James Daniels
Moving the Guns
He came back from Vietnam with a jones
for guns, and a few scars. He worked
on the assembly line tossing axles
pretending to faint one day so he could
study for college exams. The guns increased
like the paperclips of his professors. He joined
a motorcycle gang. They all packed guns.
He became a gun-show regular. The dealers
saw him coming and did not take
cover. He got big guns and little guns
though not too little. A scar near one eye
made it water. He was not crying.
Even when his mother died. His father
evaporated when he was a boy
and stuck him with the man’s name
just like his mother. He ordered a bride
from the Philippines and brought her
back to his trailer full of guns and war
movies. They had two kids, a boy
and girl. Red-haired Filipinos.
His Marine time, border patrol time,
prison guard time, all added up
to retirement. A big guy with big guns.
The trailer shrunk into small and musty.
The kids grew restless and bored
and taller than their mother. He took
guns to shooting ranges. His good eye
was still good. The guns were taking over:
beneath the bed, on high shelves,
racked like pool cues. His wife worked
in an outdoors store that sold guns.
He could not find a part- time job that fit.
His size, his tattoos. His scars and lack of tact.
His mother left him Christmas decorations
and nothing else. He threw them out—no room.
He kept one, a heavy blonde angel like his mother.
He cleaned his guns. He lost track
of life and began punching his own head.
VA sent someone twice a week.
His wife went up to full time.
How did he get there? Where were
his guns? While he slept, she snuck them
out one-by-one. The kids helped.
The motorcycle disappeared though his colors
hung in the closet like an old hunting trophy.
He did not hunt. He wondered if he should
start. He still knew how a gun worked.
Like riding a hog. He squeezed imaginary
triggers. The daughter and son shoveled
the snow. The mother drove his pickup
to work. He sat in the trailer gaining
weight, losing interest, watching old movies.
Good guys always won, wild west
or in wars—except the one he was in.
He needed to protect his family.
He found a handgun they’d missed
but no bullets. Where were the bullets?
He only needed one.
Nightmare of My Last Class Before Retirement
They kicked me out of my classroom
in the middle of my last lecture,
in the middle of a sentence
that began with I remember.
They needed the room
for routine ritual bloodletting
or emergency vacuuming.
(something something dream smoke)
I led my students out through
the gauntlet of the disgruntled self-satisfied
whose skin glistened with oily retribution
they’d been saving up for years
like belly button lint and ear wax.
(even the hallway disappeared)
They sent us to the only space available
for finishing up my illustrious career:
the local driving range. I abandoned
my notes, my grade book, my accumulated
wisdom. We all got a bucket of balls.
(such comfort to see the range balls
striped red and blue to prevent theft!)
Everyone seemed to get into it, hacking
and whacking until finding beyond all reason
a sweet spot to send one flying. I myself
had trouble getting air under the ball—
lots of line drives that bounced then rolled.
(two states away, near the horse track
by the old factory where I once toiled)
Of course, we all tried to aim our shots
to hit the caged tractor busy retrieving balls
out on the range. I must brag that I was the one
who finally nailed it. Oh, loud clanging ricochet!
( )
I discovered that I was the one driving the tractor—
both shooter and victim—and woke up.
(against my will)
I took this as an omen never to take up
golfing on actual courses, to rely on
the defined limits of the range. I suddenly
remembered leaving all my notes
in that stuffy classroom and imagined
the harumphers (authorities suggest this word
has a second r, but it doesn’t look right to me)
scouring them for evidence of my unfitness
(though they didn’t need it!)
It might have been nice to watch the notes
blow away across that stretch of green.
Perhaps that tractor I was driving
could’ve shredded them as they surged
past the rusty 200-yard sign marker.
Driving ranges are like bowling alleys!
(This great insight carries me
into retirement and beyond.)
I was using the ancient clubs I’d found
in my grandfather’s basement after he died.
My grandfather, who putted around
cigarette butts on the par 3 course
on Belle Isle in Detroit and always came
home with more balls than he’d started with.
(This all wasn’t in the dream. If you can’t
take liberties with a dream, well…)
My grandfather tried to teach me a few things.
Never say Fore! he said.
Keep your head down, he said.
On Looking Up to Assholes
I have a pretty long list. How about you?
Ones I believed in like the white sheet
Of ghosts. The garbage-truck maw of secrets
opens wide, and you don’t want to be standing
in the splash zone. Bruised arms, held back,
under eyes unprotected, the easy blood of betrayal
spilling from lips, and acrid tears, acid tears.
The lie that strips you down to shame. The missing
money. The missing apology. The blowtorch
of abandoned friendship. Who’s left holding
the evidence, peeling their own skin in search
of a true self light enough to lift off, high enough
to call them as he sees them? You.
Even Jesus rolled a gutter ball now and then,
didn’t he? Smug assholes, each their own kingpin
leading the pack in the bowling-alley line-up,
and I dutifully fell down behind them,
imagining I was helpless. In the stillness
of the storm calmly blowing in, softly blow me
a kiss of forgiveness, or at least recognition,
for some have even looked in turn to me
and I have let them down, clutching my crude stick
I’d carved my initials in: me, and mine.
Richard Lyons
Johannes Bobrowski
“My dark is already come.”
Inside the fox den—clay-streaked dirt,
a half-eaten hare, skewed feathers.
The scent of rich loam doesn’t stink
like a brand-new casket.
I crawl out, and a jay takes a berry
from my hand. Maybe it thinks
its beak must act with a vengeance,
or it possesses no memory to scare it.
Even after years, I remember the bodies
gunned into ditches, the snow falling.
With a shovel, I covered skin with dirt.
I may have repressed my role in this.
Now I climb to a nest and steal an egg.
It shines pale blue with dark flecks.
I crush it between tongue and palate.
The yolk tastes like fierce yellow sun.
To my Doppelgänger
I’m playing the abacus like castanets.
I’m turning the keys atop sardine cans.
I’m digesting the dark little fish.
I skirt the present, the way birds
scatter over a marsh.
Which strata am I standing on?
I’d bet on my newest version
of life’s inexactitude,
how it picks you out, via ricochet.
Hurts, I know, but it passes—
don’t bother complaining,
thank somebody or other.
Take the wheel.
The alignment tends to slip
toward cars coming the other way.
Grab one of these peaches
and let the juice run down your chin.
We don’t need napkins or servants.
These distractions complicate the plot
with nothing to compensate
our yearning’s longevity.
Detriments will drag their anchors
through our flesh
whether we win or lose the moment.
Keep on driving till you reach the sea.
I have it on good authority
that the octopus
has many more genes
than either of us and is more well-suited
for what will come. We won’t even be history.
Tim Suermondt
The Best and the Brightest
We all know how that went:
history often loves sticking the knife in
and keeping it there—no escape
for those who should have known better.
I admit this was on my mind
as I walked past a long row of flame trees
on Hospital Street—off to see some veterans
at a café, veterans who turned out
not in the mood to talk about the war,
much as I coaxed them in my just passable
Vietnamese. They wanted to chat about America,
grandchildren, why the best pho in the city
resides here, and basketball of all things.
The 15 to 20 foot jump shot is my claim to brilliance
I told them—nothing in the world more automatic
and on we went about different sports,
as motorbikes rushed by us like racing beetles.
The war I too folded that day, like a napkin or a flag,
was completely routed by our last round of beers,
hiding itself by the ancient river of the better memories.
George Kalamaras
Nocturne of the Western Night
We thought the years would last forever,
They are all gone now, the days
We thought would not come for us are here.
—Kenneth Rexroth
Now that the night has bitten us
we understand the words
of those who came before. The creak.
We hear the creak of each syllable
among a stand of cedar. Cottonwood.
Pine. We come flying back through
each hole of our breathing. Core.
We know the moon. How could it have ever left us?
All those years it seemed to follow
when we drove town to town, embracing
its shadow. Council Bluffs. Ogallala.
North Platte. McCook. Sterling. Now,
it gives us only slushy snow. Cold. Uncaringly.
As if the radio could not find a voice.
As if the static of our lives. Stuck.
We understand the bodies of the almost-dead,
the bent and congestive, dragged up
from the swamp. Night shifts. Books
of food stamps. The 24-hour market shelves
and fluorescent lights harnessing workers
to stock. Truckloads carrying the hours
away from all we love. The world drove us
to this. The world and only the world
made it so. This is the way of slush and rain, a path
of dark clouds and sky. Laramie. Sheridan.
Casper. The long road up through the winding dark
of the Bighorns. The night keeps on
bearing the night. Starlight is buckshot
sprayed from the mouth of a god, sometimes angry,
sometimes asleep, as she says, I am with you all
as you read this, and I am gone, broke
and blistered in the belly of the dark,
in a cradle of stars rocking through
the Milky Way. Nothing will remain
of the night except the night
clinging to the underside of our day
clothes, the way we speak, walk,
almost touch. Each word
burdened with what it holds onto
from the dark, barnacled and bent. Imagine
starlight camped in the mouth like rocks.
Imagine an all-night radio talk show saying nothing
but hurt. Imagine the only friend you have
in the long haul from Billings to Butte, Butte
to Missoula, Missoula to broke. The years we thought
would not come for us have come.
This is the night. This is the dark.
No wonder we keep trying to put it to sleep.
Dead Grouse
Of course, I thought of Jim Harrison
With his bird dogs decades in Michigan and Montana
How this bird fell from the sky
And why
This dead grouse in the driveway
Suddenly upon me in my midnight flash-lit path
Lying in gravel
Like shot dead by the stars
Her little body
Her perfect mottled bird body
Already falling into the earth
Already sinking away
Like words of love
Like so many words of touch and hurt
How many times did she fly over our home
Wondering at all the human commotion
Below?
I look long into her speckled breast
So much breath had broken into each day and night
Into the break of evening's dusk before the coming dark
And what would swallow her
So much flight
She knew she could only glide so long
She could not pursue
Herself to this final spot
This mix of gift and grit
This is not Livingston, Montana, or even northern Michigan
There is nothing living here at this moment
Even here in Livermore, Colorado, among cheatgrass and pines
But the midnight sky spitting at us both
As I peer into what she spent her life trying to avoid
And spent her motherhood teaching her chicks to shun
Such a small powerful bird in my path
The Dusky Grouse of the Rockies
Unusual on the ground
Like fierce inverted weather
Like weather reversed
Among the echo of footfalls
My footfalls
I am used to looking up into her
Underbelly of stars
Into her
Thrumming
Her otherwise beauty but am left now touching
My chest in reverence and leaving her here
Bathed in starlight
As is my hope for her
To fly one final time
Into the depth
Of darkness and the bodies of the fox family
With three ravenous kits
Denning on the hill behind us
Whining for a good death
To give them life
John S. Eustis
Her Next Husband
I doubt that I will ever meet this man
but if I did, I know what I would say.
I’ve played it in my head a hundred times.
I’m sure I would be welcoming and kind,
not wanting to disrupt their happy life.
I’d demonstrate maturity and grace
toward someone who has followed in my wake.
And after all, I’ve landed well myself.
I only saw him once, before they moved.
I was on foot, stopped at a traffic light.
He pulled up next to me, eyes on the road.
I never would have known that it was him
but recognized his car as my old Dodge.
That has to be the perfect metaphor.
Sharon Whitehill
Promises
After Naomi Shihab Nye, “Kindness”
Before you can know what promises are,
they must be broken on you,
your faith in a parent’s protection betrayed,
your belief in a friend's vow disappeared
like first snow on a sidewalk.
Remember yourself climbing into the saddle
again and again with a Charlie-Brown hope,
even bruised and still spitting out grit,
seduced by the sweat-salty tang of the horse?
Before you can know what promises are
you must break them,
stare down your shame at what you promised
your long-ago little girl:
Parents fight sometimes, it’s okay,
I promise we won’t get divorced.
Step out of your justifications
like a skirt you've dropped on the floor.
Like the skin shed by a snake,
made tender and raw as the child
whose trust you breached with a pledge
you had neither the standing
nor wisdom to make.
Before you regard any promise as binding,
beware of believing that what you are feeling today
will endure for the rest of your life.
You must study the thousands who've failed
because they fell into despair or addiction,
or simply fell out of love.
You must pay heed to women and children in shelters,
to victims who clung to their vows to the end.
Before you can grasp what your promise implies,
you must understand it as an arrangement.
Not only because of the ease of explaining away
your own failures—you promised on impulse,
you wanted to please, he broke his promise first—
but understanding that even God barters a this for a that:
If you believe, you will enter the kingdom of heaven.
By the time you come to know promises kept,
you will have shown who you are
in the face of temptation and shipwreck.
You will know to let humility color the hurtsboth absorbed and imposed,
let compassion direct you the rest of the way.
Ronald Moran
Release
What will absolve
me of my guilt
for crying out Die!
alone in our small
bathroom, door closed
when her mind kept
falling like last leaves
of a live oak, as she
tried to remember?
I knew I couldn’t cope
anymore that night,
so I got in our car,
drove until my guilt
was on the raw edge
of squeezing my head
like a vice, went home,
apologized, and led
her like a child to bed.
Rick Adang
Bringing the War Home
When my father heard about the bully pushing
my sister around, he armed Tom and me
with Louisville Slugger baseball bats
and led us out to teach that kid
that no one would mess with his daughter.
As we strode down the sidewalk three abreast
I kept glancing at those tight jaw muscles
puffing himself up to look more than 5’8”.
The evening wore on and I thought about
how much pain we might be headed for
like following the Stations of the Cross,
imagined the Louisville Sluggers as thugs
haunting the banks of the Ohio River
all snotty and snarly.
Glancing up at the sky from time to time
amazed that people could look
at that mess of stars and see constellations.
He needed this night after his year in Vietnam
a military adviser so no combat
just hanging out in sleazy Saigon
collecting Broadway show tunes on reel-to-reel
Julie London vamp songs, that Tijuana Brass album
with the naked woman on the cover
key parts hidden in whipped cream.
Dodging syphilis and sometimes thinking
that he was missing out on what truly tested a man
that it might have felt good to shoot someone.
As the night wore on I watched our shadows lengthen
as we passed streetlights, gripped my bat tighter.
I’d start whistling and Dad would say
maintain radio silence.
We scoured the streets for hours
and I thought well I guess this is war,
endless boredom, waiting to die
the enemy hidden in the jungle.
J.R. Solonche
September
School begins, and how
differently it begins for them,
for the five-year olds waiting
with mothers, or with fathers
sometimes, for the first day
of the first week of the first year,
excited, brave, they board the bus
as golden as a sunrise, while for
the teenagers, singly or in pairs,
already they look defeated, worn
down, morose, resentful, old,
“We are old,” they think as they get on
this sunset bus of their own.
Susan Shea
Pubescence
On the first day
of the new school year
middle schoolers enter
looking calm, rested, unsure
if they are unpopped sweet corn
or improvised explosive devices
filled with hormones and histories
of nature-nurture ready to go off
at the slightest provocation
already hot from summer’s irregularities
they walk back to rules and routines
unready to look into the eyes
of the teachers and counselors
who stand by terrified
praying they will have
what it takes to diffuse the commotions
craft any lost shrapnel into art
abstract enough to celebrate expressionism
that can be remembered
maybe even valued
from these uneven fields of ripeness
Ryan J. Davidson
Blue and White
One of my students died last night,
two years ago now. This
unleveled me in ways I didn’t imagine.
I found her fascinating as a person.
I taught her three times and she was in two
of my classes that semester.
She dyed her hair Kool-Aid blue
before the semester started—
two weeks and two years ago—
I usually wish I’d said more or different things
once I can’t do anything about it anymore.
I wanted to ask her about her
relationship with her closet.
Two weeks and two years ago I was asking a friend
about burial rituals in Islam
and she highlighted the wrapping of the body
in white cloth, three pieces for men
five for women. She pinned the thought
of that blue hair against the white,
that juxtaposition, in my mind’s eye.
Now I can’t remove it.
She was just nineteen,
and she will never not be nineteen now.
Greg McBride
Wind
Whose god it was invented wind
I do not know and little care,
though these unbidden thanks I hold
still gnaw as unrequited want
for that caress of naked skin
—mine, mine—wind finds. I site myself
for blessings well, iced tea in hand,
and feel my luck capitulate
to glories of the shade or sun.
A nodding day of filtered light,
the old chaise longue still cossets me,
my feet, in this celestial breeze
through stolid willow oaks, their leaves
that lightly turn in sway and fro.
Somnolent, I hum hosannas
for what some someone’s god has wrought.
Touch
—January 1970
Within the quiet of library shelves,
she moved as if Earth were all hers,
so slight its hold on her satin-black self.
Just back from war on Earth’s other
side, I found her shelves, and her, necessary
to me. We did not touch, but I felt a hush,
a chorus sounding soft as a flitterary’s
flutter in high, vaulted space. A rush
of nerves subsided in me as we talked
the small talk that transforms everything,
her every word tender as a whispered song
of longing. And yet, could we be? That spring?
My heart opened to possibility.
We did not touch, but she touched me.
Barry Seiler
Walking on Hudson Street
It must have been near here
Sinatra gazed across the widening mouth
of the Hudson at the City, not far
from where the ghost stories
of the Trade Center linger.
If I could see him standing there
looking like he could reach out
and touch the Island, I might sense
that voice forming inside him,
so much of its time,
balanced between world weariness
and intolerable yearning.
What I do see are the bride and groom
exiting the church, she wearing a lacy mantilla,
he dressed like a matador. How slowly
they descend the stone steps
careful not to trip over
their elaborate outfits.
I think this must be a wedding
choreographed by Garcia Lorca.
in a tender dream of their lives.
They do not trip. They are so dignified.
For a moment what matters in this world
is nothing else, nothing but this.
Josh Mahler
Somewhere
Before I reach the highway,
cracked asphalt leading a swarm
of faces going in one direction,
a field of wildflowers.
How so?
On either side the cars and trucks
surge forth a spectrum of color,
approximating what is natural.
If you look closely
the slender stems are bending
in sway of the blunt whoosh.
But I try and forget, or
pretend that what I see
is not impossible — that patch
of earth adjacent to I-66,
a miracle of patience, restraint.
Is this a good thing?
When I pass by on my way to work,
I think about stopping and standing
just to be surrounded up to my knees
in whatever this is, hoping to hear
something pure, sustained,
another place beyond
the eructating noise
that comes after waking up.
I would shut my eyes
and let the sun’s light
fall heavily onto my face.
I hum a song I can’t remember,
one written before I was born.
The road ahead is rippling with heat,
the vibrating flowers a form of farewell.
Stephen Gibson
At The Mütter Museum
of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
Any birth nightmare one might have is in a jar
filled with a liquid and identified with its label,
each in a cabinet of curiosities with its horrors
that someone, in the past, identified as female
or male because you can’t know what they are.
This was supposed to be a human boy or girl?
This was not the Barnes Museum with Renoir
and the other Impressionists, whose portrayal
of everyday life shows how flesh is also desire
for other flesh, to be inside of it or else to feel
that other flesh inside, although some are liars;
this was the Mütter, and each jar held an actual
once-living thing from a womb, one nightmare
a physician was duty-bound to study on a table.
Lorna Simpson
American, born 1960
Set of twenty-one lithographs and seventeen
lithographed texts on felt
The Museum of Modern Art, New York City
On view
Since slaves could be taken anywhere by slave holders
(a museum note tells us, next to one wig among many),
an enslaved man had his enslaved wife act as a master,
the woman so light-skinned, she could pass for whitey,
wearing the blondish-colored wig made of human hair,
an outlandish ruse, which almost got them out of slavery;
the second note tells the personal story of a crossdresser
wearing the indicated wig, both hiding his own sexuality
yet allowing him to live the kind of a life that he’d prefer,
while other wig lithographs fell into the cancer category,
the artist museum-note explaining wigs allowed wearers
to be more closely who they imagined themselves to be
or to be someone entirely different from who they were,
following radiation and/or chemo after the mastectomy.
Tony Beyer
Y nada más
someone quite like me
though evidently female
reads and leaves
books she’s read
at the charity shop
to be circulated second-hand
my eyes follow
where her eyes have been
and my hand on the trail of hers
turns the same pages
in this way
we have conversed
and shared thoughts
without ever seeing one another
siblings in printed text
loyally bodiless
Mary Dean Lee
The Search
In the mirror, dimly lit, passing by,
lines etched around the mouth, disappearing lips
from trying to hold on, make it past the landslide
a deep vertical ridge hiding behind the left eyebrow.
Not my accent.
Wish I could slip out of my skin every year
like a snake, grow another.
What is that gaping mouth with deep-red
lipstick doing in the upper right corner,
I can almost hear her guffaws. I slip through
the glass and join her, squish into that window,
on the other side. She’s teaching me how to
watch and listen. Already I feel lighter, limber.
I practice my laugh. Joe walks into the bedroom,
looks for me, in the closet, under the bed, under
a pillow. She puts a finger to her lips.
Other side of the mirror calls and I’m back
wriggling to try shedding, see what grows
in its place and practicing my laugh some more.
Claire Scott
Mourners Needed
What if no one comes to toss rose petals
into the six-foot hole, weeping into white handkerchiefs
or maybe only a few like Aunt Ethel with halitosis
& the neighbor I drove to Lucky last year
(what the hell is her name)
hardly standing room only
hardly the stifling smell of Calla Lilies
or the need for Elite Valet Services
Rent-A-Mourner to the rescue
guaranteeing a great turnout
making me look loved by thousands
instead of being a reclusive introvert
hardly ever leaving the house thank god for Amazon
actors imitating dear friends & family
speaking French accented English
wearing Dior dresses, Chanel shoes
Sporting just-back-from-the-Riviera tans
crowds of perfect strangers
spilling into the cemetery
sobbing in perfect pitch
stiletto heels stumbling on headstones
cashmere coats slung over shoulders
all coming to see me or the-what’s-left-of-me
who won’t know the difference
Moriah Hampton
However Far
“On 5, ready?”
At the registration office
late morning
I sit before a camera
waiting to be photographed
for my Cherokee Nation ID card
during the summer of 2024.
My thoughts turn to
you standing against a white
cinderblock wall
years ago--
the police officer snapping
your mug shot
the day he booked you
in Tyler Texas.
How did two siblings wind
up in such different places?
That afternoon
the A/C unit pumps cool
air into my one-bedroom
rental on the reservation.
I lounge on the couch
drinking a glass of cold water
after a walk through downtown
Tahlequah. I imagine
you lying on your bunk
in one of those
cells I’ve heard about
without A/C--
the inmates languishing
some dying
on days
temperatures soared.
Under the same sun
we pass our day.
Still I can’t find you here.
Two days later
the paring knife I used
to slice a peach
glistens in the disk rack
across the room.
Surrounded by ancestor’s
ghosts I feel the urge
to press the blade
against my wrist
paying the penalty for when
you pulled a “large knife”
and threatened
people all afternoon
at the back of your apartment
complex until you stabbed a man--
the aggravated assault charge
landing you in Eastham Prison
for ten years.
Is our ending present in our beginning?
Both childless
our Cherokee bloodline
stops with us buried
in soil someone’s ancestors
never owned.
Stan Sanvel Rubin
Why We Need Seasonsfor Dionisio Martinez
A man who sings only in Spring
is a cousin of the parakeet
that sings when its cage
is uncovered and the first
thin talon of daylight
breaks through the curtain.
A man who sings only in Fall
dazzles himself with colors,
likes to pretend that everything changes,
even love or his two brown eyes
which will always be brown
no matter what they see.
A man who sings only in Summer
cannot be trusted. You might trust him
to carry joy as far as his grave, perhaps,
but afterwards you would sense
what was always missing:
a longing for shadows.
A man who sings only in Winter
is a thought kept too long
in the chest, burrowing there
like a spider that needs a hiding place,
infecting everything he thinks or says
with this sorrow. Even his silence.