Tracy K. Smith - Wade in the Water

                 for the Geechee Gullah Ring Shouters

One of the women greeted me.

I love you, she said. She didn't

Know me, but I believed her,

And a terrible new ache

Rolled over in my chest,

Like in a room where the drapes

Have been swept back. I love you,

I love you, as she continued

Down the hall past other strangers,

Each feeling pierced suddenly

By pillars of heavy light.

I love you, throughout

The performance, in every

Handclap, every stomp.

I love you in the rusted iron

Chains someone was made

To drag until love let them be

Unclasped and left empty

In the center of the ring.

I love you in the water

Where they pretended to wade,

Singing that old blood-deep song

That dragged us to those banks

And cast us in. I love you,

The angles of it scraping at

Each throat, shouldering past

The swirling dust motes

In those beams of light

That whatever we now knew

We could let ourselves feel, knew

To climb. O Woods—O Dogs—                       

O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run—

O Miraculous Many Gone—

O Lord—O Lord—O Lord—

Is this love the trouble you promised?

Kevin Killian - Pickpocket

Last night whistling I passed

by their alley, saw them in a

sidelong blink of light from

traffic, a speeding car, then

I went home. Dreamed of

gold skies, black money.  I

felt so stupid, to talk

about them feels stupid.  I’m

the sullen red Sun.

Bernadette leans from tenement

windows, sailors keep searching

world after world for

Bernadette, and her arms

are black, her outstretched

proffered palms all milky.

From them coins drop into

Pickpocket’s pockets freely.

Pickpocket’s face is pocked, his

arms are pocked.  I threw

his face in a lake to make it

ripple, he smokes a

cigar to an orange hot hole in

his face, a glow.  At night

the Sun’s a kid brought behind

the woodshed and abased.

Eileen Myles - Tasha

She prefers
my phone &

using my
computer
w out the burden
of her life
last night
I described
it open
a circle
she kisses
my knee
its life
that is
my name
they thought
she had
a lot
I think
it’s enough
I mean
it’s astonishing
if I had (his)
I could
feel everything
but as it is
I know
what it is
I love your
lips.

Mary Jean Chan - The Window

after Marie Howe

Once in a lifetime, you will gesture

at an open window, tell the one who

detests the queerness in you that dead

daughters do not disappoint, free your

sore knees from inching towards a kind
of reprieve, declare yourself genderless

as hawk or sparrow: an encumbered body

let loose from its cage. You will refuse your

mother’s rage, her spit, her tongue heavy
like the heaviest of stones. Your mother’s

anger is like the sun, which is like love,
which is the easiest thing – even on the

hardest of days. You will linger, knowing
that this standing before an open window

is what the living do, that they sometimes
reconsider at the slightest touch of grace.

Hart Crane - Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step, and know

Recesses for it from the fury of the street,

Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,

Facing the dull squint with what innocence

And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

And through all sound of gaiety and quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

Jonathan Edwards - Bridge

Me? I get up early, see. I like
the hour or so before the cars arrive,
the city sleeping there over my shoulder,
the early morning sky that is all mine,
a few gulls spelling Mmmm out with their bodies.
I make the most of that because, by nine,

I bear the city’s weight here on my back,
all these commuting cars and belching vans.
I hold my nose and try to keep control
with traffic lights: they lean out of their windows
to swear, to drop their rubbish, spit on me,
to smoke a cigarette and flick a burning

bit on me. The days I like the best
are Sundays, when I just lie in all day.
The acupuncture of a gentle moped,
or this hand-holding couple, afternoon,
who linger at my apex, make my view
the background to their love. I’ve heard it said

our card is marked, our day is done, what with
advances in technology, hot air
balloon and tunnels, gravity, but this
is human, really, to look at the distance
from here to there and say, well, what’s the shortest
that could be? I do not like the nights:

the river’s tinnitus, and the low hum
a taxi engine makes is like a dream
of my own snoring. Worst are those who come
to visit at that hour. Here, tonight,
a young man walks alone towards my middle,
dumb-belling a Scotch bottle underarm:

he reaches midway, looks down at the river,
then clambers over, stands there on the ledge
and holds on tight. I feel his warm touch there.
Oh souls, believe me, I’d never let go
if I could choose. I know by heart, exactly
what it is to just have too much weight to bear.

Liz Berry - Highbury Park

In the woods at night men are fucking
amongst the gorgeous piñatas of the rhododendrons,
the avenue of cool limes.
By day I walk my son down the secret pathways,
smell the salt rime of sex on the wind,
a condom glowing with blossomy cum,
knotted and flung; I bury it gently
under the moss with my boots.
I envy them, these lovers, dark pines
beneath their knees, the tarry earth
opaline with the desire paths of snails,
fallen feathers in the dirt like warnings.
I know those days of aching to be touched
by no-one who knows you.
After he was born I wanted nothing but the wind
to hold me, the soft-mouthed breeze
coaxing my skin like the grass
from a trampled field.
How heavenly it seemed then, light shafting
emerald through wounded leaves,
the woods a church, we its worshippers,
and all that sex - freed from love and duty -
like being taken by the wind, swept
from the cloistered rooms of your life,
stripped and blown,
then jilted dazzling in the arms of the trees.

Louise Glück - Anniversary

I said you could snuggle. That doesn’t mean

your cold feet all over my dick.

Someone should teach you how to act in bed.

What I think is you should

keep your extremities to yourself.

Look what you did—

you made the cat move.

            But I didn’t want your hand there.

            I wanted your hand here.

            You should pay attention to my feet.

            You should picture them

            the next time you see a hot fifteen year old.

            Because there’s a lot more where those feet come from.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil - Baked Goods

Flour on the floor makes my sandals

slip and I tumble into your arms.

Too hot to bake this morning but

blueberries begged me to fold them

into moist muffins. Sticks of rhubarb

plotted a whole pie. The windows

are blown open and a thickfruit tang

sneaks through the wire screen

and into the home of the scowly lady

who lives next door. Yesterday, a man

in the city was rescued from his apartment

which was filled with a thousand rats.

Something about being angry because

his pet python refused to eat. He let the bloom

of fur rise, rise over the little gnarly blue rug,

over the coffee table, the kitchen countertops

and pip through each cabinet, snip

at the stumpy bags of sugar,

the cylinders of salt. Our kitchen is a riot

of pots, wooden spoons, melted butter.

So be it. Maybe all this baking will quiet

the angry voices next door, if only

for a brief whiff. I want our summers

to always be like this—a kitchen wrecked

with love, a table overflowing with baked goods

warming the already warm air. After all the pots

are stacked, the goodies cooled, and all the counters

wiped clean—let us never be rescued from this mess.

Raymond Antrobus - Echo

                                  1

My ear amps whistle like they are singing

to Echo, goddess of noise,

the raveled knot of tongues,

of blaring birds, consonant crumbs

of dull doorbells, sounds swamped

in my misty hearing aid tubes.

Gaudí believed in holy sound

and built a cathedral to contain it,

pulling hearing men from their knees

as though atheism is a kind of deafness.

Who would turn down God?

Even though I have not heard

the golden decibels of angels,

I have been living in a noiseless

palace where the doorbell is pulsating

light and I am able to answer.

                                      2

What?

a word that keeps looking

in mirrors like it is in love

with its own volume.

What?

I am a one-word question,

a one-man

patience test.

What?

What language

would we speak

without ears?

What?

Is paradise

a world where

I hear everything?

What?

How will my brain

know what to hold

if it has too many arms?

                                      3

The day I clear out my dead father’s flat,

I throw away boxes of molding LPs, Garvey,

Malcolm X, Mandela, speeches on vinyl.

I find a TDK cassette tape on the shelf,

smudged green label Raymond Speaking.

I play the tape in his vintage cassette player

and hear my two-year-old voice chanting my name Antrob

and dad’s laughter crackling in the background

not knowing I couldn’t hear the word “bus”

and wouldn’t until I got my hearing aids.

Now I sit here listening to the space of deafness — 

Antrob Antrob Antrob

                                      4

And no one knew what I was missing

until a doctor gave me a handful of Legos

and said to put a brick on the table

every time I heard a sound.

After the test I still held enough bricks

in my hand to build a house

and call it my sanctuary,

call it the reason I sat in saintly silence

during my grandfather’s sermons when he preached

the good news, I only heard

as Babylon’s babbling echoes.

                                      5

          And if you don’t catch nothing

          then something wrong with your ears —

          they been tuned to de wrong frequency

                                   — Kei Miller

So maybe I belong to the universe

underwater, where all songs

are smeared wailings for Salacia,

goddess of saltwater, healer

of infected ears, which is what the doctor

thought I had, since deafness

did not run in the family

but came from nowhere,

so they syringed in olive oil

and saltwater, and we all waited

to see what would come out.