January - Poem 16
A Maybe Ode to the Lips Mouthing Along to Protesters’ Chants / Haley Bosse
But no ode to the officer.
No odes to joining what has been shown
Again and again and again
And again and again and again
To want to kill my neighbors.
So ode to the police officer’s neighbors,
Who are also my neighbors.
Ode to their tears, watching
Masked men take our neighbors.
Ode to the dream where
My neighbors bring back
Our missing neighbors. Ode
To nights where no death
Steals the dreams of my neighbors,
Though we don’t get many
Anymore, calm nights
Where my neighbors
Walk slow through the clouds
Of warm jasmine lifting
From the trellis of our neighbors,
Nights where anything seems possible
Or at least present,
All of us breathing
Wherever we are and not
Being suffocated or shot
Or stolen by men who hide
Their faces. When I still dream,
My neighbors all have faces,
Though I’ve been told
That it’s not possible
To imagine anyone I haven’t met,
To love anyone I don’t know.
I don’t know
How many of my neighbors
Have been taken. I don’t know
How they’re being harmed
Behind fences and walls and beyond
The reach of cameras as I sit awake
All through the night and don’t dream.
I am awake and awake and awake
And awake and awake and awake
And my neighbors are not here.
and also / Jess Bowe
i am here. blue sheets. two
windows. baby, asleep. dog
rearranging on the downstairs
couch. night moving further
in to the center of my circling
thoughts. i am here, and also
in the part of an ocean i can’t name
where hands turn to nothing
and humans go from god to shell.
whalesong is caught by a cave
untouched, held deep in the jaw
of the earth. i am here, and also
in the streets on a road
where a father taught his son
to balance without caution
where a father taught his son
to make friends with every fall,
is the sound of birds
and no bird to be seen,
brick to brick to brick
the bounce of a whistle
trills a long night ahead.
i am here, and also
i can’t bring myself
anywhere but places
that appear to be drowning
in deep water,
swimming with sharks.
somewhere in the mouth
of the Dark emerges
language, ancient, stitched
across the belly of sleep.
Point of Entry / Joanna Lee
I’ve only once been to Minnesota.
A medical school interview,
an ancient history. Early December,
snow falling for the first time.
The light of it, slightly pink in the dusk,
flakes like thousands of tiny God fingers
brushing down on a hard planet.
The hospital parking lot fluorescing
pools of warmth, a familiarity.
We know each other, it said. Be welcome here.
So quiet, you forgot to be afraid.
Goosebumps of hope like only the young get.
So much wonder between that moment
and this, God taking the snowglobe
of their grand experiment
and giving it a good shake, and now
you can’t look away /you can’t not
write about it, even at such a distance,
so many unknowns: the slickness of time, its trembling
recitations of history and promise—
What if I had been there still?
What if it had been you
waiting at the door, boots on the mat?
What if it hadn’t been snowing,
no God fingers, no ice?
What good could we have done/can
we do/what good is a poem anyway
against batons, rubber bullets?
Knight-Errant / Thomas Page
A knight errant; his own wandering page
must take ahold of his blades and sabers
when he goes to fight the wyvern. Some sage
words of remainders bound the page’s labors
to tarry over yonder to neighbor-
lands in a quarry for some forgotten
symbols of battle; cymbal or tabor
rallying the knights in indigo’d cotton
dyed with oxidized blood running rotten
down their sides; a mimicry of their Lord;
passion to strip the old world of jotun.
A page comes to his old knight’s body gored.
A knight errant whispers blood in his beard:
“It is everything that I have e’er feared.”
Litany / Sarah Paley
The other day I was telling my son about an order of monks who lived circa 600 AD who catalogued and ranked everything. Everything on earth and in heaven, They’d sit at their tall desk and arrange and rearrange their lists all day, every day.
Seraphim,
cherubs,
treetops,
bird’s nests,
green…
and so on. All the way down to
toothworm,
toenail,
maggot
plague
As I explained my son interrupted: “That is the perfect job for you.” He’s right
but what he doesn’t know is I’ve been at it all my life. I start upon waking and go
till sleep. Sometimes even while I sleep.
Just now,
a man pushing a dog in a baby carriage
This job of mine has no end. No one gave it to me. Judge, place, sort, Judge, place,
sort.
leaf of a scarlet oak
older gentleman tenderly holding his wife’s elbow
the whorl of pigeons above the steeple
a sharpened pencil,
the lone hellebore on 10 th street
man asleep on sidewalk with no shoes
coffee cup lids
stickers on fruit
my attitude
a sudden memory of his/her death
ICE agents dragging a woman from her car
famine
war….
It doesn’t have to be done but it’s done.
The Antecedent of It is Grief / Amy Snodgrass
Take it with you when you ride.
Rub it into your saddle to condition and protect.
Then let your sweat and the rainwater dissolve
it over time and carry it far away to the sea.
Let it, as you paint a snail, become the yellow you dab
onto the antennae, creating the reflected light you
see when you remember her hands. It will live there
on the page, holding her in place in golden drops.
Let it, as you draft in your notebook, be teenytiny
letters, written for fun, to see if you can
read them later: like a code, private just for you.
Let it, as you stand in her kitchen, flow through
your cracks like olive oil through penne, softening
and loosening them for all that will come.
Let it laugh at that penne metaphor.
You know she would laugh, too. Hear her.
Please: turn those tiny messages and pasta metaphors
into poems. Believe you have a gift worth giving.
Let it be that belief. They have the same ending anyway.
But mostly, as you hike every year up her bluegreen hill,
let it be in every tree you pass: in the bark and in the roots, in the
pine cones and the sap, in the glowing char from a controlled fire.
