Poetry Feature
Photo: © 2001 George Kunze
Bankrupt Farms
Rob Wright
Bird in Tree
Gyorgyi Voros
Dutch Interior: The Letter Reader
Gyorgyi Voros
Interior Landscape with Frog
George Dickerson
Khyamm's Q & A
Roger Sedarat
Machine Dance
Mary Jo Bang
Moth Myth
Ciaran Berry
On the Road to Rose Blanche
Gyorgyi Voros
Paying the Rent
Zoe Forney
Playing God
Hannah Stein
To Open the Open Gate
Richard Levine
Contributor Notes
LyR Finalist Poems
~ . ~
Bankrupt Farms
Rob Wright
I was given the old boots for nothing,
black and slick as a seal's muzzle;
the cracked rubber leaked in slush,
as I tramped the bushed-out flats
and bogs, navigating with the balls
of my feet and chance, following the ruts
and tracks between rusted wire, ruts
filled with oil seep and bald tires. Nothing
left of the farm's stock but bones. A ball
joint exposed, polished by the muzzles
of skeletal dogs who patrolled the flat
field's borders, whose tracks I saw in slush
running in pairs. Their yellow marks in slush
still steaming in the ruts.
I found one shot, and lying flat—
a new mother, nipples extended, nothing
left of her head but the muzzle's
grinning jaw, and socket that held the ball
of her yellow eye. No ball-
fetcher this one, whose grave in slush
no child marked, or stroked her muzzle
in remembrance. Her pups left in a rut
for crows, marauding males, and the nothing
of hunger, the long echoes, the flat
silence. At the road's end, a flat-
roofed farmhouse, buckled, like a puffball
squashed by a giant's daughter. Nothing
left but withered pansies, the muzzle
of an iron stove, fly-specked oil cloth, slush,
and a jar of fossils, gathered from ruts.
I'd often picked prints of ferns from ruts
when the spring rain washed the flat
fields to furrows and lakes of pooling slush.
In a bedroom, I found a pink ball
gown and sash set on a rifle muzzle
like a mannequin. Of the woman, nothing
but the smell of still-birth, hard in the muzzle, a ball
of failure on a flat trajectory; flesh becoming slush.
Nothing but bones washed in spring rains from ruts.
~ . ~
Bird in Tree
Gyorgyi Voros
Like a vignette from that chest
in the Victoria and Albert Museum—
ebonied, enameled black, inlaid with stone,
mother of pearl, colored woods, all the birds
of paradise here and beyond—
the robin in the tree outside my window,
preening among walnut leaves,
breast russet against black bough and blue sky,
acts out an allegory of concealment and desire.
In each panel of that chest,
leaves were rendered in shell-like bits of jade,
breasts in jasper, eyes and wing stripes onyx.
Rounds of paduk made cherries, slivers
of a milky amethyst some other marbled berry.
Nothing was what it was, but was
instead a demonstration of skill
or outrage at the wild world, the semi-precious
standing in for the wholly real.
Art has taught me nothing about nature:
but about design, how light falls
together into a funnel of reason, how
this face means suffering and that one ennui,
how animals are not so much sinew and
hunger but versions of God's grace or wrath,
the clatter of shade and value, hues
of uncertainty, distance and perspective:
how the V recedes toward that single focal point,
vanishing , invisible,
called "truth"—
It flies. What possible
difference can it make, the picture that teaches
how the plum branch leans of its own longing
into air, and how feelingly one falsifies
the one tendril of truth: that
it flies? How even things—chairs, rocks—
press and lean toward what they are,
resist what they are not.
~ . ~
Dutch Interior: The Letter Reader
Gyorgyi Voros
I was there in the room with her when she read the letter,
the Lions of Juda her only other witnesses.
Air slammed her lungs as what she read collided
with the back wall, blue-stained as skimmed milk
with thin Northern daylight. Bounding back
against the mullioned panes, the words shattered
into pieces of silk sun as something plundered
from a distant East. They littered the floor,
that checkerboard of fatal moves. I knew why
she needed the window to give her back
her face, knew how mirror, pitcher, gleaming goblet
tacked down day, anchored her, kept her from receding
far beyond the draperies softening the frame.
I, too, get news of an absent man: you, alive
in the warrens of the seventeen provinces,
that yellowing map flattened and buckling against
my life's back wall. Like her, I stall within the first
of many foregrounds, stand arrested by the past's
depthless, impenetrable picture plane.
~ . ~
Interior Landscape with Frog
George Dickerson
(By author request, poem not published.)
~ . ~
Khyamm's Q & A
(Ghazal)
Roger Sedarat
Scholar, a sheet-wrapped Muslim in a grave
Learns his worm-wisdom forsaking the grave.
Segment the worm and divided he'll squirm;
Solomon knew the measure of the grave.
Wisdom you want? Cut your attachments, move
Out where the city ploughs an unmarked grave.
If Solomon were city folk, he'd work it
rich downtown, turning his back on the grave.
Modernity's an armless boy, roses
For sale in his mouth stolen from a grave.
Evenings I peek in my neighbor's window.
She lies sheet-wrapped, ready for the grave.
Mornings a wise man delivers lavash.
He never smiles; his voice is always grave.
This man tells me secrets of my neighbor;
I'll try my best to take them to the grave.
If you smile at the man who bakes the bread
That broke your tooth, you're close to the grave.
If bags of bones are ripped apart by dogs
At night, you're even closer to the grave.
Death fills my eyes with X's; I cross
Myself on each road leading to the grave.
I ask the armless boy for directions,
A rose in his mouth stemming from the grave.
And Solomon's out cold in an alley,
Struck by a double ax, facing the grave.
A garden for love, for death a dry field.
(Chiasmus is the main trope of the grave).
I saw an armless boy weed the rose
Of Sharon with his teeth at the Queen's grave.
I cracked my tooth on star-baked bread, jagged
Light pouring on an old man digging a grave.
I rolled my body into a sheet, let
Dogs tug my head and feet over the grave.
What worm-wisdom came from so much digging?
What woman arose to a rose from the grave?
I live alone save for the morning bark
Of bread in hallways. Alone, I'll make the grave.
I eat my bread with broken teeth, rolled up
Into my bed to make a living grave.
I sit and smell the dying rose, not caring
To reach the state that truly knows the grave.
I am Khyamm, a man going to my grave
Alive to lay a rose upon my grave.
~ . ~
Machine Dance
Mary Jo Bang
(By author request, poem not published.)
~ . ~
Moth Myth
Ciaran Berry
He stole it from the sand bucket
his older brother kept them in:
the largest hawkmoth caterpillar,
a brown, furry thing that jiggled
between his forefinger and thumb.
Obese from feeds of willowherb,
bedstraw, fuchsia, bogbean,
it was ready to cleave to a branch
or leaf and secrete a loose cocoon.
He put it in his mouth, casually
chewed, tasted chlorophyll and flower
off its viscous, hirsute flesh.
Inside his white potbelly it made
chrysalis, within which cells
divided, shifted mass, made something
new: an in-between creature
that overwintered on his stomach wall,
slumbered until late April
when olive wings suffused with pink
poked through the swollen sack, emerged
followed by antennae, thorax,
an abdomen still rough and plump—
sole remnant of that former self,
khaki markings now mottling it.
A moth full-grown, it shivered
and flew up toward his mouth,
broke into the light, the yellow room
where his agile mother hand-trapped it,
brought it still living to his lips,
made him mouth in and swallow it
for fear that it would carry off his soul.
~ . ~
On the Road to Rose Blanche
Gyorgyi Voros
Newfoundland, 1992
In a not-quite-wilderness of tarns, not tundra
but a scrubbed land, spongy, tundra-like,
we headed the car straight north, untalking.
Fog fell from clouds with some heft to them,
smudged the lank calligraphy of power lines
scrawled across the tinpot sky.
The road went just so far, the whole
southwestern part of the island roadless,
the map's townspecks accessible by boat
only. And the rest of the island, our destination,
not townless, not unpeopled, just so North,
so god-begotten stark, thick with what was not us.
How far we had gone for that delicious
poverty of mind. Spatter struck the windshield
like spit. At journey's end in a tumbled town
of greengray plod and tarry, the car swerved cliffside,
stopped. We wandered among its architecture
of sticks and stones, gangplanked, piered, fishboned,
boulders anchoring a tavern or two, the whole
pitched seaward on North America's knife-edge east
where teens in neon beamed through fog—
hot pink, acid green, electric yellow,
static passing for air and atmosphere,
cigarette smoke married to drizzle.
2.
We were sleeping in the truck in a cul-de-sac.
Night ripped
with engine whine, tire screech, rat-tat
of spat gravel.
Amid hellion hooting and howling, the pickup
careened into the lot.
The terrifying rowdiness was that (we thought)
of drunk hunters—
the kind who fuck the deer before dismembering it.
But they were
only kids, reckless with the recklessness afforded by
the world's unravelling
seamedge, graygreen blueskied garment soon
enough discarded
(as might be a spoiled deer carcass,
done with,
flown). Rattled, we demanded of them
nothing (with a sigh)
but greeting. And they (they said "Ay?")
were amazed
to hear from where and how far we had come.
"To this 'ole?" They hung
from the cab, the girls like greening tendrils,
the boys like small
explosives. Soon,
we slept again.
3.
The next day, cliffrock a pink granite composite
of diamonds and mirrors; a white beach
littered with jellyfish like cabochons of amethyst.
And offshore, a ferrous shock of blood red
on the wave-tossed rim of the continental shelf,
bulk of quartzite and rosepink aggregate, blazing,
in the right sun, like a rose floating midocean.
Hence: Rose Blanche, boutonniere tossed
by love's chevalier to heartsick sailors
as token of approaching land, or
cruel bouquet beyond reach of those stranded
townside. Rose Blanche, both hope
and its abandonment, what trick of orogeny
set you down as a frieze of color
for the color-starved, the habit of your mineral's
shattered mirror-slashes, flaked light
illuminating a life to come beyond
love's gangplanked architecture?
We could have swum for it, but turned
the truck around, headed south
for Puerto Basque. Slept amid volcanoes.
Slept among them
still much later as we segued onto
the Massachusetts Turnpike,
the peopled regions of the world,
the better and the worse to come.
~. ~
Paying the Rent
Zoe Forney
A hawk. A feather. Two lines
that waver like water or the tracks
of a wheel. Something like a discolored
raisin or a dropped lima bean lost
on its way to the table. One man
who snores, drunk in a stolen car.
You can't say that. We don't
say that. Bite your tongue. Cover
your mouth before you let yourself
laugh eat kiss smile yawn need tell feel.
Be sweet. We are not imigrants.
Everything up to this point has been
hieroglyphics. The hawk, talons first,
soaks into my wrist and turns its head
to eye my mind. In becoming quills,
feathers split and draw ink.
The first lines tangle. There is nothing sweet
about turning a corner into the big round NO
of my mother's mouth: Dirty laundry.
Don't ever tell what happens in this house.
Your filthy eyes mouth mind hands.
You'd pin the undergarments of this family
out on a line. Don't write that. Don't.
Here comes the vocabulary of flags.
Fires. Badges and stacks of stones.
Shirts. Hard wishes. Midnight drives
just for the chance to glow in a pine-
rimmed lake, half a mile's quiet from
laughter and glass. Be careful there.
Can you know what innocent is
without tasting its opposite?
A black kimono that ties also unties.
Further back, a spoon thick
with yellow batter, blunt scissors
to cut a blue bicycle with streamers
from the ruined Wishbook. Fingers
in my mouth to copy bird calls—
just now the gate smacks, motes
in the beam shift high and recall
stars, there is a Zippo snap
and a smell like penny edges,
and red lips tight against something
someone else may have said.
My mother's voice is far away
and speaks some language
I don't know:
she spit me out so long ago,
my clothes are dry.
I lived in an attic where a nun had slept
under a serape, rainbows legible like script
in the gray wool and late sun. Had anyone
ever told her? No, don't walk to the pueblo.
Don't give up your jewelry. Don't forswear
summer rentals on a distant beach for the
ugly face of a man who says he's hungry,
Don't cut your hair or wear cheap sneakers,
In this family, we are not nuns, heaven knows.
And if they worried later that she could tell
all their oldest secrets to God, did she care,
once past hieroglyphics and into the Word?
The hawk targets and reels.
Hieroglyphics shift into sense.
Borrowed wheels spark and fly,
the ace of spades angled in the spokes.
Never again will we be completely silent.
Ever scrap of what has been
inadequately put aside
my wizard eye will find.
~ . ~
Playing God
Hannah Stein
… it was only a trial.
—Kierkegaard
1
The text says nothing of Sarah. Did she
ask about the burnt-offering?
And what did Abraham reply.
He could neither tell
Sarah—old joyful woman
who gave birth at ninety—
nor lie to her. Imagine him smuggling
Isaac under the tent flap before dawn,
hustling the boy, hushing him.
When Sarah woke and found them gone
she would have set about her morning work.
A creeping disquiet bloomed over her
like a rash, though there was nothing
to suspect—not even
the color of righteousness
in her husband's eyes.
2
Abraham: charged to number the stars
that reeled in the desert sky,
to count his progeny grain
by desert grain. Who could take it all in—
a swirling in the ears, dizzy roaring
of suns before the eyes—
and keep their senses.
A whirlwind voice hasn't echoed
to us from a mountaintop; we
have not seen strangers standing barefoot
in the door of our tent,
nor called for warmed water,
for towels spiced with myrrh
to wash the feet of angels.
3
To be rewarded later, to be blessed
for such faith—
faith up to the very moment
of unsheathing the knife, of raising the knife—
—what, my own child?
to bind the kernel of my heart on a stack of wood?
To stretch forth my hand, to lift the knife,
and say Lord—
Child I love better than myself,
for whom I would enter a burning house,
support your head with my head
across the freezing river, would sacrifice
the fat that cushions tender chambers
of the love I bear you—
On whose back I piled the wood, in whose hand
I placed the fire, who so confidingly asked
But Father, where is the lamb—
—to whom I lied
not child you are the lamb…
but: the Lord will provide.
What, to cut the sweet flesh
that pulses over the artery,
to plunge the knife
into your breathing neck?
4
The secret they kept from Sarah.
In the days after their descent from the mountain
she saw that Abraham
ignored Isaac. Isaac flinched
if a mouse skittered in the grain sacks.
Abraham stopped sometimes
while chanting morning prayer,
stared into space.
Sarah asked.
He turned his eyes away.
The boy cried out in his sleep,
shuddered at the dark; Sarah
dipped figs in honey for him.
Sarah wept.
5
A quaking hand laid on the knife,
a ram appearing in the thicket.
A knife hurled to the dirt.
The iron comes down.
Shapes us with empty threats, puts promises
on our lips we'll never keep, makes us jump
like a drop of water on a griddle.
The iron shapes us,
bends the naked soul to the anvil—
the malleable blaze-red metal
cooling to black.
~ . ~
To Open the Open Gate
Richard Levine
One night my dog and I galumphed upon
a stillness Buddha meditated a lifetime
to find. Standing at the gate with garbage
cans waiting, our breath began to glide
away like schools of fog-fish, blind
to the ringing they set in silent motion.
Houses slipped back, dipping the cupped hands
of their lighted windows into the stunning calm.
The trace of a late steak carried on
a tide tested by my dog's quivering, upturned
nose. Trees stood like deer at a night pond, gracefully
angling their antlers for signs of spring or danger.
Car alarms blinked red eyes, reminding
me that time and tempers waited just beyond
this bubble-smooth moment. I feared I would burst
with it if I moved. Two clouds drew together
like a curtain, and I knew if I passed through
I would never be the same, which is true,
of course, every night, every heartbeat.
But standing on the threshold of that charged
now, I thought I saw life lived more
keenly in step with every breath and the world
becoming itself. I reached to open the open
gate, feeling new in the same old place.
Behind me, the tug of my house, solid and in
need, pulsing with a leak in the downstairs bathroom,
that caused brass veins running under the skin
of every room to sweat and strain. My toolbox
idled on cool hexagonal tiles and a black
rubber washer waited beside the weeping faucet,
like a ripple in the grip of ice.
I passed through and back along the street, feeling blessed;
for who, after all, walks the dog and plugs the leaks?
~ . ~ . ~