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.

Five poems from the April open reading period, pt VI

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.

Check back for more poems from our open reading period each Monday through December.

***

Sasha Fletcher

bedtime stories

Once upon a time there was a man named Franklin Pierce
and he had a really great haircut. One day
he was elected president of the Unites States and also
he lost his oldest son, his wife, his Vice-President,
the rest of his children, his nomination for re-election
and his lunch money. After that he buried himself
inside a bottle of gin while vultures
fed on the remains of everything he ever lost
as was the custom of the time. It is said that William Howard Taft
dined on vultures using his keen legal mind
and custom silverware while an enormous bathtub
was constructed around him and people would come
from miles around and he’d give them his teeth
and this is how souvenirs were invented. One day
a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt woke up
to find several birds in his chest that soon
ate their way down to his legs where they live to this day.
He spent most of his life keeping a blanket over his legs
because birds like to sleep when it’s dark. He’d tell them stories
about how William Howard Taft ate vultures
and how a man named Andrew Jackson ate bald eagles
which lived in hickory trees and that is why
they called him Old Hickory and also why
depending on what you have heard
there are no more bald eagles.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt hoped
this would scare the birds into flying away
but the thing about birds is that they don’t speak English
or respond well to threats. Before that though
James K. Polk acquired Texas, California,
New Mexico, Arizona and Utah and Nevada in part
or in whole from the nation of Mexico when one night he said
Double or nothing and then he took out a large bowie knife
and cut the nation of Mexico in half and said MINE and it was
and after that he tried to buy Cuba, but it was past his bedtime
so nobody would let him do it until he went to sleep.

***

Sean Bishop

Notes Toward Basic Betterness

The way the anglerfish might rather be
just the light it hangs in the Atlantic night,

or the moon might want to live as only
the cloistered stones adored by NASA,

today in this inner-life dusk I’d like
to become a smaller, simpler portion of myself.

Pretty soon now the day will dim down
to its little black dress and slink toward darker needs,

lurching high-heeled with a cruel thug ’til dawn
and smashing all the neighbors’ windows.

For once, dear bitterness, I think I’d like
not to forgive it, exactly, but at least allow its fact—

the way the girl burned by the bombings learns
to live only among her basic beauties,

and not the way the pilot opening the hatch
inhabited entirely the motive for the war.

What today wants, maybe, is no part of itself
at all, but the idea of its dayness,

like the couple in bed who want so much
to be for an hour the space they’ve built between them.

How every atom envies light.
How the moon, now that I think of it,

might rather be the golf ball abandoned on its surface,
or one just like it: a dimpled concept of itself

the people of Earth can hold and consider,
so it might feel at last what I

am feeling for you right now,
secret reader.

***

Vero Gonzalez

A Bride’s Lament

Cuckoo if I marry you after three
centuries of saying No.

Cuckoo if you come to me—
cuckoo—through the window. Tender

cuckoo at my chest,
your rough wet feathers scraped my—

breast, and your beak
made           my nipples bleed

thin.
I must have been

cuckoo for trusting you,         small bird,

when there was lightning in the sky—.

***

Victoria Chang

[The boss wears a white vest a white face through the hole of a white]

The boss wears a white vest a white face through the hole of a white
vest the boss keeps her body heat in the white down vest 700-fill-power

power down the boss the boss keeps her power her power is down today
the boss’s new boss doesn’t like her the boss’s old boss doesn’t like her it

doesn’t matter the boss keeps us down in her hand warmer pockets her
pockets filled with treats in the shapes of imported hearts we are all imported

from somewhere else the boss talks about our heritage her adage starts with
I think you are I think my age is four my cage is made of a tear-resistant ripstop

nylon shell four is a favorite of moms my four-year-old daughter still listens to
me I am the boss and I like it I see why the boss likes it

***

Vuong Quoc Vu

Flower Bomb

The bomb / also / is a flower.
—William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”

My brother, come home from war,
sits now for hours in the garden.
I see now, he says, everything
as flowers, the tendency of all things
to bloom—the way the body bleeds,
the fire from guns, the sun unfurling
after the longest night.
Everything blooms.

Brother, he says, I saw so many dead
I’ve realized that the body is, after all,
a flowery thing—its clustered petals
of cells. Despite the marble column
of its spine, the great architecture
of how it stands, the arches and taut ropes
of muscle, it is easily torn apart,
gunned down and plowed under,
how it withers and wilts with hunger.

When I saw the dead,
I didn’t look at faces and never,
never into the eyes.
I avoided all implications of a soul.
I looked at hands—those miracles
of sinew and veins—and imagined
them to be leaves.
I have seen severed hands
as if they’d fallen from a tree,
hands crushed and burned crisp
like autumn leaves.
I have seen wounds
like purple trillium
forced through the skin.
I have seen blood
that spilled and splattered like asters,
the plum colors of viscera.

Brother, I have come home from Hell.
How now shall I tell the story
of Man—the wars, wars, wars
until the end of time?
How now shall I tell—my mind
already a shattering lake of glass,
my heart bullet-holed—
to write in blood or with red rose petals?
The bomb also is a flower.

Acknowledgements:
All poems appear by permission of the authors.
“bedtime stories” first appeared in Dark Sky Magazine.
“Notes Toward Basic Bitterness” first appeared in The Carolina Quarterly.
“[The boss wears a white vest a white face through the hole of a white]” first appeared in Ploughshares.

Five poems from the April open reading period, pt III

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.

Check back for more poems from our open reading period each Monday through November.

***

Greg Koehler

Just War Theory

The war ponies hate the peace horses.
And the feeling is mutual.
And that they hate is.
Not within their powers of choice.

For they were born to hate.
One another like stalks of wheat.
Hate the rusty scythe and.
The rag doll hates the child’s hands.

The war ponies hate peace horses.
Because they are so much prettier.

The neighing peace horses hate.
The war ponies just because.

They have all the money.
And land mines are waiting patiently.
In the green green paddocks.
Where the peace horses graze.

And iron-hulled ships patrol the rivers.
Of peace where the peace horses.
Sip from the surface of cool.
Gently moving waters going home.

***

Jason McCall

Because Black Kids Can Read

comics too, I’m the conscious colored, dark
and wise, the suntanned wingman. Like Iron Man,
but with more guns and less
brains or the Green Lantern who willed
himself out of the ghetto. I’m bursting
through the wall when the hero needs me,
carrying the cliffhanger of War Machine

vs. Doctor Doom! Falcon
vs. Red Skull! Steel vs. Darkseid! No, I won’t
save the day, only keep the action going,
keep the message boards warm while the man
on the cover recalibrates his armor or finds
out why his powers didn’t work the last issue.
Either way, I’ll be found in a pile of rubble
with a villain standing over me making jokes
about Jesse Owens. The real hero

will return to avenge me, and then it’s back
to the mansion until it’s my turn
for the special issue that shows me cleaning up
my neighborhood and saving my siblings
from the street gang led by my childhood
best friend. I’ll show the brothers
drugs and thugs are as bad as a Lex Luthor lovechild
with Lady Deathstrike, and, if they stay in school
and follow the rules, they can be second class
superheroes, just like me.

***

Jennifer Tseng

When Your Face Is Draped in Silk It Is Strange after Jean Valentine

The child saying, Who are you?
Where is your face?
Yours was the one asleep,
without tears or a reason to laugh,
without a good dress or a green scarf,
without friends. Not hated, not loved.
When your face cries & laughs
I don’t know you.
When your face is draped in silk
it is strange. It is someone else.

The mother saying, No!
This has always been my face.
Everyone knows it.
If you don’t know my face,
you’re a stranger.
Their eyes the eyes of moving
sheep. Their feet the feet of old
shepherds at dusk.

***

Jono Tosch

The Sad Painters

There was a man who was sad
who happened to be a painter

And his sadness happened to eat him
as the expression goes

But the man was resourceful, not only sad,
and so he painted himself out of his sadness

by copying an apple
onto a piece of two-dimensional fabric.

Another sad man
who also had happened to be a painter

looked at what the first man had done
and for a moment he was able to throw his sadness onto the apple
and feel happy

Until he looked upon the peasant woman
who had been bent down permanently
under a bale of hay

And he left the museum
And he rode the subway home unhappy.

At home he painted his own apple
but his own apple only deepened his sadness

so he destroyed his own apple
by writing fuck you apple on it.

He then felt very alone in his apartment
with his fuck you apple and his little ramen noodles.

***

Kate Angus

“Painters”

In the museum, I was looking at paintings
(blue backdrop, gold minarets)
and remembering the party,
a few days back when Dave said

he used to be a painter. Christine
asked why he stopped and he recited
O’Hara’s “Why I Am Not A Painter”
and we laughed. Good

joke. Killing time, smoking
cigarettes; the night full
as a movie set. I will never
want to know the actual reasons. Today,

I turn a corner and I find
seven de Kooning lithographs
for O’Hara. The charcoal swirls
into hats, suits, men

in cities. The poems are mostly
about love; lithographs made
after O’Hara’s death. Don’t
die, friends. Let’s make a pact.

No matter how far
we part or how quickly, it will be
a long time before I stop
thinking of you. When I die (in a blue hotel,

in an ocean, somewhere under
a star-trellised sky), it will take
years to recognize
what I wanted or who I thought

I really was or what I made
disappear before I came here.

Acknowledgements:
All poems appear by permission of the authors.
“Just War Theory” first appeared in OH NO.
“Painters” first appeared in The Indiana Review.
“Because Black Kids Can Read” first appeared in The Los Angeles Review.
“When Your Face Is Draped in Silk It Is Strange” first appeared in H.O.W. JOURNAL.

Five poems from the April open reading period, pt I

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.

Check back for more poems from our open reading period each Monday through November.

***

Refried Bean

I am going to beat everyone at poetry.

I am going to beat everyone at poetry.
I am going to use up all the metaphors and rhyme combinations.
People will try to write poems
and I will say to them,
“Sorry, but I already compared a chicken to surfing.”
“I already compared a cigarette to that time you threw up in fourth grade.”
“I already personified your mother’s bracelet.”
People will be at their desk, writing about their grandmother,
and I will come out from behind their door,
and I will say, “I already wrote that poem about your grandmother.”
And their grandmother will walk in right then and say
“It’s true, and I’ve invited her to have Christmas dinner with our family,”
and I will accept the invitation,
and at dinner,
I will speak only in rhyme.
And I will say how now brown cow,
this is my family now.

***

Nicole Walker

Hooked and Crooked

This is a nice place so I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.
There’s a band of morning glories trailing up the mailbox

post and they invite the man who delivers home with them.
I take them by their purple heads and green them, return

their dead heads to spring. It’s not such a nice place now—
more clinical and stir-uppy. More fluorescent than flour

more causal than casual. As if casual bread would make
me apologize because even the word nice gets all clamped

up in my throat. It’s as if I swallowed the dead and their heads
and did not suffer Olympian for it. It’s as if I exchanged with,

then changed the job postman. I don’t deliver. I just pick up the checks
that sit whipping in the beyond urban boxes—they wait like tongue

depressors waving: Take me. Cash me. Drink me. Swallow.
Those checks are my ticket out of the sorry that makes this nice

not a place for me but for blued glory, pistil morning. If the bank
could just accept my deposit slip, could credit my account

with the toothsome, wholesome, butter layered bread I could
eat my apologies. I wouldn’t have to part with them. I wouldn’t

have to look at them. My sorry and I could sit on the front porch
and wait for the mailman and let him bring us ads for Pantene

and Fresca and all the carnival we’ve ever wanted. We could break
bread against the concrete steps. The postman, the flowers and me.

***

Sarah Schweig

To a Daughter

I raise a glass to you, Lorraine, to your nonexistence.
In the dark, I pour a glass and raise it up.

The golden strip beneath the door tonight means
the light’s left on in the hall, means

the man who would have been your father
has been drinking quietly the dark alcohol.

Sometimes, he speaks. He said nothing yesterday.
A man who was innocent was killed by state government,

so he drank, and I watched a boy by the river
catch a brilliant fish. He held it up for his father to see.

It wriggled in the air for water, like a prize or kept promise,
then went still. Life left it, you see, and it was better.

And the boy gutted the fish with a slight and silver blade,
like his father. And they raised their hands up,

their hands glistened with scales, and the scales were the colors
of rain. In squares, fountains run, pointless and without cease.

This is what his thirst is like, your father, this is like his pain.
You’ve been spared, my daughter, but he carries the light, Lorraine.

Tonight, I watch him, the man who would have been your father.
He raises a glass and, like light sudden through drapes,

it breaks, the way a promise might, I think, and so he takes
straight from the bottle a long drink. Cheers to you, I say.

I am no one’s mother. I look at my life as a long hallway
no one enters, a slight but gleaming space. In this way, it’s better.

You see, there is a want that answers to nothing, a want
that doesn’t cease. And this want is like his thirst, or like his pain,

and you’ve been spared this want, my daughter.
Lorraine. All day, fountains run driven only by some obscure

need. The boy discarded small bones in one,
like a tired god might have done some exhausted species,

and the father touched the boy’s hair, and called him son.
See the boy. See the fish he caught, his father grilling it.

It glimmers and chars the way the night does, you see.
The night says something, sometimes, but it knew better today.

I poured one out, and another. I am no one’s mother, Lorraine.
Tonight, in our house, all lights will turn on and beam out,

like want, and in heavy downpours, fountains will run
absurdly. Tonight, the boy will taste the charred fish

and in it taste the brilliant city you’ll never see,
and the men who are dead now will still be dead tomorrow,

and down is where the moon will go in mornings,
and the streets will go on, like your father, speechlessly.

He takes a long drink, and is better. He carries with him
what light there is, and long ago, he ignited something

in me. Beneath my skin, or in my bones, it burns
like want or pain, and ceaselessly. You’ve been spared,

Lorraine, the dark and what light there is to break
through rain. You’ve been spared the man

who would have been, and spared the girl
who loved him without question, without cease.

You see, the light is what she thought he carried,
but it was only his thirst all along, it was only his pain.

He pours one out for you, just now, his daughter.
We raise it up to you, Lorraine.

***

Lesley Yalen

In eighth period Typing
they were talking about River
Phoenix dying outside
Johnny Depp’s nightclub

I misplaced a g

That was the beginning of the fear
of things sticking, things
falling from my fingers
into a wrong pause and when
I knew we could eat
our own children for
failure to thrive

Enterprise, Columbia,
Challenger, Discovery,
Atlantis, and Endeavour

all called back
in birth order

Then a star fell
from Orion’s belt
and everyone seemed
to be looking at me
and even or especially
though I was innocent
I felt like the iceberg
the ship strikes
in a love story.

***

Andrew Durbin

from “Reveler”

It is true my face beheld
The crestfallen captcha
That reads the end of the world
Is bound to the end
Of the weekend
I buried my face in fox fur
The fur of a living fox
War is not a fox
I went swimming in a lake
I felt the war touch my ankle
The lake held the names
Of my friends
Who were not at the lake
The cold spring
Which feeds the lake
Leads to a farmer’s market
In the town Cold Spring
Your mother is a fox
War is not a fox
Your mother is aging
There is a place
In North Carolina
Called Hell’s Kitchen
As there is in Manhattan
A Hell’s Kitchen
I know an Irish slum
Is a mouse brigade
War is not a mouse
The war touched my ankle
The lake didn’t move
It has no grammar
The lake’s waves were tidal
As the river that feeds it
Is a tidal river
There is no river that feeds it
I don’t know why it is said
Why I sometimes say
War is not what I sometimes say
They say a girl dove to the bottom
And drowned
This girl touched my ankle
The girl was never found
I held a fox in the woods once
You were not there
The fox spoke to me
Of a secret it swallowed
I would have to cut out its liver
To where it stores
With its humors an info
We would all desire
To make a movie of
To stop the war
I held this fox
At a lake covered in snow
He says you must make
An incision in my belly
Put your hand into me
The war touched my ankle
At the lake where the war
Was swimming at the lake’s floor
Put your hand into my mouth
He touched my face
There is a dead girl
Who does not want to be dead
She will slip up through the film
Of algae to be undead
She is a fox who has info
To stream online
A video the war isn’t ending
It is touching you
With a metal rod
The fox is holding
In its dark belly

Acknowledgements:
All poems appear by permission of the authors.
“Hooked and Crooked” first appeared in Cimarron Review.
“[In eighth period Typing]” first appeared in Two Serious Ladies.
The excerpt from “Reveler” first appeared in Web Conjunctions and “Reveler” is forthcoming as a chapbook from Argos Books.