when he climbs in without a word.
Micah Chatterton
Medicine
for Sylvia and her mother
For a nosebleed: drop
something cold, a coin or key,
the length of your back.
Wicked lumbago
needs brown paper ironed hot,
pressed into the small.
To improve eyesight,
pierce your ears and get some gold.
Silver does nothing.
Rheumatism: carry
a young spud in your pocket.
Or soak in Epsom.
Sore throat: tie a wool
stocking round your neck; Father’s
sweaty sock will do.
Linseed, lime for burns.
Boiled onion poultice for ears.
Bread poultice for boils.
Bluebag for bee stings.
Warm cow dung for carbuncle,
or draw the devil
out with a hot glass.
Rub butter on a bumped head,
fig leaf on a bruise.
In case of a cut,
a little whiskey leeches rust.
It’s good to let dogs
lick an open wound,
but only those you know well,
not some thin-boned stray.
Next, to clot the cut,
use cobwebs, fresh cigar ash—
in a pinch, sugar.
Egg water causes warts,
and touching toads. Spin horsehair
around your finger,
or daub with sow thistle.
If that cure fails, steal a piece
of meat. Rub the wart
into the cold chop.
Bury it in the garden.
Tell no one. The flesh
and the wart decay
together. Some say you need
a dead cat. Jabber—
any meat will do.
No, what we make we make in
in burial, in hiding.
Kin
Remember this, then.
There is a girl at the edge
of town, window jimmied, slipping
lumps of scrambled egg and hard toast
out onto the damp side of the sill.
Morning fog’s bitten off all
but the nearest branches of the family
sycamore, and the family of crows
living there, chittering, churning
the clouds with their wings.
There’s a line of objects laid neatly
along the dry side of the windowsill:
a pebble, a paper clip, can tabs, beachglass,
earrings, buttons, a cat’s broken femur,
the silver half of a heart.
She waits with her nosetip cold
to the pane, quietly breathing herself
into the swirl of an old man’s beard,
until one by one, dewhooded
and coin-eyed, the crows come
clutching gifts, offering trade.
A Love Poem
What did you see in there? you asked later,
mermaid red hair floating past my pillow.
I saw the way we leaned to kiss, how we
made cairns of our cold feet, spun up shivers
from still places in our bodies, then fell asleep.
Queen of noses, Vitruvian wife, worried
nursemaid to the world’s most delicate dog,
remembrist of first things, spontaneous
cupcake baker, teacher of small children,
teacher of just one unforgotten child—
I thought, What a mother you’ll make, Jenny.
I saw too how your fear would ache into
panic, beebuzzed by unchecked burners, un-
pulled doors, always waiting for a beltfall,
some fate you might, you should have seen coming:
scuffed heels, uncoastered cups, germs or burglars.
So many days you sat in the driveway,
eyes shaking, willing yourself: Turn the key.
Yet, somehow, you loved me enough to risk
my inevitable tremors of grieving.
Somehow, hours ago, weeks pregnant, you leapt
into the shower fully clothed, new shoes
sopping, mascara bruising the porcelain,
to catch me, collapsed by a memory.
I saw you, the mother you’ve always been,
the family I never thought I’d have again.
Dropped Tanka
We all learn one day:
something dropped is something lost.
“Out of reach” means “gone
forever,” bits of childhood locked
in a mirror of pond water.
He watches my mouth, lost,
lost, thrusts against the railing
reaching for the spot
of the splash where the tiger
was thrown, dove, and disappeared.
Once below, all sound
stops. The plastic tiger sinks,
watching a boy cry
by skyfuls its wavering life,
its eternal inch of silt.
Emily Graf
Toolbox
I’ve had broken teeth dreams
and woke tasting my gums for blood.
A girl said she needed my incisors for art,
pliers shining in her hand.
She was beautiful in the way of people who know
they look good while concentrating.
Fingers stained burnt sienna
and black, she drugged me with whiffs of turpentine.
Surrender slipped gauzy under my tongue.
Of such dreams, Freud says, anxiety about sexual experience.
Jung says, renewal. Not violence,
but yes,
disorder.
In the dark afterwards, my teeth
were whole. I looked at the blue sliver
of floodlight along the curtain
and knew my life.
Photograph of Two Girls Outside Crazy Horse, South Dakota (2007)
I remember saying, bury me,
South Dakota Badlands,
crumbling crowns of black stone and basalt
in the empty ocean of the Midwest.
Under my hand a grasshopper scythed
its butcher paper wings.
We pointed our camera at a motorcycle gang, behind them
a heaving forever of sunflowers,
a harmonica,
the yellow sound of mosquitos.
Or maybe you pointed the camera, and I
held up the unfinished nose of the Indian head.
Bury me, or cut me open.
I was too young to love a landscape so greenless,
too young to think my bookishness was anything but
a free pass to hop from coast to coast
and skip the breadbasket in between.
Years later, bowing
against Chicago’s lusty sleet,
I think of you with an imaginary scalpel in your hand,
back of your dad’s RV, working on what you believed to be
an improvement of my body,
stunning revision,
while the sun thundered against the plastic curtain
of our small window.
2AM Instagram of Lunar Eclipse
Green sunslant across the dresser should be,
is not quite, an antidote for this hangover. Urgent, the phone
opens its single rectangular eyelid. A few sentences
from you, and I’m drunk again. In the night you scrolled through
the pixelated good times and lit on
my white blouse, my rose moon. How well these images
unscrew your silence. Etched in blue,
you ask for more sweet, you ask if I remember
that we have decided to forget certain unerasable errors.
Taking your words outside, a breeze lifts rosemary to my lips, I breathe i
t
toward you loose
in my two hands, and because I am so glad
to have your attention (this sparkler
burning down to its metal stem)
what is there to say next?
Concession: my love’s a shaky bubble drooping
from a plastic wand, all swollen gleam and neon rainbows,
resigned to death in the frail grass.
Striking Matches
I.
You are dealing cards on a picnic table, the wood
bruise-hued, seams crusted chalky-white.
Someone jokes “cocaine” because we’re high, I say
“it’s probably bird shit.” We’re playing cards
and I’m talking to make sure you hear me. In the game,
you and I are partners. I forget the rules.
Not Hearts. It’s not Hearts but we might be losing—
the rain ceased hours ago but the light that burnishes
your hands is still wet.
II.
You are in your apartment learning Spanish from Cuarón films.
Your shirt smells cold,
of struck matches and want. You’re using something sharp to tune gears that turn
your hands black. In your hands I am
a melting icicle. I’m not going anywhere but I might be
shrinking.
III.
You have an impulse to gather
all the cards to you while they’re still dry, still make that busy click when shuffled,
but also
to drink the whiskey that’s been passed to you. It tastes
like marigolds might.
Hot crowns, dry flares.
I wonder if I’ve spoken in the last hour. I wonder if instead I’ve been dancing
in the bloom of light tossed from a window,
revolving to rhythm you shuffle— red-
heart black-heart—song of opposites.
IV.
You are leaning against the wall of the Rijksmuseum and it is leaning back on you
while you watch the black crowns of trees
swell with birds, then deflate. Icy feet, I just broke a toenail,
black linoleum
jeweled with blood. You just lit a cigarette and the rush has you
in a headlock.
V.
In my sleep I open my mouth and a spider drops in.
I swallow. Transparent threads
suspend me from the ceiling and I kick my legs like a Rockette,
kick my legs like a doe leaping from a freeway,
kick the blankets free.
You hold still on your side of the bed,
your body curled around a vacancy.
VI.
Once I carried my memories lightly
as you carry another person in water
where what looks like work
is actually
floating.
Kate Magill
NOLA, 2006
Rusted bikes clattering
over rutted streets:
only sound this morning
in a city still learning
how to breathe
now that the flood has receded.
This boy I barely know
takes me to a childhood home.
We stand on the sidewalk
saying nothing,
breathing in the lush smell
of puddles and drowned worms.
We’re stripping away
the blackmold sheetrock,
exposing studs
we hope are strong enough,
press of bodies
in the small rooms,
smell of sweat
and waterlogged stuff.
Someone has planted
sunflowers out back.
Their big heads gyre west
to watch the sinking sun.
Down on the sand after dark
listening to black waves
and that air-swelling bayou hum:
we are almost children still,
hurtling forward,
verging on something pure.
Morning, Five Ways
1.
Whitebread morning—
give up on daring.
Focus on something
mundane and immediate:
backbone, for example,
or sinew.
2.
Through the open door,
a furnace blast of morning
The dog has shit a chickenbone
still whole.
No goose today,
no golden egg.
3.
You cannot remember,
standing in a potential friend’s foyer,
which boots are yours.
Perhaps finding the correct coat
will spark something.
4.
You have not yet opened your eyes.
The fact of being alive
kicks you in the ribs,
threatens to slit you down the middle
and spill your slick ruby innards
all across the slant of light
whose heat sears through your lids.
5.
It is best to wake first
to give yourself the option
of staying in bed and listening
to his roughhewn breaths
or leaving for an open space
where you can hear your own.
Tanka for The New Year
New Year’s Eve, and grey:
cloud upon cloud, swollen full
with unfallen rain.
We are already asleep
on the chill white sunless sheets.
LV Winter, 2015
It’s not hot yet and already I’m tired,
trying to read Bronk while the baby sleeps,
trying to sort the husk and hulk of words.
The sun is asserting itself again,
hot butter glow cowing the short grey days,
filling the air with creosote and sage.
Lizard skitter and hummingbird pulses,
the rest is stillness, that desert restraint,
knowing always when and when not to move.
Coffee is blacker in the old palm’s shade,
dry fronds brushing my shoulders, somewhat like
a lover’s presence, breathing, imagined,
remembered: that kneejerk covering-up
of unfinished pages, this black-on-blank:
I’m sorry, dear, this is not yours to read.
Michael Fleming
Desire
Bangkok, and even the name reeks of it.
The girls in the girlie bars on Patpong
Road, they know that smell, they sell that smell—shit,
cum, curry, poontang, bodies at play, songs
they know you know, dances they know you know,
the English words on their bikini butts,
twinkling in sequins—WINK. FOXY. GO-GO.
The smell of dollars, baht, dong, roasting nuts—
they’ve known that aroma all their lives, who
the hell doesn’t? Really, weren’t we all born
knowing that smell? The monks, they know it, too,
silent, single file, first dim light of morning,
bearing their bowls, a little day-old
rice, a bit of fish—want reduced to this.
It still smells of suffering—in the folds
of their robes, that whiff of death, saffron, bliss.
Khao-I-Dang
My britches got bigger the day I met you
in a bamboo room, at a bamboo table,
sizing me up (I didn’t have a clue)—
so damn sure of a world that never gave
less than what you demanded or deserved
or just made true. Couple of redheaded brats
like us, in a war zone—where’d we get the nerve
and what gave u
s the right, rat-a-tat-tat
mai pen lai days, Mekong nights . . . we recognized
refugees as people like us: alive,
moon-eyed, bee-stung but still there in the fight,
in a world that needed us, needed our jive—
Khao-I-Dang did too, back when we were brats,
eating up the last of our baby fat.
for Miss Lola
Lunch
They plopped him down (as we would later say)
like a big bag of potatoes, right there
on our long bamboo table, just the way
they (different they) plopped down lunch, right where
we were eating lunch, yes, that’s how it was,
right in the middle of lunch, rice with rocks
to break our teeth and stir-fried weeds and what
may have been chicken, or dog, and the docs
were there, and the nurses, and all of us but
the interpreters, just us and the buzz
of flies and the distant pop-pop that made
the border so exciting, good for our
stories, and then they burst in with that dead
kid soldier, Khmer Rouge, alive an hour
before, here for autopsy, just because.
The Voice of America
In Thailand, where it’s never cold, that one
day was cold, a bleak November day, raw, damp—
fresh misery to heap on sickness, guns
and hunger, madness, mud and fear. The camp
went quiet. Every stitch they had, they wore,
rags on rags. We had no more to give them.
We did have a radio, reception poor—
the Voice of America whispered, trembled
from the world we’d left, where election day
was ending, the polls were closing, Wyoming
clinched it: an old fool, nary a gray
hair on a head untroubled by wisdom,
would preside over perpetual morning
with a smile and thrilling hints of war.
Meeting Mrs Ping
Laughing, forty-two to my twenty-two,
and lovely, still the belle of Phnom Penh
even after college, marriage, kids—then
hell: the war that throttled the city, blew
in on rocket wings, the rumble and pop