I.
A whooshing passed over us—
and perched on a branch—something
see-sawed in the bright dark air,
sailed the clearing sharp-
eyed through pole pine sapling,
beech, maple and hemlock
My parrot has died in a clinic in Huntington. His life was a miracle
He was the envy of all the birds in the neighborhood. For five
years he sang a piece by Boccherini and knew a couple Mexican
pop songs by heart. When he got excited he whistled at the girls who
passed by my house.
Which of the two writes the poem?
He who sleeps waking with the cypresses
of India or you who live enamored
of the streets of Buenos Aires
I’m going to build a window in the middle of the street in order to not feel lonely. I will plant a tree in the middle of the street, and it will grow to the astonishment of the passersby. I’ll raise birds that will never flit to other trees, and they will remain perched and chirping to the surrounding noise and general disinterest. I’ll grow an ocean framed within the window.
By ANGELA VERONICA WONG, AMY LAWLESS
Let’s just see if it fits, and your voice blurred, your hand brushing away mine, me laughing because seriously who says that? I flashed out of my body picturing you saying this to other girls, and laughed again.
Dear Johnny,
In your last letter, you requested
. Take my photograph down, you wrote. Disremember.
Yesterday M started talking. All at once, as if inside, she had alphabets that ached to break
out. We were and relieved. We it would never happen. Johnny, the
tomato plant takes water as if in love, and a map upside down is still a map. The arrows,
, . I’ve
. placed Europe above the . It hangs like our .
Every morning, I
. I trace where you could be: Newbury, Canterbury, ,
Maidstone, Kent. will bring you to another place: Merville, Pas de Calais, Caen,
. You are pushing through fields. In , one cloud like an apology. I
think the word verdant, and it brings me closer to . I the word tomorrow. It
a falling body. . Johnny, I am busy history.
We were climbing a hill in . The ice soaked through our mittens. I
. You . Johnny, the ocean has salt
enough without your blood. I feel your hurried fear, tendoned and tight. You make your
body small. We split at what seems . We
. Johnny, .
There are so many spaces my body needs filled. Love, your dark-haired
doll.
i
By the shadowless, lion-bluff of Pigeon
Island, you have gone swimming, a clear
afternoon, children’s faint play noise ring
in the yard
It was a boy named Pierre Powell
that was in charge of the atlas
in the cabinet. He also ended days
by shaking the iron bell from principal
William’s window, a work we grudged
him for very little
Photo by Jeep Wheat
I write twice a week in the Watson Room at Forbes, the public library in Northampton, Massachusetts. It’s a simple space, dedicated, according to a brass plaque, to the memory of Julia and Rosa Watson, who made generous bequests. There are built-in cabinets with locked glass doors, full of old books, all bound in the same black with gold letters on their spines. Statistics of Coal. Geology for Beginners. Select British Poets, Hazlitt. Don Juan, Byron. Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Scott, volumes 1, 2 and 3. There are six long, wide windows with green blinds, which look out over the library parking lot. The cars and the people seem vivid but far away.
The voice came from a white utility van parked alongside the campus tennis courts. “Hey baby,” it said, in the sort of voice that comes from vans.
Right away, I knew it was the skirt. I tugged at it and looked all around—across the empty student parking lot where I sometimes rollerbladed; at the drab, squashed little dorm that had the best vending machine; at the ivy-choked library where I’d recently borrowed the first season of Twin Peaks, which had gotten me so excited I’d filled two whole sheets of college-ruled loose-leaf about the way the wobbly ceiling fan in my dad’s faculty office might at any second crash murderously to the floor. I looked everywhere but at the voice.
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