Breakfast - Jacques Prévert (translation by Lawrence Ferlinghetti)

He put the coffee

In the cup

He put the milk

In the cup of coffee

He put the sugar

In the café au lait

With the coffee spoon

He stirred

He drank the café au lait

And he set down the cup

Without a word to me

He lit

A cigarette

He made smoke-rings

With the smoke

He put the ashes

In the ash-tray

Without a word to me

Without a look at me

He got up

He put

His hat upon his head

He put his raincoat on

Because it was raining

And he left

In the rain

Without a word

Without a look at me

And I       I took

My head in my hand

And I cried.

Beauty - Warsan Shire

My older sister soaps between her legs, her hair

a prayer of curls. When she was my age, she stole

the neighbour's husband, burnt his name into her skin.

For weeks she smelt of cheap perfume and dying flesh.

It's 4 a.m. and she winks at me, bending over the sink,

her small breasts bruised from sucking.

She smiles, pops her gum before saying

boys are haram, don't ever forget that.

Some nights I hear her in her room screaming.

We play Surah Al-Baqarah to drown her out.

Anything that leaves her mouth sounds like sex.

Our mother has banned her from saying God's name.

Downhill - Julia Vinograd

I don’t have a home

and I live there

all the time.

Animals - Louise Glück

My sister and I reached

the same conclusion:

the best way

to love us was to not

spend time with us.

It seemed that

we appealed

chiefly to strangers.

We had good clothes, good

manners in public.

In private, we were

always fighting. Usually

the big one finished

sitting on her little one

and pinching her.

The little one

bit: in forty years

she never learned

the advantage in not

leaving a mark.

The parents

had a credo: they didn't

believe in anger.

The truth was, for different reasons,

they couldn't bring themselves

to inflict pain. You should only hurt

something you can give

your whole heart to. They preferred

tribunals: the child

most in the wrong could choose

her own punishment.

My sister and I

never became allies,

never turned on our parents.

We had

other obsessions: for example,

we both felt there were

too many of us

to survive.

We were like animals

trying to share a dry pasture.

Between us, one tree, barely

strong enough to sustain

a single life.

We never moved

our eyes from each other

nor did either touch

one thing that could

feed her sister.

Telemachus' Detachment - Louise Glück

When I was a child looking

at my parents' lives, you know

what I thought? I thought

heartbreaking. Now I think

heartbreaking, but also

insane. Also

very funny.

Untitled - Franz Wright

Will I always be eleven,

lonely in this house,

reading books

that are too hard for me,

in the long fatherless hours.

The terrible hours of the window,

the rain-light

on the page,

awaiting the letter,

the phone call,

still your strange elderly child.

It's Good To Be Here - Alden Nowlan

I'm in trouble, she said

to him. That was the first

time in history that anyone

had ever spoken of me.

It was 1932 when she

was just fourteen years old

and men like him

worked all day for

one stinking dollar.

There's quinine, she said.

That's bullshit, he told her.

Then she cried and then

for a long time neither of them

said anything at all and then

their voices kept rising until

they were screaming at each other

and then there was another long silence and then

they began to talk very quietly and at last he said

well, I guess we'll just have to make the best of it.

While I lay curled up,

my heart beating,

in the darkness inside her.

How to kill a living thing - Eibhlin Nic Eochaidh

Neglect it

Criticize it to its face

Say how it kills the light

Traps all the rubbish

Bores you with its green

Continually

Harden your heart

Then

Cut it down close

To the root as possible

Forget it

For a week or a month

Return with an axe

Split it with one blow

Insert a stone

To keep the wound wide open.

The Untrustworthy Speaker - Louise Glück

Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken.

I don't see anything objectively.

I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.

When I speak passionately,

that's when I'm least to be trusted.

It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised

for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight.

In the end, they're wasted--

I never see myself,

standing on the front steps, holding my sister's hand.

That's why I can't account

for the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends.

In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous.

People like me, who seem selfless,

we're the cripples, the liars;

we're the ones who should be factored out

in the interest of truth.

When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.

A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.

Underneath, a little gray house, the azaleas

red and bright pink.

If you want the truth, you have to close yourself

to the older daughter, block her out:

when a living thing is hurt like that,

in its deepest workings,

all function is altered.

That's why I'm not to be trusted.

Because a wound to the heart

is also a wound to the mind.

Father's Old Blue Cardigan - Anne Carson

Now it hangs on the back of the kitchen chair

where I always sit, as it did

on the back of the kitchen chair where he always sat.

I put it on whenever I come in,

as he did, stamping

the snow from his boots.

I put it on and sit in the dark.

He would not have done this.

Coldness comes paring down from the moonbone in the sky.

His laws were a secret.

But I remember the moment at which I knew

he was going mad inside his laws.

He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived.

He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top.

Not only because it was a hot July afternoon

but the look on his face --

as a small child who has been dressed by some aunt early in the morning

for a long trip

on cold trains and windy platforms

will sit very straight at the edge of his seat

while the shadows like long fingers

over the haystacks that sweep past

keep shocking him

because he is riding backwards.

I Feel Safe When You Lie - Derrick Brown

In somno securitas.

She slid into bed

easy as a knitting needle

into the spine of a hare.

I threw a bag of chalk into the air

across her body

while she slept.

Little rabbit.

I lit black lights into action

watched the frenzied prints emerge

from her breasts, neck, and thighs,

souvenirs of desire.

I breathed across her tight, sand-tanned stomach.

Chalk dust blew into her nose and she awoke.

I asked her

If the man made love to her with all his might?

Did it feel the same?

Did his beads of sweat fall upon the necklace I worked for?

Did he extend the milky antennae of her legs into the air?

Did you tune in God on the meat hook channel?

She said:

“My dear.

Slow, jealous detective,

Come sleep by me.

These prints are yours

And always yours.

They simply will not wash away.

You have had your head in other people’s hands for so long

you forget what your own touch looked like.”

The faders of twilight approached.

I curled into her with my arms,

dead across her ribs,

feeling the rate of her heartbeat increase

as she wonders if I can feel a lie through her nightgown.

It is a feeling I get

when ice-skating through the rising crackles of sunshine.

In sleep, there is safety.

Beauty: A Poem - John McDermott

A few months before

my older son took his life

he called home and told his mom

I saw beauty

and know what you and Dad

have been talking about.

I was up so late last night

that I looked out from my balcony

and saw the sun come up.

It was so beautiful that

I just wanted to tell you.

I love you, Mom.