Poetry

            and everything / Was toil, relentless toil, urged on by need.                         —Virgil   It took centuries to domesticate the wild goat, grow almonds and olives from seed, harvest barley with stone sickles. So crops, livestock, and flint tools could ripple across the Fertile Crescent. The ox was groaning and bent to the plow. Cows

The house cracked from the inside. It plaited and meandered in waves. The tree and the house grew into one. The bark entered the house, inmates of shrines of cicadas. A medieval tower with a clock blasted vertically, with no slant on its knees, and the clock swooped like an owl, grabbed all the hours

I. I have inherited these feet from the trust fund of fear a garage full of rusting knickknacks stored in a body shop of intent. Autoparts not in stock mean these limbs are bootlegged, jimmy rigged hands done put his tongue back together again until oil dribbled from the bottom. White ribs and bones slid

Holodomor, Ukraine, 1932-1933   What part of another’s flesh do you ask permission for your body to be freed from hunger the way blood frees itself from frozen earth, in spring, when rain comes to wash everything. Quietly a river refuses to disappear into ground, knowing it owes its mouth to no one— It runs

A felt hat or a cane, a pair of worn out shoes on a road thought left behind— or a hand-carved chess set passed down from my grandfather: the king’s crown a bent nail, the knight’s horse, a nub on a pedestal robbed of wings, its would-be nose blunt and chipped. The queen can still

It would have been nice, that day in Memphis, if the only one, Of all the people I hoped would break into a song By the early Elvis Presley on my way to the site Of the assassination of Martin Luther King At the Lorraine Motel, had turned out to be, Not the unreasonably cheerful

No teeth. Soft face. One hundred years old and straight-sitting all day. Riding mower up and over and around (her son). Tenants, always tenants. Young mother on porch on phone, flaking trailer smooth skin. Hollers, curves, and turns. Where my grandmother lived, what she left at 23. Who stays? Virgie stays. In the Coalton cemetery

MEG KEARNEY author of When You Never Said Goodbye  Interviewed by Lee Hope Solstice Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor   (From Lee Hope): I am delighted to be interviewing the eminent poet, young adult and children’s writer Meg Kearney.  We hear the term shape shifter, yet Meg is a genre shifter. We will explore how Meg

MARIUS SURLEACauthor of Zeppelin Jack  and MARC VINCENZauthor of Sybilline Translators of the Poetry of Ion Monoran(Read three of Monoran’s poems here) Interviewed by Dzvinia Orlowsky Solstice Editor of Poetry in Translation Introduction to Ion Monoran (1953 – 1993) Born in Petroman Village, Timis, Romania, Ion Monoran was a poet and publisher. His first poems were

Ironing taught me: we are covered in white— we are covered in white the white of Dad’s handkerchiefs, boxers. Dad’s handkerchiefs, boxers, our pillowcases and bed-sheets, ironing is what taught me. * Our pillowcases and bed-sheets (when did I know of the Klan?) What could I know of the Klan— were lynchings considered the norm?

Except anchovies and now (doctor’s orders) cheese, Except 13, except when it’s the only window seat left, Except a glass of white wine with dinner, Except the Cubs, except Ernie Banks saying “Let’s play two,” Except Elvis and Jesus, except Oprah and Madonna, Except snowflakes, each, and Starbucks, all, Except Las Vegas or Buffalo or

translated by Marc Vincenz     Miscellany   A lonely prediction followed on the heels of a great bene- diction.     Through the Valley of a Hundred Valleys   Birch trunks glow in a rambling green. Stretches of cable wobble. But first, at the rail station in Re holt, the even-footed conductor fetches his

from Like a Vagrant in a Red Sweater Translated from the Romanian by Marius Surleac and Marc Vincenz   The Socialist Republic of Romania   Remnant of a sprawling ancestry clambering northward, once further north. I won’t go there, I refuse to go—billions, even hundreds of billions of virtually imperceptible juvenile eras, make her the

Coming home one night, I felt the steering wheel go loose in my grip, the car slewing as if skating on air. My old dog, the one I never loved enough, running alongside to greet me, moved in so close her body slipped under the wheel. When she emerged, barely scathed, I formed a new

90% of the 419 skeletons and scattered— battered bone bits— interred in seven burial mounds— were wound in cloth shrouds, their heads—skulls—facing west, and laid out in correct coffins. The original Manhattanite Africans buried their beloved “with Dignity and Respect,” demonstrating behaviour “consistent with practices of enlightened Humanity.” The dead went into the earth with

Loja, Ecuador The dogs are loose as tongues, slinking along the edge of houses, down the sidewalks, into the park’s hedges where they piss their rumors, tail-high. The dogs wail at the tuneful song the propane trucks play, selling gas like ice cream along the streets. The dogs bark, sometimes, wagging, message mutt-mixed. They lie,

Armed with a cutlass, gift from my uncle, a displaced cane cutter in Belle Glade, before La Migra swooped down one Friday evening, like Shangó’s vengeance on adulterers and deported him to Jamaica before we could hire a lawyer, I opened the gate to my garden and began the yearly ritual at the end of

You think he’s half-baked, & I say no, fried, & both of us so boiled we don’t remember why we brought him up in the first place. Was it the savor of gin, bleared romance drifting in the bleached air & the tonic’s fizzing as it fetched the brim of the glass? A schemer, a

Are we all doing what we are supposed to be doing? I am standing here before you reading this poem off a sheet of 50-pound recycled paper that is printed with words I wrote several months ago on a night in September, 2009. It was a Saturday night, and I had worked on proofing some

Admit One: An American Scrapbook by Martha Collins, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016, 104 pp/, $15.95 Last spring’s release of Martha Collins’s Admit One: An American Scrapbook, is the third in a series that includes the volumes Blue Front and White Papers. The trilogy as a whole wrestles with race and racism in America from

Between the early 10th century and the 15th century, the Japanese emperors ordered the compilation of twenty-one anthologies of poetry, which each contained anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand poems. These translations are of poems from the Shinkokinwakashū (Shinkokinshū for short, “New Collection of Ancient and Modern Poems”), which, with 1,978 poems, was

He hid the fire in a tall hollow stalk of fennel, out of the sight of the great one who delights in thunder. —Hesiod, Works and Days   In those mountains he met others walking in the same direction. Backpacks, black plastic garbage bags, food sacks, a girl with two hard-boiled eggs, the shells flaking

the day you touched me, i was a child. i was body on body on concrete. everything was limber: the way my bones loosened beneath flesh, the sifting bone attached to your hips inside me. & your tongue, that restless thing proved to be a black gospel, swung off the lip like this was something

i. everyone wants                        a virgin to hunt a field              to watch           for wings or hind legs something exotic                     something everyone aches for velvet meat see the savage beast                 a haunting twitch of his brown eye sullen               his teased sway                        he’s asking for it jeans gathered at his pelvic chin & white t-shirt  a

First off, you’re in an off-duty cabbie’s Chevy. In the front seat. A fogbound field is boundary. Through a windshield, night hovers. He’s said that that bus doesn’t run anymore, but he’ll get you there. He’s failed, he says, to make clear the fare for the thirty-mile trip. Seems not to care this is your first full

Notation’s just part of the story, I know but it matters if you carved the heart/arrow/name before the first kiss or soon after if you kissed her or she kissed you either way a hasty abbreviation— the leaf-carpet crackled, footsteps coming this way • Later, erasure— crossed out in a flash, love scraped away fast

I never met your “Mrs. Pearl, a grandmother, a domestic, thirty years boarding SEPTA early mornings”— though I grew up in a suburb at the end of the line, where weekdays old women from North Philly walked down the block, trudging back up, weary and burned out, to catch the spasmodic, sluggish “A-Local” to Broad

like a red and empty shirt pinned wet to a clothesline my mother only seventeen trembles as she hands her father her belt knowing its buckle will bite the brown and black off her back and leave broken skin and bruises the color and size of jocotes en miel her knees sink as they had

Translated, from the German, by Stuart Friebert     KARL  KROLOW (1915-1999) Krolow’s large body of work – thousands of signature poems (3 volumes of Selected Poems!), haunting prose, criticism of the highest caliber, and sublime translations, from the Spanish & English, all charting a major direction for German literature — will endure as long

Translated, from the Swiss German, by Stuart Friebert       KUNO  RAEBER (1922-1992) This Swiss writer’s considerable body of work – whose spare poems weigh tons, whose novels & stories, radio plays, essays, translations and reviews have left an indelible mark on European literature that is just becoming clearer & clearer – is now

Stiff legged, my head and throat so cold, I quit the jury selection room. I dreamt of a shop with red velvet curtains where hats, the color of bark lie on the counter, The hat I wanted is cut of mink, fit for a brutal season. It has prickles of fur, dirt colored like the faces

She admits she is haunted, but does so softly, as if she really believes spirits will overhear her, spirits that neither she nor I believe in. I’m haunted, too, but standing before a window, its glass all that separates us, keeps us safe from the spirits we could never imagine swirling upward like protoplasmic spectral

Something falls silent the night we return from the chariot festival to celebrate Lord Jagganath; the last time I’ll come home with the face of a flushed and happy six year old just back from a street fair, the smell of cigarette smoke and sweaty crowds pressed on my flesh like perfume when pushing my

Soul perception earth damped, smell of flowers; sage, cedar, mugwort. Semblance shatters obsidian mirrors. Sky red dawn in songs and stories are indestructible. Five pointed star. Atop earthen dome willow reeds: sixteen mystery lodge Lakota songs last forever. Only know what one has breathed.      

A pale green flower opens in a cold window—final petals all tissue and vein—its horn-belled throat stills away two limp sepals, its filaments stretch lean and capped with senseless pollen. Here there is no summer-rapt bee, no tongued moth, nothing with wings to rub the waked anther, its umber cloaked fur. No lust is quenched,

I watched from a window as kids careened through the yard, playing games whose rules I didn’t get. Parents stood around in knots of conversation, drinking beer from the cooler, or wine in plastic cups. Potato chips were crushed into the lawn. Was it July 4th? I was helping my friend in the kitchen— slicing

She got sick even though the moon is supposedly everyone’s nightlight. I thought, Nessun dorma. My heart banged down the stairs like an anvil. The sex in Venice tore open the curtains before dawn. Against your abdomen, my pelvis feels like a crucible. Say anything serious like chemo and I’ll respond with the follow up:

Black in a black mirror— the glass panther. Even if you do not dream— the glass panther. On top of the Philco radio, in front of the rabbit ears— the glass panther. The credenza, the barcalounger, the Formica table, the orange vinyl barstool, the chrome bar caddy, matching martini shaker, the Sputnik lamp— the glass

Today I saw a motorcycle  with a license place that read  SOBER above its back fender. I’ve seen it here before, parked  along the scaffold-covered sidewalk  next to the old campus library set for demolition.  Whose is it, I wonder.  What student, what teacher enters the morning  half lost in shadows to park  next to

take     the nearest     last     off to the left     stage     show     over a marked     door     line visitor     handler     exhibit with animal     guarded     the barred banned     with child     without all of them     gatherers     gathered or some of them     citizens     justices unfit     excluded     except closed     no     or into the open air     the way     out     will not be     the

Here all the boughs belong to the dead,they wave the boughs persistently in the wind;do their young eyes still live in the photo albums,I don’t know, they left the uniforms behind,the wedding gowns, the first communion clothes,naked they slither between the boughs;is there a place to graze or picnic at God’s, I don’t know; I

Growing into loneliness, even her bike won’t help, her shiny mountain bike. Growing into the emptiness behind the windowsill, sudden precipice; growing into herself and from herself, in-between she won’t find anything, won’t find a willing one to search together – she doesn’t know that yet, for now she walks her bike and strokes it,

I entered so many churches in vain, plaster statuettes laughed at me… Left alone children cried, the remains of God had to be peeled from their muddy jackets, the father bar hopped, visited whores, the world drifted away like a wobbly rail car without a conductor or engine driver; later I met the same children

He couldn’t kill anyone but himself, and even that he couldn’t do. He lay in the hospital bed after his suicide, and heard someone dying several beds away. Her screams from a darkness no one wanted to hear, for she was afraid to die. He remembered the body bags televised on the tarmac about to

Marilyn Monroe caresses the ailing rodeo rider  who leans against her polka dots outside the Dayton Bar in Nevada, those polka dots  all over her dress, like mumps, and the car door open where they both share the same close-up.  The misfits broken up inside and out, Montgomery no longer the pretty boy— his scars

I drove all this way, but all I want to do is drive away again. All the words in Scrabble are as inadequate. Still, I keep score– 15 years to go 1 minor text message sent — because tally marks our progress. Walls, floors, ceilings, folding tables and chairs, guards and vending machines: it all

Darkness follows us. Car tires sneak through these streets. Above, headlights smile and rumble in on-coming traffic. Below we keep our lives hidden like graves.   We shoot out the sun and day vanishes into concrete as we listen to the apostrophes of tired blind men click their canes down unnumbered alleys. The dust under

1 On old Highway 20 the rides were rare. Yellowthunder’s dense eyes followed from foot to hill the split that broke along the bank of clouds where trucks blew past and excited the dust and grass.  In Yellowthunder the sky huddled its light like a fallen bird. This July Fourth he hitched a morning ride

This, it may be, is one way
That the interstices
Of sound and thought and feeling

After Hildegard of Bingen   We fill our eyes when they are closed. We dig our fingers into the crevices of the flamed grain of the oak table in search of crumbs and pebbles of sand nested there. We hear the songs that come from these nests, clear and crisp as Ordo Virtutum, a music

I was dead an entire spring.
I lost clumps of hair
and my nails peeled and flaked

I attempt a visual representation of how my daughter and I interrelate. I choose pronouns as the unit of my expressions, a circle as their container.

K— breaks her hand then takes up painting.
She uses the broken hand as lever and her other hand as guide.

Dust on my Whitman. A list of achievements for my weekend shipwreck. We got you. Your Life: The Popular Guide to Desirable Living. Illustrated lectures in the art of human relations. Social moochers snacking on the big fish. The wayward mail order sweetheart. Neither does he. More noise, confusion, radio static. First aid and your

Reciprocal sensibility machinery and armor               more so it seems an arrangement.          The formal terrain centers of crystallization read as a diary.             Believer seeking grace or sharpened sensibility. Osmotic precarious contraption                  mirrored realm of discrepancy disrupts and transports ricocheting triangulation          contrapuntal polarity. Insubstantial speck in pounding waves.          Alienation’s inherent gaze inevitably therefore. Lures and seduces secure.

Trees branch under water
Yes nests inside the yes
breathes, triangulates, bivalves

A flash of birds across the Erbil sky dissolves, dissipates and vanishes into the desert sun – a discreet instability, impulsive and determined. None that I can name except to say I have not seen them in my hometown whose birds I all know: Red Breasted Demagogue, Grime Throated Mission Creeper, Razor Beaked Oblivion. When

Mass Ave on a gray dusk black wet street shine asphalt sometimes sliced, sometimes spongey dark flesh hurled to the earth tied like a tourniquet hurled to it and swallowed by the rain. Your magic will be better than their magic Spicer was thinking of you. Early streetlights are the sun’s cribsheet. the sun, anachronistic

here is August soaked with reminder
that the world is material that changes

I recoil from the whipping wind, crouch
fetally beside the table against the retaining
wall to wait for the next rumbling of earth.

All rules break. All loves go belly up.

As flowers in the bathtub
Trees on the subway
A garden in a closet

Sunny quaalude dream:

How she never panics, never then outsources her duties to others, never needs someone to save her, does it all by herself

I will séance America into a love
Even the Supremes will be afraid of.

a radio play in ‘talking sonnets’

Stalk:Sorry. Once the dirt loved me, held me tight Anyone hear? I’ve grown colorless transparent trying to trace how. Once there was a pattern, I’m sure of it I remember feeling succulent My neighbors— rose and blue flourishes Communion My fruit hung like jewelry heavy gold treasure What I would give Already have Dirt nods

now that the world has come to an end
morning glories and poppies, flesh and sun
and rusty nails in glass jars disappear with tide

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life

A musical adaptation by Michael Heyman and Regie Gibson of a 16th-century text written by Tenali Ramalinga.

Childhood in Those Days

They still dressed us in sailor suits

Where the sun
The cedars
A shadow on the slope

It is a mystery; I cannot fathom it.
It mixes light and darkness: in the dark,

five my father hears the island language no one but he can understand, moon sound
birthed as pearls

If the air
entering us,
doing the work,
that we call ‘breath’