NewPoetry

Phoebe Wang

The evening, served on a blue-glazed platter.

The window admits as much of the slow parade

as it’s able: white moths folding like napkins,

soaking in the sun’s drops of oil.

Clouds open their gates. Crows clock

by thick as captions. It grows late.

I, too, want to be heading somewhere.

The hours roll off the table, my four-cornered life,

out of circulation. Out of the frame.

I have more than my share. Still I reach

for any excuse to leave the task at hand.

But what can other windows offer?

Boxed herbs in a flutter. Buttery light soaking

curtains as if they can’t contain that much richness.

Behind them, the shadow-play of husband and wife,

and love sits down for dinner.

My view is selective, allowing for the unseen.

In another room, I’ve made an incalculable vow.

Darkness drops down like a double-barred caesura,

between this day and all the others I’ll toss a coin for.

Molly Peacock

…………….Thomas Crawford’s sculpture, 1856
…………….Brain Bleed, 2012

The New York Historical Society.
Huge white marble sculpture in the lobby:
“Dying Indian Chief Contemplating

the Progress of Western Civilization.”
You duck beneath him with your wobbly cane
then upturn your face toward his, contemplating

his sober view of hysterical society.
“Something terrible has happened!” you say loudly
as a teenage girl to the sculpted dying man.

“He’s so sad!” you repeat to the empty lobby
where you make a pair, a society of two
(plus a volunteer and a guard) contemplating

the mystery of the new you, brain torqued
from your stroke. You connect without history
—but with feelings whole—to the agony

of the Dying Indian Chief in marble.
Your fresh response remakes his catastrophe.
Yes, something terrible has happened—

we amble on. “That’s a very sad man back there.”
Progress comes. With a cane. Without piety.
Wake up a statue. Then repair.

Michael Prior

I meant to acknowledge what you hadn’t yet confessed.
Just as a dog will tolerate strangers who approach
him sideways and with an extended hand, we’ve let

inconveniences beget emergencies. Phones closed,
switched to airplane mode, the atmosphere returned
us to our proper sphere. How could I have known

I was still broadcasting on descent? The slow burn
of aluminum scattering that which lacks mass
at lower pressures, temperatures undiscerned.

I cycled through my states, wore an ill-fitting mask.
Regret thickened asthmatic in a chamber of the heart;
its porthole was a small aquarium. If I tapped on the glass,

bright denizens below swam in and out of the dark
like fallen constellations treading water,
about to flicker out. The impossibility of disembarking

stirred an eel in my ribs. Our departure
forgotten, ambient-lighting asked for patience, pleaded
for continued understanding, as the unclaimed future

rattled in the machine. I saw what was needed,
what I had felt: the dim glow of resignation through
the tint of night—as if clarity was time’s unheeded

toll: the porthole’s algal shrouds pulsed with the blue
of wave and wind. Who rewrote our dialogue? The same
words recalled in different coloured ink. Confused,

I thought of the cuttlefish, struggling to reflect the inane
geometrics of a scientist’s whim. A life spent matching
exteriors, while the interior remained unchanged.

Eric Zboya

Daniel Nester

300. The tough guy is always African American.
301. The fatherly anvil is always feverishly ached-after.
302. The freelancer is always busty.
303. The apartment of a sucker MC is always gentle.
304. The sucker MC is always peaceful.
305. The crank call from a sucker MC is always kind.
306. The blue-balled kind is always wrong.
307. The blue-balled nutcase is always sweet.
308. A do-nothing tough guy is always to avoid sexual contact with a priest.
309. A peaceful shy brownie is always accurately hairless.
310. The Angel of Equations is always faggy.
311. An All Cows Eat Grass is always faggy.
312. The Texan is always sharp-dressed. And faggy.
313. The red wheelbarrow is always inexorably bitchin’.
314. The red wheelbarrow is always faggy.
315. The red wheelbarrow is always gentle.
316. The red wheelbarrow is always myself.
317. Act your age.
318. Grab your age.
319. High, lame, ink, lamas.
320. I’m a uniter, not a drinker of water.
321. Up in the air, fish go and marry.
322. Raise questions about rocks only underwater.
323. The tenth time you see someone nude, you must provide your own shirt.
324. Answer and measure at the same time.
325. Out of the house a funky nectar.
326. Relax on your own ass.
327. The ass responds.
328. Leap, regret, question.
329. Where your pud goes, fire follows.
330. Shapely, piggish, make your own fun.
331. Locks littered, vents, clogged.
332. Last words come easy.
333. Sturdy canes in a made-up story.
334. Your cans frustrate.
335. The lap of loquacious, the parents of the loquacious.
336. Nudge the farmers.
337. Inchoate jock itch.
338. Can’t your dolphins lighten up a bit?
339. Grab angry causes by the thorax.
340. Filthy books hold the angry.
341. Hold on to your gold.
342. Newborn dolphins unite.
343. Go with God, question him.
344. An ode in haste sings off-key.
345. The water’s hair.
346. Many caddies at the milk counter will see The Giant Labrador.
347. Inside of us and off somewhere.
348. At the start of a fight, no prayers for one’s cause.

Stuart Ross

Big Monkey watches over me
as the blistering clouds bang
against my window and I dream
of you again and you are alive.
We are in a snow fort on my lawn
on Pannahill Road and we pretend
we are soaring through space.
The rumble of a 1967 Valiant
station wagon passing by my
driveway is the roar
of a meteor hurtling toward
earth and narrowly missing our
craft. We know now that
everyone will die except for us,
because we are in space. Except
our ship has turned into a womb,
its hot, sticky walls pressing
against us until we can barely
move our arms. We are crushed
together like conjoined twins
and because you are dead, I
wonder if I too am now dead
and I call out to Big Monkey
but he is bent over my desk,
rolling a sheet of yellow paper
through the platen of my
1952 Underwood, so intent he
cannot see us in the TV set,
our palms against the screen
from inside, and vertical hold
starts slipping.

Amanda Jernigan

Waiting in the hall
I tried to recollect
a mother’s prayer: the Hail
Mary? Now and in
the hour of our death —

not right. And anyway
what right had I to say it,
who had it on faith from my atheist
father, a locked box.
Or, rather, open:

ladies and gentlemen, you
are free to inspect the contents
of this box, ‘sickness
and suffering, hatred and jealousy …
greed …’ (yes, also hope).

What is the right prayer
for Ethan? I thought. And thought:
‘What is the right prayer
for Ethan?’

Guy Gavriel Kay

She doesn’t like being understood, which makes
loneliness complicated, though you could take the
(perfectly valid) view that all loneliness is complex,
or really simple. Either, or. She wouldn’t even
be pleased that her dislikes are understood.
She walks Manhattan streets in March, long-
striding through snow melting to slush, in new boots
bought to assuage (however inadequately) her latest
iteration of midwinter blues. A southern girl in
New York, what could one reasonably expect?
She flashes confidence in her stride, at work,
in a bar with friends, end of day, into night.
She withdraws inside, seeing them falling for it,
knowing she’s only flashing, really – another
fly façade among too many in this city.
But our own mirror matters most, has to do that,
unless we’re maybe in love and then the image offered
by the one we’ve (maybe) fallen for might mean more.
Either, or. It’s hard to fall in love with people we can fool.

Dina Del Bucchia and Daniel Zomparelli

The Rose
for Belle

What happens after
you suffer through
a beast and a wedding,
everyone, objects you knew,
changed into old flesh?

You were so smart,
I always thought
it was about books, ideas,
living life through the eyes of another,
pretending because
life isn’t so fucking great.
We want more.

I’d been dismissed too
for talking about thinking,
pressing my nose to books,
creating new spaces in my body
for knowledge.

When you’re young
all the sexy misogynists,
Provencal gym monkeys
show off their brawn,
propel beastly bodies.

Maybe Stockholm syndrome
isn’t any less romantic
than cocktease guilt.

But once you get involved
in your own fairy tale,
so meta: the magical rose,
like the kind lady’s throw
to knights, like the kind
someone in a different story
will compare to your vagina

Outdated stories.

What happens
when you’ve transformed,
when you’re delicate stained glass,
decorative and one-dimensional?

hollow ship to hell
for Ariel

You saw him on a ship
and he was destined to drown, but
you saved him and fell in love.

I was a fish too, fins for feet,
flapping on the beach only for moments
before the air burned my scales.

I broke my body in half,
footed myself into his life at every moment
until I caught his attention.

I was up late one night in his bed
air burning flesh
again, my body craving the ocean.

My body sealed itself.
Skin tightened and gills
slit neck.

I filled the bathtub with
water and Epsom salts
let my scales smooth.

Then, I slipped out
of his apartment and
sunk back into the ocean.

Now, at night he cuts his skin
to create gills
but can never stay under the water long enough,

tries to keep from floating upwards,
tries to weight his body with cement,
tries to anchor.

Jaime Forsythe

This all happens where houses threaten
to slip into the sea, where no one crosses
on the stairs or sings at the table, where
odd scraps get socked away, a sparrow
in the freezer, nestled next to
the tequila, where the street
sweeper roars by under a strawberry moon.
No matter where, we don’t wash
for days and bonfire rises from every layer
of us. Chanting by the kindling, songs morph
into visions, into sketches on butcher paper.
Compatible zodiac signs hang out
around the picnic table hammered
from a kicked-in door. Words guard us
against unwelcome thoughts and shifty
visitors. Fragile alchemy gets a baby
to sleep, powered by a looping
articifical heart. The button flickers
violet, and we have entered
the right ventricle. Thirteen
beats before the curtain drops. Our lives shift
softly every time a new one arrives,
high beams interrupting the performance
and stalling the pendulums, the inner workings.
Small fuses, we disconnect and reconnect, willing
the charms we’ve created to catch.

Patrick Warner

The bearded grind-organ lady’s
Quaker-bearded monkey,
depressed elephants,
sedated lions, insouciant
ungulate dromedaries
and belligerent camels
will tomorrow be ushered
into confinement.

With these will go
the washing-machine-cum-
bisected-jet-engine that spins,
that basin of sticky wisps,
spun stratosphere that collects
on a dipped stick to make
edible pink insulation.

Stacked like ark runners will be
parenthetical sections
of the two-ring circus,
and with them the big top’s
bamboo poles a small boy
named Hal imagined were
fishing rods for whales.

His neck stiff from looking up,
his eyes so long fixed
on the glittering funambulist
he imagines he is up there
with her seeing what she sees
when she looks down:
eyes all gelatin and night,
like frogspawn in a ditch;
workweek complexions, a
shade of pale past exhaustion,
expressions as volatile
as empty petrol cans.

His stomach fills with butterflies;
butterscotch coloured they waft
and flutter as Ms Muffet makes
her way on bony
sheep-faced slippered feet
across the braided wire
from tuffet to tuffet.

Later he will not be able to say
when he got carried away
or why he hid in a wicker hamper,
under baguette-sized lace-up
bulb-toed shoes, itchy neon-coloured
nylon wigs and red ball noses,
on a bed of oily hawsers,
pegs with hangnail heads,
mauls all dents and nicks.

Tomorrow the pigeon-chested
lion tamer and the tightrope
walker will pick out his cry
from the cries of macaws,
the shrieks of parakeets,
from the ratcheting calls of toucans,
and drop him in the next town,
entrust him to the perfumed,
fire-breathing policeman.

Helen Hajnoczky

Sina Queyras

You created me, you should remember me; leaned your face into the canto of
…..my birth and broke air with me, breathed your best, your unrest
Into me even as you bled, and my father—a taut shock of muscle—caught me
…..as an Eagle takes a trout.
It was a rave, mother, a real wave and blue, a sprig of fur the three of us in our
…..first Pas de trois. You chewed the cord as he yanked,
Before that I was locked in the dashboard with Patsy Cline while you two
…..hurled and ducked. You bore me,
You should recall the blood you gave me, breathed your discontent, your
…..troubling, joyous, mysterious, unquenchable thirst for
Life in me: you shock of blonde, rare as Marilyn, a knubbly shudder of hose and
…..Almond Nougat
An edible parchment, a scroll so naïve, with such fine print, so in love with
…..your melancholy sex, you sleep as neat as a cat.

You bore me. You with your complicated luck, you should not desert me here,
…..not now, you should
Not forsake me at the lip of the mirror where the ego piques, at fifty, or fifty-
…..one, you slept on ice, do you recall?
You might have lived, you might have let go of history, made of sorrow a kite,
…..not a shroud to suffocate
Your Viking bones, wide and still as glaciers, your thin arms reaching out for
…..Valium, Ativan, Ambien. You gave into yourself my
Garbo, my tremolo, my Jeanne d’Arc, my dragon breather, mother, warrior,
…..pursuer, giver and taker of dreams,
You saved me, and then you left me, don’t you recall? Don’t you remember
…..your long arms slipping into the womb, not
Wanting that first painful separation, how you clung to me even before
…..I was breath, before
I was open my mother, my love, my jailor, your long nails like a claw raking
…..around my ears, clamping my eyes closed.
You saved me, wasn’t it that? Wrenched me into the world as you would pull
…..an arrow from your heart and
Pick your teeth? You should remember me, my two moles, my wracked brow,
…..the click of lungs, my fingers, the flat,
The round, my nails, more my fathers, like impish insect wings curled, too soft
…..to pull your hairs, grey one
For a penny, my mother myself, you said you would live for me, you said I
…..would live for you, to you, in you, you said, Tuck me
Into your pocket and walk me like a giraffe into Manhattan, just as you tucked
…..me in your bag when you ran to and from him.
You saved me, you should know me here with my palm of earth, with my
…..upturned yes, without a peony to my name.
I come for you on my knees, on my thighs, on my belly: I am so sorry I couldn’t
…..take you.
I come still, digging for your hand to find my head once again, to set me right,
…..to let me go.

Susan Glickman

For Martha Baillie

Any bird’s shadow darkening the window
is more ominous than the bird itself

In the overheated lobby a scarlet peony sheds its petals
like a woman shrugging off her fur coat

Toronto’s exiled elephants must miss their cold hectare;
even the Israelites, in the desert, hankered for Egypt

The lean shank of the dog curves to the curve of my thigh
the way a mug’s warm belly brings the palms together
while steam rises between them like prayer

Rob Winger

Tonight, this Adrienne Rich poem
is a diamond dulled with dark pencil.

Its margins announce shorthand:
men still distant, it tells me, doorframes = violence,

see famine, later, elsewhere.
The lead: silver against type.

On the cover of the book is a black and white wave
swollen to its absolute peak, beautiful and angry.

The distance from the lens that takes this image
to this particular angle of super-moonlight

by which I’m reading is at once millennia
and millisecond, is at once a yawning constellation

and a blanket, heated, to comfort some palliative nobody.
Our dreams are not what we remember.

The damp sheets, twisted; the sweat caught there:
maps for charting lost midnights.

Every body has its limits, they say.
Everyone is born in blind blood.

Across the dark fields, gasoline burns.
In shacks and dungeons, chained women still scream.

There’s just enough free speech left
for these fists to press delicate glass shards

into the shining spines
of every woman in the republic.

Michael Redhill

Dog is like eat good. The kid is like
read and sigh. The baby is like us am.

Someone finds a book on Buddhism in a box
and she’s like go undead. The dog is like eat good.

Nothing happens. Then things get tense. The girl is like
wokka wokka and the guy is like boinggg and then

It walks into the room. We’re like get scared.
I was like can’t and you were like won’t and they were like

chemical drowsing. Someone finds a book
and he’s like dream alert, he’s like this was me.

Carmelita McGrath

When the grey jay calls, its hoarse cacophony, it has swallowed too much of the day into its mouth.
Greedy for the sun, it chokes on fading light.

I held golden in a bowl. It emptied in winter. I watched its chalice shape from a picture window.
I waited for it to fill up.

It filled with longing. It seemed it was a long one. If you know a short winter, call me.

It filled in summer. There was no spring. It seemed a goddess had vomited on us.

So suddenly. I made a bed under the lilac; the rockets stretched–hesperis matronalis–intoxicants.

It was like lying in a dream of a new world; I spread a canopy
to encompass and surround me; the maples were pushing out.

I could hear them near me.

All summer I cast diversions on a theme.

A goldfinch crashed into a wall of glass, then revived in my hands:
who shook more I thought as it flew, and are you too leaving?

The bowl was emptying. I took autumn as a state of mind. Sell everything.

Park a few treasures and just go. Clean out as the leaves cleave space wide open
and tell me what is it that you own.

Julie Bruck

I wake Judeo-Christian, guilty as sin,
surrounded by my newly Calvinist family
who demand an apology for my abdication.
Meanwhile, I’ve backed the Toyota onto
Seventh Avenue, and hit something,
maybe someone, and slept with a hybrid
of former lovers (one dead, another
unseen for decades), and the sex was way,
way better than I remember: such
elaborate tattoos on their perpetually
strong, young backs! Afterwards, my late
friend Katherine stopped in, but she’s always
in a rush, which makes things fraught.
The dead will do that, since they don’t
keep time the way the rest of us think we do.
Don’t forget the mammoth plumbing problems,
epic, almost Acts of God (I’ll spare you),
and horses to gallop over huge stone walls,
and as always, a British Airways flight
to catch to an uncertain destination,
which I’ve yet to board, since complications
must ensue before I even reach an airport,
what with having so much to pack and carry.
When I’ve overslept, there’s been no
rest whatsoever, and this waking
is aching, dropped here as I am,
washed up on time’s hard shore.
So back away from the bed, my bald
man of the cloth, my teen of tefillin.
Tend to your purer sheep, steer
them clear of the Lake of Fire,
of vile books and bad company.
I’ll be there in a minute.
Busy yourselves. Elsewhere.

Michael Crummey

The weeks he worked 8 to 4 at the mill
Dad deked home by way of the Union Hall
to stand his shift a round in the lull before

supper, hustling across town to preside
over grace, doling out our daily bread
with a little glow on, a devil’s smile,

sneaking morsels from everyone’s meal
while our heads were turned, making off-colour
proposals to our mother that we were

too young to grasp in their prurient detail
though the gist came through in her dismissal:
saucy, fondly annoyed. They both seemed more

or less content with their lot, I’d have said,
if a mirrored smile is any measure.
Only once was he late through the door,

crutched in on a shift-mate’s staggered feet,
dumped and steadied in his waiting seat
where he bawled and listed hard to one side

while his sons stared and the half-eaten food
on our plates went cold. We were terrified
to see him undone—too shaken to speak,

unable to pry his eyes from the floor
even as Mom tried to coax him back
to sense, to all he asked of pleasure—

the kitchen’s fare, his young wife, fatherhood.
It seemed more than alcohol that crippled
the man, some omen of teeming failure,

and nothing he owned could staunch the flood
that rattled through and made him look a stranger,
flailing in front of his own flesh and blood.

It was a mother’s instinct to protect
her kids that placed us in a neighbour’s care
while she poured her husband into the car,

drove the blacktop to a gravel detour
ravelled through woods above Red Indian Lake
and they spent most of the evening there

watching the water’s strobing white-caps,
the sight like static on a radio’s wave,
almost a comfort, a murmuring salve

as they waited for the jag’s ragged kick
to break, for fatigue to shut off the taps.
There was no row, no needling the lapse,

as if my mother somehow understood
it was just the void peeking through a tear
in the day’s fabric that ailed her passenger,

the stone stare of all we stand to lose while
our heads are turned, that dark lull we disregard
though the gist beds in our hearts like a seed

and blooms on occasion in bald detail.
My brothers and I were already sound
by the time they idled back to town,

bewildered and spent, but undamaged.
Nothing was the same, except what mattered.
They had a life to be lived. They managed.

Sandy Pool

I won’t be around forever, A’s wife said.  One day I’m going to die.  And when I’m dead you’ll have to rely on yourself to take out the garbage or remember to change your underwear.  And while I’m at it, she added, would it be so hard to take the dog for a fucking walk once in awhile?  A knew this was true. For weeks he’d been inside, fretting and writing a tragic poem.  Writing a tragic poem was very hard work, he said.  This was the truth, but the truth was also that A was tragically depressed.  A few weeks ago, he’d received a rather gloomy prophecy that he would die by being crushed by a falling object.  He figured as long as he stayed inside, things would be o.k.  A’s wife didn’t understand this.  What is it with all you sad-sack poets she asked.  Can’t you get a real job?  Isn’t it bad enough you’ve turned our sons into tragic poets?  Eventually, A felt guilty.  He changed his underwear, and took out the garbage.  Then he put the dog on a leash.  When he got outside, the sun was blasting through the trees. A stood outside for a long time looking tentatively into the clouds.  For a while there was only light, then, only dark.  Valerius thinks he was killed by a tortoise dropped by an eagle, but no one is absolutely sure.  At his funeral, his wife said A. was a good man, but a great writer.  She quoted him beautifully:  Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.  It’s been 15 years since that funeral, and A’s wife still can’t forgive him.  Who can blame her?  Grief does funny things to people.