#poem

kennychaffin@diasp.org

THE SECOND PASS
by Taylor Mali

The first pass along the whetting stone
creates an edge too fine to last;
the second, more blunting pass
tempers the edge into usefulness.

Together we used to hone blades
so unutterably precise
tomatoes would slice themselves
open to expose their reddest flesh.

Later, in the restaurant’s kitchen,
when the head chef needed a knife,
screaming in French, he came to her
station and used one of hers.

She told me this with pride one night,
then put her hand on my chest
and cried stainless steel tears
I could not understand.

When she jumped from the window
and they searched the apartment,
they found in the bathroom a knife,
its edge unbloodied, as sharp as a razor.

And I keep thinking of the second pass,
how it sharpens as it dulls the working edge,
how the one has a real and necessary need
of the other to do what it does.

—from The Whetting Stone

2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize Winner

Taylor Mali: “In both of the books of poetry I published after Rebecca’s death I tried to include a few poems about her. But they were always so unlike the rest of the manuscript that they couldn’t stay in. I’ve known for a decade that all my poems about Rebecca would need to be published in a collection by themselves. The Whetting Stone is that collection.” (web)

#poem #poetry #literature
https://www.rattle.com/the-second-pass-by-taylor-mali/

kennychaffin@diasp.org

Theory of Sand
by Kate Partridge

Our voices in the dark across the improbable sand
hills sheathed in mountains. No flares. Red-beamed

headlamps and the tug of clouds, Venus in its brightest sequins
a little gaudy, the ridge holding us up across its spine. We

strummed it with our feet like strings. Nothing is too early except
in our expectation. We already knew blankness, had heard the song

of innocence—its high-pitched arc floating out of car windows
and across the meadow somewhere back East. l was dressed in black,

and for days the sand ran out from my toes. There is no point in being any
more sensitive. In one story, the stars twist above us like a lid clicking shut.

In another, we lie prone on the surface, for once not interfering,
as we wait for the house lights to dim, the curtain to rise.


from the book THINE / Tupelo Press

“Theory of Sand” was written after a visit to Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado, and it includes italicized text from Adam Hadhazy’s BBC article “What are the limits of human vision?" This is one of several "Theory of..." poems in my collection "THINE," which borrow their titling scheme from Muriel Rukeyser's 1935 collection, "Theory of Flight."

Kate Partridge on "Theory of Sand"

#poem #poetry #literature

libramoon@diaspora.glasswings.com

AGAIN, I DEMAND, “MERRY CHRISTMAS”

Merry Mass of Christ
riven upon the four-fold way
cut into deity and man
at the crossroads
in the witching hour.
Sing praise of all things holy.
Make us to see, feel that pain,
horror of wrenching heart
from spirit. Blithe, obliging
demonic Angel Fate,
each generation descends
into fiery pits of abuse
reaching, reaching
into and out of the story, the warning.
If Christ is love,
if love is what we truly worship, eyes closed
in holy communion,
what keeps us riven
on the crossroads?
What keeps us from reaching out
to bind each other’s wounds?

#poem #holiday

kennychaffin@diasp.org

(Because of formatting this one is best/only viewed directly)

https://mailchi.mp/poems/todays-poem-i-am-raising-jennifer-givhan-6078224?e=6ec42bce63

[I AM RAISING]
by Jennifer Givhan

I am raising a daughter
a nation
a knife
the animal nuzzled my neck
it drew blood & in the blood
across my chest spelled an animal language it took
a life to learn

                                                   *          

                                                    In the closet I girled into a demon
                                          [a woman with a girldemon in her belly]
                                                                      & the devil whispered—

                                                    *                      

                     As a mother I've realized, too late, it was

memory, where could I have learned sex-
ualization unless it was carved
into the closets of the girl I've buried

                                                   *

                                                  I memorized every letter of the bible
                                                  & still I hurt & still the wound bleeds  

                                                   *

I am raising a wasp's nest
a sharp organ
a sting that won't retract

I've ripped her from the humid biome of insects
caressing our bellies & fed her thickened milk

I am raising a stake to the fat heart

                                                   *

                                The night she fevered toward the otherworld
                           Mama I can't do this & I commanded Yes you can
                                                                    I am raising      a warrior

                                                    *

When a man
ungauzed the woundgirl the girlwound
the sticky rot place inside
I wouldn't let her see me falling apart
The daughter holds an ostrich feather to her mouth
& from her lips flower truths

[blooming toward everyone with ears] they sow

eggs in their palms & when they hatch
only the blood
of girls unbelieved
we know our calling

                                                      *

                               We came upon the ghostflowered grave[less]
                                        plaque for the girl our city calls Victoria
                                             whose mother & her mother's beasts
                                              undid the one creature in this world
                                                              God decreed she keep safe

                           I see Victoria in every field in every open space
                  remade in God's image as if her methed-out mother
                         had never vultured her girlbody, petal by petal—
                            Victoria visits me some nights & tells me she's
              slaying beasts in the otherplace where the girlwounds

                                                                               arrive for healing    

                                                                     She shows me her map
                                    & promises to lead me there someday too

                                                      *

I am raising a dead girl
a voice
a voice
a voice
a voice

                                         Hush. Victoria is singing. Can you hear

her knifeflower song?


from the book BELLY TO THE BRUTAL / Wesleyan University Press

This poem is for every girl who was not believed or didn't know whom to ask for protection. This is for everyone who needed a mama spirit inside themselves because their mama couldn't or wouldn't protect them. This is also for Victoria, whom I never met, but whose spirit will never leave me alone. I see you dancing in every wildflowered field. May your beautiful soul, released from your girlbody too soon, fly free and unharmed. May you know you're loved. And that there are mamas who would've protected you. I'm so sorry your own mama did not. I will keep your memory alive and protect all the girls I can, as fiercely as I can, so long as I live.

Jennifer Givhan on [I AM RAISING]

#poem #poetry #literature

kennychaffin@diasp.org

Gaetan Sgro

THE WEIGHT

How much does a hospital weigh
I’ve tried to estimate
Fluorescent tiled corridors, star-crossed
Friends arriving late

Bags of saline, laundry trucks
Arresting lights and spoiling plates
The best laid plans, the bitter ends
Slant rhymes to ease the breaks

I added up the midnights
And multiplied the days
Divided by the setbacks
And factored in the grace

Untied a stack of letters
And checked the book of names
But after all of this accounting
The sum was something out of range

What is it like to feel
The lightening of such weight

For weeks the leaves along the drive
Have scorched the corners of my eyes
Until today I stepped outside and saw
The naked branches dancing

From across the neighbor’s fields
The verse came charging

The hard clay shook

—from Rattle #81, Fall 2023

Gaetan Sgro: “I’ve never had much vision when it comes to career planning, arriving late to my medical training with only an English degree and an ear for stories. But the compulsion to write, to engage in this often frustrating, occasionally sublime, and ever-evolving process, has always been with me. It will always be with me because I will never get it right.” (web)

#poem #poetry #literature

https://www.rattle.com/the-weight-by-gaetan-sgro/

tord_dellsen@diasp.eu

Write my name on my leg mama
Use the black permanent marker
With the ink that doesn't bleed if it gets wet
The one that doesn't melt if it's exposed to heat

Write my name on my leg mama
Make the lines thick and clear
Add your special flourishes
So I can take comfort in seeing my mama's handwriting when I go to sleep

Write my name on my leg mama
And on the legs of my sisters and brothers
This way we will belong together
This way we will be known as your children

Write my name on my leg mama
And please write your name and baba's name on your legs too
So we will be remembered as a family

Write my name on my leg mama
When the bomb hits our house
When the walls crush our skull and bones
Our legs will tell our story

How there was nowhere for us to run

--- Zayna Azam

#ZaynaAzam #poem #poetry #Gaza #genocide

libramoon@diaspora.glasswings.com

THE PRINCE

This land is mine.
My own little bailiwick,
my power supreme.
None dare to defy me.
I choose life
or death
or some demeaning inbetween
for any who dwell here.
In love with my own majesty,
beating young virgins
into bloody sacrifice,
gorging on sweet aromas
of burning flesh.
Nothing too grand, too opulent
to venerate my presence,
lofty beneficence
of my rule.
Who has temerity to call me cruel?
Every tragedy I oversee
can be assured of
profound value.
Torment as tribute
to self-acclaimed All Powerful
has its own recompense
and pride.

#poem #political

libramoon@diaspora.glasswings.com

PRESENT OPENING

Calling forward
Lights and music
Swirling holiday cinnamon and myrrh
Taste of snowflakes
Crisp, cold, magic
Ballet nights, stories from afar
Joy becomes a hallmark
Friendly carolers decorate bright doorways
Signs say peace is nigh
If we take hope’s highroad,
glide sublime, widening sky
Warm vibrant rays glow inside and out
Affirm this season of light is about finding that place
of love to strengthen our heart
Soaring forward
Eyes sparkling fire meet
Earthly gaze
Spin a spiral of cheer
for the pleasure of all coming days

#poem #holiday

yew@diasp.eu

today some words visited me in my lair...

Illuminated in the light of night

free souls dance

to the sounds

of truth and beauty

a #ya #poem !

kennychaffin@diasp.org

A Walking Man
Alberto Giacometti

enter image description here

A Walking Man
Ilya Kaminsky

Perhaps you too, upon seeing Giacometti's "Walking Man,"
will run from the National Gallery of Art hollering
into the Potomac, will strip
off your shirt—
as you splash, the gulls will
toss your pants back and forth
making a game
of what cannot
be eaten.

Perhaps you too have an impolite need to drink with the long-legged statue, but no
beverages are allowed in the gallery & even Giacometti's
"Walking Man" is afraid of the guard & wishes
him bird droppings in his hair.

Between the flashes of tourist cameras, I
see it: Giacometti's "Walking Man" is
a political
declaration—

A public lecture
on how people's
souls are unbandaged and how
we will die of them.

The air is raw with joy.
Sit, heart, rest
from the soul’s south-west
Why so much life?
I don't know what to do with less!

I have given up all I have
to the giver of bread and breath.

Outside, Washington DC
is a theater where police vans play the role of police vans
and senators pretend to be senators
a taxi makes a city more a city
and boys still don’t read except for what is written on women's t-shirts.

At 10 am, the gallery opens and you zigzag between
our nation's most important people parading between important
paintings. Someone's
camera flashes—
a politician
hurries by as if he were
Giacometti's "Walking Man"
but he looks more like a well punched
bus ticket.

Why so much life?
I don't know what to do with less
I have given up all I have.

When I die,
find me at the National Gallery of Art
I’ll be flat on the floor
in front of Giacometti's "Walking Man"
a little flask of lemon vodka in my pocket
I want the last joy of putting my cheek
to the stone floor
of whispering
you in whom I do not believe, hello.

#poem #poetry #literature #sculpture #art

kennychaffin@diasp.org

GRAVITY IN JERUSALEM
by Arthur Russell

I wanted to grow up to be a raincloud over an upstate reservoir during a draught.
Then it was my ambition to become a slender woman, or a book cover cut from a grocery bag,
or a trumpet, or a garden rake, or a handkerchief embroidered with a strawberry heart.

The evenings were much longer then. I wanted to be a satchel with latches that slid sideways
to open, a cutting board bearing the wounds of nutrition on my back, the scratchy absolution
of a dollar bill passing through the coin slot of a charity tin at the cashier of a candy store.

Like the colors in comic books when comic books were printed on foolscap, my irises
would dilate for the dishwasher light in the darkened kitchen, and contract at the open
refrigerator door. The brass drain in the kitchen sink, scrubbed with persistence

to a low brass glimmer was my art school; it whispered, we are brass kin, and you are me
in human form. I wanted to grow up to be the lavender soap in a lingerie drawer
or the handgun under the cable knit tennis sweater on the top shelf of the hall closet.

I envied the moldings around doorways, and wanted, more than friendship, to crawl
inside a mezuzah, to read its scrolls in seclusion, and to emerge from my cell
like morning in Manhattan with muted light on the brick façade of an apartment house.

I wanted to marry a book of matches once, to have children like misaligned wallpaper seams,
and teach them how to blow their noses and spit up phlegm, and how to fit a square god
in a round soul, and how to see all fathers as bags of donated clothing waiting by the door.

There is more light in a glass doorknob than gravity in Jerusalem.

—from Poets Respond
December 10, 2023

Arthur Russell: “I have been preoccupied since October 7th with the tragic events in Israel and Gaza, preoccupied, sometimes embattled, and sometimes collapsing into a conflicted form of despair. I hear little bits of news and my emotions swing one way, and then other news, not necessarily conflicting new, that urges my heart and my rage and my despair in a new direction. Often, too, I feel disqualified by my distance from the reality, from having any feelings at all, and retreat to the emblems of my own spirit, my own morality, and my inheritance.” (web)

https://www.rattle.com/gravity-in-jerusalem-by-arthur-russell/

#poem #poetry #literature

kennychaffin@diasp.org

Hades Baedeker
by Ken Chen

Places of Interest

Any visitor to the afterlife will notice how hell’s landscape is excessively possible. Since death is fundamentally uncreative, the dead territories have been requisitioned from those of the living. The paper-windowed residences of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the villages of Indochina and the adjoining jungles wheezing from poison, bulldozed Palestinian homes reconstituted in Tartarus brick by brick, so many streets and buildings, trees and vegetation relocated here by those pinnacles of Western civilization, the bomb and development. Even the most casual tourist to hell will notice the curious spatiality of Hades, the dead geography being simply history.

https://granta.com/hades-baedeker/

#poem #poetry #literature

kennychaffin@diasp.org

Two Poems
by Lucille Clifton

climbing

a woman precedes me up the long rope,
her dangling braids the color of rain.
maybe i should have had braids.
maybe i should have kept the body i started,
slim and possible as a boy's bone.
maybe i should have wanted less.
maybe i should have ignored the bowl in me
burning to be filled.
maybe i should have wanted less.
the woman passes the notch in the rope
marked Sixty. i rise toward it, struggling,
hand over hungry hand.

june 20

i will be born in one week
to a frowned forehead of a woman
and a man whose fingers will itch
to enter me. she will crochet
a dress for me of silver
and he will carry me in it.
they will do for each other
all that they can
but it will not be enough.
none of us know that we will not
smile again for years,
that she will not live long.
in one week i will emerge face first
into their temporary joy.

from the book THE BOOK OF LIGHT / Copper Canyon Press

https://mailchi.mp/poems/todays-poem-two-poems-lucille-clifton?e=6ec42bce63

#poem #poetry #literature

kennychaffin@diasp.org

As Though It Was a Small Child
by Cynthia Dewi Oka

I attend to the snow, hour after hour, marking where light
prunes its borders until an antelope appears out of the grass
below, a yellow-green leap, misshapen in the eye then
corrected in the mind because this is the immigrant's work,
isn't it, to see what isn't quite there yet, or any longer.
To hold on, then, to what cannot be called truly an image, or
a memory, but something more vivid, less accurate, a stomach's
gurgling in the dark, that organ to which neither music or language
belongs. I wake up these days, a new mother again, watching,
waiting, to understand what to offer, how to serve, by which I
mean, organize my body around what cannot be spoken. It's not
that there aren't countless names for it, antelope being just
one of them, something you might recognize, too, if only from
the haze of afternoons spent once upon a time, innocently, with
the Discovery Channel or at the zoo, where the foreign and exotic
that have only power to survive but not to touch you, perform
themselves at scheduled times with either bared teeth or hula-hoops.
I had meant, of course, to write a poem about love, but I keep
getting stuck on its conditions. For instance, it is below zero
again today. I put my walls down and the snow blows into
my mouth, so when I say I love you, I love you, I mean, take
what I have been given. It is not one way. I will swallow your
estrangements, too. I’m not afraid. Tomorrow an antelope might
be a glacier, a book stitched of the heart-bursts of hummingbirds.

from the journal THE JOURNAL

I wrote this poem after re-reading Edward Said’s "Reflections on Exile and Other Essays" (Harvard University Press, 2002). I dedicate it to those who have been forcibly expelled from their/our homes; who have had their/our lineages destroyed by colonization and occupation; who have been designated savages, animals, collateral damage by those too weak to bear love as a responsibility. What I learned from Said: love conquers nothing, love carries everything.

Cynthia Dewi Oka on "As Though It Were a Small Child"

#poem #poetry #literature

https://poems.com/poem/as-though-it-were-a-small-child/

kennychaffin@diasp.org

THE END OF HURT IS NOT HEALING
by J.B. Penname

after Jamaica Baldwin

Whose bright idea was it to start tearing
out pages of poetry and wadding them up
to plug our wounds? The poems I like don’t
even come when you call them. As though

they’ve forgotten their masters, lost the sound
of their own names. They bear no antiseptics,
cannot cauterize you clean, but the way they
lick themselves is still good for a laugh. Is that

what I aspire to? Five years ago I nicked my finger
slicing a carrot. Five years and I can’t even watch my
father carve a turkey without getting second-hand
please-don’t-lose-your-goddamn-fingers syndrome.

But sure, when he’s done I can sit at the counter. In the
quiet of the kitchen, I can eat the turkey. Man what a turkey.

—from Prompt Poem of the Month

November 2023

https://www.rattle.com/the-end-of-hurt-is-not-healing-by-j-b-penname/

#poem #poetry #literature

libramoon@diaspora.glasswings.com

https://whitecatgrove.wordpress.com/2023/12/03/poem-deer-singing/

#POEM: DEER-SINGING

Posted on December 3, 2023 by #whitecatgrove

"I sing the prayers, you turn your face to me
night-eyed, ears fanned, and you listen. A stamp
for a stanza, your hoof against the earth,
regarding this strange phenomena:
a woman singing a prayer to you
as the oak leaves drift in their gentle rain.

My father shoots deer, stuffs the freezer
with them, my mother cooks them in a stew.
I sing to them and let them be, and so
we have a better relationship.
The turkey did a gentleman’s strut
outside the kitchen and I admired, charmed,

waiting for the butler to present
a calling card on a silver tray.
I eat flesh as health requires, but I don’t
gobble the world, I let the other be
offer up songs and an admiring eye.
Sometimes they sing back and stamp their feet."