3.31.16

The context for this poem isn't necessary, but lovely. The moral might be, meet your heroes. I wanted to share this poem immediately after reading. The way the key conjunctions, nicely italicized for us, might be part of a lesson in poetics with this composed as an example piece, kind of makes me smile. The asterisks are like bullet points, but I read much more than just a lesson here, of course, and the contrast between that straightforward list feeling and asking the universe to bend to our normal conventions is grand. If the conjunctions are part of the lesson, what are the other italicized parts? 

Atlantic Elegy

Julie Marie Wade

We see a little farther now and a little farther still

—C. D. Wright


I ask the rain to remit, but not because I am ungrateful
A raincheck for the rain—is such a thing possible?

In Florida, even the cold is warm by comparison
We sit at the ocean’s lip as it licks the sand from our toes

Consider instead—the terrifying beauty of alternative

*
I ask the sun to pumice our faces, blind us humble and good
Incumbent sun, so long accustomed to winning the stars’ wars

Consider although—like trying to whistle with a mouth full of Saltines

We only know what we know
We only see what we see
*

I ask the space to persist after the hyphen that separates
Birth from death, to leave the parenthesis like a gap tooth

Then to no one in particular, I say: What age is not a tender age?

*
This hapless haptic misses her Blackberry
Such tender buttons, were they not?
The tiny Underwood slick inside her pocket

*

I ask the lifeguard not to hang the purple flag
For jellyfish and sting rays and the floating terror

Imagine if that were your name!

Also answers to: bluebottle, Physalia physalis, man-of-war

*
Consider except—Luminara of a word—bag of sand with a light inside

Synonym for human perhaps?

*
I am not opposed to the idea of being lost—
like the red balloon, Mylar with a silver underside—
buoyed along these stubby waves

Consider forever—which is a trick command

A seagull tugs the string of the beached balloon
You see it more clearly now: a webbed design, the visage of Spiderman

*

When the rain comes, it is warm kisses, little white beads

Grown-ups stick their tongues out like children do
It’s not over till it’s over—and then, too soon

3.16.16

I liked these two poems together, although they are different enough. There are obvious comparisons, like the presence of flowers, water, the literal and figurative opening of human subjects, and how the living things outside our bodies can be inside our bodies as well. The second poem has an overt religious mention, and I am wont to find one in the first, although it is not overt. Do you find a religious theme in the first, or is it merely the tone that sounds like supplication/prayer? What do you find between these two works?



How to Prepare the Mind for Lightning


Brynn Saito



In the recesses of the woman’s mind
there is a warehouse. The warehouse
is covered with wisteria. The wisteria wonders


what it is doing in the mind of the woman.
The woman wonders too.
The river is raw tonight. The river is a calling


aching with want. The woman walks towards it
her arms unimpaired and coated
with moonlight. The wisteria wants the river.


It also wants the warehouse in the mind
of the woman, wants to remain in the ruins
though water is another kind of original ruin


determined in its structure and unpredictable.
The woman unlaces the light across her body.
She wades through the river while the twining

wisteria


bleeds from her mouth, her eyes, her wrist-veins,
her heart valve, her heart. The garden again
overgrows the body—called by the water


and carried by the woman to the wanting river.
When she bleeds the wisteria, the warehouse
in her mind is free and empty and the source


of all emptiness. It is free to house the night sky.
It is free like the woman to hold nothing
but the boundless, empty, unimaginable dark.

Cut Lillies 

Noah Warren



More than a hundred dollars of them.

It was pure folly. I had to find more glass things to stuff them in.

Now a white and purple cloud is breathing in each corner

of the room I love. Now a mass of flowers spills down my dining table—

each fresh-faced, extending its delicately veined leaves

into the crush. Didn’t I watch

children shuffle strictly in line, cradle

candles that dribbled hot white on their fingers,

chanting Latin—just to fashion Sevilla’s Easter? Wasn’t I sad? Didn’t I use to

go mucking through streambeds with the skunk cabbage raising

bursting violet spears? —Look, the afternoon dies

as night begins in the heart of the lilies and smokes up

their fluted throats until it fills the room

and my lights have to be not switched on.

And in close darkness the aroma grows so sweet,

so strong, that it could slice me open. It does.

I know I’m not the only one whose life is a conditional clause

hanging from something to do with spring and one tall room and the

tremble of my phone.

I’m not the only one that love makes feel like a dozen

flapping bedsheets being ripped to prayer flags by the wind.

When I stand in full sun I feel I have been falling headfirst for decades.

God, I am so transparent.

So light

3.10.16

There are a lot of themes cropping up lately that I want to share, and this doesn't fit in with any of them, but its a beautiful elegy. I will share some more by this author, here is his page. I often come to poets via their works, and usually come at them totally blind. So when I look the author up, sometimes I am surprised to find a face that looks different than the voice, or than what I expected. I was quite surprised to see that the author, Malachi Black is a fairly young man, considering his accolades and poetic cv. 

From Bildungsroman

  i.m. Scott David Campbell (1982-2012)

Streetlights were our stars,
hanging from the midnight   
                                       in a planetary arc
above each empty ShopRite   
parking lot—spreading    
                                       steam-bright
through the neon dark—
buzzing like ghost locusts,
                                       trembling in the chrome
trance of an electrical charge
nested in each exoskeleton—
                                        pulling, pooling
a single syllable of light
from the long braid     
                                        of the powerlines
sighing above us as we climbed   
through bedroom windows
                                       with our hair combed
and our high-tops carefully untied—
as we clung to vinyl siding,
                                       as we crawled
crablike across rooftops, edging
toe-first toward the gutters
                                       so as not to rouse
the dogs—as we crept down   
onto cold drainpipes    
                                       through the lightning
in our lungs, leaping at last
into our shadows and at last
                                       onto the lawn,
landing as if in genuflection
to the afterhours fog—
                                       fluorescent
as the breath we left
beside us on the train tracks
                                       as we walked
each toward the others,
toward the barebulb
                                       glow of stardust
on the dumpsters
in the vacant late-night, lost

From Quarantine

  LAUDS

Somehow I am sturdier, more shore

than sea-spray as I thicken through

the bedroom door. I gleam of sickness.

You give me morning, Lord, as you

give earthquake to all architecture.

I can forget.

                           You put that sugar

in the melon’s breath, and it is wet

with what you are. (I, too, ferment.)

You rub the hum and simple warmth

of summer from afar into the hips

of insects and of everything.

I can forget.

                           And like the sea,

one more machine without a memory,

I don’t believe that you made me.

                          PRIME

I don’t believe that you made me

into this tremolo of hands,

this fever, this flat-footed dance

of tendons and the drapery

of skin along a skeleton.

I am that I am: a brittle

rib cage and the hummingbird

of breath that flickers in it.

Incrementally, I stand:

in me are eons and the cramp

of endless ancestry.

Sun is in the leaves again.

I think I see you in the wind

but then I think I see the wind.

There is an interview with Black in this issue of Lightbox, I'd recommend you read it. He discusses some perennial issues, such as a poem's form, perspective audience, inspiration, etc. Here are my favorite excerpts:

As with the most engaged philosophy, the most compelling poems typically emerge from inquiry and examination, even if only of the most oblique, reflexive sort, i.e., “Why?”

It’s no small irony that, because both poetry and prayer are directionally unilateral, each medium necessitates some projection or implied construction of an audience. In effect, both poetry and prayer entail three simultaneous varieties of invention: the construction of a (speaking) self, the composition of expressive matter (the self’s communique), and the imagination of a recipient adequately equipped to receive, comprehend, or internalize that matter.