o little drops

it's raining women's voices as if they had died even in memory and it's raining you as well marvelous encounters of my life o little drops those rearing clouds

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Not only not forever

could the spirit endure,

but not for the smallest length of time.

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I’m Over the Moon

BY BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY

I don’t like what the moon is supposed to do.

Confuse me, ovulate me,

spoon-feed me longing. A kind of ancient

date-rape drug. So I’ll howl at you, moon,

I’m angry. I’ll take back the night. Using me to

swoon at your questionable light,

you had me chasing you,

the world’s worst lover, over and over

hoping for a mirror, a whisper, insight.

But you disappear for nights on end

with all my erotic mysteries

and my entire unconscious mind.

How long do I try to get water from a stone?

It’s like having a bad boyfriend in a good band.

Better off alone. I’m going to write hard

and fast into you, moon, face-fucking.

Something you wouldn’t understand.

You with no swampy sexual

promise but what we glue onto you.

That’s not real. You have no begging

cunt. No panties ripped off and the crotch

sucked. No lacerating spasms

sending electrical sparks through the toes.

Stars have those.

What do you have? You’re a tool, moon.

Now, noon. There’s a hero.

The obvious sun, no bullshit, the enemy

of poets and lovers, sleepers and creatures.

But my lovers have never been able to read

my mind. I’ve had to learn to be direct.

It’s hard to learn that, hard to do.

The sun is worth ten of you.

You don’t hold a candle

to that complexity, that solid craze.

Like an animal carcass on the road at night,

picked at by crows,

taunting walkers and drivers. Your face

regularly sliced up by the moving

frames of car windows. Your light is drawn,

quartered, your dreams are stolen.

You change shape and turn away,

letting night solve all night’s problems alone.

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wishes for sons

BY LUCILLE CLIFTON

i wish them cramps.

i wish them a strange town

and the last tampon.

i wish them no 7-11.

i wish them one week early

and wearing a white skirt.

i wish them one week late.

later i wish them hot flashes

and clots like you

wouldn't believe.    let the

flashes come when they

meet someone special.

let the clots come

when they want to.

let them think they have accepted

arrogance in the universe,

then bring them to gynecologists

not unlike themselves.

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THE PRESIDENT’S WIFE

Sometimes I wonder Is Beyoncé who she says she is Will I accidentally live forever And be sentenced to smile at men I wish were dead Is loneliness cultural Are lips true Is a mother still a self Do I glow in the dark What if men are wrong And English isn’t sound blue isn’t color Eyes are the window to storm Am I too transparent in this skirt suit Is the skirt suit a social construct What does money cost Should I stop talking while the ocean Takes California hot breath takes the Capital Will ritual outlast what visits Sleeping daughters with bad words What lets some girls grow warm and tall The arms of their lovers Are rich and imaginary like me Is desire making me sick Building in my organs like ammunition Tiptoeing behind my eyes until I’m digital I’m static Is it called desire can it speak What does beautiful cost do I afford it Do I roll off the tongue Is America going to be sick Will fat kids inherit the earth Will you untag me from that picture Do you think I should cut my bangs Do I have any friends Do you believe in me Should I go to sleep Try again harder tomorrow Should I answer the phone Who is it Who want the world like it is Spoke Baraka can you hear him now Do you understand Are calories and sitcoms Here to make me sad Am I a moon no one sees Does my lipstick look okay Am I growing tired Of my alternative lifestyle Or would I like a fresh glass Is there something spectacular In fallen trees ancient hieroglyphs Hippie towns twentysomethings will they Save us Is it possible to disappear What’s it like to be the first anything

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Badly chosen lover (1963)

Rosemary Tonks

Criminal, you took a great piece of my life, And you took it under false pretences, That piece of time – In the clear muscles of my brain I have the lens and jug of it! Books, thoughts, meals, days, and houses, Half Europe, spent like a coarse banknote, You took it — leaving mud and cabbage stumps.

And, Criminal, I damn you for it (very softly). My spirit broke her fast on you. And, Turk, You fed her with the breath of your neck – In my brain’s clear retina I have the stolen love-behaviour. Your heart, greedy and tepid, brothel-meat, Gulped it, like a flunkey with erotica. And very softly, Criminal, I damn you for it.

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Our drifting, they say, is genetic / in nature, a destiny hardwired / in our cells or the stars. // But on earth--as the story goes-- / my kin called out for mercy, / sheep down to skin and bone.

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FARM HUBBUB

They will always be building buildings.

That time in the good mountains I spent, flea markets we went to, their appetizer, chintz. Salvageable mutts. Anyway, that's what it means. Don't get all pushed out of shape, and there she was! Their new technique designed to stop us, or at least infringe in some tilapia joint. Porcelain tools make it alright. No use, it's fighting again. The great collapsible retro.

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I hung my friend on the tree as a form of preservation, an ornamental way of looking at her from below. I was in the mood for worship I confessed everything, forgot to use my stage name. She knew the actual me, firing range old man playing me that record in secret. Maybe I meant to give her my real name dared her to blackmail me, give me something to live— I shut up when I heard how my voice sounded. Somehow somehow I gave her all my power somehow she lives each day not using it. I told you she was lovely beneath her dress I was low on some bar unfit for this bond & I knew it. I knew if I passed my friend down as an heirloom generations would keep her safe, her eyes make themselves valuable. You are sparkling I said placing her on the branch, captive applause sounding green. You are my best friend—as soon as I said it I knew it was a lie, I didn’t need tenderness, I needed to be a letter soaking in watercolor, hey what’s it like to be above me? Taut bows old arrows aimed at the idea of my friend’s DNA braiding itself up into myth & pseudonym. My curiosity killed my desire to decorate itself. The tree looked like I’d loved it.

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Nothing touches like tan velvet touches the palm. Now the cracks come, because what gives without taking?–Doesn’t exist. Say

you forget what is lanolin, what is raw about fleece uncarded & unwashed. Say the silver feel of charmeuse lines your sleep. You’ve lost

what there was before pins & needles, sound a scissors makes through cloth on a hardwood floor, thick waist of the dressmaker’s dummy. Don’t tell me

any more. Without Burano lace, without cinnabar strung on a cuff, shantung and satin and netting and swiss: no rich man, no camel, no needle’s

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Thanks for your card. I like hearing from you. What a great picture, too: there must be a million people on that beach in Barcelona, so many outfits and towels and umbrellas. And your note's wry: "The cyber café has the cheapest postcards." It's different these days, even a little eerie that a postcard can be from a life lived two weeks ago—now that the internet has made the past and present one. And Instagram and Tumblr together are like the Big Bang: you're everywhere at once in Spain, with a toothache at the pharmacy, sipping an icy lemonade in a park then dipping your bandana in the fountain, finding the darkness in you is Goya's. But I'm so glad you wrote, and thought to share: thank you. Yes, I'm mostly recovered, the family's well— though no one understands Aunt Martha any more, which has an upside; you know what Aunt Martha can be like. I appreciate your thoughtfulness. Thanks to you, I see again the face of the clerk at the post office in the tenderness of her hijab, how perfectly her sigh made her lips purse when she smiled at my awful Spanish and counted out my change slowly, in impeccable English, as though I were no smarter than her stapler. But she liked me, I could tell: our moment was simple, irrespective of her politics or mine. I have been thinking a lot about the light I glimpsed in her kind irony, as though I could see the unflickering living candle of her. She liked that I was mailing myself a postcard.

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“Happy as a clam, is what my mother says for happy. I am happy as a clam: hard-shelled, firmly closed.”

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I lay on the cream shag carpet with my brother

and argue what a kobold is, and is not. I am nine.

Behind the oblong dresser in the basement

is a white stub of chalk with a wolf spider

crouching on it. It does not know I am about to pick it up.

When I am twenty-one, I clutch a cold ten dollar bill.

The gas attendant has a gold tooth.

Says, what are you all dressed up for, missy.

I smooth the gray wool of my bridge coat.

A bell chimes and my shoulder blades flinch.

I cannot see the snowflakes melting into my cuffs.

No eyes watch my body shuffle back to the car

across the ice, no witnesses.

Years later, a lover’s shadow traipses diagonally

across the floor of the limehouse. He’s just told me

he didn’t fall in love with me. The moon in splinters

across stack piles of buildings. I open his refrigerator,

gulp milk from a glass bottle.

There is nothing left for me to do.

My brother has been dead for nine years. A kobold:

a kind of sprite with thin, ivy-colored arms.

See, he is not here to dispute this.

This is what I think when the lover asks why I am

so quiet. My body shaped like a C at the foot of his bed.

My fingers coiled in blankets. Thick and coconut white.

I miss everything.

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THE FIRE THIS TIME,

or How Come Some Brown Boys Get Blazed Right Before Class and Other Questions Without Marks

how much damn broke

does it take to want to

burn just before class

lung green with chaos

  how many times the

police come to the door

way past late, your auntie

face forlorn and flashing

  in the turning blue, how

much knuckle in a boy

fist gotta break cheek till

body want to go numb

  how much brave you

gotta front, pay forward

like a hard stare, like a

work muscle jaw

  how many legal papers

say stay or go, right or

nothing, home or jail

love or palm skin

  how many words

or promises did dad

mom and god knows

who else have to crush

  so that you spit out

your eyes and slouch

like a demon, daring

me to call out your

  name, as if it had

power anyway, as if

your own name, when

you strangle it out

  your throat spill god

stuff, god, like a broke

egg, baby born into

fire, how come fire

  put you to bed instead

of sweet hands, good

hands, why they put bad

hands, why bad hands

  why the fire this time

god, why, we ain’t done

nothing, nothing yet

nothing yet and nothing

  wrong, except the babies

are on fire, on fire, babies

burning by the stairs

before school begins

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One Last Thing Before I Go

                    after Dean Young The wrist that holds the leash strains but does not break, then draws up new contracts with the same mad dogs. The broken bowl now holds the shape of glue, its jagged patterns, but it holds, and I can’t tell how to call it, if it’s mostly meant for holding or if its mostly being held, and this keeps me awake in the dark unsure of where to pour my cereal until I arrive at sleep like a bad decision. Outside the crabapples haven’t moved, they slip through stages of soft rot until each turns to yard, Psst, I’m frightened, says the iron fence whose rot moves in and grips more slowly, whose rust will strip and sting and stay. Every bone I throw slings back, Saturday morning fills with women buying china, arriving home to pile their cabinets higher. Your yowl again in my ear, instead of your broad back in the doorway. All this standing still. Remind me to forget when our stillness was somehow moving, to forget misplacing your hands in my bed as your missed plane lifted out of the bright city. Psst, I’m frightened, your calves like pillars, leaves intuiting the color of ground before they drop, cicadas easing off their crusts in the dark, everything perfectly clear, all the brown husks spelling I love you, I’m leaving. But the leaving season goes on for miles, hauling its cold freight across the year, accepting stowaways but never the right ones. When what passes passes at the speed of staying and the heart’s hopped a groaning length of train and the nightshirt’s stuffed with arms and the cupped ear can hear to the field’s far corner and the voice hanging in the throat unwraps itself like a bat and flies out, will there be at last some crisp unsticking, a caboose’s distant chuff and wag, the red-and-white-striped gates hoisting their easy burdens?

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My body is afraid of your body when your body moves to move away. My body is a theme party that’s found a deeper way to care about its guests and when they leave. It’s me and not my body that gets the words of the song wrong, My body lies over the ocean, though it’s my body that gets up now to turn off the television. On it, two bodies who aren’t your body read news that pertains to other bodies and are proper inside their clothing. I or is it my body knows when it’s time to make a room go dark, the trick is sending the sound away. Sometimes when I’m trying to fall asleep I picture large quantities of mercury. It feels good to picture this, it all slows down. Sometimes when things feel good, everything speeds up, like when a body responds to the music at theme parties. I wonder if you’re having the same thought as I am having now, that it’s too quiet to be the world.

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the clear water that holds up your boat. The water was clearly built to buoy the boat. It’s like how TV shows buoy the dead. After they’ve died, there they are, their kind faces float just out of reach like a rescue. Like that tiny island. I promise I’m not making this up. Today the world is full of people who are dead and also you are in it. By all accounts, everyone everywhere should be drowning, there’s tons of water all over and only a few ideas about how to stay dry and out of it. From your raft the smell of the water is patient, which for now is enough to love it, which for now is helping.

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In the desert

I saw a creature, naked, bestial,

Who, squatting upon the ground,

Held his heart in his hands,

And ate of it.

I said, “Is it good, friend?”

“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

But I like it

Because it is bitter,

And because it is my heart.”