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Spring Coronal
BY HYEJUNG KOOK
Again this year I’ve failed the peonies that came to us
when we bought our house in summer, not knowing what
pink and white glory grew in the northwest. After the first May,
still childless, seeing how a single bloom could overflow
the cup of my hands, the stems bowing to the ground
under their weight, I bought cages to circle the red shoots
after they crowned but only used them once. Arrow-like
as they emerge from the earth, the just unfurling leaves
look like fingers, reminiscent of intestinal villi and sea anemones,
moving with unexpected purpose. It is the force that through
the green fuse drives the flower, drives me to try and fail
again to conceive, which turns the leaves green, my eyes green,
everything greening and growing before my scaffolding
is in place. Again this year I’ve failed, but I haven’t been outside
in eight weeks without precautions against “the sickness”
as we’ve come to call it in our house, long days spent only
with my children, four and six, and my husband. A surly demand,
a dropped dish, misplaced keys, and I find myself wearing a crown
of overtowering rage, like the sun’s corona flaring,
the outermost layers of atmosphere flung violently into space,
invisible to most instruments except during a total solar eclipse,
as in 1869, when scientists detected a spectral green line,
possible indication of a new element they called coronium,
but in 1943, that grassy green was identified as iron
in a forbidden transition, half its electrons stripped away
by heat exceeding a million degrees. The world is burning
while I drift in a bubble of comfort but seized by anger
day after day until one evening I step out to find the peonies
that have managed to stay upright now reach my hips,
the pinks already perfuming the air, the whites still closed
tighter than a fist. The next morning I wake
with my grandmother’s voice in my ears, something
about mislaid glasses, and for long moments, I can’t recall
if she’s dead or alive. When I remember she’s gone,
I sob, unable to control my shudders, waking my daughter
who uncurls from my side and asks, “Why are you crying?”
How to explain the weight of loss pressing down
after a brief reprieve. The weight of a knee on a neck.
Children in detention while pandemic spreads. I don’t.
Instead I say, “I miss my grandmother who died.”
She gently pats my cheeks, then presses her forehead
against mine, so close all I see is the dark Cyclopean
blur of her eyes. Maybe it’s better to be unmoored
by rage and grief, to burn away that which binds us,
enriching the earth, making space for new growth.
Maybe my inability to cage a living thing isn’t
a failing at all. Better to let the green drive us
in a wild unfettered tangle, blooming or not,
to feel the comfort of my daughter’s touch, the renewal
of pain a small price for my grandmother alive again
in my mind while the peonies dive headfirst into the dirt.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2021)
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Pancakes Keep Coming to Mind: A Sestina Commemorating the Demise of Aunt Jemima on the Pancake Box
BY ARTRESS BETHANY WHITE
June 2020
I invoke my great-great-grandmother’s name on exhaled breath,
the vowels arranging themselves in shorts and longs,
syntax and semantics duking it out.
Mima, that could have been birthed from an African tongue.
Enee, meene, mima, mo, respectable marriage of village,
continent, and town, without a diabolic Je like a pendulum swing
to the scarlet kerchief blooming in my brain, pancakes on my tongue,
unwilling to utter that name over black families now living out
their American dream. Like reinvention, how the heart longs
to reconcile past and present, within a village
raising a newer child clawing out of epicureal stink to swing
free from stereotypes, auction block, and Aunt Jemima’s mealy breath.
Instead, pancakes every time my forebears’ syllabics touch my tongue.
Mima sans Je, not Meema, or Mi’ma[e], coy notes stepping out
of a history where grits and flapjacks were birthed in a village
to skirt my teeth or strut ’cross my lips on exhaled breath,
that ample bosom and backside mocking me, she who longs
to rear up and bark Breakfast! and Brunch! on a revolving door swing.
You are not my Auntie or Aunt pronounced like the creature crawling out
over cadavers of supermarket boxes choking my breath
on a collapsed lung of shady marketing to keep bodies bound in a village-
cum-ghetto of stranger than strange imagined black things, girl-on-a-swing
dreams culled from western imaginings of what that colored gal longs
to do over a hot stove, flipping and flapping ’cause the griddle got her tongue.
Names as revenue monikers on revue, line dancing on a hip swing.
Oh, how daring to cogitate on destiny, each syllable a village
of preferred ubiquity, once the Ghanaian name Afua translated out
to first girl child born on a Friday, sonic genealogy on the tongue,
but changed to post-baptismal Mary, a rigid catechism of colonial breath
blowing across centuries of arid longing.
Food me, fooled me, sold me, told me, held me, bled me, tongue
afire with dreams of love, life, and freedom a profusion of days swinging
between something and more. My village compound, my village
quarters, my village a city block, each century censuring my breath.
What I seek is what I speak, not handed a script of nostalgic longing.
Jemima wrenched from shelves, but a litany in my brain still playing out.
Ain’t nothing but a jonesing to tweak culinary history so my village
knows my branches are thick, swaying and swinging with longing and breath,
rolling descendancy off my tongue, blessing consumption out.
Source: Poetry (May 2021)
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You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies
BY ILIANA ROCHA
After Yayoi Kusama After FRONTLINE’s “Rape in the Fields”
“We have no work for you, but I can hire your daughters.” He would try to touch me.
Those moments accumulate in the interstices of someone else’s
history. “Let’s go inspect the field.” It was dark, but the insects glimmered as if to
distract. My body followed my hair, pulled
taut into the field’s secrecy. “There, the almond orchard.” We call them fields de calzón,
the ó bursting like ripe fruit.
“She was always ready in a red nightgown.” The streams nearby, the varicose veins
he couldn’t describe. Every acre wasn’t his to cultivate.
“Where have you been hiding her?” The field blinks. Hums. Ruptures. A confined
darkness punctured with small consolations of light.
The field, infinite mirrors at one intersection. My face echoing & echoing. “I don’t
have an answer for that.” Frogs scream for help.
Our faces echo awfully the aggregate.
Source: Poetry (April 2021)
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The Night After You Lose Your Job
BY DEBORA KUAN
You know sleep will dart beyond your grasp. Its edges
crude and merciless. You will clutch at straws,
wandering the cold, peopled rooms of
the Internet, desperate for any fix. A
vapor of faith. An amply paid gig, perhaps,
for simply having an earnest heart or
keeping alive the children you successfully
bore. Where, you’d like to know,
on your résumé do you get to insert
their names, or the diaper rash you lovingly cured
with coconut oil, or the white lies you mustered
about the older man in the cream-colored
truck that glorious spring day, who hung his head
out the window and shouted, “Coronavirus!”
while you were chalking unicorns
and seahorses in the drive? Where
do you get to say you clawed through
their night terrors, held them through their sweaty
grunting and writhing, half-certain a demon
had possessed them, and still appeared
lucid for a 9 a.m. meeting, washed, combed, and collared,
speaking the language of offices?
At last, what catches your eye is posted large-
font and purple: a local mother in search
of baby clothes for another mother
in need. Immediately your body is charged,
athletic with purpose, gathering diapers,
clothes, sleep sacks, packing them tightly in bags.
You tie the bags with a ribbon and set them
on the porch for tomorrow. Then you stand
at the door, chest still thumping wildly, as if
you have just won the lottery—
and so you did, didn’t you?
You arrived here, at this night, in one
piece, from a lifetime of luck
and error, with something necessary to give.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2021)
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Receipts from AOL Instant Messenger (14)
BY ANURADHA BHOWMIK
BUDDY INFO: CANDYDANDY24 Personal Profile:
*~iF yOu GoT mY nAmE iN yOuR mOuTh // ((dOn `T fOrGeT to sMfD1)) <3
1 SMFD (v.): Since male interaction was strictly prohibited in Ma’s police state, my attempts at heterosexual socialization Mainly drew from erotica on Xanga & my underaged presence in chat rooms. Yet, Ma was determined to Find me watching porn, to inflict her preferential punishment. My captor believed that shame bred loyalty. My Distrust for authority obliterated any loyalty. But if I lied artfully, like a man, my dissidence would evade detection.
Source: Poetry (October 2021)
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The Farmer’s Bride
BY CHARLOTTE MEW
Three summers since I chose a maid,
Too young maybe—but more’s to do
At harvest-time than bide and woo.
When us was wed she turned afraid
Of love and me and all things human;
Like the shut of a winter’s day
Her smile went out, and ’twadn’t a woman—
More like a little frightened fay.
One night, in the Fall, she runned away.
“Out ’mong the sheep, her be,” they said,
’Should properly have been abed;
But sure enough she wadn’t there
Lying awake with her wide brown stare.
So over seven-acre field and up-along across the down
We chased her, flying like a hare
Before our lanterns. To Church-Town
All in a shiver and a scare
We caught her, fetched her home at last
And turned the key upon her, fast.
She does the work about the house
As well as most, but like a mouse:
Happy enough to chat and play
With birds and rabbits and such as they,
So long as men-folk keep away.
“Not near, not near!” her eyes beseech
When one of us comes within reach.
The women say that beasts in stall
Look round like children at her call.
I’ve hardly heard her speak at all.
Shy as a leveret, swift as he,
Straight and slight as a young larch tree,
Sweet as the first wild violets, she,
To her wild self. But what to me?
The short days shorten and the oaks are brown,
The blue smoke rises to the low grey sky,
One leaf in the still air falls slowly down,
A magpie’s spotted feathers lie
On the black earth spread white with rime,
The berries redden up to Christmas-time.
What’s Christmas-time without there be
Some other in the house than we!
She sleeps up in the attic there
Alone, poor maid. ’Tis but a stair
Betwixt us. Oh! my God! the down,
The soft young down of her, the brown,
The brown of her—her eyes, her hair, her hair!
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Solitary Vice
BY VALERIE WETLAUFER
I loved a girl
when I was a girl,
before I knew desire
could be used against me.
I so wanted to be relevant.
Simple exchange—
bouquets of wheat.
My dirt-stained hands,
tangled hair. I never
could be prim,
in apple-pie order.
I dropped all the eggs,
licking their smear
off my hands;
wrinkled her ribbons
into my pocket,
tore pages from her books,
all for the sake
of the lonely hour.
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Poem
BY LUCY IVES
This isn’t a great poem.
I’m not writing this to write a great poem.
I am writing this because I am one person.
I am only one.
I have a face and a front of my face.
I have two shoulders and two hips.
I’m living.
I live.
So what can I do with my face if it can’t see that person’s face?
What do I tell my eyes to see?
How do I let them know that when they see that face it is that person’s wish that they not know it?
How do I tell them we have to go back into the world where no one knows us and we don’t know anyone?
How do I tell them to stay there?
There is nothing for them to see.
How do I tell my hands they will never touch that person’s hands?
How do I tell my ears that when that person says my name it is only a word?
How do I tell my lips to make that person’s name another word so I can say it?
How do I tell my neck that person cannot see it?
How do I tell my hair that person cannot pull it?
It is my hair.
It is my head.
How do I tell my teeth they will never strike that person’s teeth?
How do I tell my thighs it does not matter what they do?
They are the tops of my legs.
They will fall apart.
How do I tell my back it must never wait for that person?
That person will not hold me.
That person does not know where I am, does not think of me.
Does not know I have exhausted every argument against him.
That person does not know I no longer love freedom.
That person does not know what it means when I ask for forgiveness.
That person does not know I beg the world to let me change.
That person cannot see my face.
Knows a woman with my name and she is a woman.
Does not know the word I hide behind my words.
Does not know this face.
Does not know this is my face.
Says my name and looks at this person.
How do I tell my feet to stand here?
How do I tell my eyes to see?
How do I tell the voice under my voice to keep on speaking?
How do I tell my mouth to speak?
Lucy Ives, "Poem." Copyright © 2015 by Lucy Ives. Used by permission of the author for PoetryNow, a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and the WFMT Radio Network.
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Evening Lounge
BY AFAA MICHAEL WEAVER
after the painting by Brent Lynch
The humid nights are best and worst, best
because the birds sing at two in the morning when
you cannot get back into the other world, worst
because it is the moist heat that makes the skin supple,
makes you want to rub against someone else, a woman,
and there is nothing but the long list of lost chances,
things you could have said, perhaps the simple question
of will you sleep with me so that it is not just you
and this shell of a home, this place where it feels
the walls are another layer of my skin, and that is neither
best or worst. It is the holding of the dead stink,
the memories that was over him, holding them back.
It is the utter singleness of being the only person
here, the way the thoughts think themselves down to
accepting that this is really just me here wondering who I am,
just me here wondering why I am awake at two,
which trigger it was, knowing all the time all too well
the way the war of life is connected to the nervous system
of the world, the ganglia of our shared horrors, either
mine so large, or so people tell me, and here it seems
to be the membrane between the skin of my bones
and the skin of this home, the absorbing shock of space
that gives when the memories burn their way in or
out of me. I would lie here wondering how to tell her
I am wrestling with the angel, wrestling with memories
in the crevices and cracks of my body, of how I feel
right now, what it felt like then, in those times, and I am
glad she is not here, and I wish she were here, and she
has no name because this is some woman I do not know.
I practice in the silence of my thoughts the different pitch
and rhythm of how I might ask will you sleep with me,
afraid of what to say should she say yes and this decade
of my monkish life should lie open and I have to say why
I am sitting on the edge of the bed, why I have woke her from
the sweet smile I assume she has when I assume her horror
is smaller than mine.
Afaa Michael Weaver, “Evening Lounge” from The Government of Nature. Copyright© 2013 by Afaa Michael Weaver. Reprinted by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.
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Autobiography of My Hungers
BY EDUARDO C. CORRAL
His beard: an avalanche of honey,
an avalanche
of thorns. In a bar too close to the Pacific,
he said, “I don’t love you,
but not because I
couldn’t be attracted to you.” Liar—
even my soul
is potbellied. Thinness,
in my mind, equals the gay men
on the nightly news.
Kissed by death & public scorn.
The anchorman declaring,
“Weight loss is one
of the first symptoms.” The Portuguese
have a word for imaginary, never-
to-be-experienced love.
Whoop-de-doo.
“I don’t love you,” he said.
The words flung him back—
in his eyes, I saw it—
to another bar
where a woman sidestepped his desire.
Another hunger.
Our friendship.
In tenth grade, weeks after
my first kiss, my mother
said, “You’re looking thinner.”
That evening, I smuggled a cake
into my room.
I ate it with my hands,
licked buttercream off
my thumbs until I puked.
Desire with no future,
bitter longing—
I starve myself by yearning
for intimacy that doesn’t
& won’t exist.
Holding hands on a ferry. Tracing,
with the tip of my tongue,
a jawline. In a bar too close
to the Pacific, he said,
“I don’t love you, but not
because I couldn’t be attracted to you.”
His beard:
an avalanche of thorns,
an avalanche of honey.
Source: Poetry (July/August 2020)
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O friends,
BY MIRABAI
TRANSLATED BY JANE HIRSHFIELD
O friends, I am mad
with love, and no one sees.
My mattress is a sword-point,
how can I sleep
when the bed of my Beloved
is spread open elsewhere?
Only those who have felt the knife
can understand the wound,
only the jeweler
knows the nature of the Jewel.
I have lost it,
and though anguish takes me door to door
no doctor answers.
Mira calls her Lord: O Dark One,
Only You can heal this pain.
#translated poems#translation#jane hirshfield#women poets#ancient poets#desi poets#madness#love#a“z”l#unrequited love
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To You, from Your Secret Admirer
BY SHARON OLDS
I love the conversations we have
after making love—of course it’s just me, making
love to myself, talking to you,
loving you—though I do not really
know you, so I guess not loving you—
craving the dream of knowing you.
“When will I be able to scream with you?!”
I moan. “I am screaming, I am screaming,” I moan, very
quiet. Afterwards, breathing in
the fragrance on my fingers, I tell you that
I love the smell with a tender love, it is so
sweet, so nectar, as I’ve loved with a strong
love the smell of semen, with those
working animals in it,
those snapping rippling tails! I want
to go with you
somewhere I have not
been—and just lie, in a bed
for days, sometimes eat, sometimes
swim, I am so tired of not looking at you,
I want to gaze at you with a day-long
gaze. The barriers down! The doors off their
hinges! After coming, and coming,
as if with you, I miss you more.
I want you hour and hour in my line of
sight, I want to sing with you to
dance with you and sleep with you in the
still (sho dote’n shoby doe) of the nii-iiight
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Bar Napkin Sonnet #11
BY MOIRA EGAN
Things happen when you drink too much mescal.
One night, with not enough food in my belly,
he kept on buying. I’m a girl who’ll fall
damn near in love with gratitude and, well, he
was hot and generous and so the least
that I could do was let him kiss me, hard
and soft and any way you want it, beast
and beauty, lime and salt–sweet Bacchus’s pards–
and when his friend showed up I felt so warm
and generous I let him kiss me too.
His buddy asked me if it was the worm
inside that makes me do the things I do.
I wasn’t sure which worm he meant, the one
I ate? The one that eats at me alone?
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Not Everything Is Sex
BY LAUREN WHITEHEAD
Okay
Tell that to the palm
of this Black man’s hand
ever so slightly cupped
and carrying in its bend
the finger tips of another
Black man, both of them
arms stretching upward
toward the sky, measuring
their reach against one another
on a basketball court
in Brooklyn, in spring
Okay
Spring
And when I say spring
I mean bee-buzzing-near-a-pink-bud-
almost-bursting spring
tantric spring
everyone-outside-in-three-
quarter-sleeves-despite-the-virus-
buzzing-near-our-tongues
spring So you can’t tell me
it’s not sex Cause it’s not not sex
The risk of all this tenderness
all this giving of ourselves
all this inside on the outside
open, vulnerable I know sex
when I see it and I see it
everywhere: lips on the nipple
of a soft serve, an arm fist deep in
a grocery store shelf, digging
for the last can of garbanzo beans
It’s not not a ménage à trois
these three men snuggled
in the front seat of a moving
van, singing bachata
dancing from the hips up
in the window, open
throats open, their whole necks
to the wind, reckless
reckless, I tell you, full on
abandon So say what you will
about transmission
about fluid, skin to skin
about the necessary things
that make the deed the deed
I don’t care cause it’s spring
and I’ve never seen anything so intimate
as this touch still taken
in the face of an apocalypse
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Self-Portrait as Self-Care Mantra
BY ELIZABETH THERIOT
Head tilted back, eyes to the light, I squeeze single tears of moisturizer from the glass jar: forehead, cheek, cheek, a cross, martyr mystic blessing that promises to unblemish me.
//
After the hospital everyone brought facemask sheets. In meager bursts of human feeling I’d unpeel the wet paper cut into alien likenesses of a panda bear or cat. I’m not through them yet, gestures of wellness, I am working at them like a rosary, residue oily and chemical so I disobey the package’s advice and rinse my face. Yes okay I am refreshed, I am good, I am doing good.
//
I wish I had a tender nickname for myself. “Don’t believe it Lizzy” and “Lizzy you are perfect.” Anyone who used a nickname on me is long gone. I call myself worse things and I am still the company I keep, alive and unhappy. It’s not the being alive that makes me sad but the living part, my nerves so cliché and hysterical.
I fail to protest, compost, to write edgy poems about genitals, fail to scribe care onto my body, translate myself to myself, to stop lying, to know the lie, to build a marvelous cavernous boat and push its belly out to sea, to swallow anything, to sing.
//
In my mother’s bathtub I drink her syrupy $5 wine, squeeze pink goo from its envelope and smear the mask like sticky melted jellyfish debris on my face, wait, something to peel away in 20 minutes. Wine drips and disappears into the steamy water. My face tightens, is tightened around. All of it will come away beneath my nails.
Elizabeth Theriot, "Self-Portrait as Self-Care Mantra" from Sugar House Review, Issue 22. Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth Theriot. Reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Theriot.
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Mirror at Shalott
BY JAMESON FITZPATRICK
I showed you the world so you might know
what it was like for me: to never see yourself, to subsist
on a diet of images of others, elsewhere.
Your curse was mine—I didn’t build
the tower on the island in the river
or hang myself before you there. I don’t have hands.
I couldn’t pass the time with weaving.
So I liked to watch you work the loom,
your tapestry a sort of group portrait
in which I resembled every shady character.
When you realized you weren’t trapped,
that two mirrors opposite each other only make it seem
there’s no way out, you didn’t spare me
a second thought. (Thanks, Lancelot!)
I missed the boat completely. But wasn’t left lonely—
when you brought the curse down so hard
upon yourself you shattered me, “I” became we.
We’ll be stuck in the tower forever, but we have a memory:
even more of us, in still smaller pieces, a place
the air is fresh and brine, a shore, our view opening
onto a body that daily recognizes itself in the sky.
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