[apoemaday]

To Be Alive

by Gregory Orr

To be alive: not just the carcass But the spark. That's crudely put, but… If we're not supposed to dance, Why all this music?

[mimenicodes]

Try to Praise the Mutilated World | Adam Zagajewski, tr. Clare Cavanagh

Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June's long days, and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine. The nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships; one of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You've seen the refugees going nowhere, you've heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn and leaves eddied over the earth's scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns.

[mimenicodes]

Naming what has risen | Camille T. Dungy

Why not a crocus from this bulb? Why not the purple of bees’ lust so that, in honey, she might taste something good? Under skin, purple is a private taste, closer to the blood of her tongue, closer to the blood she chokes on when she’s gasping, to the clot behind her blackened eye. The heated force that slammed her shin, that pushed bone from the bone, that arched her but did not approach caress, is another kind of lust. Spring: a madness of grappling. Isn’t that what she sees outside every window? And inside? Nothing unique going on.

[tinyghosthands]

[mimenicodes]

I Dreamed Again | Anne Michaels

I dreamed again you were alive, and woke

certain     it was your voice — love is whisky, it is milk, it is water     don’t ever, you said in the dream, think I’ve gone

I woke a little more, a moment or two, then remembered. Memory makes it so. Keeps you under the trees.

So I did not turn on the lamp but lay until I felt again your warmth with mine heard your voice in my hair

I lay there a long time, forgetting

[mimenicodes]

Returning | Tami Haaland

When I open the door

and reach to the light switch the world opens as it did each time.

The garlic jar on the ledge, the ceramic cup holding cheese cutters and paring knives.

Outside a branch from the ash tree worries the window.

It was a place where I knew the drawer pulls, the feel of steps to the basement, the smell of cool cement.

If I open the middle cabinet, the linen is there as you left it, well-ordered, none of it fine.

[mimenicodes]

The Gods Among Us | C. Dale Young

One of them grants you the ability to forecast the future; another wrenches your tongue from your mouth, changes you into a bird precisely because you have been given this gift. The gods are generous   in this way. I learned to avoid danger, avoid fear, avoid excitement, these the very triggers that prompt my wings from their resting place deep inside. And so, I avoided fights, avoided everything really. In the locker room, I avoided other boys,   all the while intently studying that space between their shoulder blades, patiently looking for the tell-tale signs, looking to find even one other boy like me, the wings buried but there nonetheless. I studied them from a distance.   When people challenge a god, the gods curse them with the label of madness. It is all very convenient. And meanwhile, a god took the form of a swan and raped a girl by the school gates. Another took the shape of an eagle to abduct a boy   from the football field. Mad world. And what about our teachers? Our teachers expected us to sit and listen. In Theology, there was a demon inside each of us; in History, the demons among us. So many demons   in this world. Who among us could have spoken up against the gods, the gods who continued living among us? They granted wishes and punishments much the way they always had. Very few noticed them casually taking the shape of one thing or another.

[mimenicodes]

Dear One Absent This Long While | Lisa Olstein

It has been so wet stones glaze in moss; everything blooms coldly. I expect you. I thought one night it was you at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs, you in a shiver of light, but each time leaves in wind revealed themselves, the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak. We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove. In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires over which young men and women leapt. June efforts quietly. I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall so even if spring continues to disappoint we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain. I have new gloves and a new hoe. I practice eulogies. He was a hawk with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs of a salamander crossing the old pony post road. Yours is the name the leaves chatter at the edge of the unrabbited woods.

[mimenicodes]

Spring | Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again? Beauty is not enough. You can no longer quiet me with the redness Of little leaves opening stickily. I know what I know. The sun is hot on my neck as I observe The spikes of the crocus. The smell of the earth is good. It is apparent that there is no death. But what does that signify? Not only under ground are the brains of men Eaten by maggots. Life in itself Is nothing, An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs. It is not enough that yearly, down this hill, April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

[mimenicodes]

Don’t Bother the Earth Spirit | Joy Harjo

Don’t bother the earth spirit who lives here. She is working on a story. It is the oldest story in the world and it is delicate, changing. If she sees you watching she will invite you in for coffee, give you warm bread, and you will be obligated to stay and listen. But this is no ordinary story. You will have to endure earthquakes, lightning, the deaths of all those you love, the most blinding beauty. It’s a story so compelling you may never want to leave; this is how she traps you. See that stone finger over there? That is the only one who ever escaped.

[mimenicodes]

A Single Night in the City of Gold | Debora Greger

In the lost city of gold that was Oroville, the golden age had come and gone. I was the only person in the vast movie house. What was showing that winter night thirty years ago? The Gold Rush, of course, as if it had arrived in 1925 and never left.

Gilt dripped from the ceiling. Stains mapped their worthless claims. And there I was, still in that cheap coat the color of slush. Who was beside me? Not you, Love; you were on the other side of the country, so it was the cold

that threw an icy arm around my shoulders. A heater coughed, not meaning to intrude. The projector rattled to life and, down a mineshaft of dusty light, a blizzard swirled toward the blank screen of my past. O silent film of my life, unwind!

It wasn't the wind but the silence that howled, ecstatic in the emptiness at the heart of the West. But Chaplin had a mystic's hunger for the finer things: he boiled his boot. He wound a shoelace on a fork. He tasted shame for me, and found it sweet.

[mimenicodes]

In the Cold Country | Barbara Howes

We came so trustingly, for love, but these   Lowlands, flatlands, near beneath the sea   Point with their cautionary bones of sand   To exorcize, submerge us; we stay free   Only as mermaids glittering in the waves:   Mermaids of the imagination, young   A spring ago, who know our loveliness   Banished, like fireflies at winter's breath,   Because none saw; these vines about our necks   We placed in welcome once, but now as wreath   Against the scalpel cold; still cold creeps in   To grow like ivy over our chilling bodies   Into our blood. Now in our diamond dress   We wive only the sequins of the sea.   The lowlands have rejected us. They lie   Athwart the whispering waters like a scar   On a mirage of glass; the dooming land,   Where nothing can take root but frost, has won.   And what of warmth and what of joy? They are   Sequestered elsewhere, southward, where the sun   Speaks. For all our mermaid vigilance   And balance, all goes under; underneath   The land's gray wave we falter and fall back   To hibernate within the caves of death.

[mimenicodes]

Dear Reader | Rita Mae Reese

You have forgotten it all. You have forgotten your name, where you lived, who you loved, why.                      I am simply your nurse, terse and unlovely I point to things and remind you what they are: chair, book, daughter, soup.

And when we are alone I tell you what lies in each direction: This way is death, and this way, after a longer walk, is death, and that way is death but you won’t see it until it is right in front of you.

             Once after your niece had been to visit you and I said something about how you must love her or she must love you or something useless like that, you gripped my forearm in your terrible swift hand and said, she is everything—you gave me a shake—everything to me.               And then you fell back into the well. Deep in the well of everything. And I stand at the edge and call:                  chair, book, daughter, soup.

[mimenicodes]

The Bridge | C. Dale Young

I love. Wouldn't we all like to start a poem with "I love . . ."? I would. I mean, I love the fact there are parallel lines in the word "parallel," love how

words sometimes mirror what they mean. I love mirrors and that stupid tale about Narcissus. I suppose there is some Narcissism in that.

You know, Narcissism, what you remind me to avoid almost all the time. Yeah, I love Narcissism. I do. But what I really love is ice cream.

Remember how I told you no amount of ice cream can survive a week in my freezer. You didn't believe me, did you? No, you didn't. But you know now

how true that is. I love that you know my Achilles heel is none other than ice cream— so chilly, so common.

And I love fountain pens. I mean I just love them. Cleaning them, filling them with ink, fills me with a kind of joy, even if joy

is so 1950. I know, no one talks about joy anymore. It is even more taboo than love. And so, of course, I love joy. I love the way joy sounds as it exits

your mouth. You know, the word joy. How joyous is that. It makes me think of bubbles, chandeliers, dandelions. I love the way the mind runs

that pathway from bubbles to dandelions. Yes, I love a lot. And right here, walking down this street, I love the way we make

a bridge, a suspension bridge —almost as beautiful as the Golden Gate Bridge—swaying as we walk hand in hand.

[mimenicodes]

January Drought | Conor O'Callaghan

It needn't be tinder, this juncture of the year,   a cigarette second guessed from car to brush.  

The woods' parchment is given   to cracking asunder the first puff of wind.   Yesterday a big sycamore came across First   and Hawthorne and is there yet.  

The papers say it has to happen,   if just as dribs and drabs on the asbestos siding.   But tonight is buckets of stars as hard and dry as dimes.  

A month's supper things stacks in the sink.   Tea brews from water stoppered in the bath   and any thirst carried forward is quenched thinking you,   piece by piece, an Xmas gift hidden   and found weeks after: the ribbon, the box.  

I have reservoirs of want enough   to freeze many nights over.

[mimenicodes]

Chicago and December | W. S. Di Piero

Trying to find my roost   one lidded, late afternoon,   the consolation of color   worked up like neediness,   like craving chocolate,   I’m at Art Institute favorites:   Velasquez’s “Servant,”   her bashful attention fixed   to place things just right,   Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait,”   whose fishy fingers seem   never to do a day’s work,   the great stone lions outside   monumentally pissed   by jumbo wreaths and ribbons   municipal good cheer   yoked around their heads.   Mealy mist. Furred air.   I walk north across   the river, Christmas lights   crushed on skyscraper glass,   bling stringing Michigan Ave.,   sunlight’s last-gasp sighing   through the artless fog.   Vague fatigued promise hangs   in the low darkened sky   when bunched scrawny starlings rattle up from trees,   switchback and snag like tossed rags dressing   the bare wintering branches,   black-on-black shining,   and I’m in a moment   more like a fore-moment:   from the sidewalk, watching them   poised without purpose,   I feel lifted inside the common   hazards and orders of things   when from their stillness,   the formal, aimless, not-waiting birds   erupt again, clap, elated weather- making wing-clouds changing,   smithereened back and forth,   now already gone to follow   the river’s running course.

[mimenicodes]

The Play of Light and Shadow | D. Nurkse

We want to give ourselves away utterly but afterwards we resent it, it is the same with the sparrows, their eyes burn so coldly under the dusty pines, their small chests swell as they dispute a crumb, or the empty place where a seed was once: this is our law too, to peck and peck at the Self, to take turns being I, to die in a fierce sidelong glance, then to hold the entire forest in one tilt of a tufted head, to take flight suddenly and fuck in midair, tumbling upward.