After We Saw What There Was to See - Lawrence Raab

 

After we saw what there was to see

we went off to buy souvenirs, and my father

waited by the car and smoked. He didn’t need

a lot of things to remind him where he’d been.

Why do you want so much stuff?

he might have asked us. “Oh, Ed,” I can hear

my mother saying, as if that took care of it.

 

After she died I don’t think he felt any reason

to go back through all those postcards, not to mention

the glossy booklets about the Singing Tower

and the Alligator Farm, the painted ashtrays

and Lucite paperweights, everything we carried home

and found a place for, then put away

in boxes, then shoved far back in our closets.

 

He’d always let my mother keep track of the past,

and when she was gone—why should that change?

Why did I want him to need what he’d never needed?

I can see him leaning against our yellow Chrysler

in some parking lot in Florida or Maine.

It’s a beautiful cloudless day. He glances at his watch,

Lights another cigarette, looks up at the sky.

The Sign of Saturn - Sharon Olds

Sometimes my daughter looks at me with an

amber black look, like my father

about to pass out from disgust, and I remember

she was born under the sign of Saturn,

the father who ate his children. Sometimes

the dark, silent back of her head

reminds me of him unconscious on the couch

every night, his face turned away.

Sometimes I hear her talking to her brother

with that coldness that passed for reason in him,

that anger hardened by will, and when she rages

into her room, and slams the door,

I can see his vast blank back

when he passed out to get away from us

and lay while the bourbon turned, in his brain,

to coal. Sometimes I see that coal

ignite in her eyes. As I talk to her,

trying to persuade her toward the human, her little

clear face tilts as if she can

not hear me, as if she were listening

to the blood in her own ear, instead,

her grandfather’s voice.

1988 - Andrea Gibson

It was the year your mother

put her cigarette out on your arm.

The year you forgave her so hard

you stopped crying for good.

I was on the other side of the world

watching my father shine his knives.

I was trying to get the nerve to tell him

who to kill.

But he never figured out

there was someone to kill.

Collected knives like art

and hung them on our walls.

That autumn I made a person

by stuffing a pile of dead leaves

into an old pair of clothes.

Maybe you did too. Maybe

you found a pumpkin for a head

and dug it hollow with your hands.

Friend, if memories had been seeds

we could have chosen not to plant

do you think we would have ever found each other?

Do you believe in the magnet of scars? I believe

people who have been through hell

will build their love from the still burning coals.

Our friendship is a well-heated home

where we always agree on what is art

and what is something to sharpen

and hold in our ready hands.

VOLUNTARY - JR Walsh

My little sister said why a lot. Why this? Why that? Why everything.

My father said, Stop trying to answer every question every time.

So I said, She wants to know why so I’m telling her.

My father said, She doesn’t care. It’s involuntary.

She’s two years old and wants you to talk to her.

I’m tired of both of you. 

I didn’t ask why. 

My father left for work.

My sister wanted to know why.

So I said, To get away from you.

Then my mother said, Why’s your sister crying?

I didn’t answer why.

Maybe my father was right.

The Fear of Oneself - Sharon Olds

As we get near the house, taking off our gloves,

the air forming a fine casing of

ice around each hand,

you say you believe I would hold up under torture

for the sake of our children. You say you think I have

courage. I lean against the door and weep,

the tears freezing on my cheeks with brittle

clicking sounds.

I think of the women standing naked

on the frozen river, the guards pouring

buckets of water over their bodies till they

glisten like trees in an ice storm.

I have never thought I could take it, not even

for the children. It is all I have wanted to do,

to stand between them and pain. But I come from a

long line

of women

who put themselves

first. I lean against the huge dark

cold door, my face glittering with

glare ice like a dangerous road,

and think about hot pokers, and goads,

and the skin of my children, the delicate, tight,

thin, top layer of it

covering their whole bodies, softly

glimmering.

DAUGHTER - Lisel Mueller

My next poem will be happy,

I promise myself. Then you come

with your deep eyes, your tall jeans,

your narrow hands, your wit,

your uncanny knowledge, and

your loneliness. All the flowers

your father planted, all

the green beans that have made it,

all the world’s recorded pianos

and this exhilarating day

cannot change that.

intellectualism - Nikki Giovanni

sometimes i feel like i just get in

everybody’s way

when i was a little girl

i used to go read

or make fudge

when i got bigger i

read

or picked my nose

that’s what they called

intelligence

or when i got older

intellectualism

but it was only

that i was in the way

a wild, fresh wind blowing... - Charles Bukowski

I should not have blamed only my father, but,

he was the first to introduce me to

raw and stupid hatred.

he was really best at it: anything and everything made him

mad—things of the slightest consequence brought his hatred quickly

to the surface

and I seemed to be the main source of his

irritation.

I did not fear him

but his rages made me ill at heart

for he was most of my world then

and it was a world of horror but I should not have blamed only

my father

for when I left that... home... I found his counterparts

everywhere: my father was only a small part of the

whole, though he was the best at hatred

I was ever to meet.

but others were very good at it too: some of the

foremen, some of the street bums, some of the women

I was to live with,

most of the women, were gifted at

hating—blaming my voice, my actions, my presence

blaming me

for what they, in retrospect, had failed

at.

I was simply the target of their discontent

and in some real sense

they blamed me

for not being able to rouse them

out of a failed past; what they didn't consider was

that I had my troubles too—most of them caused by

simply living with them.

I am a dolt of a man, easily made happy or even

stupidly happy almost without cause

and left alone I am mostly content.

but I've lived so often and so long with this hatred

that

my only freedom, my only peace is when I am away from

them, when I am anywhere else, no matter where—

some fat old waitress bringing me a cup of coffee

is in comparison

like a fresh wild wind blowing.

The Forms - Sharon Olds

I always had the feeling my mother would

die for us, jump into a fire

to pull us out, her hair burning like

a halo, jump into water, her white

body going down and turning slowly,

the astronaut whose hose is cut

falling

         into

              blackness. She would have

covered us with her body, thrust her

breasts between our chests and the knife,

slipped us into her coat pocket

outside the showers. In disaster, an animal

mother, she would have died for us,

but in life as it was

she had to put herself

first.

She had to do whatever he

told her to do to the children, she had to

protect herself. In war, she would have

died for us, I tell you she would,

and I know: I am a student of war,

of gas ovens, smothering, knives,

drowning, burning, all the forms

in which I have experienced her love.

The Clasp - Sharon Olds

She was four, he was one, it was raining, we had colds,

we had been in the apartment two weeks straight,

I grabbed her to keep her from shoving him over on his

face, again, and when I had her wrist

in my grasp I compressed it, fiercely, for a couple

of seconds, to make an impression on her,

to hurt her, our beloved firstborn, I even almost

savored the stinging sensation of the squeezing, the

expression, into her, of my anger,

"Never, never again," the righteous

chant accompanying the clasp. It happened very

fast—grab, crush, crush,

crush, release—and at the first extra

force, she swung her head, as if checking

who this was, and looked at me,

and saw me—yes, this was her mom,

her mom was doing this. Her dark,

deeply open eyes took me

in, she knew me, in the shock of the moment

she learned me. This was her mother, one of the

two whom she most loved, the two

who loved her most, near the source of love

was this.

HEAVENLY CREATURE - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

For Missy

I remember the day you showed up at the bus stop:

quiet, pale, a thick veil of dark hair, we stared

at each other through overgrown bangs. We were just

beginning our dry sentences at Baldi Middle School.

In those days, our jeans would be tattooed weekly

with the coded names of every boy who flicked

his eyes our way. The backs of our hands became

necks and lips for practicing on. I once even

doused my backpack with my brother’s cologne,

a sad effort to at least smell like I’d had a boyfriend.

Walking around your housing complex, we’d stare

through the windshields of every man who drove by.

We thought of our bodies as dangerous chemicals,

our breasts as match tips waiting for love’s flinty gaze

We were sure all the boys around had firecracker hearts

just waiting to explode. And look, I know I know I know

I am not telling the whole truth. Things in your house

were different, were not right, were accepted because

maybe no one knew any better, or maybe they did

and didn’t care. And whenever the whole dark truth

would spill out, I remember I’d gather my features

into the center of my face, unable to figure out

the right combination for my concern, for fresh alarm.

I’d forget how to sit, how to blink, breathe. It’s true,

sometimes you look back and all the things

you should have done rise up like volcanic islands,

whole civilizations, whole existences, whole lifetimes.

But what did we know then? Fourteen, I took

the hammer of my dumb tongue and tried to tap

comfort into your impossibly small ears,

your impossibly small fists. We were kids,

and the future was our dependable escape plan.

We’d be gone soon, so you had just better suffer through

it all now. We’d be gone, so until then, I tried

to make you laugh. I’m sorry I never realized

I could’ve unlocked your exit earlier, that I

could’ve released your story from the shogun

of my own throat. The letters you send me now

are like postcards from that hopeful future:

you are okay, you are alright, with no return address.

So this poem is a telegram to let you know that

I still think about you, that I’m still proud of you,

that when I remember you, I always remember you

as beautiful.

The essential - Aleksandar Ristović

I was not allowed to live my life,

so I pretended to be dead

and interested solely in things

a dead man could be interested in:

petrified reptiles,

museum bric-à-brac,

fake evidence passed off as truth.

I felt a great need to be really dead,

and so at all times I wore

a mask made of wood

on which someone occasionally drew,

with colored pencils,

the look of contentment,

impatience, desire, bliss,

or the look of someone who is thinking

about an entirely different matter.

My Father - Yehuda Amichai

The memory of my father is wrapped up in

white paper, like sandwiches taken for a day at work.

Just as a magician takes towers and rabbits

out of his hat, he drew love from his small body,

and the rivers of his hands

overflowed with good deeds.

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.

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.

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.