In most settings, racists stick out
like Count Basie’s Orchestra in the middle
of a prairie, but they’re as awkward as he is
elegant compared to the world around him.
And, if you still don’t get it, imagine
a chain gang with perfect pitch
singing Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You,”
to their overseer, whose frustration swells so
for an “authentic-nigger work song,”
he and his crew demonstrate their darkest
desires and break into song themselves,
“Camptown Ladies Come Out Tonight,
Doo Dah, Doo Dah,” kicking up their heels
in the dirt, tasting an old slave
trick on their tongues, each syllable
falling from their lips like a boll
of cotton. Funny, to the naked eye,
but consider the Native American
who speaks Yiddish, appearing out of the dust
of the Old West, reminding us
of how we learn to comfort ourselves
by making ourselves a little uncomfortable
over time in the fossil of race.
Jump cut: Black Bart, our hero, enters
town where danger awaits
him, our hero who we hope
to see beat up bad guys
and win the woman, even when
the hero is black and the woman,
Lili von Shtupp, is German. “One false move
and the nigger gets it.” Yes, self-sacrifice
with his gun to his own head, but
the unwitting white liberals save him
from himself, which is their life’s mission.
You see, what’s so funny about racists,
is that they never get the joke, because
the joke always carries a bit of truth.
Notice how we can laugh only when we recognize
a Sambo of our own design, by communal hands—
in our own likeness, a likeness we own—
so we can laugh at the absurd pain of it all.
This joke, like an aloe released on a wound,
like a black man trying to do a job
in a town in which he’s not wanted,
like a black man unzipping his pants
in the Old West to a white woman in a hotel
room in the center of this town. Did I mention
how he was released from a chain gang?
Did I mention how she was an exotic dancer
who slept with men for money, helping them
hang their insecurities on a hook
on the back of a hotel-room door before entering?
Careful with your laughter; one false move and
Nigger here gets appropriated. That’s not funny
to you? Well, when they saw themselves
on screen in their comedy-drama romance,
in the darkness of the theater, they laughed.
And they needed to see it; it had to project
on the wide screen to get a good cathartic laugh
from the tragedy of the 20th century.
And it’s okay to laugh at these ironies
today because they’re blown from a wind
of past pain, with the velocity of memory.
You see, when the Jewish artist has suffered
enough he knows he can strike back
with just a stroke of laughter: A black man shtupping
a German floozy, who tries to ensnare him
between her legs, but gets hoisted by her own
garter petard? Well, that’s just some funny scheiße.
Now, please, excuse all this humor
wrapped in truth—or, is it a chiasmus of this?
Whether you’re ready or not, stand back, please,
and back away from all those stereotypes
restricting you from stereotypes you
aspire toward. As you deny self
through elective surgery on your nose or lips,
excuse me, please, as I rear back in laughter;
and excuse me as I recall the 1970s
and remember myself laughing, laughing
blue-black gut bursting songs of truth. Yeah,
please excuse me folks as I whip this out.
from The Virginia Quarterly Review
LAWRENCE JOSEPH
Syria
. . . and when, then, the imagination is transmogrified
in circles of hatred, circles of vengeance
and killing, of stealing and deceit? Behind
the global imperia is the interrogation cell. It’s not
a good story. Neither the Red Crescent
nor journalists are permitted entry, the women tell
how men and boys are separated, taken in buses
and never seen again, tanks in the streets
with machine guns with no shells in the barrels
because the army fears that those who will use them
might defect. Who knows what has happened,
what is happening, what will happen? God knows.
God knows everything. The boy? He is much more
than Mafia; he, and his, own the country. His militias
will fight to the death if for no other reason than
if he’s overthrown they will be killed, too. “Iraq,
you remember Iraq, don’t you?” she shouts,
a refugee. Her English is good. Reached via Skype,
she speaks anonymously, afraid of repercussions.
“You won’t believe what I have seen”—her voice
lowered almost to a whisper—“a decapitated
body with a dog’s head sewn on it, for example.”
Yes, I know, it’s much more complicated than that.
“It’s the arena right now where the major players are,”
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs concludes
his exclusive CNN interview. Dagestan—its province
in the North Caucasus—is what the Russians compare
it to, warring clans, sects; Lebanese-like civil war
will break out and spread across the region. Online,
a report—Beirut, the Associated Press—
this morning, “28 minutes ago. 4 Said to Be Dead
at Syrian University,” one Samer Qawass,
thrown, it is said, by pro-regime students
out of the fifth-floor window of his dormitory room,
dying instantly from the fall . . .
from The Nation
ANNA JOURNEY
Wedding Night: We Share an Heirloom Tomato on Our Hotel Balcony Overlooking the Ocean in Which Natalie Wood Drowned
for David
We imagine Natalie held a gelatinous green
sliver on her tongue, that its watery
disk caught the lamplight before
she slipped from her yacht
to drown in the waves off this island. This was
thirty years ago. And our tomato’s strain
stretches back decades, to an heirloom seed
saved before either of us was born,
before Natalie’s elbow
brushed the clouded jade
face of the ancestral fruit
in a Catalina stand, before she handed it
to her husband, saying, This one. We hover
near the plate, where the last
half of our shadowed tomato
sits in its skin’s deep pleats. I lean
toward you to trace each
salted crease with a thumbnail—
brined and wild as those lines
clawed in the green
side of the yacht’s
rubber dinghy. Those lingering
shapes the coroner found—the drowned
actress’s scratch marks. That night
we first met, I had another lover
but you didn’t
care. My Bellini’s peach puree,
our waiter said, had sailed across
the Atlantic, from France. It swirled
as I sipped and sank
to the glass bottom
of my champagne flute. You whispered,
Guilt is the most
useless emotion. After Natalie rolled
into the waves, the wet feathers
of her down coat wrapped
their white anchors
at her hips. This was 1981. I turned
a year old that month and somewhere
an heirloom seed
washed up. You felt an odd breeze
knock at your elbow as I took
my first step. We hadn’t yet met.
Tonight, we watch the wet date palms tip
toward the surf and, curling,
swallow their tongues.
from The Southern Review
LAURA KASISCHKE
Perspective
Like the lake turned to
steel by the twilit
the Flood in the toilet
to the housefly.
Like the sheet
thrown over
the secret love. Like
the sheet thrown over
the blood on the rug.
Or the pages
of the novel
scattered by the wind:
The end
at the beginning
in the middle again.
And the sudden sense.
The polished lens.
The revision
revisioned, as if
as if.
As if
the secret—
had you told me when.
Who I thought
we were, every-
where we went.
from New England Review
VICTORIA KELLY
When the Men Go Off to War
What happens when they leave
is that the houses fold up like paper dolls,
the children roll up their socks and sweaters
and tuck the dogs into little black suitcases.
Across the street the trees are unrooting,
the mailboxes rising up like dandelion stems,
and eventually we too float off,
the houses tucked neatly inside our purses, and the children
tumbling gleefully after us,
and beneath us the base has disappeared, the rows
of pink houses all the way to the ocean—gone,
and the whole city has slipped off the white earth
like a table being cleared for lunch.
We set up for a few weeks at a time
in places like Estonia or Laos—
places where they still have legends,
where a town of women appearing in the middle of the night
is surprising but not unheard of. The locals come to watch
our strange carnival unpacking in some wheat field
outside Paldiski—we invite them in for coffee,
forgetting for a minute
that some of our own men won’t come home again;
and sometimes, a wife or two won’t either.
She’ll meet someone else, say, and
it’s one of those things we don’t talk about,
how people fall in and out of love,
and also, what the chaplains are for.
And then, a few days before the planes fly in
we return. We roll out the sidewalks and make the beds,
tether the trees to the yard.
On the airfield, everything is as it should be—
our matte red lipstick, the babies blanketed inside strollers.
Only, our husbands look at us a little sadly,
the way people do when they know
they have changed but don’t want to say it.
Instead they say, What have you been doing all this time?
And we say, Oh you know, the dishes,
and they laugh and say,
Thank God some things stay the same.
from Southwest Review
DAVID KIRBY
Pink Is the Navy Blue of India
Flea market guy tells me the pornos are five dollars
each or three for ten and then leans in conspiratorially
to say “get you a bunch,” which is sound advice from
his perspective, I’m so sure, though I could watch them
all and still not know more than I do now. Friend tells me
he likes this woman we see in a bar, and when I point out
that she’s wearing a ring, he says when women wear rings,
it just means they “do it”—of course, we’d have to ask
their handsome husbands about that, wouldn’t we! Also,
was sex better in olden days? In the movies, people from
roughly the Dark Ages through Victorian times are always
wearing clothes when they do it, and the guys seem
to be having all the fun, if by “fun” you mean a fumbling
upskirts ram job that looks more like mixed martial arts
than making love, which, I realize, can take different
forms, depending on the preferences, time available,
and chemical states of the doer as well as the doee or,
who would thereby be co-doees as well. Still, repression’s
got a lot going for it: from the repressed mind
comes beautiful stories, whereas from the liberated mind comes
websites that show women having sex with vegetables.
Want an example of a beautiful story? Take Tristan
and Isolde: Isolde of Ireland is betrothed to King
Mark of Cornwall, who sends his nephew, Tristan,
to Ireland to escort Isolde back to Cornwall. Big mistake!
They do it, King Mark finds out, everything
goes to hell in a handbasket. So what makes it a beautiful story?
Not because it ends happily, which it so doesn’t,
but because everyone fulfills his or her nature, stays
in character, does what’s right for them and nobody else.
“It is unbelievable that Tristan should ever be in a position
to marry Isolde,” writes Swiss critic Denis de Rougemont
in his monumental study Love in the Western
World, for “she typifies the woman a man does not marry . . .
once she became his wife she would no longer be what
she is, and he would no longer love her. Just think of
a Madame Tristan!” Wait, let me try. No, you’re right,
Denis—can’t be done! But until things go all pear-shaped
for the lovers, there’s a huge payoff: between
the beginning of the story, where everybody’s just
walking around and shaking hands with one another,
and the end, which is filled with the usual shouting
and finger-pointing, not to mention poison draughts
and black-sailed death ships and blood-dripping
broadswords, there’s the yummy part, where, in Denis
de Rougemont’s words, Tristan and Isolde are
“exiled into ecstasy.” See, that would be excellent,
right, reader? You’d be exiled from your usual pleasures,
like dollar-off dry cleaning every Thursday and so-called
organic vegetables that are not grown by any method
verifiable by science but that you eat anyway. But you
wouldn’t care. You’d be all ecstatic! Fashion maven Diana
Vreeland says, “Elegance is refusal.” She also said, “Pink
is the navy blue of India,” and I don’t know what
that means, either. But it sounds good, right? Sounds like a secret.
from Plume
NOELLE KOCOT
Aphids
The long-legged
aphids, rich in their summertime,
The anchorite rolling around on the wet grass,
Amulet of a constellation, oh, it speaks louder
Than any church bell! I am here, at the tea table,
And the curio is very small. I drag the alphabet
To and fro, and drink non-alcoholic cocktails by
The muddy creek. Someone, tell me my life already,
Someone reliable—the phone psychics all suck,
And besides, that’s playing with demons. If I dis-
Connect my woolly body from what I am inured
To use, tell me what grief lingers in a medieval
Box, the universal liquor of a swinging child. I
Don’t know where I’m headed, but the star-lit trees
Above my path never go out. They sing songs to me
In the daytime, and their music boxes are as snows
Falling. Sometimes I peek, as the aphids eat at the road.
from Conduit
JOHN KOETHE
Eggheads
In the fifties people who were smart
And looked smart were called eggheads.
Adlai Stevenson, who was bald and went to Princeton,
Was the quintessential egghead, and so he lost
To Dwight Eisenhower, the president of Columbia.
Dave Brubeck was an egghead, with his horn-rimmed
Glasses and all those albums of jazz at colleges,
Though on NPR last week he claimed he wasn’t smart.
I took piano lessons from his brother Howard
In the Thearle Music Building in San Diego in the fifties,
Which probably would have made me an egghead by contagion
If it hadn’t been for Sputnik, which made being smart
Fashionable for a while (as long as you didn’t look smart).
Beatniks weren’t eggheads: eggheads were uptight
And buttoned down, wore black shoes instead of sandals
And didn’t play bongo drums or read poetry in coffee houses.
What sent me on this memory trip was the realization
That stupidity was in style again, in style with a vengeance—
Not that it was ever out of style, or confined to politics
(“We need more show and less tell,” wrote an editor of Poetry
About a poem of mine that he considered too abstract).
The new stupidity doesn’t have a name or a characteristic look,
And it’s not just in style, it is a style, a style of seeing everything as style,
Like Diesel jeans, or glasses and T-shirts, or a way of talking on TV: