#poetry month
REFUSAL TO MOURN
In lieu of
flowers, send
him back.
ANDREA COHEN
ANDREA COHEN
ARROW
There will be loss so great it will divide the gods up into teams. And the horses. The ones that could kill you, the ones that killed us, are making their way across the green river, that’s how cold. That’s how serious. You won’t remember because the light is soft. & the trees. & your son will say the moon. & your daughter will say Venus. & the baby baby of every song on the radio. & a horse will walk up to the locked gate. & a horse will eye your car. & a man will say careful honey. & you will throw your head back and touch the cross you wear. & he will say careful honey & you will pull back the bowstring at full draw. & he will say careful honey & you run the wind at her own game & have now. Let go.
KATHERINE OSBORNE
IN THE BAD DAYS
I am writing to you
from deep in the bad days,hoping you will hear me
wherever you are,far away in a better time —
+
In a better time,
hoping you will hear me,
far away,
wherever you are:
I came upon a heron
late at night,deep in these bad days.
+
Late tonight,
deep in our bad days,
he plucked a frog from the waterfilled ditch.
His eye
was black glass. I am writing
to you,
wherever you are
+
late in my bad days.
The frog’s neck
was broken,
so its legs dangled.
The heron eyed me
blackly
from the wet ditch.
I am writing to you
+
from deep in the black days.
The dead
dangled.
I watched from the sidewalk.
The heron’s glass eye
eyed me
in the streetlight’s glare.
Wherever you are
+
in a better time:
people were dying.
I am writing to tell you
people are dying.
Remember that
while you tie your shoes
to go for your walk
through the song-filled
night,
through the beautiful night
of another time.
KEVIN PRUFER
NEST
And then there came a day that was a day
a world of my wanting with you in it
and all the small creatures came to our side
mewing and cheeping as small creatures do
a day I had wanted for a long time
a small-creature hour in the life of our day
where there were many places to lie down
and sigh and sleep and cogitate and hug
a huge happening among the small lives
a little cuddle with a dream in it
a coddled egg an apron with a bib
a nest for nourishing the ragged nerves
O robin O rabbit O bat O tiny vole
all flyers and burrowers come to us now
through our heat ducts and tear ducts and chimneys
come to us with your small-world intentions
that place where only we know how to live
where no one else knows what we say and do
no one knows the crumbs or the flies we eat
or the silly songs we hum as we sleep
SARAH ARVIO
ATLIEN FREESTYLES OVER “WHEELZ OF STEEL”
Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.
—Toni Morrison
A paralytic sickness bias white flame burning thru red & blue cells
A ring around the revolver barrel roulette wheelz Russian clan-
destine war imagined happened & thus foreseeable Moral schism
hard for them to swallow as cod liver oil: filet mignon backmasked: rods &
cotton scalps & cod Give a woman a fish & watch her envision an end
to famine [which is the beginning of living upright] Teach a man to fish
a market & he will lure you w/ the chummy glint of an iced out life as he
guts your public for trophies Do check for trout lips at mention of any
“system” | counter- clockwise prison built to omit marrow in its
trappings E.g. shackles into handcuffs into plantation industries
into wireless tethers into “job growth” Landlord says raining dollar bills
where i hear bills dollar raining When i say precipitous one of us pictures
a cliff though we share the same broken elevator pulley- steel eyez
If only in the beginning someone said i wish us both to do more than survive
MARCUS WICKER
I’M SORRY
I want to apologize. I’m sorry that I have had to pull you down with me into this antechamber full of cold blood bags. It’s hard to believe such a room exists, that there is really a room where they just put bags of blood. But they stack up and stack up. When I got here, they didn’t cover the door, but they do now. I don’t think anyone ever comes for the blood bags again. No, really. It’s drafty. I’m so sorry.
Hold one of the bags, and feel the blood inside.
This is my mothering instinct talking.
I’m sorry for how this ends, in a chamber that used to lead somewhere.
NIINA POLLARI
NOT EVERYTHING IS A POEM
or has a poem inside it, but god help me
if I can’t find one when I empty
my son’s pockets before I do
the wash: one acorn, two rocks
(one smooth and gray, one rough
and glittering, flecked pink),
a chunk of mulch, a wilted
dandelion. The poem is there,
I think, pressing itself against
the grit or splinter or bitter
yellow, but I question its mother-
softness, suspicious of flowers
and laundry. I swear I’ve seen
poems riding my boy’s back
as he runs around our weed patch
of a lawn, letting crabgrass
saw his ankles because killing it
would mean killing the wild
violets, his sister’s namesakes.
I don’t dare look for poems
in spring even if all the purple
and green are on clearance then.
Two springs ago, my son
was so ill, he smelled bad-sweet,
and one morning he woke
shitting blood, saying my name,
my name, my name. No poem
kept his body from bruising
purple that would fade to green,
his skin a field of flowers—
no, not this poem and not
a poem at all. But he lived.
It’s spring again and he lives.
It’s spring again and his pockets
are full of petals and stones.
MAGGIE SMITH
CITY LAKE
Almost dusk. Fishermen packing up their bait,
a small girl singing there’s nothing in here nothing in here
casting a yellow pole, glancing at her father.
What is it they say about mercy? Five summers ago
this lake took a child’s life. Four summers
ago it saved mine, the way the willows stretch
toward the water but never kiss it, how people laugh
as they walk the concrete path or really have it out
with someone they love. One spring the path teemed
with baby frogs, so many flattened, so many jumping.
I didn’t know a damn thing then. I thought I was waiting
for something to happen. I stepped carefully
over the dead frogs and around the live ones.
What was I waiting for? Frogs to rain from the sky?
A great love? The little girl spies a perch
just outside her rod’s reach. She wants to wade in.
She won’t catch the fish and even if she does
it might be full of mercury. Still, I want her
to roll up her jeans and step into the water,
tell her it’s mercy, not mud, filling each impression
her feet make. I’m not saying she should
be grateful to be alive. I’m saying mercy
is a big dark lake we’re all swimming in.
CHELSEA DESAUTELS
SECOND ESTRANGEMENT
Please raise your hand,
whomever else of you
has been a child,
lost, in a market
or a mall, without
knowing it at first, following
a stranger, accidentally
thinking he is yours,
your family or parent, even
grabbing for his hands,
even calling the word
you said then for “Father,”
only to see the face
look strangely down, utterly
foreign, utterly not the one
who loves you, you
who are a bird suddenly
stunned by the glass partitions
of rooms.
How far
the world you knew, & tall,
& filled, finally, with strangers.
ARACELIS GIRMAY
No place hosts foes like the soul does:
The soul’s a field on which all of the soldiers
Are pitched in a conflict of emotions,
The victor of which will control personas;
Some souls see more wars than others
Where Hope’s men fall in appalling numbers
And there’s a significant proportion of us
Wishing for a clear field, where all is summer…
Some souls see trauma suffered -
On these fields is the battle most passionate;
There’s Fear and Mistrust ganging up on Happiness -
They’re strong by themselves, lethal in aggregate -
Indifference looks on, inanimate
As Love shrugs off Doubt, gives Lust an uppercut
And Shame knifes Pride, letting out its blood and guts;
Seems the rule of this fight is ‘double up,
Be scheming, or else get squashed like butternut’…
My soul -
Was unquiet;
See, in there, Despair had run riot;
Frustration sent Hades one client
(He’d slain Patience), and Grace lay dying,
Hastened to grave by a shot from Jealousy
Who’d sniped her from the very top of the lemon tree…
Troops marches to Malice’s drumroll,
Advancing to castle where Joy was holed up,
Mourning the loss of Optimism, who Woe just
Dismembered and left as conducts for vultures;
Seemed they’d won the day, but their way
Was blocked at the gates by Hatred and Rage -
They knew, in this fable of Aesop,
That negatives need positives to feed off
So they advised these troops to ease off
But the closing part of the team-mates’ speech was:
‘Every now and then, we can’t keep the pressure up
On this soul, or it will be the death of us;
Too much violence will leave the soul crushed,
Since there’s a fine line between diamonds and coal-dust;
You know what? Let’s retreat for now;
Let’s allow Joy to hang out with Relief for now;
Let’s let this soul’s esteem be repaired -
But when we return, they’d better be prepared.’
- from ‘Eating Roses for Dinner’ (2015)
Musa Okwongae, photographed by Naomi Woddis