Warm Days in January

Warm Days in January

BY DONALD REVELL

It has never been so easy to cry

openly or to acknowledge children.

Never before could I walk directly

to the center of an island city

feeling the automatism of millions

drawing one pious breath, shouldering

the sunset, holding it up in the oily

tree-line a while longer. Years ago,

I was never sad enough and nothing

but a hotel that I could tear to pieces

and reconstruct inside a shoebox

felt like home. My parents died. Their miserable

possessions washed up in other hotels,

dioramas of the febrile romantic.

I take my first lover, already

gray at her temples and more reticent

than shy, more tacit than admiring,

to the bus stop by the Jewish Museum.

We wait in the dark a long time.

She does not kiss me. She hurries

up out of the oily street onto the humming,

fluorescent podium of the last bus

where I see her a last time, not waving

to me, not lovable, erect in the freedom

we traduced years ago in our first kiss.

Never deny the power of withdrawal.

Never doubt that thought and time make things small.

Never refuse the easy exit line or prescribed

uncomprehending gesture. At childhood's end,

none can tell happiness from buoyancy.

None of it made any difference—

the patricides, the hotels ill-constructed,

the inconstant starlight of drugs and rebellion.

We are no more complicated

than our great-grandparents who dreaded

the hotel life. Like them, we seek the refuge

of warm days in January, a piety

whose compulsion is to survive according

to explicit laws no young woman adores

or young man follows with darling hunger.

Father Son and Holy Ghost

Father Son and Holy Ghost

BY AUDRE LORDE

I have not ever seen my father's grave.

Not that his judgment eyes

have been forgotten

nor his great hands' print

on our evening doorknobs

            one half turn each night

            and he would come

            drabbled with the world's business   

            massive and silent

            as the whole day's wish   

            ready to redefine

            each of our shapes

but now the evening doorknobs   

wait    and do not recognize us   

as we pass.

Each week a different woman   

regular as his one quick glass

each evening

pulls up the grass his stillness grows   

calling it weed.

Each week    a different woman   

has my mother's face

and he

who time has    changeless

must be amazed

who knew and loved

but one.

My father died in silence   

loving creation

and well-defined response   

he lived    still judgments   

on familiar things

and died    knowing

a January 15th that year me.

Lest I go into dust

I have not ever seen my father's grave.

The Length of the Hour

The Length of the Hour

BY CYNTHIA HUNTINGTON

New houses relax on the fields.

Garage doors open soundlessly

to admit the monster. Tires stretched

over forty pounds of air

pressure float across gravel.

 

The boy closes the last storm

door on the last evening

paper and runs to the car

where his mother waits. She does not

answer him; the door slam freezes

her dreams. It is January.

 

A dog chained to a barn door

keeps barking. Somebody's angry,

scared to let him go.

On the other side

of a forest past these fields,

wolves sniff the hard snow

of the tundra. I lay beside the only

tree for warmth, there

where the pack might find me.

 

The house takes care of us now.

Look at the meat

browning under the light.

The refrigerator switches on;

ice crashes into the tray.

 

Here are locks in case someone

wants to do us harm. Remember

how the police had to pound and pound

to wake us that night a white Cadillac

leapt from the icy road

 

into the arms of our maple! It hung there,

empty, doors flung wide—

it was a great white petal of a car,

breathing under the gas-lights, opening

and opening.

Blue Madonna

Blue Madonna

BY VANDANA KHANNA

Back before color threaded

the world, when everything

was in black-and-white, I was

the only pagan at school, hiding

my breath with its curry and accent,

mouthing words to prayers I didn't

understand. I wondered why there

were always holy men but so few holy

women. I wanted to be enchanted,

to steal the baby Jesus from the Christmas

play and keep him hidden in my closet,

pull him out when I needed to be saved.

I wanted to be the blue Madonna holding

all the pieces of her son together.

Half a world away, girls my age came

as close to God as anyone could be.

They were already throwing their bodies

over their husband's funeral pyres, flung

out like blankets over the flames, chanting

Ram, Ram like a nursery rhyme. My mother

told me it was a holy mantra, the more I said

it, the holier I would be, but I never really knew

how or why, just that it was supposed to happen.

Once I tried saying it as many times as I could

in fifty seconds, but nothing. No miracle,

no halo of thorns around my head. And all I

could think about were those girls, widows

at fifteen. What did burning flowers smell like?

Something terrible, something holy?

Appeal to the Grammarians

Appeal to the Grammarians

BY PAUL VIOLI

We, the naturally hopeful,

Need a simple sign

For the myriad ways we're capsized.

We who love precise language

Need a finer way to convey

Disappointment and perplexity.

For speechlessness and all its inflections,

For up-ended expectations,

For every time we're ambushed

By trivial or stupefying irony,

For pure incredulity, we need

The inverted exclamation point.

For the dropped smile, the limp handshake,

For whoever has just unwrapped a dumb gift

Or taken the first sip of a flat beer,

Or felt love or pond ice

Give way underfoot, we deserve it.

We need it for the air pocket, the scratch shot,

The child whose ball doesn't bounce back,

The flat tire at journey's outset,

The odyssey that ends up in Weehawken.

But mainly because I need it – here and now

As I sit outside the Caffe Reggio

Staring at my espresso and cannoli

After this middle-aged couple

Came strolling by and he suddenly

Veered and sneezed all over my table

And she said to him, "See, that's why

I don't like to eat outside."

White Papers [1]

White Papers [1]

BY MARTHA COLLINS

Because my father said Yes

but not in our lifetimes Because

my mother said I know my daughter

would never want to marry...

But mostly because they rarely spoke

of or noticed or even whispered

about and did not of course ...

Because magazines rarely TV

rarely textbooks rarely or not

at all except for figures like

George Washington Carver

who'd lived in our state

Because among the crayons

there was one called Flesh

Because paintings rarely or never

until because books from the library

never until because college literature

not at all the American lit anthology

had only Gwendolyn Brooks

who was not assigned

Because a few years after Brown

v. Board of Education I wrote a paper

that took the position Yes but not yet

although my father although

my mother although we rarely

although we whispered

although the silence although

the absence although even now

some TV books not to mention

radio websites new militias hate

groups raging against our socialist-

communist-fascist although but still:

our textbooks now our museums

mostly our college literature

courses even our crayons not

to mention our young president

who could scarcely have been

imagined when we when I—

and although I've gone back

and filled in some blanks

I'm still learning this un-

learning untying

the knot of Yes but re-

writing this    Yes   Yes

Enlightenment

Enlightenment

BY NATASHA TRETHEWEY

In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs

        at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned:

his forehead white with illumination —

a lit bulb — the rest of his face in shadow,

        darkened as if the artist meant to contrast

his bright knowledge, its dark subtext.

By 1805, when Jefferson sat for the portrait,

        he was already linked to an affair

with his slave. Against a backdrop, blue

and ethereal, a wash of paint that seems

        to hold him in relief, Jefferson gazes out

across the centuries, his lips fixed as if

he's just uttered some final word.

        The first time I saw the painting, I listened

as my father explained the contradictions:

 

how Jefferson hated slavery, though — out

        of necessity, my father said — had to own

slaves; that his moral philosophy meant

 

he could not have fathered those children:

        would have been impossible, my father said.

For years we debated the distance between

word and deed. I'd follow my father from book

        to book, gathering citations, listening

as he named — like a field guide to Virginia —

each flower and tree and bird as if to prove

        a man's pursuit of knowledge is greater

than his shortcomings, the limits of his vision.

I did not know then the subtext

        of our story, that my father could imagine

Jefferson's words made flesh in my flesh —

 

the improvement of the blacks in body

        and mind, in the first instance of their mixture

with the whites — or that my father could believe

he'd made me better. When I think of this now,

        I see how the past holds us captive,

its beautiful ruin etched on the mind's eye:

my young father, a rough outline of the old man

        he's become, needing to show me

the better measure of his heart, an equation

writ large at Monticello. That was years ago.

        Now, we take in how much has changed:

talk of Sally Hemings, someone asking,

How white was she? — parsing the fractions

        as if to name what made her worthy 

of Jefferson's attentions: a near-white,

quadroon mistress, not a plain black slave.

        Imagine stepping back into the past, 

our guide tells us then — and I can't resist

whispering to my father: This is where

        we split up. I'll head around to the back. 

When he laughs, I know he's grateful

I've made a joke of it, this history

        that links us — white father, black daughter —

even as it renders us other to each other.

Sailing to Byzantium

Sailing to Byzantium

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Scrabble with Matthews

Scrabble with Matthews

BY DAVID WOJAHN

Jerboa on a triple: I was in for it,   

my zither on a double looking feeble   

as a "promising" first book. Oedipal & reckless,   

my scheme would fail: keep him a couple drinks   

ahead, & perhaps the muse would smile   

upon me with some ses or some blanks.   

January, Vermont: snowflakes teased the windows   

of the Burlington airport bar. The waitress   

tallied tips & channel-surfed above the amber   

stutter of the snowplow's light: it couldn't   

keep up, either. Visibility to zero, nothing taking off   

& his dulcimer before me (50 bonus points   

for "bingos") like a cautionary tale. The night   

before I'd been his warm up act,   

the audience of expensive preppies   

doubling to twenty when he shambled   

to the podium to give them Martial   

& his then-new poems. "Why do you write   

something nobody reads anymore?" queried one   

little trust fund in a blazer. "Because   

I'm willing to be honestly confused   

& honestly fearful." Il miglior fabbro,   

a.k.a. Prez: sweet & fitting honorifics he has left   

upon the living's lips. Sweet & fitting too   

that I could know the poems much better than   

the man, flawed as I am told he was. Connoisseur   

of word-root & amphibrach, of Coltrane   

solo & of California reds, of box score & Horatian loss,   

his garrulousness formidable & masking   

a shyness I could never penetrate, meeting him   

would always find me tongue-tied,   

minding my ps & qs, the latter of which   

I could not play, failing three times to draw a u.   

The dead care nothing for our eulogies:   

he wrote this many times & well.   

& yet I pray his rumpled daimonion

shall guide our letters forward   

as they wend the snow-white notebook leaves,   

the stanzas scrolling down the laptop screens.   

Game after game & the snow labored on.   

Phalanx, bourboned whiteout & the board aglow   

as he'd best me again & again. Qintar

& prosody, the runway lights enshrouded   

& the wind, endquote, shook the panes.

Cinque Terre

Cinque Terre

BY JON PINEDA

Between the train's long slide and the sun

ricocheting off the sea, anyone

would have fallen silent in those words,

the language of age in her face, the birds

cawing over the broken earth, gathering near its stones 

and chapel doors. In the marina, the sea and its bones 

have grown smaller. Though the tide is out, 

it is not the tide nor the feathers nor the cat 

that jumps into the street, the dust 

lifting with each wing and disappearing. The rust-

colored sheets that wrap the sails of ships, 

I don't know their name nor the way to say lips 

of water in Italian and mean this:  an old woman 

stood by the tracks until his hand stopped waving.

sisters

sisters

BY LUCILLE CLIFTON

me and you be sisters.

we be the same.

me and you

coming from the same place.

me and you

be greasing our legs

touching up our edges.

me and you

be scared of rats

be stepping on roaches.

me and you

come running high down purdy street one time

and mama laugh and shake her head at

me and you.

me and you

got babies

got thirty-five

got black

let our hair go back

be loving ourselves

be loving ourselves

be sisters.

only where you sing

i poet.

The Snow Man

The Snow Man

BY WALLACE STEVENS

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

North of Boston

North of Boston

BY MAGGIE DIETZ

Hoarfrost coats and cuffs

the playing fields, a heyday

of glistening. So there's hope

in my throat as I walk across them

to the woods with my chest

flung open, spilling its coins.

The light so bright I can hear it,

a silver tone like a penny whistle.

It's fall, so I'm craving pine cones.

Hundreds of maples the color

of bulldozers!

            

          But something strange

is going on: the trees are tired

of meaning, sick of providing

mystery, parallels, consolation.

"Leave us alone," they seem to cry,

with barely energy for a pun.

The muscular river crawls on

its belly in a maple coat of mail.

Muddy and unreflective, it smells

as if it too could use some privacy.

The sumac reddens like a face,

holding out its velvet pods

almost desperately. The Queen

Anne's Lace clicks in the wind.

A deaf-mute milkweed

foaming at the mouth.

Back at the field I look

for what I didn't mean

to drop. The grass is green.

                            Okay, Day,

my host, I want to get out

of your house. Come on, Night,

with your twinkly stars and big

dumb moon. Tell me don't

show me, and wipe that grin

off your face.

Trying Fourleggedness

Trying Fourleggedness

BY REBECCA HAZELTON

The boy and the girl were mostly gesture,

a clouded outline, the pencil lifting, lowering

to get at the idea of childhood, not the sour milk

and scraped knee of it. Her skirt was a swoop

of ink, his hand invisible in an undrawn pocket.

Circles make up the majority of the face. We are all circles

and planar suggestion. If  the girl wants to be a horse

she need only walk into the outline of one

and line up her body with the chest. We'll fill in

the rest, and before you know it, she's a natural.

Who will ride her? The boy doesn't know how.

He has a hankering to sketch in a saddle.

When she tosses her head, he mocks up a bridle.

He mocks her. A bridle for a bride, he says,

which doesn't seem like what little boys say,

but he wasn't so little, and she didn't run away.

Hustle

Hustle

BY JERICHO BROWN

They lie like stones and dare not shift. Even asleep, everyone hears in prison.

Dwayne Betts deserves more than this dry ink for his teenage years in prison.

In the film we keep watching, Nina takes Darius to a steppers ball. 

Lovers hustle, slide, and dip as if none of them has a brother in prison.

I eat with humans who think any book full of black characters is about race. 

A book full of white characters examines insanity—but never in prison.

His whole family made a barricade of their bodies at the door to room 403. 

He died without the man he wanted. What use is love at home or in prison?

We saw police pull sharks out of the water just to watch them not breathe. 

A brother meets members of his family as he passes the mirrors in prison.

Sundays, I washed and dried her clothes after he threw them into the yard. 

In the novel I love, Brownfield kills his wife, gets only seven years in prison.

I don't want to point my own sinful finger, so let's use your clean one instead. 

Some bright citizen reading this never considered a son's short hair in prison.

In our house lived three men with one name, and all three fought or ran. 

I left Nelson Demery III for Jericho Brown, a name I earned in prison.

The New Year

The New Year

BY JASON SHINDER

I will dive to the bottom of the hotel pool and find my mother's hairpin.

 

With the mouth of a drowning woman on my lap,

I will add her breath to mine. In the dark, I will lay the thin white sheet

 

of the moonlight over the blue plums of my wife's breasts.

 

With the new planet I discovered just when I thought I was losing my sight,

I will love another man because I will be a woman.

 

Everything important will never as yet have happened. Let it happen.

 

I will throw a lit match on the secrets my body

has kept from me and stand in the fire. The people I have sawed in half

 

will appear in my bedroom mirror, getting dressed.

It would be neat if with the New Year

It would be neat if with the New Year

BY JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA

It would be neat if with the New Year

I could leave my loneliness behind with the old year.

My leathery loneliness an old pair of work boots

my dog vigorously head-shakes back and forth in its jaws,

chews on for hours every day in my front yard—

rain, sun, snow, or wind

in bare feet, pondering my poem,

I'd look out my window and see that dirty pair of boots in the yard.

But my happiness depends so much on wearing those boots.

At the end of my day

while I'm in a chair listening to a Mexican corrido

I stare at my boots appreciating:

all the wrong roads we've taken, all the drug and whiskey houses

we've visited, and as the Mexican singer wails his pain,

I smile at my boots, understanding every note in his voice,

and strangers, when they see my boots rocking back and forth on my

                                                                                                    feet

keeping beat to the song, see how

my boots are scuffed, tooth-marked, worn-soled.

I keep wearing them because they fit so good

and I need them, especially when I love so hard,

where I go up those boulder strewn trails,

where flowers crack rocks in their defiant love for the light.

Absences

Absences

BY DONALD JUSTICE

It's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.

There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,

Like the memory of scales descending the white keys

Of a childhood piano—outside the window, palms!

And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,

Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.

Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,

Like the memory of a white dress cast down . . .

So much has fallen.

                                    And I, who have listened for a step

All afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away,

Already in memory. And the terrible scales descending

On the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers

      abounding.

Lock and Key

Lock and Key

BY RACHEL SHERWOOD

I hardly know where to look

anymore. Places have a

putrid familiarity

like the smell of my own sheets

or the close air of the kitchen —

fishbones on the drain

left in the ghastly order

of temporal things.

I have been sitting in this bar

for years now

the beer is stale, the wine off-color

the music is always the same,

old, sad songs that get older

no better than endless conversation

night after forgotten night

when all I or you can recall

is the dark, the traffic lights,

the bartender's comments

about drunk women

in public places.

I would like to go home

finally, down the long streets

north and south crossed with small gold leaves;

I forget just where the hell

anything is. Locked out.

The Oven Loves the TV Set

The Oven Loves the TV Set

BY HEATHER MCHUGH

Stuck on the fridge, our favorite pin-up girl   

is anorexic. On the radio we have a riff

of Muzak sax, and on the mind

a self-help book. We sprawl all evening, all

alone, in the unraised ranch;   

all day the company we kept

kept on incorporating. As for the world   

of poverty, we did our best, thanks

to a fund of Christian feeling   

and mementos from

Amelia, the foster child, who has

the rags and seven photogenic sisters we prefer

in someone to be saved. She's proof   

Americans have got a heart

to go with all that happy

acumen you read about. We're known to love

a million little prettinesses,   

decency, and ribbons on

the cockapoo. (But who

will study alphabets for hands? Who gives

a damn what patience goes into

a good wheelchair? Who lugs the rice

from its umpteen stores

to the ends of the earth, to even

one dead-end? Not we.)   

Our constitutional pursuit

is happiness, i.e.   

somebody nice, and not

too fat, we can have   

for our personal friend.

December 26

December 26

BY KENN NESBITT

A BB gun.

A model plane.

A basketball.

A 'lectric train.

A bicycle.

A cowboy hat.

A comic book.

A baseball bat.

A deck of cards.

A science kit.

A racing car.

A catcher's mitt.

So that's my list

of everything

that Santa Claus

forgot to bring.

Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree

Sonnet in the Shape of a Potted Christmas Tree

BY GEORGE STARBUCK

* O fury- bedecked! O glitter-torn! Let the wild wind erect bonbonbonanzas; junipers affect frostyfreeze turbans; iciclestuff adorn all cuckolded creation in a madcap crown of horn! It's a new day; no scapegrace of a sect tidying up the ashtrays playing Daughter-in-Law Elect; bells! bibelots! popsicle cigars! shatter the glassware! a son born now now while ox and ass and infant lie together as poor creatures will and tears of her exertion still cling in the spent girl's eye and a great firework in the sky drifts to the western hill.

Advent Calendar

Advent Calendar

BY GJERTRUD SCHNACKENBERG

Bethlehem in Germany,

Glitter on the sloping roofs,

Breadcrumbs on the windowsills,

Candles in the Christmas trees,

Hearths with pairs of empty shoes:

Panels of Nativity

Open paper scenes where doors

Open into other scenes,

Some recounted, some foretold.

Blizzard-sprinkled flakes of gold

Gleam from small interiors,

Picture-boxes in the stars

Open up like cupboard doors

In a cabinet Jesus built.

Southern German villagers,

Peasants in the mica frost,

See the comet streaming down,

Heavenly faces, each alone,

Faces lifted, startled, lost,

As if lightning lit the town.

Sitting in an upstairs window

Patiently the village scholar

Raises his nearsighted face,

Interrupted by the star.

Left and right his hands lie stricken

Useless on his heavy book.

When I lift the paper door

In the ceiling of his study

One canary-angel glimmers,

Flitting in the candelabra,

Peers and quizzes him: Rabbi,

What are the spheres surmounted by?

But his lips are motionless.

Child, what are you asking for?

Look, he gazes past the roofs,

Gazes where the bitter North,

Stretched across the empty place,

Opens door by door by door.

This is childhood's shrunken door.

When I touch the glittering crumbs,

When I cry to be admitted,

No one answers, no one comes.

And the tailor's needle flashes

In midair with thread pulled tight,

Stitching a baptismal gown.

But the gown, the seventh door,

Turns up an interior

Hidden from the tailor's eyes:

Baby presents like the boxes

Angels hold on streets and stairways,

Wooden soldier, wooden sword,

Chocolate coins in crinkled gold,

Hints of something bought and sold,

Hints of murder in the stars.

Baby's gown is sown with glitter

Spread across the tailor's lap.

Up above his painted ceiling

Baby mouse's skeleton

Crumbles in the mouse's trap.

Leaning from the cliff of heaven,

Indicating whom he weeps for,

Joseph lifts his lamp above

The infant like a candle-crown.

Let my fingers touch the silence

Where the infant's father cries.

Give me entrance to the village

From my childhood where the doorways

Open pictures in the skies.

But when all the doors are open,

No one sees that I've returned.

When I cry to be admitted,

No one answers, no one comes.

Clinging to my fingers only

Pain, like glitter bits adhering,

When I touch the shining crumbs.

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg

BY RICHARD HUGO

You might come here Sunday on a whim.   

Say your life broke down. The last good kiss   

you had was years ago. You walk these streets   

laid out by the insane, past hotels   

that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try   

of local drivers to accelerate their lives.   

Only churches are kept up. The jail   

turned 70 this year. The only prisoner   

is always in, not knowing what he's done.

The principal supporting business now   

is rage. Hatred of the various grays   

the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,   

The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls   

who leave each year for Butte. One good   

restaurant and bars can't wipe the boredom out.   

The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,   

a dance floor built on springs—

all memory resolves itself in gaze,

in panoramic green you know the cattle eat   

or two stacks high above the town,   

two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse   

for fifty years that won't fall finally down.

Isn't this your life? That ancient kiss

still burning out your eyes? Isn't this defeat

so accurate, the church bell simply seems

a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?   

Don't empty houses ring? Are magnesium   

and scorn sufficient to support a town,   

not just Philipsburg, but towns

of towering blondes, good jazz and booze   

the world will never let you have

until the town you came from dies inside?

Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty   

when the jail was built, still laughs   

although his lips collapse. Someday soon,   

he says, I'll go to sleep and not wake up.   

You tell him no. You're talking to yourself.   

The car that brought you here still runs.   

The money you buy lunch with,

no matter where it's mined, is silver   

and the girl who serves your food

is slender and her red hair lights the wall.