My Life in Peaches, by Adrienne Su

This one's unpretentious and fun. It feels like a writing exercise that went well. 

 
My Life in Peaches

Hard, green.
Ripened, fragile.

Spiced cling.
Breyers All Natural.

Coffee cake, Jell-O,
cobbler, preserves.

In watercolor
with flowers, birds.

Long-life emblem,
acidic-sweet.

Name of every
downtown street.

More Winn-Dixie
than Samarkand.

License plate,
tollbooth scan.

Tiny carvings
in tiny pits—

Buddhas, houses,
forests, fish—

high artistic
economy.

Flesh has a price.
Stones are free.




From Peach State by Adrienne Su, 2021.
University of Pittsburg Press

[if your complexion is a mess] by Harryette Mullen

The speaker looks at contemporary burdens related to beauty in the context of being African or dark skinned. A lot of care went into this. It's packed with rhyme and near rhyme, alliteration, and assonance -- especially strong at the end with cancer and rancid. Lots of allusion and frollicking with the language paired with sharp observation, slightly acerbic in tone. 

[if your complexion is a mess]

if your complexion is a mess
our elixir spells skin success
you’ll have appeal bewitch be adored
hechizando con crema dermoblanqueadora

what we sell is enlightenment
nothing less than beauty itself
since when can be seen in the dark
what shines hidden in dirt

double dutch darky
take kisses back to Africa
they dipped you in a vat
at the wacky chocolate factory

color we’ve got in spades
melanin gives perpetual shade
though rhythm’s no answer to cancer
pancakes pale and butter can get rancid

From the book Recyclopedia by Harryette Mullen, published by Graywolf Press, 2006.

Ode to the Maggot, by Yusef Komunyakaa

This is a good one to go with Pablo Neruda's Dictionary (see below). American poet Yusef Komunyakaa names Neruda as one of his influences. The language is lustrous, just like the creature he describes. Hear him read this.

Ode to the Maggot

Brother of the blowfly
& godhead, you work magic
Over battlefields,
In slabs of bad pork

& flophouses. Yes, you
Go to the root of all things.
You are sound & mathematical.
Jesus Christ, you're merciless

With the truth. Ontological & lustrous,
You cast spells on beggars & kings
Behind the stone door of Caesar's tomb
Or split trench in a field of ragweed.

No decree or creed can outlaw you
As you take every living thing apart. Little
Master of earth, no one gets to heaven
Without going through you first.



From Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Copyright © 2021 by Yusef Komunyakaa.

Ode to the Dictionary, by Pablo Neruda

A favorite from what I've read of Pablo Neruda's 225 odes. His best are a little far out, like this one. I like the idea of the dictionary as a granary, a source of food, a source of life, the bread of life. The last part is Neruda's prayer or plea that the dictionary give him just the right bit of grain.

I like this translation, which I found online. I wasn't able to find the name of the translator.

Ode to the Dictionary

Broad ox back, ponderous
beast of burden, heavy book
systematized:
when I was young
I had no idea you existed, so wrapped up was I
in my own perfection:
I thought I was quite an item.
Puffed up like a moody bullfrog,
I pronounced: "I get
my words
straight
from rumbling Sinai.
I shall distill
their pure shapes by alchemy,
for I have magic powers."

The great Magus said nothing.

Ancient and weighty, in its worn
leather coat,
the Dictionary
held its tongue,
refused to reveal its secrets.
But one day,
after I had consulted it
and cast it aside,
after I had
declared it
a useless, outworn thing,
after it had done long months
of duty as my easy chair
and pillow, without complaining,
it couldn't take it any longer: it rose up
in my doorway,
growing fast, rustling it's pages
and its nests,
rustling its high branches.
It became
a tree--
an authentic,
nourishing
apple tree, crab apple or orchard apple,
and words
quivered brightly in its inexhaustible canopy of leaves,
words opaque and musical,
fertile in the foliage of language,
laden with truth and sound.

I turn to
one of
your
pages:
Stodgy，
Stolen
it's great
to form these syllables
out of air.
Farther down the page, there's
Storage,
a hollow word, waiting for olive oil or ambrosia.
And nearby there's
Stoop Stout Stove
Stork and Storm: 
words
that slide like slippery grapes
or explode when exposed to light
like blind seeds once confined
to vocabulary's cellars,
now come back to life, communicating life again.
Once again the heart burns them up.

Dictionary, you are not
a grave, a tomb, or a coffin,
neither sepulcher nor mausoleum:
you are preservation,
hidden fire,
field of rubies,
vital continuity
of essence,
language's granary.

And it is a beautiful thing
to pluck from your columns
the precise, the noble
word,
or the harsh,
forgotten
saying,
Spain's offspring
hardened
like the blade of a plow,
secure in this role
of outmoded tool,
preserved
in its precise beauty
and its medallion-toughness.
Also that other
word,
the one that slipped
between the lines
but popped suddenly,
deliciously into the mouth,
smooth as an almond
or tender as a fig.

Dictionary, guide just one
of your thousand hands, just one
of your thousand emeralds
to my mouth,
to the point of my pen,
to my inkwell
at the right
moment,
give me but a
single
drop
of your virgin springs,
a single grain
from
your
generous granaries.
When I most need it,
Grant me
a single trill
from your dense, musical
jungle depths, or a bee's
extravagance,
a fallen fragment
of your ancient wood
perfumed
by endless seasons of jasmine,
a single
syllable,
shutter or note,
a single seed:
I am made of earth and with words I sing.

Untitled, by Gabe Gudding

I don't think Gudding is pursuing his poems any more, and that's a shame. This just lobs peace at me. 

I think this is a prose poem. 

Untitled

We enjoyed Granada, we met amusing people there, there was a big park by the sea and a spattering of croquet balls abandoned in the grass, wooden planets, moreover there was a cow and a well and a thing brightly hanging on a high brown barn -- we walked from picnic to picnic, a little chain of picnics out to the east, and at the last one a small man with a lone banana showing us his best nickels, he kept our attention for a long time and then, like all of those days, it just kinda vanished.

From Gudding: 
Found in one of my notebooks, based, I think, on a phrase by Gertrude Stein starting, "We enjoyed Granada."

When at a Certain Party in NYC, by Erin Belieu

Here's a poem that's kind of funny and wry, and this suburbanite feels it.

When at a Certain Party in NYC

Wherever you’re from sucks,

and wherever you grew up sucks,

and everyone here lives in a converted

chocolate factory or deconsecrated church

without an ugly lamp or souvenir coffee cup

in sight, but only carefully edited objets like

the acanian soap dispenser in the kitchen

that looks like an industrial age dildo, and

when you rifle through the bathroom

looking for a spare tampon, you discover 

that even their toothpaste is somehow more 

desirable than yours. And later you go

with a world famous critic to eat a plate 

of sushi prepared by a world famous chef from 

Sweden and the roll is conceived to look like 

“a strand of pearls around a white throat,” and is 

so confusingly beautiful that it makes itself

impossible to eat. And your friend back home—

who says the pioneers who first settled 

the great asphalt parking lot of our 

middle, were not in fact heroic, but really 

the chubby ones who lacked the imagination 

to go all the way to California — it could be that 

she’s on to something. Because, admit it, 

when you look at the people on these streets, 

the razor-blade women with their strategic bones

and the men wearing Amish pants with

interesting zippers, it’s pretty clear that you

will never cut it anywhere that constitutes 

a where, that even ordering a pint of tuna salad in 

a deli is an illustrative exercise in self-doubt.

So when you see the dogs on the high-rise elevators 

practically tweaking, panting all the way down 

from the 19th floor to the 1st, dying to get on 

with their long-planned business of snuffling 

trash or peeing on something to which all day 

they’ve been looking forward, what you want is 

to be on the fastest Conestoga home, where the other 

losers live and where the tasteless azaleas are, 

as we speak, halfheartedly exploding.

This originally appeared in 32 Poems and was reprinted in 2013 in an anthology of the publication's best poems. 

De donde eres?

The Ruin, Anonymous

A rumination on some crumbling stonework done by "the Giants" (the Romans). Written before 1000 AD, this poem leads to Shakespeare, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and some current experimentalists -- the most musical of which must be hearing translations of early English in their heads. 

"Wierd" meant death, fate, what happens, what is. It's a shivery word; it makes my heart pound. It's good for October.

The spelling of wierd is correct in this translation. The elipses indicate text that couldn't be found. All of what we have of the poem  is here. 

The Ruin (exerpt)

Well-wrought this wall: Wierds broke it.

The stronghold burst ...

the work of the Giants, the stonesmiths,

mouldereth.

Rime scoureth gatetowers,

snapped rooftrees, towers fallen,

rime on mortar.

Shattered the showershields, roofs ruined,

age under-ate them. And the wielders and wrights?

Earthgrip holds them — gone, long gone,

fast in gravesgrasp while fifty fathers

and sons have passed.

Wall stood,

gray lichen, red stone, kings fell often,

stood under storms, high arch crashed --

stands yet the wallstone, hacked by weapons,

by files grim-ground ...

shone the old skilled work ...

sank to loamcrust.

From The Earliest English Poems, Penguin Books, Third Edition, 1991. Translation by Michael Alexander

Step into the sanctum.

Oak, by Atsuro Riley

This poem is a character study of a child, related by a speaker who gives us only splotches. The use of voice and sound is strong. So is the unusual syntax. G.M. Hopkins is here in the made-up compound words. Love the near rhyme at the end. And who's the oak? 

Why is this a poem? Because to say it another way would be: "Tammy thought of her absent father as the big oak tree that all of us hurting, fatherless children used to play on."  

The more I read this, the more beautiful it is.

More of this poet. 

Oak

We were all of us empty of its heft and Tammy could tell.

 

   •

  

Being she herself was (wildling) (loosestrife-weed)

(undaddied) same as us.

  

    •

  

Flung chaff-motes that we were

she saw to tell us time and time that yonder oak its bark and bulk.

  

    •

  

She harped on it; she rendered.   Instilled-

elucidated treeness piece by part.

  

    •

  

Have I said yet (howsoever she'd've told us) it was never it to her but him.

  

    •

  

As in I school myself   I climb the bluff   I followfeel the roots of  him.   They river-

bound They gnarlin' up from mud [black pluff!] He veins the bank.

  

    •

  

Some say.  Word was.

—That her (fleetblooded) actual daddy jacked the toll-thru (humps the trains).

  

    •

  

She dwelled on it; she brooded.   Elaborated-

fleshed for us especially much his arms.

  

    •

  

How one mossy brawn-span she favored

had been scathed (engraved along its length) by lightning.

  

    •

  

How the long-muscled (strict, striated) river-hanging-over one would hold.

  

    •

  

You could loop a rope there Nearabout the bicep

Whap you up a wide horsehead knot to grip.   To ride good Rid fear Let's

not feature no blackflow flowin' down below.

  

    •

  

Cling strong till your hands numb till your blood goes.

Swing low.   You could bellow you could holler while you're at it (Bending with you

not to break) You could set yourself swayin' till kingdom come Till he hears you till

  

    •

  

he weighs you.  You could ring rightful like the tongue of a bell.

From Poetry Daily
Sept. 25, 2021
From the book Heard-Hoard by Atsuro Riley, published by the University of Chicago Press.





Swing on over.