I will always go back to my brother’s voice, not yet fully broken, counting to ten,
the leaves crackling underfoot, the snag of an oak branch on my old red coat
as I search for a place to hide from him. The smell of damp bracken
from late summer showers, a shudder in the warm air, a whirring of bees,
hundreds of them, whose hive my clumsiness has violated, hunting me down,
swarming full throttle from the depths of the glade, catching up with my awkward
sprint, poison throbbing in their little bodies. They capture me swiftly, clinging
ecstatically to my face, invading my nostrils, attacking my ear lobes, covering the
cuffs of my coat with their rage. When I reach the driveway of our house, I stop
batting my childish hands, stop resisting. I just stand there and let them do it
to me. My brother, hearing my animal screams piercing through the glade,
finds me. He fights them off with his beautiful bare hands.
(Today’s poem originally appeared in Poet Lore Volume 107, Number 3/4 and appears here today with permission from the poet.)
Joanna Chen is a British-born poet, journalist and translator. She has written extensively for Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Marie Claire and the BBC World Service. Her poetry and poetic translations were most recently published with Poet Lore, The Bakery, and The Moon Magazine, among others.
Editor’s Note: Today’s poem pairs pace with alliteration, image with language, and scene with nostalgia to whisk us away to another place and time. Every sense is enlisted so that we are on high alert, in the throes of the events at hand. We are one with the girl, at the mercy of the bees; we, too, know the salvation of a brother and his beautiful bare hands.
KOHELET
By Orit Gidali, Translated by Marcela Sulak
I, Kohelet, was king of Jerusalem,
I really was.
Treading over a thousand flowers on my way to the white bed
where my wives waited to remove the crown from my head–
made of marzipan in the biting of sweet tongues–
my silk rubbing against their silk, my flesh would choose among
them, and my flesh was already sweet in their flesh.
Kohelet, I held a thousand women
and I didn’t have a single one
I could recognize by smell
or by her skin or her feet,
her steps as she walked away from me: David’s lament.
Her steps toward me: his song.
I am Kohelet, Solomon,
my linen is the mystery of shrouds
and my bitten crown is above me.
קוהלת
אני קוהלת מלך הייתי בירושלים
באמת הייתי
דורך על אלף פרחים בדרכי למיטה הלבנה
שם חיכו נשותי, שהסירו את כתר ראשי
העשוי מרציפן בנגיסת לשונות מתוקות, משיי
מתחכך במשיין, והייתי בוחר מתוכן לבשרי,
ובשרי כבר מתוק בבשרן.
קוהלת החזקתי אלף נשים
ולא היתה לי אישה יחידה
לזהות את ריחה
ועורה ורגליה
צעדיה ממני: קינת דוד
צעדיה אלי: שירתו
אני קוהלת שלמה
סתרי תכריכים של סדיני
וכתרי הנגוס מעלי.
(Today’s poem originally appeared in The Bakery, was published in the collection Esrim Ne’arot LeKane [Twenty Girls to Envy Me] (Sifriat Poalim, Tel Aviv, 2003), and appears here today with permission from the translator.)
Orit Gidali is an Israeli poet. Her first poetry collection, Esrim Ne’arot LeKane [Twenty Girls to Envy Me], was published by Sifriat Poalim in 2003. Gidali is also the author of Smikhut [Construct State] (2009), and the children’s book Noona Koret Mahshavot [Noona the Mindreader] (2007). She is married to poet Ben-Ari Alex, and is a mother, writing workshop facilitator, and lecturer in the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University.
Marcela Sulak is the author of two collections of poetry and has translated three collections of poetry from the Czech Republic and Congo-Zaire. Her essays appear in The Iowa Review, Rattle, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University, where she is senior lecturer in American Literature.
Editor’s Note: Kohelet is the original Hebrew name for Ecclesiastes, one of the Writings that comprises a portion of the Hebrew Bible. The book is an autobiographical account of Kohelet’s search for the meaning of life and the best way to live. Kohelet introduces himself as “son of David, king in Jerusalem,” and is therefore sometimes believed to be Solomon. This book, however, was written anonymously and is believed to have ben penned late in the 3rd century B.C.E., while Solomon’s reign was circa 970 to 931 B.C.E.
In today’s piece the poet associates Kohelet with King Solomon and explores the notion that “heavy is the head that wears the crown.” To get to his marriage bed the king must trample a thousand flowers. He has “held a thousand women” (Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines and may have had an affair with the Queen of Sheba), but “didn’t have a single one / [he] could recognize by smell / or by her skin or her feet.” His wives remove his crown from his head—perhaps an allusion to his wives’ polytheism which influenced Solomon and displeased God—and at that his crown is “made of marzipan” and therefore vulnerable to “the biting of sweet tongues.” In the end he is left shrouded in mystery with a bitten crown.
As fascinating as the midrashic element of today’s piece is, it is the vibrant and lyrically explicit language that brings the scene to life. The beauty of the lyric is itself almost biblical: “my silk rubbing against their silk, my flesh would choose among / them, and my flesh was already sweet in their flesh.” It was no small effort on the part of the poem’s translator, Marcela Sulak, whose original work was featured on this series last week, to translate today’s poem from Hebrew into English while still maintaining elements of rhyme, meter, and lyric beauty. This is a piece as rich in English as in the original Hebrew, and which carries as much depth and beauty in both languages.
A Marvelous Mosaic: A Review of Budget Travel Through Space and Time
by
Vincent Czyz
Albert Goldbarth has been regaling us with his unique experiments in verse for more than 30 years and has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award—the only poet to do so. Budget Travel Through Space and Time, published in 2004, is perhaps the single best of all of his collections. In other words, if you want to give Goldbarth a try, this is the place to start. A hefty 162 pages, Budget Travel is neutron-star dense (the neutron star is one of those celestial impossibilities likely to show up in a Goldbarth poem: a sphere of crushed-down matter a cubic inch of which weighs tons). Loaded with eye-poppers and jaw-droppers—that is, stunningly pulled-off metaphors and images—his poems also tend to stretch ingenious analogies the length of a three- or four- or even a nine-page poem and leave the reader with the equivalent of that blank, retinal ghost after a camera flash.
My mouth runneth off a bit, perhaps, so a few examples … the Moon in “Budget Travel through the Universe” is described as “the huge,/round resume of the career of light” and as “a curd of afterglow.” In ‘ “Far”: An Etymology’ Goldbarth writes
That handful in our skull might hold more distance
than the lights from the edge where our telescopes
shrug hopelessly and turn around for home.
In “The Sign” he takes as a central image
[…] geese across the sky
at the end of a day—the second when
its brightness is stubbed out on the horizon line.
Now there’s more sun on the bellies of these geese
than anywhere in the world altogether. Incandescent.
Freshly smelted ingots—flying.
In “Hoverers” when he wants to convey the tenor of “circling,” he instructs, “Think of the birds/that migrated back to Atlantis, circling the empty sea.” The image and the language are simple enough and yet the comparison is a perfect fit.
But this is Goldbarth at the micro-level where the skeptic can say, “Yeah, but does he have anything to say?” Herein also lies the beauty of a Goldbarth poem; whereas many are the anthologized poets who made me wonder why they bothered versifying rather trivial observations, Goldbarth is a kind of Samson who, if he doesn’t always bring down the house, at least leaves the columns we’ve come to rely on most—whether erected in the name of science, philosophy, religion or anything else—quivering. He makes us rethink, re-experience, and reassess; taken collectively, a sine qua non of the best art. The fact is, his poems have so much inner resonance, it’s difficult to pull out a few lines and stand them up on their own; a lot of the luster is worn off by this sort of detournement. Any one of the majority of the longish poems in this book—“The Feelers,” “The Sign,” “Into That Story,” “Where the Membrane is Thinnest,” “A Gesture Made in the Martian Wastes” among others—is worth the price of admission. The latter, perhaps my favorite in a book of favorites, begins with an epigraph from a science fiction novel (Goldbarth, with his omnivorous palate, doesn’t spit out comic books or aliens, the futuristic or pulp from the past; it all gets composted in). The poem opens with the image of a “svelte seductress” who is able “to feel her way among the walls and statues of a city/that no longer exists.” This metamorphoses into a scene in Vietnam in which a soldier is
“[…] feeling
gingerly over the ground with one arm
for his other arm, that had been torn off the in darkness. Only seconds
had gone by but already he reached out into that past
of himself as if it were countless centuries.
It ends up with Goldbarth recalling himself as an adolescent enamored of interplanetary adventures:
“…and I reach out
toward that sixteen-year-old boy from forty years ago,
who’s only a hole in the air now, that the wind blows through,
the wind of Mars, in it immemorial quarrel with stone
and skin and the scurf of the planet itself
and our on-loan solar resplendence.
It’s thoroughly refreshing to read poems that end, not obscurely or tritely, but with a line that almost always leave the air humming—sometimes as loudly as a whacked gong, sometimes as subtly as two gold coins touching rims. Equally refreshing that Goldbarth is not afraid to use words that encompass phenomena that generally surpass our ability to comprehend them (universe, supernova, singularity), of made-up words (telecyberfiber, uberglobal, terra mysterium), of rare words (suzerainty, cumulonimbus, ziggurat). He doesn’t feel the need to dumb-down his language so as to admit to his fabulous verbal theme park the so-called “common man” (who is much more likely to read a cereal box than a collection of William Carlos Williams), and yet he can be as colloquial as a blue collar worker sitting down to his beer at Miller Time. His poetry, full of wit and humor—both earthy and sophisticated—shrinks from nothing.
A marvelous mosaic of images, insights, ruminations, erudition, mundane details, quantum leaps of intuition, artifacts of pop culture, and historical anecdotes (Paul Revere and da Vinci both put in appearances), this collection proves you don’t need a machine to travel light years through space and time in the blink of an eye, all you need is a singularity like Albert Goldbarth.
Dear Ahasuerus, it is eleven-thirty am and my number is one hundred and eighty-six. I feel the lack of communion striving for a higher purpose in this government assistance office, and it is beyond sadness and feet and the distance of aircraft and tires and inner-tubes on turgid rivers in midsummer with aluminum cans of beer. It’s not just the ones who pick discarded numbers from the floor and say they missed their turn. The flower-selling prepubescent children sniffing glue in paper bags outside the margins of the magazine I’m reading remind me of the laundry I hung up that must be dry by now, filled as they are with warmth and wings and snapping.
This office is a fine line. The wind from the open window rustles the pages of my magazine, pumps the lungs of paper bags, lifts the plastic shopping sacks discarded in the fields, fills the vacant sheets.
When God withdraws, we all must breathe a little harder.
2.
Are these hosts the kind of people who refrigerate red wine? I wasn’t breastfed, I smelled different. I never learned to desire consolation prizes. The water hisses from the tap, sliced by the tips of lettuce leaves. The cut-crystal conversation turns on the tiniest incisions. So little of it is about you, you have to address yourself as one of your second persons. At the click of one of our host’s glances, each woman at the table presses forward, like a bullet into the chamber. It goes without saying, this is how I see myself among the women, Dear Ahasuerus, you fuck.
3.
One of the trafficked prostitutes in the Tel Aviv shelter always carries a book with her. When she’s fucked up she reads it upside down. It’s a best seller, a thriller, a romance, so it doesn’t really matter the order of the events. She can describe them in detail afterwards, which she’ll do for you when you ask about her life.
HEBREW LESSONS: LESHALEM To pay, to bring to a conclusion, bring to perfection, to make peace.
i.
I am not a piece
of cake—sometimes
the eternal á
la mode, which is
to say, I am
your mouth, not your whole
mouth, just the part
that, when full, worries
about its next meal.
ii.
The eggs must first come
to room temperature,
which is to say for
everything there is
time. While the cotton
opened white fists at her
window, one by one
my grandmother beat
six eggs by hand till
they were stiff. The hands
of the kitchen clock
tapped each fat minute,
the ready spoon curved.
The frothy batter
she poured herself into
the tube pan steadied itself
in the wood-fueled oven
and lifted. Those who ate
a single bite were filled
with an inexplicable
happiness. Sometimes
that was enough.
(Today’s poems originally appeared in The Bakery, and appear here today with permission from the poet.)
Marcela Sulak is the author of two collections of poetry and has translated three collections of poetry from the Czech Republic and Congo-Zaire. Her essays appear in The Iowa Review, Rattle, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University, where she is senior lecturer in American Literature.
Editor’s Note: While living and working in Israel for the fall semester I have become inspired by the local English-speaking writing community, as well as the plethora of work being done in translation. I hope to be able to share some of the gems the local writers and translators are creating here with you on this series, beginning today with Marcela Sulak.
Of course I am interested in Sulak’s work, in part, because of its biblical interests and midrashic tendencies. Ahasuerus, for instance, from today’s first piece, was a Persian king and husband of Queen Esther. He chose Esther for his queen after kicking out his first wife, Queen Vashti, for refusing to display herself naked before his guests. The process of choosing Esther as Vashti’s predecessor was more like a casting call; all of the eligible virgins were gathered together, put through months of rigorous beauty rituals, then paraded around for Ahasuerus to choose his favorite from among them. Today, Sulak’s bent on this tale has her channeling these young women on display, noting the lack of communion among women under such competitive circumstances. Sulak eloquently sums up the experience: “It goes without saying, this is how I see myself among the women, Dear Ahasuerus, you fuck.”
But beyond the biblical explorations lie moments of brilliant lyric and philosophy. Moments that stop you dead in your tracks: “When God withdraws, we all must breathe a little harder,” “I am / your mouth, not your whole / mouth, just the part / that, when full, worries / about its next meal,” “which is to say for / everything there is / time.” Sulak’s is writing that considers the historical, the human, and the astronomical through the lens of the day-to-day. Her vivid imagery brings to life the scenes she paints, while the ideas she plants take the reader from the microscopic to the telescopic.
I cannot save her, she will be broken, is broken,
will be broken again and again, this little girl,
five or six, in a grubby pink dress,
black hair, fat cheeks, hard black eyes
on her father—a giant version of herself
inflated by time and half-controlled
rage—who grabs her shoulders
and shoves her down on the sidewalk,
against the brick wall of the bookstore
I’m about to enter, and stands back
waiting as she gets up, tries to run
past him, unstoppable force,
immovable object, and grabs her again,
slams her down, the exact same motions
but harder this time, both of them
like marionettes the god who rules over
ruined childhoods guides with gnarled fingers,
and my hard-wired, Paleolithic radar
for violence flares inside me, turns me
towards them, makes me want to slam him
into the next universe, and horrible things
will happen today that none of us can stop,
savage human fear everywhere in full swing,
the need for comfort never-ending,
need beyond all depth and measure—
everything will happen and none can stop it
but this will not happen, not here, not now,
though she will be broken, and I say,
“Hey, man, you do that again, I’m calling
the cops—what is going on here?”
and he says, “She’s having a time-out,
call the cops if you want to,” and the raspy
mother smoking on the street corner says,
“She’s having a time-out, that’s good discipline,
daddy,” and I stand there, held in this moment,
and then he starts to gentle her, sets her
softly down, and she snarls her lip, sputters
up at him, five-year-old for go fuck yourself,
and I think good for you and he calls her honey, kneels down close to talk to her,
and I can’t tell if it’s a show for me or if it’s real,
though I can feel he feels my eyes on him,
and I’m not going anywhere, until he takes
her hand and walks her inside the bookstore,
a shimmering mirage of loving father
and trusting child, and I follow them
to where all the helpless words are kept
and time itself rests inside the covers
waiting to be set free now
and forever and he lets
me walk away.
(Today’s poem originally appeared in Rattle, where it was a 2012 Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist, and appears here today with permission from the poet.)
John Brehm is the author of two books of poems, Help Is On the Way and Sea of Faith, and the the associate editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Boulevard, The Missouri Review, and many other journals and anthologies. He is a freelance writer and lives in Portland, Oregon.
Editor’s Note: Today’s poem captures a moment, and within that moment the history of the life of the poet. The artificial lines we humans create with the idea of time become blurred. Space vanishes. A child becomes everyone’s child. A man becomes as powerful and ineffective as a god. And the whole of the world retreats “to where all the helpless words are kept / and time itself rests inside the covers / waiting to be set free.”
“Mer morte et montagnes de Judée, Palestine” By Félix Bonfils (1867) Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program
Men Go to Battle, Women Wage War: A Review of The White Queen on STARZ
by
Kurt Baumeister
Following an established pattern on premium cable, The White Queen (Saturdays at 8 PM EST on STARZ) combines breathy, bodice-popping romance with hints of war, intrigue, and just enough period history to convince you your night hasn’t been a complete intellectual bonfire. Based on Philippa Gregory’s series of historical novels, The Cousins’ War, The White Queen’s milieu is England’s civil strife of the Late Middle Ages, otherwise known as the War of the Roses. As the Houses of Lancaster and York vie for the English throne, everyone from the French to the Scots looms off-screen, promising to make trouble in coming episodes.
As far as The White Queen’s history is concerned, there’s plenty in spirit; but never so much attention to canonical accuracy that you’re sure what’s going to happen. Taking a cue from genre forerunners, The Tudors and The Borgias, the thrill and latitude of dramatic license come before the facts. And maybe this has been the point of period dramas like The White Queen all along. Maybe these high-end soaps are designed to show us just how malleable history can be; how easy it is to take dramatic half-truths; sex, skulk, and bloody them up; and turn them into the stuff of reality, or, more than that, legend. Maybe…but, then again, probably not…
After all, even if there aren’t any actual “commercials;” this is commercial television. With the supposedly more scholarly History Channel running everything from Cajun Pawn Stars to Ice Road Ax Men to Mutant Neanderthal Strippers (2015?), we can hardly expect a network that calls itself STARZ (with a Z!) to act as some sort of PBS Premium. All the ingredients for high ratings are there with The White Queen, except perhaps for its timeslot.
Rather than sticking with Friday night for the airing of its original programming (a successful recipe for Spartacus, DaVinci’s Demons, and Magic City) STARZ will show The White Queen on Saturday nights, opposite the first-run movies on other premium cable channels. While this doesn’t amount to the kamikaze mission of going up against the likes of Homeland and Boardwalk Empire on Sunday nights, the change doesn’t entirely make sense. Maybe programming executives at STARZ have done their homework and see an opportunity. Only time, and ratings, will tell.
With a breathtaking number of scenic transformations and costume changes sprinkled between bouts of vigorous soft-core, The White Queen focuses on the love of King Edward IV (Max Irons, son of Academy Award winner/Borgia Pope, Jeremy) and his future Queen-Consort, Elizabeth Woodville (Swedish beauty, Rebecca Ferguson). In the first one-hour episode alone, the action roves from woodland picnic to secret nuptials to a hunting lodge honeymoon that literally goes on for days. Tresses of hair flow, fields of flowers bloom, and there’s no shortage of bare, writhing flesh.
There are, of course, moments when love takes a back seat, when intrigue rears its toothy head. For that, Irons and Ferguson give way to older sub-leads, most notably in the first several episodes, English actor, James Frain. Sneering from horseback, stalking through castle and field, issuing fiery pronouncements to his nephew the King; Frain (The Tudors and Elizabeth) plays Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick. Known as “the Kingmaker,” Neville has been responsible for putting Edward on the throne. With courtly manners, a simmering will to power, and facial expressions that seem always to be hiding a scheme, the Kingmaker’s machinations promise to be a dramatic driver early on.
The meat for a “real life” version of the game of thrones is definitely there, the history behind The White Queen covering a conflict Shakespeare himself devoted four plays to (Henry VI, 1-3 and the more famous Richard III). As the future Richard, Welsh stage actor Aneurin Barnard appears in only one scene of The White Queen’s first episode; however, the bemused malice he shows suggests a villain in the making, one ready to accept the mantle of principle antagonist from Uncle Kingmaker. Both history and The White Queen’s first season plot synopsis promise more of a role for Richard as the series unfolds.
Beyond the usual genre conventions of beauty vs. ugliness and good versus evil, The White Queen seems to be looking for thematic resonance in its exploration of gender roles. As its advertising tagline reads, “Men go to battle. Women wage war.” Though this suggests grand ambition, the question remains as to whether there’s any “there” there. Thus far, women’s only real realm of dominance seems to be “magic,” a power that may or may not be real within the show’s cosmology.
Early in the first episode, we see Elizabeth having misty, potentially prophetic dreams. We later learn that her mother (played by Janet McTeer) fancies herself a bit of a witch and seems convinced she has passed her powers along to her daughter. Spells are casts, mirrors are gazed into, and things seem to work out as “magic” suggests they will. Still, enough ambiguity is maintained that the viewer can’t be certain this magic has any potency at all. In this, magic stands in opposition to the very real political and military power we see wielded by men. This difference points to the fact that, “Men go to battle. Women wage war,” may be nothing more than a marketing ploy; that in The White Queen magic may become the stuff of imagination, religious persecution, or perhaps even “feminine madness.”
Only as the series evolves will we learn whether the show’s pretensions to fresh thematic territory are sincere or, like the treatment of history so common to its forerunners, easily dispensed with in favor of ratings. Either way, The White Queen’s top-notch cast and large production budget have produced something exciting to watch; a worthy successor to The Tudors and The Borgias, at least on a visceral level.
***
A former international finance professional, Kurt Baumeister holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College. His first novel, a satirical spy thriller entitled PAX AMERICANA, is forthcoming. He is currently at work on his second book, LOKI’S GAMBIT, a modern fantasy told from the viewpoint of the diminished and fundamentally misunderstood Norse God of Evil, Loki. Kurt Baumeister lives in Virginia.
I don’t remember the sounds
rising from below my breastbone
though I spoke that golden language
with the girls of Beirut, playing hopscotch
on the hot asphalt. We called out to our mothers
for lemonade, and when the men
walking home from work stooped down,
slipped us coins for candy, we thanked them.
At the market, I understood the bargaining
of the butcher, the vendors of fig and bread.
In Arabic, I whispered into the tufted ears
of a donkey, professing my love. And in Arabic
I sang at school, or dreamt at night.
There is an Arab saying,
Sad are only those who understand.
What did I know then of the endless trail
of losses? In the years that have passed,
I’ve buried a lover, a brother, a son.
At night, the low drumroll
of bombs eroded the edges of the city.
The girls? Who knows what has been taken
from them.
For a brief season I woke
to a man who would whisper to me
in Arabic, then tap the valley of my sternum,
ask me to repeat each word,
coaxing the rusty syllables from my throat.
See, he said, they’re still here.
Though even that memory is faint.
And maybe he was right. What’s gone
is not quite gone, but lingers.
Not the language, but the bones
of the language. Not the beloved,
but the dark bed the beloved makes
inside our bodies.
(Today’s poem originally appeared in Rattle and appears here today with permission from the poet.)
Danusha Laméris’s work has been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Rattle, The Sun and Crab Orchard Review as well as in a variety of other journals. She was a finalist for the 2010 and 2012 New Letters Prize in poetry and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize four times. Her first book, The Moons of August, was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry contest, and is set for release in early 2014. She lives in Santa Cruz, California and teaches an ongoing poetry workshop.
Editor’s Note: What riches lie within today’s poem. How alive the market of the poet’s memory. Reading this piece is like walking through a souq; the corridors are buzzing and vibrant, but be aware. Keep your eyes wide open. In the caverns below the language lie both treasures and warnings. Both the language and the bones.
The husbands are almost sure of it. They have strong memories of an earlier time, of the wives with soft smooth faces and ten fingers and toes.
But lately, things have changed. Some of the wives have grown scaly patches, or sprouted thick pelts. Some wives have shrunk considerably. White, wide wings have unfolded, horns have appeared, tongues have grown longer and rougher and pinker, noses wetter and more sensitive than before.
The men have grown uneasy at night, listening to the wheezing and snorting of the wives as they sleep, as they embrace their husbands with tentacles and talons and long tails. The husbands aren’t sure what to do, whether to say something. They wonder if it would be rude to ask about the wives’ new appetites, their sudden hunger for mice and mealworms and raw, wriggling fish. They worry that they won’t be able to keep these ravenous wives fed. They worry that the neighbors will complain about the carcasses littering their lawns.
The husbands worry, most of all, that their wives will finally fly or crawl or swim away, untethered from the promises that only humans make or keep.
***
Amber Sparks is the author of the short story collection May We Shed These Human Bodies, and the co-author, with Robert Kloss, of the upcoming The Desert Places—both published by Curbside Splendor. She lives in Washington, DC, with a husband and two beasts.
WATCHING MY DAUGHTER THROUGH
THE ONE-WAY MIRROR OF A PRESCHOOL
OBSERVATION ROOM
By Robert Fanning
Maggie’s finishing a portrait
of our family, gluing googly eyes
onto a stately stick figure
I hope is me. Now she doesn’t know
who to play with, as other kids,
pockets full of posies,
all fall down. She wears my face
superimposed. I almost tap
the glass, point her toward
the boy with yellow trucks.
Lost, she stares out the window
toward the snow-humped pines
beyond the playground.
When I’m dead, I hope there’ll be a thin pane
such as this between us. I’ll stand forever
out in the dark to watch my grown children
move through their bright rooms.
Maybe just once they’ll cup
their hands against the glass, caught
by some flicker or glint,
a slant of light touching their faces.
(Today’s poem originally appeared in Rattle and appears here today with permission from the poet.)
Robert Fanning is the author of American Prophet (Marick Press), The Seed Thieves (Marick Press) and Old Bright Wheel (Ledge Press Poetry Award). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, The Atlanta Review, and other journals. A graduate of the University of Michigan and Sarah Lawrence College, he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Central Michigan University. He is also the founder and facilitator of the Wellspring Literary Series in Mt. Pleasant, MI., where he lives with his wife, sculptor Denise Whitebread Fanning, and their two children. To read more of his work, visit www.robertfanning.wordpress.com.
Editor’s Note: Today’s poem is dedicated to my father, who I know is watching me through the glass. I see you in every flicker and glint, now and always.
It would be the same
without this mask:
nobody would be glad
to see me naked, slicing open
bulging bags of garbage,
shoving my snout into rotten tree trunks
after sweet vermin within.
It would be the same—
my icy eyes piercing
the gloaming, only to be
melted away by the fires
of dawn. Every time
I look ahead, I see myself
splashed across some roadside
or starved while I remain
caught in a steel trap,
always dying too young
to go completely grey.
So I leave my face
swathed in darkness
that is not sleep.
(Today’s poem originally appeared in Rattle and appears here today with permission from the poet.)
Noel Sloboda’s work has recently appeared in Redactions, Salamander, and Modern Language Studies. He is the author of the poetry collections Shell Games (2008) and Our Rarer Monsters (2013) as well as several chapbooks. Sloboda has also published a book about Edith Wharton and Gertrude Stein. He teaches at Penn State York.
Editor’s Note: “It would be the same / without this mask.” What a brilliant entry into today’s piece, following the setup of the poem’s title. How much we have to think about as soon as we enter, even before the vivid picture the poet paints, even before his masterful coupling of image and alliteration. How deeply we are set within the scene, and how thin the veil between animal and man.
As It Ought To Be 