What do poets write about? Love, nature, God, death– the easiest answers, but easy for a reason. While these themes run through most (perhaps all?) poems, including the ones in this issue of The Last Romantics, there are certain subjects we are not so used to reading about in poetry. They are too political, too uncomfortable, too able to be taken the wrong way.
These are largely poems written about difficult things– a soldier facing death, terrorism, the frightening guises religion can take. Things we might read about in the news, but not necessarily in poetry. As these writers ask through their poems, why not?
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Gilderic
Islam
The food cart on Broadway and 14th
shuts down at a prime hour
because the owner unfolds his prayer rug.
Prostrate, towards Mecca –
no one spits or smirks,
everyone notices in the New York way,
shiftily, under eyelashes.
I’m interested, engaged, curious, proud
of the man who trusts Islam,
quietly performing his religion
for us to judge.
He rolls the rug up again
and cleans the charred meat
off the stove.
I knew a boy once:
Pakistani, Muslim, a secret jihadist
who actually knew the meaning of the word.
He wrote us a poem about our fear,
about Allah and the TSA, and we cheered.
I nodded my head as he chanted the rhythm.
Together we competed in the winter months,
forgot each other over summer.
until the closing dip of August.
We rose once, twice –fell
seventeen, eighteen, nineteen times.
Cyclic.
We spoke Hinglishdu over the telephone –
Hindi, Urdu, a bit of English for me –
I had a bad accent.
He sang Sufi poetry in my ear
and I tried admitting things,
like love,
hanging up every time.
On a deep winter’s night he arrived.
I lay on the bed,
showing an expanse of leg.
“Am I pretty?”
He shut his eyes,
mentioned a noose in his closet
and the pills from his parents’ cabinet
and how he couldn’t because of God.
We told the truth, half-way,
with jealousies only half understood.
He argued only to argue; I left unimpressed.
Still sometimes he dug into me
like dirty toes into a child’s sand castle.
The Koran was his mace,
chain and cane.
I think he cried.
I sobbed, struggled,
and he hated it until I stopped
telling him to leave it.
But he is gone, perhaps floundering
in that same religion somewhere.
I could not preach if he pleaded.
On 14th and Broadway, a third man collects
four hundred and eight pennies for halal.
The food cart owner smiles, says,
“It’s alright,” and touches his mat.
Eshani Medha
New York University
***
MIA
You were probably dumped behind
a tree in [ ]—no one knows.
You might’ve spent your last hours
of darkness in a foxhole.
While you squatted, your wife
patted empty space
beside her.
You might’ve felt the napalm
and imagined your boys, like
father like son chasing each other
with sparklers on the Fourth.
You might’ve seen sparks twist
a wet jungle into an inferno, brighter
than the Olympic torch. You might’ve
missed the sprinters on TV.
You were probably racing your fate,
watching your sergeant on
his knees, flayed arms in
the air, uttering defeated prayers,
as his back was ruptured by bullets.
You, too, were probably shocked with
shrapnel, left to burn like the leaves
she’ll burn in the fall.
As your hollowed chest rose and sank,
you might’ve wished you said,
Don’t wait up.
You most likely fell from that Hell
while they tossed in fitful sleep.
When they opened their eyes,
they didn’t know yours
were left as empty sockets.
Erin Dakas
Allegheny College
***
Portrait of Charles Bukowski in the Tub
The choral, wet room recalls her legs, her ass
Compressed tonalities of jasmine and semen;
God in heaven who inhabits my hell and sits
On the toilet seat, watching me shave and remember.
The abstraction of my death dissolves a rich presence
Of patchouli and smegma on the uncurtained window.
My hatred unfurls the fiddlehead: my impotence
Gets up and lopes across the stage, hands on crotch.
The higher the foam of the yeast, the sweeter the bread.
I exhale till the bathtub becomes a mirror.
Mary Catherine Kinniburgh
University of Virginia
***
Vanitas, Birds on Fire
What the children saw on 9/11
Birds on fire leaping out of the black
metal-jagged mouth full of arid breath
and into the open sky,
their clean white wings, now singed,
pumping against the air that heaved from below,
until the flames died into ash
and drifted down like snow.
At first, they flailed
flipped, wings buckled tight
in fear. But once
they regained their balance,
their tiny bodies spread
slow as syrup–
And for a moment,
in that lonely ten-second plunge,
they were suspended,
air-thirsty,
soaring, unended.
“They escaped,” the children said,
“they got out alive.”
Abbey Harris
University of Virginia
***
Snow
With my work done,
and a room full of all the things it took me a lifetime to buy,
and the general terror of having nothing to do,
I started walking and got to the park
and, desperate, asked the girls on the swings
Is there something naturally more authentic
about childhood?
They looked to the tallest,
strong-eyed and blonde, to respond:
Not in the sense you’re using it. Childhood is something you invented when you stopped being excited about finding yourself. It has no meaning to us.
Really?
The one in the middle became frustrated:
You think we have a sense of purpose, one purer than yours, but we simply don’t. I don’t need a reason to be excited for tomorrow. Maybe you do, but that’s not our problem.
I nodded:
I think I do.
Oh! The eyes of the 3rd girl
ballooned. It’s supposed to
snow tomorrow!
At this they rushed back
into the excitement their age demands,
and I understood that this was my cue.
Next morning I got up to watch,
and imagined trying to explain it to a little boy.
Is the sky falling apart?
Yes. But look,
it’s becoming something new on the grass.
Torsten Odland
Columbia University