9.25.15

For a while I was submitting to magazines (online, principally) hoping to get some work published. I stopped trying to get in print, but still enjoy the work that online journals bring.

The other day I was following links that took me to Puerto del Sol. I don't know how it compares to the square in Madrid that I visited, but I did enjoy the work. You can buy the issues to enjoy, or check out their blog. I chose to share with you from their PdS Black Voices series, some work by Elizabeth Acevedo.

These three poems are featured, and below is some commentary. I wanted to share them the same way they appear, because it feels intentional and they go well together.



Regularization Plan for Foreigners, 1922



Trujillo says: I will fix this.
And so the man digs the ditches.
The dirt packs beneath his nails and when his wife kisses
his fingers at night she tells him they smell just like graves.


He holds her close, his bella negra of accented Spanish,
who does not think how a single word pronounced wilted
could force him to dig a ditch for her.


Some nights, he dreams of yellowed eyes. Of sweat-drenched
dark brows. Bodies stacked like bricks
building a wall that slices through the sky.


Borders are not as messy as people think.


They are clear, marked by ditches, by people face down,
head-to-ankle skin-linked fences: Do Not Cross.


Puedes ser nada disfrazado en piel y pelo?

He’s learned to turn his ears down like a donkey
when the children of Haitians plead, Yo soy Dominicano.


At best they’re mules,
El Jefe tells the ditch digger, who is glad
he was born on this side of the flag. This remedy will continue,
El Jefe says. And so the ditch digger repeats the instructions
like a refrain for cutting cane:


aim low, strike wide, look away as the open earth swallows them.







Mami Came to this Country as a Nanny



and around the same time she tells me i can’t walk
the house wearing only panties anymore,
she teaches me how to hand wash them in the sink.
tsking that washing machines
don’t launder as well as a good knuckling,
she drops soap on the crotch, folds the fabric
on itself and shows me how one end
pulls out the stains of the other;
detergent, and fabric, and hands against hands
make the seemingly most dirty material clean again.
no menstrual cycle ever made me more woman
in mami’s eyes than this learning how to wash my own ass,
this turning of the shower rod into a garland of intimates.
this memory tighten my fist that first week of freshman year
when katie kerr’s mother, who has a throat made for real pearls,
points her unsoftened mouth at me, letting loose the sullied words:
you better take care of Katie, she’s always had help.
and i have to blink, and blink, and blink but leave unmentioned
all the ways my hands have learned to care for things like her.



Beloved


It’s easy to forget a pot of beans when you’re numb.
The burning crinkled my nose but I didn’t stir,
so when you come home

after work asking, did you hear the verdict?
I can only tell you I forgot to lower the heat,
that the stovetop stained where the beans split open


and pushed out from their skins; the boiling pot
sputtering blue-black water I can’t bring myself
to clean.


Cubans call the dish Moros y Cristianos
a name tied back to the time
when the North Africans conquered Spain.


No one knows why the Cubans named it that,
named their most popular meal
after black power. I think they were being hopeful.


We say a silent grace over plain white rice.
And I wonder if you, like me, pray for an unborn
child we’ve already imagined shot in the chest.


Tonight, no music plays and for the first time since I
learned to cook I understand
a meal can be a eulogy of mouthfuls.


Neither one of us scrubs the stove. Some things
deserve to be smudged. Ungleamingly remembered.

I kinda hate to say I like the prettiness of a poem, especially when it is about ugly or heavy things, but I do think these are beautiful. I also like how they are about everyday things tinged with more--laundry, cooking, outdoor work like digging ditches or cutting sugar cane. Poetry doesn't need to be about grand things, but sometimes the grand things can be reflected in the smaller, everyday things. 

If you want your voice to be part of a bigger picture of American voices, consider submitting to Juan Felipe Hererra's La Casa de Colores project. The current poet laureate is working with the library of congress to accept up to 200 words per person per month on a theme, this month's theme being "Family". The pieces will be worked into a larger, epic poem for all voices. Since we all live in a house of colors together, that makes us a family, so the epic poem will be titled "La Familia". If you submit, please share what you chose!

9.22.15

Drive-by poem:




The Praying Tree


Melinda Palacio




Ten years of driving the same highway, past the same tree, the picture is
at last complete. The eucalyptus tree and narrow birds above a blessed
steel sea with no thoughts of yesterday, today, or tomorrow.

Black cormorants on bare branches spread their wings as if in prayer.
A sunny day in Summerland and the tree, visible only from the highway,
hides its penitent perch from cars racing by too fast.

Four wheels swerve to avoid a sheer cliff, southbound on the 101.
The fat sun slides its yolk into the glass ocean. Slow down, see
an empty nest of woven round sticks in the praying tree.

Birds soak in rays without fear of melanoma or the nature
of forgiveness. Slick imperfections, wet wings
open and close in Morse code for goodbye.

9.21.15

This weekend words kinda goes with two others, but I'm not in love with them yet, so you'll have to wait.

9-16-15

I take breaths

and agree to forget what I promised

myself today.

My mouth salivates

and it tastes like copper.

I wonder at my street value--

unnoticed until I spark, perhaps,

is my pretty delusion.

Rather, it is raining

and we study the sidewalks closely

they demand no words of us

and no breaths.

9.15.15

No weekend words, since I didn't write anything of note this weekend.

I have been thinking about the current refugee crisis, and hoping to learn a little more about the people involved, specifically the artists and writers. Not that the others are less important, but because words are powerful for me (powerful, period) and I was hoping to share some work.

Despite studying Arabic, I doubt I could bring you any of their untranslated work, since we'd not be able to enjoy it as well. So I thought I'd bring up some work in English to enjoy. First, a young lady who lives in Denver who is a Syrian-American slam poet named Amal Kassir. Since most of her work is slam, there are a ton of videos, but that's not my preferred medium.



BNV finals: Denver round four

I tried to keep my mouth shut
But my tongue did not have any more room
For scars
In the shape of my teeth

“Limbs of what was once my family lay in my arms
My throat was stolen
My blood screams
Seven generations tortured
Lord, send angel Israel to guard the souls
Let them know that they are still living
And let the living hear the anthem of something
I know my people are here
Even though I can not see my people
I can hear my people

We are speaking as one
The tyrant inside of me is ravenous
Forty-one year old rotting hands bedazzled
With rings of oil drums
And gems of blood
Grinding at my veins
I tried to keep my mouth shut
But my tongue did not have any more room
For scars
In the shape of my teeth

March 2011; we have been reborn
A social infant screaming,
‘Let us live!
We will speak until throats are raw!
Until all of Syria is in the news!’

The dates will read like obituaries
The dates are coming towards us
The dates are coming towards us
The dates
Mashaallah, where?
The dates
The dates
The dates keep coming
Then men are not moving!
Why are the men not moving?!
Why are you not moving?
Why are you not moving?
They are all lying

La ostata’ an taslem! [I can not give up]
Lan taslem! [Don’t give up]
You can shoot, blood, push, stab, rape, bomb, break me
I will not fall
Stalin, McCarthy, Hiroshima me
I will not fall
Lie, shackle, battle, sweatshop me
Refugee, water board, oppress me
Textbook-capture, Tutsi me
You will try to crack my rib shotgun
But the bending of my knees belongs to my Lord

Lord, allow Hades to light a fire in my chest
On days you didn’t ignite the Sun
When nails are torn from bloody hands
When mother is ripped from son
When the last Damascus rose
Is stripped of all her colour
When I am left clutching out for the last mirage of a broken land
I can not fall
I. Will. Not. Fall.

There will be a time when we can eat together
When we will build homes out of abandoned tanks
Peace is a rusted recoil
We will sip from the cups made of old grenades
And shades of green are only worn by nature
There will be a time when the fences choose to sit with us
Instead of standing between us

Ameen

This article highlights work inspired by the current conflict. Ghada Alatrash is a Canadian translator who is working with poets to get their words out, apparently at considerable danger to themselves as some poets have been imprisoned. (Check out Ghada's book of translations of Lebanese poems So that the Poem Remains three dollars on Google!) Here is a piece she has translated:

When I am Overcome By Weakness

by Najat Abdul Samad 

When I am overcome with weakness, I bandage my heart with a woman’s patience in adversity. I bandage it with the upright posture of a Syrian woman who is not bent by bereavement, poverty, or displacement as she rises from the banquets of death and carries on shepherding life’s rituals. She prepares for a creeping, ravenous winter and gathers the heavy firewood branches, stick by stick from the frigid wilderness. She does not cut a tree, does not steal, does not surrender her soul to weariness, does not ask anyone’s charity, does not fold with the load, and does not yield midway.

I bandage my heart with the determination of that boy they hit with an electric stick on his only kidney until he urinated blood. Yet he returned and walked in the next demonstration.

I bandage it with the steadiness of a child’s steps in the snow of a refugee camp, a child wearing a small black shoe on one foot and a large blue sandal on the other, wandering off and singing to butterflies flying in the sunny skies, butterflies and skies seen only by his eyes.

I bandage it with December’s frozen tree roots, trees that have sworn to blossom in March or April.

I bandage it with the voice of reason that was not affected by a proximate desolation.

I bandage it with veins whose warm blood has not yet been spilled on the surface of our sacred soil.

I bandage it with what was entrusted by our martyrs, with the conscience of the living, and with the image of a beautiful homeland envisioned by the eyes of the poor.

I bandage it with the outcry: “Death and not humiliation.”

The poetry of war is always a tough study, as it makes so painfully beautiful objects and images which are inherently ugly. I hope we can share some more work from the voices of this (and other) conflicts. 

9.13.15

This poem is the last entry in Philip Levine's chapbook Ashes. I made a note after it "what a way to deal with nostalgia", but now I think a better description is "what a way to look at the unknown".  This is Lost and Found:


A light wind beyond the window,
and the trees swimming
in the golden morning air.
Last night for hours I thought
of a boy lost in a huge city,
a boy in search of someone
lost and not returning. I thought
how long it takes to believe
the simple facts of our lives--
that certain losses are final,
death is one, childhood another.
It was dark and the house creaked
as though we'd set sail for
a port beyond the darkness.
I must have dozed in my chair
and wakened to see the dim shapes
of orange tree and fig against
a sky turned gray, and a few
doves were moaning from the garden.
The night that seemed so final
had ended, and this dawn becoming
day was changing moment
by moment--for now there
was blue above, and the tall grass
was streaked and blowing, the quail
barked from their hidden nests.
Why give up anything? Someone
is always coming home, turning
a final corner to behold the house
that had grown huge in absence
now dull and shrunken, but the place
where he had come of age, still
dear and like no other. I have
come home from being lost,
home to a name I could accept,
a face that saw all I saw
and broke in a dark room against
a wall that heard all my secrets
and gave nothing back. Now he
is home, the one I searched for.
He is beside me as he always
was, a light spirit that brings
me luck and listens when I speak.
The day is here, and it will last
forever or until the sun fails
and the birds are once again
hidden and moaning, but for now
the lost are found. The sun
has cleared the trees, the wind
risen, and we, father and child
hand in hand, the living and
the dead, are entering the world.




The work keeps moving between sentences/verses via enjambment. The sentence may end in the middle of a verse, but the next one continues over the gap. Lost and found to me is a continuum in this context, rather than two states of being, but the vacillation between the two states until they reach equilibrium. I like what this means for us, that as we are in the present, it is merely a passing state but that the past and future will be as well.

9.8.15

A perfect offering in my email for Labor day, although it has passed:




Work Gangs


by Carl Sandburg


Box cars run by a mile long.
And I wonder what they say to each other
When they stop a mile long on a sidetrack.
  Maybe their chatter goes:
I came from Fargo with a load of wheat up to the danger line.
I came from Omaha with a load of shorthorns and they splintered my         
 boards.
I came from Detroit heavy with a load of flivvers.
I carried apples from the Hood river last year and this year bunches of       
bananas from Florida; they look for me with watermelons from              
 Mississippi next year.
 
Hammers and shovels of work gangs sleep in shop corners
when the dark stars come on the sky and the night watchmen walk and    
  look.
 
Then the hammer heads talk to the handles,
then the scoops of the shovels talk,
how the day’s work nicked and trimmed them,
how they swung and lifted all day,
how the hands of the work gangs smelled of hope.  
In the night of the dark stars
when the curve of the sky is a work gang handle,
in the night on the mile long sidetracks,
in the night where the hammers and shovels sleep in corners,
the night watchmen stuff their pipes with dreams—
and sometimes they doze and don’t care for nothin’,
and sometimes they search their heads for meanings, stories,                         
stars.
  The stuff of it runs like this:
A long way we come; a long way to go; long rests and long deep sniffs          
 for our lungs on the way.
Sleep is a belonging of all; even if all songs are old songs and the                 
 singing heart is snuffed out like a switchman’s lantern with the oil          
gone, even if we forget our names and houses in the finish, the secret     
 of sleep is left us, sleep belongs to all, sleep is the first and last and         
 best of all.        
 
People singing; people with song mouths connecting with song                       
hearts; people who must sing or die; people whose song hearts                
 break if there is no song mouth; these are my people.

9.4.15

Weekend words, right on time. Enjoy the tremendous weekend.

9-1-15

Every time I take my mortality in my hands

and let it go like shards of chert

I breathe out someone else’s dust

or ash, or vapor.

Tilted up in a vortex where I kept it,

lungs are an hourglass.

But today it rained

and the tops of puddles are a wrinkled crepe.

Drove into the valley, also folded

each layer a kink of memory,

each fold a repository for sediment.

There I can set free

the pieces I’m not sure if I will miss.

9.2.15

A triptych of death and memory.

As usual, these things seem to come together and nestle well inside and next to each other. All of these works spoke to me with their sonic backgrounds, and the physical items that make up the memories of the lost. Similarly to "what do you want on your tombstone?", I wonder, what are the items and sounds that will be connected to our memories after we die?


Only as the Day is Long


by Dorianne Laux



Soon she will be no more than a passing thought,
a pang, a timpani of wind in the chimes, bent spoons
hung from the eaves on a first night in a new house
on a street where no dog sings, no cat visits
a neighbor cat in the middle of the street, winding
and rubbing fur against fur, throwing sparks. 

Her atoms are out there, circling the earth, minus
her happiness, minus her grief, only her body’s
water atoms, her hair and bone and teeth atoms,
her fleshy atoms, her boozy atoms, her saltines
and cheese and tea, but not her piano concerto
atoms, her atoms of laughter and cruelty, her atoms
of lies and lilies along the driveway and her slippers,
Lord her slippers, where are they now?

The Rule of Opulence

Kadijah Queen

Bamboo shoots on my grandmother’s side path
grow denser every year they’re harvested for nuisance.
Breezes peel blush and white petals from her magnolia,
lacing unruly roots in the spring grass. For nine decades
she has seen every season stretch out of shape, this past
Connecticut winter slow to relinquish cold. As a girl
she herded slow turkeys on her Aunt Nettie’s farm, fifty acres
in a Maryland county that didn’t plumb until midcentury,
plucking chickens and pheasants from pre-dawn
into the late night, scratching dough
for neighbors, relatives stopping by for biscuits, and the view
from my window changes. It’s Mother’s Day
and I’d always disbelieved permanence—newness a habit,
change an addiction—but the difficulty of staying put
lies not in the discipline of upkeep, as when my uncle chainsaws
hurricane-felled birches blocking the down-sloped driveway,
not in the inconvenience of well water
slowing showers and night flushes, not in yellowjackets
colonizing the basement, nuzzling into a hole
so small only a faint buzz announces their invasion
when violin solos on vinyl end, but in the opulence of acres
surrounding a tough house, twice repaired from fires, a kitchen
drawer that hasn’t opened properly in thirty years marked Danger,
nothing more permanent than the cracked flagstone
path to the door, the uneven earth shifting invisibly beneath it.

Enough

Ellen Bass

Enough seen….Enough had....Enough…
                            —Arthur Rimbaud

No. It will never be enough. Never
enough wind clamoring in the trees,
sun and shadow handling each leaf, never enough clang
of my neighbor hammering,
the iron nails, relenting wood, sound waves
lapping over roofs, never enough
bees purposeful at the throats
of lilies. How could we be replete
with the flesh of ripe tomatoes, the unique
scent of their crushed leaves. It would take many
births to be done with the thatness of that.

Oh blame life. That we just want more.
Summer rain. Mud. A cup of tea.
Our teeth, our eyes. A baby in a stroller.
Another spoonful of crème brûlée, sweet burnt crust crackling.
And hot showers, oh lovely, lovely hot showers.

Today was a good day.
My mother-in-law sat on the porch, eating crackers and cheese
with a watered-down margarita
and though her nails are no longer stop-light red
and she can’t remember who’s alive and dead,
still, this was a day
with no weeping, no unstoppable weeping.

Last night, through the small window of my laptop,
I watched a dying man kill himself in Switzerland.
He wore a blue shirt and snow was falling
onto a small blue house, onto dark needles of pine and fir.
He didn’t step outside to feel the snow on his face.
He sat at a table with his wife and drank poison.

Online I found a plastic bag complete with Velcro
and a hole for a tube to a propane tank. I wouldn’t have to
move our Weber. I could just slide
down the stucco to the flagstones, where the healthy
weeds are sprouting through the cracks.
Maybe it wouldn’t be half-bad
to go out looking at the yellowing leaves of the old camellia.
And from there I could see the chickens scratching—
if we still have chickens then. And yet…

this little hat of life, how will I bear
to take it off while I can still reach up? Snug woolen watch cap,
lacy bonnet, yellow cloche with the yellow veil
I wore the Easter I turned thirteen when my mother let me promenade
with Tommy Spagnola on the boardwalk in Atlantic City.

Oxygen, oxygen, the cry of the body—and you always want to give it
what it wants. But I must say no—
enough, enough
with more tenderness
than I have ever given to a lover, the gift
of the nipple hardening under my fingertip, more
tenderness than to my newborn,
when I held her still flecked
with my blood. I’ll say the most gentle refusal
to this dear dumb animal and tighten
the clasp around my throat that once was kissed and kissed
until the blood couldn’t rest in its channel, but rose
to the surface like a fish that couldn’t wait to be caught.

9.1.15

Yes, rut, yes. Here's some distraction while I do the work.




Tell me Something Good


by Ocean Vuong

You are standing in the minefield again.
Someone who is dead now

told you it is where you will learn
to dance. Snow on your lips like a salted

cut, you leap between your deaths, black as god’s
periods. Your arms cleaving little wounds

in the wind. You are something made. Then made
to survive, which means you are somebody’s

son. Which means if you open your eyes, you’ll be back
in that house, beneath a blanket printed with yellow sailboats.

Your mother’s boyfriend, his bald head ringed with red
hair, like a planet on fire, kneeling

by your bed again. Air of whiskey & crushed
Oreos. Snow falling through the window: ash returned

from a failed fable. His spilled-ink hand
on your chest. & you keep dancing inside the minefield—

motionless. The curtains fluttering. Honeyed light
beneath the door. His breath. His wet blue face: earth

spinning in no one’s orbit. & you want someone to say Hey…Hey
I think your dancing is gorgeous. A little waltz to die for,

darling. You want someone to say all this
is long ago. That one night, very soon, you’ll pack a bag

with your favorite paperback & your mother’s .45,
that the surest shelter was always the thoughts

above your head. That it’s fair—it has to be—
how our hands hurt us, then give us

the world. How you can love the world
until there’s nothing left to love

but yourself. Then you can stop.
Then you can walk away—back into the fog

-walled minefield, where the vein in your neck adores you
to zero. You can walk away. You can be nothing

& still breathing. Believe me.

I don't normally include context, but the little blurb about the poem is really vivid: 

“I think when I write, I often write to the terrified versions of myself—which, for whatever reason, makes me think of fire escapes. What if a poem was all fire escape—and no building, all bones for departure? Maybe this poem is a fire escape. Maybe some fire escapes are carried inside us.”—Ocean Vuong

Here's a link to an essay of Ocean's, if you'd like to read more about poems as fire escapes. I know I would.

Here's a few more by Vuong. The links are because they're long and formatting-heavy.

Aubade with Burning City

On Earth we're Briefly Gorgeous

Prayer for the Newly Damned

Eurydice 


It’s more like the sound
a doe makes
when the arrowhead
replaces the day
with an answer to the rib’s
hollowed hum. We saw it coming
but kept walking through the hole
in the garden. Because the leaves
were bright green & the fire
only a pink brushstroke
in the distance. It’s not
about the light—but how dark
it makes you depending
on where you stand.
Depending on where you stand
his name can appear like moonlight
shredded in a dead dog’s fur.
His name changed when touched
by gravity. Gravity breaking
our kneecaps just to show us
the sky. We kept saying Yes—
even with all those birds.
Who would believe us
now? My voice cracking
like bones inside the radio.
Silly me. I thought love was real
& the body imaginary.
But here we are—standing
in the cold field, him calling
for the girl. The girl
beside him. Frosted grass
snapping beneath her hooves.