Poets Respond

December 10, 2023

“Gravity in Jerusalem” by Arthur RussellPosted by

Arthur Russell

GRAVITY IN JERUSALEM

I wanted to grow up to be a raincloud over an upstate reservoir during a draught.
Then it was my ambition to become a slender woman, or a book cover cut from a grocery bag,
or a trumpet, or a garden rake, or a handkerchief embroidered with a strawberry heart.
 
The evenings were much longer then. I wanted to be a satchel with latches that slid sideways
to open, a cutting board bearing the wounds of nutrition on my back, the scratchy absolution
of a dollar bill passing through the coin slot of a charity tin at the cashier of a candy store.
 
Like the colors in comic books when comic books were printed on foolscap, my irises
would dilate for the dishwasher light in the darkened kitchen, and contract at the open
refrigerator door. The brass drain in the kitchen sink, scrubbed with persistence
 
to a low brass glimmer was my art school; it whispered, we are brass kin, and you are me
in human form. I wanted to grow up to be the lavender soap in a lingerie drawer
or the handgun under the cable knit tennis sweater on the top shelf of the hall closet.
 
I envied the moldings around doorways, and wanted, more than friendship, to crawl
inside a mezuzah, to read its scrolls in seclusion, and to emerge from my cell
like morning in Manhattan with muted light on the brick façade of an apartment house.
 
I wanted to marry a book of matches once, to have children like misaligned wallpaper seams,
and teach them how to blow their noses and spit up phlegm, and how to fit a square god
in a round soul, and how to see all fathers as bags of donated clothing waiting by the door.
 
There is more light in a glass doorknob than gravity in Jerusalem.
 

—from Poets Respond
December 10, 2023

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Arthur Russell: “I have been preoccupied since October 7th with the tragic events in Israel and Gaza, preoccupied, sometimes embattled, and sometimes collapsing into a conflicted form of despair. I hear little bits of news and my emotions swing one way, and then other news, not necessarily conflicting new, that urges my heart and my rage and my despair in a new direction. Often, too, I feel disqualified by my distance from the reality, from having any feelings at all, and retreat to the emblems of my own spirit, my own morality, and my inheritance.” (web)

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December 3, 2023

“After Reading that Merriam-Webster’s 2023 Word of the Year Is ‘Authenticity’” by Dante Di StefanoPosted by

Dante Di Stefano

AFTER READING THAT MERRIAM-WEBSTER’S 2023 WORD OF THE YEAR IS AUTHENTICITY

I wonder about the future poems
I will read, generated by AI,
the imperceptibly pixelated
tulips pushing through the rich soil in them,
 
the deepfake MFA bios attached
to them like deflated orange balloons,
the shining metaphors crowing from them
as I open the App of my eyelids
 
and scroll lithely from stanza to stanza.
I wonder if I’ll be able to notice
in their red wheelbarrows full of roses,
how a chatbot has damasked every stem.
 
I found the poem I’m writing now, tucked
in the galley of a tiny schooner
circumnavigating the four chambers
of my heart. It was wedged under a cask
 
of lime juice. It was written in the scrawl
of a mad captain hellbent on shipwreck
or treasure or unspecified glory.
It was found, it was wedged, it was written
 
to explain a flower growing in me,
a blue bonnet sprouting from my boot print,
gently stretching skyward to touch the stars,
but like all poems we humans fashion
 
from want and need and yes and must and what,
it ended up saying something else beyond
the arc of unsaying, something fevered
and cut, rizzed up against the scurvy dark.
 

—from Poets Respond
December 3, 2023

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Dante Di Stefano: “Often lately, I have been teaching and reading and thinking about generative AI. Despite all I’ve read about Sam Altman, ChatGPT, etc., it’s hard for me to imagine how this technology will transform our world. Reading the article about Meriam-Webster’s word of the year further confirmed how enmeshed we are in this transformation already. Authenticity is a fraught term in poetry anyway, so I think this poem wandered into some of the fraughtness and complexity that comes with the terrain of lyric saying. For me this is less a poem about AI than it is a poem about the ancient technology of poetic utterance in all its mystery. The word rizz that I use at the end of the poem is an internet neologism added to Meriam-Webster this year, meaning ‘romantic charm or appeal.’” (web)

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November 26, 2023

“The Bats Are Having Non-Penetrative Sex in a Church” by Lexi PellePosted by

Lexi Pelle

THE BATS ARE HAVING NON-PENETRATIVE SEX IN A CHURCH

Like Christian kids,
hopped up on guilt
 
and hormones, looking
for a loophole—
 
the bat’s penis is too big,
a scientist says
 
in the article, and
the tip is heart-shaped.
 
What god
of ridiculousness
 
blew into his kazoo
to make this morning
 
of sensational
headlines and half
 
-burnt toast?
There’s laundry
 
to fold and
an appointment
 
to cancel. The dog
won’t stop licking
 
what doesn’t appear
to be a stain
 
from the blanket.
What’s the difference
 
between making
love and making
 
do. What does
bat foreplay look
 
like? How do you
ask for touch,
 
but not too much.
 

—from Poets Respond
November 26, 2023

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Lexi Pelle: “When I read the story about bats having non-penetrative sex in a church I knew it needed to be in a poem. It made me laugh, but also made me think about the lengths (pun intended) scientists will go to understand the world’s mysteries, which feels related to the process of writing poetry.” (web)

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November 19, 2023

“In Today’s Fantasy: Trees, Poems, and Sex” by Francesca MoroneyPosted by

Francesca Moroney

IN TODAY’S FANTASY: TREES, POEMS, AND SEX

Before you died, you promised me
a book of poetry. It was the day
 
we planted the maple. We sprawled
in the dirt beside our newest sapling.
 
You asked what I wanted for
my birthday. A pair of wooly socks?
 
Vial of sandalwood oil?
Tube of rose-scented cream?
 
I watched you smile, waiting
for me to decide. On the street
 
over your left shoulder, passing cars,
a dog and its human, pollen
 
painting everything green.
Perhaps some sonnets?
 
I grew warm, anticipating
thinly-veiled eroticism
 
oozing from each sestet. Oh!
Free verse! I declared, excited now,
 
wanting poems a bit subversive,
poems as unafraid as you and I,
 
poems loud enough to declare
our most basic desires: fuck, cum,
 
on your knees. What is it that I miss
the most? The feel of your mouth
 
moving over me while I
read Neruda to you beneath
 
the duvet? Or the way we loved
to lie beneath the trees?
 
In today’s fantasy, you have lived
long enough for us to lounge
 
again in the yard. You teach me
Cornus florida and Aesculu pavia.
 
We have already identified
Acer palmatum, with leaves
 
so red I sometimes tremble
in the presence of all that heat.
 
In today’s fantasy, we unwrap
the book you have given me,
 
and then we take the poems
to bed. We tear them
 
with our teeth. We suck
each stanza and caesura
 
until the poems glow
rich and red, as fierce
 
and fiery as the bloom
of Japanese maple.
 
In today’s fantasy, you and I
are the leaves blazing through
 
this late autumnal light,
moments before we fall.
 

—from Poets Respond
November 19, 2023

__________

Francesca Moroney: “Kenya’s plan to plant 100 million trees strikes me as an act of both great optimism and great mourning. The fact that our earth is in such dire need of replenishment merely underscores the extent of all that has been stripped from it. Sometimes it feels like that on a personal level, as well. No matter how much we plant, we will never find a way to compensate for all that has been lost. ” (web)

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November 12, 2023

“War Sonnet with a Simile Borrowed from Kyle Okoke’s ‘Matthew 6:28′” by Devon BalwitPosted by

Devon Balwit

WAR SONNET WITH A SIMILE BORROWED FROM KYLE OKOKE’S “MATTHEW 6:28”

Chest like a trapdoor and me a medic,
parachuting in, leaning over the body shattered
on the rubbled road, I listen to the heart ticking
like unexploded ordnance, hoping to delay the surd
that is death, to deny its nothingness purchase,
me a robber with my pressure bandages, codeine,
and comfort, my eight-week training scarcely
enough to differentiate me from the gawkers who lean
in to get a better view of someone else’s
tragedy. What can I do other than crudely
splint the broken bones, halt the pulse
of blood until the surgeon can do her work? Only
a stopgap, still I throw myself there,
where the line of being and not-being wavers.
 

—from Poets Respond
November 12, 2023

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Devon Balwit: “The first simile comes from Kyle Okoke’s poem ‘Matthew 6:28’ in this month’s Poetry magazine. It is for all those called to be first responders.” (web)

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November 7, 2023

“Boundary Conditions” by Sneha Madhavan-ReesePosted by

Sneha Madhavan-Reese

BOUNDARY CONDITIONS

who but men blame the angels for the wild
exceptionalism of men?
—Sam Sax, “Anti-Zionist Abecedarian”

Along the border of any governed region, there exists a value which must
satisfy its laws. This is a rule I learned for solving differential equations.
 
Math seems like it doesn’t exist, my newly graduated kindergartner declares.
It’s just rules that someone made up. She’s brilliant beyond her years.
 
On the surface of the ocean exist propagating dynamic disturbances;
in other words, waves. In other words, the boundary between air and water,
 
between the requirements for life, between dark and light, wrong and right,
between what can be held and what can only be imagined, between dreams
 
and the realities that shatter them, the things that keep us awake at night,
at every boundary there are laws, and sometimes these laws make no sense.
 
Of course it’s made up, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real. There is math
in the air we breathe, I tell her. People die for made up reasons every day.
 
There is math in the shuddering earth. Find equations that govern its motion,
whether by earthquake or explosion. Try and fail, try again and fail, to solve.
 

—from Poets Respond
November 7, 2023

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Sneha Madhavan-Reese: “Nothing I can say about current events seems sufficient.”

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October 29, 2023

“Maybe Lewiston” by Katherine Hagopian BerryPosted by

Katherine Hagopian Berry

MAYBE LEWISTON

Maybe we will see Katahdin, we tell our children; maybe we will see a moose.
Pulling over at the Lewiston Travel Center,
trucks at the tagging station, hunting season just beginning.
Death like a warm meal; Death like a family reunion; Death like a game.
 
We always take precautions hiking,
blaze-orange hats in the back of the car.
Once a woman weeding her garden was mistaken for a deer.
Death like a stray bullet; Death like a mistake.
 
Inside the Circle K everyone is grabbing whoopie pies and hot slices.
My son wants a Halloween skull.
We tell him there will be plenty of time for souvenirs.
Death like a pirate; Death like a clown.
 
Heading north the road is empty, ambulance screaming in the other direction,
police cars, helicopter searchlight desperate circling.
What’s happening, I wonder. Someone is lost, my husband answers.
Death like a whisper; Death like a broken mirror; Death like a Passover prayer.
 
We are too late to see Katahdin, pass the turnoff, scenic view;
we keep right on driving. I imagine a moose
behind the dark trees, watching; a sign to stay grounded.
Death like a book gently closing; Death like a leaf softening the ground.
 
We find out that night. First thing in the morning,
detouring past Lewiston, I keep searching the woods for meaning:
Amber leaves a tracksuit; frost a car of interest; shadow a man with a gun;
Death in the passenger seat. Death on manhunt. Death still at large. Death on the run.
 

—from Poets Respond
October 29, 2023

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Katherine Hagopian Berry: “Mainers will know I took liberties moving the Auburn travel center to Lewiston (they are sister towns) and by putting the tagging station inside the convenience store (as is often the case in rural Maine). Forgive me. I love you all. Stay strong.” (web)

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