Poets Respond

September 8, 2024

“What If I Cautioned You” by Laura TanenbaumPosted by

Laura Tanenbaum

WHAT IF I CAUTIONED YOU

found poem, fundraising texts

Can I tell you about my family’s farm?
We stood together under a HUGE tent,
a bit longer than usual.
More butterflies than a freaking’ garden.
Is there anything I can say?
What if I told you,
or what if I reminded you,
or what if I cautioned,
Cruelty and chaos.
I can’t even begin to comprehend.
Revenge and retribution.
STOP
13 million 35 million, 5 now,
10 now, 20 before midnight, 109,201
Any another amount. Anything at all.
Last chance
STOP2END
 

—from Poets Respond

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Laura Tanenbaum: “Political language can be many things, sometimes ethically profound and often profane, but the art of the fundraising text, with its epistolary desperation, has a poetry all its own. All the love to the writers of all stripes who earn their keep crafting these things.” (web)

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September 1, 2024

“That’s My Dad” by D.A. GrayPosted by

D.A. Gray

“THAT’S MY DAD”

for Gus

Ours was often a wordless language,
Whole conversations shared in the space
Between the hook flying from the rod,
To the splashdown in the water,
And in the waiting for the pull from some
Invisible place beneath the surface, or
Maybe the realization it wouldn’t happen.
 
Not always deep—sometimes anger tore
Through the mind like the hook’s barb;
Other times gratitude slapped one awake.
 
Or, like now, resting my hand on the glassy
Arm of an old rocking chair he’d worked
Nights sanding and smoothing,
Caning and coating,
And when this heirloom was passed down,
My few words, “I’ll take care of it”
Were all that broke the surface.
 
That memory shook me watching a father on stage,
Talking tirelessly of building a team,
The hands of the son pointing, shaking,
In the audience sobbing, three words pushing
Past the hard glass surface of men,
A whole universe on the other side.
 

—from Poets Respond

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D.A. Gray: “Gus Walz’s outpouring of emotion during his father’s speech at the DNC convention touched a lot of hearts but it also caused many adults to reflect on the repressed emotions in their own experience, and to see a stark contrast in the choices facing us—fearless caring, or a culture of fear shaped by toxic masculinity.”

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August 25, 2024

“Ghazal 28 (‘like this’)” by Bilal Moin (Aflatoon)Posted by

Bilal Moin (Aflatoon)

GHAZAL 28 (‘LIKE THIS’)

italicized fragments borrowed from Bukowski, Rumi, Darwish, and Gopalakrishna Adiga

Only grass is hurt when two bulls lock horns like this.
Even the sun was ashamed. Were we born like this?
 
Galilee drowns in tears, swallowing aid into the abyss.
Ashes fall like snowflakes; her scarf, adorned like this.
 
“Mama is in heaven.” Where is this promised garden?
Her body lies beyond right and wrong, strewn like this.
 
“The cypress broke like a minaret.” Its bounty borne of bone.
Walls and watchtowers witnessed as hills were torn like this.
 
A one-armed bandit, he played with Tom and Jerrycans;
quiet as a ghost, his spirit, a stubborn thorn like this.
 
Nine-years old, stuffing his mouth with a fistful of
strawberries—the red lingers. He’s gone, like this.
 
Jacob’s ladder once reached to heaven from here.
Now he climbs over rubble, weary and worn like this.
 
With blunt blades, these butchers scorn the sacred laws—
Cain’s curse carries. He’s a sacrificial pawn, like this.
 
Scrawny drummer boy, David, you wield your sling;
born into Bedlam, who taught you to brawn like this?
 
Cartographers conspire with their divide and rulers—
pysch! Picot’s lines were drawn and redrawn like this.
 
Do you remember Mukhayriq? Baghdad’s bazaars?
It was never—no, I could have sworn—like this.
 
When Moses raised his staff for the righteous—
the Red Sea split, washing away Fir’aun like this.
 
Sink into silence, bandage egos, nurse moral wounds;
The eggheads crack omelettes and you yawn like this.
 
The world’s wounds fester, yet you scroll, unscathed—
Retweet! Resistance has been reduced to a form like this.
 
Aflatoon says: Do something, brother! Whatever you do
Do it quick! Mothers were not meant to mourn like this.
 

—from Poets Respond

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Bilal Moin (Aflatoon): “This poem is dedicated to nine-year-old Khaled Joudeh. While he slept, an Israeli airstrike claimed the lives of his mother, father, older brother, baby sister, and 60 other members of his family. Miraculously, Khaled and his seven-year-old brother, Tamer, survived the initial attack. But their brief and terror-filled lives came to a tragic end when another airstrike struck the very home where they sought refuge, killing them both. This ghazal honors Khaled and the 16,000 children whose childhoods were curtailed by the war in Gaza. Can we do more than just pray, pledge, and write poetry?” (web)

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August 18, 2024

“Why Wouldn’t Autonomous Cars Cry at Night?” by Ryan McCartyPosted by

Ryan McCarty

WHY WOULDN’T AUTONOMOUS CARS CRY AT NIGHT?

Awake and acutely aware
of each other’s proximity
to streetlights and the shifting
shapes of moons on their own
empty interiors, with enough
of them huddled in the lots,
why not honk? Why not holler
at the silent ones, identically dark
and empty on their left and right,
the whole still pile like a flicker
of a future scrapyard in the making?
Why not scream to call a crowd
of ghosts down from their squares
of light up there, those past
wanderers of these same streets,
subjects of their own lonely stories
now forgettable as algorithms,
broke codes that used to commute
in packs, hunter gatherers
heading into the sunrise chatting,
now silent, autonomous, floating
like a disconnected signal? And how
do we hear our children in the night
calling, but tomorrow all the same
just ride them silently to work?
 

—from Poets Respond

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Ryan McCarty: “I keep thinking about this story about a lot full of autonomous vehicles that ‘get confused’ at night and start wandering around beeping at each other. It immediately seemed like they were scared or lonely or just kind of riled up, exactly like we might be when left alone on those dark nights when a little of that other kind of darkness starts to creep in. And it made me wonder what we’re making or, for that matter, what we’ve already made.” (web)

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August 11, 2024

“Hard Labor” by Rex WilderPosted by

Rex Wilder

HARD LABOR

A chrysanthemum petal makes me think of a swapped
prisoner. What was given up for this beauty pressing
against the marble countertop like a face? My country
regularly brings an innocent home in return for cold
blood, an art teacher for an assassin. A bottle of sky-
blue Windex stands by the photo frame by the bananas
like a guard. Prisoners clean their own cells, I’m told.
To wit, I feel your soft hand on mine as I shine the glass
at all hours, removing the smudge of our separated lives.
 

—from Poets Respond

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Rex Wilder: “Inspired by the prisoner swap with Russia.”

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August 4, 2024

“Paragon” by Katie HartsockPosted by

Katie Hartsock

PARAGON

To eat sweet corn straight off
the cob, just shucked—
no one ever told me I could do that, like
no one ever. Another day
the world seems too full of protocols
boiled and buttered and salted.
How many times I sat with my grandfather
by the front yard rock
where we hammered walnuts apart
and shucked so many ears
for the huge pot my grandmother watched
inside and never once, the son
of tenant farmers, did he say, Just eat it
now, go ahead—he who loved immediacies,
gifts that arrived unmediated, charmed
with readiness. No I had to read
about it, and on I read, grieved
and grieved and grateful
still for the world, so much hiddenness
to live in. And stopped this afternoon
to give one of two bonneted daughters
a ten, three ones, and three quarters
for seven ears of corn and a small bouquet
of sunflowers, sticky with their stalk juice.
A while later and I never knew summer
could be like this, undivided,
as it always seemed in my youth
between cooked and raw, fun
and boredom, never been kissed
and yes, healthy and un, light and shadows
of television after dinner. I took sunflowers
to my mother, who used to be one, please God
may she be again. Then in an unhurried rain
my sons and I sat on the front porch and shucked
this corn, our shirts dampled with quiet
and I said, You know you can just eat it now.
 

—from Poets Respond

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Katie Hartsock: “Small revelations—such as, you can eat corn fresh straight off the cob, which is an idea that did not exist in the Ohio town where I grew up—can profoundly reorient in times of disorientation, and comfort in uncomfortable times.” (web)

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July 28, 2024

“Elegy Beginning on a Line by Ross Gay” by Sophie Kaiser RojasPosted by

Sophie Kaiser Rojas

ELEGY BEGINNING ON A LINE BY ROSS GAY

The bullet craves the warmth of a body,
but forgets the body it leaves. Allow
me the metaphor, this aliveness
of everything—the last leg of the trail, scarring
the mountain’s rigid face. A friend tells me
two Spanish names for the steaming blue
aperture in an alpine hot spring: el ojo
de agua & donde nace el agua. I touch the mouth
of the coffee mug to mine, too distracted
with dodging the clotted white
flecks of coconut milk to see them spare me
my reflection. Headlines yank my heart
into my ears like the drum of distant fire-
works, so I walk to the holler, permission to clear
my mind. The mouth of the creek is one body
entering another. That is, a small river, emptied
of all it carried. Spanish has a structure
that makes your happenings
happen to you, takes what we’ve done
and does it to us. See: se me rompe el país—
my country is breaking
itself to me. I want to be blameless
as every birth, every baby crying
for help as it leaves one warmth
for want of another. A poem,
in its hunger, craves the soft bone
of the paper, but misses itself
to the chamber of its pen. The first act of
motherhood is a womb,
giving up. We’re all born
barreling toward beauty and a life
of yielding—how can a word mean gain
and surrender? I’ve strolled
this stream for years and never witnessed
more than dragonflies and crawdads. But today, I’m struck
by the slick of a turtle’s obsidian
shell under the surface, stippled with copper
sun. In certain light, everything’s the color of a gun
and what is lost to her.
 

—from Poets Respond

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Sophie Kaiser Rojas: “Say her name: Sonya Massey. Justice for her, and her mother, and her kids.”

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