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Naturalized / Hala Alyan

Can I pull the land from me like a cork? I leak all over brunch. My father never learned to swim. I’ve already said too much. Look, the marigolds are coming in. Look, the cuties are watching Vice again. Gloss and soundbites. They like to understand. They like to play devil’s advocate. My father plays soccer. It’s so hot in Gaza. No place for a child’s braid. Under that hospital elevator. When this is over. When this is over there is no over but quiet. Coworkers will congratulate me on the ceasefire and I will stretch my teeth into a country. As though I don’t take Al Jazeera to the bath. As though I don’t pray in broken Arabic. It’s okay. They like me. They like me in a museum. They like me when I spit my father from my mouth. There’s a whistle. There’s a missile fist-bumping the earth. I draw a Pantene map on the shower curtain. I break a Klonopin with my teeth and swim. The newspaper says truce and C-Mart is selling pomegranate seeds again. Dumb metaphor. I’ve ruined the dinner party. I was given a life. Is it frivolous? Sundays are tarot days. Tuesdays are for tacos. There’s a leak in the bathroom and I get it fixed in thirty minutes flat. All that spare water. All those numbers on the side of the screen. Here’s your math. Here’s your hot take. That number isn’t a number. That number is a first word, a nickname, a birthday song in June. I shouldn’t have to tell you that. Here’s your testimony, here’s your beach vacation. Imagine: I stop running when I’m tired. Imagine: There’s still the month of June. Tell me, what op-ed will grant the dead their dying? What editor? What red-line? What pocket? What earth. What shake. What silence.

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Kiss of the Sun / Mary Ruefle

If, as they say, poetry is a sign of something among people, then let this be prearranged now, between us, while we are still peoples: that at the end of time, which is also the end of poetry (and wheat and evil and insects and love), when the entire human race gathers in the flesh, reconstituted down to the infant's tiniest fold and littlest nail, I will be standing at the edge of that fathomless crowd with an orange for you, reconstituted down to its innermost seed protected by white thread, in case you are thirsty, which does not at this time seem like such a wild guess, and though there will be no poetry between us then, at the end of time, the geese all gone with the seas, I hope you will take it, and remember on earth I did not know how to touch it it was all so raw, and if by chance there is no edge to the crowd or anything else so that I am of it, I will take the orange and toss it as high as I can.

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The Singularity / Marie Howe

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were? So compact, nobody needed a bed or food, or money, nobody hiding in the school bathroom, or home alone, pulling open the drawer where the pills are kept. For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you, remember? There was no nature, no them, no tasks to determine if the elephant grieves her calf, or if the coral reef feels pain, trashed oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French. Would that we could wake up to what we were when we were ocean, and before that, when earth was sky, and animal was energy, and rock was liquid, and stars were space, and space was not at all, nothing, before we came to believe humans were so important, before this awful loneliness. Can molecules remember it, what once was, before anything happened? Can our molecules remember? No I, no we, no one, no was, no verb, no noun yet, but only a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny dot, brimming with is, is, is, is, is all, everything, home.

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Endings / Sandra Lim

This story has two endings.

It has one ending

and then another.

Do you hear me?

I do not have the heart

to edit the other out.

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Every Metric record is somehow cooler than the last, even after 20 years.

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Door in the Mountain / Jean Valentine

Never ran this hard through the valley never ate so many stars

I was carrying a dead deer tied on to my neck and shoulders

deer legs hanging in front of me heavy on my chest

People are not wanting to let me in

Door in the mountain let me in

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The Peace of Wild Things / Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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"Poem for My Children Born During the Sixth Extinction" / Laura Cresté

The first things kids learn in school are the seasons. By now they already know their colors, maybe even their last names. My children will learn hurricane and wildfire. It is summer and then it is winter.

They won’t know the sweet weeks of early June, honeysuckle, wearing a sundress without sweat pooling behind a knee. Maybe even a little cold at night.

They might not know bumblebees, not personally. Polar bears they’ll read about like dinosaurs. We’ll still have the old-fashioned disasters, a broken elbow, split lip.

I’ll try not to scare them, but when I see them eating unwashed grapes I’ll tell them about pesticides. One will forget but the other won’t eat fruit for years. When they ask if I believe in heaven I will lie.

When they’re little I want them to feel safe. When they’re older I want them to believe their bones will lie dumb in the earth forever. This is your one life.

They’ll want to know what their parents did before they were born We had dinner parties. Traveled a little, not enough. Read our friends’ books. Had a dog they won’t remember

but will pretend to, and too many plants. Water-damaged the windowsill and lost our deposit. When our spider plant mothered into twelve stalks, we potted them,

called them spiderettes. They were supposed to be housewarming gifts, but we didn’t know twelve people moving. We tried not using too much plastic, not eating too much meat. It didn’t matter.

We knew our children’s lives would get worse every year. We thought they might like to be here anyway, to give them oceans, ice cream, optic nerves, the flowers, and all their names.

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I lived in the first century of world wars / Muriel Rukeyser / 1968

I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, The news would pour out of various devices Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. I would call my friends on other devices; They would be more or less mad for similar reasons. Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, We would try to imagine them, try to find each other, To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, To let go the means, to wake. I lived in the first century of these wars.

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If They Come in the Night / Marge Piercy

Long ago on a night of danger and vigil a friend said, why are you happy? He explained (we lay together on a cold hard floor) what prison meant because he had done time, and I talked of the death of friends. Why are you happy then, he asked, close to angry.

I said, I like my life. If I have to give it back, if they take it from me, let me not feel I wasted any, let me not feel I forgot to love anyone I meant to love, that I forgot to give what I held in my hands, that I forgot to do some little piece of the work that wanted to come through.

Sun and moonshine, starshine, the muted light off the waters of the bay at night, the white light of the fog stealing in, the first spears of morning touching a face I love. We all lose everything. We lose ourselves. We are lost.

Only what we manage to do lasts, what love sculpts from us; but what I count, my rubies, my children, are those moments wide open when I know clearly who I am, who you are, what we do, a marigold, an oakleaf, a meteor, with all my senses hungry and filled at once like a pitcher with light.

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brothers / Lucille Clifton

(being a conversation in eight poems between an aged Lucifer and God, though only Lucifer is heard. The time is long after.)                                                                                                                     

1 invitation

come coil with me here in creation’s bed among the twigs and ribbons of the past. i have grown old remembering the garden, the hum of the great cats moving into language, the sweet fume of the man’s rib as it rose up and began to walk. it was all glory then, the winged creatures leaping like angels, the oceans claiming their own. let us rest here a time like two old brothers who watched it happen and wondered what it meant.

2 how great Thou art

listen. You are beyond even Your own understanding. that rib and rain and clay in all its pride, its unsteady dominion, is not what you believed You were, but it is what You are; in your own image as some lexicographer supposed. the face, both he and she, the odd ambition, the desire to reach beyond the stars is You. all You, all You the loneliness, the perfect imperfection.

3 as for myself

less snake than angel less angel than man how come i to this serpent’s understanding? watching creation from a hood of leaves i have foreseen the evening of the world. as sure as she the breast of Yourself separated out and made to bear, as sure as her returning, i too am blessed with the one gift You cherish; to feel the living move in me and to be unafraid.

4 in my own defense

what could I choose but to slide along behind them, they whose only sin was being their father’s children? as they stood with their backs to the garden, a new and terrible luster burning their eyes, only You could have called their ineffable names, only in their fever could they have failed to hear.

5 the road led from delight

into delight. into the sharp edge of seasons, into the sweet puff of bread baking, the warm vale of sheet and sweat after love, the tinny newborn cry of calf and cormorant and humankind. and pain, of course, always there was some bleeding, but forbid me not my meditation on the outer world before the rest of it, before the bruising of his heel, my head, and so forth.

6 “the silence of God is God.” —Carolyn Forche

tell me, tell us why in the confusion of a mountain of babies stacked like cordwood, of limbs walking away from each other, of tongues bitten through by the language of assault, tell me, tell us why You neither raised your hand Nor turned away, tell us why You watched the excommunication of That world and You said nothing.

7 still there is mercy, there is grace

how otherwise could I have come to this marble spinning in space propelled by the great thumb of the universe? how otherwise could the two roads of this tongue converge into a single certitude? how otherwise could I, a sleek old traveler, curl one day safe and still beside YOU at Your feet, perhaps, but, amen, Yours.

8 “.........is God.”

so. having no need to speak You sent Your tongue splintered into angels. even i, with my little piece of it have said too much. to ask You to explain is to deny You. before the word You were. You kiss my brother mouth. the rest is silence.

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A Martian Sends a Postcard Home / Craig Raine

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings and some are treasured for their markings –

they cause the eyes to melt or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television. It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside – a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat. They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt and everyone’s pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die, they hide in pairs

and read about themselves – in colour, with their eyelids shut.

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A Third Body / Robert Bly

A man and a woman sit near each other, and they do not long at this moment to be older, or younger, nor born in any other nation, or time, or place. They are content to be where they are, talking or not-talking. Their breaths together feed someone whom we do not know. The man sees the way his fingers move; he sees her hands close around a book she hands to him. They obey a third body that they share in common. They have made a promise to love that body. Age may come, parting may come, death will come. A man and a woman sit near each other; as they breathe they feed someone we do not know, someone we know of, whom we have never seen.

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The Kingfisher / Mary Oliver

The kingfisher rises out of the black wave like a blue flower, in his beak he carries a silver leaf. I think this is the prettiest world--so long as you don’t mind a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life that doesn’t have its splash of happiness? There are more fish than there are leaves on a thousand tress, and anyway the kingfisher wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else. When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water remains water--hunger is the only story he has ever heard in his life that he could believe. I don’t say he’s right. Neither do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body if my life depended on it, he swings back over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it (as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.

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10 years ago today I tried to end my life. Everything that has happened since then--everything beautiful, tragic, strange--needn’t have been so. And everything that is, will not be so forever, which is both sad and a relief. My life is not perfect, but every year I feel more like one of the living, and less like one of the dead.

This photo is from few days after I was checked into a psychiatric facility 10 years ago. When I look at it now, I see my eyes full of sadness and fear. I think about how young I was and how little I understood about how good things might become. And I think about how grateful I am to be alive in maybe the only place in the universe where life has ever existed, and how even on days when I feel the darkness closing in, I still usually feel very curious about what will happen next.

And this photo is from last year, on a drive down from Tahoe. I like it because it reminds me of all of the ground traveled in the last 10 years, and all of the things I love about my tiny miraculous life, of which there are too many to name here. But mostly I love how green it is, how verdant and vibrant and bright.

“Wait” by Galway Kinnell

Wait, for now. Distrust everything if you have to. But trust the hours. Haven’t they carried you everywhere, up to now? Personal events will become interesting again. Hair will become interesting. Pain will become interesting. Buds that open out of season will become interesting. Second-hand gloves will become lovely again; their memories are what give them the need for other hands. The desolation of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness carved out of such tiny beings as we are asks to be filled; the need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait. Don’t go too early. You’re tired. But everyone’s tired. But no one is tired enough. Only wait a little and listen: music of hair, music of pain, music of looms weaving our loves again. Be there to hear it, it will be the only time, most of all to hear your whole existence, rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

“To The Young Who Want to Die” by Gwendolyn Brooks

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale. The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait: will wait a week: will wait through April. You do not have to die this certain day. Death will abide, will pamper your postponement. I assure you death will wait. Death has a lot of time. Death can attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; can meet you any moment. You need not die today. Stay here--through pout or pain or peskyness. Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow. Graves grow no green that you can use. Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.

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los angeles, mexico, detroit, chicago, cuba, grand canyon, tahoe