A Good Day
by Mark DeCarteret
to Jim Harrison
To live, I’ve been left blank
giving up on the idea of evil, mediocrity.
So, so much for the shoreline
or the hutch I’ve inherited from my parents
where I keep things I’ve collected there.
A blue die with its eye blackened out.
A piece of paper doubling as a swan.
A pink golf ball labeled “Can’t Miss.”
Why is it my poems have cheapened with time,
lapsed like snow while yours have been raised up,
said, with so many last breaths, are desire-less?
My sky is picked over. No stars
to rate what I’ve artfully clamored for,
no gods in the market for my emptied cart.
I’m growing sore from all this asking.
When the world doesn’t want what you have
you eat fast food, attract viruses. This is that.
But in your final clip, you are scratching
your ass against a plum blossom.
Bumming a cigarette off of the world.
Leaving nothing in the way of wine.
Free of shake-ups and cleanses and passwords
you resist the camera’s reassurances, ever-readiness,
and burn as only the fitfully sacred can.
Issa’s horse doesn’t know a brick
from a bible, a car alarm from a liberal,
doesn’t read into the rain, weep itself crib-sick or blind.
I’m waking startled like an immigrant uncle.
Incisions made in my head. My dreams missing.
But sharing this with the angels now —
what to do with this lack we’ve recreated?
mnemonic
by Charles Coe
It is sometimes necessary
to walk along a moonlit riverbank
barefoot, on the sodden strip
where water meets land,
to remind oneself
that something in the mud
remembers the stars.
Inventory
by Charles Coe
for the poets of Norfolk Correctional Institution
I tried, as a child, to keep track of certain things:
cracks in the sidewalk between the bus stop and school,
the names of streets between the bridge
and our family’s house,
toy soldiers lined up on a shelf
Now the list of things I’ve lost, or forgotten,
or thrown away, at times seems longer
than the list of what remains;
This feeling often visits, uninvited, late at night
when every breath is a footstep
measuring the miles till dawn.
But, this grey morning as I walked across the yard,
the sun suddenly shoved through the clouds
to warm my face,
and moments I received
a small, unexpected kindness.
This life is not the one I would have chosen.
But I will try to keep an open hand
for the gifts it spreads each day
across my path,
like Easter eggs hidden in the grass.
Dad
by Gerard Malanga
The laissez-faire of social norms
shaped the way a ’40s photograph looks normal for its time.
Its innocence abounds.
Its grit & grainy surfaces act as dreamy entrances
to what surprises, what astounds.
Cocteau once said, “Astonish me!”
And I’ve been true to form
on all fours home alone
imagining worlds & games I’d invented for myself to while the
time away
until my dad came home with not much else to say.
He barely spoke a word of English.
Yet his world was full of words mostly mispronounced until he
got them right,
until I also got them right
as early poems. My curiosity my compass. Each night
my dreams would lie awake until I closed my eyes.