to seal a kiss around his open, trembling mouth,
and blow the ashes from his lungs.
Fishing
To feel without seeing
the force that pulls against us,
thrashing out its strength
beyond our measure, guess its weight and beauty,
and then to know, be certain: this is fishing.
Tradition took me to a secret pond,
taught me to bait a hook and cast a line,
to wait, relaxed, but ready for the strike,
ready to set the hook beyond the barb
deep in the creature’s mouth, and not let go.
I felt the nibble first, a spasming
Did you imagine that?
then the plunge of the line and the whine of the reel,
the strain of a living thing bowing the rod
beneath the mystery of calm, dark water;
then above, writhing on my line,
suspended from somewhere in its gut,
the swallowed hook catching and shredding there,
much heavier in thin air, swimming still,
fighting the thing inside it
past all victory and wonder.
I dropped it, rod and all, into the boat.
What kind of fisherman was I
to fear the blood-gilled bass dying in bloody flops,
its belly bulging for the knife,
working its mouth and lying still at last?
Hospital at Night
Something about the background quiet here.
The hum and clank of dinner on the roll,
a next-door neighbor rinsing out the fear
in something shallow, some event or bowl.
Beside each bed, a white contraption hums,
and suddenly a disembodied cough
erupts, but every separate sound becomes
a part of it: this hush you can’t turn off.
The doors are all ajar, as if to keep
a child from being frightened of his sleep.
The doctors come and go as darkness falls,
and weary nurses, not one beautiful,
move in a chapel calm down long white halls,
turning off and on smiles like light snowfall.
Wolf Hunting
Like some old fossil on the Isle of Wight,
some baron with a number in his name,
my grandfather kept a stable of hounds.
Like him, the dogs were poor Americans
descended from a place they’d never been,
a little taller than their counterparts
in Wales and England, built for taller game
and more wide open range, but with the same
look about them, sad but clean, saddlebacks
of black and lemon, spots of black and tan,
comical floppy ears and short rough coats:
not beautiful in any special way.
And on a weekend night, or any night,
since they were both retired old men by then,
he and his longtime sidekick used to wait
for nightfall, then sink slowly back in time.
They didn’t go on horseback, and a kill
was rare as murder. They’d just drive around
and talk and listen, breathing in the stars.
Maybe a little whiskey in a sack,
or maybe not—I never saw the stuff
in action, just the bottles in the fridge
on the back porch, there with the silty brew
that tasted like a cellar, and the wine
as sickly-sweet as Kool-Aid.
But those dogs,
you could hear them far off, their voices wild
but somehow mournful, like the highway sound
that drifted through the window late at night,
a faraway life. My grandfather claimed to know
what they were after by the sound they made—
a rabbit had a certain sound, a coon—
as if the soul of the quarry had entered them
and all they did was give it back again.
What they were after were the little wolves
called coyotes, mostly scavengers, that stayed
and flourished when the bison disappeared
and deer were hunted down. The greater wolves
were all long gone by then, they’d blown away
with the dustbowl, or about that same time,
after a hundred years of poverty
and degradation. But to a young boy
they were still there—everything was still there,
it was just hidden. And none of those good dogs,
or even three or four, would have a chance
in hell against it. Something engineered
and driven in the blood might chase it down
and corner it, but then they’d have to fight,
and out of nowhere others would appear,
the rest of it. It would be like a bunch
of prep school boys against a prison gang.
They’d all go down like lambs.
Which never happened,
of course. It couldn’t happen. Now and then
a bitch went missing or a wound appeared,
but there’d be no deep mystery in that.
The countryside itself could slash and tear.
Each year the busy highway took its share.
And then—a fact you wouldn’t so much see
as hear, when you remembered afterward—
their bodies had this tendency to turn
on one another, out there in the dark
they had no business in but still longed for,
with nothing left to guide them but the moon.
Sighting
The deer, a buck and doe,
appeared and stood
on the stage of the road,
and my father slowed
the Oldsmobile, then stopped it
completely, to wait them out.
Noble, aloof, undeniably
beautiful, like swans with hooves,
they craned their necks
and turned their gazes on us,
patiently, without apparent
curiosity. What did they see?
Two fully grown men
with boys in their eyes,
a father and son,
an old couple of sorts?
Or was it only distance,
something else, a thing to be
appraised and moved away from
carefully, without words
or thought, at a gingerly trot?
Look, the moment said,
receding all around us
like the future after love.
And then they leapt inside it,
fleeing, tender white bellies
over tightly-strung thorns.
Rachel Stolzman Gullo
Lioness
When my man stood in the morning kitchen
His shadow cast an exact likeness.
Brown flecked yellow linoleum, his soot profile
Not a husband, round forehead, swollen lips, wandering eye.
In 1950, they call him Negro, they call me Jewess.
If he knew what I was carrying, would he have
sat at my table nine months?
A Jewess and a Negress both carry nine months.
Would anyone believe that in 1950?
Yes, a woman with child knows the turn of a day.
A Jew has nowhere to go on Sunday morning.
My man ducked his hard head out the door a June Sunday.
In January the shadows are short.
There were no shadows in the room when we glimpsed the crown.
I took her from them, we locked eyes
already familiar her h
eart smell
I could have licked her clean.
On berries, squash, ripe bananas, milk bottles with honey she grows.
There is heat on her belly when I put our skin to skin
There is a sun inside.
I know how to calm a tidal wave
I can put a hurricane down for a nap.
In 1954 my kitchen is set for a party.
All of our guests bring sunflowers
we have honey cake, four beeswax candles
All around I hear the buzzing of a hive.
I lean down to peer into her eyes,
golden, they are happily distracted.
“Mommy, look at me next to you!”
I scoop her up and our shadow is an unrecognizable animal.
At night in my clean house when I try to think,
the street noise through the window distracts me.
Out there the language hasn’t changed,
but through a mere pane of glass it loses all meaning.
I step inside her room.
Her mane on the pillow thrills me
her eyelids gently lowered over a dream
lashes brush the night air.
I bend my mouth to her ear and carefully, “Lioness.”
Her mouth curves into a tender smile at the sight of herself.
The Diviner
When you cried for the first time, my new love
the stars skittered off the night’s face
and I braced my arms
To keep the cloth on the table.
Then I understood
how a mere wall of stone
held back the crusaders
at the shore of Rhodes.
A salmon can press
through nine hundred pounds of river
upstream, to its birthplace, lay eggs
like thousands of pin-pricks.
A man with eyes closed
guided by a forked branch
can dig two stories, underground, with a shovel
to draw water for a herd of sheep, lying down.
I can fathom these powers,
I knew you enough.
What shocked was the strength
I’d never known—in crying.
The Eighties Were Different
If your best friend was a child actress, you went on auditions with her.
And if you were sitting in a waiting room, and fourteen, you had a chance to audition too.
Once I almost got a Doritos spot
because my teeth were better than hers.
I bit into six Doritos for the camera
and I never felt more semitic.
But her everything else was better than mine, and neither of us got it.
When she landed a role on Charles in Charge, I spent the week on set with her.
The cast and crew treated us both like new friends.
The Eighties were more innocent, even when they were so gritty.
I asked Ricky Shroder what he wanted for his birthday.
He told me a box of condoms.
At the tender age of fifteen she lost her virginity to an overweight boy in the bedroom of a party.
She regretted it within minutes.
It was my brilliant idea that we tell him she was a prostitute and that he owed her a hundred bucks.
We both liked this idea.
We did it, but he didn’t pay.
Yana Lyandres
New York Transplant
I was born of the sound rain doesn’t make
but masquerades,
of fleeting glances
across subway platforms
for my voice is too weak
to make thoughts collide with air
in the sex of speech
but the eye can’t help but look.
I don’t know how I got from trains 1 to 3 to E
from smoking in high school
parking lots to New York City
or what about taking headache pills
makes me wish for the headache back
but stop signs are the reds of Valentines
if you let them be
and flipping through old diaries
is a requiem
for relationships passed on.
Eleven years ago, in class, we tore up squishies,
the earthworms we kept like pets,
in the name of science
and I’m still shedding tears over their
shiny intestines exposed, embarrassed
for their vulnerability.
I harden my insides with cigarettes
so when these city streets break me
and they finally get to cut me up,
there will be no wet-looking pink, blue, grey sunsets
for them to write poems about
and the black that envelopes them
will mask the wounds of the scalpels I swallow daily.
The only thing they’ll find
is what I want them to: the love letters
tucked away like children in the protection of my veins—
to the rat I saw scampering down east 10th street,
to the punk girl I met at the bodega who
thought I was the one who’s cool,
to all the people leftovers that still live inside me,
taking up space, not letting me leave.
Procession of Late Night Confessions
Sometimes coffee spilled over all
the pages, post-its of my thoughts—
soaked-through milky smell
concealing tears felt—
is a ritual cleansing,
like baptism, spring cleaning
purging of sin.
I won’t send a plague on this house,
I’m sorry, this house is not a home
rain-streaked windows
make this place more livable.
We like to talk of christenings
in lieu of baptisms in blood
I am not a martyr, I know I am not a martyr.
I know not who I am
but I know 5 AM
and its cousins—hunger sans appetite,
dry heaving over toilets, the silence
like scalpels, silence like UV rays
burning my skin with the lights turned off;
silence—
you wouldn’t believe me if I told you how
5 AM is a scalding cup of chamomile
I pour down my throat every night
and every time I’m still surprised
when it burns.
Cut Me Open, Make It Hurt
For Nancy Spungen
You cut up your arms with
love bite-heroin injection cocktails
but if you ask me about these markings
on my skin, I will bear my teeth.
This is not self-harm like my mother
tells me—it is survival.
Some people use the backs of their hands, veins—
feet because they’re easy to cover—
as a sketchbook, the medium—dad’s
toolbox nails, razors left in the med cabinet—
please
cut me open to prove
there is blood in these veins
instead of strings of copper, zirconium—
I don’t hide hi-tech electronic tendrils
of synapses under my hair.
I can’t tell you how to love your scars, Nancy—
like ones Barbie doesn’t have—
but mine are my art history,
and if this sharp linework and shadings,
teacup, clover, fadings in the letters
reminds you of addiction—I’d say,
Hell yeah, these beauty marks—not scars—
chart my path through self-deprecation, hatred,
crises of identity I metaphorically injected
into my veins every day for the past eight years—
yet reveal, on close inspection,
a faint floor plan back
to self-love.
I gladly go under the needle,
pour ink into my skin
to be less human—
not bionic but stronger
than bones and teeth.
Nancy, close-read yourself, study
the patchwork quilt you wrote
on your own body—I don’t talk smack.
What kind of love is this,
if you don’t come back.
Coast to Coast
I could not tell you why
I’ve never had the taste for Earl Grey tea
or why I’ve been craving shrimp lately
or why my little brother’s hands
tightening reflexively around my wrists
makes me think
of low-tide wanderings,
hermit crab-chasings,
lobster rolls with Cape Cod chips
and sweater sleeves hanging limp past my fingertips
but home is bus windows looking out
onto the calm roads of Cambridgeshire,
friends who wander with you along shorelines
past town limits ‘til you couldn’t know what would follow
or if you would be swallowed up
by seaside winds and unsaid hope-filled mementos
of future meetings, hints of which wafted toward you
from the ocean depths.
I cannot say I have much to be proud of lately,
but last week I went to bed before 11 three nights consecutively,
didn’t miss my stop on any of the trains I took,
and feasted on a love expressed in crêpes with jam
in a seaside town in Suffolk.
MD’s Nu descendant un escalier n° 2
Cubist-Futurist Modernist classic
can’t take my eyes off
that stroboscopic-, stop-
motion photography
those curves and lines
browns and ochres. Can this simply be
a dissection
of movement, human like a machine?
Faceless, emotionless
someone, teach me
how not to feel
give me a new word
for fucked-up hurting
instead of “broken”
there is a certain strength
in getting out of bed.
Can’t walk
down a staircase right,
watch these Iron Man legs
and shapely thighs,
curvaceous ass like 3-D disks—
I trip over stairs that aren’t there.
I’ve been told to stay away from
empty calories,
feminist arguments,
to keep my clothes on,
I drink my coffee black.