Cradle Song
by Janine Pommy Vega
I lower my bones in you
Adriatic Sea
through the porthole
lapping on my ceiling
all night long
I surrender my joints and knuckles
the watery lining of my lungs
the passageways of breath
and brain wave
rock me
Mother of the apron pocket
crook of the arm
susurrous lullaby O
rock me in your cradle
all night long
The Death Of Santa Claus
by Charles Harper Webb
He’s had the chest pains for weeks,
but doctors don’t make house
calls to the North Pole,
he’s let his Blue Cross lapse,
blood tests make him faint,
hospital gown always flap
open, waiting rooms upset
his stomach, and it’s only
indigestion anyway, he thinks,
until, feeding the reindeer,
he feels as if a monster fist
has grabbed his heart and won’t
stop squeezing. He can’t
breathe, and the beautiful white
world he loves goes black,
and he drops on his jelly belly
in the snow and Mrs. Claus
tears out of the toy factory
wailing, and the elves wring
their little hands, and Rudolph’s
nose blinks like a sad ambulance
light, and in a tract house
in Houston, Texas, I’m 8,
telling my mom that stupid
kids at school say Santa’s a big
fake, and she sits with me
on our purple-flowered couch,
and takes my hand, tears
in her throat, the terrible
news rising in her eyes.
We Try Harder
by Hal Sirowitz
While I was getting a drink at the bar
a half hour ago I saw you deciding,
she said, whether you should talk to me,
I tried making your decision easier
by smiling at you, but you started
talking to someone else. I’m
your second choice. Just like
Avis has to try harder than Hertz,
I have to try to outshine the other women.
Knowing you picked her over me
makes me want to tell you
to just go back to square one.
After We Saw What There Was to See
by Lawrence Raab
After we saw what there was to see
we went off to buy souvenirs, and my father
waited by the car and smoked. He didn’t need
a lot of things to remind him where he’d been.
Why do you want so much stuff?
he might have asked us. “Oh, Ed,” I can hear
my mother saying, as if that took care of it.
After she died I don’t think he felt any reason
to go back through all those postcards, not to mention
the glossy booklets about the Singing Tower
and the Alligator Farm, the painted ashtrays
and lucite paperweights, everything we carried home
and found a place for, then put away
in boxes, then shoved far back in our closets.
He’d always let my mother keep track of the past,
and when she was gone—why should that change?
Why did I want him to need what he’d never needed?
I can see him leaning against our yellow Chrysler
in some parking lot in Florida or Maine.
It’s a beautiful cloudless day. He glances at his watch,
lights another cigarette, looks up at the sky.
It’s the birthday of poet Kenneth Patchen, born in Niles, Ohio (1911). He came from a working-class family — coal mining on his mother’s side, farming on his father’s, and while he was growing up his father was a steel worker in Youngstown. His Scottish grandfather loved to read aloud Robert Burns poems. And Patchen said that in Burns’ poems and his grandpa’s stories, “there was what you would call magic.” He started keeping a diary when he was 12 years old, wrote poems throughout high school, went to a handful of colleges, and traveled around the country working as a migrant laborer.
Then he went to a friend’s Christmas party and met Miriam Oikemus, a college student at Smith and an anti-war activist. The daughter of Finnish socialist immigrants, she had joined the Communist Party at the age of seven. Kenneth and Miriam fell in love and exchanged letters for a while — Patchen wrote her love poems. They got married in 1934. A few years later, when Patchen was just 26 years old, he suffered a terrible spinal injury while he was helping a friend separate two collided cars. He spent the rest of his life in severe pain, and went through three surgeries. The first two surgeries were helpful, and increased his mobility, so he was able to tour the country and give poetry readings. He partnered with Charles Mingus and the Chamber Jazz Sextet, and he set his poetry to jazz music, for performances and recordings.
But during the last surgery, something went wrong and Patchen fell off the operating table and permanently ruined his back. He was bedridden for the rest of his life, but he continued to write and paint in bed. He said: “It happens that very often my writing with pen is interrupted by my writing with brush, but I think of both as writing. In other words, I don’t consider myself a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend.”
During his career, Patchen wrote more than 40 books of poetry and prose, much of it illustrated, including The Journal of Albion Moonlight (1941), The Memoirs of a Shy Pornographer (1945), The Love Poems of Kenneth Patchen (1960), and But Even So: Picture Poems (1968). He dedicated every book to Miriam.
In 1945, two journalists published an article called “The Most Mysterious People in the Village,” about the life of Kenneth and Miriam Patchen. Miriam told the journalists that her husband was “absolutely impossible until he’s had a whole pot of coffee in the morning.” They wrote about visiting Kenneth Patchen’s bedroom: “The bed was massive and so was the man. He wore a faded gray sweatshirt with washed-out blue cuffs and pocket. The shirt was tucked into the waistband of black woolen trousers that were frayed at the cuffs. Patchen wore blue, maroon and tan Argyle socks, but no shoes. His body seemed muscular and powerful; his face delicate and sensitive. His skin was white and his eyes were a deep blue-gray.”
Years later, Miriam described their daily routine: “I’d be up earliest, go for the paper, read it. He’d awaken later, having finally gotten to sleep, have breakfast and look at the news, then get to work. ‘Get to work’ meant writing in bed, lying down. The upright sitting position was painful for him, then. I’d read, wash clothes, house clean, take coffee to him frequently. When we had almost no money life was the same as when we had a little. At 12th Street we always had the rent and money for utilities. With an advance from Mr. Padell we bought a couple windsor-style chairs, one easy chair and a table. What elegance those pieces gave to the doll house.”
Kenneth Patchen died in 1972, at the age of 60. Miriam Patchen remained a champion of leftist causes as well as her late husband’s poetry, and collaborated on his biography Kenneth Patchen: Rebel Poet in America (2000), by Larry R. Smith. Miriam Patchen died in 2000 at the age of 85, sitting up in a chair, reading.
Kenneth Patchen said, “It’s always because we love that we are rebellious; it takes a great deal of love to give a damn one way or another what happens from now on: I still do.”
Once in a While
by Mark Perlberg
Mother was agitated all morning.
A call had come from her brother Harold,
who was spoken of only in whispers
and despised by those with a talent
for never changing their minds.
But Mother loved him.
Somehow I learned that my uncle
had forged checks and spent time in prison.
And I knew he played the saxophone
in small jazz bands.
In late afternoon the doorbell rang.
My uncle stood in the hall.
A tall man slightly stooped, he shook snow
from his long brown overcoat. He had a high
hooked nose and wavy brown hair
that fell across his forehead,
and he carried packages wrapped in Christmas paper.
My stepfather signaled: disappear.
In early evening Uncle Harold
knocked on my door with a gift for me:
jazz records, the first I’d seen.
Fats Waller beaming from the album cover
is clearer to me now than my uncle’s face.
“I can’t give you anything but love, baby.”
A mourning sax backing Lee Wiley:
“Once in a while, will you give just
one little thought to me…”
At first light my uncle was gone,
His footprints vanishing in a fresh fall of snow.
At the Office Holiday Party
by Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
I can now confirm that I am not just fatter
than everyone I work with, but I’m also fatter
than all their spouses. Even the heavily bearded
bear in accounting has a little otter-like boyfriend.
When my co-workers brightly introduce me
as “the funny one in the office,” their spouses
give them a look which translates to, Well, duh,
then they both wait for me to say something funny.
A gaggle of models comes shrieking into the bar
to further punctuate why I sometimes hate living
in this city. They glitter, a shiny gang of scissors.
I don’t know how to look like I’m not struggling.
Sometimes on the subway back to Queens,
I can tell who’s staying on past the Lexington stop
because I have bought their shoes before at Payless.
They are shoes that fool absolutely no one.
Everyone wore their special holiday party outfits.
It wasn’t until I arrived at the bar that I realized
my special holiday party outfit was exactly the same
as the outfits worn by the restaurant’s busboys.
While I’m standing in line for the bathroom,
another patron asks if I’m there to clean it.
Developing the Land
by Stephen Behrendt
For six nights now the cries have sounded in the pasture:
coyote voices fluting across the greening rise to the east
where the deer have almost ceased to pass
now that the developers have carved up yet another section,
filled another space with spars and studs, concrete, runoff.
Five years ago you saw two spotted fawns rise
for the first time from brome where brick mailboxes will stand;
only three years past came great horned owls
who raised two squeaking, downy owlets
that perished in the traffic, skimming too low across the road
behind some swift, more fortunate cottontail.
It was on an August afternoon that you drove in,
curling down our long gravel drive past pasture and creek,
that you saw, flickering at the edge of your sight,
three mounted Indians, motionless in the paused breeze,
who vanished when you turned your head.
We have felt the presence on this land of others,
of some who paused here, some who passed, who have left
in the thick clay shards and splinters of themselves that we dig up,
turn up with spade and tine when we garden or bury our animals;
their voices whisper on moonless nights in the back pasture hollow
where the horses snort and nicker, wary with alarm.
Butter
by Elizabeth Alexander
My mother loves butter more than I do,
more than anyone. She pulls chunks off
the stick and eats it plain, explaining
cream spun around into butter! Growing up
we ate turkey cutlets sauteed in lemon
and butter, butter and cheese on green noodles,
butter melting in small pools in the hearts
of Yorkshire puddings, butter better
than gravy staining white rice yellow,
butter glazing corn in slipping squares,
butter the lava in white volcanoes
of hominy grits, butter softening
in a white bowl to be creamed with white
sugar, butter disappearing into
whipped sweet potatoes, with pineapple,
butter melted and curdy to pour
over pancakes, butter licked off the plate
with warm Alaga syrup. When I picture
the good old days I am grinning greasy
with my brother, having watched the tiger
chase his tail and turn to butter. We are
Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite
historical revision, despite
our parent’s efforts, glowing from the inside
out, one hundred megawatts of butter.
Buying Stock
by Denise Duhamel
“…The use of condoms offers substantial protection, but does not
guarantee total protection and that while
there is no evidence that deep kissing has resulted in
transfer of the virus, no one can say that such transmission
would be absolutely impossible.” –The Surgeon General, 1987
I know you won’t mind if I ask you to put this on.
It’s for your protection as well as mine–Wait.
Wait. Here, before we rush into anything
I’ve bought a condom for each one of your fingers. And here–
just a minute–Open up.
I’ll help you put this one on, over your tongue.
I was thinking:
If we leave these two rolled, you can wear them
as patches over your eyes. Partners have been known to cry,
shed tears, bodily fluids, at all this trust, at even the thought
of this closeness.
Girl Riding a Horse in a Field of Sunflowers
by David Allan Evans
Sitting perfectly upright,
contented and pensive,
she holds in one hand,
loosely, the reins of summer:
the green of trees and bushes;
the blue of lake water;
the red of her jacket
and open collar; the brown
of her pinned-up hair,
and her horse, deep
in the yellow of sunflowers.
When she stops to rest,
summer rests.
When she decides to leave,
there goes summer
over the hill.
Immanence
by Major Jackson
My own jury I acquitted my inner savage,
known for one-kneed vows to décolletage.
I was aiming for shadows bones make,
namely, the jolt of leaves and roses. A clock struck
and returned the slick smell of snow
on chanterelles. I settled into a naked meadow.
Beneath my right palm disappearing, I brought
an even finer thirst for soil and amateur brawls.
When I faced Nature, I had not a tincture of will.
I tossed her on my bed and kept still.