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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: VALENCIA ROBIN

I confess when I watch the big award shows on TV

I still think that could be me up there thanking people,

my mother, my grandmother, my entire collective

in the hereafter screaming, beaming down to join me,

my father wondering if he can come, too.

I admit to everything including wanting to kidnap

the young dread knocked out in front of the Paramount

and not setting him free until he’s marriage material. I know

I should want to send him back to his community

to start a farmers’ market or space program, to help us

expand into previously unknown aspects of being.

But first I want him to take my little neighbor to a play.

I’m the person who sees the happy baby and aches

to climb into the mother’s lap, who routinely falls for trees,

their wide, open arms beckoning. My painting helps,

though most days it’s just my dream of painting. Last night

this woman kept referring to her father as daddy

—daddy this, daddy that—as if he was everybody’s daddy.

My current form of self-medication are the hours between 6 and 8 AM,

the day slowly dressing itself, the light touching me. Sometimes

I watch the news, sometimes I love all that hate. Then there’s beauty

(with the little b) that heartless time suck. Still—all my life

I’ve been screaming Daddy, daddy! and so many people

—friends, strangers—have come running.

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: EMILY SKAJA

Someone gave me 30 lions a year ago & I just remembered they’re upstairs. I’m in a math test, a coffin, a play, I’m literally Hamlet & I didn’t prepare. T.S. Eliot found out that I said “The Waste Land” is overrated. There’s a man with a bayonet in the corner of my bedroom & I’m about to die commenting on his niche choice of weaponry. The whole world is counting on me to stop an asteroid from obliterating Earth but I missed my window because there’s an ADHD medication shortage in space. My teeth have turned into grapes. I’m in the dentist’s chair, he’s telling me he never much got into poetry himself, & I say that’s okay, I never got into dentistry either. Then I spit raisins all over the chair. I’m driving on a bridge when I remember I’m God & I forgot to save my draft of the Mississippi River. My car careens into the abyss, I forget how to roll up the windows, the abyss leaks in & the door won’t open & oh my God I’m that God who caused the embarrassingly unpoetic death of God & now everyone is furious.

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: KATE GASKIN

After she died the crocuses bloomed

and the purple phlox. The daffodils bloomed

and the snowdrops. The star magnolias bloomed

and the forsythia. The crab apples bloomed

and the redbuds. The jewelweed bloomed

and the wild stonecrop. The rue anemone bloomed

and the oxeye daisy. The bindweed bloomed

and the blue-eyed grass. The grape hyacinth bloomed

and the chickweed. The purple deadnettle bloomed

and the tickseed and the bloodroot and the spring air

was thawed ice and crushed petals and powdered sex

and I walked through it slantly, stutteringly, as if driven forth by

a nightmare, seeing everything through the new prism

of the sudden and horrible dream logic of my life.

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: RICK BAROT

In the park we stopped and looked up at the high branch where the ferruginous hawk ate another winged thing, the torn feathers drifting down. The hawk made a noise, like a little lever of pleasure giving way inside. I thought of the question the choreographer asked her gathered dancers: What do you do in order to be loved? It was as though I’d been holding my breath the whole day, walking beside you. A strong spring light struck us. Next to you on the ground, your shadow looked like crumpled black paper.

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INAUGURAL EPISODE OF THE MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY PODCAST!

In this episode I talk to Todd Davis about his poem, "For a Stray Dog near the Paper Mill in Tyrone, Pennsylvania"

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: G.C. WALDREP

According to rule. The terrible safeguard of the text when placed against the granite ledge into which our industry inscribed itself. We were prying choice from the jaws of poverty, from the laws of poverty. But what came out was exile. Safety, is it serious or unserious, I mean as aspiration? It’s not tangible the way the wild ginger is tangible, the way the bloodroot is tangible. The beckoning armature of stone-in-stone, a fire birth paraphrases. Not a prophecy although it labors like one, back bent, into the coal seam. You can’t see its face. Perhaps after all it has no face left to see. Multiple worlds comply in the event that is my hand, the thin loam cast up against desertion’s flank. We were creating a brief for recognition, although we didn’t know this yet. I take my pulse, I calculate the pain in my left shoulder, my right leg. Safety, a sign no one has taken away yet, an arch through which our futures crept. Voids are uncanny though we bleed in them, necessitating the oxygen of forms and their variants. The breath I take, like my pulse, an ample rhythm that captures the known inside the unknown. Possession, intangible though it passes through my hand, it stages its shift in authenticity. Night’s body, on the autopsy table for all to view. The bats unfurling from the drift-mouth at dusk, co-aspirators, co-appetitive: they calculate my presence with their aversive echoes. I can feel the blame taking hold, but it has another name in this place, one it keeps secret. I rest my thought against it, the beauty of the now I’ve squandered. How it chases our mothers and fathers into perfect elegy.

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: DONIKA KELLY

Of course, the sink is never empty, or rather: empties, briefly, then is full again: the one plate; the one mug; the many spoons. A knife. Which I sharpen. Which dulls. Outside the window, night clatters, comes; the water drained, metal too. Me, too, sunk in the bed’s shallow mouth, the pit I’ve worn into the ticking. The night like a sink: full: trill of air rushing the spiracle, swelling the throat pouch; a silent wing; then scream; wet paw in the litter, in the brush. Like the night I sink: small hollow in the throat, full of water, turgid; full of metal too. I feel with my paw the small holes of my body, the small ponds: the bank beside; feel with my wing a shallowing cup, the spoon’s horizon. I swallow. Knife of the mind. Which I sharpen. Which I dull. A sword. To myself I say, choose. Do I empty. Am I full.

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: JASMINE LEDESMA

I lost sleep over you    my wide, cigarette-flinging snow angel, falcon princess                                   I laid in bed already defeated by you                 Tap water and glistening floss                 I think the girl at the ammo store is in love with me When she looks into my eyes does she see you                 reflected back like a mirror in a crowded theater? Stiff drinks and that long walk home, all the way home                 I keep you in my wallet                                 I grit you in my teeth                 Nobody on earth understands this throb in my side the gassed army men in my head                                 It’s you, my oil slicked dove—                 So come out in April. Come out to the street,                 See the morning sun refracted against the glass panes America’s Kids Daycare Center. Shrapnel. Graceless collapse.                 See the broken mommies and                                                 look at the widening gap! See what I have done for you.                 Smell the hot propaganda. My tonka truck woman.           My love is bloodied at the mouth.                               My love is a weapon of mass destruction.

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: IZZIE HINGSTON

I love your metal clad hearts, I love how you thumped down girlishness like a stack of files on a desk, case closed. I love you butches and your metal clad boots and how you tip toe along the high wire, arms out, balancing. Pint in one hand, cig in the other. I love you butches and your metal on metal walk, keys jangling. I love you butches in Sainsbury’s. I love you metal in face butches, heart on sleeve butches. I love you butches on TV. I love the word butches, wouldn’t say butches in front of my mother, wouldn’t speak of my love on TV. Butches you are stronger than me, you have metal shells and warm yolk inside. I love you butches, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, butches, they don’t love you out there. I’m sorry they fear you with metal prongs and beg woman out of you, I’m sorry butches, you must be steel.

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: KATE MAUDE

You can start with the dog carving its claws into the wooden frame, trying to get closer to the danger outside. And then you could go much bigger: war, famine, religion. But you see mealybugs on the cucumber vines, thrips on the gladiola, aphids, mites, whiteflies. Leaves crisp and powdery. A virus carried from one warm breath to the trachea, bronchi, bronchiole, alveoli. The word that slipped into the air from your mouth, bitter oil of walnut on your tongue. Bone that turned to powder, ulna, clavicle, acetabulum. A car turning too soon, a car slipping on ice. A cat in the yard, crying in the dark. The way you turn your eyes from the homeless man whose luck hasn’t been anything like yours. And you know that’s what this all is. Not grace or tao or dharma, there is just the luck of you having the whole damn world for now. The river to slide into, and when you slink below the surface, that thrumming sound in your ears, your heart still beating. And you have lips to kiss, fingers that brush the fine hairs on your arm. The sound of your daughter turning a page in a book. The creak on the stairs that means someone you love is still at home.  

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: EMILY LEITHAUSER

When you arrive in our city, you will see, Prophet,

body bags; shoeprints rising from the mud, still;

shards of homes; a razed, blackened, and burned 

dominion all around. And when  you find the right 

news source, you will weep, or have sex,  or forget; you will give

money and cry in earnest. We’ve wanted to save

each other for so many years that we’ve forgotten 

how. In the afternoon  the cathedral was almost 

cold. But when he explained  that he, all that time, 

had been with someone else,  I felt no cold, 

no global catastrophes, just me: flawed

and echoing. And when I breathed, I saw

my mistakes, bright and clean  as glass in the windows 

of someone else’s house.

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: CHARLIE DIVINE STEELE

my mother said you know a pearl is real by tapping it against your teeth. she said I’m sorry, she said you know         there’s this darkness inside me. I realized I don’t have childhood photos– the surgical assistant sends a memo post-election something about scrubbing your assigned sex from the records, paper trail so neat it absolves         I wonder where my girlhood goes. somewhere in my parents’ basement film slides of my fifth birthday party I don’t remember the box mix Barney sheet cake but I remember the purple foil, the dark-eyed freckled girl, lank mullet, half-smile         do I imagine a darkness there? a photograph of my mother at eleven the first evidence of her childhood I’ve seen I was such a weird kid she said & I thought it was shame grainy, discolored with age–she’s reaching for the camera mouth open smiling. I look for myself in her face but it is only her face, her girlhood         I’ve started to carry it with me. she gave me a pearl necklace for my sweet sixteen every young woman needs a string of pearls. some idiosyncratic coming of age it takes a decade to love too late–pearls catching on my adam’s apple         the ends reach but never quite meet. in her latest email mom asks when we’re visiting says she’s always been proud of me, such incredible acts of life and living. I swell, I swallow         & I put it to my teeth.

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: ROBERT FERNANDEZ

What hurts when you’re young is that there’s no one. There’s never anyone, is there? All you’re left with  are the embarrassing memories of your earliest efforts. The heart has  a capsule like a worm in tequila that falls out when a child dies. When a child dies, the heart vomits the seed of a demon. Everything is lost. There’s no one. I want you to feel the truth of it. The truth of loss. Of devastation. A moth stands up in the afterbirth, red eyes dreaming of money. Honey, you don’t even know where I’ve been. The world hurts. The girl I am gave birth to the man.

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: CONSTANT LAVAL WILLIAM

Kenny from Skid Row is my prophet today, my sobriety sponsor and spiritual advisor,

his dirty suitcase squeaks like angels, his nicotine voice is Vivaldi or shofar, olive oil, Amaranthus, his kingdom

wherever car keys go when lost, my holy comptroller, my king. A wicked neck tattoo calls all the drunks in

to the church basement, and he performs the miracle of still being here. In Saint Augustine’s confessions,

it was not the pears stolen from the tree he relished, but the act of stealing itself—my pleasure in doing it

was that it was forbidden; that is to say I loved my own undoing. Self-destruction was our mutual kink, and I’m trying my best

to undo what I’ve undone here. Amidst the deities, I am the breathing ghost that haunts the meridian

between chemical peel and gothic face paint, between the two darkened rooms of the nursery

and the mortuary—the divining rod planted between the X and Y axis. I’m ornery

in my mortal robes of palomino gold, flyweight in my fight against the hostile architecture

of downtown, the thanatophobia of second-life survival. A Louboutin heel on a neck,

a hickey, a throbbing compass rose, all my small gods guide me like nothing else—

bless you, Salvador! In the bombed-out squat house with the buck knife on your hip,

I canonize you saint of inked skulls and bloodlust, offer you a hecatomb

of my past lives, super glued amphorae to fill with empty reminders of the victor’s oil.

Bless Erin in the suburbs where we grew up— you house the fentanyl, grind the stone, instruct me

on how not to remain. And peace be with the one who robbed my childhood, the ones on the street corners

heckling strangers, the skeletons in the back alleys parroting the insane tongues of God, the dealer

who sold the dope that killed my friends, the hand that tore the shirt off my back,

the man in the dumpling restaurant who taught me the right from wrong

end of a 9mm. You are my greatest enemies, my greatest teachers. You freebase the ram’s blood,

you guide my clone up the mountain, you grasp the obsidian dagger,

show me exactly who to kill by not killing him.

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: PAGE HILL STARZINGER

I look up the stars,

hard and glittering

as if chipped from a giant's horrible,

glimmering throne. No

moon, not for nights, just

wind scraping over scrub

rustling with animal. I can only guess

about. Iguana. Deer. Stray dog. I save

bread to scatter, but then who

am I to imagine this is a good

idea. I am a visitor,

and look what the others did.

Slave barracks

sugar plantation, part of a

cobblestone road. I walk down

our - the - driveway , take

a photo of a beat-up green

jeep with half doors

and the owner, a local, asks what

I am doing. It's a great old jeep, I say. But

what am I doing.

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: LAUREN SHAPIRO

in the Jewish cemetery he is looking for a belovèd but all we see are tiny piles of stones atop the graves of others the grass rises and falls awkwardly over where pits have been dug and filled back up     it is cold but I keep moving farther and farther away     all I can think of is finding the grave for my father it feels like I’ve seen the grave of every other name     my feet are wet with swamp water and starting to hurt from cold     no I won’t give up     my father I see is out of breath     he stops      looks up and puts a hand on his head     Maybe, he says, we are in the wrong cemetery.

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MEDITATIVE WEEK OF POETRY: LUCI ARBUS-SCANDIFFIO

When I was a child I was always touching something the crease in the wall the crease in the man’s face a button to the umbrella which I broke by pressing thirty times in a single day. Allegedly, I was unintelligible— like a foghorn I bleated and filled my chest with air. I lived like a raisin stuck in someone else’s pocket— was happiest in winter til my birthmark turned red. Blood red! And slightly blue on the edge. In the children’s wing they froze it off—I slept like a number between 1 and 10. The girl next to me was getting her ulna reset. She was hidden by geraniums which were planted between our beds. I assumed “reset” was a button the nurse would press— the sound was like a scissor slicing open a vinyl chair. Then I felt my own arm unzipping, the butterfly escaping, a hundred white stars falling out.