By L. S. KLATT
my mother died, & I
was moth, my body
alert with warning
coloration. Instar,
I cut myself
out & started
again. I couldn’t
possibly have been
Atlas, colossal,
camouflaging
By MERYL ALTMAN
—after Pindar, Olympian Ode #1
Water is best; and gold, which shines like fire
burning at night, says this is a very rich man
like nothing else does; and when you need
an image for the thrill of victory, what could be
stronger than the sun? there can, one supposes,
be poems about the moon, or a good loaf of bread,
but no one searches the empty daytime sky
for any fainter star when the sun is shining;
We watch the trees the way we watch the birds,
sitting more quietly than we have to,
though trees do not respond to sudden motion,
a crossing fox, a knock on the window,
or anything less momentous than the day.
My freedom is not
to answer the phone
or open the door. I don’t care
if I’m not liked anymore.
I’m free to be that, disliked, to sweat
to be that—take flight, from like or dislike.
Aphrodite was whipped from the sea, spun from the foam of Oranos / Uranus.
In science class, I’m laughing at Uranus / your anus. Now, I’m cornered in timeout.
He wants me when I’m fresh, for my curves. He wants me when I’m fermented,
for my composting capabilities. I can grow something made from him.
But the daughter would be born with the worms, and it doesn’t take much for
worms to molt into Medusan snakes. Aphrodite was worshiped as a goddess
—for Joseph O. Legaspi
And when you whispered under your mask, I don’t think I can stand these two young lovers, bright as the low winter sun shining through the dingy subway car windows, I knew what you meant: maskless, giggling, boy holding girl by the waist, taking selfies on a gray seat made for two. We sat across, letting their tenderness reflect on us: her back to his chest making a hearth of their bodies while the train snakes its turn over the elevated tracks. Hi-rises loom over gentrified streets, the graffitied walls, a sign for $0.99 pizza—how old neighborhoods create a new belonging. Nothing jostles these two as they attend to their own happiness, not the train’s hard lurch, its rumble and squeal, this couple at the beginning of their desires, you turning to me with your brown eyes in the day’s last light as we approach our final stop.
Your speech
tongue in cheek, like descriptions of cocktails
in this bar full of handsome strangers
who won’t meet my eye
To say you cannot stand inside the sky and still see its blue
is a way of understanding longing. But here in Penne-d’Agenais,
my favorite lesson doesn’t hold: step over the threshold and
you are all in, Hail Queen in Latin exclaiming from its underside
above a carousel of vibrant glass. It isn’t ancient, but it is pleasing
for a Sunday. Nor is it really a basilica—just a church no one troubles
to diminish. Our guide jabs his thumb at the confessional smiling, and
I mime looking at my wrist, mouth, How much time do they have?
Nothing is very beautiful. They say it’s where a shepherd sheltering
in the ruins prayed for a goat and one appeared. Our pilgrimage is
for foie gras and wine. All day I think of how last week when I left
someone, I turned and they were still there waving. Of Plath writing,
The train leaves a line of breath. In truth, I’m desperate for a world I can
touch: limestone dissolving along the cave’s joints, parched earth that
extends the salvia’s roots. Not even we would exist without constraints.
The last time we saw each other, we had sex in the extra room then
made the bed to look untouched. You smoothed your hand over it like a
benediction. I crossed into the open air, your eyes flints of mica through
the glass. The far / Fields melt my heart. I would have left my whole body
there. Would scatter what was left over the plush acres of tobacco in
the Lot-et-Garonne, over the cherry trees hung low with fruit, to know
how it would feel to love this wildly, without purpose, and be forgiven.
Michelle Lewis is the author of Animul/Flame and the forthcoming Spare. Her poetry has appeared in places like Bennington Review, Indiana Review, Copper Nickel, Hunger Mountain, and Denver Quarterly.
By ALAN BAER, CARLIE HOFFMAN, CAMPBELL MCGRATH, and FARAH PETERSON.
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