Sixfold Poetry Winter 2015
grateful for the reminder that some forms of intelligence break
the world into pieces of beautiful ugliness,
and some do not break the world at all.
Now You See It
My mother cups my uterus
to her mouth and blows.
The uterine balloon she hangs
like a trophy in her bedroom,
nailed to the far wall like an animal
skin.
At parties she fills it with wine,
places a nozzle on it and pours.
The guests are enchanted. They tell me
what a good girl I am. How lucky
to have a mother so intimate. I tell
them that my mother loves
tricks, loves the jigsaw puzzle
of my spine, love to pull my heart
from her ear and make it disappear
into her mouth. What a mother, they say.
What a magician.
Soon, she’ll be able to make you
disappear altogether.
Freud’s Asparagus
She tries to sublimate
a hot Sunday at 8 a.m.,
but he pounds at her door,
repressed, Freudian
and hungry.
She cooks him sweet butter eggs
and asparagus
and he looks at her.
“Sometimes an asparagus is just
an asparagus,” she says, placing
the green, feathery tip deep
into her mouth.
She hands him a swollen, red
plum, a fat, hairy peach.
She says, “Eat.”
She says, “Read to me. Tell me of Plato’s
Republic. I want to see a civilization come
from between your lips.”
They practice sword fighting
in the garden. She has better footwork
but his shaft is longer, bright red
and she laughs at him.
He pins her again and again in the garden
with swollen red fruit and thick
leaves and she laughs at him.
He does not know what the woman wants.
She leads him to the bath.
“Here. Play with the toy boat—
the small fringed sails, the wet hull . . .”
He is nearly hysterical when she takes him
(as she knew she would)
and hours later, in the lingering flame of his sleeping body,
she smokes.
Jane Schulman
Final Crescent
Think of me on bruise-blue nights when
moons wane to wisps
and you scan the eastern sky.
Think of me as a crocus
cracking through matted leaves.
For I was born on ebbing days
of Adar, when winds blew out-of-tune
and the moon a final crescent.
My soul makes its way through
the world with hesitant footfalls.
Two of our sons were born in the month
of Nissan. Prankish as lion cubs,
hearts of honeycomb and voile.
I know my soul more by what it is not.
When Krupa Played Those Drums
Sometimes I can’t think in metaphors.
Rocks are rocks. Tumors are tumors.
Time in close present.
10 tomorrow, CT scan.
I lie in bed. Listen for signs of life.
A cough. A snore.
By 2 AM clack of Dad’s walker,
slipper-shuffle to the kitchen
for bourbon on ice.
9 AM He falls. I boost
from behind. He yanks
with still-strong arms
and he’s on the sofa.
Victory when we don’t
need to call 9-1-1.
9:45 He slips on his loafers.
Back in motion. We’re off for the test..
5 PM He leans back in his chair,
stares at a black TV.
No Jeopardy. No C-Span.
Not even Ella Fitzgerald on the stereo.
What is it you think about, Dad,
while you sit with the TV off?
I go back to the good years
when I’d just met your Mom
and Gene Krupa played those drums
till three in the morning.
He doesn’t ask about
the CT scan; I don’t say.
Krupa, the way
he beat out those heartbeats.
Overheard on the F Train
My iPod snatched from an unzipped purse,
I’m left to listen, overexposed
to snatches of dialogue unrehearsed.
Ripped from my private universe,
of Dylan, Marley, Billy Joel
when my iPod’s snatched from an unzipped purse.
“Haven’t you heard, Karl’s cancer’s worse,
melanoma misdiagnosed.”
Snatches of dialogue unrehearsed.
“Leah just lost her job as a nurse
and her crazy ex-husband’s out on parole”
now my iPod’s snatched from an unzipped purse
“My daughter’s pregnant with her fourth.
You’d think she’d never heard of birth control.”
Snatches of dialogue unrehearsed.
A random act, what appeared a curse,
scattered totems of lives unposed.
My iPod snatched from an unzipped purse.
Gift of snatches of dialogue unrehearsed.
Back and Forth
Dad hurled words across the table at Frank
and me, empty hollow volleys. We’d toss back
streptococcus or carnivorous.
Little by little, I quit relying on words, chose
near-silence instead. Syllables jagged crystals
spit from my mouth. Starts and stops
like stutterers’ struggles to let loose sounds.
Still I’m tongue-tied, weighing each word
for heft, holding each up to the light.
No wonder my work now is shaping baba
and mima into words, smoothing a child’s stutter,
releasing the “gorilla voice” in a boy who only whispers.
I strain to hear my own still voice beside
the black-ring doves calling back and forth
from the cottonwoods along the river.
After
I used to talk real good. I used
to tell the best stories, the funniest jokes.
But now. I’m shut down, trapped
in my own head. Since the stroke,
I know what I want to say but words
get tangled and twisted all up. I think
“coyote” and “crocus” comes out.
“Excited” turns into “extinct.”
My friends don’t have time to wait for me
to spit out words. They keep filling in
empty spaces. Half the time, I’d rather
just be by myself—rocking and thinking,
rocking and thinking. I’m a man of Babel,
punished for my pride. Unravelled.
Susan F. Glassmeyer
Hercules Visits My Kitchen
Tonight, waiting for scones to rise in the oven,
the scent of warming yeast and cream
filling the room, I sit down at the table
and flip open the new Audubon to learn:
Carrion beetles
using organs of smell in their antennae
can locate a mouse within an hour of its death
and from as far away as two miles.
After
flying to the carcass, they drop
to the ground, crash through the litter,
burrow under the body, and by heft
of their magnificent orange backs
lift the mouse remains like mini sons of Zeus,
flip and roll it several feet to a final resting place
where the beetles bulldoze the dirt
and bury the mouse deep under the soil.
(This, all done at night to prevent
rival flies from laying their eggs.) The beetles
then strip the mouse of its fur, covering
the carrion ball with a jelly-like goo,
a refuge of food for their own larvae
to feed upon.
There’s more I haven’t told you
but the oven timer is ringing
so I must grab my spatula to flip the hot scones
into a pine grass basket to cool . . . breakfast
fuel for my family rising hungry at dawn.
Seeing Movement
For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love. — Carl Sagan
In his workshirt dark from sweat
the gardener lays down his hedger
to kneel gingerly in thick ivy.
With the hands of Kuan Yin
he flutters the damaged bird up
to his chest, whispering to it.
While Holding a Shivering Toad in My Hands
I thought about last night’s mouse
rattling inside the live trap
in the kitchen drawer.
I can’t bring myself to kill
mice anymore. Tried it once
in Michigan. The cottage, quiet
as a book when the snap trap
sprung along the baseboard.
That contraption flew into the air
like a deranged bird pinching in half
the stunned mouse who only wanted
a dumb piece of cheese.
I thought only women standing on chairs
in cartoons screamed at mice
running along the floor.
I did not know a mouse would squeal
when it died like that. I did not know
I would scream.
First Moon of a Blue Moon Month
Tonight while she’s asleep
come through the kitchen window above the stove.
Follow the path of her belongings.
Climb the stairs
without making them creak.
Enter the room of her refuge.
Here she has tumbled with night into bed.
Hover awhile.
Let your roundness shimmer above her own.
Be a chandelier to her longings.
Study her lips,
two languages for truth in her sleep.
If you slip under the covers without waking her,
she will lean into you until you are full again.
She can never be touched too lightly.
Parting Word
An attendant props you up, cheerfully
rolls you to a table for a last meal.
Doesn’t that look good, sweetheart?
It doesn’t. I offer roses and a bag
of dark kisses though we both know
they don’t make sense anymore.
What took you so long, you ask, squinting
at me through your good eye. I hold up
your head in the hammock of my hand.
Quiet resumes. No mention of love. You
ask is my other hand on your leg? Yes.
Melissa Tyndall
For Our Children, Not Yet Born, I Preserve the Images of Animals
They are nearly gone: the black-footed ferret,
gloved and bandit-masked, last leopards
fading into Russia’s northern forests. You’ll never
see a nighthawk’s forked plumes and gaping mouth,
watch the Dusky Darter swim Tennessee creek beds,
hear the jumping meadow mouse chirp or its tail
drum against the earth. One night, the woods will empty,
the howl of the red wolf forgotten like a sudden storm—
a strong wind that wails briefly, then dies
in the dark. Here once were 600-pound cats,
fanged and orange as cinders,
and foxes—yes, Fox, your last name—
with wide noses, rufous-colored ears,
and long, black-tipped tails. I hold
them here, until you arrive.
Postcards from the Amer River
A trip to Alaska prompted the first—
backed with near-blue landscapes,
silver-tipped ice whorls, concentric shells.
Last summer, your script spilled past
lined margins, threatened the spiny
bones of sea animals, birds in watercolor,
beachfront sunsets brushed in gold,
lavender and dusty pinks, trapped
the way icebergs entomb volcanic
fragments, carry it for years, before
the black rock ripples, peeling back snow,
upheaving it into crags along the water
the local paper described as God-sized
snowmen melting. At Christmas,
your letters come thrust against Dutch
postmarks. You write of beer and spiced
black teas ripe with honey and cinnamon
and bayberries; how climate or distance
can reframe a place, remove doglocks,
allow migration. Words rise in waves
like relief-maps, from this new country,
set us adrift in reverse, cotton us to memory.
At the first hint of spring, the grass will green
again, grow back into itself, shake off the frost
and black smut whips. In Tennessee,
green foxtails, wild and weedy,
will shatter and scatter their seeds,
and I’ll feel the need to write to
you, but there’s nothing I want to say.
Haptics
Scientists say we never truly touch—
despite any sensation we might feel,
our electrons begin to push away
the moment we move toward each other.
This is the unquestionable nature
of our universe and its elements,
and we’re no more than a collection of
atoms encased by an invisible
force field that allows us to overlap
temporarily, but repels those who
venture too close. It absorbs the shock of
others, protects us from risk. Science claims
contact is just an illusion caused when
our energies brush against each other.
They argue touch is no more existent
than a memory of you—how blue your
eyes look in the dark, the way your long,
dark hair falls into your face when you lean
over the neck of my guitar. No more real than
morning after bruises, evidence of teeth
on my breasts, hands on my throat—than
the recollection of the first time we met.
You cross the room, talk about the summer
storm that rages for hours. You smile. Then,
a low rumble of thunder, a hot vein
of lightning, the rain like a high hat beat
just on the other side of the window.
Film Studies
Ever the Southern gentleman
in your indie film,
you ask before kissing her
on the front porch.
I wonder, if we kissed,
if you’d do it this way
off-screen. Later, you lift
her onto the sink of a hotel
bathroom, your hands running up
her thighs and under her skirt.
I imagine myself in her place—
countertop to
pantyhose off,
in one of two double beds, wonder
if your face would look as it did
when you said you loved her.
But the first time you lean in
is during a lull in conversation
on the deck of an East Nashville
bar, the string of lights twinkling,
the fans humming, spinning
like a film reel. I find myself wishing,
not for the crescendo of night sounds,
or our flash forward, but for a loop
of this instant, for the infinite
playback—to preserve the still
moment no movie can capture.
Aubade
After the separation, the first man
to sleep in my bed does just that—sleeps,
fills the vacant side. His long, blonde hair, even
longer than mine, spills across the pillow,
fine as cornsilk strands. Our bodies mirror
each other, hearts flailing against our ribs.
During the night, he pulls my arm over
his torso, grips my thigh to draw my leg
between his, presses my front to his back.
When he shifts, a tribal tattoo licks past
the collar of his white T-shirt and up
his neck. I know the ink runs the other
way, too, almost dips into his waistband,
and it conjures up the memory of him
peeling a shirt over his broad shoulders—
how, after a party, he pushed me down
gently, pinned me back-flat on the carpet.
How he laid on top of me, grew harder
when we kissed, and he fisted the fabric
of my shorts when those kisses dipped
under my shirt, his hair grazing my flesh—
but we stop ourselves.
He wants to pursue
friendship only, he claims, but that’s undone
each time our eyes meet across the bartop
and he refuses to look away, nights
we lean against each other on the couch,
our fingers interlaced. Is this what friends
do? He walks the apartment and cleans up
bottles, empty glasses, locks the front door,
turns off any forgotten lights. I lift
up the corner of my blanket for him,
an invitation he accepts