Author: newgreyhair

“A Panic That Can Still Come Upon Me,” Peter Gizzi

If today and today I am calling aloud

If I break into pieces of glitter on asphalt
bits of sun, the din

if tires whine on wet pavement
everything humming

If we find we are still in motion
and have arrived in Zeno’s thought, like

if sunshine hits marble and the sea lights up
we might know we were loved, are loved
if flames and harvest, the enchanted plain

If our wishes are met with dirt
and thyme, thistle, oil,
heirloom, and basil

or the end result is worry, chaos
and if “I should know better”

If our loves are anointed with missiles
Apache fire, Tomahawks
did we follow the tablets the pilgrims suggested

If we ask that every song touch its origin
just once and the years engulfed

If problems of identity confound sages,
derelict philosophers, administrators
who can say I am found

if this time you, all of it, this time now

If nothing save Saturdays at the metro and
if rain falls sidelong in the platz
doorways, onto mansard roofs

If enumerations of the fall
and if falling, cities rocked
with gas fires at dawn

Can you rescind the ghost’s double nakedness
hungry and waning

if children, soldiers, children   
taken down in schools

if burning fuel

Who can’t say they have seen this
and can we sing this

if in the auroras’ reflecting the sea,
gauze touching the breast

Too bad for you, beautiful singer
unadorned by laurel
child of thunder and scapegoat alike

If the crowd in the mind becoming
crowded in street and villages, and trains
run next to the freeway

If exit is merely a sign

“In between,” Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Late for the feast. Let me guess, she said, everything worked
against you.

Some pulverize experiences at the pool. When the air slaps, they
flip into the water and speak of the excitations of distress. The
stratagems of delivering an annulled emotion. And how is one to
read a nod? Is a nod an exclamation?

Does one kiss after a nod?

A woman mutters something about the tea being too weak.
The walls threaten to expose us, shadows pinch as we mutter
jouissance, jouissance, while the university teacher said the use of
the word was a considerable error. A most lamentable error, given
half of us are illiterate and unattached. Think of words in their
system of birth. Now do you see, the teacher said. Ah, see.

Dogs were barking for no reason.

Some of us went to the ghats and watched the dead burn. Woman
in white wailed, her hair a dumb struck line against her rocking
spine. We look for other distractions in a place of death.

In the afternoon meanings are extolled.

We are asked to name our loves. I will not, he said, use common
language to talk of love. I will not jump into the substance
without reinforcement. He took his body to the breeze and
swayed till we begged him to stop. The rain subsided but we were
still wet.

Thousands have died in a nod

“Heaven,” Cathy Song

He thinks when we die we’ll go to China.
Think of it—a Chinese heaven   
where, except for his blond hair,   
the part that belongs to his father,   
everyone will look like him.
China, that blue flower on the map,   
bluer than the sea
his hand must span like a bridge   
to reach it.
An octave away.

I’ve never seen it.
It’s as if I can’t sing that far.
But look—
on the map, this black dot.
Here is where we live,
on the pancake plains
just east of the Rockies,
on the other side of the clouds.
A mile above the sea,
the air is so thin, you can starve on it.   
No bamboo trees
but the alpine equivalent,
reedy aspen with light, fluttering leaves.   
Did a boy in Guangzhou dream of this   
as his last stop?

I’ve heard the trains at night
whistling past our yards,
what we’ve come to own,
the broken fences, the whiny dog, the rattletrap cars.   
It’s still the wild west,
mean and grubby,
the shootouts and fistfights in the back alley.   
With my son the dreamer
and my daughter, who is too young to walk,   
I’ve sat in this spot
and wondered why here?
Why in this short life,
this town, this creek they call a river?

He had never planned to stay,   
the boy who helped to build   
the railroads for a dollar a day.   
He had always meant to go back.   
When did he finally know
that each mile of track led him further away,   
that he would die in his sleep,   
dispossessed,
having seen Gold Mountain,
the icy wind tunneling through it,
these landlocked, makeshift ghost towns?

It must be in the blood,   
this notion of returning.
It skipped two generations, lay fallow,
the garden an unmarked grave.
On a spring sweater day   
it’s as if we remember him.   
I call to the children.   
We can see the mountains   
shimmering blue above the air.
If you look really hard
says my son the dreamer,
leaning out from the laundry’s rigging,   
the work shirts fluttering like sails,   
you can see all the way to heaven

“Getting There,” Christopher Buckley

Time to give up
grieving my mother’s loss,
faulting my father and
his Neolithic moral certitude
about every detail
on the evening news,
his general absence
hanging like the gray
sheets on the line.

Never mind how
mismatched in the heart,
I should be grateful
they were there at all,
for that moment
that childhood stretched
like fog, the beach empty
and unmarked.

It comes to little now
who I forgive, mourn,
or thank. The dust shifts
and we are barely
suspended in the light.

I know this little thing:
there’s a boy somewhere
in a station where
the trains still run,
wearing scuffed brown shoes,
gray overcoat, and cap;
someone has neatly parted
and combed his hair.


He is waiting
to be taken by the hand
and told where we are going,
to hear we are headed home—
though I can see nothing
beyond the smoke
and midnight haze
at the far end
of the platform,
where I am not
even sure of the stars.

“A Secret I’ve Said Three Times and Still Feel As If I’ve Never Told,” Elijah Patterson

I appointed myself the guardian of his breath.
This man, nearly a stranger to me in eulogy,
rasping and gurgling his final days
while I sat at the head of his bed reading
      (a good tribute)
      and my grandmother smoothed his quilt
            and asked if I was ready,
                  and if I was strong.

When she left to wash the same dishes again
      (how important it is to be useful,
      how important it is to be needed);
I apologized to him
for her speaking over his head
as if he were not there.

Hours pass, and positions change,
our bodies follow the hands of the clock,
chairs in the house stops on the dial.
We rotate from his bed,
to couch and kitchen and bedroom–.
And then,
across the room,
I heard it–
      the silence.

He’s quiet now.

            I said, after a longer pause
            than I have ever admitted,
            these three times I told.

And his son said

Good.

      And then–

Wait.

We walked to his father’s hospital bed,
(seven paces).
He pressed his fingers to his father’s silent throat
feeling for the rubbery tube of the carotid,
opened his own mouth–

and then–

      a gasp–

            –bright, upright, lungs full,
            teeth a decrepit grey fence
            with its gate swung open–

and then–

                  a fall–.

And I spoke again to the shape of his ear:

            Didn’t mean to scare you.
            Just checking.

Even though I knew he couldn’t hear.

“Crystal Meth Under Her Choir Robe,” John Repp

No surprise. Bills to pay, pain to obliterate,
a favor to a friend desperate
for more time before facing facts,
or a reason less beholden to One-day-at-a-time
or I-don’t-know-why or There-is-no-why-
I-just-like-getting-high or Then-Jesus-spoke-to-me
blather. Nothing’s enough, not even the moments
when her voice — any voice, my voice —
vanishes into the Voice the hymn
wrenches from the throats of the spiritual
paupers up there swaying in black satin.
The God of the Garden is the God
of Chemistry, too, a single sniff
in a lifetime proof enough — nothing
can slough errands or heartbreak
so fast into the metaphysical ditch
where all of it belongs. Weren’t we made
for better than the Fall, if Fall this is?
We all see what the Flood keeps doing.
A little while dry, please, a little while
with no chattering chimp between
the ears & the Wizard once more in Oz.
This is my mind, not hers. She’s a story
I heard. I’m a story I can’t stop hearing.
A plastic tarp in a monsoon may be
her future. A plush ride home to havoc.
A vision that delivers her from want,
deserving or not.

“Self-Portrait in the Body of a Whale,” Frances Justine Post

We come upon the body of a whale, a fresh beaching.
      It smells like a thousand fishes.      
I crawl in on the carpet of its tongue, seeking the injury out.

      Outside, you cough and look away as I squint
            through the eye at you. I dig into the room
its ribs make and squat in the warm gloom. The heart,

a chandelier, hangs down, ringed with veins. Here and there
      the skin, thinned by hermit crabs, lets in the light
like a stained glass window with blood red panes.


      I lie down on the bed of its liver as the tide fills the body,
            each wave, higher. You give the whale a kick
I almost didn’t feel and gesture towards the dunes,

backing away, disappearing. Is this who you really are?
      This is where I live now like a barnacle,
stern and grumpy. If you try to move me, I will cut you.