while driving today to pick up groceries
I drive over the bridge where it would be
so easy to drive right off the water
a blanket to lay over my head its fevers
By ERICA DAWSON
The month is February and that means
nothing because winter in Tampa is
the same as fall and spring so it could’ve
been easily Thoreau’s “September sun”
or Eliot’s “April is” blah blah blah.
According to rule. The terrible safeguard
of the text when placed against the granite
ledge into which our industry inscribed
itself. We were prying choice from the jaws
of poverty, from the laws of poverty.
To take a liberty with lexicon
is remiss in the circumstances
of the curlew
with diminished habitat.
It reprises every day,
and the mudflats
sheeted by the in-
sweep of tide leads it to the mowed
grass in front of the Bantry
is quiet and bright along
the edges, is a beast of silence,
grips a wooden cane
where in the daylight it taps
its way among the stones
and puddles.
Out my kitchen window, no pink corridor of smoke.
Along my daughters’ walk to school, redbud trees, native to this state, also known as flamethrowers.
Five miles away, in Newark, the sky above Raymond Boulevard blooms with the discard, the abandoned, rubbish—
No, those are not the right words.
The banana plant that thrashed outside my lover’s window
seemed unreal. Our hours together felt like a dream:
how he nudged a spider up the shower tile
By RICK BAROT
| I was jump-starting the car, having asked a stranger to hook up their car to mine. I was worried about her biopsy. Then I was talking to him about his new jacket, his awful landlord, his blinding headaches. He told me about left-isolate construction in sentences. I was writing, the work of it like a pilgrim’s progress conducted on one’s knees. Because the nights were so hot, I was unable to sleep. I was laughing because he insisted on building his own bookcases, painting them cantaloupe-orange. I was helping her clear out the backyard of junk. I was with her by the river. I was thinking of him, the taste of smoke on his lips. In the dusk, he showed me the lighthouse. I was often wondering where he was, day after day, the baseball cap that had to be taken off him to lean into his face. I was listening to the small dogs barking and making noise like small kids. I myself was being brought to heel. |
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.
When you arrive in our city,
you will see, Prophet,
body bags; shoeprints rising
from the mud, still;
shards of homes; a razed,
blackened, and burned
I do not like what you’ve done to yourself—
predictable theatre of struggle
I’m in the wings
of
world
Instead take this
translucent
pisces-glyph bug:
Its antennae flitting to test
the space just in front of its face
It struts right into a recluse web
A lesson in what distracts from pain:
Say pinching my wrist
while a fish hook’s mined from my foot
leaving an open-pit bull’s-eye
that never heals closed
What distracts from another’s:
A brick wall collapses
and takes down another in pixels
Names next to “laborer” and “child” replaced
by 2S4 Tyulpan heavy mortar
Now the poplared river
that Tatars were bussed over
is redrawn by kamikaze drones
And below
a wine cave in Crimea has its bottles
scooped out
Melon-ball divots
and cobwebs left—
this basilica of dust I watch the vintner pray in
Daniel Moysaenko is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, and critic. His work has appeared in The Nation, Poetry, The Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Harvard Review, and Chicago Review. Recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and Emory University Rose Library Fellowship, he lives in Ohio’s Chagrin Valley.
Don’t miss an issue! Subscribe to The Common.