They're Putting Up Reindeer, Singing Songs of Joy and Peace

A Ringing in My Ears

Love Letters Mostly
Deborah Digges
from The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart, forthcoming from Knopf.

Notes in a bottle floated up the bloodstream,
script hardly audible, a ringing in my ears,
love letters mostly, transfused through centuries,
once thrown from breakwaters
or cliffs. And then the writers,
unrequited, walked toward home.
Who knows how they lived out their lives,
if those they so desired did finally turn to them.
Who made me who I am.
I love to stand under an awning, smoking,
while some storm hits hard the ports of Boston.
What knows to do so dives deep as it can.

Click here for W.S. Merwin's piece on Deborah's work in the current issue of Brick.

A Wearied Porch of Earth

Two from Patricia Smith's brilliant Blood Dazzler, finalist for the 2008 National Book Award in Poetry.

Luther B Rides Out the Storm
Patricia Smith

Lord ham mercy, m'dear moaned,
slow and real Baptist like, every time some kink
swerved her day--an August noon sweatin'
the sugar out of her just-pressed hair,
a run in her last pair of church stockings.
Luther B sympathized with a cock of his thick head.
Now, in the looped reloop of dog thought,
he wonders about that Lord, and mercy,
and m'dears little surrenders, surrenders.

His wet yelps and winding croon teach nothing.
Wobbling, he latches muzzle to the wall of ind.
There's got to be some good livin' at the end of this,
maybe a pork chop with some religion still hangin' from it,
or a skillet scrape of m'dear's fat oxtails and onion rice.
But there's daybreaks stackin' up behind those clouds,
regular, with quiet moons behind, all rowed up, and ready.

The day's pewter howling wounds a rib,
darken Luther B's itching with blood.

Paddling in frantic blue circle,
he fights his slippery chain,
treads toward a little bit more of remember--
Damn dog ain't nothin' but trouble.
But I loves me some Luther B.
I loves him to death.

*****

Luther B Ascends
Patricia Smith

sketched against a wearied porch
of earth,

smashed level with the mud,
smalled

by roaring days, and a sky
he trusted

this beast
this child

Quit and Move Over and Shh

From the current issue of elimae...

Watching Our Reflections on TV While We Wait
Meakin Armstrong

We sat in a row on the long couch and no one's legs could reach the floor. Granddaddy took the first one the kid who no one knew and said to us "the rest of you stay put." We didn't look at each other and we didn't say anything and we noticed how strange it was to be with a lot of people in a room so quiet. Opposite the TV was off. We could see ourselves reflected on its screen and we watched our reflections like we would TV. We saw ourselves squirm and wiggle and could see the Granddaddy when he came back and took Big David who was fat. Big David was the size of three of us and when he left we had more room. Then he took Matthew who we all liked the best because he had a wooden leg and he let us touch it. Matthew couldn't run, not fast, so he leaned against something when we played. We wiggled our feet and looked at the TV and then our feet and we were on TV. We whispered Quit and Move Over and Shh. Someone had to pee and the noises grew louder and there was more room for us on the long black couch.

Consecration

Such busy, busy days. But only one more week now....

A passage from Nam Le's "Love and Honor and Pity," which we're going to talk about in my fiction workshop tomorrow night.

*****

At sixteen I left home. There was a girl, and crystal meth, and the possibility of greater loss than I had imagined possible. She embodied everything prohibited by my father and plainly worthwhile. Of course he was right about her: she taught me hurt--but promise too. We were two animals in the dark, hacking at one another, and never since have I felt that way--that sense of consecration. When my father found out my mother was supporting me, he gave her an ultimatum. She moved into a family friend's textile factory and learned to use an overlock machine and continued sending me money.

"Of course I want to live with him," she told me when I visited her, months later. "But I want you to come home too."

"He doesn't want that."

"You're his son," she said simply. "He wants you with him."

I laundered my school uniform and asked a friend to cut my hair and waited for school hours to finish before catching the train home. My father excused himself upon seeing me. When he returned to the living room he had changed his shirt and there was water in his hair. I felt sick and fully awake--as if all the previous months had been a single sleep and now my face was wet again, burning cold. The room smelled of peppermint. He asked me if I was well, and at that moment I realized he was speaking to me not as a father--not as he would to his only son--but as he would speak to a friend, to anyone, and it undid me. I had learned what it was to attenuate my blood but that was nothing compared to this. I forced myself to look at him and I asked him to bring Ma back home.

A Visit to the Parrish Art Museum

For more about the current exhibition, American Landscapes, click here.

Only Geranium and Melamine

Sad Verso of the Sunny ______________
Liz Waldner

Veldt? Sounds good to me.
Like melt. Back when you could eat Velveeta
and call it cheese. My grandfather's macaroni and cheese
featured a whole brick of Velveeta. I liked peeling away
its beautiful silver wrapper, Velveeta Velveeta all over in blue.

The expanses of time in which there was this grandfather
appeared endless when I was in them. Who
could see to the ends of the plains and so see her end
beyond them? Who could think to look? You
(like Ohio and its vowels) went on forever,
just ate your macaroni and cheese, relishing
the brown bubbles on top, then did the next thing,
were the next moment surrounded and held in it
by all the things you didn't know would end.
Nothing ceded. No portend.
Only geranium and melamine
and thank you,
everywhere preceded by some please.