When asked about their favorite Pink Floyd album, rural Americans,
the religious right, and most CEOs respond quickly with The Wall.
The rest of us ask, “Why are you asking us that?” and get no answer.
Good fences make good neighbors. A wall is bigger than a fence.
Would a wall, then, create even better neighbors?
Good question, I think.
What else should we ask? If we don’t ask, we’ll just get told.
Let’s see. There’s the Berlin wall, but that one got torn down.
The walls of Jericho – there was something going on there…
Anyone remember? Mention them anyway. It sounds good regardless.
How funny that something like a wall, the posterchild of practicality,
can become instead the symbolic child everyone fights over
for custody.…
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I hear the whippoorwill
at the bank of the river.
Your body floats along
covered in arrows.
The fletchings blend with the cattails
as the sun goes down.
I’m sitting here on your horse
like a throne, watching this day end.
I remember your voice
from long ago. You said, The body
is the greatest country to serve.
Its cause beats in your chest.
I’m building a fire
with old blankets and pillows
to muffle the other sounds.
I’m thinking more
about containment now,
just like you said. I bend an ear
to the ground. Nothing.
Even the birds are quiet now.
Live closer to the ground, you said.
I put a root down in the warm spot.
The growing time has ended,
but maybe something.…
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Just seconds after my grandma passed there,
a tension broke. When a spirit rises
from a body, it somehow grows
stronger, stiff, and then it splits in two.
In the same way our fingers still curl
when relaxed: what is it we’re poising for,
our whole lives? This is not a question
to ask right away. It comes much later on,
out of the hospital, in the aging summer
when you thought you moved past
those sorts of things. I tell myself the dead speak
in verse, if they do speak. If a body in the hospital,
just passed, has something to say, it would be
a closed fist: ready, ready, ready.
– Brendan Bense…
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a girl wore pajamas to look her age halved
and gutted for its hard-to-reach testaments
to a body that awakened and grew in the night-light
that now contoured the face of the bathroom mirror
with the aftershock of the worry that she was home alone for the worse
that she was inside while her mind turned out
but a creak from the staircase caused her jaw to slacken
and bloat to its over-glory when it didn’t put words to fear
right then she put a shadow to the noise and a towel to her mouth
to anesthetize the area before it could scream or do wrong
by the man who saw the light from the second-floor window
as a signal of a challenge left alone to be overcome
but then he saw the girl exit the bathroom like her bones needed longer to fuse
before she was more than a cavity for this silence to decay
so he gave her that time and an apology before exiting the way he came
and she waited until she remembered to walk
before she descended the stairs that strained under her fresh
weight until she saw the mosaic of her front door on the ground
that her bare feet were tempted to walk across
as a rite of passage from her broken home
but she stood in place until the siren-sounds
replaced the rising screams of heat
warning her to sleep through the night
– Julia Feinberg…
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Bachelor’s buttons, black-eyed Susans,
Queen Anne’s lace and baby’s breath;
my mother loved great swathes of riotous colors,
threaded leaves, seed heads bent by hungry finches.
She never bothered with hybrid teas or
careful chrysanthemums,
boring rows of marigolds and petunias.
In tiny towns with manicured lawns and
spindly evergreens, she filled beds with mounds
of sticky, swollen peonies,
let wild roses climb the windowsills.
When it was time, my mother
gathered buckets and tubs, cardboard
boxes lined with black garbage bags.
She dug it all up:
flag iris, daylilies, coneflowers, bee balm,
Sweet William, tickseed and feverfew.
While the truck filled with beds and chairs,
foot stools, dishes, linens and books,
blankets, clothes, curtains and dolls;
she filled the station wagon
with her flowers,
covered with damp newspapers and rags.…
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It used to bother me—the way people
would cut their eyes at us as if they knew
our story. One white, one black, two men.
At first, no one regarded our coupling
as extraordinary. Youth gave us skin
to believe in and the cheapest of beer
to swill. It’s acceptable to buck rules
when you’re beautiful. But now, when our
clothes are out of fashion and our hair is thin
and grey, when one of us walks slower
than the other and the other waits patiently
at the corner, now, people notice:
one white, one black, old men. Our history,
the tilt of our bodies in conversation
reveals a kindness that was promised
but remains unrealized, a whisper
of high yellow, good hair, tan paper bag skin. …
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(In December You Return to Italy)
It took you years
to debut your face
to the social
media masses.
You started
with Christmas
lights and a risk
of death.
It’s no surprise
I’m shadows
and fragments.
You teach me
Sicilian card games
your family plays
at Christmas:
scopa, briscola.
Eventually you
moved on
to two black cats
in the sink.
Their camera
green eyes told you:
mind your own
business.
Bicontinental.
I praise the vast
distance and gift it
everything I have:
the millions of
seconds when
both feet were
off the ground
as I ran. If you
can’t already tell,
this game is
mostly luck.
– Matty Bennett…
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