an archive of (mostly) poetry

"If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it." —Anne Carson

[incorrigibletenderness]

Elms by Louise Glück

All day I tried to distinguish

need from desire. Now, in the dark,

I feel only bitter sadness for us,

the builders, the planers of wood,

because I have been looking

steadily at these elms

and seen the process that creates

the writhing, stationary tree

is torment, and have understood

it will make no forms but twisted forms.

[incorrigibletenderness]

Pear Tree by Rachel

Conspiracy of spring

a man awakes and through the window sees

a pear tree blossoming,

and instantly the mountain weighing on his heart

dissolves and disappears.

O you will understand! Is there a grieving man

who can hold on stubbornly

to a single flower that withered

in last year’s autumn gale,

when spring consoles and with a smile

presents him with a giant wreath of flowers

at his very window?

[incorrigibletenderness]

Tomboy by Claudia Masin

translated by Robin Myers

I don’t understand how we walk around the world

as if there were a single way for each of us, a kind

of life stamped into us like a childhood injection,

a cure painstakingly released into the blood with every passing year

like a poison transmuted into antidote

against any possible disobedience that might

awaken in the body. But the body isn’t mere

submissive matter, a mouth that cleanly swallows

whatever it’s fed. It’s a lattice

of little filaments, as I imagine

threads of starlight must be. What can never

be touched: that’s the body. What lives outside

the law when the law is muscled and violent,

a boulder plunging off a precipice

and crushing everything in its path. How do they manage

to wander around so happily and comfortably in their bodies, how

do they feel so sure, so confident in being what they are: this blood,

these organs, this sex, this species? Haven’t they ever longed

to be a lizard scorching in the sun

every day, or an old man, or a vine

clutching a trunk in search of somewhere

to hold on, or a boy sprinting till his heart

bursts from his chest with sheer brute energy,

with sheer desire? We’re forced

to be whatever we resemble. Haven’t

you ever wished you knew what it would feel like to have claws

or roots or fins instead of hands, what it would mean

if you could only live in silence

or by murmuring or crying out

in pain or fear or pleasure? Or if there weren’t any words

at all and so the soul of every living thing were measured

by the intensity it manifests

once it’s set free?

/

Yo no sé cómo se hace para andar por el mundo

como si solo hubiera una posibilidad para cada cual,

una manera de estar vivos inoculada en las venas durante la niñez,

un remedio que va liberándose lentamente en la sangre

a lo largo de los años igual que un veneno

que se convierte en un antídoto

contra cualquier desobediencia que pudiera

despertarse en el cuerpo. Pero el cuerpo no es

una materia sumisa, una boca que traga limpiamente

aquello con que se la alimenta. Es un entramado

de pequeños filamentos, como imagino que son los hilos

de luz de las estrellas. Lo que nunca podría

ser tocado: eso es el cuerpo. Lo que siempre

queda afuera de la ley cuando la ley es maciza

y violenta, una piedra descomunal cayendo

desde lo alto de una cima

arrasando lo que encuentra. ¿Cómo pueden entonces

andar tan cómodos y felices en su cuerpo, cómo hacen

para tener la certeza, la seguridad de que son eso: esa sangre,

esos órganos, ese sexo, esa especie? ¿Nunca quisieron

ser un lagarto prendido cada día del calor del sol

hasta quemarse el cuero, un hombre viejo, una enredadera

apretándose contra el tronco de un árbol para tener de dónde

sostenerse, un chico corriendo hasta que el corazón

se le sale del pecho de pura energía brutal,

de puro deseo? Nos esforzamos tanto

por ser aquello a lo que nos parecemos. ¿Nunca

se te ocurrió cómo sería si en lugar de manos tuvieras garras

o raíces o aletas, cómo sería

si la única manera de vivir fuera en silencio o aullando

de placer o de dolor o de miedo,

si no hubiera palabras

y el alma de cada cosa viva se midiera

por la intensidad de la que es capaz una vez

que queda suelta?

[incorrigibletenderness]

Arroz Poetica by Aracelis Girmay

I got news yesterday from a friend of mine that all people against the war should send a bag of rice to George Bush, & on the bag we should write, "If your enemies are hungry, feed them." But to be perfectly clear, my enemies are not hungry. They are not standing in lines for food, or stretching rations, or waiting at the airports to claim the pieces of the bodies of their dead. My enemies ride jets to parties. They are not tied up in pens in Guantanamo Bay. They are not young children throwing rocks. My enemies eat meats & vegetables at tables in white houses where candles blaze, cast shadows of crosses, & flowers. They wear ball gowns & suits & rings to talk of war in neat & folded languages that will not stain their formal dinner clothes or tousle their hair. They use words like "casualties" to speak of murder. They are not stripped down to skin & made to stand barefoot in the cold or hot. They do not lose their children to this war. They do not lose their houses & their streets. They do not come home to find their lamps broken. They do not ever come home to find their families murdered or disappeared or guns put at their faces. Their children are not made to walk a field of mines, exploding. This is no wedding. This is no feast. I will not send George Bush rice, worked for rice from my own kitchen where it sits in a glass jar & I am transfixed by the thousands of beautiful pieces like a watcher at some homemade & dry aquarium of grains, while the radio calls out the local names of 2,000 US soldiers counted dead since March. &, we all know it, there will always be more than what's been counted. They will not say the names of an Iraqi family trying to pass a checkpoint in an old white van. A teenager caught out on some road after curfew. The radio will go on, shouting the names &, I promise you, they will not call your name, Hassna Ali Sabah, age 30, killed by a missile in Al-Bassra, or you, Ibrahim Al-Yussuf, or the sons of Sa'id Shahish on a farm outside of Baghdad, or Ibrahim, age 12, as if your blood were any less red, as if the skins that melted were any less skin, & the bones that broke were any less bone, as if your eradication were any less absolute, any less eradication from this earth where you were not a president or a military soldier. & you will not ever walk home again, or smell your mother's hair again, or shake the date palm tree or smell the sea or hear the people singing at your wedding or become old or dream or breathe, or even pray or whistle, & your tongue will be all gone or useless & it will not ever say again or ask a question, you, who were birthed once, & given milk, & given names that mean: she is born at night, happy, favorite daughter, morning, heart, father of a multitude. Your name, I will have noticed on a list collected by an Iraqi census of the dead, because your name is the name of my own brother, because your name is the Tigrinya word for "tomorrow," because all my life I have wanted a farm, because my students are 12, because I remember when my sisters were 12. & I will not have ever seen your eyes, & you will not have ever seen my eyes or the eyes of the ones who dropped the missiles, or the eyes of the ones who ordered the missiles, & the missiles have no eyes. You had no chance, the way they fell on avenues & farms & clocks & schoolchildren. There was no place for you & so you burned. A bag of rice will not bring you back. A poem cannot bring you. & although it is my promise here to try to open every one of my windows, I cannot imagine the intimacy with which a life leaves its body, even then, in detonation, when the skull is burst, & the body's country of indivisible organs flames into the everything. & even in that quick departure as the life rushes on, headlong or backwards, there must, must be some singing as the hand waves "be well" to its other hand, goodbye; & the ear belongs to the field now. & we cannot separate the roof from the heart from the trees that were there, standing. & so it is, when I say "night," it is your name I am calling, when I say "field," your thousand, thousand names, your million names.

[incorrigibletenderness]

[incorrigibletenderness]

Bad New Government by Emily Berry

Love, I woke in an empty flat to a bad new government;

it was cold the fridge was still empty my heart, that junkie,

was still chomping on the old fuel vroom, I start the day like a tired

motorcyclist I want to go very fast and email you about the following

happy circumstances: early rosebuds, a birthday party, a new cake recipe but

today it’s hot water bottles and austerity breakfast and my toast burns in protest

You are not here of course but you live in me like a tiny valve of a man

you light up my chambers Later I will call to tell you about the new

prime minister, the worrying new developments and about how

I am writing my first political poem which is also (always) about my love for you

[incorrigibletenderness]

How Judas Died by Gabrielle Bates

There’s a bird believed to suck the teats of goats at night.

Flocks alight swollen on the slash pines while we sleep.

Here, in this dark field, among what’s been cast out

from the body of birds, goats, and men, Am I late or early?

is a question. It asks the black grass against my face.

Without light, every color is a past someone decided

to believe in. The official account is this:

Judas’s organs burst from his body in an open field

or he hanged himself from a tree. It was after dark

or it was day, and on the other side of the world,

a soldier’s ear, severed from cochlea, was free of the mind

to listen properly to the dust. Cartilage coil in a street,

it spills, and this is silence. Or this is silence

betraying itself as currency. If Judas coughs up a coin

into my hand, let it be night—the birds, hungry.

If I put what was once liquid metal in my mouth, let my mouth

become a glossy orange arm reaching up out of the mold

back into crucible, then pouring out again.

Body from body, speech from speech.

Judas is there, fully eared, in the sunbright street

or he is the nightly sigh of a fat-uddered goat going dry.

The throaty creak of a branch, or the flapping of wings.

Which or both or neither, I am listening. As milk slithers back

from beak to nipple. He unbreaks his neck with a rope.

[incorrigibletenderness]

the lost women by Lucille Clifton

i need to know their names

those women i would have walked with

jauntily the way men go in groups

swinging their arms, and the ones

those sweating women whom i would have joined

after a hard game to chew the fat

what would we have called each other laughing

joking into our beer? where are my gangs,

my teams, my mislaid sisters?

all the women who could have known me,

where in the world are their names?

[incorrigibletenderness]

Thanks by W.S Merwin

Listen

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

we are standing by the water thanking it

standing by the windows looking out

in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you

in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators

remembering wars and the police at the door

and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you

in the banks we are saying thank you

in the faces of the officials and the rich

and of all who will never change

we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us

taking our feelings we are saying thank you

with the forests falling faster than the minutes

of our lives we are saying thank you

with the words going out like cells of a brain

with the cities growing over us

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

thank you we are saying and waving

dark though it is

[incorrigibletenderness]

Famous by Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,

which knew it would inherit the earth

before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds

watching him from the birdhouse.

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

The idea you carry close to your bosom

is famous to your bosom.

The boot is famous to the earth,

more famous than the dress shoe,

which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it

and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

I want to be famous to shuffling men

who smile while crossing streets,

sticky children in grocery lines,

famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,

but because it never forgot what it could do.

[incorrigibletenderness]

Commas in Dante by Jessica Laser

Loosed from the rain, suspended

like a bough that broke and didn’t fall,

Sergei returned to fix the fake fire.

I’d worried the pilot was on too strong.

Though he fixed it for free, fire

always means profit and free

in this case means already paid.

“Finally,” I calculated,

“I found out I love you.

We achieved the physical

life of difference

we’d always held from each other inside.

I saw your life as if across a stage

I had tossed you a looking glass.

There are so many ways to think of us

that I have thought them all.

In one, we’ve been a painting

to which we were in a museum drawn,

stood peering at it for days

imagining the essays

and then we walked away.

In another, we preferred to dine

with literary people of unliterary sympathies,

who said at the restaurant, humiliating the effort,

Get your head out of books. Write for the waitress.

I close down around me like a thousand-petaled lotus

when I privilege my sympathy with others

over my system of belief, my thought

that at times I have no sympathy

at all, none except my own belief

that I have no belief

that is not a sympathy.

Freeing myself from what ailed me in others

gave me room to encounter someone new.

That’s how I took you, as someone

working for but excluded by virtue.”

“Makes me feel dumb,”

he said of my poem.

[incorrigibletenderness]

Highbury Park by Liz Berry

In the woods at night men are fucking

amongst the gorgeous piñatas of the rhododendrons,

the avenue of cool limes.

By day I walk my son down the secret pathways,

smell the salt rime of sex on the wind,

a condom glowing with blossomy cum,

knotted and flung; I bury it gently

under the moss with my boots.

I envy them, these lovers, dark pines

beneath their knees, the tarry earth

opaline with the desire paths of snails,

fallen feathers in the dirt like warnings.

I know those days of aching to be touched

by no-one who knows you.

After he was born I wanted nothing but the wind

to hold me, the soft-mouthed breeze

coaxing my skin like the grass

from a trampled field.

How heavenly it seemed then, light shafting

emerald through wounded leaves,

the woods a church, we its worshippers,

and all that sex - freed from love and duty -

like being taken by the wind, swept

from the cloistered rooms of your life,

stripped and blown,

then jilted dazzling in the arms of the trees.

[incorrigibletenderness]

To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall by Kim Addonizio

If you ever woke in your dress at 4am ever

closed your legs to a man you loved opened

them for one you didn’t moved against

a pillow in the dark stood miserably on a beach

seaweed clinging to your ankles paid

good money for a bad haircut backed away

from a mirror that wanted to kill you bled

into the back seat for lack of a tampon

if you swam across a river under rain sang

using a dildo for a microphone stayed up

to watch the moon eat the sun entire

ripped out the stitches in your heart

because why not if you think nothing &

no one can / listen I love you joy is coming

[incorrigibletenderness]

The Life of Trees by Dorianne Laux

The pines rub their great noise

into the spangled dark.

They scratch their itchy boughs

against the house and the mystery

of that moan translates

into drudgery of ownership: time

to drag the ladder from the shed,

climb onto the roof with a saw

between my teeth, cut those suckers down.

What’s reality if not a long exhaustive

cringe from the blade,

the teeth? I want to sleep

and dream the life of trees, beings

from the muted world who care nothing

for Money, Politics, Power,

Will or Right, who want little from the night

but a few dead stars going dim, a white owl

lifting from their limbs, who want only

to sink their roots into the wet ground

and terrify the worms or shake

their bleary heads like fashion models

or old hippies. If trees could speak,

they wouldn’t, only hum some low

green note, roll their pinecones

down the empty streets and blame it,

with a shrug, on the cold wind.

During the day they sleep inside

their furry bark, clouds shredding

like ancient lace above their crowns.

Sun. Rain. Snow. Wind. They fear

nothing but the Hurricane, and Fire,

that whipped bully who rises up

and becomes his own dead father.

In the gale winds the young ones

bend and bend and the old know

they may not make it, go down

with the power lines sparking,

broken at the trunk. They fling

their branches, forked sacrifice

to the beaten earth. They do not pray.

If they make a sound it’s eaten

by the wind. And though the stars

return they do not offer thanks, only

ooze a sticky sap from their roundish

concentric wounds, clap the water

from their needles, straighten their spines

and breathe, and breathe again.

[dearhummingbird]

[incorrigibletenderness]

Sonnet by Richard Brautigan

The sea is like an old nature poet who died of a heart attack in a public latrine. His ghost still haunts the urinals. At night he can be heard walking around barefooted in the dark. Somebody stole his shoes.

[incorrigibletenderness]

Manifesto of the Lyric Selfie by Becca Klaver

Our “I”s. They are multiple. We shuffle them often as we like. They can tag us. We can untag ourselves. We’ve got our to-be-looked-at-ness oh we have got it. We peer and cross. Go lazy. We’re all girly. We’re pretty selfie. We write our poems. We write our manifestos. While sitting in the photo booth. While skipping down the street. We think: if only my camera could see me now. There is a tranquil lyric but we recollect emotion with the speed of the feed. We pose to show the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. There are no more countrysides. There are no more churchyards. We smudge our vistas. We flip the cam around. What is burning in our little hearts? Hashtags of interiority licking like flames. We had been reflective. We have been reflected.