Poems of the Week

FOR IBRAHIM QASHOUSH They found you like a river stone in the Orontes where the people fished you out. And like oil on water you take the tint of all colors. Now a streetwise nation wakes, thousands on the Brooklyn Bridge, down Broadway, Cleveland, L.A., on the lawn of the Capitol jailbreaking our jobs and mountains, our houses foreclosing or falling down. There’s no due process to undo a quarter-century of bankers clapping the beat of a pop tune, people lost to a blindfold of interest. Listen. They’re singing your song in the square, old and young, a voice wading out where the cameras can see. ____________________________________________ Laren McClung is the author of Between Here and Monkey Mountain (Sheep Meadow 2012). She lives between two cities. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Walter Stone Poem of the Week: Geoffrey G. O’Brien Poem of the Week: Luke Johnson Poem of the [...]

from (Opera) Asylum 1. ______Here is the proof, ____________everything about me. I couldn’t stop thinking ___________about myself as him, so the revelatory parts of me _____like confetti undropped grew dusty and apologetic. “It isn’t enough _____to tell you any more.” ____________* _____“I’d like to think myself _____a generation who stayed married.” Back here, while walking past the foreign languages, my daily discussion with the parrot behind me, _____above all I am unaware who is trying to help. ____________* _____Given an infinity to write this, ___________you might. On courage: so much is trial and error. _____To adapt though, to take the raw materials _____of predestination and refine to a convenient last name. _____Once, my father _____said something accidentally better than any he ever thought. ____________* _____The closest I get to being alone an unanswered phone, _____the showers even crowded. _____Nancy the butcherbird changes _____the sheets and rallies discrete with nicknames and [...]

Crude H2 its smothered O circling for sense there is none three-eyed or blind delirious with repair eventually or now _________________________________________________ Kevin Simmonds is a San Francisco-based writer, musician and filmmaker originally from New Orleans. His writing has appeared in jubilat, Kyoto Journal, Massachusetts Review and Poetry. His books include the poetry collection Mad for Meat and two edited works: the poetry anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality and the late poet Carrie Allen McCray’s Ota Benga under My Mother’s Roof. He wrote the music for the Emmy Award-winning documentary Hope: Living and Loving with HIV in Jamaica and Voice. Share this: Related Posts Poem of the Week: Daniel Nathan Terry Collective Brightness Poem of the Week: Luke Johnson On Poets and Speakers Poem of the Week: Kevin Shea

The following is from a series of Pi Poems, or Cadae—the alphabetical equivalent of the first five digits of Pi (3.1415). Pi is a transcendental number that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter approximately equal to 3.1415926535897. In poetry, it has been used as the basis for a syllabic form that obeys the following distribution of syllables and stanza lengths, resulting (by line length) in a kind of sonnet: xxx __________(3) x ____________(1)___________ } 3 xxxx _________(4) x ____________(1)___________ } 1 xxxxx ________(5) xxxxxxxxx ____(9) xx ___________(2)___________ } 4 xxxxxx _______(6) xxxxx ________(5)___________ } 1 xxx __________(3) xxxxx ________(5) xxxxxxxx _____(8)___________ } 5 xxxxxxxxx ____(9) xxxxxxx ______(7) from Cadae: The Pi Poems 1 The music stopped for a moment then— when we began to savor in its absence silence— started again, maybe a bit louder than before or maybe we only heard it as such, a [...]

The 8th of May: A Vow Made for the 7th of May Upon seeing a video of a man in North Carolina firing his rifle into a sign asking citizens to Vote Against NC Amendment One. There are oaks that remember what we would forget—the burn of the rope, how a body takes on more weight the moment it breathes its last, how the earth below shoeless feet grows hungry for the slaughtered. There are rooms where paint has been rolled over blood, where the body’s salt has been vacuumed into bags of dust, where the veneer of a nightstand still bears the imprint of a living hand’s last message. Ghosts of children and men and women hang from fences, linger in the corners of dorm rooms, courtrooms, churches. This is how we deal with it around here, he said, after emptying his gun into a plea for equality, and [...]

The Meaning Comes Close All the cognates. This knowledge we’ve invented. Refracted by motion. Disguised as the moon. Built of shells. All the stranger. And without a word for. Materiality has a fulcrum. Where these narratives move. As functions of the wind. _________________________________________________________ Sophie Sills‘ full length book of poetry, Elemental Perceptions: A Panorama was released from BlazeVOX Books in the winter of 2010. Her poems and literary criticism have appeared in various journals. She lives in Los Angeles and publishes the Peacock Online Review. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Wallace Stevens Poem of the Week: Emily Pettit Would you like a Signed Copy of Mark Strand’s New Book? Poem of the Week: Bernadette Mayer Poem(s) of the Week: M.A. Vizsolyi

__________________________________________________________________ Phoebe Giannisi is a poet and architect. She works as an assistant professor at the University of Thessaly in Greece, where she teaches design and poetics related to urban space and landscape. She is interested in the performative and acoustic dimensions of poetry, and she organizes in situ poetic performances in public spaces. In 2010 she was co-curator for the Greek Pavilion of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition (La Biennale di Venezia). She is the author of several poetry collections including Loops (Nefeli Editions) and Homerica (Kedros Editions), as well as the chapbooks Sea Urchins and Ramazan. She has also published numerous books on Ancient Greek poetics and architecture. Read one of her chapbooks . Related Posts Poem of the Week: Takashi Hiraide Poem of the Week: Aaron Simon Poem of the Week: Josh Hockensmith Poem of the Week: Dorothea Lasky Poem of the Week: Jason Labbe

Sad Indianapolis I go to the movie theatre to look at the rows of exit lights just to feel like I’m landing in my life. I tried to pull the world back from the explosion; but it is snowing; the sky looks like falling ash. Each morning I stitch together a moment, say, the muted light around a bowl of peaches, but soon the junior senator in me so timidly casts his vote for desire I can barely pour the milk. Sad Indianapolis, famous only for a race that comes once a year, the noise so loud it evacuates the head briefly and orderly like a fire drill; then it all returns: worries, regrets, Yvonne, the hilltop, endless strip- mall parking lots where I would sit as a teenager, the tongue of the world on my battery, and feel a huge, yet exact emptiness, as if someone were unfolding thousands [...]

I write for ghosts I write for you, old women who sit at the gates, spin yarn and knit socks for the dead. My every gesture is mirrored by a thousand hands. I carry these faces inside me, on my back, on my feet. The ghosts don’t let me sleep. They gather on windowsills and roofs, in the moon’s breath, and chat with chattering teeth. I write for my father who still hangs on in Skype, to reach him, fill the gap with words. Hang on, Daddy, hang on. Here’s a rope ladder. Here are the words, Daddy. Here’s the blood, the new heart, the straw. Scriu pentru stafii Scriu pentru voi, femei batrane ce stati la porti, toarceti si impletiti ciorapi pentru morti. Fiecare gest mi-e oglindit de o mie de maini. Port aceste fete in mine, pe picioare, in spate. Stafiile nu ma lasa sa dorm. Se strang [...]

Anger Managment A man wanted to control his anger, so frightful even grizzly bears feared him. A shaman told him to insult and beat a log with a stick until he was exhausted. When the weary man returned and asked, “What lesson have I learned?” the shaman replied, ______________“Be like the log.” KOHT’AENE TS’AKUT’EH (Literally “The man who gets angry”) Koht’aene ts’akut’eh, tsaani lii koht’aene. C’ededliinen koht’aene yaa nitezet ‘eł tson decen kae sen xał k’e tsaa. Koht’aene na’idyaa ‘eł yaa “Yidi uzadalts’et?” c’ededliinen yaa, ______________“Cic’uunen decen.” _________________________________________ John Elvis Smelcer is one of the founding editors, and poetry editor, of Rosebud magazine, about to release its 50th consecutive quarterly issue in March. Smelcer is a Clifford D. Clark Fellow in English at Binghamton University in upstate New York. Smelcer is one of the last speakers on earth of the Ahtna Athabaskan language, an endangered Alaska Native language. Only 20 [...]

Piercings Pierced flesh grows back like graffiti painted over the morning after wounds we carry from the dark show scars we cannot hide in the mirror my piercings are invisible to the naked eye but mark me as a troubled heart nailed to your memory slowly mending _________________________________________ Rob Mustard‘s first ebook of poems, Blue Moon, was published in December. As he writes on his poetry site, www.rhmustard.com, “My poems are about love, death, the power of memory to save us. I am most interested in the unexpected ways words speak to each other, the hidden meaning they reveal about us and the world.” Rob lives in Los Angeles. Related Posts Poem of the Week: Bernadette Mayer Poem of the Week: Peter Kline Poem of the Week: Robert Kelly Poem of the Week: Lizzy McDaniel Poem of the Week: Joan Larkin

River 2 They thought themselves too much Acquainted with their seasonal Removal from the wet industry, Or rather placed beside it, Two picnickers blessed by them And losing the thought carefully Like a scientist in the river sent To be their blind guest As the center keeps forming Only to the situation That knows it and to no other Abstraction suggesting, “Things have gotten Too soon.” All things should be Sent back—except the hawks— Without us to the city. __________________________________________ Paul Legault is the author of The Madeleine Poems (Omnidawn, 2010), The Other Poems (Fence, 2011) and The Emily Dickinson Reader (McSweeney’s, forthcoming). He is co-editor of the translation journal, Telephone, and he works at the Academy of American Poets. PHOTO CREDIT: Lawrence Schwartzwald Related Posts Poem of the Week: Sharon Olds Poem of the Week: Adam Tessier Poem of the Week: Saeed Jones Poem of the Week: Christopher Stackhouse [...]

A On my entire obscene face there is something I’m trying to achieve. It is colorless. It is self-published. It is inner fatigue. It is so superfluous! It is part of an addiction I hate and depend on. It naturally enters into conversations. It will induce a kind of slow intuition. It will be sloppy and corrugated. It will smell pleasant. It will be animals playing on a farm. It will be completely alone. It will not be so bad. It will be missing out. It will have a vague sense of relief. It will be committing without action. It will be floating on the surface of everything. It will be an amorphous tedium. It will be sleep. It will be a party. It will be a good lunch and supper. It will be a whole day and night. It will be an indefinite field full of universal life. It [...]

Pissing What part of life is in the weirdness spreading illimitably around what fits? At face level, as he stood there, glaucous light was caught in the clear plastic shower curtain. This light came from the sun by an obscure but direct path through the airshaft. Look at it! The body of the slender man slouched forward like a bow. And his hand pinched his cock over the trouser notch. He hadn’t turned the light on, because, of course, he knew where the gleam-smudge of the commode cupped its shadowed pool. What a limp arrow and what an idle, slouching cupid! Whom does he hope to transpierce? He touched the plummeting fireflies of urine with his gaze and with thought. Would he ever choose to pass this moment if this were heaven where every action flows in simple purposefulness from desire? However absurd and embarrassing, he thought of love. All [...]

Tinsel Tinsel for M.C. A fool for love, an inner refugee, sees a peacock strutting in the birdhouse high on a branch and fanning the broadest, most articulated fan tail the fool for love has ever seen. “Come fly with me!” the fool calls to the peacock, but the bright bird keeps strutting up and down above the fool for love there on the ground. A blackbird comes and settles on his shoulder. His pecks are rough caresses as he asks him, “Why do you keep staring at that tree?” “Peacock!” the fool for love cries, but the blackbird caws back, “Fool! Since when do peacocks fly? Look around the birdhouse: see us towhees, wrens and jays and blackbirds flittering and swooping— what we always do for free.” All the fool can do is stare. His neck is permanently out of whack; he doesn’t care. But one fine day in [...]