Broken Tulips

by John Ashbery

A is walking through the streets of B, frantic
for C's touch but secretly relived
not to have it. At Tamerlane
and East Tamerlane, he pauses, judicious:
The cave thing hasn't been seen again,
schoolgirls are prattling, and the Easter rabbit
is charging down the street, under full sail
and a strong headwind. Was ever anything
so delectable floated across the crescent moon's
transparent bay? Here shall we sit
and, dammit, talk about our trip
until the sky is again cold and gray.

Another's narrative supplants the crawling
stock-market quotes: Like all good things
life tends to go on too long, and when we smile
in mute annoyance, pauses for a moment.
Rains bathe the rainbow,
and the shape of the night is an empty cylinder,
focused at us, urging its noncompliance
closer along the way we chose to go.

from Where Shall We Wander

Future Conditional

by Marilyn Hacker

After the supper dishes, let us start
where we left off, my knees between your knees,
half in the window seat. O let me, please,
hands in your hair, drink in your mouth. Sweetheart,
your body is a text I need the art
to be constructed by. I halfway kneel
to your lap, propped by your thighs, and feel
burning my hand, your privacy, your part
armor underwear. This time I'll loose
each button from its hole; I'll find the hook,
release promised abundance to this want,
while your hands, please, here and here, exigent
and certain, open this; it is, this book,
made for your hands to read, your mouth to use.


fromLove, Death, and the Changing of Seasons

Masochism

by Quan Barry

after Lucie Brock-Broido

was the meek .
was montgomery overcome.

was bombed. was empty buses.
was bull's eye to bullet,

the billy club, the bloody church.
am black, historically

was skin kindling. was prey
to hook and hood. was the named thing

and never called. learned
to take a beating. was silent

despite the presentation of the throat,
the brick and truncheon,

the gutting clean. nineteen
fifty five and the we

walking there and back. was the seeing
of things for the first time, the tele-

vision, the web of fire.
opposed the politicians in the door,

the turning on of the dogs, the sicking
of the hoses. am the nonviolently

strong. was the women and children first.
was song. was the lifting out of egyptland.

was black eyes. was swollen lips. was asking for it.
the sitting down. the giving over.

from Asylum

Twelve and Listening to the Stones

by Catie Rosemurgy

Yeah, you got satin shoes. Yeah, you got plastic boots.
--The Rolling Stones, "Can't You Hear Me Knocking"

If I had a best friend, I might not tell her
that once you find your insides
and can tighten them, you can bring the ground
up to your face, bring the earth you're standing on
up through your body, until you can breathe
the grass as it comes through the dirt.
I might not tell her
I have muscles no one can see.
Not only can I keep rhythm and bring it
inside me one beat at a time, I can also clench
right in front of the paperboy's face until I feel a fist
loosening its grip on the largeness
inside me. The most he can see about me,
even if he looks impossibly close,
are the barely colored wisps of hair against my forehead.
They might tremble.
I tighten while I wait for the school bus.
I've worn the snow into ice.
How quiet I can be.
I close my eyes and change the size of things.
My house disappears below me.
The dark moves inside me like hands.

from My Favorite Apocalypse

Lost Innocence of the Potato Givers

by Lucia Perillo

They're just a passing phase. All are symptoms
of our times and the confusion around us.
-Reverend Billy Graham on The Beatles

At first we culled our winnings from the offering
of fists--
one potato, two potato-- untill we realize that such
random calibration
was not real test of love. So we cultivated pain:
hunkering on the macadam
sun-baked for hours in the schoolyard, our panties
bunched beneath our skirts.
The girl who could sit there longest would gain title
to the most handsome Beatle, Paul.
John George Ringo-- the rest were divvied according to
whose buttocks were most scarlet.
And when our fourth-grade teacher asked why we wore such
tortured looks through long division,
we shrugged, scritching our pencils over fleshy shapes
of hearts and flowers.

Ed Sullivan started it, his chiseled and skeletal stub
of a head, his big shoe
stomping our loyalties to the man-boys Dion
and Presley.
Even priggish neighbor Emily said I had to kneel before
the TV as though praying.
Then the pixels assembled the audience's exploding
like a carcass when it's knifed,
and I copied the pose assumed on-screen: hands pressed
against sides of my skull
like a bald dwarf who stands goggle-eyed on a jetty
in Munch's painting, and screams.
My mother rushed to the basement, a dishrag dripping
from her soaped hand.
What's wrong? she yelled. Are you hurt? What in godsname
is all this screaming?

February 1964: Johnson's choppers were whopping up the sky
over the Gulf of Tonkin.
Despite the tacit code of silence about the war, somehow
they must have known:
on television, girls were brawling drunkenly and raking
fingernails across their cheeks,
ripping their own hair in vicious chunks, as though beauty
were suddenly indulgent or profane.
That night in Saigon's Capital Kinh-Do Theatre, three GIs
got blown up during a strip show.
But of course I didn't know that. I couldn't have even
found Saigon on a map.
Girls were limp in the arms of riot-geared policemen,
who carried them off like the dead,
and my mother was stunned when she saw I'd torn my shirt
over my not-yet-breasts.

After that, I kept everything a secret, the self-inflicted
burn and scars and nicks.
I was doing it for love love love: the stones in my shoes,
the burrs in my shirt,
the mother-of-pearl penknife I used for cutting grooves
in my thumb or palm
whenever I need to swear some blood pact with another
disenthralled potato giver.
We spent recess practicing how to tick our tongues
in Paul's imaginary mouth,
letting everything drain out until we were limp, nothing,
sucked right into the earth.
Then we would mash our bodies against the schoolyard's wide
and gray-barked beech,
which was cruel and strong and unrelenting, smooth and cold,
the way we hoped our husbands would be.

from Body Mutinies.

Melitopoles

by Nick Flynn

When a warrior falls in battle,
beloved &

far from home, the melitopoles
sell their finest grade

to suspend his vanquished corpse in honey.
Thus his body will cease

to decay, will last the road
back. Seal him behind glass

& you could gaze upon

his unchanged face, tinted
amber, but glass
will not survive such portage. Even honey

cannot hold him forever,

his mouth forced open, shocked
eyes, every pore

now filled with sweetness.

from Blind Huber

Tiny Fable

by Cort Day

Darling, your infant's been whispering
into my Dictaphone again, and its tiny fable
scares me: it says the new Disposable Symphony
will repixelate all property as green or
"rain is money." Right now the voice is on fire.
It's reproducing the wood, phoneme
by phoneme, it's generating "dappled sunlight"
and "ideas of God" so quickly, there's no time
to drag the river for the missing--

from The Chime

zeitgeist

by Quan Barry

or Chapter VIII: The Death of the Poet

after Red Pomegranate

1.

One by one the men remove their black cassocks, let in the dawn.

2.

At the top of the stairs a door opens. Behind it, the darkness tactile, felt-like.

3.

She arrives in a green gilded gown, on her shoulder a white bird perched like a balance.

4.

If you touched them, the walls would crumble in your hands.

5.

The roof is made of stone. One by one the men unrobe. Even here they cry like candles.

6.

When someone speaks, it is only to command you to sing.

7.

What does it mean to fall on your knees, to let what spills from the jug

8.

Sing.

9.

pour over you?

10.

"Though I die, no more will be lost to the world."

11.




12.

Your sentence is an unpaved road. The fruit was bleeding.
The camera never moves.






from Asylum

Bag of Mice

by Nick Flynn

I dreamt your suicide note
was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,
& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag
opened into darkness,
smoldering
from the top down. The mice,
huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag
across a shorn field. I stood over it
& as the burning reached each carbon letter
of what you'd written
your voice released into the night
like a song, & the mice
grew wilder.

from Some Ether: Poems