Punch-in-the-Face Poetry showcases poems that leave you sore, gasping, and possibly embarrassed. They make you feel like you've got something to prove. They bring you out swinging.
I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don’t cut that one.
I don’t cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.
–for Drago Štambuk
Tess Gallagher, "Choices" from Midnight Lantern: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 2011 by Tess Gallagher. I
Throughout the afternoon I watched them there,
Snow-fairies falling, falling from the sky,
Whirling fantastic in the misty air,
Contending fierce for space supremacy.
And they flew down a mightier force at night,
As though in heaven there was revolt and riot,
And they, frail things had taken panic flight
Down to the calm earth seeking peace and quiet.
I went to bed and rose at early dawn
To see them huddled together in a heap,
Each merged into the other upon the lawn,
Worn out by the sharp struggle, fast asleep.
The sun shone brightly on them half the day,
By night they stealthily had stol’n away.
II
And suddenly my thoughts then turned to you
Who came to me upon a winter’s night,
When snow-sprites round my attic window flew,
Your hair disheveled, eyes aglow with light.
My heart was like the weather when you came,
The wanton winds were blowing loud and long;
But you, with joy and passion all aflame,
You danced and sang a lilting summer song.
I made room for you in my little bed,
Took covers from the closet fresh and warm,
A downful pillow for your scented head,
And lay down with you resting in my arm.
You went with Dawn. You left me ere the day,
The lonely actor of a dreamy play.
Conversations with a Muslim friend
1
So, if you don’t believe in full it means you don’t
believe. Words tumble onto the rock. A book
happens.
Okay then tell me about heaven’s beautiful
food and women. Who are these women?
My friend says, “This life is like a twenty-minute train ride.”
He says, “I live inside my
faith more fully every day.”
I am standing on soaked pavement outside
that majestic hotel in the center of town. Just before
dark, the birds come in a furious swoop like
hornets, stinging the sky to let in
what is on the other side.
II
Then the next life is equally
about the body, denied in the first?
“Do you know the Prophet knew the exact number of bones in the human
body? And why do you ask so many questions? You ask
more questions than you take in breaths of air.”
The birds beat. They crumple in
rivers of sky. At the same time every day. Kierkegaard said that
every instant a man in despair is contracting it. My friend is not
in despair; I am not in despair.
III
Kierkegaard says there are three kinds of despair: despair
at not being conscious of having a self, despair at not being
willing to be oneself, and despair at willingness to be
oneself. Listen, the train. Why complain about
the seat, the air conditioner? Just do
your best until you arrive.
During Ramadan, I fasted a week. I went to the mosque.
My friend’s uncle said:
“So you are becoming Muslim?” I said: “No.” He said: “Shame
on you.”
In the cold November current, there is a whirring of wings. Sometimes
they cloud into petals, sometimes they don’t.
IV
When the forehead presses to the earth, the blood moves
down. In the joining, the self lightens. You must count the three perfect
joints of each finger to keep time. Make no mistake, you leave the body only
through the body. The train ride. This quiet voice that is borrowed or my own.
Source: Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly Books, 2008)
The house felt like the opera,
the audience in their seats, hushed, ready,
but the cast not yet arrived.
And if I said anything
to try to appease the anxious air, my words
would hang alone like the single chandelier
waiting to dim the auditorium, but still
too huge, too prominent, too bright, its light
announcing only itself, bringing more
emptiness into the emptiness.
When the pestilence had left Newcastle
We sent in the prisoners of war
As an advance guard to clear the rats
And burn their carcasses on waste land
Between the town and the hills to the north.
And to these dry hills we then dispatched
The prisoners, giving them their freedom.
It is not known how many survived
Or what caused the deaths of those who perished.
The burial of our own dead we left
To the old people, arguing fairly
That they had an abundance of memories
And must possess a kind of immunity
To have lived so gradely and so long.
But after the carting and interment
In mass graves, they were required to camp
For six weeks outside the eastern gate.
We were pleased to see how many returned.
The rest of us, except for the wounded,
Small children and women at full term,
Sweated for days on the muddy bankside,
Humping up full buckets from the river
To sluice the filth out of the buildings.
Months later we might still catch the stench.
Few if any sexual relationships
Were brokered or resumed in this period,
But there was a brisk market in commodities.
Electricity has become a legend,
A concept the young ones cannot grasp.
And sometimes we forget to boil the water
Or lack the fuel with which to do so,
Having consumed it in the imperative
To forge new weapons and new defenses
From scrap metals of the past regime.
These we render down, though there are alloys
Beyond our ability to melt.
Elsewhere the future may be in progress,
While here traffic makes its way on foot,
Porterage being a sort of livelihood.
The insects having returned to office
With their doctrinaire policies, losing
Is what we appear to be condemned to.
Laws, so-called, are vested in hard hands,
But we pass our nights in fear of pilferers
And our leisure at knuckle-bones and hazard
when my mother struggles to spell a word in english
I want to break the entire language
into little pieces
so the edges of these letters
will stop cutting her
[Source]
A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stonework sand.
We say, “Hand me the sack,”
but we get the weight.
Heavier if it got left out in the rain.
To think that the sand or stones is the self is an error.
To think that grief is the self is an error.
Self carries the grief as a facsimile carries the side bags,
being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
The self is not the load of ropes and nails and axes.
The self is not the miner nor builder nor diver.
What would it be to take the bride
and leave behind the heavy dowry?
To let the thin-eared mule browse the tall grasses,
it’s long ears waggling like the tails of two happy dogs?
Laid out flat
in the back of the station wagon my father borrowed
I look up:
the leaves are immense,
green and golden with clear summer light
breaking through –
though I turn only my neck
I can see all of them
along this avenue that has no limits.
What does it matter
that I am only eyes
if I am to be carried
so lightly
under the trees of the world?
From beyond the numbness of my strange body
the wealth of the leaves
falls forever
into my small still watching.
What a thing it would be, if we all could fly.
But to rise on air does not make you a bird.
I’m sick of the hiss of champagne bubbles.
It’s spring, and everyone’s got something to puke.
The things we puke: flights of stairs,
a skyscraper soaring from the gut,
the bills blow by on the April breeze
followed by flurries of razor blades in May.
It’s true, a free life is made of words.
You can crumple it, toss it in the trash,
or fold it between the bodies of angels, attaining
a permanent address in the sky.
The postman hands you your flight of birds
persisting in the original shape of wind.
Whether they’re winging toward the scissors’ V
or printed and plastered on every wall
or bound and trussed, bamboo frames wound with wire
or sentenced to death by fire
you are, first
and always, ash.
Broken wire, a hurricane at each end.
Fire trucks scream across the earth.
But this blaze is a thing of the air.
Raise your glass higher, toss it up and away.
Few know this kind of dizzy glee:
an empty sky, a pair of burning wings.
— Translated by Austin Woerner
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
Punch-in-the-Face Poetry 