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Poet Of The Month: Ari Banias

VOLLEY

In the absence of sunlight, in the absence of a genuine river, I blew air into a balloon. I gave my breath over to its empty shape. I filled & pinched & no matter how fast I tied it off, how tight & swift, the air, my own, drained out. And here I was again and here you were. Watching? No, imagining. So think what this balloon might represent if we passed it back and forth and took turns adding our breath. What the quick tying might. And our marveling at its lovely shape, like an egg but also a tear-drop. Our hands on it, our fingerprints darkening its surface all powdery and matte at first, with a bare sheen. Think of the balloon sent into a crowd at a party. How that crowd might move to keep it in the air, protective and playful, almost flirting with itself, a crowd with light volleys will send & resend a balloon upwards, high above their heads. Until it drifts down and asks to be touched by them again. And with such innocent gestures, they do. Though eventually they too will tire of this. I can’t just say innocent; I know that. But I’m going to say innocent. Innocent as a balloon not meant to last. Think of it handed back and forth between us.

Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2016). He lives in Berkeley, CA, where he teaches poetry and works with small press books.

Friendly reminder, we're accepting submissions: http://bit.ly/1My2WNB

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Poet of the Month: Javier Zamora

VOWS

Ever since a brown girl wanted fifteen thousand from me to marry her, I’ve vowed to not sign documents to get a visa, then ask myself why I’ve let that hurt me so much to never buy rings.

Amor, tell me to shut up, tell me none of that matters, come watch the tide drain south to where the house I left is lined with glass and barbwire.

When I call abuelos, ¡Ay no mijo! Someone else is dead. Then, they ask about you. I’m four years older than them when they got married, six years older than my parents, always they ask when I’ll visit, soon Abuelos, soon. What I mean is I can never go back. Amor, know more than I love you quite possibly I love that bay at low tide, even possibly, mangrove roots with bright-orange crabs.

You can’t know what it’s like to have that place disappear, those brown waves, those bright-orange crabs, what I really mean when I say I can never go back

is I wish to lie next to you every morning, where we dive headfirst to know what it’s like to swim in the middle of love and see each gull flee like clothes bouncing off the wall to the carpet we must pick clean like a beach, after hurricanes.

Javier Zamora is the author of Unaccompanied, his first collection of poems, a hope-filled clarion call that traces Zamora’s 4,000 mile long origin story from El Salvador to the United States when he was just nine years old. He is a 2018-2019 Racliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, the Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Stanford University and Yaddo.

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Poet of the Month: Hafizah Geter

How to Bring Your Children to America

The mothers became targets, hanging on clotheslines, bibs of barely fed children—countries born split in two, firstborns whose first steps aborted their sisters and brothers, the fresh bread of their love language, children the English tearing sphincters in two. The mothers came by boat, with wings, forgetting their own mothers’ uteruses, singing praises to Allah they came over and over again until it didn’t matter if so-and-so had died, we were the nicknames escaping their bellies, the translation between stay and never arrived. Husbands, uncles, we were wives, illnesses, pawpaw seeds, only thing that could save them, sickle cells that knew better than to touch. Visible, only in their dialect, they spoke to cousins, wired money, forgave ancestors we couldn’t trust. They stopped speaking to us in our birth language until we became new dictionaries, became the consonants of the constitution they studied, our first words forgotten objects in our home countries. They were the ones whose fathers had died without daughters, in the milt of language. In America, we were memories without accents or consensus, lambs that couldn’t be traded for milk, meal, or honey, the fact of our bodies in America their new Quran. And, oh, how they moaned, how they starved, sucking teeth between King’s English, yelling for us to stop playing immigrant and go get naturalized.

Born in Zaria, Nigeria, Hafizah Geter serves on the board of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, and co-curates the reading series EMPIRE with Ricardo Maldonado. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books and West Branch, among others. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in McSweeney’s, VIDA Review and The Volta. Hafizah is a 2018 92Y Women in Power Fellow. She is on the poetry committee for the Brooklyn Book Festival and is an editor at Little A from Amazon Publishing where she acquires full length literary fiction and nonfiction.

Our Poet of the Month series is curated by our friends at Poetry Society of America. The nation’s oldest poetry organization, founded in 1910, PSA’s mission is to build a larger and more diverse audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the vitality and breadth of poetry in the cultural conversation, to support poets through an array of programs and awards, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life.

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Poet of the Month: Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Love in the Time of Swine Flu

Because we think I might have it, you take the couch. I can count on one hand the times we have ever slept apart under the same roof in our five years,

and those usually involved something much worse than this sort of impenetrable cough, the general misery involved with dopey nausea, these vague chills.

But this time, we can’t risk it—our small son still breathes clear-light in the next room and we can’t afford to be both laid up on our backs with a box of tissues

at our sides. Especially now that I carry a small grapefruit, a second son, inside me. In bed, I fever for your strong calves, your nightsong breath on my neck

and—depending where we end up—wrist or knee. I fever for the slip of straps down my shoulder, I fever for the prickled pain of lip-bite and bed burn. You get up and come

back to bed. We decide it is worth it. I wish my name meant wing. The child still forming inside me fevers for quiet, the silence of the after, the silence of cell-bloom within our blood.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the prize-winning collections, Miracle Fruit, At the Drive-In Volcano, and Lucky Fish. Her latest collection of poems, Oceanic, was published by Copper Canyon Press in April of 2018. She currently teaches creative writing and environmental literature as a professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, MS.

Our Poet of the Month series is curated by our friends at Poetry Society of America. The nation’s oldest poetry organization, founded in 1910, PSA’s mission is to build a larger and more diverse audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the vitality and breadth of poetry in the cultural conversation, to support poets through an array of programs and awards, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life.

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Poet of the Month: Erika L. Sánchez

Girl

In the evening hum of traffic and cicadas, you watch the ugly curtains flutter in hot wind: Little Orphan Annie and her ridiculous flame of hair. Outside two sparrows bathe in dust, a man thrusts against a prostitute who gasps when she sees you in the window— always the little spectator, feral and plugged with squalor. Finally, you’ve learned to crawl inside the meat of your silence. On the way home from school, you study the factory’s chemical blooms in the distance. A man with a tumor glowing from his head exits the rank motel on the corner. You crash your bike into a boy by mistake, and his porcine father screams at you until he’s hoarse: Fuck you, you motherfucking bitch. Shaking, you run inside, and for months you’re convinced he’ll find a way to kill you. Weed lot in the muted sunset: the retarded boy pulls down his pants and a circle of kids laugh at his stiff, red penis. It looks like an alien, you whisper to your friend. The women with black eyes and wizened faces call you honey, call you sweetie. A man on the street tears the gold necklace from your mother’s neck— this is how you learn that nothing will belong to you. In your mangled language, you’ll count all the reasons you wish to die, the apartment bristling with roaches. Always the smell of corn oil. But what right do you have to complain about anything, with your clean socks and fat little stomach? Burnt pies from the thrift bakery you shove down your desperate gullet. What can you blame but your rootless eye? Your mind so soft and full of hysterical light. You’ve already learned that your body is a lie.

Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. A poet, essayist, and fiction writer, she is the author of a young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (Knopf Books for Young Readers), a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and instant New York Times Best seller; and the poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion (Graywolf), a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. She is a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow.

Our Poet of the Month series is curated by our friends at Poetry Society of America. The nation’s oldest poetry organization, founded in 1910, PSA’s mission is to build a larger and more diverse audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the vitality and breadth of poetry in the cultural conversation, to support poets through an array of programs and awards, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life.

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Poet of the Month: Chen Chen

I’m not a religious person but

God sent an angel. One of his least qualified, though. Fluent only in Lemme get back to you. The angel sounded like me, early twenties, unpaid interning. Proficient in fetching coffee, sending super vague emails. It got so bad God personally had to speak to me. This was annoying because I’m not a religious person. I thought I’d made this clear to God by reading Harry Potter & not attending church except for gay weddings. God did not listen to me. God is not a good listener. I said Stop it please, I’ll give you wedding cake, money, candy, marijuana. Go talk to married people, politicians, children, reality TV stars. I’ll even set up a booth for you, then everyone who wants to talk to you can do so without the stuffy house of worship, the stuffier middlemen, & the football blimps that accidentally intercept prayers on their way to heaven. I’ll keep the booth decorations simple but attractive: stickers of angels & cats, because I’m not religious but didn’t people worship cats? Thing is, God couldn’t take a hint. My doctor said to eat an apple every day. My best friend said to stop sleeping with guys with messiah complexes. My mother said she is pretty sure she had sex with my father so I can’t be some new Asian Jesus. I tried to enrage God by saying things like When I asked my mother about you, she was in the middle of making dinner so she just said Too busy. I tried to confuse God by saying I am a made-up dinosaur & a real dinosaur & who knows maybe I love you, but then God ended up relating to me. God said I am a good dinosaur but also sort of evil & sometimes loving no one. It rained & we stayed inside. Played a few rounds of backgammon. We used our indoor voices. It got so quiet I asked God about the afterlife. Its existence, human continued existence. He said Oh. That. Then sent his angel again. Who said Ummmmmmm. I never heard from God or his rookie angel after that. I miss them. Like creatures I made up or found in a book, then got to know a bit.

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. The collection has also been named a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, The Best American Poetry, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. Poets & Writers Magazine featured him as one of “Ten Poets Who Will Change the World.”

“I’m not a religious person but” by Chen Chen from When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. Copyright © 2017 by Chen Chen. Reprinted with the permission of the author. Author photo by Jess Chen.

Our Poet of the Month series is curated by our friends at Poetry Society of America. The nation’s oldest poetry organization, founded in 1910, PSA’s mission is to build a larger and more diverse audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the vitality and breadth of poetry in the cultural conversation, to support poets through an array of programs and awards, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life.

"what I mean when I say I'm sharpening my oyster knife" by Eve L. Ewing

I mean I'm here to eat up all the ocean you thought was yours. I mean I brought my own quarter of a lemon, tart and full of seeds. I mean I'm a tart. I'm a bad seed. I'm a red-handled thing and if you move your eyes from me I'll cut the tender place where your fingers meet. I mean I never met a dish of horseradish I didn't like. I mean you're a twisted and ugly root and I'm the pungent, stinging firmness inside. I mean I look so good in this hat with a feather and I'm a feather and I'm the heaviest featherweight you know. I mean you can't spell anything I talk about with that sorry alphabet you have left over from yesterday. I mean when I see something dull and uneven, barnacled and ruined, I know how to get to its iridescent everything. I mean I eat them alive. what I mean is I'll eat you alive, slipping the blade in sideways, cutting nothing because the space was always there. _____

"No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife." –Zola Neale Hurston Read about the poem here.

Countee Cullen, via NYPL.

#Countee Cullen

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