are you dreaming, Frederick?

"[...] she had quite unexpectedly--carving the mutton for Sunday lunch, for no reason, opening a letter, coming into a room--divine moments, when she said to herself (for she would never say this to anybody else), 'This is it. This has happened. This is it!' And the other way about it was equally surprising--that is, when everything was arranged--music, weather, holidays, every reason for happiness was there--then nothing happened at all. One wasn't happy. It was flat, just flat, that was all."
--Virginia Woolf, The New Dress


"I would like to beg you, dear, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
--Rainer Maria Rilke


"Child of Fear:"
By the bed that lies square
By the sky that lies shapeless

In a wrecked yellow forest
she is studying holes.

The bullet of solitude,
that faceless instructor,

bores through her skin, forming
dark portals from whatever it touches.

Under its tutelage, she is sister to wood-bee,
drilling dank shingles to dust.

Her tiny punctures make eye-
sockets for rain.

She takes an oath against plans,
outstacks cedar with absence-of.

The gypsy moth is her hoodlum leader--
together they infiltrate the grove.

(In thin air, the little dunes of debris
pile, whispering unintelligibly.)

There are endless parades of holes, the sky
is humming with holes, the earth collapsing
to dirt-frittered lace, as she

writes the book of unmaking.
--Alessandra Lynch


"80"
How her footsteps crossing blurred the borders
Wet Without papers Wilderness Barbarian

The rock of Tarik Dark lighthouse
for a raft and an unaccommodated barbarian

The whirlwind at the world's western edge
to mark the beginning of the barbarian

The promontories from Algeciras
Almost touching One nosotros One barbarian

If you go there If I follow you If
they forget which of us to call barbarian

A ship's hold fitted with chains A bomb
of infinite radiance Not barbarian

In the barbed hamlet In the vilayet
Ask her body questions and she'll answer in barbarian

From the archipelago of camps Incessant
prayers and songs and curses in barbarian

Wind over the trench graves gathering
every lost nuance of barbarian

How the clean men learn to make bodies dead
then gather in secret to play barbarian

Make him jabber Foul his holy things
Call him One Forsaken in barbarian

Reduced to the radiance of a body
But the days to come made of this Of barbarian

Here's your lover of Babel In the quarrel conducted
in Scripture Empiric Your tongue And Barbarian
--Suzanne Gardinier


"93"
How the guards preserve his life and foul
his body in order to take his soul

The vizier's cross for the master sergeant
Honored harrier of the enemy soul

Is this what's rising over the east rooftops
taking off her old clothes and mine Someone's soul

If not this what are you touching then
Inside me all night If not my soul

I see her smoking a cigarette on the terrace
Touching death with her lips and her fingers Your soul

The looks on the faces of the people gathered
at the salt island scaffold for the auction of her soul

Which is the translation and which
the original tongue The body The soul

The uprising your hand makes The heat and ache
The eloquent stammer of the body The soul

A kitchen for lovers and a woman singing
Why haven't you seen it Body and Soul

Not sure what to do with her outlawed hands
Hesitating in the doorway Whose soul

You've made me forget my name tonight
touching my body aka my soul
--Suzanne Gardinier


"97"
How he walked the hills where the people had died
under his protection as a kind of healing

The rain's way with the shards of September
Touching and bearing away Healing

The girl who had no choice but to walk
on the broken place as it was healing

Under the bandage of darkness The night
the wound's plummet tilts toward healing

She learns to tell them apart by their fruits
The pain of waste and the pain of healing

My transgressor My dove My undefiled
What the fathers called filth and the lovers called healing

She's rewriting the arson warrants tonight
Yrs blessed in the fire Yrs annealed Yrs healing
--Suzanne Gardinier


"98"
My left hand in my hair My right
holding you and writing this poem

This bent message This sheaf of notes
From the whirling night this piece This poem

Hiding and watching the host of young men
and touching himself and making his poem

Whose messenger from the commotion
Whose footfalls just before Whose poem

This scattering This archipelago
scored by straits of silence This poem

How they knew who he was by what they found
in his coat pocket after A witness A poem

In my ninety-eighth dream you and I were sailing
not in a harbor but in a poem

How it burned from the binding of its fascicle
A lightning bolt disguised as a poem

What did not protect her but made a place
where her soul could learn to live A poem

From the margins After When the emperor's edicts
are ashes A song stripped of music A poem

Under my fingers the wetness of this
commission This way you touch me This poem
--Suzanne Gardinier


"Late Empires"
a dead girl by the road

Like a stadium,
emptying its hushed crowds--
Like a fallen empire, spilling refugees--
the stomach
displays its contents.

--

Sorry, the grass said
to the fingers' rigid purple,
to the half-smile where an arm bone
cracked
and split the skin. Sorry,
to the face on the roadside, to the gravel
pitted in the flesh

--

that has sunk these last weeks
into the scrub,

that has cooled in the mists,
the clouds
of drunken flies.

--

He is far away
sleeping on a hotel bed,
singing to the radio,

driving to the city
with another girl
for drinks, more drinks.
We'll have a drink, he says.

--

Rome fell;
the girl fell when he hit her hard.

The girl cried out
and, like Rome, fell on her broken arm
on the roadside.

The girl cried in the sun
on the gravel,
and a knife
to the baths, a knife to the libraries,
knife to the Palatine, knife to the slums,
knife to the throat
that wanted only
to keep its voice inside it.

--

The silence between one Rome
and another:
each empire's incipient failure,
a body's slow decay.
He has already forgotten,
he is far away, and, anyway, this is only
a dead girl,
having spilled a population
into the grass.
--Kevin Prufer


"The 20th Century"
Kiss its cheek, then smooth its sad, gray hair.
Bring it secret cigarettes. How could they hurt
it anymore? A smoke to stanch the fear
is mercy in the end. The doctors purse

their lips or look away. They occupy their hands
with clipboards. Leave them to their notes. Smile. It's what
the dying want. Not tears, you fool. Nor bland-
eyed sentiment. Truth, neither. Offer it

a light. Tell that joke about the Jew, the queer,
the drunken nigger. There you go. It smiles
at that, and so should you. Nothing quells our fears
like comedy, nothing sublimates our ills--

And if it finds no comfort from your visit,
put a pillow to its mouth, and, so, be done with it.
--Kevin Prufer


"Red Velvet"
(for Rosa Parks, 1913-2005)

People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. No--the only thing I was--was tired of giving in.
--Rosa Parks

i

Montgomery, Alabama, 1955

The setting: A rolling box with wheels
The players: Mr. Joe Singleton, Rev. Scott,
Miss Louise Bennett, Mrs. Rosa Parks,
Jacob & Junie (fraternal twins, fourteen)

The game: Pay your Indian head to the driver,
then get off the bus.
Then, walk to the door at the end of the bus.
Then, reboard the bus through the Black back door.
(Then, push repeat for fifty years.)

Sometimes, the driver pulled off,
before the paid-in-full customer
could get to the one open door.

Fed up with buses driving off--without them--
just as her foot lifted up, grazing, the steel step:

She was not a child. She was in her forties.
A seamstress. A woman devoted to
handmade things.

She had grown up in a place:
where only white people had power,
where only white people passed good jobs on
to other white people,
where only white people loaned money
to other white people,
where only white people were considered human
by other white people,
where only the children of white people had new
books on the first day of school,
where only white people could drive to the store
at midnight for milk
(without having to watch the rearview).

ii

A seamstress brings fabric and thread, collars & hems,
buttonholes, together. She is one who knows her way
around velvet.

Arching herself over a river of cloth she feels for the bias,
but doesn't cut, not until the straight pins are in place,
marking everything: in time, everything will come together.

Nine months after, December 1, 1955, Claudette
Colvin, fifteen, arrested for keeping her seat; before that,
Mary Louise Smith. The time to act, held by two pins.

iii

The Montgomery seamstress waits and waits for
the Cleveland Avenue bus. She climbs aboard,
row five. The fifth row is the first row of the Colored
section. The bus driver, who tried to put her off that day,
had put her off twelve years before. But twelve years
before she was only twenty-eight, still a child to the
heavy work of resistance.

By forty-two, you have pieced & sewn many things
together in segregated Alabama. You have heard
"Nigger Gal" more times than you can stitch your
manners down. You have smelled fear cut through
the air like sulfur iron from the paper mills. The pants,
shirts, and socks that you have darned perfectly, routinely,
walk perfectly, routinely, by you. (Afternoon. How do.)
Those moving along so snug in your well-made, well-sewn
clothes, spit routinely, narrowly missing your perfectly
pressed sleeve.

By forty-two, your biases are flat, your seams are inter-
locked, your patience with fools, razor thin.

By forty-two, your heart is heavy with slavery, lynching,
and the lessons of being "good." You have heard
7,844 Sunday sermons on how God made every
woman in his image. You do a lot of thinking with
a thimble on your thumb. You have hemmed
8,230 skirts for nice, well-meaning white women
in Montgomery. You have let the hem out of
18,809 pant legs for growing white boys. You have
pricked your finger 45,203 times. Held your peace.

iv

December 1, 1955: You didn't notice who was
driving the bus. Not until you got on. Later you
would remember, "All I wanted was to get home."
The bus driver, who put you off when you were
twenty-eight, would never be given the pleasure
of putting you off anything ever again. When he
asks you to move you cross your feet at the ankle.

Well--I'm going to have you arrested.

And you, you with your forty-two years, with your
21,199 perfect zippers, you with your beautiful
nation of perfect seams marching all in place, all
around Montgomery, Alabama, on the backs &
hips of Black & white alike, answer him back,

Well--You may go on and do so.

You are arrested on a Thursday. That night in
Montgomery, Dr. King led the chant, "There
comes a time when people just get tired." (He
wasn't quite right, but he was King.) He asked
you to stand so your people can see you. You
stand. Veritas! You do not speak. The indelible
blue ink still on your thumb saying, Enough!
You think about the qualities of velvet: strength
& sway. How mighty it holds the thread and
won't let go. You pull your purse in close,
the blue lights map out your thumb, blazing
the dark auditorium.

On Courthouse Monday, the sun day dew
sweating the grass, you walk up the sidewalk
in a long-sleeved black dress, your white collar
and deep perfect cuffs holding you high and
starched in the Alabama air. A trim black velvet
hat, a gray coat, white gloves. You hold your
purse close: everything valuable is kept near
the belly, just like you had seen your own mother
do. You are pristine. Persnickety. Particular.
A seamstress. Every thing about you gathered
up and in place. A girl in the crowd, taught not to
shout, shouts, "Oh! She's so sweet looking! Oh!
They done messed with the wrong one now."

You cannot keep messing with a sweet-looking
Black woman who knows her way around velvet.
A woman who can take cotton and gabardine,
seersucker and silk, swirl tapestry, and hang
boiled wool for the house curtains, to the very
millimeter. A woman made of all this is never to
be taken for granted, never to be asked to move
to the back of anything, never ever to be arrested.

A woman who believes she is worthy of every
thing possible. Godly. Grace. Good. Whether you
believe it or not, she has not come to Earth to play
Ring Around Your Rosie on your rolling
circus game of public transportation.

A woman who understands the simplicity pattern,
who wears a circle bracelet of straight pins there,
on the tiny bend of her wrist. A nimble, on-the-dot
woman, who has the help of all things, needle sharp,
silver, dedicated, electric, can pull cloth and others
her way, through the tiny openings she and others
before her have made.

A fastened woman
can be messed with, one too many times.

With straight pins poised in the corner
of her slightly parted lips, waiting to mark
the stitch, her fingers tacking,
looping the blood red wale,
through her softly clenched teeth
she will tell you, without ever looking
your way,

You do what you need to do &
So will I.
--Nikky Finney


"Weather Picture"
The October sea glistens coldly
with its dorsal fin of mirages.

Nothing is left that remembers
the white dizziness of yacht races.

An amber glow over the village.
And all sounds in slow flight.

A dog's barking is a hieroglyph
painted in the air above the garden

where the yellow fruit outwits
the tree and drops of its own accord.
--Tomas Tranströmer, translated by Robin Fulton

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."
--George Orwell


"A word after a word after a word is power."
--Margaret Atwood


"Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you'll look back and realize they were the big things."
--Kurt Vonnegut

"The writing of a poem is like a child throwing stones into a mineshaft. You compose first, then you listen for the reverberation."
--James Fenton


"We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit."
--Audre Lorde


"Do Not Make Things Too Easy"
Do not make things too easy.
There are rocks and abysses in the mind
As well as meadows.
There are things knotty and hard: intractable.
Do not talk to me of love and understanding.
I am sick of blandishments.
I want the rock to be met by a rock.
If I am vile, and behave hideously,
Do not tell me it was just a misunderstanding.
--Martha Baird


"The Applicant"
First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit--

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they'll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk , talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
--Sylvia Plath


"Marie Curie Gives Advice to Her Daughter Irene before Her Wedding"
I remember this moment--the pram distilled,
its sediment was an infant,
no longer something born from me,
not residue, not pitchblende,
but its own particle,
an open mouth, a cry,
within its head, a mind wrestling with thoughts
--my motherland could be there,
driven into the skull,
some ancient homing.
Years I have soaked
in radium.
I've begun to bleed light.
I see your father again
crossing streets in rain--
the doors are locked,
his umbrella fills with wind,
the horses approach,
hauling a wagon of soldier's uniforms--
something to dress the dead--
it's come to crush him.
My navy suit with solid stitching crushes me.
And since then I've begun to confuse
the glowing test tubes
with wicks of the moon, a dazing field of stars,
my own soul, and a moment goes by
when I forget the brutish charm of work.
My hope, daughter, is that
what you love doesn't come to kill you,
eye by eye, ear by ear, bone by radiant bone.
--Julianna Baggott


"Zebra Question"
I asked the zebra,
Are you black with white stripes?
Or white with black stripes?
And the zebra asked me,
Are you good with bad habits?
Or are you bad with good habits?
Are you noisy with quiet times?
Or are you quiet with noisy times?
Are you happy with some sad days?
Or are you sad with some happy days?
Are you neat with some sloppy ways?
Or are you sloppy with some neat ways?
And on and on and on and on
And on and on he went.
I'll never ask a zebra
About stripes
Again.
--Shel Silverstein


"Like This"
If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say,

Like this.

When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,

Like this.

If anyone wants to know what "spirit" is,
or what "God's fragrance" means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.

Like this.

When someone quotes the old poetic image
about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings
of your robe.

Like this.

If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don't try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.

Like this. Like this.

When someone asks what it means
to "die for love," point
here.

If someone asks how tall I am, frown
and measure with your fingers the space
between the creases on your forehead.

This tall.

The soul sometimes leaves the body, then returns.
When someone doesn't believe that,
walk back into my house.

Like this.

When lovers moan,
they're telling our story.

Like this.

I am a sky where spirits live.
Stare into this deepening blue,
while the breeze says a secret.

Like this.

When someone asks what there is to do,
light the candle in his hand.

Like this.

How did Joseph's scent come to Jacob?

Huuuuu.

How did Jacob's sight return?

Huuuu.

A little wind cleans the eyes.

Like this.

When Shams comes back from Tabriz,
he'll put just his head around the edge
of the door to surprise us

Like this.
--Rumi, translation by Coleman Barks


"A Small, Soul-Colored Thing"
The dog walked out of the forest with the deer in its mouth.
No. The deer came out of the forest. The dog
ran beside it, over, under: the dog slipped itself
into the animal lurching to my side of the road,
one of its throats bent back to the sky,
one of its spines dissolved to pear-white belly.
The throat was red. And the long legs looked broken.
But I made a mistake. The legs were not broken.
And the deer did not appear dead, though it must have been,
animated by the dog's hunger so that the deer moved
when the dog did, shivered like the soul inside the body,
the dog's face all red, which could be the color of the soul.
The back of the dog was sleek and brown
and expensive looking. When I stared at him,
I could see the lawns he must have escaped from,
the gravel drive winding down from the hills in the gold tags
jangling at his chest; the clean, pink flaps of his ears
flushed with cold. Now they were froth covered.
And his eyes were glazed with a furious longing.
The dog tore at the deer's throat as if he could dig
himself inside of it. The dog became a dog
again, and I watched him do it, and the deer became
something else: it left the soft ash shape of the doe
grazing by the bus stop, it abandoned
the buck's bright energy leaping over the stone wall
that separates my house from the cemetery,
its low border taut as a muscle that herds of deer trace
in moonlight, cast out of the canyons choked with snow.
The deer became some shadow torn between us:
beneath it, the beautiful legs, the elegant ribs
twisted into the road. I stopped and watched
this wrestling, the dog half deer, the deer
half dog, myself poised behind them
so as to remain invisible, though a low,
slow growl loosed itself at my approach.
It entered the deer and reverberated there
until its fur grew long and thickened,
and its face took on the shape of a lion,
a wolf, a bear. It became the shape of a mouth
tearing and tearing as I watched it, wanting
to take my share of it, kneeling at the walk
and putting my mouth to the flesh, letting
fur and blood both coat my tongue, while my hands
reached into the stomach to rip and empty it.
I wanted to loose my gray hair out
upon my shoulders, to feel antlers grow
from bone, letting my own heart be pierced
until the soft pulse shivered in the skin. No.
The dog tore at the deer's throat. And I watched it.
I was the human that could watch it. I was the small,
soul-colored thing that wouldn't change.
The deer trembled and lay still.
It grew slack in the deepening snow.
The road disappeared and the sky turned white.
The snow piled up. It kept on falling.
--Paisley Rekdal


"Modern Poetry"
Mostly grey clouds, same color
as battleships, suburban Seattle.

In the bottom left corner: a clown--
his red nose, a sudden start, or

stoplight. Only his comic prosthesis
is clear--the rest's a blur (everyone

gave up on faces in the 80s--too hard).
The clown ends at neck--his body

fades to clouds. Then, like a ghost,
in the center: white outline

of a bitchin' 70s muscle car,
hood popped. Its centrality

and size suggest deep feeling.

Questions for Discussion
1. Look at the clown under a magnifying glass. What is the word that best describes his expression? Type the word in your blog. Does that word change when you smoke pot?

2. If you were standing in the poem, would you be wearing a T-shirt or a parka?

3. The airplane on which you are flying home to visit a dying loved one (but can you really love at all? what good is your love?) suddenly loses a wing and begins plummeting towards earth. What do you grab on the way down: the cloud, the clown, or the muscle car?

4. When was your last good kiss, and why?
--Jennifer L. Knox


"On Mercy"
Knowing he was soon to be executed
the condemned man asked if first he might
please
have something to drink, if first he might
be drunk.
So the soldiers brought him a drink
and because there was no hurry, another,
and one for each of them, too.
Soon they were all
very drunk, and this was merciful
because the man probably didn't understand
when they put him to the wall and shot him.

--

I'll marry the man who can prove this happened,
the dying leaves said
in their descent.

I'll marry the one who looks through that window,
the waiting grasstips said.

But the sun went on with its golden rays
like a zealous child

and the camera-eyed bees jittered mercifully
in the distant branches.

--

The man slept on the floor
and the little mouse in his head also slept.

The soldiers didn't know who would drag him away
or where they should hide him
so they laughed nervously and one
offered the body a drink, Ha ha,
a toast!

then left him by the rich lady's liquor cabinet
where she'd find him when she came home from the hills.

--

I'll marry the girl who kisses the lips
and brings a breath to them,
the starving horses said from their fields.

I'll marry the man who pounds the chest
and starts the heart,
the caved-in houses said.

And the window let the light in
until the sun failed in the branches
and, like mercy,
darkness smothered the town.

--

Later in the story, her grown son wrapped him
in a parachute
and dumped him in a neighbor's yard.

Later, that neighbor, who understood bad luck,
dragged the man to another's lawn.

And so he traveled, yard to yard,
to the edge of town
where at last he slept by a little-traveled road
in a merciful ditch

while the bombers unzipped the sky.

--

And when the town burned, he missed it,
and when the treetops bloomed and charred, he missed it.

I'll marry the man,
the grasstips said in the hot wind,

I'll marry the girl,
the horses said, running from their burning barn, aflame,

their bodies glowing bluely in the dusk.

--

And no one proved it happened,
which was merciful for us all,

the road forgotten, the man gone to root and weed,
to marrow and tooth.

--

And if it had happened--
Who would find his jawbone in the loam?
Who would pick out his bullet shells and fillings,
like glitter in the new wood?

And if a man should string them
like words on a golden chain

and make from them a charm,
and give them to his wife,
wouldn't that be mercy, too?
--Kevin Prufer


"Resurrection of the Errand Girl: An Introduction"
The girl is sent for dinner fish. Inside the market she fills her aluminum bowl with ice-blue mackerel and mullet, according to her mother's instruction. The fishmonger standing there, blood on his apron, whale knife in hand, asks, Head off and split? Translation: Do away with the watery gray eyes, the impolite razor-sharp fins, the succulent heart, tender roe, delicate sweet bones? Polite, dutiful, training to be mother, bride, kitchen frau. Her answer, Yes.

Forty summers pass. Girl no longer girl. Her blood dries into powder red dust. It is the time of animals on the move: on land, fancy blue lights beep quotidian conversations deep into the inner ear of fast-walked humans; on thinning ice, polar bears turn cannibal and the last male emperor penguin is holding one solitary egg on the quivering slope of his webbed feet. In the oil-drenched Gulf a flotilla of grandfather sea turtles floats--shell down, feet up. On hurricane-soaked rooftops Black people have been abandoned--again. The errand girl, resurrected--woman, dutiful, grown--drives home as she often does to see the two who made her. On the way in, her mama calls, to ask if she can stop and pick up dinner from the market. Friday. Fish. Tradition as old as the South itself. An hour later, she steps into Liberty Street Market, this fragrant hundred-year-old fish house. Inside, the hungry wait wall to wall. Beneath her cotton dress she wears what she could not wear when she was the errand girl--her poet's gauzy slip. She pulls her chosen fish by the tail out of the bed of ice that anchors all sides of the room. She extends her full bowl of ice-blue mullet and flounder to the fishmonger-of-her-youth's son. A man her same age but of a different persuasion. He echoes the words he heard as a boy from his father, Head off and split? Her answer is offered even quicker than the fish. No. Not this time. This time she wants what she was once sent for left whole, just as it was pulled from the sea, everything born to it still in place. Not a girl any longer, she is capable of her own knife-work now. She understands sharpness & duty. She knows what a blade can reveal & destroy. She has come to use life's points and edges to uncover life's treasures. She would rather be the one deciding what she keeps and what she throws away.

She recognizes the fishmonger: he does not recognize her. Even though she is the daughter of the most beautiful woman in the world. He holds his inherited bone-handled whale knife high in the air, teasing her answer of refusal around. He laughs out loud, warning her about the painstaking work the toothy-bony fish will require. With his hairy hands around his own hairy neck he imitates choking on an overlooked bone. Nobody waiting in the fish market laughs. He is boastful, imprecise. Three Black boys wearing rubber aprons listen right behind him, waiting to be handed bowls of fish, for dressing. His backup chorus: three-dollar-an-hour, head-off-and-split boys, snugly set like rhinestones in the dark wet air behind him. They shine out in unison, their faces speckled with the white sequined scales of fish already beheaded. The boys honk a Pip-like reverie out into the salty air of the sweaty room. The sight and sound of them does nothing to change her mind. For once in her life she will not go sentimental. She will not rescind her order. She wants what she has come for kept whole, all marrow and every organ accounted for, just as it was pulled from the sea. Her whole fish is wrapped in yesterday's news, tied with white fishmonger string, and handed over. She steps through the crowd, slips out the door, heads home.
--Nikky Finney


"60"
The forced forsythia wet on the counter
because the first vase she chose was broken

The stirring in the tight buds when winter's
seal on the storehouse of daylight is broken

The meal without you I eat with my fingers
The slick give when the shrimp shells are broken

I carry this watch because the face tells
the time although the hands are broken

The emperor's men who thought the rebellion
would stop if the children's arms were broken

For the emperor's windows hurled stones made
from the stone houses the emperor left broken

The emperor's squads of heroic women
who touch the stripped men and deliver them broken

In my pockets bits of unused tickets
Smelling of smoke Borrowed Blue Broken

How she scrabbled on the floor to assemble
the pieces of what my sons had broken

Forgive me my stranger Whose eyes I can't meet
For what's beyond healing now What's broken

Shall I stop with the dumb leaper in my chest
On and on Keeping bad time Faithful Broken
--Suzanne Gardinier