“Eventually the text began to explain itself.
Written out, the code was easier to decipher.
They devised a strategy, frequent division,
occasional subtraction. One fragment kissed another.
A sexual innuendo of sorts. Distance was not kind.
They understood the adage that omissions can be cruel
so a system of substitution was concocted. A three was used
to connote a blank space. A blanket was thrown
over the bed but only because it was very, very cold.
It was all in an evening’s amusement.
All a moment’s distraction.”

Mary Jo Bang

Burlesque by Amaud Jamaul Johnson

Watch the fire undress him,
how flame fingers each button,
rolls back his collar, unzips him
without sweet talk or mystery.

See how the skin begins to gather
at his ankles, how it slips into
the embers, how it shimmers
beneath him, unshapen, iridescent

as candlelight on a dark negligee.
Come, look at him, at all his goods,
how his whole body becomes song,
an aria of light, a psalm’s kaleidoscope.

Listen as he lets loose an opus,
night’s national anthem, the tune
you can’t name, but can’t stop humming.
There, he burns brilliant as a blue note.

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

The Earthquake In This Case Was by Mary Jo Bang

A seismic storm that knocked down
buildings—the buildings teetering before falling
the way ideological beliefs might sway back and forth

if they were preserved in a glass tower
that was about to be toppled. In any storm,
one hopes he or she is bound in advance

by the story line to escape at the end. In speech,
the mouth becomes a wheelbarrow
that can assert its contents.

The tool-and-die exactitude of pre-packaged thought
is estranging because it suggests
the discrete elements can't be teased apart.

Blind faith relies on an obedience that verges
on boredom. Any disquiet, however slight, might
define a moment like a character's obsessive cough

might define a character by exploding
when it shouldn't. It keeps exploding just when
it shouldn't and when it does it acts in the story

like a glass box cracked by a hammer that breaks
and becomes a broken box. In both situations,
action releases the stale air encased there.

And now the question: what do we do with the longing
for what can destroy us? You're free to think:
logic can change even the most obstinate person; or,

logic cannot change the most obstinate person.

Apt Answer

Every morning,
I wake in a bad dream.

Thoughts of all
that’s gone awry
flood my mind
to overflow
and
all
I
can do
is clutch
the shards
of wreckage
wrought from
billowing despair
with bleeding hands.

I know what I did to us.

I was like a hamster
running in circles
in a plastic ball
losing air
while
you
were
silently
suffocating
in your own misery.


I unwittingly
slashed holes
through our foundation
in my desperation
to find breathing room
without considering
the weapon
I was wielding
for our salvation.

If I’d been more mindful,
I would’ve reached for a saber.
But unknowingly,
I grabbed a cleaver.

Wait by C.K. Williams

Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax— 

not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely,   

time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail, 

one part of my body a hundred years old, one not even there anymore,   

another still riven with idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was   

for whom everything always was going too slowly, too slowly. 

It was me then who chopped, slashed, through you, across you,   

relished you, gorged on you, slugged your invisible liquor down raw. 

Now you're polluted; pulse, clock, calendar taint you, befoul you, 

you suck at me, pull at me, barbed wire knots of memory tear me,   

my heart hangs, inert, a tag-end of tissue, firing, misfiring,   

trying to heave itself back to its other way with you. 

But was there ever really any other way with you? When I ran 

as though for my life, wasn't I fleeing from you, or for you? 

Wasn't I frightened you'd fray, leave me nothing but shreds? 

Aren't I still? When I snatch at one of your moments, and clutch it, 

a pebble, a planet, isn't it wearing away in my hand as though I,   

not you, were the ocean of acid, the corrosive in I which dissolve? 

Wait, though, wait: I should tell you too how happy I am, 

how I love it so much, all of it, chopping and slashing and all. 

Please know I love especially you, how every morning you turn over 

the languorous earth, for how would she know otherwise to do dawn, 

to do dusk, when all she hears from her speech-creatures is "Wait!"?   

We whose anguished wish is that our last word not be "Wait."

Present Light by Charles Ghinga

If I could

hold light

in my hand

 

I would 

give it

to you

 

and watch it 

become

your shadow.

"It was an alarming thought that these false selves should still have me in their power, and in my bewilderment I began wondering whether any such thing as my real self could be said to exist at all. Like a sudden revelation, then, it became clear to me that the self was always changing, always developing, only capable of evolving fully through the integration of all past semblances. I wouldn’t be my true self till I accepted and learned to know all those selves I’d disowned and deserted...As if this were something I could do consciously, there and then, the last of my inertia vanished, consumed by an ardent desire for identification with the essential ‘I’ – until this had been achieved I’d always be as I was now, wandering like a stranger, lost, frightened and confused, among the changes and contradictions of my own personality." 

-Anna Kavan

Love Lessons

As for me, I used to be a bird
with a gentle white womb,
someone cut my throat
     just for laughs,
     I don’t know.
As for me, I used to be a great albatross
and whirled over the seas.
Someone put an end to my journey,
without any charity in the tone of it.
But even stretched out on the ground
I sing for you now
my songs of love.

More Merini

"And, up against me, the inanimate things
that I created earlier
come to die again within the breast
of my intelligence
eager for my shelter and my fruits,
begging again for riches from a beggar."
(“When the Anguish”)

"So, within your shaping arms
I pour myself, small and immense,
serene given, restless given,
unending developing motion."
(“The Presence of Orpheus”)

"As for my crying over you, I bleached it away slowly
day by day as full light does
and in silence I sent it back to my eyes,
which, if I look at you, are alive with stars."
(“And it would be even easier”)

On my mind: Aphorisms by Alda Merini

Psychoanalysis 

always looks for the egg 

in a basket 

that has been lost. 

*       *       * 

I sample sin as if it were 

the beginning of well-being. 

*       *       * 

I don't like Paradise 

as they probably don't have obsessions there. 

*       *       * 

If God absolves me 

he always does so 

for insufficient 

evidence. 

*       *       * 

Everyone is a friend of his own pathology. 

*       *       * 

When I raise a toast to madness, 

I toast myself as well. 

*       *       * 

There are nights that don't 

ever happen.

— Translated by Douglas Basford

And soooooo (s)he kicked him in the ding-ding!

"Lost causes are the only ones fighting for."

Spent by Rae Armantrout

Suffer as in allow.

List as in want.

Listless as in transcending

desire, or not rising

to greet it.

To list

is to lean,

dangerously,

to one side.

Have you forgotten?

Spent

as in exhausted.

Second Helpings by John Brehm

I wear my heart on my sleeve,

or rather both sleeves, since 

it's usually broken.

Sometimes when I join my hands

to pray, the jagged edges

briefly touch,

like a plate that fell and cracked

apart from being asked 

to hold too much.

The Language by Robert Creeley

Locate I 

love you some- 

where in 

teeth and   

eyes, bite   

it but 

take care not   

to hurt, you   

want so 

much so   

little. Words   

say everything. 

I 

love you

again, 

then what   

is emptiness   

for. To 

fill, fill. 

I heard words   

and words full 

of holes   

aching. Speech   

is a mouth.

Not Over It by Heather McHugh

By woman so touched, so pressed,

detachment being thought

achievable at all

 

is boggling in itself. Its being

thought achievable by love—but love

for only all (not someone’s single) sentience—

 

appears the precept of too cold

a form of flame. How much

of a hand in things

 

relinquishes the hold

of things-at-hand?

What kiss might such

 

a mind reclaim? A swirl of dust

in Buddhist schools, perhaps.

A view of several solar

 

systems from above.

Not love.

The thought

 

appeals as it appals:

Slow learners, we must spurn

the selving sensualities, to feel

 

for feelers of this kind,

unfasten passion’s burner

to identify what’s under it—

 

in short, must court

dispassion just

to be compassionate.

Where The Wound Lies by Angela de Hoyos

because I go 

          like the professed 

                 sinner repentant 

to the altar 

of your baptismal flame 

         I am saved 

despite your 

                        sculptor-love 

whose whimsy kneads 

                                             and molds 

                                             and fires

then breaks 

the free-form 

of my fasting body

                                             to make 

                                             me whole

yet thankful 

I accept

                these carnal gifts

                of you 

                              Eros 

and wear them 

as I would

flawless jewels 

               (how can you 

                know that I 

                have bled

                the way 

                and back 

                biting the dust 

                to wear 

                your name?) 

. . . the wound lies 

                                                not

in your infliction 

         but in my

                 expectations . . .

 

Brutal to give

the prisoner a window—

a blue sky glimpse—

as if an afterlife

existed. Brutal

for you to parade 

in a body

in the same 

room where I dream you.

Slide by Kate Colby

You and I inhabit thresholds, clinging to neither here nor there, and to

and: this is a threshold of no relief, of interrogative light and obviated

shadows, of questions flattened between clapboard slides,

in laboratories of hanging frames—in a potential frame,

the next moment slumps beneath the shadow of the overhang.

 

They call it earthquake weather, a day like this, of reflected light

and leveling heat of no relief, of corners around which

and angles of incidence jellied in consommé,

molded in amber lunches of tea and

impossible: no incidents or tension, no reflection.

 

No striations: rather, bangle, a broken shoelace

and what are we going to do about that hair?

 

We were in a boat. You were navigating and I was tending

the lines, which flew from my hands, flapping like live wires

on the wind. You watched the shadow of our sail on the water

through the light reflected in your face, conducted a depth sounding:

 

You went under, but not overboard, swam away to plot reliefs

of ocean floors. It is far too shallow here to die.

 

Tonight I Can Almost Hear the Singing by Silvia Curbelo

There is a music to this sadness. 

In a room somewhere two people dance. 

I do not mean to say desire is everything. 

A cup half empty is simply half a cup. 

How many times have we been there and not there? 

I have seen waitresses slip a night's 

worth of tips into the jukebox, their eyes 

saying yes to nothing in particular. 

Desire is not the point. 

Tonight your name is a small thing 

falling through sadness. We wake alone 

in houses of sticks, of straw, of wind. 

How long have we stood at the end of the pier 

watching that water going?

In the distance the lights curve along

Tampa Bay, a wishbone ready to snap 

and the night riding on that half promise, 

a half moon to light the whole damned sky. 

This is the way things are with us. 

Sometimes we love almost enough. 

We say I can do this, I can do 

more than this and faith feeds 

on its own version of the facts. 

In the end the heart turns on itself 

like hunger to a spoon. 

We make a wish in a vanishing landscape. 

Sadness is one more reference point 

like music in the distance. 

Two people rise from a kitchen table 

as if to dance. What do they know 

about love?

Japanese Maple by Clive James

My daughter’s choice, the maple tree is new.
Come autumn and its leaves will turn to flame.
What I must do
Is live to see that.

The Lost Art of Letter Writing by Eavan Boland

And if we say
An art is lost when it no longer knows
How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see

The way we lost it: stacking letters in the attic,
Going downstairs so as not to listen to
The fields stirring at night as they became

Memory and in the morning as they became
Ink; what we did so as not to hear them
Whispering the only question they knew

By heart, the only one they learned from all
Those epistles of air and unreachable distance,
How to ask: is it still there

People Exchange Words by Tadeusz Dabrowski

Every day love plays with another tongue, with other
lips, and wears thongs underneath its habit.

Gravity (excerpt) by Galway Kinnell

"As long as two kvetches remain alive,because inside each is self-hatred so hardenednot even nonexistence can abide them,as long as the hummingbird strikesthe air seventy-four times per second,as long as the mound of earth remains heapedbeside the rectangular hole waiting to be filled,gravity cannot be said to impose its will."

Please Don't by Tony Hoagland

tell the flowers—they think

the sun loves them.

The grass is under the same

simple-minded impression

about the rain, the fog, the dew.

And when the wind blows,

it feels so good

they lose control of themselves

and swobtoggle wildly

around, bumping accidentally into their

slender neighbors.

Forgetful little lotus-eaters,

solar-powered

hydroholics, drawing nourishment up

through stems into their

thin green skin,

high on the expensive

chemistry of mitochondrial explosion,

believing that the dirt

loves them, the night, the stars—

reaching down a little deeper

with their pale albino roots,

all Dizzy

Gillespie with the utter

sufficiency of everything.

They don't imagine lawn

mowers, the four stomachs

of the cow, or human beings with boots

who stop to marvel

at their exsquisite

flexibility and color.

They persist in their soft-headed

hallucination of happiness.

But please don't mention it.

Not yet. Tell me

what would you possibly gain

from being right?

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"the truest, most intimate 

pleasure you can sometimes find

is the wet kiss 

of your own pain."

Definitely by Mary Jo Bang

What is desire 

But the hardwire argument given 

To the mind’s unstoppable mouth. 

Inside the braincase, it’s I 

Want that fills every blank. And then the hand 

Reaches for the pleasure 

The plastic snake offers. Someone says, Yes, 

It will all be fine in some future soon. 

Definitely. I’ve conjured a body 

In the chair before me. Be yourself, I tell it. 

Here memory makes you 

Unchangeable: that shirt, those summer pants. 

That beautiful face. 

That tragic beautiful mind. 

That mind’s ravenous mouth 

That told you, This isn’t poison 

At all but just what the machine needs. And then, 

The mouth closes on its hunger. 

The heart stops.

"We make habits out of words. I grew accustomed
to his, the way they spooned me into sleep
so many times."

Sorcery by Jessica Hagedorn

there are some people i know
whose beauty
is a crime.
who make you so crazy
you don’t know
whether to throw yourself
at them
or kill them.
which makes
for permanent madness.
which could be
bad for you.
you better be on the lookout
for such circumstances.

stay away
from the night.
they most likely lurk
in corners of the room
where they think
they being inconspicuous
but they so beautiful
an aura
gives them away.

stay away
from the day.
they most likely
be walking
down the street
when you least
expect it
trying to look
ordinary
but they so fine
they break your heart
by making you dream
of other possibilities.

stay away
from crazy music.
they most likely
be creating it.
cuz when you’re that beautiful
you can’t help
putting it out there.
everyone knows
how dangerous
that can get.

stay away
from magic shows.
especially those
involving words.
words are very
tricky things.
everyone knows
words
the most common
instruments of
illusion.

they most likely
be saying them,
breathing poems
so rhythmic
you can’t help
but dance.
and once
you start dancing
to words
you might never
stop.

Ghost by Cynthia Huntington

At first you didn’t know me.

I was a shape moving rapidly, nervous

 

at the edge of your vision. A flat, high voice,

dark slash of hair across my cheekbone.

 

I made myself present, though never distinct.

Things I said that he repeated, a tone

 

you could hear, but never trace, in his voice.

Silence—followed by talk of other things.

 

When you would sit at your desk, I would creep

near you like a question. A thought would scurry

 

across the front of your mind. I’d be there,

ducking out of sight. You must have felt me

 

watching you, my small eyes fixed on your face,

the smile you wondered at, on the lips only.

 

The voice on the phone, quick and full of business.

All that you saw and heard and could not find

 

the center of, those days growing into years,

growing inside of you, out of reach, now with you

 

forever, in your house, in your garden, in corridors

of dream where I finally tell you my name.

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Fuck Stuck by Naomi Morris

Do I fuck you or hate you?
It feels wrong in every limb
But I do it anyway
’Cause it feels right when you’re in.

Your generosity is perverse
And confined to your bed
The only thing you’ve given me freely
Is head.

September Is (excerpt) by Mary Jo Bang

Memory is deeply not alive; it's a mock-up

And this renders it hateful. Yet, it is not a fiction,

Is a truth, indeed a sad and monstrous truth.

I was assigned to you, together we were

A beautiful and melancholic picture.

This last picture is the realization

Of the overwhelming moment

In which the acute eye perceives you as a now

That is over. A now that is fixed

In the swept past.

Faint Music by Robert Hass

Maybe you need to write a poem about grace.

When everything broken is broken,   

and everything dead is dead,

and the hero has looked into the mirror with complete contempt,

and the heroine has studied her face and its defects

remorselessly, and the pain they thought might,

as a token of their earnestness, release them from themselves

has lost its novelty and not released them,

and they have begun to think, kindly and distantly,

watching the others go about their days—

likes and dislikes, reasons, habits, fears—

that self-love is the one weedy stalk

of every human blossoming, and understood,

therefore, why they had been, all their lives,   

in such a fury to defend it, and that no one—

except some almost inconceivable saint in his pool

of poverty and silence—can escape this violent, automatic

life’s companion ever, maybe then, ordinary light,

faint music under things, a hovering like grace appears.

As in the story a friend told once about the time   

he tried to kill himself. His girl had left him.

Bees in the heart, then scorpions, maggots, and then ash.   

He climbed onto the jumping girder of the bridge,   

the bay side, a blue, lucid afternoon.

And in the salt air he thought about the word “seafood,”

that there was something faintly ridiculous about it.

No one said “landfood.” He thought it was degrading to the rainbow perch

he’d reeled in gleaming from the cliffs, the black rockbass,   

scales like polished carbon, in beds of kelp

along the coast—and he realized that the reason for the word   

was crabs, or mussels, clams. Otherwise

the restaurants could just put “fish” up on their signs,   

and when he woke—he’d slept for hours, curled up   

on the girder like a child—the sun was going down

and he felt a little better, and afraid. He put on the jacket   

he’d used for a pillow, climbed over the railing   

carefully, and drove home to an empty house.

There was a pair of her lemon yellow panties

hanging on a doorknob. He studied them. Much-washed.   

A faint russet in the crotch that made him sick   

with rage and grief. He knew more or less

where she was. A flat somewhere on Russian Hill.   

They’d have just finished making love. She’d have tears   

in her eyes and touch his jawbone gratefully. “God,”   

she’d say, “you are so good for me.” Winking lights,   

a foggy view downhill toward the harbor and the bay.   

“You’re sad,” he’d say. “Yes.” “Thinking about Nick?”

“Yes,” she’d say and cry. “I tried so hard,” sobbing now,

“I really tried so hard.” And then he’d hold her for a while—

Guatemalan weavings from his fieldwork on the wall—

and then they’d fuck again, and she would cry some more,   

and go to sleep.

                        And he, he would play that scene

once only, once and a half, and tell himself

that he was going to carry it for a very long time

and that there was nothing he could do

but carry it. He went out onto the porch, and listened   

to the forest in the summer dark, madrone bark

cracking and curling as the cold came up.

It’s not the story though, not the friend

leaning toward you, saying “And then I realized—,”

which is the part of stories one never quite believes.   

I had the idea that the world’s so full of pain

it must sometimes make a kind of singing.

And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps—

First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.