September - Poem 18
Body Count / Laura Bandy
My friend says he never got his license
since autos coming at him on the road
all to him just looked like coffins with wheels.
When he moved to L.A., city of end-
less freeways, it felt like the death drive. What
was it Freud said? In all organic things,
inherent tendency to return to
an inorganic state exists, in part-
icular when it comes to muscle
cars, drift battles, and high-stakes scrambles. That
last has Fast and Furious verbiage (I
did not know Freud was a fan). Fast cars and
sex go together like waterbeds and
charcuterie boards with tiny silver knives—
the combination seems a fine idea
at the time. Los Angeles County racks
up around 800 car wrecks per year,
while waterbed punctures are too rare to
track. You see the smart play here. Another
friend asked my body count and seemed surprised
at the number, though I’m not sure in which
direction. Ever heard of the pleasure
principle? Freud attributed most of
human behavior to the seeking of
sexual pleasure—libido in the
driver’s seat, y’all, or maybe backseat
depending on space and time. Dominic
Toretto would beg to disagree. He
uses cars as God and Dodge intended—
to race, to chase bad guys, and to drive his
family from place to place. In college,
all my friends were down the hall or across
the Quad. Now we’re spread from the start of Route
66 in Chicago, to the end
in California, and some even jumped
the pond. Love, death, family, final beds—
my sister is my twin, like the poet
Philip Levine had. In “How to Get There”
he said, the day will become something
it’s never been before, something for which
I have no name. I count on my fingers
but forget the math, forget who asked.
Roll the Rock / Alicia Boemi
Steady as the rock that rolls...
beyond the pines into the needle-filled forest floor,
I wonder...
have I told you I love you?
The trees won’t share my admission, only silence from them.
And so I melt into the moss without saying a word.
Maybe I need a bigger rock to roll.
People Who Wake Up to Fish Stews Every Morning / Jesse DeLong
Cento titles and lines from Graeber and Wengrow, Boully, Pollan, Earling, Earling, Tokarczuk translated by Croft, Wetherington, Plumly, Davis, Ford, Joudah, Arendt, Moshfegh, Miranda, Ford, Brooks, Okada, Orange, Göransson, Sharma, Lundy Martin, Graeber and Wengrow, Long Soldier, Ford, Persson, Brown and Drake
Death would indeed involve luna moths and lilacs,
so let’s begin at the beginning, with fire.
I huddle over my belly like it is a fire that will go out.
The People died like rotten plums,
like a purple coat worn on holy days.
What does it mean to witness in language?
That was the moment I began to wear my father’s body.
The hummingbirds had been replaced by large moths that arrived at dusk.
The owls kept closer to the ground.
Still they shared the dead among them.
The mob was flesh,
an ominous kind of stillness, like a slingshot being pulled back too hard—
these new names for hunger.
What was to be said against that?
Pray, to pray?
People forgot and, in forgetting, forgave
how everyone lives in different states now.
This is how art works, through infection, contamination.
How it can crush me into bits how everything can.
What other place is possible besides
theatre or history,
winter water cold-steeped in pine needles,
hairbrushes, frying pans, and copies of Sappho?
The morning of the fish and roots.
Still, as the dead do
in our language full of light.
Cheyenne Bottoms on the 17th / Shelly Krehbiel
Some places feel like they shouldn’t exist. 41,000 acres
of wetlands in the middle of Kansas. If you don’t know where to look
you would never know it’s there. Unless you drive that particular road,
happen to notice the road sign. Unless you also follow the sign
and find yourself on a road with water on both sides and reeds and where
did it come from - this water? Maybe you arrived just at the right time
to see the cranes, whooping cranes on their 2500-mile journey
from north to south or back again. How do whooping cranes even exist –
white wings carrying their long bodies from far-from-here to another
far-from-here? You know there aren’t that many left, right? Cranes. Stopping places.
Three hundred sixty-four other kinds of birds use these waters too, one
name for each day of the year. What if you knew them, the names, the feathers?
What would come to you in the middle of the night? What dreams would show you
water and sky so far away you’d never know it existed if
you hadn’t woken in time to remember? There probably weren’t any
cranes that day. It was the wrong season. I didn’t even know cranes
could be there. I had to be somewhere, didn't I? It was just a sign.
First weather, / rob mclennan
An age of melancholy, rotation. Routine. Every few months. Blue Moon Café, this poutinerie. A wealth of nations. Uppercuts, into the air. The attention of sleep, infamous slices. What out-of-phase syntax. A corner, we round on. Against, or obscene. Kids, when the clubs hollow. Contrary. One lobbies for windmills, an ambient passage. Parodistic. Turbulence corridor, straight south from Wellington. What meaning, holds. The sheer force. Where the palm reader sat. By the window, just there. To procrastinate, panel. Great Canadians. A pure matter, faith. As the wind blows. I believe in you not at all.
after C. P. Cavafy / Connor Simons
no room to remember except in memory
and even then it’s mostly shades and senses a stretch
of hair running down from the belly
button nourishment’s first locus desire’s starting point
and now what can be familiar?
maybe a futon laden with throw pillows
an acrylic tapestry nailed into a wall
the swirling hues smudged by the first embrace
of moan or maybe not that maybe it was
a bed and maybe it was only
posters on the wall now just items heaped
beside others in a rural landfill but there is
the scene of rodeo boys scowling when he held my hand
some part of his palm’s warmth is that heaped too?
some afternoons the arid sunlight still
tangles the dark hair on his calves
… one night he decided to put me
wherever it is the ghosts of a bedroom go
a place contained in the dark space
where breath and tongue pass through lips
According to the Gospels / Veronica Vo
Jesus was tempted three times in the desert. Hunger, life, and splendor.
One of the stories I remember most from a lifetime of Catholicism.
I remember it again in a restaurant, telling a friend about my diagnosis
for the first time. The temptations to make friends tell me if my relationship
was working. I succumbed every time. I want things to be different.
I want to prove I can do it right. There it is again. Only belief.
Satan tests Jesus’ ability to feed himself and resist worldly splendors,
but the one that sticks with me the most is his ability to overcome death.
Devil takes Son to a cliff and tells him to jump. If God is real the angels
will catch him. Jesus says not to test God. Imagine that: a faith so strong
it doesn’t need to be tested. The crux of the problem: a feeling mistaken
for fact. Each temptation a test. They say if it’s hard it isn’t right. I said
this wouldn’t be easy. In the desert, any mirage can become reality.
The Infant Perdita / Melinda Wilson
Finding herself in the stormy wilderness of a shoreline
that could not have existed and without a soul to take
up her care, the infant Perdita turned to her instincts.
Unable to speak beyond the babble of a babe, she broke
into an expeditious crawl toward the tree line, joining
her insect brethren under the elliptical leaves of the beech
trees, where she pondered her condition. Her new
and capacious consciousness whirled with quandaries:
hunger and thirst, shelter from elements and predators,
but chief among these agita was loneliness. Who would
teach her the ways of this world? Who would take her
in their arms, so she would know love? Who would help
her bear her pain when it came for her? Who would
be hers? Having exhausted herself with doubt, she fell
into a numbing sleep and, in the mist, came upon a bear
and a wolf. The bear, who called himself Spinoza, told her
that the universe and the divine are one and therefore
she could never be alone. She looked quizzically from
Spinoza back to the wolf, who told her that there would be
no survivors from this world, so in the meantime, she must
rely on only herself, for every heart vibrates to that iron
string. When she woke, she knew she must begin the work
of living,
ready herself to meet
any joy, any terror.
