The days are sad and many people’s backs hurt.
We are too occupied with our devices to notice
what is crescendoing in the woods.
Cell phones are like bird coffins in our hands.
No one makes love without a mirror or a camera to witness—
often the sounds are recorded.
No one gets injured without posting pictures of the wound,
the veering drive to urgent care, the forlorn face of the nurse
sewing the stitches, the hot dog eaten afterward.
What is this ceaseless self-focus, but the hoopla,
hue, and cry of an un-held baby?
A harelip never tended with a floral unguent.
No rain or sun on our skin, only the hum and haloes
of screens swaddling us. So when an angelic transvestite
in powder blue hot pants and lustrous butterfly wings
approaches us on the avenue with an offer of a piece of her soul,
along with a piece of dulce de leche ice-cream pie
and a shot of pink-tinted tequila, we are too vanished inside
a dull vortex, looking at facsimiles of flowers, fountains & females
to invite her inside and massage her exquisite feet.
Instead, we become frantic and apoplectic to find that we’ve lost
our chargers and it’s 3:17 am and the Apple Store is closed
and we don’t notice the twenty-four-carat
cut-adrift angel
walking away on black pavement
swaying her veritable ass—
ferrying her gifts out of reach.
from The Kenyon Review
MARTÍN ESPADA
* * *
I Now Pronounce You Dead
for Sacco and Vanzetti, executed August 23, 1927
On the night of his execution, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, immigrant
from Italia, fishmonger, anarchist, shook the hand of Warden Hendry
and thanked him for everything. I wish to forgive some people for what
they are now doing to me, said Vanzetti, blindfolded, strapped down
to the chair that would shoot two thousand volts through his body.
The warden’s eyes were wet. The warden’s mouth was dry. The warden
heard his own voice croak: Under the law I now pronounce you dead.
No one could hear him. With the same hand that shook the hand
of Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Warden Hendry of Charlestown Prison
waved at the executioner, who gripped the switch to yank it down.
The walls of Charlestown Prison are gone, to ruin, to dust, to mist.
Where the prison stood there is a school; in the hallways, tongues
speak the Spanish of the Dominican, the Portuguese of Cabo Verde,
the Creole of Haiti. No one can hear the last words of Vanzetti,
or the howl of thousands on Boston Common when they knew.
After midnight, at the hour of the execution, Warden Hendry
sits in the cafeteria, his hand shaking as if shocked, rice flying off
his fork, so he cannot eat no matter how the hunger feeds on him,
muttering the words that only he can hear: I now pronounce you dead.
from Massachusetts Review
NAUSHEEN EUSUF
* * *
The Analytic Hour
1.
A suspension in time. A pause, a parenthesis,
a rarefaction, an exstasis.
The error in the script: an inscrutable other.
Not Erlebnis, but Erfahrung,
its frozen terror. The funhouse you feared
with its jeering maze of mirrors
where all reference reveals the uncongealed
humors of its clowning tutelar.
2.
To my right, the single window an oculus
onto the world: a tiled roof,
each tile gently overlapping the one below,
hiding the nails, joints, seams,
the structure that keeps the whole in place,
armored against the elements.
Above the neat row of houses, the contrails
of a jet, its trail cleaving the sky.
3.
What are you thinking? I could ask you
the same, but to no avail.
I am thinking of the window. Refulgence.
Luminosity. The grand fiat.
The diaphanous curtains hung between
the light and me—I who see
but do not see. More light, for god’s sake,
more light. Let there be light.
4.
I free-associate, though nothing is free.
Free, feral, ferrous. A rusty
outdoor faucet, the one that watered
my mother’s garden,
its brass now weathered to verdigris.
The handle won’t budge.
A drop of water hangs vestigial from
the stiff rounded lip.
5.
Who needs a garden? Thy will be done.
New spirits inhabit
the stations of hearth and home. Take them:
I give them to you.
The clock avows the hour. Nothing happens.
Nothing ever happens.
An exercise in detachment, divestiture.
I learn how not to need.
from The American Scholar
VIEVEE FRANCIS
* * *
Canzone in Blue, Then Bluer
There wasn’t music as much as there was
terror so the music became as much a
part of the terror as the terror it-
self with the swell of the arpeggio building and
breaking, building and breaking, upon the shores
of you. Your shores washed slowly away but
not slowly enough, you still feel it, every grain
of sand a note going under, bluing the
body, granular and wet. This has happened
before. You weren’t special. You belonged to
no group of any more particular concern
than another. But the music has become
you. The hurt coming out, from your open mouth, could
open a grave. Let every done-wrong haint throw
its head back and groan. Not done-wrong as in some-
body loved left, somebody is always left,
but done-wrong as in someone who deserved to live
as much as anyone else died by another’s hands
or neglect or the indifference of someone
who cared less or just not about you. And you sang
like you cried until the music of leaving,
of long-gone became you. Does it matter how
many strings? It only takes one to make this
music. But let’s say it was the sound of
a choir that accompanied the run of
blood down a leg. Let’s say a violin sped
its notes down the side of a neck, a tirade
of pricks. Or a high C from a voice thrown sharp
as the pieces of skull a bullet through the
head would leave. Or the river, the river rush-
ing cold and rock-bottomed, with its own furious
song carries you with it, sings you right over
the falls. That is when terror is not blue but bluer,
blue as capillaries bursting from an eye,
blue as the vein under this razor, blue as
the skin beat so far it breaks into song, a
song like this. And I’ve sung this so many times dear
my voice has almost given way, and I’m so scared.
from Asheville Poetry Review
GABRIELA GARCIA
* * *
Guantanamera
Nothing lingers on the lips like a death song,
my mother says, while shredding cassava
and invoking the spirits—
C
elia Cruz José Martí—
or singing blood verse, a church lady
working the line, refugee intake.
Celia rolling pride through a gap
in her teeth, a cry that is palm tree split
middle-of-night lightning,
and my mother, hands full of seashell witchcraft,
hands full of rooster feather prayer,
says the ocean tastes different
once we’ve drunk it all, once we’ve bongo beat
to water bumping on a home-baked raft: we
pilgrims who sway and dip to the sky because
how close to almost-death is our trombone shriek
and even if we deny it—our blackness
our fufú plátano quimbombó-ness,
we end up riding the rhythm
on the right pause, roaring lineage on our hips
and in our swings when
we are dancing across the oceans like gods.
from Cincinnati Review
AMY GERSTLER
* * *
Update
My dresses huddle in their closet.
No histrionics, no tears. They’re undaunted,
unhaunted, since you disappeared.
Torture by laundry and mothball
is all I can offer them, though it’s Christmas.
And despite the holiday, there’s endless
wrestling on TV. Is that your nudge to me:
toughen up and roll with the punches?
Here on earth, another rough era is birthed.
Sea monsters burst from the surf,
through waves of what we’ve mistaken
for civilization. Any advice from the heights
where you’re exiled? Some flutter of succor
to dial back the angst to a dull roar? Though you
are no more, the onions you planted, shoved
underground, too, send shoots into this persistent
rain, feelers like little green racks of antlers. Your
bougainvillea’s ablaze with reds, magentas
and noisy finches. The maple tree lost her leaves,
then grew six inches. I’ll slip on my coat and hike
to the river, praying I see your image, fringed
by whitewater, in it. If I do, can you gift
me with savagery-management tips, or some
comforting sign, surreptitiously, via the mist?
from Ploughshares
CAMILLE GUTHRIE
* * *
Virgil, Hey
Ah me! I find myself middle-aged divorced lost
In the forest dark of my failures mortgage & slack breasts
It’s hard to admit nobody wants to do me anymore
Not even Virgil will lead me down to his basement rental
Take a look at my firstborn son
Who put me on three months’ bedrest
For whom I bled on the emergency room floor
Who declaims his device sucks
Stabs holes in his bedroom wall
Complains his ATV’s too slow
Who plots to run away to join terrorists
He’d rather die than do math
And the little one ripped
From my womb in the surgery room
I pierced my nipples to unblock her milk
Who pours lemonade on the floor for skating
Howls in rage cause her cake isn’t pretty
Carved No Mom on her door with scissors
Who says, No fence but you’re kinda fat
She’d rather die than wear underpants
Virgil, hey! Send me down
To the second circle of hell where I belong
With those whom Love separated from Reason
Where an infernal hurricane will blast me
Hither & thither with no hope ever no comfort
Rather than drive these two to school this morning
And suffer forever with the other mothers
from The New Republic
YONA HARVEY
* * *
Dark and Lovely After Take-Off (A Future)
Nobody straightens their hair anymore.
Space trips & limited air supplies will get you conscious quick.
My shea-buttered braids glow planetary
as I turn unconcerned, unburned by the pre-take-off bother.
“Leave it all behind,” my mother’d told me,
sweeping the last specs of copper thread from her front porch steps &
just as quick, she turned her back to me. Why
had she disappeared so suddenly behind that earthly door?
“Our people have made progress, but, perhaps,”
she’d said once, “not enough to guarantee safe voyage
to the Great Beyond,” beyond where Jesus
walked, rose, & ascended in the biblical tales that survived
above sprocket-punctured skylines &
desert-dusted runways jeweled with wrenches & sheet metal scraps.
She’d no doubt exhale with relief to know
ancient practice & belief died hard among the privileged, too.
I was strapped in my seat, anticipating—what exactly?
Curved in prayer or remembrance of a hurt
so deep I couldn’t speak. Had that been me slammed to the ground, cuffed,
bulleted with pain as I danced with pain
I couldn’t shake loose, even as the cops aimed pistols at me,
my body & mind both disconnected
& connected & unable to freeze, though they shouted “freeze!”
like actors did on bad television.
They’d watched & thought they recognized me, generic or bland,
without my mother weeping like Mary,
Ruby, Idella, Geneava, or Ester stunned with a grief
our own countrymen refused to see, to
acknowledge or cease initiating, instigating, &
even mocking in the social networks,
ignorant frays bent and twisted like our DNA denied
but thriving and evident nonetheless—
You better believe the last things I saw when far off lifted
were Africa Africa Africa
Africa Africa Africa Africa Africa . . .
& though it pained me to say it sooner:
the unmistakable absence of the Great Barrier Reef.
from Poem-a-Day
ROBERT HASS
* * *
Dancing
The radio clicks on—it’s poor swollen America,
Up already and busy selling the exhausting obligation
Of happiness while intermittently debating whether or not
A man who kills fifty people in five minutes
With an automatic weapon he has bought for the purpose
Is mentally ill. Or a terrorist. Or if terrorists
Are mentally ill. Because if killing large numbers of people
With sophisticated weapons is a sign of sickness—
You might want to begin with fire, our early ancestors
Drawn to the warmth of it—from lightning,
Must have been, the great booming flashes of it
From the sky, the tree shriveled and sizzling,
Must have been, an awful power, the odor
Of ozone a god’s breath; or grass fires,
The wind whipping them, the animals stampeding,
Furious, driving hard on their haunches from the terror
Of it, so that to fashion some campfire of burning wood,
Old logs, must have felt like feeding on the crumbs
Of the god’s power and they would tell the story
Of Prometheus the thief, and the eagle that feasted
On his liver, told it around a campfire, must have been,
And then—centuries, millennia—some tribe
Of meticulous gatherers, some medicine woman,
Or craftsman of metal
discovered some sands that,
Tossed into the fire, burned blue or flared green,
So simple the children could do it, must have been,
Or some soft stone rubbed to a powder that tossed
Into the fire gave off a white phosphorescent glow.
The word for chemistry from a Greek—some say Arabic—
Stem associated with metal work. But it was in China
Two thousand years ago that fireworks were invented—
Fire and mineral in a confined space to produce power—
They knew already about the power of fire and water
And the power of steam: 100 BC, Julius Caesar’s day.
In Alexandria, a Greek mathematician produced
A steam-powered turbine engine. Contain, explode.
“The earliest depiction of a gunpowder weapon
Is the illustration of a fire-lance on a mid-12th century
Silk banner from Dunhuang.” Silk and the silk road.
First Arab guns in the early fourteenth century. The English
Used cannons and a siege gun at Calais in 1346.
Cerignola, 1503: the first battle won by the power of rifles
When Spanish “arquebusters” cut down Swiss pikemen
And French cavalry in a battle in southern Italy.
(Explosions of blood and smoke, lead balls tearing open
The flesh of horses and young men, peasants mostly,
Farm boys recruited to the armies of their feudal overlords.)
How did guns come to North America? 2014,
A headline: DIVERS DISCOVER THE SANTA MARIA
One of the ship’s Lombard cannons may have been stolen
By salvage pirates off the Haitian reef where it had sunk.
And Cortés took Mexico with 600 men, 17 horses, 12 cannons.
And LaSalle, 1679, constructed a seven-cannon barque,
Le Griffon, and fired his cannons upon first entering the continent’s