This love is like the ghost of Schrödinger’s dead cat

I’m sure my moans could carry
across 4000 miles. More maybe.
They go as the crow flies when I think
you’re in another woman’s bed.
I have my fingers crossed
against it— the thought of your closed curves,
your celestial bodies ascending
in euphony…
nauseating—
warm hands, heads, tongues;
caresses are just speculative structures and, god,
I’m linking them all,
killing Spacetime.
Your disparate points should be mine.

In another version, somewhere,
a ghost cat stuck up an impossibly branched tree;
its non-stop crying across dimensions
for the you
who wants to be with me
can be heard right through Earths 1-42.


roifaineantpress

Self-lit

You’re humming through the streets,
self-lit. I have to correct strangers
who touch your head without asking,
as if to bless you or to take a blessing from you.
When we leave the city, you become
a boy hunting locusts. Nature stuns you—
you load up your pockets and want to bring it
home with us, but Nature stays with nature, I say,
a refrain learned from another mother.
You cannot be unpuzzled by things,
but you marshal all your sweet bravado for me,
who tries but never beats you in a game of chess.
I witness the rook and Queen
moving inside your thinking, squaring
and hewing to pathways of wins, losses.
Childhood’s end is always menacing,
apparent places of stars mark its outer limits.
It heaves up in you when you lose,
when you rage, when you’re afraid.
Glowering out of a fever dream, your eyes shine
as you confess in the dark I was the monster.
You show me a hornet’s nest on a bed of cotton,
hold it up as an offering. I wonder with you
at what you hold—
     summer rivers that show bracken corners,
     eye agate marbles,
     daggerwings of our days in the city
     built of strangers,
         in a country built of sky.
When I pull you close,
what will flee trembles in you.


KC Trommer

[Oye! This is an apartment building ode]

Oye! This is an apartment building ode.
But not just any ode, an ode about breathing,
walking, jumping, running, skipping people.
An ode to a time where we’d remember what
odes felt like to read outside. An ode about
oding so hard it boxes itself into a sonnet.
Harder than bus stop benches and light rail
seats, taxes, and systemic poverty. The oding
of this poem is an apartment building sonnet
about people stacked up like bricks like words
in a sonnet. People that will tap your shoulder
to make sure you’re listening to the fact that this
poem is a token, a favor, a shirt off their back.
Oye! This is The Apartment Building Ode.

There’s Freestyle, Hip Hop, and Bachata on the steps
depending on the time of day we pick up groceries.
There are bikes by the curb and notebooks on those steps,
soda bottles, 2 quarter juices, and candy wrappers in bags.
There is a 10pm curfew for noise and the music plays
until 9:59, because the stoop DJ wakes up early too.
There are “No loitering on the stairs” signs in every hall-
way though it is understood that what we do isn’t aimless.
There is the smell of food, home-cooked or homemade,
plantains in C5, Hot Pockets in A3 and Chinese in the lobby.
There are lovers, soothsayers, tall-tale tellers, doers, hustlers,
potatoes, flowers, lighters, and so many hand gestures.

This is a concrete box that we call home.
There is a life we’ve learned to love and live.


Dimitri Reyes Poet/

#haikuThursday

(2022)

5 snow on sliding ice
7 true shoe stories dangling
5 above beyond reach


36 poems dot org (Boulder, CO)

Basement Suite

Karen Solie (2020)

Left to our use are the fixtures and appliances
Repented of by the homeowners
Who don't realize this is a way to know them.

In the basement one is closer to God
Because closer to consequence
To the creatures no one loves but the specialists.

Rice weevil, bean weevil, rose weevil, pea weevil,
Flour, black vine, and strawberry weevils,
A weevil to every purpose under heaven.

The basement is a tree house in the roots
Think of it that way
And cold on five sides, like childhood

When water in the pipes was a talking animal
And it was advertised that soil neutralized
The toxins applied to it, that

Our bodies did, and that the sea
Carried poison on its back into the hills.
Our faces to the wall, to radial domestic passages

Beyond it, heartbeats and adjustments
Attenuated through the half-space, lo-fi
The light is radio light.

The house tries to forget we are here
Yet there are bars on the windows
In some places, like childhood.

A slight clinging smell is associated.
Every living situation has one.
It's not the Underworld, for Christ's sake

Which is everywhere, without depth
But the gaze does learn to creep along the baseboards
And sharpen its knives on them.

Walking on the surface again
If we can bear it
After so long sheltering in place, we may appreciate

More than anyone a bit of natural warmth
Though money flows no more freely up here
Look around you.

American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin

Terrance Hayes (2019)

The black poet would love to say his century began
With Hughes or, God forbid, Wheatley, but actually
It began with all the poetry weirdos & worriers, warriors,
Poetry whiners & winos falling from ship bows, sunset
Bridges & windows. In a second I’ll tell you how little
Writing rescues. My hunch is that Sylvia Plath was not
Especially fun company. A drama queen, thin-skinned,
And skittery, she thought her poems were ordinary.
What do you call a visionary who does not recognize
Her vision? Orpheus was alone when he invented writing.
His manic drawing became a kind of writing when he sent
His beloved a sketch of an eye with an X struck through it.
He meant I am blind without you. She thought he meant
I never want to see you again. It is possible he meant that, too.

The Blue Booby

James Tate (1968, Poetry magazine)

The blue booby lives
on the bare rocks
of Galápagos
and fears nothing.
It is a simple life:
they live on fish,
and there are few predators.
Also, the males do not
make fools of themselves
chasing after the young
ladies. Rather,
they gather the blue
objects of the world
and construct from them

a nest—an occasional
Gaulois package,
a string of beads,
a piece of cloth from
a sailor’s suit. This
replaces the need for
dazzling plumage;
in fact, in the past
fifty million years
the male has grown
considerably duller,
nor can he sing well.
The female, though,

asks little of him—
the blue satisfies her
completely, has
a magical effect
on her. When she returns
from her day of
gossip and shopping,
she sees he has found her
a new shred of blue foil:
for this she rewards him
with her dark body,
the stars turn slowly
in the blue foil beside them
like the eyes of a mild savior.

Waiting for the Storm

Timothy Steele

Breeze sent a wrinkling darkness

Across the bay. I knelt

Beneath an upturned boat,

And moment by moment felt

The sand at my feet grow colder

The damp air chill and spread.

Then the first raindrops sounded

On the hull over my head.

It Could Happen To You

David Lehman (2019)

It's June 15, 2017, a Thursday,

fortieth anniversary of the infamous day

the Mets traded Tom Seaver to Cincinnati

and they're still losing

I mean we are

7 to 1 to the Washington Nationals

a team that didn't exist in 1977

the summer of a little tour in France

with Henry James

in a yellow Renault douze

the light a lovely gray

the rain a violin

concerto (Prokofiev's No. 2 in D Major)

and I had books to read

Huxley Woolf Forster and their enemy F.R. Leavis

Empson a little dull for my taste

also Freud on errors, Norman Mailer on orgasms,

James Baldwin in Paris

Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground Part 1

and John Ashberry tells me he is reading The Possessed

translated as The Demons in the newfangled translation

while Ron and I stay faithful to Constance Garnett

I went upstairs stood on the terrace ate some cherries

admired the outline of trees in the dark

and Rosemary Clooney

sang "It Could Happen To You"

and I was a healthy human being, not a sick man

for the first summer in three years.

Silver Spoon Ode

Sharon Olds (2018)

I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth

and a silver knife, and a silver fork.

I would complain about it—the spoon was not greasy,

it tasted like braces, my shining access

to cosmetic enhancement. And I complained about

the taste of my fillings in my very expensive

mouth, as if only my family was paying 

where did I think the rich got

their money but from everyone else?

My mother beat me in 4/4 time,

and I often, now, rant to her beat—I wear

her rings as if I killed her for them, as my

people killed, and climbed up over

the dead. And I sound as if I am bragging

about it. I was born with a spoon instead of a

tongue in my mouth—dung spoon,

diamond spoon. And who would I be

to ask forgiveness? I would be a white girl.

And I hear Miss Lucille, as if on the mountain

where I'd stand beside her, and brush away the insects,

and sometimes pick one off her, sometimes

by the wings, and toss it away. And Lucille

is saying, to me, You have asked for enough,

and been given in excess. And that thing in your mouth,

open your mouth and let that thing go,

let if fly back into the mine where it was brought

up from the underworld at the price of

lives, beloved lives. And now,

enough, Shar, now a little decent silence.

Todas as minhas coisas são tuas

Leonardo Gandolfi

Quando fiz Do you know the way

to San Jose, preparei algumas variantes

que acabaram ficando de fora da versão final,

gravada em 1968 por Dionne Warwick.

A mais importante delas talvez tenha sido

uma pequena quebra de andamento

mais ou menos na metade da música,

indicada sobretudo por uma mudança de nota

nos três trompetes que, naquele instante,

preenchiam os espaços em branco.

Isso, apesar de rápido, sempre me remetia

a um tempo em que meu pai me levava

ao bar a meio quilômetro da nossa casa.

As cordas de um piano que eu nunca mais

ouviria. Anos depois, toda vez que toco

Do you know the way to San Jose, penso

no meu pai. A música que fiz com certeza

não fala disso, a suspeita a um só tempo

oportuna e desacreditada que nos separa

dos nossos. Frio antigo e úmido que,

como depois percebi, da ação até a demora

não leva nem mesmo alguns segundos

translated from Portuguese by Farnoosh Fathi

Everything I Have Is Yours

When I wrote Do you know the way

to San Jose, there were a few flourishes

in the arrangement that didn’t make the final cut

recorded by Dionne Warwick in 1968.

The most noteworthy of these was perhaps

a small break in the rhythm midway

through the song, further indicated by a

note change from three trumpets that were,

at that time, filling blank spaces.

Although quick, that break always reminded

me of when my father used to take me

to a bar half a mile from our house,

the chords of a piano I would never hear again.

Now, years later, when I play Do you

know the way to San Jose, I think

of my father. The song I wrote certainly

doesn’t tell of this, the suspicion both

fitting and unreasonable that keeps us apart

from our own. A damp old chill that,

as I was later to realize, from action to stall

lasts no more than a few seconds.

pouca coisa

Angélica Freitas

não calcula a perda ao comprar a caixa de alfinetes (da china)
e tampouco de onde vão despontar com suas cabeças (chatas)
e maldiz mao tsé quando sai uma gota de sangue (do dedo)
e quando vê um alfinete na rua não pega (nem morta)
mesmo se igual aos que pontuam as blusas (no armário)
e que rocem na pele produzindo vermelhos (tão raros)
e que alguém sonhe com alfinetes (na china)
na vida só valem às dúzias (é claro)



(translated from Portuguese by Farnoosh Fathi)

one more (tiny) thing

don’t calculate what you’ve lost in buying a box of pins (made in china)
and from where exactly they emerge with heads (flat)
and your cursing mao tse when a drop of blood appears (from the finger)
and when you find a pin in the street, leave it there (it’s not dead)
the same kind of pin pointing to the blouses (in your closet)
and brushing your skin it produces a red (so rare)
and someone is dreaming of pins (in china)
in this life only valued by a dozen (clearly)

Bored

Margaret Atwood (1995)

All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces, and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn't even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details. Myopia. The worn gunwales,
the intricate twill of the seat
cover. The acid crumbs of loam, the granular
pink rock, its igneous veins, the sea-fans
of dry moss, the blackish and then the greying
bristles on the back of his neck.
Sometimes he would whistle, sometimes
I would. The boring rhythm of doing
things over and over, carrying
the wood, drying
the dishes. Such minutiae. It's what
the animals spend most of their time at,
ferrying the sand, grain by grain, from their tunnels,
shuffling the leaves in their burrows. He pointed
such things out, and I would look
at the whorled texture of his square finger, earth under
the nail. Why do I remember it as sunnier
all the time then, although it more often
rained, and more birdsong?
I could hardly wait to get
the hell out of there to
anywhere else. Perhaps though
boredom is happier. It is for dogs or
groundhogs. Now I wouldn't be bored.
Now I would know too much.
Now I would know.

The Imagined

Stephen Dunn (2012)

If the imagined woman makes the real woman
seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in
gracefulness and intellect and pulchritude,
and if you come to realize the imagined woman
can only satisfy your imagination, whereas
the real woman with all her limitations
can often make you feel good, how, in spite
of knowing this, does the imagined woman
keep getting into your bedroom, and joining you
at dinner, why is it that you always bring her along
on vacations when the real woman is shopping,
or figuring the best way to the museum?

And if the real woman

has an imagined man, as she must, someone
probably with her at this very moment, in fact
doing and saying everything she's ever wanted,
would you want to know that he slips in
to her life every day from a secret doorway
she's made for him, that he's present even when
you're eating your omelette at breakfast,
or do you prefer how she goes about the house
as she does, as if there were just the two of you?
Isn't her silence, finally, loving? And yours
not entirely self-serving? Hasn't the time come,

once again, not to talk about it?

The Understudy

Bridget Lowe (2016)

High spring. The sounds at their
utmost registers. I am building
a language with my bike. Shame

makes the wheels go, shame
pumps its sick jet fuel.
I am flying over tiny hills with moats

of purple flowers. My fantasy
is evidence. My fantasy is a white skull
gleaming through a bed of mulch.

I let go of the handlebars and beat
my chest with shame’s gorilla fist
until the trees get in my way.

Nancy Drew before me, Nancy Drew
behind me, Nancy Drew on all
sides of me, Lord hear my prayer.

Zoo-Keeper's Wife

Sylvia Plath


I can stay awake all night, if need be ---
Cold as an eel, without eyelids.
Like a dead lake the dark envelops me,
Blueblack, a spectacular plum fruit.
No air bubbles start from my heart. I am lungless
And ugly, my belly a silk stocking
Where the heads and tails of my sisters decompose.
Look, they are melting like coins in the powerful juices ---


The spidery jaws, the spine bones bared for a moment
Like the white lines on a blueprint.
Should I stir, I think this pink and purple plastic
Guts bag would clack like a child's rattle,
Old grievances jostling each other, so many loose teeth.
But what so you know about that
My fat pork, my marrowy sweetheart, face-to-the-wall?
Some things of this world are indigestible.


You wooed me with the wolf-headed fruit bats
Hanging from their scorched hooks in the moist
Fug of teh Small Mammal House.
The armadillo dozed in his sandbin
Obscene and bald as a pig, the white mice
Multiplied to infinity like angels on a pinhead
Out of sheer boredom. Tangled in the sweat-wet sheets
I remember the bloodied chicks and the quartered rabbits.


You checked the diet charts and took me to play
With the boa constrictor in the Fellow's Garden.
I pretended I was the Tree of Knowledge.
I entered your bible, I boarded your ark
With the sacred baboon in his wig and wax ears
And the bear-furred, bird-eating spider
Clambering round its glass box like an eight-fingered hand.
I can't get it out of my mind


How our courtship lit the tindery cages ---
Your two-horned rhinocerous opened a mouth
Dirty as a bootsole and big as a hospital sink
For my cube of sugar: its bog breath
Gloved my arm to the elbow.
The snails blew kisses like black apples.
Nightly now I flog apes owls bears sheep
Over their iron stile. And still don't sleep.

Ice for the Ice Trade

Stephen Burt (2015)

Everybody wants a piece of me.

I have been weighed and measured,

tested and standardized,

throughout my young life. It happens to everyone,

or to everyone with my ability.

Now I live quietly

and mostly in the dark, amid sawdust and sheer

or streaky wooden surfaces. My role,

when I reach maturity,

may be to help people behave

more sociably, and reduce

the irritations of summer,

or else to make it easier to eat.

For reasons I cannot fathom, I weep when it rains.

My handlers keep me wrapped in awkward cloth.

They will not let me touch my friends

or show any curves. They have taught me how to shave.

A few twigs and dragonfly wings got caught

near the center of me long ago; they serve

to distinguish me from others of my kind,

along with some bubbles of air.

I am worth more when I am clear.

When I am most desirable

you should be able to see yourself through me.

Some of my distant relatives

will probably never go far,

because they are too irregular, or opaque.

Many of us will end on a cart.

I, on the other hand, have had my work

cut out for me by so many gloves

and tongs, pallets and barges, poles and planks

that I am sure I will go to New York;

there people who own

the rights to me will give elaborate thanks

to one another, and go on to take me apart.

Poker

Paul Farley (2015)

You’re told this deck was found

in some shattered bothy or croft

north of the Great Glen,

missing its six of diamonds,

shuffled and dealt to a soft

pliancy, greased with lanolin

and you’re told this deck lived behind

the bar in a barracks town

and came out to play most nights,

cut between the Falklands

and Iraq, its spring long gone,

dark-edged with mammal sweat

and you’re told this deck is the one

recovered from a halfway house

where fatty stalactites

grew in a microwave oven,

where a bottle of Famous Grouse

was brandished in a fight

and it might be a pack of lies

or it might be a sleight of hand,

and you can’t tell which is a bluff

because words are a good disguise

for holding nothing. I’ve found

that nothing is more than enough.

The Duck Shit at Clarion Creek

Idra Novey (2014)

We liked to stick it in a BB gun and shoot it.

We tattooed with it. We said hallelujah,

the poor man's tanning lotion.

Then the frack wells began, something black

capping the water and we got high

watching a green-backed heron die.

We got funny at Clarion, flung

each other's underwear into the trees.

Why was it we got naked there

and nowhere else? Maybe we knew

we were getting good and ugly, rusted inside

as the trucks we rode into the water.

Maybe we knew we only appeared

to be floating, but soon and wholly

we'd go under, and there

would be nothing in return.

I Can't Swim

Heather Christle (2013)

I can't swim because I can't fit

into the water

I am

two million feet tall

but thank you for inviting me

I am standing in line

inside my giant shirt

If someone wanted to weaponize me

they would tell me to lie down on New York

and the city I destroyed

would hurt me back

I eat stars

it's a riot

I know

my big mouth

full of their light