Yahoo! (A Lion, a Duke, the Tax-Rate Fungi) Yahoo! (A Lion, a Duke, the Tax-Rate Fungi)
If men read epic poetry in bed, And never change their Eeyore underwear, On bunny kidney they’ve unwisely fed: That’s whorehouse food, and most unwholesome fare. If lotus eaters kick spondaic asses, And love trochaic bunny ears the best, It starts a war between the lower classes And puts poetic hooey to the test. If op art poet laureates go bald, And end up haunting Fred on Scooby-Doo, It’s they who to a nunnery are hauled: They have some vinyl bunny ears for you. On Yahoo! you are only who you are, And no one there is anyone… so far.
Jul 27, 2011 / Books & the Arts / K. Silem Mohammad
Raisin Raisin
I dragged my twelve-year-old cousin to see the Broadway production of A Raisin in the Sun because the hip-hop mogul and rapping bachelor, Diddy, played the starring role. An aspiring rapper gave my cousin his last name and the occasional child support so I thought the boy would geek to see a pop hero in the flesh as Walter Lee. My wife was newly pregnant, and I was rehearsing, like Diddy swapping fictions, surrendering his manicured thug persona, for a more domestic performance. My cousin mostly yawned throughout the play. Except the moment Walter Lee’s tween son stiffened on stage, as if rapt by the sound of a roulette ball. Scene: no one breathes as Walter Lee vacillates, uncertain of obsequity or rage after Lindner offers to buy the family out of the house they’ve purchased in the all-white suburb. Walter might kneel to accept, but he senses the tension in his son’s gaze. I was thinking, for real though, what would Diddy do? “Get rich or die trying,” 50 Cent tells us. But then my father sang the country lyrics, “Don’t get above your raisin’,” when as a kid I vowed to be a bigger man than him. That oppressive fruit dropped big as a medicine ball in my lap meant to check my ego, and I imagined generations wimpling in succession like the conga marching raisins that sang Marvin’s hit song. Silly, I know. Outside the theater, my cousin told me when Diddy was two, they found his hustler dad draping a steering wheel in Central Park, a bullet in his head. I shared what I knew of dreams deferred and Marvin Gaye. (When asked if he loved his son, Marvin Sr. answered, “Let’s just say I didn’t dislike him.”) Beneath the bling of many billion diodes I walked beside the boy through Times Square as if anticipating a magic curtain that would rise, where only one of us would get to take a bow.
Jul 12, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Gregory Pardlo
Cayucos Cayucos
boats used by African emigrants to reach Spanish islands A girl asleep beneath a fishing net Sandals the color of tangerines Off the coast of Morocco A moonlit downpour, God’s skeleton Bark, dory, punt, skiff “Each with a soul full of scents” Day after day spent shaping A ball of wax into a canary Little lamp, little lamp The word “contraband” arrived In English in the 16th century via Spanish Throw your shadow overboard Proverbs, blessings scratched into wood The tar of my country better than the honey of others
Jun 28, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Eduardo C. Corral
Oreo Oreo
Miriam felt that a wolf spider was stalking our pet cricket, Oreo who lives in a small indented "crouching pit" next to the refrigerator So I followed the spider’s wanderings then put a glass jar atop slid a paper underneath & carried it out to the garden She pointed out that Oreo had halted its chirping while the wolf was on the floor then resumed when I carried it out: When the wolf peeks through the door-jamb no more baaing from the lamb
Jun 15, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Ed Sanders
Whimbrel Whimbrel
Kin to the limpkin, she whimpers when primping, wears rimless eyeglasses for skimming her primer on swimming. She splashes through grasses amassing her ration of shrimp, and stands, a fat ampersand, on the sandpaper strand making eyes at a snipe, fanning the passions of the sandpiper nations.
Jun 7, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Sidney Wade
Onderdunk Road Onderdunk Road
from the Iroquois Museum came the story of a sky woman who fell thru the clouds and was caught by geese who set her down on a turtle’s back. Thus, people came on Bear Road there were no bears on Schoolhouse Road only a swamp on the state highway freight trucks roared past us for half a mile and on Red Barn Road somebody had recently painted a barn red and there the mud-covered cows charged toward us and waited for a word at the hot-wired fence we told them we meant Helios no offense weeping willow trees were always close to houses while lichen-covered, crag-wrinkled trees had faces to be seen, recognized on them all these barns with roofs sagging like wet paper tear themselves down by decay unstitched nails pop from buckled walls under which the white ash and maple sprout when we came down from the hill where fog enshrouded us rushing water in culverts was loud but invisible
Jun 1, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Daniel Bouchard
Swarf Swarf
If you have seen the fine metallic filings flying onto the fellow who crimps copper into flashing and fashions pivot hinges from brass, you have seen it. This is not the late Bronze Age. There are no palace economies, only the economy of one man milling metal to earn the flimsy dollars that keep him fed. When you knock on his door he quiets the grindstone raises his polycarbonate visor and greets you swathed in a swarm of gold— not war gold or altar gold but the metalsmith’s hard-won residue: swarf.
May 18, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Erica Funkhouser
Kerf Kerf
What disappears when an eight-foot plank is sawn in half, yielding two less-than-four-foot boards, a solid term for what’s lost to the teeth of separation. Neither sawdust nor error, nor the labor of gremlins waiting to wreak havoc on perfectly accurate measurements. Kerf—you will know it by its absence, like divided attention. Small consolation: each board as it’s halved releases both sides of a single scent, limewood for linden, pine for pine.
May 18, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Erica Funkhouser
Hordes of trees with unpronounceable names poured down on our suburb Hordes of trees with unpronounceable names poured down on our suburb
As the seasons waned Collided with our own trees grown grassy with meditation Club-footed humilis draped in a coat borrowed from the wolf Quercus with its tympanums pierced by vindictive birds Oleaster black with the secretions of cemeteries We would wait for them with sticks, hatchets and bark-eating dogs Our widows pursued them howling The moon dumped its overload of stones and sparks on them They left without having parted the love-furrow of a single rose Without having touched the downy neck of a single honeysuckle Or showed their wounded knees to the healing beech tree They retreated to the river where they emptied their pockets full of beetles That they had intended for us We witnessed their rout through the town’s interstices From shafts of light kept for heat waves Hairy Disheveled And their sooty souls left traces on our laundry The mother’s heart went out to plebian trees To the elm that holds dreams back at hell’s gate To the golden-eyed arbutus Their photos on our walls replaced those of ancestors gone to graze on the mountains Of a brother who died for having written a book with the words of the pomegranate tree that splashed the doorstep with blood (Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker)
May 18, 2011 / Books & the Arts / VĂ©nus Khoury-Ghata
Ode Ode
Blue jay vocalizes a clash on the color wheel, tulip heads removed one by one with a golf wedge. It’s something in the frequency. Expectations are high. There’s a reason they call it the nervous system. Someone in bed at 11 AM impersonates an empty house. Dear god. The sharpener’s dragged his cart from the shed. His bell rings out of the twelfth century to a neighborhood traumatizing its food with dull knives. A hammer creeps to the edge of a reno and peers over. Inching up its pole, a tentative flag. What is the source? Oh spring, my heart is in my mouth.
May 4, 2011 / Books & the Arts / Karen Solie