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Not a Bad World, Is It?
Too bad I'm not an ocelot. Too bad I cannot be a warbler or a lorikeet. A shame I woke up human again this morning—dry-mouthed, sullen, reading cruelties we have done now to our own. By nature, it seems. A shame I cannot be a glasswing butterfly hidden in the world. Too bad I've got these mosquito bites—ankles, arms, one prickling my forehead. Too bad I'm stuck inside this body, too bad I'm numb, good thing I'm alive to cleave each bump with a fingernail, I guess. Leave small engraved Xs, I guess. A shame I'm not a colt. A shame we still kill each other over land, beliefs, nothing. The story I read that haunts me happened last century, the one I'm struggling to tell you now: a father, a meat grinder, a heavy bag, the drive, the drop-off—Here's your missing husband. A shame, a shame. In time they'll vanish, all these crosses I scored into my flesh. In time I might say yes.
David Hernandez
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Keeping Quiet
Now we will count to twelve and we will all keep still for once on the face of the earth, let's not speak in any language; let's stop for a second, and not move our arms so much.
It would be an exotic moment without rush, without engines; we would all be together in a sudden strangeness.
Fishermen in the cold sea would not harm whales and the man gathering salt would not look at his hurt hands.
Those who prepare green wars, wars with gas, wars with fire, victories with no survivors, would put on clean clothes and walk about with their brothers in the shade, doing nothing.
What I want should not be confused with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about...
If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death.
Now I'll count up to twelve and you keep quiet and I will go.
Pablo Neruda
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Field Notes on Loving a Girl in Secret
There's a danger in comparing her to things. Her prayer, a stall of horses. Her anger, the beak of a bird. Her sleep, a sun-bleached fence. Her sadness, a yard pile of firewood.
A patch of pines is all I remember of a field. Quiet, she says. Her stick-shift sedan, her trouble with mathematics, her car radio turned up all the way. I write her questions
on a sheet of paper so no one can hear. Late at night in my blue car, we drive back roads, the only place we speak openly. The field's full enough tonight, I think, to break into a thousand wings.
Julia Koets
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Aubade
O morning earthsmell like small bent basil, a child blinking open
wet with thanksgiving a sky we lay under talking over
birdchatter we spoke the bee tumble gradually an understanding our
lungs became pockets handing out the days
saying here take it just take it in your hand who knew you would
be so good at ax throwing what aim I love the arc of arm
the fog of morning with my teeth on your ear, the morning come
through the windows like children awake now It's Christmas
all the lights your hand couldn't we be opening each other
Lindsay Illich
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Ghost Animals
We knew they were out there at dusk, all that bamboo for cover, to say nothing of the thick forsythia, distracting the eye with its yellow flags. You know they're there when the owls come out, telling each other across the yards, and when the dogs come slithering through their hatch door, heads down and quiet. It's then I head for the cabin. I suspect they slip in through the side window. I turn on the lamps, not the overhead light, and say, "Welcome," I don't want to scare them. My "Spirit House" Mary called it, and I take it on trust. Whatever animal comes unbidden and invisible must have something to tell or something to ask. I wait for the words that can't be spoken.
Susan Ludvigson
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Chernobyl
I wish I were in Chernobyl today. The streets are peaceful there.
No cars or bicycles rush by, no one is late for work. No children are crying on the playground or getting into trouble.
The file cabinets in the police department are full of mice, and the outcome of the important vote at the General Assembly doesn't matter.
There are plenty of vacancies in the brand-new state prison, and for once, no one is talking in the library. Not even a dog is out today, pursuing mysterious errands.
Life in my city is tiring. Deadlines and unread books. Making love, or dinner. So many people to disappoint, so much to buy in the supermarket. Almost unbearable, this city.
But today in Chernobyl the clocks have given up. No one is tapping the phones, and every night the movie theater shows the same old silent film.
Does anyone have a question? No.
The houses of Chernobyl tend their silences and on the dinner table two gray sandwiches are waiting with such quiet patience. Like an old married couple.
George Bilgere
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Why to Save the World
We need to begin by shooting people, leaders who lead by a leash the property
they call theirs, a friend says. My son wants me to carry a little pistol because men still
haven't learned that I am my own smoking embers to tend. At this table with a burger
& a beer I am more still than I've been in months, even when I wonder which of the sadfaced boys
passing in their hunt for Pokémon might be the one to hold a jagged blade to my throat.
I'm trying to remember how it felt to walk so close beside someone you let a bit of your weight fall
to them. Alone, you always listen to the new couple or old friends & feel them lie to each other,
performing themselves. I still hear the scream from the woman in the front row wearing the
president's brains after the sound the gun makes saves the silence from itself. We are all worried
we've forgotten something. One man leaves his drink at the bar & never wonders when he comes back if
someone drugged him while he pissed. Our hearts beating, our lungs pumping—we think of them as
often as we think how miles of asphalt might feel like duct tape over your gagged mouth.
On this birthday I wish to be invisible & to make this row full of men own my body, make them feel
living with a leash no one sees, tethered to threat. I don't want to forget my mother died on a bathroom
floor or to pretend our Earth is not in a constant state of ache— a body in pain being a body
under control. The gunshot echoes again. Who would we shoot first? What happens to a face the bullet owns?
How can a woman drink so much vodka her daughter could pass her on the street & never know?
Body of our bodies, we are becoming strangers. We each live at the edge of a wall we should never look over.
Lisa Fay Coutley
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[my body dies the more I use it]
my body dies the more I use it so I use it often / there a tender
death wish / terrifying entrance / when I panic it's from choking
on three separate tongues / mine my lover's & a tired history
of loss / what I use my body for today is running & a mediocre poem
which I use for therapy / it works temporarily / any small re-entrance
is a sign of progress / writing down the trauma for the first time is still
trauma / writing down the trauma for the fifth time is still trauma but
at least I have a poem in my hands / my lover is resilient / peeling back
a sleeve she shows me ghost incisions / slice your skin & you're no longer
in a poem or a metaphor / you are here with a paperclip inside your wrist /
does the past decay the more I use it in a poem / can I out-poem the past
from churning in my belly-pit / yes the future is an enzyme & a catalyst
or a burp that smells like hotdogs & a little like my grief / I hate that
stupid constant place which refuses tense / longing too / greedily I suck
my lover's upper lip looking for a poem or I lick the balmy archive of my gut
with all three tongues / one says loss one says loss one says I am not your tongue
Sarah Sgro
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What if the Wish to be Precise Survives the World of Objects
after Rae Armantrout
The light of a thing can't account for why it wobbles or wilts—
when the doctor steps into the room I can't tell whether she knows
my life or just suspects that I've been going about it wrong.
I think it's "energy adjacent" that one end might be the result
of a formula while another just happens to be what's going on:
unaccountable, imprecise like the faux-primrose by the sink.
Plastic colors beneath the overhead florescent, nothing for us to trim.
Jacob Griffin Hall
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Backwards Man in His Hotel Room, NYC, 1961
"A photograph," you once said, "is a secret about a secret." So you've spectered yourself just so—somewhere beyond the bedstead where he stands, body in perfect profile to your camera's
eye. His nose and chin jut west, feet due east behind him, trench-coat obscuring his silhouette's sleight of hand. Two hangers, the Mommy Dearest kind, dangle one atop the other against the closet
door. He looms, a slender Z, above the double fringes of a folded rug. A paper window shade occults the light. Or is it night? Who folded the rug? Then pulled tight the shade? A naked
bulb hangs just beyond his gaze. One click of your ghostly finger sets it all ablaze.
Cathy Smith Bowers
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Feral
That year the world handbasketed to hell, To bind our busted Loves to something guileless and frail
We brought a rabbit home. We bought the cage, The sweetest timothy, The pellets and the pine. We rearranged
The house to make him room. We couldn't wait To rest his softness In our laps, to feel him soften
To our touch, to touch the tender of his head All undefended. But he flinched from every gentle,
Every gesture in his presence, trembled When we tendrilled Green shoots to his feeding,
Hunched for cover at our coming. Every evening's New endeavor To lure him into his enclosure
He fled, and ended hackled in a corner Heartbeating Like we were predators.
The more he ran, the more we had to chase. Anon, apace, We each fulfilled the other's fears.
Kimberly Johnson
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Advice to Myself
Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don’t even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in through the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.
Louise Erdrich
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The Beach at Big Salt
Tools of antiquity—the compass, the straight edge—could not square the circle, couldn’t tame its numberless sides. Arcs, curves, chords of circles remain, tracing hollows of shells, clawed waves, parabolas of sand. See how matter curves around the emptiness, how it cups and gently holds the space where things are absent. Matter buckles and spirals around it, proving what is missing is more potent than what isn’t.
Matter aches to escape the discipline of being. Creation longs to possess the freedom from being a thing begotten. Even babies in their mothers’ wombs lie curled, crouched around the swell of the primordial. Straight or curved, tools cannot measure what it means to be, after all this time, still nascent, beholden to what you can never know. Armless, legless, a seahorse unrolls his tail, reels it in endlessly bobbing and straining in the tides.
Jessica Goodfellow
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her sleep - Toshihiko Okuya
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Love via a Rube Goldberg Diagram
Love will be activated when birch tree (A)grows to a height where, when leaf (B)releases in fall and wafts down to porch (C),crow (D) is inspired to caw and to take the leaf in beak (E) back to nest (F) where the leaf ages and withers into heart's shape (G)until person (H) discovers the leaf and retrieves it,taking it to lover (I) who carries the leaf to lamp (J)and they study the leaf's details together (K)until they press it between the pages of dictionary (L)and return the dictionary to shelf (M) in bedroom (N)where, inspired by shadows (O) cast by the birch tree on blinds (P), they will pull quilt (Q) from bed (R)and lift sheet (S) until there is enough air (T) beneath that they can lie down and embrace (U) until the sheet drifts down over them (V) and they become secluded in their own world of diffused light (W),while outside (X) two bees (Y)hover over peach tree flowers (Z).
Gregory Stapp
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