MiPOesias

mipoesias Spring 2015 ISSN 1543-6063

cover artwork by Diane Pieri

www.mipoesias.com

TABLE OF CONTENTS Allison Titus p. 6

ESSAY ON LONGING ESSAY ON THE HOMEOPATHIC CURE FOR HUMAN LONGING

Dalton Day p. 9 A Theory of Return (1) A Theory of Return (2) A Theory of Return (3) Sandra Lim p. 10

AFTER LOVE AT DUSK

deborah brandon p. 13 excerpt from RICOCHET

Jessica Smith p. 18

29 May 2012 / Harpersville 11 December 2009 / Buffalo

Joe Ahearn p. 20 AFTER READING MY OWN POEMS LATE AT NIGHT ELEGY FOR THE MERELY PLEASANT Arielle Greenberg p. 22

Ten Pounds Thinner Than That The Postpartum Body Supermodels

Nate Marshall p. 26 repetition & repetition & Harold’s Chicken Shack #1 Kate Westhaver p. 30

Shame Nativity Scene Watching The Baby Sleep, Midwinter Chapter For Feeding My Son

Christopher Soto p. 36

Ode to the Starfish

CONTRIBUTING ARTIST

Diane Pieri

has had 29 solo exhibitions and been included in 200 national and international group exhibitions since 1969. She has been the recipient of two Pollock-Krasner Grants (1999/1992), two Independence Foundation Fellowships in the Arts (2001/2011), a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Grant (1992). She was included in the 2005 Philadelphia Invitational Portfolio, Philagrafika. She has been a fellow at Yaddo (1991) and The MacDowell Colony (1990). In 1990 Pieri was also an Artist-in-Residence at Mark diSuvero’s Socrates Sculpture Park where she created a 15 ft. sculpture made of rusted and gold leafed can lids. In 2006 Pieri’s public art project, Manayunk Stoops: Heart and Home, a series of 9 seating elements fabricated in Italian tesserae, was installed along the Manayunk towpath through the Association for Public Art’s groundbreaking program, New Land Marks.

Since 2001 Pieri has completed 10 murals working with Philadelphia’s Mural Arts Program. Since 2008 she has completed 7 murals in an elementary school in College Station, Texas. In 2005 Pieri founded the Cooke Museum of Art, modeled after the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at the Jay Cooke Elementary School in North Philadelphia. Pieri has been a Teaching Artist at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for 18 years. She is also a Teaching Artist for The Barnes Foundation. Diane Pieri is represented by the Rosenfeld Gallery, Philadelphia, PA. www.dianepieri.com www.inliquid.com

CONTRIBUTING POETS Joe Ahearn

is the author of two books of poems, Five Fictions and synthetic. His poetry, fiction, translations, criticism and essays have been widely published, both in this country and abroad. Recent and forthcoming work has appeared or will appear in Prairie Schooner, The Texas Observer, Borderlands: Texas Poetry in Review, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetry, and the anthology, 99 Poems for the 99 Percent. Ahearn earned his M.F.A. at the University of Texas, where he was a Fellow at the Michener Center for Writers and served on the editorial board for Bat City Review. He teaches writing courses in the M.F.A. program at Western Connecticut State University and in the Early College Start Program at Austin Community College.

deborah brandon

is a multidisciplinary queer artist with an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Deborah Brandon’s work appears in OCHO, Transom, [PANK], Bombay Gin, Mom Egg Review, Denver Quarterly, Moonshot, Hotel Amerika, Cadillac Cicatrix, Puerto del Sol, Slipstream, and Evergreen Chronicles; and is forthcoming in the anthology Writing the Walls Down, to be published by TransGenre press.

Dalton Day

is a terrified dog person and an editor for FreezeRay Poetry. His work has been published or featured in Hobart, Jellyfish, The Millions, and PANK, among others. He is the author of the collection Supernova Factory as well as Fake Knife, which is forthcoming from FreezeRay Press. He can be found at Basically, he thinks everything is cute & won’t stop crying about it.

Tumblr: myshoesuntied Twitter: @lilghosthands

Arielle Greenberg

has two books coming out in 2015: the poetry collection Slice and the creative nonfiction book Locally Made Panties.

She’s also the author of the poetry books My Kafka Century and Given, and the chapbooks Shake Her and Fa(r)ther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials. She is co-author, with Rachel Zucker, of Home/Birth: A Poemic, and co-editor of three anthologies: most recently, with Lara Glenum, Gurlesque.

Her poems and essays have been featured in anthologies including the Best American Poetry, Labor Day: True Birth Stories for the 21st Century and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. She also writes a regular column on contemporary poetics for the American Poetry Review. A former tenured professor in poetry at Columbia College Chicago, she now lives in Maine and teaches in the community and in Oregon State UniversityCascades’ MFA.

Sandra Lim

is the author of The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), selected by Louise Glück for the 2013 Barnard Women Poets Prize, and a previous collection of poetry, Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). A 2015 Pushcart Prize winner, she has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Getty Research Institute. Lim was born in Seoul, Korea and educated at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and lives in Cambridge, MA.

mipoesias

GOSS183 publishing group

Didi Menendez publisher creator

Jay Menendez layout designer editor

Sarah Blake poetry editor

Nate Marshall

is a poet and educator from the South Side of Chicago. He is the editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop. His first book, Wild Hundreds, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He serves as a Zell Postgraduate Fellow at the University of Michigan. A Cave Canem Fellow, his work has appeared in POETRY Magazine, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Nate won the 2014 Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award and the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award. He is a founding member of the poetry collective Dark Noise. He is also a rapper.

Jessica Smith, founding editor of Foursquare and name magazines

and Coven Press, serves as the librarian for Indian Springs School, where she co-curates its Visiting Writers Series. She is the author of numerous chapbooks including mnemotechnics (above/ground 2013), Trauma Mouth (dusie 2015), and one full-length collection, Organic Furniture Cellar (Outside Voices 2006).

Her second book, Life-List, is forthcoming from Chax Press.

Christopher Soto

(aka Loma) is a queer latin@ punk poet and prison abolitionist. They are currently curating Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color in collaboration with The Lambda Literary Foundation. They have work published in Columbia: A Journal, Anti-, Apogee Journal and more. They are an MFA candidate in Poetry at NYU and the 2014-2015 Intern at Poetry Society of America.

Allison Titus is the author of the novel THE ARSONIST’S SONG HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH FIRE, and two books of poetry: SUM OF EVERY LOST SHIP, and THE TRUE BOOK OF ANIMAL HOMES (forthcoming). She teaches in the low-res MFA program at New England College.

Kate Westhaver

received her MFA from the University of Oregon, and was a recipient of the Margery Davis Boyden wilderness writing residency. She currently lives with her family in Massachusetts.

Allison Titus

ESSAY ON LONGING A quickening at the edge: clutch of smock-throated birds folding over overhead.

Their collective cry filled the clouds.

How loud;

how gathered.

I was waiting for you I was preparing a suitable face with which to greet yours,

when you arrived

across the distance felled by a broken horse, which was a body of water.

Across the great bellwether and threshold, which was a body of water.

6

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

Centuries bloomed & centuries passed & then the day we knew was coming broke

& everything was beautiful & everything was different

I stood there waiting preparing my mouth for the small words I would speak to you.

At the modern shoreline the wind scrolled,

an unyielding thing,

familiar with shipwrecks and the efforts of recovery.

Let us keep us here, resplendent & beginning

held

& withheld, & holding. www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

7

ESSAY ON THE HOMEOPATHIC TREATMENT FOR HUMAN LONGING titled after Dario Robleto

There was no more time already.

It had all run out.

What was there to do about it besides sit here, on this bench behind the rented farmhouse and memorize the winter light holding the leaves down cold.

I didn’t do much else.

I fed the goats raisins.

I finished my cup of coffee.

I thought of the unbearable news of the day before which followed the unbearable news of the day before that and I stared at the useless trees.

Late in the afternoon the deer came, haltingly, through the dusk of the woods to press in a cluster this field. I counted seven. Soft darknesses threading into darker shadows.

Going somewhere, on the way somewhere, already disappearing.

8

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

Dalton Day

A Theory of Return Because I want to panic I build a lake in me. I hide in the trees until all I see is the feeble glint of my stars in the lake’s surface. Horses run into the water repeatedly, & they always drown. I have never seen a horse drown, but I know the hurt it brings. But now, birds are hatching everywhere & I want to protect them from falling. So I flood the lake in reverse. I take out everything except the birds, & the dark dark sky. I’m a horse. I forget where I’m going next.

A Theory of Return My small hands are bigger now so I whittle them into houses. Inside the houses are trees. Inside the trees are air & the possibility of light. With your help I turn the trees into a sleep. When I step inside the sleep there you are, with your arms, & your hands connected to them. You say you are proud of the home I have become. The clouds stop what they are doing so they can move against us. My small hands look like they are glowing, but they are just learning to float.

A Theory of Return You don’t believe I am a map, so I show you. I unfold myself like the opposite of sleeping. There is blood & organs & bone. While I am unfolding, you say you imagined velvet. You say you remember reading about deer shedding their velvet in response to weather. The sky has since been stained with blood, & this is why we call it the heart now. When I am unfolded, when I am no longer a body, but instead a distance, the points of my life are laid out to you. At one end, I am tearing my antlers out to invent trees. At the other, hooves are leaving the ground for the first time.

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

9

Sandra Lim

AFTER LOVE Listened to the thump of myself live: the dark suck of my centers.

My life carried out the theme in decorations— a sweetened bed of solitude, a cork floating in a rushing river.

Then, after love, nothing inaccessible to me.

No more desire for consolation, for the low earth of duty.

10

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

AT DUSK

—make something come into being whose need is not felt— because if there was a need, it would fall into mere accomplishment

and not pleasure, that delighted fury.

Faint sounds of traffic in the air, supermarkets staying open late, windows spattered with rain.

And the erotic, he says, stubbing out his cigarette, is one edict,

one way that love will make its widening will known.

—or is it a glimmer of some other poverty,

just a smaller space within which to feel distances?

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

11

Phases of The Sun Series: NIGHT AND DAY gouache, casein, and iridescent ink on handmade Japanese paper 9” x 10”

12

deborah brandon

∞ When convenience erupts, I’m evacuated beyond it, to the boat waiting for water. Roots sail silent below cities. The traveling brush is wider than words.

What falls from trees cannot be seen on the brain. Cornfields buckle; a series of nerves, flat under stars. Pallasites guarding their glittering windows; pallasites at the ends of fields. A genesis of birds.

I arrive at midnight, but my carriage is not with me. Lightning has pruned the bushes into stumps above time. I stand in the air with a unicorn foot.

‘The chickens are elegant,’ mother says. ‘I live here now with the house growing old, & everything after the same.’

Upon my return, Mother has the following fears for me: My ankles are too delicate for dancing I could accidentally fuck someone I will release the kaleidoscope and turn myself instead.

She already knows I will use an anchor even in the city; even during evaporative times.

Further fears: That I’ll explain the crater that refuses explanation And the time for plumes is over And backstitching will not remedy this mistake.

Wind relapses, causes a dent which realizes the light.

Mother wants to know—what can the sea bring or remove, with its tributaries lost? — where i am warm i will calm her. i show her my eyes only slightly, still careening from my way and the foam i found inside it.

—here i am. www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

13

∞ when the narrative fell through

the chapparral earth below

not forbidding this,,,

half the story

the sky careening;

melted before the cold atmospheric charnal house a narrative burned by its own

flesh folding in on itself —& forced cold, &newly made a bright thing oriented all through dark flight,,,,,,

honey it made quite an impact crater shooting fractured language running past rims

mesquite roots,

coral-flame flowers, when i came upon this

high varnishing summer mirage striking my ankles

venom in my blood, i gleaned

fallen a strewn revelation my own bones

14

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

∞ The clairvoyant said it was time for the cake to fall. Lose it a little closer to yourself this time, she suggested. You’re trapped. Around the edges, you’re sticking to the pan.

i with the heat on / drove through mountains the light began to blow the snow’s eyelashes sweet motes singing over the grey dash

i thought, i am so very much in love with you && then pitched love - strong and

impossible as clouds - out the window in your direction. blood pedaling my body, and

the silvery blooms in the sky were all perfectly cut pieces as i neared the source, the blister that kind of weird throat torture, Want.

i found you in the chalk room without full erasure and second drawer locked you running your hand along the war

in the wood and right here is where i stood dreaming for the first time:

in the hallway with the helium-parquet floor with hands in the locker-room anthill how did it feel to hold the landing; the fruit-screwed plum?

the people i’ve created want everything

the loveseat snows

unbuckled by a dream onto the floor

The clairvoyant said I would want to dig trenches. And when you do, you will marvel that you are infected but never felt the bite. Wobbling like an egg those final hours the ones i have loved all flailing synapses

a He searchlight-sweeps this

only arms tiny bones

What you’re wearing and its dank clap against your body and your body itself become unknowable. That dress you harvested at the season’s height of green glamour, now mere palping dinge for departing hands.

15

i’m only smudging leaves from the stick over your stump of a mouth my mirror

hoping for seeds does set the saucer spinning

the culprits are long since recovered.

Basically it will be difficult, she said. ∞ I stood by while mother strode into rain for the car. A shred with a hat on it. Her lips pursed in a pale pink bow left what she couldn’t carry.

I knew the street was cobblestone even with the force coming down. A bull steered me under the awning but I shrugged my red cape black with rain. In Savannah, the graveyards were beautiful. Here, they are pocked with drought.

Mother says I have seventy lights ripe for sifting. She thinks she is sure, but then again- I tell her- rain does lift a stain.

So I’ll set these stains using stones in a desert. ‘While you’re away, nature will take its course,’ she says. ‘You’ll have a diamond to flash at me when you return.’

If I do, I will blind— I was not with her her hands over my eyes, I was not.

A nest of white hair waited to see if I would skim the foam from the bean pot ablate the bone.

I said I wanted cheese grits; mother threw me from the tree.

i don’t believe you. the angels don’t dwell there.

Glory, glory, a stalk for the tether still looking spare a gland for my opals

I looked up and knew an other side.

16

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

∞ I’ll put it in the wind or that’s the devil, feeding himself with his other hand.

I don’t care if I called you from the sun.

Few fevers pitch this much light. mother coils etiquette round my shoulders a viper orlando, orlando I have all these rings to throw. That one rock— I’m told does not match the rest of its range.

One flourish of my wrist, then fangs.

Mother who was never Mama, I’m saving this shape of the moon.

Please let it stay in the house; no one will suspect it is here and i will take all the rest with me tomorrow

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

17

Jessica Smith

29 May 2012 / Harpersville like these houses teach us nothing how to escape

the heat in the blue sky

tornadic weather tour my memory

below like skinned game

the remains of

remember this green

a house

rich pine walls

rush back

unbidden

my grandfather and I carefully up the stairs

outside trees

ruined orchard knee-deep in leaves and old fruit

over the missing planks a broken chair

mackerel clouds

and apple blossoms and at the top an abandoned library strength in

what remains this green

the way it was before

18

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

see

11 December 2009 / Buffalo you know how nights like this begin the kind of know your heart gets in the stories flood under the door the information offered up

the little head

all the options for death

buried the agreement

the death of relief the death of constant mourning the egg doesn’t take, or

the uterus refuses to gestate any way you turn, it’s gonna hurt “it’s never the right time” that we might trust

four miscarriages three miscarriages two miscarriages one stillbirth

each other all the death in birth

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

19

Joe Aheran

AFTER READING MY OWN POEMS LATE AT NIGHT No lilies here, even at the water’s shore.

Dragonflies and a few skimmers far off.

Up close, the ripplings are brownish, clouded,

warm like blood.

There’s not much to see.

A few mutterings of oaks, parched grasses scrabbling the hard ground.

Nothing seems to begin here.

But it’s quiet. Bright.

It’s a place to go mad.

20

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

ELEGY FOR THE MERELY PLEASANT Behind it all, one wants to say, are the various grays, folded and fissured like medulla. Otherwise, we’re teeth.

Rictus. In front, one hopes, are the reliable reds, the vermilions and their dramas, the golds arranged like a sleep, leggy and recumbent. —One wants a picture, the pleasures of an arrangement, the lie of three roses and a dozen small pears saved to paint after breakfast on a cool, sunny day. Otherwise, we’re lost.

Otherwise, what flies before us is only a wave— upflung, cold like laughter, iced, bleak, single.

Otherwise, what cracks and heaves between us is just a smallest sea, one loved by the maddest of painters for its whitest sky, its blanchings of cloud, for its birds that fall and fall again, blooded with ice, like us.

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

21

Arielle Greenberg

Ten Pounds Thinner than That If I were ten pounds thinner than I am right now, I would be at my normal adult weight, the weight my body seems to have preferred since I became sexually active at seventeen (and thus a woman, some might say) and went on the Pill and gained about ten pounds more than I had been previously as a teenager, a weight about which, at the time, I never gave much thought.

If I were ten pounds thinner than that, twenty pounds thinner than I am right now, I would be the weight I had previously been as a teenager and that is a weight I usually feel really good being, even though as a teenager I never thought about it and mostly wore oversized rock concert t-shirts and billowy clothing from the Indian import shop and kitschy finds like ladybug skirts and Catholic schoolgirl uniforms from the Salvation Army and my boyfriend’s jeans.

This weight I’m talking about is not a thin weight. It is a healthy weight; it is medically considered within the normal weight for my height, but it is by no one’s definition thin.

If I were ten pounds thinner than that, which would be thirty pounds thinner than I am right now and forty-three pounds thinner than I was a few months ago, I would be at a weight at which I imagine society might begin to consider me for the qualification of “thin,” but maybe not even then. And I don’t think I could ever be thinner that that weight. Nor would I want to be. I myself don’t admire bodies thinner than that weight.

What does it mean for a thirty-seven-year-old woman who has been pregnant three times and breastfed for two years and pumped other breastmilk for someone else’s baby for two weeks and then breastfed again to want to be the same size she was when she was sixteen? Does it matter that this was not actually a thin weight?

Because yes, I’d like to like how my body looks naked, but mostly I care about how I look in clothes.

22

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

The Postpartum Body Pregnant bodies are one thing, but the postpartum body is something else entirely. The phrase sometimes used is “deflated cream puff.�

It took me two years to lose my pregnancy weight after my first child was born. That same weekend I’d finally lost the weight, I went shopping while on vacation in Minnesota and bought a really cute short-sleeved fitted top in a dainty floral print with Western style snaps and a pair of navy blue cotton shorts that were actually not too unflattering. I went back to the hotel after the shopping trip and felt like I had a stomach bug. I went home from the vacation and took a pregnancy test and realized I was pregnant again, and I put the top and the shorts into a plastic storage tub and never got to wear them at all.

Then that baby died and I went to Weight Watchers and cried and felt very sorry for myself, with a deflated cream puff body again and big old leaking breasts and no baby to nurse. I went running every single day I could and watched what I ate and lost the weight about seven months later. Then I went shopping while on vacation in Maine and bought a vintage 1960s pink and white Hawaiian print shift dress with three-quarter-length sleeves and also a vintage wool cardigan in a lovely shade of green. I came home from vacation and took a pregnancy test and realized I was pregnant again. I think I did wear the shift dress once or twice before it stopped fitting. The sweater almost immediately did not fit over my enormously once-again pregnant breasts.

And now my oldest child is five years old and I am nursing this third baby and have about ten more pounds to lose off my deflated cream puff body with big old breasts before I am my regular weight.

I love my children very, very much, but sometimes I take out the plastic storage tub full of my old clothes, my size 10 clothes, the clothes I wore before I ever got pregnant, the clothes that are dry clean only or have beading or sharp buttons or are otherwise not so wise to wear while holding a baby, and I get very sad. I miss my clothes. I love my children, but I also love my clothes.

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

23

Supermodels Heidi Klum, the supermodel, producer and emcee of Project Runway, has had four children. At least. And she has the body of a supermodel. She wears miniskirts in her third trimester and then a few weeks after the baby is born she models lingerie.

I have to do this thing where I think to myself: but she was a supermodel before she got pregnant. Not just a model: a supermodel. The kind of model only certain very select models become.

And you weren’t. You weren’t even a regular model. You weren’t even close.

24

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

Phases of The Sun Series: RED AIR gouache, casein, and iridescent ink on handmade Japanese paper 9” x 10”

25

Nate Marshall

repetition & repetition & ours is a long love song, a push out into open air, a stare into the barrel, a pool of grief puddling under our single body. a national shame amnesia & shame again. we are a pattern, a percussive imperative, a break beat. we are live on the airwaves, until they close, in the pubs until they close, in the schools until they close. we are close to the edge of the city limits. we are limited to the hood until we decide we are not. baby we are hundreds: wild until we are free. wild like amnesia & shame, amnesia until we realize that its crazy to keep forgetting & we ain’t crazy baby we are wild. we are 1. we are love.

26

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

we are love. we are 1. baby we are wild. & we ain’t crazy, crazy to keep forgetting. we realize that its amnesia until & shame. wild like amnesia, wild until we are free. baby we are hundreds. until we decide we are not we are limited to the hood. to the edge of the city limits we are close until they close. in the schools until they close, in the pubs until they close, on the airwaves, we are live. a break beat, a percussive imperative. we are a pattern, amnesia & shame again. a national shame under our single body. a pool of grief puddling, a stare into the barrel, a push out into open air, ours is a long love song.

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

27

Harold’s Chicken Shack #1 I was born by a lake, chicken shack, & a church - Common, “The Morning”

1st defense against food deserts. when the whitefolk wouldn’t sling us burgers you gave no fuck. stuck your golden ringed hand into the flour & fixed the bird. you 1st example of black flight. original innovation of deep fry. you beef tallow, city slick & down home migration taste. of course your sauce sweet & burn at the same time. of course you call it mild so whitefolk won’t know to fear until it’s too late. you no corporate structure, just black business model. they earn the recipe & go make it their own. every cut of crow you throw in the grease is dark meat. the whole shack: shaking, drenched in mild sauce, sweet spirit, baptized.

28

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

Phases of The Sun Series: GANDHI’S TOMB gouache, casein, and iridescent ink on handmade Japanese paper 9” x 10” 29

Kate Westhaver

Shame I turned off the TV. My toddler was so angry he head-butted me and my tooth hit my lip, raising skin in the shape of a fang. When I held him on the changing table, he kicked and hit and laughed at me and kicked and hit and smashed his hand into the mirror until it rocked, pieces of my face swinging back and forth before his foot smacked into my rib—that’s when I lost it, and my fist hit his chest before I could stop—

I wanted but didn’t want

to hurt him and who knows if he wanted to hurt me but hurt is what happened and hurt is what happened when my father’s hand went through the drywall, when I rocked a chair on my brother’s head and my mother threw her pans on the floor, yet— she’s the one I called, the one who told me again and again I’m not a monster, even she can still see marks in the shape of her palm printed on my thigh.

30

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

Nativity Scene The toddler smacks the infant’s head until red welts appear in the shape of small fingers.

By the time his brother has switched from hitting to smiling, the baby’s forgotten pain, smiles back as if love is all he’s ever known.

Such forgiveness is not forgiveness.

Now the mother sits between to keep her sons from mauling one another. All day: chaos.

At night: cold. Glittering Christmas lights across the street.

Holy Mary almost overwhelmed by the glow. Your son is coming! Your son is coming!

He will save us even though you didn’t ask for it.

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

31

Watching the Baby Sleep, Midwinter Tiny arms startle out

—fingers splayed— the reach of some distant ancestor falling

through a tree. They say muscles remember—

you must extend hands

to save yourself.

Your brother – a little older – just learned to say

“fall down.” He’s up

on the changing table,

wants to roll. I say no, and he says: no—

you might fall down

he says, fa dow— ends of words

dropping off.

Some day

32

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

he’ll know endings.

In the orchard

beyond the window past the baby now asleep,

limbs bend so

much they almost touch the ground.

Spring will come with all its blossoms,

summer’s shimmering, even fall, when all the heavy

fruit will loosen,

tumble to the ground.

Then, when I stand there

longing for what’s hanging, untouched, my kids

will pick what they can reach and love

that it has fallen.

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

33

Chapter for Feeding My Son after Timothy Donnelly’s “Chapter for Kindling a Torch”

In this case it wasn’t quite

laid before me, nor was there much mystery

as I held out my hand and he spit milk and mucus

into it, making a warm pool that may or may not

have meaning.

And though I won’t say

it gave me pleasure, I can’t say it displeased

me, either— one hand at his mouth,

the other searching for a rag to wipe

his face so he could resume eating. It’s not

that I won’t take responsibility for

making meaning out of this mess. I will.

I take it.

34

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

Phases of The Sun Series: SUNSHINE EYELETS gouache, casein, and iridescent ink on handmade Japanese paper 9” x 10”

35

Christopher Soto

Ode to the Starfish You cannot drown, not now, NOT NOW! You are a starfish: you,

shine from the bottom [of the deepest blue]

LOOK, AT THE SKY: see your reflection, burning:

terrible angels.

[a shooting star]

so luminous! [I make a wish for you]

You are sitting in the bathtub &

waters overflow

like sand collecting in the hallway

beige carpet,

YOU PUT THAT RAZOR DOWN!

onto

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,

the skin flaps open: so soft & gentle

You cannot drown; you, are a starfish!

why, did the curtains not flail their arms?

your pubic hairs curl

[like broken strings on a harp]

there is no music: NOT TODAY!

ssss sssss

the sound of waves

is the night

[this isn’t supposed to happen] HOW could they stay SO QUIET?!

, , ,

But

there is

beating mermaids

[seafoam collecting at their fins]

[I am frantic] & fucked with & pulling on your ankles, dragging you

back into the ocean

36

[

: the placenta

]

www.mipoesias.com Spring 2015

mipoesias

Diane Pieri Allison Titus Dalton Day Sandra Lim deborah brandon Jessica Smith Joe Ahearn Arielle Greenberg Nate Marshall Kate Westhaver Christopher Soto