December 2015 - Poetry Foundation

founded in 19 1 2 by h a r r iet monroe
December 2015
FOUNDED IN 1912 BY H ARRI E T M ONROE
volume ccvii • number 3
CONTENTS
December 2015
POEMS
sheryl luna
219
The Thief
atsuro riley
220
Moth
donald revell
222
Pericles
joanne diaz
224 Equator Sky, Manila Bay
Psychomachia
jaap blonk
228
Secret Recipe 7
Secret Recipe 10
jeffrey skinner
230 The Bookshelf of the God of Infinite
Space
F R O M T H E P O E T RY R E V I E W
kathleen jamie
233
Fianuis
zaffar kunial
234
From “Empty Words”
fran lock
236
And I will consider the yellow dog
sarah howe
238
Sirens
geraldine clarkson
240 Dora Incites the Sea-Scribbler to
Lament
simon barraclough
241
From “Sunspots”
ian duhig
244
Riddle
michael hofmann
245
Baselitz and His Generation
caroline bird
248
The Amnesty
helen mort
249 Ablation
Scale
daljit nagra
252
The Love Song of Mugoo and Gugoo
kathryn maris
256 The House with Only an Attic
and a Basement
simon armitage
258
Camera Obscura
ruby robinson
259
Apology
graham mort
266
Pigeonnier
amy key
267
Delphine Is on Silent Retreat
R U T H L I L LY A N D D O R OT H Y S A R G E N T
R O S E N B E R G P O E T RY F E L L OW S
nate marshall
273
Harold’s Chicken Shack #86
Oregon Trail
safiya sinclair
276 Center of the World
The Art of Unselfing
Confessor
jamila woods
282
Ghazal for White Hen Pantry
Ode to Herb Kent
beverly, huh.
erika l. sánchez
286 Six Months after Contemplating
Suicide
Kingdom of Debt
danniel schoonebeek
290
Cold Open
R O B E RT L A X : N OT H I N G I S TO O S M A L L
michael n. mcgregor
295Introduction
robert lax
301
contributors
316
Kalymnos: November 29, 1968
Editor
Art Director
Managing Editor
Assistant Editor
Editorial Assistant
Consulting Editor
Design
don share
fred sasaki
sarah dodson
lindsay garbutt
holly amos
christina pugh
alexander knowlton
cover art by david m. cook
“All the Small Things,” 2013
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POEMS
sheryl luna
The Thief
I am not saying “mark my words,”
as the thief says early each winter.
He leaves nothing of value. He too wants.
A brute with language, he has a fondness
for preaching. I am bathed to luster.
Memories move musically through my bones.
He sings above, vaults off a horse with feigned
kindness, lands so fancy. Letting go of this,
sitting with tropical leaves the size of men
in a terrarium, I am beautiful. He means well,
admonishing women. He is lucky
with the show of crankiness.
What does it mean to let go the envy?
I sometimes hope stars don’t spread themselves
over New York’s lights. Performing for himself,
glasses glittering, he reads stories of poverty,
claims them all as his own.
Here in Colorado irises of all colors unfold
outwards to the half-hidden sun. On the cracked
cement, chilly before rain, I see perpetual
beginnings. I’m going to forget him:
lock him in a box in my head,
lock him in the haunt of violins, let go
what’s his in the hurl of breath of my groans.
S H ERY L LU N A
219
atsuro riley
Moth
— Candy’s Stop, up Hwy. 52
I been ‘Candy’ since I came here young.
My born name keeps but I don’t say.
To her who my mama was I was
pure millstone, cumbrance. Child ain’t but a towsack full of bane.
Well I lit out right quick.
Hitched, and so forth. Legged it.
Was rid.
Accabee at first (then, thicket-hid) then Wadmalaw;
out to Nash’s meat-yard, Obie’s jook. At
County Home they had this jazzhorn drumbeat
orphan-band ‘them lambs’ they — They let me bide and listen.
This gristly man he came he buttered me
then took me off (swore I was surely something) let me ride in back.
Some thing — (snared) (spat-on) Thing
being morelike moresoever what he meant.
220O
P O E TRY
No I’d never sound what brunts he called me what he done
had I a hundred mouths.
How his mouth. Repeats
on me down the years. Everlastingly
riveled-looking, like rotfruit. Wasn’t it
runched up like a grub.
First chance I inched off (back through bindweed) I was gone.
Nothing wrong with gone as a place
for living. Whereby a spore eats air when she has to;
where I’ve fairly much clung for peace.
Came the day I came here young
I mothed
my self. I cleaved apart.
A soul can hide like moth on bark.
My born name keeps but I don’t say.
AT S U RO RI LEY
221
donald revell
Pericles
What are my friends? Mouths, not eyes for
Bitterest underflesh of the farewell.
I was a man and suffered like a girl.
I spoke underneath to where the lights are
Pretty, pretty, pretty whence they came to tell
One God gets another. My friends are
Mouths for God, tearing me. In such a world
Broken only daughter opens to splendor.
My first thought was that dying is a deep well
Into the image of death, a many of one girl.
Later it meant to smile with no face, where
Mirrors are mouths. Cupid and Psyche wore
Blindfolds made of glass, which explains why girls
Get to heaven early mornings Adam fell.
Gods after gods we go. Still later,
Friends shouldered high mountains to the lee shore.
Gashed, and the gash a fountain of waters,
The landscape defames a single flower:
Amaranth. Magic hides an island world
Of boys and one daughter. I buried a pearl
In God’s eye. And yet He sees her,
Defames her, considers His time well
Spent imagining a continent of flowers
Whose final climate is a broken girl.
Bells of a Cretan woman in labor
Hurled from a tower, flesh realer
Than the ground she somehow upwards curled
Into the bloom of her groin where bells
222O
P O E TRY
Are bees. I am an old man with a new beard.
I am the offspring of my child sprung from hell.
Shipwreck makes peninsular metaphor
Out of my hatred, her rape, and one bell tower.
Confusion suicides the poems, heaven I heard
Where the juice runs from stone-struck flowers.
At the end of the world I must use proper
Violence. Nothing is more true to tell.
Tell the taut-strung higher calendars
I’ve a margent in mind and new words
Hope to say, catastrophe to hear,
Old confederates and inwood apples
Where apples never shone. Also tell
Of mountains shouldered underneath one flower
Called amaranth. They tired of the world
Who made the world this way. God never
Did, never will. If you were to call
From the bottom of the ocean, the words,
Every one to me a living daughter,
Would shout wild mercy as never was before.
DON ALD REV ELL
223
joanne diaz
Equator Sky, Manila Bay
Here, the brightest constellation
is Hydra, the Water Snake, named
for the half-woman, half-reptile
whom Hercules slew with the help
of Iolaus, his charioteer. Imagine
the sound of so many heads screaming — the long, shrill bays of an angry woman
times twenty — and the smell of birth,
of all origins, that followed Hydra
as she rose from her fetid swamp. Iolaus
was strategic, went straight for the bowels
instead of the mouth, burned her center
before the head. When her fundament
was reduced to ash, only then could
Hydra be silenced. Hera, enraged
that Hercules was able to slay the creature
she had raised in order to destroy him,
flung the corpse of the decapitated,
maimed Hydra into the sky, lest she be
forgotten. Hydra’s blood, unstoppable,
became hot gas; her screams rose
and fell until they were radio waves;
and her wild flailing was fixed
into points of radiance. Hera was right
to hurl those stars here, above this bay,
so close to where the earth is bisected,
a place where Hydra’s mirror image
224O
P O E TRY
glosses the water, where dense blooms
of algae flourish on the nitrogen surface,
thousands of wild heads and arms
devouring ammonia, cyanide, and sewage
as fast as we can produce them,
this hydra, emblem of insatiable desire.
J OAN N E DI AZ
225
Psychomachia
At the Mind Museum, you can walk to the back,
step on several large buttons on the ground,
and watch parts of the brain light up: the frontal lobe
for decision and memory, the temporal lobe
for smell and sound, the occipital for sight. I try
to make my toddler son laugh by hopping
from one button to the next, watching each lobe
light up along the way, but he will not leave the prison
of his melancholy. My son: how he loves to revisit
the most difficult point of conflict in a picture book,
or the moment at which his favorite car heaves
a difficult sigh at the pinnacle of a movie’s emotional
arc, or the promise of injury if I take a fall. My son,
so distant from other children in his sadness.
Just the other day, at the pool, he gazed
at the boys and girls splashing and shrieking
and said, Look. The children are having fun,
as if he were an anthropologist in a foreign land.
If these are his musings at age two, one can only
imagine the life that must follow. Through a dark channel
he was born; to darkness he is most drawn. Easier
to write than say the guilt I feel for giving him
the sharp pain of melancholy. My son, always
in the world without husk or shell, it is as if his heart
226O
P O E TRY
throbs on the outside of his body, as if his brain
has no skull to absorb the assaults that strike it.
Today, I watch him writhe in the pain of a tantrum —
a typical kid, this is what they do, everyone assures
me — and usually I rush in, unwittingly increasing
his sense of emergency. Instead, today, I stand back,
relinquish the role of skull and skin, watch his mind
unfurl like a medieval tapestry. In that moment
of my feigned disinterest, his head is no longer head
but battlefield where Wrath wages a fierce war
against Patience. He is no longer a little boy
screaming on the ground and throwing plastic trucks;
instead he is a creature engaged in a struggle
to free his enslaved heart from the monsters
whose foaming mouths and hot fumes
and clots of foul blood besiege him
as he gathers his thoughts from the unraveling
of his universe. Prudentius says that fiery Wrath
in her frenzy slays herself and dies
by her own weapons. I will watch and wait
for my son to close his mind from the anger
and sorrow that fester in him, but if the mind
does not close, I hope I can hide the weapons
before, one day, it is too late.
J OAN N E DI AZ
227
jaap blonk
Secret Recipe 7
228 O
P O E TRY
Secret Recipe 10
J AAP B LON K
229
jeffrey skinner
The Bookshelf of the God of Infinite Space
You would expect an uncountable number,
Acres and acres of books in rows
Like wheat or gold bullion. Or that the words just
Appear in the mind, like banner headlines.
In fact there is one shelf
Holding a modest number, ten or twelve volumes.
No dust jackets, because — no dust.
Covers made of gold or skin
Or golden skin, or creosote or rainSoaked macadam, or some
Mix of salt & glass. You turn a page
& mountains rise, clouds drawn by children
Bubble in the sky, you are twenty
Again, trying to read a map
Dissolving in your hands. I say You & mean
Me, say God & mean Librarian — who after long research
Offers you a glass of water and an apple — You, grateful to discover your name,
A footnote in that book.
230O
P O E TRY
F RO M T HE P O E T RY R E V IE W
The second installment of our exchange with The Poetry Review.
kathleen jamie
Fianuis
Well, friend, we’re here again — sauntering the last half-mile to the land’s frayed end
to find what’s laid on for us, strewn across the turf — gull feathers, bleached shells,
a whole bull seal, bone-dry,
knackered from the rut
(we knock on his leathern head, but no one’s home).
Change, change — that’s what the terns scream
down at their seaward rocks;
fleet clouds and salt kiss — everything else is provisional,
us and all our works.
I guess that’s why we like it here:
listen — a brief lull,
a rock pipit’s seed-small notes.
K AT H LEEN J AMI E
233
zaffar kunial
From “Empty Words”
Meaning “homeland” — mulk
(in Kashmir) — exactly how
my son demands milk.
•
Full-rhyme with Jhelum,
the river nearest his home — my father’s “realm.”
•
You can’t put a leaf
between written and oral;
that first A, or alif.
•
Letters. West to east
Mum’s hand would write; Dad’s script goes
east to west. Received.
•
Invader, to some — neither here, nor there, with me — our rhododendron.
•
Where migrating geese
pause to sleep — somewhere, halfway
is this pillow’s crease.
•
234O
P O E TRY
Now we separate
for the first time, on our walk,
at the kissing gate.
•
Old English “Deor” — an exile’s lament, the past’s
dark, half-opened door.
•
Yes, I know. Empty.
But there’s just something between
the p and the t.
•
At home in Grasmere — thin mountain paths have me back,
a boy in Kashmir.
Z AF FAR K U N I AL
235
fran lock
And I will consider the yellow dog
And Smart saw God concentric in his cat.
Smart’s cat, artificing faith from cyclone
volition. There is no God in you, yellow
dog. Your breath is our daily quicksand;
you juggle your legs into an avid heap.
You are bent on death. There is no God
in you. You are imperfect and critterly.
I will consider you, for all of that. Today,
as you joust farewell to the park; the pack
in their garrison palsy, tails agog, and you,
cocking your head to cup Madam’s strewn
bark, your nose like an antique brooch
in the sun. I will consider you, yellow dog,
as you twist in a rapt mechanical dream.
I will consider your coat, the color
of fenced gold; how you are your own
secular halo. I will consider your skull,
the narrow skull of a young gazelle
whose victory is leaping. And I will
consider your eyes, their hazel light
a gulp of fire, those firewater eyes,
holding now a numb depth down,
and milkier flickering monthly. I will
consider your youth, when we didn’t
know if you would saunter or quake;
when we didn’t know if you
would prove savvy or giddy or both.
It was both. Our frank amaze at your hardy
smarts! Our silly delight at each degree
of more-than-human knowing. I will
consider you, yellow dog, your pale
moods and your gazing; your fidgets
and your snoozes. There is no God in you,
the deep-time of a dog year is enough.
And lately you are wiser than all zero.
236O
P O E TRY
Dear dog, creaking like a haunted house,
I will consider you, from bucking young
’un to patient as settling porter; how you
held the pack when Fat Man was small
and a zoomy nuisance of wriggling. I will
consider your narrow self, aslant against
my chest in grief, in grieving, overwhelmed,
when you were the busy broom that swept
the pieces of me together. Yes, I will
consider the yellow dog, his bestowing
snout in the chill a.m.; his royal cheek
and his dances. A yellow dog comes only
once and is hisself: brilliant, final, and entire.
F RAN LOCK
237
sarah howe
Sirens
pickerel, n.1 – A young pike; several smaller kinds of N. American pike
pickerel, n.2 – A small wading bird, esp. the dunlin, Calidris alpine
I see it clearly, as though I’d known it myself,
the quick look of Jane in the poem by Roethke — that delicate elegy, for a student of his thrown
from a horse. My favorite line was always her
sidelong pickerel smile. It flashes across her face
and my mind’s current, that smile, as bright and fast
and shy as the silvery juvenile fish — glimpsed,
it vanishes, quick into murk and swaying weeds — a kink of green and bubbles all that’s left behind.
I was sure of this — the dead girl’s vividness — her smile unseated, as by a stumbling stride — till one rainy Cambridge evening, my umbrella
bucking, I headed toward Magdalene to meet an
old friend. We ducked under The Pickerel’s
painted sign, its coiled fish tilting; over a drink
our talk fell to Roethke, his pickerel smile, and
I had one of those blurrings — glitch, then focus — like at a put-off optician’s trip, when you realize
how long you’ve been seeing things wrongly.
I’d never noticed: in every stanza, even the first,
Jane is a bird: wren or sparrow, skittery pigeon.
The wrong kind of pickerel! In my head, her
smile abruptly evolved: now the stretched beak
of a wading bird — a stint or purre — swung
into profile. I saw anew the diffident stilts
of the girl, her casting head, her gangly almost
grace, puttering away across a tarnished mirror
of estuary mud. In Homer, the Sirens are winged
creatures: the Muses clipped them for their failure.
238 O
P O E TRY
By the Renaissance, their feathers have switched
for a mermaid’s scaly tail. In the emblem by Alciato
(printed Padua, 1618) the woodcut pictures a pair
of chicken-footed maids, promising mantric truths
to a Ulysses slack at his mast. But the subscriptio
denounces women, contra naturam, plied with hindparts of fish: for lust brings with it many monsters.
Or take how Horace begins the Ars Poetica,
ticking off poets who dare too much: mating savage
with tame, or snakes with birds, can only create such
horrors, he says, as a comely waist that winds up
in a black and hideous fish. The pickerel girl swims
through my mind’s eye’s flummery like a game
of perspectives, a corrugated picture: fish one way
fowl the other. Could it be that Roethke meant
the word’s strange doubleness? Neither father
nor lover. A tutor watches a girl click-to the door
of his study with reverent care one winter evening — and understands Horace on reining in fantasy.
S ARAH H OWE
239
geraldine clarkson
Dora Incites the Sea-Scribbler to Lament
Sees him at the far end of the strand,
squamous in rubbery weed, his knees bobbing
urchins, his lean trunk leaning, sea-treasure for her.
After it all (they mate, like carapaces, in parentheses)
Dora feels coolness in new places, lifts a reused
razor shell, mother-of-pearly and straight
and signals out to the swell of moldering green.
Dora is electric, in love, and deep water.
Dora, Dora, Dora, in which dread is.
People people the beach, peering
through splayed hands, appealing:
DAW-RAAaargh. A boat sees her passing.
Sea-scribbler’s chest buckles
in aftershock:
his quill is primed: squid-inked and witful.
240O
P O E TRY
simon barraclough
From “Sunspots”
For I will consider my Star Sol.
For I am the servant of this Living God and daily serve her.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East I worship in
my way.
For this is done by fixing espresso and watching the pinkening light
on The Shard.
For then she waves her warmth across the scene and lifts the hearts
of those who took a Night Bus at 4 a.m. to clean HQs.
For she tickles the orbitals of foxes in their stride and hies them
home.
For having risen and settled into her groove she begins to consider
herself.
For this she performs in eleven degrees.
For first she does the Planck to strengthen core stability.
For secondly she runs a malware scan for comets closing in.
For thirdly she completes the paperwork for eclipses total, annular,
and partial.
For fourthly: flares.
For fifthly she sorts her sunspots into pairs.
For sixthly she gives neutrinos Priority Boarding.
For seventhly she referees the arm-wrestling match between the
upstart fusion and gravity.
For eighthly she weaves flux ropes and thinks up skipping games.
For ninthly she degausses her plasma screens.
For tenthly she is profligate with her photons.
For eleventhly: star jumps.
For having considered herself she will consider her neighbors.
For she runs a cloth around the ecliptic to make it gleam.
For she oils the wheels of any planets gliding there.
For she sends invites out to wallflowers in the Oort cloud.
For she issues shadows for children to dodge as they make their way
to school.
For she shakes out her blankets for devotees of helioseismology.
For when she takes her prey she plays with it to give it a chance.
For one planet in nine escapes by her dallying.
S I M ON B ARRACLOU G H
241
For in her morning orisons she loves the Earth and the Earth loves
her.
For she is of the tribe of Tyger! Tyger!
For she hands out coloring books to chameleons in the morning.
For when it is time to rise she blushes to be seen at so intimate an
hour.
For when it is time to set she is crimson ashamed to run out on us.
For though she neither rises nor sets she thinks it best that we
believe so, so that we can take our rest and fuel our waking with
anticipation.
For she lifts oceans over mountains without thinking.
For she tries to solve the puzzle of the weather, placing this here and
that there and attempts to even out the air.
For she is a mixture of gravity and waggery.
For she’s a stickler for solstices.
For she booms like a woofer for those that can hear.
For she cares not what lives as long as all live.
For she takes her time.
For she lenses the light from distant stars to swerve it into our sockets.
For sometimes in the winter haze she’s as pale as a lemon drop and
lets us watch her bathe unpunished.
For she never calls in sick.
For her colors are open source.
For every raindrop’s an excuse for Mardi Gras.
For she will work on her drafts for a million years and release them
typo-free.
For she will lash out and then regret the hurt.
For she promises radio hams jam tomorrow.
For your power grid is a cobweb she walks into when she steps off
her porch.
For she kept mum through the Maunder Minimum.
For her behavior is definitely “on the spectrum.”
For she keeps dark about dark matter but she definitely knows
something.
For she plays Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Furnaced.
242O
P O E TRY
For she offers board and lodging to Turner’s angel in the Sun.
For she made a great figure in Egypt for her signal services.
For she can fuse the wounded parts of a broken heart and release the
lost mass as hope.
For she spins plates to create auroras.
For she leaves clues all over the place: some cryptic, some quick,
some general knowledge-based.
For she is hands-off.
For she tends to micromanage.
For she lays down squares of light for your pets to sleep in.
For she turns a blind eye to all the creeping, swooping killers of the
night but leaves a Moon-faced night-light on.
For her sunquakes flatten no buildings, gridlock no cities, disgorge
no refugees.
For she is not too proud to dry your smalls.
For she gives us heliopause and time to rethink disastrous decisions.
For Ray-Bans.
For she polarizes opinion.
For her secrets are waiting to free us.
For she appreciates Stonehenge and visits every day.
For she sets herself by the grid of Manhattan.
For she will kill you with the loving of you.
For she can shine.
S I MON B ARRACLOU G H
243
ian duhig
Riddle
Who I am’s child’s play,
a cry in a kindergarten;
though I pun on Latin,
my Yorkshire kin’s laik,
a whole lexical rainbow
unweaving in no code,
no Mason’s Mahabone
nor Horseman’s Word — but I’m caltrops at night
to the bare feet of adults
inspiring their language
to such colors as I am,
Kulla, Mondrian plastic
pixelating Mies blocks;
the Ephesian Artemis
in each cubist bust;
the Song of Amergin
by a Turing machine:
name me or you’ll be
thicker than any brick.
244O
P O E TRY
michael hofmann
Baselitz and His Generation
For Hai-Dang Phan
I have no doubt where they will go. They walk
the one life offered from the many chosen.
— Robert Lowell
They are all also, it should be remembered, West German artists, with the
partial exception of Penck, and are all male.
— John-Paul Stonard
He was born in the countryside / the provinces / the blameless sticks
in ( false) Waltersdorf (recte) Dresden
in what is now Czechoslovakia / the Czech Republic (laughs) /
Czechia, if it ever catches on
what’s it to you.
Stripped of his East German citizenship, he fled
on foot with a handful of pop music cassettes
in a pantechnicon mit Kind und Kegel
in pandemonium
nach vorne
cool as you like, in an S-Bahn from the Russian Sector, in the
clothes he stood up in.
Germany (thus Goethe’s friend Mme de Staël) is the land of poets and
thinkers
der Dichter und Denker
or of judges and executioners
der Richter und Henker
or of Richter and Penck.
He drew innocent geometrical shapes
boxed shirts / boxer shorts / boxy suits
men without women
hairy heroes of the Thirty Years’ War / lansquenets / strangely
MI CH AEL H OF MAN N
245
fibrous figures a bit like those New Yorker caveman cartoons
empty Renaissance helmets / mostly US fighter jets
the suicides of Stammheim.
He took the name of an American boxing promoter
a German Ice Age geologist
the village of his birth
the one he was given.
His first work to really catch on / be banned / get him in trouble /
cause widespread revulsion was Onkel Rudi
Die große Nacht im Eimer
Höhere Wesen befahlen: rechte obere Ecke schwarz malen! / oyez,
oyez, oyez, Politburo decree: upper right-hand corner in ebony!
ohne Titel
a mural in the cafeteria of the Hygiene Museum, since painted
over.
He wound up in Düsseldorf
Berlin, doh!
la bella Italia
tax-exempt Ireland of Böll- and Beuys-ful memory, where the
earth apples bloom.
His paintings were fuzzy geometry
like the country, ripped across the middle
upside down (especially effective: the trees)
shoveled out of the window
later withdrawn.
His favored technique involved stick figures
Polke dots
out of focus grisaille photographs
scribbling on his pictures
woodcuts à la Dürer.
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The numerals on his graphics represent a recent shopping bill
an attempt to disconcert the onlooker / ostranenie
amortization
bar code
some other code
Durchnummerierung.
He studied with Joseph Beuys
the least doctrinaire painter he could find
for the best part of ten years, in East and West, so that everything canceled itself out
what’s it to you
he didn’t.
MI CH AEL H OF MAN N
247
caroline bird
The Amnesty
I surrender my weapons:
Catapult Tears, Rain-Cloud Hat,
Lip Zip, Brittle Coat, Taut Teeth
in guarded rows. Pluck this plate
of armor from my ear, drop
it in the Amnesty Bin,
watch my sadness land among
the dark shapes of memory.
Unarmed, now see me saunter
past Ticking Baggage, Loaded
Questions, Gangs of Doubt; my love
equips me. I swear, ever
since your cheeky face span round
I trust this whole bloody world.
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helen mort
Ablation
Inside the Northern General
they’re trying to burn away
a small piece of your heart.
I want to know which bit,
how much
and what it holds.
My questions live
between what doctors call the heart
and what we mean by it,
wide as the gap between brain and mind.
And in our lineage of bypassed hearts
we should be grateful
for the literal. I know my heart
is your heart — good for running,
not much else
and later as you sit up in your borrowed bed
I get the whole thing wrong,
call it oblation. Offering
or sacrifice. As if you’d given something up.
As if their tiny fire was ritual
and we could warm by it.
H ELEN MORT
249
Scale
My weight is
four whippets,
two Chinese gymnasts,
half a shot-putter.
It can be measured
in bags of sugar, jam jars,
enough feathers for sixty pillows,
or a flock of dead birds
but some days it’s more
than the house, the span
of Blair Athol Road.
I’m the Crooked Spire
warping itself,
doubled up over town.
I measure myself against
the sky in its winter coat,
peat traces in water, air
locked in the radiators at night,
against my own held breath,
or your unfinished sentences,
your hand on my back
like a passenger
touching the dashboard
when a driver brakes,
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as if they could slow things down.
I measure myself against
love — heavier, lighter
than both of us.
H ELEN MORT
2 51
daljit nagra
The Love Song of Mugoo and Gugoo
Mugoo was a sweeper boy and the cleanest
of the sweeper caste. He would leap at the blush
of dawn to clean the paths and the steps spotless.
Gugoo was a bootmaker girl who made boots.
Gugoo was higher caste than Mugoo. By rights
he was the floor and she was the foot that trod.
Yet after work, while the boys and girls played
at tug of war, wrestling, or archery, shy boy Mugoo
and shy girl Gugoo would draw the boys and girls.
The children smiling at the shining visions would hug
Mugoo and Gugoo. Then that couple would bury
the drawings for fear their elders feel scandalized.
In manhood for Mugoo and womanhood for Gugoo,
how hard that Gugoo thread boots for her father
when she had no golden stitch for the gaping hole
in her soul. How hard that Mugoo scrub the lanes!
Who dare be swept away from the law of caste
by the foul stamp and passport of besotted love?
Yet the hairs at their ears, their nipples, bomped
by a mere sultana breeze. Then the swirling night
when they’d escape for Arabia than stay near-far ... In Mugoo and Gugoo Love was a rabbit leaping on
a radish when they became runaway lovers! Like hares
under the sketched moon they bobbed in the grunch
wind before the tossed river. Timorous Gugoo
to timorous Mugoo, “Is it not said the pure of heart
are able to turn water into solid crystal orbs?”
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“I have heard it Gugoo. Let us swim till the waters
turn dot by dot into crystal orbs, slowly mounting
up for us a solid path so we can bobble across.”
That cub-like couple held on a first-ever daredevil
cuddle. Then snuck a parched kiss! And fell into
their dive across Punjab’s muggur of an ogre — the
river Ravi! They were soon to learn the blunderous
water was bigger than they; they were dabbing onwards
on the spot; directionless comical pups; pawdawdling . .. Only Death was woken by their swallowed screams.
At the sight of a cutesome pair brinked for his maw
Death’s thin lips aah’d and coo’d. To tickle himself
Death tipped a witching shriek in the eardrums
of the ferryman, Charan, who was rank in a dream.
Charan swore at Death, “What bastard panchod
is unheroing my dream? I was the River God
riding the turmeric sea when the fisher king’s
red bill fished me up a buxom masala mermaid!”
Death hushed Charan. Bundled him into the boat.
Charan, still swearing, fished for a scream-trail,
for bunny-like feet in the sudden dead-stop river ... Next morning, by the prophecy of the snake-priest,
the villagers arrived at the shame-faced riverbank.
Charan, in his guzzy saffron turban, was blaring
at the crowd about a passion crime. Huffing too
had arrived the muscly cobbler and sweeper fathers.
All heard Charan, “I am my own King of the Sticks!
DALJ I T N AG RA
2 53
I row two weeks that way to the flowers of Kashmir
the gold-haired men with their bloated bags of honey,
and one week that way for the spices of Samarkand
with the red-fingered sellers of kalonji, saffron, jeera.
Today I catch by the feet a fresh parable of a kutchapucka business. I sing it for only one rupee each!”
All looked down by Charan’s sandal’d feet.
Dared to be rolled in the same shivering blanket
(like a chapati rolled around saag paneer)
yet fearing to be parted, yet tenuously panting were
Mugoo and Gugoo! The frail couple like shy red
squirrels, “O father, we love you. But. Most we are ... loving this: this that is my soul’s mirror. Mugoo is
my Gugoo: Gugoo is my Mugoo.” The bony youths
clung sauced together. Stiffed for the glooping apart.
The bootmaker father been crunching his own fists,
the sweeper father been hurling daggers from his eyes,
as the crowd fell silent, the fathers spoke as one,
“What draws them out of caste, their underhand
idle drawings. Such fancy is inking good for nothing.”
Gugoo and Mugoo raised their necks, “If all hearts
were good for nothing, could love from each for each
blow as one?” The apricot breeze blew a soft cadence
but could it push the dominion of the communal mind
past its bound and daily utility? Could sweet nothings
clear the world free of blood fear? Of sweet-faced
Mugoo and Gugoo in a threadbare pleading, “Do not
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part us.” From their mild rhetoric and politic of Love
the hills and valleys had swooned into blossoms of
heaven, and had set the scene with gaudiest cheeks.
So who dare part them? O Love, be roused, take arms
and wound for the cause of love! Or at least shackle
the shadows that deepened into that tinsy couple.
DALJ I T N AG RA
2 55
kathryn maris
The House with Only an Attic and a Basement
When two sane persons are together one expects that A will recognize B to be
more or less the person B takes himself to be, and vice versa.
— R.D. Laing, “The Divided Self ”
The woman in the attic did not have visitors.
The man in the basement gave parties that were popular.
The woman in the attic had mononucleosis.
The man in the basement had type 1 diabetes.
The woman in the attic listened to audiobooks which the man
in the basement held in disdain.
The door to the attic swelled in some weathers; in order to shut,
it had to be slammed.
“There is a way in which” was a way in which the man opened
sentences, as in “There is a way in which to close a door so it
doesn’t slam.”
The woman in the attic took cautious walks to build her strength.
The man in the basement pointedly said, “Some of us have ailments
which are not manufactured.”
The man in the basement wrote stories about heroin.
The woman in the attic read stories with heroines.
The woman in the attic noticed a bruise that ran from the top to the
base of her thigh.
The bruise looked like Europe.
The man in the basement was in love with the sister of the secretive
man who loved him more.
He whooped at the woman, “You killed your student?”
To himself he wept, “I killed my father.”
The man in the basement, recently divorced, was left with literally
two possessions.
The woman in the attic purchased books on psychopathology.
The man in the basement produced fecal matter
that blocked the pipes in both attic and basement.
The woman in the attic produced nothing at all.
The woman in the attic was a waste of space.
The man in the basement had sex almost daily.
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The woman in the attic had panic attacks.
The man in the basement had only one rule:
the woman in the attic was banned from his bedroom.
But once she stole in and lay on his bed
in his absence (or perhaps he was absent because she was there).
The man in the basement moved to the West Coast;
the woman in the attic crossed the Atlantic,
whereas the house with the attic and basement saw states
of fumigation, exorcism, detoxification, and rehabitation.
K AT H RY N MARI S
2 57
simon armitage
Camera Obscura
Eight-year-old sitting in Bramhall’s field,
shoes scuffed from kicking a stone,
too young for a key but old enough now
to walk the short mile back from school.
You’ve spied your mother down in the village
crossing the street, purse in her fist.
In her other hand her shopping bag nurses
four ugly potatoes caked in mud,
a boiling of peas, rags of meat, or a tail of fish
in grease-proof paper, the price totted up
in penciled columns of shillings and pence.
How warm must she be in that winter coat?
On Old Mount Road the nearer she gets
the smaller she shrinks, until you reach out
to carry her home on the flat of your hand
or your fingertip, and she doesn’t exist.
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ruby robinson
Apology
I can’t go up because I don’t know how.
Nobody has shown me.
So many names, my mother, I’m never sure
what to call you. So many names for all your predators
and crushes and suitors. I’m sorry.
I’m sorry I’m here and I’m sorry I’m not here.
Would you have made it on your own
without the comorbid condition of motherhood
and the slowness and consistency of time?
I’m sorry for the slowness and consistency of time;
years like zombies dawdling toward a cliff edge
holding back the child’s writhing body, itching to grow, packed
around the same mind I have now.
I’m sorry the concept of promise outgrew the concept of child
and that systemic contradiction and wizardry left only a dim sense
of suspicion; a crescendoing breeze, accumulating clouds
amidst bewildering dichotomies.
I’m sorry for resembling your relatives and captors and the man
who penetrated you, who’s still there, communicating boldly
via intersections of others’ thought waves and memories,
blatant into the long nights, haunting,
for my inferiority in the face of nuclear family culture,
feeding on detritus of white goods, leisure sports, laminate floors,
a real home and fake recycling,
for creeping by night into a tight void, blinds down, brain blown
glass-thin, electric impulses and bloated thoughts bolted in.
For this life being the only one my quiet mind knows,
RU B Y ROB I N S ON
2 59
its many versions and phases, I’m sorry. I wasn’t your daughter
— or anyone — when you were the blue-water navy,
or the beheaded, or the baby boy. Or was I?
I’m sorry I was not yet born and could not yet hear you
when you were over there, listening carefully
for the rain and small movements of animals, for sounds
of life, through a green, five-fingered haze.
I’m sorry I consider sentiment, fact; authenticity, originality,
when they are irrelevant. So many choices
in supermarkets, the natural habitat of panic attacks,
it’s enough to make anyone sorry and I am.
I’m sorry it’s taking over half a century to link your purple-patched
brain scan to the basic biology of stress. The piano thunders on,
sustain pedal wired to the facial muscles of all your neglecters,
aching like hell behind their stamina and machinery.
I’m sorry I had, logically, to think of my own self first / simultaneously,
navigating through the fire and acid of Trust and her sycophant
Love before returning. All the powerful were women; the power
of penises and facial hair originated there, cajoled by matriarchs.
As if skin and breath were insignificant!
I’m so sorry.
Where are you now, to take into my arms and resuscitate?
Is it too late, given you’re fifty and no longer a child?
It’s always mothers and mind control which is why
I thank you for breaking the cycle, withstanding the enormity
of generations, magnetic as water,
to let us go. You weren’t to know
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about other outrageous families and sadistic counterparts.
A nugget of my limbic system remembered choosing my own
lemon-yellow baby clothes so thank you.
I squeezed that into the thumb-sized space
in the palm of my hand knowing all along they were wrong
and imploding with it.
I’m sorry I wept in the shower for your canceled wedding,
letting the violet dress down the plughole, unsure
what it all meant except things staying the same, future
aggravating my brain, a baby brother gone again.
I’m sorry you were out there, alone, defined by the worst
of others and defined by your children’s prisms of hope
and survival mechanisms. In one version, you did marry and lived
in a house with green walls and extravagant furniture.
I’m sorry that consensus reality had you set fire to your bed
as you lay in it; arrested, put in a cell, let off the next day
because the lawyer believed it was a genuine attempt
and convinced the police.
I’m sorry you’ve had to withstand such torrents
of knowledgeless advice and legal toxification,
clinging to reality by a sinew of tooth, remembering yourself,
through the rough and the smooth.
I’m sorry I was absent, memorizing books of the Bible
for a bar of Dairy Milk, owning up to things
I’d never done, getting confirmed as an antidote
to the evil core of me.
RU B Y ROB I N S ON
2 61
I’m sorry it was exotic to think of kids like me
ending up in prison, coincidentally, inevitably
or prevented (which is the same), salvaged, peristalsized
through society, brain safely contained,
doused daily in cold water or electricity
or disgrace, temptations kept consistently far enough away
as to appear illusory
like you, my brave mother, fantastic prodigy
in flowing white caftan, knotted long brown hair, a beautiful gaze
of solemnity, rare stone, emotionless (defined by others).
I’m sorry I was ill-prepared for your soiled mattress
and comatose body, under a wave of advocaat
and transistor radios oozing with cheap Scotch. Even I
developed feelings for them amidst adults acting like it’s okay
to leave you this way, the blue bottle flies in on it,
inflated with dog shit and red hot egos, resting on your cheek,
your lip, too cunning to get rid of.
I’m sorry that laughing off a difficult childhood
didn’t make it never happen. Even a basic calculator
recognizes an infinite loop as a malfunction; don’t they see cutting
off my privates every night needs additional information?
I’m sorry I talked you out of wounding yourself
although I know it feels hopeful and lets in sunlight and air
through an open door. I’m sorry I can’t help you go up.
I, also, don’t know how.
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I’m sorry I prioritize the stimulation of adrenalin and opioids
in my own axis before I come to you. Thank you
for believing I love you even though you know
I don’t know love or trust it.
I dreamed a baby died from kidney failure. The worst part?
Not knowing distress from relief in the face of the mother,
like a child in an experiment. What does this mean?
My man fearing a moment of madness. Not locking the
knives away but keeping a steady eye on them, paying attention
to the moon and turning moods. He underestimates me;
I’m my own doppelgänger. Here I am, locked to him, discussing
sex positions and holiday destinations. Here I am
courting solitude in the doorway, a pair of eyes and a chest cavity
thrumming on the dark boundary between survival and self-control.
While there are no babies, I carry on. I am testament to the problem
of the baby. Look at me — flaunting my own survival. Who am I?
Except the parasite that accidentally caught on
to your womb wall as you lay stoned on a fur-lined coat
in a hallway in Moss Side? Happy accident, accidentally on purpose.
Close the piano lid. Empty a drawer. Things happen.
I’m sorry for absences, holidaying in France, studying guilt,
time-traveling the pain barrier, intent on nerve endings
and their connections to various biological systems.
Learning to accept and relinquish responsibility appropriately.
Throwing back the hot stone in a horizontal line.
RU B Y ROB I N S ON
2 63
Thank you to the policeman who took all the men whose safety
you feared for to the pub so you could come home
for dinner, monologue, nail varnish remover, a set
of impartial weighing scales and cheap French wine.
I’m sorry about the home, the wine, the monologue resonating
against the plastic mug others might keep for you, fussing
over makeup-smeared walls, upholstery and understatements.
I’m a bit sad we can’t see Al. He comes on the radio sometimes.
I’m sorry I’m not bringing you home, finally, to thrive and repair.
I wanted to stay, singing Luther Vandross on the walkway
outside at 6 a.m., fetching toast from the neighbor. I was hoping
for perfection, believing in anything, all those years.
Is it too ambitious to hope? I’m sentimentally sorry
despite a genuine fear of sentimentality and pseudo-unhappiness,
struggling under the weight of an A1 poster on complex trauma
and a pair of Sennheiser headphones to lock me in.
Think of what it is when God himself puts his arms around you
and says “welcome home.” There’s nothing mysterious
about my thoughts or affect, nor yours, nor anyone’s, biologically
generated by the relationships we hide our consciousness from.
Oh unhappiness and infidelity! Disguised in metaphor
you’re nothing but the deep yearning of an infant for its mother
and the furiousness. Making this connection is like remembering
being born, which is like folding time, which is no one to blame and
all the world to blame.
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Thank you for picking up the handless, footless doll
in the park, saving him from a dog or fox or thoughtless children,
keeping him to your breast on the tram, the bus, in pubs
and not noticing the scathing looks.
I learnt to trust without you, leaving my thoughts
outside for five minutes and trusting the neighbor’s cat
not to urinate on them.
I’m sorry my stand-in mother was an evil replica, machine-like
yet unpredictable. We tried to calculate an algorithm for her
mood, as you would’ve done, and in 14 years never cracked it.
She remained seated when I left for the last time.
You weren’t to know
and they wouldn’t have believed you anyway.
We learn to accept the clouds for what they are
and wait, patiently.
RU B Y ROB I N S ON
2 65
graham mort
Pigeonnier
He walks through a cloud of blue moths — one for each apostle — into a round tower
with a peaked chapeau of tiles, the oak door
rotted, wasps fierce in the vine, limestone
steps hollowed. Rows of nesting boxes dark
as the eyes of city whores; pigeons sleeping;
a wedge of sun chiseling mica through dusky
air. Now the quiet clamor of roosting birds
kept for the eggs he candles in the sacristy;
for the sweet meat of their breasts and dung
dug into the Abbé’s onion beds; for music of
a sort: the crooning of forbidden sex, blood
bubbling from a man’s cut throat. The boy
reaches to their stink, peering at novices
working the pump below: their creamy thighs
and sleek-dipped heads, their oxter hair and
sideways looks; soapy laughter, stiff nipples,
wide eyes, and slender hands. Now this backplumage black as smeared soot; iridescent
necks; this underwing down dense with heat
and lice and suffocating dark. Their amber
eyes stare incuriously as he kills, wringing
out last sobs of life, lining them up neat
as martyrs cut down from a cross of air.
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amy key
Delphine Is on Silent Retreat
1
Delphine is snug in the corruptible quiet, her heart all lurgy.
She is vigorous with postures and slackening her jaw.
The vogue memory is how when she was ten she stuck
her tongue out really far and her friend said,
“That makes you a lemon.” Retrospectively,
what she wanted was a perm
and a dad that gave money for the arcade.
2
Delphine lies down in the corner and gets up and lies down again, etc.
This is so she knows she’s lain down on every bit of the floor.
3
There’s no one to see, so makeup is taken very seriously.
If she French kisses the window her hair starts to curl — it is all very boudoir. Delphine expected to be bored.
What she needs to say aloud is smooch.
4
Delphine’s heart is more woolen than sure.
She nipped off the fur buds
from the pussy willow and strung them
into a necklace — a means of clustering wants.
In the faraway land, her old milk glass
holds other people’s toothbrushes and curdling water.
AMY K EY
2 67
5
Precision here is superfluous as cut flowers. On the seafront
the shrubs are meek in the blossoming wind.
Delphine has worked on her complexion.
Bestowed with peaches, she’s personal limelight.
6
At night her cruelties sneak up the ladder of her throat.
Its delphinedelphinedelphine on steamed-up mirrors,
always in joined-up finger-writing.
7
Singing is only permitted in the dark. Delphine is judging
her own obedience. Look at me being strict! But she has
to remind herself of the rules, hourly. Deceit is its own discipline.
8
Today the shrubs are insolent, waiting for adults to prepare a new
game.
Delphine considers ceremonial magic, but how to practice
without a little magic escaping?
9
Wish yourself into a lovely place, she thinks. Loveliness
would include shrubs without such expressions!
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10
Wisdom may well have been squandered on seafronts
and lipstick. So many years afraid of waste is its own
waste is her self-comfort when the light folds.
AMY K EY
2 69
RUTH L I L LY A N D D O ROT HY S A R G E N T ROS E NB E RG
P O E T RY F E L L OWS
Through the generosity of Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg,
the Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine award five annual fellowships
to younger writers in support of their study and writing of poetry.
nate marshall
Harold’s Chicken Shack #86
we’re trying to eliminate the shack.
— Kristen Pierce, Harold’s CEO & daughter of founder Harold Pierce
when i went to summer camp the white kids had a tendency
to shorten names of important institutions. make Northwestern
University into NU. international relations into IR. everybody
started calling me Nate. before this i imagined myself
Nathaniel A. maybe even N. Armstead to big up my granddad.
i wrote my whole name on everything. eventually i started
unintentionally introducing myself as Nate. it never occurred
to me that they could escape the knowing of my name’s
real length. as a shorty
most the kids in my neighborhood couldn’t say my name.
Mick-daniel, Nick-thaniel, MacDonnel shot across the courts
like wild heaves toward the basket. the subconscious visual
of a chicken shack seems a poor fit for national expansion.
Harold’s Chicken is easier, sounds like Columbus’s flag stuck
into a cup of cole slaw. shack sounds too much like home
of poor people, like haven for weary
like building our own.
N AT E MARS H ALL
2 73
Oregon Trail
For my great aunt & Jonathan Hicks
my first venture west was in Windows 98
or Independence, Missouri. class in the computer lab
& we were supposed to be playing some typing game
or another. the one i remember had a haunted theme.
ghosts instructing us on the finer points of where
to put our fingers. these were the last days
before keyboards as appendage, when typing
was not nature. i should’ve been letting an apparition
coach me through QWERTY but rather
i was at the general store deciding between ammo & axles,
considering the merits of being a banker or carpenter.
too young to know what profession
would get me to the Willamette Valley
in the space of a 40-minute period.
i aimed my rifle with the arrow keys, tapped the space
bar with a prayer for meat to haul back to the wagon.
this game came difficult as breathing underwater after
trying to ford a river.
i was no good at survival.
somebody always fell ill or out into the river.
each new day scurvy or a raid was the fate of a character
named for my crush or my baby sister.
this loss i know, how to measure what it means
to die premature before a school period ends.
i can’t understand the game coming to a late end.
an elderly daughter grieving her elderly mother.
reading the expansive obit in a suburban
Detroit church is a confusing newness.
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when the old do the thing the world expects
i retreat into my former self. focus on beating
video games I’ve always sucked at, brush up
on Chicago Bulls history, re-memorize
the Backstreet Boys catalog, push
away whatever woman is foolhardy enough
to be on any road with me. i pioneer my way away
from all the known world. i look at homicide rates
& wish we all expired the way i know best. i pray
for a senseless, poetic departure. i pray for my family
to not be around to miss me while i’m still here.
i want a short obituary, a life brief & unfulfilled,
the introductory melody before a beat’s crescendo into song,
the game over somewhere in the Great Plains.
i want to spare my descendants the confusion
of watching a flame flicker slow. keep them from being
at a funeral thumbing the faded family pictures like worn keys,
observing the journey done, the game won, the west
conquered.
N AT E MARS H ALL
2 75
safiya sinclair
Center of the World
The meek inherit nothing.
God in his tattered coat
this morning, a quiet tongue
in my ear, begging for alms,
cold hands reaching up my skirt.
Little lamb, paupered flock,
bless my black tea with tears.
I have shorn your golden
fleece, worn vast spools
of white lace, glittering jacquard,
gilded fig leaves, jeweled dust
on my skin. Cornsilk hair
in my hems. I have milked
the stout beast of what you call America;
and wear your men across my chest
like furs. Stickpin fox and snow
blue chinchilla: they too came
to nibble at my door,
the soft pink tangles I trap
them in. Dear watchers in the shadows,
dear thick-thighed fiends. At ease,
please. Tell the hounds who undress
me with their eyes — I have nothing
to hide. I will spread myself
wide. Here, a flash of muscle. Here,
some blood in the hunt. Now the center
of the world: my incandescent cunt.
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All hail the dark blooms of amaryllis
and the wild pink Damascus,
my sweet Aphrodite unfolding
in the kink. All hail hot jasmine
in the night; thick syrup
in your mouth, forked dagger
on my tongue. Legions at my heel.
Here at the world’s red mecca,
kneel. Here Eden, here Bethlehem,
here in the cradle of Thebes,
a towering sphinx roams the garden,
her wet dawn devouring.
S AF I YA S I N CLAI R
2 77
The Art of Unselfing
The mind’s black kettle hisses its wild
exigencies at every turn: The hour before the coffee
and the hour after.
Penscratch of the gone morning, woman
a pitched hysteria watching the mad-ant scramble,
her small wants devouring.
Her binge and skin-thrall.
Her old selves being shuffled off into labyrinths,
this birdless sky a longing.
Her moth-mouth rabble unfacing
touch-and-go months under winter, torn letters
under floorboards,
each fickle moon pecked through with doubt.
And one spoiled onion. Pale Cyclops
on her kitchen counter
now sprouting green missives,
some act of contrition; neighbor-god’s vacuum
a loud rule thrown down.
Her mother now on the line saying too much.
This island is not a martyr. You tinker too much
with each gaunt memory, your youth
and its unweeding. Not everything blooms here
a private history — consider this immutable. Consider
our galloping sun, its life.
Your starved homesickness. The paper wasp kingdom
you set fire to, watched for days until it burnt a city in you.
Until a family your hands could not save
278 O
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became the hurricane. How love is still unrooting you.
And how to grow a new body — to let each word be the wild rain
swallowed pure like an antidote.
Her mother at the airport saying don’t come back.
Love your landlocked city. Money. Buy a coat.
And even exile can be glamorous.
Some nights she calls across the deaf ocean to no one
in particular. No answer. Her heart’s double-vault
a muted hydra.
This hour a purge
of its own unselfing.
She must make a home of it.
S AF I YA S I N CLAI R
279
Confessor
This is where you leave me.
Filling of old salt and ponderous,
what’s left of your voice in the air.
Blue honeycreeper thrashed out
to a ragged wind, whole months
spent crawling this white beach
raked like a thumb, shucking, swallowing
the sea’s benediction, pearled oxides.
Out here I am the body invented naked,
woman emerging from cold seas, herself
the raw eel-froth met beneath her tangles,
who must believe with all her puckering
holes. What wounds the Poinciana slits
forth, what must turn red eventually.
The talon-mouths undressing. The cling-cling
bird scratching its one message; the arm
you broke reset and broke again. Caribbean.
Sky a wound I am licking, until I am drawn new
as a lamb, helpless in the chicken wire of my sex.
I let every stranger in. Watch men change faces
with the run-down sun, count fires
in the loom-holes of their pickups, lines of rot,
studying their scarred window-plagues,
nightshade my own throat closed tight
28 0O
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against a hard hand. Then all comes mute
in my glittering eye. All is knocked back,
slick hem-suck of the dark surf, ceramic
tiles approaching, the blur of a beard.
The white tusk of his ocean goring me.
This world unforgiving in its boundaries.
The day’s owl and its omen
slipping a bright hook
into my cheek —
S AF I YA S I N CLAI R
2 81
jamila woods
Ghazal for White Hen Pantry
beverly be the only south side you don’t fit in
everybody in your neighborhood color of white hen
brown bag tupperware lunch don’t fill you
after school cross the street, count quarters with white friends
you love 25¢ zebra cakes mom would never let you eat
you learn to white lie through white teeth at white hen
oreos in your palm, perm in your hair
everyone’s irish in beverly, you just missin’ the white skin
pray they don’t notice your burnt toast, unwondered bread
you be the brownest egg ever born from the white hen
pantry in your chest where you stuff all the Black in
distract from the syllables in your name with a white grin
keep your consonants crisp, coffee milked, hands visible
never touch the holiday-painted windows of white hen
you made that mistake, scratched your initials in the paint
an unmarked crown victoria pulled up, full of white men
they grabbed your wrist & wouldn’t show you a badge
the manager clucked behind the counter, thick as a white hen
they told your friends to run home, but called the principal on you
& you learned Black sins cost much more than white ones
28 2O
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Ode to Herb Kent
Your voice crawls across the dashboard of Grandma’s Dodge Dynasty
on the way home from Lilydale First Baptist. You sing a cocktail of
static and bass. Sound like you dressed to the nines: cowboy hat, fur
coat & alligator boots. Sound like you lotion every tooth. You a walking discography, South Side griot, keeper of crackle & dust in the
grooves. You fell in love with a handmade box of wires at 16 and
been behind the booth ever since. From wbez to v103, you be the
Coolest Gent, King of the Dusties. Your voice wafts down from the
ceiling at the Hair Lab. You supply the beat for Kym to tap her comb
to. Her brown fingers paint my scalp with white grease to the tunes
of Al & Barry & Luther. Your voice: an inside-out yawn, the sizzle of
hot iron on fresh perm, the song inside the blackest seashell washed
up on a sidewalk in Bronzeville. You soundtrack the church picnic,
trunk party, Cynthia’s 50th birthday bash, the car ride to school,
choir, Checkers. Your voice stretch across our eardrums like Daddy
asleep on the couch. Sound like Grandma’s sweet potato pie, sound
like the cigarettes she hide in her purse for rough days. You showed
us what our mommas’ mommas must’ve moved to. When the West
Side rioted the day MLK died, you were audio salve to the burning
city, people. Your voice a soft sermon soothing the masses, speaking
coolly to flames, spinning black records across the airwaves, spreading the gospel of soul in a time of fire. Joycetta says she bruised her
thumbs snappin’ to Marvin’s “Got to Give It Up” and I believe her.
J AMI LA WOODS
2 83
beverly, huh.
you must be
made of money.
your parents
must have grown
on trees.
bet you’re black
tinged with green.
bet you sleep
on bags of it.
bet your barbies
climb it.
bet you never
wanted.
bet you never
had to ask.
bet you golf.
bet you tennis.
bet you got
a summer house.
bet you got
a credit card
for your 5th birthday.
bet you played
with bills for toys.
bet you chew
them up
for dinner.
bet you spit
your black out
like tobacco
that’s why you talk so
bet you listen to green day.
bet you ain’t never heard of al.
bet your daddy wears a robe
around the house.
28 4O
P O E TRY
bet his hands are soft as a frog’s belly.
bet your house is on a hill.
bet the grass is freshly cut.
bet you feel like a princess.
bet the police protect your house.
bet you know their first names.
bet your house has a hundred rooms.
bet a black lady comes to clean them.
J AMI LA WOODS
2 85
erika l. sánchez
Six Months after Contemplating Suicide
Admit it — you wanted the end
with a serpentine
greed. How to negotiate
that strangling
mist, the fibrous
whisper?
To cease to exist
and to die
are two different things entirely.
But you knew this,
didn’t you?
Some days you knelt on coins
in those yellow hours.
You lit a flame
to your shadow
and ate
scorpions with your naked fingers.
So touched by the sadness of hair
in a dirty sink.
The malevolent smell
of soap.
28 6O
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When instead of swallowing a fistful
of white pills,
you decided to shower,
the palm trees
nodded in agreement,
a choir
of crickets singing
behind your swollen eyes.
The masked bird
turned to you
with a shred of paper hanging
from its beak.
At dusk,
hair wet and fragrant,
you cupped a goat’s face
and kissed
his trembling horns.
The ghost?
It fell prostrate,
passed through you
like a swift
and generous storm.
ERI K A L. S ÁN CH EZ
2 87
Kingdom of Debt
According to a report from the University of San Diego’s Justice in Mexico project,
138,000 people have been murdered in Mexico since 2006.
They call it the corner of heaven:
a laboratory, a foot at the throat
of an empire. Before the holy
dirt, the woman with the feline gait
waits with tangled hair, mouth
agape — the letter X marked
on what’s left of her breasts
and face. Nuestra Belleza
Mexicana. A roped mule
watches a man place a crown
on her severed head. Tomorrow
the queen will be picked clean
by the kindness of the sea.
Shuttered shops and empty
restaurants. Stray dogs couple
in a courtyard. Under a swaying
palm tree, a cluster of men
finger golden pistols, whisper,
aquí ni se paran las moscas.
Two boys, transfixed, watch
a pixelated video: a family fed
to a swarm of insatiable pigs.
A butcher sweeps blood
from an empty street. Death
is my godmother, he repeats.
Death is a burnt mirror.
When the crackling stereo
dithers between stations — amor
de mis amores, sangre de mi alma — a gaggle of silent children
gather before a sputtering
trash bin. Together they watch
28 8 O
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the terror hover like flies.
ERI K A L. S ÁN CH EZ
2 89
danniel schoonebeek
Cold Open
It was the thought that — if you could watch, if I could leak to the public the film of when I
needed to reach you — that would be one way.
•
From a little-known bluff overgrown last summer with wildflowers,
if you could watch a family of turkeys,
a mother and 162 poults,
if you could watch them abandon their roost on the lowest branch
of a cottonwood tree,
and lugging 163 tow cables behind them when they departed,
if you could watch them dragging the tree through a field overgrown last summer with
tanglehead grass.
And discarding the yellow tree pitilessly across the rails of the
Sunset Limited,
which was carrying that day exactly 162 passengers west to their
sentencings.
It could be one way, I kept telling myself, to awake in summer when
everyone’s sentenced
and film myself shut of those dead to me.
If the lights came up on my train in a field overgrown last summer
with tanglehead.
If we could slow to a halt in front of the yellow tree obstructing our
path.
There could be a smash cut,
an establishing shot of the bluff where you knelt cutting wildflowers,
and off-camera if the cottonwood started hemorrhaging yellow
290O
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termites,
if you could see the mites glowing yellow having drunk the yellow
blood of the tree.
If I could leak to you what the camera work couldn’t — in a hand-me-down suit
an unsavory man
he’s inside a renaissance cherry casket,
and the casket’s buried eight feet beneath the Sunset Limited’s
engine room,
and the casket’s rigged on the inside with a hand-crank generator,
with Christmas lights in five colors,
if we leaked red first then blue,
if we leaked green before we leaked orange,
last yellow,
the light of which illuminates the interior of the casket enough for
the man
(he’s alive)
to watch his face decompose in the mirror that’s rigged to the ceiling,
if we could cut to the sentence handed down to the man many years
ago,
that any unsavory man is a man who should watch himself die.
If there was a slow zoom on a woman’s hands typing eight words in
first class,
a slow dissolve to a child in coach,
if he fingers a text that says don’t change for you,
don’t change for me, if there’s no ellipsis, no period at the end,
if he doesn’t need to ask who it’s from.
From a little-known bluff you could stand up with a fistful of wildflowers.
DAN NI EL S CH OON EB EEK
291
If you could watch the faces of 162 passengers darken unannounced
as if from a lightning storm.
The cottonwood could stand up from the rails and dust off her own
blood herself.
Resume her cold work, untangling the grasses.
If you could watch my train resume its terrible campaign for the west.
Unseen for you I could stay buried here,
beneath 162 suitcases with the rest of the stowaways.
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RO B ERT L A X : N OT HIN G IS TO O S M ALL
Poem found by archivist Paul Spaeth in one of Robert Lax’s notebooks
michael n. m c gregor
Introduction
In the fall of 1962, at the rather late age of forty-six, Robert Lax left
his native New York to try living in Greece. Except for short excursions to earn money or give readings or, for one longer and more
painful period, escape the threats that came from being thought a
spy, he lived on various remote islands there, among fishermen and
sponge divers, for the next thirty-eight years. As a result of his long
absence and his concurrent turn in a more experimental direction,
his poetry remained less known and less appreciated in the US than
it might have been. By the time he died in 2000 he had long been,
as Richard Kostelanetz once wrote, “among America’s greatest experimental poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems
from remarkably few words.” But only a few perceptive critics and a
handful of readers knew it.
The year Lax left for Greece, Journeyman Press, an imprint Emil
Antonucci founded to publish Lax’s work, issued only his second
book, the somewhat cryptically and blandly titled New Poems. A
slender volume of daringly spare, experimental verse, the book
perplexed those like Denise Levertov who had praised the lyricism,
imagery, and sonic quality of his first collection, The Circus of the Sun.
“Robert Lax’s work of recent years saddens me sometimes,”
Levertov wrote in 1968, “because I believe so deeply that the mainstream of poetry is aural — sonic — not visual; and I found in ‘The
sunset city . .. ’ [from The Circus of the Sun] and others of his earlier
poems such especially impressive examples of the sonic.” She went
on to say, however, that some of his more recent poems were pleasingly sonic in nature. “I am thinking particularly of ‘Sea/Sun/Stone,’”
she wrote,
in which the repeated words, when the poem is read aloud
properly, bring about in the imagination a more profound sense
of their meaning till by the end of the poem we are hot with the
sun on stone and our [ears] are filled with the susurrations of
the sea and our eyes with its dazzle.
What Levertov was hearing and sensing was a new kind of stripped-
M I CHAEL N . M C G REG OR
295
down, rhythmic approach to poetry evoking an ancient world, a simple amalgam of sights and sounds and sensuous feelings as old as the
Bible or Homer.
For those who knew Lax only from his early and far more mainstream New Yorker poems (over a dozen starting in 1940, when he
was twenty-four) or his Circus collection, in which he transformed
the spectacle of the circus and the lives of acrobats, freaks, and roustabouts into metaphors for creation, the shift Lax made around 1960
was certainly bewildering. Instead of lush lines like “Once more now
they are with me, the golden ones, / living their dream in long afternoons of sunlight; / riding their caravans in the wakeful nights” he
offered starker, simpler, edgier images such as:
every
night
in the
world
is a
night
in the
hospital
These “new poems” (a term he used because they represented a
new style for him and were unlike poems he’d seen before) arose
from unhappiness — with stale poetic conventions, with life in commercial New York, with his own inability to articulate a truer vision — but they could not reach their purest form until they were purged
of the world that gave them birth, until he had moved to the ageold world of the Greek islanders. He said later that he could not
have written the first of them anywhere but in late-fifties New
York, a place where experimentation and America’s obsession
with materialism and violence were intertwined. But they would
never have reached the heights attained in his masterwork Sea &
Sky — an epic that, in the words of poet John Beer, “through its
repetitions . .. works to dismantle the boundaries between time and
timelessness” — if he hadn’t moved, if he hadn’t found somewhere
like Greece, where the land and the people, the sun and the sea, the
work and the way of life were as simple as his poems.
296O
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Because of the striking appearance of his poetry on the page, thin
columns with only a word or two or sometimes a syllable per line,
Lax has often been grouped with the concrete poets, but the label
never quite fit. It is the “verbal magic of the rhythm” Lax uses that
keeps him from being “a mere concrete poet,” wrote R.C. Kenedy in
an extended critique of his work in the Lugano Review in 1971.
His insistence on minimal typographic blocks, floated as these
are into the airy and skylike spaces of near-blank paper, convey optical impressions of a deliberate character — but Lax’s is
a poetry which has aural traits strong enough to overcome its
self-imposed (concrete?) limitations.
(Kenedy was one of an increasing number of European poets and
critics who discovered and embraced Lax’s work during the decades
he lived in Greece, including Ian Hamilton Finlay, Emmett Williams,
Maurizio Nannucci, David Miller, and Nicholas Zurbrugg.)
In Kenedy’s view, Lax’s thin vertical columns “stress, if anything,
the ultimate solitude of the voice which pierces a categorical emptiness. Whether the emptiness belongs to silence or to a yearning for
some sort of communication.” Finally, though, it is the attentiveness
and humility of the person observing the world and crafting poetry
from his observations that gives the poems their power: “These compositions have the force to imply that everything is capable of being
transformed into symbolic meaning by coming into contact with a
passionate human being.”
Lax’s passion was more of a spiritual and intellectual passion than
a physical one, an intense concentration on what exists as a means
to understanding life as it is, as well as what lies beyond it. In Lax’s
poetic world, Kenedy writes, “nothing is too small and nothing is
too great to be comprehended — or to transmit the meaning which
is behind meanings and which defines itself by remaining incomprehensible.”
Lax, who was born a Jew, became a Catholic, and lived the last
half of his life among Orthodox Greeks, was greatly influenced by
the same Hindu holy man (Mahanambrata Brahmachari) who influenced his close friend Thomas Merton, as well as the Zen Buddhism
Merton championed, the Kabala, and Chinese philosophy. He believed, in the words of the mystic Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that
“everything that rises must converge.” Or, to put it another way — one
M I CHAEL N . M C G REG OR
297
more reflective of his poetry — that knowing the essence of one thing
helps you to understand the essence of others.
During his peripatetic early days, Lax, who had been a star writer
and editor at Columbia University, sampled the writing life in a
variety of ways. He worked as an editorial assistant at the New Yorker,
a movie critic at Time, a freelance reporter for Parade, an editor for
the Paris-based journal New-Story and the New York-based Jubilee
magazine, a writing professor at the University of North Carolina
and Connecticut College, a scriptwriter in Hollywood, and a writer
in residence at General Beadle State College in South Dakota. What
he always wanted to do, however, what he thought he was best suited
to do, was write freely and simply about the life around him. In order
to do that, he did what few writers are willing to do: gave up having
possessions, a family, and any kind of respect or regular place in the
world.
When he moved to the remote Greek island of Kalymnos, Lax
found what he thought was the perfect place to live cheaply and simply among humble yet clever and spiritually oriented people. His trust
in those people was shattered when tensions between Greece and
Turkey caused some of them to think him, a foreigner who was always
writing and taking pictures, a spy. He recovered, though, moving
eventually to the nearby island of Patmos, a holier-seeming place
where he lived out his days in peace.
Lax wrote and published many different kinds of writing — fables, aphorisms, spiritual meditations, and reportorial observations
among them — but his reputation, now and in future years, will always be closely tied to the kind of lean, columnar writing found in
the following poem sequence. This previously unpublished piece — written on Kalymnos on November 29, 1968, the day before he
turned fifty-three — showcases the environment and people he
wrote about, his careful separation of images, his use of repetition for
emphasis or a sense of duration (“at mid- / night // mid- / night”), the
subtlety of his metaphors, his rhythmic line breaks and spatial decisions, his close observation and fidelity to lived experience, his focus
on external things and activities (with explanations in parentheses),
his contrasting of the earthiness of Kalymnos with the holiness of
Patmos, and his preoccupation with what he calls here “the endless
city,” the place, both imagined and real, where all of humanity and
maybe even the angels come together.
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Postcard sent to Michael N. McGregor on May 13, 1986
Sent to Michael N. McGregor with a letter on May 14, 1995
robert lax
Kalymnos: November 29, 1968
1
pavlos
looking out
to sea
explains:
son costa,
20, will be
coming home
went with a
sponge caiqui
to nearby
island
a storm
came up:
the boat
was smashed
& sunk
the boys
all got
ashore
& will be
coming home
in another
caiqui
ROB ERT LAX
301
2
late at
night
i saw
them
costa &
the others
they’d saved
the sponges
too
unloaded them
first
in burlap
bags
then hoisted
them onto
their backs
trotted up
the stone
steps
plodded up
a steep
hill
at midnight
302O
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midnight
to the
storehouse
ROB ERT LAX
303
3
at 5
in the
morning
at the
cafeneion
the captain
described
the wreck:
the boat
had turned
over &
over
in the
water
churning it
like a
propeller
304O
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4
costa
went by
later
on his
motorcycle
(tall &
sombre)
riding
like an
indian
ROB ERT LAX
305
5
spiro
(young
gypsy)
fishes
off the
dock
when he
isn’t
climbing
hills
& selling
blankets
306O
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6
what can
you do?
i get
bored
around
the house
the children
crying
fighting
can’t sit
all day
in the
cafeneion
so i
fish
ROB ERT LAX
307
7
after an
hour
he rolls
in his
lines
teaches
me two
words
in the
romany
tongue
for ‘no
fish’
(in the
plural)
308 O
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8
pat
mos
pat
mos
an
gels
an
gels
kaly
mnos
kaly
mnos
men
kaly
mnos
kaly
mnos
men
pat
mos
pat
mos
ROB ERT LAX
309
an
gels
an
gels
kaly
mnos
kaly
mnos
men
310O
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9
stergo
has a
tired
eye
bright
but
weary
when he
looks
at you
he looks
into
you
his eye
takes
the place
of whatever
you were
thinking
ROB ERT LAX
311
10
his café
is near
the customs
house
(& the
pier)
he keeps
it open
till late
at night
& opens
again
at 5 in
the morning
if ever
his customers
find it
closed
they walk
right by
(& won’t
drink
312O
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coffee
anyplace
else)
ROB ERT LAX
313
11
in the
endless
city
the endless city
the beggars are
in one
place
the cops
in another
the fine
people
here
& the
poor
people
there
(each has
his parish
each his
precinct)
in the endless
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endless
endless
city
ROB ERT LAX
315
c o n t r i bu to r s
simon armitage’s most recent collection is Paper Aeroplane: Selected Poems 1989–2014 (Faber & Faber, 2014). He is Professor of Poetry
at Oxford University.
simon barraclough* is the author and editor of several books,
including Laboratorio (Sidekick Books, 2015), Neptune Blue (Salt Publishing, 2011), and Bonjour Tetris (Penned in the Margins, 2010). The
poem in this issue is from Sunspots (Penned in the Margins, 2015).
caroline bird* is an award-winning poet with four collections
published by Carcanet. Her latest is The Hat-Stand Union (2013).
jaap blonk* is a self-taught composer, performer, and poet. He has
performed on all continents.
geraldine clarkson’s* poetry is influenced by her Irish roots
and time spent in a monastic community in Peru. She has published
widely in UK journals.
david m. cook* (AKA “Bonethrower”) is based in Los Angeles
by way of Brooklyn, but is originally from Louisville, Kentucky. He
is amicable, unassuming, and hardly seems the “type” to consistently
and skillfully crank out such a lewd labyrinth of work that is equal
parts modern mysticism and memento mori.
joanne diaz* is the author of My Favorite Tyrants (University of
Wisconsin Press, 2014) and The Lessons (Silverfish Review Press,
2011). She teaches at Illinois Wesleyan University.
ian duhig’s poem in this issue is from his seventh book of poetry,
The Blind Roadmaker (Pan MacMillan, 2016) © Ian Duhig and published with permission of Picador.
michael hofmann’s book of essays, Where Have You Been?, was
published in 2014 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
sarah howe* was born in Hong Kong and lives in London, but is
currently based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “Sirens” is from Loop
of Jade, published by Chatto & Windus, © Sarah Howe 2015.
kathleen jamie is a celebrated Scottish poet and essayist. Her
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collection of essays, Sightlines (The Experiment, 2013), won the Orion Book Award. “Fianuis” is from The Bonniest Company (2015) ©
Kathleen Jamie and published with permission of Picador.
amy key’s debut collection is Luxe (Salt Publishing, 2013). She coedits the online journal Poems in Which.
zaffar kunial* was born in Birmingham, England. He spent 2014
in Grasmere as the Wordsworth Trust Poet-in-Residence. His poem
in this issue was first published in Faber New Poets 11 by Zaffar Kunial
(Faber & Faber, 2014).
robert lax* (1915–2000) is the author of over two dozen books
of poetry and prose, including A Hermit’s Guide to Home Economics
(New Directions, 2015) and Poems (1962–1997) (Wave Books, 2013).
The poems in this issue appear courtesy of the Robert Lax Literary
Trust, the Robert Lax Archives at St. Bonaventure University, and
Paul Spaeth, archivist.
fran lock* is an itinerant dog whisperer and author of two poetry
collections. Her work explores ideas surrounding traveler identity,
cultural diaspora, and imperfect assimilation. Also mastiffs.
sheryl luna is the author of Seven (3: A Taos Press, 2013) and Pity
the Drowned Horses (University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). She is
a CantoMundo fellow.
kathryn maris’s most recent book is God Loves You (Seren, 2013).
nate marshall’s poem “Harold’s Chicken Shack #86” is from
Wild Hundreds by Nate Marshall, © 2015, reprinted by permission of
the University of Pittsburgh Press.
michael n. m c gregor* is the author of Pure Act: The Uncommon
Life of Robert Lax (Fordham University Press, 2015). He teaches in
the creative writing program at Portland State University.
graham mort* is Professor of Creative Writing and Transcultural
Literature at Lancaster University, UK. His latest book of poems,
Cusp, was published by Seren in 2011.
helen mort’s* first collection, Division Street (Chatto & Windus,
2013), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Costa Prize.
Her second, No Map Could Show Them, is forthcoming.
daljit nagra* was born and raised in London and has published
CON T RI BU TORS
317
three collections of poetry, all with Faber & Faber. His most recent
book is Ramayana (2013), a retelling of the Asian epic.
donald revell is the author of twelve collections of poetry, most
recently Tantivy (Alice James Books, 2012). His prose work, Essay: A
Critical Memoir, was published by Omnidawn in 2015.
atsuro riley was brought up in the South Carolina lowcountry
and lives in California. His book is Romey’s Order (University of
Chicago Press, 2010).
ruby robinson lives in Sheffield, UK. Her debut collection, Every
Little Sound (2016), is forthcoming from Pavilion Poetry, an imprint
of Liverpool University Press.
erika l. sánchez is a CantoMundo Fellow and winner of a 2013
“Discovery”/Boston Review Prize. She has received scholarships from
the Fulbright Program and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
danniel schoonebeek is the author of American Barricade
(YesYes Books, 2014). Poor Claudia will publish his second book,
a travelogue called C’est la guerre, this month. His book Trébuchet was
selected by Kevin Prufer for the 2015 National Poetry Series.
safiya sinclair* was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica.
Her first full-length collection, Cannibal (University of Nebraska
Press, 2016), won the 2015 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.
jeffrey skinner’s recent collection of poems is Glaciology (Southern Illinois University Press, 2013). He is a 2014 Poetry Fellowship
recipient from the Guggenheim Foundation.
jamila woods is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and front
woman of the soul duo M&O. She is currently the Associate Artistic
Director of Young Chicago Authors.
* First appearance in Poetry.
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e x t e n t a n d n at u r e o f c i r c u l at i o n :
p o e t ry ( p u b l i c at i o n # 0436740 )
a Total # of copies (net pressrun)
b Paid circulation
1 Mailed outside-country paid
subscriptions stated on form 3541
2 Mailed in-county paid subscriptions
3 Sales through dealers and carriers,
street vendors, counter sales, and
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4 Outside the mail
e Total free or nominal rate distribution
f Total distribution
g Copies not distributed
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i % Paid and / or requested circulation
d o n s h a r e , e d i to r
avg # copies each issue
preceding twelve months
26,070
20,853
0
1,583
# copies single issue pub
nearest filing date
25,172
20,940
0
1,510
0
22,436
0
21,738
125
0
0
3,236
3,361
25,797
274
26,070
87%
109
0
0
2,964
3,073
24,811
361
25,172
88%
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T HE POETRY FOUN DATION PRE SE NT S
December Features
Poetry Podcasts
On the Poetry Magazine Podcast, Poetry editors
Don Share and Lindsay Garbutt go inside the pages
of this issue, talking to contributors and sharing their
poem selections with listeners.
Poetry Off the Shelf, a weekly podcast, explores the
diverse world of contemporary American poetry.
Hear Saeed Jones and Franny Choi’s recent
conversation about race, social media, and the Loch
Ness monster.
Podcasts are available free from the iTunes store.
Harriet News
December’s featured blogger, Morgan Parker,
discusses race and feminism, poetics and craft,
and the writing life of a poet at
poetryfoundation.org/harriet
Learning Lab View educational resources including an
Edna St. Vincent Millay poem guide and an
essay by new Young People’s Poet Laureate
Jacqueline Woodson at poetryfoundation.org.
Events Plan your trip to The Poetry Foundation in Chicago
to see some of our December events!
Bagley Wright Lecture Series
Srikanth Reddy
Thursday, December 3, 7:00 PM
Reading
Tony Hoagland
Thursday, December 10, 7:00 PM
Exhibition
Volatile! A Poetry and Scent Exhibition
December 11, 2015–February 19, 2016
Monday–Friday, 11:00 AM –4:00 PM
Volatile! Opening
Friday, December 11, 6:30 PM
POE T RY FOUN DAT I ON
61 West Superior Street, Chicago, IL
(312) 787-7070
www.poetryfoundation.org