Author: newgreyhair

“Pluralities,” Ralph Adamo

I hate that you are on the other side this evening

If I go somewhere to cry for you how will I stop

I hope this finds you well. It’s been too long.
I said when you were already gone.

Listening to you talk
over there is like
listening to water

I compose
you are here
music breaking whitely
one track crossing over another
to reach disaster

Shooed from the blues I stand
against one breeze
and feel the summer’s cascade
buggy and wet in my blood

I a sunken man with an old nose and long eyes
wind-shredded
used to the way little becomes less
unprepared for bounty
whittling sorrow down to its toothsome size

****

The little house of my dead first wife
blows me a kiss as I go past
on wheels, the sidewalk cracks
one more lame joke to boot, and
then I am on the other side, again.

“From a native Hawaiian woman shipped out to Oklahoma because of prison overcrowding in Hawai’i,” Amalia B. Bueno

1. I left three years ago.

2. If you want to know about my crime, ask Prosecutor Peter Carlisle.

3. If you want to know how much cash and drugs I had on me, ask my husband.

4. If you want to know where my husband is, ask his attorney, the guy who plea bargained so the State could get bigger fish.

5. If you want to know why the dealers don’t get caught, ask my cousin at W triple C who’s also a mule like me.

6. If you want to know why my cousin is a drug runner, ask her boyfriend who threatened to kill her if she didn’t do it.

7. If you want to know where my daughters Liana 6, Shawneen 10, and Cody 14 are, ask Human Services Director Lillian Koller.

8. If you want to know why I was moved from Women’s in Kailua to O triple C in Kalihi, ask the suicide watch supervisor who gives out the meds.

9. If you want to know why I got shipped thousands of miles away from home, ask the case worker who recommended me because she said I wouldn’t be a management problem.

10. If you want to know what the first Oklahoma winter was like, I have never been so cold in my life I thought I was going to die.

11. If you want to know why me, a kanaka maoli, is among so many Native Hawaiians in prison, ask the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.

12. If you want to know why I had to leave the place where I was born, ask Governors Waihee, Cayetano and Lingle.

13. If you want to know if I still get family visits like before, the answer is no.

14. If you want to know if I’m allowed weekly phone calls to my daughters like before, the answer is no.

15. If you want to know if I’m off the waiting list and got my required substance abuse treatment class, the answer is no.

16. Sometimes I think no one cares about me, or remembers mothers and daughters who’ve gone away, or notices Hawaiians, or thinks prisoners matter because we’re out of sight, out of mind.

17. I don’t want to think about it any more.

18. I couldn’t wait anymore. So I left.


* After Bino A. Realuyo’s “From a Filipino Death March Survivor Whose World War II Benefits Were Rescinded by the U.S. Congress in 1946.”

“Facts About the Moon,” Dorianne Laux

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters, and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

“Fate, Chance, and Twelve Packs,” Ron Salutsky

You threw empty Miller ponies
at DANGEROUS CURVE signs along 461

on the ride back from the nearest wet county
& now in the playground gravel you see glass

scattered like tea leaves & you don’t know
if they’re telling you to write more poetry

or go build a nursery on the west coast
of the Sea of Cortes. First, your will
must evaporate like moths when a tree falls
in the forest. You must speak

like an orchid, fancy yet tender, bold enough
to be rooted in bark. Somewhere in the stars

is written a holy bibliography
of the places you’ve published your urine,

mostly on drunken nights long ago
in a Kentucky summer when the world was your toilet,
existence a mishap. Lean in now, listen
to what the rain says as it shines
the glass & gravel & pokes its way
into the cracked dirt as if Earth’s dark loam

were something you could peel back
& slide into until the sun returns.

“i must be a menace to my enemies,” June Jordan

1
I will no longer lightly walk behind
a one of you who fear me:
Be afraid.
I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
and facial tics
I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
and this is dedicated in particular
to those who hear my footsteps
or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
cart
then turn around
see me
and hurry on
away from this impressive terror I must be:
I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
surrounded by my comrades singing
terrible revenge in merciless
accelerating
rhythms
But
I have watched a blind man studying his face.
I have set the table in the evening and sat down
to eat the news.
Regularly
I have gone to sleep.
There is no one to forgive me.
The dead do not give a damn.
I live like a lover
who drops her dime into the phone
just as the subway shakes into the station
wasting her message
canceling the question of her call:
fulminating or forgetful but late
and always after the fact that could save or
condemn me
I must become the action of my fate.

2
How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number?
South Africa for instance:
do we agree that more than ten thousand
in less than a year but that less than
five thousand slaughtered in more than six
months will
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?
I must become a menace to my enemies.

3
And if I
if I ever let you slide
who should be extirpated from my universe
who should be cauterized from earth
completely
(lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
terrorist degree)
then let my body fail my soul
in its bedeviled lecheries

And if I
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.

I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies.

“Running Orders,” Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

They call us now.
Before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think “Do I know any Davids in Gaza?”
They call us now to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of
war time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.

“I Want To Be Shocked Shitless,” Gloria Anzaldúa

I’m afraid, I told them,
that you will open no gates for me,
that neither one of you will floor me.

I fear that the hooks
in your words will not grip me
that I will vanish
into that inner terrain
where none follow.

I fear you will bore me.
I know you will call me
on the awkward line,
the hollow word.
But the truths I don’t uncover,
the visions I don’t aim toward,
don’t reach, will you–

I don’t want to be told
what to write
I can excavate my own content
I want to be pushed into
digging deep wells
in unheard ofland.
I want you to give me eyes in
in the back of my head.
Be a thunder clap
and rouse me.
Be an earthquake
make me tremble
Be a river raging rampant
in my veins.
Shock me shitless.

“Implosions,” Adrienne Rich

The world’s
not wanton
only wild and wavering
I wanted to choose words that even you
would have to be changed by
Take the word
of my pulse, loving and ordinary
Send out your signals, hoist
your dark scribbled flags
but take
my hand
All wars are useless to the dead
My hands are knotted in the rope
and I cannot sound the bell
My hands are frozen to the switch
and I cannot throw it
The foot is in the wheel
When it’s finished and we’re lying
in a stubble of blistered flowers
eyes gaping, mouths staring
dusted with crushed arterial blues
I’ll have done nothing
even for you?

“The Reassurer,” Wendell Berry

People in the throes of national prosperity, who breathe poisoned air, drink poisoned water, eat poisoned food,
who take poisoned medicines to heal them of the poisons that they breathe, drink, and eat,
such a people crave the further poison of official reassurance. It is not logical,
but it is understandable, perhaps, that they adore their President who tells them that all is well, all is better than ever.
The President reassures the farmer and his wife who
have exhausted their farm to pay for it, and have exhausted themselves to pay for it,
and have not paid for it, and have gone bankrupt for the sake of the free market, foreign trade, and the
prosperity of corporations;
he consoles the Navahos, who have been exiled from their place of exile, because the poor land contained
something required for the national prosperity,
after all; he consoles the young woman dying of cancer caused by a substance used in the normal course of national
prosperity to make red apples redder;
he consoles the couple in the Kentucky coalfields, who sit watching TV in their mobile home on the mud of
the floor of a mined-out stripmine;
from his smile they understand that the fortunate have a right to their fortunes, that the unfortunate have a right to their misfortunes, and that these are
equal rights.
The President smiles with the disarming smile of a man who has seen God, and found Him a true American,
not overbearingly smart.
The President reassures the Chairman of the Board of the Humane Health for Profit Corporation of America,
who knows in his replaceable heart that health, if it came, would bring financial ruin;
he reassures the Chairman of the Board of the Victory and Honor for Profit Corporation of America, who has been wakened in the night by a dream of the
calamity of peace.