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—

Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes? By Tracy K. Smith

1.

After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.
And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure

That someone was there squinting through the dust,
Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only
To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then,
Even for a few nights, into that other life where you
And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy?

Would I put on coat and return to the kitchen where my
Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove?
Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep
Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old,
Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired

And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen
That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life,
In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky
Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands
Even if it burns.

2.

He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie
For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play
Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours

Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out,
Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens.
But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin.

Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives
Before take-off, before we find ourselves
Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?

The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts
For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky
Like migratory souls.

3.

Bowie is among us. Right here
In New York City. In a baseball cap
And expensive jeans. Ducking into
A deli. Flashing all those teeth
At the doorman on his way back up.
Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette
As the sky clouds over at dusk.
He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel
The way you’d think he feels.
Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes.

I’ve lived here all these years
And never seen him. Like not knowing
A comet from a shooting star.
But I’ll bet he burns bright,
Dragging a tail of white-hot matter
The way some of us track tissue
Back from the toilet stall. He’s got
The whole world under his foot,
And we are small alongside,
Though there are occasions
When a man his size can meet
Your eyes for just a blip of time
And send a thought like SHINE
SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE
Straight to your mind. Bowie,
I want to believe you. Want to feel
Your will like the wind before the rain.
The kind everything simply obeys,
Swept up in that hypnotic dance
As if something with the power to do so
Had looked its way and said:
Go ahead.

Omm: Tao Te Ching…

24-Mitchell

He who stands on tiptoe
doesn’t stand firm.
He who rushes ahead
doesn’t go far.
He who tries to shine
dims his own light.
He who defines himself
can’t know who he really is.

He who has power over others
can’t empower himself.
He who clings to his work
will create nothing that endures.

If you want to accord with the Tao,
just do your job, then let go.

24-Walker

A man who tiptoes can't stand

A man who straddles can't walk

A man who shows off can't shine

A man who justifies his actions isn't respected

A man who boasts of his achievements has no merit

A man who brags will not endure

To a person of Tao, these things are

excess food and superfluous behavior

Because nothing good can come of them

he doesn't indulge in them

Omm: Women and Honor by Adrienne Rich

“Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it is a movement into evolution. Women are only beginning to uncover our own truths; many of us would be grateful for some rest in that struggle, would be glad just to lie down with the sherds we have painfully unearthed, and be satisfied with those. Often I feel this like an exhaustion in my own body. 
The politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve still deeper. *** 
The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.

When relationships are determined by manipulation, by the need for control, they may possess a dreary, bickering kind of drama, but they cease to be interesting. They are repetitious; the shock of human possibilities has ceased to reverberate through them. 
When someone tells me a piece of truth which has been withheld from me, and which I needed in order to see my life more clearly, it may bring acute pain, but it can also flood me with a cold, sea- sharp wash of relief. Often such truths come by accident, or from strangers. 
It isn't that to have an honourable relationship with you, I have to understand everything, or tell you everything at once, or that i can know, beforehand, everything I need to tell you. 
It means that most of the time I am eager, longing for the possibility of telling you. That these possibilities may seem frightening, but not destructive, to me. That I feel strong enough to hear your tentative and groping words. That we both know we are trying, all the time, to extend the possibilities of truth between us. 
The possibility of life between us.”

 "Character is not who you are when you try hard; 

it is who you are when there's nothing to gain."

(What I (Wish I) Learned From My Mother)

What I Learned From My Mother 

Julia Kasdorf

I learned from my mother how to love 

the living, to have plenty of vases on hand 

in case you have to rush to the hospital 

with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants 

still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars 

large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole 

grieving household, to cube home-canned pears 

and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins 

and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point. 

I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know 

the deceased, to press the moist hands 

of the living, to look in their eyes and offer 

sympathy, as though I understood loss even then. 

I learned that whatever we say means nothing, 

what anyone will remember is that we came. 

I learned to believe I had the power to ease 

awful pains materially like an angel. 

Like a doctor, I learned to create 

from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once 

you know how to do this, you can never refuse. 

To every house you enter, you must offer 

healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself, 

the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.