Welcome Back, Welcome Back, Welcome Back
It’s been too long, my friends, my lovers of poetry, my Luelies. Lately, life has been full of ups and downs and downs and more downs. Lately, poetry, although I’ve been writing it, hasn’t necessarily helped any. What do you go to poetry for? Why do you write poetry? Recently, these are the questions that have been bothering me. Like I said, I’ve been writing, but, fuck, those post-first book blues isn’t something to play with. The pressure to get it right again or at all. The pressure to sustain a line, an image, an experience, a narrative. The pressure to make something of the page. Fuck. And then, to even consider all these things with the fucking world. To live. To keep living. You know the saying—something like, “To live is to write.” What if living isn’t enough? Where is the muse when you need them? What if you need more? Hell, how do you even know what “more” is?
Over the last several months, I’ve come across poems that give me “more.” That sustain me. That keeps me going. I hope these poems do the same for you if even for an hour.
Enjoy!
*Note: Due to Substack’s limited editing, some poems may not be in the exact format.
To the Watchlist
by George Abraham (via The Drift)
a disappearing ghazal for my body, staying
I get it. You’re obsessed with me.
Damn the waters, now you’ll be blessed with me.
When did you get this fabulous? A beloved said after reading
your little profile, your unintentional publicity for me.
I still hope someone spits in a zionist’s salad today,
& not in a sexy way — Happy Aries Season to me!
Call it what you will — double-take, bio-weapon, terrorist’s
sympathy, etc — you’ll never get a body’s apology from me.
It began with a need to be seen. Now
you’ve made a garden in the seeing of me.
Who Midased the touch golden? Who echoed
the body a dis-remembrance? Was it me?
From the water’s perspective, Narcissus was a failed
experiment in surveillance: gays into me/gaze into me.
Screenshot your c*nary mi$$ion page for dating
profiles, a friend jokes. I was a child in your photo of me.
In a life where he mattered — the Palestinian boy disappeared
mid-school day over a Facebook post — he’d be named Ganymede.
*
They made me feel observed, she said after small talk over dinner
with poets, to which I replied, maybe that’s why they’re dear to ] [
My girlfriend’s still around, he said while asking to reschedule
after a month’s phone-tag, I can’t be open around her like I can with ] [
It wasn’t the straight boy coming out to himself, but how he learned
to forgive his father, in that after, that made it a love story to ] [
Take me to Ibiza after, my subconscious asked him in the dream
before waking to a message, I can’t wait to escape this hellhole with ] [
Love more like ya qamar than malek(at)i, more hayat
than habib, more habib than — don’t say burial, don’t bury ] [
How imtalak, to own, shares its root with malakeh, queen, means
to have a body is to queen myself, the distance between pleasure & ] [
I love showing off to you, he whispered into the hole, collapsing
our cross-costal distance. I like to watch, said my quivering ] [
(Can you see it yet? I’m beating you to respectability’s
punch-line: in the heart of the empire, I dared to want ] [ )
The ars poetica is where my body feels most
at stake, I say, while running from a poem about ] [
*
But does there even exist a poem
where my body has ever not been
at stake? I ask the muse
who names himself
my center, writing love
always in the shadow
of empire, but never empire
collapsed into dust
beneath the shadow
of a new sun, made possible
by names for light beyond
mere distance: not stellar
but dizzying still
in spin & endless, not moon
of sky but qamar
of the face rising, setting
east of nowhere but the space
of bedside impressions.
Lift open my curtains,
if you must — see me
in the light of your own
eclipsing — catch me
breathless in quiver, starstruck
by nothing but my name.
in the dormitories after dark
by James Fujinami Moore
Understand:
they carried the boy
naked, hogtied to a pole,
down the hallway and I stood by.
It was punishment. He had
been late too many times,
and the older boys stripped
him down for—
amusement—he smiled
at first, too.
I stood there, beside—
or by—hearing them chant
shower, shower
their faces grabby at each
humiliation, shining
from inside with it & made
brighter & even then
I knew it was holy, a ritual to bind
us, a secret, the words
that even years later
lying beside you
I’d refuse to say. Lying by.
Even now, after your touch
has faded, I still remember this:
the great white mass of him
hung from the pole and swinging.
How after a while he stopped
smiling. How heavy it was
when it was my turn
to carry it.
You Who the Earth Was For
by Steffi Tad-y (via Room Magazine)
After Jean Valentine
You fleeing war, carrying a rooster with your shaky hand.
You trained to pummel, never the first to wince or flinch.
You who plant their sadness into the dirt.
You whose questions have no gentle answers.
You who cook too close to the stove.
You at the table, missing the one not there.
You whose loss comes with a wordlessness.
You beside the rubble, out to build again.
You in the backseat being loved.
You running towards the water.
The Deer
by Ama Codjoe (via The New York Review)
Walking alone in a forest, I came upon
a deer—this was not a vision.
It faced me, on its four thin legs,
unmoved as a cave painting
brushed by light. I made myself still.
I spoke to it, softly. I can’t remember
what I said. The deer regarded me as a god would,
eased by my astonishment.
Then, slowly, I moved closer, and the deer
did not run. By now, you know it was love
I walked toward, not the deer, but
what hung in the space between us. I know
it was love because, as I held
my breath, the deer took
a few steps toward me before
bounding into the camouflage
of branches and leaves.
Wood
by Ahmad Almallah (via Adroit)
It’s true, the architecture
of discovery is a strange one,
a curious art, maybe the basis
of all disaster: what were we
expecting to find out in these
strange stretches of land,
a few boys mining the earth
with whatever sharpness
they could find, scavenging
the construction site for clarity
and wood, to build what,
to drag what out of where?
Am I warming up to some
defining memory
or am I
simply
collapsing
whatever comes to mind?
from River of Love
by Kami Enzie
Like a morgue of oranges inside the lower crisper laid. Loose rinds bruised, and if not torn, still their battered segments will again never repaired be, not really. Waxy bodies deep welled yet near zested to rot, petrified. Peels touched with white mold and darksome burns as if brushed by green fire, brown spots (black rot) at their blossom end or in their navel growing. Forlorn inside the bottom storage pan that glides beneath the shelf spare with souring yogurt and wrinkled, loose grapes slumped in dewy condensation across the frosty pane. Nor am I able to divine the cleromantic significance from this found constellation of scattered fruit, relevant to our pursuit of liberty, of money. In your sleeping presence, my eyes switch ac/dc in their sockets. I inevitably find myself back inside the fridge. I clean the countertop, the petite canyon of dishes. Trash the pizza box. The sinking river running through it gushes voiceless pounding down. I pour two glasses of orange juice. I stream Ballroom Throwbacks, scroll through bitch tracks and entwine both hands around my head to fashion an emoting crown of fingers. I peek into the fridge door for proof of light and something larger, before the empire strikes again wrapping epiphanic darkness in gauzy bolts of light. In the morning, you will find breakfast readied from things present and good in our pantry. I will help you shave your back like a lamb. Before the mass grave of oranges, the appearance of weathered, severed pygmy heads inside red mesh polypropylene bags, every dimpled, sensuous body grew fat in a buffet of CO2 and sunlight in halcyon blue Egypt, South Africa, Daytona, down the international supply chain, carrying idiosyncratic ways of wanting to be peeled open without breaking apart unique to the individual. We drove them home one night in the backseat from the Hy Vee on North Dodge with mutual approval and excitement. Safe together. Nothing more to spark from the orange manes of mold that rhyme with sun. When the trigger wedge for the refrigerator light flies away into the ceiling, may velvet dark keep sleep in your crystal castle. When the covey scatters from your window, dream me a place of rest inside that ziggurat.
Ceremony
by Ibe Lienberg (via Blackbird)
Pace the table scratches and inked boredom
of my youth. I am responsible for all of it.
When I tried to ignore her, I was impossible.
There is a word in Chickasaw for you, she said.
Chepota loma the bastard. I didn’t think
I existed. The word existed. In that other tongue.
A wobble in the uneven of oak chair.
An auntie stables behind me.
Other family lean in too.
We posture the pause.
She could birth the words for being fatherless
to me again. Walked away from.
My hands clamp the chair,
wait to be called something with my wandering stutter
I call accent. A name that will stain until her death
or we declare she is her own disaster.
I Could Be a Whale Shark
by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Bolinao, Philippines
I am worried about tentacles.
How you can still get stung
even if the jelly arm disconnects
from the bell. My husband
swims without me—farther
out to sea than I would like,
buoyed by salt and rind of kelp.
I am worried if I step too far
into the China Sea, my baby
will slow the beautiful kicks
he has just begun since we landed.
The quickening, they call it,
but all I am is slow, a moon jelly
floating like a bag in the sea.
Or a whale shark. Yes—I could be
a whale shark, newly spotted
with moles from the pregnancy—
my wide mouth always open
to eat and eat with a look that says
Surprise! Did I eat that much?
When I sleep, I am a flutefish,
just lying there, swaying back
and forth among the kelpy mess
of sheets. You can see the wet
of my dark eye awake, awake.
My husband is a pale blur
near the horizon, full of adobo
and not waiting thirty minutes
before swimming. He is free
and waves at me as he backstrokes
past. This is how he prepares
for fatherhood. Such tenderness
still lingers in the air: the Roman
poet Virgil gave his pet fly
the most lavish funeral, complete
with meat feast and barrels
of oaky wine. You can never know
where or why you hear
a humming on this soft earth.
APRÈS-SOLEIL
by Gamze S. Saymaz (via Sand Journal)
APRÈS-SOLEIL I
Down at the mantı place,
near the beach, two gold
rimmed plates of garlic
yoğurt marbled with
tomato olive oil, red
pepper flakes, and dried
mint hiding a constellation
of hot dough, are set on
the blue, plaid tablecloth
that almost matches your
shirt, as chrysanthemums
reach out of the stained
glass vase at the centre
to cover half of your face.
APRÈS-SOLEIL II
Bikini briefs hanging from the bathtub faucet like some tired fruit dripping nectar.
Running Manton Ave. in a Pandemic
by Kurt David (via & Change)
I dress myself in flowers. Barechested,
boxers ballooned, boys pop wheelies
outside the bodega. Girls swap soda-
teeth secrets, elbows cocky in meeting.
Two boys jump a third. Cars honking,
they pull apart. They finessed me,
the boy insists, searching the roadside
for his phone. When he borrows mind,
our fingers touch. Up past the corner pharmacy,
a masked woman scoops shaved ice.
The road wishbones around the median
where a kid shouts, Are you gay? until
I answer, Of course, just look at me. Snapdragons tight
around my legs, daisies sopping sweat at my hairline.
Then his friend yells, I respect it! And I blow him
a kiss headed home again.
(Re)location
by Kinsale Drake (via poets.org)
Salt Lake City boasts white tabernacles,
half-filled parks, a mineral
highway, and archives so vast
they fill mountainsides.
One summer, we researched our family
genealogy there, surrounded by giddy Mormons.
Their screens flickered with famous
relatives: a Custer, Jackson, Theodore,
Kit. Nothing came up on ours,
so we went and got burgers at a place
that sold no liquor. The burgers
were okay. But we shared our shakes
and secret smiles and imagined
ourselves renegades in that room.
Old-West-portrait: an Indian girl
on the run with no records and no documents,
her wind-whipped father clutching
his sarsaparilla. We had infiltrated
the saloon and city hall.
I locked eyes in the burger joint
with the confidence of a pistol-whipper.
The room stirred.
It smelled of grass
and gunsmoke.
I would not be moved again.
Travel Advisory
by Campbell McGrath (via The Threepenny Review)
You are now approaching planet Earth,
third in ascent from a lesser star
in a tertiary whorl of the Milky Way.
Go ahead, fill your lungs, you
were born to breathe
its atmosphere, designed to survive
its spectrum of sensory textures,
which, like you, no longer conform
to manufacturer’s specifications—
your eyes as delicate as dust, your hair
soft chains of discarded proteins,
your teeth remote cousins to the fang.
Once, you were conjoined with eternity,
your navel a mark to recall transition,
now you will live and die only here,
no other realm or source, no other sun
but that the ancients knew
to be triumphal, its radiance sufficient
to burn its emblem upon your brow.
Stand beneath its fountaining ions.
Feel how narrow the margin is.
Metrology Theory #5
by Sean Cho A. (via Ecotone)
ignoring possibilities. like. the memory of water.
like. how this glass of water was once in the stomach
of the very last woolly mammoth,
on his last day. he thought the sky is melting fire or.
all the mountains are crumbling but. hopefully in reality
nothing at all. hopefully. he wasn’t the very last one.
but. one of. hopefully all his mammoth friends
were there too. since it was the end in every elsewhere.
normal day / disaster / together. not at all. then.
all at once. like. how when we need it. we tell each other
the story of how we met. the lake. the light. ignoring
the thousands of minnows at our feet. ignoring the end
of august. i don’t remember the sound of the waves.
but. i know you and i were there.
PALESTINE IS A FUTURISM: THE DREAM
by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi (via Strange Horizons)
THE DREAM PULLS MY MEMORY FROM A WELL
I AM SERVED MEMORY FOR BREAKFAST!
INSIDE THE DREAM I SHALL HAVE TO UNLEARN
THE BITTERNESS OF THE WARHUNGRY CAPITALIST LIFE
THE EMPTY MEANINGS OF THE LOBBYING FIRM!
THE LANGUAGE THAT TURNS ME CRUEL AND USEFUL!
IN THE DREAM I AM REQUIRED ONLY BY MY LOVERS
NEVER THE EXTRACTIVE DRILLS OF THE OILEATERS!
I HAVE BEEN UNMADE BY THE DREAM OF GOD
I HAVE BEEN RELEASED FROM MEANING!
THE SUN BURNS NEW MEANING ONTO MY SKIN!
I AM CRISP WITH NEWNESS
THE DREAM VOMITS UP THE SLUDGE OF ABANDONMENT
SWIMMING IN THE SLUDGE IS A MCKINSEY CONSULTANT!
SWIMMING IN THE SLUDGE IS ARTHUR BALFOUR!
THEY DROWN
I AM THE LOVE OF THE DREAM EMBODIED!
I WILLINGLY DISSOLVE MY BITTER ATTACHMENTS!
THE DREAM IS A FUTURISM OF THE SPIRIT!
THE SPIRIT IS AN ORALITY!
THE SLUDGE IS A STATE DEPARTMENT!
MY MEMORY RETURNS ME TO THE GREAT EARTHDREAM!
PALESTINE IS A DREAM OF THE FUTURE!
FUTURE IS A PALESTINE OF THE DREAMING!
First Mother
by Fiker Girma (via Adroit)
1
We sit in the cold white incense at work, asking each other are we
good women if only to answer in number of whole chickens cooked red for
the holidays. The men are few & men. They answer in hens killed. I
hide my eyes in the smoke, so I don’t have to answer. Silver bone cuts
from washing plucked wings sound too girlish. Yesterday, I had to ask
my mother how bread is made. She began you scoop out some starter (to
genesis) & throw it into pewter. I watched my mother make bubbles
with her lips as the water went in. She called the mixture yeast &
though I wanted to correct her, I couldn’t think of the right word
or any. I had done so little to meet life’s basic needs myself. My eyes
have slid past hand & batter turning in bowls to scored revelation
on a girdle in sheer Gray bliss. Once at a restaurant, I pulled
a single hair off a plate & horrified, showed it to my mother &
she, horrified too, shoved my hand & it under the table & said just
eat. Later, she explained first, you take the hair out of your own eye.
2
My grandmother passed before my mother gave birth. Now, so much
of her was left to be craved without mercy or consent & a second
mother had to see to mine & her hunger, terrible as a girl wild-eyed
for the last bite left on her mother’s plate. Send me bread so I may learn
to eat from a hand not my mother’s. The dough smarted. The cob’s
dark edge cut & gifted. So my mother was denied the center flesh
against verse & tradition. Bread is broken from the middle first & this
free core, the breadmaker’s gift to callers. When my mother received
hers, a blackened ring, rough with burnt banana leaf hairs, she just ate
the strands & later wept into her dreams. There, a good woman
waited for her daughter, gift in hand.
Good Father
by Nick Soluri (via Lumina Journal)
In the snow I cannot
hold any weight I'm given.
Hanging on the wooden
shovel handle like the boy
I will never grow away from,
it seems that his rock hard
hands could cut clean
through blocks of ice.
Its better somewhere else
on the Earth. In a corner
another boy is riding a horse,
learning knots, preparing for war.
If there is a place where hands
can be washed clean and returned
to an imagined purity, is never where
the father has been. Sons take
what is passed down, given portals
and asked to close their fathers’ pasts.
When I cannot hoist the snow
over my shoulder, he laughs,
shows me how to tense
a bicep, position
my shoulders. It’s like asking
a bad soldier to relieve
his morals. It is like asking a soldier to stop
thinking of his country first. I am not
a soldier, I can never be anything
other than gentle—a pressed face
in the soft snow. The right
lighting feigns immortality.
I cannot scoop all that is asked of me
into hands I never hold. Instead,
I remind myself: for every callus
there was a choice.
But what makes the callus,
must forget the bruise.
When the day is finally finished,
we build a fire. Crack a whiskey.
Near us, the heaps of snow
glow white against the siding
of the house. In this lighting, I can see
the weapon of his body uncovering.
He hands me a glass, hurriedly,
before I can say otherwise.
The mounds of snow glow white
against a black sky, impossible stars.
Grownfolk Blues
by Jae Nichelle (via The Georgia Review)
bill collectors find me no matter where I move
been eyeing some comfortable dr. scholl’s shoes
google med school for every bump & bruise
webmd say I’m gon die by tues
pocket list full of endless to-dos
options ain’t options when they all a lose-lose
dead dead dying say the grownfolk news
I got the grownfolk blues
I got the grownfolk blues
got no control over what no people do
none over disaster or what I go through
yet people keep saying my life’s what I choose
I got the grownfolk blues
I got the grownfolk blues
grownfolk expenses & grownfolk foods
finished school just to follow grownfolk rules
looking for answers but everybody confused
we got the grownfolk blues
we got the grownfolk blues
saturdays for laundry & not cartoons
ma kicked me off the insurance & phone plan too
bought everything the commercials told me to
I got the grownfolk blues
I got the grownfolk blues
just play the game & I’ll get what I’m due
turns out that ain’t close to true
so I’m same sad me with a new perfume
I got the grownfolk blues
I got the grownfolk blues
Three Graces
by Paul Tran (via The New Yorker)
Who could about the probability of love when brought, like us, to this
world under endless darkness? A great mountains engulfed
by a greater ocean, we formed, ever so slowly, from tectonic plates
colliding, one mounting another, riding the way time rode
sunlight and moonlight across the icy surface of the water.
We learned, with time, to view and invent this life from the depths
where beasts, now extinct, bellowed and belted their brutal songs.
All that remains of them, and of that time, are the bones we buried, burnished
beneath beds of sandstone and limestone, made unknown and then known
when the waves and the darkness dried up. The wind whittled us
like a restless sculptor pacing around a slab of marble, imitating
God with a hammer and chisel. In the Garden of the Gods, we endured
the erotics of erosion. Loss. Change. What we couldn’t change
and what we lost to time made us more fully ourselves
and full of ourselves. We fooled around and made a fool of God.
We, in our faulted and faultless glamour, became a brand-new home
for the bighorn sheep and lions, the canyon wrens and white-throated swifts
swinging low below a cloudless sky. We drank the sky and threw up
acres of wild prairie grass, piñon juniper, and ponderosa pine
from the remains of ancestral ranges and sand dunes. Maybe this was love
after all. We remained. We reinvented ourselves. We let the weaker parts of us go
and decided, despite our egos and the tests of time, to test time and show
how miraculous it is to exist. To live beyond survival. To be alive
twice and thrice, and countless times to find one with and within another.
What are the chances of that? One in a thousand. One in a million. One in love
proves and is living proof that anything and everything is probable
through seasons counting on rain to come down like a downpour of stars.
Seasons of Never This Again. Seasons of This Could Last Forever.
Constitutional
by Erin Jones Bennett (via Muzzle Magazine)
He follows her like dust
behind a pickup. Her skirt clutched
in his left hand and a bottle
in his right. And every night they sit
by the fuzz covered pond--
the only murmur
of color on a flesh-painted farm.
And sometimes they sit there all night
until her skirt is limp
as an over-sunned azalea.
I can’t help but want to pluck her
from that grass.
Mal de Ojo
by Leslie Sainz
I study her hip bones, midday.
Something crackles through the trees—no, a withering.
I let the last malanga rot on the counter because it is easier
not to have to cut another thing open.
Bulls in my blood, pawing. The winter of it all.
Days later, I make another woman my enemy.
I follow her for three blocks before I trip over my envy,
forget to lessen myself. When I hit the sidewalk,
I feel my mother fall in Florida, and her mother, the same.
But I am smaller now than I was then.
Please, do not ask about my thens.
Oh how convenient is it that I have no more wine!
—Lue