Premier Jour

Jacques Prévert

Des draps blancs dans une armoire
Des draps rouges dans un lit
Un enfant dans sa mère
Sa mère dans les douleurs
Le père dans le couloir
Le couloir dans la maison
La maison dans la ville
La ville dans la nuit
La mort dans un cri
Et l'enfant dans la vie.

________________________________________

White linens in a closet
Red linens on a bed
A baby in its mother
Its mother in pain
The father in the hall
The hall in the house
The house in the city
The city in the night
The death in a cry
And the baby in this life.

Translated by Ash Ayrer (November 15, 2008)

AN ANTI-ENVIRONMENTALIST DRAFTS HIS NEXT NEWSPAPER COLUMN WHILE EATING TAKEOUT AND DRIVING HIS HUMMER

Benjamin Cohen

The good news is in: Plastics are great. Stop your bitching. I've been reading all the research and the problem is you. No, I'm not anti-environment; I'm anti-environmentalist. It's like that line, right? You shoot messengers?

This whole thing, I'm with crack reporter John Tierney, our friend at the Times over there debunking pointless concerns from Crocs-wearing pansies. Those alarmists have complained for years that unsightly gobs of plastic bags won't deteriorate for centuries. In landfills, in oceans, flying out of the garbage truck in front of me as I write this column on my PDA. Then they go and complain about the tiny, tiny chemicals inside, like this bisphenol-A thing they made up—chemicals they can't even see! Or pronounce! So which is it? Unsightly gobs or invisible fake chemicals? The environmental movement is riddled with these moral contradictions. That means we can all relax: plastics are good for us. Right now I'm eating General Tso's chicken out of a plastic container with a plastic fork using my non-PDA-typing hand. Knees are working the steering wheel, if you're wondering.

Which reminds me: food. For as long as humans have been alive, they have been eating food. Recent evidence from the national academies shows that animals also eat food. Many, I'm told, on a daily basis. We can either crank up the Radiohead, put on our dark sunglasses and long-sleeved T-shirts, and throw garbage cans at Monsanto GMO headquarters or we can get our next meal with the best modified genes science has to offer. By the way, as with bisphenol, You Can't. Even. See. Genes. What are they fighting against? Plus, a new study, conducted this past weekend on Dan and Marlene's new deck, shows that tofu dogs taste like crap.

Did you know that steering SUVs with your knees saves gas? Did I say that yet? It's harder to do in smaller cars, because leg room sucks. One more reason the anti-SUV hysteria is just that. Smaller cars also waste gas, because you have to drive them so much more to haul all your stuff. When we got our other SUVs, we could haul three times as much garbage to the river and twice as many recyclables, if we had them. But the Connie Cleanwaters don't want you to know that.

Also, mercury is good for you. Drink it up. At least one study (hat tip to John T.) found that mercury is our best way to determine the temperature of the earth. And yet tree huggers would have you believe that the earth is warming. Ironically, the only way they could know this is by using the same mercury-filled thermometers they apparently think are bad for you.

You don't have to worry about global warming anyway. Some are now arguing that what we lose in cooler temps we make up for with less spending on clothes. Bad news for Old Navy; good news for Americans and the environment. It all evens out economically, just like in that Seinfeld episode where everything always evens out. Can you believe that Kramer guy? What a racist!

Incidentally, racism is no longer a problem. They caught Kramer. And that one guy is running for president.

© McSweeney's, which is teh awesome.

Brick

Ben Folds and Darren Jessee

6 am day after Christmas
I throw some clothes on in the dark
The smell of cold
Car seat is freezing
The world is sleeping
I am numb

Up the stairs to the apartment
She is balled up on the couch
Her mom and dad went down to Charlotte
They're not home to find us out
And we drive
Now that I have found someone
I'm feeling more alone
Than I ever have before

She's a brick and I'm drowning slowly
Off the coast and I'm headed nowhere
She's a brick and I'm drowning slowly

They call her name at 7:30
I pace around the parking lot
Then I walk down to buy her flowers
And sell some gifts that I got
Can't you see
It's not me you're dying for
Now she's feeling more alone
Than she ever has before

She's a brick and I'm drowning slowly
Off the coast and I'm headed nowhere
She's a brick and I'm drowning slowly

As weeks went by
It showed that she was not fine
They told me son, it's time to tell the truth

She broke down, and I broke down
Cause I was tired of lying

Driving home to her apartment
For a moment we're alone
Yeah she's alone
I'm alone
Now I know it

She's a brick and I'm drowning slowly
Off the coast and I'm headed nowhere
She's a brick and I'm drowning slowly

©Ben Folds Five

A Dentist Tries His Hand at Poetry

Brent Fisk

First, numb your pages. Have a mint
on your tongue and keep your nose hairs trimmed.
Ideas will come like sleep, catch you unaware—
a sudden scrawl of pen across a legal pad.
Do ideas have sound? A scrape of tool,
the high whine of a drill?

In the parking lot wrens occupy
a shopping cart lodged in the junipers.
What is there to write about, my fingers
always in a stranger’s mouth? My secretary
in the bright yellow lobby, a smile pure Muzak,
dust motes dancing through the light.

Perhaps as she unbends
paper clips, doodles on memo pads, she’ll daydream
of dentists, hot sex in the linen closet, laughing
gas cracking up the rubber tree.
Goldfish swim upside down in circles
collecting flaked food and stray thoughts.

Tell me why you grind your teeth, why you fail
to floss. Are bodies buried in your basement?
Does a mistress snore on a vibrating bed? Hold the cotton
close and don’t panic at the sight of blood.
Wait at least an hour before you eat
your regrets. Some days I drill holes where I shouldn’t,
fill molars with radio signals, dumb down wisdom teeth.

I wait for a Tuesday I’ll remember forever,
the day the police find the tooth fairy in my trunk,
mason jars of milk teeth beside her.
I’ll barricade the door, turn the nitrous on full blast,
and with one little bent mirror,
eyeball you from behind my desk.

© Prick of the Spindle 2007

Backseat Delirium

Dan Nowak

I am your dead lover
tonight, lit candles burning
in your old Cadillac. Saturdays
were never this much fun.

Remember my body, my skin –
it hasn’t missed you. It’s missed
us, our leather and our need
to burn ourselves at the feathers.

We aren’t blue jays, just flightless
angels stuck. I’m on my knees behind
the driver’s seat and your love.
Please make me work for it –

my wings still need a down payment.
Tonight we are more than ourselves,
than our pasts. We are satellites
carrying our galaxies in our mouths.

© Blood Lotus, February 2006

Bartender

Regina Spektor
Come on bartender
Won't you be more tender
Give me two shots of whiskey
And a beer chaser
Love will be the death of me
Love is so fickle
Cause it starts with a flood
And it ends with a tr-tr-tr-tr-tr-tr-tr-tr-trtrickle

Come on bartender
Just a little more tender
I ate all your peanuts
Return me to sender
I've been too candid
Now I'm barely standing
Just call me a taxi
And prepare me for landing

Ooh, you have got to kick me back out
Into the cold and nasty weather
And maybe if i sober up
I will stop pretending that love is forever
Love is forever
Come on bartender(x3)
(x2)

Love will be the death of me
Love will be the death of me
Love will be the death of me
Love is so fickle
Cause it starts with a flood
And it ends with a tr tr tr tr tr tr tr tr tr tr trickle
Trickle
Trickle
Trickle
Trickle
Trickle
Come on bartender
Come on bartender
Come on bartender

Passage from The Sixteen Pleasures

Robert Hellenga

Where was Margeaux, my second self, the traveler who'd followed the road not taken? She was climbing into one of the limousines with Jed, bending over provocatively, waiting for him to pat her fanny. And suddenly I realized something I should have known all along:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence
Two roads diverged in a wood and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Mama alwasy maintained that anyone who'd heard Frost read "The Road not Taken," as she had, would know that the last line was ironic, a joke, but I'd never understood what she meant till now. There is no "road not taken," there's only this road. The road not taken is a fantasy. My mysterious double had never made love to Fabio Fabbriani on the beach in Sardegna; she'd never gone to Harvard; she'd never been near the Library of Congress; she'd never been profiled in a Dewar's ad: "Latest accomplishment: restoring the Book of Kells." She'd been right by my side all the time, filling my ear with might-have-beens and if-onlys, encouraging me to feel sorry for myself. And look where it landed me. In bed with - I didn't want to think about it. A man who wore Harvard underpants.

So when I saw the limousine drive off down the Lungarno I was glad. Glad to be rid of her.

I say I was glad. But it was hard, too. She was my oldest friend, my closest companion. She knew me better than anyone else, better than I knew myself.

(Blogkeeper's note: go buy The Sixteen Pleasures. Now.)

Don't Write a Poem About Rape

Julie Buffaloe-Yoder

For the editor who told me

rape is not a fresh subject

(he knows who he is).

Rape is a cliché.

Unless it happens to you.

But don’t write a poem about it

or the editor might say

it’s just not fresh.

Rape is not fresh.

It’s been done too much.

It’s too emotional, confessional.

There are too many words.

People are not shocked anymore.



Don’t write a poem about it

especially if you were in the dark

university parking lot, a little more than tipsy,

and he forced you into his car with a gun.

Dark parking lots and guns are so overdone!

Don’t write a poem about it

especially if the digital time on his dash

was 12:00. It’s too much like the Twilight Zone

especially if those stiff red numbers

still ring in your brain sometimes

when you’re in the grocery line

and you drop everything you got, and the tomatoes

and the peaches, and the can of cream corn

go rolling down the aisle.



Don’t say he drove you down a dead end road.

Don’t tell how he bent your fingers back,

slammed them with the door over and over.

How heavy-handed can you get?

Don’t tell how he took the right to bare your arms,

your legs, your goose-bumpy little nipples,

and when he ripped your shirt in loud red shreds

you were trite enough to worry

what people would think about you.



For God’s sake, don’t say you were a virgin.

Honey, save it for the Movie of the Week.

Don’t tell about the fistfuls

of sand and gravel in your open mouth,

your open face, up your open legs.

It’s just not fresh.

Maybe try a different point of view.



Don’t tell how he held the gun so tenderly

in your ear, under your tongue,

deep inside the stretched-out skin

of your nostril, and you could smell the click

as he cocked it, and you could taste the click

in your throat as he made you call him Lord.

With the right music, it might work for a porno flick

but not for a literary journal.



Don’t tell how you looked up at the full moon

with its mouth torn into a little o

as you waited for it to be over.

Don’t you know the moon is overused?

And there are inconsistencies if you say

you almost laughed out loud

cause you were a stupid little twit who thought

who actually believed the first time would be romantic.



Don’t write a poem about it. Just don’t.

Especially if you went crazy when it didn’t end

and the only defense you had was to black out

and dream the damnedest dreams about a book

you used to have when you were a girl

and you dreamed a little song about the silvery moon,

the moon on the breast of the new fallen road

the Carolina moon that kept shining, shining,

shining on the one who’s raping you.

And when you woke up, it wasn’t over

but the Goodnight Moon was gone,

and you saw an old woman in the distance

come out on her porch to hear

what all the Hell raising was about,

turn out the light and go back inside

and you might’ve thought Good Night

to the Old Lady Whispering Hush,

but that’s too obvious, and anyway

we’ve heard that story before.



Don’t say he dragged you down the road by your hair,

the gravel chewing your back to bits.

Good Night Bowl of Mush, it’s just

the caveman syndrome. Get over it.

We’re sick of wenchy women poets

who are always bashing men.



And the part where he was gentleman enough

to drive you back to your dorm

just doesn’t fit the character.

Don’t say he told you he’d kill you if you breathed

a word, then asked your forgiveness, told you

not to worry and go get some sleep.

Would he really say that?



Don’t say he drove off in a limp line of smoke

as the sun came blinking over the horizon

and you staggered and puked your way back to your room,

knowing you wouldn’t make it to Psychology class that day.

Don’t talk about the guilt for not turning him in.

Take your ass to a talk show or a support group or a priest,

stop throwing the reader around.



Don’t tell the never ending end

of your whiny little poem. Get a grip.

Especially if your roommate laughed and said

Why would anybody want to rape you?

And the counselor said you’ve got to take control

of your life, and your boyfriend tried to understand

why even his understanding would never be enough,

why even his softest fingertips would always be too much.

So you drank yourself into a quiet rage

and now six years later it’s backed up in a corner

of your throat, bristling, sideways, ready to lunge

at the thickest, closest, slickest, hardest vein.



Nobody wants to hear about it anymore.

And the editor doesn’t care that

you’ve already cut half the words

and many of the details.

It’s still too sprawling, too baggy,

too talky, not fresh.

Go tell it to Ginsberg, we’ve

got a comma to perfect.



But if you’re that damned stubborn, go ahead.

You’ll write the poem alone

and it’ll live in a junk drawer

swelling up like a belly

under a pink pile of rejection.

Serves you right.

So stop acting like a bitchy female poet.

It just won’t work. It’s just not fresh.

On food

Edward Abbey

Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialistic, otherworldly, New Age spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu and seaweed slime.

35/10

Sharon Olds

Brushing out our daughter’s brown
silken hair before the mirror
I see the grey gleaming on my head,
the silver-haired servant behind her. Why is it
just as we begin to go
they begin to arrive, the fold in my neck
clarifying as the fine bones of her
hips sharpen? As my skin shows
its dry pitting, she opens like a moist
precise flower on the tip of a cactus;
as my last chances to bear a child
are falling through my body, the duds among them,
her full purse of eggs, round and
firm as hard-boiled yolks, is about
to snap its clasp. I brush her tangled
fragrant hair at bedtime. It’s an old
story—the oldest we have on our planet—
the story of replacement.

Love Sonnet XI

Pablo Neruda

I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.

I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.

I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,

and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.

Quotations 26th June 2008

Salman Rushdie

On Vlad Tepes III: "Dracula was much nastier than a vampire ever could have been."

On researching various sex manuals: "I'll share with you some research - and by research I mean...reading."

On his part with the band after writing a song for U2: "So I thought we could be called U2 + 1. I also suggested Me2, but..."

And the winner of the night: "Fiction arrives at a much different truth than journalism does. It is similar to the difference between a portrait and a photograph."

The Joy of Sex

Carrie Conners

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
—e.e. cummings

Killing time before a party, I open
my friend’s copy of The Joy of Sex

while she showers and find an e.e.
cummings poem that my ex used

to get me into bed. Despite fights
and his wholesome northern accent

those words made me flush, like they
were unbuttoning my shirt. Maybe

it’s the scent of my friend’s tea
rose shower gel, but now it all

seems too sweet, artificial as latex.
Chalk it up to bitterness (it’s been

a while) but thumbing through
the sketched characters with their

unlimited flexibility, their ability
to live upside-down without risk

of oxygen deficiency, the expert
instructions of how to rub what

and where that read like a car
owner’s manual make me

wonder how I ever fell in love
with a poem especially when

Amanda’s husband stares at Fox
News for hours every night instead

of watching her body unfold
like an arched wave nearing the shore

and gym-obsessed Eileen has
forgotten what the body is for

and I haven’t been really kissed
by a man in years, making me feel

very young and very old all at once like
the first time at anything always does.

© DMQ Review Winter 2008

Vilanelles in Her Pores

Kristen Holt

A skin that crawls with nouns
Words leaked from stranger's lips
Transfixed by toxic sounds

From petticoats to gowns
Thin wrists that couple hips
A skin that crawls with nouns

A hide that peels and browns
Revealing hidden scripts
Transfixed by toxic sounds

Wicked and doll surrounds
The curls of silken slips
A skin that crawls with nouns

A girl’s eyes meekness hounds
Which vanish, thick, encrypts
Transfixed by toxic sounds

In ink and silence drowns
The sounds of wrist and ships
A skin that crawls with nouns
Transfixed by toxic sounds

© Wicked Alice Spring 2008

lines from Divisadero

The first time I read Ondaatje was in the course Readers Writers and Books with Tom Kinsella. He told me to read carefully and closely, and to pay attention, because the beauty of Ondaatje's moments is that they only happen once.

She was sixteen years old. Almost nothing. p30

It was a tattered guitar. When she got close she could see his hands had been bitten by insects, were scarred. His clothes, which had looked formal from a distance, were unironed, muddy at the cuffs; the waistcoat had lost buttons. But it was the hands that were too lived in, overused. p67-68

Who is she? This woman who has led him into this medicine cabinet of a room where most of her possessions exist - books, journals, passport, a carefully folded map, archival tapes - even the soap she has brought with her from her other world. As if this orderly collection of things is what she is. So we fall in love with ghosts. p76


What night gave Rafael was a formlessnessin which everything had a purpose.As if darkness had a hidden musical language. p78

She would whisper something into his ear and then kiss it, to seal it there, so he could never give it away to another. p84

she was told by a dean that the best way to learn French was to take a French lover. p89

For we live with those retrievals from childhood that coalesce and echo throughout out lives, the way shattered pieces of glass in a kaleidoscope reappear in new forms and are songlike in their refrains and rhymes, making up a single monologue. We live permanently in the recurrence of our own stories, whatever stories we tell. p136

This is where I learned that sometimes we enter art to hide within it. p142

(on Asphalto): Just another place named after a mineral on the map of the world. How many are there? A greater number, I suspect, than named for royalty. p146

The three of them, she had always believed, made up a three-panelled Japanese screen, each one self-sufficient, but revealing different qualities or tones when placed beside the others. Those screens made more sense to her than single-framed paintings from the West without context. p156

We relive stories and see ourselves only as the watcher or listener, the drummer in the background keeping cadence. p158

She had a name as small as a keyhole. p163

Lucien realized the man used names like passwords, all of them with a brief life span...With such a name it would almost be possible for this thickset man to turn into a three-ounce bird or a subtle grammatical form. p182

The clockmaker has still not arrived, being somewhere in the south, correcting time along the small villages of the Pyrenees...They are a strange breed, clockmakers, some surly and insensitive to all save the machine about to whir into life, some uncertain as poets about their gift. p191

She knelt on the turned earth, they were in someone's field, he came into her mouth, and she stood up again. Around them suddenly was the rest of the world. p228

he rarely used her name when they spoke. It had always felt too normal for what there was between them. Even her simple, lovely name. p257

She bent almost in two, a naked hairpin. p259

Swans

Mark Thalman

A swan slides across a reflection of sky.
On the opposite bank, a tall, dark-haired man in a tuxedo
escorts his bride, who also glides like a beautiful bird
in her long white gown. They are having their reception
in the Dampier Chateau. I remember taking this photo
while the critical care nurse informs me
that the small transparent hoses inserted in my neck
are called “swan tubes.” They loop through
the jugular and down to heart and lungs
forming the shape of swans
to measure function and pressure,
administer medicine.

A day later, the nurse tells me to sit up straight,
take a deep breath, hold it, and stay very still—
same as an x-ray. Standing slightly behind me,
he pulls in one long steady motion . . .
wings lifting through my veins.

© Apple Valley Review

Quotation from Francois Mauriac

"'Tell me what you read and I'll tell you who you are' is true enough, but I'd know you better if you told me what you reread."

Find out more

Samson

Regina Spektor

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first, I loved you first
Beneath the sheets of paper lies my truth
I have to go, I have to go
Your hair was long when we first met

Samson went back to bed
Not much hair left on his head
He ate a slice of wonder bread and went right back to bed
And history books forgot about us and the bible didn't mention us
And the bible didn't mention us, not even once

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first, I loved you first
Beneath the stars came fallin' on our heads
But they're just old light, they're just old light
Your hair was long when we first met

Samson came to my bed
Told me that my hair was red
Told me I was beautiful and came into my bed
Oh I cut his hair myself one night
A pair of dull scissors in the yellow light
And he told me that I'd done alright
And kissed me 'til the mornin' light, the mornin' light
And he kissed me 'til the mornin' light

Samson went back to bed
Not much hair left on his head
Ate a slice of wonderbread and went right back to bed
Oh, we couldn't bring the columns down
Yeah we couldn't destroy a single one
And history books forgot about us
And the bible didn't mention us, not even once

You are my sweetest downfall
I loved you first

Missed Call

Dawn McSweeney


I believe it was you,



who called just now,
rang and rang my phone
but hung up on its answering machine
as I ran through the hall



naked,
my hair soaked, raining down,
my skin exploding in goosebumps;



ran to get to your voice
but, standing bare and alone,
all I got was a click of goodbye,



so I ask that the next time—



the next time I'm running through the hall



naked



soaked



exploding—



to get to some of your beautiful words,
please
do leave a message.

© Anderbo Journal

Bowl Of Oranges

Bright Eyes

The rain, it started tapping on the window near my bed. There was a loophole in my dreaming,
so I got out of it. And to my surprise my eyes were wide and already open.
Just my nightstand and my dresser where those nightmares had just been.
So I dressed myself and left then, out into the gray streets.
But everything seemed different and completely new to me.
The sky, the trees, houses, buildings, even my own body.
And each person I encountered, I couldn't wait to meet.
I came upon a doctor who appeared in quite poor health.
I said "{I am terribly sorry but} there is nothing I can do for you
{that} you can't do for yourself."
He said "Oh yes you can. Just hold my hand. I think that would help."
So I sat with him a while and then I asked him how he felt.
He said, "I think I'm cured. No, in fact, I'm sure.
Thank you Stranger, for your therapeutic smile."
So that is how I learned the lesson that everyone is alone.
And your eyes must do some raining if you are ever going to grow.
But when crying don't help and you can't compose yourself.
It is best to compose a poem, an honest verse of longing or simple song of hope.
That is why I'm singing...
Baby don't worry cause now I got your back. And every time you feel like crying,
I'm gonna try and make you laugh. And if I can't, if it just hurts too bad,
then we will wait for it to pass and I will keep you company
through those days so long and black.
And we'll keep working on the problem we know we'll never solve
Of Love's uneven remainders, our lives are fractions of a whole.
But if the world could remain within a frame like a painting on a wall.
Then I think we would see the beauty.
Then we would stand staring in awe at our still lives posed like a bowl of oranges,
like a story told by the fault lines and the soil.

Quotation from Oscar Wilde

"Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months."

That's What I Say; It's Not What I Mean

Feist

Here I am, hopeful again
I can't say when
I wasn't this way

Don't need to worry about me
That's what I say
It's not what I mean
That's what I say
It's not what I mean

Here I am, swinging alone
A timeframe surrounds the pictures I hold
But they don't hold up well
Started to wonder if I fell in love with you at all
If I fell in love with you at all

And when will a time come
I could hear a sad love song, that doesn't speak to me
And when will a time come
I could sing a nice love song, using thou and me

Here I am, walking away
My head's held high
What's the use gettin' down
Because all that I wanted is here
I just kept the ground, close to my ears
I just kept the ground, close to my ears

And when will a time come
When will it come
Ooh

(Inner Tube)

Michael Ondaatje

On the warm July river
head back

upside down river
for a roof

slowly paddling
towards an estuary between trees

there's a dog
learning to swim near me
friends on shore

my head
dips
back to the eyebrow
I'm the prow
on an ancient vessel,
this afternoon
I'm going down to Peru
soul between my teeth

a blue heron
with its awkward
broken backed flap
upside down

one of us is wrong

he
his blue grey thud
thinking he knows
the blue way
out of here

or me

Anyways

Suzanne Cleary


for David

Anyone born anywhere near
my home town says it this way,
with an s on the end:
“The lake is cold but I swim in it anyways,”
“Kielbasa gives me heartburn but I eat it anyways,”
“(She/he) treats me bad, but I love (her/him) anyways.”
Even after we have left that place
and long settled elsewhere, this
is how we say it, plural.
I never once, not once, thought twice about it
until my husband, a man from far away,
leaned toward me, one day during our courtship,
his grey-green eyes, which always sparkle,
doubly sparkling over our candle-lit meal.
“Anyway,” he said. And when he saw
that I didn’t understand, he repeated the word:
“Anyway. Way, not ways.”
Corner of napkin to corner of lip, he waited.
I kept him waiting. I knew he was right,
but I kept him waiting anyways,
in league, still, with me and mine:
Slovaks homesick for the Old Country their whole lives
who dug gardens anyways,
and deep, hard-water wells.
I looked into his eyes, their smoky constellations,
and then I told him. It is anyways, plural,
because the word must be large enough
to hold all of our reasons. Anyways is our way
of saying there is more than one reason,
and there is that which is beyond reason,
that which cannot be said.
A man dies and his widow keeps his shirts.
They are big but she wears them anyways.
The shoemaker loses his life savings in the Great Depression
but gets out of bed, every day, anyways.
We are shy, my people, not given to storytelling.
We end our stories too soon, trailing off “Anyways....”
The carpenter sighs, “I didn’t need that finger anyways.”
The beauty school student sighs, “It’ll grow back anyways.”
Our faith is weak, but we go to church anyways.
The priest at St. Cyril’s says God loves us. We hear what isn’t said.
This is what he must know about me, this man, my love.
My people live in the third rainiest city in the country,
but we pack our picnic baskets as the sky darkens.
We fall in love knowing it may not last, but we fall.
This is how we know home:
someone who will look into our eyes
and say what could ruin everything, but say it,
regardless.

Poem about Poems

M.T. Buckley

The sitting in a bar at three AM gesture
The look what America has done to me gesture
The scrofulous prophet gesture
The I can shit on you because I'm a poet gesture
The I will tell you all gesture
The there are infinite mysteries gesture
The fascination of generally worthless phenomena gesture
The see how I have suffered gesture
The impossibility of telling you anything gesture
The it's all toothpaste commercials gesture

All of this must stop
It's time for something entirely new

The
all of this must stop
it's time for something entirely new
gesture

Paris

Charles Bukowski

never
even in calmer times
have I ever
dreamed of
bicycling through that
city
wearing a
beret

and Camus
always rather
pissed
me.

That Time

Regina Spektor

Hey remember the time when I found a human tooth down on Delancey
Hey remember that time we decided to kiss anywhere except the mouth
Hey remember that time when my favorite colors were pink and green
Hey remember that month when I only ate boxes of tangerines
So cheap and juicy, tangerines

Hey remember that time when I would only read Shakespeare
Hey remember that other time when I would only read the backs of cereal boxes
Hey remember that time I tried to save a pigeon with a broken wing
A street cat got him by morning and I had to bury pieces of his body in my building's playground
I thought I was going to be sick, I thought I was going to be sick

Hey remember that time when I would only smoke Parliaments
Hey remember that time when I would only smoke Marlboros
Hey remember that time when I would only smoke Camels
Hey remember that time when I was broke
I didn't care I just bummed from my friends
Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum...

Hey remember that time when you od'ed
Hey remember that other time when you od'ed for the second time
Well in the waiting room while waiting for news of you I hallucinated I could read your mind
And I was on a lot of shit too but what I saw, man, I tell you it was freaky, freaky

Lyrics courtesy A-Z Lyrics

The Bee Meeting

Sylvia Plath

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers----
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,
And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,
Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.
They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.

Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?
Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?
Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors,
Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.
Their smiles and their voces are changing. I am led through a beanfield.

Strips of tinfoil winking like people,
Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers,
Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.
Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?
No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.

Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat
And a black veil that molds to my face, they are making me one of them.
They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.
Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?
The barren body of hawthon, etherizing its children.

Is it some operation that is taking place?
It is the surgeon my neighbors are waiting for,
This apparition in a green helmet,
Shining gloves and white suit.
Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?

I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me
With its yellow purses, its spiky armory.
I could not run without having to run forever.
The white hive is snug as a virgin,
Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.

Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.
The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.
Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.
If I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,
A gullible head untouched by their animosity,

Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.
The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.
Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.
She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.
While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins

Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,
A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,
The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.
The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.
The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?

I am exhausted, I am exhausted ----
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magician's girl who does not flinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.

Celui qui entre par hasard

René Guy Cadou

Celui qui entre par hasard dans la demeure d'un poète
Ne sait pas que les meubles ont pouvoir sur lui
Que chaque noeud du bois renferme davantage
De cris d'oiseaux' que tout le coeur de Ia. forêt
II suffit qu'une lampe pose son cou de femme
A la tombée du soir contre un angle verni
Pour délivrer soudain mille peuples d'abeilles
Et l'odeur de pain frais des cerisiers fleuris
Car tel. est le bonheur de cette solitude
Qu'une caresse toute plate de la main
Redonne à ces grands meubles noirs et taciturnes
La légèreté d'un arbre dans le matin.


Translation by Marie Jones and Todd Hall

He who by chance enters a poet’s home
Does not know that the furniture has power over him
That each knot in the wood harbors more
Bird cries than the heart of a forest
A lamp needs only settle its womanly neck
Against a varnished corner at dusk
To free suddenly a thousand tribes of bees
And the fresh-bread smell of cherry trees in bloom
Because this solitude’s happiness is such
That a mere stroke of the hand
Returns to that tall, black, silent furniture
The lightness of a tree at dawn.

Copyright © 2003 Adirondack Review

Golden Oldies

Rita Dove

I made it home early, only to get
stalled in the driveway-swaying
at the wheel like a blind pianist caught in a tune
meant for more than two hands playing.
The words were easy, crooned
by a young girl dying to feel alive, to discover
a pain majestic enough
to live by. I turned the air conditioning off,
leaned back to float on a film of sweat,
and listened to her sentiment:
Baby, where did our love go?-a lament
I greedily took in
without a clue who my lover
might be, or where to start looking.

Copyright © 1995 Mississippi Review.