6peaches

[6peaches]

Shelley Wong - Pride Month

It is June & I read about having grace to forgive those who would condemn us. It is June & a man reads a poem where the father becomes a dying stag & the son says there is something I need to tell you. It was June when I was in bed past 1:00 a.m. gathering news about the Orlando nightclub shooting. I fell asleep knowing I would wake to walk against grief in waves. It is June & I am happy that, at some point, Tegan & Sara will appear in San Francisco or Oakland. It is June & I have never prayed to any god. It was June in the 2000s when my ex-partner ran the New York City pier dance. We slid through a sea of men with shaved chests. The songs hardly had words & the bass shuddered into our bodies. Orgasms of glitter spilled over the Hudson & New York rocked & roared back. I stood in the VIP section in a tropical sundress surrounded by so many barely dressed people double- kissing my face, saying happy Pride & where is your wife

[6peaches]

Nood Hindi - Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying

Colonizers write about flowers. I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks seconds before becoming daisies. I want to be like those poets who care about the moon. Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons. It’s so beautiful, the moon. They’re so beautiful, the flowers. I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad. He watches Al Jazeera all day. I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan. I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies. Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound. When I die, I promise to haunt you forever. One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

[6peaches]

Molly Brodak - Molly Brodak

I am a good man. The amount of fear I am ok with is insane. I love many people who don't love me. I don't actually know if that is true. This is love. It is a mass of ice melting. I can't hold it and I have nowhere to put it down.

[6peaches]

Sonia Sanchez - Sonku

i collect wings what are you bird or animal? something that lights on trees breasts pawnshops i have seen another path to this rendezvous.

[6peaches]

Sonia Sanchez - Haiku

i turn westward in shadows hoping my river will cross yours in passing.

[6peaches]

David Romtvedt - Sunday Morning Early

My daughter and I paddle red kayaks across the lake. Pulling hard, we slip easily through the water. Far from either shore, it hits me that my daughter is a young woman and suddenly everything is a metaphor for how short a time we are granted:

the red boats on the blue-black water, the russet and gold of late summer’s grasses, the empty sky. We stop and listen to the stillness. I say, “It’s Sunday, and here we are in the church of the out of doors,” then wish I’d kept quiet. That’s the trick in life— learning to leave well enough alone.

Our boats drift to where the chirring of grasshoppers reaches us from the rocky hills. A clap of thunder. I want to say something truer than I love you. I want my daughter to know that, through her, I live a life that was closed to me. I paddle up, lean out, and touch her hand. I start to speak then stop.

[6peaches]

“Well I hate America, Louis. I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word “free” to a note so high nobody can reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. […] I live in America, Louis, that’s hard enough, I don’t have to love it.”

— Angels In America, Tony Kushner. (via the-library-and-step-on-it)

[6peaches]

Thomas Lux - A Little Tooth

Your baby grows a tooth, then two, and four, and five, then she wants some meat directly from the bone. It's all

over: she'll learn some words, she'll fall in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet talker on his way to jail. And you,

your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue nothing. You did, you loved, your feet are sore. It's dusk. Your daughter's tall.

[6peaches]

Christa Forster - Letter

It’s winter. I’m sick, naturally. A kind salesman tried to sell me a kumquat, but I don’t think he arrived in time because there’s a war on, eking out another champion. The mothers shouldn’t be disturbed, so I walk quietly. Perhaps their dreams will occur to me: I hear them in their famished forms. I know the world won’t end this time, but I’m super scared, and I’m never clean. In a week, the streets will clear. Change is uncomplicated. I can put your stuff in storage and walk around.

[6peaches]

Danusha Laméris - Insha’Allah

I don’t know when it slipped into my speech that soft word meaning, “if God wills it.” Insha’Allah I will see you next summer. The baby will come in spring, insha’Allah. Insha’Allah this year we will have enough rain.

So many plans I’ve laid have unraveled easily as braids beneath my mother’s quick fingers.

Every language must have a word for this. A word our grandmothers uttered under their breath as they pinned the whites, soaked in lemon, hung them to dry in the sun, or peeled potatoes, dropping the discarded skins into a bowl.

Our sons will return next month, insha’Allah. Insha’Allah this war will end, soon. Insha’Allah the rice will be enough to last through winter.

How lightly we learn to hold hope, as if it were an animal that could turn around and bite your hand. And still we carry it the way a mother would, carefully, from one day to the next.

- Insha’Allah by Danusha Laméris

[6peaches]

Ursula K. Le Guin - Leaves

Years do odd things to identity. What does it mean to say I am that child in the photograph at Kishamish in 1935? Might as well say I am the shadow of a leaf of the acacia tree felled seventy years ago moving on the page the child reads. Might as well say I am the words she read or the words I wrote in other years, flicker of shade and sunlight as the wind moves through the leaves.

[6peaches]

Langston Hughes - April Rain Song

Let the rain kiss you. Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops. Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk. The rain makes running pools in the gutter. The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night—

And I love the rain.

[6peaches]

Mary Oliver - April

I wanted to speak at length about The happiness of my body and the Delight of my mind for it was April, a night, a full moon and—

But something in myself for maybe From somewhere other said: not too Many words, please, in the muddy shallows the

Frogs are singing.

[6peaches]

Pam Bernard - Falling

Here, falling is best. Rainer Maria Rilke, “To Holderlin”

Words are my wing beat, my snow angel— my own wings not enough for the task.

But who will see me when I fall? Who will chart my journey from where I once lay dreaming among the trees?

Who will call out as I descend, the world blurring by in sleep and despair?

When I inhabit the brief wilderness between sky and earth, can I not linger there? Are we forever passing through?

Each of us has been born at least once falling like applause from a balcony.

I hadn’t known I was falling. Am I falling still?

[6peaches]

Victoria Chang - Wanting to See

It is midwinter  and I cannot bear the minutes,  their procession as  they keep inching like snipers.  How can our purpose  be just to watch people die?  The peaches blooming  in the dark are saved for the  ground. I confess, I want them.

[6peaches]

Chelsea B. DesAutels - Some Half-World

What can I say about how the snow is falling this morning, almost imperceptibly? I am a long way from the people I love. Distance, I’m discovering, is better in the imagination, though my imagination has been weak lately, caught in some half-world between memory and creation, either one a truer planet than this moon I’ve been hauling around. The sun crawls up the horizon, and the light in the forest shifts, a pale-white making space for the day’s drama. I force myself to recall the man with the sharp chest hovering above me in a hotel room years ago—no matter how I try, I can’t remember what happened after I woke and said stop. I see only a taxi door closing. And the next morning, snow on wet streets, an instinct to turn in on myself, to make of myself a hard, small marble. It would be a miracle to see you right now, my beloved writes. It’s true, I am far away. A habit, which, I understand, has been a mistake.

[6peaches]

Alex Dimitrov - Birthday in Palm Springs

The winds made me crazy. At King’s Highway diner I did tarot for the waitress and she drew a heart on my bill. Every day I watched a boy play dead in the pool. His friends laughed at him from their beach chairs. “I won,” he’d yell. “I beat all of you again.”

When a stranger in a cowboy hat asked if I was born in 1984 I didn’t answer. I stared at the San Jacinto Mountains in his BMW. He said, “pull the seat back,” so I did. Most nights I played alive at the bar, after dinner, the hotel bathrooms, a fire pit near my room.

“You remind me of no one,” the cowboy said. It was supposed to be a compliment. I was supposed to be older but I’ve been six years old since I got here. Trying to write this poem since I can remember. Trying not to die and I don’t want to die here. No one has been good. No one has known what I am.