The Bowery Presents
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EXPECTATIONS
One Nice Bug Per Day
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@spirit-fireanddew
But, for you, I wanted this to be a backyard swimming pool at dusk,
lit from beneath--a thick palm above, lemon branches laden with apricot-
colored dates--a place for you to dive, head and hands first, spend the night
backstroking between pleasure and understanding.
- Robin Coste Lewis from Pleasure and Understanding
Art & Craft
I would figure out all the right answers
first, then gently mark a few of them wrong.
If a quiz had ten problems, I'd cancel
out one. When it had twenty, I'd bite my tongue
then leave at least two questions blank: _____ _____.
A B was good, but an A was too good.
They'd kick your ass, call your big sister
slow, then stare over your desk, as if you'd
snaked out of a different hole. Knowing
taught me—quickly—to spell community
more honestly: l-o-n-e-l-y.
During Arts and Crafts, when Miss Larson allowed
the scissors out, I'd sneak a pair, then cut
my hair to stop me from growing too long.
-Robin Coste Lewis
Snow
Telephone poles relax their spines; sidewalks go under. The nightly groans of aging porches are put to sleep. Mercy sponges the lips of stairs.
While we talk in the old concepts – time that was, and things that are – snow has leveled the stumps of the past and the earth has a new language.
It is like the scene in which the girl moves toward the hero who has not yet said, “Come here.”
Come here, then. Every ditch has been exalted. We are covered with stars. Feel how light they are, our lives.
-Lisel Mueller
- January Gill O’Neil from diode poetry journal
The Embrace by Mark Doty
You weren’t well or really ill yet either;
just a little tired, your handsomeness tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace. I didn’t for a moment doubt you were dead. I knew that to be true still, even in the dream. You’d been out–at work maybe?– having a good day, almost energetic. We seemed to be moving from some old house where we’d lived, boxes everywhere, things in disarray: that was the story of my dream, but even asleep I was shocked out of the narrative by your face, the physical fact of your face: inches from mine, smooth-shaven, loving, alert. Why so difficult, remembering the actual look of you? Without a photograph, without strain? So when I saw your unguarded, reliable face, your unmistakable gaze opening all the warmth and clarity of you–warm brown tea–we held each other for the time the dream allowed. Bless you. You came back, so I could see you once more, plainly, so I could rest against you without thinking this happiness lessened anything, without thinking you were alive again.
Braided Between the Broken
Today apologies were falling
from the trees and the apples
were being ignored.
There’s a chapter in our lives
where we tried to shred pages,
where we tried to rewrite the tale.
Let’s call that chapter, The Numbness,
or The Boredom, or the place where we forgot
we were alive.
That morning I woke up and wandered outside
onto the backtrail,
past the No Trespassing sign into the arms
of an evergreen or a black bear. It didn’t matter
who held me then; I was the moss, the lichen,
the mushroom growing on the fallen log.
No one expects perfection, except when they do,
which is always.
Even you, king of the quiet,
crash, when I talk about my brokenness.
Cover up, your fractures are showing.
In my life I try to apologize for things I haven’t done
yet. Those are the bruised apples of me,
the possible fruit rotting in the field.
Remember when I kept replaying melancholy?
Remember when I opened our melody with a switchblade?
Rip out the carpet. Mow down the dahlias.
Let’s ruin our lives.
It felt good to hurt then--
until it didn’t, until we were left
with bad flooring, a garden
where nothing grew.
You’re asking about the next chapter
and the one after that. You’re asking
what time I’ll be home and hand me
a cloth to buff my halo.
Let’s put a comma here.
Let’s put a semicolon and think about
the next sentence.
I dream of erasers. I dream of wite-out.
I dream of the song where the pharmacist
doesn’t judge me for not being able to make it through
the day without some sort of pill.
-Kelli Russell Agodon from Dialogues with Rising Tides
Advent
It’s hopeless, the stars, the books
about stars, they can’t help themselves
and how could you not love them for it
here in the new week with animals
burying food and everything outlined
in cold and even friends, it’s hopeless,
this mess, this season, all that
is lost and tickets and strangers,
what can I say, only sitting here
on this dark bench waiting for what
I don’t know, I want this world
to remain with me, this holy tumult,
which does not know it loves me
and you, friends, spectacular driveways,
an orange, the vanishing year.
-Heather Christle
Part of Me Wanting Everything to Live
This New England kind of love reminds me of the potted chrysanthemum my husband gave me. I cared for it faithfully, turning the pot a quarter turn each day as it sat by the window until the blossoms hung with broken necks on the dry stems. Cut off the dead parts and watched green leaves begin, new buds open. Thinking the chrysanthemum would not die unless I forced it to. The new flowers were smaller and smaller, resembling little eyes awake and alone in the dark. I was offended by the lessening, by the cheap renewal. By a going on that gradually left the important behind. But now it’s different. I want the large and near, and endings more final. If it must be winter, let it be absolutely winter.
-Linda Gregg
Dream Doughnuts
I tell them how I read Ray’s
book of poems cover to cover until he entered
my dream as through some side-door in the jazz club,
some loophole in time.
I’m so glad to see you again, I say.
He’s carrying a bag of powdered doughnuts
and two paper cups of black coffee.
Was I gone too long? he asks, fresh from the bakery.
Too long is if you don’t come back at all, I say.
Time is funny, he says, biting into the doughnut
so the hole breaks open to the entire air supply
of the planet. Powdered sugar clings to the corners
of his lips. Ghost-lips I call him, as he
tears off doughnut and feeds it to me like a small bird
who won’t eat any other way. Time,
like the doughnut hole, has rejoined itself,
as when joining breaks us open to ourselves, corollary
to again.
I say to Ray:
Did you ever think
it would be like this?
Drink your coffee, he says, while it’s hot.
For a while we’re all out there together, but soon
I know I’ll have to go back to that alcove
in which we’re always waiting to see
each other again, the one we call Life, so it has
a hole in the middle, a sign of arrival, given
so we don’t need to miss ourselves or anyone else,
we’re sure that the whole,
in some unaccountable lightning-flash-hyphenation,
goes on and on, as it takes
our very breath away.
-Tess Gallagher from Dear Ghosts
-Carl Phillips from Pale Colors In A Tall Field
Hail
Mary who mattered to me, gone or asleep
among fruits, spilled
in ash, in dust, I did not
leave you. Even now I can’t keep from composing you,
limbs and blue cloak
and soft hands. I sleep to the sound
of your name, I say there is no Mary
except the word Mary, no trace
on the dust of my pillowslip. I only
dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets,
of honeybees above you
murmuring into a crown. Antique queen,
the night dreams on: here are the pears
I have washed for you, here are the heavy-winged doves,
asleep by the hyacinths. Here I am,
having bathed carefully in the syllables
of your name, in the air and the sea of them, the sharp scent
of their sea foam. What is the matter with me?
Mary, what word, what dust
can I look behind? I carried you a long way
into my mirror, believing you would carry me
back out. Mary, I am still
for you, I am still a numbness for you.
-Mary Szybist, from Incarnadine
Making Love to Myself James L. White When I do it, I remember how it was with us. Then my hands remember too, and you’re with me again, just the way it was. After work when you’d come in and turn the TV off and sit on the edge of the bed, filling the room with gasoline smell from your overalls, trying not to wake me which you always did. I’d breathe out long and say, ‘Hi Jess, you tired baby?’ You’d say not so bad and rub my belly, not after me really, just being sweet, and I always thought I’d die a little because you smelt like burnt leaves or woodsmoke. We were poor as Job’s turkey but we lived well— the food, a few good movies, good dope, lots of talk, lots of you and me trying on each other’s skin. What a sweet gift this is, done with my memory, my cock and hands. Sometimes I’d wake up wondering if I should fix coffee for us before work, almost thinking you’re here again, almost seeing your work jacket on the chair. I wonder if you remember what we promised when you took the job in Laramie? Our way of staying with each other. We promised there’d always be times when the sky was perfectly lucid, that we could remember each other through that. You could remember me at my worktable or in the all-night diners, though we’d never call or write. I just have to stop here Jess. I just have to stop.
I was a child made of silt and agitation. Built of granules of guilt.
- Catherine Pierce from “Poem for Quicksand”
-Ariel Francisco
-Andrés Montoya
So much time spent at the kitchen table trying to decide where to put commas in sentences about made-up lives
-Valzhyna Mort
