романс

“Our love of each other is like one long shadow kissing without hope of reality.” – Anaïs Nin

[wordwhile]

“I have just come back from a party where I was the life and soul. Witticisms flowed from my lips. Everyone laughed and admired me — but I left, yes, that dash should be as long as the radii of the earth’s orbit ———— and wanted to shoot myself.”

— From the journals of Søren Kierkegaard, April 1836, trans. by Alastair Hannay

[anatolae]

I listened with horror to the words I was missing. A wrongness was growing in the living moon. & nearby, the sea rolled endlessly.

Shanna Compton, “The Driest Place on Earth”

[anatolae]

My body tauter, poised to carry. When I pitch forward I tumble inside. Each time I try, an algal bloom replaces language’s surface. Ruby-red & unmoored, waves over laminate surfaces… Everything alive aching for more aliveness.

Sharon Wang, “Radial Scent”

[anatolae]

Of the Irresolubleness of Diamonds

By Monica Ferrell

If my love for you were a teacup, I would praise it for its blue. I’d consider Its delicate handle, the pictures painted there Of ladies, of their parasols. But my love is not a teacup,

It is not even the tar pit from which we draw Fodder for the desolate streets, oh lightless at night, Oh pathways asking for feet and their memory, It is not even a tugboat going Bravely into morning, carrying cordage and salt,

Nor that saddest, sickest animal In the zoo, carious, mangy, whose hair molts, Who with its wounds sits in the bare Hay-padded corner of a cell and licks At the question of what it means to be here.

Yet in winter my love is covered with the brightness Of snow, in winter my love is filled with eyes. It waits for me at the block’s edge, Habitual dog, who walks me back into that gaseous Entity we call life. Others’ loves may wink and smile

Like the moon through a resurrection of vapors, Like the coy and barbarous moon, who knows no allegiance. But my love is more like an ice sculpture In a country of perpetual coldness, which the heat Of your anger cannot damage, nor the pick

Of your words impugn. Now Lay your worry aside from you, stranger, Put your hands near these curves: do you feel That hallowed temperature? Among my people We call this absolute love.

[anatolae]

There’s this line in an unpublished poem of yours. The river is like that, a blind familiar. The wind will die down when I say so; the leaden and lessening light on the current. Then the moon will rise like the word reconciliation, like Walt Whitman examining the tear on a dead face.

Franz Wright, “Wheeling Motel”

[anatolae]

You must learn soon, soon, that despite Judas The great betrayals are impersonal (Though many would be Judas, having the will And the capacity, but few the courage). You must learn soon, soon, that even love Can be no shield against the abstract demons: Time, cold and fire, and the law of pain, The law of things falling, and the law of forgetting.

Hyam Plutzik, “To My Daughter”

[anatolae]

XXIX [Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind]

By William Wordsworth

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom But Thee, deep buried in the silent Tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find? Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind— But how could I forget thee? Through what power, Even for the least division of an hour, Have I been so beguiled as to be blind To my most grievous loss?—That thought’s return Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore, Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more; That neither present time, nor years unborn Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

[anatolae]

Given to Rust

By Vievee Francis

Every time I open my mouth my teeth reveal more than I mean to. I can’t stop tonguing them, my teeth. Almost giddy to know they’re still there (my mother lost hers) but I am embarrassed nonetheless that even they aren’t pretty. Still, I did once like my voice, the way it moved through the gap in my teeth like birdsong in the morning, like the slow swirl of a creek at dusk. Just yesterday a woman closed her eyes as I read aloud, and said she wanted to sleep in the sound of it, my voice. I can still sing some. Early cancer didn’t stop the compulsion to sing but there’s gravel now. An undercurrent that also reveals me. Time and disaster. A heavy landslide down the mountain. When you stopped speaking to me what you really wanted was for me to stop speaking to you. To stifle the sound of my voice. I know. Didn’t want the quicksilver of it in your ear. What does it mean to silence another? It means I ruminate on the hit of rain against the tin roof of childhood, how I could listen all day until the water rusted its way in. And there I was putting a pan over here and a pot over there to catch it.

[anatolae]

aria

By Mariama J. Lockington

white-throat sparrows/full of note/netted in the eventide/voices sawing the trees/fragile little bodies/tracing frantic circles             not understanding/what we must all come to accept/not one                    day                         will last/we must end ourselves/as gently as we can             take our swords/our facts/oddments of feather                         turn them into the dark/she takes us as we are             windswept/awake with shattering & nothing             is as loud as her arms pulling us             close/not even these wings             landing/forever             in the nests of             my ears

[anatolae]

And my death is not my death, but a pillow beneath my head, a rock propping the window open to admit the jasmine.

Li-Young Lee, “Spoken For”

[anatolae]

I work and work but I am an empty sack Until I bleed the food all over the floor Then I am once again with everything Until the gods say, you’ve done well, good sir You may die now And the people who were asking me for favors all along Knock on the coffin door But I am gone, gone

Dorothea Lasky, “The Miscarriage”

[anatolae]

Alms

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

My heart is what it was before,   A house where people come and go; But it is winter with your love,   The sashes are beset with snow.

I light the lamp and lay the cloth,   I blow the coals to blaze again; But it is winter with your love,   The frost is thick upon the pane.

I know a winter when it comes:   The leaves are listless on the boughs; I watched your love a little while,   And brought my plants into the house.

I water them and turn them south,   I snap the dead brown from the stem; But it is winter with your love,—   I only tend and water them.

There was a time I stood and watched   The small, ill-natured sparrows’ fray; I loved the beggar that I fed,   I cared for what he had to say,

I stood and watched him out of sight;   Today I reach around the door And set a bowl upon the step;   My heart is what it was before,

But it is winter with your love;   I scatter crumbs upon the sill, And close the window,—and the birds   May take or leave them, as they will.

[anatolae]

I Cannot Be Quiet an Hour

By Mary Ruefle

I begin to talk to violets. Tears fall into my soup and I drink them. Sooner or later everyone donates something. I carry wood, stone, and hay in my head. The eyes of the violets grow very wide. At the end of the day I reglue the broken foot of the china shepherd who has put up with me. Next door, in the house of the clock-repairer, a hundred clocks tick at once. He and his wife go about their business sleeping peacefully at night.

[anatolae]

In the evening, sorrow dies   With the setting of the sun; In the evening, joy begins,   When the course of mirth is done; In the evening, kisses sweet   Droop upon the passion vine; In the evening comes your voice:   “I am yours, and you are mine.

Fenton Johnson, “In the Evening”

[anatolae]

Epistemology

By Catherine Barnett

Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more. Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know. Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord to keep it from fraying? Not the man who called my life a debacle, a word whose sound I love. In a debacle things are unleashed. Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary. I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate, the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing. They don’t use words, but they can be said to love. They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another            tree. And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare, to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth. Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.

[anatolae]

We Named You Mercy

By Amanda Johnston

after Gwendolyn Brooks

I count the years after you, know your would-be ages and remember the sadness that consumed me with the bitter sound of you, my almost-children. Could not conceive in conceiving you our muted heat and all that got through heaven’s gate to become that half-wing that was your soul. Was you. I saw your face once and, yes, I did kiss your cheeks and cry for your sweet not- quite nose, not-quite lips. Would I get another chance to see you if I held the knife? Cold, the sterile taker’s tools, my hands, bloody and damp. In the darkness, I felt your toes bloom small petals against my ribs. Your closed eyes, pulps of possibility. Did you see me? The one with empty arms stretching to embrace a a silhouette of you? A ghost with little more than hope for history. Or did I make that up to keep you with me a little longer? Did you stay until the no I set upon your body untangled itself from sprigs of hair and released you from the softness that tethered you to the love in our cold mercy? Quieted blues, your singers whose band tucked away their baritone horns and my chosen grief. How those little workers of sadness gathered me up, my heart, that splintered with your hard stop. I will never know the joy to have handled your urgent cries against my chest or thirst for the almost milk that did not swell, but was light as air.

[anatolae]

the white woman means lucky to be here and not mexico. my dad sings por tu maldito amor & i’m sure he sings to america. y yo caí en tu trampa ilusionado. the white woman at the party who may or may not have voted for trump tells me she doesn't meet too many mexicans in this part of new york city. my mouth makes an oh, but i don't make a sound. a waiter pushes his brown self through the kitchen door carrying hors d’oeuvres. a song escapes through the swinging door. selena sings pero ay como me duele & the good white woman waits for me to thank her.

José Olivarez, “I Walk Into Every Room and Yell Where the Mexicans At”