The Best American Poetry

Chris Mason: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

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Pocket Dial

 

Cell phone pocket dials daughter

            sleeping with boyfriend, pre-dawn.

Crickets, truck banging around, cell phone

            doesn’t dial cranky

exuberant Mrs. Deemer, or the

            bus driver

from Special Olympics.   My Dad is gone

            but still on the phone.

My sister found U. S. Savings Bonds

            grandparents sent us,

the note says, “We are proud of the

            young man you have become.”

Hard to dial up the sound of their voices,

            even in dreams

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Chris Mason’s most recent books and chapbooks include Something Something Morning (Blabbermouth, 2020), Some of the Methods of Performing Poetry Employed in and Around Baltimore from the Late 60’s to the Early Teens by Poets in Their Late Teens to Early 60’s (Primary Writing, 2019), and ­Hum Who Hiccup (Narrow House, 2011).   He is a member of 3 bands:  The Tinklers, Coocoo Rockin Time, and Old Songs.  The Old Songs group translates archaic Greek poetry and puts it to music.  He lives in Baltimore with his wife, Ann.

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Amy Gerstler: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Lost in the Forest

 

I'd given up hope. Hadn't eaten in three

days. Resigned to being wolf meat...

when, unbelievably, I found myself  in

a clearing. Two goats with bells

round their necks stared at me:

their pupils like coin slots

in piggy banks. I could have gotten

the truth out of those two,

if goats spoke. I saw leeks

and radishes planted in rows;

wash billowing on a clothesline...

and the innocuous-looking cottage

in the woods with its lapping tongue

of a welcome mat slurped me in.

 

In the kitchen, a woman so old her sex

is barely discernible pours a glass

of fraudulent milk. I'm so hungry

my hand shakes. But what is this liquid?

"Drink up, sweetheart," she says,

and as I wipe the white mustache

off with the back of my hand:

"Atta girl." Have I stumbled

into the clutches of St. Somebody?

Who can tell. "You'll find I prevail here

in my own little kingdom," she says as

she leads me upstairs--her bony grip

on my arm a proclamation of ownership,

as though I've always been hers.

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Amy Gerstler is a writer living in Los Angeles. Index of Women, a book of her poems, will be published in April by Penguin Random House. She is currently collaborating with Steve Gunderson on a musical play. 

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Cornelius Eady: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

photo by Yoon Kim

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Handymen

 

The furnace wheezes like a drenched lung.

You can’t fix it.

The toilet babbles like a speed freak.

You can’t fix it.

The fuse box is a nest of rattlers.

You can’t fix it.

The screens yawn the bees through.

Your fingers are dumb against the hammer.

Your eyes can’t tell plumb from plums.

The frost heaves against the doorjambs,

The ice turns the power lines to brittle candy.

No one told you about how things pop and fizzle,

No one schooled you in spare parts.

That’s what the guy says but doesn’t say

As he tosses his lingo at your apartment dweller ears,

A bit bemused, a touch impatient,

After the spring melt has wrecked something, stopped something,

After the hard wind has lifted something away,

After the mystery has plugged the pipes,

That rattle coughs up something sinister

An easy fix, but not for you.

It’s different when you own it,

When it’s yours, he says as the meter runs,

Then smiles like an adult.

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CORNELIUS EADY’s poetry collections include: Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for a 1992 Pulitzer Prize; and Hardheaded Weather (Putnam, 2008). He is co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation. [For more poems by and information on Cornelius Eady, click here.]

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Maureen Owen: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Rachael Pongetti

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Survival Song

 

Don’t worry about me        on latenight subways

coming home down snowy abandoned blvds.

I am La Coyote       she of the white track

loping through thick drifts          the stinging

crystals at my eyes        muggers drop their arms

at my approach     murderers withdraw back into

doorways   shivering       as my shadow floats over

the snow        trotting soundlessly up second ave

“German Shepherd,”  someone says to calm his

startled companion          but really I am La Loba

the she-wolf       a low hum in my throat

a terrible power in my yellow eyes          junkies

quiver           haggard & dangerous con men

skirt widely as I pass them moving at a low run

down 110^th     perverts howl & race for cover

I am La Coyote   invisible in the deepening snow

no one touches me   I make it home     everytime.

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Maureen Owen, former editor and chief of Telephone Magazine and Telephone Books, is the author of Erosion’s Pull from Coffee House Press, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize. Her title American Rush: Selected Poems was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and her work AE (Amelia Earhart) was a recipient of the prestigious Before Columbus American Book Award. She has taught at Naropa University, both on campus and in the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program, in Naropa’s Summer Writing Program, and edited Naropa’s on-line zine not enough night through 19 issues. Her  newest title Edges of Water is available from Chax Press. She has most recently had work in Blazing Stadium, Positive Magnets, Posit, and The Denver Quarterly.  Click here for her Poets on the Road Tour with Barbara Henning. She can be found reading her work on the PennSound website.

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 Jackson Pollock, The She Wolf, 1943

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ron Padgett by Siobhán Padgett, 2020

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Morning

Who is here with me?

My mother and an Indian man.

(I am writing this in the past.)

The Indian man is not a man,

but a wooden statue just outside

the limits of wood. My mother

is made of mother. She touches

the wood with her eyes and the eyes

of the statue turn to hers, that is,

become hers. (I am not dreaming.

I haven’t even been born yet.)

There is a cloud in the sky.

My father is inside the cloud,

asleep. When he wakes up, he

will want coffee and a smoke.

My mother will set fire

to the Indian and from deep inside

her body I will tell her

to start the coffee, for even now

I hear my father’s breathing change.

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Ron Padgett’s How Long was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry and his Collected Poems won the LA Times Prize for the best poetry book of 2014 and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His translations include Zone: Selected Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars’ Complete Poems. Padgett has collaborated with artists Joe Brainard, Jim Dine, Alex Katz, George Schneeman, and Trevor Winkfield. Seven of his poems were used in Jim Jarmusch’s film, Paterson. His most recent collection is Big Cabin (Coffee House Press). ["Morning," from Collected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013), is used by permission; © 2013 by Ron Padgett.]

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 (L-R) Jim Jarmusch, Ron Padgett, and Adam Driver attend the New York Special Screening of Amazon Studios and Bleecker Street's "Paterson" at Landmark Sunshine Theater on December 15, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Paul Bruinooge/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)

 

Anne Harding Woodworth: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Looking Homeward

 

Bill Waldron spared my mother and father agony

by teaching me how to drive a stick in a cornfield.

 

Think of it as an H, he said of the lever that came

out of the steering shaft of his two-door Dodge,

 

which my mother called a coupay. We were on the two-rut road

around the field that the tractor took to get in and out

 

at planting and harvest. The grassy hump sometimes hit the underside

and Bill would say, Oh m'god, downshift, girl, easerup,

 

which wasn’t hard as long as I remembered to clutch—

or the car would stutter over itself

 

and on the passenger side, Bill would get thrown around

almost to bumping his nose on the dash.

 

He had a big nose, talked as if he had a cold,

and his eye was on my older sister, who dreamed of boys

 

and going to Africa. I felt pretty important as the vehicle

to her heart, though I knew Bill didn’t have a prayer.

 

My sister married a Rhodes Scholar and went to Uganda

for Uhuru. Bill married the daughter of the town monument maker

 

and took over the business

before he even had a chance to look away.

 

He marked my father’s, then my mother’s grave,

so they won't ever be forgotten in that town I drove out of.

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Anne Harding Woodworth’s seventh book of poetry, Trouble (Turning Point, 2020), includes her persona cycle, “Hannah Alive,” which became a one-woman play in verse that was a finalist at the Adirondack Shakespeare Co. festival in Essex, New York. Harding Woodworth’s poetry, reviews, and essays appear in anthologies and journals, both in print and online, such as Poet Lore, TriQuarterly, Women & Language, Crannog, Gargoyle, and Innisfree Poetry Journal. She is a co-chair of the Poetry Board at the Folger Shakespeare Library and a member of the Board of Governors at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.

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John Yau: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Eve Aschheim

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Things I Should Tell You Before It’s Too Late

 

Princess Sitting Duck isn’t my real name

I am not one of the ones marred

 

By inexplicable outbursts of an obstreperous nature

Most times I am a curtain of conviviality

 

Don’t make friends with my dog

I used to collect ideas until I realized

 

I don’t have any of my own

Learn to shirk your duties

 

With dignity I always say

I used to dress in a squirrel suit

 

and play in the forest

where it flanks the railroad tracks

 

leading to the haunted mines

I never reached the rank of colonel

 

You can hold my hand

as long as you don’t lose it

 

I serve drinks in tall blue glasses

I am never sure which principles are mine

 

Sometimes I get glassy-eyed

and pee on the neighbor’s porch

 

I no longer throw stones at children

I bow whenever I see a high-ranking dignitary

 

stop to tie his shoes

or zip up his fly

 

Princess Sitting duck isn’t my nickname either

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John Yau has published many books of poetry, fiction, and criticism. He has a book of poems, Genghis Chan on Drums, forthcoming from Omnidawn, and a monograph on the Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong, from Lund Humphries (both fall 2021). He is the publisher of Black Square Editions, and his reviews of art and poetry appear regularly in the online magazine Hyperallergic Weekend. He lives in New York City and teaches at Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University). [For more information on, and work by, John Yau, click here.]

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                  John Yau, 1983. Oil on canvas by Robert Berlind

 

 

 

M.L. Smoker: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Borrowing Blue

I’m not the painter here. I leave that to you, but blue
is the color of my father’s camping cup, left tonight
on the Formica counter. This pen I am writing with.
and the beaded moccasins and belt I danced in
before my mother died.
My grandmother had made these for her as a child—
spelling out in blue beads on blue beads
each of our names, our collective history
in an invisible pattern only we would recognize.
Not the blue of Montana sky either,
not that at all, but the pulse of lake water lapping
at your ankles, the temperature rising
as a storm gathers on the plains.
The push and pull of forgiveness.
I’m already thinking of leaving again.
Did I tell you this? How can I speak of this wind,
how it has no color, no sense,
no guilt. It makes me feel even more lonely
than I would ever let on.
I’m guessing you figured this much already.
(We will never stop missing them, will we,
the parent each of us has lost.)
I’ll be honest, I have no idea what I would see
in the paintings if I were to visit you.
I like to think there would be some kind of end
to the blue, a visual end to what is never
adequate: blue flame, blue bead, blue ovary,
blue lung. See how easily we fail?
How can we believe that our secrets are in good hands—
yours resting at the bottom of Flathead Lake, mine held
in a small leather suitcase beneath the stairs.
I have not worn those moccasins or that belt for over
six years now. We should both be ashamed.
Look at us.  Look, as the grey fog
settles into your streets outside, how the near-white
canvases wait. You almost didn’t notice again.
Just like I almost didn’t notice the wind
dying down for evening.
So yes, let’s call it Montana blue, the vanishing point:
Maybe this is the real reason I have never learned
to trust in color. How can you take back
the kind of blue you’ve been dreaming of—trust
it will make something unhappen—
if it is the same blue you’re made of?

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M.L. Smoker is a member of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana.   She currently serves as co-poet laureate for the state of Montana, alongside her longtime friend, Melissa Kwasny. ◙ She holds an MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula, where she was the recipient of the Richard Hugo Fellowship. In 2019 she was recognized as an alumna of the year by the University. ◙ Her first collection of poems, Another Attempt at Rescue, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2005. In 2009 she co-edited an anthology of human rights poetry with Melissa Kwasny entitled, I Go to the Ruined Place. She received a regional Emmy award for her work as a writer/consultant on the PBS documentary Indian Relay. ◙ She served as the Director of Indian Education for the state of Montana for almost ten years. In 2015 she was named the Indian Educator of the Year by the National Indian Education Association and was appointed to the National Advisory Council on Indian Education by President Barack Obama.  She currently works at Education Northwest as a practice expert in Indian Education. [For more on M.L. Smoker, click here.]

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Flathead Lake, Montana

 

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

Geoff Young, Dec 2020. Background-- painting (detail) by Morgan Bulkeley, called 'Facing Heroes.'  Photo by Lillian Anderson.

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His Apprenticeship Never Occurred to Me While I Was out Surfing

 

I want to thank Bob Dylan

Not only for the songs and movies

But for the March 1978 Playboy interview

In which he tells how he got turned on to folk singing

 

He was fifteen years old

He owned an electric guitar, he loved Elvis

And then he heard Odetta’s first record

He learned every song on it

 

Proceeding to Harry Belafonte and The Kingston Trio

Uncovering more & more as he went along

Until finally he was doing nothing

But Carter Family and Jesse Fuller songs

 

At 19, the discovery of Woody Guthrie’s music

Opened up a whole new world

And like a bullet shot from a bow he entered it

Somehow I always figured that Zimmy was born

 

With the complete history of blues and folk

Just taped to his lungs

That when he breathed the songs came naturally to life

With the likes of Leroy Carr, Blind Willie McTell,

 

Leadbelly, Bill Monroe, and Muddy Waters

All harried bluesmen in dark caverns playing for drinks

Living from one clean white shirt in a cardboard suitcase to the next

As if Bob never had to read Kierkegaard or even sheet music

 

Or woodshed for endless teen hours

In order to strum axe and blow harp

At the same time, remembering

All those words, distorting voice for chorus after chorus

 

As if he never had to drive himself nuts

Just to write the songs in the first place

After twenty years, he said, I’m still using

Those same three chords, the ones Odetta played

 

And thanks for admitting it, Bob

I mean about Harry Belafonte

And The Kingston Trio, too

Jesus, we could be brothers!

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Born in 1944, Geoffrey Young grew up in San Diego.  After a Fulbright year in Paris, he worked at La Galerie Sonnabend for a spell.  In 1982 he moved from Berkeley to Great Barrington, Massachusetts.  Over a thirty-year period, his small press, The Figures, published more than 135 books of poetry, art writing, and fiction.  ◙ Recent books of his poetry and drawing include Pivot (2020), and Asides (2020). The trilogy:  Alibi (2019), Sauce (2018), and Sight Unseen (2018) exist in small editions. ◙  For twenty-seven years he directed the Geoffrey Young Gallery, which closed as of Christmas, 2018.   Over the years Young has written catalog essays for more than a dozen artists. [For more on Geoffrey Young, click here.]

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Beth Baruch Joselow: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Blacker Pacific

 

Travel this glass canyon

on your back, on a sled

pulled by dogs blue with fear.

 

As long as the blankets

are thick, and the medicine 

takes, you may arrive at base

 

without having lost it all.

Don’t tumble or drag

a finger through the snow.

 

Even the smallest arch

is a figure of strength, bending

its back to hold the load. That

 

scratch of the runners on glass can’t

come to seem musical, but with luck

it can be polished out

 

until what is reflected,

clear as a bell, is the journey

itself, the tale you’ll tell.

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Beth Baruch Joselow is the author of numerous books and chapbooks, including Excontemporary (Red Hen/ Story Line) and Begin at Once (Chax Press). Her poems have appeared in dozens of magazines and in several anthologies. Joselow has collaborated on artists’ books with visual artists in the U.S. and Ukraine. Born in Baltimore, Joselow spent most of her adult life in Washington DC, where for many years she was on the faculty of the Corcoran College of Art + Design. She now lives in Lewes, Delaware, and works as a psychotherapist. [For a recent interview, click here.]

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Eamonn Wall: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Eamonn Wall. Photo by August Jennewein

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The Grassy Garbage of Inwood

 

If anyone walks through here from out of town

he/she/it will hardly be pleased by grinding

boomboxes, the leaves of twenty autumns,

every brand of beer can, bottle, and cigarette

known to the bodega owners of this great city.

And I agree that Inwood Park is an unholy mess

and would be hard pressed indeed to write the

Fall/Spring/Summer/Winter verse The New Yorker

demands for each pristine season because I don't think

that he/she/it in the dentist's waiting room

in Cincinnati would like to read a nature poem

with a beer can in it. No way. Remember too

The New Yorker pays big money for nature poems.

Nevertheless, we are here as usual in the afternoon

and when we pass the first radio you wiggle your

little ankles to the beat and when I put you on the

grass you pull it as if it were the belly hair of paradise:

you find a Winston butt and show it to me before

diving into the vast anthropology of leaves. Your

mother said to me before we left the house: "Don't

let him near the trash," but what can I do,

a child must learn what his hands are for? Finally

it's time for the stream where a bird is drinking

beside a can of Heineken Holland Beer. You walk

on the stones, crouch, and let the water flow

through your soft fingers and I shout to The New Yorker

and the gardening weeklies that this is the natural world.

I take you away from it in tears, brilliant world of

grass and radios stretching out and bursting, and a

slinking butt lying there for you to notice it.

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Eamonn Wall is a native of Co. Wexford, Ireland, who has lived in the US since 1982: in Wisconsin, New York City, Nebraska, and for the past twenty years in St. Louis. His books of poetry and prose include Junction City: New and Selected Poems 1990-2015 (Salmon Poetry, 2015); From the Sin-e Café to the Black Hills (University of Wisconsin Press. 2000); Writing the Irish West: Ecologies and Traditions (Notre Dame, 2011). Current projects include a new collection of poetry and a new book of essays on contemporary writing. He works in international education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

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Grace Cavalieri: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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The Sound That Haunting Makes

 

I'd like to talk about how the day went, talk as we used to do,

not with singing words, but smaller celebrations gathered until

we noticed the ridges of each other—

the missing parts that no one else could see.

 

I don't mind that you’re away, an understandable

shift—aerodynamic in fact—you loved to fly—but

that you would forget me is impossible.

Did you see this sweater’s lost a button loop?

 

And that excessive fruit makes the basket spill?

Are you laughing at my decorating skill?

Are you assuring me the problem is in the straw,

its weaving, the oversized pear, the lopsided chair?

 

I'd like some decisions from you, yet I understand—

as a passenger of time—you are beyond my reach.

I need some help with perceptions, logistics—

teaching myself to live under the weight of visibility.

 

Since we seem to be of two different geographic climes,

can you direct me closer to you? You, who flew from Japan

to California using only the stars. Should I sit here in the sun

or move my hands, my heart, a little to the left?

 

I understand these are contradictory criteria—

the living and the dead—yet at times, through my devotion

to the past, plus my unreasonable emotions, I feel a

radiant warmth encircling me. Of course, at other times

The cumulative effect of memory left on its own is staggering.

Yesterday, you were solid as stone, rich with detail, revolving around me,

and other days like this one, I'm sure you understand,

It's as if it never happened.

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Grace Cavalieri is Maryland's tenth poet laureate. She founded "The Poet and the Poem" for public radio, now from the Library of Congress, celebrating 44 years on-air. Her latest books are Showboat (2019), which centers on her 25 years as a Navy wife, and What The Psychic Said (2020, both books from Goss 183 Pub.). Her latest play is "Quilting The Sun," Theater for the New City, NYC, 2019. She was married for 60 years to the late sculptor, Kenneth Flynn. They had four children. Grace lives in Annapolis, Maryland.

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                Kenneth Flynn with one of his sculptures

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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News of the Dead Pope

 

Out of a window musical notes float in single file

past the windbreak of sage-colored trees.

 

The notes are black with mourning. Black birds

hang in the stillness over the courthouses

and other sacred buildings.

 

At the lake a child notices the sound as if it were coming from the ground,

out of a strange nautical cellar nearby.

 

The news travels quickly on such a clear day,

through the clouds shaped like Valkyries,

the clouds swinging swords.

 

On the child’s screened-in porch a radio lights up.

It is old and made of wood;

nevertheless it rises to the occasion.

 

The child, who heard everything

including the bankers sobbing in the chapel across the lake,

 

thought he might play saxophone when he grew up.

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Matthew Rohrer is the author of ten books of poems, most recently The Sky Contains the Plans, published by Wave Books. His book-length poem The Others won the 2017 Believer Book Award. His book A Green Light was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. “News of the Dead Pope” is from his first book, A Hummock in the Malookas, which won the National Poetry Series and was published by W.W. Norton in 1995. He attended universities in Ann Arbor, Dublin, and Iowa City, and then moved to Brooklyn, and that is where you will find him from now on. [For more information on, and poems by, Matt Rohrer, click here.]

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30th Anniversary of the Death of Tim Dlugos [by Terence Winch]

It was thirty years ago today that Tim Dlugos died at age forty of AIDS. Tim was a poet of enormous talent and creative energy. He was beloved by many, myself included. His warmth, humor, and congeniality made him very easy to like. When his friend David Trinidad brought out Tim's collected poems (A Fast Life) in 2001, I was impressed by how much great work Tim had produced in his short life. Like so many others, I still miss him and, as the poem below demonstrates, still dream about him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Next Best Thing

 

I am having lunch in the humongous

cafeteria at my workplace. I’m not sure

what my job is, but the cafeteria is packed.

I scan the room and see that my best friend,

Michael David Lally, is sitting alone ten or so

tables across from me.  So I go to join him.

 

But just as I start heading his way, he bolts up

from his chair and scoots off to another table

where Conway Twitty is also having lunch.

Conway is alone and looks like a successful

businessman. He has glasses and wears a suit.

I can’t imagine why he is in our cafeteria,

but he and Michael seem to be in an instant

intense conversation and I don’t feel that I should

interrupt them. Their faces are only an inch apart.

 

Then I am in front of the Childe Harold, a great

bar in Dupont Circle that went out of business

some time back. I’m sitting on the little brick

wall in front waiting for Tim Dlugos. We’re

having lunch together. I haven’t seen him since

he died and am hoping I won’t have trouble

recognizing him. But along he comes, looking

older but good. He has very long hair, mostly gray,

and he’s clutching a briefcase from which papers

seem to be tumbling. It’s so good to see him again.

 

Bernard Welt happens along. I want to invite him

to join us for lunch, but I also feel selfish about

seeing Tim. We have so much to catch up on.

So I don’t invite Bernie, and feel a little guilty about it.

I am trying to call him Bernard rather than Bernie,

just as I want people to call me Terence rather

than Terry, but I ask him if he would mind if

I started calling him “Bernardie” instead.

Tim thinks that’s funny. Then we part ways.

11/28/2020

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Here is a Tim Dlugos post I wrote for this site in 2008. There's a good bit of information online about Tim, including sites that offer examples of his work. This DC site is especially good. Tim's greatest poem is, arguably, "G-9," which can be found here. 

 

 

Meg Kearney: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

photo by Gabriel Parker

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George Says Stop Writing About Yourself

(New York, December 2001)

 

This one’s for George, who urged take off those

shit-kicker boots, leave your husband wrapped

in the scroll of last night’s sheets, forget your mother

sipping a cigarette, a Dugan’s Dew—forget

your other mother, your other father, too,

 

and the one you last saw in a coffin not looking

at all like himself, so much not-him you couldn’t

bear be near that body. Forget your first kiss—

how it sounded like peanut butter, tasted like

a train. Stop talking about the Alabama Slammers

 

and four Blue Whales or those men you drove crazy

with your push-him, pull-him love. And don’t speak

of babies, about not having them or the ugly one

who’s so much a part of your nights she must be

real, her mongrel face breaking into sadness.

 

Don’t talk about holding her above your head,

calling her Sweet Girl, Mama’s Girl—how she almost

smiles. Just for George, this poem looks beyond

Sea Monkeys and that first Louisville Slugger.

It opens the window to the stench, three months

 

now of that smell, man-made, human, wafting

from downtown. This poem is in the street,

where war does its thing. See, there’s a man

walking up Broadway: his shoes, suit, eyelashes,

lips covered with dust that used to be a building.

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In June 2021, The Word Works Press will publish Meg Kearney’s All Morning the Crows, winner of the 2020 Washington Prize for poetry. Meg is also author of An Unkindness of Ravens and Home By Now, winner of the PEN New England L.L. Winship Award; a heroic crown, The Ice Storm, published as chapbook in 2020; and three verse novels for teens. Her award-winning picture book, Trouper, is illustrated by E.B. Lewis. Meg’s poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s “A Writer’s Almanac” and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry” series, and included in the 2017 Best American Poetry anthology (Natasha Tretheway, guest editor). She lives in New Hampshire and directs the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program in Massachusetts.

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Charles Bernstein: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On Election Day

 

I hear democracy weep, on election day.

The streets are filled with brokered promise, on election day.

The miscreant’s vote the same as saint’s, on election day.

The dead unleash their fury, on election day.

My brother crushed in sorrow, on election day.

The sister does her washing, on election day.

Slowly, I approach the voices dark, on election day.

The men prepare for dying, on election day.

The morning hush defends its brood, on election day.

So still, so kindly faltering, on election day.

On election day, the cats take tea with the marmoset.

On election day, the mother refuses her milk.

On election day, the frogs croak so fiercely you would think that Mars had fallen into Earth.

On election day, the iron man meets her frozen gasp.

The air is putrid, red, interpolating, quixotic, torpid, vulnerable, on election day.

Your eyes slide, on election day.

Still the mourners mourn, the weepers wept, the children sleep alone in bed, on election day.

No doubt a comet came to see me, fiery and irreconciled, torrid, strummed, on election day.

On election day, the trespass of the fatuous alarm and ignominious aspiration fells the

       golden leap to girdled crest. 

The tyrant becomes prince, on election day.

Neither friend nor foe, fear nor fate, on election day.

The liar lies with the lamb, on election day.

The last shall be the first and first sent to the back of the line, on election day.

The beggar made a king, on election day.

“Let him who is without my poems be assassinated!” on election day.

Let he who has not sinned, let him sin, on election day.

The ghosts wear suits, on election day.

On election day, sulfur smells like beer.

On election day, the minister quakes in fear.

On election day, the Pole and the Jew dance the foxtrot.

On election day, the shoe does not fit the foot, the bullet misfires in its pistol, the

        hungry waiter reels before steadying himself on facts.

The grid does not gird the fiddler, on election day.

Galoshes and tears, on election day.

The sperm cannot find the egg, on election day.

The drum beat becomes bird song, on election day.

I feel like a nightmare is ending but can’t wake up, on election day.

 

(November 4, 2008)

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Charles Bernstein is the author of Near/Miss and Pitch of Poetry. ROOF recently published The Course, a collaboration with Ted Greenwald. University of New Mexico Press has published a facsimile reprint L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, a volume of related letters, as well as the late 1970s collaboration Legend. He lives in Brooklyn.  [For more information on, and poems by, Charles Bernstein, see the Poetry Foundation.]

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Sandra Beasley: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Vocation

 

For six months I dealt Baccarat in a casino.

For six months I played Brahms in a mall.

For six months I arranged museum dioramas;

my hands were too small for the Paleolithic

and when they reassigned me to lichens, I quit.

I type ninety-one words per minute, all of them

Help. Yes, I speak Dewey Decimal.

I speak Russian, Latin, a smattering of Tlingit.

I can balance seven dinner plates on my arm.

All I want to do is sit on a veranda while

a hard rain falls around me. I'll file your 1099s.

I'll make love to strangers of your choice.

I'll do whatever you want, as long as I can do it

on that veranda. If it calls you, it's your calling,

right? Once I asked a broker what he loved

about his job, and he said Making a killing.

Once I asked a serial killer what made him

get up in the morning, and he said The people.

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Sandra Beasley is the author of Made to Explode (forthcoming February 2021); Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize; and Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir. She also edited Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Washington, D.C. ["Vocation" is from I Was the Jukebox: Poems. Copyright © 2010 by Sandra Beasley.]

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Ahmos Zu-Bolton: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ravis

 

My brother turns his life insideout,

from a jail in Leesville,

from a half-way house in Lake Charles,

from a slave-quarter in DeRidder.

He is prisoner of his own rage,

trapped behind the swollen bars

of some lingering chains

and some sudden cage.

 

I speak to him from miles away,

from the cell next door and

lightyears away,

from motherlands and the fertile earth

our Mississippi father plowed:

 

I am trying to be the lawyer he needs,

the father who died fighting for his son,

the big brother with muscles in his miles,

the preacher with his pitiful prayers,

 

I am trying to give him

the key to the cage, the hammer

to break the chains, the plot

the escape, the magic, the ju-ju

the tunnel under the demon walls,

the North Star to follow,

 

I climb inside all his sins,

find them in the flesh of this poem,

do bloody battle with them,

rip them apart like a white man's curse,

become their bitter judge,

their merciful jury,

their solemn executioner,

 

I leave them on the open floor

of his cell, spread out like the pages

of a testament, shadowboxing him

like a mirror,

 

I can forgive them

those far-away long-ago sins,

but I can't erase them,

for they have their own afterlife,

their own ghost pulsating

on the hot breath where

my brother's frustrated bloodline boils...

 

yet no loving offering

from my elderly black hand

can reverse his youthful middle passage

as he sits

on the frontporch of his betrayed generation,

sent to his silent room

like a spoiled boychild,

where he conjures secret maps

for whatever freedoms

he chose to rock his dusty soul with.

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I remember Ahmos Zu-Bolton II as a charismatic and gifted poet. He occasionally took part in the Mass Transit readings in Washington DC's Dupont Circle in the early 1970s, which was when I met him. A poet, playwright, Vietnam War veteran, and tireless promoter of African-American writers, Zu-Bolton was born on 21 October 1935 in Mississippi and grew up in Louisiana. He founded Hoo-Doo, a magazine devoted to African-American activism and arts, and, with E. Ethelbert Miller, edited the 1975 anthology Synergy D.C. His poetry collections include A Niggered Amen (1975), Ain’t No Spring Chicken (1998), and 1946 (2002). He died  at age 69 on 8 March 2005, at Howard University Medical Center in Washington, D.C.  See Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s excellent post on Zu-Bolton; Doug Lang’s 2007 blog on Zu-Bolton offers links to more information, plus brief remembrances by Michael Lally and Beth Joselow; see also Grace Cavalieri’s perceptive essay on Zu-Bolton’s work in Beltway Poetry Quarterly.  

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Joan Retallack: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

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The Magic Rule of 9

 

Your sonic suit will never be a perfect fit. You’ll learn to

get by. Just don’t assume all art is all about victory over

death all the time. Not to say the meantime isn’t as good

a time as any to enjoy not being dead. In the swell of

many a meantime, many have diverted themselves with

great success. Hence civilizations’ discontents and

greatest hits. Take for instance the magic rule of nine.

That the sums of all numbers within the sums of all

multiplicands of 9, up to and including 9, equal 9:

1x9=9, 9=9; 2x9=18, 1+8=9; 3x9=27, 2+7=9; etc.

This is numerically melodious (bird sings in tree) to the

species that longs for more than a first glance affords.

Someone will say, If you really think this is magic, you

don’t properly understand the decimal system (bird

falls out of tree). Who among us doesn’t long for magic.

Who among us truly understands the decimal system.

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Joan Retallack's BOSCH'D (Fables, Moral Tales & Other Awkward Constructions), in which this poem appears, came out from Litmus Press on April Fools Day, 2020. She feels it's impossible to dispute the aptness of that date given local and global circumstances at the time. Retallack is the author of The Poethical Wager (University of California Press) and Procedural Elegies—Western Civ Cont'd (Roof Books) among many other volumes of poetry and essays. Her Gertrude Stein: Selections (California) and conversations with John Cage (MUSICAGE, Wesleyan) examine the humor and gravitas of idiosyncratic aesthetics that became, respectively, so widely influential. Prior to BOSCH'D, Litmus Press published Retallack’s The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times— 2018 textual/visual continuation of an event she organized at MoMA in collaboration with Adam Pendleton. In all her work, Retallack combines socio-political inquiry with linguistic, visual, performative experiments in what she considers "poethical wagers.” 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Shibboleth

 

One didn’t know the name of Tarzan’s monkey.

Another couldn’t strip the cellophane

From a G.I.’s pack of cigarettes.

By such minutiae were the infiltrators detected.

 

By the second week of battle

We’d become obsessed with trivia.

At a sentry point, at midnight, in the rain,

An ignorance of baseball could be lethal.

 

The morning of the first snowfall, I was shaving,

Staring into a mirror nailed to a tree,

Intoning the Christian names of the Andrews Sisters.

“Maxine, Laverne, Patty.”

 

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Michael Donaghy was born in the Bronx to Irish immigrant parents. In his thirties, he settled in the UK, where he became a well-known and highly regarded poet. Also an accomplished flute and whistle player, he was an active part of London’s traditional Irish music scene. His sudden death at age 50 was a great loss to both the literary and traditional music communities. Fintan O’Toole’s piece for the Irish Times examines Donaghy’s “elastic identity.” Donaghy’s wife, Maddy Paxman, published a book in 2014 about their life together.  See also The Guardian and the Poetry Foundation for more on Donaghy's life and work. See the Session for information on his life in Irish music. To hear him play, see this clip:

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