A man pining for a woman dead on a slab at St. James

                                By Natasha Trethewey

Geography

1.

At the bottom of the exit ramp

my father waits for us, one foot

on the curb, right hand hooked

in the front pocket of his jeans,

a stack of books beneath his arm.

It's 1971, the last year we're still

together. My mother and I travel

this road, each week, to meet him –

I-10 from Mississippi to New Orleans –

            and each time we pull off the highway

            I see my father like this: raising his thumb

to feign hitchhiking – a stranger

passing through to somewhere else.

2.

At Wolf River my father is singing.

The sun is singing and there's a cooler

of Pabst in the shade. He is singing

and playing the guitar – the sad songs

I hide from each time: a man pining

for Irene or Clementine, a woman dead

on a slab at St. James. I'm too young to know

this is foreshadowing. To get away from

the blues I don't understand, I wade in water

shallow enough to cross. On the bank

at the other side, I look back at him as if

across the years: he's smaller, his voice

lost in the distance between us.

3.

On the Gulf and Ship Island Line

my father and I walk the rails south

toward town. More than twenty years

gone, he's come back to see this place,

recollect what he's lost. What he recalls

of my childhood is here. We find it

in the brambles of blackberry, the coins

flattened on the tracks. We can't help it –

already, we're leaning too hard

toward metaphor: my father searching

for the railroad switch. It was here, right

here, he says, turning this way and that –

the rails vibrating now, a train coming.

From Natasha Trethewy, Thrall (2012).

Shadows of your hands in firelight

            By John Hollander

                 115-116

Arachne spies by the door on wise Penelope

To learn what will be her own undoing. By lamplight

She sees the busy shuttle going back on itself

With a more favulous skill than when, that afternoon,

It had been proudly building the fabric of a shroud.

Taking apart the cover of darkness fabricates

Light, and Time itself goes forward by unravelling:

So the queen's dismembering hand weaves te images

Of faith and remembrance on the bared warp of her loom.

Arachne ignores the lessons of nay-saying that

Lurking in what she sees there in the midnight's uwrking.

Her eyes are only for the energies of result,

Of what is spun out of oneself in devout silence.

Such emblems of old craftiness that are clear enough

Still to read, point to the one step forward, two-and-a-

Half steps back that everyone eventually gets

Used to. Now you sit on that red prayer-rug, undoing

A dark scarf, skeining the wool in puzzlement, as if

The process should not be still continuing, nature

Having forgotten when to stop, knowing it too well.

But we need not despair of negations: bits of yarn

Snipped far too short for knitting were tied, knot after knot,

Onto the warp and weft of some anatolian

Frame, shunning all human figures for the intricate

Shapes, “purely decorative,” geometric, that lie

Refigured now with shadows of your hands in firelight.

                                                                                                  Fancy-Work

From Powers of Thirteen, in John Hollander, Selected Poetry (1993).

The riddle of a storefront

THREE POEMS

by David Keplinger

Beatification

            The only soul                      who beatifies itself

             is the lightening bug                      of North America

also called firefly               also called

Half-in-love                                     with-dusty-death

also called slant-                 of-light also known

as Hobo-who-believes-he's-Jesus

and You-                              oh-my-soul

which announces                            its coming greased

with luceferin: Never         venerate yourself

in the presence                                of children

is the lesson here                the flashing timed

metronomically                             which enables the child

to track you                         to follow the rhythm

snap his fist                                   and squeeze

R

It was a language of white hills, red brick towns.

An alley was a comma in the agony's grammar.

It was the old one tied against a chair, madness swelling like a thought

too big for her head, and each death was a period. The mortician

a stain, a drop of ink in his black suit, before

a page-white mausoleum. It was a language

of yeast soup, snowy hills, towns called Beauty and Cold,

where even the names of things had a kind of corresponding

order, beauty always going cold, always losing itself

to something permanent. There was fish at the fishmonger,

paper at the paper store. Time at the clockmaker's shop.

There were syntactical surprised: the headmaster turned janitor 

in a matter of a day, the ambassador

seen on the subway in tattered clothes, the president

dressed as a prisoner, delivering his acceptance speech,

the secret police dressed as tourists on their own beat.

But mostly it was a language one used when speaking

in a whisper, rolling the “R,” practicing the “R” in your mouth

until it dropped from the palette to the tongue

as from the pocket of God, and hung there momentarily

in its shiny majesty, a sound much older than the language

that spent it, that offered it from mouth

to mouth like money.

A City I'm Traveling To

No solution hath the riddle of a storefront.

Its awnings billow up in wind and light

The waiters in their tiny jackets pull

Their jackets sown against the sudden cold.

A servant bears a latched up trunk, ruefully,

ruefully! And a certain old woman is waiting

To sell me a flower: to offer it with one hand,

To cover her teeth with the other.

From The American Poetry Review, September-October 2014.

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.