à la folie

 à la folie

If there was a god
Who could make a world in seven
How many thousands of days have
I sat not creating fire? No, I mean
A woman is not a rope-bridge

I am reaching for the apotheosis
An arc between catastrophes
The boys come and pass, looking at love
Through sunlit glass, and a woman
Is not a pier leading to an ocean

When I do not say Je t'aime
In any language
There is a great body of love falling
From these tiny hands that were
Never good containers

If there was a god, she would not be a
Woman is not a rope, a noose or lasso
No, I mean, letting down my hair
The need to give is not a dispensation
Dragging by my hair, a woman is not
A respite from despair, pulling down
My hair as I lay slack the reins, lay
Waiting to be stepped upon, a kiss of
Salt is no gauge for a woman

When I do not say Je t'aime à la folie
A great body of love
Escapes me
Through tiny fingers
That never were containers



[copyright Taylor Roberts 2016]

My Grandmother's Love Letters

Édouard Boubat

My Grandmother's Love Letters
by Hart Crane

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

I Wont Lie This Plague of Gratitude

I Wont Lie This Plague of Gratitude

­­by Kaveh Akbar

I won’t lie this plague of gratitude
________is hard to bear       I was comfortable
in my native pessimism         not this spun-
________sugar fantasy         last night I made actual

______________cake        there were no worms in the flour no
________bloody whirls in the eggs        afterwards the minor
______________holiday below my waistband remained festive
________ as ever        when I touched two breasts        each one

was my favorite       not long ago I was hard to even
________hug like ribbons of cartilage cut
from a lamb      I dressed in shredded roses
________and pistachio shells      I drank an entire language

______________ and flung tar at whatever moved
__________until the world cut me open like a tube of paint
______________ until it crushed me between its fingers
__________like a hornet         none of it was graceful

I had to learn to love people one at a time
________singing hey diddle diddle will you suffer me
a little       how could they say no
________how could they say anything      I kept

                                  biting their tongues     I kept clicking
___________my heels        now I am cheery
_______________ and Germanic like a drawer full
___________of strudel       I always wanted to be a saint

but I thought I’d be one of the miserable
________ones       sainted by pain      burnt alive inside
a brazen bull      instead I weep openly at obnoxious
________beauty      cello music comes in

________________from blocks away and I lose it completely
________ there is a word for these fits of incomprehensible
________________delight       I said it last night
________ when my mouth was full of cake


Kaveh Akbar’s poems have appeared in Poetry, APR, Guernica, PBS NewsHour, Boston Review, and elsewhere.  He is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry Press, January 2017) and full-length collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, late 2017). He is the recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a Pushcart Prize, and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, He was born in Tehran, Iran and currently lives and teaches in Florida. 

This poem was originally published in Black Warrior Review and is shared here with the generous permission of the author. Read more about the author here.

Photo of Pier Angeli by Alan Grant.

Peonies

Peonies 

This year       I need you more than you need me

Cut for bloggers, smashed upon your sisters in buckets, my orphans

I wave my cash at the flower farmers and adopt you, bulbous babes

Displaced delicacies, you are my children, my saviors, my paramours, the treasures to which I awake each morning as I anticipate your nascent opening

Your naked thrush-poms, sweet scent of love-nectar and the sublime momentary burst of blossom

I cannot make you close enough

I eat and smother you and yet I cannot make you too near

I long to thrust you into that space in my heart where lovers once ravaged

To sow you into that hole

That I might learn to know my love as holy

wholly

wholly

my own

-->

Nos petites étoiles

 Nos petites étoiles

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 

(excerpts)

“To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world....” 

“People have forgotten this truth,” the fox said. “But you mustn’t forget it. You become responsible forever for what you’ve tamed. You’re responsible for your rose.”

“You’re beautiful, but you’re empty...One couldn’t die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she’s the one I’ve watered. Since she’s the one I put under glass, since she’s the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she’s the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she’s the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she’s my rose.”

Peace Love

Peace Love

by Taylor Roberts

Dare I miss the days without the fog 

When all we sought was that purest note of wonder,

The jasmine gasp. Fallen Wasp,

I wandered where the groves once were.

I wandered, wanting nothing more.

Haiku

Students sit in protest at Woolworth's in Jackson, MS. Photo by Fred Blackwell.

Haiku 

by Sonia Sanchez


my bones hang to-
gether like pinched dragonflies
shake loose my skin



[copyright Sonia Sanchez, 1999]