QUE SUIS-JE?
-Montaigne
Sitting in a speckled chair on a rocky
beach
under sun that comes and
goes
under airplanes that come and
go
past neighborhoods of
houses
past panes of glass that make up a
window
that make up a window
that makes up a wall
that makes up a view
and our HEROINE’s
murderer’s
mother is dying
with her meaty arms
and perfumed neck thus
dying is the gravy she
thickens
each Thanksgiving in a shirt
box.
Catherine Barnett
AFTER THE PROCESSION OF THE VIRGIN OF
SOLITUDE
Imprisoned in her winters,
in her nights, her folds
of endless gown and under
her bolder-thrown gaze,
her thorn tree embrace,
they learn to love and give
up.
His back cracks and her ears
burn
at the sound of swallows
tearing at their bath.
The sky, the afternoon
wilts like the lilacs
left on the riverbank
beside their empty clothes.
reminding them of
sin.
Theresa Burns
THE QUICKENING
It has to be quiet before I feel
it,
not just the radio and TV off,
but the hum of the truck filling the oil
burner
next door gone, the sitter out with the baby.
I pick up the trail of raisins
they've left on the floor
and when I sit down I feel
it:
not a kick, but a finger
curling,
or a yawn, the first toothless
negotiation.
I'm concentrating, unable to
answer,
holding my breath
to decipher its message,
the way my aunt held still at her son's wake,
her face tilted, intent,
as if she didn't recognize his bald-headed,
gray-suited, thirty-year-old body,
but could feel its music
moving through her, where it once began.
And if she were quiet
enough
she might catch, three days after his
death,
the last notes of him escaping,
a quickening in reverse, the engine
ticking out its heat,
the cells shutting down.
Sue Carnahan
IRREPARABLE
In an otherwise perfect skin of
diamonds
the jagged one offers a way in.
Smeared,
irregular dapple of scales, pearl engulfing
grit,
pothole that pulls a wheel in and spills the
cherries.
This is how it happens: just once,
distracted,
the knitter wraps her finger the wrong
direction
and drops a stitch, leaving a gap where the
wind
can enter, the mind escape through a
keyhole
in the otherwise admirable sweater:
neat
clusters of berries, choker of tiny
plums,
placket slit in the neck for
closure.
Navajo weavers say you weave what you
think
so leave a spirit line open, out to the
edge.
Leave what looks like error. My
mother
used to unravel an old sweater to knit four
hats
from the kinked wool. I love
economy;
nothing ends but rather veers off: punctured
tires
cut into strips for bumpers, wilted
blueberries
boiled for a pie. On my living room
wall
a snakeskin hangs-marred, headless,
printed
all on one side, just as the day I took
it.
Julia
Cole
IN THE NEXT
ROOM
What if from now on it were
always this way:
me just waking up and him just
in the next room,
singing. Always just apart has
it charms
but this would grow old - he
would stop singing,
grow hoarse, or I would feel an
itch
but not want to move to scratch
it
and it would become the whole
world
and he and the rest would
disappear.
And I would miss how his
skin
feels elastic and
unbroken.
One thing will ease into the
next
if you let it, and right now I
won’t.
How easy it might be to rise
and begin the day
with him, and how impossible
now to move
in that direction. To reach the
shower
he stripped down and stood
shivering,
felt the cold floor through the
mat while
the water heated, while I lay
here thinking
of our rooms: the wood floors
and good light,
our friendly clutter, how still
we have been here
and what we have done despite
that stillness,
how much we have tried here in
our slow way.
We are like a time release
trick;
look at us now and we are
hardly moving,
but flash back and we have
blossomed
and you barely know us.
Look:
once he stood in the shower and
soaked it up,
and then it was over and he got
out.
Once it was night and I
slept,
and then I woke up and I
rose.
Kenneth Hart
UMBER
Over dinner, my new painter friend tells
me,
after mixing colors that day in her New York
apartment, that raw umber "brings a color
down."
I ask what she means and, sipping hot
saki
as we wait for the main course, she
says,
"You know how Miles used a trumpet mute? He
took
all that gold blaring and flattened it
out.
When I put umber into my landscapes, I
pull
the canvas down like a curtain between me
& the world."
Around us, couples are interviewing each
other,
the traffic lights in their eyes saying stop
and go
to each question before the gears in their
mouths
engage, and black veins of soy sauce drip
down
their chins as dark secrets mix with white
lies.
"Writers ask a lot of questions. God
forbid
you publish anything about me," she
says
as she sucks the duck meat away from the fat
in her Chinese soup, and I twirl lo-mein
noodles
around the tines of my fork. I listen to
all
the details about her family, her mother's
gin
problem, and about her years in Brittany
with
a Frenchman whom she describes as an
overgrown boy.
I don't twinge in fear that she may say the
same
of me across some table one day to another
man,
letting her phrases end with "I'll never
date
a younger man again." I'm too busy
tapping
the keys down the scroll of tape in my
brain,
gathering stories like sheaves of wheat that
will
rise to bread, armloads of peaches I'll
squeeze
down to juice and offer to the
world.
As the waiter with boot-shined hair and
thick
black spectacles jingles more
ice-water
into our glasses, she's got a pile of duck
fat
lumped on the side of her dish, and
begins
driving the slippery curves in her
story,
turning down the old mining road
past
the brown schoolhouse towards her
childhood.
What she can't hear me thinking as
she
tells me of her older step-brother's acrid
breath on her bare neck that June
day
in the orchard, as his heat pressed into
hers
and she plumbed the treetops for
answers,
is that artists are thieves. We take, we
use,
we pick the locked diaries of others
as
ruthlessly as our own, turn them inside
out,
and stitch them into resurrected
monsters
that terrorize the countryside with our
pain,
and our love, and our stolen fire.
Melissa Hotchkiss
CLAUS TRO PHO
BIA
Imagine him as a cat,
caught in a dryer
- hitting the sides of the drum -
without
air
and
too much heat
Unexpectedly undressing
in front of a woman
he looks like a cat,
caught
in a dryer.
Unexpectedly needing to
change from
shorts to pants
he
retreats to the
bathroom
caught
STRONG NETS
Snagged on coral
the abandoned net
continues to fish
Near the shower, the
spider
we thought so patient
hangs tangled, long
dead,
in his own web
Dumber still,
the fly stumbles in
What strong nets catch
is usually stronger
but down on its luck
Look at the salmon
up the waterfall
then under the butter
just another
sucker for love
Kasey Jueds
Claim
Once during that
year
when all I
wanted
was to be anything
other
than what I
was,
the dog took my
wrist
in her jaws. Not to
hurt
or startle, but the
way
a wolf might, closing her
mouth
over the leg of
another
from her pack. Claiming
me
like anything else: the round
luck
of her supper dish or the
bliss
of rabbits, their
infinite
grassy cities. Her
lips
and teeth
circled
and pressed,
tireless
pressure of the
world
that pushes against
you
to see if you’re
there,
and I could feel
myself
inside myself again,
muscle
to bone to the
slippery
core where I
knew
next to
nothing
about love. She
wrapped
my arm as a woman might
wrap
her hand through the
loop
of a leash-as if
she
were the one holding
me
at the edge of a busy
street,
instructing me to
stay.
Judy Katz
THE VINE
No one tells you the cord of
flesh
binding mother and
child
is a vine that once cut
grows stronger, unseen
sometimes
for whole seasons. Or that one
day
it will wrap around you
and your husband in an ordinary
moment
as he reaches for the
salt
and mentions in passing a phone
call
to a woman you do not know. You will
feel
a tug
a pull a
cord reeling you
in.
How it will tighten
invisible to your friends, the
grocer,
the man on the corner who sits in the
sun.
But your husband, he
will feel something catch, a lock of
hair
in a low-lying branch, and
know
he hasn’t got you.
And later, when he takes you
up
and loosens your hair and
forgives
what is unforgivable, and your
limbs
unfurl and your shoulders and
breasts
like bound, cut flowers
fall-
you will remember for an
instant
the small wound
at the center of your
body,
how it withered and fell
away.
Maud Lindsay
UNRAVELING
How many times have I started this
hat?
I checked my stitch gauge twice,
measured.
It all seemed right. Damn, it doesn’t
fit.
Yet the tension is not too loose, not too
tight.
First, I removed five
stitches
The second time, ten.
Still it hangs over my
eyes
like an opaque lens.
Counting and
recounting,
I can’t figure it out.
What went wrong
What was I thinking
as I unconsciously knitted along and
along?
Suzanne
Parker
CAMPING THE
INTERIOR
After the Alaskan night
stripped us to bones and chattering as if our heat
were inconsequential, a
promised bride, a debt,
we lay staked to the ground,
the tent's thin skin our only protection
from the beasts shaped of
night's sounds. We
huddled
deep in the sleeping bags hands
fingers twisted through one another's bound
by noises stronger than
ourselves: ice bumping down the river,
the salmonberry dropping its
solitary flower, the bear cub's mewling
for its mother and the fug of
berry-packed shit and turned fish
that announced her near, the
taste of steel as terror flooded the tongue
and the extravagant touch of
each hair rising from the skin
as the huge body cut its own
tide through the placid air crunching twigs
with each step. My lover's eyes shone
cat-bright
as she begged to go see and
hunched curved at the door head half out,
demanding this experience of me
as if it were mine
to give and in the morning when
the sun's siren called us to unlink,
to separate, the pebbles became
not a moonlit map to texture
but only small flat
water-smoothed rocks left by the water sometime before
when its reach washed farther
and higher across the banks.
Peg
Peoples
AT 65 MILES PER
HOUR
It began with the white-tailed
deer
and 80,000 pounds of tractor
trailer.
It began with the tree
frogs
leaping the road in the
mist-filled
air, how their bodies
gleamed
in the lights over the slick
black
macadam, and how we had not
yet
learned where they came
from
but knew only they were the
second
note of summer’s amphibious
choir.
It began with porcupines
bulged
at the side of the road,
scraps
of feathers, the windshield
pitted
with a butterfly’s flecked
yellow
wings-bumblebees scraped
clean
off the hot grill. And so we
stopped
at the side of the road,
ridiculous
in our sorrow, and
thinking
for once, if we started from
here,
if we carried the weight of our
dead-
the woman suckling her
child
on the march from the city, the
small
fires flaring on the bordered
nights,
the knife scrapes and bats, the
automatics
and chains and broken arms, or
the hunger
we could not speak of. Cars
passed.
Their headlights disappearing
into the night
like the light of the TV going
off
in the living room. And still,
we did not move.
Lee
Peterson
THE NATIONAL LIBRARY
Sabiha
I had decided to study history at
university
the day the library started
burning.
I was loaded down with books on my way to my
parents' house.
People darted. They jerked like
fish
caught on a huge, dry
stone.
I stood and watched for the longest
time.
Pieces of paper lit on my shoulders and
hands.
It was August, my
birthday.
I'd been thinking how my mother would
cry
when she saw I cut my hair. I'd light a
cigarette. I'd wait.
I'd been thinking how to tell my
father:
History, Papa. Not mathematics. Not
physics.
My father mistrusted
history.
I stood for a long time preparing my
speech.
The leather straps dug into my
shoulders.
I stood until the fish settled on their
stone
until ash gathered at my
feet
until it covered my
face
and the rest of me.
Patrick
Rosal
Freddie
Freddie claimed lineage from
the tough
Boogie-Down Boricuas
who taught him how to break-
dance on beat:
up-
rock, headspin, scramble, and
dive
We called it a suicide:
the front-flip B-boy move that landed you
back flat on the blacktop That
was Freddie’s specialty - the way he’d
jump
into a fetal curl mid-air then
thwap
against the sidewalk-his body
laid out like the
crucified
Jesus he knocked
down
one afternoon in his mom’s
bedroom
looking for her extra purse
so both of us could shoot
asteroids and space invaders
until dusk
then buy with whatever we had
left
fat laces in every color
That wasn’t long before Freddie disappeared
then returned one
day as someone else’s ghost
smoked-out on
crack
singing Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
las chicas de Puerto
Rico
That was the first summer we believed
you had to be good at something
so we stood around
and watched
Freddie on the pavement-all
day-
doing suicides
until he got it
right
Susan Scheid
POETICUS
I saw her, far down the promenade, a small figure toeing its
blocked-granite walkway, overarched by a column of maples. Though I couldn’t see her
well - she was too far from where I stood - I knew well enough that
it was Rose. She was
shoot-spotting, trying to determine whether the green blade lifting
out of the ground, capped with rooty dirt, was a daffodil or
narcissus, a Mount Hood trumpet or poeticus actaea. No matter that we’d
confirmed long ago that all daffodils are narcissus, that we'd
memorized the plantings along the promenade as we had those in our
garden and they never varied, or that it was not truly possible to
differentiate the shoots.
The tradition of spotting shoots was part of our shared
archaeology, and there was Rose, unearthing the site of our
marriage, excavating our lost landscape from its tender ruins. I considered stepping in
next to her and venturing a guess (poeticus, surely - with
its white petals and delicate white eye, lined at the edge in red);
we might have fallen into our old, comfortable pattern, as if
nothing had intervened to disrupt. But I didn’t. Instead, I watched until
Rose went on down the promenade; only then did I go to where she had
been, stand where she had stood, and examine the urgent spears of
green, burst from the wet spring dirt. I had been mistaken,
though. They were not
poeticus.
from the short story The
Order of Things
Elaine
Sexton
Enclosures
I dig for replacements in her
button box.
Sometimes a bit of fabric
clings
to the metal backing of a
clasp,
a perfect match hangs by a
thread.
I hold the past lives of
apparel, a snap,
an embroidered enclosure
in my head. I retrieve every
part
of a torn blouse, a worn vest
she stripped for its parts,
pearls
snipped from a bodice, bone
knobs
cut from their beds. An old
zipper
lines the back of a new
dress.
Lace and elastic seek
re-employment.
I run my palm over jagged
teeth,
unmatched seams of a striped
shirt.
I dust my mother’s shiny black
Singer,
her foot on the pedal, the hum
she’d
retreat to, the needle and
bobbin.
ANGEL TWICE REMOVED
You know how in every major city there’s a
zoo
that always looks a little run down,
red bricks missing in places along the
path.
If you go past the unmanned information booth
down to the left of the bird sanctuary, but
before
the Arctic exhibit with the polar bears
in full winter coats even though its 70
out...
well anyway, once you hear all the kids
yelling
you know you’re there: the Ape exhibit.
And you know how all the monkeys are hooting
and swinging around like they were given
espresso-Prozac
and chocolate frosted sugar bombs instead of
bananas, and then
there are the lazy Orangutans with their wide
leathery faces
looking at you like you’re a tube of glue,
and next
to them are the Gorillas, who sit in truck
tires
and scoop-up big handfuls of poop to throw at
the dumb guy
in the red ball cap. Well, just past that are
the Chimpanzees.
On his mother’s back, the baby chimp stares
at everyone,
how it looks so human, just like a people
baby,
and the young chimps - the children chimps
who can’t sit still, and two or three of them
spin
wild revolutions, making themselves dizzy
and the field-trip kids point and laugh.
Well here's the thing: In the back of the
cage
there’s one who will not turn to face us.
He’ll just sit there like he’s protesting
something,
sit there showing only his silver back - and
sometimes
looking up, slowly drag a stick across the
cement stones.
That’s the one. He’s the one I
mean.
Aaron
Smith
BOSTON
I’ve been meaning to
tell
you how the sky is
pink
here sometimes like the
roof
of a mouth that’s about to
chomp
down on the crooked steel
teeth
of the
city,
I remember the
desperate
things we
did
and that I
stumble
down sidewalks
listening
to the buzz of street
lamps
at dusk and the crush
of leaves on the
pavement,
Without you here I’m viciously
lonely
and I can’t remember
the last time I felt
holy
the last time I offered
myself as sanctuary
•
Last night I watched
two men press hard into
each other, their
bodies
caught in the club’s
bass drum swell,
and I couldn’t remember
when I knew I’d never
be beautiful, but it
must
have been quick
and subtle, the way
the holy ghost can pass
in and out of a room.
I want so desperately
to be finished with
desire,
the rushing wind, the
still
small voice.
Jeet
Thayil
London
The air is shut too tight, its
unoiled hinges resist use.
Every day I assay
new methods of entry,
nothing works
but a handful of pills.
The light is wrong;
slant intent
grown homicidal,
it tells us something
relevant about
responsibility,
something I do not want
to hear. It is difficult
enough to breathe,
and get this line just right.
