Love and the Moon
When I see something beautiful I think of him,
my friend in love tells me. That’s how I felt—
for years, stepping outside to see the moon
tipped like a boat, or a vertical half
like an open book. Wherever she is,
I’d think, she also sees this moon,
and what I meant was each of our hearts
lifting toward it, the moon like a magnet
pulling our gaze from wherever we stood on the earth.
And if we were separate in time,
well, the moon doesn’t change. Just the shadow.
In those years I felt it pinned us in time together,
wherever we were. The physicists say
light doesn’t get old. But now when I see
something beautiful, I think of someone
no longer here. It’s just that beauty
hurts more now, and I can look
at almost anything but the moon.
Nan Cohen
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The Name in the Doorway
My daughter waits in the doorway. She mouths Mom silently. My name floats from her mouth, hovers wordless above my body in bed. A blue and humming three-winged bird, my name waits and waits, lands softly on my mouth to wake my body from sleep, soft as the start of a pistol, soft as a lurching coaster, soft as a table leg in the night. My daughter is gone. Only the blurred and glowing outline of her body fills the frame. Maybe the stomach ached. Maybe the spider shadow crept. Maybe the water empty. Maybe she never left her bed. Maybe only my name left her pillow, flew across the house, dropped on top of me in sleep. The name returns every night, every night to kiss my mouth, every night to steal my sleep and breath.
Allison Blevins
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Daughter, before you thought in words
did you think the sound of my singing, green of my eyes, give of my breasts, scratch of my pen? Did you see yourself in the glow of sunned snow-light from your bedroom window? Every room in our house is glowing and we are glowing. Today you are older, toothed and walking. I am older too. Your face spots pink when you scream. I see how anger spreads across your forehead, down your ears as a fever. I've lost so much time trying to burn the smell of you into me: wood and light like the sliver under my childhood door. Some part of me survives in your neck and mouth and ears. I press into you again and again. My only thought the celebration of our coming together and pulling apart.
Allison Blevins
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housekeeping chores
hurricane & tornado suck humanity’s
debris up their whirling, grey hoses
into nature’s vacuum.
monsoons toss their buckets over
the steps & stones of the world’s
back porches.
fire torches kindling, then leaps
& roars, purging the tallest manscapes
& habitat to cinder & char.
larvae strip pastures like hotel beds;
viruses eat away our intimate spaces
without a decent warning.
but darlings, take comfort. sunlight still opens
the store faithfully each morning, sweeping
grit from our waking lashes;
and a compassionate moon still lights
its floating candle, honoring possibility
and tomorrow’s opening door.
Kerry Rawlinson
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You on a Table in Someone Else’s Hands
In the cab, you turn pink from the streetlights checkering the window.
Just as palpable, you grow inner-blue with hush, staring somewhere
beyond the moon. Post-surgery, wrapped in a massive scarf,
sunglasses on, you fall suddenly asleep. I have no choice but to watch
the world—it reflects off your dark lenses, a glittering that dims
then sparks again. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned in thirty-five years
it’s: if this is how it must go, it will. You breathe & we are one buoy
on the vast water, your breath uplifts me, your sleep rests my bones.
Captaining your breath, it’s clear the heartbeat is a comma. Grogged up
& numb in your hospital bed, you waved as if from across the sea,
“come here.” I was already here. While they opened your
breast, I sat down the street at Grey Dog, chewing a sloppy BLT
I wouldn’t finish, trying to siphon my mind away from you on a table
in someone else’s hands. We leave your seatbelt off to let the stitches
spider-webbing your nipple breathe. Wherever you were on that table,
now you’re speckled in sun & shadow, there’s no other way
to say it: life loves you. All I did—all I can do—is witness,
comma after comma after comma, & sometimes point “this
way,” so the driver turns down Flatbush while your eyes
open, as if for the first time, to flood the cab. You see
& the miracle of it—with each blink, your eyelashes
bow, rising only to bow again. Your brown-black irises, wet
& muscular as a horse’s back, effortlessly
take it all in. I want to brush my hands over such
seeing, just as the almost-evening takes a ride
on your seeing. Soon the street will be black & loud with boom
-boxes & swerving delivery bikes. You’ll see that too. Propped up
in our bed, slurping takeout, you’re alive: a fact. But only a fool
would concretize you, so I put away all futures & swim beside you,
your heel in my mouth, someone is laughing, who
can tell who, as inside your breasts the cysts
will or won’t. When your eyes meet mine, all commas flutter, all
rules undo, buttons unbutton, & the roof across the street breaks
into birds—
SHIRA ERLICHMAN
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Men and Birds
If it is possible for a woman to sling an arm
around the neck of a boyfriend who put her other arm
in a sling, a bird might love the man who took
a scissors to its wings’ primaries, careful, balancing
the damage to each side. I am trying not to
compare the falconer to Ike Turner. And I am trying
not to think the super who keeps rooftop pigeons
an orphan master; not to take for a pimp
the lonely guy in the park with a green parrot
epaulet, even though, like a pimp, he named her Jade.
A birdwatcher is not a peeping Tom. Still, it seems
purer to lumber into a rope swing, to dangle heavily
all day, to be old in a weaver’s nest, a hammock
chair, and from there to remark, across a gulf too wide
for craving, the hummingbirds’ hovering.
Jane Zwart
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I'm Making an Inventory of the World
things you can buy and things you cannot:
waves, dish-drainer, tree frog who moves
into the open when the rain comes
how the proportions have changed — how rare, resistant
the unbuyable has become
yellow flowered fennel covered in road dust
you can't pay for the dust, it comes for free
the roar of crickets on a back road —
what would you pay for this
night and its impenetrable
avalanche of stars
Meredith Stricker
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"LAST WINTER YOU LEAVE ME UNPLANTED”
& when you come back I will garland,
I will wreath, I will carnation, I will
braid gendhekaphool thick & globular,
I will inflorescence, I will faith, I will
doveaglecrow, my mouth will form the
words you tell me, I will blossom crêpe
paper jasmine delicate & jagged, you
will flush greater flamingo whitepink,
we will unearth with our pinnate hands
letting the soil imbibe & absorb into
frondfingers, I will not bury something,
I will not bury something, & I will not
bury something.
Arya Vishin
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Digging for Apples
Give me my shovel
of love for the sound
it makes slipping into
the gravelly ground
where we buried all the golden ones;
give me my boots
with weights in the heels
to root me where I am
not wanking off in fields
of rareripes and dandelions;
give me a backdrop
of what can't be controlled
to lend me by contrast
an air of great deliberateness, and I'll get
back to business, but first—
what if the poem itself
is what's narcissistic, irrespective
of authorship, and this is
what makes it appeal to us,
not because it can love us but
because it needs us to watch
it love being itself, and the surplus
we're left with in
the end is what we call
beautiful, like starlight on snowfall?
Timothy Donnelly
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Ground Beetle
I cup the frozen
body of evening,
trace the lines
that creep along
the beetle's velvet
shell. It's hard
to replicate
an insect's symmetry;
you might draw
the thing over
and over again
until there's no
light outside,
start thinking
you see
more clearly
this way. The same way
your bone marrow
emanates heat,
like the beetle's
luminescence.
I've learned
the mind is
a velvet curtain:
not all things
need heat
or light.
Ana Pugatch
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Aubade Between Seasons
Suddenly the hummingbirds battling
over a red blossom disappear,
replaced by goldfinch swaying
on bent necks of late sunflowers.
Ravished seed heads spear through
mist, dawn drags its feet, sun
retreats to its far corner, scent
of earth and rot, green tomatoes
that lost their bid to ripen. One
last morning glory opens, one
bloody leaf splays the fading lawn.
Raucous jays set off alarms, wind
chimes in counterpoint. Orange
and yellow marigold jewels, still
unfrozen, wait to drape ofrendas
on Dia de Muertos. Skin, hair,
lips and teeth of long-gone lovers
call out, desire like a low flame
simmers before first frost's kiss.
Gail Thomas
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Grief Dog
I keep thinking of dogs, of how I could use
some company, a breathing thing
to fill the space you left, the sound of the door
you slammed still in my ears,
the smell of your perfume still in the air.
I keep thinking of names I might give my new pet,
Sad Dog, Grief Dog, names that bounce
off the ceiling, wag their way down the hall
to the room with the bed I can't sleep in.
I keep thinking of the movie I saw last night,
the one with the dog who runs in circles,
its bark no match for its bite, how it grips
the leg of its owner and won't let go,
teeth that dig into meat it misses.
I keep thinking of my neighbor, not a Miss
or a Ms. but a Mrs., how in winter
she dresses her dog in a sweater that matches
her coat, how she walks down the sidewalk
unaware of the stares of those who pass by,
how the dog seems embarrassed, won't look
in anyone's eyes. And neither will I.
Wyn Cooper
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A Story About the Body
Robert Hass
The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity—like music—withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl—she must have swept them from the corners of her studio—was full of dead bees.
Robert Haas
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For What We Don’t Know
I am unsure of the world, but my dog reads
what’s underground, what lingers around trees.
She lives by what she hears lurking in spaces we don’t know.
Tonight the sunset will expose thin, broken limbs
and gild them in a certain glow
before day dissolves and winks again.
For all trees losing ground,
for all passersby, our porch light—
mystery of blue haze and a small arch—gleams
for the dog tilting her ear, for birds, for the moon
hiding its stars and silvering the snow.
Maryfrances Wagner
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How Damage Can Lead To Poetry
roots: both sustain & strangle
It’s morning and there’s a poem in my jacket
pocket, and I like how that sounds:
jacket pocket,
but I’m thinking about what the stranger penciled
in my book, how he circled the word
mistakes, then wrote, how damage can lead
to poetry.
We are quiet birds under the morning
glory — jacket pocket — in the near-heart of the dying
hydrangeas. Damage creates the thought
of brokenness: my garden never had enough
songbirds, my life never had enough
song. It’s morning and there’s a poem in my family
history — I know the suicides, the stories
of strange deaths: brother choking
on a balloon, sister tripping on the church steps
and hitting her head so perfectly
her arteries became a celebration, Bastille Day,
New Year’s Eve. And she was. And he was. Gone.
Even though I wasn’t there, I still see my sisters
finding our father’s first wife in the greenhouse
where he grew orchids — jacket pocket
— a gunshot to her head.
This is postpartum with suicide corsages,
psychopsis, dendrobium, a landscape
of the dying, a three-year-old finding
her mother, blood on the leaves
of the plants near her. My sister would later say,
It’s why I dislike the colors of Christmas,
and yet, she. And yet, she. Grew up
like so many of us, near-heart, fingers
in the roots of the dying, and mostly,
somewhat, okay.
Kelli Russell Agodon
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The Hum of the Living
Tonight, what haunts me is remembering
the Helpful Instructions for the Dying
pamphlet the hospice worker gave me.
It's subtle but it's not, like finding
a pocketknife in your favorite birch,
like the last bedroom she wandered in,
she wondered in, her last inhale.
When the hospice worker said, Listen
to a song that gives you hope, I said
it's the hum of the living, the sound
of dishes being set in the kitchen sink,
they remind me—life is here.
All those years of wishing
for quiet, for calmness, for less clutter—
protect the chaos with your life.
Kelli Russell Agogon
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