Category Archives: Poetry

Kafka’s Father

Snorts in the passageway, pinches the delicate ones—

those who wear the jackdaw’s gray plumage.

Kafka’s father and Kafka’s father’s two dead sons.

This trilogy in which a Czech accent flourishes, upon which

the holy days continue to riffle the year.

Can such a man corrupt the liver of a virgin goose?

A bread job, then. A useless son for Kafka’s father,

this loser looking into the lost fingers of workers.

A bit of blood spreads through the lungs.

Feathers ink the page. It’s 2 pm or 2 am?

At what hour does the incessant womanizing begin?

How to avoid marriage, how continue flirtations with

drowning.

Kafka’s father’s son, dirty with the sex of octaves.

Filthy to himself, and as for marriage,

that rumor died in Munich. That consummation—

a conjugation of who, with whom, when, and why.

The father above, the son below, High German spoken

to veil a lowly Yiddish dialect.

Its only remaining artifact—a few satin skirts

left to themselves like theater curtains,

in whose wake the story exists.

Give us a moment to learn to pray for Kafka’s father.

Pater in his silk dressing gown with the dusty lilies,

the one who rises early to begin his work again.

Engrossed

Grabbing a raincoat, I find a moth and ask:

What do you do here in my closet,

what of your light–

to which he says: At the end of each night,

my light goes into my soul, what of

yours? The day is then

the weather’s blue colors, mirrors and rain,

that almost white where a thick darkness

blurs with a thick light.

Standing there, I see myself almost a man,

almost a moth, pieces of

a remembered face

brought up, overlapping, as if the changing face

were on old film, and that old film

played across moth wings

holding their position. Almost myself

frame by frame and without sound,

imposed on dust

for an audience. Almost my face holding

still, and face turning away. Face

of wing-wilt and wend.

Grabbing a raincoat, I found a moth and asked

myself about light, and myself answered

light; a moth

throbbed at having been found. When

my words had flickered aloud, the moth,

too, flickered,

an unknown face caught cringing, unfolding

face laughing, face

forgetting its name.

Tourist

Nights like these, when I am less a man

more a traffic light lingering on yellow,

more feet full of running, twitching over the gas

pedal,

more snake caught between rocks thrashing,

more a radio’s needle stuck between static and

station,

coughs and crashes of what could be

song or argument,

more the image of the moon as garlic clove,

as burst and leaking light –

when tourist season makes me feel I can stop

pretending –

I know I don’t belong here, I belong everywhere.

Girls Without Fathers

The engagement was over, so Amanda dug a well

in the middle of a field, tossed a pack of Camels

and a few cracked novels down the hole,

then dyed her hair redder in that water, so cold

it dried stiff. She wanted to see Maine’s lighthouses,

but the drive was too damn far, so she started digging.

I can see light when I look up from here, anyway.

She wears a kimono like a tired housewife,

blows smoke away from my face, clinks her cider

against my beer, a Cheers to every woman

who believed a man when he said love and true,

who let herself bloom when there was no rain.

Down there, the light becomes a white coin hanging

above her slack mouth, her tilted chin, her dull eyes.

How Would You Describe Yourself to Yourself?

i’m afraid of stars

fuck it

all of outer space.

how small it makes me.

i’d rather not count

the grains of sand

stuck to my thighs

after sex

on the beach

a millepede

scuttering next

to my shoulder

meteors shooting

blank over

my lover’s head.

not so blank.

i abort a galaxy

half named after me.

named ammo.

named nothing.

i don’t know how

to navigate a maze

without knocking down

walls. i don’t know

one place

one thought

one urge

from the next.

but i know

what it means

to roll over

in the middle

of the night

to shallow breath

of a quiet sleeper

who—when he wakes—

will disappear

inside me.

Constellation

by Trina Burke

 

Who is my mom’s secret first husband

to me? No more a landscape feature

than the Zuiderzee. What can I say? I caved

when asked for a family

history. They are to me a collective

mystery, a game that is a book

in which we all write results

that are as strange to us as a dull butter knife

with its florid handle patina

obscuring bright plating, for special occasions only,

in a family that celebrates nothing.

 

And if my father could never be anything

but a used car salesman,

telling stories that are not strictly true

and in which we all wish to believe, then he did

wreck a corvette in Lake Spear,

then I am the one with the German mother,

then the waves in the sea

are the built-up energy of a finity of shad tails

swishing and have nothing to do with you or the moon.

There is no noun for my relation to a wave of the sea.

 

For salt is neither a texture thing nor

a question of taste. It is simply right

with the rightness of a baker baking. Allspice

does not encompass all spices,

it is no part cardamom, contains no mace.

It’s a hard hat to hold onto in a hurricane, yes,

but we were never meant to stand against gale force winds.

We are wily, we go to ground when we recognize

that our buildings weren’t built to code. We know

that we are Dasein, and this place at which we have arrived

is unheimlich. Only the call and response of a pair of cranes

might render it familiar. Only

the hen’s egg dropped too soon in the soup.

 

The Sail

by Valentina Cano

 

I imagine my hair in a different era.

Coal-strewn and tobacco scented.

I picture it sailing through snapping sea air,

unfurled like a sail.

Threads of it let loose

to search out fresh territory.

Trash Day at the Park

by Valentina Cano

 

Bottles full of exhales

landed drunk on their sides.

Darkening patches of grass

with their humming plastic torsos,

leaving a yellow cross stitch

where they slept off the fumes.

Marking their spots like dogs.

The Indian Woman Reading on the Bus

by Tim Suermondt

 

I’ll take, always, a gander

at the beautiful: this time

at the long black hair,

 

the short black skirt,

the razor thin pantyhose

and the black high heels.

 

She’s easing my way through

the monotonous landscape

of upper New York, leavened

 

only by the Subway shop

with it’s reasonably priced

array of foot long sandwiches.

 

I notice “The First Circle”

on the cover—Solzhenitsyn, that

grouch, would have loved this

 

and wished he’d been exiled

to the Indian Continent instead

of to the Winter snows, the Summer

 

mosquitoes of  a lonely Vermont.

At the Buffalo Airport stop

she grabs all her belongings, hawk-like,

 

and dashes off the blue bus.

I watch her wobble a bit,

but continue on at a spirited pace.

 

I unwrap the rest of my sandwich,

being as careful as if opening a great

book, eating slowly to make it last.

The Best Funeral Ever

by Hilde Weisert

 

Why doesn’t everyone think of this? His daughter

is a minister herself, perhaps that gives her license;

perhaps it’s the art he loved, or just the indelible

 

imprint of a person on the people who love him.

Perhaps it’s love. At first, we are taken aback,

seeing what she’s laid out – not a body, out here in the park,

 

and not the standard photographs or video montage,

but his actual clothes – the giant jacket hung

from a branch on a tree, and on the ground

 

his shoes, huge now without the tall man to stand

in them. Ellie stands on the grassy rise, and instead of

talking about him, remembering this and that,

 

she gives us Dan’s arms, hands splayed out

in his wide gesture of amazement, voice lifting

from a charged hush to an onrush of words

 

for the latest earth-shaking idea, invention – his, yours,

some genius across the world. Isn’t there a rule

that says you don’t mimic the dead? Don’t bring

 

a dead man’s shoes to his funeral? But a daughter

can make her own rules. Ellie is all he used to

bend our ear about, and this is the best

 

funeral ever. We don’t learn anything, we just see

what we didn’t even know we’d noticed.

For an hour, we grow big, amazed; like Dan.