Missing In Action: October/November 2011

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

September 2011 : Ferment the Bitter Rednesses

It’s about time we had a poem about Facebook. And Da Vinci. And eels.

Strange relationships exist in our poems this month, where Leonardo is propositioned for his hair, online “relationships” are called out for all their absurdness, and Rimbaud is invoked on a porch somewhere on every college town’s 14th street.

Rimbaud, young seer, addled genius, may be the best way to guide us into these strange and wonderful poems. In the voice of a vessel taken by the sea in the long poem “The Drunken Boat,” from which this issue takes its title, Rimbaud writes  :

“And from that time on I bathed in the Poem
Of the Sea, star-infused and churned into milk,
Devouring the green azures; where, entranced in pallid flotsam,
A dreaming drowned man sometimes goes down;

Where, suddenly dyeing the bluenesses, deliriums
And slow rhythms under the gleams of the daylight,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than music
Ferment the bitter rednesses of love!”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user harrymoon

…fermentent les rousseurs amères de l’amour !

 

 

Drunk on a Patio

to Rimbaud

Little chimp, I picture you in a wardroom—filled with kaleidoscopes of pragmatism—where you dwell with practicality of unsuspected longevity. This room floats through the hollow confine of my cranium like DNA caught in a gypsy-vision dance. Certain slang has polished my facets; the charisma of language has cast a sham across my endless facade. The phlebitis swimming in me swells with excitement, ready to rupture—& with that it brings an everlasting influx of mongooses & matter. Now influenza haunts me within this wild wrack where I experience no civility from mammals. But at least, respected by you, strange chimp, I am overcome by my own afflatus—
Little chimp, in my eyes it can all be reduced to your musical physique.

Conley Lowrance
University of Virginia

***

shedding season

this is the skin wake, this is the blood month,
this is when we cast our foreheads to the horizon
and hope we don’t find remnants of ourselves
in the buckets we take home at night,
heavy with bait.
the moon rises, unsure if it’s a reflection of
itself, lost, as ever, in the
waters it beleaguered out of existence,
the flow we regulate with an unconscious regret.
the eels rush with damnation; if their
tails flicker then the cycle begins again,
the rivers gushing into themselves too full.
their eyes are so much
like ours, some have said, but the dead
possess no pupils and what is it to be
seeing if your body is nothing but a conductor?
these grim conduits,
they make sense in what they do.
at night we sprinkle their tended river
over our hat brims, lending us their prophecy.

someone has to take ownership of this:
the eels extricate themselves from the turbines
steady as degradation,
shucked of their skins,
ripped from their own irascibility.
their hearts too, we whisper,
are so like ours.
red, they are panting in our hands,
our leather gloves now flumed with scales.
after the damage left the eels bare and gasping,
we find the water boiler overheated and bubbling.
that’s how they fell from the heavens, too,
a riot of unjawed turbulence.
how is it that we can love their beauty, now
that we’ve seem them without their selves on?
Emma Backe
Vassar College

***

Sammie B.

Broken butterfly wings cling to and sing from
the fabric you’ve use to patch the holes in your heart.

The souls of your bare feet
share beats with your holy heart
and they dance like shooting stars
on the rooftops of love and loss.
No one moves like you do.

I see childhood when I look in your eyes,
and the shine from your smile
writes raw across my mind’s sky
in a language I was born to read.

I can’t help but smile back
when I look between the lines
and find all the little things I lost
in the fire.

Things like crayons.

and face paint.

Like wide-eyed excitement.

I wanna jump up and down again
and mean it.

I wanna pretend to fly again,
and believe it.

Jacob Moeller
University of Arizona

***

Da Vinci in San Francisco

Did you step off a train, mister?
No. Who invented these slopes?

He murmurs incessantly
Passing the edge of speech
He is
Where the Venn diagram of man and woman mesh
A hybrid
Bathed in crinkled white fabric
Ensconced in viscous skin.

You goin’ my way, sugar?
Which way is that?
Does it point towards the sun?
You got lovely hair,
So long and precious
I’ll bet there’s a nice dime in it for ya

He drinks black coffee with mild distaste
From a deli open till 4 am
He does not pay
The cashier asks,
What are you?
I am a memorandum of skies
I trickle down sparingly
But with impeccable precision.

Jessica Kagansky
New York University

***

A  Devil in Facebook

A matrix of visible brain escape
coddled college kids
seeking physical reciprocity
transient
randomized
she opened his chest in plain range
divulging his world.
high school nobodies desperate for somebody
connect through electric
hookups
verse turns into the perverse
a computer routine
embezzles
free time
hunker down in lonely spaces
reassuring detachment.
Facebook pages to fill a
Facebook bestseller.
an encyclopedia of disjointed intelligence
associating lives that shouldn’t be bridged
unzipping the past that should’ve kept zipped
a breeding ground for self-indulgence

I don’t care what you ate for dinner.

posting pictures of homemade carbonara
doesn’t make you cultured
or intriguing.
updating your line to fit to size
to air day to day affairs with a fan–
page request,
If Jesus is your savior, click Like!

Marisa Roman
Florida International University

***

bilge, coming up

my boss, my chief, my lieutenant.
oh, oh, oh woe! can’t you hear?
can’t you hear my siren cry?
does my crooked bow and broken
arrow not strike your heart as
your words did mine? i feel that
the maritime stage, with crescendos and
high strung high notes and characters
all have a new story, a new language,
a different soul to give to the rest of us.
yours gave to me a specifically bombastic
tone, a shrill cry of sad desperation and anger
and angst and admiration. a concerto for
my confusion, you wrote, how stupidly beautiful.
forget me and i will remember you fondly.
pianopiano, my heart falls like a wet feather into a dry well.

Daryoush Saber Motamedi
Gallatin of New York University

Rend open the heat: April/May 2011

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

H.D., “Heat”

 Contributing writers: Carlyn Attman, Candace Myers,  Katie Longofono, Jesse Saldana, Matt Conover

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jimmedia

 

Archetype of My Mother

You—turned wheat field wispy and
bowed against me as I screamed for you to
let me eat, my tongue dry, white-cracked.

So I bent you lower and your wrists sunk
and your face was covered earth,
worms swam heartily in your ears. All you
could hear was their swish swish and glub.

From off your back I could pull on branches and pick
apples crisp is my palms and you said
nothing though a raven spoke to me on your behalf. He said
It is not your turn to live.
And so I shot the raven, with poison apple seeds and
he decomposed beside you.

As I ate my mouth filled out with warm air and
my own, sweet, blood. My breasts rounded through the wind
ripples lapping my skins—I cried, then, and looked down to see that

you were not sinking, but singing, loping through the meadow,
harvesting wheat for our family to make three whole loaves of your
brimming honeybread.

Around your waist was a rope made of
braided sun and riverwater. It was tied, I saw, to the whistling
raven who was much larger now, and much more like man,
with two strong legs and a greying beard.  And the
rope didn’t end there. Behind the raven was your own mother and
the doctors you once knew and know and your father too, waving
merrily to me though we had met but once.

I dropped the apples from my arms so they might
land and grow trees themselves, and with my open palms felt my belly.
It was warm like your shoulders under the arches of my feet.

I stepped down, all barefoot in the meadow mud and laughed,
and you laughed too. Your eyes shone oceans filled
with sea glass and crystals the two of us, there,
floating easily on a raft made of your
head strong smiles and my belly laughs,
all rising and falling with the tidal sea—

Carlyn Attman
Vassar College

***

Summer

I think of the summer of our contentment:
Lilies blazed waist high –burnt umber and orange–
bronzed by summer heat.  And hummingbirds,
like jewels, cut the air with wing-buzz like honeybees
and posed, almost still, to suck sugar suspended ruby-red
in mid-air. Wind-chimes and your voice, still with us
in the summer as the heat-haze lay heavy with rose-scent
and we basked unknowing you would leave
and take the summer.
I can’t find the flowers and the birds beat
the silence with wings like buzz-saws,
too brightly burning as they pass.
We linger longer to catch the trace of roses
in air draped like blankets, wet with winter
creeping closer, as we listen to the absence–
no trace of summer
no sound of you.

Candace Myers
Troy University

***

Compose Yourself

When you are restless like this
I can’t help but lean forward,
cupping my ears. You speak soft
and with no strategy, so your sentences
become a litany of pauses.
You stutter and scratch
for words, hiccupping under your breath,
and I am still straining.
I cannot hear you anymore.

You say I will leave you
for someone with superior enunciation;
your nights are consumed by terrors
of my name, grotesque, in another
man’s mouth. He will clip his Ts
with precision, fondle the curves
of my fricatives with a fluid tongue.
You cannot stand the thought
of me, poised and propped
against his sentences’ clarity.

Katie Longofono
University of Kansas

***

Abuelo

or, as I said
grandpa, unable
to change my
ways. To worn to

pull back the hard
skin of time.
Its hardened layers
of skin dried,

withering in hand.
The last harvest spoiled
patches of onion
and redwing,

scarce as a whole
and fish, a dozen
laid on the ground
rotted by the rain.

These days
I would play
to imagine: a way
to restore a memory
that was never there.

Jesse Saldana
University of Virginia

***

Tomorrow

be as clear as yesterday
be clear as the inside of the mirrored
glass where I watched falcons in the updrafts
dance between the financial towers.
I wait for you on crowded concrete paths
wandering amidst jumping reflections,
I see the sun play off watch-faces
dangling in the free afternoon between
traffic on the downtown expressway,
I look for you behind the window-glare
of all the cars in that city-drift. Come,
take me to my empty night road—
I’ve watched headlights break over these signs
and now I am weary of the same exits.
Find me, show me where the road ends.

Matt Conover
University of Virginia

One more folded sunset : February/March 2011

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel”*

*also source of issue title

Contributing writers: Hannah Wright, Gabrielle Williams, Luke Rife, Elaina Mercatoris, Abigail Hoglund

Photo courtesy of Flickr user davedegetre

Metro, Los Cemeterios

Coke bottle spilling wildflowers, freshly chosen.
Candy from the man with the stand on the corner of
this city apart. Umbrellas shading
vines of glories over the graves.

This could have been the beach, but
there’s no water, no sand. A lot of dust risen
from the earthquake, unsettling what
cannot be

settled. Mourners melting candle wax to keep
something like a headstone intact, names
fading, overlapping your own, a mausoleum
for sale, even permanence only transient, as you

cannot prove you are dead or alive or living perhaps
on an entirely different map.

Hannah Wright
Davidson College

***

Yesterday

In July we danced the Vietnamese
Waltz under moss-covered water.
Swam like doves into stained
glass murals. We chased
the tails of tadpoles.

I enjoyed long car rides
to fancy movie theaters
and listening to that sound
your hands made when you
touched my knees.
I liked watching you drive.

In August you told me
you were empty.
I tried to sew my smiles
and laughs into the holes
of your chest.

You said love is not
Enough.
You said
My love is
Not enough.

In September I placed
Kisses between your ribcage
And lung.

In October you called
yourself ugly.

But I think your scars
Are beautiful.
They remind me of
Sun burnt raisins.
And almonds.
And your lips.

Gabrielle Williams
Columbia College Chicago

***

A fallen astronaut

He wasn’t sure how, but suddenly
He was un-tethered from the ship. Cut loose.
He had been doing repairs on the hull
but,
then he went off.
Pulled down by the earth’s embrace.
The crew members said he waved to them,

goodbye. He was actually trying to crawl back,
to the safety of the metal skin.
but,
winds whipped him back
towards that earthly dome and, I hope,
the gods kissed his forehead as he passed
their perch.
but,
did he then see, in the lens of the mind, his family?
Did he see his children sleeping down below, or his wife wondering,
what time zone does he sit upon today?
I don’t know
but,
I read, once, that his skin would have melted suddenly.
Just like butter sizzling down into a iron pan,
that sits upon the warm cottage stove tucked between
Ground and the vast pupil of space.

And then he fell apart, a quick cremation.
A dispersal of it all.
And like a spring rain,

He came and went
quietly.

Luke Rife
Louis and Clark College

***

Twelve Years Old

It did a back flip.
The blood was not difficult to track—
snow covered snow that morning.
My cold stiff skin
still limber enough to squeeze the lemon—
the serenity of silence
broken by my trigger finger.
The deer didn’t get very far
with a hole in his heart—
I suppose I wouldn’t either.

Elaina Mercatoris
Allegheny College

***

Perseids on Cadillac Mountain

I wait until the summering multitude
grows bored with the bird’s eye
view of their isle abodes and the wind
braiding their hair,
sore calf-to-glute from the unfinished
mountain trek.

Their humming Hummer-held at last,
they scuttle down the mountain
in packs, bound to suck
lobster and slurp seafood bisque
at Jordan Pond House,
popover Mecca.

Alone, I lay down
on Mt. Cadillac, stroking
the granite, staring at the giant,
jagged rock that slices the sky
and blocks the islands, those craggy
ocean boulders softened with fir.

The Sun dims and dies. Rising
from its ashes are
the stars—Betelgeuse blood,
Polaris’s pale quartz—
the glowing nebula at Orion’s sword,
the Pleiades.

Finally, the thousand fiery
meteors, ghosts of a comet,
stream through Perseus
like neutrinos. Turn your head once,
and you could miss
them ravaging the darkness.

Venus flickers and fades.
Then comes twilight,
shutting off the lighthouses one by one.
The Sun raises its glittering head, pushes down the dark
and plucks the stars out of the sky
like ripe Maine blueberries.

Abigail Hoglund
Johns Hopkins University

Home was home then: January 2011

While virtually excluded from the literary canon during the 20th century, Robert Louis Stevenson wrote one of the most avidly read works in the English language, translated more than those of Wilde and Poe. Perhaps adventure crosses cultures better than humor or horror.

In his poem “Home No More to Me,” from which this issue title comes, Stevenson opens:

Home no more home to me, wither must I wander?

Hunger my driver, I go where I must.

In the poem, the narrator closes his door to memories of childhood, loved ones, and time passed, knowing he will never return. Even the most adventuresome and imaginative of travelers feels the ache of homelessness, of being condemned to wander, of always going and never coming back.

This month, our poets take us from the former gold rush town of Nevada City to the former concentration camps of Germany to the streets of Portland to the inside of a man’s lungs. These poems show how going somewhere else throws our identities into relief,  making us examine our lives with newly acquired distance. If we leave, in search of treasure or anything else, will we return to a place that is no longer home to us?

Contributing Writers: Lilliana Tannous, Vincent Hiscock, Maggie Rich, Sean Bugg, Katharine Derrick, and Emily Bihl

Horizon

The go getter holds me in reprieve–
the sun his stop watch.
The lovers worship my ending in four handed prayer
groping the dark.
And the dreamers regard me always–
proffering themselves to me at midday.
And had their strained eyes not thinned into crescents
they might have seen the colors of me at dawn
and remembered themselves in that first light.
Before they had thrown their dreams out into
the distance.
Before we had bled out unremarkably.

Lilliana Tannous
University of San Francisco

***

South Fork of the Yuba River, Nevada City, California
To Gary Snyder

From such a trembling height as this,
The creek looks like obsidian glass.
Earth really must be my element –
I know the river rock like a billy goat
But always feel like my scrotum’s in my throat
Before the plunge into the cold.
Alone, I come out beading-wet
To a speckled-paper copy of Paul Muldoon,
And to Arizona ice teas when with friends
(Each more or less casual and oblique,
Asquint and parallactic,
Awkward, easy, furtive, keen, and free).
The blazing granite,
The cool shadows and cooled stones –
There’s one submerged, a cold drill
Bit it right straight through the core.
We all found it, swimming at four,
And have come back to it all these years.
Single jack carnage, pick marks, and a thousand trails,
These are labyrintine hills;
Arrowhead leavings, razor flakes,
And flaking white, filling the glaring sky
Glittering, when the snow
Was cold enough to white the river rocks
Even with the mountain-melt
Roaring by.
From this high ridge
I can see the fat deer flanks
Pushing through the grass, on their way to water.
Knuckle-edged, my triangular wedge,
I’ve always like to lunch here
(Knapsack lunch of course),
Far above the plumb pool.
Knees scrape on granite,
They smooth in that underwater touch,
Gasping for one more intolerable breath;
We’ve watered there, too.
Twilight, water is putty (black);
Ashy loam sits on red clay
(There’s a volcano,
Deep down).
Flowers, four orange petals,
Grow stitched on rocks,
After the snow has melted,
While the foam turns white in the dawn.
Land is never finished,
Its feel turned over in your hands,
Thinking of your hands,
Of running in flakes of soft snow and soft ash
And a heap-dash crash, broke open
Into impossible, long shot space.

Vincent Hiscock
Vassar College

***

Fir Tree Found Growing in Man’s Lung

Somewhere between his sternum
and short spine, a little fir tree is rabid
with anxiety;

overflowing with green cilia,
a seed chewing on lung’s lining
like a bear sucking the marrow from a salmon’s bones.

Its needles kneel with your exhale
and raise their arms in fervent expectation of your next inhalation:
A damp sprout sustained
by your deep breaths.

You’ve been doing that all week:
growing life,
cutting it down,
and growing more.

Maggie Rich
Allegheny College

***

The Fire Game, jedem das seine

Daisies profuse the fields,
Their blossoms, snowflakes on the ground,
leading the way down cobblestones
bright with morning’s light wash of blood.

Entering the gate, clang, the only note it sang,
telling me there was no escape,
that the hour was too late –
forcibly made to walk
this kindly laid path between neglected stone ruins,
they blur.

Fruit trees ghost the yards:
arms into which I wish, I could,
a child again climb.

Sean Bugg
University of Virginia

***

Thru the town of Zimmerman, MN

I’ve walked your iron grounds
and saw the pits swallowing dark blonde Lithuanians
like you and me,
and I’ve ridden on your Northbound highway
with all blue signs pointing to holy Duluth–
the city with the refreshing frosty air of birth,
I’ve touched the reeds of stony Superior
and saw Pound and Eliot in the captain’s tower
with Rimbaud smoking opium onlooking terribly;
I’ve used a rhyming dictionary and enrolled in scroll writing
then bent my mind with a marijuana tambourine man,
skipping along Oklahoma dust roads with a harmonica.
I’ve gotten so lonesome I could cry, but the tears
did not become a Hard Rain, they stirred in the pools
of my sunken cheeks and were absorbed by the skin.
And I’ve worn black glasses to deny others judgment—
your audience gapes in wonder, acolytes to an enigma;
my audience dissects me en masse and never wonders.

This art is all yours, Dylan.
No one can approach your ability to create endlessly
and never answer.
This is the brand of beauty that you own.

Katharine Derrick
University of Arizona

***

After, Therefore, Because Of

September has come and I wake,
Smelling of Persephone, and Portland
Leaning down to stretch both palms across the asphalt
Intersecting Honor and Athens.

September has come and I wake,
(To “missed” calls in name only)
With strangeness rotating above me,
With the Chicago River before me,
Straight like a serpent stoned dead.

I sleep with the dead man that afternoon.
I’m told the train derailed shortly after.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc.
He is awake and wanting when I return.

All that’s left are cities and matchsticks.
When I recount the stories, I’ll mistake the names.
September has come and I wake,
Pack my bags, the impulse to leave like the itch of an old burn.

Emily Bihl
Johns Hopkins University