Tag: workshop poem

Poems of the Week 01/09/2018

Desert Eagle Reads a Book

Don Zirilli

When picking out a book to hold
between your chest and a Desert Eagle .50 caliber pistol,
think about the pages the bullet must get through.

Your Encyclopedia could sacrifice its H,
the letter most like breath,
Hackensack hacked through,
“2000 Years of Hair Dressing” snipped away
by this metallic Hake,
“a large food fish of greedy habits,”
leaving behind a Halo of Hanging Gardens,
ending in Hysteria.

The Bible could offer a dream of creation,
a wall full of laws,
a history of disappointment,
Surrealist predictions,
and a frantic part two revision
before succumbing to Revelations.

The phone book could give up its names.

That hardcover Impressionist tome
could splatter its feverish color,
blur itself further,
refuse to focus or to clarify its aim.

When picking out a book to hold
between your chest and a Desert Eagle .50 caliber pistol,
consider the stories you’re prepared to lose,
string together memories of riven words,
read new endings with your lips moving,
walk slowly to the library,
wink at bluebirds, decoupage
another day to store away.

You’ll be tempted by stiff, heavy bricks of paper,
but check out a novel
that responds to your touch,
a tale that’s open-ended, unresolved,
that dares you to keep on going
after it’s done.

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Diaspora

Arthur Russell

I have raised my eyes to a Midwood, Brooklyn sycamore
on the walk we’d take around my parents’ block
to smoke some pot before Thanksgiving dinner,
and I have seen the stick nest of the Quaker Parrots
jutting like a beaver lodge above the leaf-strewn lawn
of the Orthodox Jews who invaded
our assimilated neighborhood in the decades
since we siblings moved to Jersey and Connecticut,
unaware that Kings would one day rise again.

And I have heard their noisy chattered ruckus, though to me they sounded less
like Dizz and Bird at Minton’s Playhouse, popping peanuts,
than housewives calling deli orders out to countermen
in lab coats and smudged white paper side caps on a Friday
at Blue Ribbon while their cars were double parked on Avenue J.
So, when my sister touched my sleeve to pass the roach,
I pointed, as first one and then another, green as Kool Aid
or Hawaiian shirts, emerged and paused at the nest’s dark mouth,
pulsed their verdant wings, then flew away, and asked,
“Cindy, are those parrots or a figment of the weed?”

My Uncle Fred and Cindy’s boyfriend Robert watching Dallas
play the Giants in the kitchen, dipping crackers in the baked brie
before the guests arrived, when we, half-baked ourselves,
got home from our pre-Thanksgiving walk, I told my mother,
peeling carrots at the sink for crudité, there were parrots
green as Kool Aid or Hawaiian shirts living in the tree
outside the Berson’s house, and she said,
“Arthur, darling, Berson moved out years ago;
the yahmmies live there now.”

In his Clinamen Improvisation, Gregory Pardlo
sees those parrots, whose ancestors arrived from Argentina
in the hold of an airship and escaped from a crate at JFK,
as surprising avatars of love dispersed and thriving
on electric poles and street trees from Green-Wood,
where I’ve never been, to the ballfields of the college,
where I also smoked some pot back in the day.

Now, the cognoscenti give Quaker-Parrot tours to day-trip hipsters,
who are forced to sign agreements to keep nesting sites a secret,
lest the poachers catch and make the parrots into pets,
the very things that they were meant to be that distant day
their forbears came to America in crates.

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Poem of the Week 01/02/2018

John Barrale

The Warm Coney Island Sand

I think of my father when I shovel snow.

The simple act of picking up
and throwing down

reminding me
of him,

in WW II,

tramping through

the Belgian snow.

I still mourn
the frostbitten toes

my father left

at the battle
of the Bulge

though the blackened ounces
were as lucky as rabbit’s feet

because he
came home.

=They don’t hurt, he said, reading my mind
as he wriggled the four stumps
deeper
into the warm
Coney Island
sand.

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Poem of the Week 12/12/17

Arthur Russell

The Heavier Stone

My dad died eight years ago.
Our relationship has improved a lot since then.
He arrives unannounced in my poems,
driving his maroon Lincoln Town Car,
bearing odd gifts – like a ten-pack of paper towels —
plays with the baby, leaves before dinner.

I hope my mother’s death earlier this year
will put us on a similar trajectory.
I’m not asking to be reconciled.
That would require a deeper well or a heavier stone,

but possibly, now she’s dead, she’ll stop interrupting
when I explain how an answering machine works,
and also be nicer to my wife.

Her refugee belongings huddle
in the dust-bunny corners of my home,
as if they, not I, had been orphaned,
and reminisce about her orderly closets,
her straightened twist ties and the pens
that weren’t tossed aside simply because they didn’t work.

I’ve never done well with actual people.
After cartoons and pen pals,
it was girlfriends in distant cities,
then poetry, the ultimate girlfriend in a distant city.

I hear my daughter and her friends
laughing in the living room.
That is the correct distance between me and joy.

Some people jump up and wave,
or run along the station platform;
others dream of the wind.

She told me that I couldn’t go to little league that day.
I slipped out, anyway, still crying in my uniform, with stirrup socks,
my oiled baseball glove on my hand,
and tried to walk to the game.

By the time I reached Marine Parkway,
the angry tears and snot had dried,
and I was enjoying my brigand walk
past the lawns, the stores and intersections
of our usual car route,
when she stopped across the street
and rolled down the window of her Bonneville,

and her face appeared in that trapezoid of missing glass.

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Poem of the Week 12/5/17

Nasreen Khan

Indiana

You moved us here the day before
my birthday. We packed up the kid and the cat
and the milk crates of secondhand books and cardboard boxes of anemic houseplants
and said goodbye

to the cramped one-bedroom we choose for its drafty sunroom
where we made our baby, and where he slept bundled under the greenhouse panes
in the pale January sun.

We said goodbye to the nagging, constant thrumming
that maybe we’d make it, and maybe we’d have enough someday to
do more than walk hand-in-hand past the New York City shops
in their Christmastime trimmings,

and goodbye to the church where we were married and goodbye to the friends hard-won
in the spaces between the North Jersey hustle, goodbye to the mossy wall on Park Avenue
that my fingers loved, goodbye to the people we had wanted to become here.
Goodbye.

Here,
where I see cracking plaster walls and a muddy Midwestern sky,
you see a future and an inheritance you can leave me, a backyard to
teach your son to ride his bike,
a sandbox to build, a tire swing to hang, a garden to dig for me.

You were so pleased to bring me home,
you would have carried me over the threshold
if I hadn’t been sobbing. Instead,
you laid me down on the camping mattress on the dirty floor to stroke my hair
and said what you’ve always said,
“We’ll make it, we’ll make it babe, you’ll see”.

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Poem of the Week 11/21/17

Patrick Hughes

Berko Proceeds Through Grace and Spasms- Notes on I’dSIMTH PT2

it’s not your house till you curl up on the slope
till then you’ve just repossessed the venom drip in abject apartheid
and even the neon but shadow mannered swell
will feel you turned and left it
with a halfway you “for sale” sign
the tack on begs fart butts and gingerbread awning crust
and a decade’s weather book
and a decade’s weather book
an all the way forespent
as you lift your head
in the car
a height acknowledged
above the sphere on the top of
the flag post

and you’re checking in
your key ring hand
and it’s warmth on your face
all crowds and places
hand held up waves
the tracking motion and all of
what is inherent in
a gaped mouth and a tight hug

an idle drift
a bridge of stairs
more patio than cobblestone

with bells in our chests
holding the course of distribution
let you down like the rest
palm print’s proxima-null
and hover round a village corner
a let down of too many goes
to turn around and
drive back the other way

and it’s not your house
and the last wave is not affected

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Poem of the Week 11/14/17

Elinor Mattern

Cardiac Nurse

The doctors say she’s very good at it,
she tells me in her South African lilt. A skill that’s rare.
Is called on when surgery requires someone who can stand still
and hold a heart in her hands without moving for hours.
No food. No water. Little breaths. A sacred trust.

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