Scary Movies

by Kim Addonizio

Today the cloud shapes are terrifying,  
and I keep expecting some enormous  
black-and-white B-movie Cyclops  
to appear at the edge of the horizon,

to come striding over the ocean  
and drag me from my kitchen  
to the deep cave that flickered  
into my young brain one Saturday

at the Baronet Theater where I sat helpless  
between my older brothers, pumped up  
on candy and horror—that cave,
the litter of human bones

gnawed on and flung toward the entrance,  
I can smell their stench as clearly
as the bacon fat from breakfast. This  
is how it feels to lose it—

not sanity, I mean, but whatever it is  
that helps you get up in the morning
and actually leave the house
on those days when it seems like death

in his brown uniform
is cruising his panel truck
of packages through your neighborhood.  
I think of a friend’s voice

on her answering machine—
Hi, I’m not here—
the morning of her funeral,  
the calls filling up the tape

and the mail still arriving,
and I feel as afraid as I was
after all those vampire movies  
when I’d come home and lie awake

all night, rigid in my bed,
unable to get up
even to pee because the undead  
were waiting underneath it;

if I so much as stuck a bare
foot out there in the unprotected air  
they’d grab me by the ankle and pull me  
under. And my parents said there was

nothing there, when I was older  
I would know better, and now  
they’re dead, and I’m older,  
and I know better.

Kim Addonizio, “Scary Movies” from What Is This Thing Called Love. Copyright © 2004 by Kim Addonizio. 

The Opposite of Nostalgia

by Eric Gamalinda

You are running away from everyone
who loves you,
from your family,
from old lovers, from friends.

They run after you with accumulations
of a former life, copper earrings,
plates of noodles, banners
of many lost revolutions.

You love to say the trees are naked now
because it never happens
in your country. This is a mystery
from which you will never

recover. And yes, the trees are naked now,
everything that still breathes in them
lies silent and stark
and waiting. You love October most

of all, how there is no word
for so much splendor.
This, too, is a source
of consolation. Between you and memory

everything is water. Names of the dead,
or saints, or history.
There is a realm in which
—no, forget it,

it’s still too early to make anyone understand.
A man drives a stake
through his own heart
and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia

begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves
and the leaves take over
and again he has learned
to let go.

Eric Gamalinda, "The Opposite of Nostalgia" from Zero Gravity.  Copyright © 1999 by Eric Gamalinda. 

At the Putney Co-Op, an Opera

by Chard deNiord

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
                                                      —Allen Ginsberg

"Go ahead," I say to my neighbor at the Putney Co-op who tells
     me he can't complain. "Let it out. It's mid-March and there's still
two feet of snow on the ground. Fukushima has just melted down and
the Washington Monument cracked at its pyramidion. Put down your
     bags and sing. How many times dear father, graybeard, lonely old
     courage teacher must you walk down the aisles as a randy eidolon
humming your tunes for us to start? Our song begins in silence and grows
to a buzz. We make it up as we go along, then watch our numbers swell—
     ten thousand members who have eyes to see and ears to hear. Who fly
     like a swarm to join us in our chambers, which are these aisles."

     I'm singing without knowing it, carrying the tune of main things,
     lamenting the prices with Bernie Sanders. My neighbor joins me
for no other reason than singing along as a member of the cast we call
the multitudes of lonely shoppers. I roam the aisles with the sadness
     of America, juggling onions, blessing the beets. It's a local stage on
     which the country opens like a flower that no one sees beside the road.

In my hungry fatigue, I'm shopping for images, which are free on the highest
shelf but costly in their absence—the only ingredient here that heals my sight
     of blindness. I see you, Walt Whitman, pointing your beard toward axis
     mundi by the avocados, reading the labels as if they were lines, weighing
the tomatoes on the scale of your palms, pressing the pears with your thumbs
the way you did in Huntington, Camden, and Brooklyn. And you, also, Ruth
     and Hayden, at the checkout counter with empty bags you claim are full
     of apples, almonds, and bananas. What can you say to those outside who
haven't read your poems? Who find it hard to get the news from poetry
but die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

     It's night. The Connecticut slips by across Rt. 5. The moon is my egg
     and stars, my salt. I score the music of the carrots, scallions, and corn in
the frost of the freezer windows. The sough of traffic on 91 washes my ears
with the sound of tires on blue macadam. The doors close in an hour....
     We'll both be lonely when we return on the long dark roads to our silent
     houses. I touch your book and dream of our odyssey westward to a field
in Oregon, Kansas, or California where we plant our oars and die ironically.
Where we finish our journey as strangers in our native land. These are the
     lyrics to our song in the aisles—the buzz of the swarm with our queen
     at the center. What America did you have, old howler, when you scattered
into the sky, then floated like a cloud as another form in the making outside
of time, forgetful at last and empty of all you sang?

Chard deNiord, "At the Putney Co-Op, an Opera" from Interstate. Copyright © 2015 by Chard deNiord.  

Buffalo Dusk

by Carl Sandburg

The buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads down pawing on in a great pageant of dusk,
Those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
And the buffaloes are gone.

Morningside Heights, July

by William Matthews

Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.
A man and a woman on a bench:
she tells him he must be psychic,
for how else could he sense, even before she knew,
that she’d need to call it off? A bicyclist
fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped
hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle
on the boil. I never meant, she says.
But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost
collide; someone yells fuck in Farsi.
I’m sorry, she says. The comforts
of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon.
The sky blurs—there’s a storm coming
up or down. A lank cat slinks liquidly
around a corner. How familiar
it feels to feel strange, hollower
than a bassoon. A rill of chill air
in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail.

William Matthews, “Morningside Heights, July” from After All: Last Poems. Copyright © 1998 by William Matthews. 

Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute  
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless  
As the flight of birds.

                         *              

A poem should be motionless in time  
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,  
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time  
As the moon climbs.

                         *              

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean  
But be.

Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica” from Collected Poems 1917-1982. Copyright © 1985 by The Estate of Archibald MacLeish. 

Being Muslim

by Hayan Charara

O father bringing home crates
of apples, bushels of corn,
and skinned rabbits on ice.

O mother boiling lentils in a pot
while he watched fight after fight,
boxers pinned on the ropes

pummeling each other mercilessly.
And hung on the wall where we
ate breakfast an autographed photo

of Muhammad Ali. O father
who worshipped him and with
a clenched fist pretended to be:

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
O you loved being Muslim then.
Even when you drank whiskey.

Even when you knocked down
my mother again and again.
O prayer. O god of sun.

God of moon. Of cows
and of thunder. Of women.
Of bees. Of ants and spiders,

poets and calamity.
God of the pen, of the fig,
of the elephant.

Ta’ Ha’, Ya Sin, Sad, Qaf.
God of my father, listen:
He prayed, he prayed, five times a day,

and he was mean.

Hayan Charara, "Being Muslim" from Something Sinister.  Copyright © 2016 by Hayan Charara.

Because I Will Be Silenced

by Ha Jin

Once I have the freedom to say
my tongue will lose its power.
Since my poems strive to break the walls
that cut off people’s voices,
they become drills and hammers.

But I will be silenced.
The starred tie around my neck
at any moment can tighten into a cobra.

How can I speak about coffee and flowers?

Ha Jin, "Because I Will be Silenced" from Between Silences.  Copyright © 1990 by Ha Jin. 

Fourth Of July

by John Brehm

Freedom is a rocket,
isn’t it, bursting
orgasmically over
parkloads of hot
dog devouring
human beings
or into the cities
of our enemies
without whom we
would surely
kill ourselves
though they are
ourselves and
America I see now
is the soldier
who said I saw
something
burning on my
chest and tried
to brush it off with
my right hand
but my arm
wasn’t there—
America is no
other than this
moment, the
burning ribcage,
the hand gone
that might have
put it out, the skies
afire with our history.

John Brehm, “Fourth of July” from Help Is on the Way. Copyright © 2012 by John Brehm.