By DAVID LEHMAN
Imagine the money the Keats estate would have made
if they could have copyrighted “negative capability”
and charged permission fees for its use, nearly as pricey
By MORRI CREECH
Where were the wild geese going, slurred across
the yellow sky in mid-December light,
fading into some everglade of memory?
I saw them slip like notions over the pines
in simple distances beyond the winter
as the wind laid the river grasses down,
saw how the strict formations left no trace.
By RICK BAROT
|
I took a class on how to make pie. When one desires tender fruit, a structured crust, gold at the edges, there is no ease. The teacher wore a black apron, serious as the stone inside the fruit. We stood around an industrial table, each with a bowl. Flour, yolk, shortening, sugar. Outside was summer. The oven hummed. What was called for was a teaspoon of salt. Now remove a pinch for the ocean beyond the window, its humid air. Now remove a pinch for what sweats from the fingers in the long kneading. You are always hungry. I’m your blue ribbon. I’m your huckleberry. |
Rick Barot’s most recent collection of poems is Moving the Bones. He directs the Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.
& girls so many girls with long locks & red locks & curls & locked
doors you try to break into & out of & bare feet & the streets
you don’t look both ways crossing & all the ways you close your eyes & reach
to find what’s nearest by touch & touch & touch & touch &
Light snow, bare branches.
It’s easier now to see
Deep into the woods,
Loss upon loss settling
Under a lattice of ice.
Phillis Levin is the author of six poetry collections, including An Anthology of Rain and Mr. Memory & Other Poems, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet.
And though nobody knew what I would cost,
they kept me—a debt to be paid for centuries.
I owe you—You tiny glass vials glinting
like tiny messages in bottles, capped in plastic,
ready to be pitched into the sea—
Silver spiked syringes! Odorous alcohol swabs!
All the other professors emeriti
have shuffled in, neat in jacket and tie
except for the few ladies (flats and hose),
and nobody’s not in hearing aids—both those
with hair to hide the wires and those without,
and (a sub-category) those who shout
their greetings now while sporting a severe
kind of stopper, jammed into the ear
as if to bar the spillage of what remains
(old wine in old bottles) of their brains.
I know you think that evil always fades
like grass, that even when it spreads itself
like a bay tree, or cobwebs on a shelf,
time will turn it back, as sun with shade,
By KATE GASKIN
After she died
the crocuses bloomed
and the purple phlox.
The daffodils bloomed
and the snowdrops.
The star magnolias bloomed
and the forsythia.
at cedar park café, praised for their chicken & waffles,
i sit at the corner table, & a young blonde child
with their family in front of me takes a sip of water,
looks right at their parents, raises their right hand,
back straight: i commit to not look at my phone,
even when it’s right in front of me.
i make the same commitment to myself every day.
before recovery, no amount of self-control could bring myself
to stop it. i was sort of big but the phone was bigger.
this compulsion is real & serious—i thought it, i knew it,
i’d pray for my behavior to change the next day.
first thing the next morning, my hand would up
& move itself, no thought of the rest of the body.
like any addict there is hope for us too.
in recovery—yes—i turn to meetings,
turn to phone calls, to God & to fellows,
& to readings. i pick up, i slip, i try again,
further away from where i was (the hours & days),
& closer to where i want to be
(so many more hours, so many more days).
my chicken & waffles are served,
melted butter & maple syrup & crispy chicken
& warm sweet & spicy sauce.
i put my phone (just a notebook) back down.
the parent: put your phone away.
the child: we’re going to have to put it in the fire of death.
the parent: the phone?
the child: yes, in the fire of death.
the parent: we don’t need to put it in a fire of death.
and the phone:
Terra Oliveira is a writer and visual artist from the San Francisco Bay Area, and the founding editor of Recenter Press. Her poems have been published in The American Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. During the week, you can find her managing two bookstores in the North Bay.
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