by Ilya Kaminsky

They say so much sky in her chest addicted her.
They claim, with inappropriate laughter, she requested

to be locked in a bird house, refusing to believe in silence,
Sonya Barabinski goes to the Opera with chickens in her pockets.

She bites a hole in an apple and in that hole
she pours a shot of vodka.

She drinks from the apple in turn, to our health !
— just before her death — Sonya

announces: I will become a government musician
whispering: Better one of them should

die than one of us —
              in the chill and iron heart of cobblestone street every
woman she meets

comes forth to kiss her face.
Every mother buried just east of town, an honest place

to drown, quiet homegrown bodies
lie down.  Under this earth, she is no less blessed.

Those still alive must raise their hands.
She sets off for the beach, on foot, a good mile

and a half of wind,
a vodka glass in her pockets, and when the bottle is empty

she drops her striped dress and walks, her mouth open, into the sea.
“Boatswain, I am your daughter !  I let this water

fill my lungs’ whisper: boatswain, I am your pregnant daughter.”

by Ilya Kaminsky

To live, as the great book commands,
is to love.  Such love is not enough ! —

the heart needs a little foolishness !
So I fold the newspaper, make a hat.

I pretend to Sonya that I am the greatest poet
and she pretends to believe it —

my Sonya, her stories and her beautiful legs
her stories and legs that open other stories !

And I say: a human being
understands the universe: its music

makes us foolish.  I see my future: a yellow raincoat,
a sandwich, a piece of tomato between my teeth,

I raise my infant daughter to the sky —
I am singing as she pisses

(Old fool, my wife laughs)
on my forehead and my shoulders !

by George Quasha

The space between me and what I touch breathes freer today.
It’s possible now to say what keeps saying itself.
Ask my hand, it knows the other way home.

Things talk in the dark.
I say what I hear.
Fear fails to fill the gap.

Grief forgets to be a boat floating on its happiness.
No one tells need but it needs to tell.
Cut loose, the trail is following.

Take it personally like everything.
Speak only to yourself as everyone hears trees.
Any angle opens the world from the beginning.

by George Quasha

1                                  on the pale trail of the pores on fire

Speaking with chilies in your mouth produces gustatory sweating. Think wild of
stones.

The poem finds itself resisting reading.
Heat back.  Return to the sensible center’s facing the flame.

If there’s one sure thing it’s imbalance in denial.
Reading suffers the ledge to tone down silence.

2                                                      optimizing the inaccessible

Suck on her braid to abrade the tongue.
She teaches me to sit in landslide glory.

Lift your lips off the words and they run straight to me, she said. Maxims magnify
unsayable into optimal minimal.

And if the long – sought free point can’t access beyond ?
The hand writing races the line to end before bending back.

3                                  as one sense dulled the heart grew wider

Surfing surfaces like licking lips backtrack to tell their tale.
There’s no reading the same line twice.

Turning tables torque like facing faces.
Relax, there’s not much danger of a counterfeit free point.

Swallowing between words may yet sweat out the endorphins. Delphine
hormones predict the titillated tissue.

4                                                      fire burns where it is

Look, the edgy boulder is contemplating its swivel.
And rolling stones release their tones.

The same line differs from itself to protect you from your mind, Pray for
spontaneous opinion combustion.

Her focusing mouth speaks hereunder steaming up the gaze. Dolphins, words, the
hot thought hearing the clearing cracks.