This month, we’re pleased to bring you poems by contributors DAVID BARBER and DAVID LEHMAN.
Table of Contents
- From David Barber:
- “Raining Fish”
- “USERNAME”
- “Hell Box”
- From David Lehman:
- “When I Lived”
- “La Bella Desnuda”
David Barber (left), David Lehman (right). Photos courtesy of the authors.
RAINING FISH
By David Barber
Sometimes a small miracle, sometimes right on schedule.
Sometimes an omen, a screaming headline, a sign from above.
Sometimes a marvel of meteorology, the makings of a hypothesis.
Sometimes historical, sometimes supernatural, sometimes hearsay –
Sometimes a little bird tells someone it’s raining sprats on the isthmus.
Not just fish – sometimes showers of frogs, the odd lizard or elver.
Could be the waterspouts wham-bamming in from the Atlantic
behind the annual cloudbursts of minnows high in Yoro, Honduras
they call Lluvia de Peces, could be the answer to the fabled padre’s prayers
for manna to fall from the heavens to feed the poor folk of the uplands.
Could be dust-devils, a Biblical plague, a fish story. Could be something
from Pliny or Ripley, could be sometimes it’s coming down
catfish & dogfish, toads & snails in buckets, newts & smelts in torrents.
Could be all of the above, the end of the world but not as we know it.
USERNAME
By David Barber
Homer says my name means son of pain. Some sources favor
child of anger or man of constant sorrow. Others like to underscore
the double-edged semantics: to hate and to be hated or the one
who suffers and brings suffering. One theory holds that everyone
in my day would hear echoes of the roots they knew for wound
and thigh, a not-so-veiled allusion to the scar on my haunch from
the gash of a tusk as I slew the great boar on the boyhood hunt
that made my name. I suffered; I exacted suffering; thus I bore
the lifelong wound that nearly gave me away when I found
my way home in rags after ten years on the run. I suffered;
I unleashed suffering; I lived up to my name time after time,
like the time the monster told me to say my name, and I said
My name is Nobody. My mother and father call me Nobody. My men
call me Nobody. My noble name is Nobody. Nobody is my name.
HELL BOX
By David Barber
a receptacle into which a printer throws damaged or discarded type
In it all goes, rattle & clatter, right into the two-bit bin here by my side –
everything unprintable, unspeakable, unthinkable, anything sure to cut
to the quick, out with the lot now, every slur, every sling, every arrow
ever let fly in rancor or spite, all the cheap shots & sick jokes I spat out
or choked back, everything hateful that ever came out of my mouth
before it was washed out with soap, long past time when it was just
the bad or broken slugs of type still hot from the press that got tossed
in there, I wish, now it’s any dumbass crack or gas-lit shitpost from my lips
to the devil’s ears & every dirty little lie I’ve told about myself to pimp
myself out for any red cent & not just the words all bent out of shape
in crapped-out fuming lumps but the molten stuff of shame & animus
seething inside about to blow before I bite my tongue & not just to junk
it all, punk-clink, clink-punk, but to melt down the whole bloody mess
to see if I can spell out something a little less hellish before my ass is ash.
When I Lived
By David Lehman
When I lived on Arden Street,
I admired Eve Arden in Mildred Pierce.
When I lived on Chesterton Road,
I read G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday.
When I lived on Riverside Drive, facing west,
I blessed “The Lordly Hudson.”
When I lived on Valentine Place,
I wrote the poems assembled in Valentine Place.
When I lived on Waverly Place,
I did not read the Waverly novels of Sir Walter Scott.
When I lived on West End Avenue
I listened to Louis Armstrong and the West End Blues.
When I lived on Remington Road,
I pictured Ernest Hemingway’s portable typewriter.
La Bella Desnuda
By David Lehman
“. . .que te acuestes en mi oda” – Pablo Neruda, “Oda a la bella desnuda”
Beauty of the nude flesh first,
then the clothes she has shed,
the trail leading from couch to bed.
If she could sleep in my poem
the way she sleeps in my bed,
wearing nothing but the fragrance
of la bella desnuda, apples so ample,
hips that heed the imperative
of the race, oasis of curls below
the belly, torso like a violin
or cello, la chute de reins
the shape of a pear, I would write
that poem, and prepare
the bed where we shall lose the night.
David Barber’s fourth collection of poems, Naked, will be published at the end of the year by Northwestern University Press. He has worked as an editor, educator, critic, and journalist for more than thirty years. He writes on Substack at Postcards from the Volcano.
David Lehman won the 2025 New Criterion Poetry Prize for his book of sixty sonnets, Ithaca. His nonfiction books include The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets andSigns of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. For A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, he received the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP.
