Sixfold Poetry Winter 2013 Read online

  tired of drooping his ears

  under tables and desks.

  But we are all gods here ambushed

  in the center of the infinite wooden

  babushka doll,

  clawing and crawling

  and cussing and singing

  all praises, all hail

  the Great Babushka.

  I submit now, roll on my back,

  in a wooden container like

  a babushka doll under a desk,

  miming and suffocating and cowering

  with simple movement like a puppet.

  Society, I bring you clichés now.

  I bring you red roses

  and blue violets.

  I cower under your table,

  and like a dog,

  I piss on your floor.

  Pandora

  Remember, remember, this is now,

  and now, and now. Live it, feel it,

  cling to it.

  –Sylvia Plath

  It is Mother’s Day Sunday, and I have

  read the chapter of Luke before opening

  the dusty box of yours, my deceased mother.

  Your journal is sealed with the emblem

  of an asylum. Your name written, chiseled

  into the top like a vintage museum piece.

  I open your words, gloveless,

  a box of evils sprouting into the world,

  red, red apples thrusting into the open

  air like sins, hope left in the bottom

  corner next to a ball of lent.

  Lately, I have been reading the journals

  of Plath like a bible thinking they were you,

  reading the chapters and verses and now,

  and now, and now, I am finally holding

  your words which are distorted,

  which are incomprehensible

  through a bell jar of tears.

  Remember, remember the chapped lips

  of your smile, the features of your face,

  the swampy feeling of my cheek after your kiss.

  And to see your journal lying here next to Plath’s,

  next to mine, juxtaposed, is colossal.

  We have spoken to each other now,

  clung to each other now, through written

  telepathy, our journals mingling in comparable

  time discussing life as two old feminists

  in rocking chairs, like Plath and Sexton

  chuckling, rocking, like Eve reaching

  for a red, red apple.

  Paul R. Davis

  Landscape

  I like the way

  lamplight makes the page

  of the book

  I’m reading gleam.

  A wild vanilla with

  crazed insects wobbling

  into my mind.

  I start to close

  the book

  and night appears,

  sheep stranded high

  on the outcropping.

  Between the pages

  is the everdark valley

  of no language,

  where words cross over

  hurriedly to reach

  the other side.

  I put the book down,

  the words don’t fall out,

  or over themselves.

  They are locked in place,

  like fresh eggs in their

  cartons, asleep

  and dreaming of speech.

  Second Vision

  Too many eyes, too many things to see.

  Twin cathedral steeples, nipples

  erupting from the breasts of God.

  Signs falsely proclaiming pizza is both

  original and Italian.

  Conversations boomerang off bent elbows,

  mismatched words litter avenues.

  Briefcases, laptop attache cases,

  bag lunches, boxes of pizza for one:

  FedEx will not deliver your life

  or you from it.

  Clouds invade your shoes,

  your pockets full of gray money,

  handfuls of anxiety fall out of your hat.

  Afraid to go home, afraid of the continual fear,

  drowning in the comfortable couch.

  Going to sleep naked,

  one sheet, one blanket,

  2,738 dreams you won’t remember.

  Morning is a roving wolf,

  eating the bones you forgot.

  Eating Molly’s Pie

  It was a sunny morning,

  sky of flour and butter.

  I went out to eat

  some of Molly’s pie,

  came away fuller than the moon.

  It was noon like turtles lounging.

  I went out and had some more

  of Molly’s pie.

  I left the desk,

  overturned the timesheet,

  went out like a thunderstorm.

  I looked in corners where butts are thrown,

  looked at signs like forgotten face cards,

  looking for Molly’s pie.

  Close to midnight

  down by the river,

  Hungry Davy was there,

  eating the last of Molly’s pie.

  I cried up, all the way through my hair,

  wanting some of Molly’s pie.

  Klismos

  (4th Century Greek chair, perhaps the first of Western civilization)

  Ladies, be seated.

  Rest in elegance and wait for the news.

  Your husbands are in the fields,

  or fighting for Athens.

  When Rome ascends,

  when Saint Peter visits,

  he will be crucified but leave a seat

  for his crude descendants.

  But this will be hidden, kept secret

  from the tillers and the potters.

  They will have curved backs,

  broken backs, will lack support.

  Castle residents will know the comfort,

  the tribute from the fields, the gathering laws.

  Conquistadores will bring saddles

  and crucifixes to a world reclining.

  They will join with missionaries

  to bring enlightenment and germs.

  All the world will be seated:

  To work, to learn, to take rest.

  What wondrous device will ennoble us?

  How will nature uncivilized devolve?

  We will lose our legs, take on those of wood,

  carved with faces straining under the weight.

  Our backs will weaken,

  our eyes forget the wide vistas scouting danger,

  our minds will turn more quietly.

  We will be soothed.

  The oceans are crossed while we stand

  before the compass, afraid to sit and

  not see the upright horizon.

  These new lands have knowledge

  of running and resting,

  but we bring strange new instruments

  lacking harmony with nature.

  Forests are hacked down,

  the wood is shaped into towns,

  houses and their possessions,

  legs and spindles hold us in place.

  Intricacy and detail envelop our bodies,

  stiffnecked we suffer the hardness

  of where we sit.

  The plains and rivers hold freedom

  like butterfly wings hold the sun,

  we seek the prairie grass to burn.

  The western shore is gained

  but there is no rest for our business,

  still we are straight-backed.

  Leisure is acquired with sweat

  and now we can know comfort

  of leather, of upholstery,

  feathering our labors.

  Finally, we sit: collapsed,

  to think of new inventions,

  made for human bodies.

  New devices take craft

  and they have arm
s, levers,

  footrests and let us dream.

  All in beautiful reveries,

  we take our seats.

  Philip Jackey

  Garage drinking after 1989

  Her world will spiral like a merry-go-round in the belly of storms.

  The matches and lighter fluid she’ll buy at Walmart

  will seem a lot less dangerous than they did before—

  well as the cheap vodka that’ll burn within her throat,

  and after the fifth or sixth shot, it won’t burn anymore.

  Cobwebs will surround her; in all corners they’ll spread like lies.

  Spiders will fuck other spiders; their egg sacs swaying

  with momentum like a Newton’s cradle.

  And with her back turned, few feet away,

  an industrial fan will spin at its highest speed.

  She hates the heat; it sweats out the alcohol,

  and nothing smells worse than the depths of disease

  protruding through stale fragrance that will embed,

  into vintage tank tops with Mickey Mouse on the front,

  over a pink bra and blue denim shorts bathed

  in Giorgio perfume—wrinkled and creased, and

  crammed in a cardboard box on top another cardboard box:

  the furthest decade she’s able to reach without a step stool—

  the last one she’ll ever trust, to rational thinking.

  Only stigmas will remain—of oil and antifreeze,

  Fieros and Firenzas, Madonna in the tape deck—

  the beaming of the headlights unfolding

  the shadows that ascend to the ceiling.

  Hanging hacksaws will warp into sharp fangs.

  Lawn rakes into claws.

  And the storm will come. Her gutters will surely give,

  to pouring rain under black clouds, blacker than their predecessors,

  bringing bad fortune through meandering felines.

  Soaking black Maine Coons take shelter with lemon-marble eyes

  gouged from years of sidewalk disputes, and yet to purr thereafter.

  Instead they will stay still, struggle to see,

  their eyes slowly dimming like a wicker candle.

  And she will feel pity—for whom or what, she won’t know,

  just enough to understand belligerence will not kill the pain.

  A lit match to methanol works best.

  Swimming at night in suburbia

  The pool shines mercury beneath the moonlight,

  where young girls jump off of diving boards into the deep,

  somewhat ashamed as only their bikini tops break the surface,

  spilling polka-dots, some amber, others amaranth.

  And the boys can’t see, only touch, because chlorine

  burns their eyes the same way liquor does their virgin throats,

  sinking ten feet to the bottom, haggling air through a kiss—

  sealed, the radio drowns by a thousand pin drops,

  and the girls allow to be touched with pruny fingers.

  Subterranean lights beam bright,

  outlining shapes, the shadows: a frog

  who gave his life in the skimmer, a thousand

  ripples projected on a white painted fence, and silhouettes,

  all different sizes as they watch their former selves,

  slide off eachother, poor attempts at a carnal act,

  squeezing the air out of inflatable rafts,

  on such a night where fireflies dress their best,

  and luminesce the pungent air.

  Granny and Papa’s house

  And for sure this house is haunted;

  it moans at night like papa did,

  when he wasn’t papa anymore,

  rather a sad story of children and their children

  and pestilent cancer cells, his sunken cheeks pale,

  and white as the ghosts who live here.

  If you listen close, you still hear his son,

  been dead since ’72—

  plastered to a tree, killed instantly,

  thrown out the window like a sack of shit,

  the same way most repudiated

  his mendacious words of advice.

  And you can still smell the menthols,

  almost if she hadn’t lost to the stroke

  ten years prior, my granny,

  who smoked before you could die from smoking,

  turning the walls to dirt, stained dull yellow

  like the nicotine on papa’s teeth.

  And granny’s the kind of gal papa read poems about,

  and papa didn’t read poems, he was more

  a hands on kind of man,

  who preferred using fists when he’s pissed off, scared,

  and even in love because granny swears

  that one of the holes papa punched through the closet door

  was in the perfect shape of a heart.

  And you could see right thru,

  skeletons stacked on skeletons.

  Karen Hoy

  A Naturalist in New York

  I cannot see the buildings

  of Manhattan in the dark,

  though at a far journey’s end

  as we cross

  (yes it is,

  confirms the driver)

  the Brooklyn Bridge

  towers of window lights are rising

  in the buildings’ negative space.

  It’s the way each

  illuminated giant facet turns,

  revealing more as we approach.

  Transitions of galaxies,

  oblong astronomical bodies

  in a moving geometric display;

  metropolitan northern lights,

  and I am in awe.

  I’ve seen things as stunning before:

  the terrace of salt-white

  pools at Pamukkale;

  the cap of Kilimanjaro

  afloat on African clouds;

  stalactite ballrooms in

  Carlsbad Caverns;

  a neon-red sunset

  on the Serengeti.

  I feel my own turning,

  my marrow re-engaging

  in ways I didn’t know

  my insides could fit.

  I’m not a city person

  is no longer available

  as I adapt and rearrange;

  a discontinuation

  of a former stock phrase.

  Nan’s Photographs

  That one, that’s my favourite,

  of my mother in a tutu,

  age sixteen, on points,

  with her raven hair straight

  from a white hairband

  and her hands arched above her.

  of all your photographs

  of even that one of me

  with my brothers

  when I wouldn’t keep still

  at the photographers,

  and Darryl is smiling

  and Kevin has been instructed

  to keep me on the seat

  I’m already half off,

  as if at any minute

  eighteen month old me

  will slither to the bottom

  of the round frame

  and drop, gurgling

  onto your hall carpet.

  more than the scattered ones

  in little straight frames

  around your bookshelves

  and the dresser;

  a collection of cousins

  in the dull plumage

  of successive school seasons.

  This photo,

  my mother; your daughter;

  the family’s only dancer.

  Look at her—

  our loose-tendoned

  connecting icon

  in her own space,

  owning the frame.

  I love this photo,

  how it shows excellence

  pursued, found,

  redelivered on demand

  for the camera’s exposure;
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  her talent in black and white,

  en pointe in a silvered

  chemical capture.

  For Peter in Memory of Jo

  Meteorites land mostly

  in the sea

  or in forests

  far from our eyes.

  Sandcastles are always

  washed away

  by the tide—

  they don’t survive.

  But in between

  these statistics

  are things we risk

  by being alive.

  By survival

  we’re defined by

  losing people,

  precious people,

  lost to us,

  the ones behind.

  Somewhere on earth

  a meteorite.

  Ankles are lapped

  by sand

  sent swirling

  into flower-shaped fractals:

  a million tiny rocks

  in the tide.

  Mrs Bing and Mrs Bailey

  and the list read

  Bing Bing Bailey Bailey

  Bing Bing Bailey.

  Visiting you, we waited

  with the suitcase, by

  the noticeboard on the lobby wall,

  while Mum brought in

  the rest of our stuff,

  letting the double doors close off

  to the hot ice-cream-dripped tarmac

  of an English just-a-half-season

  or the rest of the year’s