Return Return
January robin, I want you to live more than I want you to stay and I want you to stay more than I want to live. Stipple your frost-fitted feet on the crunchsqueak of the cornsnow lit up with its own freezing. Your chest like morning-mouth blood on the pillow for reasons I’d rather not know. Cold-cramped wing fly you to Iowa for half-safety for these climes will climb to your beak. And all we hear from is heat and melt. Let that rumor your feather, fling you far.
Jan 26, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Christopher Richards
Marriage Marriage
At the lowest stratum of Troy, beneath the Skaean Gates and broken dishes and bronze flakes as brittle as fallen leaves, Schliemann found a pair of toads in hibernation since the time of Hector and Andromache. To think of what survives!
Jan 21, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Devin Johnston
Koi Koi
Koi converse in slow circles of what we have not seen Mercy and the dark bottom of the pond The recirculating pump we call karma is only a sound and mysterious as well being A comforting surrounding to lives of endless destinations
Jan 21, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Allan Peterson
Gunboy Gunboy
killing the child said became like drinking water clean or clean enough though one says that one is part of everything there is a conflict there is a resistance involved this for that that life for this a finger to the lips or to the trigger the revolver is vulgar in the boy’s hands decorated with beads the weapon turns over like a word on the tongue bella bellum the war of all against all the beauty of all against all to emerge from emergency form out of force equal to all those bodies bathed in that free water
Jan 7, 2015 / Books & the Arts / Beth Bachmann
Salt Song Salt Song
—Zunis make shrines on the way to a lake where I emerge and Miwoks gather me out of pools along the Pacific the cheetah thirsts for me and when you sprinkle me on rib eye you have no idea how I balance silence with thunder in crystal you dream of butterfly hunting in Madagascar spelunking through caves echoing with dripping stalactites and you don’t see how I yearn to shimmer an orange aurora against flame look at me in your hand in Egypt I scrubbed the bodies of kings and queens in Pakistan I zigzag upward through twenty-six miles of tunnels before drawing my first breath in sunlight if you heat a kiln to 2380 degrees and scatter me inside I vaporize and bond with clay in this unseen moment a potter prays because my pattern is out of his hands and when I touch your lips you salivate and when I dissolve on your tongue your hair rises ozone unlocks a single stroke of lightning sizzles to earth—
Dec 23, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Arthur Sze
Barber Barber
From the hotel in Martyrs’ Square we drive west into Achrafieh in search of a barber, where I learn there are four words for barber— three of which are spit out, the last of which—coiffeur—anoints the tongue with its mellifluence, like the milky coffee served by the small African woman who never stops bending and refilling. We sit with a group of men wearing three-piece suits fingering their prayer beads and crosses and watch a man, larger than most, giggle through his haircut. He has some advice for what I ought to do with my sideburns. They are too long, and my beard, it is not good, there are ways to fix this, and so these men, who in another time would have other advice, and other things to offer, gather around to officiate as my coiffeur takes a blade to my neck, and gently trims until my head is as smooth and perfumed as a past which is not past, but present.
Dec 16, 2014 / Books & the Arts / John Freeman
The Osprey The Osprey
or sea-eagle, what the guidebook says is white, grayish brown, and “possessed of weak eye- masks” in its non-migratory island instance, is blue. Blue, riding thermal bands so low over the water it picks up the water’s color, reticulate tarsi tipping the light crests; and picks up one of the silver fish cutting the surface there, so the fish is blue, too, flapping-gone- slack in the grasp of its claws—as only the owl shares an outer reversible toe-talon, turned out for such clutching; as the water, in turn, picks up the sky- depth reflective blue sent down from ages beyond, into which the osprey lifts now without a least turning of wing-chord though “they are able to bend the joint in their wing to shield their eyes from the light”; what I mean is, by the time I tell you this it’s gone: fish-and-bird, this “bone-breaker,” brown or gray “diurnal raptor,” back into the higher trades. Someday, too, this blue—
Nov 25, 2014 / Books & the Arts / David Baker
Transmission Transmission
So he who strongly feels, behaves. —Marianne Moore You find in an alley the mouthpiece of a flute. Gossip alone makes music and suddenly from the pines the birds all fly away. You are devoted to giving clear meaning to one movement. The water in the fountain. Down the fountain. Over it. The prayer chapel but its brick bench. Magnolias in almost bloom. The failure to believe in mathematics is a failure of emotion— you have spent all of your free time. Choral directors describe the torso in terms of the muscles of sound. Your wife paints your two-year-old’s fingernails and the two-year-old says, toes too! Sitting next to an anthill feels like this. They work so hard. And for so little. For salvation. This is the mystery. This is forgiveness.
Nov 25, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Gary L. McDowell
Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Noon ictus cooling the veranda’s fretwork the child sits after his harp boning burlesque in the bower, his slit of gulls nerves silenced into hydrangea. Violet and roan, the bridal sun is opening and closing a window, filling a clay pot of coins with coins; candle jars, a crystal globe, cut milk boxes with horn petals snapping their iceberg-Golgotha crackle. The loneliness is terrible, the ice is near, says the hasp-lipped devil, casting beatitudes at the castor-oiled pimps in Parliament, Pray for them, joyfully, their amazing death! Light seethes bulging like pipes blown with napalm from his big golden eyes turning the afternoon ten degrees backwards, then through palm fronds’ teething the bridled air, sprigs of goat hair fall.
Nov 11, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Ishion Hutchinson
Some Like It Hot Some Like It Hot
So regret her divined blemishes, smoking, drinking, having dated the wrong men, the wrong sex: Sugar’s top-lit in the spotlight (breasts, breasts) and what could be more innocent than someone begging to be loved?
Nov 5, 2014 / Books & the Arts / Sarah Trudgeon