Elegy Ending with a Slice of Sour-Cream-and-Raisin Pie

Joe Wilkins

A boy wants to break
the world in half and put it
in his pocket. All through the eulogy

I thumbed a cracked mussel shell
pulled the day before from the shallows
beneath the bridge,

the shell’s interior curves so perfect
and slick I could almost feel
the mother-of-pearl—

lavender and rose, cream
at the thin, crumbling edge. My collar
itched. I didn’t like the golden

corduroys I had to wear,
hand-me-downs from an older
cousin, and still my only pants without

mended knees or a patched ass.
The priest needed the cup,
so I held it up. I didn’t know the man

who died. He was my grandfather’s age,
which worried me, but not enough
to slow me down

(wasn’t my first funeral, wouldn’t
be my last). I shucked
my starched vestments faster

than all the other altar boys,
and so was first in line
for a chipped-beef sandwich and pie.

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UPON GOOGLING AN OLD BOYFRIEND AND FINDING HIS OBITUARY

Terry Godbey

Eleven years ago

he checked outta here,

dead at 58,

just as I emerged

from a cancer chrysalis.

No mention of a wife

or children,

and no more chances

for me to apologize

for stomping on his heart

40 years ago.

The absence of kids

stings a bit

since his mention early on

of having little Terrys with me

was what sent me running,

still a little Terry myself.

I wasn’t expecting a man

to want to stick around.

Even I didn’t care that much

for my company.

I don’t remember

breaking up

or explaining anything.

I just stopped

answering my phone,

heard his motorcycle

stirring the summer night

outside my apartment

where I was kissing my new man.

We ran into each other

at the newspaper where we worked,

wound up at the same parties

where his eyes followed me everywhere

and I accepted his cocaine

but nothing else.

He moved to D.C., where I heard he crashed

his motorcycle, struggled with a brain injury,

but in his 20s he was a sun-burnished god,

all muscle and quick to smile.

Good with his hands, he had built

his own catamaran, and we sailed

on the Banana River

and in the Atlantic

amid pods of dolphins.

His sister left a cryptic online remembrance:

Unfortunately, he took the wrong path in life.

So many questions

and no answers.

See, here I go again, making it all about me.

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Carolene Kurien

A Confession

I am a bad horse.

I neigh and hoof my way into the houses

of neighborhood husbands

and commission myself for rides

to know straddle and buck.

Some say my mane is the color

of the death beyond death. Some say

it’s best to avoid direct eye contact.

I ask the hydrangea why it is so hard to forgive

people who have changed. Did you know

the more acidic their soil, the bluer

they get? I am not trying to make a metaphor,

but I am saying that most of my daydreams

involve being loved by large groups

of people. I walk into a surprise party

with a banner that reads Happy Birthday,

You Are A Good Person! Someone has baked

my favorite carrot cake. Someone has bought

more mini razors for my mustache. The people I fuck

in my fantasies have no faces. I can barely make out

their bodies. The ghost of myself whimpers

under the ghost of theirselves,

and none of us can smile. The book I am reading

says it’s not my fault. How I am.

That I was just a kid, apparently. But now I am old;

my teeth will fall out soon. And my empty

mouth will no longer have someone else to blame.

Saudade

I am eating a jam sandwich the taste of rain.

I am finding it difficult to harness myself

into the concept of forgiveness. Rosmarie Waldrop

wrote Your skin was delicate, like a retracted confession.

The dent in your back I placed wishing coins upon

thin and deepening. Your empty, welling face.

Under a microscope, various teardrops have various

physiognomies. Onion tears reach outward like rhizomes,

ever-wet and blooming. Tears of ending and beginning

are Rorschach tests filled with your features: a boat-shaped

birthmark, a whisper of nose. Under the streetlight I pick

a painting and live it. I walk the cliff at Pourville.

I disassemble into yellow kiss. Above my head floats

an assembly of arms. I am uneasy with what I’ll become.

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Edmund White

What’s left of an ex in my memory?

He was kind and courtly (as he should have been

Since he was a Sicilian aristocrat),

When he wasn’t being horrid if I stepped

Out of line, then frozen with fury and

Unforgiving. He taught me one good pasta

Recipe, Pasta alla Norma, with fried eggplant. He

Bought me a CD player when mine broke, several

Cashmere blankets, and he restored a leather

Club chair that was in tatters. He was a doctor, could play

The harpsichord, cook a few dishes, entertain

In his battleship-sized loft, lie and cheat convincingly,

Make the sort of love a heterosexual Mediterranean

Male might make, selfish and athletic—and which I liked

Because it never dwindled away even after we broke up.

We both cried a lot. He had a black ceramic vase with an

African face and a crown, until I explained that

Was unacceptable in politically correct New York.

Then it was banished, as was I when I told his new

Lover that Giovanni and I were still having sex. I saw a good shrink

And got over him. I’ll never have another lover—

Too much of a bother. Once in a while I wish we could

Speak on the phone, to find out whether his father’s

Parkinson’s is progressing, whether his little brother

Got married, and did he ever discover a cure for that

Kind of breast cancer. And does he still hate me?

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Vincent Antonio Rendoni

I witnessed something beautiful, friends

One day,

on my father’s monthly visit
to give his father
some money

Abuelo,

who kicked him out at sixteen
who didn’t believe in touch or mercy

caught his son limping

& put away the contempt fathers have for sons
& suspended the law of machismo reached for the rusted Texaco box
with the antiseptic, tweezers & gauze
slapped his knee
& called to his son’s feet,
& began working his way
through the skin & blood
of a used car salesman’s ingrown toenail

& never thought, not even once

as he cut through the keratin
cleaning & washing the lowest part
of working folk
that this is something
a man has to think about.

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Boundary Waters

Donald Platt

Accessible primarily by canoe, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in northeast Minnesota . . . extends 150 miles along the U.S.-Canada border, covering approximately 1,098,000 acres . . .
— Explore Minnesota

I want to go

to the Boundary Waters, canoe its one thousand lakes,

hundreds of miles

of rivers. So many places I’ve never been. I’d like to see sunset

reflected in Tuscarora

Lake, when it’s so still you cannot tell the difference

between sky on fire

and water on fire. Rosanne and I could paddle together

in our red canoe

to the very middle of the lake. Her hair would outshine sunset.

One loon would call

to another loon with its otherworldly wail from across

wide water.

That’s all I want to hear. But Rosanne, who has been to the Boundary

Waters and back,

tells me gently, firmly, matter-of-factly—in the voice

I love more

than any other woman’s voice—that no, I will never go as far

as Tuscarora

Lake. My body with its nerve pain, unable to walk anymore

without its rollator,

would not be able to do even one long portage.

She’s right, of course.

And even if I were to canoe that cold, aquifer-fed water

so clear I can see

twenty feet down to the rocky bottom, always another

waterway is waiting.

Night calls me with its unanswerable cry. Death’s loon

cries out

to me to come, come. Canoe to him alone across

dark, starlit water

where the moon now rises. Keep him company upon those other

boundaryless waters.

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Weight of Water

Allison Field Bell

Yesterday at the kitchen sink, my lover told me again
how I can’t do it right—load the dishwasher, wash the cast iron.
No soap, no scrubbing. My hands submerged in water, scalding.

Today, I’d rather be a fish. Scales, gills, unblinking eyes. Curl
around the toxic tentacles of that blooming mass: the anemone.
Brilliant orange and white stripes against the rainbow of reef.

None of that anxiety that dwells in the stomach, hollows it out, drops
it to the knees. The way my lover yelled when I panicked—
shook and shimmied. Too much, too much.

Too much pressure from the weight of water above,
but not feeling the ear-popping ascent from the depths of
the sandy floor. Water crushing bones. A whole sea of it to live in.

I’d like to be a shark. A predator. Free in my own kingdom.
Beast so ancient, so full of its own history, so full of its
own instinct. So full. So unlike the way I am. Sitting on the edge

of the bed now, my lover beyond a slammed door. I wonder
what it is to escape something. Where it is I could go. Beyond
the twist of whitewater, the shallow sand shelf to the deep

underbelly of sea, cold dark infinite. Bliss, all that water, swimming.

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MISSING THE FARM

Travis Mossotti

Here’s the orchard someone else will tend to.
And the crawl space beneath the porch
of the house where someone else’s barn cat
will slumber through the summer nights
dreaming of long-tailed mice in the high grass.
Over that field, the light dips and refracts
through the broken glass of the muck pond
where a catfish will take someone else’s bait
and hook—that it might meet the refined
heat of a skillet. The ghosts of a thousand
head of cattle walk through the woods at night
in someone else’s dream while the windows,
cracked slightly, let a mild breeze pass
through the empty rooms like an appraiser.
There is no death that cannot be undone
by simply turning the compost with a pitchfork
or by scattering scratch in the dirt for chickens
who sing each time they lay, but every repair
is only a gesture against the torment of slow
winds and steady rain and heavy sun. It will be
someone else who grows too old to climb
the ladder into the barn’s cool loft or the flight
of stairs that lead to and from their own bed.
It will be their hand weighing the mortgage.
It will be their face forgetting its smile. Listen,
if the well pump kicks to life at dawn, it will be
someone else drawing a bath for the last time—
joints relaxing as their form submerges, body
recovering and failing in the same held breath.

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I WANNA BE WRONG

Michael Chang

wanna sleep till i see u again
words u generally wanna hear
except when ur already at their haus
hey do u wanna get outta here
i like it when u talk abt cannes
so much
i like it so much
i’m a same-sex couple
a warehouse
nothing in me but a grand piano
stop staring
start tearing
if u’d changed u wouldn’t be here
did u see my present
the one i left
believing u could be deterred
i think i threw it out
as they used to say in hollywood
that movie sold popcorn
he asked to take me to the pound shop
but it was just a dollar tree
u go to the disco, panic
they want a better look at u
any acknowledgment of their infinitesimal existence
as mark twain’s old saw has it
the difference between a fire & a firefly
rain that looks like u, clean sheets
we luv to be intrusive
take an invasive procedure
make it more invasive
find it hard to leave relationships
luv being in luv w/ machines
money from a white-shoe firm
in fact a frozen-foods conglomerate
angel cakes bearing lines of credit
do not be afraid

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I Woke Up Eating Donuts in the Rain

Jarrett Moseley

is the note I left for myself
on the introduction page
of a poetry book
three years ago.

I did not wake up eating donuts in the rain
except for once
when I was a kid
and even then I was dreaming.

I’m always dreaming
of an elsewhere
where the reams of grass
I tucked into a wicker basket
last July have not withered
and the grease of fast food
slides off my fingers like sunlight
and a child touches a mirror, feeling
unlike a severed power line.

I was not that child.
When I was nine, I wrote a song
about the black tongue of death
before I even knew what it looked like.

I don’t know what to make of that
or if everything is a river
though I keep having the persistent feeling
that everything is supposed to be a river
even bad things
like loneliness.

Three years ago, I was lonely
and writing sad notes to myself
like screaming into a shower head.

Since then
Mason died
and Savanah moved to New York
and Gracie left New York for L.A.
and Sarah gave birth
and I decided against writing summary poems
but here I am.

When I say I’m always dreaming
that’s not what I mean
but that there’s a place inside me called outwards
where each thing faces away
from the next thing.

The couch back pushed against another couch back
which is facing away from the mirror
which is facing away from the window
which is facing away from the outside lawn
which is facing away from the world’s
violent unbuckling.

You can just say a lot of things
and get away with it
and even without music
or a bicycle wreck set on a loop forever
or waving one’s arms in circles from a distance

but once love gets involved
the whole thing turns red-tinted and jutted.

The last person who touched me naked,
we didn’t even have sex
we didn’t even know each other
we just slept in the same bed
with our feet barely brushing,
which is more intimate than sex
then never spoke again.

I could write an entire symphony
on things more intimate than sex.

I slap the back of a friend,
a boy holds the book at just the right angle,
we watch the car skid out on the road.

The news blurs into the radio,
a stone reverses back through a window,
the ground is seared with footprints.

Remember you are a river—
maybe that’s what the note should have said,
to move inside the banks of my body
through absolute loneliness
to write not about the leaf stuck in my hair
but rather, the wind that put it there.

Three years ago I was not having sex,
no one was sleeping in my bed,
my shoulder was like a stick in the mud,
and I didn’t even dream.

But today,
on the 12th of March,
pollen scattered like yellow DNA
across the glass porch table
that points outwards

into the community courtyard
where a girl mounts her pink tricycle
as her father pushes behind,
into the 70-degree warmth
swarming the dogwood trees
and the cardinals they carry,
into the peace of learning
to love the cliché
of blooming hope,

I open a poetry book and read
the note I had forgotten about.

Sometimes
you don’t want to dream.
Sometimes you don’t want to think
about death
or loneliness
or even sex.

You want to wake up
eating donuts in the rain,
to feel the river rise,
and to float a letter
to yourself
from one world
hoping it finds you
happily in the next.

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Category: Poetry