Sixfold Poetry Fall 2013

  When this plane goes down, I want to be sitting beside you,

  your hand atop mine, my hand resting on your thigh

  when the air cracks in two and the oxygen masks drop

  and the attendants float around the cabin like lost balloons,

  the ones without enough helium to lose themselves in the sky,

  when all the screams become one scream and we push it

  behind us and start to fall, your hand atop mine, my hand

  resting on your thigh, toward the trifling patchwork of farm

  and park and baseball diamond, or toward the circuit board

  of a city shivering. We can fall toward the men and women

  who live as though the world is already burning, the ones

  whom god has called to rise from this scabrous plain, or the ones

  who sell their brothers and sisters daily to the mulch pile

  for another chance at glory, no, not even glory, for another

  chance to rule and power is the only rule, power grinds

  mountains into dust and dust into fuel and fuel is the beast

  that carries them into the fortress, locks the gates and pays

  the mercenaries to walk the walls, it tints their sunglasses

  and wraps the wires they stick in their ears. Or we could fall

  toward the center of the ideogram, the heart of the advertisement,

  the mainspring, the all-seeing eye, and pray for absorption

  so, rather than die, we might multiply and occupy the other world,

  the one we make with our bodies in space, the one that floats

  up from our bodies like scent rising from a rose, the map

  that we carry and share and inscribe together—but that is not

  a life, yearning to be another stain on the wine-press, one more

  palimpsest lurking on channel 132, 257, 308; instead,

  let’s just fall, your hand atop mine, my hand on your thigh,

  and look at me so we might live each in the others’ eye,

  an infinite recursion of selves and eyes, each smiling the same,

  each ringed with hair alive in the wind that strokes the earth.

  The Mower Obeys The Covenant

  —after Marvell

  The grass keeps on growing,

  and I keep on mowing,

  and then there’s the room where I cry.

  The carnivals come

  and the cancer creeps up pantlegs

  and lovers draw their curtains

  and go about their days.

  The grass keeps on growing,

  and I keep on mowing,

  and then there’s the room where I cry.

  I work, I follow the covenant;

  I am a homeowner and a responsible

  digit. If only they knew

  how I longed for a sea of blood.

  The grass keeps on growing,

  and I keep on mowing,

  and then there’s the room where I cry.

  Instead, the food court.

  Instead, I watch the carousel

  turning, a galaxy of fiberglass horses

  collapsing too slow for the eye.

  The grass keeps on growing,

  and I keep on mowing,

  and goddamn I wish I knew why.

  Jonathan Travelstead

  Prayer of the K-12

  Lord, let me start with one pull,

  my bar shuddering in your calloused hand

  as you ratchet my disc

  to the scream that melts cast iron.

  I pass through it, a ghost through rebar.

  Chattery teeth, set on the floor and released.

  On a house of cards, a tidal wave.

  So much you have engineered, Lord.

  I beg you let loose my chain

  so with my carbide teeth

  I can chew through the paper of this world.

  My god! let me do what you made me to do,

  and growl beneath your trigger finger.

  Let me tear this place in two.

  Prayer of the Maul

  Let me sweep aside a factory wall, Lord,

  cinder-blocks preventing passage

  to an engine room scrolled in flame.

  I am the grunt before thought.

  My load is greater than your stamina,

  and though I am your simplest machine

  if you let yourself love too much

  what is inside the mountain

  I am sure to burst your colossal heart.

  Even in my dreams

  I am a juggernaut ready to destroy all things.

  I pray only that you heft me

  from that place between your shoulders.

  Let me be the one chosen.

  Jennifer Lowers Warren

  Our Daughter’s Skin

  He left for Tikrit when milk,

  not language, was pooling

  in our daughter’s mouth.

  A drowsy suckle.

  He is prepared for saw-scaled vipers

  and scorpions curled

  in the toe of his no-shine boots

  but not her dialogue.

  She is sand skinned

  and camel haired,

  everything glistening.

  He’s seen the underside of baby shine,

  dark grit, bodies turned inside out.

  He knows her skin is just casing

  and beautiful features are

  just pieces, ground sausage.

  Tightly packed.

  Easily scattered.

  God’s Hips

  I have hips like God’s.

  Ample and unbroken,

  a thick sway.

  Children slopped out of me

  and into cupped hands like

  yolks slipping, shell to bowl.

  God gave birth too,

  oceans and continents crowning.

  Stars fell from his strained divinity

  like tears. He sweated light.

  Thighs spread. Elasticity tested.

  Omnipotence intact.

  Operation Iraqi Freedom

  After an IED they search

  and wager,

  comparing body parts,

  one against the other.

  My husband finds the

  biggest chunk—

  five hundred for the face.

  They favor circumference

  over length.

  Eve Hitchhikes in Hawaii

  I pick her up at Haleiwa Beach Park,

  home to the North Shore hungry.

  She carries a plastic bag

  full of strawberry guavas

  and three cigarettes,

  half smoked and stubbed for later.

  A conservationist.

  She reaches into the backseat,

  touches the inside of my daughter’s ankle,

  legs turned out in sleep.

  She whispers,

  “Soft like Abel, Cain’s toes.”

  We talk about spearfishing

  for Ulua and trapping the feral pigs

  that rut along the ridgeline trails.

  She leans deep into the floorboard

  and pulls her shirt up,

  showing me her coral scarred back.

  Then rising with a smile,

  crooks both arms against her body

  as if still nursing

  both brothers.

  Eve’s Response

  “Well I met him under the tree while Adam was wallowing

  in his dreams of God and the grass.

  I was bored, Adam was oblivious and He was handsome.

  He tongued my innocence.

  I was an eternity too young to know the difference

  between the systematic tick on the clitoris

  and the slow tap of someone knocking

  against the wall of my heart.

  I sucked syrupy mangos from his fingers and went back to Adam

  with th
e juice still on my lips.”

  Jeff Burt

  The Mapmaker’s Legend

  Life cannot be limited to the Compass Rose

  And the scale and the symbols of demarcation,

  hues presenting heights of apprehension

  and lows of depression, places to stop

  and get off if only to wheeze, appreciate.

  All the careful study of the distances and graphs

  will not prepare one to travel, and cannot describe

  the years spent dwelling in a single dot

  desperate and willing to depart.

  The sun’s face in the center of the Rose

  will not shine in the valleys of loneliness

  you will run your fingers through

  like an imaginary woman’s long hair, who sat before you

  and was gone before you could see her face.

  Only the symbol for railroad tracks will be true,

  the lines with crosses that look like stitches

  that run up and down over all terrains

  seemingly holding the map together,

  closing wounds and scratches and leaving scars

  of remembrance, your head cracked open

  by an inadvertent elbow at school,

  the glass imbedded in your palm

  when you smashed the pane hearing cancer,

  the bypass for your heart broken once too often

  that meant you no longer wanted to love,

  the second set of stitches for your heart

  because you couldn’t live without loving.

  Tribute for Phyllis

  She punished the laundry, scraping the jeans of her boys

  knuckles white against the washboard

  flapped and snapped dishtowels and rags like a randy bully

  in the high school shower against the butt of the basin

  and clipped the clothespins with revenge to hold the sheets

  that had been bleached and softened and breeze dried.

  She could make shirts weep and undershirts cry

  and boxers mourn as they pinned on the line.

  Disease flew from her ferocity, and comfort came

  when she’d hold the swaddling clothes to her nose

  and sniff and smile as if something holy had taken place.

  When she walked down the river the rocks remembered

  and the riprap still murmurs her praise.

  History

  The Greeks would jump and dance about

  mawkish-faced and freaks afoot,

  and Prospero the Roman had an ugly face

  scourged by smallpox and missing an ear,

  so was a natural for amusement between acts of play.

  But Prospero the Roman had seen an egret

  from the Nile stand on one leg peering into water

  then slowly trade its balance to the other,

  so in his pantomime he played the bird

  to which crowds booed and threw things at him,

  but several asked for a private performance,

  so he followed storks and cranes in landings

  and takings off, the slow circling head of a female swan

  as she knew her young had died,

  the nightingale with upturned throat

  that sang until its voice exhausted,

  and when his time for performance came

  he mimicked the storks and cranes,

  and did the egret to murmurs of appreciation,

  and the crowd was pleased, left gasping,

  and for his finale performed the nightingale in song

  by stretching his neck upwards as if to God

  with his arms like wings forcing out the last of his breath,

  then the circling of the swan

  with his body, and left the audience hushed.

  When he performed before the Emperor,

  with executions and maulings of slaves on the fare,

  he was whisked off stage after the act

  and banished for life to a quarry outside of Rome.

  But a thousand girls had the seen the mime,

  and when brushing hair they would stand on one foot,

  when walking down stairs would hold out their arms

  as if cranes landing in a field, when imagining a lover

  would strain their neck and appeal to God,

  and when unrequited, slowly circle to the ground.

  The Lost Pilot

  Nestled in the far distances

  my imagination had roamed

  in the nether land,

  still I am near to and nearing my home.

  Frieda, my grandmotherly neighbor,

  waves me in, the lost pilot

  returning from the army air corps.

  Yet after the fantasy recedes

  its repercussions linger:

  I step over a fence

  and it rapidly disappears,

  the steadily burgeoning sun

  wades through formidable leaves,

  air widens, and twilight shadows

  fly over drought-shrivelled grass.

  The paint on a primitive church shines

  pudgy and white,

  billowing like a parachute.

  I smile, listen:

  the wood is not laughing.

  In the dry hot wind button-black susans

  tango and rock,

  dust waltzes

  to unheard-of music, Frieda’s wave

  a metronome of my heart.

  With each thing both fanciful

  and real, how flat the imagining man,

  a solid body with spirit

  which cannot by any artifice

  detach itself from flesh

  and vanish in a vaporous ascension

  to the promise of joy.

  How, when we can believe

  all the feather, bone

  and beak of our existence was born

  of a central egg, can

  we not set the mind skyward,

  free in its flight?

  Like gravity the daily routines

  pull down magnificent creations,

  and it is one continuum

  between fancy and fact,

  the two ends of the pole

  with which we balance

  unaware of any safety net,

  the tipping of one end too high

  sure to flip us off the wire.

 

  So I feel: it is hot.

  While there are no limits

  to the distance a dream may take,

  the clock of my body yanks

  me back to the small seam

  of time I continually try

  to rip—a far journey

  in a short span.

  And though reentry

  to the war-torn fortress

  of a common world is loss,

  an unshielded burning,

  the greater intensity

  of rapid associations

  reduced to a linear conversation,

  it is the condensation,

  the subsequent recalling

  of the imagined event

  which makes the fantasy desired.

  The ether I once was

  vanishes, and I reappear

  glistening and whole, joy

  rising to the surface of my face,

  death and logic submersing

  to become a sediment

  from which I can only toss and swell above.

  I am liquid, a lake,

  and the trickle from the hose

  is a river replenishing

  my arid head,

  and a beer is the storm

  dousing the kiln

  of my thinning throat.

  Three Threads

  In Mason jars the machine, the wood, the metal,

  the button-head, slotted, crossed,

  whorled, knurled, tipped
to explode, bound,

  locked, washered, starred, bolted, nutted,

  used, saved, reclaimed from rust.

  All these threads, mechanical stitches,

  filling punched, drilled holes

  to keep the world from falling apart.

  I have not found a fastener

  for the hole since you’ve departed.

  Patricia Percival

  Giving in to What If

  after Steve Scafidi

  If I only wrote about what I knew, as once

  Plath wrote of moons, mannequins,

  and the grievous words of yew and elm—

  I would tell of the last call my brother made,

  when he said he wouldn’t come for Christmas

  and I tried to change his mind, and he insisted,

  and I had the flu and didn’t, maybe, hear

  the tone of his voice. Or I’d only write

  of diapers, cakes baked, and failed tomatoes,

  or of fees simple, encumbered and joint.

  But I prefer to imagine life

  in the animal kingdom, where,

  as I understand it,

  they get by without what ifs.

  Here I can drift, a sea turtle

  on ocean currents, weightless

  from Thailand to the Golden Isles,

  and not once consider

  the half-ton of gravity

  I bore across the sand

  at nesting time, and will again,

  when the moon draws me ashore.

  As a crane I’m blessed with a mate

  who chose me for life and is happy,

  who doesn’t brood about the crane

  one creek over, the one with plumper knobs

  on her knees, knobs he’d like

  the other males to envy

  during annual migration.

  I am a crow, immersed

  in the collective mind of the murder,

  and when the phone rings

  someone, at least one of us,

  has heard that tone of voice before,

  remembers the up-shot, and tells me,

  your brother needs help.

  Go now.

  Waiting for the Good Humor Man

  Houston, 1962

  Prone beneath mimosas,

  the picture-book God

  of rules and hellfire

  deferred to the grace

  of the natural world.

  Pompons rained on me,

  already dazed

  by the scent of heat

  rising off asphalt,

  the smell visible

  as a mirage

  in a foreign legion film.

  And though I don’t believe

  my catechism, as I did then,

  I’ve kept my eyes open to visions,

  mild thunderbolts which saints

  might call the voice of God:

  After a storm, starfish

  littered the beach at Sanibel,

  hundreds of six-armed bodies

  expelled from the deep.

  And fifty years ago, I saw