But Not Forgotten

by Dorothy Parker

I think, no matter where you stray, That I shall go with you a way. Though you may wander sweeter lands, You will not soon forget my hands, Nor yet the way I held my head, Nor all the tremulous things I said. You still will see me, small and white And smiling, in the secret night, And feel my arms about you when The day comes fluttering back again. I think, no matter where you be, You’ll hold me in your memory And keep my image, there without me, By telling later loves about me.

The Rules

by Kyle Carrero Lopez

after Adrian Piper

1.        I will always mean what I say.

(In all things art, put quality first. Being a dick can fly, to a point, if you know they’ll coin it “sass.” Shake the dice. Switch the code. Girls and gays: that’s Bible. Pre-Bible, really — a duo waaay back to cuneiform slabs. Not really. It’s all too yum to make stuff like that up. I been Mister Jester from the jump, stay tellin’ tall tales. Stay worried what could come if I stop being fun. How the glances change, how they might do me, what I might do.)

2.       I will always do what I say I am going to do.

(Never ever date a babe with your name. Put some drama in each umbrella unfurl. Walk like you know where you’re going, where you come from. Like a too-loud blouse from a not-close friend, discomfort’s a gift I’ll quickly return. I’m a bill on Capitol Hill; I sing the body electorate. Your contracts for you ain’t for me to sign. If contraction’s not an option, be massive: Fagamemnon. Break any rule that would break you.)

3.       I will always be too expensive to buy.

(At brokest broke I took seven caramel chews from a book launch, ate ’em all, called it a night. Was this a queering of dinner? Time is money in that I got neither. My sweet friend Mikey once paid half my March rent. Though I’m not much one to pray — I sit by a dad who resembles my uncle D with a baby in a stroller lookin’ just like one of my cousins, we’re waiting for the A train, I’m dying to tell him his son, a sleepy, pouting dahlia sprout, is so angelic, so darling, but no guarantee it’d go well, assumptions create assumptions create silence — I’m not a girl, not yet a father, who the fuck am I to this man but guise of gay voice, gay shirt, shadow, beard; the A arrives, we board separate cars — my eyes shut with the doors. I hold tight to the handrail, ask something please, please, hold them.)

What We Want

by Linda Pastan

What we want is never simple. We move among the things we thought we wanted: a face, a room, an open book and these things bear our names -- now they want us. But what we want appears in dreams, wearing disguises. We fall past, holding out our arms and in the morning our arms ache. We don’t remember the dream, but the dream remembers us. It is there all day as an animal is there under the table, as the stars are there even in full sun. 

Habits

by Nikki Giovanni

i haven’t written a poem in so long i may have forgotten how unless writing a poem is like riding a bike or swimming upstream or loving you it may be a habit that once acquired is never lost but you say i’m foolish of course you love me but being loved of course is not the same as being loved because or being loved despite or being loved

if you love me why do i feel so lonely and why do i always wake up alone and why am i practicing not having you to love i never loved you that way

As I Grew Older

by Langston Hughes

It was a long time ago. I have almost forgotten my dream. But it was there then, In front of me, Bright like a sun -- My dream. And then the wall rose, Rose slowly, Slowly, Between me and my dream. Rose until it touched the sky -- The wall. Shadow. I am black. I lie down in the shadow. No longer the light of my dream before me, Above me. Only the thick wall. Only the shadow. My hands! My dark hands! Break through the wall! Find my dream! Help me to shatter this darkness, To smash this night, To break this shadow Into a thousand lights of sun, Into a thousand whirling dreams Of sun!

"Have you got a brook in your little heart"

by Emily Dickinson

Have you got a brook in your little heart, Where bashful flowers blow, And blushing birds go down to drink, And shadows tremble so?

And nobody knows, so still it flows, That any brook is there; And yet your little draught of life Is daily drunken there.

Then look out for the little brook in March, When the rivers overflow, And the snows come hurrying from the hills, And the bridges often go.

And later, in August it may be, When the meadows parching lie, Beware, lest this little brook of life Some burning noon go dry!

Barking

by Jim Harrison

The moon comes up. The moon goes down. This is to inform you that I didn’t die young. Age swept past me but I caught up. Spring has begun here and each day brings new birds up from Mexico. Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain.

Daily

by Naomi Shihab Nye

These shriveled seeds we plant, corn kernel, dried bean, poke into loosened soil, cover over with measured fingertips

These T-shirts we fold into perfect white squares

These tortillas we slice and fry to crisp strips This rich egg scrambled in a gray clay bowl

This bed whose covers I straighten smoothing edges till blue quilt fits brown blanket and nothing hangs out

This envelope I address so the name balances like a cloud in the center of sky

This page I type and retype This table I dust till the scarred wood shines This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again like flags we share, a country so close no one needs to name it

The days are nouns: touch them The hands are churches that worship the world

Mock Orange

by Louise Glück

It is not the moon, I tell you. It is these flowers lighting the yard. I hate them. I hate them as I hate sex, the man’s mouth sealing my mouth, the man’s paralyzing body — and the cry that always escapes, the low, humiliating premise of union — In my mind tonight I hear the question and pursuing answer fused in one sound that mounts and mounts and then is split into the old selves, the tired antagonisms. Do you see? We were made fools of. And the scent of mock orange drifts through the window. How can I rest? How can I be content when there is still that odor in the world?

Poetic Subjects

by Rebecca Lindenberg

The capital city. Arrowroot. Water-bur. Colts. Hail. Bamboo grass. The round-leaved violet. Club moss. Water oats. Flat river-boats. The mandarin duck.                         — The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon

The sky. And the sky above that. The exchange of ice between mouths. Other people's poems. My friend says we never write about anything we can get to the bottom of. For him, this is a place arbored with locust trees. For me, it's a language for which I haven't quite found the language yet. The dewy smell of a new-cut pear. Bacon chowder flecked with thyme. Roasted duck skin ashine with plum jam. Scorpion peppers. Clothes on a line. A smell of rain battering the rosemary bush. The Book Cliffs. Most forms of banditry. Weathered barns. Dr. Peebles. The Woman's Tonic, it says on the side, in old white paint. The clink of someone putting away dishes in another room. The mechanical bull at the cowboy bar in West Salt Lake. The girls ride it wearing just bikinis and cowboy hats. I lean over to my friend and say, I would worry about catching something. And he leans back to say, That's really the thing you'd worry about? We knock the bottom of our bottles together. How they talk in old movies, like, Now listen here. Just because you can swing a bat doesn't mean you can play ball. Or, I'll be your hot cross if you'll be my bun. Well, anyway, you know what I mean. Somewhere between the sayable and the unsayable, poetry runs. Antidote to the river of forgetting. Like a rosary hung from a certain rearview mirror. Like the infinite rasp of gravel under the wheel of a departing car.  Gerard Manley Hopkins's last words were I'm so happy, I'm so happy. Oscar Wilde took one look at the crackling wallpaper in his Paris flat, then at his friends gathered around and said, One or the other of us has got to go. Wittgenstein said simply, Tell all my friends, I've had a wonderful life.

My Name

by Mark Strand

One night when the lawn was a golden green and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered what I would become -- and where I would find myself -- and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard my name as if for the first time, heard it the way one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off as though it belonged not to me but to the silence from which it had come and to which it would go.

Ever

by Meghan O'Rourke

Even now I can’t grasp “nothing” or “never.” They’re unholdable, unglobable, no map to nothing. Never? Never ever again to see you? An error, I aver. You’re never nothing, because nothing’s not a thing. I know death is absolute, forever, the guillotine — gutting — never to which we never say goodbye. But even as I think “forever” it goes “ever” and “ever” and “ever.” Ever after. I’m a thing that keeps on thinking. So I never see you is not a thing or think my mouth can ever. Aver: You’re not “nothing.” But neither are you something. Will I ever really get never? You’re gone. Nothing, never — ever.

In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself

by Wislawa Szymborska tr. Stanislaw Baraczak and Clare Cavanagh

The buzzard never says it is to blame. The panther wouldn’t know what scruples mean. When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame. If snakes had hands, they’d claim their hands were clean.

A jackal doesn’t understand remorse. Lions and lice don’t waver in their course. Why should they, when they know they’re right?

Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton, in every other way they’re light.

On this third planet of the sun among the signs of bestiality a clear conscience is Number One.

The Sun Is Still a Part of Me

by Jennifer Willoughby

More than ever shy is why I am inside with the sun as my more popular roommate. The sun illuminates my uniform of silence. The sun knows how love is just the distance between unlovable objects. My phone is lying over there. My phone is close to solving the mystery of why I don't answer the phone. I am so busy. I am practicing my new hobby of watching me become someone else. There is so much violence in reconstruction. Each minute is grisly, but I have to participate. I am building what I cannot break.

We Who Are Your Closest Friends

by Phillip Lopate

we who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting as a group to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift your analyst is in on it plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband and we have pledged to disappoint you as long as you need us in announcing our association we realize we have placed in your hands a possible antidote against uncertainty indeed against ourselves but since our Thursday nights have brought us to a community of purpose rare in itself with you as the natural center we feel hopeful you will continue to make unreasonable demands for affection if not as a consequence of your disastrous personality then for the good of the collective

A Country Called Song

by Najwan Darwish tr. Kareem James Abu-Zeid

I lived in a country called Song: Countless singing women made me a citizen, and musicians from the four corners composed cities for me with mornings and nights, and I roamed through my country like a man roams through the world.

My country is a song, and as soon as it ends, I go back to being a refugee.

West Virginia Nocturne

by Geffrey Davis

One grief, all evening —: I’ve stumbled upon another animal merely being itself and still cuffing me to grace.

This time a bumblebee, black and staggered above some wet sidewalk litter. When I stop at what I think is dying

to deny loneliness one more triumph, I see instead a thing drunk with discovery — the bee entangled

with blossom after pale, rain-dropped blossom gathered beneath a dogwood. And suddenly I receive the cold curves and severe angles

from this morning’s difficult dreams about faith: — certain as light, arriving; certain as light, dimming to another shadowed wait.

How many strokes of undivided wonder will have me cross the next border, my hands emptied of questions?