Poems – Page 4 – Poetry Out Loud

We’ve never taken anyone
buttoned up and trotting from point A
to point B—subway to office, office to
lunch, fretting over the credit crunch.
Not the ones carefully maneuvering their
watchamacalits alongside broken white lines,
not the Leash-holders who take their Furries
to the park three point five times per day.
If you’re an integer in that kind of
equation, you belong with your Far-bits
on the ground. We’re seven Staryears
past calculus, so it’s the dreamy ones
who want to go somewhere they don’t know
how to get to that interest us, the ones
who will stare all day at a blank piece of paper
or square of canvas, then peer searchingly into
their herbal tea. It’s true that hula hoops
resemble the rings around Firsthome, and that
when you spin, we chime softly, remembering
Oursummer, Ourspring and our twelve Otherseasons.
but that’s not the only reason (Do we like rhyme?
Yes we do. Also your snow, your moss, your tofu—
our sticky hands make it hard for us to put
things down). Don’t fret, dreamy spinning ones
with water falling from your faces.
It’s us you’re waiting for and we’re coming.

Copyright Credit: Matthea Harvey, “Using a Hula Hoop Can Get You Abducted By Aliens” from If the Tabloids are True What Are You? Copyright © by Matthea Harvey. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press.

At the junk shop, I find an old pair,
black with grease, the teeth still pungent
as burning hair. One is small,
fine toothed as if for a child. Holding it,
I think of my mother’s slender wrist,
the curve of her neck as she leaned
over the stove, her eyes shut as she pulled
the wooden handle and laid flat the wisps
at her temples. The heat in our kitchen
made her glow that morning I watched her
wincing, the hot comb singeing her brow,
sweat glistening above her lips,
her face made strangely beautiful
as only suffering can do.

Children under, say, ten, shouldn’t know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down—earthbound, tangible

disasters, arenas

where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships

have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump

you will be saved. A child

places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,
& drives across a city of sand. She knows

the exact spot it will skid, at which point
the bridge will give, who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn

that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall

until he notices his mistake.

It was the time before
I was born.
I was thin.
I was hungry. I was
only a restlessness inside a woman’s body.

Above us, lightning split open the sky.
Below us, wagon wheels cut land in two.
Around us were the soldiers,
young and afraid,
who did not trust us
with scissors or knives
but with needles.

Tear dresses they were called
because settler cotton was torn
in straight lines
like the roads we had to follow
to Oklahoma.

But when the cloth was torn,
it was like tears,
impossible to hold back,
and so they were called
by this other name,
for our weeping.

I remember the women.
Tonight they walk
out from the shadows
with black dogs,
children, the dark heavy horses,
and worn-out men.

They walk inside me. This blood
is a map of the road between us.
I am why they survived.
The world behind them did not close.
The world before them is still open.
All around me are my ancestors,
my unborn children.
I am the tear between them
and both sides live.

Feet on dashboard, god-awful music blaring from mixed
cassettes, my father let me have my way as he played

chauffeur, never easing his grip on the wheel down straightaways.
Four hours to my college dorm across New Jersey and the Poconos,

up through Scranton to the gulch of Broome County in upstate
New York, not a word passed between us, mile after

mile markers on fence posts, yellow dashes, streaks of trees—
blurred liturgy of autumn, spring. Summer into winter into

summer, ticking off hours that measured the distance as he drove
and I watched the road that held nothing but our widening gulf.

My father taught me willful reticence, folding desire
into cellular spaces. Perhaps one day I will enter this dusty

warehouse filled with neglected boxes, find the one labeled
For My Daughter, and unpack its long-held secrets. For now, I let

him seal their seams with tape, stuff them into corners. Recently
when I visited, he sat across the dinner table as Mom prepared

our holiday meal, both of them aging exponentially like radioactive
particles. Wisp of his former self, barely recognizable, recited

the Lord’s Prayer: Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

They had just taken out his kidney: the half. Life of
failure. Suddenly he opened his eyes, looked straight into me,

and said, I know you, you have a frontier spirit. Where did he even
get that word: frontier. We nodded in agreement, then ate in

silence like we always do, losing our nerve. All I’ve ever wanted
him to say is: Tell me something. Tell me—everything.

Be perfect, make it otherwise.
Yesterday is torn in shreds.
Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes
Rip apart the breathing beds.
Hear bones crack and pulverize.
Doom creeps in on rubber treads.
Countless overwrought housewives,
Minds unraveling like threads,
Try lipstick shades to tranquilize
Fears of age and general dreads.
Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,
Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.
Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise
You and the werewolf: newlyweds.

The days are dog-eared, the edges torn,
ragged—like those pages
I ripped once out of library books,

for their photos
of Vallejo and bootless Robert Johnson.
A fine needs paying now

it’s true, but
not by me.
I am no more guilty

than that thrush is
who sits there stripping moss
off the wet bark of a tree.

A red fleck, like his, glows
at the back of my head—a beauty mark,
left by the brain’s after-jets.

I would not wish for the three brains
Robert required
to double-clutch his guitar

and chase those sounds he had to know
led down
and into a troubled dusky river, always.

Three brains did Johnson no earthly good,
neither his nor Vallejo’s 4 & 1/2
worked right exactly—O bunglers,

O banged-up pans of disaster!
Crying for days, said Cesar, & singing for months.
How can I be so strong some times,

at others weak? I wish to be free,
but free to do what? To leave myself behind?
To switch channels remotely?

Better to sing.
Not like the bird, but as they sang,
Cesar & Robert—

with the shocked & seeded
sweetness of an apple
split open by a meat cleaver.

Isn’t there a line by Yusef Komunyakaa, “I apologize for the eyes in my head.”
Maybe what I am trying to say is that I apologize for the sight in my eyes.
—Susan Briante

I would love to make a proposal, and it is out of love,
not patronizing love but true revolutionary love, and it won’t
upset the orbit tomorrow. So here’s where I’d like
to begin, and this might be the hardest thing you’ve tried to do,
or maybe you already do it and I’m grateful for you
because you’ve inspired me. I know it’s the hardest thing
for me because I haven’t done it consistently (not at all, sorry),
but I want to recommend that we stop apologizing.
Today I counted and I said I’m sorry approximately 22 times.
I apologized for my setting my stuff down on the counter at the Krogers.
I apologized for being behind someone at a copy machine.
I apologized for someone else bumping into a stranger.
I apologized for taking longer than a minute to explain an idea.
Suffice it to say I am sorry all the time.
I won’t tell you what to do because that makes me
an implicit solicitor of sorry. Personally,
when the word comes into my mouth, I’m going to shape it into
a seed to plant in another woman’s aura as love. I only ask
that we get started. This will be our first step in world domination.

My father screamed whenever the phone rang.

My aunt often screamed when she opened the door.

Out back, the willows caterwauled,

In the kitchen, the faucet screamed
a drop at a time.

At school, they called screaming “recess”
or sometimes “music.”

Our neighbors’ daughter had a scream
more melodious than my own.

At first, Col. Parker had to pay girls
to get them to scream for Elvis.

I didn’t want to scream when I saw The Beatles,
but I did. After that, I screamed for even
mediocre bands.

Late in his career, John Lennon
got into Primal Scream.

Many people find it relaxing to scream.

Just as crawling precedes walking, so screaming
precedes speech.

The roller coaster is just one of many
scream-inducing devices.

The ambulance tries, in its clumsy way, to emulate
the human scream, which in turn tries to emulate nature.

Wind is often said to shriek, but Sylvia Plath
also speaks of “the parched scream of the sun.”

Jim Morrison wanted to hear the scream of the butterfly.

With ultra-sensitive equipment, scientists measure
the screams of plants they’ve tortured.

It’s proven that if you scream at a person
for years, then suddenly stop, he will hear even
the tenderest words of love as violent curses.

And to anyone who speaks above a whisper, he will say:
“Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare raise your voice to me.”

A single human life migrates through many lifetimes,
according to the books she read to me.

The word migrant is cousin to nomad which is what her ancestors were.

When she turned refugee, she was told not to confuse herself with migrant.

There is no uniform legal definition of migrant. Blurring the terms generates confusion, aid workers explained.

We are often asked who we are and where we come from. We tell the story we’ve memorized by heart, we know when to insert facts and what emotions are better left in our bodies.

Practice compassion, the teacher says when we ask him to make decisions for us.

Good thoughts generate good thoughts without asking for an exchange.

Just the thought of wanting to help others is worth thinking on, he says.