Category Archives: Great Poems Online

Two Poems from Amanda Auchter’s “The Wishing Tomb”

Winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Award in Poetry, Amanda Auchter’s exquisite new collection The Wishing Tomb (Perugia Press, 2012) surveys the cultural history of New Orleans over three centuries, in poems that quiver and shake with music and surge with the violence of floods. End-notes provide background on the incidents that inspired each poem.

About those notes: At first I found it distracting to flip back and forth between the storyline unwinding in the lyric poetry and the factual squibs at the end of the book. Should I break the flow and spoil the surprise by checking the notes first, and risk only finding what I already “know” the poem is about? Should I read the poems first, and endure the disorientation of not comprehending their context? I just had to read the book twice! And I’m sure it won’t be my last visit to these steamy, sad, gorgeous pages.

Upon reflection, I understood that the unreconciled duality of form was part of Auchter’s commentary on New Orleans, city of masks, oppressive and beautiful. A number of the poems hinge on the tension between the official story and the suppressed voices within it. Slaves speak here, and criminals, the dead, the polluted landscape.

The poems below, “Harriet Beecher Stowe at the Cornstalk Hotel, 1850” and “St. Louis Cathedral, 2005”, are excerpted from The Wishing Tomb, with the permission of Perugia Press, Florence, MA. Copyright 2012 by Amanda Auchter.

Harriet Beecher Stowe at the Cornstalk Hotel, 1850

A man and a woman arrive together

in chains. His voice surfaces—
I shall try to meet you there—but I cannot

hear what follows. Tea cools in white china.
I think of horses, the way they walk back

and forth, hold up their heads. Horses,
the way a man in a coat turns them about,

   
opens their mouths, checks their teeth. Scars

on the flanks. A chimney gasps smoke
into the afternoon. The body looted. A child

plays a violin outside the stalls, watches
as women remove their handkerchiefs,

      
show their hands. A whip

weaves close to the ears. The balcony overlooks
a narrow street, a cart and driver.

   
The voices drift out, an edge

of an outline. The voices say, I hope
you will try to meet me in heaven.

      
I shall try to meet you there.

****

St. Louis Cathedral, 2005

The marble Jesus opens his eyes to the violence
     
of wind shaking bananas from tender stems,
  
the crack of two oak trees falling

in St. Anthony’s Garden behind their ornamental gate.
     
Rivers fill his mouth and in each
  
he tastes a shipwreck: torn boards, canvas,

drowned bodies. The slap of purple beads
     
against his bare feet. His arms
  
spread out as though he could cradle the city

inside him, as though the water that rises
     
above porches and windowsills,
  
above attics could abate with his strange light.

While the city darkens, he continues to turn each palm
     
skyward, an offering of damp stone,
  
a leaf caught in the crack of his right palm. Water

falls from his eyes and behind him, the wind
     
tears a hole in the roof of the church.
  
The rain enters the roof, floods

the Holtkamp pipe organ until everything is silent
     
of music. His hands are quieted
  
of their pale prayers—the left forefinger

and thumb broken off by a brick spinning its red stream
     
into the air. They push away
  
from his body. He watches

the city float past with its shattered glass, shoes,
     
telephone wire. How the debris of his
  
broken fingers swirl away from him, then point back.

Two Poems from Diana Anhalt’s “Lives of Straw”


Poet and political historian Diana Anhalt moved to Mexico with her family in 1950, where her parents joined a community of left-wing expatriates who’d left the U.S. to escape Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist persecutions. She would live there for the next 50 years. The full text of her nonfiction book A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico, 1948-1965 (Archer Books) is available online here.

Her new poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press, Lives of Straw, movingly depicts Mexican cultural traditions and characters from the economic margins. The opening and closing poems are from her perspective, first as a young girl adapting to a foreign country and language, and then her equally disorienting return to America half-a-century later. Within that frame, Anhalt lets her Mexican characters speak for themselves, in colorful, musical, yet often blunt persona poems that show many facets of the struggle for survival. Fortune-tellers, street vendors (including one selling poetry), herbal healers, death-defying construction workers, and con artists must devote all their creative genius to earning their next meal. Diana has kindly permitted me to reprint the poems below.

Dancing Alone

A summer’s night in Veracruz. The Rico Perez band plays a bolero
in the plaza principal. Lanterns thread the trees. I thread my way
through the sidelines. Edge past an ice cream vendor, girls in silk
and denim, dog walkers, two bald babies in headbands–to the center.
Couples shake and shuffle to the music. Some women dance alone,

reminding me of women in Pinochet’s Chile who danced the cueca,
partnered with snapshots of their desaparecidos–husbands, mothers,
sons. Here, an elderly woman in a pearl gray dress, struts, twirls
to the music, flexes her hands, nods her head, pauses to tighten
an earring. I suppose that everywhere, after violence, illness, divorce

women congregate on dance floors, raise their arms above their heads,
swing their hips to a merengue, beat out the rhythm of a cha cha cha,
and dance alone. This woman in gray resembles my mother-in-law,
now dead, who never would have. Me? I only pray, should–
dios no lo quiera–heaven forbid–that day come, I would.

****

Querencia,

a word that inhabits my Spanish-speaking mouth,
lies under my tongue and smells of evergreens,
and rainy Mondays, smoke. From the word querer—

to want, desire, wish. It refers to bulls
who seek their place of solace in the ring.
For the waif in every living creature. I think

of the neighbor’s dachshund hunkered under the porch,
the sparrow haunting a fallen tree, the child
afraid to stray too far from his mother’s side.

We took to driving the Cuernavaca highway
and parked in the clearing with that Mexico City view.
As the air turned hazy with cigarette smoke,

we’d drink wine from the bottle, talk and listen to danzones
on the radio. We drove away soon after, took
our memories with us, haven’t returned.

After years away, our key no longer fits
the lock. And our home, grown used to strangers’ feet,
is home no more.

Two Poems from Heather Christle’s “The Difficult Farm”

As April is National Poetry Month, I thought I’d give my blog readers some relief from the theological heavy lifting, and share some excerpts and reviews of the poets I’ve enjoyed lately.

I picked up Heather Christle’s The Difficult Farm at the Octopus Books table at AWP 2011 because of the haunted-looking one-eared rabbit peering out from its acid-yellow cover. He’s an apt mascot for these poems, whose randomness can be both sinister and humorous.

…Dear nasty pregnant forest.
You are so hot!
You are environmentally significant.
Men love to hang themselves
from your standard old growth trees.
Don’t look at me.
…
(“Acorn Duly Crushed”)

The book’s title made me think of “the funny farm”, slang for an asylum, the place where persons deemed “difficult” are shut away, laughed at for the nonsense they speak. But is it nonsense? Christle’s poems are held together by tone rather than logic. They have the cadence and momentum of building an argument, but are composed of non sequiturs. But the individual observations within that stream of consciousness often ring so true that you may find yourself nodding along: Q.E.D.

…I am remembering how yesterday
a falcon landed on the telephone pole
and we stepped out of the car, amazed.
It was the color of somebody’s carpet.
In somebody’s carpet there is a falcon-
shaped hole.
…
(“It Is Raining in Here”)

I had to ask myself whether I perceived the book’s speaker as female because of the author’s name, or whether “she” did indeed sound like the quirky nerd-girl character from indie romantic comedies, who naturally thinks in words like “paraphrasic” and “over-cathected” but acts hapless and adorable in social situations. Whatever the reason, it made her more likeable than John Ashbery, whose technique is similar but never appealed to me. This book displayed an eagerness for connection through talk, while recognizing that we mostly use language for social glue rather than sincere information exchange. So why not serve up a “radiant salad” of words?

Heather has kindly allowed me to reprint the two poems below. Visit her blog to find out about her latest books. Some of my other favorites from The Difficult Farm, including “The Avalanche Club” and “The Handsome Man“, are available elsewhere online. Or you could just buy the book, and help the bunny pay for his plastic surgery.

Barnstormer

I do not have a farm do you have
a farm? on my farm are horses
cows pigeons chickens a dungeon
they tend to themselves it’s so easy!
I do not feel well do you feel
well? my throat’s on fire I mean
missing something crucial let’s say
the filament say filament! everyone
feels really good especially the horses
riding around like a bunch of stupid
chickens those are some foxy
beasts! I think beauty rises from
the dead do you think beauty rises?
like the great retarded sun? like
here comes beauty with its slow
dumb light and it’s touching stuff
& now I’m scattering feed I ordered
from mother nature’s catalog
which everyone knows has the best
pictures that’s why it’s all cut up
& the seed is falling out the holes &
the chickens are falling out
the holes & everyone gets papercuts!
goodbye chickens have a nice
time exploding in oblivion!

****
Stroking My Head With My Deception Stick

Someone shut down the local shimmer
but not the police who thought

it was Sunday and so spent hours
arranging their long and pliant hair.

Constable Jacques is the best man I know
but even he won’t converse with the dead.

The dead are so vain and hungry–
they will straddle your mirrors and swallow

your oak trees with their huge elastic lips.
And then you hear the screaming, not to be found

within the dead, but rather in the tiny
black pot which holds the greater part

of our mass and the difficult
farm where all the hens are black

and black are the wheatfields through which
runs a black and silent wind. Thin teachers

explain to our children: if the farm is a burgeoning
snowglobe, then the screaming’s a legend, like glass.

New Poem by Conway: “Indignance of Time”


My prison pen pal “Conway” has made good use of his time to write poetry while he waits for a hearing on his early release petition. Here, he shares a brief intense lyric that he wrote inside a card with his original artwork, inspired by Salvador Dali’s melting clock faces in the painting “Persistence of Memory”. I was struck by the apocalyptic closing image of missiles lined up and waiting. “The day of perpetual consumption” is a uniquely modern American twist on the Last Judgment — the fire that never ceases to consume us, who never cease to consume the world.

Indignance of Time

Dancing on an escalator
   any Blackjack can move
as verse quakes off the sound
   rattling around
This town this shaft going nowhere.

Some shop keep roars.
   From shag deep floors
     But no one keys the door.
   Once done, no’one can come
back out of this inner sanctum
   this Holy glass of need.

We crave to tour the billboard lit night.

   Abundant commerce
      misled souvenir missiles of clay;

Lined up to wake the day
   of perpetual consumption…

New Poem by Conway: “Throwing Strikes”

In this latest poem from my prison pen pal “Conway“, he makes a pun on California’s “three-strikes” sentencing law, which condemned him to 25 years to life for receiving stolen goods. He is still awaiting a court date on his early release petition pursuant to the law’s repeal in 2012.

Throwing Strikes

In this deserted surround
  no voice echoes
   as shards of concrete
    erupt from rusted selves
     just disregarded shells.

Another door slammed shut
  forged considering the score
   blind no more to loose lips
    the silent frame up
     of unlimited mysteries’ damage.

Back when I couldn’t admit
  some small time defeat, even if
   it put me back on the street.

I knew the situation…
  It would not end, even after
   a meeting of knuckles on skin.

Light lyrics, became heavy lies
  years, as far away as yesterday
   ricochets snatched up so easily
    become the law, the gavel
  as a systematic machine
   takes it in, like a pitcher’s glove…

New Poetry by Conway: “City Elegy V”

I’m pleased to share the latest installment in the “City Elegy” series of prose-poems by my prison pen pal “Conway”. I was particularly struck by the metaphors he uses to describe the Los Angeles streetscape. That’s first-class noir.

As I interpret the line about the “confidential lunatic’s serenade”, he’s alluding to the confidential “evidence” that the state is allowed to use against his petition for early release, which he is not permitted to review. Due process has a different meaning when you’re on the other side of the barbed wire, apparently. For more information, read this 2012 exposé of the prison gang validation system at Mother Jones.

City Elegy V

Stone-cold-dumb, stumbling through this carnival of unforgiveness.

As another dawn rose madly above my city’s turning cog.
You know, that overflowing coffee mug of smog, steaming along the Angeles crest.
Traffic lights still pierce the night, painfully pulsing like a stab wound;
Bleeding colors across cracked back sidewalks. Plus the white lines,
stitches down the separated black hem of asphalt lanes.

Here though, chain links and crossed fingers wish for an open door, or
a crusty-assed crack in the floor, of this rusted-out cage of bars
being played like a harp.
Old bits of things, themes echoing gray-stoned ballads, ground up talk.
Now used up chalk, stalking the thirst of first burst freedoms.

Yesterday, they played a confidential lunatic’s serenade.

But, I recognized his unclaimed tune, by the scatter-brained beat.
In the heat of officially spun, as it raced away, down storm drains
and ditches. Just to dump the remains of life into an ocean of prisoners.

I knew that sound already. It staggers between
two huge exhaust fans, and the steel sectioned dayroom doors.
Those doors clank open or closed when the cops swagger in.
To drag our chained up skin, outside, then back in —
for discipline or another bus trip to no-where…

Charlie Bondhus: War Poet for the Post-DADT Era


Charlie Bondhus’s masterful, heart-wrenching new poetry collection, All the Heat We Could Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), could not have been written in any previous generation. In the closeted centuries following the Greco-Roman era, the poetry of gay male love and the poetry of war have only been permitted to overlap in sublimated and metaphorical ways. Bondhus merges them candidly, but the story this book tells is more elegiac than celebratory.

The alternating narrators of Heat, a veteran of the Afghanistan war and his homefront lover, seem free from their forerunners’ self-conscious anguish about sexual orientation. They can admit openly how sex between men is like martial arts grappling, how killing can be orgasmic and the camaraderie of soldiers more intimate than lovers. They can savor the flowers in their backyard garden without weighting down those fragile stems with the entire burden of their erotic communication, and without fearing that attention to beauty makes them unmanly.

But despite this unprecedented openness, an unbridgeable rift separates the lovers, and that is the tragedy at the heart of this book. Combat changes the veteran in ways that his partner cannot comprehend first-hand. His feelings are hardened like scar tissue. He can’t fit in, can’t understand the relevance of the civilian routines that he left behind. He eventually goes back to the war, not because he believes in it, but because it’s the only place he feels at home.

The past few years have brought high-profile victories for gay and lesbian inclusion in mainstream (some would say conservative) institutions like marriage, the church, and the military. After the celebrations fade, there’s an opportunity to look critically at the social structures into which one has been assimilated. Heat suggests that participation in systems of oppression doesn’t end with the waving of the rainbow flag.

Charlie has kindly permitted me to reprint these poems from his collection, which won the 2013 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award.

Sharing a Bed

I remember the first evening in bed,
making love with the lights on.

Outside the window, a hanging basket
of red impatiens
and a ruby-throated hummingbird.

In late spring’s greenish light
my head was a bowed peony,
     
your torso,
     
a grand urn
     
of tissuey ranunculus.

Summer found us sharing a home
with mismatched furniture,
plagues of ragweed and clover
choking the thin, dark spaces
between our together-time.

Like angel’s trumpet, I craved
the cool white suddenness
the moon brings,
and when it came
     
silent as a cloud
our limbs were not the marble of roses,
or the patrician regularity of zinnias,
but the cheap, unsung beauty
of daisies, wild pinks.

Hornets nested in our heads.
Butterflies settled on our eyelids.
Morning’s first finches began to sing.

My arms were full of nettles and lamb’s ear.

****


Wood Gathering

In November we gather
straight branches into bundles,
and carry them

past flowerbeds
we stopped tending
last spring, to the shed

door which always sticks
in cold weather.
I want to ask you

how long since the seasons
became the same,
neither sun

nor perennials penetrating
our ribs, to the place where organs
slump like frozen vegetables?

When the snow starts,
you will cross
the backyard, and tugging

and grunting, pull open
the shed, where what
we’ve gathered is stacked neatly

as bones. Wordless
(we have no use for lips),
you will track dirt and ice

across the carpetless floors
and drop the flaking
wood on the fire,

filling the house
with the easier
kind of warmth.

First, pink rushes
to fingertips. Next,
skin cracks as heat

refills the heart
like hot water
into a cold glass. And then

like a body
rising
from a thawing lake,

and bumping heavily
against the sheet ice:
a pulse

or what remains of love,
brushing the underside
of the wrist,

a feeling
brittle as firewood,
finite as frost.

Poetry by Donal Mahoney: “Feliz Navidad”


Longtime Reiter’s Block reader Donal Mahoney returns with this simple but profound poem about the kind of person we often overlook in our consumerist Christmas frenzy. It made me think of Pope Francis, the first Pope from Latin America, who is re-emphasizing the church’s commitment to economic justice.

Feliz Navidad

Pedro swings a mop all night
on the 30th floor of Castle Towers
just off Michigan Avenue
not far from the foaming Lake.
The floor is his, all his,
to swab and wax till dawn.

The sun comes up and Pedro’s
on the subway snoring,
roaring home to a plate
of huevos rancheros,
six eggs swimming
in a lake of salsa verde,
hot tortillas stacked
beside them.

After breakfast,
Pedro writes a poem
for Esperanza,
the wife who waits
in Nuevo Leon.
He mails the poem
that night, going back
to his bucket and mop.

Pedro’s proud
of three small sons,
soccer stars
in the making.
On Christmas Eve
the boys wait up
in Nuevo Leon
and peek out the window.
Papa’s coming home
for Christmas!

Pedro arrives at midnight
on a neighbor’s donkey,
laughing beneath
a giant sombrero.
He has a red serape
over his shoulder,
and he’s juggling
sacks of gifts.

When the donkey stops,
the boys dash out and clap
and dance in circles.
Esperanza stands
in the doorway
and sings
Feliz Navidad.

Two Poems from Jamaal May’s “Hum”



Winner of the 2012 Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books, Jamaal May’s electric debut collection Hum embodies the vitality and struggle of becoming a man. The word “elegy” is not entirely right for such energetic, muscular poems, but there is mourning here for May’s native Detroit and the men of his family who were scarred by addiction, war, and racism. The speaker of these poems fights back with beauty, noticing the shine of the handcuffs while enduring police harassment, or the inspiring message on the plastic bag that holds his relative’s ashes “in a Chinese takeout box”. In the age of e-readers, AJB’s elegant book design makes a case for the pleasures of print. Poems titled after various phobias are interspersed through the book on black paper with white type, creating moments of visual “hush” amid the “hum” of text.

Jamaal has kindly given me permission to reprint the following two poems, which first appeared in Poetry Magazine and Blackbird, respectively. Follow him on Twitter @JamaalMay.

Hum for the Bolt

It could of course be silk. Fifty yards or so
of the next closest thing to water to the touch,
or it could just as easily be a shaft of  wood

crumpling a man struck between spaulder and helm.
But now, with the rain making a noisy erasure
of this town, it is the flash that arrives

and leaves at nearly the same moment. It’s what I want
to be in this moment, in this doorway,
because much as I’d love to be the silk-shimmer

against the curve of anyone’s arm,
as brutal and impeccable as it’d be to soar
from a crossbow with a whistle and have a man

switch off upon my arrival, it is nothing
compared to that moment when I eat the dark,
draw shadows in quick strokes across wall

and start a tongue counting
down to thunder. That counting that says,
I am this far. I am this close.

****

Man Matching Description

Because the silk scarf could have cradled
a neck as delicate as that of a cygnet,
but was instead used in last night’s strangling,
it is possible to marvel at the finish on handcuffs.

Because I can imagine handcuffs,
pummeled by stones until shimmering,
the flashlight that sears my eyes
is too perfect to look away.

Because a flashlight has more power
on a southern roadside than my name and blood
combined and there is no power in the very human
frequency range of my voice and my name is dead
in my mouth and my name is in a clear font on a license
I can’t reach for before being drawn down on—
Because the baton is long against my window,
the gun somehow longer against my cheek,
the vehicle cold against my abdomen
as my shirt rises, twisted in fingers
and my name is asked again—I want to
say, Swan! I am only a swan.

Poetry by Lauren Schmidt: “The Waiting Room of Past Lives”


In Lauren Schmidt’s earthy, revelatory poetry collection Two Black Eyes and a Patch of Hair Missing (Main Street Rag, 2013), bodies eat, sweat, climax, and die. Some of them are stuffed. All are handled with reverence. Comical or embarrassing moments open up suddenly into a vision of fellowship that levels social distinctions.

Schmidt shows why humor, humility, and humane have a common root. Many of her poem titles sound like premises for a stand-up comedy sketch: “Why I Am Not a Taxidermist“; “My Grandfather’s Balls”; “Portrait of My Parents Making Love as a Stomach Virus“. Each time, however, the poem takes a surprising turn, reversing the typical use of disgust to create distance and superiority, and instead breaking down the pretensions that alienate us.

Lauren and Main Street Rag have kindly permitted me to reprint the poem below, which first appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review. For more about her work, enjoy this interview on the Splinter Generation blog.

The Waiting Room of Past Lives

No one likes it here. You can tell
by our bodies: this one chews
his cuticles; that one pretends
to read. A woman fingers the drag
in her stockings. A man watches
from across the room, blowing steam
from his third cup of sludge.
He’s used up all the stirrers.
The girl behind the blurred glass
snaps her gum, watches the clock
for five. On the wall, CNN

bleats something about this
or that. The war here or there.
There seems to be only one channel,
but nobody bothers to check. We wait
in the glow of the red numbers. Now
Serving, the sign says. We pinch our slips
as if waiting for lunchmeat.

It gets harder and harder to do this.
They put a note in my file. It explains
the crutches, the bandage on my brow.
I was eighty then, collapsed in the hedges
racking my brain for the line that came
before the dish ran away with the spoon.
When you’re eighty you don’t always
remember. The last time I was eighty,
I left notes on my front door
should a visitor happen by: Be right back,
in the bathroom, scrawled by my shaky hand,

letters like the eyelashes I pulled out
with my fingers and arranged
in my notebook during Physics
in the life before that. I loved
to watch them scatter in one full
breath, didn’t care much that girls
stared at my nest of hair or laughed
at my penchant for saying silly things.
I chose my words carefully,
spelled them with my lashes.

By senior year, I had no brows
left either: two bleached seams
arched above my eyes, an eternity
of expressing horrified surprise.
My mother made them draw brows
so I wouldn’t look strange
in the casket. The irony, too much
for the man I shared it with here,
in the waiting room, a man
whose laughter made his jaw click,
like the snap of my infant neck
in the life I had that didn’t last very long.
My memory went only as far
as the garden of my mother’s
hair when she hovered above my crib

to kiss me. In the life where I learned
what it meant to be a father,
I put my nose to the rose of my son’s
lips, waited for breath, contented
just to watch his infant chest rise
and fall. I recall the feel of my own

stuttered breast as I lay in my mess
of wings in the middle of the street.
After the windshield, I remembered
the boy, the rock, the way he lifted
it above his head. Its shadow trembled
above me, dilating as it broke over me
like a dark corsage before the lights
went out and I was back in line again.
The rock was something like mercy,
but do we really have the words
for the magician’s hat of how

our lives are made and taken? We’re rabbits
blinking in stiff confusion, some big hand
fisted around the ears, feet, kicking, pendulous,
and marking time. Sometimes we’re a flurry
of doves in a round of applause. I have been
the rabbit, would be the rabbit again
because there simply is no lover
more eager to be in the world.
I have been the boy with his pellet gun, too,
a piece of wheat in my teeth and nothing to do
but wonder what a tuft of hair looks like
when it erupts with blood, wonder the sound
flesh makes when it’s pulled from fur
which isn’t anything like the sound
of denim ripping as you might think.

On CNN there is a man on his knees.
Dirty shirt, holes in his jeans.
Another man grips his hair, dark tufts
sprout between his fingers. In the other fist,
the flash of a murky blade. The man’s eyes
are lurched wide from his pulled hairline.
The shadow of the blade breaks over

a shaking face. This one stops chewing
his cuticles. That one stops pretending
to read. The woman leaves her stockings
alone and the man stops watching her.
All eyes gaze at the TV screen. We don’t see
the rest, but everybody knows what happens
next. With any luck, the man on his knees
will wake up praying near a bed
in a room he somehow knows is his.