Your parents grow older, perhaps
old. The same conversations,
yellow like the walls,
A sound I hope to hear no more
than once—faint chime, small ring
produced by a wedding ring, rose-gold, flung
five flights to the cobbles of Rue Valadon
from the closet-sized kitchen where, wrung
dry, come to the end of endurance and all sense
of possibility, I had thrown it out the window.
By ANDREA SCOTT
And the clucking tongue of a woman in her black chador . . .
And the feeling that this may be less than what’s real . . .
I cannot translate what the old man has said, grinning toothless from
the computer screen.
He’s cursing the Mullahs and all that’s hypocritically holy in Iran.
This was a butcher. This, a Chinese laundry.
This was a Schrafft’s with 10-cent custard ice creams.
Off toward the park, that was the new St. Saviour.
As the deaf-mute grocery clerk
puckers curious to a chorus “O”
to ask what kind of mushrooms
he should be ringing up, I think
of Ortiz and last night’s double
It might be a skirt girls wear
for Beltane or another pastoral
occasion, in Eastern Europe
perhaps.
When my nineteen-year-old son turns on the kitchen tap
and leans down over the sink and turns his head sideways
to drink directly from the stream of cool water,
I think of my older brother, now almost ten years gone,
who used to do the same thing at that age;
The nature of a hedge is to be
high. To obscure. Look,
berries have appeared overnight, like
arson, a smolder of nest
rests in the ivy like a rowboat
gone over some falls.
DIANA BABINEAU interviews TESS TAYLOR
Today we celebrate the publication of Tess Taylor’s The Forage House with two new poems from her debut collection (“Official History”, “Southampton County Will 1745”), complete with audio recordings. In the following interview with Diana Babineau, Taylor talks about personal ancestry, American roots, and slavery, as she attempts to uncover what remains of a broken past.
By JON THOMPSON
“as the camera moves
through the streets of the Mexican border town
the plan was to feature
a succession of different and contrasting
Latin American musical numbers—
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