If there is no fire, it isn't a poem

                          By Sandra Simonds

August in South Georgia

Why do I drink so much gin? Has something to do

with the way the burn the trees down here on either

side of the highway. Man selling boiled peanuts,

man selling handmade canoes. If you know the south,

you know a good woman can only really get the blues

in the winter. Summer is meant for losing weight. No white

people are going to talk about race. The Goodwood Plantation

I drive by every day has no memory – all those baby

alligators and volunteer tour guides with their quaint anecdotes

that lodge in your throat like the demented sun.

21^st Century Ars Poetica

If you touch this poem, it will turn to fire.

If you tough the fire, it will burn your finger.

If you burn your finger, you'll cry to your mama.

If you cry to your mama, your mama will die.

If your mama dies, you'll be an orphan.

If you're an orphan, God will give you a cupcake.

If God gives you a cupcake, you should probably eat it.

If you eat the cupcake, you'll want another.

If you eat another, you might get fat.

If you get fat, you can go on a diet.

If you diet too much, you'll become anorexic.

If you become anorexic, you'll get depressed.

If you get depressed, you can't fight oppression.
If you can't fight oppression, your poems have no meaning.

If your poems have no meaning, they can't burn your finger.

If they can't burn your finger, there is no fire.

If there is no fire, it isn't a poem.

From The American Poetry Review, September-October 2014.

Like a knife-winged hawk balanced on a cliff

Meanwhile in Ein Karem the doves are coloured white

Typogram and translation by Ornan Rotem.  

                                                              

MEANWHILE IN EIN KAREM

by Rachel Shihor

                        

                        I have spent my entire life at the Scottish Convent and I

have been musing over the convent in Ein Karem. Here we

heat water by shoving mouldy logs into an overhead stove

that takes up most of the space of the bathroom, and the

taps are narrow and they heat up in such a way that you

cannot touch them without slightly scalding yourself,

and the cloisters and narrow, and the cells are rectangular,

and in the dining room the carpet is frazzled and stained,

and the flowers are slightly withered, since they are not

drowned by the rays of sunlight that penetrate the room

obliquely as the day nears its end, and days turn to night

so quickly that the loss of light is barely noticeable, and the

dogs dribble, and the grape harvest is never satisfying, and

all the tools are rusty, and the main water valve has been

in want of repair for ages.

      Meanwhile in Ein Karem the doves are coloured white

and they are weightless, and the storks sojourn on the

pavilion roofs as they make their way south, and the smoke

coming out of the heating chimneys is bluish, with grey

only on the rum. And the pancakes are wafer thin, and

the prayer books are not stained, and Mother Superior

and her assistant wear fresh collars every morning, and

unhurriedly the evenings descend, and come to a close

when Sister Wanda, after putting her dolls to sleep, plays

short piano sonatas that extend over the whole valley and

then beyond, over the lowly hills finally reaching us.

This cloister-shaped typogram is balanced on the same letter,

the terminal n [the long red and black L-shapes] but given

the direction of the text, they end up being presented horizontally

and as a mirror image of one another.  The first n appears in Ein Karem,

the name of an ancient village near Jerusalem that is now a

neighborhood in the city.  Ein Karem means 'Spring of the Vineyard'. 

The other n is in lavan (white).

The book we both will write forever

Father, Insect

                      by Nick Flynn

After her

bath, as a way to apologize for all

my imperfections, I remind my

daughter, You know, before you were

born, I was not

a father. She takes this in

silently, moving a tiny blue elephant across

the carpet. If you weren't a father, she

eventually asks, then what were you --

a bug? We'd been looking at picture

of cavemen, talking

about evolution, about where we

came from, about all those

who came before -- Are they us?

she asks. I

told her about the carbon in her

pencil, about hydrogen bonding

with oxygen, about bacteria with

only one thought in their tiny

heads -- she

used her finger to write it all out

in the air, creating each

word as I spoke it. When

did want become more

than hunger, when

did need become more

than shadow? Ecclesiastes warns

about the making

of books, of which there is no end,

this chain of meaning, this

offering -- the book we both will write

today into forever.  

From American Poetry Review, May/June 2014.