daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
After Midnight
Sometime after midnight
Han Shan drifted down
a mountain path
and arrived in my dream
only to announce
that every angel is terrifying
also that heron you saw
by the muddy pond
was not real.
You, reader,
may believe this or not.
Han Shan said
that he does not
though he spoke
such words
to me
as if
they were his own.
_________________
Michael Palmer
Little Elegies for Sister Satan
New Directions, 2021
The Afterlife of Paper
the last best love is language in the mouth
the last best hope for joy doesn't forget
a besting sensation
the last stranger blooming on the tongue
a compass rose blooming internally
laying down track
riding the rails
wake unto me
_____________________
Peter Gizzi
Now It's Dark
Wesleyan 2020
U F O
A kite from another world arrives
Bearing another lonely dream
_______________
Lao Yang
Pee Poems
Circumference Books
2016
translations by
Joshua Edwards
Lynn Xu
Honky-Tonk Sonnet
Before cancer, I was a country.
Now—, I’m a fucking country
Song: job gone, house gone,
Wife diagnosed w/ Post-Traumatic Stress—
I’m missing more organs
Than a looted church.
Even my dog’s been repossessed!
Know what I got left?
2 years. The lifespan
Of an average rat. My wife’s therapist
Tells me I can use this time to find
Out who I really am. Lord help me Jesus,
I’ve wasted it, so/help me Jesus,
I know what I am: squeak.
_______________
Jay Hopler
Still Life
McSweeney's, 2022
‘Were that we all had lived together’
Were that we all had lived together
under one roof
without separate kitchens—
grandfather, great aunt,
father, uncle, siblings—
and remained in
the same neighbourhood.
Grass lives next to grass,
mud next to mud,
and in the wind live
storms, hurricanes,
and scent-laden gusts.
Unbroken, without knots,
the earth’s wind is one
with our breathing.
_________________________
Vinod Kumar Shukla
(with ever thanks to
Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
who sent the poem to me
from India this morning)
“College” was first published in English in Blue Is Like Blue (2019), a collection of Vinod Kumar Shukla’s stories translated by Mehrotra and Rai, by HarperCollins India.
WHEREAS:
YOU KNOW this street, you're safe, but
somehow the hushed houses, tilting
trees, bent shadows look unfamiliar.
You find your apartment, approach
the door, a chatty neighbor kid
trailing you. But your key, it doesn't
fit the lock. Maybe you don't live
here, says the kid. You try another
door, and this time —relief—the key
slides right in. You notice all the lights
are on, Frank Sinatra's voice purring
in the living room. Did you leave
music on? says the annoying kid.
In the bathroom, there's a young
woman in white scrubs. She's tending
three bodies on stretchers. Still
bodies—much too still. Who
are you? you demand.
Sanan, she replies. But I live here,
you declare, pushing the hardness
of the fact in her placid face.
Not now you don't, she states.
In the basement, you tell your story
to a cop, who nods politely.
When you begin to shout,
he gently places an open hand
on your chest. It feels like a bird,
warm and fragile. I'll look into it,
the cop tells you. Which stirs
more anger. Upstairs,
in the bathroom, you hear Sanan
tell one of the patients, Don't worry.
This place is now ours.
___________________
John Bradley
Dear Morpheus, The Glue That Is You
Dos Madres Press, 2023
from The Feeling Sonnets
49.
Some say poetry is already translation.
Thought worded, bordered and ordered. Incorrect.
The word is its own reward in poetry. It reigns over itself.
It is sovereign. The word is weird. It is foreign.
Poetry is when you don't understand the language.
When you don't understand, you stand under. You listen.
What you don't understand is poetry.
What you understand is translation.
Is that true. Or is it just poetry.
If it were true would it be just translation.
"The doubt that is not doubted is not the ever-fixed doubt."
I am reading a study of Laozi, which positions his lines as
propositions.
Is there a poetry of propositions.
Is there a poetry where words don't contradict each other.
________________
Eugene Ostashevsky
The Feeling Sonnets
New York Review of Books
2022
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