#poem
Old King’s Cold/Grail King
And the old King dies.
transcends his mortal ghost
to gain Olympian plains.
“I am the mighty he;
ruled wisely while I was allowed;
sold my soul to please the crowd;
withered on the vine divine.
There is no more of me to kick around.”
Drink from the golden Grail,
oh New Found King.
Adorned, adored, supreme.
A bright dawn upon the now
offers sparkling hope,
better days aborning.
Don’t despair poor peasant folk,
though you think despair all you
can cling to.
The Fisher King has roared in, high
on his desert adventures.
He brings ebullient tides to
slake the thirst
of this arid land.
I beg you yet again
to take a stand.
Take harness, plow your pastures.
Believe that the seed will take hold.
Listen to shamanic heralds
shouting lines in the sand.
They know great flood impends
after many a hard rain —
but don’t despair!
It is a flood of fertility,
a harbinger promising carpets of grain,
lush vegetation.
All this is foretold if you
do your part.
The old King, so long dying of dank,
festering wounds, has poisoned our past
with ill-fated rule.
Cast out the poison from your hearts.
Tend your fields with bold will
of nobility.
Never forget you are free.
Never forget that responsibility.
Happy Birthday Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night
Dylan Thomas
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I Told My Therapist I Put the Bi In Bipolar
Two poems by Bleah Patterson
When I tell my therapist I put the ‘bi’ in Bipolar she asks to see me twice a week
little, I screeched a bucket of water
in the backyard
tadpoles! tadpoles!
look! tadpoles!
but they were— my grandma shakes her head—
mosquito larvae much too small
much too filthy darting around the sludge
of the shallow They’ll bite you
when they’re big, best to kill ’em now
murky part of my
brain emerges manic screech like tadpoles!
tadpoles! look! therapist dips her
fingers into shallow murky
—shakes her head — too filthy too
nasty, it’s always the worst stuff
floating on top says feeling like I could survive
anything if I only wanted to, —big, I
bite razor to wrist, inner thigh— is a
goldfish, belly up, childhood fingers
tapping the tank Why won’t it swim and
my brain is telling me you don’t love me
anymore pink puckered pomegranate lips
chapped not answering the phone
but deep down
an angler fish knows that’s
not true I’m making things up again
imagining the worst I can’t hold my
breath long enough down there
but still they’re in the shallow
the murky not tadpoles!
tadpoles! no, look!
sales lady says stop romanticizing the struggle
but i’m slanted floor boards, always creaking
always leaning too far in one
direction wine out of a chipped mug
and when i take a lint roller to my lipstick
stained cat-hair covered personality
i can’t make anything stick sales lady says
“everyone should own a nice set of dishes, for company”
and i tell her the company i keep is a
handful of bread smeared through the butter dish
forks straight into the still steaming pot
she says my mother must be so proud and
rolls her eyes i say my mother always
told me a little dirt don’t hurt and i took that to
mean it feels good, took that shit
literally, took that and smeared the mud
across my eyelids said i was ready for a
night on the town the sales lady
says “everyone should own a nice pair of heels,
for date night,” but i’m a bare feet on his dash—
bored at the four-star restaurant, let’s
make love on the shingles, orion is mood lighting
she says the boys must love me rolls her eyes
I say fuck the boys I mean that literally
take all of that shit to heart.
https://electricliterature.com/two-poems-by-bleah-patterson/?mc_cid=2618de7d97
Bleah Patterson (she/her) is a southern, queer writer born and raised in Texas. A current MFA candidate and writing instructor, she is a Pushcart nominee and her various genres of work are featured or forthcoming in The Brazos River Review, Write or Die, The Texas Review, Across the Margins, Queerlings, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Beaver Magazine, and elsewhere.
“On Similes”
*by Miller Oberman *
I have read my father’s book and, as I suspected, much of it is bad.
Especially the attempts to teach mindfulness, which,
given that once at a bakery he listened at length to a woman
from a mindfulness class he taught gush about its effectiveness
all the while standing on my mother’s foot, is no surprise to me.
Especially bad are the similes.
“Grief is like an unkempt beggar” (242).
“…sniff these last days of summer like a fine wine” (242).
This compared to when he’s not trying so hard.
When, at 42, he has a heart attack and his father comes,
“he holds me as if I’m made of smoke” (109).
Housekeeping
BY Natasha Trethewey
We mourn the broken things, chair legs
wrenched from their seats, chipped plates,
the threadbare clothes. We work the magic
of glue, drive the nails, mend the holes.
We save what we can, melt small pieces
of soap, gather fallen pecans, keep neck bones
for soup. Beating rugs against the house,
we watch dust, lit like stars, spreading
across the yard. Late afternoon, we draw
the blinds to cool the rooms, drive the bugs
out. My mother irons, singing, lost in reverie.
I mark the pages of a mail-order catalog,
listen for passing cars. All day we watch
for the mail, some news from a distant place.
I just learned there is a new Li-Young Lee book of poems out that I missed notice of in May!!
Li-Young Lee: Selections
Poems “descended from God”
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/162904/li-young-lee-selections?mc_cid=1300a55b19
At the End, There is Always a House
by Sara Eliza Johnson
These days I move from room to room looking for a thing to
haunt. The filaments inside my teeth glow in the dark,
thirty-two beacons no one will see, except the mirror I
return to again and again, hoping for it to swallow me, to
find anything there but my face. Mirror is another word for
hunger. Hunger is another word for dead. Anyone would be
tired of hearing from me, the kind of woman — this repulsive
word — who'll never have a garden or greenhouse, only a
fridge crisper full of broccoli and kale and lettuce, all
rotting to sludge, bananas on the counter blackening like
frostbitten skin. I used to quarter an apple with such
perfection I could have been autopsying my own heart. The
thing is there's no way out of this house. Memory circles
like flies. Even the dead need to eat. Even the dead dream. I
left a note in the memory: You deserve so much more than
desire.
from the journal ALASKA QUARTERLY REVIEW
https://mailchi.mp/poems/todays-poem-at-the-end-there-is-always-a-house-sara-eliza-johnson?e=6ec42bce63
Disobedient Methods: On Li-Young Lee
Honoring one of the most influential lyric practitioners of our time.
BY Ocean Vuong
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/1600620/disobedient-methods-on-li-young-lee
Letter to the Corinthians
By Elizabeth Willis
When I was a child, my eye was older than an oak.
From the highest chair, I saw string beans move from my brother’s plate into my mother’s mouth when my father looked away. I watched my sister spit her peas behind the sink. A dog moved from the woods toward the kitchen door. The house unfolding like a book.
I read my father’s secret history of anger, my mother’s dissertation on subterfuge, their parlor of doubt, the kitchen of their discontent.
This was my host country and I its virus.
I witnessed a world that couldn’t be explained. Rhymed and unrhymed, its alien talk floated above a blanket of verse.
In time, I would adopt its pattern language. I would deliver its messages like a page. I would spy with my little eye. I would open and close like a camera.
In the stories of that planet, I would find no character resembling myself, so I would place myself outside them, in a poem.
When I was a child, I hated lace; I buried all the dolls.
I hid in the snow and thought about what it would mean: to disappear. A little ghost whispering help!, testing its alarms.
But when I was grown, I opened the box of broken dolls, and when it was dark, I held the tree by its branches and all the childish words rustled back into the woods, into the purple snow.
I knew there was a story larger than anything.
At the back of the lens, the end was already on fire.
End of Summer
BY Stanley Kunitz
An agitation of the air,
A perturbation of the light
Admonished me the unloved year
Would turn on its hinge that night.
I stood in the disenchanted field
Amid the stubble and the stones,
Amazed, while a small worm lisped to me
The song of my marrow-bones.
Blue poured into summer blue,
A hawk broke from his cloudless tower,
The roof of the silo blazed, and I knew
That part of my life was over.
Already the iron door of the north
Clangs open: birds, leaves, snows
Order their populations forth,
And a cruel wind blows.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/54898/end-of-summer-56d235ce0824f?mc_cid=e9abfd2de4
Gotham Wanes
BY Bryan D. Dietrich
The mask? Because we were never ugly
enough. Because our ugliness was epic.
Because we were given to it, because
we were so misgiven. You wear one. I
wear one. Yes. Kings, Pharaohs had them
fabricated, poured out in gold and beaten.
Most wore them to the grave. In Mexico
the living wear them, not to scare the dead
away, but as invitation. They leave candy
on the mounds of those they mourn. New
Orleans? Women wear them in order
to bare everything else. Men wear them
in order to watch. I can remember, back
before it all grows grim, making one
out of the news, trying to paste it together.
I remember my mother helping me. I don’t
really remember my father. Something
like a face, like the man in the moon.
I understand we’re hardwired this way,
to make faces before anything else.
It’s why we see the Madonna in mold,
alien architecture in Martian crater creep.
We keep looking for those first faces, first
familia. Every culture, every eon. Witness
the oldest we know, his cave, his wall, one
hundred seventy centuries gone. They call
him Sorcerer. They call me Knight.
We have always lived in the dark.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/54986/gotham-wanes?mc_cid=612b74ec37
Trio
by Bruce Snider
a. Driving Home from the Night Shift, Our Mother
Listens to Hank Williams' "Lost Highway"
She cracks the window,
letting the cold air
slap her awake. Cranking
the radio, she sings
along as she leans
into the burn of Tiger
Balm, her shift,
like her body, a sharpening
of drill bits, the break
room doors. Soon,
she'll enter the house
before anyone is awake.
This is her time
when everything is still,
when she could be
anything—a thief,
a mouse. Alone,
she'll wipe coffee rings
from counters, scrub
sinks, floors. Love,
she'd tell you, is work, and work
is what remains
when she leans into
a sleep she can
almost taste, when
our father like the dawn
rises to slip
his arm around her waist.
b. My First Boyfriend and I Slow Dance to Jeff Buckley's
Cover of Hank Williams' "Lost Highway"
This new voice is the old
voice of wanting
what you already have.
It marks me like
pressed hands in wet
cement, leaves me
warm against a boy
in a dorm room
damp with the musk
of hair gel,
drugstore rubbers
and knock-off Calvin Klein.
This is not romance.
This is not a story
of easy need, though
there's cheap beer
on the dresser,
rumpled white sheets
on his unmade bed.
Anything could happen—
his mother could call,
his roommate
could walk in the door, or
we could flinch,
dropping down as we inch
into each other, the track
on repeat: Now, boys, don't
start your ramblin' round . . .
c. Encore: Months Before His Overdose, Hank Williams Sings "Cold,
Cold Heart" in 1952 on The Grand Ole Opry—YouTube, 2021
Here, as if brought to
life, the echo of some
lost world: this skinny
lightning-voiced angel
with his white cowboy
hat askew. Like death,
the Internet, I've read,
is a ghostly well,
ever-expanding grave-
yard of last breaths.
Is this, at last, what
we're meant to become—
Hank's blazing eyes,
soulful black windows?
He sings and sings,
Byzantium's golden bird.
Or is this Christ's after-
life, gates ajar? Now,
colorless, Hank strums
his phantom guitar.
He stares. He blinks
and grins. He feels no pain.
Strange beauty in the lie,
this screen between
what's twice alive but
dead, what never ends.
When he stops, I click
back: he sings again.
from the journal GEORGIA REVIEW
https://mailchi.mp/poems/todays-poem-trio-bruce-snider?e=6ec42bce63
Calling Things What They Are
BY Ada Limón
I pass the feeder and yell, Grackle party! And then an hour later I yell, Mourning dove afterparty! (I call the feeder the party and the seed on the ground the afterparty.) I am getting so good at watching that I’ve even dug out the binoculars an old poet gave me back when I was young and heading to the Cape with so much future ahead of me it was like my own ocean. Tufted titmouse! I yell, and Lucas laughs and says, Thought so. But he is humoring me; he didn’t think so at all. My father does this same thing. Shouts out at the feeder announcing the party attendees. He throws out a whole peanut or two to the Stellar’s jay who visits on a low oak branch in the morning. To think there was a time I thought birds were kind of boring. Brown bird. Gray bird. Black bird. Blah blah blah bird. Then, I started to learn their names by the ocean, and the person I was dating said, That’s the problem with you, Limón, you’re all fauna and no flora. And I began to learn the names of trees. I like to call things as they are. Before, the only thing I was interested in was love, how it grips you, how it terrifies you, how it annihilates and resuscitates you. I didn’t know then that it wasn’t even love that I was interested in, but my own suffering. I thought suffering kept things interesting. How funny that I called it love and the whole time it was pain.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/162174/calling-things-what-they-are?mc_cid=56deb727c3
Two Poems from Sarah Carson
https://electricliterature.com/two-poems-by-sarah-carson/?mc_cid=3631611afe
Myth
by Joseph J. Capista
Cross a thin ribbon of sky which is, of course, the river. A child pits a bowl of olives with the bone-handled paring knife. Its blade is whetted too thin; it holds everyone's reflection but her own. She is eight. Off with your finger she says to no one, then lops off a tip, pinches its skin, and extracts with her teeth the olive pit, which she spits into another bowl. Three bowls, in all: one for what is hard, one for what is soft, one for what remains untouched. From the hook she has lifted, draped along her neck, and tied at the small hollow of her back the night. Clock, upon clock, upon clock. Still, who is prepared for this moment? If you want to hear better, close your eyes, she says. If you want to hear better, cover your ears. Each olive in the yellow bowl is black. Lining the river bridge are houses identical to this house; windows on one side hold the world, but windows on the other side hold the world. She counts sparrows on ratlines. When you stop dreaming of ghosts, she explains, then you have become a ghost. When she dreams, the olives in her dreams are green.
from the journal SOUTH DAKOTA REVIEW
Joseph J. Capista on "Myth"
Art makes problems by solving problems, I tell students, and solves problems by making problems. After stepping away from the writing desk for some time―COVID chaos, teaching obligations, family preoccupations―I returned to it disenchanted with problems of received forms and accentual-syllabic verse. Where better to turn than the prose poem? Russell Edson defined the prose poem as “a burst of language following a collision with a large piece for furniture.” No injuries occurred during the making of this poem.
https://mailchi.mp/poems/todays-poem-myth-joseph-j-capista?e=6ec42bce63
I Hear America Singing
By Walt Whitman
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46480/i-hear-america-singing
To measure internal activity while it turns all I know to rubble
By Rusty Morrison
I repeat “dead” aloud enough times for its meaning to loosen
from sense. Once the word I repeat is no longer comprehensible,
it begins to attack everything else I know.
Giorgio Agamben says devastation is one face of a Genius
that exists inside us. The other face is creation.
The two sounds that begin and end “dead” echo in my ears.
Then a third appears between them. The middle sound, between
the coronal plosives of the letter d, is the ghost.
Agamben tells us that the Genius is within us only as long as
we realize it does not belong to us. Just as existence does not.
Now I begin to voice only the ghost, and watch it ‘not appear.’
Is the narrow space between my Genius’s two faces
where that ghost lives? When I listen for what will not appear,
I hear my own voicelessness amplify.
My hearing is most acute when I’m naked
in front of the bedroom mirror.
I want voicelessness to create an echoing hollow
inside every word I type.
I feel how listening to find disappearances makes my nipples erect.
Disappearance is my new self-seduction.
“I was dealing with the death of someone close. My feelings were complicated, leaving me exhausted. But something in me shifted when reading Giorgio Agamben. He freed me from grieving, allowing me to find a fierceness—a fierceness that asked me to plunge into this moment, then the next, to dive into everything changing. The poem took time to finish. I was standing in front of my mirror, as I describe, when I opened to see the many selves I am disappearing, as I asked myself who I am. Then I wrote the last lines, or the poem wrote them for me.”
—Rusty Morrison
Rusty Morrison
Rusty Morrison is the copublisher at Omnidawn. She has authored several poetry collections, including Risk (Black Ocean, 2024) and Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. The recipient of fellowships from UC Berkeley’s Arts Research Center, Civitella Ranieri, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Morrison lives in Richmond, California.
https://mailchi.mp/poets/september-02-2024-poemaday-12138304-331miebijr-12140576?e=2706955217
Mrs. Butterworth, Uncle Ben & Aunt Jemima
BY Frank X. Walker
...walk into a bar in America.
Butterworth says, I’m being repackaged.
Ben says, I’m being rebranded.
Jemima says, I remember
when they branded my mama on her back.
The bartender says, I could stand in the middle
of Main Street and kill somebody
and I wouldn’t lose any voters.
Butterworth says, then I’ll take eight bullets
in my sleep. Ben says choke me to death
with your knee. Jemima says,
lock me in a holding cell and say
I decided to hang myself.
The bartender poured the drinks,
said he felt threatened
and was simply standing his ground
when he thought the thug
was reaching for a gun.
The headlines said Well-Loved American
Foods Resisted Arrest, Failed
to Comply, and Were Delicious While Black.
Butterworth’s daughter said here’s to progress,
we might finally get an anti-lynching bill.
Ben’s son said I’d rather they abolish
qualified immunity. Jemima’s kid said you know
they abolished slavery once,
then they hung my mama on that box.