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Category: Poetry
Two Poems
Halloween: Ends
Michael Myers at the 711 filling up his SUV.
Michael Myers at Home Depot buying fancy drill bits he doesn’t really need.
Michael Myers sitting in the back of the room at the PTA meeting, scrolling through Tinder.
Michael Myers doing taxes.
Michael Myers scrolling through Facebook in the movie theater.
Michael Myers at couple’s counseling.
Michael Myers letting the dog out one night and telling the kids it ran away.
Michael Myers killing all the sex workers in Grand Theft Auto.
Michael Myers sitting in the back pew at church, scrolling through Tinder.
Michael Myers mowing the lawn on a beautiful Sunday afternoon.
Michael Myers wearing an apron that says I Rub My Own Meat.
Michael Myers getting drunk at his Superbowl party.
Michael Myers explaining the differences between a bratwurst and a sausage to a woman looking at her phone.
Michael Myers renting Saw IV again on Amazon Prime.
Michael Myers taking his mask off to have sex but leaving his socks on.
Michael Myers toweling off in the locker room.
Michael Myers rubbing against people on the train.
Michael Myers at the hotel bar explaining the difference between bourbon and whisky to a woman looking at her phone.
Michael Myers calling up toiletries and answering the door in his bathrobe each time.
Michael Myers ordering his burger well-done.
Michael Myers sending his food back twice.
Michael Myers not tipping.
Another autumn
after Mikey Swanberg
walking the mile
to work,
freezing in the morning,
sweating on the way back,
each step a stitch
quilting the heavy blanket
of our unhappiness.
Nothing has happened,
and still—
I imagined my lover
might show up
in my office
before I left,
shut the door
and we would fuck
quietly on the desk
to the rhythm
of the copy machine.
In another version,
he’d walk out to me
halfway along the mile,
stitching his own path,
and say something
he was never going to say,
that he had changed, and I
had changed, but
all for the better,
and we were stronger for it,
as though love
were a sourdough,
dying then restarting,
grown through being given away.
How long did I believe that time
was the most costly thing.
What a hard bargain
to find it is the only thing.
west country
the bad thing is too big to look at. the bad thing is heavy. when i kick the bad thing, its side caves in like an old football. i put the bad thing in my backpack. i walk with the bad thing to the train stop. the bad thing and i buy a pasty from warrens. i throw the wrapper away, but i can’t throw the bad thing away. at church the bad thing lights candles. at home the bad thing holds my hand. when i talk to the bad thing, the bad thing talks back sometimes. when i read to the bad thing, the bad thing listens. the bad thing likes television. the bad thing likes location, location, location. the bad thing says it might go away if i took it on a country walk, but the bad thing is lying. the bad thing sings to itself, very softly, under its breath. the bad thing wants me to listen. i don’t want to listen to the bad thing. i want to leave the bad thing alone, by itself, in an empty room. the bad thing likes this room. the bad thing helps me close the door, so that we are in this room together.
Rain
Correlation is not causation, but few things correlate more to a mood than rain.
Do people still come down with “a case of the vapors”?
What is weather if not causality in a landscape?
When it rains it pours. How does the Morton Salt Girl maintain her kicky attitude, happy under that umbrella and never bored with life?
Half the idiots in charge of this country don’t even know enough to come in out of the rain.
The Great Plains are basically a desert and thus Nebraska is a fairly dry state. In Lincoln, my Grandpa Boo was obsessed with his rain gauge, and therefore I, too, obsessed became.
Raining cats and dogs may come from the Greek cata doxa, “contrary to experience or belief.” I can’t believe how hard it’s raining!
Swipe a fingertip heart in the misty windowpane.
I hate to be the one to say it, but your parade’s going to get rained on.
Never have I ever been so depressed as when I lived for one year in the Pacific Northwest. It literally always rains and people metaphorically are always taking rainchecks. The Seattle No, I later learned it was termed, aka the Seattle Freeze.
A rain of arrows. Soot and ash raining down. What is life but a rain of blows?
This is the third year in a row that the rains have failed.
A peer-reviewed study found that of all 50 states, Washington ranked 48th for the trait of extraversion.
Gentle rain on the roof is as pleasing as alliteration, day or night, right as rain.
Does rain like being the external correlative of sorrow? Of pain? That feeling of tears going into your ears when you’re lying on your back and crying.
When you listen to “Famous Blue Raincoat,” what shade of blue do you see?
At this point it’d take a meteor shower to get the earth really clean.
Droplets stitch the day with gray silken threads. Come rain or shine, the hits just keep coming.
Call and Response
It is a hinge.
It is a flash splintering
the sky,
then a rumble.
Under ripe light,
it is pollen
furring the bees.
It is a wood thrush’s
song rising
from the backyard’s
green pulpit.
Over and over
one calls, insistent.
Then another
parses, flute-like
as the head
bobs. Tail flicks.
It is the link
embedded in us.
Think of
the old gospels
which require
a beating heart,
church hands
to answer.
No matter what
form it takes
it seems impossible
to disentangle.
And still the God-weld
split, despite my bows
and prayers
to save my son.
You were silent.
This poem originally appeared in our 46.2 issue, and was a runner-up for The Florida Review‘s 2022 Humboldt Poetry Prize.
Prize judge David Keplinger’s citation: “In this delicately achieved lyric, like the prayer it references, rife with “pollen/furring the bees,” and the “backyard’s/green pulpit,” the natural world is imbued with sacred qualities, though the speaker’s calls to save the unnamed son are not answered. Nevertheless, the poem honors the tangled music of this realm, offering the song of the wood-thrush, “flute-like,” as embodiment of this grief.”
Sunset
After Jim Harrison
On this excursion my hands were folded,
I tried not to see anything, didn’t pick up the pole,
let him do all the work, he took every turn
for the both of us—promising I would be amazed
at any moment, soon enough, and I fucking doubt it
I replied, wanting something more from my time,
as though each of my moments were precious
and meant to be filled with golden sap, we,
through mangrove canals where pregnant
wolf spiders ran their fingers through my hair,
and blackened crabs climbed from root to root,
the water moved past our boat like soft hands
swimming in still water, paddled toward the sunset
when two boar, nose-to-tail, took to the water to cross
from shore to shore oblivious of us one way or another
and now is a good time to define what our time is worth.
This poem originally appeared in our 46.2 issue, and was a runner-up for The Florida Review‘s 2022 Humboldt Poetry Prize.
Prize judge David Keplinger’s citation: “On a miserable excursion through mangrove canals, rife with crabs and spiders, what seems a resistant young person sits with hands folded as an older figure tries to amaze and awaken them; and they do; they do awaken to the worth of this moment with its boars crossing the shore “oblivious of us” in that instant of marvelous connection with the natural world.”
Two Poems
Witness Statement
And, behold, in the year
of unencumbered plague
those who trafficked in wickedness
did so on palatial golf courses.
An orphan cried for succor
and received spit.
Nothing of this was new
or profound, only more naked.
And, lo, I fed my son a breakfast
bar on a dying planet.
And on a dying planet
the wicked watered
my son’s playground with poisons.
They hallowed his oceans with lead.
Tell me what should I have done
but bathe bread in peanut butter
mince Flintstones in a cup of cola.
And, lo, the wicked thought only
of my boy as a horsetail dreams
of flies. His chest rose and fell
as we both tacked the garbage
truck rumbling its track.
In this was no sin.
In this was only another
form of hunger: the truckness
of the truck begetting wonder
begetting want. Oh, felt my boy
with every rattling atom.
And the wicked kenneled
a brown boy so like my son.
I said, I am sickened.
I said, I will maim you
with my claws before you
take their boy, my boy whose laugh
turns this truck ripe with refuse
to some radiant blessing.
Anubis at the DMV
Let me be blunt:
fate is no whim.
It is the voice of
a thousand bureaucrats intoning
now serving 554.
If diligence is a knife
you are our bread.
if service is a repeating decimal
a herd of digits flashed to life
you’re dead last.
Ultimo.
The sarcophagal cero.
Each attendant is a monolith
in a desert you wander
an hour, a lifetime.
Who can know?
The intervals grow
immeasurable.
Think of a cat
toying mindlessly with a string
an entire day
bored
somnambular.
Past the grave
vice or virtue is simply
the dust we brush off.
Let it accumulate.
Let the carpet fiber
crack beneath your feet
Now you want to know
how much longer
a day, a year, a league.
Like all dictators
I simply push the beads
across, then back.
Who am I
to enumerate
your wait time?
Who to tell you
how to spend your death?
Announcing the 2022 Humboldt Prize Winner & Runners-Up
The Florida Review is pleased to announce the winner and runners-up for the third annual Humboldt Poetry Prize. The Prize, which is funded by an anonymous donor in honor of Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), recognizes the best poems with an environmental focus published in the previous year in The Florida Review and on Aquifer: The Florida Review Online. The winner receives an award of $500, and each runner-up $250.
This year’s winner and runners-up are:
- Winner: Zoë Fay-Stindt for “Fall in Languedoc” (Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, March 2022)
- Runner-Up: Madelyn Garner for “Call and Response” (TFR 46.2, Fall 2022)
- Runner-Up: Cole W. Williams for “Sunset” (TFR 46.2, Fall 2022)
- Honorable Mention: Zoë Fay-Stindt for “A Robin at the Bus Station” (Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, March 2022)
The winner and honorable mention will be reprinted in The Florida Review 47.1, Spring/Summer 2023; both runners-up will be republished on Aquifer: The Florida Review online this spring. David Keplinger served as the final judge for this year’s Prize. Continue reading “Announcing the 2022 Humboldt Prize Winner & Runners-Up”
Did You Miss Your Saturn Return
There is a spectrum of brightness. You might not have realized
that gleam is stronger than glimmer. The latter suggests movement,
like when sunlight hits an unstill surface and we call it dancing.
Similarly, I know water isn’t blue, it just reflects the colors
around it. And I know it isn’t solid—it just invites being touched.
Yes, I’m talking about hope again, and you are in your bed all day.
I’m googling the concept of a Saturn return because, thematically,
I like the idea of reaching an age where it’s acceptable to change
my mind. You don’t believe in astrology. I’m not sure you believe
in anything, and I worry you missed the chance to see it all fresh.
I’m worried it’s easier to try to fix your problems instead
of sitting and feeling mine. I’m not a good swimmer because
I struggle to breathe through my panic. I struggle to let my chest
loosen when I walk down the street. My chest, surely it was tight
any time you touched me and we pretended water was solid, blue.
Welcoming Our New Poetry and Fiction Editors!
We are thrilled to welcome to our new Poetry and Fiction Editors! Read more about them and their work below.
Rochelle Hurt (Poetry Editor) is a poet and essayist. She is the author of three poetry collections: The J Girls: A Reality Show (Indiana University Press, 2022), which won the Blue Light Books Prize from Indiana Review; In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), which won the Barrow Street Poetry Prize; and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014). Her work has been included in Poetry magazine and the Best New Poets anthology. She’s been awarded prizes and fellowships from Arts & Letters, Poetry International, Vermont Studio Center, and Yaddo. Originally from the Ohio Rust Belt, Hurt now lives in Orlando and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.
Brandon Amico (Poetry Editor) is the author of a collection of poetry, Disappearing, Inc (Gold Wake Press, 2019), and the recipient of a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. His poetry can be found in journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2020, The Adroit Journal, Blackbird, Booth, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, New South, Slice, and Waxwing.
Blake Sanz (Fiction Editor) is the author of The Boundaries of Their Dwelling, a collection of short stories that won the 2021 Iowa Short Fiction Award. His short fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Joyland, Ecotone, Puerto del Sol, and other literary magazines. He and his writing have been featured in Poets & Writers, Electric Literature, and other national forums. Originally from Louisiana, he teaches fiction at the University of Central Florida.
Submissions to our 2023 Editor’s Prizes in Fiction, Poetry, and Creative Nonfiction are now open! The winner in each genre will receive $1,000 and publication in the Review. All entries are considered for publication, and all entrants receive a complimentary one-year subscription to the journal, as well as the option to purchase an additional discounted subscription. We thank you for your support of The Florida Review, and look forward to reading your work.
Accidental Selfie in the Photo of a Window Quote
West Hollywood, 2019
Who should I look to be when AIDS took a generation of leaders & artists & mentors & thinkers & lovers from me…
But the photo is a ghost: reflected boy who takes the picture, boy becoming thread. Boy sick again, undiagnosed, to whom these words will ring divine. Paint to pane, this sigil for departed, lives held in the glare against this glass. The photo is a ghost: boy not a boy but body double with rejection. Somehow, living then; a wasting king left wanting for long curls and smoother cheeks. The blue dress that will save boy still years off. Boy then is short hair and a loose black tee, scruffed face behind the camera. Above, branches off the sidewalk trees part and drop down midday light. Sun-skinned here, boy gospels with a generation. And that night, perched upon a tub’s ledge soaking feet and tonguing cankers, legions call again. Will wash boy’s wounds with sweetened salves, will offer up salvation through new life. Today that boy is gone but isn’t to be mourned. The sun still knows this spirit, how bright to light her walk below the trees.
*This poem appears in The Florida Review 46.2, Winter 2022.
Christmas Eve
A small tree leans against a wall. The windows, frozen over
lakes. There is no sky. Day and night.
Somewhere, grief is a place
no one is dying from. Heavy organ music. A cathedral, hymning the half-dark.
If you know anything, it is that a child dies at least once
in childhood.
You remember snow. Its quiet. How no one came.
How time can make small that which is no longer small.
Still. Imagine it is just another night. A cocktail and a cigarette in hand. A friend
saying, take care, before putting on a coat and getting in a cab. The snow, flitting
under streetlights. The moon laid across the lake by the park.
Imagine a life that you wanted to be yours. How you asked
to deserve it. Blue oars. A boat on a lake clear as harm.
Imagine some forever no one has named
heaven. Where loneliness is a mask
one is forgiven when it is taken off.
The last thing said or not said. Its sudden importance.
And all is blue. Day and night.
And all is blue. Day and night.
Three Poems
Aftertaste
The aftertaste of beauty is anxiety.
The foretaste of history is prediction
as if the tongues had been written on.
I had been doing the ironies
till they were flat and unwrinkled,
the cuffs standing sharp and the pleats
and the blastula beginning with a dimple.
The background of Longinus was time.
The preface on paper was illusion.
In this the figures of the fixed wings
took on the pressed faces of threats and promises,
Peregrinus naming the poles of a loadstone,
the brass of the locks bitter but secure.
Observations
There is no coincidence
even quirks that become tradition
are rain practicing rivers on the glass
History is all antecedents
Showing how once upon a time persists
is a pleasant fiction with variations
chorus as footnotes coconuts
starting new islands on plain paper
folded to a boat and set adrift
Content
If you’d just change the accented syllable
to the second we’d all feel better
Blood in its lessened pressure included
It would bring back the creek
where we’d ride past the plaster pig
in a suit to see the gathering tadpoles
redstarts starting red into the underbrush
and stingrays would come to the divers
entangled in drift nets and rusted hooks
to be blissfully relieved
Blues for King Kong
the soul tends to hide deep beneath the blues • & pain has chosen to call blues beautiful • & pain could not have seen things differently • when someone owns a thing we call it their possession • & yet what do we call it when some sinister spirit has entered them? • of curtains that are mostly drawn • of a blues felt more intimately with the eyes closed • slow song for a masochist • a gentle tapping of feet • bassist under collagen of bones • bassist of a chest-deep beating • & some no longer look their friends in the eyes • others have not noticed themselves becoming islands • sunlight as a clarity reflected by water • moonlight as uncertainty reflected by water • drown under sounds of a profound saxophone sorrow • soak in softening passages of pain moving through the body • a falsetto waters the seeds of anguish • protruding from the mouth • the roots of a soul reaching for light
Cool Side of the Pillow
Have you ever heard the sound of a screen door
closing old-timer slow?—Inching madness to the edge
of its seat?— Think of shoes on the wrong feet.
And how fingernails scratch the chalkboard
to test your impulses. When the dog shits
in the house, and the house isn’t yours.
Lost keys. Bad haircut. Bad ink. Bad poem.
Broken tooth. Ulcer. Speeding ticket.
Bad job. Foreclosure. Your ovaries tied.
Boyfriend sexting someone else.
Your kid hates you. Your dying friend has
no insurance policy. You’re addicted to soap.
Boss screaming down your throat.
You burnt the turkey. Is it worth mentioning,
that moss has no roots?— We know something
has been tampered with, when the seal
is broken. Only one thing to do, don’t surrender,
turn over your armor, dream a little dream.
Murphy’s Law
30 rabies shots, my uncle got
when, after cornering a rat for fun,
and drunk, it lept and bit his bare chest.
when, after cornering a rat for fun,
and drunk, it lept and bit his bare chest.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, they
say—what can happen, will—Which is what
my dad was thinking when he passed the pub
so aptly named on the day they sawed
through my skull. This is the perversity
of the universe. You go outside
to catch your breath and butcher’s knives wink
in every window. Miles’ trumpet intones
So What while atom bombs dream of flouting
their dormancy. The night before surgery,
I lay on the plush hotel bed, staring
at a room service form. When I was
little, I was obsessed with opulence.
I wanted filet mignon, lobster
delivered to my imagined penthouse
as I watched cartoons: a toddler bobbing
along the steel girders of a nascent
skyscraper, pianos crashing down, turning teeth
into sonatas. Sometimes you have
to confront the world’s malice like a mouse
who’s been burned too many times by spring-
loaded-cheese. I remember assuming
the hospital’s food would be suspect.
Juice with plastic peel-off top, overly-
Juice with plastic peel-off top, overly-
salted soup, but, I thought: that’s only
if they don’t slice into my temporal
lobe. If they don’t accidentally
give me a lobotomy, or cut my
head clean off. I’ll be lucky to gag
on pot pie while mom scrolls WebMD.
Two Poems
On Our Date I Forget the “Birds of Prey” Exhibit is Closed Sunday
Grace is just life
caught in the throat. Imprinted
and broken winged.
Crow hit by my Toyota, muddy.
Peace and rehab three-syllable words
when slurred. Grace of certainty
in the sun’s smallness—small enough
to set behind your hand,
yet still lift like a hand
on her waist while facing a dark nerve.
Her to touch, a crow
not very much a crow, wingless
who must hop from branch to branch
as crippled form of grace,
as chapel wind is pious, bows
in gospel like fletching
post-launch, inalterable flight.
Who dares claim the feathers
of such a fucked-up bird for
violence?
Rhetorical questions claim
power from the empty, ellipses
lit like street lamps, spacing
regular pools through dark.
Anyways you forgot
your walking boots. Leave
like the cut that gliding scissors
pass. You came into this life
like chains deliver the flightless.
Like silence delivers a stillborn grace.
Touchpoints
The wanting child breaks a bowl
before he loses his first tooth. Research says
we regress before moving forward
the way white tides marshal themselves
before they break. A circle
opens into a spiral and the trauma
opens into an echo. But I don’t wanna
echo. But despite the begging
watch the hitting segue into bars
and showers full of right heat. The way
washing becomes a sloughing
or a person becomes a lesson.
On the Levee Once Again I Walk to Sharpen
my body to a blade. Weapon for nothing. Recall my first diet, 66 pounds, my proud refusal of a fist-sized milk carton. My mother’s sister at 40, spooning Gerber peaches into her mouth at the family table. Recall the game my mother taught me when I was a teenager— —find someone on the street who has my body— Now without her how I will sharpen. Will be vapor. Smoke. Furious at the world for nothing. Rushing down the year’s dark corridor, street unspooling every morning, tracking miles. How I craved my mother’s judgement. Be vapor. Be smoke. Be blade. Remember how it feels to desire nothing, not even touch’s static. Remember why emptiness still comforts like nothing else. I will shrink myself down to where I don’t matter. Thumbelina, tight and safe in a walnut shell. Yet grief thickens everything. Even the imprint of my body. Who’s keeping count.
Two Poems
How It Is Now, How It Was
as a boy panning the stream behind my house
for the minnows that drilled
down the current in schools. They moved as one—
muscular, thick, sequined—
so if I dipped down, I could nearly scoop
handfuls of their bounty up
to my chest like some dream of my hunter ancestors
lost in the currents
of my DNA. I imagine desire like this.
But whenever I stabbed
my hand into that glacier water, they dispersed
at once, every one. And this entertained me
until the day I did catch one, held its slim, jeweled body
inside my fist. The thrill
of its tail flickering inside my palm
like candlelight, like a snake’s forked tongue
until I unclenched my hand to let it go and saw
it was already gone.
Nurture
As souls in heaven, before inhabiting their bodies, children choose
their mothers. I heard my mother say this exactly twice.
Once after we had fought in the car to cut the silent ride home.
And once on the phone with my aunt after my cousin shot himself
through the mouth. I was born after a summer solstice
under a new moon. Rain thickened the green outside my window.
Above my crib two portraits of angels hung.
Holiday 2
Winner of the 2021 Humboldt Poetry Prize; originally published in TFR 44.2
On this day that in my childhood we celebrated Christmas
I found myself this year on the Gulf of Mexico
with the sea gone as leaden as clay. It seemed to heave
with an inner dislike—at least from where I stood, three stories up
from the beach, a few expensive yards in
from the sand, the humid spray blocked
by the floor-to-ceiling windows,
and the barely moving palms. I was making
a dinner from my childhood. An egg batter you poured
in hot oil and closed inside the oven for a full
twenty minutes till inflated to crisp gold,
plus a wad of beef crosshatched and pressed with flour and salt.
As it cooked, I read my son the story of Midas, how
he wanted the idea of everything, and the lesson was
that everything was dangerous. Darwin wrote that late
in life he’d lost his taste for poetry, for the fat copy of Milton
he was said to take with him on that first trip, still particular
for all the living parts of earth and mind. The couch
I sat on thinking this was as long as the yachts
we’d seen that day at the marina. In their moorings
they were lined so tight and tidily they hardly bobbed, each the same
synthetic just-washed white and dark blue lettering.
We looked at all their given names. We saw some people walk their dog,
step off their bleached wood deck, onto the plastic dock,
as their small thing scampered merrily into the nearby grass,
the people calling after, calling after. Our boys ran ahead.
What is it to live at this cushioned here and now, these privileged
boundaries where everything that could be said, remembered,
can yet still lie ill or unexpressed: the page I read about the girls
who shaved their teacher’s head and stabbed at it with scissors,
the ink they poured upon it, I was scared to tell my husband
how it haunted me, it followed me all day, such cruelty,
and then the nothingness of ocean and the light’s jewels rippling on it,
at least on these high days when the sun shines.
Faith Test
When the counselor asked her
disciples to gather around the bucket,
her head crowned in clover stems,
we all wanted to be anointed.
The Pentecost of chapel steps and snakes
expelled from little cabins
lined against the trees:
this was our church, our induction
into something greater
than youth group on Wednesday nights
where a teen with a bible taught us
to renounce sex, rated R movies,
the devil in a hot pink romper.
When the counselor dipped her hand
in the water we thought baptism, the bonfire
lit with praise hymns and acoustic guitar.
None of us imagined the goldfish,
its body of shingled scales,
such orange iridescent delight.
To be brave for the lord is to
combat any fear
How do you say no to a soulless tail,
the hand reaching out to say
you could be special too?
How she called on us
to grab the soft round and place it
on our tongues like communion,
like the body we cannibalized
week after week. This is the memory:
feeling the heart rate pulse
against my thumb,
the way my throat closed up
then pushed the belly down.
Analog
Last October my mother clipped out
an article from the New York Times
about why millennials love plants and
I mocked her for the old-fashion. She
sent me a letter every week in the
month of June, although I had since
left the city, because I didn’t
pick up the phone. My mother
writes things on paper that she
would never say out loud. Her
letters read like the Book of Proverbs
and she always doodles on
the envelope. She says things like No I wouldn’t
take care of your cats but if you have babies
then give them to me. I grow older and further
from her portrait of my future
life lived. Too far to see
the disappointment crinkle
on her eye corners. Close
enough to hear a sigh over radio waves.
Value-added
“Tree-huggers refuse to admit
Mother Nature can be
a bitch, or very blind
or simply is,” my father insists,
though he hikes
the Appalachian every weekend.
I’ve never gone with him.
“We are always at the mercy
of our environment,” he claims,
tells me he outraced a prairie fire
in the Sooner state, more hurricanes
than he can list,
though he’s always been tempted
to get caught up in some disaster,
miss delivering whichever speech
he’d been on his way to give. “Nature is,
I suppose, efficient,” he says, a word
that shows up more than any other
in his writing except “trash,” “waste”
or “recycling.” His boss will use
his rhetoric against him.
He and I argue about anything,
spring, its length, time
and lusciousness after a brief cold spell
as opposed to a short orgasm of color
after a long thaw. Storm-chasing.
A tornado will turn and stare
right at you, rain come down so hard
you can’t see the shoulder, but once,
and I believe the sentiment’s appropriate,
he saw a triple rainbow with my sister,
who shot an entire roll of film
beyond the Panhandle.
They were alone. Dramatic, yes,
even at home, even after a long night
of ordinary thunder and wind,
a tree uproots and smashes
my parents’ bedroom.
It must have all night tossed
violently in the storm,
and they slept through it,
except that once they woke
and saw it swaying, and swaying
was still the word they used
in the morning to describe
it was an accident they lived.
Relative Risk
—A Golden Shovel after Katie Englehart’s “We Are Going to Keep You Safe Even if It Kills Your Spirit,” The New York Times, Feb. 19, 2021
No matter what the therapists say about dementia, how we
should know our half-blind mother can’t live alone, how they are
clear she can’t afford to fall—the only way to keep her going
on her own (not risk-free) is a scooter or a four-wheel walker, or to
move her to a place, they won’t say where—best to keep
the care type vague—helpful doctors will tell you
recommended choices: memory pills, life locked inside, a safe
space, always a mask, no rugs or dancing, hugs, even
if your loved one, if Mom, is vaccinated, if
we instead allow her finger-walking walls, her wandering, it
wouldn’t be the worst to drop and die at home, we’ll say—what kills
is a voice silenced or a vision atrophied, when all your
good intention stymies dignity, what we recall of spirit.
Poisons and Medicines
“All things are poisons, and nothing is without poison; only the dose makes a thing not a poison.”
–Paracelsus
During rituals of divination,
Mayan sorcerers and healers
induced risky hallucinations
with Brugmansia candida,
angel’s trumpet. The poison
in its white, waxy flowers
and dark green leaves,
ingested or absorbed through
the body’s mucous membranes,
causes convulsions, paralysis,
coma, and death.
To dilate the pupils of their eyes
and bring a flush to their cheeks,
fashionable ladies in medieval Europe
drank juice pressed from the berries
and leaves of Atropa belladonna,
the deadly nightshade.
To enhance their beauty,
they risked their lives with a poison
used since antiquity to alter potions
and tip arrows with lethal results.
Our ancestors felt more closely
than we the embrace
of science and mystery.
We are still looking
for the boundary.
Chemicals crossing
the blood-brain barrier
create effects in the brain
that achieve results in the body,
altering perceptions
of pleasure and pain.
Reliever of illness
or harbinger of death
is a matter of degree.
Digitalis from foxglove,
lily of the valley, and oleander
strengthens the heart’s contractions
while causing blurred and double vision
and hallucinations.
Taxol from the bark of the Pacific yew
destroys cancers of the breast
and ovaries but harms the liver.
Although it induces nausea,
vincristine, an alkaloid
from Madagascar periwinkle,
is the reason why most children
with leukemia now survive.
For the stomach spasms
I suffered as a child,
I was prescribed a daily dose
of a chalky green medicine
containing belladonna alkaloids
and phenobarbital
to prevent nausea and relax me.
Derived from salicin
in willow bark and meadowsweet,
aspirin reduces inflammation,
eases headache, and lowers fever.
Years ago, my great-aunt, sick of life,
swallowed the entire contents
of a bottle and bled to death.
Grief Is a Sudden Room
Grief is a sudden room.
After flailing around, breaking
all the furniture inside it for years,
you can think you’ve shut
the ancient door behind you,
but the latch hasn’t worked for aeons,
it will just pop open anytime
you open a window, elsewhere
in your mind. No matter. The room
will arrange itself in your absence
and wait for your return.
You’ve never seen such patience.
Two poems
A Robin at the Bus Station
Newly loose with death,
I can imagine her stomach, the give.
I bring her an oyster shell from the shore,
prop her head. A pine branch blanket.
You taught me how to care for the dead like this,
how to get quiet in their moment,
early January, no other willing witness.
It’s big work. And even I step away,
whisked back to life by the bus,
where in front of me a young man
video chats his girlfriend, who cries
the entire hour-long ride as he slumps
further into his seat, humming short responses.
A whole bus of us listen to her pleas,
and despite her foreign tongue
I can feel the ruptures, the cold valleys.
I press a warm thumb into the sea
spinning past the window. Bleached shell,
pine branch, stuttering connection.
With these tired hands, we can only
build beds, soft spaces to land.
Fall in Languedoc
Officials in Japan are running out
of storage space for the ocean water
used to cool down Fukushima’s
nuclear cores. Tens of thousands
of tons, all newly radioactive,
with talks of releasing it all back
into the ocean. Across the globe,
we fill a tractor load—two or three
tons of grapes—in four hours
with a team of eight. What would
a hundred tons of our juice look like;
a thousand? I try to measure the ruined
water in tractorfuls, but run out of room
in my mental valley. How diluted
does a radioactive ocean have to be
before it stops killing everything
it laps up? How much longer
will the waters stand us?
Here, the Hérault’s been low
all summer, thirsty, only two storms
filling her throat. The gorges dried,
scratchy. Her rocky bottom cuts
into my kayak’s belly, though
the carp are fat, the seaweed
an impenetrable forest. Here, slung
between the map’s bright red pins
that mark each nuclear throne,
I imagine the steel drums planted
beneath us, beating out a cold,
toxic tune. The foxes are hungry.
Tourist-trained, they visit us
at picnic hour, panting, patient,
catching grapes in their skinny mouths
swarmed by flies, fleas trampolining
from their fur as they polish
avocado peels of their fatty linings.
From a too-hot summer, the vines
have fried, harvest light this year.
The last fat bulbs were stripped
in the night by wild boars, though
Christian is diligent in his midnight
rounds, has caught half a dozen
perpetrators already. At lunch time,
he brings me their pink meat
in a small Tupperware, cut
neatly into strips.
the reckoning
CPH said, “too many” can be as few as three—
the magic number exposing how the trick is done,
light shifting from the blonde assistant to hands
concealed in the dark. the advertiser’s golden ratio
of aggregate melanin. the progressive tipping point
where the cool is lost from chic restaurants, the polish
from AP classroom. where they no longer feel
embarrassed for confusing Eunice for Jackie
for Miki. Julio for Erik for Hugo. where “diverse”
slippery slopes to “awkward,” “ghetto,” “overrun,” or
silent blue-eyed glances. the not flaxen straw
breaking the tolerant’s back. it’s a quaint thought.
but experience shows “too many” can be as few as
one.
Gravida 3 para 1
When the nurse asks if I have a surgical history
I begin to form the word of my uterus and its
drawing out, consider inviting her into the recovery room
filled with women giddy from their return to somatic
solitude, then into the smoke-filled apartment with its
futon mattress and warm bottle of retsina, reward
just for time, passing from before to after
it. I begin to form the word, but the word—its roundness, its flat vacuum
of a face—swallows its own tail. After the medical abortion
I imagined a fish, small fry flapping, and still in some Boston Harbor
it haunts a stand of seagrass, is haunted in turn by its half-sibling
the surgically aborted, ripped from stories
too. Sibling’s sibling I do not speak of, my double-standard shame, my
ill-gotten fishlet, in my mind I hold you in loving kindness and say no
When I Am Dorothy Gale
The curtain comes crashing down
and there I am, ruby-footed and murderous,
doing it all for the bloated shadow
of a little man. How foolish I have been
again and again, poppy-cocked
and clumsy, letting the boom of a voice, the cast
of a giant, tease me into storming
the castle to take what I never lacked. What is
more incarnadine: the glitter of these
shoes or the myth of blood now on my hands.
I look at the man and he looks back,
the fury of being caught pinking his cheeks.
I am not the heroine, and I know that
too late. He has no power to give me, after all,
the fading of his theatrics, and if he did,
I understand he’d keep it. We all fell for green,
called it real. There’s no place like money.
There’s no seduction like a beast of sewn-up skins,
a cotton ball on fire, a thrown voice
that tells us what we want to hear. Which of us
escapes? He told the lie; I did the killing.