Tag Archives: poetry

Reading Kierkegaard at the Bar

books poetry lit October 9, 2014 Leave a comment

I am practicing exercises in futility.
I call it hope.

At the bottom of this beer,
drunk becomes Enlightenment.
It will this time.
The stool will stop quivering
rippling tsunamis to my thighs.

The ice cubes invited themselves
to this party, but they can’t tell
a good lie. They look like a priest
I once knew.

The corners of the bar look like God
right angle perfection. My fingers,
bell curve or parabola
depending on the glass. Mismatched.

There is an infinite qualitative difference
between the desire to sit on a bar stool
and the feeling of your ass two hours later.

I am as lucid as the waitress’s open pockets.
I have exact change. I know grace
when it catches me by the throat
and refuses to kill me. This is why
I come to the bar. Alone.

I have all the fear and trembling
and drowning has never been
so difficult. The floor, the only
leap of faith I cannot make.

I found God in apron pockets. Not hers.
Never looked, just felt. Just fought the urge
to hide behind the potted palm
beside the ladies’ room all night,

sipping the glass half-full
tucked between the corner
and the plant.

-Hilary Kobernick, Paper Nautilus

 

Poetry: Whale

books poetry lit October 3, 2014 Leave a comment

In every way they come to us, we weigh them in pieces.
At dinner by the shore my sister and I pretend

to pretend we are friends
not shamed by growing up. The whales

are swimming in the cove, and all year
this has been happening—they die and wash ashore

like secrets the kids jab with pointed sticks.
First a great balloon, swelling with each day’s heat,

a smell the wind doesn’t wash away—
weeks in, the skin frays as cooling wax breaks

from a slate. My sister and I are in a cage made of ribs
that we built for each other, we are

in childhood’s oiled tent. Sometimes in our minds
we balance on the whale, feel with our toes

the grooves, the loosing of cells, the melting
inside as the methane grows. The mass of it

even scientists can’t determine.
On the whale we are little again—

she snaps a toy we shared, and I press my palm
over her nose, seal off its edges

and count to five. For five seconds
on the television, biologists weigh bricks

of animal, calculate the weight
of blood lost in the death. Always

I have carried that moment, the power
of releasing my hand, of knowing I could choose my memory.

Eventually the whale becomes
what the mind is: a body threatening to burst.

-Kasey Erin Phifer-Byrne, Word Riot

Faces

books poetry lit September 26, 2014 Leave a comment

She beats the driftwood against her thigh during a break in the squall, with branches and burls culled from debris and dark conversation of wind, water and wood about her feet.
She shakes out sand and rubs the wood on her jeans to shine up the wet pores looking for a face, and finds it, fumbling with a worn-out burl, her snowy cheeks turned scarlet like twin fires on the beach of the morning.

She has discovered a fable to create for her children.

I look, see nothing, and I shall not forget that when she left me that morning the ducks and gulls and the sea turned from tone and sonority to rattle and racket, the caesura and pause of the sand transformed to an endless taut drum by the pounding of the surf.
I shall not forget how I could taste the cold metal my tongue had become without her melting syllables, how wet and warm from the rain at the river’s mouth I stood shoes hung about my shoulders, impoverished of myth, looking at the torment of the sky, the storm in my mouth gone quiet and dry.

-Jeff Burt, Treehouse

Poetry: Ultrasound

books poetry lit September 26, 2014 Leave a comment
I picture her exhausted, drained, snoring
beside her snoring husband, breathless at times,
waking in fits in the dead of night

to wander the darker rooms,
leafing through a blue book of names
her mother left on the kitchen counter,

then groaning back up the hardwood stairs
for the last precious hours of rest
before the next day pushes her along,

before the bells of the 5:30 alarm,
before the cold air waiting to bite when she opens the shower curtain,
before the black drip coffee, before the blueberry yogurt,

before the kiss goodbye that doesn’t last long enough,
before the lone cough in the subway car,
before the frown of the security guard

who hands out plastic badges and points her toward the basement
where she stands beneath fluorescent lights,
signs her name, the day, the time, and admits aloud—I’m here,

I’m here. I need to see the doctor.

I smooth the cool clear gel
gently in small circles
over her stretched and tired body,

and above the thin prism
that separates me from her paper white skin,
I press down gently with the small gray wand

that speaks for me, pauses
to listen to itself, thinks for a moment,
and only then shows me

the black and white echoes of a nearly round head,
the quiver of the heart,
the cord reaching across two worlds

sharing two body heats, sharing the winter air,
sharing a black coffee, sharing the same letters
of another new story, and sharing a brief scene with me.

As I begin to speak, the static shushes impatiently.
Snow falls, and we look at the white screen—hush;
close your eyes,

and I’ll show you again.

-Vikram K Sundaram, [PANK] Magazine

Matins

books poetry lit September 22, 2014 Leave a comment

You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I’m never weeding, on my knees, pulling
clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I’m looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?

-Louise Gluck

Big Boy Ohio

books poetry lit September 14, 2014 Leave a comment

gets an apron and nametag.

She rolls pennies. The pie case turns
the color of the moon. She fills
coffee cups and sugar boxes.

She fills half-full ketchup bottles
from half-empty so customers believe
they have new natural tomatoes
boiled down and slipped into glass necks

“Hey honey,” they say before they order burgers
so neatly she might be a virgin
who sleeps under a field of stars
and soothes cows for the dinner table.

-Julie Babcock, Decomp Magazine

Ekdekhesthai

books poetry lit September 11, 2014 Leave a comment

Mornings I wake to one place, and at dusk

another. There are many kinds
of sleep. As a child I believed

sleeping with one’s eyes
open was the world

according to John. I called

a ghost, who.
A scarecrow, that.

I wake standing at the window

telling you I don’t see
the fire in the street. I wake
standing in red light

as emergency workers carve a woman
out of steel
horseshoed around the sugar

maple. Sometimes I half
expect to peel a clementine

& find nothing inside.

My mother calls to say
my grandmother just walked down
the hall. My grandmother,
dead for years. I do not know

whether to trust my mother

or the ghost’s side of the story.
All prophets perform
the miracle

of context. As does light.
As do birds in the morning.

-Emilia Phillips, West Branch Wired

The Late Summer

books poetry lit September 8, 2014 Comments: 2
Though this

powerful season isn’t over
and she’
s still snuggling up to me,
she brings
a cryptic bulletin
with ragged ice.
To experience aspect of
“that time” and “that sense” enough,
quiet tables bearing fugitives
shall spend time under sunshine.
The more sunshine,
the more shadow covers
this burned heart.
-Natsuko Hirata, Blazevox

Jeez

books poetry lit September 5, 2014 Leave a comment

I’m starting to back away
from the world slowly,

in order to become pure ear.
Air. A mule deer.  Maybe

Karen O. We are who we’ve been
waiting for. What’s taking place

now is free of time—tents
quavering like moon jellies

in the L.A. sky.
Heart’s mind says to itself

I am free to move about.
And also, I am afraid.

We cannot have any unmixed
                                                            emotions, says Yeats.

-Diane Raptosh, White Whale Review

Apologia Litania

books poetry lit August 25, 2014 Leave a comment

Today in Pest’s open air markets there is a sale on holy
water and scapulars, hand-carved chess pieces, and Oriental
spoons whose sole task is to approximate the luxurious

sprawl of the Danube. There are swords upon which I’d throw
myself were it the time and place to throw myself
upon vanity, and fresh fruits. Think of a hitchhiker’s passport

to heaven. But there is a holier water distilled from the tap
and used to clear the ciborium of divinity that she poured
into the mulch insulating the dogwood. What is devotion

more than loyalty to that alternate power truly and ably
able to wound us; worship that it seeks to soak into the roots
of a precious tree. For all my talk of tied-down guns and dying

with my boots on, the way I play Augustus McCrae giving all
of himself to the gangrene to spite his rotting legs, the voices
in which I say A man isn’t a man if he doesn’t have the faculties

with which to kick a pig—for all of that, you have seen me absolutely
ugly as I listen to my father preempt his dying wish in which
he wishes I become a priest: baling bread, smearing ashes, falling

in love with a crisp cassock and phrases like Latens Deitas-–
and you have borne it. My Pillar of Autumn. My Tower
of the Off-Ivory. You said to me yesterday a second time

wounded lover, who else would love you? And no one would.
And I know I do not yet understand this morning’s market
where I’ll guess wrongly under which shell lies the pea.

-John Fenlon Hogan, Linebreak