Tag Archives: poets

“A Short History of Silence” – Jane Yeh

In our house, all the clocks are turned off and the mirrors
Don’t work. We sit like bread in a stay-fresh wrapper,
Keep ourselves to our selves. Sometimes the speeches
Are so beautiful it hurts. On the porch where we can’t be

Seen to smile, the honeysuckle meshes with silent
Weeds. We rock back and forth, back and forth in our long
Black dresses. Mosquitoes taste our blood and find it good.

Inside, candles are lit every night and keep going
Until they burn themselves down. We kiss our fingers
To our lips like Italians, promise we’ll never look back.
Whip-poor-will. When the doorbell rings we don’t answer.

In winter, the fur grows long on the horses and the ice
Grows long on the eaves. We sleep in the same bed
Like good animals, braid our hair together, tailor
Our limbs to fit. Conspiracy of wood.

First published in Poetry Magazine, December 2017.

“Generic Husband” – Rebecca Hazelton

Who mows the lawn. Who prunes the rangy rose.
Who whacks the weeds by the chain link with mafioso panache.
Who drinks the beer. Who has no questions. Who knots
a tie four-in-hand. Who washes the car. Who drives stick.
Who smoked but did not inhale. Who wears the drugstore cologne
his kid gave him. Who wakes up beside the same wife.
Who has no questions. Who parts his hair. Who has a bald patch.
Who plays golf. Who plays Call of Duty. Who plays
the stock market, responsibly. Who reads biographies
of generals. Who does not dream. Who climbed trees
as a boy. Who leaves his towel beside the hamper.
Who has never swum nude. Who knows cardinal directions.
Who sees the sun set without a sense of unease.
Who walks to the train. Who watches sports. Who reclines.
Who maintains a sense of calm. Who has a small, bad tattoo.
Who wears humorous socks. Who tells the tame, dirty joke.
Who reads the newspaper online. Who is politically unmoved.
Who had a job upon graduation. Who go-gets. Who has no questions.
Who shovels the walk. Who did not keep his letters
from his college sweetheart. Who had a college sweetheart.
Who called her “baby.” Who was sincere. Who did not ask
why she left him. Who does not climb trees. Who drinks one beer
at the end of the day. Who remembers meeting his wife and how young
she was then. Who does not question. Who kills the spider.
Who clips a dog with his car and keeps driving. Who adjusts the mirror.

Originally published by The New Yorker. November 13, 2017 Issue.

“Body & Kentucky Bourbon” – Saeed Jones

In the dark, my mind’s night, I go back
to your work-calloused hands, your body

and the memory of fields I no longer see.
Cheek wad of chew tobacco,

Skoal-tin ring in the back pocket
of threadbare jeans, knees

worn through entirely. How to name you:
farmhand, Kentucky boy, lover.

The one who taught me to bear
the back-throat burn of bourbon.

Straight, no chaser, a joke in our bed,
but I stopped laughing; all those empty bottles,

kitchen counters covered with beer cans
and broken glasses. To realize you drank

so you could face me the morning after,
the only way to choke down rage at the body

sleeping beside you. What did I know
of your father’s backhand or the pine casket

he threatened to put you in? Only now,
miles and years away, do I wince at the jokes:

white trash, farmer’s tan, good ole boy.
And now, alone, I see your face

at the bottom of my shot glass
before my own comes through.

 

 

 

 

From Prelude to Bruise. Copyright © 2014 Saeed Jones.

climbing

a woman precedes me up the long rope,
her dangling braids the color of rain.
maybe i should have had braids.
maybe i should have kept the body i started,
slim and possible as a boy’s bone.
maybe i should have wanted less.
maybe i should have ignored the bowl in me
burning to be filled.
maybe i should have wanted less.
the woman passes the notch in the rope
marked Sixty. i rise toward it, struggling,
hand over hungry hand.

“i am running into a new year” – Lucille Clifton

i am running into a new year
and the old years blow back
like a wind
that i catch in my hair
like strong fingers like
all my old promises and
it will be hard to let go
of what i said to myself
about myself
when i was sixteen and
twentysix and thirtysix
even thirtysix but
i am running into a new year
and i beg what i love and
i leave to forgive me

—Lucille Clifton (1936-2010)

“The Layers” – Stanley Kunitz

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

excerpt from “At the Sea Floor Exploration, Sarah Asks” – W.J. Herbert

Ghost fish, tail flapping
like a translucent scrap
of linen in the wind,
flag of surrender
with a spine inside,
eyes riding on slow
light through the deep
ocean’s darkness:

Do you know what my mother
was looking for? —

—from “At the Sea Floor Exploration Exhibit, Sarah Asks”

“Memoir” – Vijay Seshadri

Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life.
The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations.
If I wrote that story now–
radioactive to the end of time —
people, I swear, your eyes would fall out, you couldn’t peel
the gloves fast enough
from your hands scorched by the firestorms of that shame.
Your poor hands. Your poor eyes
to see me weeping in my room
or boring the tall blonde to death.
Once I accused the innocent.
Once I bowed and prayed to the guilty.
I still wince at what I once said to the devastated widow.
And one October afternoon, under a locust tree
whose blackened pods were falling and making
illuminating patterns on the pathway,
I was seized by joy,
and someone saw me there,
and that was the worst of all,
lacerating and unforgettable.

Excerpt from “A Season in Hell” – Arthur Rimbaud

Oh! Science! Everything has been revised. For the body and for the soul,–the viaticum,–there are medicine and philosophy,–old wives’ remedies and popular songs rearranged. And the pastimes of princes and games they proscribed! Geography, cosmography, mechanics, chemistry! . . .

Science, the new nobility! Progress. The world marches on! Why shouldn’t it turn?

«««

On highroads on winter nights, without roof, without clothes, without bread, a voice gripped my frozen heart: “Weakness or strength: there you are, it’s strength. You do not know where you are going, nor why you are going; enter anywhere, reply to anything. They will no more kill you than if you were a corpse.” In the morning I had a look so lost, a face so dead, that perhaps those whom I met did not see me.

«««

Out there, are they not honest souls that wish me well? . . . Come . . . I have a pillow over my mouth, they do not hear me, they are phantoms. Besides, no one ever thinks of others. Let no one come near me. I must smell scorched I’m sure.

«««

I used to make him promise never to leave me. It was as vain as when I said to him: ‘I understand you.’

“Ah! I have never been jealous of him. He will not leave me, I believe. What would become of him? He knows nothing; he will never work. He wants to live a sleep walker…”