On Beauty and Being Just, by Jane Zwart

Here the poet explores what she sees as her own plainness compared with the beauty of the natural world. I like this poem's sly way of sliding into traditional metaphor. The moth, for example, is phosphorescent like eyeshadow. That sounds right. I wore shiny, blue moths on my eyelids in the seventh grade.

On Beauty and Being Just

It is possible that I have been unfair

to them, the flamboyants:

to opals, to abalones, to moths

more phosphorescent than any eyeshadow I’ve worn—

because who knows?

Maybe the painted bunting

would willingly trade

his layered, paint-by-number capes

for the robin’s rusty apron. Maybe

the hibiscus is not a satellite dish

tilting on its stem to overhear

the praise of passers-by

but an umbrella mortified

that day has left it open

in a narrow place to dry. Maybe

the Northern Lights’ magic

is static, escaped photons

from the cupped palm of a modest

earth, smoothing her skirt.

. . .

But there, too, I have been unjust,

asking the bird to disavow

his jaunty beauty, rose mallow to flower

rue. Wanting to be fair—

let me trade it for plain

delight. Let me quit shaming

the flame-like things

or, at least, let the wind 

unwinding its argon sarong

not mind the likes of me.

Published in 32 Poems magazine
Spring/Summer 2020




Do mind me.

Gestational Size-Equivalency Chart, by Catherine Pierce

Looking through my phone recently, I found this small miracle of a baby poem. The comparisons in this are all over the place, just like the wonder of carrying a baby and of the baby itself. I like it that a moment -- say, of seeing a whale shark or of hearing a great song kick in -- can have a size. At the end, the heaving of the red vinyl panels of the Gravitron call up the act of childbirth. So, so happy to have found this.

Gestational Size-Equivalency Chart

Your baby is the size of a sweet pea.
Your baby is the size of a cherry.
Your baby is the size of a single red leaf
in early September. Your baby is the size
of What if. The size of Please Lord.
The size of a young lynx stretching.
Heat lightning. A lava lamp.
Your baby is the size of every dream
you've ever had about being onstage
and not knowing your lines. Your baby
is the size of a can of Miller Lite.
Apple-picking. Google. All of Google.
Your baby is also the size of a googol,
and also the size of the iridescence
at a hummingbird's throat. Your baby
is the size of a bulletproof nap mat.
Cassiopeia on a cold night. The size
of the 1.5-degree rise in ocean temps
between 1901 and 2015. Your baby
is the size of the lie you told your mother
the night before Senior Skip Day, and
also the size of the first time you saw
a whale shark glide by, its gray heft
filling the tank's window, and also
the size of just the very best acorn.
Your baby is the size of the Mona Lisa.
The size of the Louvre. The size
of that moment in "Levon" when
the strings first kick in. Your baby
is the size of a baby-sized pumpkin.
A bright hibiscus. A door. Your baby
is the size of the Gravitron, and your fear
the first time you rode it that your heart
might drop right through your body,
and then your elation when it didn't,
when the red vinyl panels rose and fell
and you rose and fell with them.

From Danger Days: Poems by Catherine Pierce
Saturnalia Books, October 2020

What say you?

Posting one of my own. For my son when he was a baby.

Tucked In

Moon head,
you pearl the world.
You opalize,
you sheen with green
the now I tend.
You are my prize.
Jewel,
I would polish you,
engrave a plaque
and label you
my son,
my perpetuity,
my eon.

But you're not rock.
You're mouth,
you're breath
unfailing,
soft as footsteps on a rug.
And you are clear eye
wide as love
that guards me as I move
from door
to shelf,
from shelf
to drawer,
to you.

And you are
many-splendored lobe,
vellum nub I tug
between my teeth
and you are nape
and nose
and springy cheek,
warm enough to bite,
boy-sweet bun face.

Some distant night from now
the lack of you
will lope into this room.
And you'll be gone.
But I'll know how
I stroked the first white swirls
upon your head,
too fine for working hands,
so I touched them
with my lips
instead.

Hum, by Joshua McKinney

I skim through a lot of poems, and the sounds here made me stop. Blur, were, whir, heard, scales, tell, forked, afloat, tongue, foxglove, work, earth, remote, rote, broken, token, came, kiss, meant, make, matter. The poem reveals an ear. I wouldn't say it hums, exactly. Maybe it huffs. There's some work here.


Hum

When I smelled green through the blur
where its wings were, felt
           the whir of their arc, heard the red
           of its ruby throat-scales, tasted the dart of its forked tongue
                       afloat in the foxglove—my only desire was
to tell you.

                       My weed-work stopped. Hands
in earth, I knelt by the garden wall,
           and suddenly that world seemed remote.

           I called to you, aloud, and the words I spoke
                       were rote, broken, each one an arbitrary token
of the tiny bird that came to kiss the flowers.

                       It was then I knew my exile's full extent.
The phenomenon of pungent sound is brighter—
           sheer iridescent now there then—
           than the hours of thought without flesh. Once, to be
                       at one meant to act, so I have tried to make this
matter.


Published in Boulevard


Hum or whirr here.

The God and the Goat, by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

This poem feels both Christian and pagan. "Deliver me my skin" echoes "deliver me from sin," and the goat takes me to classical mythology. The language is unusual -- subtled as a verb, for example. But it's the sounds and the imagery, like nacre-gnarled and beetle-back sky, that grab me.

The God and the Goat

And then the goat said to the God,
Deliver me my skin. And He
Did. Then the goat said to the God,
Anoint me in my skin again.
—And He did. Then the goat said
To the God, Seal me in my skin.
And He did—. He salved the seams.
And subtled him. And Himself, too.
Call it unrecognizable
Weather: boiling snow sidling
Gilt cloudbanks; a beetle-back sky;
Nacre-gnarled écorchés of ought
And nought air; all caught in the thought
That we were the God and the goat,
Once strangers, now just strange, and bound
By the songs of Heaven and wound
That wing out from our one shared throat.




Baaa

Skate

Another one of my own. For Spencer when he was little and long of limb.


Skate

Fling of elbow,
spree of wheee,
festivity
of nerve and knee,
love,
you jubilate,
you clop toward grace
but smack into,
collapse onto,
askew,
the curb.

My specimen,
my bony bird.
You’ve hit perdition
gravel gray.
You flap, you flay,
you feather, flop,
you loud squawk up
and scatter sky.
You beak, you bok,
you rage, I rock
you, spew, I coo to
you, the my

whose lashes clump.
Whose chin fits in my palm.
Whose tear slides
toward my fingertip.
Whose ruin I’ll wrap
in ever arm
until you chirp.
Until you fly.

2007?

A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London, by Dylan Thomas

Just three sentences here. The syntax of the first is hard to follow, but logical: "Never until ... shall I ... ." The poem has a primal feel, and I think it is Judaeo-Christian. The last line, to me, says that on some level this is about the fall of man. The tragedy of one is the tragedy of us all.


A Refusal to Mourn ...

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.


Unspeakable