Sample Poems (2008)
Jan Beatty
Red Sugar
You walk inside yourself on roads and ropes of blood vessels and tendons, you walk inside yourself and eat weather — Gretel Ehrlich
When I was young, I was a comet
with an unending shimmering tail,
and I flew over the brokenness below
that was my life. I didn’t know until I was
twelve that we carry other bodies inside us.
Not babies, but bodies of blood
that speak to us in plutonic languages
of pith and serum. When I was
six, there was a man in the woods,
naked. I didn’t know him, but I knew
he was a wrong kind of man/so I ran.
With my inside body I see his skinny
white bones and curled mouth, he looks
like sickness and it’s the body inside me
that’s running, my red sugar body
that shows me the brutal road to love,
the one good man, the one song
I can keep as mine. I heard it once
when I was waitressing, something
made me turn my head, made me
swivel to look at a woman across
the room, wasn’t even my station,
but the red sugar said, go.When I
saw her up close, I knew she was
blood. I can’t explain this—I only met
my mother once. I said, Do you know
a woman named Dorothy? Her face
was pale, she said, No—in that hard way.
Maybe her red sugar told her to run—
but before she left, she grabbed my arm,
said, I did have a sister named Dorothy,
but she died. Two inches away from her
dyed blond hair, I said, okay,but both
our inside bodies knew she was lying.
Some people call it eating weather—
the way you swallow what you know,
but keep it—later it rises like a storm
from another world, reptilian and hungry.
It’s the thickness that drives us and
stains us, the not asking/just coming/
the cunt alive and jewel-like/the uncut
garnet and the lava flow/it’s barbarism/
bloodletting/the most liquid part of us/
spilling/spreading/the granular red sea
of sap and gore/sinking/moving forward
at the same time/slippery/red
containing blue/it’s the sweet,
deep inside of the body.
Paula Closson Buck
NOVEMBER CONSOLATION
Katerina is crying
and no one can make her stop.
She wanted Turkish candy,
or yogurt with honey—
she is tired or injured or sad.
More generally speaking, it is November—
a time of wooden tables and men in cafés,
Americans on TV threatening war.
The world undertakes
its oversized grief.
In the olive grove behind Katerina’s
and the house where I stay, two exfoliated hens
nest on a cushion in the dirt.
They always welcome a fugitive
from the massive
scale on which things take place.
This village collapses
one uninhabited room at a time.
And each day arrives
like a perfect egg. Or two.
There there, Katerina.
Craig Czury
from Click
from my still dark room I turn the lamp on to write and see only
the reflection of my craggy face almost image when I look out no middle
no beginning being born out of split-second click I don’t advance
I don’t know what this book is about but I’m writing it with one eye on the page
and my ear to what my readers say the page says about them
I have to trust what you remember of your life while reading that you become its writer
my eye blurs when you turn your page I turn my page and keep writing
I write this from my picnic table between blindness and vertigo
there are sounds that mimic birds make from birds long extinct
as I sit up in the dark fishing around with my feet for slippers
also an ancient gesture before clicking on the lamp
I’m sitting at the kitchen table she’s sitting at her kitchen table
the neighbor’s red maple going bare I don’t know where the birds will go
somewhere sorry for who knows doesn’t help the leaves are almost
and facing me is the memorial park with a tent set up for a funeral
I’m just now wrapping the details whatever theological notion of being image and breath
but we never got it this lush with death in its midst teasing us toward a cure of sorts
so untidy and inexact levels I can’t put even into words strange but always
as if there’s a kind of knowing a kind of living in your consciousness at insane hours
in a secret place I have mixed feelings coming from Lorca says
laughter amid a rosary of deaths
on my way to a performance I passed a woman on a bike she had my face
and I was stunned by her smile
Karla Kelsey
VANTAGE OF LANDSCAPE AND SOFT MOTION
And so turning in departure the dock dipped and the world turned on its side until
months later I looked to the future of zinc set against rust, oscillation and char seen
through a claude-glass with a green tint and whitecaps whipped by the current
and breeze
of if I. But if I
am in and through the window and the summer storm, walking through heat-
heavy lilac
to crouch under the holly tree, departure composed in the view from the dock
drawn in nettle and air as inside the shelter of my body we fall, particles of sand
and salt
among water-
vented pollen
dispersed by image and breeze. This discord saturates with the seen-through-a glass,
with the wait-in-the-doorway-until-you-recognize that your name is only a problem
under the distance of certain systems, constituting, reconstituting, the barn
sinking back into
naked aspen,
leaves gone to mulch as light shines on the boy walking down the sidewalk singing Mary,
Mary, Mary,
an attempt as in my eyes settle on lupine and sage, ocean and field. The dog barks
and a choir
of birds
preamble the cicada season, the turn-turn, the nape of your neck as you said lilac—
chosen in the hothouse interior of her rooms with the gesture of a well, a steeple
to the left
in the blue swirl
of sky. The sweet
of the lilac divides the sea from called to the sea, the land from the harrowed
so that in town masts list as from building to building wind wraps and the flagpole’s
halyard clanks
as do the lines upon the mast. Land and weather submerge. On the wall the sun
draws each degree of declension, the path smooth though somehow the middle of the day
spans hours.
Phillip Terman
Albert Einstein at the Soup Kitchen
Do I look like anyone?, he asks,
as he swoops the long spoon into the peas,
lifts it a few inches
and holds it steady to pour
onto the tray of the next famished mouth,
shouts to George for more
as his supply empties down.
I’m the bread and donut man
in this assembly line of volunteers
who gather for our three hours
of weekly service and socialism:
Jose the finger-pointing Filipino
who pours the punch and repeats:
the wages of sin is death
and only reads Paradise from the Comedy,
for his description of heaven, he says, and light;
Jake the Buddhist, who scrapes the dishes
as they are returned, saves whatever
appears untouched for someone else’s
insatiable hunger;
Sal, who tells me he was on the other side
of the line, meaning he was one of the thousand
who form every morning single-file around this Church
of the Apostles, up 9th Avenue and around
28th Street,
like the snake, he chants,
looking out the window beyond Crack Park,
cursed above the beasts of the city
to eat dust all the days of its life.
And their eyes are filled with dust,
drugged and sleepy,
bodies stiff from sidewalk cardboard sofas.
G.C. Waldrep
AGAINST THE MADNESS OF CROWDS
in memoriam Pierre Martory
Reckon the haste of one wall burning.
There is no thickness there is no terror there is
a transparency like oxygen like fire over this bright space.
And will the ashes that rise meet the ashes that fall.
On a light breeze. In this ruined garden.
Is this not physics is this not too much to ask.
This simple question.
For there is a language of flowers as Smart wrote.
There is a language of clouds, and of their wispy orthography
but it is not comforting.
A prayer for a new image, yes:
have we not studied, have we not pasted our rations
in their strict enrollments their proper homologies.
And here, the arrangement of humors.
What I feel in my ribs now is only an echo.
I stand at one distance, I open my wallet
press flesh against cured hide
and I am ready. The blue of the gentian is nothing to me.
The calla, the violet of the iris are nothing
compared to the sky you bring
with your coming when you come with your singing and your sighing
with your counting backward from one hundred
when you come. Is this not too much to ask,
the venation and the marrow
the clandestine order and meaning of all signs.
So while the ashes that rise meet the ashes that fall
I will be the world, for a little while. As such waiting.
The rose of each lung blooms inside.
Monrovia, Revisited
This is the city that killed my mother;
its crooked legs bent
from standing too long,
waiting so angry people can kill
themselves too.
No grass along street corners—
so many potholes from years of war.
Immigrants from all
over the globe used to come here
on tender feet,
in search of themselves.
Abandoned city—
a place that learned
how to cry out loud even though
nobody heard.
This is the city where I first learned
how to lose myself.
Windy city, blue ocean city.
They say a city on the hill
cannot be hid.
The city of salty winds, salty tears,
where stubborn people still hold
us hostage after Charles Taylor.
You should come here if you want
to know how sacred
pain can be.