The Rival by Sylvia Plath

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,

And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.

The moon, too, abuses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.

No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

XII

If we have become incapable
of thought, then the brute-thought
of mere power and mere greed
will think for us.

If we have become incapable
of denying ourselves anything,
then all that we have
will be taken from us.

If we have no compassion,
we will suffer alone, we will suffer
alone the destruction of ourselves.

These are merely the laws of this world
as known to Shakespeare, as known to Milton.

When we cease from human thought,
a low and effective cunning
stirs in the most inhuman minds.

Wendell Berry

The Inside Out Mermaid by Matthew Harvey

 

The Inside Out Mermaid is fine with letting it all hang out–veins, muscles, the bits of fat at her belly, her small gray spleen. At first her lover loves it–with her organs on the outside, she's the ultimate open book. He can pump her lungs like two bellows and make her gasp; ask her difficult questions and study the synapses firing in her brain as she answers to see if she's lying; poke a pleasure center in the frontal lobe and watch her squirm. No need for bouquets or sad stories about his childhood. He just plucks a pulmonary vein and watches the left ventricle flounder. But before long, she starts to sense that her lover, like all the others before him, is getting restless. This is when she starts showing them her collections–the basket of keys from all over the world, the box of zippers with teeth of every imaginable size–all chosen to convey a sense of openness. As a last resort, she’ll even read out loud the entries from her diary about him to him. But eventually he’ll become convinced she’s hiding things from him and she is. Her perfect skin. Her long black hair. Her red mouth, never chapped from exposure to sun or wind, how she secretly loves that he can’t touch her here or here.

“nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals 

the power of your intense fragility.”

e.e. cummings

Questions Before Dark by Jeanne Lohmann

Day ends, and before sleep
when the sky dies down, consider
your altered state: has this day
changed you? Are the corners
sharper or rounded off? Did you
live with death? Make decisions
that quieted? Find one clear word
that fit? At the sun’s midpoint
did you notice a pitch of absence,
bewilderment that invites
the possible? What did you learn
from things you dropped and picked up
and dropped again? Did you set a straw
parallel to the river, let the flow
carry you downstream?

BIBLE ALL OUT OF ORDER by Tony Hoagland

One thing’s for sure; in the future, the morgues

are going to be full of tattoos.

It’s going to be more colorful and easier to 

manage:

“Hey Jeff, move Dolphin-Shoulder-Girl to tray

seven.”

“And get Mr. Flames-on-My-Neck out for the

doc.”

In Italy the tabloids are talking about

  L’Ambulanza della Morte,

The Ambulance of Death;

a medic who was killing his passengers

to provide business for his brother’s funeral

parlor.

I think we can agree that the world is a Bible

with chapters shuffled all out of order.

I think we still can’t decide which we want

in the end: Justice or Mercy.

When my doctor asks what my symptoms are, I

tell her

self-pity and a desire to apologize.

She says my insurance policy covers self-pity,

but not, unfortunately, remorse.

Remember the movie in which Sidney Portier

plays a school teacher

who returns the love letter from one of his 

students,

returns it with all the grammatical errors

corrected in red, heartbreaking ink?

I'm sometimes afraid that’s what I’ve done with

life.

Yet here’s what I have to say to all you travelers

-

Moses doesn’t make it to the Promised Land.

Cain and Abel don’t get reunited in the end.

Belief is not a requirement to go on living.

It’s possible I have this all out of order.

We’ll end up at a funeral parlor run by

somebody’s brother,

Our bodies covered with scars and invisible ink.

While I’m lying there naked, flat on my back,

I hope I remember all that I went through-

the storms and the lovers and mountains;

Complaining at the top of my lungs;

salting my grief with my mirth