My mother in each hand brandishes a pan.
Breaking for the back door
she bounds the hill, leaving lunch
to burn on the stove top.
Her desperation drives back alpacas
from the fence,
while the two brother donkeys bray
their long alarm.
The bees are all over, arguing
fiercely, fifty-thousand plaints
for a staked claim to the sky; roiling clamor
in whatever calamity
put them out, beating the breast of their hive
wildly overhead—my mother beats
in sync like a charmed pitch
meant to match…
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So begins the ancestral laying-on-of-hands. White on green,
the first snowfall comes a sad, melting martyr
to disaffected, banknote-colored leaves I hope survive.
The mason’s terracotta bricks overlay grass
and won’t retain warmth, neither will the cherry tart
left on the counter for my friend who recently moved in.
As faces flurry, melt upon each other’s cheeks,
I feel a sense of relief. The thousand-piece puzzle
is nearly complete. No one is dead.
The singing whisper of a choir, or the mindful totality
of ancients voices, or something close to Hark, the Herald Angles Sing.
My anxious breath returns my lungs with frigid air, then warms that air.
Damp snow accumulates on the white cedars’ arms,
until they drop stress, then raise themselves again.
– Elias Diakolios…
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O, what a face full of things:
With cigarette in mouth and with fear Sometimes
transparent tongues of heat
at my thighs—
Such longings: Errant. Verdant.
Yes, when the signs of summer thicken,
like bees, and I
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
Thus I: faltering forward,
endlessly. Your voice on the telephone.
I mean the bees in my body are restless again
and set out to find you.
(lines from A.D. Hope, Roberto Bolaño, S. Ben Tov, Seamus Heaney, C.D. Wright, Rudyard Kipling, May Swenson, Albert Goldbarth, Thomas Hardy, Margaret Holly, Paisley Rekdal, Yehuda Amichai)
– Leah Schwartz…
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In the year of my birth, a mammal preserved in amber
was identified by scientists for the first time.
When they spoke of its age, the scientists broadly estimated
18 million to 29 million years—referring, of course, to the age
of the fossil itself. What I’m curious about is
how long the tiny mammal lived, how much time was cut short
when it fell indelibly into the resin. There’s simply
no way to know. I know that in hindsight
its lifespan seems ludicrously insignificant.
An eon spent in amber turns the time before
preservation into something like prehistory,
like a half-life, or less.
– Leah Schwartz…
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The day before school started Gina told us about her brother
taking two buses to seventh grade. His balled-up angry fists
got expelled last year right before the first graders taped
their turkey hand prints against the classroom glass.
The principal told her mother that there wasn’t room
in his small brick building for anger that large. He probably
looked down at his shoes when he said it. He told
Gina’s mother that her son hurled chairs onto desks,
pounded fists through closed doors. That her son needed
a school with bars on the window. Gina’s mother studied
the route that would take him twelve blocks and a climb
up a steep hill. The second bus would drop him across
from a gas station and a dirty park. …
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Where did we sleep before time betrayed us and I learned to carry my grief
like a carapace
under
which I sometimes shelter? Years ago, those boys slipped into the tortoise shell
wearing yellow slickers
sleek
with sweat and island rain. Lemon laughter resonated through the space
and likely loops,
lingers
there trapped in a layered, timeless echo. They were our flock
of flightless cormorants,
tea
stained and dolphin dizzy as they traipsed across the rocking decks at night
and boogied bare-
foot
among the blue footed boobies by day. On an icy glacier they spied the Cotopaxi
Andean slinky fox
search
for a meal amongst the snowbound rocks and volcanic black. The intrepid young travelers
leaned into stories
spun…
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Back then, the seller told me that it’s made
of a buffalo’s horn, (didn’t I know
then that it wasn’t a cool idea?) and would
last a hundred years or more (though I
didn’t get the connection). Its base came off
in five months, and I had to fix it on
a block of wood. The two carved birds, with
intricate details, eyelids and all,
could have elevated it to a pure work of art
but for their perch, a stunted tree branch
that looks like a cross between an uninspiring
schistose structure and concrete. I still like
to look at the birds when I wake up, to
reflect on their gaze upwards, as if they’re
looking eternally at a taller tree branch, or
for some rain that falls slanted in the dry wind
to rekindle a horn that’s not dead yet
in their core, breathing a glow to those eyes
– Jose Varghese
Author’s Note: My poems are inspired by the sensory and emotional experiences of individuals who negotiate the political and ideological spaces they live in.…
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