—David Abram
Like an enormous leech the pancreas lies with its head tucked into the duodenum, upside down, the tail outstretched over it, an animal curled in on itself. In the preserve jar of the belly, it wriggles like a strange, medieval cure. When we sleep, Anicka, the pancreas secretes its juices, reverting tonight’s toutlerre into Germanic syllables again: cake, meat, blood. All of this healing is out of our hands. I turn to you, completely unconscious. Completely unconscious, you turn to me. |
Copyright © 2011 by David Keplinger. Used with permission of the author.
1025 molecules
are enough
to call woodthrush or apple.
A hummingbird, fewer.
A wristwatch: 1024.
An alphabet's molecules,
tasting of honey, iron, and salt,
cannot be counted—
as some strings, untouched,
sound when a near one is speaking.
As it was when love slipped inside us.
It looked out face to face in every direction.
Then it was inside the tree, the rock, the cloud.
—2009
From Come,Thief (Knopf, 2011), by Jane Hirshfield. Copyright © 2011 by Jane Hirshfield. Used with permission.
A Black came in after dinner and sat with the ladies...Lord M...calls her Dido, which I suppose is all the name she has. He knows he has been reproached for showing fondness for her...
From The Diary and Letters of His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson,
August 1779
Dido moves quickly— as from the Latin anime. Breath or soul. Beside her, the generations-free kin, a biscuit figurine in pink. Dido standing in irony— the lowest are taller here— Elizabeth should provide an unkind contrast: pretty, blond, pale in uncovered places— but no. The painter worships the quickened other. Dido, his coquette of deep-dish dimples, his careless, bright love. Forget history. She's a teenager. We know what that means. Cocky, stupid about reality. No thought of babies— feathers in her arms. She might wave them, clearing dead mothers from the air— and surely, she's special— her uncle dressed her with care, hid her from triangles and seas outside this walled garden. Let her be. Please. No Dying Mythical Queen weaving a vivid, troubled skin— but Dido, full of girlhood, and Elizabeth reaching a hand. Behave, cousin, she begs. Don't run away from me.
Dido was the great-niece of William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield; as Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench, he is responsible for the Somersett ruling (1772), which essentially outlawed slavery in England, though not in the colonies.
Copyright © 2011 by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers. Used with permission of the author.
I have walked a great while over the snow, And I am not tall nor strong. My clothes are wet, and my teeth are set, And the way was hard and long. I have wandered over the fruitful earth, But I never came here before. Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door! The cutting wind is a cruel foe. I dare not stand in the blast. My hands are stone, and my voice a groan, And the worst of death is past. I am but a little maiden still, My little white feet are sore. Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door! Her voice was the voice that women have, Who plead for their heart's desire. She came—she came—and the quivering flame Sunk and died in the fire. It never was lit again on my hearth Since I hurried across the floor, To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door.
This poem is in the public domain.
for matthew z and matthew r
I remember telling the joke about child molestation and seeing the face of the young man I didn't know well enough turn from something with light inside of it into something like an animal that's had its brain bashed in, something like that, some sky inside him breaking all over the table and the beers. It's amazing, finding out my thoughtlessness has no bounds, is no match for any barbarian, that it runs wild and hard like the Mississippi. No, the Rio Grande. No, the Columbia. A great river of thorns and when this stranger stood up and muttered something about a cigarette, the Hazmat team in my chest begins to cordon off my heart, glowing a toxic yellow, and all I could think about was the punch line "sexy kids," that was it, "sexy kids," and all the children I've cared for, wiping their noses, rocking them to sleep, all the nieces and nephews I love, and how no one ever opened me up like a can of soup in the second grade, the man now standing on the sidewalk, smoke smothering his body, a ghost unable to hold his wrists down or make a sound like a large knee in between two small knees, but terrifying and horrible all the same.
Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Dickman. Used with permission of the author.
Pretty girl. The weather has knocked her down again and given her to the lake to wear as a skin. Why am I always being the weather? There were days in the winter when her smile was so lovely I felt the breathing of my own goodness, though it remained fetal and separate. I was a scavenger who survives with a sling and stones, but whose god nonetheless invents the first small bright bird. And it was like flight to bring food to her lips with a skeletal hand. But now she will always be naked and sad. She will be what happens to lake water that is loved and is also shallow enough. The thickening, the slowing, the black blood of it, the chest opened to reveal the inevitable heart attack. God, the silence of the chamber we watch from. What happens to water that isn't loved? It undergoes processes. It freezes beside traffic. But the reaching out to all sides at once, the wet closing of what was open? That is a beautiful woman. So of course I stand and stare, never able to pinpoint the exact moment I killed her.
From The Stranger Manual. Copyright © 2010 by Catie Rosemurgy. Used with permission of Graywolf Press.