Author: newgreyhair

“And Then It Was Less Bleak Because We Said So,” Wendy Xu

Today there has been so much talk of things exploding
into other things, so much that we all become curious, that we
all run outside into the hot streets
and hug. Romance is a grotto of eager stones
anticipating light, or a girl whose teeth
you can always see. With more sparkle and pop
is the only way to live. Your confetti tongue explodes
into acid jazz. Small typewriters
that other people keep in their eyes
click away at all our farewell parties. It is hard
to pack for the rest of your life. Someone is always
eating cold cucumber noodles. Someone will drop by later
to help dismantle some furniture. A lot can go wrong
if you sleep or think, but the trees go on waving
their broken little hands.

“It’s Always Something,” Sally Delehant

Yesterday the wind took our picture
off the wall over the piano;               birds chirped
their curt symphonies in the box elder.             I thought
of you—         your obvious loveliness,                 your obliviousness
to lost things.        An ambulance blinks two lanes over,
a restaurant goes under,       your little niece kicks off her shoe.

We pantomime infatuations,             put on scarves.
you’ll never again speak to your father.            What was
once my knee in a theater                 is tired eyes at a kitchen sink;
we fall into us.                       A squirrel upsets the feeder, hangs by one leg
and reaches.                   (Even my feet are angry.)               You tromp in
muddy leaves,                test the alarm,              whisper lub-dub.

Silvered streets gird our apartment.                   I fasten
my parka            to leave.                                   Everywhere muck, newspapers,
a blanket—        our neighbor in flip-flops has forgotten her key.
     I daydream the ocean, your hand on my ankle.
I’ll walk without stopping, won’t care if I ever do.               The wind can whip
its wants, can rattle each thing,                          rip roofs from shingles

at angles.           I’ll think of you—            forgetting
which switch is a light                    and which the disposal,

climbing on my back at a carnival,           quieting

after pendulum hung work days.           The streetlights

have been on for an hour.           Nothing will let me come to you.



From A Real Time of It (Cultural Society, 2012).

“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.

“first time,” Reina María Rodríguez

we went into a market—they call it a grocery—and you can’t imagine. fruit brilliant as magazine photos. all kinds of different oranges, grapefruits, mandarins, some tiny clementines with a blue sticker—Morocco—they’ve come so far…the eggs are painted with colors corresponding to the days of the week you’re supposed to eat them: a different color for each opportunity. i felt dizzy, the gulf between myself and this place seemed insuperable. tears welled up in my eyes, i wanted desperately to flee, to get outside so i could breathe. i wanted to explain to Phillis, the North American who had invited me, what was happening to me. i tried, but she couldn’t understand: you have to have felt it yourself: the first time. for the first time my mind had crossed over five hundred years of development at jet speed and arrived in the future, a cold future, its display cases filled with artificial snow and artificial heat. there were a thousand things i never knew existed, a panoply of brand names and gadgets for every purpose. i felt like someone from the stone age, and realized most people on the planet never know the era they’re living in, any more than they could know the quantity of living matter in this galaxy that surrounds us, or the milky complexity of the molecules in their own brains, and what’s more they don’t know that they’ll die without ever knowing. i felt terror of that gloss, of the waxed fruit, of propaganda so refined it could dilute the existence of the strange things before my eyes, other sensations: everything wanting to be used up, immediately, licked, tasted, eaten, packaged, mastered. i knew i couldn’t stand this avalanche, this brilliant swarm, for long, these rows on rows of distant faces staring out at me from cardboard boxes. i’d seen nothing singular in the place, no unique thing i could separate out from the amorphous mass of texture and sensation. i began to move closer, imagining i walked with those who have never eaten meat or tasted cow’s milk, who have never nursed except from the teat of a goat. those who have had only wildflowers to chew when the winter hunger comes. i approached closer still, imagining i walked with the salty ones, who collect their water from the public pipe. my nose began to bleed and Phillis said it was the cold; i knew that wasn’t the problem. we were near the seafood display, i moved closer. fish have always aroused in me both horror and desire. i moved closer, like a lost child feeling her way through space toward something of hers that’s hidden. i brushed the shells with my fingertips, they were smooth and delicate, but obviously artificial, made to be used once and thrown away. at first touch they might seem real, pearly, perfect, but they’re actually plastic, and they’ve never even seen any sea.

“Hospital parking lot, April,” Laura Kasischke

Once there was a woman who laughed for years uncontrollably after a stroke.

Once there was a child who woke after surgery to find his parents were impostors.

These seagulls above the parking lot today, made of hurricane and ether, they

have flown directly out of the brain wearing little blue-gray masks, like strangers’ faces, full

of wingéd mania, like television in waiting rooms. Entertainment. Pain. The rage

of fruit trees in April, and your car, which I parked in a shadow before you died, decorated now with feathers,

and unrecognizable
with the windows unrolled
and the headlights on
and the engine still running
in the Parking Space of the Sun.

“ROYGBIV,” Fred D’Aguiar

The shoemaker’s wife ran preschool
With a fist made not so much of iron
But wire bristles on a wooden brush.

She made us recite and learn by rote.
Our trick was to mouth words, sound
As if we knew what we would one day

Come to know, what would dawn
On us as sure as a centipede knows
What to do with its myriad legs.

She made us settle our feet on the mud
Floor of her daub and wattle hut and she
Wielded a cane cut from wood that bit

Into the palm of the hand and left a burn
That resonated up the arm for an age
After its smart swing and crisp contact.

Worst of all was the shoe cupboard
Where the old man stored his wire
Brushes: a cold, dark, narrow place,

Replete with brushes hung on nails
Covering every square inch and said
To come alive when a child was locked

In with them so that they scrubbed
Flesh off that child’s bones. She said
We would end up there if we did not

Concentrate, so we stilled our feet
And spoke the words in the right order
For colors in a rainbow until the very

Thing took her place in front of us
Arranged in cuneiform, polished,
Brandishing a window to climb out.

“For the Man Whose Son My Son Killed,” Gary Earl Ross

You must understand this: my son
called me after his first firefight,
distraught that he had taken life
when I had taught him to cherish it.
He called me, said he felt weird
and needed to talk to somebody.
Who better than the father who
carried him in a backpack, read
him a bedtime story each night,
and would always love him?
I’m here, I said. Tell me about it.
He did, and I listened, offering
mmm-hmms and yesses and words
of comfort when his voice caught.

Afterward he felt better and returned
to his duties in this dubious war.
Meanwhile, I was relieved he had
survived another day of the insanity.
On his second tour his vehicle hit a
roadside bomb. Bleeding from his
eyes because of a concussion, he flew
to the military hospital in Germany and
later came home. Again I was relieved.
Today, on the first leg of his third trip
to the Twilight Zone we’ve made of
your home, he called. I was glad to hear
his voice. Glad every damn time, ever
terrified your experience will be mine.

Later, when NPR broadcast a wailing
Iraqi father who’d lost two sons in this
chaos, I thought of you for the first time,
wondered if you were that father. It was
purely chance that your son aimed at mine
and mine squeezed off an auto burst first.
Two—no, three fathers in agony because
our leaders are all fools. Still, someone
should recognize your pain. I do, sir,
and so does my son, himself a father.
We are both sorry for your loss.

“Boardinghouse with No Visible Address,” Franz Wright

So, I thought,
as the door was unlocked
and the landlord disappeared (no,
he actually disappeared)
and I got to examine the room
unobserved. There
it stood
in its gray corner: 
the narrow bed, sheets
the color of old aspirin.
Maybe all this had occurred
somewhere inside me
already, or
was just about to.
Is there a choice?
Is there
even a difference? Familiar,
familiar but not
yet remembered …
The small narrow bed.
I had often wondered
where I would find it, and
what it would look like.
Don’t you?
It was so awful
I couldn’t speak. Then
maybe you ought to lie down for a minute, I heard myself
thinking. I mean
if  you are having that much trouble
functioning. And when
was the last time
with genuine sorrow
and longing to change
you got on your knees?
I could get some work done
here, I shrugged;
I had done it before.
I would work without cease.
Oh, I would stay awake
if only from horror
at the thought of waking
up here. Ma,
a voice spoke from the darkness
in the back seat where
a long thin man lay,
arms crossed
on his chest,
while they cruised slowly up and down
straining to make out the numbers
over unlighted doors,
the midnight doctor’s;
in his hurt mind
he was already merging
with a black Mississippi
of mercy, the sweat pouring off him
as though he’d been doused
with a bucket of ice water
as he lay sleeping. “I saw the light,”
they kept screaming. “Do
I saw the light!”
Ma — there ain’t no light
I don’t see no light.

— Dayton, Ohio

“Postcard from a Place I Have Never Been,” Steve Kistulentz

One condition of work-release is daily to confess
my obsessions, which I then write in disco glitter,
one gluey blossom across my permanent record.
When I eat too much of the local fruit, it gives me
clairvoyance. But I forget to write down the predictions,
instead crush cherry pits into a fine powder, chop
the powder into lines with an expired credit card.
The homeless give me quarters. Union rules require
at least one mention of the weather here. My flight
leaves on an inexact date in the nebulous future,
arrives late afternoon, two days before our first kiss.
I pay the airline $25 extra to lose my dignity between
here and Chicago. At the airport you buy it back.
When I walk to the market to buy more cherries,
a parade of kittens follows, marching in formation,
singing precise and bawdy cadence about prostitutes
and crack houses. They change the names to protect
the innocent. Signs say this mile of interstate is paved
with the bones of the great mastodons, and kept clean
by the well-meaning gentlemen of the Kiwanis Club.
Vacationers from further south sit in the lobby
watching guests from the north put on
one-act plays. On even-numbered days, only, of course.
Registered letters from the clerk of the court inform me
that it won’t violate my probation to drag you across
state lines as long as I promise to return you by 8 p.m.,
mostly whole. The desk clerk is also the milkman
is the town orthodontist. Instead of leaving Bibles
at bedside, Gideons leave individual soaps printed
with couplets from the Song of Songs, or corkscrews.
I did not catch last night’s plays, but promised to attend
this evening’s performance. I play a slightly amplified
version of myself, with one line: Wish you were here.
It’s a song and dance number. Everyone applauds.