May 2016 Poetry Feature

Please join us in greeting new contributors Jane Huffman and Jeff Hipsher.

JANE HUFFMAN

Spanish Riding School

A mannequin diligence to pallor, to possession.
That’s what they look for in their Lipizzaner

stallions, and in their riders, calf bicorne hats,
white suede gloves, all animal material and gin

clean manes braided in the same practicing plait.
They go transparent fast. They prance in light

campaigns, pretty like warfare. I went as a child
to the arena where you could see through them.

The summer stables, men in swan neck spurs,
and the sun that cooks the piss into the ground,

I watched them school around and around, ghosts
in mud tails and cruppers. The riders

could have been headless for all I cared. Costumes
affixed to nothing, reins pooling nothing

into fluid obedience, no wolf tooth to snag
the snaffle. The absence of horse flies struck me

like horse flies. I was in the presence of empire.
I bought a souvenir topper and crop, pretended

Taraxippus, the patron of spooking Hippodrome
horses, was trotting under my broomstick. No

Pegasus. No Norse eight-legged horse or St. George
peeling out of heaven, deus ex machina with a strap-on

horn. The dead here are dappled grey and flea-bitten,
and they can be ridden. When a Lipizzaner dies,

they let the earth take him quietly. Relief from one
ceremony begins with another. I lead him away,

into the summer by his halter. Before we canter,
I salute you with a skedded hand, o embodiment.

I never stopped wearing the uniform

I never stopped wearing the uniform

of the kind of woman
who presses her white shirt
into a whiter shirt,
who quenches

her cigarette
in the birdbath
outside of the cathedral
and goes in
trailing pewits.

I was never christened
anything.
The residual furor of mass
made my collars go
up in plainsong.

In high school, I watched
a woman pause
to rub a scratch off
her boot. I measured

sublimity
in the significance
of numbers. Compulsively,
I began transforming
into snow. Snowier,

until the field
I used to be was gone
and the girl
no longer could be called
or counted on.

Church clothes
became conventicles
for us lightweights.
Jesus would step
down from his sun
an tell us what to wear
tomorrow.

No,
nothing in him was transitive.
Not even his marred,
subaltern horselaugh.

Jane Huffman has recent poems in Witness, West Branch, The Adroit Journal,SOFTBLOW, Radar Poetry, Word Riot, and elsewhere in print and online.

JEFF HIPSHER

Asleep in the Retreat at Twin Lakes

FOR TRAYVON MARTIN

You can’t quite see it, but they say

at night, as you lie on the pullout couch

all the things you’ve failed

to understand push themselves

back into their own neighborhoods. A place,

if we’re being reductive, called The Wilderness. Still,

out in that unmappable distance,

you imagine them. Under the imported palms

shading the car port. A dark rumor

spread across your lawn. Inside, you turn

to face the drywall. Its certain white

ancientness. Its cool vibrating drawl.

Thy Clean White Hand Is Open Wide

Lord, & thou are just, Lord, just

very tired. I spent twen

ty years there one night.

Y’all’s woods were full

of policemen, ya’ll. But y’all,

y’all just talk trees All Day

In the riven troughs, the splay-

ed leaves pile up. Here by

the sagging gate, stopped

by the wall. Had to move

my family out the country,

the sunken fields of hemp

out from under the shade

of the trees, the crazy hemlock

’s point, before, the sentinel

of the grave, All Day, turnt

out the way it were, turning out

to greet y’all.

NOTES
Allen Tate – “Ode to the Confederate Dead”

Alethea S. Burroughs – “Savannah”

Kanye West – “All Day,” “New Slaves”

Dick Gregory – Nigger: An Autobiography

Bertolt Brecht

John Ashbery – “The Chateau Hardware”

Of the Out of Style

I know I braid too much my own snapped off perceptions

of things as they come, televised from that pasturage

of dishwater where soaks an opulence of bridges, electrical

grids, clandestine tunnels, and so forth. That immense

tract of dazzling whiteness, its hand rising through

the terrible science of clouds over this place that leads to

all others. And having enforced its will would have all of it

tremble at their coming, the only accepted celestials

of the new and unknowable intelligence that fills

my mind like cold milk, until all that’s left is something

so anomalous to my function, I could not immediately

detect it. And when I do, it shifts to something else

altogether, not for itself, but for the self it has tended

for so long. And it must look pretty appealing, the acreage

of might flung far out on the land. An entitlement of damp plains.

The pale and foggy freeze that sometimes it feels like

in this morning that has seized us again. But baby, I’m amazed

I don’t feel I can negotiate disinheriting such a thing, unafraid

of the savage and continuous disorientation of losing

privilege. And it knows there’s so much we want

to say, but also how easy to lay under its invisibly open spaces

broad waking in a mood of remote orchards, soon forgotten.

NOTES

Jimi Hendrix – “1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be)”

John Ashbery – “The One Thing That Can Save America”

Bad Religion – “It Must Look Pretty Appealing,” “Sometimes it Feels Like,” “You”

Jethro Tull – “Auqualung”

Selected phrasing from Marvel Comics’ “The Eternals” as written by Jack Kirby
Jeff Hipsher is the founding editor of Catch Up;a journal of comics and literature.

April 2024 Poetry Feature: New Metamorphoses

Saturday

Translation: Poems from The Dickinson Archive