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

"Bird-Understander"
Of many reasons I love you here is one

the way you write me from the gate at the airport
so I can tell you everything will be alright

so you can tell me there is a bird
trapped in the terminal all the people
ignoring it because they do not know
what do with it except to leave it alone
until it scares itself to death

it makes you terribly terribly sad

You wish you could take the bird outside
and set it free or (failing that)
call a bird-understander
to come help the bird

All you can do is notice the bird
and feel for the bird and write
to tell me how language feels
impossibly useless

but you are wrong

You are a bird-understander
better than I could ever be
who make so many noises
and call them song

These are your own words
your way of noticing
and saying plainly
of not turning away
from hurt

you have offered them
to me I am only
giving them back

if only I could show you
how very useless
they are not
--Craig Arnold


"Lion Dream"
I may have been wounded before I came
to you, I was
I know. A large fierce feline gripped
me by the neck
back before I knew anything of sex or
logic,
like a cat moving kittens, only rougher,
its piercing canines, its carnivorous
breath--
it hasn't let go yet.

When the abrasion of your unconcern,
saying you love, then roughly "I'm
in pain, I suffer, I've got
serotonin deficiency, I don't let that
stop me,"
as if toughing it out answered terror,
answered it, yes, like a brutal
father, I wake with the baked desert
air
in my ear, its throb a dryer,
scratches

at my left arm, mauled memory, etched net of scar
wondering about harm, what it
wants from me.
--Monica Raymond


"Measuring the Tyger"
Barrels of chains. Sides of beef stacked in vans.
Water buffalo dragging logs of teak in the river mud
outside Mandalay. Pantocrator in the Byzantium dome.
The mammoth overhead crane bringing slabs of steel
through the dingy light and roar to the giant shear
that cuts the adamantine three-quarter-inch plates
and they flop down. The weight of the mind fractures
the girders and piers of the spirit, spilling out
the heart's melt. Incandescent ingots big as cars
trundling out of titanic mills, red slag scaling off
the brighter metal in the dark. The Monongahela River
below, night's sheen on its belly. Silence except
for the machinery clanging deeper in us. You will
love again, people say. Give it time. Me with time
running out. Day after day of the everyday.
What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge.
Newness strutting around as if it were significant.
Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry.
I want to go back to that time after Michiko's death
when I cried every day among the trees. To the real.
To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive.
--Jack Gilbert


"An unchangeable colour rules over the melancholic: his dwelling is a space the colour of mourning. Nothing happens in it. No one intrudes. It is a bare stage where the inert I is assisted by the I suffering from that inertia. The latter wishes to free the former, but all efforts fail, as Theseus would have failed had he been not only himself but the Minotaur; to kill him then, he would have had to kill himself. But there are fleeting remedies: sexual pleasures, for instance, can, for a brief moment, obliterate the silent gallery of echoes and mirrors that constitutes the melancholic soul. Even more: they can illuminate the funeral chamber and transform it into a sort of musical box with gaily-coloured figurines that sing and dance deliciously. Afterwards, when the music dies down, the soul will return to immobility and silence. The music box is not a gratuitous comparison. Melancholia is, I believe, a musical problem: a dissonance, a change in rhythm. While on the outside everything happens with the vertiginous rhythm of a cataract, on the inside is the exhausted adagio of drops of water falling from time to tired time. For this reason the outside, seen from the melancholic inside, appears absurd and unreal, and constitutes 'the farce we must all play.' But for an instant--because of a wild music, or a drug, or the sexual act carried to its climax--the very slow rhythm of the melancholic soul does not only rise to that of the outside soul: it overtakes it with an ineffably blissful exorbitance, and the soul then thrills animated by new delirious energies.

"The melancholic soul sees Time as suspended before and after the fatally ephemeral violence. And yet the truth is that time is never suspended, but it grows as slowly as the fingernails of the dead."
--Alejandra Pizarnik, "The Bloody Countess," translated from the Spanish by Alberto Manguel


"Whereas Iser focuses mainly on the realist work, Barthes offers a sharply contrasting account of reading by taking the modernist text, one which dissolves all distinct meaning into a free play of words, which seeks to undo repressive thought-systems by a ceaseless slipping and sliding of language. Such a text demands less a 'hermeneutics' than an 'erotics': since there is no way to arrest it into determinate sense, the reader simply luxuriates in the tantalizing glide of signs, in the provocative glimpses of meaning which surface only to submerge again. Caught up in this exuberant dance of language, delighting in the textures of words themselves, the reader knows less the purposive pleasure of building a coherent system, binding textual elements masterfully together to shore up a unitary self, than the masochistic thrills of feeling that self shattered and dispersed through the tangled webs of the work itself. Reading is less like a laboratory than a boudoir. Far from returning the reader to himself, in some final recuperation of the selfhood which the act of reading has thrown into question, the modernist text explodes his or her secure cultural identity, in a jouissance which for Barthes is both readerly bliss and sexual orgasm."
--Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction


"9"
I've lost my shoes Have you seen them
The winged ones that used to carry me

I've heard that when people die they remember
their mothers and call in the night Carry me

When my son used to say I can do it myself
he was whispering Could you carry me

When the quick rain soaks the shoulders of my shirt
it's saying Just for now Carry me

There's a tenderness around your eyes
Have enough tears said Carry me

All day in this new dream I walk on gravel
and the words you didn't whisper carry me

When my mother arrives at the end of something
it's to faint in my arms and say Carry me

I've known how to walk since before I was born
It's useless to try to carry me

What the dazzle of light says as it touches
the wave swelling Cresting Breaking Carry me

What the secrets say as they line the edges
of my eyes Your eyes Carry me

What the shoeless stammerer doesn't say
as she doesn't step into your arms Carry me
--Suzanne Gardinier, from Today: 101 Ghazals


"19"
Irish tea from Assam and Kericho
Did it change names crossing the border

The smallholders' plots in the rift valley highlands
Sweat becomes pleasure across the border

Two leaves and a bud One girl with a basket
as tall as she Across the border

The bushes smuggled out after partition
The divided ones calling across the border

A regiment of tea drilling over
the ghost of a forest Across the border

A terrace of pickers The ache in his neck
The cuts on her hands Across the border

The growing tips to the withering trough
Cut Torn Curled Across the border

Three shillings per kilo The smell of her tiredness
What will it sell for across the border

The auction Monday mornings in Mombasa
What leaf plus stoop means across the border

The savor of hunger Of take Of plantation
Can they taste it in Belfast Across the border

Plantation of cocoa Cinnamon Jasmine
The cost of sweet Across the border

Two Mombasa garlands A needle through
each closed blossom's tip Across the border

In an acre five hundred pounds of blossom
Is that Vishnu lifting one Or a girl Across the border

Threaded blossom opening on the neck
of the bride Of the groom Across the border

Or the spent blossoms reddened and crushed in the lawless
lovers' bed Across the border

Two leaves and a bud That dip and pivot
The ache it makes Across the border

Here's a witness Two aches One of absence
and one of partition Across the border
--Suzanne Gardinier


"21"
All night your breath at my neck and this rocking
Carried limp in a lion's mouth

Plush underfoot Arched vault overhead
Template of a palace A lion's mouth

Teeth but you keep them from tearing me
The long night ride in a lion's mouth

Breathing high plains and the deft leapers' heartbeats
Smeared with blood A lion's mouth

Knowing and deep How you come when I'm sleeping
Beyond the settlements A lion's mouth

Shall I show you how brave I am
My head all night in a lion's mouth

The rock of your heartbeat Your paws on my chest
Your tongue Your growling A lion's mouth

Guttering candle lit Not at the hearth
My hips pressed to a lion's mouth

Your voice that makes the bent grass tremble
In danger In darkness A lion's mouth

The chair The whip The emperor's shouting
All for the soft wet lion's mouth

Your prey still pinned open remembers
a little death A lion's mouth
--Suzanne Gardinier


"25"
I must have missed the day this was discussed
Teach me then What is a person

This mask This way This face I've borrowed
from the old ones From you Is the owner a person

The way a stranger is not a stranger
Would I understand this if I were a person

The way this ruled island moves and whispers
and presses against me Does it think I'm a person

A palace Not a tent A hawk Not a perch
A message Not a messenger Is this a person

Who is that sitting across the table
A variation on Body & Soul or a person

The chastened lovers making way
for the ceremony of the chosen person

The individuality documents
I can't seem to keep on my person

To have and to hold the rain on the river
A glint of the unbroken braid A person

A spark in clothing When she comes in a dream
I can smell her So one of us must be a person

Come sit with your half-deaf union-rent comrade
Did you say misprision Or prison Or person
--Suzanne Gardinier


"32"
The slanted light The winter coming
The leaves in drifts the color of honey

The men who believe the cure for shame
is murder Plotting in shops that sell honey

If you hear an airplane meet me in the cellar
The winter walls lined with August honey

After bees roll in the poppies' black dust
over fields of ordnance what's the taste of honey

The winter hive in the rock cleft dust
Is this the presence or absence of honey

The sweep of your legs Your restless pacing
What's between Honor A borrowed lock Honey

Nectar to flight to spit and labor
The dance Life to death Interrupted by honey

Flecked with shrapnel and shirt threads of old children
Broken webs Weapon grease Still Honey

The soldier from the waist down made of steel
She who remembers him made of honey

The gulled harvesters breaking jars in the street
because they forgot the taste of the honey

The one without it who comes at night
and naked and says the prayer for it Honey
--Suzanne Gardinier


"Why Some Girls Love Horses"
And then I thought, Can I have more
of this, would it be possible
for every day to be a greater awakening: more light,
more light, your face on the pillow
with the sleep creases rudely
fragmenting it, hair so stiff
from paint and sheet rock it feels
like the dirty short hank
of mane I used to grab on Dandy's neck
before he hauled me up and forward,
white flanks flecked green
with shit and the satin of his dander,
the livingness, the warmth
of all that blood just under the skin
and in the long, thick muscle of the neck--
He was smarter than most of the children
I went to school with. He knew
how to stand with just the crescent
of his hoof along a boot toe and press,
incrementally, his whole weight down. The pain
so surprising when it came,
its iron intention sheathed in stealth, the decisive
sudden twisting of his leg until the hoof
pinned one's foot completely to the ground,
we'd have to beat and beat him with a brush
to push him off, that hot
insistence with its large horse eye trained
deliberately on us, to watch--

Like us, he knew how to announce through violence
how he didn't hunger, didn't want
despite our practiced ministrations: too young
not to try to emphasize
with this cunning: this thing
that was and was not human we must respect
for itself and not our imagination of it: I loved him because
I could not love him anymore
in the ways I'd taught myself,
watching the slim bodies of teenagers
guide their geldings in figure eights around the ring
as if they were one body, one fluid motion
of electric understanding I would never feel
working its way through fingers to the bit: this thing
had a name, a need, a personality; it possessed
an indifference that gave me
logic and a measure: I too might stop wanting
the hand placed on back or shoulder
and never feel the desired response.
I loved the horse for the pain it could imagine

and inflict on me, the sudden jerking
of head away from halter, the tentative nose
inspecting first before it might decide
to relent and eat. I loved
what was not slave or instinct, that when you turn to me
it is a choice, it is always a choice to imagine pleasure
might be blended, one warmth
bleeding into another as the future
bleeds into the past, more light, more light,
your hand against my shoulder, the image
of the one taught me disobedience
is the first right of being alive.
--Paisley Rekdal


"Ballard Locks"
Air-struck, wound-gilled, ladder
upon ladder of them thrashing
through froth, herds of us climb
the cement stair to watch
this annual plunge back to dying, spawn;
so much twisted light
the whole tank seethes in a welter of bubbles:
more like sequined
purses than fish, champagned explosions
beneath which the ever-moving
smolt fume smacks against glass, churns them up
to lake from sea level, the way,
outside, fishing boats are dropped or raised
in pressured chambers, hoses spraying
the salt-slicked undersides a cleaner clean.
Now the vessels
can return to dock. Now the fish,
in their similar chambers, rise and fall
along the weirs, smelling the place
instinct makes for them,
city's pollutants sieved
through grates: keeping fish
where fish will spawn; changing the physics of it,
changing ours as well:
one giant world encased
with plastic rock, seaweed transplanted
in thick ribbons for schools to rest in
before they work their way up
the industrious journey: past shipyard, bus lot,
train yard, past
bear cave, past ice valley; past the place
my father's father once,
as a child, had stood with crowds
and shot at them with guns
then scooped them from the river with a net, such
silvers, pinks crosshatched with black:
now there's protective glass
behind which gray shapes shift: change
then change again. Can you see the jaws
thickening with teeth, scales
beginning to plush themselves with blood: can you see
there is so little distinction here
between beauty, violence, utility?
The water looks like boiling sun.
A child has turned his finger into a gun.
Bang, the ladders say
as they bring up fish into too-bright air, then down again,
while the child watches the glass
revolve its shapes into a hiss of light.
Bang, the boy repeats.
His finger points and points.
--Paisley Rekdal


"Voyeurs"
A horse falls on a girl
in its trailer. The horse
is a thoroughbred
lame with founder. The girl
a girl. You can't
imagine the pain.
You can't
because this story
isn't yours, isn't that
of the woman telling it
either. You watch
her take the basket
of bread, tear it
slice by broken slice.
When the horse
slips in the moving
trailer, it pins the girl
by her torso to the floor.
The woman smiles.
If he tries to rise,
she says, his shoulder
will push downward
to her spine. The dull
thud of the heart
beats against her chest.
She orders another
glass of wine.
You can see
the girl's damp fingers
stroke the silken neck.
You can't imagine why
the woman looks at you
and smiles. The horse
will grind its full weight
into her. In the light,
your thin sleeves sway
like flame. An image
of the time he grabbed
your wrist, twisted
till you cried
that he would break it.
The woman takes the smallest
sip of wine.
Her face is flushed.
A lock of hair is caught
inside your mouth.
One quick twist
of shoulder. Another
glass of wine? Voices
sweep the metal, echo
through the trailer. What
to say of the dim shapes
moving in the dark?
Straw rustles. The breath
grows shallower. You watch
the damp face twist, the hands
reach out to tear
another, broken slice.
--Paisley Rekdal


"Sideshow"
We only shelled out a buck,
knew The Snake Man

was a sham and Electra,
someone's mother. We were promised

The Smallest Woman in the World,
but expected some specimen in a jar.

Instead, The Smallest Woman in the World
asked for money to buy a wheelchair, said

she was from Trinidad.
We'd never heard of it.
--Sommer Browning


"Either Way I'm Celebrating"
They're saying irony is dead.
And for a few minutes I thought

I might die too--a woman
who would buy a fifth of liquor
and a pregnancy test just to see
the look on the clerk's face.

It's always strange to be born
before the cusp of some new age,
hanging onto nothing as if it were

Los Angeles. I remember glaring
through the windshield of the family
Pacer, watching a thirty-foot man
crack jokes on the screen.

My parents were laughing,
but I didn't get the way something
huge and astonishing could be flat,
could not exist at all.
--Sommer Browning


"Revel"
I have difficult or painful chest pain.

I have difficulty swallowing.

I open my eyes. I write open for hope.
I write difficult for swallowing. At what point

do I wish for swallowing. For difficult or painful
chest pain. I open my chest at this point.

I write hope for open. I have difficult or swallowing
chest pain. My eyes at this point

have difficulty swallowing. I have painful
difficulty swallowing. For hope or open

my chest at this point. I have painful or
swallowing eye pain. At what point

do I wish for chest pain. I open
my chest. I write difficult eye pain

for open.

I have difficulty writing.
--Sommer Browning