“Snow where the horse impresses itself / is solitude, a gallop of grief.” —Miguel Hernández
What use is a language
that lacks a name for hazard?
When wheat brays in an alley.
Where do you go
if you aren’t born
an adoration?
If you start the book
of brutality
you will never finish,
knowing how many
teeth go missing
every year.
A trapped animal
will tell you
how each chrysalis
necessarily entombs
a liberating force.
When water hisses in a barrel.
How many excuses
for the absence
of footprints about the body?
Even the desert
has a language
capable of uncovering
the ontology of the castaway.
Around the ocotillo,
around the narthex and dumpster,
each mouth exhales
a shrine.
Copyright © 2018 by Rodney Gomez. Used with the permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Quarterly West Issue 94.
What I won’t tell you is how I became a flute
and brushed against lips but there was no music.
When the blows came furious as juniper.
There were days when I was a parachute
and the wind was free but kind. I won’t lie
and say there were no such days. There were days
when I curled into hailstone and pretended
it was only breezing outside. Another man’s music.
Eventually the need to unfurl overcame the need
to stay anchored. Tsunami greeted me in its maw.
I have his smell all about me but it dwindles every day.
What I won’t tell you is how I escaped. One day
I met a map at a bar. It pointed to a gash on its head
and said I could get there by becoming someone else.
Most of me was still scrawled on a carpet under a belt.
What was there to lose that I hadn’t already lost?
Alone, in the middle of the night, the road smelled
like freshly sawed mesquite. I wormed my way out.
A buckle still loomed in the background.
And I told myself, there is no gleam.
Copyright © 2018 by Rodney Gomez. Used with the permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Quarterly West Issue 94.
What can you say about the knife that hasn't already been said? It is the same knife today as it was yesterday. Even if the law decided to melt it down, it would still be a knife tomorrow. You can travel back through the history of the knife & discover the America-like violence of its birth, how it carved yokes into brown bodies & how it chose night as its uniform. The knife very quickly discovered skin, blood, & the poor. The knife is an instrument & so takes its identity from the purpose of the hand that uses it. The knife can glide gracefully down a backbone in mimicry of a feather. Or it can leap from one carved island of bone to another. When I was given the knife I pretended to be a survivalist even though I lived in the inner city. The knife melted into milk in my hands & I poured it into the wailing mouth of my baby. It was redelivered into the world & made its way to an open sewer. A woodpecker used the knife to cut down the lone acacia on the block. The tree tumbled & soon it was as if nothing had ever grown there. Except the knife. From a sandy oval in concrete, the knife jutted like a mouse tail. It waited for someone who believed in dynamite.
Copyright © 2018 by Rodney Gomez. Used with the permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Quarterly West Issue 94
You say intimacy breathes.
I drop in.
I know the sexiest
sentence there is—the most
erotic. I know it
like I know the last moment
wants to draw us
closest.
If we could say it doesn’t go—
plainly as that
knowing the most intimate
line there is
or I know
simultaneously
on so many occasions those
yes yes yeses almost
what they yesed—
Copyright © 2018 by Rae Gouirand. Used with the permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Quarterly West Issue 94.
She’s saying
I wish there could be a metaphorical
investigative committee
and I’m saying
therapy or a priest?
and, behind us,
the excellence of bright children
and, on our walk home,
the left glove
and I’m saying
I’m fueled by kissing and crimes
against the environment
and she’s saying
the cat shaped depression in this cushion
the necessity of the cat
and I’m saying
I’ve never met a silk sheet I didn’t want to ruin
and, at home,
the fingerprints disappearing
from your grandfather’s coat
the way we carve people out like water through a rock face
the way we read it on their faces
like laundry lines
like clouds
Copyright © 2018 by Emily Hunerwadel. Used with the permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Quarterly West Issue 94.
You are a nobody
until another man leaves
a note under your wiper:
I like your hair, clothes, car—call me!
Late May, I brush pink
Crepe Myrtle blossoms
from the hood of my car.
Again spring factors
into our fever. Would this
affair leave any room for error?
What if I only want
him to hum me a lullaby.
To rest in the nets
of our own preferences.
I think of women
I’ve loved who, near the end,
made love to me solely
for the endorphins. Praise
be to those bodies lit
with magic. I pulse
my wipers, sweep away pollen
from the windshield glass
to allow the radar
detector to detect. In the prim
light of spring I drive
home alone along the river’s
tight curves where it bends
like handwritten words.
On the radio, a foreign love
song some men sing to rise.
Copyright © 2018 by Christopher Salerno. Used with the permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Quarterly West Issue 94.
—John Ashbery
How you carry yourself in
the train station says a lot
about the Constitution what
it lets you experience in
the eyes of the engineers
and how one day you may
believe it necessary to board
the express out of town
you tell no one and in this
you take your freedom
you take a cold sandwich
from the thin man pushing
his cart down the aisle outside
the trees impress the darkness
of the train as you pass
into the middle of America
so much change rattles
around in your head you know
you cannot sleep you
know sleep is for those
on slower land around their heads
it is morning the alarms
have yet to sound this pleases
you the trains are moving swiftly
at their destinations
Copyright © 2018 by David Welch. Used with the permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Quarterly West
—Heather Christle
You meet someone and inside of them
you know there swells
a small country brimming
with steel and beasts of labor.
You love the country
and so you fear it.
Its flora fascinates you.
You wish to visit, though
you worry you won’t
wear the right clothes, that you'll fail
assure the clerk in the flower
shop you aren’t a thief.
They’re only roses. They remind you
of the one you love.
Even with your eyes closed
in your own mouth you’d know
they’re roses.
Copyright © 2018 by David Welch. Used with the permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in Quarterly West Issue 94.