missedstations

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[…] - Fady Joudah

And out of nowhere a girl receives an ovation

from her rescuers, all men on their knees and bellies

clearing the man-made rubble with their bare hands, disfigured by dust into ghosts.

All disasters are natural including this one because humans are natural.

The rescuers tell her she's incredible, powerful, and for a split second, before the weight

of her family's disappearance sinks her, she smiles,

like a child who lived for seven years above ground receiving praise.

#Poems #Fady Joudah

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diogenes tries to forget by Mary Karr

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"[…]" - Fady Joudah

Still they ask in podcast and electronic ink: How are you doing?

And they keep you in their hearts, pump you to their minds, circulate you unimagined.

Take all the space you need, they say, empathy loves the damaged.

You offer no solutions. Only clarity they don’t believe, only they get to tell the future what to be.

Then they pump you into their viscera, and feel you bilious, ineffable, cast iron, butterfly.

Their questions like a shovel that doesn’t know what earth is, but digging anyway.

They hope you would say: “I am multigenerational and can fracture natural bonds in my DNA,”

for this they can sell to a tycoon press, a Carnegie of thought dissemination.

And your answer comes: “Things are a seasickness and no land in sight.

Your peeping is no witness.”

#Poems #Fady Joudah #[…]

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"Adult Acne" - Noah Arhm Choi

Because puberty can be confusing, god made acne to give you one thing to be sure to hate, to hide, to blame for the dim lights and sticky shirts and showers mid-day. They warned me testosterone could do this. Diabetes. Heart problems. Anger like a rock inside a clump of snow. The only time my grandmother touched my mother was praying over her womb, saying boy boy boy when really she meant history history history. The only time she brought her food was the red ginseng, the bitter melon as if a full mouth always gives you what you want. Everytime my mother tells my birth story it changes. A crucifix showing up in a dream, a dream of her boy running through the field, an altar of ocean rock, mugwort, one blue shoe. When I arrived and the doctor yelled yeoja, not a boy, my grandmother walked out of the room. To arrive then is to let your name be plucked from a stem while the other leaves die. Grandmother died without forgiving my mother for never bearing sons, two years before I look up adult acne and grindr dates with lights off and what insurance lets you arrive changed instead of changing while everyone can see and ask you stupid questions forgetting they too have access to google. God was slow to birth language that could be a mirror or a car to drive home in, so I arrive late and out of breath, driving only a little over the speed limit towards a skyline that could be everything I’ve ever wanted, everything my mother was afraid to name.

#Poems #Adult Acne #Noah Arhm Choi

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"Second Sight" - Danusha Laméris

Back then, it freaked my friends out I knew things I had no way of knowing, like that the 680 East would be closed the next day, a trip to Tahoe, cancelled. Or how I called my boyfriend the night before the giant quake, told him Something big is going to happen tomorrow. And when it hit, I was in the open field everyone else was running to, watching at a distance as windows cracked, chunks of glass falling to the ground. What’s next? they’d ask, as if I’d know or as if knowing would do any good, the world still coming down around us: children kidnapped from the corner store, poison in the water, planes shot from the sky. So when I dreamt my parents’ house exploded, I hoped it was a metaphor but a week later a fire climbed the dry scrub uphill and torched the gas lines. My family got out but lost almost everything: photographs, Christmas ornaments, my grandmother’s gold. Though the gift of seeing is something I think I got from her, my mother’s mother, if such a thing can be passed down. A rogue strand of DNA slipped into the chain, a code for here’s what’s coming, for beware. Useless, maybe. Or maybe the way our line survived, a pantry full of extra stores, an escape route cut through the underbrush, a knife at the ready.

#Poems #Second Sight #Danusha Laméris

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"Out of the Sun" - Hsien Min Toh

A late friend’s grandfather used to tell stories of being tailgunner on a B-17 flying missions over Dresden or Cologne, before the disease clouded his mind. He told of being crammed into a tiny closet at the arse-end of the plane, where pins and needles were companions, but at least he wasn’t Cecil the top turret gunner, who every so often had to glance into the sun to try to have the earliest possible warning of a Messerschmitt or Focke-Wulf seeking to rip a talon of bullets into the fuselage. One time Cecil certainly saved the crew by opening fire on a suspicious sunspot at the precise moment a first volley like rain splattered on the wings, and maybe he got lucky but the Focke-Wulf banked away and fled with a grey silk thread issuing from its engine. But his friend Cecil, despite standard issue sunshades, messed up his vision. He saw spots even in the barracks, and never made the squadron’s softball team even with the ever-changing pool of players. Eventually, he went blind at the age of eighty, and said the only thing he could still see was an image of the sun and occasional shadows weaving for position around it. I don’t visit my late friend’s grandfather these days, and Cecil has now passed on, but I think of them and wonder how much of that focus we apply injures us in ways we cannot see until we do, the raptor swooping out of the sun to strike.

#Poems #Out of the Sun #Hsien Min Toh

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"Women love me, fish fear me" - Jordan Hamel

Life’s too short to eat bowfin, or that minced pollock they batter and call Filet-O-Fish, or the dolphins that get swept up in tuna nets poached in a mercury brine. I often dream of the creature from The Shape of Water, I bet he tastes amazing with vinegar. I’m sorry. The wife is making us go vegetarian, I’m trying, but it’s not easy. I’ve been trawling this shoreline for centuries, just me and my rod and my net and my two large sons, roughhousing in the dingy instead of learning how to properly rig a double sliding sinker line with frozen squid chunks. You try to teach kids the little things in this life; you try to show them how seaweed slips through sand and snags on rocks, how light refracts on the water when dawn opens her eyes, how to gut a 10 lb. snapper ass to mouth without tainting the meat. But the youth don’t know what they don’t know until it’s too late. I am a decent man. I tell myself this often. I emerged fully formed from a sea of good men. I don’t know if god exists but if he does I know where he’d spend his Sunday mornings. The wife jokes that I move through life with a bucket of bait in one hand and a beer in the other, all smiles and salt breath and tall tales for anyone who will listen. She says I should slow down, take a second, breathe. I’m not as young as I once was, but I still have so much love to give.

#Poems #Women love me #fish fear me #Jordan Hamel

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"My Brother Stole Every Spoon in the House" - Steven Espada Dawson

so we don't eat soup anymore. We tried. The bone broth fell right through our forks,                                                                our fingers, stained the carpets. We all learned to speak twelve languages but only the words for good morning                                                                       and hospital. In Old Norse my mom learns the phrase where are all the fucking spoons. Brian went outside, whispered swears to the poplars.                                          They bent their necks to hear him. Brian went outside                                    and left forever, took the rest of the silverware. Brian went outside and left a thousand doodles he drew,                                                      every happy animal that wasn't him. We crumpled them like origami                                roadkill. Stomped them under our feet until they became wine between our toes. We're still drinking it now,                                                   ten years later. I don't know how magnets work. If I tied a million together, could they pull him here?                            The cutlery turned                                                                  ash in his pockets. That heavy metal in his blood.

#Poems #My Brother Stole Every Spoon in the House #Steven Espada Dawson

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"Flip Side" - Mónica de la Torre

In October, transmissions paused temporarily in certain regions of the planet. No marks made it to the page then, hence the retroactive declaratives. If you looked up at the yellow dwarf star at the right time in the right place, you’d see the culprits, sunspots, sitting there available to the naked eye and readily confused with muscae volitantes, a.k.a. floaters, where loops of magnetic field in the sun’s photosphere find their footpoints and launch themselves out to its atmosphere—its corona—tracing arcs of light so beauteous their optimization as screen savers is likely a fait accompli. Set them to Vangelis and they make for even better ambience. The sun's on its twenty-fifth eleven-year cycle, manifesting as alternating bouts of languor and hyperactivity visible in the number of blemishes. News has it that late in the month the sun had an outburst, hurling plasma and highly energetic particles our way. Its mass ejection supercharged the northern lights I've never seen and caused a brief radio blackout across Earth's daylit side, centered somewhere in the South American vastness. Whether is all connects or this is another instance of word magic falls beyond this account's purview, this side of paranormal. Face the sun.                                                           Close your eyes. What do you see.

#Poems #Mónica de la Torre #Flip Side

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[While everyone was in the hut I wandered out into the night.] - William Letford

While everyone was in the hut I wandered out into the night. A full moon. The more you know about the universe, the smaller you feel. But the moon somehow seems closer now. Solid and steady. The fact that it’s barren is a comfort.

#Poems #William Letford #[While everyone was in the hut I wandered out into the night.]

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"This Too Shall Pass" - Kim Addonizio

was no consolation to the woman whose husband was strung out on opioids.

Gone to a better place: useless and suspect intel for the couple at their daughter’s funeral

though there are better places to be than a freezing church in February, standing

before a casket with a princess motif.  Some moments can’t be eased

and it’s no good offering clichés like stale meat to a tiger with a taste for human suffering.

When I hear the word miracle I want to throw up on a platter of deviled eggs. Everything happens

for a reason: more good tidings someone will try to trepan your skull to insert. When fire

inhales your house, you don’t care what the haiku says about seeing the rising moon. You want

an avalanche to bury you. You want to lie down under a slab of snow, dumb as a jarred

sideshow embryo. What a circus. The tents dismantled, the train moving on,

always moving, starting slow and gaining speed, taking you where you never wanted to go.

#Poems #This Too Shall Pass #Kim Addonizio

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Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish

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"The Oriental and the Hummingbird at the Trailer Park" - Joan Kwon Glass

My eighty-year-old Korean mother bought a trailer in a 55+ Florida trailer park. She has always seemed more comfortable around white folks than other Koreans, delights in their abundance of potato salad and poke cake, appreciates that so many of their children did not go to Yale or Harvard, is awed by and basks in all of their shameless, American imperfections. When she came home from a six-week stay and I asked her So, how was it, her face lit up— Oh! I was the only Oriental, so they just loved me! My mother, an adorable curiosity. So small, so precious. Something to behold. Unbeknownst to her, I too have a trailer park story. When I was fourteen, I got wasted and then tripped on acid for the first time. My friend Ondine and I drove down to the trailers off Woodward, past Six Mile Road, looking for pot. I was five the first time someone I loved called me a chink. Twelve the first time a grown man said he loved me then shoved his tongue down my throat. Maybe that's why I am always desperate to stray from whatever flock I am told I belong to, wander instead to those who see me but keep their distance, those who do not care that I can only fly backwards. I got my first tattoo that night on someone's bed—a hummingbird on my right ankle— a choice I was too drunk to remember making. He held the tender bulb of my heel in his hand like an offering while everyone else watched. Hummingbirds don't migrate in flocks, choosing, rather, to travel hundreds of miles on their own. When they find each other, they are called a glittering, a shimmer, a hover. My mother is home and I meet her at the door so she can watch me retreat, hum my wings so fast I can almost hide behind my own heartbeat.

#Poems #Joan Kwon Glass #The Oriental and the Hummingbird at the Trailer Park

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"Revelation" - Zaynab Bobi

When the doctor said to your mother, She walked out of the clock I painted three scenes: First, your breath went anti-clockwise: the hour hand walking backwards until it was swallowed by time. Second, you crossed out of time with the minute hand stuck between your teeth — night had slipped into your mouth. Third, you drained your mother's chest and poured yourself into it; swinging back and forth begging for gravity. Pain, too, is a child.

#Poems #Zaynab Bobi #Revelation

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"Quick Flesh" - Hilary Plum

She moves from farm to town bringing only daughters. The call of dough thrown to hot stone. In the butcher's shop she loses only two fingers, while the vacant farmhouse on whose porch I was never pictured vanished. There's little the rich won't harvest. Wind threshes only an orchard, in the womb a child burgeons. In the hospital mother holds the hand of father's body, which takes two weeks to release the dose of radiation it may release while alive. Daughters bear daughters, a dark roof to the orchard's mouth. There's a sound caught like a soft piece of lung or a phrase in the old language for a hand hot on the back, the back to another cold wall. Across state lines you followed, quick stitching of an organ to itself. In town she lost only one religion. Other daughters watch, sewing butter to butter. This is the bread of the body not left for coyotes and it was birds I first no longer heard.

#Poems #Hilary Plum #Quick Flesh

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"My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field" - Supritha Rajan

It was not long after the war— and just saying after the war places him in history, the one that counts the progress of time as seismic shifts, as the partitioning of before and after, as if history unfurls a taut chain that surveys the distance from one point on the landscape to the boundary of another while everything else falls to the side like small pebbles along a rock-face bound to nothing but the abyss of unrecorded intimacies, dark and spacious as those tunnels the imagination builds from pools of ink. My father leans over a page, his brown hand bound to the binding of a book and the book a white fog from which steps forth a man wandering alone along a country path and walking, walking all day long the endless length of a field in search of what the resistance of a wind alone could teach him—the type of man who, possessed by vagrant passions, becomes the man he reads about in a book, and so is also my father standing up from a twin cot in a small room with an even smaller suitcase and wandering into a field he walks all day long against a wind that smells of the Welsh sea until weak-kneed and parched with thirst he stops for water in a churchyard. This is before I am a point of view in history, before he becomes a household bound, like any man, to that war between self-clouding sorrow and vague ambition. It is the month of Chaitra. The beginning of a new year. Everywhere in the field fluttering around him, nameless as the impulse that first led him here, the bright and strange crowd of yellow flowers called daffodils.

#Poems #Supritha Rajan #My Father Walks Out of an English Book and Into an English Field

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"The Goal" - Cole Swensen

The goal of life is happiness (Agnes Martin); the word happiness shares the root hap with happenstance, haphazard and, simply, happen. I once had a friend named Happy—we worked for years at a restaurant together, and once during a slow moment, he took my Maybelline eyeliner pencil—warm brown—and with that alone, made up my eyes, creating amazing nuances, subtleties, new depths and contours. Neither they nor I had ever before (nor ever have since) been so beautiful. Chatting, as one does with someone who's immobilized you by working on your body, I happened to ask him about his name, what it meant; he said it means that I'm occurring right now.

#Poems #The Goal #Cole Swensen