By TINA CANE
Today’s lively experiment was supposed to be about the virtues of olive oil
and the simple yet sumptuous lifestyle of Italian nonnas maximizing their wellness
by just being themselves but no sooner had I embraced the integrity of handmade
bucatini and a schmatta than did my mind migrate towards questions about the source
of self-regard and whether there really are any self-evident truths
I was in my car
It’s minus forty outside, and on Baba Lena’s glassed-in balcony the towels have dried stiff and I stand them up on the couch like snow cranes flying north and breathe in their frozen freshness. On a warm winter day of minus twenty Celsius, we could go buy ice cream. Rita wanted to come to Baba Lena’s too, but she is in the hospital. When we have a cold, mama makes us breathe hot steam from boiled potatoes, but Rita leaned too close and scalded her throat and her voice is gone and it hurts so much she can’t even swallow.
I would happily trade places with her if I could have Aleksey as my best friend.
bird song laced the particulate air
wind emptied the pines of their whistle
a cloud roamed aimless arriving somewhere
the creek lapped away at its trestles
I don’t know what this means.
It’s just before 8, and my darling
cat pounced behind the recycling mound
and emerged with a mouse. She carried
it up to my room to begin her dirty work,
the quest to kill without wounding,
We wanted to say goodbye to the world we knew
so we drove the coastline north from Miami
as far as we could go. It was a farewell tour,
sure, but farewell to what? Not the ocean,
looming daily out the right-hand window,
not the water but what the water would erase.
Farewell to Florida, nipped in the bud, cheeky
and self-satisfied as a sun-worshipping infant—
goodbye, little baby Florida, goodbye!
Goodbye to Ocracoke and old Saint Simon,
Virginia Beach and Fire Island, goodbye
to all those literal-minded municipalities—
Surf and Ocean and Atlantic Cities—tossed up
like flotsam along that waterlogged littoral.
Six weeks and thousands of meandering miles later
we found ourselves at a picnic table outside
the Chowder Hut in Meat Cove, Nova Scotia,
where the final stretch of tire-rutted gravel
gives up the ghost: end of the road, folks.
By KAS BERNAYS
her voice crackled like a distress signal
interrupted as she told me
how in the bright haze
halfway between borders
and their certainties
the engine’s faltering stutter
had drowned under her daughters’ wails
and all desperation had coiled
into the kick of her unborn son
By DIANE MEHTA
You can’t risk too much Jenga in a lift
but when you leave her, put your foot down,
exit to the steady earth we merely balance on—
you risk collapse, your knife-edge youth
retracts while you are full of spirit and mistakes.
By SHARON DOLIN
—after Rilke
Yours, still the hardest face to see—
even the mirror lies, with your image
in reverse. To see into your life
you must look into the life of things:
take this brass candelabra shaped
into a circular set of stairs that,
when lit, sees into you, seizes
hold of your brokenness and
shows you all growth starts
with a wound. Think of the earth
in spring, split open by green shoots.
By JOHN POCH
I try to wish the best for him, our rival. His lines which really amount to nothing, the phrases that his readers fawn over, “I’m here for it” or “What a time” or even single words he uses as lines like “Fair” or “Same” or “Cheers”… I shouldn’t let them get to me. He even rhymes Halloween/Thirteen in a sonnet called “Hell.” People have come to treasure the expected, lavishing praise on the nice and cute, but that is not poetry. Is there something else to it, or is it just a minor cult of personality, the same way cheerleaders are chosen? Those readers who believe in him are the ones who don’t believe in absolute truths so allow fiction in their nonfiction willy-nilly. Gossips, they know little poetry or even of poetry. They fancy themselves naturalists and italicize it. They are educators rather than teachers.
I gotta buy a cake for my kid.
Some kind of ice cream jamboree from J.P. Licks down in West Roxbury.
She’s gonna be 20.
When you are a parent, you just keep buying cakes for your kids.
You could be 80 and she’s 60
and still you head on out to Carvel in New Rochelle, Webster Avenue,
and get her the Fudgie the Whale 12-inch
even if you have diabetes and two busted kneecaps.
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