Patricia Spears Jones

Possibly for Nari, possibly not

The valise is empty—art 
Presents negation—an open circle,
Slashed canvas, a wound in sheep’s 
Hide. Foot on malleable ground

Valise empty—art presents negation
Symbolic suffering lean against space
Active void.                                                         Footfalls, running steps,
Tippy toes through the muck of murdered
alliances
One way or another
GO
Somewhere            MAYBE  
The lights will “give” a little
Maybe the people will be kind

Unlikely choreography, a dance around
These massive symbols of displace    ment. Old clothes
Old shoes, old cut up bags-stripes remade soon sold 
The artist profits 

No the artist witnesses 

A magnified drum of feet in motion, the beat bends
The props enfolds the vision, stocks the artist’s heart

Patricia Spears Jones

Dinner with the ghost of Lorenzo Thomas

 
He was wearing a dapper suit and midnight blue brocaded tie–no stripes on him.
There was a sparkle in his brown eyes/his ghost was most corporeal
 
You’re still curious about the world, I asked.
 
“Oh yes”, said he spying an Obama 2012 poster.
 
“Brotherman needs to keep smoking!”, he opined
The hole in his throat the size of a ballpoint pen.
 
“Reefer” I guessed. “Oh yes”, he laughed.
 
The digits of his spectral hands shook gestures
What do you miss, I asked.
 
“Skin, he says. I remember flesh
soft to touch or rough from scabs on shins
falling off bicycles and such. Tough
 
Life was/is tough. But you”, and then his voice
Muffled something meant for me, but
 
Oh Lorenzo, what did you say to me?
 
He chuckled, then rhymed
 
“The world is always spinning round like a broken toy you can’t shut down”
 
Light crosses the hole in his throat.
As if its speed has found just the right portal.
 
“Reefer”, he repeats. And we are laughing
 
I pick up the bill. It costs what it costs.
 
I pay what I can pay.
 
What was it he said, and why couldn’t I hear it?
 
 
 

Plume

 
Bet your beeswax who said
 
Bet your beeswax what is
 
Beeswax –how did it arrive?
 
 
What moist hands dropped it where and oh how
 
Clever to drink from a cup made of bets
 
On beeswax, crop dusters, gramophones
 
Huge things with gears and bolts a century of
 
Forget-me-nots plucked and placed in books
 
Biblical in manner the colors flat –one day
 
 
Fade away like a plume of smoke pretty sight
 
The mustachioed man the pretty desperate woman
 
A song between them, ancient, hostile heard long
 
After the first singing. The payoff made in amber.
 
 

Patricia Spears Jones

Mythologizing Always: Seven Sonnets

I.

Here is a place where declarations

are made/where the heart takes precedence

the gleam goes bland

This is the heart part/intense improvisation

on the I/THOU axis

pity the poor actors (darlings)dust

in their throats (choking) dialogue ancient

(concentrated chatter dictated by clouds)

click of whispers

dammed up phrases     {mythologizing always)

Moans move through their limbs like wind through

Trees talking mad talk 'cross the illuminated

Avenues of hard cities.

III.

Dime falls, your voice rises (fevered)

It's keen, the way the wind whips this

Garbage up and around like a father

Swinging his baby we are holding hands

And yes, giggling no force can stop us now

We are singing all the James Brown songs

We know helpess off-key, but exhilarated

Columbus Avenue breakdown: how the puddles

In the sidewalks radiate splendor/glass

Broken against high-rise buildings beckon

We are hungry the shifting children salsa

And you may be our feast, please linger

You offer me your laughter

I take the sweat from y our cheeks and hum.

IV.

Taste like tears—sea flaked and heated—

Taste like try again and get nowhere,

Maybe, this is the sonnet that mimes itself

Sequences silent and perceptive

The "might have saids"

The stomach-eating rage

The power of conversation is in its

Possibilities of Interpretation

(here's where the mime becomes important

because the words sound so dumb)

And here's where the anxiety dance gets choreographed.

It goes like this: You turn clockwise.

I turn Counter-Clockwise. We stop, stumble

Resolve our steps. Begin again.

Kaveh Akbar & Javier Zamora

 

A country embraces
absence like something it’s earned—
the gnarled math of dust.

You tried to legalize us,
brief hope. No, no se pudo.

Mary Jo Bang/d.a. Powell

 

You perfectly fit
the house that stood for a time-
less sense of purpose

Someone’s swiped the welcome mat
wiped their wee hand on the drapes

         Mary Jo Bang/d. a. Powell

Rosmarie Waldrop

Elizabeth Willis, in an extract from her article in The Prose Poem . . . (1994)

Formally, Waldrop's prose poems read like syllogisms, but their meaning is multiple rather than reductive or elided. These sentences do not lead us methodically to a strictly conceived illumination. In- stead, they refer backward and forward within the book, so that the overall effect is that of dreaming. As readers we are often unable to distinguish syntactically an insight from an observation, a quip, an ac- cusation, a foreshadowing, or a rebuttal of what has gone before, since a sentence will often perform, structurally, many of these functions at once. A single dangling modifier finds us guilty in our over-achieving desire to construct meaning at the same time that it reevaluates the role of a partner:

This is an attempt to make up for inner emptiness in the way that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance with more desper- ate brio to add a third dimension to their characte

Rosmarie Waldrop

From The Lawn of the Excluded Middle

 2

I’m looking out the window at other windows. Though the pane masquerades as transparent I know it is impenetrable just as too great a show of frankness gives you a mere paper draft on revelations. As if words were passports, or arrows that point to the application we might make of them without considering the difference of biography and life. Still, depth of field allows the mind to drift beyond its negative pole to sun catching on a maple leaf already red in August, already thinner, more translucent, preparing to strip off all that separates it from its smooth skeleton. Beautiful, flamboyant phrase that trails off without predicate, intending disappear- ance by approaching it, a toss in the air.

24

In the way well-being contains the possibility of pain a young boy may show the meekness we associate with girls, or an excess of sperm, on occasion, come close to spirituality. But a name is an itch to let the picture take root inside its contour though sentences keep shifting like sand, and a red patch may be there or not. All heights are fearful. We must cast arbitrary nets over the unknown, knot the earth’s rim to the sky with a rope of orisons. For safety. For once human always an acrobat.

Adrian Matejka

 

If You’re Tired Then Go Take a Nap 

  

I never liked bridges or cops & there 

are more of both of them in the suburbs, 

lording over possibilities like stumbles 

  

do stairs. Down the blue & white set next 

to the small gym after first period, shoelace 

caught under a new bully’s foot. He would 

  

have gotten stole on in Carriage House, but 

not by me. Gots to chill or it’ll get worse: 

in blue Jams & pushed off summer’s slick 

  

ledge, long fall into the private pool broken 

into three distinct verses: the flail & giggling 

girls, the sun-stroked lifeguard’s exclamation, 

  

& the red-handed water’s backslap rising up, 

splitting into two, more chlorinated skies.

Caleb Crain

from Necessary Errors (2013)

At last there were shoes on the stairs again—louder this time, a clatter—and three young Czechs rushed down. The tallest, who had a comically long face and thin, sandy curls, seemed to be telling his companions a joke, which he himself laughed loudest at. “Dobrý vecer,” he saluted the attendant. There was something arch about the formality with which he spoke the greeting, and Jacob felt at once that he liked the young man. He drifted away from the wall he’d been leaning against, with the intention of slipping in behind the trio as soon as the attendant opened the grille. “Ahoj,” the tall, curly-haired man said to Jacob out of the corner of his mouth—now his voice was feline, and the greeting, sounding very much like the sailor’s hello in English, was a familiar one—to intimate that he had noticed Jacob’s approach.

The attendant had noticed it, too, and because Jacob didn’t want to take advantage of the young men’s entrée unless he was sure of their permission, and because he was put momentarily at a loss by the touch of proposal in the young man’s voice, he hesitated, and the attendant slammed the grille in his face with a clang.

Derrick Austin

 

Epithalamium

                    Today I'm happy by myselfwandering this creek's paths of sand and crushed shells,                    what used to be submerged.Mosquitos drain me good.Before this river was redirected, it joined two others                     and flowed into the Gulf.What we cannot change, we evade                     and call new. We delay. I couldcall the irrigation works at the headwater bog                                      an aubade                     against flooding.There are picnic spots nearby, gazebos and grillsemerging from palmettos and bindweed.A storm blew down the oak I'd climb to watchfireworks for free.Men still cruise out here.In this lush expanse a manwas lynchedat the beginning of the centuryI was born in.Moving off the trail, I wade into the river.Time feels suspended.My bare feetshuffle pebbles like some grubbing shore bird.Screeching insects, thickets of sweet bay and titi,moldering scent—All this will be gone someday.Gone that paths and signs, gone the milkweed, gonethe armadillos and the fieldand the lynching tree when this river rejoins the othersand washes this away—                                                     no, not gonebut come together, history, nature, love, and lossbrought to scale in a gloriousalgal bloom, a brightness of jade and amber,all this water moving toward where it's always belonged,where I cannot be, where I am.

Derrick Austin

Tenderness

That summer I was a body. I was that body. The Body.

Overnight, a fog of linen inside the mauve Victorian down the block.

Another house empty for the season, for the season, for the season.

Hours built up on both sides of my bedroom door.

Morgan and Danez rowed in the Grand Canal at Versailles.

Morgan filled a postcard with her hands and memory.

Rose quartz? A diary? Holy water? (With what belief?) What could I have asked for?

Leaving my apartment for the first time in days,

I walked five minutes to Lake Mendota. Barking, honking, shrieking, grunting.

Men tested their bodies for each other and themselves.

Opened doors to admit the breeze, the possibility of that one guest.

When Emily Brontë wrote they’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water,

and altered the colour of my mind, she wasn’t writing about my depression.

Double tapped a photo of Morgan and Angel

posing near a green door with hinges older than the Constitution.

They read their black poems in English

to black people who spoke English and French and Arabic.

If I sent a postcard to everyone I loved

it’d say, Sometimes I think you’re just too good for me.

The most personal question I’m consistently asked: Why are you so quiet?

That I’m getting this all down wrong. That I’m getting it down at all.

Caleb Crain

 I

Sallies

In the afternoon four black-throated blues

Tossed themselves up from the pavement at nothing.
At the rain. And having made a surgeon take back
His stitches early, I lifted my phone
Beyond the shelter of my unsteady umbrella
And tapped at their cursive capital Gs.
Suddenly I felt ashamed. You could see
I had nothing better to do. I stopped.

Four in the morning. Fill the kettle by touch.
Floof the gas. Unpick the bandage
To look, though water does boil watched.
We can’t not solve the problem.
The sky facing the birds and me had glared
Like undeveloped photo paper.
Find a voice to sing against the voice
That doesn’t answer when asked why not.

Tracy K. Smith

 

Sci-Fi

There will be no edges, but curves.

Clean lines pointing only forward.

History, with its hard spine & dog-eared

Corners, will be replaced with nuance,

Just like the dinosaurs gave way

To mounds and mounds of ice.

Women will still be women, but

The distinction will be empty. Sex,

Having outlived every threat, will gratify

Only the mind, which is where it will exist.

For kicks, we'll dance for ourselves

Before mirrors studded with golden bulbs.

The oldest among us will recognize that glow—

But the word sun will have been re-assigned

To the Standard Uranium-Neutralizing device

Found in households and nursing homes.

And yes, we'll live to be much older, thanks

To popular consensus. Weightless, unhinged,

Eons from even our own moon, we'll drift

In the haze of space, which will be, once

And for all, scrutable and safe.

Tracy K. Smith

BEE ON A SILL 

Submits to its own weight, 
the bulb of itself too full, 

too weak or too wise
to lift and go. 

And something blunt in me
remembers the old charade 

about putting a thing out 
of its misery. For it? For me? 

Sleep, Bee, deep and easy. 
Hive, heave, give, grieve. 

Then rise when you’re ready
from your soul’s hard floor

to sweet work 
or some war.

Richard Siken

 

Detail of the Hayfield

I followed myself for a long while, deep into the field. 
Two heads full of garbage. 

Our scope was larger than I realized, 
which only made me that much more responsible. 

Yellow, yellow, gold, and ocher. 
We stopped. We held the field. We stood very still. 

Everyone needs a place. 

You need it for the moment you need it, then you bless it— 
thank you soup, thank you flashlight— 

and move on. Who does this? No one.

Richard Siken

Detail of the Fire

A man with a bandage is in the middle of something.
Everyone understands this. Everyone wants a battlefield.

Red. And a little more red.

Accidents never happen when the room is empty.
Everyone understands this. Everyone needs a place.

People like to think war means something.

What can you learn from your opponent? More than you think.
Who will master this love? Love might be the wrong word.

Let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other.
We know who our enemies are. We know.

Richard Siken

Meanwhile 

  

Driving, dogs barking, how you get used to it, how you make 

                                the new streets yours. 

Trees outside the window and a big band sound that makes you feel like 

          everything's okay, 

      a feeling that lasts for one song maybe, 

                          the parentheses all clicking shut behind you. 

            The way we move through time and space, or only time. 

The way it's night for many miles, and then suddenly 

                                       it's not, it's breakfast 

    and you're standing in the shower for over an hour, 

                         holding the bar of soap up to the light. 

I will keep watch. I will water the yard. 

        Knot the tie and go to work. Unknot the tie and go to sleep. 

                             I sleep. I dream. I make up things 

    that I would never say. I say them very quietly. 

                            The trees in the wind, the streetlights on, 

        the click and flash of cigarettes 

being smoked on the lawn, and just a little kiss before we say goodnight. 

     It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue, 

                                                                     green beautiful green. 

It's simple: it isn't over, it's just begun. It's green. It's still green.

Frank Bidart

In Memory of Joe Brainard

the remnant of a vast, oceanic

bruise (wound delivered early and long ago)

was in you purity and 

sweetness self-gathered, CHOSEN

                                • 

When I tried to find words for the moral sense that unifies

and sweetens the country voices in your collage The Friendly Way,

you said It's a code.

You were a code

I yearned to decipher.—

In the end, the plague that full swift runs by

took you, broke you;—

                                           in the end, could not

                                           take you, did not break you—

you had somehow erased within you not only

meanness, but anger, the desire to punish

the universe for everything

not achieved, not tasted, seen again, touched—;

. . . the undecipherable

code unbroken even as the soul

learns once again the body it loves and hates is

made of earth, and will betray it.