the 2010 Poets’ Prize, and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Widely anthologized, her recent poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Salmagundi, Moment, and the Best American Poetry (2019). She teaches at the George Washington University, and lives in Washington, DC, and in Vermont. [See this link for more poems by, and information on, Jane Shore.]

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Buck Downs: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Buck Downs, 2019. Photo by Steven Phillips

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More Special Music

 

            looking in my face

            at the shaving glass

 

                        a glass of air

                        I work by feel

 

            a dozen souls

                        have died

            in this body—

            reincarnation

running in reverse—

 

            the great glam drone

            of heart & head

beating together—

                        that’s my jam—

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A native of Jones County, Miss., Buck Downs works as a publishing consultant and writing coach for corporate clients, technology developers, and authors who need individual attention. In 2017, Furniture Press Books of Baltimore published a selected poems, Unintended Empire. His most recent book of poetry is Not Right, Now! (Buck Downs Dot Com). For thirty years he has distributed his poems as a series of postcards and other author-published ephemera. (Click here for Buck Downs on writing.)

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Ted Berrigan on the 38th Anniversary of his Death: Posthumous Pick of the Month [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Mark Hillringhouse Photography

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New Personal Poem

to Michael Lally

You had your own reasons for getting
In your own way. You didn’t want to be
Clear to yourself. You knew a hell
Of a lot more than you were willing
               to let yourself know. I felt
Natural love for you on the spot. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Right.
Beautiful. I don’t use the word lightly. I
Protested with whatever love (honesty) (& frontal nudity)
A yes basically reserved Irish Catholic American Providence Rhode
               Island New Englander is able to manage. You
Are sophisticated, not uncomplicated, not
Naïve, and Not simple. An Entertainer, & I am, too.
Frank O’Hara respected love, so do you, & so do we.
He was himself & I was me. And when we came together
Each ourselves in Iowa, all the way
That was love, & it still is, love, today. Can you see me
In what I say? Because as well I see you know
In what you have to say, I did love Frank, as I do
You, “in the right way”.
That’s just talk, not Logos,
               a getting down to cases:
I take it as simple particulars that
               we wear our feelings on our faces.

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Ted Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. He attended Providence College for a year before joining the army in 1954 at the age of 19. After serving in Korea he received a BA in English from the University of Tulsa in 1959 and an MA in 1962. Berrigan moved to New York in the early 1960s where he edited and published C Magazine and C Press Books, wrote art criticism, and collaborated with writers and artists Ron Padgett, Joe Brainard, and Anselm Hollo. Berrigan taught at the St. Mark's Poetry Project and was writer-in-residence/visiting poet at the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Yale University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Essex in England, Northeastern Illinois University, and the Naropa Institute. In 1979 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Berrigan was a central figure in the second generation of the New York School of Poets, which included Ron Padgett, Anne Waldman, Jim Carroll, and Anselm Hollo. He was the author of more than 20 books, including The Sonnets (1964), Bean Spasms (with Ron Padgett and Joe Brainard) (1967), Poems, In Brief (1971), Red Wagon (1976), and A Certain Slant of Sunlight (1988).  Blue Wind Press published So Going Around Cities: New & Selected Poems, 1958--1979 in 1980. The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (edited by Alice Notley with Anselm Berrigan and Edmund Berrigan) came out in 2005 from the University of California Press. [bio mostly from Poets.org]. Ted Berrigan died on July 4, 1983.

Michael Lally blogs at Lally's Alley.   [Also check out this post on Michael from 2008.]

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                                           Alex Katz,Ted Berrigan,1967.

 

             Ted Berrigan,Tim Dlugos, Penny Milford, Michael Lally, Caitlin Lally (profile) at Michael & Penny's wedding, NYC, 14 Feb 1982.

                                                 

 

Gardner McFall: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gardner McFall. Photo by Susan Unterberg.

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First Kiss

 

When Raymond glided by me across the playing field, I chased him

     like a jet off radar

to plant the ultimate sting on his cheek: a kiss that burned him

     to a blossom of tears.

"What drove you to that?" the teacher inquired, pulling us both aside,

     his small shoulders heaving,

my eyes scanning the air for a reason. It sprang from the boys'

     chanting, "Girls have cooties."

If I had them, why shouldn't he? After school, Mother's withering

     look met me at the door.

She forced me to confess the recess affair to my father,

     the squadron commander,

God's right-hand man, my prank now promoted to a top-ranking sin.

     Love and sex dove under-

ground, buried deep as my spinster great-aunts, though I recall once

     during my college years,

when I came home too late, Mother asked if she should screw a scarlet

     bulb in the front-yard lamp—

Did I plan to turn our street into a red-light district?

     Raymond, wherever you are, whatever your last name is,

you are the pyre on which I throw each guilt-ridden kiss.

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Gardner McFall is the author of The Pilot’s Daughter and Russian Tortoise (poems), an opera libretto entitled Amelia (commissioned by Seattle Opera), and two children’s books.  She edited Made with Words, a prose miscellany by May Swenson. She has poems in Norton’s 2018 anthology, Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees, edited by Laren McClung, with a foreword by Yusef Komunyakaa. Her 2018 chapbook, On the Line, was published by Finishing Line Press. [“First Kiss,” from Russian Tortoise (2009), is reprinted by permission of the author]

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   Roy Lichtenstein, Kiss II, 1962.

Bob Hicok: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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The Order of Things

 

Then I stopped hearing from you. Then I thought

I was Beethoven's cochlear implant. Then I listened

to deafness. Then I tacked a whisper

to the bulletin board. Then I liked dandelions

best in their afro stage. Then a breeze

held their soft beauty for ransom. Then no one

throws a Molotov cocktail better

than a Buddhist monk. Then the abstractions

built a tree fort. Then I stopped hearing from you.

Then I stared at my life with the back of my head.

Then an earthquake somewhere every day.

Then I felt as foolish as a flip-flop

alone on a beach. Then as a beach

alone with a sea. Then as a sea

repeating itself to the moon. Then I stopped hearing

from the moon. Then I waved. Then I threw myself

into the work of throwing myself

as far as I can. Then I picked myself up

and wondered how many of us

get around this way. Then I carried

the infinity. Then I buried the phone.

Then the ground rang. Then I answered the ground.

Then the dial tone of dirt. Then I sat on a boulder

not hearing from you. Then I did jumping jacks

not hearing from you. Then I felt-up silence. Then silence

and I went all the way.

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Bob Hicok's tenth collection, Red Rover Red Rover, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2021. Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007) was awarded the 2008 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. Animal Soul (Invisible Cities Press, 2001) was also finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Recipient of nine Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim and two NEA Fellowships, his poetry has been selected for inclusion in nine volumes of Best American Poetry. [For more poems by, and information on, Bob Hicok, click here.]

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                         Joseph Cornell, mixed media collage