Poet Of The Month: Ari Banias
VOLLEY
In the absence of sunlight,
in the absence of a genuine river,
I blew air into a balloon. I gave my breath over
to its empty shape. I filled & pinched
& no matter how fast I tied it off,
how tight & swift, the air, my own, drained out.
And here I was again and here you were.
Watching? No, imagining.
So think what this balloon might represent
if we passed it back and forth
and took turns adding our breath.
What the quick tying might.
And our marveling at its lovely shape,
like an egg but also a tear-drop.
Our hands on it, our fingerprints
darkening its surface all powdery
and matte at first, with a bare sheen.
Think of the balloon sent into a crowd at a party.
How that crowd might move
to keep it in the air, protective
and playful, almost flirting with itself, a crowd
with light volleys will send & resend
a balloon upwards, high above their heads.
Until it drifts down
and asks to be touched by them again.
And with such innocent gestures, they do.
Though eventually they too will tire of this.
I can’t just say innocent; I know that.
But I’m going to say innocent.
Innocent as a balloon
not meant to last.
Think of it handed
back and forth between us.
Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2016). He lives in Berkeley, CA, where he teaches poetry and works with small press books.
“Volley” from Anybody by Ari Banias. Copyright © 2016 by Ari Banias. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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Friendly reminder, we're accepting submissions: http://bit.ly/1My2WNB
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Poet of the Month: Javier Zamora
VOWS
Ever since a brown girl wanted fifteen thousand from me
to marry her, I’ve vowed to not sign documents
to get a visa, then ask myself why
I’ve let that hurt me so much to never buy rings.
Amor, tell me to shut up, tell me none of that matters,
come watch the tide drain south
to where the house I left is lined with glass and barbwire.
When I call abuelos,
¡Ay no mijo! Someone else is dead. Then,
they ask about you. I’m four years older than them
when they got married, six years older
than my parents, always they ask when I’ll visit,
soon Abuelos, soon. What I mean is
I can never go back. Amor, know more than I love you
quite possibly I love that bay at low tide,
even possibly, mangrove roots with bright-orange crabs.
You can’t know what it’s like to have that place
disappear, those brown waves, those bright-orange crabs,
what I really mean when I say I can never go back
is I wish to lie next to you every morning,
where we dive headfirst to know
what it’s like to swim in the middle of love
and see each gull flee like clothes
bouncing off the wall to the carpet
we must pick clean like a beach, after hurricanes.
Javier Zamora is the author of Unaccompanied, his first collection of poems, a hope-filled clarion call that traces Zamora’s 4,000 mile long origin story from El Salvador to the United States when he was just nine years old. He is a 2018-2019 Racliffe Institute Fellow at Harvard and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, the Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, Stanford University and Yaddo.
“Vows” by Javier Zamora from Unaccompanied. Copyright © 2017 by Javier Zamora. Reprinted with the permission of the author and Copper Canyon Press.
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Poet of the Month: Hafizah Geter
How to Bring Your Children to America
The mothers became targets,
hanging on clotheslines, bibs
of barely fed children—countries born
split in two, firstborns
whose first steps aborted
their sisters and brothers, the fresh bread
of their love language,
children the English
tearing sphincters in two.
The mothers came by boat,
with wings, forgetting their own mothers’
uteruses, singing praises to Allah
they came over and over again
until it didn’t matter if so-and-so had died,
we were the nicknames escaping
their bellies, the translation between
stay and never arrived.
Husbands, uncles, we were
wives, illnesses, pawpaw seeds,
only thing that could save them,
sickle cells that knew better
than to touch. Visible,
only in their dialect, they spoke to cousins,
wired money, forgave ancestors
we couldn’t trust.
They stopped speaking to us
in our birth language until we became new
dictionaries, became the consonants
of the constitution they studied,
our first words forgotten
objects in our home
countries. They were the ones
whose fathers had died
without daughters,
in the milt of language.
In America, we were memories
without accents or consensus,
lambs that couldn’t be traded
for milk, meal, or honey,
the fact of our bodies
in America their new Quran.
And, oh, how they moaned,
how they starved, sucking teeth
between King’s English, yelling for us
to stop playing immigrant and go
get naturalized.
Born in Zaria, Nigeria, Hafizah Geter serves on the board of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts, and co-curates the reading series EMPIRE with Ricardo Maldonado. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books and West Branch, among others. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in McSweeney’s, VIDA Review and The Volta. Hafizah is a 2018 92Y Women in Power Fellow. She is on the poetry committee for the Brooklyn Book Festival and is an editor at Little A from Amazon Publishing where she acquires full length literary fiction and nonfiction.
Our Poet of the Month series is curated by our friends at Poetry Society of America. The nation’s oldest poetry organization, founded in 1910, PSA’s mission is to build a larger and more diverse audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the vitality and breadth of poetry in the cultural conversation, to support poets through an array of programs and awards, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life.
How to Bring Your Children to America by Hafizah Geter from Boston Review. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with the permission of the author.
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Poet of the Month: Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Love in the Time of Swine Flu
Because we think I might have it,
you take the couch. I can count on one hand
the times we have ever slept apart
under the same roof in our five years,
and those usually involved something
much worse than this sort of impenetrable
cough, the general misery involved
with dopey nausea, these vague chills.
But this time, we can’t risk it—our small son
still breathes clear-light in the next room
and we can’t afford to be both laid
up on our backs with a box of tissues
at our sides. Especially now that I carry
a small grapefruit, a second son, inside me.
In bed, I fever for your strong calves,
your nightsong breath on my neck
and—depending where we end up—wrist
or knee. I fever for the slip of straps down
my shoulder, I fever for the prickled pain
of lip-bite and bed burn. You get up and come
back to bed. We decide it is worth it. I wish
my name meant wing. The child still forming
inside me fevers for quiet, the silence of the after,
the silence of cell-bloom within our blood.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the prize-winning collections, Miracle Fruit, At the Drive-In Volcano, and Lucky Fish. Her latest collection of poems, Oceanic, was published by Copper Canyon Press in April of 2018. She currently teaches creative writing and environmental literature as a professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, MS.
Our Poet of the Month series is curated by our friends at Poetry Society of America. The nation’s oldest poetry organization, founded in 1910, PSA’s mission is to build a larger and more diverse audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the vitality and breadth of poetry in the cultural conversation, to support poets through an array of programs and awards, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life.
Love in the Time of Swine Flu by Aimee Nezhukumatathil from Oceanic. Copyright © 2018 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Reprinted with the permission of the author and Copper Canyon Press.
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Poet of the Month: Erika L. Sánchez
Girl
In the evening hum of traffic
and cicadas, you watch
the ugly curtains flutter
in hot wind: Little Orphan
Annie and her ridiculous flame
of hair. Outside two sparrows
bathe in dust, a man thrusts
against a prostitute who gasps
when she sees you in the window—
always the little spectator,
feral and plugged with squalor.
Finally, you’ve learned to crawl
inside the meat of your silence.
On the way home from school,
you study the factory’s chemical
blooms in the distance. A man
with a tumor glowing from his head
exits the rank motel on the corner.
You crash your bike into a boy
by mistake, and his porcine father
screams at you until he’s hoarse:
Fuck you, you motherfucking bitch.
Shaking, you run inside,
and for months you’re convinced
he’ll find a way to kill you.
Weed lot in the muted
sunset: the retarded boy pulls
down his pants and a circle
of kids laugh at his stiff, red penis.
It looks like an alien, you whisper
to your friend. The women
with black eyes and wizened faces
call you honey, call you sweetie.
A man on the street tears the gold
necklace from your mother’s neck—
this is how you learn that nothing
will belong to you. In your mangled
language, you’ll count all the reasons
you wish to die, the apartment bristling
with roaches. Always the smell
of corn oil. But what right do you have
to complain about anything,
with your clean socks and fat
little stomach? Burnt pies from
the thrift bakery you shove down
your desperate gullet. What can
you blame but your rootless
eye? Your mind so soft and full
of hysterical light. You’ve already
learned that your body is a lie.
Erika L. Sánchez is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. A poet, essayist, and fiction writer, she is the author of a young adult novel, I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter (Knopf Books for Young Readers), a 2017 finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and instant New York Times Best seller; and the poetry collection, Lessons on Expulsion (Graywolf), a finalist for the PEN America Open Book Award. She is a 2017-2019 Princeton Arts Fellow.
Girl by Erika L. Sánchez from Lessons on Expulsion. Copyright © 2017 by Erika L. Sánchez. Reprinted with permission of the author and Graywolf Press.
Our Poet of the Month series is curated by our friends at Poetry Society of America. The nation’s oldest poetry organization, founded in 1910, PSA’s mission is to build a larger and more diverse audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the vitality and breadth of poetry in the cultural conversation, to support poets through an array of programs and awards, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life.
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Poet of the Month: Chen Chen
I’m not a religious person but
God sent an angel. One of his least qualified, though. Fluent only in
Lemme get back to you. The angel sounded like me, early twenties,
unpaid interning. Proficient in fetching coffee, sending super
vague emails. It got so bad God personally had to speak to me.
This was annoying because I’m not a religious person. I thought
I’d made this clear to God by reading Harry Potter & not attending
church except for gay weddings. God did not listen to me. God is
not a good listener. I said Stop it please, I’ll give you wedding cake,
money, candy, marijuana. Go talk to married people, politicians,
children, reality TV stars. I’ll even set up a booth for you,
then everyone who wants to talk to you can do so
without the stuffy house of worship, the stuffier middlemen,
& the football blimps that accidentally intercept prayers
on their way to heaven. I’ll keep the booth decorations simple
but attractive: stickers of angels & cats, because I’m not religious
but didn’t people worship cats? Thing is, God couldn’t take a hint.
My doctor said to eat an apple every day. My best friend said to stop
sleeping with guys with messiah complexes. My mother said she is
pretty sure she had sex with my father so I can’t be some new
Asian Jesus. I tried to enrage God by saying things like When I asked
my mother about you, she was in the middle of making dinner
so she just said Too busy. I tried to confuse God by saying I am
a made-up dinosaur & a real dinosaur & who knows maybe
I love you, but then God ended up relating to me. God said I am
a good dinosaur but also sort of evil & sometimes loving no one.
It rained & we stayed inside. Played a few rounds of backgammon.
We used our indoor voices. It got so quiet I asked God
about the afterlife. Its existence, human continued existence.
He said Oh. That. Then sent his angel again. Who said Ummmmmmm.
I never heard from God or his rookie angel after that. I miss them.
Like creatures I made up or found in a book, then got to know a bit.
Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, the GLCA New Writers Award, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. The collection has also been named a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. His work has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, The Best American Poetry, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. Poets & Writers Magazine featured him as one of “Ten Poets Who Will Change the World.”
“I’m not a religious person but” by Chen Chen from When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities. Copyright © 2017 by Chen Chen. Reprinted with the permission of the author. Author photo by Jess Chen.
Our Poet of the Month series is curated by our friends at Poetry Society of America. The nation’s oldest poetry organization, founded in 1910, PSA’s mission is to build a larger and more diverse audience for poetry, to encourage a deeper appreciation of the vitality and breadth of poetry in the cultural conversation, to support poets through an array of programs and awards, and to place poetry at the crossroads of American life.
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"what I mean when I say I'm sharpening my oyster knife" by Eve L. Ewing
I mean I'm here
to eat up all the ocean you thought was yours.
I mean I brought my own quarter of a lemon,
tart and full of seeds. I mean I'm a tart.
I'm a bad seed. I'm a red-handled thing
and if you move your eyes from me
I'll cut the tender place where your fingers meet.
I mean I never met a dish of horseradish I didn't like.
I mean you're a twisted and ugly root
and I'm the pungent, stinging firmness inside.
I mean I look so good in this hat
with a feather
and I'm a feather
and I'm the heaviest featherweight you know.
I mean you can't spell anything I talk about
with that sorry alphabet you have left over from yesterday.
I mean
when I see something dull and uneven,
barnacled and ruined,
I know how to get to its iridescent everything.
I mean I eat them alive.
what I mean is I'll eat you alive,
slipping the blade in sideways, cutting
nothing because the space was always there.
_____
"No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife." –Zola Neale Hurston
Read about the poem here.
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Countee Cullen, via NYPL.
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