Poems of Our Climate 2022-2023

Dearreader,

fall2022-spring2023

Editor:Sofia Baluyut

CoverDesign:

Kathy Liang

WithspecialthankstoOliver EggerandBenTogut

PoemsofOurClimateisaweeklypoetrycolumnpublishedinThe WesleyanArgusnewspaper.ThecolumnwasestablishedbyOliver Eggerin2021asapartoftheRoute9LiteraryCollective.

Thecollectionyouholdnowiscomposedoftheworkofstudentpoets publishedinthecolumnfromfall2022tospring2023.Butitisalso composedofmorethanthat--itholdstheircarefulattentions,their griefs,theirspiritsofplay,theirpracticesofmemory,theirkinships.I hope,too,thatthiscollectioncanholdhowdeeplygratefulIfeelfor beingtrustedtotendtotheirwork.

Maythesepoemsandpoetscontinuetomoveothersastheyhave movedme.

Withlove, Sofia

TableofContents

uponlearningthat60%ofwesleyan’scollectionsare NativeAmericaninoriginbySofiaBaluyut watchmedancebyJadaReid

thankyou,inotherwordsbyEdmundJosefJurado

OurBayinAtlanticCitybyMadisonMacalintal PraiseSongbyEmilyChen

LeavingForSchoolbyEthanHyunooPark

TonybyAidanFitzmaurice

ToBeaPoetbyBanri(Mari)Saito

OdetoBeatrixPotterbyAmandaDing

Nomatterwhatthisworldcallsus,someonecalled ustheirsbyAvaGuralnick

mymemoryismine(andiloveherevenwhenshe lies/andshelovesmesoshelies)byGenesis Pimentel

RoadKillbyOliverBijur

Twenty-FourthAnnualReportoftheTrusteesofthe MassachusettsSchoolofIdioticandFeebleMindedYouth:October,1871byOliverEgger

TemporaryComfortbyMariTall

TheMet:Month8AfterbyStellaTannen

uponlearningthat60%ofwesleyan’s collectionsareNativeAmericaninorigin

SofiaBaluyut

after Zubaida Bello

ivory tower, the library hush, and print, you press your ear to books to hear them hum. see the circulation desk, life beating out from center. see the slowing, the rhythm of breath in contact with dust. they say life’s within these tomes, the white men in white rooms; white men in white coats, how they doctor the truth for slaughter. see? what is promised, here, is also stolen.

watchmedance JadaReid

after, with, and inside of Zora’s how it feels to be colored me

from front porch to jungle jazz club, you taught me to speculate. to spectate and to know that i am spectated

little zora watches herself mold into a blackness and in the mirror there is me waving back at her

waiting for the moment where cross time, we meet, only to find

everything we knew was never different about us.

bits of broken glass & our voices this is how i speak in pieces and

little zora knows whiteness only in that it passes her. moves past, and forward, leaving her there. leaving

what is at the core – what happens if you split me open, and outpour my memories, all the things i’ve ever loved and the space they take up inside

would there be gods in there? or just matter – paper bag & paper bag, emptied

finding me, shattered and all; bits of broken glass – a door never opened

part and parcel of the same star i come from – i reach for your words. pierce them into my body and sometimes i pretend they are mine.

tell me Zora; what is it that you see?

not to plagiarize but to imagine i am the person that wrote this refusal. refusal. refusal.

thankyou,inotherwords

EdmundJosefJurado

and it’s still my favorite story to tell about you the apartment still had a smell to it as places do when they are not home yet but not like how your shirts always smelled when we hugged at the airport, no, that was home come home to us— one night you made dinner from what we had (a head of garlic, an onion, a stalk of celery, carrots and potatoes, tomato paste) from what we had you made everything we needed then for weeks turned years we asked you to make it again

but it was different each time and each time it was still what we need

at the dining table warmth in the blanket we shared a birthday cake only blown two hours after midnight you made us pull our clothes from a hot heap on the center of the bed every sunday you made us rush to the window every night we heard you pull into the lot and it’s still my favorite story to tell about you: the story of how you made from what we had a home and i can’t say we learned to be so happy with so little because then we had so much

OurBayinAtlanticCity MadisonMacalintal

This banig we lay on the silky shore every year Once towered over all, flowered as buri palm, Now dried by the sun, flows by the sea.

In this bay of marbled sand and crying boats, My Papo sits on the rocks, sways his net, As the spring sprouts once more, He waits for the stream to gently hum The song he remembers from home

The dilis swivel through the cloudy water, But we all know we would rather see them swim In the boiling, bubbling oil my Lola Pulls them into and pushes them out of A current of neverending flavor.

Papo kicks, splashes, paddles closest to the rope, We submerge our heads, until our eyes burn, Until our skin is salt, until our hands reach theirs The ones he left, the ones I do not know.

This water is the only place that touches Our home here and our lavishing land there, Every time we come back, we swim further Catch more little fish, so that he can say He still remembers.

PraiseSong

EmilyChen

After Martín Espada

This is where the student loosens her muscles from the library and lies down, her mind breaks from the hard bone of calculus to write the dream of a poem. The roof unfolds to reveal the sky, trembling like piano strings.

This is where the mother shuts off her computer. She has ignored her body for years. Her heart is a brass yellow drum pounding signals of urgent need to her brain. Her body follows her heart. She grabs her electric scooter, the wind carries wisps of her hair, the breath of the universe, she has never known the world like this before.

This is where the man closes his eyes after punching out. The bang and drum of the soybean factory hammers through conveyor belt capillaries.

He listens to his heart remembers that it connects to the veins in his wrists.

Beneath his eyelids there is his mother It is morning time in Anhui. She makes a pot of tea, steam unfurling as she sings an old song.

leavingforschool EthanHyunooPark

four floors above a broken elevator, somewhere off of route 29 and on the other side of a road you can no longer cross: tight-lipped glass doors and a balcony looking out onto nothing at all, home to halfway haunting and two ill-defined figures shuffling past and inwards and inwards and backwards and backwards and past.

today is warm blue and lucid as you used to be but the sun still refuses to enter bare: light sneaks through stiffened blinds and slips silent onto mahogany floors, dim and diffuse. we are inside, where a sonata bleeds out of fuzzy black maws and drops like dead weight, where the whine of warping wood soaks ripe into the air. and i cannot hear it from the guest room, held under the thrash of a washing machine still spinning stains that will not come out.

we are inside, where the coarse leather of an orange couch you brought from a past life still does not give an inch, yet asks to be sat upon; we are inside, where ruby apples are peeled naked and left to brown for occasional company, and i wonder if it seems any emptier than the last time i was here we are inside, where you putter around each other, towards each other, away from each other, towards, away and around. we are inside, where you ask and i answer:

september 3rd is when i go back to school, halmoni

and i do not tell my mother to lower her voice or to get more sleep. there is rust along the edges of a picture frame on spotless marble, and there you are, smiling behind smudged glass; and there she is, atlas under the weight of palms pressing padded shoulders and there is love, i know, and i think i hear it somewhere in her stillness, but still i sometimes wish to hear it spoken aloud

we are inside, where your smile is wide and full of its past, shallow and drained of its presence. you say i have grown so tall and i say you have shrunk, because that is the joke: you are shrinking and we all laugh until we cry, you turn to haraboji and ask him what we are saying. he tells you slowly in a tongue still not mine and you laugh too. you slap his once-broad shoulders and laugh and laugh and laugh so hard that you forget to cry. then five minutes pass and the joke is forgotten again and again:

in a few weeks, halmoni, on september 3rd.

and sometimes i wonder about what you choose to remember your age, your spotted hands, your hair thinning beneath a faux burberry bucket hat: creasing textures of a reality that begs to be held and covered; sheet music you will not reteach yourself and the cutting of glass surfaces, among other heavy reminders. recalling what you have lost, forgetting what you will lose, knowing not to worry but still doing it again and again:

september 3rd, halmoni, two more weeks.

your father made shoes on the north side of a road you can no longer cross, rubber shoes that you still speak of. he gave them to your friends, you said, you were so rich, you said, he was a good man, you said. and i do not know what he said while weaving gold discreet into a child’s blouse that might fit you still. threadbare is the luxury fabric of years ripped into by someone else’s war: years you still do not speak of. and i do not speak of very much in korean, but i know how to say “i do not need” your father’s generosity that you cannot afford, though i know it is generosity that you cannot afford to lose again and again: a week from now, halmoni, september 3rd.

and how do i tell you i woke up crying from a dream about you? dancing and smiling and laughing, you were there as i have always known you to be. battered hands cupping ground shrimp, nimble fingers striking ivory now atrophied and silent. you were there as i have always known you to be. but perhaps we are both stretched outstretched towards a past no longer ours, a past no longer or shorter than any future worth remembering again and again:

september 3rd, tomorrow is when i leave you, halmoni.

i will miss you too, halmoni, i will miss you too.

Tony AidanFitzmaurice

You boxed men half your age until your ears

Gnarled and split like spit-out bubblegum And even in your slumber, the fighting did not stop: Your sheets soaked in terror before the sleep apnea mask Testified to your inner sick.

Tony, please tell me you were not yet in the teeth Of dementia Please tell me you did not yet taste Our farewell. Your bulldog paunch was never meant For the antiseptic smock of hospice care.

I cannot watch as they rub vaseline on your bedsores. I cannot watch as they dab a wet sponge to your tongue. Tony, I am struggling to find the poetry in this. Tony, please help me find it

ToBeaPoet Banri(Mari)Saito

Recently I keep yearning to write / my own medicine / but I cannot unwrite the sins that bind my words. I am a poet but cannot express anything / useless / cannot do anything / right / or / wrong / does not matter when all you can do is sift through your memories–sakura petals that disperse too early from their guardian branches–and try again.

My purpose is simple / human nature: they said / that “one day there would be a man who would plunder through / his [her] organs until he [she] houses a child within him [her]” / and I cannot fathom to do any of that. I know there is a younger self / on the other side, waiting / to gather new sakura / patient / as I have left him {it is raining red inside and I am a bleeding sculpture punished for the sins that I’ve written} something I cannot help but continue because / I am a poet / and you–you are a historian of your ancestors; parents forbidden to be stars.

OdetoBeatrixPotter

AmandaDing

languid afternoons spent spilling sunlight liquid splinters in seconds.

lavender suspends itself over an open fire the red rag plump with onions,

a courier trip. benjamin maybe, a son, sneaking out to the cucumbers.

his sisters are good, they gorge themselves on blackberries on occasion, and sing sweetly to the brambles.

all from the palm shaped crinoline creations, sweeping watercolor captures imaginations.

you gather all of this lying belly down in weeds smelling sweetgrass, sorrow tastes like torn pages,

delicate rejections from booksellers. lace trims the edges of childrens’ dresses,

her flaxlike hair becomes Jemima the goose, his waistcoat Mr. Samuel Whiskers,

Tom Kitten in his navy coat and brass buttons mewling in an attic,

serenades me to sleep I could spend days,

inhaling dandelion afternoons, drenched in honeysuckle rain:

a soporific dream, authored by you.

WhentheSyncopationStops

AvaYuanshunGuralnick

"No matter what this world calls us, someone called us theirs."

--Rachel Cargle

I am pointing at myself. which is to say, I am pointing at a past past me.

Because a threshold is not just a point of entry, but a finger Yes! In a middle; somewhere.

I am dreaming of that day–

presence presented you in a flash; flood. And then dissipated, once again.

Turn left at the sign

With red characters hired to fill white space Look down.

another baby in a box where breath lay posted with a post-it note: May 11, 2003

less than a week old, I had learned to reach And now, Even boundaries were borderless.

Were your eyes still smiling, touching me a final time? your creation built close to a heart to a love before hands carved eternal folds of form, and I think I can still feel it.

The syncopation of our beats–Farewell must also mean hello Because sometimes we are gone before named and although I do not know who named me, mine suits me well 太元

順、 have a smooth journey.

mymemoryismine(andiloveherevenwhen shelies/andshelovesmesoshelies)

Genesis(Hennessy)Pimentel

it has been said that memory is your old television, fuzzy, color fading away and you must hit the side to get the image back, before you blink you think other realities have slipped through, too and so the memory of us i see through the yellow-stained glass, the portrait is surrounded by a haze but still i know it’s you here my mind reconstructs you as we were a visual of my handiwork, a topography of curves and bumps i felt we were

visceral always is my memory my body aches today where it remembers the pain my blood flows a rise, a fall in the same rhythm as when we first happened flowing this way only when i think of you and you think of me, too the process of becoming everyone, everything, every experience as i know it in my body

i’ve heard that some say memory is a kind of fiction a fable for truth a lesson learned, a hope come true what I ought to know because of what I don’t

but still the remembrances recur: the first kiss myth you ask me if it’s true and for you i say yes all the first kisses, realfake, stored in my mind: sep 12 2014 and/or sep 29 2014 and/or/and/or my mouth remembers every kiss as a new one a pleasure of the lips, lingua franca, oral history

but still

soon i will forget that you ever seeped through for the care and delicacy required to love when i relive myself

because my memory is my love fluffing pillows, smoothing out wrinkles, retucking the sheets

my memory is my own sustained acts of attention, the remaking of my bed

RoadKill OliverBijur

a house cat lies paralyzed, rigor mortis preserving the instant a soul departed, blood dripping from the left nostril has dried solid, connecting to the pool underneath in a delicate red line

one eyeball rolls on a pink string stretched through a scaly crack in half of an Armadillo’s shattered face opened like an eggshell, his leaky yolk fries sunny side up on the pavement

an opossum offers its intestines ripped open rib cage a cornucopia the shining white bones picked clean as dark wings beat overhead

pink flesh stretches like bubblegum from the bloody beak of this huge black bird whose feast we have disturbed, he leaves behind a small wet hairy stinking dead thing

a carcass so twisted it is unrecognizable, or rather easily recognizable (it is a twisted carcass) but unidentifiable, brown fur dark blood broken bones some reckless mammal but who?

I grimace and turn to Elijah, what the fuck was that? we laugh, teeth clenched, and the vultures resume

Twenty-FourthAnnualReportoftheTrusteesofthe MassachusettsSchoolofIdioticandFeeble-Minded Youth:October,1871

OliverEgger

“The daily morning prayer; the blessings at meals; the evening supplication, are not made in vain…these devotional habits do certainly sometimes make deep impressions upon their childish natures, and give them some comfort through life, and some hope in death. We have striking instances of this…A little boy who lately died became, during his sickness, an object of great interest to the Matron, teachers and attendants, who all became, by turns, his tender nurses. The approach of death seemed to awaken his spiritual life.”

It is not made in vain. The ritual: the morning daily prayer, the blessings at meals, the little ones at night, knees bent by their beds, clasped palms up and out to Him of whom they know nothing.

Doubtless there was joy in heaven, when George Toby, the little idiot, died. He put up those hands and muttered, Me wanna go up. Me wanna go up As feathers spread like ash among the thousand hands of nurses who wept, and prayed, and pet the black jet of his hair off the heat of his head.

Do our tears take his eyes? Did he just want to be one boy of many? Another gravestone upheaved for the driveway of a new four-bedroom? Do we not always refuse his permission?

The room was filled with onlookers, who stared and sweared that out of that decaying body seemed to rise the growing soul, some feathered thing, some untethered tide, as he sighed to some sort of heaven, They’ll say here comes one of the boys from the South Boston School for Feeble-Minded.

It is not made in vain. Every night as the little ones kneel by their sheets, they hear something higher and better than men, the wings which rustle in a herd, bound for a nothing, a heaven without tears, where each stone is sunk without a story.

MariTall

TemporaryComfort

When I sat beside the old woman Black cart held loosely between her fingers On that relatively empty train car I realized that I did not place myself On that two person seat For the physical comfort

No, I sat there Because I saw within her My mother.

Pressed between her And the wall, In the small remnants Of the orange seat, There was no ignoring The zipper of her coat Digging into my thigh

But I could pretend It served a purpose, Reminding me I’m here, I am with you

And with that When I found the wheel Of her black shopping cart Stubbing my toes As the train swayed to a stop At each station

The urge to apologize With each occurrence Laid Potent On my tongue, But her displeasure At these pleas for forgiveness Shone bright in her eyes

So there I sat With her disappointment And her zipper Imprinting me

TemporaryComfort

The old lady Sitting beside me Moved to get up

I could do nothing But watch

The wheel of her black cart screeched As she made her way Out of the metal doors And into the world

I waited for her To turn around To face me As the train pulled away But on she kept Walking With the lilt of My mother.

And as the train sped off Every color Faded

TheMet:Month8After StellaTannen

Just off the angel atrium where atheist tourists reckoned with God there was a simple window that overlooked Central Park. The sallowed fog had settled snug on the grass, hung opaque and placated

I stood in front of the window, looked out over the muted green I, full of life!

cried because I was there.