by Jack Myers

The smart ones think
they can climb
with their brains.

The talented ones
slide halfway up
without trying.

Those who merely feel
deeply drown
in their own syrup.

But the quiet girl
from Bangladesh
who fled here alone

reads her poem
about a tea party
she had as a child.

She fills each cup
with tiny white flowers
then re-paints her
imaginary guests’
chipped red fingernails red.

by Jack Myers

Immaculate white swans float in the river’s
fishless dishwater like squat question marks.

Under the huge stone buildings,
looking like sunken wedding cakes,
lovers kiss long and slow as if growing
shells of longing over themselves,

as if dreariness decided to imagine them
as pink and purple petals of amnesia
growing out of something long and terrible.

At dinner, a waitress charges me $10
for a bottle of water without blinking,
as if cost could be a ladder out of loss.

Next morning on the tram a well-dressed man
whose eyes are all white gets up.  Then his wife,
who is also blind takes his arm, and they get off.
I close my eyes to feel what it is like to be her
and follow the sound of tapping our way home.

I’ve set the camera to snap a picture of me
under a portico of gods and caryatids.  I have
no idea where I am.  But I could never be from here.
Then again I think, why not?  I’m always tying to catch up to
where I’m at.  I’ve always felt I can’t be where I’m from.

by Joanne Kyger

The next morning the Buddha puts on
his new robe and walks into town

No one notices him
but he notices all
around him

C’s new poems
make me too anxious to read them
all the way through
Feel like being a sucker all over again?

Why not, if you like to suffer . . .
Which I hate so much . . .  hate suffering so much

that I suffer.  And it isn’t the little children
coming unto me, either.  It’s more like

idolatry of fucked up emotions.
The lovely little screwed up pieces of ‘peace’
from the factions of religious ‘entitlement’.

Look, here’s another bomb to tear your heart out —
made right in your financial backyard.

Why are you so angry all the time?

— because it’s better to be quiet
emotionally

a profile of dependency
on the shadow
of a new robe

by Joanne Kyger

You have to give Everything you have
ALL THE TIME}
not just some of the time
Put everything you have into it
and then go outside and rest

It’s fear or pain that drive one to quit
those tiresome addictions

and this so called ‘strength’
of character is supposed
to bloom
like a lotus in the muddy footprints
of the past

A sick feeling
that the boredom of repetition
might be over.

It’s three o’clock