The Best American Poetry

Kathleen O’Toole: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Those Reels

 

skip from Billy's accordion

skim the polished floorboards ’til

they land up under your heels

 

then swell into a pulse

that tips the scales of reticence

holding you fast.

 

Into a circle of arms

now twining, now reaching by,

the notes come skittering

 

alive in the glistening of flushed

faces, arched along flexed

calf muscles, legs

 

that spring against the gravity

of measured days. So out of place

in the city, these tunes

 

when they spill out

over the urgent bass

of sidewalk rap, above

 

the din of tin cans

and scrap in a pushcart, from the window

of a smoky bar—a stream

 

of flute, soft and absurd

as sheep would be, grazing in Bayview Park.

Yet there's more beneath

 

this breath. Under

the taut-stringed fiddle's a fire: grief

pressed to oil, to wine

 

to a dance

on the exile's grave.

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Kathleen O’Toole is the author of four poetry collections, most recently This Far (Paraclete Press, 2019). Her poems have received numerous honors and prizes, and have appeared in such publications as  America, Christian Century, Notre Dame Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Spiritus. The former Poet Laureate of Takoma Park, Maryland, O’Toole is a longtime community organizer who finds joy in birding, biking, sailing the Chesapeake, and in Irish music and dancing.

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                                                                     Tomas O'Maoldomhnaigh, Fleadh Ceili Ennis, 2018.

 

Jesse Nathan: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Scouts

 

There was a boy even stranger than I

who’d call me in the evening

to see if I’d come to Scouts. Something in me

hesitated. Then one morning

 

during eighth grade English we got hall passes

and did it in a stall in the bathroom

taking turns over the john,

as thrilling as clumsy.

 

We kept our secret.

But he came to seem a target

around that one-light town. The cut of his hair

or the way he laughed, or maybe

 

his jittery hunched-up walk.

For a while he went on calling me

to see if I’d go with him to Scouts.

Instead I learned: treat him low

 

or be treated so myself.

Once in Art while the others snickered

I planted tacks across his chair,

and he sat down and shot up so quick

 

the chair sprang backwards, a few silver tacks

still sticking in his rear, his roar

like the shining in the corners of his eyes,

snarling as he came at me with scissors,

 

and only the teacher’s lightning maneuver

kept me from my due.

After that he looked at me, if at all, like the traitor

I was. Later that year his dad moved him

 

to a Christian school where they teach

the planet was made in seven actual days

and dinosaur bones got planted by God

to amuse geologists and children.

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Jesse Nathan was raised in northern California and rural Kansas. He was a founding editor of the McSweeney's Poetry Series, and now teaches literature in the English Department at UC Berkeley. His poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, and other magazines, and he's been a recipient of fellowships from the Arts Research Center and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He lives in Oakland.

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                                  Boy Scouts at a swimming class at Boy Scout Camp in Florence, Alabama. Photograph, July 1942

Diana Cao: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Old Dogs (Remember)

 

You’ve heard the saying. The first day at home,

snub-nosed and sweet, house-trained but otherwise

unbroken, our rescue ignored every trick

in the book—classic commands: sit, stay,

be good, I begged. But as the wisdom goes:

At some point, learning comes too late. The sun

sinks on the dull glare of what used to cut,

bitter and sweet and just out of reach

of memory. Redemption is for those 

who remember, and my mother slaps the glasses

off my father’s face, laughing, her sharp edges

blunted into the barking violence of a bully.

 

Be good holds no water when the night falls,

dripping with the echo of another 

she can’t recall. The sound of time running out

sounds a lot like the word they keep asking her, 

sounds like something she can almost string

together. Sounds, a little bit, like surrender.

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Diana Cao is a writer and JD candidate at Harvard Law School, whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, The Georgia Review, 32 Poems, and elsewhere. She has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and International Literary Seminars, and her writing has been nominated for a PEN/Robert J. Dau Award and Best New Poets. She is a winner of Nimrod International's 2023 Neruda Prize, and she likes night swims, talking to citrus, and the gloaming.

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                                                        No Escape from Within, photo by Tony Luciani of his mother

 

"Saving Face" [by Terence Winch]

I waited too long. Everything I did was wrong.
I didn't know how to make sense of time.
I have no idea where I was when Kennedy was shot.
What you didn't see is what you got.

So I came down here to be alone with the phone.
I was sick to my stomach, waiting for your call.
I used to drink red wine and eat cheese in cheap hotels.
Bite off more than you can chew, then swallow it.

Everyone waves goodbye to me, even though
I have no plans to go. I am waiting for the snow.
I hate the spring. I don't want anything to grow.
The apple falls far from the tree.

We are told that light is too far away to see.
You cannot hide any more in the refrigerator.
The neighbors will never learn their lesson in the dark.
People in glass houses continuously walk around in circles.

So fare-thee-well, valiant comrades of the revolution.
We all showed up for the rally that night with our guitars
and sang a Joan Baez song about rivers and stars.
Give a man a fish that will last forever.

2011

R.T. Smith: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Doc Watson on the Cicada Concert

 

They seem to think they have something to say,

those locusts high in your circle of pines.

I wish they’d get tired of tuning and play.

 

I can’t tell if it’s murder or chivaree.

You know it’s mountain.  Listen at the whine.

They seem to think they have something to say.

 

You think they’d hurry; they live about a day

to marry and leave a hollow shell behind.

I wish they’d get tired of tuning and play

 

“Shady Grove,” “Omie Wise,” “Gypsy Davy,”

anything with blue chords and a sober shine.

They seem to think they have something to say

 

About life’s sweet desperation.  The way

They hover, praying whilst they die and dine.

I wish they’d get tired of tuning and play

 

a ghost song or ballad.  If you ask me,

an old time melody’s not so hard to find.

They seem to think they have something to say.

I wish they’d get tired of tuning and play.

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R.T. Smith has lived in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Washington, D.C. He has taught writing and literature at Washington and Lee, Auburn, and VMI. Smith has edited the journals Cold Mountain Review, Southern Humanities Review, and Shenandoah.  His twenty books of poetry include Trespasser, Messenger, and Brightwood (all from LSU), and Outlaw Style (Arkansas); his selected poems, In the Night Orchard, is published by Texas Review Press. Smith’s newest book of poetry is Summoning Shades, the Adrienne Bond Prize Winner for 2019. He has received the Governor’s Award for the Arts in both Alabama and Virginia.  A Parkinson’s patient, Smith lives on Timber Ridge in Rockbridge County, Virginia, with his wife, the novelist Sarah Kennedy, and their bluetick hound Gypsy.  He can be contacted at [email protected].      [Author photo by Sarah Kennedy.]

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             Chivaree Wedding (artist unknown). The wedding night is one of the most sacred events of a marriage, but for some communities, it was a chance to bang pots and pans outside the newlyweds’ chamber. This mock serenade is sometimes spelled shivaree.

Brandy Nālani McDougall: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On Cooking Captain Cook

 

If you ask the blonde-haired concierge

at the Grand Kīhei, he will tell you

        that we ate him whole,

        strung his white meat on a stick,

        filled his mouth with apples,

        and slow-roasted him over fire.

 

The sunburned vendor selling t-shirts

in Lāhaina will say we ate him, too,

but only certain parts:           

        the head, heart, hands

        wrapped in a kind of spinach

        and held over hot lava.

 

The owner of the Hoola-Hoola Bar

and Grill will say we only ate him

for lack of fine cuisine,

        rubbed his skin with sea salt

        then boiled him in coconut milk

        and served him on a bed of yams.

 

My anthropology professor, long researching

ancient cultures, will offer explanations

from his latest book:

        The white-skinned men seemed gods

        to those without metal or written words.

        by eating him they meant to become him.

 

But if you ask my tūtū

while she waters her orchids and protea

she will invite you in

to eat, to eat.

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Brandy Nālani McDougall is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Hawaiʻi, Maui, and Kauaʻi lineages) poet raised on the slopes of Haleakalā on Maui. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon and a PhD in English from the University of Hawaiʻi. Brandy Nālani McDougall was recently selected as the Hawaiʻi State Poet Laureate.

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   Three Hawaiian women and one Hawaiian man sitting on the ground eating taro, with four bowls in front of them. Late 19th century lithograph.

Simon Schuchat: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Baltimore Sun

 

there’s a passage in Mencken’s diaries—

now, I think Mencken’s a great writer—

so don’t take this wrong—

anyway, he describes a

somewhat large

immigrant Jewish family

down the street

and how they inspire

in him

powerful feelings of disgust

 

and the thing is

my great-grandfather lived on that street

in Baltimore

with all his sons and some of their wives

we have the census records

we know how many were employed,

and I know from my uncle

how proud they were

to have Mencken as a neighbor

 

but I guess

since he called his essays

Prejudices

there’s no call to be surprised

and anyway there could have been other Jews on the street

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Simon Schuchat has lived in Chicago, New York, Shanghai, Tokyo, Beijing, and Moscow, to name a few.  His translations of Chinese and Russian prose and poetry have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, as has his own poetry, which has also been published in four collections. According to Kathy Acker, “his poetry doesn’t tell you stuff: it is consciousness.” Ted Berrigan said he was “the opposite of petty, which is grand.”  Soviet Texts, his translations of Moscow conceptualist poet Dmitri Prigov, came out in 2020 from Ugly Duckling Presse. The Centos of Simon Schuchat is due out from Edge Books in fall 2023.  [Baltimore Sun” originally appeared in the Beltway Poetry Quarterly; author photo by Christine Chen.]

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                A tailor shop on Lloyd Street, c. 1908. Gift of Caroline H. Bernstein and Helen K. Silverberg, Jewish Museum of Maryland

"Last Song" [by Terence Winch]

Last Song

 

Mother! Where have you been? Your
children are drinking beer and playing
the piano. Every single thing you ever
owned has long ago disappeared. We’re
not even sure when exactly you were born
or what ship you came here on.

Sweet hope, show me the way
out of this mess. I keep talking to people
who can’t remember who they are.

And then there’s this feeling of every
thing being just out of reach or not quite
audible. I couldn’t remember John Prine’s
name this morning on the way to the Safeway
listening to him in the car singing
“Remember Me When the Candlelights 
Are Gleaming” with Kathy Mattea.

His last song, “I Remember Everything”—
so frail and beautiful, it moves you to tears.

I remember now where
all of you have gone.
Floating in the air
from song to song.

—Terence Winch

from Glimpse (#56, Spring 2023)

Drawing of Terence Winch by Joe Giordano in Baltimore, 20 Sept 2023.

Valencia Robin: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Milwaukee, 1968

Say it loud! I’m black and I’m proud

                                                —James Brown

I was there the day black stopped

being the worst thing you could call somebody.

Right on 16^th Street between Friebrantz

and Olive. The day before, the exact same word

could get you beat up or spanked, but that morning

we turned on the radio and it was as if the sun had come out

of the closet, as if the moon was burning her underwear.

And we didn’t just stand around and watch

either. Me, Michael, Sherrie, David,

and Theresa—we marched up and down the street

singing ourselves into brand new people,

doing our part to free the nation.

And when the street lights came on, I marched

right up the stairs to our second floor flat

still singing loud and proud, praying my mother

had heard we weren’t colored anymore, kind of worried

and yet no turning back, marching around and around

the kitchen table, was not going to be moved,

was like a tree planted by Lake Michigan,

finally peeking over at my mother washing dishes,

spying her trying not to laugh

and wonder who I’d be if she’d done the opposite,

if by the following week we weren’t both wearing afros.

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Valencia Robin is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes poetry and painting. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, her debut poetry collection, Ridiculous Light, won Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and was named one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of 2019. She holds an MFA in Art & Design from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia. She currently lives and teaches in Johnson City, Tennessee.

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                             Valencia Robin, Memory is a Strange Thing, 36 X 36, acrylic and pencil on canvas.

Jericho Brown: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Foreday in the Morning

 

My mother grew morning glories that spilled onto the walkway toward her porch

Because she was a woman with land who showed as much by giving it color.

She told me I could have whatever I worked for. That means she was an American.

But she’d say it was because she believed

In God. I am ashamed of America

And confounded by God. I thank God for my citizenship in spite

Of the timer set on my life to write

These words: I love my mother. I love black women

Who plant flowers as sheepish as their sons. By the time the blooms

Unfurl themselves for a few hours of light, the women who tend them

Are already at work. Blue. I’ll never know who started the lie that we are lazy,

But I’d love to wake that bastard up

At foreday in the morning, toss him in a truck, and drive him under God

Past every bus stop in America to see all those black folk

Waiting to go work for whatever they want. A house? A boy

To keep the lawn cut? Some color in the yard? My God, we leave things green.

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Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in Buzzfeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies.

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                                          Ladies on the Town, Bus Stop In Chinatown, Washington, DC. Photo by Gerald L. Campbell

Paula Bohince: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Trespass

 

Father’s paroled during the drought

of seventy-eight only to vanish again, this time

taking me with him—

stealing into Levi’s pasture for cow skeletons,

sun-stripped and patiently gleaming

between the crushed iris.

 

Above and around us, the electric fence

hums like God—

a magnification of the dreaming gnats we awakened

discovering the lode of bones.

 

Collecting skull, rib, sternum, spine, the dead

rise, and we forget to be afraid,

thinking only of profit, new lives:

 

bird earrings from breastbone, the knife-stroke

of feather, fish candlesticks

from femur, long and tapered as sabers.

 

Escaping through acres where the living cattle

study us, an ache

in language-less throats, we struggle

to carry home all we can hold, glancing heavenward

with knowing, with eyes growing large

all over our bodies.

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Paula Bohince is the author of three poetry collections, all from Sarabande, most recently Swallows and Waves.  She was the guest editor of Best New Poets 2022 and an Artist in Residence at Green Box in Colorado in 2023.  She lives in Pennsylvania. [author photo by Patrick Mullen]

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                               Sidney Nolan (Australian, 1917-1992), Untitled (cow carcass and cow skull), 1952, Archival inkjet print

Wyeth Thomas: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Heir of All Knowing Is Forgetting

 

I once dreamt that God

was a girl in a flour sack dress

rolling clay between Her tiny

fingers. She started easy making

snakes, fish, moonbeams,

the Ziggurat of Ur; graduated

quickly to mule deer, beargrass,

the Basílica de la Sagrada

Família; and wept at the beauty

of Her loveliest creations:

quasars, Yosemite, democracy,

Paul Newman. Five trillion years

later, lying in Her great hammock,

thinking of all the old colors

and voices, She forgot

the word “molasses.” It scratched

like wool at the tip of Her

enormous, old tongue. “Mollusk,

mollycoddle, moldering, molest?!”

It chafed at Her all afternoon

so that She could not enjoy

the way the eucalyptus trees

knuckled the darkening heavens

or the way the fog rolled in from

the bay, slow as...as...as...

She could not say.

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Wyeth Thomas is a PhD candidate in English and Creative Writing at the University of Utah. His most recent work appears in Western Humanities Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Best New Poets 2022. He currently lives in Salt Lake City.

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                                                                  Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, Barcelona 

 

Ama Codjoe: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Deer

 

Walking alone in a forest, I came upon

a deer—this was not a vision.

It faced me, on its four thin legs,

unmoved as a cave painting

brushed by light. I made myself still.

I spoke to it, softly. I can’t remember

what I said. The deer regarded me as a god would,

eased by my astonishment.

Then, slowly, I moved closer, and the deer

did not run. By now, you know it was love

I walked toward, not the deer, but

what hung in the space between us. I know

it was love because, as I held

my breath, the deer took

a few steps toward me before

bounding into the camouflage

of branches and leaves.

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Ama Codjoe is the author of Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022), finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. She has been awarded support from Bogliasco, Cave Canem, Robert Rauschenberg, and Saltonstall foundations as well as from Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, Hawthornden, MacDowell, and the Amy Clampitt Residency. Her poems have twice appeared in the Best American Poetry series. Among other honors, Codjoe has received fellowships from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York State Council/New York Foundation of the Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. Codjoe is the 2023 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim Museum. She is the winner of a 2023 Whiting Award.  [Author photo by Jamie Harmon. “The Deer” first appeared in the New York Review of Books.]

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                                                               Neolithic cave painting in Spain's Penáguila region.

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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A Dictator Walks into a Bar

In the hotel lobby, leaning against a marble column
from when the Romans ruled, I sip my vodka as gunfire
night and day ricochets in celebration

 

punctuating someone's wedding or a moment in
someone's mood in which blowing
off a clip into the air fights off boredom:

 

in this cellphone video that's more slashes of light,
jiggle and jag than a stable point of view,
I watch them drag him from muck out

 

of a culvert, his kufi knocked askew,
heavy body thrown across a Toyota battle wagon
where an electrical engineer turned militia man,

 

who reminds me of my father, mild, unshowy, studiously
polite, doesn't smile, frown, as he
watches himself slapping, in the footage that he's

 

showing me, the Brother Leader, great Murshid,
the Guide—doesn't comment, doesn't shy away
from my oh so fine-tuned sensitivities

 

quivering on the brink, maybe a little drunk, my cloak of objectivity
already tattering into rags—his lumps, welts
not quite bleeding—unable to look away,

 

am I hoping to see blood? It isn't every day that a dictator writhes under
your heel—the one powerful enough to say
Those who do not love me do not deserve to live—

 

as if he himself were the soul in the body politic and we
were just an afterthought, accessory
to his glory, the merest janitors to his trash, or maybe

 

just the trash itself, all of us human trash
waiting to be burned. But now, it's our turn,
and we've got him where we want him—

 

his livid puffy face, its blankness unto death
like slopped over paint running down the can—
his nose by now smashed in so his mouth

 

hangs open to the blahness of desert hardpan cliffs shadowing
tank tracks back into the Nafusa Mountains
where just an hour ago we were driving and he was worrying

 

about load-shedding and high-voltage grids,
the tragedy of no infrastructure—while I was daydreaming
of vodka and peeling happy hour shrimp

 

glinting like armor plate—finally, I've seen enough; but as I
turn to give him back his phone he's moved down
the bar and seems, head bowed, to be

 

peering into his drink with that intimate anticipation
that could signal a joke or a prayer speeding
to its punchline, only it's the new kind

 

of humor, the new kind of prayer,
in which the jokes aren't funny and prayers don't deliver,
and whether you're praying or laughing, it's all on you.

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Tom Sleigh is the author of eleven books of poetry including winner of the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize The King’s Touch (Graywolf Press, 2022), House of Fact, House of Ruin (Graywolf Press, 2018), Station Zed (Graywolf Press, 2015), and Army Cats (Graywolf Press, 2011). His most recent book of essays, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees (Graywolf Press, 2018) recounts his time as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, NEA grant recipient, and winner of numerous awards including the Kingsley Tufts Award, Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, John Updike Award and Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, Raritan, The Common and many other magazines. He is a Distinguished Professor in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, NY.  [Author photo by Annette Hornischer.]

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                                                                                       Wall painting, Tripoli, Libya

Karla Cordero: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Tiburón

once, as a child, my parents & a credit card bought a pool table

& i found myself in the backyard with clumsy hands & growing breasts— 

 

i claimed corner pocket until i could master sinking an eight ball 

& by fifteen the neighborhood kids knew of the mexican girl 

 

named Tiburón— the shark who’d bite at the sound of a pool stick 

chalked into strategy in exchange for walmart gift cards.

 

& i recall a time when a boy who thought himself a man 

challenged me to a game of strip pool.

 

i thanked the sky for the cold desert night, for cloaking my body 

with layers. i emptied the table of its striped billiards &

 

the boy who thought himself a man stripped down to a full moon,

cupped his manhood & i walked away 

 

with his shit-talk in my pocket. years later, in college, my roommate

asked me to accompany her to the local pub.

 

the bar sticky in old beer & jukebox, we took our seat on broken stools, 

rickety when our legs crossed themselves for good balance.

 

the room full of tall men hovered over the pool table, their hands 

choking the necks of IPA’s. i stacked a tower of quarters on the table.

stared down a white man covered in mermaid tattoos 

trapped in the ocean of his arm.

i’ll play for 5 bucks & a few smokes. i break the table & his jaw 

snaps back at the reckless dance. four beers later i sweep 

a twenty dollar bill & american spirits. i walked into the alley, 

smoked my winnings & exchanged my dollar bills for a california burrito. 

 

my mouth smothered in salsa verde. i laughed, laughed at the history 

of men who dare doubt the feral animal that blazes in this blood.

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Karla Cordero is a Chicana poet, educator, and a 2021 California Arts Council Established Artist Fellow. Her poetry collection, How To Pull Apart The Earth, is a San Diego Book Award winner and finalist for the International Latino Book Awards. Karla’s work has appeared on NPR, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock, The Oprah Magazine, PANK, The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 4 LatiNext Anthology, among other publications. She is the Executive Director for the non-profit art organization Glassless Minds and Professor at MiraCosta College and San Diego City College. Follow her @karlaflaka13 on Instagram or visit her website.

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                                                                   Charles Edouard Boutibonne, Ladies Playing Billiards, 1869

 

Ray Gonzalez: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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One El Paso, Two El Paso

 

Awake in the desert to the sound of calling.

Must be the mountain, I thought.

 

The violent border, I assumed, though the boundary

line between the living and the dead was erased years ago.

 

Awake in the sand, I feared, old shoes decorated with

razor wire, a heaven of light on the peaks.

 

Must be time to get up, I assumed. Parked outside,

Border Patrol vehicles, I had to choose.

 

Awake to follow immigration shadows vanishing inside

American walls, river drownings counted as they cross,

 

Maria Salinas' body dragged out, her mud costume

pasted with plastic bottles and crushed beer cans,

 

black water flowing to bless her in her sleep.

Must be the roar of illegal death, I decided,

 

a way out of the current, though satellite maps never

show the brown veins of the concrete channel.

 

Awake in the arroyo of a mushroom cloud, I choke,

1945 explosion in the sand, eternal radioactive wind,

 

the end of one war mutating the border into another

that also requires fatal skills of young men because few

 

dream the atomic bomb gave birth in the Jornado,

historic trail behind the mountain realigned, then cut

 

off from El Paso, the town surrounded with barbed

wire, the new century kissing car bombs, drug cartels,

 

massacres across the river, hundreds shot in ambushes

and neighborhood soccer games that always score.

 

Wake up, I thought, look south to the last cathedral

in Juarez before its exploding bricks hurtle this way.

 

Make the sign of the cross, open your eyes to one town,

two cities, five centuries of praying in the beautiful dust.

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Ray Gonzalez is the author of 16 books of poetry, including Suggest Paradise (University of New Mexico Press). He is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

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   Judithe Hernández (U.S., b. 1948), La Santa Desconocida de la serie Juárez / The Unknown Saint from the Juarez series, 2017. Pastel on paper 

Cindy Hochman: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Inner Life (With Sabotage)

 

This poem will be intentionally vague.

Candlewicks flicker. Chemicals misfire. Crossed wires refuse to untangle.

Sometimes I slip into something less comfortable.

Carousel horses and streetlights make me weep deeply.

My handsome father’s death has turned into stilted breath.

My benevolent brother’s death is still caught in my throat.

Everyone gives me flowers to fill the fissure between limbs and loss.

And I bury them under layers of, what? Nothing but my own undoing.

A startled and startling voice tells me to go even deeper than this.

Onyx and obsidian wrestle it out with a chest full of white diamonds.

Frankly, my dear, I’ve had enough of dancing through the murk with my not-so-better angels.

Excuse me while I remove this battering ram from my solar plexus.

Let me open my palms to the hazy sunshine. I promise I will stop shaking soon.

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Cindy Hochman is the president of “100 Proof” Copyediting Services and the editor-in-chief of the online poetry journal First Literary Review-East. She has been on the book review staff of Pedestal Magazine, and has written reviews for American Book Review, Clockwise Cat, Home Planet News, great weather for MEDIA, and others. (And she reviewed the 2009 edition of Best American Poetry for Coldfront Magazine eons ago.) Her previous chapbooks are Wednesday’s Child (Bear House Press), The Carcinogenic Bride (Thin Air Media), Habeas Corpus (Glass Lyre Press), and The Number 5 Is Always Suspect (Presa Press), a collaborative chapbook with poet/collagist Bob Heman. Her latest chapbook is Telling You Everything (Unleash Press). Cindy lives, loves, reads, writes, edits, meditates, learns tai chi, studies Russian, and agonizes over politics in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn.

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   Reginald Marsh, George Tilyou's Steeplechase, 1932, oil and egg tempera on linen mounted on fiberboard, Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Seamus Heaney: 10th Anniversary of His Death [ed. Terence Winch]

                                    Portrait of Seamus Heany by Edward McGuire, 1974, oil on canvas. Ulster Museum

 

Before I ever met Seamus Heaney in person, he sent me a little poetic greeting. Out drinking in Dublin on 16 Sept.1980 with friends, one of whom was also a friend of mine, he was encouraged by her to write something to me. This was the result, which, needless to say, I still treasure:

 

I did finally meet him a year or so later and, like multitudes of others, I was impressed by his warmth, unpretentiousness, and genial disposition. I had already been deeply impressed by his poems. His death, ten years ago today, was a terrible loss. To mark the sad occasion, here is a wonderful piece from Arrowsmith by the poet/scholar Thomas O’Grady on Seamus’s great poem, “The Given Note.”

The Poet & the Fiddler: A Musing on Seamus Heaney

by Thomas O’Grady

This morning, I cued up the first cut of The Poet & the Piper, an album released on CD by Claddagh Records in 2003 that featured a conversation—poetic and musical—between Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and eminent uilleann piper Liam O’Flynn (a founding member of the legendary Irish folk and traditional supergroup Planxty). Comprising readings of 17 poems by Heaney interspersed with instrumental complements on the pipes or on tin whistle by O’Flynn, the album in its entirety makes for pleasurable listening. But with the tenth anniversary of Heaney’s sudden and all-too-early death looming on August 30^th, I wanted to pay particular attention to that first cut, his reading of “The Given Note,” a poem published in his second volume, Door Into the Dark, in 1969. Specifically, I wanted to see if, hearing him read it and O’Flynn respond to it (the only direct segue on the album), I could glean why, of all the possibilities in his vast body of work, that slight and relatively early lyric was chosen to be the sole poem read at his funeral mass, held in Sacred Heart Church in Donnybrook on Dublin’s south side on September 2^nd of 2013.

Obviously, countless other Heaney poems might have been appropriate for the occasion—many of them much better known. His signature poem “Digging,” for example, with its predictivemetaphor: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” Or “The Harvest Bow,” with its elegantly burnished lines and its finely slant-rhymed stanzas. Or “The Skylight” from his sonnet sequence “Glanmore Revisited”: “when the slates came off, extravagant / Sky entered and held surprise wide open.” Or the wonderful imagining of—and in—“St Kevin and the Blackbird,” which Heaney draws attention to in his Nobel address “Crediting Poetry.” Or “Postscript,” which, recalling a windy drive in the west of Ireland, invites the reader to be pervious to the “big soft buffetings” that can “catch the heart off guard and blow it open.”Or perhaps “The Gravel Walks,” whose closing stanza yields the phrase that would be inscribed on the poet’s permanent gravestone two years after his interment in St. Mary’s cemetery in Bellaghy in south County Derry: “walk on air against your better judgement.”

But who am I to second-guess either the great man or his family? Presumably, given that Heaney had experienced some serious health issues several years before his death, he had shared with his loved ones some wishes regarding his eventual funeral.

In any case, “The Given Note” is an intriguing choice for several reasons. One is that its setting on the Blasket Islands, an archipelago off the coast of County Kerry in the far southwest, is pretty much the furthest point in Ireland from Heaney’s home county of Derry in Northern Ireland, an area which he wrote richly into his poems from the very start of his career until the very end. It is also far removed in a different way: unlike the great majority of Heaney’s poems, “The Given Note” is based not on personal experience or observation but on a secondhand (or thirdhand) anecdote. In that regard, even as an ars poetica, which it ultimately is, it differs conspicuously from his similarly-themed poems that are contemporaneous with it yet whose metaphors of poetic creativity are grounded in the immediacy of his intimately “known world” of Irish farm life: “Churning Day,” “The Diviner,” “Personal Helicon,” “The Forge,” “Thatcher,” and others.

The anecdote at the heart of the poem is intriguing in its own right. One version of the story has it that at some point in time—probably before the government-assisted permanent evacuation of the Blaskets, completed in 1954—a fiddler from one of the islands heard a haunting melody while out fishing on the ocean and by playing along with it managed to capture its essence. In another version, an elderly couple heard the melody and memorized it. Latter-day speculation allows that the mysterious music may have come from humpback whales migrating to their breeding waters. Regardless, in Heaney’s poem a fiddler “brought back the whole thing”. . . a plaintive air in loose 3/4 time that came to be known as “Port nabPucaí” (“Music of the Fairies”). While in some tellings the fiddler is identified as one Muiris Ó Dálaigh, the earliest known taping of the tune dates to 1968, a field recording made of Seán Cheist Ó Catháin, who was born on An Blascaod Mór, the Great Blasket.

Eventually the anecdote (and presumably the tune itself) made its way to Heaney, and from the evidence of the resulting poem, it seems to have appealed to his interest in the wonder of the creative process, the question of how a work of art—in this instance a musical composition as a stand-in for a poem—comes into being:

So whether he calls it spirit music
Or not, I don’t care. He took it

Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.
Still he maintains, from nowhere.

It comes off the bow gravely,
Rephrases itself into the air.

In that regard, is it just coincidence that the poem’s title—“The Given Note”—resonates with Heaney’s musings in “The Makings of a Music: Reflections on Wordsworth and Yeats,” a lecture he delivered in 1978 that engages with the “two kinds of poetic lines, les vers donnés and les vers calculés” identified by Paul Valéry. He remarks: “The given line, the phrase or cadence which haunts the ear and the eager parts of the mind, this is the tuning fork to which the whole music of the poem is orchestrated, that out of which the overall melodies are worked for or calculated.” Describing further how “the quality of the music in the finished poem has to do with the way the poet proceeds to respond to his donné,” Heaney essentially admits to his own Wordsworthian tendency to surrender to “the given,” to allow himself “to be carried by its initial rhythmic suggestiveness, to become somnambulist after its invitations.” Its sonic texture comprising mostly slant-rhymes on the first and third lines of six tercets of variable line lengths, “The Given Note,” as read by Heaney on The Poet & the Piper, proceeds with the same rubato feeling that characterizes Liam O’Flynn’s playing of “Port na bPucaí” that follows it; indeed, metaphorically, the poem too “comes off the bow gravely, /Rephrases itself into the air.”

Yet, even while appreciating “The Given Note” as an ars poetica both thematically and stylistically, a reader might still be inclined to ponder its selection as the single poem read at Heaney’s funeral were it not for what seems, at first glance, to be Heaney’s exercising of poetic license by locating the fiddler not in a leather-hulled curragh in the North Atlantic, but indoors:

On the most westerly Blasket
In a dry-stone hut
He got this air out of the night.

Strange noises were heard
By others who followed, bits of a tune
Coming in on loud weather

Though nothing like melody.
He blamed their fingers and ear
As unpractised, their fiddling easy

For he had gone alone into the island
And brought back the whole thing.
The house throbbed like his full violin.

Some scholars have proposed that Heaney first heard the anecdote about the Blasket fiddler from renowned Irish composer and arranger Sean Ó Riada, whom he met in 1968 and for whom he wrote a poem in memoriam included in his volume Field Work (1979). Ó Riada, whose legacy includes the arranging of Irish traditional music for ensembles in the style made globally popular by The Chieftains, died young in 1971; but in 2014, Gael-Linn released a recording of his performing “Port na bPucaí” on solo piano, so the tune was clearly in his repertoire around the time that he and Heaney had some social interaction. In fact, Ó Riada may have heard that field recording made in 1968.So it is plausible that he was Heaney’s source.

One way or the other, whatever version of the anecdote he may have heard, “The Given Note” itself offers evidence that Heaney took the initiative to trace the story to its telling in linguist Robin Flower’s 1944 memoir The Western Island or the Great Blasket. Though locating the tale of the fiddler not on “the most westerly” of the Blaskets, which is Tearaght Island (An Tiaracht), but on Inishvickillane (Inis Mhic Uileáin), which Flower spells Inisicíleáin, his narrative nonetheless seems clearly to underpin Heaney’s poem:

In the old days, when this island was inhabited, a man sat alone one night in his house, soothing his loneliness with a fiddle. He was playing, no doubt, the favourite music of the country-side, jigs and reels and hornpipes, the hurrying tunes that would put light heels on the feet of the dead. But, as he played, he heard another music without, going over the roof in the air. It passed away to the cliffs and returned again, a wandering air wailing in repeated phrases, till at last it had become familiar in his mind, and he took up the fallen bow, and drawing it across the strings followed note by note the lamenting voices as they passed above him. Ever since, that tune, Port na bPúcaí, ‘the fairy music,’ has remained with his family, skilled musicians all, and, if you hear it played by a fiddler of that race, you will know the secret of Inisicíleáin.

But that is not all. Explaining that “the music that went over the house on the island that night was a lament for one of the fairy host that had died and was carried to this island for burial,” Flower concludes his account with an interpretation of the episode that certainly rings true to the enormous sense of loss experienced—and expressed literally worldwide—by Seamus Heaney’s legion of readers and admirers in the immediate wake of his death ten years ago: “That fairy music, played upon an island fiddle, is a lament for a whole world of imaginations banished irrevocably now, but still faintly visible in the afterglow of a sunken sun.” While that interpretation is neither explicit nor implicit in “The Given Note,” its mournful spirit would certainly have been in the air when the poem was read at Heaney’s funeral. And like the droning undertones of Liam O’Flynn’s uilleann pipes or the slow bowing of the countless fiddlers who have likewise been drawn to the mysterious calling of “Port na bPucaí,” it continues to reverberate a decade later.

Originally published in Arrowsmith: https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/poet-fiddler

Thomas O’Grady was Director of Irish Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston from 1984 to 2019. He is currently Scholar-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana.

See also:

 

Peter Bushyeager: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Citadel Luncheonette

 

I’m beached in the Citadel Luncheonette

with my pinned eyes blinking over minestrone.

Dr. Lester’s acid-yellow light

was one inch from my face then his

blue metal examining ring plumped my eyeball.

 

Gesture’s important.  The thumb and forefinger

lightly touched together: a little bit of jelly

for my toast.  The index to the nose: follow with

your eyes while my drops vaporize your

vision like deer in a volcano blast.

 

Besides Irish, English and Welsh are Celtic, too.

My father was 50 percent Welsh with a black cloud

Mother clicked shut venetian blinds on neighbors

in her measured English way and I love

the droney ancient modal keys:

 

Songs about dressing a dead wren in

a satin cape, gently laying it down in

a ribboned pasteboard box lined with

gathered crepe, twisting its neck

delicately to the side like

 

a martyred pope, piling gold rings on

its head, carrying it door to door

collecting coins and

proclaiming a capella that

the King of Winter is dead.

 

If I’m lucky I won’t wake up

bilious tonight from my carnal dreams.

I’ll make a wiry leap past Lester’s

taupe leather sofa and his wry knee-to-knee verdict

of naturally deteriorating sight

 

feel out the thickness of quarters in my pocket

lay out six on the counter

and walk dignified through the

snowiness of the Citadel

to even whiter light on Lexington Avenue.

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Peter Bushyeager’s poetry appears in journals that include New American Writing, Hurricane Review, Local Knowledge, Sensitive Skin, Global Poemic, Boog City, and in his book Citadel Luncheonette. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.      

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                                                    St Stephen's Day--- Three wren boys in road, Athea, County Limerick, 1947

 

Melissa Broder: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Ahoy!

 

By the gates of the walled lung

we stand circled in the dark.

 

We’ve come through his throat

by ship.

 

I say What if he hiccups?

 

I am channeling my grandmom’s fears

of common colds and foreign air.

The women judge me silly.

 

They say Unsisterly!

Your angst is old, so old.

 

To prove myself fierce

I run down the danger corridor

of his guts to his intestines.

 

There are cabbages and acid.

There are meat screams

and a fancy market.

 

I am relieved to discover

my favorite gourmet yogurt

with full nutrition labeling.

 

Indulging in a blueberry variety

on the banks of his duodenum

I watch the villi sway.

 

It’s a scene nearing Monet’s La Rivière

but I am not a visual person.

 

My mind is full of letters.

 

I say Help me be a sister.

I mean to say Don’t make me die alone.

 

Back at the lung

roommates have been chosen.

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Melissa Broder is the author of the novels Death Valley (October 2023), Milkfed, and The Pisces, the essay collection So Sad Today, and five poetry collections, including Superdoom: Selected Poems and Last Sext. She lives in LA.  [Photo of the poet by Petra Collins.]

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                                                                          Claude Monet, La Rivière, 1881

 

Jose Padua: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Made in America

 

If I were a less sane person I would probably stalk

Zoey Deschanel. After stalking her from nine to five,

I would come back home to my wife and daughter

and tell them about my day. “I stalked Zoey, but I

 

never saw her,” I’d say. “You’re just not trying hard

enough,” my wife would reply, “don’t give up.” After

glaring at me for a moment my daughter would say,

“Why don’t you just find a real job? No one’s going

 

to pay you to stalk Zoey Deschanel.” So I’ll tell her

about fame, about the things in this world that aren’t

real and the rain and the empty river in a dream. “I’m

not doing this for money,” I’ll explain, and she’ll turn

 

away from me and back to her strawberries, pulling

a plump red cone from the blue bowl on the table.

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Jose Padua’s first book, A Short History of Monsters, was chosen by Billy Collins as the winner of the 2019 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and is out from the University of Arkansas Press. His poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in many publications. He has read his work at Lollapalooza, CBGBs, the Knitting Factory, the Public Theater, the Living Theater, the Nuyorican Poets' Café, the St. Mark's Poetry Project, the Split This Rock festival, and many other venues. After spending the last twelve years in Washington DC and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, he and his family have moved slightly north to Lancaster, PA.    [Author photo by Maggie Padua, Oct. 2022; this poem originally appeared in Live Mag! #17]

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                                                 Zoe Deschanel mural on an abandoned brewery in East Berlin