[100pitchersofhoney]

“The Smallest Effective Distance”

By Tessa Rumsey

Where is the original skin this version can be checked against? Snow, Cholera, Red Shoe, Nightingfale—the image outshine the actual, the body outshines the soul, the angel food cake dissolves as you dip it into a cup of black coffee before me, dark sugar & inevitably, fading. You are my ex & thus the past must outshine the present in a way that hurts just to look at. In another country wasps burrow into October’s fallen butter pears & poppies are halfway drawn toward dying. Everything in this life has an outline that at sometime will cease to contain it. So many different renderings of the same wink & silence that I nearly forgot what time it was— do you know what lesson this is? Ah, the one where she is made to decipher desire alone, the one where she wants to be loved but instead is outshined by her wanting. So easy to think for a second that the original may soon pale in comparison. No, says the actual, It was the best you’d ever had, & its one true joy is that you’ll never have it again.

[exceptindreams]

Mariela | Sandra Cisneros

”Mariela” Sandra Cisneros

One day you forget his bitter smell and one day you forget your shame. You remember how your small cry rose like a blackbird from the corn, when you picked yourself up from the earth how the clouds moved on.

[100pitchersofhoney]

“In The White Sky”

- William Stafford

Many things in the world have already happened. You can go back and tell about them. They are part of what we own as we speed along through the white sky. But many things in the world haven’t yet happened. You help them by thinking and writing and acting. Where they begin, you greet them or stop them. You come along and sustain the new things. Once, in the white sky there was a beginning, and I happened to notice and almost glimpsed what to do, But now I have come far to here, and it is away back there. Some days, I think about it.

[100pitchersofhoney]

“Candles”

By C. P. Cavafy Days to come stand in front of us like a row of lighted candles— golden, warm, and vivid candles. Days gone by fall behind us, a gloomy line of snuffed-out candles; the nearest are smoking still, cold, melted, and bent. I don’t want to look at them: their shape saddens me, and it saddens me to remember their original light. I look ahead at my lighted candles. I don’t want to turn for fear of seeing, terrified, how quickly that dark line gets longer, how quickly the snuffed-out candles proliferate.

[100pitchersofhoney]

“Coda”

By Jason Shinder And now I know what most deeply connects us after that summer so many years ago, and it isn’t poetry, although it is poetry, and it isn’t illness, although we have that in common, and it isn’t gratitude for every moment, even the terrifying ones, even the physical pain, though we are halfway through it, or even the way you describe the magnificence of being alive, catching a glimpse, in the store window, of your blowing hair and chapped lips, though it is beautiful, it is; but it is that you’re my friend out here on the far reaches of what humans can find out about each other.

[100pitchersofhoney]

“Sunrise”

By Mary Oliver You can die for it - an idea, or the world.  People have done so, brilliantly, letting their small bodies be bound to the stake, creating an unforgettable fury of light.  but this morning, climbing the familiar hills in the familiar fabric of dawn, I thought of China, and India and Europe, and I thought how the sun blazes for everyone just so joyfully as it rises under the lashes of my own eyes, and I thought I am so many! What is my name? What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us?  Call it whatever you want, it is happiness, it is another one of the ways to enter fire.

[100pitchersofhoney]

A Wreath of Stars: Symsonia, Kentucky, 1914

By Joe Bolton

They’d caught me skimming cream off the top of the churn, So half that winter I had to go upstairs Right after supper without any dessert— No thick-comb honey Mamie stored in jars. No muscadine, no sunset-colored cake Sweetened with molasses, no piecrust plumped With apple or blackberry.  Still, what made me ache The most was missing that music my brother thumped Out on his guitar while Pap’s fiddle whined Along like some hurt thing—like the bitch retriever Hung up in barbed wire for hours, who tried To eat me alive when I came to uncut her. I’d climb those stairs like somebody going to heaven Before he was ready, the loose boards creaking, then breathe On my frosted-over window till seven Cold stars shone on the dark sky in a wreath.   * The night Pap and my brother didn’t come in For supper, Mamie told me to go ahead And eat their peach cobbler.  We waited, then— I watching through my window while she read. And along towards midnight I saw two figures weaving Down the road: one tall and lean, the other Much the same, singing and carefully passing A thick glass jug between them—Pap and my brother. They must have saved a month to buy that whiskey, But leaning together, their sweet breath rising like clouds, One passed the jug, the other didn’t see, And the glass broke open on the frozen ground. They stared down at the spill as at a grave, Then at each other—with hatred for a minute; Then knelt down as though praying to be saved And lapped up every star reflected in it.

[100pitchersofhoney]

“Morning”

- Conchitina Cruz

You never know when somebody will walk away from you on a bright day on a busy street, never looking back and you cannot believe the slow disappearance, cannot believe what is moving away from your reach until the busy street no longer needs its presence to look the same, because it is the same. And the city offers you its fruits and fish, and the churchgoers lift their veils as they step out in the open and you know the picture is incomplete but it can stand for itself and who are you to ask for more, who are you to insist on hunger?

[100pitchersofhoney]

“The Way It Is”

- William Stafford

There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can't get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding. You don't ever let go of the thread.

[100pitchersofhoney]

“Toy Camera”

- Lenore Horowitz

If only life could be like that sometimes, just blurred at the edges, slightly out of focus, a tiny bit fogged, and those people in your frame caught looking, harmless, like cartoon characters, and the surprises you couldn’t see when you snapped the shutter, guessing at focus, exposure— how the sun glows softly, and shadows spread like coffee, and all life’s multitude of grays shimmer like silk scarves and dance in summer’s breeze.

[100pitchersofhoney]

“Black Maps”

By Mark Strand

Not the attendance of stones, nor the applauding wind, shall let you know you have arrived, not the sea that celebrates only departures, nor the mountains, nor the dying cities. Nothing will tell you where you are. Each moment is a place you’ve never been. You can walk believing you cast a light around you. But how will you know? The present is always dark. Its maps are black, rising from nothing, describing, in their slow ascent into themselves, their own voyage, its emptiness, the bleak, temperate necessity of its completion. As they rise into being they are like breath. And if they are studied at all it is only to find, too late, what you thought were concerns of yours do not exist. Your house is not marked on any of them, nor are your friends, waiting for you to appear, nor are your enemies, listing your faults. Only you are there, saying hello to what you will be, and the black grass is holding up the black stars.

[100pitchersofhoney]

“Old Love”

By Pat Mora

When my aunt died, my uncle raised his hands like a prophet in the Bible. “I've lost my girl,” he said, “I've lost my girl,” over and over, shaking his head.

I didn't know what to say, where to look, my quiet uncle raising his voice to silence.

My aunt was eighty-seven. “Listen,” my uncle said, sighing like a tree alone at night, “women know. Every midnight on New Year's Eve, when others sang and laughed and hugged, your aunt looked at me, tears in her eyes. Sixty years. She knew. One day, we'd kiss good-bye.”

[100pitchersofhoney]

”The Cranes, Texas January”

By Mark Sanders

I call my wife outdoors to have her listen, to turn her ears upward, beyond the cloud-veiled sky where the moon dances thin light, to tell her, “Don’t hear the cars on the freeway—

it’s not the truck-rumble. It is and is not the sirens.” She stands there, on deck a rocking boat, wanting to please the captain who would have her hear the inaudible.

Her eyes, so blue the day sky is envious, fix blackly on me, her mouth poised on question like a stone. But, she hears, after all.                                                           January on the Gulf,   warm wind washing over us, we stand chilled in the winter of those voices.

[100pitchersofhoney]

“The Usual”

By Rachel Sherwood

This is what it's like: you sit in the white room singular, knees together arms over your head to break the noise from the radio that is false as a drunk's promise to loan you his car next week.

Of course next week never comes lies continue, nobody disbelieves them but some are ready for the real story the young man involved breaks her tired heart it's the usual: spilt liquor, broken dishes, wrecked cars.

[100pitchersofhoney]

December

By Michael Miller

I want to be a passenger in your car again and shut my eyes while you sit at the wheel,

awake and assured in your own private world, seeing all the lines on the road ahead,

down a long stretch of empty highway without any other faces in sight.

I want to be a passenger in your car again and put my life back in your hands.

[100pitchersofhoney]

Postcard 2

By Franz Wright

Incomprehensible fate that sentenced my father to my mother. I can’t blame him, I would have left the raving bitch myself, and would do so many many times in years to come. Then, of course, I came along. There is a limit to what one man can endure. So I suppose I am the reason he left, actually. I am the one to blame. And yet he did his best; he did all that he was capable of doing, and wrote me every year, like clockwork. He rarely remembered to mail what he wrote me, poor man (when I think of what I must have put him through), barely legible one-sentence postcards he sometimes worked at half the night; but as they all said the same thing, word for word, it wasn’t that bad. He could be forgiven. The blizzard I visit your city disguised as will never be over and never arrive. I think what he was trying to say was that at some point I’d begin to notice I was freezing, wasn’t dressed right, had nowhere to go, and was staggering into a blinding snow that no one else could see. I think he meant, the cold will make you what I am today.

[100pitchersofhoney]

“You Are the Penultimate Love of My Life”

By Rebecca Hazelton

I want to spend a lot but not all of my years with you. We’ll talk about kids                              but make plans to travel. I will remember your eyes                              as green when they were gray. Our dogs will be named For Now and Mostly.               Sex will be good but next door’s will sound better.

There will be small things. I will pick up your damp towel from the bed,                                                            and then I won’t. I won’t be as hot as I was                              when I wasn’t yours and your hairline now so               untrustworthy. When we pull up alongside a cattle car                              and hear the frightened lows,                              I will silently judge you                              for not immediately renouncing meat. You will bring me wine                              and notice how much I drink.

                                             The garden you plant and I plant                              is tunneled through by voles,                                                             the vowels                                                             we speak aren’t vows,               but there’s something                              holding me here, for now,               like your eyes, which I suppose                                                             are brown, after all.