Poet's Corner

[Dhara]

Writing In The Afterlife - by Billy Collins

I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulphurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.

Many have pictured a river here,
but no one mentioned all the boats,
their benches crowded with naked passengers,
each bent over a writing tablet.

I knew I would not always be a child
with a model train and a model tunnel,
and I knew I would not live forever,
jumping all day through the hoop of myself.

I had heard about the journey to the other side
and the clink of the final coin
in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,
but how could anyone have guessed

that as soon as we arrived
we would be asked to describe this place
and to include as much detail as possible—
not just the water, he insists,

rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles—
and that our next assignment would be

to jot down, off the tops of our heads,
our thoughts and feelings about being dead,
not really an assignment,
the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—

think of it more as an exercise, he groans,
think of writing as a process,
a never-ending, infernal process,
and now the boats have become jammed together,

bow against stern, stern locked to bow,
and not a thing is moving, only our diligent pens.

 

[TheGreatKing]

Living - by Alok Srivastava

A chance encounter with a word
gave rise to a recessed memory
of a long forgotten smell,
attached to various things hoary.
Thus unearthing an era,
long gone and nullified,
pressed under sheets of experiences
like the fossil of a reptile.
The folded lobes of the mind
contain chapters of lives past.
A smell here, a sound there
are enough to raise their facade.
We are so busy in living
that the beauty of the moment is lost.
Only such triggered visions
make us realize what we tossed.
A life well lived,
or a life lived not?

 

[Dhara]

Mercury in Retrograde

BY SHERYL LUNA

The day ended badly with a broken ankle,
a jinxed printer, and a dead car. The dry yellow grass
against the sunset saved me. Roosters

pranced across a lawn of shit, proudly plumed
in black feathers, bobbing before the gray goats.
It was the first day I saw god in the quiet,

and found a mustard seed was very small.
There I had been for years cursing “why?”
and all the gold in the sun fell upon me.

There was a white mare in the midst
of brown smog, majestic in the refinery
clouds. Even the radio wouldn’t work!

My mother limps and her hair falls out.
The faithful drive white Chevy trucks
or yellow Camrys, and I’m here golden

on the smoking shock-less bus.
I lost language in this want, each poem
dust, Spanish fluttered

as music across the desert, even weeds
tumbled unloved. The police sirens seared
the coming night, dogs howled helplessly
sad.

Lo I walk the valley of death, love
lingers in my hard eyes. Mañana never
comes just right. I mend myself in the folds

of paper songs, ring my paper bells
for empty success. Quiero Nada,
if I sing long enough, I’ll grow dreamlike
and find a flock of pigeons, white under
wings lifting awkward bodies like doves
across the silky blue-white sky.

 

[Dhara]

Bones" by Sheryl Luna

Once, as a girl, she saw a woman shrink
inside herself, gray-headed and dwarf-sized,
as if her small spine collapsed. Age
and collapse were something unreal, like war
and loss. That image of an old woman sitting
in a café booth, folding in on herself, was forgotten
until her own bones thinned and hollowed,
music-less, un-fluted, empty.

She says she takes shark cartilage before she sleeps,
a tablet or two to secure flexibility and forget
that pain is living and living is pain.

And time moves like a slow rusty train
through the desert of weeds, and the low-riders
bounce like teenagers young and forgiving
in her night’s dream. She was sleek in a red dress

with red pumps, the boys with slick hair, tight jeans.
She tells me about 100-pound canisters of lard
and beans, how she could dance despite her fifth
child, despite being beaten and left
in the desert for days, how she saw an angel
or saint glimmer blonde above her, how she rose
and walked into the red horizon despite
her husband’s sin.

I’m thinking how the women
in my family move with a sway, with a hip
ache, and how they each have a disk
slip. The sky seems sullen, gray, and few birds
whisk. It’s how the muse is lost
in an endless stream of commercials, how people
forget to speak to one another as our ending skulks
arthritically into our bones, and the dust
of a thousand years blows across the plain,
and the last few hares sprint across a bloodied
highway. Here in the desert southwest, loss
is living and it comes with chapped lips,
long bumpy bus rides and the smog of some man’s
factory trap. And there are women everywhere
who have half-lost their souls
in sewing needles and vacuum-cleaner parts.
In maquiladoras there grows a slow poem,
a poem that may only live a moment sharply
in an old woman’s soul, like a sudden broken hip.

And yet, each October, this old woman rises
like the blue sky, rises like the fat turkey vultures
that make death something beautiful, something
towards flight, something that circles in a group
and knows it is best not to approach death alone.

Each October she dances, the mariachis yelp
and holler her back to that strange, flexible youth,
back to smoky rancheras and cumbias—songs
rolling in the shadows along the bare Mexican hills.
She tells me, “It’s in the music, where I’ll always
live.” And somehow, I see her jaw relax,
her eyes squint to a slow blindness
as if she can see something I can’t.

And I remember that it is good to be born of dust,
born amid cardboard shanties of sweet gloom.
I remember that the bare cemetery stones
in El Paso and Juárez hold the music, and each spring
when the winds carry the dust of loss there is a howl,
a surge of something unbelievable, like death,
like the collapse of language, like the frail bones
of Mexican grandmothers singing.

 

[Dhara]

A Letter to the Girl I Used to Be”
By Ethan Smith

Dear Emily,
Every time I watch baseball a voice I no longer recognise whispers
“Ethan, do you remember? When you were going to be the first girl
To play in the major league Seattle mariners rally cap?”
But to honest Emily I don’t
Dad told me that like it was someone else’s bedtime story
But I do know you had that drive
Didn’t let anyone tell you to wear shorts above your knees
Didn’t care if boys thought your hair fell on your shoulders just right
But with girls, sleepovers meant the space between your shoulder and hers
Was a 6-inch fatal territory
The year you turned 11
Was the first time you said out loud that you didn’t want to live anymore
In therapy you said you wouldn’t make it to 21
On my 21st birthday I thought about you
You were right
At 19 you started to fade
I tried to cross you out like a line in my memoir
I wished I could erase completely
And maybe I’m misunderstanding the definition of death
But even though parts of you still exist
You are not here
Most of my friends have never heard your name until now


I’ve been trying to write this letter for 6 months
I still can’t decide if it should be an apology or not
But now you will never hear “Emily Smith” announced at a college graduation
Get married, give birth
When the prescribed testosterone started taking effect my body stopped producing the potential for new life every month
I thought about your children, how I wanted them too
I let a doctor remove your breasts so I could stand up straighter
Now even if I somehow had those children I wouldn’t be able to nourish them
My body is obsolete
Scarred cosmetic but never C-section
I was 4 days late
There will never be grandparents
I was one week late
They will never hold their lover’s sleeping figure
I was 11 days late
They will never breathe in a sunset and a sunrise in the same night
I was 2 weeks late
They will never learn to jump rope
I was 3 weeks late
They will never shout “Watch mummy, watch me on the slide”
I was 2 months late
A piece of us will never wrap their arms around our legs for comfort
Just to keep them from falling down
And I am sorry that this process is so slow and all you can do is wonder if you ever had a place
You did
You still do
Don’t forget that
Yours, Ethan
P.S. I never hated you

 

[midcan5]

 

[Dhara]

Thanks, midcan and everyone for making this such a great thread.

I'm proud of it's continuity for so many years.

 

[Dhara]

And a youth said, "Speak to us of Friendship."

Your friend is your needs answered.

He is your field which you sow with love and reap with thanksgiving.

And he is your board and your fireside.

For you come to him with your hunger, and you seek him for peace.

When your friend speaks his mind you fear not the "nay" in your own mind, nor do you withhold the "ay."

And when he is silent your heart ceases not to listen to his heart;

For without words, in friendship, all thoughts, all desires, all expectations are born and shared, with joy that is unacclaimed.

When you part from your friend, you grieve not;

For that which you love most in him may be clearer in his absence, as the mountain to the climber is clearer from the plain.

And let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.

For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.

And let your best be for your friend.

If he must know the ebb of your tide, let him know its flood also.

For what is your friend that you should seek him with hours to kill?

Seek him always with hours to live.

For it is his to fill your need, but not your emptiness.

And in the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures.

For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.

Khalil Gibran

 

[Dhara]

Lee Mokobe: A powerful poem about what it feels like to be transgender | TED Talk | TED.com

 

[Dhara]

Salt Sheet

By Liam O'Brien

There’s a wound in me, wound up in me, expert
like a corkscrew unscrewed. And the cork is kept.
Press a palm over it—help, there’s a wound in me—
no, three. No, more. No, here is a ship at sea
and she sinks. She was the enemy. So the borer—
the boy with his brace & auger—he swims over
to the Golden Vanity. Entreaty. Captains,
can’t trust them far from land. And so he ends—
the boy—I’m drifting with the tide. They stitch
him in his hammock—it was so fair and wide.
How many holes got the enemy? How many
left to plug, crew bailing, boys tiring in the tide?
Fight’s over, brace & auger. Wrap me in my salt sheet.
What deserves disease will get it, or has already.




Liam O’Brien grew up on a small island outside Seattle. In 2012, he graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, where he received the Stanley and Evelyn Lipkin Prize for Poetry and the Nancy Lynn Schwartz Prize for Fiction. His work can be found in print in “Unsaid Magazine,” and online at “The Offending Adam,” “Blackbird VCU,” “Buffalo Almanack,” and “Industrial Lunch.” He is currently pursuing his MFA at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.

 

[Dhara]

I. Machismo, the Trans Prince

When I enter the room,
everything feminine faints in my presence.
I am a contagious plague of sexy.
Every face snaps towards me like a school
of starving fish praying to be reeled in.

I roll with a gang ready to shin-kick
the first person who dares not call me Mister.
I am a gender-bending James Dean—
my hair an impenetrable coat of cool.
Every other butch thing wishes they were me.
I'm so butch they call it courage.

I strut manly and sensitive—
a football team that hugs it out
and sings acoustic versions of 90s alt-rock love songs.

I am the coolest oppressed kid in the room—
my oppression out-oppresses all the normal gay boys.
My gay boy friends are bathroom bouncers,
guarding the men's room door while I pee.

Every cup of punch I drink is spiked with
"Tonight is MY night, motherfucker!"
The DJ plays all my requests. I ask any girl to dance.
The room is bowing to me—
they're calling me their King.




II. Amanda, the Easy Target

She has not been asked to dance all night.
Nobody is complimenting her dress—
we all just stare, waiting for an outline
of stuffing. It's impossible to divorce
the shape of her body from her new name,
so we don't even try.

She's at her third school this year—
the teasing, the graffiti on her locker
is painted all over her.

Tonight she talks to the chaperones,
holds hands with her glass of punch.
In the next year she'll probably win
a death threat, a nudge
towards the edge of a building,
the knot in her noose.

In November, we will both celebrate
Transgender Day of Remembrance.
We'll pretend we've lost the same things.

 

[Treeshepherd]

In dreams
There is a castle
Atop a cloudy butte

White steeds
Dressed in tassles
Trot along a route

O'er streams
The carriage travels
'cross bridges of the mind

Thru trees
The pathways ravel
O'er dreaming's lifetime

'till gleams
That shining castle
High on sunlit butte.

-Treeshepherd 5/22/16

 

[Capstone]

Memorial Day

Go young and dumb to war, without a thought
of who or what you're really killing for
(the 'God and Country' faux esprit de corps
suffices well to shoot or to be shot)!
And when the time has come to redeploy,
a little older, wiser, more informed
about truths hidden from the uniformed,
don't dwell on why but how to best destroy!
And when at last you're free, if still alive,
expose the lies to spare our future sons
The Lesson that you learned among the guns:
that PROFIT is the reason battles thrive.​

 

[Capstone]

The Silouette of Love

Dark figures cast their shadows on
an otherworldy sky
where birds and hearts are free to soar
and passion's free to lie

in two dimensions that deny
the cold and bitter truth
that love is but a fool's delusion
fostered in our youth

by images of heart shaped trees
with leaves of pink and red
that fade to blackened silouettes
when love, at last, is dead.​

Author's Note: Obviously, the picture prompt was most likely not intended to evoke anything so dark, but I wanted to give the image's creator a little something different to think about. *lol*

 

[Capstone]

The Elephant in the Room

((drumpf)) ((drumpf)) ((drumpf)) ((drumpf))
What's that awful sound?!
((drumpf)) ((drumpf)) ((drumpf)) ((drumpf))
Strap the China down!

(((DRUMPF))) (((DRUMPF))) (((DRUMPF))) (((DRUMPF)))
Box the keepsakes! Wrap the glass!
((((DRUMPF)))) ((((DRUMPF)))) ((((DRUMPF)))) ((((DRUMPF)))))
Hold on tightly to your ass!

(((DRUMPF))) (((DRUMPF))) (((DRUMPF))) (((DRUMPF)))
Footsteps drawing near!
(((DRUMPF))) (((DRUMPF))) (((DRUMPF))) (((DRUMPF)))
I guess it's not our year!



Author's Note: Inspired by a scene from the original Jurassic Park movie.​

 

[Capstone]

^Oh, c'mon guys, that was sheer unadulterated genius, if I do say so myself!

 

[Lilah]

Five Minutes

It was a circumspect dance with
careful distance between your
body and mine until you slid
your hand to my waist, bringing
me flush against you.
Then it became something else
entirely -- a rare moment of
self-indulgence.

The span of five minutes is
pretty insignificant in
the scheme of things.
People lose hundreds of minutes
every day, squandering them
on trivial things.
But sometimes in those fragments of
time, something can happen you will
remember the rest of your life.

Being held by that handsome stranger,
suffused in his nearness was an
act of intimacy far greater than sex.
Even now, I can feel that moment of
absolute connection and the blood
still rises to my face.

 

[Capstone]

A Candy Bar, Bubbles, and the Cosmos​

The brightly colored plastic ring-tipped wand
pulled from the soapy liquid had been raised
to puckered lips that gently blew the glazed
translucent spheres into the great beyond.

The cluster formed a bubble galaxy
that flew away and burst into the skies
beyond the scope of its creator's eyes,
to pop, collide, congeal, and cease to be.

The child wonders how the bubbles fared,
without an inkling of their swift decline,
and hopes and prays that each is doing fine,
that none are lonely, hurting much, or scared;

then shrugs and drops the wand and child's play,
to gobble up a fun size Milky Way.​

 

[Borillar]

Roses are red, violets are blue
your candidate sucks and mine does too.

 

[theliq]

A Candy Bar, Bubbles, and the Cosmos

The brightly colored plastic ring-tipped wand
pulled from the soapy liquid had been raised
to puckered lips that gently blew the glazed
translucent spheres into the great beyond.

The cluster formed a bubble galaxy
that flew away and burst into the skies
beyond the scope of its creator's eyes,
to pop, collide, congeal, and cease to be.

The child wonders how the bubbles fared,
without an inkling of their swift decline,
and hopes and prays that each is doing fine,
that none are lonely, hurting much, or scared;

then shrugs and drops the wand and child's play,
to gobble up a fun size Milky Way.​

Men can get breast cancer too