Poetry
Scared of Poetry
By Steve Dube
February 23
By Maureen Andary
Soft Cough
By Arianna Georgi
jacksonpollock calls it "the she wolf"
By Tao Lin
The Reader Lives With Cats
By Amira Pierce
Comfort
By Christina Ranon
Valentine
By Lindsay R.
The Love Letter Versus the Poem
By Maureen Andary
Rain
By Lindsay R.
On Geography
By Kate Lobosco
Autobiography
By Kate Lobosco
Leaned
By Maureen Andary
The Importance of Skin
By Luis Amate Perez
Short Poem with a Biblical Theme
By Siobhan Ciminera
Inevitable
By Arianna Georgi
Iranian Revolution Movie
By Maureen Andary
Nature's Way
By Katy Ball
"Certain."
By Steve Dube
horseshoecrabs
By Emily Dufton
Scared of Poetry
I'm scared of poetry
Ever since Nature caught me close reading
it's been giving me the evil eye
Yet I'm writing this
and you should see the unseen manuscripts
It started out innocuously enough
with a burst of clichéd perspicacity
contemplating death
which no one has ever done before -
Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts"
(Another boat ride)
I'm scared of writing about poetry
The poet is diseased
If you want to know everything
you can't do something
And if you want to do something
you can't know everything
The poet is like gum on the sidewalk
squashed and black
once hot with saliva
This poem is not a Hamlet
It ended with the mainstream avant-garde
I want my poetry to be
Spice Girls' lyrics that work
I like the Super Bowl
I have pictures of the star of Gilmore Girls
On my dorm room walls
Steve Dube
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February 23
I am afraid to go to sleep.
Water is slicing at the windows
and I ate bacon after
beer and who knows what will happen
with a volatile combination like that.
I would feel safer sleeping with someone,
so I couldn't fall asleep slipping into death-
who wouldn't want to
on a night like this:
rain-wet, spattered, loveless, cold,
emphasized with beer, a spit of brandy,
and pig fat to top it all off.
My girlfriend, Sandy, says,
it's creepy that a person would ever spend hours
watching someone else breathe, adoring
the curve of a stomach pumping up and down,
the slightly open mouth, the gusts
of warm air.
But I would pay someone
to watch me breathe on a night like this-
a heart-stopper, an artery-clogged night.
I would feel safer with another body perched above
mine-a face sinking its eyes into my respiratory system,
watching me work.
Maureen Andary
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Soft Cough
The man behind me on the train
has a soft cough
It is a cough like an
insect that falls forward
on its own legs
an insect that was never meant to be born
an insect that was born in pieces on a shining red day
The soft cough shimmers right behind
me like some comic book demon
It is so disturbing
Its sound beckons me
down the dripping wet hallways
of some haunted house
I want to move, I practically see
the soft cough making love to my
freshly washed hair
I can practically see turning around and catching that
man with my hair in his
soft-cough mouth
Anyway, for now, I will have to stand here
There is nowhere to go
It makes sense
this soft cough
It makes sense
with where I am headed
Arianna Georgi
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jackson pollock calls it "the she wolf"
if all the world's insanity
was carefully extracted
and condensed
what else would you call it
but laughter
and if i was a boy
home from preschool
i might laugh uncontrollably
at jackson pollock's
"the she wolf"
i might curse humanity
for embracing horseshit
smeared on a canvas
if i was a bitter old man
near death
and sane
too sane
to imagine
and be youth
and if i was ignorant
or knowledgeable enough
to act a little boy
i just might see a bison
with a man sticking his neck
out the bison's ass
and a yin-yang and a black sperm
swimming to meet the ghost
on the right
and i just might lie down
on the bison's back and if i could stop laughing
for a moment
i might whisper in the man's ear
that i hope he knows
he's in a bison's ass
Tao Lin
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The Reader Lives with Cats
Once upon a time,
the writer was alone in his room,
blocked or seething or bursting along,
one word chasing the next across white
pages: now scattered leaves, loose
pages, crispness that the cats are
drawn to, as they prowl the room,
conquer the bed. Their cat paws crackle
across subplots, cat asses settle
on misconstrued characters,
cat bellies squash overwhelmed narratives.
Cat paws conquer tales of palm trees, California
to Minnesota and then back to Brooklyn. Cats paw
evil clowns, husbands toying with Internet romance,
a heroine putting on her face. And sandwiches.
And fancy sandwiches eaten by a very fat man
and his very sexy wife and the narrator wants her
and the fat man tells him it's okay, tells him
to want her, fuck her, make her happy like he can't,
a bedpan by their marriage bed. Paw through
the overripe innuendo, the fervent orifices,
the men opening new age bookstores in Southwest towns,
harboring impossible crushes on young waitresses next door.
And always more sandwiches.
Oblivious cat-sleuths trace it all through the leaves
and back into the room, where the reader's steps
have weight, make noise, where cigarettes hang up in the air
and she tries out her voice for the first time today
on the slip of herself in the mirror, hears voices as tones for the first
time today on the radio, a documentary: a large number of teenagers
live and work on one of the country's largest battleships
in the Arabian Gulf.
They have crushes, bet on reality television shows, play basketball.
Amira Pierce
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Comfort
When it comes down to it,
the frail cruelties are bearable.
You heft your heart into the cradle
of your shoulders and smile,
because kindness doesn't suit you;
your jaw is easier to place
against the scales of ruin
than those lip-shaped sincerities
that throw you off balance.
And these curses bolster you
in a way that my arms never can,
those songs that hit you like prayers of the dying,
when God hears and answers no.
Christina Ranon
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Valentine
I wanted to go to the Copa.
Every rattling footstep begs the question-
ice tea on the sweaty oak-the waitress
rubs her chest inside the tuxedo shirt,
her heart folding over itself.
I wanted to unlearn the space
behind your ear and learn it again.
I wanted something to resemble longing
in protrusive parts, elbows and chins,
everything out in the open.
Lindsay R.
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The Love Letter Versus the Poem
Like a map, the poem is sketched out--
it has a landscape and a texture
it is a hue but not a color.
Convex, it turns with oxymorons,
grows bright with allusions,
ties itself to jets going in opposite directions.
"I know a good poem when it takes off
the top of my head," said Emily Dickinson.
A poem tumbles, polyamorous,
smitten by ideas.
A love letter wraps itself around
the reader's throat, wanting only
out of its cage, to overwhelm, to pull
up rugs from underneath,
lift the hairs off a neck,
to transmit itself like radio waves
to hands and the eyes it wants to see, the body
it cannot draw.
Maureen Andary
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Rain
They hold hands tighter, lean in. A woman
collapses in a fast food restaurant: they watch
it on the window, on the sidewalk, the body
falling. It makes a sound, money in the bank.
It echoes in dryer places, beads red
in the sand. They take the hint: where it drops
on the arm will not be burned. They forget
umbrellas. If the office has a view,
they'll watch it all day and not feel
guilty. It's designed to drain but mostly
collects in dirty puddles. If it lasts long enough
on the streets, they'll stay home, cancel
appointments to watch the kitchen ceiling rot,
noticing the skin-like quality of plaster as it peels.
Lindsay R.
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On Geography
It was what she called shyness: the beginning of a beach:
plump, salty tide coming in,
the rivulets, blue patterned; unctuously,
rising up, diving in rash decisions
Expatriate, early winter morning,
running shoes without socks,
spurting, gasping
Nimbus clouds,
empty orange horizons; violent,
like letters formally addressed,
a gun cocked next to the coat rack.
A clout, necks of brown bottles
spilling over
like the blowfish tank
in a pediatric unit.
Anodyne, ice beds -
sheets, crumpled up at the ends.
Blue lips, too thin,
almost to hoarfrost
The torn ligaments of a tall pine
still warm to the touch
Like the days
that were supposed to be mine, he said,
but it's too serious a word.
The way photographs burn,
curling, like the head in a lap.
Kate Lobosco
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Autobiography
I will kill on this long, hard mile;
where fires to the south
lie flat, and bodies
stack like sheet rock:
one on top of the other, and each sleep
two to a bed - like the threads of a frozen railway.
Barges that steep us, so bitterly,
and the highbrows of swings that remind me
of my best friends both named Melissa.
It is a dead metaphor,
black and white,
as if writing it down could make it more
or less - true;
the head in hand.
Father and son
with backs at the fisheries.
Behind, talking about the way the wind should blow,
and drinking problems, and the Mohawks of Michigan wheat
shafts, and finally see their shadows
drafted across a strange glass on the sideboard.
And the sister, who locks herself in the bathroom,
who sings and sometimes cries
and thinks we don't know.
I bite my hand to keep from telling her.
The strong legs of a tripod in the spring,
sleepless mothers with their joy of smoking,
and the girl who was, and is-
Incarnations; a pillow propped against her stomach
imagining the extra girth could be a small child
and she could do it all over again, this time, right,
because it makes the disease bearable.
Do I make myself this way,
Can't I dream of owning a home - with a garden, in which
my teeth will be whiter, almost cannibals,
and there will be a tattoo, and time, and my mother's hair will stop coming up
all over the house.
Where the overhead lights will be bright enough
and the wallpaper, unpeeled, tells empty stories
of a boy, whom I will never be able to marry,
and I will hate him, because I will never be able to tell him.
I bite again
turn green like a bruise on the knee.
I wake up, warm up the car, pull out of the driveway, and know
that any new turn could give a new name,
a family approach, and a vaster street.
Kate Lobosco
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Leaned
Your body bended like geometrics.
Growing up you must have folded
over in right angles or trapped
yourself into an isosceles triangle with matched ends,
eyes reflecting the pecan fields in heavy
gulps. Remembering the touch of your
father's hand still sends you a tremor and
the traveling back to Alabama with your
five small boys to close the plantation.
You still mention the sharecropper,
your personal Boo Radley, waiting for
final pay in the town so breathless to you.
Maureen Andary
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The Importance of Skin
There's a pain in tinsel, the faithful
arms' re-measurement of the value-
less gold, the way mothers dress Christmas
trees, faded threads wound precisely 'round
plastic evergreens. Worn hands dance the weight
of the tree, naturally; "There's only one way
to wrap a Christmas tree."
The fingers turn over molten
threads, pick away the ones too worn
to apply. "No one likes to look
at shedding Christmas trees," just like
no one likes close-ups of a preserved mother.
*
Watching her walk around the tree, I think
of old actors running lines from movies
that made them stars. Pretend close-ups
in the bathroom mirror, "Is that you in there?"
"Well, it sure ain't me."
Luis Amate Perez
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Short Poem with a Biblical Theme
I knew
that when I laughed at the old woman
who looked like a witch
wearing a fanny pack
and what used to be a red sweatshirt
singing a rendition of "Fame"
(which was really quite well done)
at the karaoke bar
I was going to hell.
Siobhan Ciminera
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Inevitable
1.
Her children bring home their class
photos and toss the envelopes on the tables
with disregard. The mother opens them and looks at the
five rows of smiling faces and thinks it is
inevitable some of them will die before they turn
eighteen. She shifts the glossy surface to avoid the glare from the
kitchen window and studies it closely with this in mind.
2.
My aunts grow to thick teenagers in the house
they were born in. The war comes and
washes the men away from the town and to the east.
The war ends and washes them back
some broken like shells,
by then it is too late.
My aunts never marry. One becomes a television producer and
talks about the time John F. Kennedy came to her station on his way to New York.
They buy a stationary bike and say the rosary to kill time while they peddle.
3.
All day the planes come over the house
always in ten minute intervals and always from the west.
They make low groaning sounds as they pass overhead
like they are waiting at a restaurant for someone who hasn't come yet.
Not all of them land.
4.
The teacher says that once every 22 million years
a large meteor hits the earth. He says with some apparent glee that
it's about that time again. He says, "I am not saying this to depress you."
He is a large man, who says one day we may only see animals in zoos
and no longer in the wild. He drives an SUV and shrugs and says
that he has to because of his girth.
5.
The boy comes to her house while she is sitting
on the couch watching TV, still in her bathing suit and still damp from the pool.
He sits on the couch next to her and watches as well. If you were standing outside the
window, you could hear the sound of laughter from the sitcom. You could see the window lit up in blue light while the fireflies sparked all around your feet.
But you couldn't smell the chlorine like the boy could.
You couldn't know how that night he saw a vision of their future that left him sure of things in a way he never had been before.
6.
The conductor wipes his brow and puts more coal in the engine.
If you ask him, he will say that the train gets there when it gets there,
he will say that there is no way to hurry the train.
In the night, the train rumbles forward, it goes through hills and plains
and to the ocean. When it gets there, it comes back again.
All the while, the conductor shovels coal.
Soon his job will be obsolete.
Arianna Georgi
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Iranian Revolution Movie
While doorways shiver with private
plans, the pull balloons to a tremor.
This is how they fight: running
crack to crack in blue jeans,
sneakers to match the stolen gun.
They do not wear robes--
sleeked by sweatshirts and
sport coats, slim torsos, ripe
beards. Like leather used
to sharpen a knife, they are
rubbed forth to back.
Leaping onto parked tanks, they
slash tires on the way in a smooth move,
bodied like cats, while,
dipped in ragged stars, theirs
are the eyes of unkempt times.
Maureen Andary
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Nature's Way
I sink teeth into the matte brown neck
of a pear, engine of mouth whirring with light-
steeped juice watery as uninstalled panic
effective flesh most miraculous as it is
being broken through,
a tangible marveling;
the clean savagery of incisors
cut by the slogging cradles of molars
and the slip of their vise.
Predator and prey bind electrically
as the pound of adrenaline strides converge, the warmth
of lion cheek sliding up the gazelle flanks
then peeling back to gleaming maw.
It's as if all things epidermal wait for
the unmatched caress that comes before a tear
with haunches quivering
and the door to their sensory arsenal
swinging dangerously on its hinges.
Katy Ball
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Untitled
Certain.
Why would anyone want to kiss
through a shower curtain?
"I wouldn't,"
she said.
She is not a
well-rounded character.
What a thin convention!
Thick with emotion
but no abstraction.
When you see it,
you shouldn't see anything.
The buttons are malfunctioning -
why, how, who, when, where;
incessant incessing.
Science is a discovery of
what you look for.
She came into the whirlpool wet.
Steve Dube
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horseshoecrabs
right, i am doing everything wrong
and while he has anxiety attacks in pennsylvania,
stopping to calm himself in alleyways,
stable on parked cars,
i fret in nyny
thinking "oh yes, there's nothing to do!"
"oh yes, that's right, there's nothing to say!"
i remember once i walked on a beach
somewhere, i don't know, in delaware or south
and there were horsecrabs all along
that moonsoaked fucking bay
so my friends and i are drunk by now
because parents are still in pa
and so we think
"save them!"
and we toss them, each one
back into that water
- the bigger ones are females and the smaller ones are male and i pulled my sweatshirt sleeve down over my hand (protection! their tails are sharp like fangs on roses) and afterwards it smelled always of salt -
they land with plops! and crashes! and booms!
or so it seemed
because i am tipsy on one bottle alone
still a little girl, yes! still little, so so young
but you do not do not DO NOT pull them apart
(each horseshoe remains)
if they are conjoined, two conjoined always, at their ends
they are mating
we stay quiet, we feel dirty and watch,
fascinated by nature working itself into a simple simple frenzy on the sand and stone near water, low tide
they stay conjoined forever
they've found their other half
(but this is idiocy, romantic notions and dumbdumbdumb!)
the bigger one, the female,
who will detach first and the male will wander off looking for algae or a rainbow,
who does not believe in finding other halves
because horseshoecrabs are not as foolish as humans,
she goes off to birth eggs and turn up on bayshores at midnightonepm so we can toss her, head first trail following into a
dark dark dark dark sea
so, were i a horseshoecrab, fighting my way at lowtide
and were i one of the oldest living creatures in the world
(because horseshoecrabs, you know, date back to prehistoric times)
i would find my anxious boy
leaning on parked snowed in cars in pa
shaking
and we would join backtoback for one moonsoaked night
fall apart when the deed is done
and then huge hands
just huge
huge hands
could come and sweep us up
sweatshirt covered hands that smell of salt
and we would be tossed
we would fly
we would sail airside
land with our plop, our crash, our boom
in cold cold dark dark sea bay
and there we would just
sink.
Emily Dufton
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Spring Issue
© 2003 the Minetta Review
All rights revert to the author upon publication.
ISSN 1065-9169