Deep Dish poem-a-month

To Be In Love

To be in love
Is to touch with a lighter hand.
In yourself you stretch, you are well.
You look at things
Through his eyes.
A cardinal is red.
A sky is blue.
Suddenly you know he knows too.
He is not there but
You know you are tasting together
The winter, or a light spring weather.
His hand to take your hand is overmuch.
Too much to bear.
You cannot look in his eyes
Because your pulse must not say
What must not be said.
When he
Shuts a door-
Is not there
Your arms are water.
And you are free
With a ghastly freedom.
You are the beautiful half
Of a golden hurt.
You remember and covet his mouth
To touch, to whisper on.
Oh when to declare
Is certain Death!
Oh when to apprise
Is to mesmerize,
To see fall down, the Column of Gold,
Into the commonest ash.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

The World of Gwendolyn Brooks, copyright Harpercollins 1971.

Immigrant Blues

People have been trying to kill me since I was born,
a man tells his son, trying to explain
the wisdom of learning a second tongue.

It's the same old story from the previous century
about my father and me.

The same old story from yesterday morning
about me and my son.

It's called "Survival Strategies
and the Melancholy of Racial Assimilation."

It's called "Psychological Paradigms of Displaced Persons,"

called "The Child Who'd Rather Play than Study."

Practice until you feel 
the language inside you, says the man. 

But what does he know about inside and outside,
my father who was spared nothing
in spite of the languages he used?

And me, confused about the flesh and soul,
who asked once into a telephone,
Am I inside you? 

You're always inside me, a woman answered, 
at peace with the body's finitude, 
at peace with the soul's disregard
of space and time.

Am I inside you? I asked once 
lying between her legs, confused
about the body and the heart.

If you don't believe you're inside me, you're not,
she answered, at peace with the body's greed,
at peace with the heart's bewilderment.

It's an ancient story from yesterday evening

called "Patterns of Love in Peoples of Diaspora,"

called "Loss of the Homeplace 
and the Defilement of the Beloved,"

called "I Want to Sing but I Don’t Know Any Songs."

Li-Young Lee

From Behind My Eyes by Li-Young Lee. Copyright © 2008 
by Li-Young Lee. Published by W.W. Norton. 
Used with the author's permission.

Momma in Red

They said 
that the only reason 
my momma wore a red
dress to her daddy’s funeral
was because she hated him 
and was just being sassy

I know she wore it
because it was
the only one she had

Nichole L. Sheilds (1969 - 2009)
One Less Road to Travel: A Collection
Publisher: [s.n.] (1998)

When

In the early 1980s, the black men
were divine, spoke French, had read everything,
made filet mignon with green peppercorn sauce,
listened artfully to boyfriend troubles,
operatically declaimed boyfriend troubles,
had been to Bamako and Bahia,
knew how to clear bad humours from a house,
had been to Baldwin's villa in Saint-Paul,
drank espresso with Soyinka and Senghor,
kissing hello on both cheeks, quoted Baraka's
"Black Art": "Fuck poems/and they are useful,"
tore up the disco dance floor, were gold-lit,
photographed well, did not smoke, said "Ciao,"

then all the men's faces were spotted.

Elizabeth Alexander
American Sublime, copyright 2005 Graywolf Press. Used with permission.

Nothing Was Out of Reach

I ordered a bottle of wine
because I love the idea
of letting alcohol make all
the important decisions. 
By dining room, I mean a den

of iniquity and the double
entendre in being asked
if I would like anything
to eat.  I am thinking
of a specific kind of tree

and the acres of orchards
nestled in the foothills
of the Cascade: imagine
a stream bank moonlighting
as a hotel bed, imagine

the two of us dying
of curiosity, imagine us
arm wrestling over who takes
a bite first.  I am describing
the tree as slumped

because there is real danger
to knowledge.  It wasn’t
a garden as much as
a speakeasy in the center of town
with waitresses dolled up

in Bavarian outfits, circling
the room with late-harvest
fruit: apples with pistachio-
almond butter and poached
fig. Your fingers were snow

melting in a bright room, the perfect
mud, my secret affection
for cliché rolling up its sleeves. 
Nothing was out of reach.  I clapped
my hands, the fields rose up. 

Frank Matagrano

originally published in Cider Press Review, Volume 9, copyright Frank Matagrano. Used with permission of the writer.

Windy City

The garments worn in flying dreams
were fashioned there -
overcoats that swooped like kites,
scarves streaming like vapor trails,
gowns ballooning into spinnakers.

In a city like that one might sail
through life led by a runaway hat.
The young scattered in whatever directions
their wild hair pointed, and gusting
into one another, fell in love.

At night, wind rippled saxophones
that hung like windchimes in pawnshop
windows, hotting through each horn
so that the streets seemed haunted
not by nighthawks, but by doves.

Pinwheels whirred from steeples
in place of crosses.  At the pinnacles
of public buildings, snagged underclothes -
the only flag - flapped majestically.
And when it came time to disappear

one simply chose a thoroughfare
devoid of memories, raised a collar,
and turned his back on the wind.
I closed my eyes and stepped
into a swirl of scuttling leaves.

Stuart Dybek

Streets in their Own Ink, Copyright 2004 by Stuart Dybek. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, pub.

Hive

             For Stephen


Tucked in a cleft of arm you hunt
for milk.  Roseate.  Areola.

I circumnavigate the signs
pictured on your pajamas.  Arrows

point east and west; a violet hive;
bear:  tail end up in honey-pot.

Cars drone outside.  I comb back tufts
of hair.  We burrow in these chintz

pillows, sink deeply down in sofa.
For now, we are a pair spied on

by animals.  (A rabbit pokes
its ear, antenna-like, from under

cushions.) I’ve read ‘during the summer
honey flow, worker bees will travel

55,000 miles to gather
nectar to make one pound of honey.’  

A foot kicks off its sock.  You sip,
roaming many miles, honey-seeker.

Days tumble.  I would like to buzz
into the orchid of your ear.

Elise Paschen

from Bestiary, forthcoming from Red Hen Press in the spring of 2009. Copyright Elise Paschen and used with permission of the author.

Hydrophobia

Cornflowers fringe the river like lashes.
I am lonely, you concede. Leaves

adhere to your back in mottled tongues;
air articulates your face with odor of roasted

apples, evening's end. In second-story windows,
girls in fine coal dresses undress, scrim of their slips

lemon light: thin as a bone-button that unfastens
the sky. Blue door on a black house, your body

like glass: a pitcher of violets, twilight, a blue fruit
abandoned. An ice skate floats by on the river's ear.

Do you hear the current's assembly: a comb,
a greenfinch, platic lids, an index finger, a fishing

lure, a mirror fragment containing the tumult of water
and bodies. Listen to the river's hiss; metal swallows

clip the air. Hunters in bright orange vests
approach you as though you were a ghost deer.

Simone Muench

Lampblack & Ash, Sarabande Books. Copyright 2005 by Simone Muench. Used with permission of the author.

-eulogy-

Chuck D said John Lennon was killed today
and I miss Pac and Big more than ever
I am Holden Caulfield watching hope break in the stalls of public bathrooms
I am Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth reminiscing over the fallen body of b-boy
Trouble T-Roy and dying hip-hop birth sites falling wayside to the pounding beats
of green-fisted real estate agents and the hard crack rock drug wars american wages
on her children creating culture with turntables

we have been here before

and I want Scott La Rock back to break up all this violence
I want Big L to throw a peace sign up in the air and DREAM
and Ramon and all the other graffiti artists killed in the line of their calling
to come back and bomb the World Trade Center
with the biggest streaked wildstyles the sky has ever seen:
a mural for the forgotten spray painted on the clouds
a gold chain cast across the sun
a single shell toe held up in the air

it was Jam Master Jay who introduced me to the culture
who soothed me over the bridge of whiteness and rock
it was his cool lean arms wrapped around chest / head back
in black fedora / no laces in his adidas / he stole electricity
to light the block parties / reparations / for all the stars exploded
before he could pay the last song they requested / he'd send shine
beams on vinyl / into the distant homes of the sun starved
and let us bask in his light scratching scarce sounds / found
digging the landfills / of america's sonic consciousness

it's not bad meaning bad but bad meaning
it's not bad meaning
it's not bad meaning
it's not

Kevin Coval

Slingshots (A Hip-Hop Poetica), EM Press. Copyright 2005 by Kevin Coval; used with permission of the author.

Counting

My mother is very direct. That's why we're friends.

Once, while drunk on maternal recognition of my maturity, I slipped on a casual reference to some collegiate bedhopping I'd done. I figured, hell, she was just Catholic, she wasn't dead. I expected some kind of motherly admonishment because she's into that, but she just looked at me. And then she said:

"Lisa, I spent two weeks watching your uncle die of AIDS. We got there at the very end when he was at his very worst. Once, I remember a nurse was putting a breathing tube down his throat, and she said, 'Does it hurt? Are we in pain?' And he shook his head no. But when I asked him, I said, 'John, are you okay? Does it hurt?' He shook his head yes and closed his eyes and went with it, because that's all that any of us could do, really.

And when it looked like he was going to be on a respirator permanently, we got together as a family and we gave him two weeks and I sat there in the hospital room and I said:

John
You've got two weeks left, honey, you better pull out of it . . .
John
You've got eight days left . . .
six days . . .
four days . . .
You've got two days left, John . . .

Until we had to let him go.

And frankly, Lisa, I don't think that a little piece of latex is too much to ask for the sake of your body and your mother's peace of mind."

My mother's direct, boy. That's why we're friends.

Lisa Buscani

Jangle, Tia Chucha Press. Copyright 1992 by Lisa Buscani. Used with permission of the author.