Book of Forget
I made a stage out of an abandoned house, small
enough for me to look bigger, and I walked from end
to end in spangles, shaking what my momma
gave me in a symphony jiggling out over the dry
desert night. I danced after the knife thrower threw
his blades and before the velvet clown kicked away
his chair and hung himself, his tongue thick and purple,
urine dribbling down to the boards. There were
men in the audience, their hands hidden,
but mostly the darkness around me was oily
and the floods couldn’t pool much further than the music
carried. Once a woman came and sat in the front row,
wife to one husband who stayed overlong in my dressing room.
She watched my entire act. I hope she went away
with some kind of answer, but these steps remain
the same regardless of who watches: one two, and I turn,
three four, I cock the hip. I wanted to be a contortionist,
to stand on my own neck before anyone else could,
but the world is full of women who can halve themselves.
My talent is in looking like someone you want
when the lights are on and like anyone who’ll do when they’re off.
There are other ways to dance but I never learned.
There are other ways to forget. This one barely works.
from AGNI
ELIZABETH HAZEN
Thanatosis
For those who cannot camouflage themselves,
the alternative to fight or flight is tonic
immobility. The victim’s one trick:
to keel over. The cooling skin expels
foul smells, teeth clench, eyes glaze, the heart sustains
a sluggish thump. What’s outside can’t revive
the creature; it feels nothing, though alive,
paralyzed while the predator remains.
Waiting in the closet behind my mother’s
dresses, scent of hyacinth, I transmute—
mouth pressed in the wool of her one good suit—
into a speechless, frozen thing. The others
call me from far away, but I am fixed
right here. As if these shadows have cast doubt
across my way of seeing. I don’t want out,
and like the prey who plays at rigor mortis,
biding her time when the enemy is near,
while I’m inside this darkness I can see
no difference between death and immobility,
what it is to hide and to disappear.
from Southwest Review
JOHN HENNESSY
Green Man, Blue Pill
Her first assumption: life’s hard, so Mom runs trails
through Amherst’s woods. She sidesteps mud puddles,
clears mosquito larvae swimming there.
They’ve got a right, too, she says. Trim, spare
in words and body, she wears Bettie Page–
bangs, yoga pants and sunburst tops, her age
irrelevant. She trots around burdock root, cuts
the tap to grind for toothache, back spasms, dandruff,
abrupt as mushrooms sprouting in her wake,
or lichen spreading across the rocks she mistakes
for hunting cats at first. Even they’ve come back,
big cats sauntering past stopped trains, blown tracks,
retracing dead routes across the northern plains.
She’s run through hot flashes, frost in her mane,
sidled around men and let them lap, her claws
retracted, still sharp, made long by menopause.
She sees herself in trillium blooming near
the brook, cracked robin’s eggs, fronds growing clear
of jack-pine roots. Once, she’d have brought the fire,
a bladder full of kerosene and sparking wires,
but now she’s grown more careful near her man.
Love pats, tongue prompts, powders—with help the plan
includes a morning hour—clary sage, wild
green oats, deer velvet, rose maroc, a vial
of blue pills—what hasn’t this old May Queen
already fed her Corn King, Jack-in-the-Green?
And he needs his run, too. Thick-limbed, slow-pulsed,
his sap eases through branch and leaf, the hulk
of late middle-age, and nothing polite is left
to sacrifice. He plods—he stumps—he hefts
his trunk along. He seems half worms and wood chips
and wears the holly crown around his hips
these days. Life’s hard, my mother likes to say,
still hard. Me, I like to remember them in flagrante,
woods blazing, dodder’s twining orange vines
trimming their legs, white flowers, burning tines.
from Southwest Review
DAVID HERNANDEZ
All-American
I’m this tiny, this statuesque, and everywhere
in between, and everywhere in between
bony and overweight, my shadow cannot hold
one shape in Omaha, in Tuscaloosa, in Aberdeen.
My skin is mocha brown, two shades darker
than taupe, your question is racist, nutmeg, beige,
I’m not offended by your question at all.
Penis or vagina? Yes and yes. Gay or straight?
Both boxes. Bi, not bi, who cares, stop
fixating on my sex life, Jesus never leveled
his eye to a bedroom’s keyhole. I go to church
in Tempe, in Waco, the one with the exquisite
stained glass, the one with a white spire
like the tip of a Klansman’s hood. Churches
creep me out, I never step inside one,
never utter hymns, Sundays I hide my flesh
with camouflage and hunt. I don’t hunt
but wish every deer wore a bulletproof vest
and fired back. It’s cinnamon, my skin,
it’s more sandstone than any color I know.
I voted for Obama, McCain, Nader, I was too
apathetic to vote, too lazy to walk one block,
two blocks to the voting booth. For or against
a woman’s right to choose? Yes, for and against.
For waterboarding, for strapping detainees
with snorkels and diving masks. Against burning
fossil fuels, let’s punish all those smokestacks
for eating the ozone, bring the wrecking balls,
but build more smokestacks, we need jobs
here in Harrisburg, here in Kalamazoo. Against
gun control, for cotton bullets, for constructing
a better fence along the border, let’s raise
concrete toward the sky, why does it need
all that space to begin with? For creating
holes in the fence, adding ladders, they’re not
here to steal work from us, no one dreams
of crab walking for hours across a lettuce field
so someone could order the Caesar salad.
No one dreams of sliding a squeegee down
the cloud-mirrored windows of a high-rise,
but some of us do it. Some of us sell flowers.
Some of us cut hair. Some of us carefully
steer a mower around the cemetery grounds.
Some of us paint houses. Some of us monitor
the power grid. Some of us ring you up
while some of us crisscross a parking lot
to gather the shopping carts into one long,
rolling, clamorous and glittering backbone.
from The Southern Review and Poetry Daily
TONY HOAGLAND
Wrong Question
Are you all right? she asks, wrinkling her brow,
and I think how unfair that que
stion is,
how it rises up and hangs there in the air
like a Welcome sign shining in the dark;
Are you all right? is all she has to say
with that faint line between her eyebrows
that signifies concern,
and her soft, moral-looking mouth,
and I feel as if I have fallen off my bike
and she wants to take care of my skinned knee
back at her apartment.
Are you all right? she says,
and all the belts begin to move inside my factory
and all the little citizens of me
lay down their tasks, stand up and start to sing
their eight-hour version of The Messiah of my Unhappiness.
Am I all right?
I thought I was all right before she asked,
but now I find that I have never been all right.
There is something soft and childish at my core
I have not been able to eliminate.
And yet—it is the question I keep answering.
from Fifth Wednesday Journal
ANNA MARIA HONG
A Parable
At the edge of the village roofed with mossy
slate, stood a hermitage, an embassy, and
a palace. Being spent, we chose to enter
the palace, a very busy place. Messy as we
were, we were treated like royals,
Class E, which entailed the following
advantages: Being served muesli in vintage
glasses, being assuaged that the King’s
boozy rhetoric would not become policy,
and three, having the opportunity to bless
the day’s carnage in homage to the deceased
Queen. Such delicacies! For our wages,
we were pinned with corsages dense with
glossy leaves, which became permanent
appendages. A page waved to indicate
that it was time to go to the embassy,
where nothing memorable happened. Then
it was on to the hermitage, the last stage,
where we would presage the image of ecstasy
and thus emboss our legacies. We pledged
to finesse the fallacy of hedge and spillage
and erase the badge of unease around certain
engagements. We gauged our audience and the time.
We lost our accents and flimsy excuses in a gorgeous
cortège. We learnt to parse our emphases.
We became quite adept. In the distance, always
the glass sea breaking. It was our time to savage.
from Boston Review
MAJOR JACKSON
Why I Write Poetry
Because my son is as old as the stars
Because I have no blessings
Because I hold tangerines like orange tennis balls
Because I sit alone and welcome morning across
the unshaved jaws of my lawn
Because the houses on my street sleep like turtles
Because the proper weight of beauty was her eyes
last night beneath my eyes
Because the red goblet from which I drank
made even water a Faustian toast
Because radishes should be banned, little pellets
that they are
Because someone says it’s late and begins to rise from a chair
Because a single drop of rain is hope for the thirsty
Because life is ordinary unless you plan
and set in motion a war
Because I have not thanked enough
Because my lips moisten whenever I hear Mingus’s
“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”
Because I’ve said the word dumbfuck too many times in my life
Because I plant winter vegetables in July
Because I could say the morning died like candle wax
and no one would question its truth
Because I relished being sent into the coat room
in 3rd grade where alone, I would turn off the light
and run my hands over my classmates’ coats
as if playing tag with their bodies
Because once I shoplifted a pair of Hawaiian shorts
and was caught at the Gallery Mall
Because soup reminds me of the warmth
of my grandmother and old aunts
Because the long coast of my dreams is filled
with saxophones and poems
Because somewhere someone is buying a Rolex or a Piaget
Because I wish I could speak three different languages
but have to settle for the language of business
and commerce
Because I used to wear paisley shirts and herringbone sports jackets
Because I better git it in my soul
Because my grandfather loved clean syntax,
cologne, Stacy Adams shoes, Irish tweed caps,
and women, but not necessarily in that order
Because I think the elderly are sexy
and the young are naïve and brutish
Because a vision of trees only comes to
wise women and men who can fix old watches
Because I write with a pen whose supply of ink
comes from the sea
Because gardens are fun to visit in the evenings
when everyone has put away their coats and swords
Because I still do not eat corporate French fries or rhubarb jam
Because punctuation is my jury and the moon is my judge
Because my best friend in 4th grade chased
city buses from corner to corner
Because his cousin’s father could not stop looking
up at the sky after his return from the war
Because parataxis is just another way of making ends meet
Because I have been on a steady diet of words
from Ploughshares
MARK JARMAN
George W. Bush
Because he felt that Jesus changed his heart
he listened to his heart and took its counsel.
When asked if he felt any of that counsel
had impacted the veterans he rode with
on a bike trek through hills and river beds—
some of the men without their limbs but able
to keep up despite the chafing ghost pain—
he said how honored he felt to be with them.
But no, he said, still listening to his heart,
the heart that Jesus changed, “I bear no guilt.”
How much is anyone whose heart speaks for him
responsible for what his heart has told him?
The occupation of the heart is pumping
blood, but for some it is to offer counsel,
especially if it has been so changed
all that it says must finally be trusted.
Nested within the lungs, sprouting its branches,
the heart is not an organ of cognition.
But some would argue that its power is greater
than the mind’s even, once the heart is changed.
And so a change of heart he believed saved him.
I hope we understand belief like that,
for there are many we would grant that mystery.
The challenge is to grant the same to him.
Perhaps we can remember one of the columnists
who often wrote as his apologist,
arguing that a convicted murderer
must still be executed for her crime,
even though she had found the Lord in prison.
Forgiveness was between her and the Lord.
If we’re outraged at him or at each other,
who will come between us and our outrage?
If there’s no guilt to bear, what’s to forgive?
Our losses are unbearable. Our pain
will have to be the ghost of our
forgiveness.
from Five Points
LAUREN JENSEN
it’s hard as so much is
punctuated wrong. honest. human. my uncle
committed suicide when i was in the sixth grade,
basement/gun, gun/basement as if
these things come in a package with the special bonus
of a cracked open door, cigarette smoke,
revolving fan. when i think of my uncle i find myself
trying not to think about my uncle and then
i think about him even more.
how at a seminar that discussed “helpful tips
for a successful interview,” two panelists debated
whether first and last impressions
were the most important part of it all, but i find it
hard to imagine a leather band without a clock,
a body without its belly or a poem without its middle.
would “it’s hard as so much is” followed by
the line i haven’t written yet satisfy (you)
me? at times i forget to embrace the afternoon,
only love the morning, only kiss what falls above
the waist and there are so many parts of the day/body,
body/day that go untouched and i think it’s because
in the light i think about what others think
too much. consider that (me writing) you reading
this now might be wondering where the “heart” went
and if this will eventually fit together, function
how i want, but it won’t. but only because the middles
are such a necessary mess that i could endlessly sift
like the second drawer where an incomplete deck
of playing cards and sewing needles and a ceramic
monkey with a missing tail and other stuff
can be found, and it’s the “stuff” that i love the most
that i often forget, let go. like two summers
before the gun went in my uncle’s mouth,
and how his chevron mustache would scratch my face
and how he would pick me up over his head
and how his arms held me at my bathing-suited waist.
from Mid-American Review
A. VAN JORDAN
Blazing Saddles
Mel Brooks, 1975
What’s so funny about racism
is how the racists never get the joke.