Black braids like hound dogs

LA PERRERA OF CHAVEZ RAVINE

                                  by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

                   

                          Chavez Ravine, 1949

La Perrera lived with a handsome man

much younger than she.

Neighbor women gossiped across clotheslines

that she held him with witchcraft.

But it was long black braids streaked white

that kept him coming to her bed.

At night, she entwined his taut body to her,

braids weaving through limbs,

around iron posts of her bed,

between wooden slats of her shack,

until she, he and everything around became one.

But on August days, when want grew restless,

she commanded black braids like hound dogs,

like hairy henchmen, to sniff him out

of factories or construction sites

and guide him home. Once, he was in an orchard

as far out as Oxnard with arms full of oranges

when braids hunted him down.

Bright orbs dropped to the fertile soil,

and off he was led back to her bosom, to her lips,

to her hips, bed and shack. But he never minded

when he found himself wrapped in her.

From The American Poetry Review, January/February 2015.

Suicidally beautiful galloping sons

GO SO YOU CAN COME BACK

                                    by Jared Harel

Go so you can come back,

says my wife, meaning go but don't linger

in frozen foods, or forget

where you parked, or chat up the cashier.

Go, certainly because something

needs getting while our daughter takes a nap

and the snow isn't snowing,

and here are some coupons that happen

to be expiring, so go before all the produce

turns soft and stringy,

and school lets out, and a tallish boy

hawking fruit snacks

by the entrance wins you over, and you throw him

cash, your wallet, everything for the sake

of his under-funded football team

because though you never loved football

you love James Wright's poem about football

and solitude, and those suicidally

beautiful, galloping sons

and go because I love you, though I also love

those parmesan pop chips,

and to love is to leave

room for longing, but come back

so that we might go out together, later,

in a perpetual rotation of goings and comings

which require nothing but patience

and faith that when we go

we remember where is home.  

From The American Poetry Review, January/February 2015.

AUTUMN BEGINS IN MARTINS FERRY, OHIO

                                        by James Wright

In the Shreve High football stadium,

I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,

And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,

And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,

Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.

Their women cluck like starved pullets,

Dying for love.

Therefore,

Their sons grow suidically beautiful

At the beginning of October,

And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/autumn-begins-martins-ferry-ohio

Bullet Park

                                                                                  by John Cheever

Holy Communion. Sexagesima. Nailles heard a cricket in the chancel and the noise of a tin drum from the rain gutters while he said his prayers. His sense of the church calendar was much more closely associated with the weather than with the revelations and structures in Holy Gospel. St. Paul meant blizzards. St. Mathais meant a thaw. For the marriage at Cana and the cleansing of the leper the oil furnace would still be running although the vents in the stained-glass windows were sometimes open to the raw spring air. Abstain from fornication. Possess your vessel in honor. Jesus departs from the coast of Tyre and Sidon as the skiing ends. For the crucifixion a bobsled stands stranded in a flowerbed, its painter coiled among the early violets. The trout streams open for the resurrection. The crimson cloths at Pentecost and the miracle of the tongues meant swimming. St. James and Resurrection fell on the first warm days of summer when you could smell the climbing roses by the window and when an occasional stray bee would buzz into the house of God and buzz out again. Trinity carried one into summer, the dog days and the drought, and the parable of the samaritan was spoken as the season changed and the gentle sounds of the night garden turned as harsh as hardware. The flesh lusteth against the spirit to the smoke of leaf fires as did the raising of the dead. Then one was back again with St. Andrew and the snows of Advent.

From Chapter 2 of John Cheever, Bullet Park, 1969.

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary

                                                    by A. E. Stallings

             After a Greek Proverb             Ουδέν μονιμότερον του προσωρινού       

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—

Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

We dine sitting on folding chairs—they were cheap but cheery.

We’ve taped the broken window pane. TV’s still out of whack.

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query.

When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry,

But there are always boxes that you never do unpack.

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Sometimes when I’m feeling weepy, you propose a theory:

Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack.

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—

We stash bones in the closet when we don’t have time to bury,

Stuff receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack.

Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Twelve years now and we’re still eating off the ordinary:

We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack.

We’re here for the time being, we answer to the query,

But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

              Poetry (January 2012).

We lie through the blood of the dog

                                                by Heleanor Feltham

The icon painter

Lazarus the icon painter

Senior among the artists of Byzantium

Caught God in wood and gold

And filled the courts, churches and monasteries

With choirs of angels.

But there were those who said

The infinite could never be confined

Within the circuit of a golden frame -

Not even in the glittering tesserae

Of the great dome.

How can the living Word express itself

Through the dead medium of glass and paint?

(And when the hanging lamps supply the light

Through coils of blue-sweet smoke, and incense hangs

And shimmers in the air,

How easy to suppose the image smiles

And moves within a cloud of miracles.)

So Lazarus was branded on both palms

And scourged, and stigmatised;

Anathema cried out against him.

Those who would steal a part in God’s creation

Must also suffer in His crucifixion.

……But when they smashed the glittering reliquary

Did God hatch from the icon like an egg?

Drinking the blood of the dog

Ref: Theophilacti Bulgariae archiepiscopi in  Fontes Graeci Historiae Bulgaricae, Sofia 1963, 6: 31

When Leo V, Byzantine emperor,

Devious pragmatist, local boy made good,

Wary iconoclast,

Met with the young Khan Omurtag to sign

A treaty giving thirty years of peace,

They swore by Bulgar custom on each other’s gods

To seal the bargain.

Leo killed a dog,

And raising one hand filled with grass to heaven

He drank its blood. The chronicle does not say

What Christian oath Khan Omurtag declaimed.

Dogs, nomad people think, prefigure us.

They are the unborn human generations

Come here to sniff the landscape; fugitive,

They monitor our contracts.

And how they live with us comes back to haunt us

On the other side of a new incarnation.

A generation of the dispossessed,

Abandoned and abused

Darkens the sun.

Those who receive our love,

Fire suns to harvest.

Dogs who are valued, and whose lives are lived

Within the frame of mutual obligations

May be cut short when need is absolute.

Dogs, on the whole, deal honestly with us.

Out of a primal, bright-eyed innocence,

An honoured sacrifice will take our vow

Swiftly as wind through grass

And bring our words

To lie in the hands of God like a thrown stick.

And the dog within will see our treacheries.

Leo did not live long. His death

Was cinematic.

In the shallow pre-dawn dark of a Christmas morning

With the rows of chanting monks and the incense rising,

And rings of lamps reflected off white walls

As clear of images as snow,

And even the emperor singing in a voice

More used to moving armies,

His assassins moved

Out from among the monks.

And Leo fell,

Wielding the abstract gold cross like a club

Against the sudden violence of death.

Cut down, his blood spilt over holy ground,

No sainted stony eyes to follow his,

No numinous shimmering surfaces to haunt

And echo in the night;

Only the betraying purple and the feral dog

At the heart of things.

We spin out empty words in the hollow air;

Sending a message to the yet unborn

Of doubt, mistrust and fear.

We lick our lips and lie through the blood of the dog.

So the end of a rope frays

                                             Marianne Boruch

                                                     Mudfest

Some kid in the class,

a boy usually. Do we have to, Sister?

And the nun once: no. She turned and slowly no, you don't

have to do anything

but die.

A room's hush

is a kind of levitation. So the end of a rope frays. So mortality

presses its big thumb into clay early, 6^th grade,

St. Eugene's School, mid-century.

It's a mudfest, ever after. Free, yay! Is what some heard

howbeit the gasp

primal, a descending, an unthinkable click.

Forget what she'd no doubt been

programmed to say, as postscript, as speaking of: but we live forever,

don't we, children? In God's sweet light?
She didn't. Too old, too mean, too tired, too smart, maybe shocked

at her own relish, her bite coming hard.

I'm just saying there are

charms on the bracelet from hell.

An ordinary question, the boy's whatever it was, and did we have to?

He was stunned. I could tell.

And he must have walked home in the falling leaves distracted,

disturbed, pushed off for a time

from the anthill.

As for the other ants, we had our work.

It gleamed like truth is said to, in the dark before us –

grains of edible filth or just

sand and splintered glass. To carry.

Carry it down.

From The American Poetry Review, November-December 2014.

The last gladiator in the new Rome

                                                     Brian Barker

                                                     Evel Knievel

He jumps mountain lions, man-eating sharks, a pit of rattlesnakes three

feet deep. He jumps from skyscraper to skyscraper, over ten thousand

hippies marching down Fifth Avenue. He jumps six Soviet battleships

and a caravan of sheiks perched on camels. He jumps one hundred dead

Hell's Angels stacked like flattened Impalas. He jumps the Great Wall of

China at dawn, and the Grand Canyon in moonlight. He jumps fifteen

yellow school buses full of nuns and orphans. They wave pennants from

the windows, pom-poms, streamers, and he jumps blindfolded, with no

hands, spread-eagled while eating a bucket of fried chicken. He jumps

and never comes down, floating on his motorcycle through the blue-black

limbo of a coma. As his cape flaps in the stratosphere, he sweats through

his hospital gown. His hair beneath the gauze skullcap still smells like

gasoline. A nurse sponges his bruised testicles with one hand and hefts

his gold belt buckle in the other. She lifts it to her cheek and dreams of

the Aztecs, of the lost shield of Achilles. He's the last gladiator in the new

Rome, and she feels the light from his broken bones crowd the room like

jig-sawed ghosts. Deep down in his darkness, he's squinting through a

snow of confetti. He's sizing up the next ramp. He's revving his engine

against destruction.

From The American Poetry Review, November-December 2014.