any name. The shooter
was thirteen years old
and was aiming
at someone else. But
a bullet doesn’t care
about “aim,” it doesn’t
distinguish between
the innocent and the innocent,
and how was the bullet
supposed to know this
child would open the door
at the exact wrong moment
because his friend
was outside and screaming
for help. Did I say
I had “one” student who
opened a door and died?
That’s wrong.
There were many.
The classroom of grief
had far more seats
than the classroom for math
though every student
in the classroom for math
could count the names
of the dead.
A kid opens a door. The bullet
couldn’t possibly know,
nor could the gun, because
“guns don’t kill people,” they don’t
have minds to decide
such things, they don’t choose
or have a conscience,
and when a man doesn’t
have a conscience, we call him
a psychopath. This is how
we know what type of assault rifle
a man can be,
and how we discover
the hell that thrums inside
each of them. Today,
there’s another
shooting with dead
kids everywhere. It was a school,
a movie theater, a parking lot.
The world
is full of doors.
And you, whom I cannot save,
you may open a door
and enter
a meadow or a eulogy.
And if the latter, you will be
mourned, then buried
in rhetoric.
There will be
monuments of legislation,
little flowers made
from red tape.
What should we do? we’ll ask
again. The earth will close
like a door above you.
What should we do?
And that click you hear?
That’s just our voices,
the deadbolt of discourse
sliding into place.
from Poem-a-Day
GREGORY ORR
* * *
Three Dark Proverb Sonnets
1.
None have done wrong who still
Have a tongue: even Cain
Can explain.
Yet every atrocity
Breeds its reciprocity:
No murder
That doesn’t lead to further.
If I was in charge, those who
Praise rage would be made
To visit more graves.
Skulls
Annul. All knives should be dull.
And yet, once we’d built the coffin
We had no choice: we had to find a corpse.
2.
Watch the leopard, not its spots.
It’s the tiger that strikes,
Not the stripes.
The smart hide their claws
In their paws, then add
Fur for allure.
Combining smiles and wiles
And calling it “style.”
But a needle
Is sharper and cleaner—
Less mess, less evidence.
It was never just the arrow
We bowed to; it was also the bow.
3.
Remember: every fist
Began as an open hand.
Even a bridge is a ledge
If you stray to its edge.
You can lead a horse
To water, but
You can’t make it drink.
You can guide a fool
To wisdom,
But you can’t make him think.
You can close one eye to evil,
But you’d better not blink.
In the dark, adjust your eyes.
In the darker, your heart.
from Mississippi Review
CARL PHILLIPS
* * *
Rockabye
Weeping, he seemed more naked
than when he’d been naked—more, even, than when
we’d both been. Time to pitch your sorrifying
someplace else, I keep meaning to say to him, and then
keep not saying it. Lightning bugs, fireflies—hasn’t what
we called them made every difference. As when history
sometimes, given chance enough, in equal proportion
at once delivers
and shrouds meaning . . . About love: a kind
of scaffolding, I used to say. Illumination seemed
a trick meant to make us think we’d seen a thing more
clearly, before it all went black. Why not let what’s broken
stay broken, sings the darkness, I
make the darkness
sing it . . . Across the field birds fly like the storm-shook shadows
of themselves, and not like birds. Never mind. They’re flying.
from Callaloo
ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS
* * *
Halo
We wander round ring after ring of life,
One after another, blossoms of light
To which we’re but a mere flotsam of bees.
And although this isn’t true, the poem says
This is true; life, light, flowers and bee: truths.
So stop and hold this poem above your head.
Hold it up to whatever light you find.
Then let it go: forget it if you can.
If it is meant to remain it will remain.
And if it is meant to light, it will light.
Your hands will have moved on to something else
But your head will have, say it, its halo.
from The American Scholar
ROBERT PINSKY
* * *
Names
Arbitrary but also essential.
Before you can remember you will have found
You are Parvati or Adam, Anne or Laquan, all
With one same meaning: the meaning of the past,
A thunder cloud. Byron de la Beckwith, Primo Levi.
Medgar, Edgar, Hrothgar. Ishbaal.
Not just an allusion, but also an example:
Each with its meaning but also
An instance of the meaning of naming.
Lightning. Tamir. Abdi. Ikey Moe.
“What kind of name is that?”
Your own: the one word you can’t ever
Hear clearly, but as in a carnival mirror.
Found and to find. Sandra Bland.
Tereke, Ehud. Jason. Duy. Quan.
Lost and to find.
Stammering Moses of Egypt, found
Afloat among bulrushes. Royal.
Aaron of Goshen, the articulate.
from Salmagundi
STANLEY PLUMLY
* * *
Poliomyelitis
Magical numbers! Roosevelt the most famous infantile paralysis
adult to ever live with it, thrive with it, die with it, at sixty-three,
contracted at thirty-nine, the same integral number as my birth year
and the year, 1939, when the world war that changes everything starts—
the President treading water with his hands and arms, standing
at poolside in Warm Springs, the life in his legs different from any feeling.
Polio the proof that the child in us never disappears but turns against us
jus
t when we think we’ve outgrown its memory and become who we are
and were meant to be, a whole other human body with a mind like a city,
more beautiful at night, while the still heart is a pastoral, with a piper.
A man said Roosevelt, at the end, looked like the most dead man alive
he’d ever seen: the girl in the iron lung, too, resembling what children
imagine death in the satin of its coffin looks like, her face roughed up
with rouge, her soft brown hair straightened, the rest of her forgotten.
from Ploughshares
PAISLEY REKDAL
* * *
Assemblage of Ruined Plane Parts, Vietnam Military Museum, Hanoi
My eye climbs a row of spoilers soldered
into ailerons, cracked bay doors haphazarded
into windows where every rivet bleeds
contrails of rust. An hour ago, the doctor’s wand
waved across my chest and I watched blood
on a small screen get back-sucked
into my weakened heart. It’s grown a hole
I have to monitor: one torn flap
shuddering an infinite ellipses of gray stars
back and forth. You’re the writer, the doctor said
in French. Tell me what you see. Easier to stand
in a courtyard full of tourists scrying shapes
from this titanic Rorschach. Here’s a pump stub
shaped like a hand; something celled,
cavernously fluted as a lobster’s
abdomen. How much work
it must have taken to drag these bits
out of pits of flame, from lake beds
and rice paddies, and stack them in layers:
the French planes heaped beneath
the American ones, while the Englishwoman
beside me peers into this mess
of metals, trying to isolate one image
from the rest. Ski boot buckle
or tire pump, she muses at me, fossilized
shark’s jaw, clothespin, wasp nest?
According to the camera, it’s just a picture
changing with each angle, relic
turned to ribcage, chrome flesh
to animal: all the mortal details
enumerated, neutered. I watch her trace
an aluminum sheet torched across a thrust
as if wind had tossed a silk scarf
over a face. If she pulled it back, would I find
a body foreign as my own entombed
in here, a thousand dog tags
jangling in the dark? I tilt my head: the vision slides
once more past me, each plane reassembling
then breaking apart. Spikes of grief—
or is it fury?—throb across the surface.
Everything has a rip in it, a hole, a tear, the dim sounds
of something struggling to pry open
death’s cracked fuselage. White sparks,
iron trails. My heart rustles
in its manila folder. How the doctor smiled
at the images I fed him: A row of trees, I said,
pointing at my chart. Stone towers,
a flock of backlit swallows—
Now I kneel beside a cross
of blades on which the Englishwoman
tries to focus. Do you think I’ll get it
all in the shot? She calls as she steps back.
Steps back and back. Something like a knife sheath.
Something like a saint’s skull. The sky
floats past, horizon sucked into it. She won’t.
from The Kenyon Review
MICHAEL RYAN
* * *
The Mercy Home
Your mother died in fear.
No one was with her.
You didn’t want to be with her.
The last time you saw her, two months before,
while you were saying goodbye to her,
her turkey-claw hand shot up like a viper
from under her wheelchair lap-cover
to clasp your hand and keep you with her,
to bind you to her,
to not let you leave her ever.
I CAN’T STAY HERE
she screamed like a toddler, over and over,
insane with fear, lost in fear,
without a mind to guide her,
her brain saying horrific truths to her.
You were on the Mercy Home basement floor,
by the nurses station, where she slept in her wheelchair,
because she couldn’t be alone ever,
because the moment another human being left her
she was left with her fear, which instantly seized her,
so she couldn’t sleep in her room or ever go there
except when a nurse took her for a sitting shower
and stripped her and undid her diaper
and propped her weeping under the water
and soaped her and rinsed her and dried her and dressed her
and lifted her back into her wheelchair.
Did she know the man standing over her
was her son, saying goodbye to her?
Your hand was any hand, a human tether.
She wanted you to take her home in a car
but the Mercy Home was her home—she had no other—
she meant home with her husband and children fifty years before.
What does it matter who you were to her?
Or whether she had ever been your mother?
She was a shrunken old woman, ninety-four,
plundered by years of medical torture,
installed in a wheelchair with a backpack oxygen canister
that fed tubes up her nose so she wouldn’t drown in air.
You felt all her fear-strength clamping your fingers
as if she had slipped from a cliff and you were holding her,
only it wasn’t gravity pulling your hand from her—
it was you, pulling a trigger:
your hand snapped free, recoiling like a revolver
as if you had shot her,
and you watched her fall into terror,
into her nightmare future,
and she couldn’t stop screaming over and over
I CAN’T STAY HERE
which is where you left her.
She was right: she couldn’t stay there.
She suffered her life only two months more—
if every hour to her were not a year,
if her death in fact meant her suffering was over.
For all you know, she endured centuries there.
(For all you know about what others suffer.)
How did she fall out of her wheelchair?
That was a question no one could answer.
She gouged her leg so they stopped the blood thinner
that kept her alive despite congestive heart failure
so she died in the night three nights later
in her bed in her room on the basement floor,
alone with her fear, her tormenter, her familiar.
The Mercy Home for aged and infirm Mercy Sisters
and your mother, a devout believer,
not a Sister but a faithful Catholic school teacher
so they made an exception and accepted her.
Those who need minimal care live on the second floor.
Those who need assisted care live on the first floor.
Those who need nursing care live on the basement floor,
and one by one all of them die there.
How do they bear moving lower
when the last move left is to the basement floor?
Their “personal items” and family pictures
are gathered into cardboard boxes by the nurses helper
because they don’t own luggage anymore,
because they will never go anywhere.
Hospital rooms off the basement floor corrido
r
border the common rooms in the center:
TV room, game room, lunch room, beauty parlor
where a volunteer does the ladies’ hair.
When someone dies in the night like your mother,
the next morning the telling Lysol smell is everywhere
while the room is aired, door propped open, bed stripped bare,
and in the corner her former wheelchair
empty except for its backpack oxygen canister.
At breakfast there’s an extra prayer,
and a prayer too by those in wheelchairs and walkers
when they pass her room and try to remember her.
How do the old nuns remember her?
Tubes up her nose, dozing in her wheelchair?
With you, the Cheerful Son when you visited her?
This will be your attempt to remember her—
not how she failed you so you failed her,
not how confused she was by your anger,
not how she needed your kindness as you had needed her
when you couldn’t walk either and also wore a diaper
and she carried you with her and pushed you in your stroller
to parks and playgrounds to show you to neighbors.
That last moment you were together,
after you pulled your hand free and were about to leave her,
you leaned over to kiss her, for what good it did her.
At least you did that, helpless to help her.
Now you may take her out of there.
Now you’ll never fail each other.
No drunk father, no molester neighbor,
no sadist coaches, no nasty teachers,
no nuns, no priests, no Pope, no hellfire,
no need for her to be your protector,
no need for her to suffer her failure
or watch you grow absorbed by anger
and wilder and wilder teenage behavior
that scared the bejesus out of her
(you loved scaring the bejesus out of her)—
you who thought you invented despair,
you who drank despair with your father.
mother fear father despair molester neighbor
shame fouling the air
shame everywhere