I GO INSIDE THE TREE

Indoors for this ash
is through the bark:
notice its colour – asphalt
or slate in the rain

then go inside, tasting
weather in the tree rings,
scoffing years of drought and storm,
moving as fast as a woodworm

who finds a kick of speed
for burrowing into the core,
for mouthing pith and sap,
until the o my god at the heart. 

 

By: Jo Shapcott

My Mother's Perfume

Strange how her perfume used to arrive long before she did,
       a jade cloud that sent me hurrying
first to the loo, then to an upstairs window to watch for her taxi.
       I’d prepare myself
by trying to remember her face, without feeling afraid. As she drew
      nearer I’d get braver
until her scent got so strong I could taste the coins in the bottom
       of her handbag.
And here I am forty years on, still half-expecting her. Though now
       I just have to open
the stopper of an expensive French bottle, daring only a whiff of
       Shalimar
which Jacques Guerlain created from the vanilla orchid vine.
       Her ghostly face
might shiver like Christ’s on Veronica's veil – a green-gold blossom
       that sends me back
to the first day of the school holidays, the way I used to practise
       kissing her cheek
by kissing the glass. My eyes scanned the long road for a speck
       while the air turned amber.
Even now, the scent of vanilla stings like a cane. But I can also smell
       roses and jasmine
in the bottle’s top notes, my legs wading through the fragrant path,
       to the gloved hand emerging
from a black taxi at the gate of Grandmother’s garden. And for a
       moment I think I am safe.
Then Maman turns to me with a smile like a dropped
       perfume bottle, her essence spilt. 

 

By: Pascale Petit

Without Me

Once, in the hiatus of a difficult July,
down Eskra’s lorryless roads from sweet fuck all,
we were flinging – such young sophisticates – like a giant frisbee 
this plastic lid of an old rat poison bin.
 
We were flinging it from you to me, me to you, you to me;
me-you, you-me, me-you, you back again.
And you would have sworn that its flat arc was a pendulum,
compassing Tyrone’s prosey horizon.
 
And I would have sworn that our throw and catch had such momentum
that its rhythm might survive, somehow, without me.

By: Leontia Flynn 

DARK LOOKS

Who anyone is or I am is nothing to the work. The writer
properly should be the last person that the reader or the listener need think about
yet the poet with her signature stands up trembling, grateful, mortally embarrassed
and especially embarrassing to herself, patting her hair and twittering If, if only
I need not have a physical appearance! To be sheer air, and mousseline!
and as she frets the minute wars scorch on through paranoias of the unreviewed
herded against a cold that drives us in together – then pat me more, Coventry
to fall from Anglo-Catholic clouds of drifting we’s high tones of feeling down
to microscopic horror scans of tiny shiny surfaces rammed up against the nose
cascading on Niagara, bobbed and jostled, racing rusted cans of Joseph Cotten reels
charmed with his decent gleam: once we as incense-shrouded ectoplasm gets blown
fresh drenched and scattered units pull on gloss coats to preen in their own polymer:
still it’s not right to flare and quiver at some fictive ‘worldly boredom of the young’
through middle-aged hormonal pride of Madame, one must bleed; it’s necessary . . .
Mop mop georgette. The only point of holding up my blood is if you’d think So what?
We’ve all got some of that: since then you’d each feel better; less apart. – Hardly:
it’s more for me to know that I have got some, like a textbook sexual anxiety
while the social-worker poet in me would like her revenge for having been born and left.
What forces the lyric person to put itself on trial though it must stay rigorously uninteresting?
Does it count on its dullness to seem human and strongly lovable; a veil for the monomania
which likes to feel itself helpless and touching at times? Or else it backs off to get sassy
since arch isn’t far from desperate: So take me or leave me. No, wait, I didn’t mean leave
me, wait, just don’t – or don’t flick and skim to the foot of a page and then get up to go – 

 

By: Denise Riley

RAIN

It started unremarkably,
like many regimes. We sat like children
making quiet things indoors. The rivers

burst their staves and soaked the folds mid-
country; they were schlepping people out in pedalos,
and punting through cathedrals saving cats. One lad

clearing out his granddad’s drain was still caught
when the waters lapped the record set in 1692.
Imagine. News-teams donned their somberer cagoules.

The house had more floors than we knew. In twenty years
we’d never spent so much time in one room. I’d no idea
you had a morbid fear of orange pips, or found French novelists

oppressive. On the seventh day, completely hoarse,
we took to drawing on the walls and staging tableaux.
In delirium all actions feel like role-play –

protein-strands against the ooze, the animals we made –
and rain, a steady broadcast on all wavelengths,
taught us everything we know about the tango. Only

when we grew too thin for metaphors was rain just rain.
We thought about the drowned boy, how he watched
the lid of water seal him in, for all his bright modernity.

Was it a Monday morning when the garden was returned,
tender with slugs, astonished at itself? Our joined hands
were the last toads in the ark. We walked, we needed news.


By: Tiffany Atkinson

TIME AND MATERIALS

Gerhard Richter: Abstrakte Bilder

1
To make layers,
As if they were a steadiness of days:

It snowed; I did errands at a desk;
A white flurry out the window thickening; my tongue
Tasted of the glue on envelopes.

On this day sunlight on red brick, bare trees,
Nothing stirring in the icy air.

On this day a blur of color moving at the gym
Where the heat from bodies
Meets the watery, cold surface of the glass.

Made love, made curry, talked on the phone
To friends, the one whose brother died
Was crying and thinking alternately,
Like someone falling down and getting up
And running and falling and getting up.

2
The object of this poem is not to annihila

To not annih

The object of this poem is to report a theft,
In progress, of everything
That is not these words
And their disposition on the page.

The object o   f this poem is to report a theft,
            In progre   ss of everything that exists
That is not th   ese words
            And their d   isposition on the page.

The object     of his poe is t     repor a theft
           In rogres f ever hing at xists
Th is no ese w rds
           And their disp sit on o the pag

3
To score, to scar, to smear, to streak,
To smudge, to blur, to gouge, to scrape.

“Action painting,” i.e.,
The painter gets to behave like time.

4
The typo would be “paining.”

(To abrade.)

5
Or to render time and stand outside
The horizontal rush of it, for a moment
To have the sensation of standing outside
The greenish rush of it.

6
Some vertical gesture then, the way that anger
Or desire can rip a life apart,

Some wound of color. 

 

 

By: Robert Hass

Sales

Miguel might, if he speaks English, call the colors
of ukuleles stretching their necks from yards
of canvas duffel yoked across his shoulders,
auroral azul, cherry pop, or mojito green,
under this Pac Heights sky where the awful rich
snap their heels past shop windows, past goatskin bags
and spiked heels that bring them closer to heaven,
fibristic sheets of celadon paper from Zhejiang,
FIAT cremini, and Cinco de Mayo gelato.
Smiling past them, he passes with his happy load,
a display model whole and nude in his hand,
on sale to no one, uplifted like a Stratocaster
sacramental from mahogany forests in Paraguay.

By: W.S. Di Piero

What To Do

Places we leave
slick our bodies
with silky air
or foam we feel
faithful and tickly
(even somehow taste)
but can't clearly see.
We wear its weight
like atmosphere—
runs, blots
of what we’ve done
in and with
each place
—what to do
with it now?—
and what it does
to us still. 

 

By: W.S. Di Piero

Two Girls

Eighteen-sixty eighteen sixty-four,
six hundred ten thousand men
gaseous gray, blackened body parts
like chopped wood in Virginia sunshine.
Or nineteen-fourteen nineteen-eighteen,
trench rats, thousands, big as badgers,
rip chines from horse and human flesh.
IED’s, cluster bombs, punji sticks,
primed to shred feet, thighs, spine, sack,
yesterday, when we were countless.
Conscience says Count them up and be good,
suck on me like red candy stick
in casual lookaway moments.
Protected by neighbors, two girls
villagers know to be deficient
doll themselves up as bombs
for market day’s chickens and yams,
and like a world-body neural surge,
their protectors fly into fatty parts. 

 

By: W.S. Di Piero

I HATE

I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound,
not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling,
keeps rasping in me, not in its old guise as nostalgia,
sweet crazed call of blackbird in spring;

not as remembrance, grief for so many gone;
nor either that other tangle of recall: regret
for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions,
petrified root too deeply hooked to ever excise;

a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh
of delight in astonishing being, of being in being,
with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what,
not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love;

not even war, fuck war, sighing for war,
sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease;
more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note,
sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us,

echo of love we had, have, for world, our world,
on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge,
mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise,
cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment,

din from which every emotion henceforth emerges,
and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides:
sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue,
of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy. 

 

By: C.K. Williams

FEAR OF HAPPINESS

Looking back, it’s something I’ve always had:
As a kid, it was a glass-floored elevator
I crouched at the bottom of, my eyes squinched tight,
Or staircase whose gaps I was afraid I’d slip through,
Though someone always said I’d be all right—
Just don’t look down or See, it’s not so bad
(The nothing rising underfoot). Then later
The high-dive at the pool, the tree-house perch,
Ferris wheels, balconies, cliffs, a penthouse view,
The merest thought of airplanes. You can call
It a fear of heights, a horror of the deep;
But it isn’t the unfathomable fall
That makes me giddy, makes my stomach lurch,
It’s that the ledge itself invents the leap. 

 

By: A.E. Stallings

FISHING

The two of them stood in the middle water,
The current slipping away, quick and cold,
The sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold,
Once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter.
Maybe he regretted he had brought her—
She'd rather have been elsewhere, her look told—
Perhaps a year ago, but now too old.
Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her:
To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails
And fishes shelter in the undergrowth.
And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales
Beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth,
Life and death weighed in the shining scales,
The invisible line pulled taut that links them both.

By: A.E. Stallings

COLD CLEAR NORWEGIAN SEA

the water was clear so clear.
the water was as clear as water that is clear.
as clear as water that to be clear appears.
just as if.
just like water you’d like to hug, pile high,
or mail off as a letter.
as clear as the Pythagorean Theorem.
the first Law of Thermodynamics.
which you wish also applied to water.
as very clear as it is blue, green, fluid, statically dynamic.
as clear as the right side of the universe.
so clear that you seem to be watching it (water) through a pane
of clear to almost clear water.
like as if.
clear as a fish of clear water.
clear as the effect of unreal terror on reality.
clear the way it’s clear that fish are edible
locomotion and ships
inedible journeys.
mostly.
not as clear as H2O.
clear, as if the water (it) doesn’t multiply
with itself.
so clear, it’s as if water weren’t transcendence
but in fact substance.
so clear that the comparative value Jellyfish appears unclear.
and actually even
much clearer than
as if. 

 

By: Ron Winkler