Terrible Mother

Poem of the Week

PRACTICE

Love, my faith is vague. When others speak

of how they practice it, I think of kung fu

and plywood destroyed by pajamed banshees,

how they always say you learn

such force through practice, pain repeated until

pain isn't pain. It's the piccolo

with its reed humming slivers

of sound that won't ever be music

no matter the fervor of practice,

no matter the pursed poise

of your lips. When I write you, when I peel

away the stamps one no longer

need lick, I'm careful. Careful

for ounces of ink and pulp

and minutes shaved from time

if it exists at all and these words

I strung together beyond needful elaboration

only to say I thought of you

today beside the humming fountain

and had no change to wish

you some better life,

some cloud of shade to be

at your infinite beck, your always and immediate

call. A form of faith I follow

is the sky because it never falls,

despite the testimony of chickens

snuffed by hail, ragdolled by the rain

and through my window

I'm watching the last of summer

as the leaves begin to curl

in invisible fire

and I want to tell you

one thing which has within it no urgency at all

over and over again.

-Paul Guest

Poem of the Week

FIRST LOVE

They say
the first love's most important.
That's very romantic,
but not my experience.

Something was and wasn't there between us,
something went on and went away.

My hands never tremble
when I stumble on silly keepsakes
and a sheaf of letters tied with string
— not even ribbon.

Our only meeting after years:
two chairs chatting
at a chilly table.

Other loves
still breathe deep inside me.
This one's too short of breath even to sigh.

Yet just exactly as it is,
it does what the others still can't manage:
unremembered,
not even seen in dreams,
it introduces me to death.

-Wislawa Szymborska
from Monologue of a Dog

(Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak)

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Poem of the Week

Ballade of the Troubled Mother

She was only trying to unlock the boredom a little.
The days stretched out from the bed to her son.
She tried singing songs. She could hear the fiddle
in the back of her mind. The chores left undone,
she would wander all the way to the fence. The sun
going down would remind her of blood. How could
a woman be content with such silence? Was she the one,
who might do what only a woman would?

She was only trying to unlock the boredom. A little
bruise here or there. His hand, his soft palm, a won-
der to behold. She held it, firmly. In the middle
of the day, the heat might lead to many con-
templations. She might just without meaning to. The son
cried and cried. Who would ignore such sorrow? Could
a woman who did so be considered good? None
of the other mothers would do what a woman should.

She was only trying. To unlock the boredom, a little
cunning was needed. The invention of games: one,
two, untie his shoe. Three, four, shards litter
the floor. Was this the story, the way it was sung
from mother to child? Was she transmitting it to her son
when she wept, silently, into his hair? Should
she bind her own mouth to staunch the tune?
She would do just what a mother should.

She was only trying. To unlock the boredom a little
requires a few instruments, a hammer, nails, wood.
She was the key, sang silver, knew the true song of metal.
She would love him the way only a mother could.

-Lynn Kilpatrick

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Poem of the Week

Cultural Soliloquy

Back when I still believed in God
is not a good way to start a poem
& perhaps this is why Iowa passed
& you wound up in an MFA Program
full of vegetarians who say
your poems are all about sex or poets
or having sex with poets
or not getting into Iowa, & frankly,
they're all tired of you saying
there's no meat in any of their work.
A woman with scars like railroad tracks
tells you to be thankful
because at least you have a schtick
& when she mentions Puerto Rico
she says it like it's one word, Port-o-rico,
like the name of any Southwestern city
accustomed to being tied & butchered
by stiff tongues: San-a-barbra, San-a-fay.
She suggests you write about the violence
you surely encountered growing up
& you think about the time some cocolo
ripped the chain net off the hoop rim
& beat you up with it & stole your Pumps
& how it wasn't even a real hoop rim to begin with
but a milk crate with the bottom cut out
& how none of this ever really happened.
The woman's comments are Midwestern, at best:
everything she says is corny & overripe,
like the concept of a soul. She has been published,
she tells the class, in an Iowa anthology
& when you google her
you find what she wrote about you
in her blog: your colorless aura,
the monotony of your work. Her poems
are all about burning elevator buttons,
her Zippo has a proper name that isn't Zippo.
The tofu of her poem is always guilt
& the conceit is always healing
& the payoff is always resurrection. You think
there is no claim as cavalier as rebirth
but this may be just another of those lines
that didn't get you into Iowa. Let me tell you
something about guilt—you want to say—
guilt is an invisible tiara that weighs as much
as lightning. Broken mirrors have everything to do
with layout & nothing to do with fortune.
Quaalude is not a poetic form
& Reiki is not a revision process
& when did anyone publish an anthology
about vicious Zippos who run wild at night?
Back when you still believed in God
you would not have told a suicidal vegetarian
that her poem is as flat as old arugula,
but now, this is exactly what you say. Workshop
is a fishtank & metaphors are the pellets you all eat—
Inside, Formalists can cohabitate, & Beats too,
but only if there's enough weed to go around;
if you drop two Experimentalists, they might quarrel,
& the Confessionalists will take turns
jumping from the tank. You're the one
getting sucked into the filter,
everybody's shit flushing through your gills,
& if there's something you can say of healing
it's that distance always makes a good cliché.
O abnegated patria! O stagnant schtick!
O benighted bards of cyberspace, how the cursors
of the world rollick through your blogs,
how those bulging links flaunt your publications!
The one claim more cavalier than rebirth
may just be immortality. Even as you write it,
you can already feel the rasp
of the muzzle you must wear
while this poem is being scrutinized.
It was Iowa who put the shhh
in workshhhop. It was Iowa
where your brother went, the invisible one,
Pepito, whom your father said
was the only poet the family had room for
& whose thesis has been published by Knopf.
Now, with two weeks until the deadline,
your thesis is missing thirty pages
& if your advisor doesn't make you
cut lines as superfluous as this one
it will just be missing twenty-six.
If only Narratives & Lyrics would beget,
then the mirror at the bottom of this fishtank
might become a tunnel leading to the sea.
This is the truth: when you write & save
poems about faithlessness,
a part of you still waits for God
to break into your house
& drag their doubt into the trash bin. Guilt
is being from a place you cannot write about
because if you write about it, you know
you will just be writing about idleness.
Guilt is writing poems about language
in a language that once beat you like a stepdad.
Remember how your advisor said
your endings are always too conclusive?
Every once in a good while, she said,
the reader needs the last line to hold
an open door & not a grinning keyhole,
& not a period, this tiny knob.

-Kevin A. Gonzalez

Call for Submissions

I would like to put some poems from new poets, or the front lines, so to speak, up on the blog. So I'm asking for submissions. No money of course. And no fame. But please send me your poem.

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Poem of the Week

Lucky

If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to help your enemy
the way I got to help my mother
when she was weakened past the point of saying no.

Into the big enamel tub
half-filled with water
which I had made just right,
I lowered the childish skeleton
she had become.

Her eyelids fluttered as I soaped and rinsed
her belly and her chest,
the sorry ruin of her flanks
and the frayed gray cloud
between her legs.

Some nights, sitting by her bed
book open in my lap
while I listened to the air
move thickly in and out of her dark lungs,
my mind filled up with praise
as lush as music,

amazed at the symmetry and luck
that would offer me the chance to pay
my heavy debt of punishment and love
with love and punishment.

And once I held her dripping wet
in the uncomfortable air
between the wheelchair and the tub,
until she begged me like a child

to stop,
an act of cruelty which we both understood
was the ancient irresistible rejoicing
of power over weakness.

If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to raise the spoon
of pristine, frosty ice cream
to the trusting creature mouth
of your old enemy

because the tastebuds at least are not broken
because there is a bond between you
and sweet is sweet in any language.

- Tony Hoagland

Poem of the Week

Getting Older

Sometimes what you remember is their voices again,
coming on inside you like strung lights in your blood,
certain words they'd tongue differently
from anyone else, or your own name
and its surprisingly infinite nuances.
And sometimes you remember their hands,
not touching you but draped over a steering wheel
or cupped briefly around a cigarette,
anywhere you could watch them
in their life apart from you, knowing how
they'd find you later, blind but sure,
and come to rest where you needed them.
You remember the hardness of their bellies,
the soft line of hair that swirls down
toward the cock, the look of each one
that entered you and then withdrew, or lay
quietly inside awhile longer before slipping
away like a girl sneaking out in the middle
of the night, high heels dangling from one hand
as her stockinged feet drew sparks from the rug.
Sometimes you wander the house all day,
the fog outside stalled at the tops
of trees, refusing to rise higher and reveal
the world you hope is still there, the one
in which you're still a woman
some beautiful man might helplessly
move toward. And you remember how one
looked at you the first time you undressed,
how another didn't mind that you cried.
Sometimes it's enough just to say
their names like a rosary, ordinary names
linked by nothing but the fact
that they belong to men who loved you. And finally
you depend on that, you pray it's enough
to last, if it has to, the rest of your life.

-Kim Addonizio

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Poem of the Week

For a Bitter Veteran Student Who Is 24 Years Old

Shipped out, you learned quickly that
the First World wasn’t the only world,
that numbers always become statistics.

Now, you are back among civilians with
their vaudevillian worries. Judgment
isn’t meant for someone who has just

jerked off in a desert far from his gods
who actually came from a similar desert.
You tell me your fantasy was: a gripped car,

skinnydipping, a gun up the moon’s ass.
Write as if your life depends on it; it does.
Write about how you learned to curse

in order not to be cursed, how cursive
bomb drops were your chandeliers, how
you were touched only when mourning

for someone next to you. Right it, fight
the fuck you in your ballsy little boy
looking for his mother in screaming

nights. You will yet play strip poker and
be astonished when no one asks about
the scars. You will not die on my watch.

-Rane Arroyo

Poem of the Week

The Cinnamon Peeler

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...

When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grasscutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume.

and knew

what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in an act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.

You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.

-Michael Ondaatje

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Poem of the Week

September Poem

Now can I say?
On that blackest day,

When I learned of
The uncountable, the hellbent obscenity,

I felt, with shame, a seed in me,
Powerful and inarticulate:

I wanted to be pregnant.
Women in the street flowing toward

Home, dazed with grief, and my daze
Admixed with jealous awe, I wondered

If they were,
Or wished for it, too,

To be full, to be forming,
To be giving our blood’s food

To the yet to be.
To feel the warp of morning’s

Hormonal chucking, the stutter kiss
Of first movement. At first,

The idea of sex a further horror:
To take pleasure in a collision

Of bodies was vile, self-centered, too lush.
But the pushy, ennobling pulse

Of the ordinary won’t halt
For good taste. Or knows nothing of tragedy.

Thus. Today I have a boy
A week old. Blessed surplus:

A third child.
Have you heard mothers,

Matter of fact, call the third
The insurance policy?

That wasn’t why.
And not because when so many people

Die we want, crudely pining,
To replace them with more people.

But for the wild, heaven-grazing
Pleasure and pain of the arrival.

The small head crushed and melony
After a journey

Out. Sheer cliff
Of the first day, flat in bed, gut-empty,

Ringed by memories and sharp cries.
Sharp bliss in proximity to the roundness,

The globe already a-spin, particular,
Of a whole new life.

Which might in any case
End in towering sorrow.

-Deborah Garrison