Good Bones, by Maggie Smith

Raising children in a world at least 50 percent bad. It's not rich language here but sentiment and the churning way the sentiment is said. Wow.

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

From The Poetry Foundation

Chirp, chirp. 

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.

Saint Rose Counsels the Washerwomen of Lima

Orlando Ricardo Menes

Some say poems should appeal to the senses, frequently seeing or hearing. This one is about touch. I feel my fingers all around in it. And the only word that doesn't feel right -- feels too contemporary -- is "kids."

Cast off those husbands at the tavern, drag those kids to the
foundling house, & come live in my convent of cleanliness,
sisterhood of thorned habits, thistle sandals, rawhide girdles. Silent
toil will be your rule as you stoke the copper vats, starch wimples
to discipline. Bleach will smother like honey your pruned-up hands.
Your bare knuckles will rasp washboard Te Deums. Want to be
the Bride of Christ? Pain alone can lure his love. The cloistered
coquette learns to flirt by flagellation, wears a goat-hair negligee,
primps with quicklime, red pepper. She distrusts spectacles, demands
caustic benedictions. She has no need of priests in gilded chasubles
or altar boys dancing with silver crowns. Holy is her laundry water
at workday's end, her chapel sooted & clotheslined, her soap
sacramental, lye from Lenten ash.

I feel you speaking.

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

Wedding Toast, by Richard Wilbur

A formal poem for the formal celebration of love. The short third line of each verse holds back so that the fourth line feels like an overflow, creating a sense of abundance -- exactly what the poem celebrates. I love the word smack in the last line. It says taste, kiss, and the smack that love can hit you with.



Wedding Toast


St. John tells how, at Cana's wedding feast,
The water-pots poured wine in such amount
That by his sober count
There were a hundred gallons at the least.

It made no earthly sense, unless to show
How whatsoever love elects to bless
Brims to a sweet excess
That can without depletion overflow.

Which is to say that what love sees is true;
That this world's fullness is not made but found.
Life hungers to abound
And pour its plenty out for such as you.

Now, if your loves will lend an ear to mine,
I toast you both, good son and dear new daughter.
May you not lack for water,
And may that water smack of Cana's wine.

In the beginning was the Word. Write one?

You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior, by Carolina Ebeid

What causes so much energy in this poem? It is lithe and sinewy in sound and image. The repetitive "was," "was," "was" creates a hurried feel. The poem moves. And I like the end, which alludes quietly to the book of Genesis.

You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior

It was all roadside flowers & grasses
growing over the cities
was made of wilderness & sky
with God washed out of it
was the foreign prayer-word
it was a list of missing persons
was the solid bronze charging
bull on the famous street
was like the Roman method for making bees
was its taken-down carcass
& its bed of apple branches & thyme
was a new anatomy, a beaten hide,
a skeleton sweetening to glowing fluids,
& the bee born out, & the grist of them born
glistening as coins
it was anthem
was the listening,
the way a searchlight listens over a lake
it was the prayer-word out of your mouth
your thousand-noun request
it goes up up to the florescent weather
was an ivory box,
was hurdle & burn, burning through
the infinite, your overbright comet
was made of stones, made of berries & box tops & eggshells
it was like the word having reached the ear
& the words pollinated the dark, there was darkness there,
like the after-hours inside a library

The Colorado Review

Is anyone home?

Doing the Loop by Andrea Cohen

The use of "howl" must be a shout backward to Allen Ginsberg. The little snippet of an off-rhyming couplet at the end sounds self-satisfied but also sad. There are no rules. Begin again. ... Another workday. Another meal. Another loss. Another "how?" Sounds like life to me.

Doing the Loop

The rules are made in factories.
The rules are made to be broken.

Broken people see themselves in broken things.
Whole towns of broken people work somehow.

Somehow is not a place.
Yet you get there and wonder: how?

How, repeated, is a kind of howl.
In wilds and towns, how answers how.

How do you begin or end?
There are no rules. Begin again.


Beloit Poetry Journal
Winter 2014/2015
Howl here.