Sixfold Poetry Winter 2015

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