Author: newgreyhair

“7:17,” Elijah Patterson

you come back to me in a memory
of frantic morning primping,
a hurricane of flat-ironed hair and unironed pants.
the bathroom mirror still fogged
by your shower and breath as you squintingly apply eyeliner, shouting
“time check!” every few minutes.

you are always late.

it takes some time to trace the memories
of women i have loved and not deserved
before i get to your name and face,
two words instead mean the essence of you.

i    have never been good with time.
i    have never been good with months or years.
i    looked after those hands with unblinking dedication.

and
sleepless tuesday mornings, i wonder
who it is that now attends
to the ticking of your clocks.

“Semi Semi Dash,” Jillian Weise

The last time I saw Big Logos he was walking
to the Quantum Physics Store to buy magnets.
He told me his intentions. He was wearing

a jumpsuit with frayed cuffs. I thought the cuffs
got that way from him rubbing them against
his lips but he said they got that way

with age. We had two more blocks to walk.
“Once I do this, what are you going to do?”
he asked. “I wish you wouldn’t do it,” I said.

Big Logos bought the magnets and a crane
delivered them to his house. After he built
the 900-megahertz superconductor, I couldn’t go

to his house anymore because I have all kinds
of metal in my body. I think if you love someone,
you shouldn’t do that, build something like that,

on purpose, right in front of them.

“Dream Song #16,” Daniel Borzutzky

Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes    …    Yo no sé!
— César Vallejo

They sniffed us out of the holes with the animals
they had programmed and there are blows in life so
powerful we just don’t know and there were trenches
and there was water and it poured in through our mouths

and out of our ears and there were things we saw in the
sand at that moment of sinking: mountains and daisies
and tulips and rivers and the bodies of the people we
had been and the bodies of the people we had loved

and we felt hooks coming through the trenches and we
felt hooks coming through the sand and I saw hooks coming
through my child’s clothes and I wanted him to know that they
would never be able to scoop us out of the sand but of course

it wasn’t true they had scooped us out of the sand and our
mouths were so full of dirt it is what they do when you’re
dead and they made us spit and they beat us until our mouths
were empty and they paid us for constructing the mountain and

it was me and L and we looked for S and we looked for J and J
and we looked for O and we looked for R and we looked for J
and S in the holes in which the bodies of those we loved were
hiding or dying or sinking or stealing some shelter some little

worm’s worth of cover to keep their bodies from dissolving
into the maniac murmurs of this impossible carcass economy

“I Sing the Body Electric, Especially When My Power Is Out,” Andrea Gibson

This is my body.
I have weathervanes. They are especially sensitive to dust storms and hurricanes.
When I am nervous, my teeth chatter like a wheelbarrow collecting rain
I am rusty when I talk:
It’s the storm in me.

The doctor said some day I might not be able to walk
it’s in my blood like the iron
my mother is tough as nails,
she held herself together the day she could no longer hold my niece
we said,
“Our kneecaps are our prayer beds
everyone can walk further on their kneecaps than they can on their feet.”

This is my heartbeat
Like yours, it is a hatchet.
It can build a house or tear one down.
My mouth is a fire escape,
the words coming out don’t care that they are naked,
there is something burning in here.
When it burns,
I hold my own shell to my ear,
listen for the parade when I was seven.
The man who played the bagpipes wore a skirt
he was from Scotland;
I wanted to move there,
wanted my spine to be the spine of an unpublished book,
my faith the first and last page
the day my ribcage became monkeybars for a girl hanging on my every word
they said,
“you are not allowed to love her,”
tried to take me by the throat to teach me
I was not a boy,

I had to unlearn their prison-speak
refuse to make wishes on the star on the sheriff’s chest,

I started asking the sun about the Big Bang
the sun said, “it hurts to become.”
I carried that hurt on the tip of my tongue
and whisper “bless your heart” every chance I get
so my family tree can be sure I have not left
you do not have to leave to arrive, I am learning this slowly

So sometimes when I look in the mirror
my eyes look like the holes in the shoes of the shoe-shine man
my hands are busy on the wrong things.
Some days, I call my arms wings while my head is in the clouds
It will take me a few more years to learn flying
is not pushing away the ground
safety isn’t always safe
you can find one on every gun.
I am aiming to do better.

This is my body.
My exhaustion pipe will never pass inspection
and still my lungs know how to breathe like a burning map
every time I get lost in the curtain of her hair
you can find me by the window
following my past to a trail of blood in the snow
the night I opened my veins,
the doctor who stitched me up asked me if I did it for attention.
For the record:
If you have ever done anything for attention,
this poem is attention.
Title it with your name
it will— scour the city bridge every night you spend kicking at your shadow,
staring at the river,
it does not want to find your body doing anything but loving what it loves
love what you love
Say “this is my body,
it is no one’s but mine,
it is my nervous system
my wanting blood,
my half-tamed addictions,
my tongue tied-up like a ball of Christmas lights
if you put a star on the top of my tree, make sure it is a star that fell,
make sure it hit bottom like a tambourine
‘cause all these words are stories for the staircase to the top of my lungs,
where I sing what hurts
and the echo comes back
“Bless your heart”
Bless your body.”
Bless your holy kneecaps, they are so smart
You are so full of rain,
there is so much growing,
hallelujah to your weathervanes,
hallelujah to the ache
hallelujah to your full, to the fall,
hallelujah to the grace,
and every body
and every cell
of us all.

“Providence,” Natasha Trethewey

What’s left is footage: the hours before
      Camille, 1969—hurricane
            parties, palm trees leaning
in the wind,
      fronds blown back,

a woman’s hair. Then after:
      the vacant lots,
      boats washed ashore, a swamp

where graves had been. I recall

how we huddled all night in our small house,
      moving between rooms,
            emptying pots filled with rain.

The next day, our house—
      on its cinderblocks—seemed to float
in the flooded yard: no foundation

beneath us, nothing I could see
      tying us      to the land.
      In the water, our reflection
                  trembled,
disappeared
when I bent to touch it.

“Song of myself,” Diane Seuss

If there’s pee on the seat it’s my pee,
battery’s dead I killed it, canary at the bottom
of the cage I bury it, like God tromping the sky
in his undershirt carrying his brass spittoon,
raging and sobbing in his Hush Puppy house
slippers with the backs broke down, no Mrs.
God to make him reasonable as he gets out
the straight razor to slice the hair off his face,
using the Black Sea as a mirror when everyone
knows the Black Sea is a terrible mirror,
like God is a terrible simile for me but like
God with his mirror, I use it.

“Myth,” Natasha Trethewey

I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,

the Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try taking

you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking.

*
Again and again, this constant forsaking:
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
You back into morning, sleep-heavy, turning.

But in dreams you live. So I try taking,
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow.
The Erebus I keep you in—still, trying—

I make between my slumber and my waking.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow.
I was asleep while you were dying.

“Bakersfield, 1969,” Dorianne Laux

I used to visit a boy in Bakersfield, hitchhiked
to the San Diego terminal and ride the bus for hours
through the sun-blasted San Fernando Valley
just to sit on his fold-down bed in a trailer
parked in the side yard of his parent’s house,
drinking Southern Comfort from a plastic cup.
His brother was a sessions man for Taj Mahal,
and he played guitar, too, picked at it like a scab.
Once his mother knocked on the tin door
to ask us in for dinner. She watched me
from the sides of her eyes while I ate.
When I offered to wash the dishes she told me
she wouldn’t stand her son being taken
advantage of. I said I had no intention
of taking anything and set the last dish
carefully in the rack. He was a bit slow,
like he’d been hit hard on the back of the head,
but nothing dramatic. We didn’t talk much anyway,
just drank and smoked and fucked and slept
through the ferocious heat. I found a photograph
he took of me getting back on the bus or maybe
stepping off into his arms. I’m wearing jeans
with studs punched along the cuffs,
a t-shirt with stars on the sleeves, a pair
of stolen bowling shoes and a purse I made
while I was in the loony bin, wobbly X’s
embroidered on burlap with gaudy orange yarn.
I don’t remember how we met. When I look
at this picture I think I might not even
remember this boy if he hadn’t taken it
and given it to me, written his name under mine
on the back. I stopped seeing him
after that thing with his mother. I didn’t know
I didn’t know anything yet. I liked him.
That’s what I remember. That,
and the I-don’t-know-what degree heat
that rubbed up against the trailer’s metal sides,
steamed in through the cracks between the door
and porthole windows, pressed down on us
from the ceiling and seeped through the floor,
crushing us into the damp sheets. How we endured it,
sweat streaming down our naked bodies, the air
sucked from our lungs as we slept. Taj Mahal says
If you ain’t scared, you ain’t right. Back then
I was scared most of the time. But I acted
tough, like I knew every street.
What I liked about him was that he wasn’t acting.
Even his sweat tasted sweet.

“The Blue Terrance,” Terrance Hayes

I come from a long line hollowed out on a dry night,
the first son in a line of someone else’s children,
afraid of water, closets, other people’s weapons,
hunger and stupidity, afraid of the elderly and the new dead,
bodies tanned by lightening, afraid of dogs without ethos,
each white fang on the long walk home. I believe all the stories
of who I was: a hardback book, a tent behind the house
of a grandmother who was not my grandmother, the smell of beer,
which is a smell like sweat. They say I climbed to the roof
with a box of light bulbs beneath my arm. Before the bricks,
there were trees, before the trees, there were lovers
barely rooted to the field, but let’s not talk about them,
it makes me blue. I come from boys throwing rocks
bigger than their fists at the head of the burned girl,
her white legs webbed as lace on a doily. In someone’s garage
there was a flashlight on two dogs pinched in heat.
And later, a few of the puppies born dead and too small
to be missed. I come from howls sent up all night and all day,
summers below the hoop and board nailed to a pine tree.
I come from light bulbs glowing with no light and no expressions,
thrown as far as the will allows like a night chore, like a god
changing his mind; from the light broken on the black road
leading to my mother. Tell me what you remember of her
now that her walk is old, now that the bone in her hip strains
to heal its fracture? I come from the hot season
gathering its things and leaving. I come from the dirt road
leading to the paved one. I will not return to the earth
as if I had never been born. I will not wait to become a bird
dark enough to bury itself in midair. I wake up sometimes
in the middle of the country with fur on my neck.
Where did they bury my dog after she hung herself,
and into the roots of what tree are those bones entangled?
I come blessed like a river of black rock, like a long secret,
and the kind of kindness like a door that is closed
but not locked. Yesterday I was nothing but a road
heading four ways. When I threatened to runaway
my mother said she would take me where ever I wanted to go.