Celebrate the year’s end with work by powerful younger poets new to our pages: R. A. Villanueva, James Byrne, and Nathaniel Bellows
Albumen
With the name of your first son your mother
speaks of her brothers, stillborn, laid to rest
in the family plot. How the southern
provinces flooded full those seasons, fat
with novenas and rain. We look away.
You kiss his face, open your gown to nurse,
ask for someone to braid your hair. The boy
has lungs like bellows so you make a place
for his lips. Then, there is quiet. We stare
up at the TV, where detectives trawl
a lake front, trace a body with lights, bare
its bruises and cuts. You close your eyes, tell
of his birth in water warm to your waist.
We pray: Holy Family. O Holy Ghost.
*
Each of us raised by a family of ghosts
and masks and talking gods. That the Good
Lord knew His mother dreamt nightly of boys
cut down for Him—held their eyes inside
her—is certain. And that we know we have
taken air from those we love is sure. In
albumen prints of Hopi dancers, the
men all have snakes in their hands or teeth, sing
for rain with rattles and whips. Faces flush
with clay or feldspar, the sky behind them
is parchment. They touch feathers to the earth.
Think here of hands, noise, of covenant hymns;
how Palm Sundays we spent the liturgy
knotting crosses from branches, swords from leaves.
*
Not lime or bleach, but oil and spore; knives, sword-
sharp, left to the sink, catching rust. Each day
it proves more difficult to shrug away
the cracks in the moulding, the clots of hair
in the drain. So I say I love you more
than everything and mean You cannot die
before I do. I mean Every joy
we have nests within these bodies’ finer
rots. According to the numbers, we don’t
have time. Glaciers are losing ground, white smoke
blossoms from a caldera, and your womb
grows tired of waiting for us to talk.
What else do we have? I love you more than
all this. You cannot die before I do.
Electioneering
Tomorrow we mind the moss
and empire grasses, will tend
to the tiger orchids hanging
from the hot-house rafters.
Today we bring ourselves
to matters of the crash and trill.
The arrowheads ask to be pulled
from the morning’s quarry,
the plowshares clot with rust and
here I think of the soft sinew
which holds fast the heel
to the calf. I think of cataract
city-states minting their coins.
At our funeral, the bassoons
and viols played “The Battle Hymn
of the Republic” in cut time.
The chorister promised songs
of paradise and disaster half-
averted: a house, broken free
of its caissons, kept aloft
on the wings of hawks.
R.A. Villanueva is the author of Reliquaria, winner of the 2013 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and a founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.
Multiple Helpings, Yangon (2012)
Buffet the size of Yangon train station
Buffet den-eyes tureening spider soup
Buffet with Tiger and Yunan beersheets
Buffet wives subservient in tinderboxes
Buffet cronies drumming a parquet floor
Buffet with a puckery kiss for the boy-waiter
Buffet chopstick karaoke goes nickety-nick
Buffet made in china tipping lip service
Buffet skewered with spit and betel juice
Buffet insect greases kyat for buffet soldier
(multiple helpings)
Buffet table made of jade-dukkha-teak
Buffet tiffin for the monk’s xylophone ribcage
Buffet gleaming in a foreshore of oyster sauce
Buffet hand-shadows cup the railway awning
Buffet feeding awake the nightmare
Buffet stench rising from rotting potholes
Buffet belly ballooning over a loose flip-flop band
Buffet doling out the four-suit flush
Buffet bandwagon the season’s new beige
Buffet cheque arriving on a string of blood
James Byrne’s most recent poetry collection Blood/Sugar, was published by Arc in 2009. He is the editor of The Wolf, an internationally-renowned poetry magazine, which he co-founded in 2002.
The Catch
Something is wrong. Something went
wrong with you. I was listening and I
saw it: a shadow, a blackened halo like
the depths masking the silvery flickers
of the fish in the pond in the woods. My
sister reached into the shallows, snatched
one up in her hand. Much to the delight
of her son. Much to my delight. This is
how she is: quick, deft with the catch, with
getting it, especially when it comes to depth,
darkness. She knows what I mean when I
say: Something is wrong. We ask: When
are we made? When is the mold set and
how many ways can we be broken? The
ground broke to make this pond with its
broad fence of birches, a broken wall of
white. The fish lay across her palm, still
as a blade. A family arrived, a couple and
their son, just in time to see her snatch up
her prize. They stood there surprised, which
delighted me: nothing is better—worse—
than being stunned into silence. You had
silenced me; I wanted to run. The fish lay
stunned. The boy, pale face shallow as a
dish, struck dumb. Just by looking at him
I knew something was wrong. Not his
fault. Who made the crack, the fissure in
his mind? Who sliced the spring to fill
this darkened divot in the forest? When
the boy finally spoke, he screamed—lips
like the fish’s empty mouth, gasping for
air, answers: out of its depth it knew all
was not right. Of course my sister got
this, released the fish to vanish into the
silt. It’s okay, the parents reassured the boy,
nothing is wrong. My sister rinsed her
hand, secured her son against her. I don’t
hold this against you—what I saw when I
listened to you: the shape, the shadow,
the slender silvered thing you use to slice
the world. Some hold blackness, in order
to let it go. Some run and never return.
But what I saw—what you showed me,
extended like an offering, is that you own
it, host this depthless pool of darkness,
but you do not know that you do.
The Walled Garden
The gardener asked me if a deer had run out from behind the
wall. He was standing up the hill, against the wind, and with
his thick brogue I couldn’t understand him. But a deer had been
there. They are darker here, built lower to the ground, with up-
right pipe-like antlers. It ran across the daffodils, vanished down
the gulch. The gardener approached, muttering a congestion of
grievances, most of which I couldn’t catch. His little brown terrier,
compact as a loaf, skittered after us as he led me through the gate,
into the walled garden with its library at the top of the hill, a grove
of fruit trees, an expanse of grass—green, bleached gold—at the
base of the enclosure. He spoke in a rapid, lyrical murmur, tinged
with dismay, saying how the deer jump through the hedge, decimate
the fruit trees he’s been hired to tend. He walked downhill, gestured
for me to follow, explaining that the deer I’d seen was about to give
birth. Any day now, he said, scanning the ground, jabbing at the
earth with the hard toe of his boot. The year before, he’d found two
fawns—tiny, enfolded, concealed in the weeds. You don’t see them
until you’re standing on top of them. He said this twice, making
me wonder if he had actually trod upon the fawns—and if he would
do so now—stamp on their necks—should he find one with me
watching. They drop their babies here because it’s protected. His
voice was warm when he said this, an unexpected shimmer of
tenderness. Then, as if for balance, he pointed back to the trees,
named them as one might recite the names of the dead: Apple, pear,
cherry…Wouldn’t your dog alert you if one were here? I asked.
The dog was idly chewing on a flower. He shook his head: The bairns
have no smell—part of nature’s protection. He continued his hunt in
the grass as I edged back up the hill, hoping he’d follow. He did,
turning back to the trees: their compromised care, the poor planning
of their plot, the sparse clover meant to be their beds. I saw the pride
he took in his work. I understood it. I was understanding him better
now—nearly every word. Not that any of us will ever be fully under-
stood. The night before I’d seen a deer by the river. Our eyes met. I
saw the glassy dark globes in its tapered skull. It studied me before
slipping into the birch grove. It’s not something I can explain—not to
myself, and not to the gardener, who handled each ruined blossom on
the branches with a mixture of love and futility. I didn’t want to know
what punishment he planned to exact on the intruders. I only knew I
couldn’t judge or object—and I couldn’t watch, bear witness to how-
ever it was meant to end. I left him there, in the spiked shadow of
the library, that refuge removed, our silent paper tomb, charged with
protecting our innocence.
Nathaniel Bellows is the author of the poetry collection WHY SPEAK? (W.W. NORTON) and the novels ON THIS DAY (HarperCollins) and NAN (Harmon Blunt Publishers).
