Rangi McNeil

Three Poems

Sections of the AIDS memorial quilt on display on Governors Island August 2014
Of the crowded ferry’s paying passengers, I was the only person
of discernable color; having the choice of Gustav Mahler or Dolly Parton,
as accompaniment to the thrum of the dun-colored waters

of Upper New York Bay, I chose the simple over the symphonic.
But what was I rightly to do with these (my) narrow hands
in that vast, green field, almost, fully aflower in grief?

My mother wakes & calls for me by my middle
name. She says, I had a piece of paper in my hand

& I twisted it; it smelled like ginger.
Ginger! O, Lamar, you would have loved it.

Her hands are limp & empty. Her heart
could well be wrapped in cotton, its beat is so faint.

If not failure at its most exquisite – a Polish cavalry
assailing German tanks – then what is it, this quickness
reduced to an eternal stillness?

The dead outnumber & litter the living. They mingle,
in daylight & darkness, with the dust atop framed photographs.
The flavor of root vegetables. And those of winter.

She was an agile, swift skiff.
My Excalibur.
My yoke everlasting.

Rangi McNeil is the author of The Missing (Sheep Meadow Press, 2003) and Occasional Poems (The Song Cave, 2015). He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

These poems are not previously published.

Joanna Cleary
blood

my veins are fat with greed
and my body is bloated with
blood, distant, naked like a prayer.
i want, i need, i always begin
while hastily rubbing my skin
until it is rough and concave
and there is nothing left but
rubbery silence that spends
hours stretching itself out
until i hear something tear.
it is a hollow sound filled
with open mouths and pauses.
my blood is childish, always
crying give me, give me, give
me, and curling itself slowly
into confession. my blood is
saturated with scabby words
that ricochet like breath off
bones and belief. my blood is
swollen, waiting. none of us
are immune to hope and i am
no exception. the heart is a
hymn that plays achingly
onward into the murky night
until my skeleton is red like faith
and the raw unanswered sunrise.

Joanna Cleary’s poetry has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Cicada Magazine, Inklette Magazine, Glass Kite Anthology, Parallel Ink, Phosphene Literary Journal, and On the Rusk. She recently became a Poetry Reader for Inklette Magazine. When Joanna is not writing, she can be found reading, eating various forms of chocolate, and, of course, thinking about writing. Joanna currently attends the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

This poem is not previously published.

Don Yorty
5

When I think of all the lovers I’ve had
it’s a blur, I’m afraid, of quantity
but there was quality in quantity
angels found in the common crowd, riffraff
whose amorous wings, far from this fact called earth
took me up in heavenly abstraction
from the orgy really to the action
of orgasm when remembered or birth
or flame or premonition, Adam Eve.
Who can tell us what has been? For love you
have to wait, be as chosen as a Jew.
Love’s not Godot though and fortunately
when I think of Love’s smile softly I can
remember those lips. Whose? I’ve forgotten.

Don Yorty is the author of the poetry collections A Few Swimmers Appear (Philadelphia Eye and Ear, 1980) and Poet Laundromat (Eye and Ear Downtown, 1983) and a novel, What Night Forgets (Herodias, 2000). His work appears in Out of This World: An Anthology of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project 1966-1991 (Three Rivers Press, 1991). Don has a BA in Latin and Greek from the City University of New York and an MA in TESOL. A poet and garden activist,  Don lives in New York City, works on sonnets, and blogs at donyorty.com.

This poem is not previously published.

Emily Gordon
Crush

I was doing OK
till I saw you play.

YouTube is full
of your push and your pull.

A stage, a grave,
three feet of snow.

A voice like rocks.
Pickless, thumb ravenous.

These videos on autoplay
strip off the suburbs’ ovine

coat. But you’re a woolly wolf.
A tender ram. A cutie pie.

Your stance suggests, a hunch,
you’re not sucked off enough.

In recent years, fellatio
has joined my private reel.

“Since we can’t fuck, I want to know
everything about you”—I stash

this proposition just in case.
My past’s sole pluck in infidelity,

my shame in lustful thoughts.
Dumb rut. House wins. I’ll keep it

in my peanut, Deacon Jim.
But I tend to give off pheromones.

Your boy child is out of control.
I can see where he gets it. Live coals

in your skull, spring-loaded spine
braked. Hair high-voltage filaments.

Rock beats scissors. Paper beats rock.
Red-hot last sets, tour bus, seared meat

suffusing your memory. Of course
they got you. You should be tamed.

Too bad I came too late, missing
two thousand six, pressed up

to the front of the venue, as close
to the groin as I was when Iggy Pop

showed half his cock and spit on us.
You say you have stories. I can tell.

You’ve run from jealous husbands,
come to ready cunts, to women’s breath

and knees. Turn on the warning light,
recording: sweat, the center of the bra,

remixed so past and present overlay,
voices confused. Your wife’s a slim tulip,

rare arrow quivered, wrapped safe
in her resilience and your conjugation.

So why start conversations…well, I know.
Love jams. It gets you happy, hard.

You’re Jagger, Malkmus, Mould,
you want more, more, more—

not lovers, but lives. The scorch
of baby back ribs, the woofer blown,

the ears to take your stories.
A lust for your blurred sound.

Your friendly eyes have hooks.
They jarred me up, awake.

I’m filling fast.
You haven’t asked.

I don’t wreck homes.
Except in poems.

Emily Gordon is working on a musical set in 1920 and a memoir set in 2010. She lives in Brooklyn.

This poem is not previously published.

Harnidh Kaur
Detailings

Mornings start with the shuffle
of feet against the tiled floor,
whisper of cheap, fake georgette
rubbing against itself, static, buzz,
never reaching electric fulfillment,
the clip of a ceramic mug against
the edge of the glass top, making
the wood of the table grunt against
that of the bed, angry, stubborn inertia,
the muddled crackle of the newspaper
damp with the heavy water-bearing air,
interspersed with the muffled clap and
clomp of utensils being shifted, lids
clanging like the cymbals stirring out
of control from a young drummer’s hands—
quiet whirr of the refrigerator now
punctuates the shrill screech of the
food processor, rising up in crescendo
with the sizzle pop crackle of a single egg
(fried with a little shimmer of pepper
glinting off the white, black granules
wading through yellow glimmer grease),
paired with the stunned alarm of the
toaster letting off its ward, unharmed
except for the slight char echoing the
metallic binds of orange heat branding
through the carefully timed traps—
stillness is a lost language in a world
defined by violent sounds and smells.

Harnidh Kaur is the author of The Inability of Words (Writers Workshop, 2016). She is currently pursuing her masters degree in public policy from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai. Her work can be found on her personal blog, Forever Awkward (and Maybe Learning).

This poem is not previously published.

Journey McAndrews
The Gulf Deepens

Between the haves and the have-nots,
lies a gulf of materialism,
deep enough to bury us all
beneath piles of
plastic products,
hypodermic needles,
dirty diapers,
and broken G.I. Joe “men”.
British Petroleum now joins the ranks
of other big companies,
who cannot suture the wounds
they have inflicted on earth.
And the rest of us just want to fill our SUV’s
with cheap gas,
so we can beat the crowd to Wal-Mart
and stock up on the latest “Rollbacks”.
Outrage comes swift and easy,
then slides between the headlines
of the latest Washington scandal.
Along the way,
precious life is swallowed alive,
someone has to pay for our sins,
who will miss a few birds?
a few grains of sand?
a little water?
a few fish?
A small price to pay really,
to keep our lifestyle alive and well.
By God, to behave any other way
is un-American.
Let the fish drown in the sludge,
let the birds struggle to breath,
let the water burn.
In the end,
God will come and save us all,
right?

Journey McAndrews is a poet and essayist who was born in the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky. Her work regularly appears in Kentucky Monthly, and has appeared in Motif, LILOPOH, and Inscape, among other journals. She lives in Lexington and received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction with a minor in Poetry from Spalding University in Louisville. Journey has received an Individual Artist Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and an AWP Writer-to-Writer Mentorship. She is a Writing Mentor at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington, teaches Feature Writing at Eastern Kentucky University, and is studying to become a Clinical Mental Health Counselor. She just completed a food memoir, I Eat My Peas with Honey, and is co-authoring a book of food essays and poems with poet and activist Jay McCoy.

Photo: Carrie Wilson Photography

This poem appeared in The New Verse News.

Yoko Ono Lennon
IMAGINE PEACE 2011

18 February 2011

Dear Friends,

Today, February 18th, 2011, I am 78.

I know you are asking many questions on Twitter and elsewhere about what I am really like. It’s something I would love to know, too! One day it will suddenly dawn on us …maybe.

The world situation is too urgent for us now to discuss trivial things, like what I eat for breakfast.

We are at a point in human history when we have to wake up and realize that the only people who can save the world are us.

Every hour that goes by without us doing anything about it affects us, and affects the world that we love so much.

In his State of the Union Speech, President Obama said we should do “big things.” Well, we are already doing the biggest thing anybody in the human history could ever hope for.

Together, we are creating a world of Peace, Love and Freedom, all while the negative forces try their hardest to stop us.

With their power, they want to control the whole world. But we will not let them.

That’s big.

The way we are doing it is by being conscious of the “Power of Togetherness.”

The negative forces do not have that. They are an elitist minority, dipping their heads in arrogant madness.

They always play the same game – using violence, changing laws for their convenience, and seducing us with words to get what they want.

They say if we do things their way, we will all be rich. Well, that’s not happening. It never will. Once there is great wealth, they will want to keep it for themselves.

They also use fear tactics, saying the world will be in a great mess if we don’t do it their way. Well, the world is already in a mess. Why? Because we followed them.

It’s Time for Action. It’s Time for Change.

We, the people of the world, are not dumb. We understand what the “Blue Meanies” are trying to do. We just don’t know how to stop it. And wonder if we can at all.

But we can!

We are doing it.

Take a look at this map. Each dot represents millions and millions of people who are all, right now, thinking of Peace: wishing it, voicing it, and hoping that their dream of peace will become a reality.

Map of global locations of visitors to www.IMAGINEPEACE.com 2010-11 from Revolver Maps

The map expresses what my husband John Lennon and I envisioned. I know he is smiling, thinking of how little time it took for all of us to Come Together.

IMAGINE PEACE is a powerful, universal mantra that we should all meditate on.

With it, we will achieve the impossible. Hopefully, without bloodshed.

Look at all the courageous people who are now being hurt in marches and thrown in prisons for no other reason except for carrying “Peace, Love and Freedom” in their hearts and voicing it.

I don’t want you to get hurt. You shouldn’t have to.

7 billion of us, people of the world, have the birthright to live with a healthy mind and body at all times.

You should not even get one scratch on you, and you won’t, if you don’t allow it.

So keep IMAGINE PEACE in your head.

Have a clear picture of where we stand, what we are doing, and where we want to be.

Know that we are connected in our hearts and minds.

War Is Over, if you want it!

I love you!

Yoko Ono Lennon
18 February 2011

Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer and peace activist who is also known for her work in performance art, music and filmmaking. She is the widow and second wife of singer-songwriter John Lennon.

The HIV Here & Now Project has absolutely no right to post this piece.

Davidson Garrett
Death in Harlem Hospital with Straussian Overtones: 1986

In Memory of Richard Jurgis

No operatic good-bye
the morning you died
of AIDS; only a deep sigh

of grief. I then cried
taxiing home,
a long autumnal ride

past the hidden dome
of the cathedral. My
brain began its comb

for a tidy reply
to white-lie amend
& demystify

death. Couldn’t pretend
with an Elektra-mind—
but did violently rend

all excuses designed
to disguise. Your cold
dead corpse—reclined

in a morgue of mold
alone & battered—
your Queens’ mother I told,

was shattered!

Davidson Garrett is the author of To Tell the Truth I Wanted to be Kitty Carlisle and Other Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2013), Southern Low Protestant Departure: A Funeral Poem (Advent Purple Press, 2015), and King Lear of the Taxi: Musings of a New York City Actor/Taxi Driver (Advent Purple Press in 2006). His poems have appeared in Big City Lit, Marco Polo Arts Mag, The Stillwater Review, Third Wednesday, and Xavier Review, among others, and in the anthologies Pears, Prose and Poetry (Eggplant Press, 2011) and Beyond The Rift: Poets of the Pallisades (The Poet’s Press, 2010). Davidson is an actor and cab driver and lives in New York.

This poem appeared in To Tell the Truth I Wanted to be Kitty Carlisle and Other Poems.

A. R. Ammons
Corsons Inlet

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning
to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
rounded a naked headland
and returned

along the inlet shore:

it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,
crisp in the running sand,
some breakthroughs of sun
but after a bit

continuous overcast:

the walk liberating, I was released from forms,
from the perpendiculars,
straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds
of thought
into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends
of sight:

I allow myself eddies of meaning:
yield to a direction of significance
running
like a stream through the geography of my work:
you can find
in my sayings
swerves of action
like the inlet’s cutting edge:
there are dunes of motion,
organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance
in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:
but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events
I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting
beyond the account:

in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of
primrose
more or less dispersed;
disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows
of dunes,
irregular swamps of reeds,
though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all …
predominantly reeds:

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,
shutting out and shutting in, separating inside
from outside: I have
drawn no lines:
as

manifold events of sand
change the dune’s shape that will not be the same shape
tomorrow,

so I am willing to go along, to accept
the becoming
thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish
no walls:

by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek
to undercreek: but there are no lines, though
change in that transition is clear
as any sharpness: but “sharpness” spread out,
allowed to occur over a wider range
than mental lines can keep:

the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:
black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk
of air
and, earlier, of sun,
waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,
caught always in the event of change:
a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals
and ate
to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab,
picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy
turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits:

risk is full: every living thing in
siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small
white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears
the shallows, darts to shore
to stab—what? I couldn’t
see against the black mudflats—a frightened
fiddler crab?

the news to my left over the dunes and
reeds and bayberry clumps was
fall: thousands of tree swallows
gathering for flight:
an order held
in constant change: a congregation
rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable
as one event,
not chaos: preparations for
flight from winter,
cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps,
beaks
at the bayberries
a perception full of wind, flight, curve,
sound:
the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness:
the “field” of action
with moving, incalculable center:

in the smaller view, order tight with shape:
blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:
snail shell:
pulsations of order
in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,
broken down, transferred through membranes
to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no
lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together
and against, of millions of events: this,
so that I make
no form of
formlessness:

orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override
or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain
the top of a dune,
the swallows
could take flight—some other fields of bayberry
could enter fall
berryless) and there is serenity:

no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,
or thought:
no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:

terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities
of escape open: no route shut, except in
the sudden loss of all routes:

I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will
not run to that easy victory:
still around the looser, wider forces work:
I will try
to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening
scope, but enjoying the freedom that
Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,
that I have perceived nothing completely,
that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

Archie Randolph Ammons (1926–2001) was an American poet who won the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1973 and 1993. Ammons’s first poetry collection, Ommateum, with Doxology, was published by Dorrance in 1955. Corsons Inlet, of which today’s selection is the title poem,  was published by Cornell University Press in 1965. A Selected Poems, edited by David Lehman, was published by Library of America in 2006.

This poem appears on Public Domain Poetry, but I have trouble believing it is really in the public domain.

Yolanda Wisher
Dear John Letter to America

America, you beautiful suitor of indigenous bitches. I am a slave ship and you are a skyscraper. I keep the bottom line, you got the upper hand. We try to make love but there’s a war of flesh and steel going on.

Used to woo me with roses carved from melons, douches of Colt 45 and holy water, ivory pearls that turned out to be my grandpa’s wisdom teeth. I must’ve been crazy to keep setting your place at the welcome table, thinking this or that would be the night that you eat from my fork of blues. Said you loved me but you just loved my doggy style. You ejaculated rotted dreams, rusted passion across my chest. In the morning, you left my thighs like crackbrained riverbeds, left the scent of your hunger in my hair.

Ashamed to say I fell in love with you, America. With your swagger and your big talk. Nobody told me your heart was the world’s first digital camera, beating humanity into bloody squares. Nobody told me how you cut mugs from the get-go, the army of hookers you ran with before you lay in my bed, the arsenal of whips and ropes in your closet for the cowboy flicks you produced, directed, and starred in every century.

You keep telling me how you different now, you saved. But you keep making purple moon’s rise on my eyes. Say you sorry but you still find a way to 302 me into oblivion. Build me a dollhouse of steel cages so all my flowers can grow separate and evil. Laugh like a tree grinder when you read my suicide letters. From my soul you make a sharecropper, a little black box.

America, I am the slave ship and do you are the skyscraper. I keep the bottom line, Baby, you got the upper hand. We makin love and there’s a war of flesh and steel goin on. America, you the most sublime, transcendental fornicator. You keep gettin caught with your dick out, tryin to drill a hole in the world. Sometimes I wanna fuck you like there is a tomorrow and a tomorrow and a tomorrow. Sometimes I wanna take your hand, take you to the little markets where the people sell their spirits in small pieces, to the alleyways the hustlers have made soft with hip talk. Walk hand-in-hand along a beach unbought and unbridled, and ride you till you say my name and you change, change. You’d brand me with invisible kisses. I’d be just like those talk show mamas—forgiving. We’d meet every day at the intersection, the bridge, the phone booth, the hot dog stand, and you’d tell me your baby dreams, the ones dense and wet as first forest. Show m your dirty drawls and your secret birthmark. Maybe then, America, I might give myself to you.

Yolanda Wisher is the author of Monk Eats an Afro (Hanging Loose Press, 2014) and the co-editor of Peace is a Haiku Song (City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, 2013). Her work has appeared in Fence, GOOD Magazine, Harriet: The Blog, MELUS, Ploughshares, The Sun Ra Mixtape Vol. 1, and in the anthologies Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade (U. Michigan Press, 2006), edited by Toi Derricotte, Cornelius Eady, and Camille T. Dungy; Gravyland: Writing Beyond the Curriculum in the City of Brotherly Love (Syracuse University Press, 2010), edited by Stephen Parks; Lavanderia (Sunbelt Publications, 2009), edited by Donna J. Watson, Michelle Sierra, and Lucia Gbaya-Kanga; Stand Our Ground:Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander (FreedomSeed Press, 2013), edited by Ewuare X. Osayande; and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (University of Georgia Press, 2007), edited by Nikky Finney. As an English teacher at Germantown Friends School, Wisher founded and directed the Germantown Poetry Festival (2006-2010). She also served as the Director of Art Education for the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program (2010-2015). She lives in Philadelphia.

Reprinted from Monk Eats an Afro ©2015 by Yolanda Wisher, by permission of Hanging Loose Press.