balancing

What Should We Do?

Gratefully, I acknowledged that my doubts had kept me from going all aswim in
contentment over such givenness as prevailed everywhere one turned.
MARCEL TOULET

Since everything had gotten so much worse,
I tried to take in at least some one thing
to make out how we came to where we were,
with the result that, on my walk that morning,
which I take solemnly every day, over toward the creek
that rises beyond the highway then disappears
into the forest behind us, to reemerge
two or three blocks away in tiny cataracts
beside a yellow house with a gazebo,
I resourcefully recollected that the French
for garbage can sounds like a word for a tiny
blue iris a couple might name their daughter after,
so that when I tried to articulate that moment
in my semiyearly letter to my friend Marcel,
who lives near Montbourbier in the Dordogne,
with its otherworldly river and black cliffside,
I could not imagine how I would convey
with any force in his own vivacious tongue
that we had tumbled into the garbage can of history—
nous sommes tombés dans la poubelle de l'histoire
simply would not do—so I wrote instead
how my wife and I welcomed the news that our plan
to come over to search for leases with options to buy
would coincide with the birth of a new grandchild
who might look back on these as times of triumph,
with or without tumbrels rumbling in order to have it.

By michael heffernan

Monday

Staff Sgt. Metz

Metz is alive for now, standing in line
at the airport Starbucks in his camo gear
and buzz cut, his beautiful new
camel-colored suede boots. His hands
are thick-veined. The good blood
still flows through, given an extra surge
when he slurps his latte, a fleck of foam
caught on his bottom lip.

I can see into the canal in his right ear,
a narrow darkness spiraling deep inside his head
toward the place of dreaming and fractions,
ponds of quiet thought.

In the sixties my brother left for Vietnam,
a war no one understood, and I hated him for it.
When my boyfriend was drafted I made a vow
to write a letter every day, and then broke it.
I was a girl torn between love and the idea of love.
I burned their letters in the metal trash bin
behind the broken fence. It was the summer of love
and I wore nothing under my cotton vest,
my Mexican skirt.

I see Metz later, outside baggage claim,
hunched over a cigarette, mumbling
into his cell phone. He's more real to me now
than my brother was to me then, his big eyes
darting from car to car as they pass.
I watch him breathe into his hands.

I don't believe in anything anymore:
god, country, money or love.
All that matters to me now
is his life, the body so perfectly made,
mysterious in its workings, its oiled
and moving parts, the whole of him
standing up and raising one arm
to hail a bus, his legs pulling him forward,
all muscle and sinew and living gristle,
the countless bones of his foot trapped in his boot,
stepping off the red curb.

DORIANNE LAUX

multi-tasking

MONDOTEQUE

When I'm like zig zagging among stuff

and I can't find things in which pile

where/ on the desk, in the kitchen,

bed table/ car/ some place/

the work station above is what I yearn

for, with lots of drawers and com-

partments for different sized papers,

notebooks, postcards and photos,

binders, flashdrives whatever,

this man imagined it/a data-managing

collecting searching device/container

personal? cultural? whatever, could such

a desk? workstation? help me

be more organized, no doubt, my

system now is broken file cabinets

and canvas bags, and thank goodness

for the canvas bag, the various colors,

designs and causes enable my monkey mind

to recall oh yes, that's the paperwork

for blah/blah But I dilly dally now.

reading

Last year I helped put together an exhibition of writing

and art. One of the writers I solicited was Nick Flynn.

I've long admired his work -- poetry, memoir. He wrote

the poem hello, birdy based on the Motherwell print

above. And now that poem is included in his new

collection, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands.

I'm reading this book now. It's a collision of forms,

voices and images. It has some stuff to show me,

not only in the meanings but in its architecture.

How the book and the work are made and then

assembled.

I like the changes he made in the two versions.

The note card image is my fiddling by writing

his poem.

Here's another poem from the book.

haiku (failed)

The thin thread that hold us here, tethered /or maybe tied, together,

what / do you call it -- telephone? horizon? song? Listen / to yourself

sing, We are all god's children / we are all gods, we walk the earth /

sometimes, two sails inside us sometimes / beating, our bodies the

bottle, a ship inside each / until one day, for no reason, it sails --

hello? / damn phone -- until one day it sails / out of sight, until one

day it cuts out of / earshot, bye-bye muttered into your cupped palm,

bye-bye / boat, bye-bye rain -- Look / maybe this is the place we've been /

waiting for, maybe this place / is the day, inside us, inside each /

corpuscle, the day, that day, everyday is / inside, my body, your body,

everyday is / this thread, everyday you said, come / get me, everyday

you said, it's been way too long / you said, bye-bye, bye-bye, not a day /

went by, the thin, the thread, so thin, this thread, are you still / here,

is it still, your heart, is it well?

look

Sorrow, with Some Eye Contact

Mostly you just disappear. When I don't see you dead

I know you're alive, I can see you by the clothes you're wearing,

by your boot print on the unloved grass.

We make an ugly street ugly, a giant room stripped,

its high wood beams and bed big enough for six of me

or three of us. You swear we have no roof.

One morning we counted chickens

and ate their eggs for breakfast. We played with hats.

I think I thought your weight was on me,

but you were vanishing, even as you sculpted us from clay.

Someone has shown up for me, I sense a chariot,

the sky is preparing to rain on everything.

We forgot to put the doves away.

I can barely see you. I think someone has shown up for me,

can you see headlights? Hear footsteps?

Some remember my snatching an outstretched hand.

And in a room of rafters you do what must be done,

under moonlight, though it's days before you are found,

chickens gone, doves in trees, my bust smashed and mouth

punched in so its grin runs into an eye, winking.

LYNN MELNICK

ghost moon

It's on the way, I tell you I smelled the mud

the melt, the thaw. Spring is out there

tonight behind the moon. Go now.

In the Room of Glass Breasts

By Brenda Hillman

Around each word we're hearing,
there spins an original flame;
the unborn wait in a circle of commas,
upright robins wheel to Wheeler
& termites with arms in their heads
dig under the chairs—

It is impossible to describe the world;
that's why you get so sleepy listening to poetry.
The writer skates but spring takes
the gold (ooo don't let her fall in sequins)—dusk
buzzes in its meaning kit...

maybe you drank too much but that's not it:
the sexy cadence puzzled everyone.
You were drawn to poetry by something nothing
satisfies but poetry: boundless sensation,
an abstract tone—
then one day, two normal words
had made you weep: Unreal...City.... Not
mostly; mostly they didn't make you weep, but still:
Unreal... (then that big pause:)...
City.... Look at that slumped
italic guy over there, waiting to be in a stanza:
Sat low our lord of literature
for he was very tired—

Outside the room, the spell ends,
the vowel of an owl/the owl of a vowel
dives onto a warm body, the ruined gardens
of the state, tended by the great dead—
You were called by a silence you can't understand.
You're grown up now. You can read all night
if you want in the bride's bed—

Much Madness

The Woodmans

I will be seeing this film.

MARWENCOL

The brain is on my mind. Trauma and otherwise.

Saw this movie coincidently last night. Go see it.

Netflix it if possible or whatever. Weirdly wonderful.