An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets. An Anthology of Florida Poets
Chameleon Chimera page 2
An Anthology of Florida Poets
An Anthology of Florida Poets
GREGG SHAPIRO. BRENDAN WALSH. DENISE DUHAMEL. DUSTIN BROOKSHIRE. JESSICA Q STARK. TYLER GILLESPIE. MAUREEN MCDOLE. MAUREEN SEATON. JULIE MARIE WADE. ELISA ALBO. NICOLE TALLMAN. RICHARD BLANCO.
STEVE KRONEN. JAMES KIMBRELL. PETER SCHMIDT. BRAD JOHNSON. HOLLY IGLESIAS. GEOFFREY PHILP. BARBRA NIGHTINGALE. MICHAEL HETTICH. JESSE MILLNER. SARA RIES DZIEKONSKI. LETESIA CRUZ.
STEVE KRONEN. JAMES KIMBRELL. PETER SCHMIDT. BRAD JOHNSON. HOLLY IGLESIAS. GEOFFREY PHILP. BARBRA NIGHTINGALE. MICHAEL HETTICH. JESSE MILLNER. SARA RIES DZIEKONSKI. LETESIA CRUZ.
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Gregg Shapiro Fort Lauderdale (LD)
Polly Amorous Can you hear the parrots of Manor Grove over the traffic on Andrews Avenue? They are arguing or laughing. They are gossiping or singing, rehearsing choral numbers and solos for a concert. Clannish and bossy. Possessive and demanding. Issuing directives about predatory hawks. They fear no squirrel, raccoon or iguana. Can you find them on the branches blending in with leaves the color of their feathers? You rarely see them on the ground, waddling through the duck-trodden grass. Avoiding the yellow bamboo stalks where they stand out like Pentecostals at a porn shoot. Flying in cacophonous formation, waiting for someone to notice, perhaps write a poem about them. Originally published in Panoplyzine Brendan Walsh Hollywood (Gregg Shapiro) cedar key roseate spoonbills hotpink in the live oak across the saltpond fly out with the tides so pronounced such flamboyant high-low swings the fish jump constantly towards sun the noseeums eat-us-up tonight as we dismantle clams our fingers oiled and garlicked everything must feed the dolphins in the bay who barely touch our kayak with their cartoonish snouts hunt fish differently than other dolphins they’ve constructed distinct divisions of labor to secure meals for every mouth this is their culture this is who they are we forget that culture is a human word for universal animal behavior like how the spoonbills on cedar key prefer some small marsh minnows unavailable further west or south or how i’ve cooked this steak for us and you knew the farmer maybe even knew the cow we name every bite of food we name birds and forget kinds of fish except the few we like to eat imagine shellmound just east of here without thousands of years of discarded shells left by the killed-off indigenous people their civilization defined by clam and oyster and we know nothing of what they called themselves or who they loved and now white people come to study their trash and theorize about extinction what will we leave behind in this place not bottles or plastic bags not these scraps which are trucked off-island to a regional landfill how quiet it will be once we’re gone oh thank god this noiseless world these miles of tidal swamp fishjump and birdhonk an unnamed song the gulf growing rich with emptiness Originally published in Sidereal Magazine Denise Duhamel Hollywood (Gregg Shapiro) How It Will End We’re walking on the boardwalk but stop when we see a lifeguard and his girlfriend fighting. We can’t hear what they’re saying, but it is as good as a movie. We sit on a bench to find out how it will end. I can tell by her body language he’s done something really bad. She stands at the bottom of the ramp that leads to his hut. He tries to walk halfway down to meet her, but she keeps signaling don’t come closer. My husband says, “Boy, he’s sure in for it,” and I say, “He deserves whatever’s coming to him.” My husband thinks the lifeguard’s cheated, but I think she’s sick of him only working part time or maybe he forgot to put the rent in the mail. The lifeguard tries to reach out and she holds her hand like Diana Ross when she performed “Stop in the Name of Love.” The red flag that slaps against his station means strong currents. “She has to just get it out of her system,” my husband laughs, but I’m not laughing. I start to coach the girl to leave the no-good lifeguard, but my husband predicts she’ll never leave. I’m angry at him for seeing glee in their situation and say, “That’s your problem--you think every fight is funny. You never take her seriously” and he says, “You never even give the guy a chance and you’re always nagging, so how can he tell the real issues from the nitpicking?” and I say, “She doesn’t nitpick!” and he says, “Oh really? Maybe he should start recording her tirades,” and I say “Maybe he should help out more,” and he says “Maybe she should be more supportive,” and I say “Do you mean supportive or do you mean support him?” and my husband says that he’s doing the best he can, that’s he’s a lifeguard for Christ’s sake, and I say that her job is much harder, that she’s a waitress who works nights carrying heavy trays and is hit on all the time by creepy tourists and he just sits there most days napping and listening to “Power 96” and then ooh he gets to be the big hero blowing his whistle and running into the water to save beach bunnies who flatter him and my husband says it’s not as though she’s Miss Innocence and what about the way she flirts, giving free refills when her boss isn’t looking or cutting extra large pieces of pie to get bigger tips, oh no she wouldn’t do that because she’s a saint and he’s the devil, and I say, “I don’t know what you can’t just admit he’s a jerk,” and my husband says, “I don’t know why you can’t admit she’s a killjoy,” and then out of the blue the couple is making up. The red flag flutters, then hangs limp. She has her arms around his neck and is crying into his shoulder. He whisks her up into his hut. We look around, but no one is watching us. from Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013) Maureen Seaton Miami (Denise Duhamel) Sweet World I never had a nemesis before. I kinda like it. ~Felicity Smoak, The Flash Wonder what I’d be today if I was still married to my Wall Street husband besides married to a Wall Street husband and puking gin in a silk sheath at Delmonico’s. I might be a blond size 4. I might be a secret Democrat or a weekend lesbian. This morning five planes flew over the yard in a V as I was about to dig into a pile of lavender pancakes al fresco. The V flew low and slow. It flew loud and ominous. It alarmed me, sounding a lot like the war movies of my fifties’ childhood. My cranky Chihuahua was proverbially biting at flies and I was sitting there not thinking about hate. Recently, I experienced life with cancer. An intoxicating time, richly infused with the liquor of death, but good too because no one expected much of me and I was left to my own mind, which is what I’m missing most these days. Unless that’s it over there, screeching on two wheels around the racetrack. Today I typed gnos instead of song and I wondered if it was some new app designed to mess with me. I’ve never thought to call the world sweet before. A nemesis can do that for you, make things taste different. Suddenly you’re a hero/ine. All this devastation—and you’re still standing in the middle of it. Dustin Brookshire Wilton Manors (Gregg Shapiro) Revisionist Villanelle Columbus couldn’t navigate for shit, but that isn’t how his story is told. There is too much history we don’t admit. If you praise Columbus— quit. He chopped off hands for lack of gold. The man couldn’t navigate for shit. In 1500, Ferdinand found Columbus unfit. Spaniards were tired of being controlled. There is too much history we don’t admit. Columbus was stripped of his governorship, but still funded to find more gold, even though he couldn’t navigate for shit. A tyrant, murderer, enslaver. A culprit textbooks let get away. So many sins untold. There is too much history we don’t admit: Columbus was a sex trafficker. We omit, and no one knows how many girls he sold. Christopher Columbus is a piece of shit. There is too much history we don’t admit. Originally published in Oddball Magazine. Jessica Q. Stark Jacksonville (Dustin Brookshire) In Want of a Quiet Place for Cora The news is featureless today, which feels oceanic—a calm, threatening place marker between catastrophes. Tomorrow, there will be more tongues on the vacated state of some anonymous womb, some new language for rubbernecking desire, some paralyzing provision on more men holding guns holding hostages holding guns in this haughty age of deep-sea, sedating rage. Most powerful women scandal-sucking marrow and then find a new name, so let me state her plain: Cora Ethel Eaton Howarth, Cora Murphy, Cora Stewart with a shake-less chaperone, Cora Cora Cora Crane making coffee, Cora Taylor, Hotel of Dreams. And my favorite: Imogene Carter—savvy-saw war correspondent vying for a novel mind and another nation on behalf of women, though she admits out there she only found more men plucking flowers for dead stones. Every neighbor she met was a thesaurus for bad woman on the basis of too much or too little love. Every storm scale is a matter of perspective. At the turn of the century, a red light provided both theater and information: copaiba oil for stomach cancer. Mercury, arsenic, and vinegar for a different face. Once, I was determined to re-read the review that underscores my ambition, and with that, I was enlisted. Danced it near-naked for student loan forgiveness--forgive me. Or the time I was tipped a phone number at Duke’s Bar in Midtown and smiled at the candid tedium of my feminine situation. Look, this poem has a seam, too, and I’m in it for the gamble. I’m in it for the information, for the pursuit and rise of whole buildings of women moving breathlessly next door. But mostly, I’m in want of some quiet place, Cora Cora, aren’t you? Some footpath out of this invisible battlefield. It takes so much thinking to make a life, to make a decent dress. It takes so much of me to resist horizontal living. A contemporary review of Cora’s failed writing stresses that her stories graze a purpose, but they never come to full fruition—all rumination, no point, not enough blast. Cora’s grave features the wrong birthdate. Her death date, too. There’s no fabric to a pointing limb, but the reviewer did include an accurate description of the cause of death. She died on the beach after trying to move a car that was trapped—stone stuck-- way down deep in the sand. Tyler Gillespie St. Petersburg (Dustin Brookshire) britney spears argues a specific worldview. posits Britney Spears argues a specific worldview. Posits only two types of people exist: the ones that entertain & the ones that observe. Other theorists may disagree. (Judith Butler et al recognize the performed nature of gender – so who isn’t performing? – & we trace poetry’s roots to song, to orality etc. etc. etc.). Britney’s binary might seem reductive, but her framework proves useful for us to consider the active/passive nature of existence: the (in)action of choice. Consequence of being. She asserts it’s better to dance (entertain) than to stand (observe). I’m usually against such absolutism in judgment but if pressed yesterday I would have agreed. Today, though, I’m not so sure. Originally published in mutiny! as well as my book the nature machine! Maureen McDole St. Petersburg (Tyler Gillespie) My Grandmother’s Curtains Pink sheer curtains swelled in the girls’ room when my mother was growing up. She shared the pink shades with her sisters. When I spent nights in that room, those curtains’ shadows scared me away from sleep. A framed felt picture loomed over the hallway that led to the bathroom: a group of dogs playing poker. I swear they stared at me until I shut the door. The walk-in closet was a meeting place for ghosts. It wasn’t safe to sleep with two eyes closed. As an adult, I claimed the pink curtains when my grandmother passed and the house sold. I hung them in my bedroom and learned to love the color they bred with the light. My once lover named it Womb Room, a place I reclaimed. Sara Ries Dziekonski St. Petersburg (Maureen McDole) Rewind The days are not equal mixing bowls of time. A moment can be a slow stir through the country, or a dash to another country, map melted in mouth, new set of keys jingling in your pocket. A glance can be a year, or a walk down the stairs, like how my closer to three than four year old came down post nap so casually, said Hi Mommy. He used to call my name when he woke, and I’d rub his back until he was ready to be lifted from the crib to rejoin the world. We’d rock back and forth, then peek through the blinds at the house being built next door. I’d hum him a song I used to listen to when I was small, incessantly pressing rewind on my CD player to jot down every lyric of my favorite songs on silver moons. But today is a stone skipped into many tomorrows, and my son got older in one sleep. He came down so casually, said Hi Mommy as though about to grab cereal and pour himself a bowl, / came down so casually as though swinging a backpack over his sturdy shoulder to catch the bus / came down so casually as though about to fix his coffee and locate his briefcase, / came down so casually as though I am on the sofa of his house, and he’s about to ask me if I’ve remembered to take my medicine / — My son came down so casually, and there’s not one unscratched / way to rewind. Julie Marie Wade Dania Beach (Denise Duhamel) Out Here For Julie A. the air is clear the water has gone down under the bridge the same bridge that once was burning and you’ve heard the way they say the daffodils are out now and other kinds of flowers by which they mean their green stems have given rise to blossoms and you are blooming too the fist of your heart clenched so tight for so long inside you now slowly unfurling the air is clear though you may be breathing heavy your voice a slim missile of light against the vast dark landscape you wonder who can even hear you out here if anyone is even listening the stars peer back merely curious tracing your whereabouts as you once traced theirs the moon has been accused of phases too but marvels how they still say constant as the moon an orbit is not a weakness a body heavenly or otherwise is not a metaphor just think of the first time you ever wandered into the woods someone told you to hide so you ran toward the nearest thicket crouching down counting silently to yourself in the underbrush fearing at first the rustle of feet but later fearing the absence of the rustle had they forgotten you after all out of sight out of mind? the air was thick with smoke someone had been burning leaves it was late autumn and you followed the spice of the wind toward a clearing you had never felt so small as when you stood in the center of the open field but your lungs swelled you shouted and heard the out in it even then the way your throat became a bright flower a tulip huge and red opening in the unobstructed light of the wrong season olly olly oxen free! it was a forecast but you didn’t know that then a rallying cry you wanted them to find you so much the daylight broad the future faraway as the riverhead or the ending of a fairy tale and when at last they came they were waving with theirmittens on fingers fused into a single woolen spade you followed when they said there was a fire a wild fire they said and even then you wondered if there was any other kind tonight the air is clear the spring indisputable as dew the crisp cool newness of it which is sometimes called splendor and sometimes called terror you raise your hand like a flare you close your eyes and stutter come out come out wherever you are! you are waiting under the new moon beneath the loom of these impossible trees but we are coming I promise we are rustling our way toward you murmuring welcome! some of us rain-swept some of us wind-shook though some of us are closer than you can imagine some of us are glowing like fireflies our small light unmistakable some of us are already here Originally published in New Letters Elisa Albo Fort Lauderdale (Julie Marie Wade) Volver a Cuba February 2017 They say you can’t go home again, but if you try, you’ll need a taxi driver like Rafael Martín Martín lounging beside Casa de las Americas in Havana’s El Vedado and smoking a slow cigarette when he caught me pacing the sidewalk—determined not to use a legal but rude taxi driver from the stand at the Hotel Presidente next to my casa particulár-- and offered to drive me to my first home in Miramár. They say you can’t go home, but if you try, you’ll need Rafael willing to drive in circles for an hour, up and down the other Calle Ocho, entre Septima y Quinta Avenidas, and finally to park in front of the garish green three-story building, walk you to the front door, verify the address, cross the busy street for a better picture, cross back, stare up from the sidewalk and help you imagine the wide balconies not caged in by ugly black metal railings rising to the ceiling. Is that where your nanny stood with your year-old self in her arms, wailing to your eighteen- year-old mami below that the authorities had sealed the house shut, barred her from entering her own home after my father had fled the country to avoid imprisonment? Was this where she stood, on this sidewalk, looking up at one child, another sleeping inside, her husband at that moment in the sky, their plans for us to follow uncertain? They say you can’t go. You won’t even knock on the door. No one will come to the window. Mami will glare at pictures you took with Rafael. She’ll study them fifty-five years after she locked for the last time the door to her first married apartment and say, No, that’s not it. I don’t recognize it. You can’t go home. You can return to the land of your birth when your mother who carried you out is not keen—to say the least-- on you returning, stepping onto the island you have never known, the place that scattered her family forever and buried them on three continents. And you’ll return to the look on her face, the do-what- ever you-want-I-don’t-like-it-and-won’t-say-another- word-about-it face. That one. And, not for the first time, or the last, she will have been right: Cuba es bella, llena, basilla, pero no se puede volver. *Translation: Cuba is beautiful. full, empty, but one can’t go back, ** Thomas Wolfe took the title You Can’t Go Home Again with permission from a conversation with writer Ella Winter who asked him, “Don’t you know you can’t go home again?” |
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Holly Iglesias (Maureen Seaton)
KANNAPOLIS, 1941, REEL 2 —after Movies of Local People by H. Lee Waters So beautiful the men in hats, the straw boaters, and fedoras, and caps. So beautiful the ladies in ladies’ dresses, summer cottons, dotted Swiss, gingham checks, rowdy plaids. So beautiful the string bag of onions and the basket of canned goods and the boxes tied with twine. So beautiful the children holding hands, bashful in front of the camera, two of them toothless. So beautiful the youth leaving the mill, overalls flecked with thread, sleeves rolled up to show off his muscles, machine oil on his chin. So beautiful the girl, whippet-thin and haughty, rushing to move past the camera until someone shouts her name and she breaks into a smile. So beautiful the men smoking on the curb outside the courthouse, the lawyer strolling behind them in a seersucker suit and two-tone shoes. So beautiful the mule pulling a wagon heaped with cartons of peaches and berries, so beautiful the driver of the wagon and the mule. So beautiful the grocer in a pristine apron, unrolling the awnings to protect the lettuce from the noonday sun. So beautiful the grandma in her housedress and lace-up shoes, a boy on one hand, a girl on the other, each licking a lollipop. So beautiful the bodies passing by, so beautiful the haircuts and cloth jackets, so beautiful the dungarees spiffed up with a Sunday shirt. So beautiful the plate of navy beans with ham and red-eye gravy and two yeast rolls to sop up the gravy. So beautiful the girls who scowl, the girls who grin, so beautiful the boy who looks away. So beautiful the mothers outside the shoe store, gazing at the new pumps and oxfords behind the glass. So beautiful the running board where the men rest, chewing the fat, bone-tired and laughing. So beautiful the tongues licking ice cream cones, so beautiful the bare arms and sun-suits, so beautiful the hats set at flirtatious angles. So beautiful the man behind the lens, the man who loves their flowing by, so beautiful the river of their days. |
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Steve Kronen Miami (Elisa Albo)
Schrödinger's Cab They did not dare take a taxi to the station for fear their departure might be reported to the authorities. – Schrödinger: Life and Thought -- Walter J. Moore You won’t be sure of its arrival until it rolls up to your curb. Wave, the cabbie’ll say, farewell. All you own’s inside your satchel. The cabbie says you’ll beat the curfew -- you won’t be sure if he’s a rival, or if these roads lead to the terminal where, huddled in their roundhouse, cars points to or from the far walls of your city. You’ll pat your pockets for the schedule. The cab backfires and hugs its curve and you won’t be sure if it’s a rifle or why the heart, beating out the spatial, is agitated at its core, something at the center feral: these posted signs, the engine’s purr, your travel- ing light along this course. You won’t be sure just how your eye falls where you’re bound, or why that feels, in passing, like free will. Originally published in The New Statesman James Kimbrell Tallahassee (Steve Kronen) Green Ouija If my parents left anything unsaid, they kept it to themselves before stepping into that breeze that blows backwards, into that boat that rows beyond passage. If I could hear, if I could reach their nearest syllable, then I would know I have assumed the body of the Mississippi sandhill crane I’ve always wanted to be. If my sisters could fly beside me, we’d count the teardrop sandbars down the Chickasawhay, tipping our gray feathers. This is just to say, if the dead could send a message, it might be written in the cursive of bees hovering above my uncut grass. If I could read their flight, I wouldn’t need to be satisfied with missing my father. These are the conditions of the cosmos and gravity, from which I cannot budge. Meanwhile, airplanes look like boats motoring overhead, the sky is that deep. Originally published in Grass Routes, 2021 and in my latest manuscript, The Law of Truly Large Numbers. Peter Schmitt Miami (Steve Kronen) Friends with Numbers If you make friends with numbers, you don't need any other friends. --Shakuntala Devi, math genius They are not hard to get to know: 6 and 9 keep changing their minds, 8 cuts the most graceful figure but sleeps for an eternity, and 7, lucky 7, takes an arrow to his heart always. 5, halfway to somewhere, only wants to patch his unicycle tire, and 4, who'd like to stand for something solid, has never had two feet on the ground, yet flutters gamely in the breeze like a flag. 3, for all his literary accomplishments and pretensions to immortality, is still (I can tell you) not half the man 8 is asleep or awake. 1, little 1. I know him better than all the others, these numbers who are all my friends. Only 2, that strange smallest prime, can I count as just a passing acquaintance. Divisible by only 1 and herself, she seems on the verge, yet, of always coming apart. And though she eludes me, swanlike, though I'd love to know her better, still I am fine, there are others, many, I have friends in numbers. Originally published in Hazard Duty (Copper Beech Press, 1995) Brad Johnson Delray Beach (Peter Schmidt) Married Saturday Mornings I don’t want to let you out of bed this Saturday morning. While a storm lifts the curtains of the open windows and whiffs of rain sweep through the sliding glass door, I don’t want to roll over, don’t want you to sit up, don’t want the telephone to ring or you to dial because then I will have lost you to your friend in Happy Valley who’s getting married to a Methodist archeologist from Missouri, or to your other friend who’s getting married outside of New Haven one week from yesterday and the dresses don’t fit. The best man’s threatening to not show. The last wedding we attended, in Michigan two weeks ago, was my Irish-Scottish friend’s and I wore a kilt and long wool stockings and no underwear and a little satchel around my waist where I kept a flask filled with whiskey. We’ve been married one month and I don’t want to let you out of bed this Saturday morning. I’ve heard if you put a marble in a jar for every time you have sex during the first year of marriage and remove one marble for each time you have sex anytime after, you’ll never empty the jar. I want to fill that jar and empty that jar, construct new jars, shape marble sculptures, fashion monuments, employ museum curators, assemble gardens. Originally published in New Zoo Poetry Review in 2006. Geoffrey Philp Miami (Holly Iglesias) Archipelagos After Derek Walcott At the end of this sentence, a flood will rise and swallow low-lying islands of the Caribbean, like when Hurricane Maria whipped the Atlantic into a ring of thunderstorms that advanced the way Auerbach described her vision of terror, “wooden huts torn away from their foundations were carried away, women and children were tied to the ceiling beams, but no one could see a tangle of arms waving from the roof, like branches blowing in the wind, waving desperately toward heaven toward the river banks for help.” And a man, chest-deep in the surge that snatched his family from his arms in waves, swelling before him, like how Columbus and his crew imagined Leviathan, “whose mere sight is overpowering,” and “looked down on all that is haughty.” But wasn’t it pride, greed, those sins we’ve forgotten, for they remind us of what we could have become instead of what we’ve settled for and extended our reach, like the virus with its crown of spikes, around the waist of the world to the polar ice caps, melting into the ocean that’s rising one inch every three years in Miami where leatherbacks lumber out of the water to lay their eggs, as carefully as I swaddle my grandniece in a blanket, which my daughter remembers in the same breath with the bumper sticker on the first car I owned, “Save the Whales,” the protests where we marched before she could walk, the war she inherited along with my grandmother’s hair—that simple country girl from St. James, home to Sam Sharpe and the Maroons who fought redcoats, their bayonets stained with the blood of Africans, kidnapped from huts under the growl of the harmattan’s sweep over the Sahara to the rim of the Cape Verde Islands, garlanded by trade winds that complete the circle and begin a new alphabet of catastrophe: hurricanes that stagger like a betrayed lover barreling through the islands until its rage is spent on the sands of our beaches littered with masks and plastic bottles. Originally published in Archipelagos published by Peepal Tree Press (2023). Barbra Nightingale Hollywood (Geoffrey Philp) The 18th Chili Dog after Ashbery It was summer or the end of summer Indian Summer has gone out of fashion. Cancel culture and all that. The skies at night are red and white streaked with blue, or checkerboard like those papers in the basket at Boardwalk eateries. There was a can waiting to be filled, a blank page waiting to be inked. It all happens so suddenly it’s hard to take it all in. That’s when the bell rings ending it all. Or is it just the beginning? Look to the east. Michael Hettich (Barbra Nightingale) The Problem of Analysis This city is so large, no one could possibly walk every street in one lifetime, even walking every day. In fact, this city has grown so massive it might not even be a city, properly speaking, but more like the nerves and atoms in an ordinary brain of someone who happens to be sleeping, let’s say-- and if we could sneak inside her as she dreams, stilling our breath not to wake her, we might look more closely up and down the meandering alleys, peer along the hallways and alcoves of the buildings inside her, of the lives there—as now, through a half-opened window on the second floor a young man sits reading. When his phone rings, he answers, distracted, looking down at the street, where a beautiful woman is walking a dachshund who poops in the middle of the sidewalk while she pretends to examine her manicure, which infuriates the young man, who tosses his phone and leaps through the door to the street, to give her a piece of his mind—which makes this a good time to move in deeper, into another neighborhood, where an old man who looks like a dog in a bathrobe is pouring milk into a fish tank crowded with pollywogs, or to a public swimming pool where children are engaged in a race to see how fast they can drink all its water. At the bottom something is moving. And one boy, a show off, keeps jumping from the diving board, trying to swim to the bottom and touch that shape—whatever it is—before it lies still. On another street, trains full of feathers fly past waiting rooms; someone gathers spider webs to make a violin while caves are being dug in the ground behind the bleachers by girls who were cheerleaders before they grew moss; and still we move deeper, stealthily, growing harder to see as it grows harder to see ourselves anywhere, until we can’t help becoming more like the trees and birds that sang here a thousand years ago than we are like ourselves, dear city of the inner life, until we are less than a smidgen of sap that might once have quickened a now- extinct species of flower that smelled like the sky, deep in the layers and folds of our memories, where we’re nothing like ourselves, where bees still gather pollen with a buzzing that fills the afternoon wherever that afternoon is, and pollinate other long-extinct flowers to make honey as sweet as this brief time we’ve been given to breathe. Jesse Millner Estero (Michael Hettich) Affirmation for Joseph Kromelis, the Walking Man For decades, Joseph Kromelis walked alone along the city’s busy downtown streets, mile after mile, regardless of the season. Tall and lean, with a bushy mustache and flamboyant hair, the urbane, sharply dressed stranger fascinated his fellow pedestrians and Loop workers. He was rarely seen talking to other people in the crowd, adding to his mystery. Chicago Tribune, June 11th, 2023. The homeless man I saw often in downtown Chicago all through the 1980s, wanders down Wacker Drive this Saturday in August. Now it’s the 21st century, and yes, he still has drooping mustache, a chiseled face, but the long hair has grayed, and his waist has shrunk to bone. He wears old clothes and he’s always walking. Yes, that’s how I remember him and how I see him now, as my wife and I walk south on Wabash, where the Trump Tower has long replaced the old Sun-Times black, aircraft carrier on the Chicago River. I whisper to my wife, try to explain the shock of seeing this ancient figure, almost like a Chinese poet resurrected from the mist, how strange this old memory pasted over the new city, bones emerging from the tired flesh. Yes, we are both older, the wandering man and I. Yes, I used to drive a bus in the city, and he crossed against the traffic lights, ignoring those flashing signals of “yes” and “no.” And sometimes his jaywalking pissed me off as he held up my right turn on to Michigan Avenue, but now that anger seems less than petty, and now I’m seeing the true shape of this city, this world, this life with all its roaring emptiness. For hundreds of years, old poets wandered the cold of withered landscapes that shivered in the shade of western mountains. For hundreds of years they crapped in the fields and tried to capture the still beauty of that one cloud above, shaped like the horse they knew in childhood. Yes, that horse, the one who so mightily trembled when given the apple. Yes, it’s always good to bring horses into poems, whether they come from the sky or from memory, or from some tattered weaving of sky and yesterday. Yes, I see my grandfather’s horse, a brown figure in a sea of green tobacco leaves, Billy Buck sweats in the hot Virginia sun, pulls a sled filled with the dusky harvest. Each bead of perspiration is a “yes.” The white diamond on his forehead affirms every motion of his brown body. I can still hear the pounding hooves, fifty-years later, five decades into my continental drifting from South to West, to Chicago, and finally to this morning in Florida, and yes, it’s hot, and yes, the summer flowers glow orange, red, and yellow, and yes, the cloud factory is simmering deep in the Everglades, and yes, this summer afternoon will be filled with rain and lightning, and yes, I will gather every storm memory up into my arms, and yes, I will love those days that have circled, then fallen into the ring of night. And yes, I will be more humble as I look into the faces of trees and animals, into the wet beauty of this living world, waxy tangerine, gleaming slash pine, stout mango, even a blessed pineapple rising from its spiny green throne. Originally published in Millner's chapbook My Grandfather Singing (Yellowjacket Press, 2009). Nicole Tallman Miami (Elisa Albo) Poem for the Soft Boys Where I come from, there’s a season for guns, as if rifles should be celebrated like Christmas. There’s a smell. I’d like to call it November, but it’s a special blend of blood, rust, estrus, and a winter so cold it freezes the hair inside my nose. There’s a ritual. It’s men dressed in camouflage and hunter orange. It’s the law. And they stay out late on the 40 and chug 40s, perch up in trees or shelter in blinds, chew tobacco and build big fires. Where I come from, it’s also about the merchandise. The “Nice Rack” shirts and mounted deer heads on the wall. Not surprisingly, racks are one reason men prize the buck more than the doe. There’s a sound out my window where I come from. It’s earsplitting gunfire and the fight between my uncle and cousin who never speak again. There’s a name for the soft boys where I come from, the ones who don’t drive big trucks and don’t refer to women as broads you just load up and throw in the back. Where I come from, hunting is a blood sport. And it breeds blood-thirsty boys who think it’s ok to say: Do what I say or I’ll shoot you. There’s also a mascot: a dead deer, purple gray tongue out, gutted and hanging from the rafters of the garage. The same purple gray of the deer liver my dad left on the counter for my mom to cook. She said it reminded her of afterbirth and made her gag. (Note: This poem was written in response to the question “Where are you from?”—a question people still ask me in Miami, even though I’ve been living in South Florida for 18 years. The answer is Michigan. This poem was first published in trampset under the title “Rifle Season,” and was republished under the title “Poem for the Soft Boys” in my second book, Poems for the People. Richard Blanco Surfside (Nicole Tallman) Looking for The Gulf Motel Marco Island, Florida There should be nothing here I don’t remember . . . The Gulf Motel with mermaid lampposts and ship’s wheel in the lobby should still be rising out of the sand like a cake decoration. My brother and I should still be pretending we don’t know our parents, embarrassing us as they roll the luggage cart past the front desk loaded with our scruffy suitcases, two-dozen loaves of Cuban bread, brown bags bulging with enough mangos to last the entire week, our espresso pot, the pressure cooker—and a pork roast reeking garlic through the lobby. All because we can’t afford to eat out, not even on vacation, only two hours from our home in Miami, but far enough away to be thrilled by whiter sands on the west coast of Florida, where I should still be for the first time watching the sun set instead of rise over the ocean. There should be nothing here I don’t remember . . . My mother should still be in the kitchenette of The Gulf Motel, her daisy sandals from Kmart squeaking across the linoleum, still gorgeous in her teal swimsuit and amber earrings stirring a pot of arroz-con-pollo, adding sprinkles of onion powder and dollops of tomato sauce. My father should still be in a terrycloth jacket smoking, clinking a glass of amber whiskey in the sunset at the Gulf Motel, watching us dive into the pool, two boys he’ll never see grow into men who will be proud of him. There should be nothing here I don’t remember . . . My brother and I should still be playing Parcheesi, my father should still be alive, slow dancing with my mother on the sliding-glass balcony of The Gulf Motel. No music, only the waves keeping time, a song only their minds hear ten-thousand nights back to their life in Cuba. My mother’s face should still be resting against his bare chest like the moon resting on the sea, the stars should still be turning around them. There should be nothing here I don’t remember . . . My brother should still be thirteen, sneaking rum in the bathroom, sculpting naked women from sand. I should still be eight years old dazzled by seashells and how many seconds I hold my breath underwater—but I’m not. I am thirty-eight, driving up Collier Boulevard, looking for The Gulf Motel, for everything that should still be, but isn’t. I want to blame the condos, their shadows for ruining the beach and my past, I want to chase the snowbirds away with their tacky mansions and yachts, I want to turn the golf courses back into mangroves, I want to find The Gulf Motel exactly as it was and pretend for a moment, nothing lost is lost. Letisia Cruz St. Petersburg (Maureen McDole) Nothing of Beauty The summer I was 11 I learned from Yanina and Yvette-- girls much older than I—that the religion of women who wear lipstick is beauty. Beauty. I wore no lipstick then, had no religion. But I could disappear into any room. Blend into the wallpaper. At times I wondered-- do I even exist? One night under a summer diluvio, I stood outside our green apartment building watching the neighbors run from the bodega to the laundromat, to the corner bar. The sun sank lower casting orange shadows on the front steps, and I faded. Not a single soul lay witness. The religion I learned as a child was not beauty, but survival. I did not know it by name then. But I knew the sounds-- the timbre and cadence of gunshots. Hurricanes rushing for shore. Fists breaking over my mother’s face. Now the stars were all dim. A Friday night and I sat in the back seat of Wilma’s Buick parked a block from her boyfriend’s house with the windows rolled up, the engine turned off. Wilma and my mother eyed the front door like little hawks waiting for someone to swoop in with dinner. Wilma sank lower behind the wheel, eyes full of flames. I’d seen the same look in my mother’s. The man strolled out the front door and we followed. Love makes us hungry, my mother said. My stomach grumbled. Hunger, too, was religion. But one I already knew would fail me. How hunger, like beauty, leaves you vulnerable. Makes you forget where you are-- in a car. In a field. Under water. Locked up in the basement of your own house. Not survival. My religion was the worship of place. This—here and now. This. Open your eyes. By god girl, don’t you ever forget it. Religion is a barred window. The flame of a match. A sky void of stars. The smell of burnt rice. Fog. Religion is your mother’s long hair. Burning. Your father’s smile. The way he looked at her. Then darkness. Nothing but night. The place you came to as a child. Your abandoned reservoir. Your escape. Religion is setting your crosses on fire. Holding nothing of beauty. No hunger. How the night sky is wide open. Originally published in Migrations & Other Exiles, Lost Horse Press (2023) |