Lue's Poetry Hour: Moving Through It All
There’s so much, isn’t there, impacting our lives at this moment. And what exactly is “this moment,” you may ask. I get it. Everyone is dealing with something different, something red and strange and amorphous. I guess it’s wise to be clear. There’s a genocide happening in Gaza. There are students and teachers protesting across the nation. There are mothers and fathers and children and loved ones and friends and and and and—that are dying. On top of that, there are our individual lives that, to no end, must continue. It’s jarring to think that we’re supposed to just continue moving through it all while so many are suffering. How does one do it? I’m asking. This is not rhetorical (although, maybe the questioning becomes exactly that as I continue this note).
I ask myself, how and why am I even moving through it all? What about my life is so special? What have I done?
If you find yourself asking the same things, worrying, curious, sullen and heartbroken, you may not find the answers here in this Hour. In a lot of ways, Poetry cannot save, cannot answer, cannot resurrect. So, why are we here together? I can offer this for the time being—the words of others who have truly impacted the small amount of time while I read them. Sometimes I’ve walked away changed. Sometimes I’ve walked away refreshed, even energized. And sometimes, I was reminded of the suffering, the dying, the body’s last utterance.
Dear ones, I’m not asking you to “move through it all.” Maybe what I’m trying to say is there’s no need to move past in hopes to regain some semblance of nourishment or happiness or joy or positivity. Things are happening all around us and as humans, I think, it is our job to interact, feel, and grab hold of the emotions that our bodies inhabit. I hope these poems elicit doing just that if even for an hour.
Enjoy!
Field Notes
by Tariq Luthun (via The Rumpus)
One by one, the boys
line up at the lip
of the pond, the clearing
in the wood just a few steps
away. I watch their limbs —
browned by, and before,
the sun — pile into the emerald abyss
until each disappears. On the other side
of the green — blades of grass folded
beneath me — I test the range of each
joint, my fingers crackle behind
each pull and twist. I wring myself
into a pain loud enough to numb
my sorrow. How long before they learn —
those boys — to do the same? The preying
mantis, I have read, can fly
but doesn’t; machinery unsuited
for long journeys, opting to glide
towards its destination. Another day,
I am met by the resident cat, another life
hanging helplessly from its jaw.
What coaxes a beast towards
an outcome? In what forge is a target
molded? I fall in love with a different
person each afternoon — some of them
are me; who I wish to become. I still ponder
the distance required for one to chart
the self; how long can I be left in the wild,
alone with the pull of my desire. I jump —
the boys are long gone; no trace
that any of us had been here, save
for the pasture’s greenery bent
into the soil; overtaken,
a trail of dirt
drying in the sun.
Recipe to Recover
by Camonghne Felix (via Boston Review)
There was an order. Each day
a cup of water, yellow light
a bowl made dense with cowry
shells, two spoons of whatever
goes into my mouth. I wanted
to resist the contours of
reverence, wanted not to be
a woman of tiny reason, wanted time
to come to me but it had to be done
like this, though troublesome, it
had to be my hand in the river
my body laid down undressed
my being the source of my own
welcome, my own
theory of disbelief. In translation
I was to become an unbecoming—
a stranger to myself
in order to protect
myself, my mirrors on alert.
I had to enter the nursery of
the red dirt, had to defy my
devastated heart, had to take care
of the witch who came before me
to be the witch who came
before me, that innocence of
ignorance gone like a dream.
Simplicity would complicate me
my tender wildness not undone.
It’s not that I am crazy, they tell me
but touched
by the bare lie of perdition. There is
no hell but the one of memory
so what could kill me
now? Now that I wear
The salts of my ladies?
What thing?
Not even me.
Memoir of Muted Posthorn
by Adrian Dallas Frandle (via Hooligan)
In another life I got a wrist tattoo taken from The Crying
of Lot 49. A muted trumpet over radial artery announces
nothing. The symbol is inert, meant to represent the search
for lost symbols. My marginalia can confirm this
search is ongoing. I say another life because that dead ink
only haunts me now. Static as that trumpet and quiet
as my comebacks in a fight. I never fought for myself
honestly, so the sin can only be mine. O’ trespass of meek
rainfall, that will shower forth apocalyptic from all
that dammed up water behind my muted posthorn. Symbols
are meant to be shared. Somehow he found a way to steal
what had freely flowed. Now his back wings under
the weight of memory needled into skin, an image
of a bird lifting off water, or an island arrested between sea
and sky, but exploded so the span shadows scapulae. Scan
the open ocean’s text, but I am rendered unreadable.
Find me an aster blossom as trumpet, an orange floral
instrument just shy of bursting. I want my hands to speak
up to boom blooming. To be unrecognizable, a loud flower.
The Threshold of Someplace Good
by Satya Dash (via Sixth Finch)
The spike in my stress levels
on my smart watch while I'm sleeping
suggests there comes a point
in my relatively easy paced dream
when the diagnostics of my subconscious
get inflected by some kind of situational frenzy.
The dream comes to me in the medium of scenes
transmitted by a vintage Thomson television placed
inside water. Ideally the water is of a swimming pool
where I'm learning to swim for the first time,
where I'm learning it's fun to look stupid,
even better to not care about looking stupid
while having fun. As a kid, looking good while being
stupid was my major takeaway watching SRK
in DDLJ, a movie that ran daily for 25 years
at a theatre's matinee show in Mumbai. The last time
I watched a movie at a theatre, I fell asleep
when the noble village leader was about to enter
the forest and I woke up drooling right after
the tiger chose not to attack him. I looked down
at my smart watch and there were no signs of stress.
I looked up towards the screen and the forest rangers
were chasing the man for trespassing, the roar
of the disappearing tiger echoing in the backdrop
as beside me lay the hand of my beloved squeezing
my arm harder. I leaned against her shoulder,
spicy notes of citrus in her body mist settling
over my moustache. It felt like a wonderful moment
to die, all eyes in the dark blue of the vast room
neon-focused on the moving light of the screen
as I turned my face away, counting down
from ten before closing my eyes again.
Iowa, Summer
by Maia Siegel (via Adroit Journal)
I talked to every flower in the yard,
naming them. They stood attentive, waiting
for roll call. When I milked a cow it spurt out
nothing of value, clear liquid dashed
in the mud. I couldn’t pull hard at her. Her skin
hung loose into her own dung. When I moved aside
she replaced me with a statue of brown sludge, made
in my likeness. On the farm, a girl with my same name
wore a pouch around her neck. All summer I asked her
to open it. Instead, she taught me how to cut around a salad
so it looked like you ate it. Years later,
she would try to cut an avocado and open her hand
instead. The doctor gave her pills for it
that she never stopped taking. On the last day of August
she opened the pouch, grinning.
Like a named flower, I stood at attention.
Parkside & Ocean
by b ferguson (via Poets.org)
there is a kind of memory that feels, somehow
suddenly, like a wound, though not always, not until
one wanders back through: the dark, damp alley the only path
toward home—every place i have loved has forced me to leave.
and then there is memory as one might always wish:
bejeweled, like sugar on the tongue upon reentry.
what is the name for the scent that whispers mother,
the twanged hue of evening that gestures island,
limestone, cane, spume?Flatbush, i have sauntered away
from everything that has called me kin now,
as i have before, but in what little time we have left,
let me remember you, let me remember what lay beneath
your weather—your snow-born streams, your troubled foliage.
guinep, worship, convenience, heel and toe. old dream,
will either of us return to what we once were? to when?
Requiem
by Xochi Cartland (via Muzzle Magazine)
for Jesus Ociel Baena and Dorian Herrera
In Aguascalientes, the lovers lie in the living room. One holds
the razor like a ring, the other is held by the razor like a rosary.
It has only been a few hours, the news has not yet risen louder
than the ranchera spilling from balconies and open doorways. Still,
cobwebs clot the wound. My grandmother always said spiders
could bless a house, but the houses of their bodies collapsed.
The police call it a crime of passion. We do not believe them,
the magic men whose favorite trick is to make us disappear.
Every time they spit the word maricón, a boy surrenders
to the life he was sentenced as a hand-me-down humiliation.
Still, we are here, some of us standing, all of us bruised. Beneath
our feet, Mexico unfurls like a field of forgotten marigolds.
(A planted love–deep enough to bring back the dead.)
Zapata, Belén. “Mexico’s First Openly Non-Binary Magistrate and Prominent LGBTQ Activist Found Dead.” CNN, Cable News Network, 14 Nov. 2023.
Abuelo Delouses Mister
by Diego Baez
Rubber hose in one hand,
pumping with the other,
Abuelo douses the poor mutt
in kerosene as Ponchito
and Paola, emerald-bodied
parakeets, shrug shoulders
and fall into fits of laughter,
shaking hands and slapping
one another on the back.
My brothers and I
stand there aghast,
like straight men or suckers.
Like three gringo amigos
made up like mariachis.
Before the Body
by Katie Condon (via Gulf Coast)
It appears to be the hours before dawn, though there is no such thing yet as time. Beauty also is unaccounted for. The mist is merely what it is: water too weightless or wantless to fall. Soon, cells wound up on the spool will be spun into a body that, when it speaks, only speaks in code. Soon, where there was no mystery there will be mystery in abundance. Where there once was pasture, a pancreas, a spleen. Crows looming each on a fence post now roost on a trellis of cartilage, memory’s liquid weight clouding the amygdala. Here, before muscle, before blood, there is nothing worth fearing. There is nothing here but the stars drifting through their orchard like embryos descending blindly toward their wombs.
Love Song, with Removed Cyst
by Sharon Olds (via The New Yorker)
Then we're lying on the bed, in our clothes, in the overcast,
after he has had the cyst removed
from his knuckle, now bulbous with lattice bandage.
It was like a wisdom tooth growing up
out of his joint, they cut it out
and cut its long roots out.
He lies on his side, I lie on my back,
he keeps the hand elevated
on my breast.
Between us we have so many doctors now,
maybe a dozen. He's asked me to tell him,
again, what
a simile is, and why I never use a metaphor—
because for so long I had thought that they were crazy. But I am sane as a level,
sane as the level bubble in its greenish
indoor pool. I am sane as a scissors,
sane as a sieve, sane as a scales,
sane as a gyroscope, sane as
an ellipsis, sane as orgasm,
sane as every stage of it:
aura, surge, thrust, first stage
rocket, second stage rocket, third stage
rocket, fourth, rest, begin-again, fifth. He rests, he sleeps,
the window shade beyond him is closed,
its mild right-angle hills and valleys like
ripples in water, little doll-house
syncline anticline syncline. We talk about my
not writing— my voice went woggle
woggle as I said, "I need a friend,
in you, about this," and he said, "I’ll be
your friend." Now he dreams. I am sane as a friend,
sane as a dream.
mask on, mask off
by Thanh Búi (via Pinhole)
for Dr. Wayne Lesser
Lila Mae Watson & I fix our faces
every morning for the same reason—
I am not alone, just addicted to the myth
of silos. like other poets, I am enamored
by the 52-hertz whale. look at that elusive
creature everyone searches for while it wants
for itself. the other week "name for the order?"
came up & Thi & I turned to each other only
to realize neither of us could do the thing. we
went with his. then back to our ocean silos. Thi
too likes being singular while wishing for another.
what else to do when you meet the same frequency?
"Do not believe anything this kitten says. He is fine."
why wolf when cats more cunning? then again do any
of us really choose to perform? the bit has gone on for
so long I forgot which one was the truth. how many layers
of satire til home run? I don't know inside baseball (too american,
no father) but frankly I knew it would rain, I just wanted
to play the role of hurried, panicked woman
grabbing the wet laundry before too late.
Getting Your Rocks Off
by Melvin Dixon
Reading clouds beyond the road I calculate our distance, survey the space between our clothes where rising curves and mountain tug for air, touch, release. You drive to the hairpin slope, hesitate, turn up and in. We ride on every naked fear you have and discover that men like us are not all granite, shale, deceptive quartz, or glittering layers of mica. From here you see the whole world differently: brownskin, tufts of black grass. And many times I have given myself to summits like these. Ride in, ride high. Ride until the clouds break. You will learn to read rain. You will follow the white gravel it leaves.
Asthma
by Aliyah Cotton (via Adroit Journal)
At King St. Station in Old Town it is our income. My mother asks strangers for money as I hold her hand and my chest rattles behind the cardboard sign. When there is nothing for us to count in our box I look instead to the dogwoods that guard the station gate and the daffodils that grin around the base of each trunk 4 there 6 there and there * * * * At Fairfax Hospital it brings Sarah to me walking in with a cookie & a wink every night for 2 weeks. Her scrubs are blue like Cookie Monster painted on the walls and my mother’s box of cigarettes and the round stickers on my chest. When I leave Sarah says she never wants to see me again and I do not understand * * * * On Halloween night in the little girl’s bedroom it is the reason he pauses – to glance down at the wheezing unabridged churning in her frame brittle as the twin bed on which she struggles. She can see shapes in the stipple ceiling: a dog a flower crescent moon beach umbrella what else what else * * * * At night it’s hard to breathe because I cannot remember anymore how her voice sounded in my lungs as she read to me. I think it was about a sun bear no a red panda no
Annunciation
by Sarah Ghazal Ali
My pillaged body
is not as interesting
as my virginal sister’s,
I know. Your books
efface me, dismiss me
as naturally lacking.
So my hair has long
since grayed, cropped
short, held back
under a matronly veil.
I sent my husband to bed
another woman—I’m nobler
for it. I allowed a slight
to get the ball rolling.
By moonlight I grieved
the perpetual
blood marbling red
and black down my thighs.
They visited me first,
you know. God
and two angles came
with glad tidings,
announced I would flower
with a boy. But
all you remember
is what came next:
I hung my head and laughed.
When God at last
conferred my body
with fruit, the angles
raised their yellow wings.
They broke bread.
I listened until I heard
a great humming.
A child, a ripe boy
I would mother. The hive
coming to me
after all I’d done—
what else inside
to offer at the moment
of absolution but a flash
of sound? I knew
I wasn’t favored
but damned. My whole
long life I’d been groomed
to unfurl for the coming
of bees. I knew
when I passed, he
would go back to her
and you to you Mater Dei,
your lily among thorns.
After all this, knowing
I’d be written over,
a vessel forgettable
but for a moment of sonic
lapse, tell me—
what would you have done?
From “Take Me Back, Burden Hill”
by L. Lamar Wilson (via Poets.org)
Take me back to homesteaders who pronounce poem & perm
The same & know neither take too well watered or weighted down.
To those who teach the difference between wahoos & no-hows
& haints & t’ain’t no body’s beast or business or property no mo’.
To endless back roads, verdant & muddy. To racing waist-deep
In fields of wildflowers & corn stalks as tall as your big brother’s crown
& Verily, I say, & because I say, so it is. To fields of blinding white &
Chiggers & bolls that burrow deep in soil richer & veined & reddened
By all those black, bruised palms’ blood. To never will I pick again. To
Melons & peanuts & as many hogs & heads of cattle as our pennies
& prayers can feed. To knowing when to slaughter & what
To keep. To knowing where to hide the blade, who not to tell.
To Mrs. Mable’s snuff-mucked mouth & her darlin’ Ben, to
Mack & Nellie & they ol’ mule Sally’s slack back breaking wind.
To Sister Lola’s man’s astigmatism, Uncle Willis’ crossed legs
& arms belying memories of a rifle, his right hand unflinching
In salute, winning the Battle of the Bulge I never will. To Miss
Lou Mamie convulsing, then giving up the right for the wrong
Right there, finally, in the choir stand, where Grandpa Roy
& Grandma Noretha keep time at the Hammond & Console,
Ruby-throated tenor & contralto entwined across a space vast
As the two-room shanty where they will make the restless boy
Who will make me, whose hearts stopped ’fo’ I could lay on
They chests & listen. To unsteady as this fraught rhyme reaching,
Reaching, echoing the murmur they gifted him & me, they baby
Boygirl. Take me back to the original question, which enters
This room’s crooked lines long before you with your morning
Coffee or fresh blend of tinctures, teas or spirits: What must
I do to be saved from myself now? What you got to take away
This plague’s unyielding ache?I’m nobody’s savior, Nicodemus, but
Come here. Hear them. In my dreams, these & a few others await:
Always alive, hear them rocking a stain-glassed house of pews,
Blues creaking in sync, brows & arms aloft, hands caressing
Oaken divets on the quaking boards’ floors & collicky babies’
Backs in brokenhearted girls’ arms & laps. Let us kneel, faces flat,
Fingers flexed, nostrils becking Pine-Sol to cleanse every crevice
It can reach, backs arched, conjuring bolts of holy heat
No unnatural flesh, unmoved, can stand. Come on, Jesus
Allah Amma. Anyone Listening? Take us down, down into
These plantations’ mire, believing in ussin the only way beyond through
To ours. There, Thomas’ dubious gaze will mirror mine, help us
Cross in a calm time. Rest our thorny sides in its briar patch, thatch
A home from its scrapyards’ booty, undulate real proper like, loose
Our selves in this shifty baldachin’s ready sway. I’ll go, I cried all
Those years ago. Send me. But I’m so tired, all cried out, so take
Me back to this nowhere town, where we can lay our burdens down.
A Kind of Garden
by Nica Giromini (via Bat City Review)
At the end, think of a wind
entering a kind
of garden. Opened, wind
enters a garden—what else could
whatever what wall
encircles be called—
listen to it ending, the draft
within earreach within.
Then consider the exterior.
Greened stone parts already
uncertain field. But there
is wall before. What I was
circling first, outer scarp
I had been returning from, another
part of unlevel field a
long defile assumed, revealed
as steep-sided ditch now
rendered abandoned by new
wall, something some straying
thing might look to hutch
up down in. Yes, what
went on was like that.
Foregrounded before. For
a stint, charted. What I
walked up and, inside
which, above which, walked.
This wasn’t how I said I would,
at the end, go on. This is
what lure is, isn’t it, revisiting
a shut perimeter. The gates
that can open not opening.
Self-portrait after a funeral
by Hayan Charara (via Green Linden Press)
I bought groceries, washed
dishes, peeled
oranges for the kids, watched
TV—all the while and into the night
I had profound thoughts.
And by the morning I knew
for sure
they were not.
The Reasons
by David Mura (via Poets.org)
A father is fate
say the ancient oracles
or the modernist therapist
or the son despondent
harrowing against.
A mother
is mystery or
memory, a makeshift
stay against the father.
And me? I see now
how easy it was to be
a son. How if the son dies
before the father
there is no end to it
and so what eases
the father is the imminence
of his death, which eases
too the son
if the son is not
a child. And a mother?
Her death is that hole.
In the earth or the universe.
In the heart or the hell
the family has wrought
where the father vanishes
and all is her absence.
No one solves these.
No one outlives these.
There are reasons poems live,
people die. There are reasons.
April Interval IV
by Marilyn Hacker
There was no spring in Saratoga Springs.
I’ve spent a month under relentless rain,
uncomforted as I have ever been
thought not in jail, love, anguish, debt, or pain.
No deft phrases or well-proportioned lines
relieve the repetitions of routine.
Sodden, the leaflings spoil. Only the pines
are green. My solace has been buying things:
a white duck jacket, insulated boots,
three patchwork quilts dead countrywomen pieced.
It snowed last week, then thawed. A few released
yellow and purple crocuses uplifted
between shade trees on lawns. The wet wind shifted
and rain battered them back against the roots.
A History of Termina
by Summer Farah
In the mayor’s office, men with money pretend the moon is not falling.
Laborers point to its growing shadow, poets ready their pens,
a violence is not solved without memory.
Lonely children do not cry wolf.
Laborers point to its growing shadow, poets ready their pens.
When the moon chooses its end, who will remember us here?
Lonely children do not cry wolf
while playing in the forest past nightfall, they ask—
when the moon chooses its end, who will remember us here?
They wrote songs to one another, named them for the girls
playing in the forest past nightfall, asking
what happens to lonely children with aching lungs.
They wrote songs to one another, named them for the girls
hidden away in their rooms, lit only by noon.
What happens to lonely children with aching lungs,
who yell at the falling light?
Hidden away in their room, lit only by moon,
men with money ignore the children
who yell at the falling light.
If it’s something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it!
Men with money ignore the children
with bones growing over their face; children, shrouded in light;
if it’s something that can be stopped, then just try to stop it
Who drank all my wine?
—Lue