Month: April 2019

hoodoo-voodoo

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A Lock of Her Hair
–Robert Wrigley
As a hoodoo-voodoo, get-you-back-to-me tool,
this hank’s thankless task is vast,
a head down to the ground impossibility, possibly,
since what I’m thinking of is your toe pad pinknesses too,
your soup hots and round-and-rounds, the fine
and perfect poundage of you on my paws, the very cause
and problem I moan and bemoan
the absence of. For Love, above the head
this reddish coil once lavishly wore, there’s an air so far away
it’s sad for me to even think the same sun’s rays play
where it was and do to you what I would do
if I were there or you were here. Still, some thrills
remembered do resemble thrills, one hopes, and the ropes
of it that gently fell around me bound me so well
no hell of miles can defile this dream I dream. I mean
the anyway DNA I can find of you. I mean the home
of bones and blood that holds the whole of you
and which this fizzed-up missive means to conjure, missy,
my world in a curl, girl, this man oh man half man I am
when you’re gone.

Photo by Arash Asghari on Unsplash

day window

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Day Window
–Joanna Klink
Screen Shot 2018-11-03 at 15.59.59

Photo by John Adams on Unsplash

corner meeting

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Corner Meeting
–Langston Hughes
Screen Shot 2018-11-03 at 15.27.40

Photo by Biao Xie on Unsplash

remedy in water

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For You
–Kim Addonizio
For you I undress down to the sheaths of my nerves.
I remove my jewelry and set it on the nightstand,
I unhook my ribs, spread my lungs flat on a chair.
I dissolve like a remedy in water, in wine.
I spill without staining, and leave without stirring the air.
I do it for love. For love, I disappear.

Photo by Fabio Ballasina on Unsplash

adage

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Adage
–Billy Collins
When it’s late at night and branches
Are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it’s a little more complicated than that.

It’s more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor’s clothes.

No, it’s more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It’s a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped
stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

Photo by Jeremy Allouche on Unsplash

airless

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You Know
–Mary Jo Bang
You know, don’t you, what we’re doing here?
The evening laid out like a beach ball gone airless.

We’re watching the spectators in the bleachers.
The one in the blue shirt says, “I knew,

even as a child, that my mind was adding color
to the moment.”

The one in red says, “In the dream, there was a child
batting a ball back and forth. He was chanting

that awful rhyme about time that eventually ends
with the body making a metronome motion.”

By way of demonstration, he moves mechanically
side to side while making a clicking noise.

His friends look away. They all know
how a metronome goes. You and I continue to watch

because we have nothing better to do.
We wait for the inevitable next: we know the crowd

will rise to its feet when prompted and count—
one-one-hundred, two-one-hundred,

three-one-hundred—as if history were a sound
that could pry apart an ever-widening abyss

with a sea on the bottom. And it will go on like this.
The crowd will quiet when the sea reaches us.

Photo by Ivana Cajina on Unsplash

1971

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1971
–Donald Justice
America has so many roads-
On every road, someone lost.
And should we be sorry for the girls
Who will go into labor nine months from tonight?

Should we be sorry for being born
Americans? Here, lost at the crossroads,
Trying to find our place on the map.
So many towns, so many little stars…

America has surrounded us.
And the poems that fell from our mouths
Like stars in August-
Look for them in the Pacific.

Photo by Jakob Braun on Unsplash

staying dead

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After Three Years
–Donald Hall

You think that their
dying is the worst
thing that could happen.

Then they stay dead.

—

In a week or ten days
the snow and ice will melt
from Graveyard Road.

I’m coming! Don’t move!

Photo by Ashim D’Silva on Unsplash

love sounds

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Love is Like Sounds
–Donald Hall

Late snow fell this early morning of spring.
At dawn I rose from bed, restless, and looked
Out of my window, to wonder if there the snow
Fell outside your bedroom, and you watching.

I played my game of solitaire. The cards
Came out the same the third time through the deck.
The game was stuck. I threw the cards together,
And watched the snow that could not do but fall.

Love is like sounds, whose last reverberations
Hang on the leaves of strange trees, on mountains
As distant as the curving of the earth,
Where snow still hangs in the middle of the air.

Photo by Jessica Fadel on Unsplash

by force

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Watching Television
–Marie Howe
I didn’t want to look at the huge white egg the mother spider dragged
along behind her, attached to her abdomen, held off the ground,

bigger than her own head–
and inside it: hundreds of baby spiders feeding off the nest,

and in what seemed like the next minute,
spinning their own webs quickly and crazily,

bumping into each other’s and breaking them, then mending
and moving over, and soon they got it right:

each in his or her own circle and running around it.
And then they slept,

each in the center of a glistening thing: a red dot in ether.

Last night the moon was as big as a house at the end of the street,
a white frame house, and rising,

and I thought of a room it was shining in, right then,
a room I might live in and can’t imagine yet.

And this morning, I thought of a place on the ocean where no one is,
no boat, no fish jumping,

just sunlight gleaming on the water, humps of water that hardly break.

I have argued bitterly with the man I love, and for two days
we haven’t spoken.

We argued about one thing, but really it was another.
I keep finding myself standing by the front windows looking out at the
street

and the walk that leads to the front door of this building,
white, unbroken by footprints.

Anything I’ve ever tried to keep by force I’ve lost.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash