Five poems from the April open reading period, pt VII

To everyone who submitted to our open reading period this April, thank you so much for sending your poems to us. It was a real honor to read all of your work. We received over 750 submissions, from all over the U.S. and the world, and the Editorial Board took most of the summer and into the early fall, sitting together and reading every single manuscript, discussing individual poems and entire manuscripts, reciting them aloud, thinking and learning. It was amazing to read such a variety of poetic approaches, and encounter so many different forms of the imagination as expressed in poetry. These poems gave us hope for our present time, and for the future, and we thank you for them. Along the way we picked out some of the poems that we really enjoyed reading to each other, and thought that with the permission of the poets over the next several weeks we would share them with you. There were many more poems we could have selected to publish here, this is only a sample, but we hope doing so gives you at least a small sample of our enthusiasm, and of our gratitude for all you poets of the world.

This is our last set of poems from the open reading period.

***

Justine Post

Self-Portrait as Beast

I put on my face. This one is wolfish,
     covered in whorls of black and gray fur.
My whiskers flex and fall; I comb them

     with my nails. My teeth are broken in places.
           Depending on the light, I am glossy
or made of shadows. When I walk, my skin,

loose, follows with a slight delay. What did I wear
     when we were new. Must have been the curly
one, lambish. Later, I was the blind ostrich,

     my face a sad block, all eye and beak, hiding
           in the sand. I chew my paws and pace
the bedroom. My fur is furrowed and sweaty.

I pant. I pant and growl softly, bare my teeth
     at you on your way out. I heard everything,
do you believe it. The uneasy feeling

     of a stranger by your side. Turn around;
           I am the stranger. Go on, run away now,
run away on your dainty little hooves.

***

Zoe Dzunko

The First Cold Night

I ate macaroni and cheese
in bed and it did not satisfy me

I paired it with a Rosé that I had
purchased mistakenly when

it appeared a darker red, somehow,
under the fluorescent lights

in the store. I had dreamt of this
night during the afternoon slump

of a Wednesday when the sun
was still high enough to be noon;

my face burns all summer long
and even natural fibers rough

my limbs. I am not the island
I hoped to be, water please lap over

my edges anticipating these caprices–
I shrink and grow like the lung

you make breathe, the idea of you
is the oxygen which sustains me

impalpably. My new shampoo smells
like the tropical holiday I have never

been on, like a sunrise doesn’t count
if you’re yet to go to bed and watching

it close in on the night before. I’m sure
that when Winter lulls the days to

sleep, I will be dreaming of Havana–
in movies the characters appear to me

to be having a better time than I can, always
they stand to face the ocean and say wow.

***

Jason Koo

Work

Everyday Django goes to work at the same time.
Takes breakfast at eight, runs a quick shower-paw over the ears, then
     hits the office
By 8:25. And by office I mean
Bed. This is work he excels at, stretching and accepting
Petting when he’s looking particularly cute. I find the word “particularly”
Particularly hard to say, but Anna has no such problems;
Everyday she goes to work putting people into yoga poses, making them
     say “particularly”
With their bodies. In yoga, you learn to release yourself
By resisting yourself. What a beautiful idea.
Even more beautiful is how one almost always feels this actually to be
     happening while doing it,
Unlike poetry, which is governed by a similar idea
Yet rarely provides this feeling while one is doing it.
Of course, one never really feels oneself
To be “doing” it. Anna leaves a mat on the kitchen floor
That serves as a runway for spontaneous headstands
As I’m “writing.” I’ll be walking back and forth between Django’s office
     and the kitchen
And think, Hell, let’s get inverted.
Already today I’ve done three headstands.
Anna recommends this as a good way to get the blood
Pumping through the brain in the morning
And hence the poetry, but so far I have yet to see Rilkean results.
Django loves his work, he never tires of being tired.
It is a particularly human quality to grow tired of being tired.
Look at him using the whole country of the bed,
First camping out in Florida, Maine, Alaska, Mississippi, now Idaho,
     Oregon, Nebraska, Arizona.
He likes to spread the good work of his body around, as does
Anna, what a service she gives her students.
She makes them feel better about their bodies and themselves.
Importantly, her students want to be there.
I go to work in the Bronx and most often my students do not want to be
     there.
What a strange thing, to be required to be somewhere
You don’t want to be, submitting yourself to the particularly painful
     torture
Of writing. They put up with it because the College demands it
And listening to the College will help get them a job.
I talk and they listen and don’t listen and more and more
I wonder what I am doing. I am not making them feel better about
     themselves or their bodies
Like Anna, and I am certainly not making myself feel better
Like Django. Who wins? English Composition?
Django has moved to Pennsylvania, which is a big state but he covers
      almost all of it.
He’s got his left rear white paw sticking out like a golf putter
Over the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh, where there’s a wonderful room
Full of silver balloon pillows blowing around
Called “Silver Clouds.” That is one way to work.
You know you’re making people happy when you’re making clouds.
Warhol told Lou Reed he wasn’t working hard enough,
But maybe Lou Reed just wanted to be making clouds and couldn’t
Because ol’ Factory Warhol had already smelled that idea out.
Warhol would also tell me I’m not working hard enough, to which I’d say,
You look like you have a cat on your head.
Does your cat think your head is his office? His paws give you all your
     ideas?
A little scratch or two and presto, Clouds. Many thanks, Fluffy.
Django provides no such service.
Amazing we’ve been together all these years and still he speaks no
      English.
I speak a little cat but he can’t even say “Hi.”
Since Anna moved in, Django no longer sleeps on the bed at night.
He sleeps in my office and I sleep in his office; in the morning, we
     change places to go to work.
Django had to cede position to Anna, the superior speaker of English and
      petter.
The problem with Django is he accepts all this petting
And never gives any back. That’s just not part of his line of work.
Neither is playing the guitar without a full assortment
Of fingers, as his namesake Django Reinhardt could beautifully do.
Just once I’d like to feel him rub me on my belly.
Who speaks better English, Django or my students?
On some days, it’s a toss-up. At least Django harbors no pretensions
He’s good at English, unlike those students I have to strain
To give a C who storm into my office wondering why they haven’t gotten
     an A.
I do feel bad for them, they accept all this torture,
No petting whatsoever. But they give the torture back.
I don’t grade their papers so much as continually cry for help in a
     quicksand of sentences.
I’m trying to teach them how to write critical papers
So they can potentially write papers for any college course.
And so I prepare them for college but not for life.
If I were preparing them for life, I’d teach them how to write
Thoughtful, anger-alleviating break-up letters,
Sweet but sexy Valentine’s Day cards,
Witty but grave toasts and eulogies that make everyone in the room want
     to sleep with you,
Tasteful, unburdensome thank-you notes,
And gracious but subtly snarky emails to hopelessly idiotic but
     higher-ranking co-workers.
I’m a writer. When have I actually used a thesis statement
In my adult life? Sometimes I think thesis statements were
     invented
To make reading student papers less onerous for teachers
Because they helped them identify the student’s heretofore M.I.A. main
      point.
But ironically students in search of a thesis statement
Have come to write particularly gruesome English.
Sometimes when I have trouble with the word “particularly”
I can hear a vestige of how my parents struggle with r and l sounds in
      English.
What a nightmare for a Korean speaker, all those r/l sounds
Jammed together in such a fast, polysyllabic word.
I remember how my mom used to pronounce the word “film”
Fihdum. I thought this was kind of cute actually.
But when my students make mistakes with the language
I go insane, and Anna has to hear about it as we de-tox after work at
     night
By intoxicating ourselves with beer or wine.
What a mystery, how one person learns and another doesn’t.
Or maybe not a mystery. Everyday my dad woke up early to work at the
      hospital.
We moved from Minneapolis to St. Paul to New York to Toledo to
     Cleveland
As he kept getting better and better jobs.
He worked hard to get better jobs so he could get paid enough
To send me to better schools, where I learned the particularly particular
     craft of English,
So someday I could release myself like this.

Acknowledgements:
All poems appear by permission of the authors.
“Self-Portrait as Beast” first appeared in The Kenyon Review.
“Work” first appeared in The Missouri Review.