What Rough Beast | Poem for September 4, 2019

Dion O’Reilly
Membership

It’s weird to be a member of an invasive species,
accumulating sky miles and slurping Starbucks.
Weird to be within my skin, yet part
of a horde, colony, swarm in search
of sugar, creating commerce as it goes.
My activewear unspools its filaments,
fills the mouths of salmon, remains
in their guts like undigested worms.
I dream of generations pouring out
of my womb—shining insects,
their hungry mandibles eating
from a trough filled with strange corn.
Now, the night is bereft of music
I’ve almost forgotten—
hosts of frogs belching love,
slip of salamander
into the cold grip of stream.
The color of the sky today
like something scraped from
the walls of a collapsed hive—
golden elixir acquired
with the last coin sewn into my coat.

Poems by Dion O’Reilly have appeared or will appear in New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She has worked as a waitress, barista, baker, theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher.

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What Rough Beast | Poem for September 3, 2019

Ana Fores Tamayo
La viuda negra

Loca lectora de la poesía errante:
¿Quién soy yo,
pintada en el lago azulado del espejo,
reflejada en ese triste vistazo—
intercambio de unos ojos negros,
inocencia vestida en trapos de muerte ajena,
llena de máscaras y mentiras del no ser?

¿Quién me convierte en alma de un pie quebrado
por las fracturadas piezas
de un rompecabezas poco natural —
¿Eso es una ilusión de lo real,
eterno instante de un cíclico al revés?

No me busco en el río ensangrentado,
ni en los bosques masacrados.
No en las negruras de la negación;
tampoco en las iglesias corrompidas
encontraré el ritual de mi pena ajena.
Dentro de todo se cae la parodia del bruto eterno,
burguesía repugnante que no la encuentro
porque no la quiero imaginar,
vacío angustioso de la nausea,
envenenado por el mal castigo de nuestro Adán.

Veo las torturas de un progreso estilizado
en el espíritu frustrado,
mientras las sombras de la noche deseada
destruyen ilusiones
ya quemadas en el fuego
de una voz sin voz.

Y el mundo—
falsificado en su triunfo tierno—
se disuelve en la nada
de los tejidos imparciales de una viuda negra
que, con sus dedos largos y existenciales,
rompe y desmantela su vestido blanco
sobre un altar abierto,
desmoronándose,
consagrada por los dioses,
sin alterar alguna voz.

The Black Widow

An interpretation, not a translation
(because translation is never poetry)

Oh crazed reader of the wandering verses:
Who am I,
painted as a cerulean reflection in a lake view mirror,
echoed in a melancholic gaze—
exchanged for black ebony eyes,
innocence dressed in the rags of foreign death,
filled with masked lies of being yet nothingness?

Who transforms me into that soul
perpetuating a broken foot,
through each of the fractured pieces
of a stilted puzzle—
Is that the illusion of reality?
¿Or is it the instant moment of an eternal cycle:
could it be the other way around?

I do not look for me in bloody rivers,
or in butchered forests.
Not in the blackness of denial,
nor in the corrupted churches
will I find the ritual of my grief.
Within all falls the parody of bestial eternity,
loathsome bourgeoisie I cannot find
because I have no wish to imagine its conception,
anguished emptiness of nausea,
poisoned always by Adam’s sin.

I see the tortures of a stylized progress
in frustrated spirits,
while the shadows of the night desired
destroy illusions
already burned in the fired
precipice of a voice without a voice.

And the world—
forged in its sentimental triumph—
dissolves into the nothingness
of impartial weavings knitted by a black widow spider
which, with its existential fingers,
breaks and dismantles her waxen dress
on an open altar and
disintegrates,
consecrated by the gods,
without altering any voice.

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR: This poem previously appeared in Literary Yard. What Rough Beast does not generally post previously published work, but what started out as a faux pas blossomed into a thrupple, and we’re sticking with it.

Poems by Ana Fores Tamayo have appeared in Acentos Review, The Raving Press, Rigorous, Chaleur Magazine, Memoir, Poxo Press, Chachalaca Review, The Evansville Review, K’in, Laurel Review, Down in the Dirt, Twist in Time, Selcouth Station, and Fron//tera, as well as in the anthologies Poets Facing The Wall (The Raving Press, 2018), edited by Gabriel H. Sanchez, and The Spirit It Travels: An Anthology of Transcendent Poetry (Cosmographia Books, 2019), edited by Nina Alvarez. Her photography has appeared in journals and has been exhibited in shows, often displayed along with her poetry.

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What Rough Beast | Poem for September 2, 2019

Yuan Changming
[monody to presidential candidates]

They are great speech actors, working with
      Eight classes of words and
      Seven syntactic elements
Changing singulars to plurals
Passive into active, or otherwise

A whole set of rules
      All as conventional
              As idioms per se

Adding some new vocab every year

Their job is to make new sentences
Based on the same old grammar

Yuan Changming is the author of the poetry collection Chansons of a Chinaman (Leaf Garden Press, 2009), and the critical monograph Politics and Poetics: A Comparative Study of John Keats and Li He (LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010). His poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Literary Review of Canada, London Magazine, Paris/Atlantic, Poetry Salzburg Review, SAND, Taj Mahal Review, The Threepenny Review, Two Thirds North, and many other journals, as well as in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009 (Tightrope Books, 2009), edited by A. F. Moritz and Molly Peacock, and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012 (Tightrope Books, 2012), edited by Carmine Starnino and Molly Peacock. Born and raised in Songzi, China, Yuan holds a PhD in English from the University of Saskatchewan, and lives in Vancouver, BC, where he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan.

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What Rough Beast | Poem for August 31, 2019

Chad Parenteau
Straight Pride Jesus Tanka

Flanked by twelve proud boys
and marshaling Judases
Straight Pride Jesus will
baptize himself on the cross
no one asked him to carry.

Chad Parenteau is the author of Patron Emeritus (FootHills Publishing, 2013). His work has appeared in Tell-Tale InklingsQueen Mob’s Tea HouseThe Skinny Poetry JournalIbbetson Street, and Wilderness House Literary Review. He serves as associate editor of Oddball Magazine. His second full-length collection, The Collapsed Bookshelf, is forthcoming.

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What Rough Beast | Poem for August 30, 2019

Judith Skillman
Crow the Only Constant

Dogs three eagles, harasses, caws,
asks to be forgiven for its murderous rages,
blackens the corner of your eyes,
stamps out the last passion
you had for your lover.

The crows flies as it flies—
no measurement
captures feathers, no short cut
from one surgery to the next,
for one bone graft taken from the iliac joint of the hip.

Crow walks like a Rabbi in the streets, hop hop.
Climb on board, it says, the next train
leaves for your trial
the one you will lose to the persecutors
and the maggots that dwell

in the lily of your arm.
From its square in a cornflower sky
comes crow’s petulance,
its barrage of hoarse cries,
the rage and tantrum of a June baby.

Judith Skillman is the author of Came Home to Winter (Deerbrook Editions, 2019) and 15 other poetry collections. She has received grants from Artist Trust & Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Cimarron Review, Zyzzyva, We Refugees, and elsewhere. Visit judithskillman.com.

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What Rough Beast | Poem for August 29, 2019

Mary Crow
This Is a Test: Fill in the Blanks

Do you know how I can get to the other side of the river?

On the other side of the river, the last party had just finished visiting the profitless locale.

“The broken bodies stand by the river and wait. . . .”

I waved at them and they waved back when what I wanted was for the ferry to come back and carry me over.

I needed to escape the starving regions.

[So the ferryman] pointed to the line the refugees stepped over and said: ‘That’s where the country begins.’

Or this river forms one border of a country.

But I still need to cross over.

“. . . he told me to go to the river and ask to be put on a boat.”

Desolation Canyon. Separation Rapid. Lava Cliffs. The boat will pass them all.

On the other hand, dynamiting the air has not induced rain to fall, unfortunately.

“Each to his grief, each to/ his loneliness and fidgety revenge.”

“Poet your favorite poet from now on is my boot.”

“On this side of the river, in a package of minutes there is this We.”

“. . . it is now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds, if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can . . . .”

Mary Crow is the author of three chapbooks, three full-length books, and five volumes of poetry translation. Her poems have appeared in journals including American Poetry Review, New Madrid, Hotel Amerika, A Public Space, Interim, Poet Lore, Denver Quarterly, Illuminations, Cimarron Review, Indianola Review, Wisconsin Review, and Tulane Review. Her awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Colorado Council on the Arts as well as three Fulbrights. For 14 years she served as Poet Laureate of Colorado. Crow is retired from the faculty of Colorado State University’s creative writing faculty. She lives in Fort Collins, Colo.

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What Rough Beast | Poem for August 28, 2019

Dion O’Reilly
Big Fish Eat Little Fish

after a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

I am the simple sieve that drinks the universe.
—Ruth Stone

Flying fish pause mid-flight, watch
the butchery like sad birds.
Men segment the fish gut,
disgorge her digestion—
smaller, bodies, same as hers, swallowed whole.
They in turn puke minnows and krill, tinier still.

Mindless, Un-maliced, all feeding, all food.
What else was there in her tidal whispers, moon shifts,
bioluminescence and blackness— but to open her great
unseen mouth, suck down what drifted in
on a thick rushing stream?

The men are armored. Industrious. Bringers
of hooks and tritons, ladders, boats, saws, cities, distant cranes.
Wild instruments of dissection. To slice up a deep-water
creature, find an endless hunger.

Do they recall—in their cold-blooded bodies—
the sweet eaters of salmon and blessed trout, who sprouted feet,
walked ashore, covered the earth and learned to be human?

Poems by Dion O’Reilly have appeared or will appear in New Ohio Review, Sugar House Review, Rattle, The Sun, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Bellingham Review, Atlanta Review, Catamaran, and other journals and anthologies. O’Reilly has spent much of her life on a farm in the Santa Cruz Mountains. She has worked as a waitress, barista, baker, theater manager, graphic designer, and public school teacher.

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If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value the What Rough Beast series, please consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.

What Rough Beast | Poem for August 27, 2019

Joyce Schmid
After the Fire

She runs to see,
but everything is gone,

gone white.
She kneels

on shards of jagged Dresden bone
painted with a blue, anoxic rose,

holy relic
of her mother’s mornings.

A little plaster angel sitting on a rock,
wings gathered in,

just sits and looks at her.
She stands and smashes it.

Now days are darkness,
nights are flaming,

and a gravestone rises in the East
to mother her.

Poems by Joyce Schmid have appeared in Poetry Daily, Missouri Review, New Ohio Review, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband in Palo Alto, California.

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What Rough Beast | Poem for August 26, 2019

Yuan Changming
[private communication]

Listen, just in case, 
	In case what?	

In case there should be, in case tragedy
	      What kind?

In case volcano, in case earthquake, in case fire
    Where? When?

In case market, in case earth, in case
			In case Trump?

He cuts her short, switches off his iPhone, puts down his 
Coffee cup, gets up from his long held position
And leaves his voice echoing at the other end 
In case asynodia, she murmurs, in case

Yuan Changming is the author of the poetry collection Chansons of a Chinaman (Leaf Garden Press, 2009), and the critical monograph Politics and Poetics: A Comparative Study of John Keats and Li He (LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010). His poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Literary Review of Canada, London Magazine, Paris/Atlantic, Poetry Salzburg Review, SAND, Taj Mahal Review, The Threepenny Review, Two Thirds North, and many other journals, as well as in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009 (Tightrope Books, 2009), edited by A. F. Moritz and Molly Peacock, and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012 (Tightrope Books, 2012), edited by Carmine Starnino and Molly Peacock. Born and raised in Songzi, China, Yuan holds a PhD in English from the University of Saskatchewan, and lives in Vancouver, BC, where he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan.

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If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value the What Rough Beast series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.


			

What Rough Beast | Poem for August 25, 2019

Adam Malinowski
Dawn

Dead water PFAFs blooming with gasoline algae & glass
The Eros of moving bodies camped out in the square
Damn careerist! He just watched the RBG movie in a Saturn Aura
(quick, warm breaths, please). Paying off anarchist corporations,
communists advocating reform nowadays. The last remaining centrist mother
-fucker opposed to de-segregation. A bunch of failing enterprises—
amnesiac deja-vus sapient cigarette crimes you arrogant bastard if only
you were to make the world in the shape of all these big words, but no
you left the world only to enter the world again anew
but then you got cancer of the leg!
Now, in 2019, as I am translating your poem, the failure of the imagination
has been fully realized by policy-maker donor-class elites & the Wall’s
GoFundMe is over $1 mil. My favorite song Television’s See No Evil
is on the jukebox as I tear up in this ratty dive.

Poems by Adam Malinowski have appeared in  Poets Reading the News, Philosophical Idiot, and in Mirage #5/Period(ical) #6. They hold an MA in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University, live in Detroit, and facilitate a poetry workshop at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility in Ypsilanti, Mich.

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