10.18.16

Here are some people who write better than I do; you should go enjoy their words.

The Vespertines

Miller Oberman

1

Do you remember when we were green and supple
I told you stories, my sapling, my brother-sister,
those nights not-sleeping on our bedrolls
made of boiled wool and moss
and I told you of the cloud-maker, ghost
in the cloud-house who made the night-
white wisps and noon-heavy layers,
who drifted in our door—I translated
for you what the cloud-maker said,
the billowing stories that dissolved you,
once, what was the one, do you
remember, that drifted you, laughing,
to sleep?
 

2

We read a book, later, about two
brothers from a far country,
one who died of a cough, the other
soon after in a fire, and both woke, and
both rode to a valley of orange blossoms
and cherry blossoms on a white horse
and found kindness, and found kindness,
and joined the orchard workers’ rebellion
against unjust taxes and were killed
in battle by the landowners’ arrows—
was that, do you remember, the book
singed so we never knew its ending,
or did they wake up again, elsewhere?

Last Lesson from My Grandmother

by Justin Rogers 

there was a time where
you were a pool of energy
a subway
a trolley car from your days in San Francisco
a drug rush that you love to reassure me
was never worth it at the end of the line
you used to tell me
how you traveled nothing but a trainwreck path―
left college to cram a final
hit in abandoned buildings before
dawn reminded you the scariest part
of going high is not the fall, it’s landing
in the same place you took off.

you followed a boy to the Golden Gate Bridge
fell over the edge
landed behind bars
with a drug addiction and no demon to blame but yourself
you tell me walking out of that prison
is what taught you how to walk fast
faster than the odds against you―
never run, you say―
running is admitting you
are already defeated
that there is nothing in your future
to stop and smell except skin drenched kerosene
a noose
a razor
the rust of the Golden Gate bridge
where you plant your feet

Bingo

by Chelsea Weber-Smith

At the muckleshoot casino my girlfriend and I are playing bingo
at their half-price, Thursday evening session.
At the other end of our long table there is a woman in her forties,
sitting alone with a glass of white wine in front of her
on a square napkin, with her orange dauber held in her hand like a pencil.
She looks like she is writing something more important than I am now,
on a piece of paper with numbers on it, marking a code
that people smarter than me will arrange and understand, without brains
that stop suddenly and pointlessly, like squirrels in the middle
of a busy road. Women behind her smoke and loudly announce
that they are approaching bingo or that they have never played bingo before
or that they don't understand the new bingo shape. On the huge TVs
hanging around the room we see the hand of the caller, only a part of her hand,
so close that we can see the wrinkles of her knuckles like pebbles dropped
into water. Her nails are painted a reddish purple, and I imagine
that she has a manicure every week. She is a celebrity here,
turning the ball toward the camera gently, and then calling
the letter and number with a practiced and elegant lilt.
N thirty-five. Can you say that three hundred people wait
breathlessly, apprehensively, for your every single word? I can't. And though I dream
it once in awhile, three hundred people, three thousand people,
listening to me read some poem or sing, or talk like a manic priest
about how Jesus was just a man brave enough to
announce his own holiness, I'm not sure I've got what it takes
to get there, or if I even want to. But at the muckleshoot
those hands hang above us, gently move unknowns into view.
When someone yells Bingo! there is a collective groan first,
because we're in this damn cold world together
and then after the win is verified, sometimes a small applause.