Nothing But Death by Pablo Neruda

 

There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain. 

Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail, 
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.

Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.

I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.

But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.

Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.

A Wreath of Hummingbirds by Cathy Park Hong

I suffer a different kind of loneliness.

From the antique ringtones of singing

wrens, crying babies, and ballad medleys,

my ears have turned

to brass.

 

They resurrect a thousand extinct birds,

Emus, dodos, and shelducks, though some,

like the cerulean glaucous macaw,

could not survive the snow. How heavily

they roost on trees in raw twilight.

 

I will not admire those birds,

not when my dull head throbs, I am plagued

by sorrow, a green hummingbird eats me alive

with its stinging needle beak.

 

Then I meet you. Our courtship is fierce

in a prudish city that scorns our love,

as if the ancient laws of miscegenation

are still in place. I am afraid

I will infect you

 

after a virus clogs the gift economy:

booming etrade of flintlock guns sag.

Status updates flip from we are all

connected to we are exiles.

What bullshit

 

when in that same prudish city,

they have one exact word to describe the shades

of their sorrow, when they always sit together

and eat noodles during white days

of rain, in one long table,

though not all.

 

As a boy, my father used to trap

little brown sparrows, bury them in hot coal,

and slowly eat the charred birds alone

in the green fields, no sounds,

no brothers in sight.

 

Holiest are those who eat alone.

Do not hurt them, do not push them, insult them,

do not even stare at them, leave

them to eat alone, in peace.

 

 

Characteristics of Life by Camille T. Dungy

 A fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction, say scientists. 

         -BBC Nature News   

Ask me if I speak for the snail and I will tell you

I speak for the snail.
                          speak of underneathedness
and the welcome of mosses,
                                        of life that springs up,
little lives that pull back and wait for a moment.

I speak for the damselfly, water skeet, mollusk,
the caterpillar, the beetle, the spider, the ant.
                                                        I speak
from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon.

Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly. I will tell you
                        one thing today and another tomorrow
        and I will be as consistent as anything alive
on this earth.

                        I move as the currents move, with the breezes.
What part of your nature drives you? You, in your cubicle
ought to understand me. I filter and filter and filter all day.

Ask me if I speak for the nautilus and I will be silent
as the nautilus shell on a shelf. I can be beautiful
and useless if that's all you know to ask of me.

Ask me what I know of longing and I will speak of distances
        between meadows of night-blooming flowers.
                                                        I will speak
                        the impossible hope of the firefly.

                                                You with the candle
burning and only one chair at your table must understand
        such wordless desire.

                                To say it is mindless is missing the point.

After Opening The New York Times I Wonder How to Write a Poem about Love by Camille T. Dungy

To love like God can love, sometimes.

Before the kettle boils to a whistle, quiet. Quiet

that is lost on me, waiting as I am

for an alarm. The sort of things I notice:

the bay over redbud blossoms, mountains

over magnolia blooms. There is always something

starting somewhere, and I have lost ambition

to look into the details. Shame fits comfortably

as my best skirt, and what can I do

but walk around in that habit? Turn the page.

Turn another page. This was meant to be

about love. Now there is nothing left but this.

“Love...no such thing.

Whatever it is that binds families and married couples together, that's not love. That's stupidity or selfishness or fear. Love doesn't exist. 

Self interest exists, attachment based on personal gain exists, complacency exists. But not love. Love has to be reinvented, that’s certain.”

Rhapsody by Diane Seuss

I like to call marriage state-sponsored

fucking. To return

to the world I must learn

how to love the world again. My problem

is with the word again. I don’t like repeat

performances. I come from a long line

of hungry people who hate leftovers.

The only movie I can watch more than once

is the original Frankenstein. I like the present

tense of spectacle. It’s like eating

 

an over-sour pickle. Wakes you up but hurts

your gonads. I got good

at romance early by choosing to wear pink

knee socks to the funeral. I sat on the floor

of the hearse on the ride from the church

to the cemetery, “making the best of it.” That’s

romance. It’s like when my mother took me to see

Mary Poppins for my eighth birthday and it turned her

into a flaming bitch. I understand why you didn’t like it,

I said to her, but I really loved it because I’m a kid.

 

Actually I hated it as much as she did.

That’s romance. Or when she went to the slaughterhouse

to pick up a cow heart for my science project.

It was still warm, wrapped in white paper.

They handed it over like a newborn and she gagged

all the way home. That’s romance. Some poet wrote

that he adores economy and requires precision.

I actually looked for antonyms:

extravagance, ignorance, imprudence, negligence, squandering.

I felt like a poor kid who finds a quarter and gorges

 

themselves on penny candy. From then on, everything

I created or promoted would be Rococo. Bows

and beams of sunlight festooning the candelabra

of the bewigged swing set. I have oppositional

poetry disorder. I want to express

my opinion about people expressing their opinions.

If only I could jump on the back of a motorcycle

and ride into the sweet potato field where the mother

deer flash their hooves and roar, and lay flat on the snake-laced

ground at midnight and watch the empty spectacle of the numb

 

satellites’ mindless circling that looks a lot like a boob

who thinks they’ve found nirvana. And to observe

with a jaundiced eye the skunk family march in a line

out of the cedar swamp and eat crayfish from a washtub. I want a papa

bear to split the Tree of Life down the middle scattering

the wormy apples. His furry berry-stained maw

such a display of what used to be called reality. 

I want the next turn I make to be unearned.

Like getting gang-banged in a greenhouse at age fourteen

and calling it a honeymoon. I guess now that would be called

 

trauma, a word I’ve grown to hate. It’s like a cute puppy

who got old and whose only new trick is shitting in the house,

or a Band-Aid they call “flesh colored”

that only matches the flesh of the owner of the Band-Aid

company. A word can be overused into emptiness,

which is also a banality, so don’t tell anyone you love them.

If you call fucking making love I’ll kill you in your sleep.

Don’t say I do. It’s what suckers say, what liars say,

never take an oath wearing clothes that have to be hung

on padded hangers.

 

When women are murdered

people on TV always comment on the victim’s cheerfulness.

Like being a songful canary should have kept her

from getting her throat slit. My advice is to live on a street

in which no one will say, when you’re murdered,

things like that don’t happen here. Live in a neighborhood

where every house is considered a scar on the face

of France. My adult son calls me at noon to ask

if I ever loved his father. How can I

express that marital love is twelve banalities ago?

 

It’s like asking if I liked the taste of peaches

when I was a toddler. I preferred

smoke, catalpa worms, bowling trophies,

and using tweezers to remove the lit-up ass of a firefly

so I could smear it around my finger like a wedding ring.

The adage is that a cynic is a broken romantic

except for Arthur Rimbaud who was born and died

a misanthropic shrew. I would like to conjecture

that a romantic is a cynic who has been infected

with resurrection metaphors and believes in the integrity

 

of a good

line break. I know

someone who saw a famous

lounge singer carried out

of a Vegas hotel

on a stretcher with a broken

light bulb in his ass.

Be that guy.

Don’t be Jesus, be the Shroud.

Don’t be the savior, be the stain.

 

Arrival by Elane Kim

“I have murdered the lovely and the helpless; I have strangled the innocent as they slept, and grasped to death his throat who never…” — Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

This is a story about hands: how I
am always searching for things to bury. I have
only this blue body, this terrible body, this murdered
self. A face blue like overripe stars, like pigeons. I want the
ending to be bright. Inside a forest, a place so green, so lovely
it burns. This is a story about burning &
being burned. I will give you bellflower root, mugwort, the
sour skin of my throat, my tongue still helpless,
noiseless against the rain. Here is my body & here is what I
can give you. I am only what I sing, stretched shirt, stale half
of a bread roll. Just a little music as the birds unfurl, strangled
into song. What can I give that will make you stay? The
song looped over, the other half. Innocent,
soft. Something that has known warmth & swallowed it. The body as
a measure of everything but itself. The birds as they
continue to sing. A beat of quiet for flickering rain, for ruin slipped
under pillowcases. This is a story about hands &
everything they cannot touch. The only ending I know: grasped
mouths & blue palms & a forest burning to
silence. Here is what’s left. Here is my body, death
-less & waiting & so cold. All I have is this:
a face nothing like yours, your voice still scratching at my throat.
Here is my body & the way it has forgotten who
-leness. Here is my body. A story about how it never—