Last post loves Johnstown the most

[lexiconic]

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss — we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.


- Marie Howe

[lexiconic]

Even if I now saw you

Even if I now saw you
Only once,
I would long for you
Through worlds,
Worlds.

- Izumi Shikibu

[lexiconic]

What I Wouldn't Do

The only job I didn’t like, quit
after the first shift, was selling
subscriptions to TV Guide over the phone.
Before that it was fast food, all
the onion rings I could eat, handing
sacks of deep fried burritos through
the sliding window, the hungry hands
grabbing back. And at the laundromat,
plucking bright coins from a palm
or pressing them into one, kids
screaming from the bathroom and twenty
dryers on high. Cleaning houses was fine,
polishing the knick-knacks of the rich.
I liked holding the hand-blown glass bell
from Czechoslovakia up to the light,
the jewelled clapper swinging lazily
from side to side, its foreign,
A-minor ping. I drifted, an itinerant,
from job to job, the sanatorium
where I pureed peas and carrots
and stringy beets, scooped them,
like pudding, onto flesh-colored
plastic plates, or the gas station
where I dipped the ten-foot measuring stick
into the hole in the blacktop,
pulled it up hand over hand
into the twilight, dripping
its liquid gold, pink-tinged.
I liked the donut shop best, 3 AM,
alone in the kitchen, surrounded
by sugar and squat mounds of dough,
the flashing neon sign strung from wire
behind the window, gilding my white uniform
yellow, then blue, then drop-dead red.
It wasn’t that I hated calling them, hour
after hour, stuck in a booth with a list
of strangers’ names, dialing their numbers
with the eraser end of a pencil and them
saying hello. It was that moment
of expectation, before I answered back,
the sound of their held breath,
their disappointment when they realized
I wasn’t who they thought I was,
the familiar voice, or the voice they loved
and had been waiting all day to hear.

- Dorianne Laux

[lexiconic]

Good Girl

Look at you, sitting there being good.
After two years you’re still dying for a cigarette.
And not drinking on weekdays, who thought that one up?
Don’t you want to run to the corner right now
for a fifth of vodka and have it with cranberry juice
and a nice lemon slice, wouldn’t the backyard
that you’re so sick of staring out into
look better then, the tidy yard your landlord tends
day and night — the fence with its fresh coat of paint,
the ash-free barbeque, the patio swept clean of small twigs —
don’t you want to mess it all up, to roll around
like a dog in his flowerbeds? Aren’t you a dog anyway,
always groveling for love and begging to be petted?
You ought to get into the garbage and lick the insides
of the can, the greasy wrappers, the picked-over bones,
you ought to drive your snout into the coffee grounds.
Ah, coffee! Why not gulp some down with four cigarettes
and then blast naked into the streets, and leap on the first
beautiful man you find? The words Ruin me, haven’t they
been jailed in your throat for forty years, isn’t it time
you set them loose in slutty dresses and torn fishnets
to totter around in five-inch heels and slutty mascara?
Sure it’s time. You’ve rolled over long enough.
Forty, forty-one. At the end of all this
there’s one lousy biscuit, and it tastes like dirt.
So get going. Listen: they’re howling for you now:
up and down the block your neighbors’ dogs
burst into frenzied barking and won’t shut up.

- Kim Addonizio

[lexiconic]

The Professor's Lover


Dogs barking, wind blowing, how I never get
used to wind blowing, how I can never make
the wind mine, it just goes through me. Trees
spackled us with shadow and everything was still
okay. Strike that. Reverse it. The trees became
more specific. And suddenly, the wind clubbed
against me like a clapboard. You heard. People do
this. People collide like sex. You told me what
you heard. I repeated his name quietly. I repeated
her name loudly. And his wife suddenly had no name.
She became a gabled roof with a rusted antenna,
she watched them inside lathering each other,
holding the bar of soap up to the moonlight.

     *

I took a wrong turn. Here I am at another
poetry reading. The beams above don't look
like stars. They are rotting wood beams.
Professor X opens and closes his mouth.
There's a light that halos around his head and
a podium he clutches like a drink. But I am not
listening. I am thinking of what you just told me.
I am thinking of him again. And his wife. And
the child. There is always a child. I remember
one summer. We sat in the little blue café.
He said: I miss my wife. I imagined him biting
a wife's neck, kissing her with his eyes closed.
And I stared into those fierce eyes.

     *


The laundry room was just a laundry room.
Where clothes beat against each other.
But I missed the point, always missed the point,
always have to be told. A laundry room
is not just a laundry room. A man is not
just a man. A young female student is not
just a young female student. Who is up from
a night of dancing on wooden floors. Up from
too many dizzy drinks. So she pulls the old
married professor into the laundry room,
he doesn't pull away, and she cleans his mouth
with her lips and tongue, and their bodies beat
into each other, fold, collapse.

     *

Two eyes and a heart don't add up to human.
In my latest dream, the telephone had replaced
the heart and it rang and rang but I couldn't
pick it up. In class, I stared at her bare back and
knew that he had run his pink fingers across it.
Had cried in its winding tunnels. Her back, his tears,
the garden where his wife pulled up weeds each year,
the fireworks, the fish in the river. How can they
not be aligned? Walking back from the party,
I stopped in the middle of the dark dead road,
and watched two shadows come out. Then
disappear. Then two more. You tell me. People
do this. People pair up. That's fine for now.

     *

A hind limb, an eye, apparitions appear and
disappear, cicadas stick and unstick, shout
in unison on all sides of this narrow Tennessee
road. It is anguish not to see them, to know that
at once, they can lower themselves onto me and
do what they will, kick me with their boot-
like legs, stamp me out. Go ahead, come down
from the thicket of trees and wag your legs
at me. You will all die brittle. But what is that
through the trunks? A white cross as large
as a farmhouse. Even the cicadas stop their
factioning. What have I done? I begin to see the
morning's failure, the cicadas' failure, my failure.

     *

If I take off my eyes and give them to you,
will you take them? I want to tell you without
having to confess anything, without having
to tell you about the men that have passed
through my mind just this morning. Imagine
them. Imagine their hair pressed down with
my hands. Am I guilty if I stand behind
the window and look? If I only desire to bloody
my fist? If my mirror holds a thousand tides?
I try, I do. I try and try. But there are the dreams.
There are these mornings. This road. The cross.
The empty benches before the cross. The cicadas
that eventually must land.

- Victoria Chang

[lexiconic]

From an Atlas of the Difficult World

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

- Adrienne Rich

[lexiconic]

The Madness Vase

The nutritionist said I should eat root vegetables.
Said if I could get down thirteen turnips a day
I would be grounded, rooted.
Said my head would not keep flying away
to where the darkness lives.

The psychic told me my heart carries too much weight.
Said for twenty dollars she’d tell me what to do.
I handed her the twenty. She said, “Stop worrying, darling.
You will find a good man soon.”

The first psycho therapist told me to spend
three hours each day sitting in a dark closet
with my eyes closed and ears plugged.
I tried it once but couldn’t stop thinking
about how gay it was to be sitting in the closet.

The yogi told me to stretch everything but the truth.
Said to focus on the out breath. Said everyone finds happiness
when they care more about what they give
than what they get.

The pharmacist said, “Lexapro, Lamicatl, Lithium, Xanax.”

The doctor said an anti-psychotic might help me
forget what the trauma said.

The trauma said, “Don’t write these poems.
Nobody wants to hear you cry
about the grief inside your bones.”

But my bones said, “Tyler Clementi jumped
from the George Washington Bridge
into the Hudson River convinced
he was entirely alone.”

My bones said, “Write the poems.”

- Andrea Gibson

[lexiconic]

Saint Monica Wishes on the Wrong Star

Maybe they were both the wrong star.
Perhaps she had wished on a battered
sloop instead of a majestic ocean liner,
read the green tea leaves upside down,
or failed to reveal the correct details
outside the psychic's booth at the fair.

She was always waiting to cut herself,
like in that movie where the protagonist
cut herself. Monica wanted to go in
reverse, even in fourth grade, when she
jammed her legs into last year's yellow
fleece pajamas. The movie's protagonist

washed dishes at the local pub, impaling
pint glasses on the scrub brush panel
two at a time. Monica remembered the best
parts of all her past jobs, especially ones
she despised. The twenty-minute lunch
in the break room with an orange booth,

ashtray overflowing its stale Virginia
Slims. She was reading an Anne Tyler
novel, which almost made it romantic.
The protagonist of the film had probably
wished on the wrong star, which would
explain the two men on opposite sides

of the jukebox. Monica's grandmother
claimed she'd learned to walk backwards
before ever running forward. As a teen
Monica had scoured the previous year's
fashion magazines. Who could blame
her, though? They lived in Michigan,

where nothing ever changed. But when
would the pint glass shatter in her hand,
just like the woman on the screen, limp
ponytail snaking around her shoulders?
Would she have to wait for the flush
of blood, or would the transformation

be instantaneous? The black and white
world reversed, a bite of tea cake spit
out, onto the saucer. How long until
she went back fifteen years, days before
she staked all her money on the wrong
horse, grazing in the wrong pasture.

-  Mary Biddinger

[lexiconic]

Tonight at Noon

Tonight at noon
Supermarkets will advertise 3p extra on everything
Tonight at noon
Children from happy families will be sent to live in a home
Elephants will tell each other human jokes
America will declare peace on Russia
World War I generals will sell poppies on the street on November 11th
The first daffodils of autumn will appear
When the leaves fall upwards to the trees

Tonight at noon
Pigeons will hunt cats through city backyards
Hitler will tell us to fight on the beaches and on the landing fields
A tunnel full of water will be built under Liverpool
Pigs will be sighted flying in formation over Woolton
And Nelson will not only get his eye back but his arm as well
White Americans will demonstrate for equal rights
In front of the Black house
And the monster has just created Dr. Frankenstein

Girls in bikinis are moonbathing
Folk songs are being sung by real folk
Art galleries are closed to people over 21
Poets get their poems in the Top 20
There's jobs for everybody and nobody wants them
In back alleys everywhere teenage lovers are kissing in broad daylight
In forgotten graveyards everywhere the dead will quietly bury the living
and
You will tell me you love me
Tonight at noon

- Adrian Henri

[lexiconic]

Dust

Someone spoke to me last night
told me the truth. Just a few words, but I recognized it.
I knew I should make myself get up,
write it down, but it was late,
and I was exhausted from working
all day in the garden, moving rocks.
Now, I remember only the flavor --
not like food, sweet or sharp.

More like fine powder, like dust.
And I was elevated or frightened,
but simple rapt, aware.
That's how it is sometimes --
God comes to your window,
all bright and black wings,
and you're just too tired to open it.


- Dorianne Laux

[lexiconic]

April in Maine

The days are cold and brown,
Brown fields, no sign of green,
Brown twigs, not even swelling,
And dirty snow in the woods.

But as the dark flows in
The tree frogs begin
Their shrill sweet singing,
And we lie on our beds
Through the ecstatic night,
Wide awake, cracked open.

There will be no going back.


- May Sarton

[lexiconic]

On the Necessity of Sadness


Let me tell you about longing.
Let me presume that I have something
new to say about it, that this room,
naked, its walls pining for clocks,
has something new to say
about absence. Somewhere
the crunch of an apple, fading
sunflowers on a quilt, a window
looking out to a landscape
with a single tree. And you
sitting under it. Let go,
said you to me in a dream,
but by the time the wind
carried your voice to me,
I was already walking through
the yawning door, towards
the small, necessary sadnesses
of waking. I wish
I could hold you now,
but that is a line that has
no place in a poem, like the swollen
sheen of the moon tonight,
or the word absence, or you,
or longing. Let me tell you about
longing. In a distant country
two lovers are on a bench, and pigeons,
unafraid, are perching beside them.
She places a hand on his knee
and says, say to me
the truest thing you can.
I am closing my eyes now.
You are far away.

- Mikael de Lara Co

[lexiconic]

Lies I’ve Told My 3 Year Old Recently

Trees talk to each other at night.
All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.
Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.
Tiny bears live in drain pipes.
If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.
The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.
Everyone knows at least one secret language.
When nobody is looking, I can fly.
We are all held together by invisible threads.
Books get lonely too.
Sadness can be eaten.
I will always be there.

- Raul Gutierrez

[lexiconic]

Practicing


I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:
That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each others’ mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and
one was the boy, and we paired off – maybe six or eight girls – and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our
nightgowns or let the straps drop, and Now you be the boy.

Concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.
Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,
plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.

We sucked each others’ breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs
outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost
in someone’s hair … and we grew up and hardly mentioned who

the first kiss really was — a girl like us, still sticky with the moisturizer we’d
shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire
just before we made ourselves stop.


- Marie Howe

[lexiconic]

A glimpse at the great poet, Charles Simic.

Why I Still Write Poetry