Poem

Advice on Nighttime Caregiving

Know the bulk of night

will be sleepless and embrace it

with the weariest part of yourself.

 

Nothing but bitter tea will do,

steeped too long as you pour

another glass of water

 

another mouth will drink,

as you console another crying

child who values sleep

 

on different terms,

as you — deep in the black

hour when familiar constellations

 

wend into a strange topography —

walk the dog who will thank you

without language: she who eats

 

white clover by night,

sniffling through dark

grass sweetened with dew.

 

Now sleep or wake — let go

of what you hold. The untouched

tea is as cool as morning.

— Benjamin Cutler

Benjamin Cutler is the recipient of the Susan Laughter Meyers Poets Fellowship and the author of The Geese Who Might be Gods.

Poem

Skipping

Walking my heart (good boy!) after lunch,

suddenly my bored step hitches, stutters,

propels me firmly up and forward, and look,

I’m skipping, I’m skipping, I’m skipping

like I haven’t in over half a century, one foot

then the other bouncing lightly on its ball,

springing my dull earthbound body along

like a rock across water, lightly touching down,

like a cantering horse on the verge of a gallop,

a syncopated gait that swings my arms out

for balance like the girls’ when I was a kid

but so what, I let hands and hips sashay,

lost my partner, what’ll I do, skip to my Lou,

my darling heart leaping in my lifted chest

as I dance on down the sidewalk, double-time.

— Michael McFee

Poem

Snap the Whip

          Winslow Homer (1872)

You know the game: everybody

runs hard as they can, holding hands,

and then the boy on the near end

suddenly stops, sets his feet hard

against the ground, and the others

swing, like a gate made of children,

swinging faster the farther out,

fighting centrifugal force now

to keep from being flung away,

flung out of the sudden circle

this line of children has become

a radius of, and those farthest

out have to hang on for dear life.

What saves them is how tight they and

their friends can hold on, and for how

long. The farthest from the center

need the strongest friends.

— Millard Dunn

Millard Dunn is the author of
Places We Could Never Find Alone.

Poem

On an Okra Flower

On an Okra Flower

A pollinating wasp sliding

from white lip to purple darkness, 

the shadow-heart so deep inside,

the plant, itself, tall African

in the kitchen garden’s last row,

speaks of passage and endurance,

those far too common abstractions,

made real here in the summer heat.

Let it lead us, serve as a guide,

tell how each struggle leads to bliss

and what to bless when we decide

to see the past and present blend

into what we need to know

—a mind aware or in a trance?—

what to keep close, what to shun,

made real here in the summer heat.

What song can a wasp sing gliding

the flower’s dark throat? A long kiss

like winged tongues tangled deep inside—

a blind passion, an obsession.

I hear it as a prayer now,

music for the world’s whirling dance.

Sound, sight and scent. An orison

made real here in the summer heat.

— Paul Jones

Poem

Map Fragment, on Clay

Who first thought of scratching here and there

on soft clay, instead of only giving

directions, must have wanted to keep close

the shape of all that lay between himself

and someone whose absence turned regular days

and nights into a vast terra incognita, a blank

that his mind filled with terrifying beasts, winged

serpents, who sang of other courses, other

islands, other ways. If he drew the place

he knew, and those distant places he thought

he knew, he could touch the map where she was

and say to himself, without leaving home,

if she is not here, she is there.

— Millard Dunn

Millard Dunn is the author of Places We Could Never Find Alone

Poem

I Swear

This won’t hurt.

I’ll always love you.

You’re perfect.

I do. I will.

I didn’t. It wasn’t —

You’ve got it all wrong.

I only want what’s best for you.

This will be good for both of us.

Nothing can be done.

You’ll never change.

It wasn’t my fault.

I’m only trying to help.

No one’s to blame.

It will be better soon.

— Debra Kaufman

Poem

Beige Wall Telephone, 1960s

Beige Wall Telephone, 1960s

To you who have never known what it is to be tethered

     to the family’s one phone by a corkscrew cord

          filthied by idle fingers twisting it as we talked

and stretched by our efforts to sneak with the handset

away from the dining room where that cheap plastic box

     clung to the wall, my sister and I desperate

          to hide behind curtains or in a nearby room

and mumble dumb endearments to whichever lucky soul

we had a crush on that week: I won’t say how wonderful

     it felt to hear a call’s unexpected tremolo

          and rush to answer that sudden summons,

lifting the receiver’s heavy curve out of its metal hook,

or to dial seven numbers on a whirring analog wheel

     and hear a distant ringing pulse in the ear,

          knowing that actual bells trilled as a body

moved through space to deliver its hopeful Hello? –

no, it was awful, that phone, intended for businesses,

     brisk standing exchanges of information,

          not a home where its too-public anchoring

left adolescent siblings open to each other’s mockery

and the cocked ears of nosy parents straining to decode

     one side of conversations as we curled closer

          to the wall and whispered words downward

into the darkness that our huddling made, not pacing

like a barking dog chained to a stake in the backyard

     but trying our best to vanish, descending

          slow as a diver sipping words like oxygen

from a humming line whose other end kept us breathing.

— Michael McFee, from We Were Once Here,
Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2017

Poem

Pairing Mantids

He has only one job to do. And she, with her hunger,

her need to feed the future without him by consuming him,

has a lot to get done before winter.

His head tilts slightly, like a sinner at communion,

like a teen expecting his first kiss to be like lightning.

Then his body starts to do the work it was built to do.

She turns toward him and wipes off his face.

He knows it’s all over, but his body keeps on, unknowing itself.

His is the kind of stupid happiness

you can only appreciate at a distance,

the kind you know cannot be as good as it looks.

Hers is the work of duty and a different devotion.

While he takes her from behind, she takes him

head first just like she took a yellow striped hornet

who would have taken her to his own hideaway,

just as she took the grasshopper who was tired of summer,

as she took the large green moth who had no mouth of its own.

She ignored those magnificent wings — just let them fall —

as she ignores the thrusting body that falls away from hers.

He dies two deaths at once, the deaths of love and of life.

But the moment between, the moment before it all ends,

is the moment of his glory and the beginning of her toil.

— Paul Jones

Paul Jones is the author of What the Welsh and Chinese Have in Common

Poem

Greyhound

Every year for one summer week we fled city concrete,

our skinned and scarred bony legs climbing steel bus steps.

Our mother shaking her head at the zoomorphic use

of a racing dog she believed was grossly falsified, sighing:

Why they would put a fast dog on this slow-ass bus is beyond me!

The driver collecting tickets always shook his head back,

not for the misleading hound, but the long night ahead —

a sundown that commenced crying fights, the lap feast

of cold fried chicken and bread slices, head balancing acts

of sleep upright. All to get down home, a foothill

in the blue ridge mountains where we stepped off

into a morning and the arms of our grandmother

who’d say: My you’ve grown. How was the ride? Who’d boast

she rode the mule-pulled tractor to the schoolhouse in snow.

— Crystal Simone Smith

(From the book All the Songs We Sing, celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Carolina African American Writers’ Collective published by the Blair/Carolina Wren Press.)

Poem

What It Was about that First Marriage

The floors were fine. Gorgeous,

in fact. Blond as sunshine, clean,

polished, alive with the kind of promise

we had dreamed. But oh those two

mismatched tables. Same height,

so we kept trying to line them up

as if they were a unit. One was maple,

right out of somebody’s 1950s Nebraska kitchen, with a scalloped leaf that folded down,

though it was years before we saw it

for what it was. The other, streamlined,

sleek. Once we tried pushing them together

and covering both with a patterned cloth, though dinner guests kept banging their knees. When I look back, I’m amazed

we didn’t toss it, haul it to the curb.

But, no, we struggled for years

to make it work, painting,

and painting again, turning it sideways.

— Dannye Romine Powell