excerpt from Red Doc >

Shuffling recipes
coupons horoscopes in
a kitchen drawer he turns
up an old B&W
photograph of her posed in
dashing swim costume on
some long ago back porch.
One leg forward like a
Greek kouros a cigarette
in the other hand she
glows as a drop of water
glows in sun. She looks
sexually astute in a way
that terrifies him he puts
this aside and all at once
the grainy photograph the
early marvel of her life
flung up at him a thing
hardly believable! knocks
him to his knees. He grips
his arms and weeps. Pain
catches the whole insides
of him and wrings it.
Oddly now remembering
his grandmother’s wringer
washer silvergreen and
upright on a platform of
wet boards in her back
kitchen beside the
washing tubs. How
carefully he’d been taught
to feed a piece of dripping
cloth between the two big
lips of the rollers while
she cranked the handle
and the cloth grabbed
forward to emerge on the
other side as a weird
compressed pane of itself.
He hadn’t known his
grandmother long or well.
She smelled of Noxzema.
Didn’t like doctors.
Believed in herbs and the
Bible. When the apostles
walked down the street
she said their shadows
would heal people. His
mother once told him a
story about her dying.
They never liked each
other hadn’t visited for
years but someone
arranged a phone call. So
there they were mother
and daughter on the
telephone separate cities
separate nights both
suffering from asthma and
so moved they couldn’t
speak. I heard her
breathing I knew what it
was his mother said. He
looks up. He’d almost
forgot about the rain.
Unloading on the roof and
squandering down the
gutters. Rain continuous
since the funeral a
wrecking rattling
bewildering Lethe-
knuckling mob of rain. A
rain with no instructions.

Listening to rain
he thinks how strange all
its surfaces sound like
they’re sliding up. How
strange his mother is lying
out there in her little
soaked Chanel suit. The
weeping has been arriving
about every seven
minutes. In the days to
come it will grow less.



--Anne Carson

Brokeheart: Just like that

When the bass drops on Bill Withers’
Better Off Dead, it’s like 7 a.m.
and I confess I’m looking
over my shoulder once or twice
just to make sure no one in Brooklyn
is peeking into my third-floor window
to see me in pajamas I haven’t washed
for three weeks before I slide
from sink to stove in one long groove
left foot first then back to the window side
with my chin up and both fists clenched
like two small sacks of stolen nickels
and I can almost hear the silver
hit the floor by the dozens
when I let loose and sway a little back
and just like that I’m a lizard grown
two new good legs on a breeze
-bent limb. I’m a grown-ass man
with a three-day wish and two days to live.
And just like that everyone knows
my heart’s broke and no one is home.
Just like that, I’m water.
Just like that, I’m the boat.
Just like that, I’m both things in the whole world
rocking. Sometimes sadness is just
what comes between the dancing. And bam!,
my mother’s dead and, bam!, my brother’s
children are laughing. Just like—ok, it’s true
I can’t pop up from my knees so quick these days
and no one ever said I could sing but
tell me my body ain’t good enough
for this. I’ll count the aches another time,
one in each ankle, the sharp spike in my back,
this mud-muscle throbbing in my going bones,
I’m missing the six biggest screws
to hold this blessed mess together. I’m wind-
rattled. The wood’s splitting. The hinges are
falling off. When the first bridge ends,
just like that, I’m a flung open door.


-- Patrick Rosal

Wintering

I am no longer ashamed
how for weeks, after, I wanted
to be dead - not to die,

mind you, or do
myself in - but to be there
already, walking amongst

all those I'd lost, to join
the throng singing,
if that's what there is -

or the nothing, the gnawing -
So be it. I wished
to be warm - & worn -

like the quilt my grandmother
must have made, one side
a patchwork of color -

blues, green like the underside
of a leaf - the other
an old pattern of the dolls

of the world, never cut out
but sewn whole - if the world
were Scotsmen & sailors

in traditional uniforms.
Mourning, I've learned, is just
a moment, many,

grief the long betrothal
beyond. Grief what
we wed, ringing us -

heirloom brought
from my father's hot house -
the quilt heavy tonight

at the foot of my marriage bed,
its weight months of needling
& thread. Each straightish,

pale, uneven stitch
like the white hairs I earned
all that hollowed year - pull one

& ten more will come,
wearing white, to its funeral -
each a mourner, a winter,


gathering ash at my temple.


by Kevin Young

Gapped Sonnet

Between the blinds Past the coded locks

Past the slanted gold bars of the day

Smelling of all-night salt rain on the docks

Of grief Of birth Of bergamot Of May



In the wind that lifts the harbor litter

Wet against my fingers in a dream

Salvaging among the tideline's bitter

gleanings Generous Exigent Lush and lean



Your voice A tune I thought I had forgotten

The taste of cold July brook on my tongue

A fire built on thick ice in the winter

The place where lost and salvaged meet and fit

The cadences a class in grief is taught in

The sound when frozen rivers start to run

by Suzanne Gardinier