The houses are photographed with light in mind:
The sun, they say, is shining here. The filter
hints at lemons: fresh laundry on a quaint
old line. The “den” becomes the “family room”
where we’d play rummy and watch TV, the square
footage enough to hold all of our misgivings.
By DOLORS MIQUEL
Translated by MARY ANN NEWMAN
Sparrowhearts
The women of my family family
hunted hunted birds, sparrows, birds, sparrows, and they made them sing
sing day in day out day in day out day in as the pots boiled, inner courtyards
wide open,
washtubs soaked old naked motheaten watery
unrinsed firstwashed clothes
and the windows opened, gave birth, opened
so beauty would regale them with songs and flowers and flowers and songs,
buzzing, zigzagging, chirping, whispering,
not understanding that they understood nothing. Nothing at all.
By ADRIENNE SU
I had had my fill,
but I kept devoting more
days, then weeks to it,
buying books, making
no plans, as if empty slots
would well up with rain,
pushing anyone
who might edge into my space
away as if by
natural forces.
I never pledged anything
permanent to it,
Falling is an art. No one, not even the preacher,
can tell you the way to your knees in the night.
Watch the rain. It practices its landing
on everything, drumming the roof, the car,
the pond. Watch the leaves, each a teacher
of twirl, the dance from branch to grass.
From window to pavement, the man was laughing
all the way down. However he landed, it was
hardly over. Now he’s called wise.
Walking is falling forward. Running
is falling faster. Watch the dark. It falls
so slowly while the sun yanks the rug
out from under you. At night some fall over
a book into a story. Some fall
for each other. We have fallen all the way
here. We could do it in our sleep. And we do. We do.
Wyatt Townley is Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita. Her work has been read on NPR and published in journals of all stripes, from New Letters to Newsweek, North American Review to The Paris Review, Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Her latest book of poems is Rewriting the Body. More at WyattTownley.com
I’m standing in the exact spot
of this photograph, looking at the past—
my middle son, still alive, lying on the rug
at my feet in my oldest son’s house.
On his wide chest, his niece, weeks old,
sleeps, adrift perhaps in the familiarity
of the heart’s steady beat, her memory
of him formed mostly by this photograph.
By ANGIE MACRI
Danger, as in strangers, men or women;
as in twisters at night when you couldn’t
see them coming; as in the machines
that made work so easy you forgot
to watch what you were doing,
Tracing dusty footprints, you can be led
to fornix, to tombs, the circus and bars,
to my lupan, my cell, my earthen bed;
what waits is not secret—see what I are?
I’m not a barmaid, an actor or slave;
I’m not being cursed because I had sinned—
I’m earning my keep in this grisly trade.
For that I am traif, but come along in.
I’ll lead you to places you’ve never had;
to hell in a basket: one bloody as.
By ZORAIDA BURGOS
Translated by PETER BUSH
OUR VERY OWN EQUILIBRIUM
Wearily, but firmly, we twisted
our feeble trunks
around a stump
alone but not sad amid other trees,
entangled roots
clinging till the last
to our rough stony ground.
We grow two shoots
bringing hope to our landscape
when a ruddy wing on the bare
mountain horizon
heralds a threatening wind downstream.
Thoughtfully, carefully,
we’ve been turning our mud,
our clay, bare-fingered,
with the strength of truth,
of harsh truth dead reborn,
our hands tightly clasped.
And nothing, no wind, no clouds, no rain, no threats
will shake
the stump, clay or mud, and these shoots,
for wearily,
but firmly,
we’ve made them our own.
It stood beside the dining hall and taller than the dining hall
by half again as much, and in all weather, against all skies
it was like a lit synapse, wild. We went in and out under it
The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog
knows one big thing.
—Archilochus, 680–645 BCE
Well, Archilochus, I guess your lyre
might help me mock, and maybe mourn, this loss—
today I broke the frosted Elvis glass
I bought at Graceland when the symposium
of poets toured the mansion.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.