- POEMS

- THE CHORUS THESE POETS CREATE: TWENTY YEARS OF LETRAS LATINAS

POEMS

- Editor’s Note

- Gratitude

- Is This My Last Ferry Trip?

- Self-Elegies

- If Upon Me in My Garden

- Portrait of My Father Mocking Sammy Davis Jr.

- From “Arden las pérdidas”

- From “Burn the Losses”

- On Translating Antonio Gamoneda

- The Apostle Paula

- Lost Music

- A Convolution of Astral Forces

- In the listening room

- From “Stretching Time Over the Sky”

- From “carrying songs from the sky to crease the ground”

- Julius Caesar

- Icarus: A Self Portrait—1984

- CODEX©

- A Panel of Experts

- Eroica 1

- The Birth of Venus

- Trot Song

- After “Killers of the Flower Moon”

- A Girl and Her Fireplace

- Ars Poetica with Invocation

- Code

- Histories

- The End of Childhood

- Manuel Sánchez. Lavish

- Manuel Sánchez. My Pregnant Wife Sleeps in a Boardinghouse Hallway

- Manuel Sánchez. Our Demand

- Everpresent Guest

- Sink

- Limerence

- What You Need to Survive Vernon, OK

- How to Incorporate a Town

- Failing at the Exit Ramp, Icarus Jones Speaks True

ADRIAN MATEJKA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

Editor’s Note

At the end of every year, we’re all thinking of the future, one with the possibility of gentleness and abiding joy.

BY Adrian Matejka

Originally Published: December 02, 2024

When I was a kid, Christmas was my least favorite holiday. Despite all the good-will-toward-men caroling and yuletide trimmings, the commercials for Star Wars toys and shiny BMX bikes weren’t the titillating possibilities they were meant to be, but advertisements for what my family didn’t, couldn’t, and wouldn’t have. It reminds me of the Notorious B.I.G.’s classic have-not lines from “Juicy”: “We used to fuss when the landlord dissed us/No heat, wonder why Christmas missed us.” There is no real joy in holiday capitalism, but in retrospect, the things we couldn't afford inspired us to create our own joyful rituals: PJs all day and Christmas movies on ABC, munching on homemade cinnamon bread until the delicious, messy loaf was gone.

Memories like these make holidays necessary for connecting and honoring our divergent histories and community traditions. Any annual celebration exists simultaneously across time: past memories, present experiences, and future opportunities are commemorated by anyone who participates. Every issue of the magazine tries to do this too, cataloging our various poetic and cultural moments in couplets and stanzas. This is especially true of the folio here, which honors the twentieth anniversary of Letras Latinas. Curated by poets Francisco Aragón and Laura Villareal, it is a compendium of some of the most vital Latinx poets working now, including Ada Limón, Carmen Giménez, and Rigoberto González. The creative and communal work catalyzed by founding director Aragón offers a template for how poets can hold their own histories, hold each other, and dream a different creative future together.

Holidays themselves, like the most inspiring poems, are situated in the most faithful parts of ourselves. We don’t always agree with the perspectives of our three-eggnogs-in half cousins or long-lost high school friends, but we rock with them at the holiday parties anyway because that’s what gatherings are for. At the end of every year, we’re all thinking of the future, one with the possibility of gentleness and abiding joy. Thanks to the poets here, like Elise Paschen, Megan Denton, and francine j. harris, among others, the celebration of living goes beyond our current demoralized moment, beyond consumerism’s year-end TV ads or corporate jingles. All the poets in this issue offer a similar kind of promise and faith, a bit of brightness and warmth when the days in Chicago are their shortest.

Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. Matejka served as Poet Laureate of the state of Indiana in 2018–19, and he became the editor of Poetry magazine in 2022.

Matejka is the author of several collections of poetry, including: Somebody Else Sold the World (Penguin, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize; Map to the Stars (Penguin, 2017); The Big...

Read Full Biography

Next In Issue

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1625028/editors-note at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:21 PM EST.

PATRICK DUNDON | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Gratitude

By Patrick Dundon

Today I think I am healed. I do not want

what I do not have. Even the lover who sleeps

across town—one of my hairs trapped behind his ear—

feels near to me. Sure, my mother did not hold me enough,

too tempted by the specter of satiety only alcohol can bring.

But I do not resent her. Even she is wild and shining

in the palace of memory, my mind’s glass castle.

Last night I woke from a dream of a terrible storm

to the sounds of a terrible storm: wind rattling the windows,

knocking branches against the roof. No one was there

to hold me, and I was happy. A little curtain of satisfaction

fell over my face while I lay there, wanting nothing.

Jonathan asks me to send him a poem about gratitude.

At first, nothing comes to mind. All poems, I think,

are about lack: language’s inability to capture the real.

So I send him a poem about contentment:

gratitude’s simpler sibling, the privileged child

who can rest on their laurels without self-knowledge.

To thank takes work. You must risk foolishness to do it.

In the morning, the storm had passed, only a few

sporadic clouds releasing the last of their burden,

punctuated by sun, steam lifting off the concrete.

Was I thankful for this, or was my emptiness

merely glossed over, inoculated, fed?

I opened the curtains as wide as they would go,

inviting all the possible light. Jonathan thanked me

for the poem. We both knew it was not what he wanted.

In the end, the speaker sees birds rising up

from gnarled trees and thinks, as they fly off,

I need to go there too. When really, the birds

should exist without the complication of need.

I tell Jonathan I will find a new poem, one

without desire, or, better yet, without birds at all.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625034/gratitude at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:21 PM EST.

MARTHA SILANO | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Is This My Last Ferry Trip?

By Martha Silano

Is this the last time I’ll admire the guys

in their neon-yellow slickers, guiding us

to our parking spots before we head up

two flights to the passenger deck,

to the cafeteria where a man in a black derby

and black suspenders nods and smiles

as he nibbles popcorn? In honor of this maybe

last trip to San Juan Island, the last time

I hear that somber wail of a horn,

I’m gonna go see if there’s anything I can eat,

and of course there is: Ivar’s clam chowder,

just what the nutritionist ordered:

extra cream, extra butter, tiny potatoes I easily swallow.

Two spoons: one for me, one for the man

otherwise known as my personal

representative. When the time comes, he will help me administer

the cocktail that kills, but until then it’s The Marvelous

Mrs. Maisel, his book about Vronsky and Anna,

my book about the journey to the Higgs boson,

while our daughter calls to remind us

to take pictures of things

she can draw—a sprig of rose hips, a clump of serviceberries.

A deer she nicknamed Chewy. Bellies full of chowder,

we almost forget one of us is dying.

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1626380/is-this-my-last-ferry-trip at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:21 PM EST.

MARTHA SILANO | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Self-Elegies

By Martha Silano

Because why not? Why not take the smashed pinecone

of my life, render it in purple? Why not dream of baking

thirteen pies, six bumbleberry, seven sour cherry? I wouldn’t

press myself into a grief box, but I will confess I’m happiest

under a sleeping sky, love the darkness like I loved to run

through old-growth Doug firs and cedars. There’s no more

rolled-out crust, no more loping strides or flour, but at midnight

I read a book about microbes and fungi, how these critters

find a way into us, never leave. It’s the never-leaving part

I like. It’s the memory of the Cuisinart loaded with dough,

the rolling out, crimping with a fork. No grief in the night,

though I’d welcome a northern shoveler, the green head

of a mallard. The Vaux’s swifts that crowd the rising moon.

My husband’s favorite tomato, the Jaune Flamme.

In a Plum Village meditation, a woman says smile,

so I smile, though sometimes I don’t, though sometimes

I’m unable. Disabled is my smile, and a lot makes me cry.

I tell those who hear me sobbing I’m not sad, and it’s true—

I’m moved when friends bring fennel soup or say I look,

well, undying, when I share my joy that my daughter

has said hello to my death, not exactly made friends

but isn’t hysterical, and isn’t that like a favorite song,

the unsilence of “The Sound of Silence”? She’s smiling,

beautiful in her black cap-sleeve top and oversized jeans,

and so is everything out my bedroom window. I open

my curtains to the crows, to a scrub jay in the maple.

Accepting I’ll do death alone like I’ve done most everything:

birth, growth, forgiveness, hunger, all these freaking feelings.

The other night I danced for the first time in months

to my favorite Sheryl Crow song—opens with guitar

and drums. I’ve never been there but the brochure

looks nice. I used to dance on my paddleboard

for hours. Ran down all sorts of winding roads,

getting closer. I could’ve never walked, but I walked

for sixty-two and a half years. Now I look out my window,

envy the dog walkers. Did I ever think I wouldn’t jump in,

... enjoy the show? Each morning, I looked in the mirror,

said, “You’re sure not your grandma!” Pridefully, smugly

able. When anything went. Now the green’s mostly

what I see from my wheelchair. Getting into the done, I guess

you’d say. A little closer to no more Polish polkas,

no impromptu kitchen waltzing. To not feeling fine.

Maybe I was stained with mercury and malathion.

Maybe that time I ran through the fog of mosquito

repellent wasn’t the best idea, though we all did it,

didn’t we? When a friend told me to get a watch

to keep track of my miles, I didn’t know it would

become an obsession, that I would go the way

of Lou Gehrig, the Iron Horse. No one told me

don’t overdo it. Even if they had I would’ve been

swinging at the scallops, bashing the bivalves.

Wanna have a good cry? For decades I had flashbacks

I was having another psychotic episode. Fear and Trembling:

isn’t that a great title? I can’t blame my parents or genes

(kinda refreshing). May I free myself, like Insight

Timer instructs, of debris. May I hover like a gull.

Not sure where this is going, though, yeah,

pretty fucking sure. Pretty not pretty as my

daughter would say, kinda shapeless and no

funeral please, no roses or potted begonias.

Please donate to trolling for fish instead of

netting, to Cornell Lab of Ornithology. When

I stack breaths, I’m reminded it ceases—

that’s the Hurricane Debby of this thing:

weakening diaphragmatic storms. Inhalations

de-escalating. My nineteen-year-old self didn’t

imagine this. I was learning bird calls, hermit thrush

and song sparrow. Keeping a list, but also wandering

the forest counting the decades forward, a human

life like alpine snow that seems it will never melt.

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1626393/self-elegies at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:21 PM EST.

FRANCINE J. HARRIS | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

If Upon Me in My Garden

By francine j. harris

After Jericho Brown

If upon me in my garden, I mouth up sun and die of some bitch

seasonally snuffing my golden light, then omen me an open grave

and a night knife. Cue up the dead, nasty grinders. Swish me in a jug

of haunt rubbish. For fuck sure make me dogbody ravage against dirt’s

invisible fence. And while I might, in my life, have put up fists at organic

grocers, I never once boxed a bitch in the bulk aisle. And while living, I

might have forgiven too many trespasses passed off as oblivion, and kept

nary a gun to hunt the killers of children, fuck prison. At least in death,

hum me up a blade of wayward chopper for genociders. Percenter me

an eye on the walking devil so I can chokethroat the ragweed; give

me a goddamned scythe.

And I swear to you, if someone made me want to be so severing,

then that motherfucker is a walking, bloody guillotine. A soggy

perversion of constrictor, abrupt at the swamp edge, bloated

and greedy on his own coiling mortal. O then, make me

a mutant haint, covered in swamp soot, sudden surge

of wet cough muscle collapsing in his empty chest.

But of the body, which will love its maggots back forever, lay this

black-eyed bitch on a body farm, and make of me a compost

mudding up plump and thick for a richer, blacker world.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625032/if-upon-me-in-my-garden at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:21 PM EST.

FRANCINE J. HARRIS | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Portrait of My Father Mocking Sammy Davis Jr.

By francine j. harris

He widens an eye and gets down on one knee.

He accepts a sliver of silver from my mother and kisses

her behind. He calls her Frank Sinatra. He calls our house

the Rat Pack. He steps away from his piano into the kitchen with a carrot

and now he is Nat King Cole. He is singing “Mona Lisa” on a tap

while he holds my mother’s hand. She is the head

of Capitol Records. He could do this every day

for 15 minutes. He forever sings to the stalk over jungle plants

buzzing along the windowsill. They go hand over hand

in a photo album. His pompadour is tight. He leans out the window crooning.

He hollers at all the little snakes, get back. Now he is bundling up in sweaters.

Now we all eat chocolate pudding. He hates the way we curse.

My father is silvering up his tap shoes. He overdoses on

a living room couch. Now, he has a Duke Maestro on a poster.

He’s super funny with a self-demure. In his nod he is Richard Pryor,

bluing in an afro flame. He jokes about his body

on fire. Now, if only he could remember his mother. He crumbles into

Sunday morning on stage. Suddenly scatting over oatmeal, now he is

Al Jarreau. We, she, and he take five. We are strumming into stutter

on guitar. But now he is turning over the dark into Miles. He turns his back

to my mother’s fading hue. He is blowing holes into living

room walls. His popped lapels are flattening. Flattering

his jacket is leather and Shaft. He sports the Private Eye Duke

slumped over. He takes up a shotgun to the neighborhood

in blue. Here he is, the mirage of a sober pimp.

He sends my mother off to the mailbox. One last honey

go get my money. The snow is full of snow and maroon.

He is Bryant Gumbel up at sunrise. Keeping his news

tuned to the network. He is high and he can’t stop

smiling. None of his teeth go missing. He is painting his mouth

blue and dressing in dresses. My father flips Flip Wilson. No

one will see his second act. The weather is full of beautiful

muppets. My father is Ben Vereen.

He tips his bowler, and he lifts the sky.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625036/portrait-of-my-father-mocking-sammy-davis-jr at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:21 PM EST.

ANTONIO GAMONEDA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “Arden las pérdidas”

By Antonio Gamoneda

De las violentas humedades, de

los lugares donde se entrecruzan

residuos de tormentas y sollozos,

viene

esta pena arterial, esta memoria

despedezada.

Aún enloquecen

aquellas madres en mis venas.

Fue

la música mortal, el alarido

de los caballos incesantes, fue

una pavena fúnebre a la hora

del algodón ensangrentado.

Fue la declinación de mil cabezas,

la gárgola que aúlla maternal, los círculos

de la gallina atormentada.

Es aún, otra vez, la cal, el hueso

frío en nuestras manos, la

médula negra de la policía.

Bajo la actividad de las hormigas

había párpados y había

agua mortal en las cunetas.

Aún en mi corazón

hay hormigas.

Notes:

“De las violentas humedades, de,” “Fue,” and “Bajo la actividad de las hormigas” by Antonio Gamoneda from Arden las pérdidas, © Antonio Gamoneda, 2003.

Read the translators' note by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625038/from-arden-las-perdidas at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

ANTONIO GAMONEDA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “Burn the Losses”

By Antonio Gamoneda

Translated By Katherine M. Hedeen & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

Translated from the Spanish

From the violent dampnesses, from

the places where residues

of storms and sobs intertwine

comes

this arterial sorrow, this memory

torn to pieces.

Still losing their minds

those mothers in my veins.

It was

the music mortal, the shriek

of the incessant horses, was

a funeral pavane at the time

of the bloodied cotton.

Was the declination of a thousand heads,

the gargoyle howling maternal, the circles

of the tormented hen.

Is still, once more, the lime, the bone

cold in our hands, the

dark police marrow.

Beneath the ant activity

there were eyelids and there was

water mortal in the ditches.

Still in my heart

there are ants.

Notes:

Read the translators' note by Katherine M. Hedeen and Víctor Rodríguez Núñez.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625040/from-burn-the-losses at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

KATHERINE M. HEDEEN, VÍCTOR RODRÍGUEZ NÚÑEZ | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

On Translating Antonio Gamoneda

Readers must accept being co-creators.

BY Katherine M. Hedeen & Víctor Rodríguez Núñez

Originally Published: December 02, 2024

Antonio Gamoneda was born in Oviedo, Asturias, Spain, in 1931. He grew up in León in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, witnessing firsthand the repression brought about by the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, in power from 1939 to 1975. Gamoneda left school definitively at fourteen, took a job as a messenger boy at a bank, and continued to work there in different capacities over the next twenty-four years.

Gamoneda was fiercely opposed to the Franco dictatorship and deeply involved in the resistance movement. While his first book was published in 1960, his next would only come out in 1977, after Franco’s death. It wasn’t until the mid-eighties that his work began to gather widespread attention, winning two prominent awards, including the National Poetry Prize. In 2006, he earned the two highest honors a poet can receive in the Spanish-speaking world, the Reina Sofía Poetry Prize and the Cervantes Prize. He is one of the few writers to obtain both in the same year.

Despite such accolades, Gamoneda is not a poet of the establishment. He is self-taught, working-class, insurgent; a truly extraordinary voice in post-Civil War Spain. His work is defiant: hermetic, elliptical, fragmented; words have no fixed meaning; readers must accept being co-creators. Accordingly, it offers an alternative to the so-called “poetry of experience,” the prevailing poetic trend in his country, which places great value on expressing “ordinary” experiences and is overly preoccupied with the common reader’s “enjoyment” of a text. 2003’s Arden la pérdidas (Burn the Losses) serves as an outstanding example of Gamoneda’s poetics.

For Gamoneda, poetic language only takes on meaning at the very moment it is spoken or written; language is the creator of consciousness and knowledge, and so we can only know after the words. This is what he calls “poetry’s reality.” Such openness, such plurality, such mutability are no doubt challenges for Gamoneda’s translators. And yet, translation—by its very nature interpretive—resists the idea that words say what they say and nothing more. What a privilege for us, then, to be called to co-create, to go deep into poetry’s possibilities.

Katherine M. Hedeen is a prize-winning translator of Spanish-language poetry. She has translated over thirty books of some of the most respected voices from the region into English.

Read Full Biography

Víctor Rodríguez Núñez is one of Cuba’s most celebrated contemporary writers, with eighteen collections of poetry in Latin America and Spain.

Read Full Biography

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This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1626767/on-translating-antonio-gamoneda at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

CHRIS WATKINS | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Apostle Paula

By Chris Watkins

Likewise, I want women to adorn themselves with proper clothing, modestly and discreetly, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly garments, but rather by means of good works, as is proper for women making a claim to godliness.

—The Apostle Paul, 1 Timothy 2:9–10

I was riding toward Damascus

to yell at some Christians and maybe

stone a few uninhibited women

when Christ, that cowboy,

saw I couldn’t ride a horse for shit.

Came down as the wind

and whispered, buck, in my pony’s ear.

The next thing you know

I’ve had a vision, a conversion.

I’ve slept in the house of Christians,

and I’m no longer Saul, but Paul.

I know all the Catholic prayers

better than your grandmother.

And still I couldn’t get things right—

always telling women what to do

or even how to wear their hair

in church. O ladies of Ephesus,

surely you know that most of us

need more than one transformation

in our lives. Christ set me straight

a second time by putting me in drag.

And I have to admit, at first,

I thought She was crazy,

coming at me with that makeup brush

as if it were a knife, and I the lamb

of sacrifice, then hog tying me in that corset.

But like most prudishness,

I found mine was rooted in jealousy.

Who doesn’t want to wear

pearl earrings, gold eyeshadow,

and to speak of beautiful things?

I wanted every bit I couldn’t want:

a costly garment, low cut,

velvet, high slit up the thigh.

I wanted breasts and cat eyes,

glue-on lashes, and hair that bumped

the doorframe when I walked

into the room. I wanted to be

noticed by everyone—to glitter

like a stage light at a cabaret.

My whole life till then had been a lip sync

where I kept getting the words

wrong. No longer! Welcome

to the stage the Apostle Paula!

This one goes out to my

Ephesian sisters. I can’t ask

your forgiveness for all the pain.

But dammit! I can sing.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625042/the-apostle-paula at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

L.A. JOHNSON | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Lost Music

By L.A. Johnson

In the backseats of cars, I used to shimmy

the seatbelt low around my waist

despite, once, a friend’s mother threatening me

that doing so would slice off my breasts

if there was an accident.

Not even ten years old,

I was too small to sit in the passenger seat.

Her concern with the flaccid fat

on my chest confused me,

as if the mother understood about my body

a secret I didn't know.

I told no one my new fear,

but didn’t stop wrangling the seatbelt like a lasso,

daring something to happen. Once,

in winter, I watched my father,

driving, tune the radio, searching for

a good song or classical, whichever

came first. We didn’t speak

over the electric static, stray notes, and chatter

that garbled together into a stillness.

All my life, people have branded me carelessly

with language. That mother’s fear

still cuts

between my breasts. And that December day,

like a dream, my father, wordless,

drove us somewhere I can’t remember and

no accident happened.

Now, the ordinary words that passed between us

are gone. He lives only in my mind and I miss

the silence surrounding him, and also the music.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625044/lost-music at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

ERIKA MEITNER | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Convolution of Astral Forces

By Erika Meitner

we fetishize what we’ve

abandoned and what’s

abandoned us, which leads us

to obsess, says a series of posts

by an Instagram therapist

the mystery of the unseen

inside of things, the numinous

body’s portals and holes:

breathing passages, the mouth,

anything below the waist

you’re not a bad person

for wanting to merge with

someone else

some days the sky is a mirror

offer yourself up for adoration

penetration interpretation

think of a line of blinking fireflies

trailing the underside of night clouds

headed for the moon

that evening, after we saw

the perplexingly bright light string

beautiful and freaky and ethereal

after she told us that her father

loved to drive, got a job driving

a Good Humor truck through

the city at seventeen

then got fired for giving away

all the ice cream for free, Maeve

reminded us to let the doubt

into our work

We refuse to be intimidated

by uncertainty or time, we thought

after her pep talk

after we Googled “perplexingly

bright light string” and got

Elon Musk and Starlink

6000-plus mass-produced

satellites in low Earth orbit

designed to communicate

with designated ground

transceivers

some people think this

is how prayer works

direct messaging, then

intercession

Santa’s train of reindeer

carting gifts because you

made a list, but it’s August

your higher power won’t

answer, though it can be

anything: the universe,

Dolly Parton, science,

a household battery made

of seven components

that result in an electro-

chemical reaction

all the parts working together

to create energy we rely on

something carries the current

someone thinks we deserve

something good

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625148/a-convolution-of-astral-forces at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

ERIKA MEITNER | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

In the listening room

By Erika Meitner

authenticity & impenetrability exist simultaneously

we take turns at knowability sans calamity or consequence

immeasurable silent applause erupts regularly

we are all here with our noise-cancelling headphones around our necks

out the windows: minimal traffic, a small herd of goats eating excess underbrush

inside the room: ghosts retrieved from an endless place of waiting—

like a doctor’s office, only worse & there is no diagnosis

& in the listening room there is so much patience, too

so much wanting to know, but not asking

so much respecting the opacity of the other

there is shushing of wind in the trees carrying through half-open windows

there is silence but also conflicting definitions of time around how long it lasts

or time is epiphanous, or both

& epiphanous in this case is “offering surprising discoveries”

meaning: we are spiritually receptive to your story

as long as it turns an unexpected corner

the listening room is a lighthouse & we are ships

guided in past the breakwater

we want you to stay alive

the listening room is an open suitcase

or an ancestral home with furniture covered in plastic

& in the summer our thighs stick & someone asks

if we can just sit on the goddamn couch—its fabric skin

in the listening room we will carry you over the obstacle

back to navigable waters

we are practicing portaging

the obstacle can be anything

we eschew the tyranny of relentless positivity

we drink a lot of seltzer

the room itself becomes sacred through neural patterning

even when we are all unique & inexplicable

in the listening room, we see you

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625046/in-the-listening-room at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

JUSTIN ROVILLOS MONSON | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “Stretching Time Over the Sky”

By Justin Rovillos Monson

Featuring Rexx Life Raj, Aaliyah, Drake, Pusha T, and Jhené Aiko

I. I WISH I HAD MORE TIME IN THE DAY

‘You have one minute—’

Rumor has it there is a small space

between the lungs & the heart

where two rivers pour from the sky

& into the body’s ocean. // [wavecrashes/backbackforthforthmotion]

Rumor has it I’ve been heavy out here

on this yard & still have my mouth

open for the rain & I peeped

you followed me months before rumors made me ghost.

Rumor has it you conjured clouds

& brought the lightning on all the nights

I lay without rest—quiet storms

for this savage life.

Look, these walls taught me to be thorough:

There are two sides to every currency

There are secrets to keep & secrets we fit inside

so I palm the universe so still still still

in both hands & speak here

in tongues when you come come

around. Long as I’m a city, you’ll always have a place to sit

a wall to lean on & get your fiend on.

‘Thank you for using—’

II. JUST [LIKE] KNOW IF I HAD IT MY WAY

This ain’t that customer service, ‘How are you today, miss?’

that ‘Excuse me, can I steal a moment?’ This that thick layer

over rugged noise; that Timbs on the soaked

cement in the wintertime, snow melting & dripping

off the suede; that immigrant blood in my muddy

veins, eat every grain of rice & lick clean the plate

& still still still labor in three tongues

for the next meal; that pushups in the cell

playing D’Angelo—how does it feel? This—fuck that

bring the bass in low & let me untangle every knot slow.

[honey&warmth in the wintertime—UUGGHH]

& when I ask what’s good?

that means something different to me.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625048/from-stretching-time-over-the-sky at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

JANICE LOBO SAPIGAO | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “carrying songs from the sky to crease the ground”

By Janice Lobo Sapigao

After Sonia Sanchez, Sarah Russell, and Barbara Jane Reyes with E-40, H.E.R., YG, Mac Dre, Dorrough, The Supremes, and Joe Bataan

1.

i wish i could tell you why i go back and forth between cities.

maybe i belong to the bridges & 880 freeway. maybe loneliness

is not an ending / i want these songs to show me the way /  back

to

myself:

can i build you a playlist? / cold air over warm water: /

topline fog walls on the peninsula / the songs go:

dumb dumb & s l i d e / most nights i’m a slow jam /

a two-step / a mist / a fantasy /

2.

i try not to think of other versions. [if i had three lives, i’d you in two.]

[the other?] didn’t sonia sanchez write a way?—for all the women who have

ever stretched their bodies out anticipating civilization & finding ruins?

can i show you places where

cities have nearly broken me?

maybeucanhelp

i’m having some

trouble believing

that bad & good

areoppositethings

what if you came

to see about me?

i would take you

to a concert or

a lake / around

hella ppl just to

be alone & then

i would take you

to a bookstore

but not to read.

& well what if we

kissed too much?

ourlipsstackedlike

booksontheshelf.

anticipatingtouch.

‘there goes the day

becoming shadow,’

amongourwhispers.

i’m afraid i want to blur

the lines / i don’t plan on

getting no sleep / while we

the premise:

these poems

take place

in the dark

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625050/from-carrying-songs-from-the-sky-to-crease-the-ground at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

NICK MAKOHA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Julius Caesar

By Nick Makoha

I believe that James McAvoy is a type of Caesar. But he never stays

in character long enough to make it hold. Now when pirates had

Caesar caught in a trap off the coast of Rhodes, he demanded that

they ask for more than double the ransom. When Caesar says,

do this, it is performed. These fishermen, his kidnappers (is “kidnapped”

too strong?), accepted his request as he recited poetry to them on a throne

of flour. Two months after paying the ransom, with the aid of a private

army, he squeezed the yolk out of these men. We’re doomed. I know

we can’t all be Moses but have you noticed that superstars always want to

play our parts. There’s this dialogue where Nicholas Garrigan, played

by McAvoy, is rebuked by Idi Amin—You promised to me you would help me

build a new Uganda. McAvoy doesn’t answer. Don’t you know that that’s

how they take us? It is Bura’s Desperado Sacrifice. Forcing the Black king

to h8 doesn’t seem to accomplish much, but it makes all of the difference

in just two moves. (1. Qxh8 2. Xxa1 Qd4). Crossing a runway is not

like crossing the street, especially when your Black king is a counterfeit

played by Forest Whitaker and his lazy eye. Planes have been hiding in

the air. This duty-free gin is a useless placebo. But rumour has it Miss

America Tawny Godin from Yonkers has a smile you want all to yourself.

The thing about my country is that there is always somebody ready to say

—You’re mine. Maybe I should have led with that. Anyway, it’s your move.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625054/julius-caesar at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

NICK MAKOHA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Icarus: A Self Portrait—1984

By Nick Makoha

I quit my job that Saturday when I heard my name called by the manager.[1] That motherfucker always

looked at me like I was running drugs for some cartel or there was a stain on my pants after coming

from the bathroom. Two months ago,[2] I was drunk[3] in New York with an au pair who was studying to be

a fashion photographer. She was ordering coffee in Harlem when she dropped her change. The barista wrote

her name—“Alizée” with two Es—on the rim of her latte. That was about the same time the energy embargo

began. Her English was better than my French, but in a moment of relaxation, I offer to pay for her

drink. It was the least I could do. In my mind, I was hearing myself say, Let me pay for your hot drink but what

came out was Je suis chaud. And to think I walked in to ask directions. I was already late for my meeting.

As I placed my card on the counter she asked, “What do you mean?”[4] Photographers see the world differently[5]

from the rest of us.[6] To you and me a day is just a day, but to them,[7] it is a gathering of time or more

accurately of light. The same light Plato speaks about in the cave. In an hour from now,[8] we would be sat

by the window[9] talking about migrants cast adrift on flimsy rafts and what Kubrick’s 2001 would have been

like if it had been directed by Orson Welles as her third latte cools off. Behind me white clouds gathered

before the thunderclaps. Alizée was taking pictures while flicking her black hair behind her ears. The next

thing I knew, in a moment that I thought was mine, we were in the back of a taxi.[10] Someone had left

an issue of Newsweek on the seat, opened to page 11. This is where the mythology begins. What do you

want to know? That her name means trade wind. Or that a painter can use a myth to reinvent what has

happened before. In the same way that we played two jazz cassettes on repeat in her hotel room while

making love, only resurfacing for room service and to purchase scalped Dave Chappelle tickets at a

comedy club in Soho on Friday. I’d be lying if I did not admit we were playing with death. Exchanging

what we owned with what we didn’t own. It was the nature of recovering what was lost until she left for Paris.

_____

1I have retreated like this before as though life were

a vessel chartered for a distant coast.

2Didn’t you notice this new decade lengthening

as I woke before birds migrating seaward?

3It is not yet summer, and you know next to nothing

about me, except the old story.

4I mean, don’t leave me to this earth the way

the wind does, unwinding its portion above us.

5There is not a combination of sound and shadow

that I can solidify, that describes my privacies.

6That includes you, reader: there is no word for forget,

only leaving and even that is a song. Selah!

7Coming from a point-and-shoot neighborhood,

I am looked at from all sides. Ask Caleb.

8To survive I find ways to make the earth move,

a persistent rain follows me in the black car.

9My eyes can’t keep pace with the motorbike picking

up speed. Brake lights have the same motion.

10The things that abandon you in the front seat.

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625507/icarus-a-self-portrait-1984 at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

NICK MAKOHA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

CODEX©

By Nick Makoha

SAMO© first appears as a tag on a New York

City wall in 1978 two blocks down from Aswad

bookstore. It is a kind of CODEX© to speak

the unspeakable as if it were a confession on redbrick

or brownstone in the hard years. Downtown

was Jean’s street studio. So were the fridge, TV,

wall and floor in the apartment. He saw no division

between earth and sky. To call it graffiti is to call

hieroglyphics gibberish. That’s ignorant. This is

Jean-Michel ordering a tequila to test his outer limits.

It’s a summer night and we have rented two 35mm

cameras. He’s figured out that a painting is stronger

than memory, passports, planes, and nicotine. Curtains

drawn. Wood scavenged. Paint and unpaid rent.

After red wine he swears he heard the wall say

—Let your wrists be free. In the face of all this,

he was kin to me. This is a photograph of

Jean-Michel after the ten-minute set at the Mudd Club.

He says—It’s not me, and shows more interest

in the streetlamp above us. Look the camera is guessing.

Selfhood is a controlled hallucination generated

by the brain. The night is a black moon. The Empire

State Building has always been a lead character

in his inner movie. From the loft, it glows orange.

This is Jean-Michel, and he says—If you can’t see

my three-point crown you should see a doctor.

He is divided and dying for a piss. He presents

as an image of a man and as matter in motion.

Notes:

This poem has special formatting. You may need to scroll right to see all of the text. You can also view a PDF of the poem here.

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625509/codex-copy at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

NICK MAKOHA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Panel of Experts

By Nick Makoha

Tell me about the first time you met Basquiat. Not this request again ...

So: Kobe has the ball, Staples Center, they’re up by eight

against the 76ers. Two rows behind Jack Nicholson and the lady

he is with, who keeps adjusting her bra. Phil Jackson calls a timeout.

I’m not used to American money, so when the popcorn vendor

offers me my change I say, keep it. Some kid asks Basquiat for an autograph.

He’s not even paying attention. He’s waiting for the timeout to end

so he can watch men stand on the edge of the earth’s lip and return

to being birds. There’s red paint on his Comme des Garçons suit.

Before combing his Ray-Bans into his dreads he asks me for a pen

like he knows me, while still watching the game as if it were a Spanish

tragedy. Time is a real cannibal: the rest of the day plays like the Zodiac Suite

on loop. By track five it’s Saturday, 3 AM. Breakfast is a powerful piece

of technology. So, I order two omelettes and some OJ. We talk for hours

about Joyce—the act of endless beginnings, but the world can’t simplify

itself. A TV screen is witnessing a small catastrophe. Basquiat isn’t scared

of the hi-tech wolf. So, we climb right into the canvas like a galaxy shivering

and he says, don’t be fooled by the never-ending pattern of abstraction. It’s the only way

we can become particles of light. As time becomes a direction he has to leave. I barely

remember, but I think the Lakers won. Of course, the transitions were much

slower. I think he had the remote. Hey! Does that answer your question?

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625052/a-panel-of-experts at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

NICK MAKOHA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Eroica 1

By Nick Makoha

I. SAMO© AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO BLAH ... BLAHBLAHBLAH. BLAHZOOEY ... BBLAHBLAH QUASI-BLAH ... ETC.

(in E♭ major).

Now, I am second guessing, but in principle aren’t we worth more

than sparrows? But here too, even after dying and a forced landing,

I am lost for words. What can I tell you about the history of violence?

This is our misfortune: to leave hot summers and embrace a forced

migration. The minute I wrote this I became an armed man. If you

ask me, it’s time to get out of here. But before we do, what if we go

back and reconnect with our people? Not to the IDF commandos

spraying bullets. They did as ordered. Not to the oligarch with his

overdressed Russian girlfriend or the soldiers asleep in the control

tower awaiting their own destruction. We can skip the passenger

headcount and the follow-up report (salted with fingerprints) by the UN

aviation agency. It tells the story of the diverted passenger flight from

Athens, but excludes the ones boiling beans over a slow fire watching ants

on a chicken bone from the day before. What follows is an account

of the nature of birds or the nature of glory, or the nature of what made

Moses lead us out of Egypt, or the nature of fury. I imagine it’s something

you would want to come back to, like this painting that allows us to crash

through the wall of a room. Ever tried it? I know enough about living

to know that the canvas is merely a cluster of spatial theories in the shape

of a landscape. Brake lights. Black car. Notice this new decade lengthening.

It’s summer and yet you know next to nothing about me, except the old story.

II. SAMO© ... AS AN END TO BOOSH-WAH ...

(in C minor)

What follows is a description of an unknown timeline. In December 1969

Thelonious Monk taped a show for French television titled  Jazz Portrait:

Thelonious Monk. I, Basquiat, would have been nine at the time. This is two years

after Ngũgĩ publishes A Grain of  Wheat. Flawless! At one point, the text reads,

Then nobody noticed it; but looking back we can see that Waiyaki’s blood contained within

it a seed, a grain, which gave birth to a movement whose main strength thereafter sprang from

a bond with the soil. Rewind your mind. Press play. Such erasure should surprise

no one. Anyway, back to Monk. Listening to a live recording is like observing

a low solstice. Deep silence and its imitation meld into a narrative so that you can say,

I was there when. Feel free to add your own peril. Monk’s music is devoted

to reversing the silence, in the same way that da Vinci was devoted to discussing

the moon’s brightness relative to the sun. Mark their ways and what they capture.

Mark the border, a field’s end, that place across the street, the twelve, seagulls

defending the shore, dogs sleeping in mud, airport walls in need of repairs ... etc.

Mark the harmonic function of everything repeating. A tarmac road leads to

more tarmac roads. With this careful adjustment made, it turns out that if the runway

and plane could speak to each other then we would have a gate in this lengthening

summer. Which is another way of saying  June 1976—red ants have found the trees,

guards are sweating oil. In the background my veins thicken like wings. Sidenote:

my marriage to Madonna would have failed. I treated her face on the New York Post

like the Holy City of Safed. At this slip boundary let us use the second act as a getaway car.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625056/eroica-1 at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

SARA MAE | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Birth of Venus

By Sara Mae

For the tides, barnacles open their throats to drink

or close the door to brood in their own wetness.

Barnacles ruin hydrodynamics; they are

expensive & insist on slowness. Venus

is a mythology of vegetation, fertility. That we

come to shore ripe. Beneath Botticelli’s

scallop shell (compact mirror, teenage girl

hand imitating the chatter of some boyfriend,

a fist opening & closing me like a door),

a sleeve of barnacles. Imagine an underbelly

of hungry, one-eyed zooplankton, tempera-

paint crustacea gazing malocchio out onto

Botticelli’s wrists, their own Mediterraneans

pulsing & what aphrodisia brewed there

unrealized, Emily S in magic marker on a

bathroom stall writing [my name then] is a

lesbian before I knew the nature of my desire,

or why I was dressing up, my costume jewelry

shimmering like calves of docks & even

now in cosmic tubs, my ghost mouths open

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625060/the-birth-of-venus at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

ELISE PASCHEN | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Trot Song

By Elise Paschen

During the Grayhorse

Dances in June,

my mother side-stepped

around the circle,

echoing moves

her grandmother

Tallchief had taught.

Someone pulled me

aside, insisting

I stop my mother

from dancing. When

she had to lie

motionless during

an MRI,

my mother said

she would pretend

to hear the drum

pulse of her youth.

My daughter and I

now enter the circle,

pick up our pace

as we imitate

the gait of mares

trotting, those songs

chanted by

generations

of warriors

who galloped back

into the heart

of the village.

Wrapped in what

we inherited,

striped broadcloth blankets,

we shadow chestnuts,

pintos, palominos,

claiming back hoofbeat.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625058/trot-song at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

ELISE PASCHEN | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

After “Killers of the Flower Moon”

By Elise Paschen

Lily Gladstone confides she wore my great

grandmother Eliza’s blankets in three scenes.

I don’t remember my great grandmother, though

in a photo, aged ninety, she holds me in her arms.

The actress plays Mollie Burkhart, who lived

down the street from Eliza in Fairfax.

Hands out wide, Lily says Eliza had a broad wingspan.

She pleated the wool broadcloth several times.

Through an open window, wings outstretched, an eagle

owl looms toward Mollie’s mother, dying from poison.

My mother told me that owls in trees wailed

the windswept night before her father died.

Wrapping my great grandmother’s striped blanket

around her shoulders, Mollie asks her husband,

during a downpour, not to close the window.

Be still, she says, and listen to the rain.

Eliza’s blankets fold and unfold stories.

Into every pattern, I fly back home.

The Osage replaced hide robes with Dutch-

traded blankets in the mid-19th century.

I stop breathing during the night of film

when a murderer calls Osage women blankets.

While her husband injects Mollie with arsenic,

each sister is shot, poisoned, or bombed to death.

A woman, in a voice-over, foreshadows,

this blanket is a target on our backs.

In the quiet, after Mollie’s obituary

is reported, I only hear rain.

Outside the theater, silent thunderbirds

overhead spread dark cloud-spattered wings,

outlining circles across a broadcloth.

Inside each target, a hole in the sky.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625062/after-killers-of-the-flower-moon at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

MEGAN DENTON | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Girl and Her Fireplace

By Megan Denton

Born on a new moon, one minute after my sister

and one pound less, my ribcage was full

of roosting songbirds and hers a steady drum,

and when all three pounds of me came earthside I heard God say,

everyone you love lives here. It was a Tuesday, past

the spun-sugar pink of morning, past the betwixt place, past high tea

and two handfuls of good soil. There was no laying on

of hands. I was let loose in a world too cruel for me, emptying

my new box of crayons onto the floor, in search of the perfect color

to draw the sky. Wee unchurched mountain girl,

planting jelly beans in the forest and hoping for magic stems.

At thirty-four and many years sick, sometimes I still think

of all the people throwing coins into fountains. I thank

every tipped domino that led me here: my first winter

completely alone, save for the glowworm orange

of my hearth. I admit at first I was terrified. I admit I sit

a little too close. Forgive me. I am at the doorway

of the firebox, feeding all my prayers to the flame.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625066/a-girl-and-her-fireplace at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

MEGAN DENTON | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Ars Poetica with Invocation

By Megan Denton

Which way to the monster cage? I am in my god body now—

in my sandy foxhole

sat backwards in a chair.

I wintered in a lighthouse

not far from here. My imagination,

my monastery. My little monk feet

clack about my mugwort garden: a tisket, a tasket,

a green and yellow basket. Try it.

Push against me as hard as you can. Still I will

go on swinging my war ax,

despite my stringbean heart. All the queen’s horses

and all the queen’s men could not stop

the scritch of my pen.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625064/ars-poetica-with-invocation at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

LINDSAY TIGUE | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Code

By Lindsay Tigue

My messages have exceeded the storage limit and I covet a home. The cat and dog wait for me in particular and the dog has certainly shit on the floor. J’arrive. Sure, when I tweet approximately three people respond or like it, or say, “same.” I have a lot of broadcasts to no one. I keep a list of classic movies I want to own and when I find one I stack it in a cabinet—not in alpha order, but arranged in a chaos system known only to me. I catalog them on an app; scanning their barcodes makes a little chirp. I inspect them for gay clues. These days, I live at my parents’ house again and when I empty the trash at night the neighbor’s light bursts over the driveway. I’m caught, finally. Look, I would read the tea leaves if I could. I will dig the Magic 8 Ball out of the attic. Every January, my mother tells me this will be my year. Yes, a treasure. You see, it’s disconcerting really—how long I don’t know myself. How old I have to become. And I keep misremembering the same dream. In it, I am driving and every third car flashes its lights at me. Click, flash, click. Flash. I lean forward into a bit of it all.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625070/code at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

LINDSAY TIGUE | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Histories

By Lindsay Tigue

Have you ever searched for tunnels behind bookshelves? Have you ever zoomed out quickly on Google maps and felt afraid? Have you ever walked over to a window and reflected on your rural surroundings? Have you ever loved a flat place? Have you ever held a warped ruler in your hands? Have you ever desired intangibility in an overbright megastore? Have you ever cried to New Year’s movie scenes put to film in 1939? Does Auld Lang Syne get you every time? Have you ever saved a list of the 200 best sapphic movies to your phone notes? Do you look for the future in the past and the past in the future? Do you ever reimagine your queerness next to VHS tapes and internet cafés? Have you ever projected a light-show constellation on the ceiling in the middle of a plague? Do you ever imagine yourself calling collect in 1999, butterfly clips adorning your dirty blond hair? Have you ever drank a beer and told a secret? Have you ever watched someone build a fire from a distance? Do you think about all those bygone fires in the distance?

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625068/histories at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

WAYNE MILLER | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The End of Childhood

By Wayne Miller

My daughter is building a path

across the lake.

Each morning she goes out

with an armful of boards

and hammers them

into the ice. Her brother

brings the coffee can

of nails, tucks the hammer

into his belt. The ice is thick,

the path is growing.

We watch them

all day from the railing.

No one else lives

at this end of the valley

though up around the bend

there are lights.

My daughter’s project

is not to reach them,

she tells us, but just

to leave a perfect

track of boards

floating on the water

that first day

the ice has melted.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625074/the-end-of-childhood at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

LIS SANCHEZ | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Manuel Sánchez. Lavish

By Lis Sanchez

Utuado, Puerto Rico

September 1899*

Before there were cavalry horses sheening the street

with golden turds, there were strains of a treble wafting

out of the whitewashed café, perturbing the flamboyán’s red petals.

Before there were boardroom bosses, there were hacendados

with cutting whips, with wrought iron hair,

with hooves for stamping macheteros out of the high cane.

Before Rough Riders were storming the street, Civil Guards were

perfecting the art of torture.

Before there was a bronze Cristóbal Colón there was Cristóbal Colón

manicuring his nails. You opened your arms, he lopped

them off. You opened your mouth, death crawled in.

Before, I was lavishing a woman’s hands with coffee berries, humming.

My whole body was humming. Now I am

walking away from my flattened orchard with the same woman.

With her blowing white sash, with her berry-stained fingers,

she hears me shriek at the wind, and insists I am singing.

Notes:

*One month after landfall of San Ciriaco, the most destructive hurricane in Puerto Rico’s history.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625072/manuel-sanchez-lavish at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

LIS SANCHEZ | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Manuel Sánchez. My Pregnant Wife Sleeps in a Boardinghouse Hallway

By Lis Sanchez

Do I hear you, flitting dream, shaking your feathers?

I am sitting perfectly still, preventing the sleepless from wandering

over your fluttering feet.

Do I hear you, green dream, rustling your feathers?

Or is it the wings of geese lifting from a field of cut cane,

freighted with wild seed?

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625078/manuel-sanchez-my-pregnant-wife-sleeps-in-a-boardinghouse-hallway at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

LIS SANCHEZ | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Manuel Sánchez. Our Demand

By Lis Sanchez

Ferry terminal, Puerto de San Juan, Puerto Rico

November 22, 1900*

At the gangway, our demand was a straw pava.

We wore our demand jauntily cocked across our skull.

So what if rain poured inside our collar?

Our demand had a crown woven of twenty-five american dollars.

It jounced as we danced for our wives.

We affixed it to our head with rusty nails.

Our demand was a wedding mantilla drooping off our face

down to our clavicle;

it would have blurred our vision if not for the countless holes

made from years of stabbing it with a spanish comb.

The demand we wore to the point of abasement was a nun’s wimple.

To prove to our wives that we still grew beards, we made endless

adjustments,

even when we lay prostrate with our arms cruciform.

The demand we settled for was a five dollar tatter

the size of a neckerchief, and sweat ridden.

The wind snatched it, twisted it loose.

Some of us refused to step off the dock without knowing

where our demand had blown.

It was plastered across our eyes.

Notes:

*Hawaiian sugar growers’ agent MacFie promised to pay one hundred and fourteen Puerto Rican workers twenty-five dollars each prior to departing San Juan. This promise remained broken.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625076/manuel-sanchez-our-demand at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

ROY WAHLBERG | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Everpresent Guest

By Roy Wahlberg

Talons close

with an angry snarl

an atom short of flesh:

ancient appetites whetted

but still outwitted

by the thinnest

shred of skin.

But then Death pauses, smiles,

leans back and relaxes,

satisfied to know

that he fattens on both

the quick and the slow,

each in their own good time.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625082/everpresent-guest at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

DAMIEN MCCLENDON | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Sink

By Damien McClendon

suppose you’re eight

a crow drowns in the dishwater

black plum

-age all over the place.

your mother’s kitchen will never be clean enough

to please God. she wakes

you from your sleep in the night

to wash the spoons.

you don’t talk back but gag

at the thought of it, old food

floating in the cold

swampy sink. in your mouth

you throw up a yellow

narcissus pretty as forgiveness

should be and swallow it. your mother

raises you like a welt—palpable earth

-worm under the skin.

suppose the crow was preying

over you, your hungry angel. for punishment

your mother had a hundred belts

but you forced yourself not to cry

when she hit you because it felt

better than rolling a bawl

into an abyss.

suppose the crow cried

out in your voice: I’m sorry

and only God knew at the time

that those were the wrong words.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625080/sink at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

STEVEN LEYVA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Limerence

By Steven Leyva

What do we call this desire

to be desired? The milkweed’s impenitent bow

to the monarch or starlight. The heart’s timpani

at a sundress, a thigh,

a braided anklet. A kind word escaping the cocktail

glass. An olive in brine. Name it beauty

and chase will become

our watchword. Call it love and the sun will kneel.

Say happiness and “Do I deserve this?”

follows, rapturous, like a sparrow

pecking the ground. Instead of wisdom, why not

wish for the owl’s heart

at night, seeing in the dark

more than a meal, but a place to sing. Don’t imagine

a dirge for the eaten. Conjure

an exhale instead:

the hoot of being alive. Name it

whatever you like.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625084/limerence at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

STEVEN LEYVA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What You Need to Survive Vernon, OK

By Steven Leyva

Sheer luck. Dumb-as-a-hammer-

without-the-handle luck. Two-yolks-

in-the-egg luck. The fourth leaf on

the clover isn’t enough. Leave the rabbit’s

feet alone. Beginner’s luck. One

bounce of the Plinko chip into the bonus.

The universe’s casual lagniappe. Crossing-

the-platform-and-catching-the-other-train luck.

Even-better-when-late luck. Onion-ring-

in-the-fries luck. The penny’s street resumé.

Hard worn, back-country luck. The creek unrisen.

The anti-Lazarus creek. The-glint-against-

the-barrel luck. Luck to see the sniper asleep.

Oil-derricks-never-went-dry luck. All-sevens-

and-a-pineapple luck. Good fortune to defy the odds

of hypertension or hair loss. Arm of the lucky cat

scratching the air forever. Unambitious Icarus Jones—

boy was lucky as a broken wishbone. Oh to match his lack

of fear, his letterman swagger [All State, Triple Jump Champ],

his young, gifted, and Black luck. A palm itching, money-on-

the-way luck. An ear burning, willing-to-fry-anyone-

who’s-talking-shit-around-the-way luck. An ace in the hole type.

A rueful magnanimity toward what is out of control.

An ease with being at ease while the state becomes the dust bowl.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625086/what-you-need-to-survive-vernon-ok at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

STEVEN LEYVA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How to Incorporate a Town

By Steven Leyva

Against the stain of heat

lightning that cracks a fresco

of Oklahoma dusk, add

this husk of breath. The lawn

a skeletal color. Any remembrance

of robin’s egg blue, or born-

again vermillion along the myrtle

leaf, has sunk into seasonal

fable. Arkansas river mud

an odd Valhalla of frogs. An endless

scrim of small towns along the Indian

Turnpike. Guess, if you can,

the name of this opera with an empty

libretto. What can be said against

the stain of mass relocation

that hasn’t been said by simply weeping?

What phantasmal wheat

makes the bread ghosts eat?

Slim vials of rain arrive

at a place where the plains end

their protest of dust, where

the late birthmark of Art Deco

architecture has grown, where

Osage hills assuage Ozark

Mountains, where the Wild Bunch

and Daltons gunned a hole in history,

where oil transubstantiates. Add to that rain

whatever dignity stains. Wouldn’t you

know, metaphor is the usual method

of incorporating a town. Colonial

becomes normative, becomes Norman,

Oklahoma, becomes a University,

becomes a universal land grant,

becomes a honeycomb of dead bees

in the apiary of America. Our magnum

reginae is a coin over each eye.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625088/how-to-incorporate-a-town at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

STEVEN LEYVA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Failing at the Exit Ramp, Icarus Jones Speaks True

By Steven Leyva

Ever missed throwing change in the toll

booth’s wide trough? The easiest bank shot

imaginable, and the light zinc, the phantom

silver, the miniscule nickel, which no wind

should be able to disturb, falling short, rolling

like five marbles stuck by a jawbreaker along

the exit ramp’s ramshackle yellow lines. Haste

is the haint today, in the paint—crooked

as an arthritic finger—in the circumlocution

coins sing on gravel, and the miracle

of an upright stance that gains inches

from the reach of your hand. How

on earth? raises its hand to speak

through a throb at your temple. Listen

whether laughter follows or calling the wind

anything but a child of God, the veil you’ve

sewn so carefully to claim control is torn

like any other scrim, gentle first and then

all at once. Clink and the light isn’t looking

to reflect, the coins gone after the dark under the car

or sunk into cracks they were meant to pay for. Here in

the rearview, a crow’s foot spinning out of the coin of my eye.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625090/failing-at-the-exit-ramp-icarus-jones-speaks-true at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

THE CHORUS THESE POETS CREATE: TWENTY YEARS OF LETRAS LATINAS

- One Poem Festival: A Twentieth Anniversary Folio

- Carnivore

- Searching

- The Moon Is on Wellbutrin

- God Was Not

- As Capitalism Gasps for Breath I Watch the Knicks Game

- My First Thanksgiving on Hispaniola

- Instructions upon Arrival

- While Everything Else Was Falling Apart

- Transcendental Love Song

- Pamela Franklin’s Neck

- Transgender opera for perpetual metamorphosis

- between our legs all manner of

- Brujitas

- Tempera at the Maria Novella Church

- Negative Capability in El Salvador

- strategic

- flowers for Robert Waddell: an elegy

- From “CANTARES”

- What the Moon Said to the Poet

- What Poetry Told Me

- Screaming

- Communion

- In the Surgical Ward

- To Shelter Itself and, Sheltered, to Conceal Itself

- The Wake

- / FOR / AFTER / JAN BEATTY /

FRANCISCO ARAGÓN, LAURA VILLAREAL | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Prose from Poetry Magazine

One Poem Festival: A Twentieth Anniversary Folio

We must be deliberate in considering what we owe each other and how we care for and protect each other.

BY Francisco Aragón & Laura Villareal

Originally Published: December 02, 2024

Afro-Latinx Poetry Now gathering in 2022. Pictured from left to right: Roberto Carlos Garcia, Yesenia Montilla, Jasminne Mendez, Raina J. León, John Murillo, and Darrel Alejandro Holnes. Photo courtesy of Letras Latinas.

The queer Chicano poet Francisco X. Alarcón (1954–2016), when reminiscing about the Floricanto gatherings in the seventies, liked to invoke the term “One Poem Festival.” This was how he coined his favorite session at these multi-day affairs—one where a sizable group of poets would step to the mic, one at a time, and perform one piece, thereby gifting the audience with a rich, collective sampling of their community’s literary art. That’s what we aspire to do here in print to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of Letras Latinas, the literary initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies: present a festival of poems by individuals who have been in community with us, and one another, in various configurations, in the last two decades.

Letras Latinas’s mission is to amplify our community’s storytellers, with a particular emphasis on poetry. Over our twenty years, we have provided a multifaceted constellation of projects, programs, live events both on and off the Notre Dame campus, and publishing initiatives, including three national book prizes: the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, and the Lorca Latinx Poetry Prize. Partnerships and collaborations have been crucial throughout it all. These have often emerged from Letras Latinas’s membership in the Poetry Coalition, a national alliance that began in 2015. Although Letras Latinas relied mostly on the efforts of its founder, Francisco Aragón, during its first seventeen years, the initiative has become a team effort with the addition of associates Brent Ameneyro and Laura Villareal and, most recently, Poetry Coalition fellow Cloud Delfina Cardona. Our programs have often fostered conversation across artistic disciplines, with particular attention on poetry and the visual arts.

In 2014, for example, Rigoberto González delivered a memorable lecture in Washington, DC, for a Letras Latinas program in collaboration with the Library of Congress. It was titled “Latino Poetry: Pivotal Voices, Era of Transition.” And about midway through this twentieth anniversary folio, readers will encounter and experience a piece by Aleida Rodríguez, who, in 2006, was part of “POETAS Y PINTORES: Artists Conversing with Verse,” a multidisciplinary initiative in which poetry inspired the creation of new visual art. Rodríguez was one of twelve featured poets, alongside twelve featured artists. The gesture culminated with a twenty-four-piece traveling exhibit of new visual art curated alongside poems. A partnership with the Center for Women’s Intercultural Leadership (CWIL) at Saint Mary’s College, “POETAS Y PINTORES” was partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Our selection here concludes with Richard Blanco, who, before President Obama selected him as his second inaugural poet, read his poems at Notre Dame in 2007, where he also sat for an interview as part of the Letras Latinas Oral History Project. This archival undertaking produces video interviews for the community as a free online resource and currently contains over seventy recordings. Blanco returned to campus this past October 16 and was joined by Rigoberto González for the seventh in a series of nine planned events throughout 2024—both on and off campus. In fact, this was the most prevalent criteria for inclusion in these pages in Poetry: participation in one of our anniversary events.

As you may have gathered from the programming described, Letras Latinas has long been focused on putting poets in conversation with one another and creating opportunities for writers to be in community. We allowed that spirit of conversation and community to guide the selection of these poems. You’ll find poets bound together in their poetic obsessions—the moon, the body, memory, and music, to name a few. Read as a whole, you’ll hear the chorus these poets create when placed together. A main chord to listen for while reading is how the poems reckon with or respond to a question posed by Jordan Pérez. She asks: “Can you show me a body that is itself/whole?”

Bodies of all sorts are represented in these poems: lustful bodies, colonized and displaced bodies, the bodies of loved ones and our own—all of which require care. We witness art as visceral and embodied. We hold vigil for those housing the ghost of memory. As Emma Trelles writes, “the past is a haunting and the best you can hope from a ghost is a sorrow that won’t kill you.” The poets also remind us that we need each other. We are called to address what it means to live in a body under attack by hostile legislation or genocide. We must be deliberate in considering what we owe each other and how we care for and protect each other. As Yesenia Montilla fittingly calls out:

We fight for a win to fill

the ache of losing: Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Ayiti. We take

what we can, celebrate small victories until we win everything

we thought we never could—

We must keep fighting for and celebrating each other.

This essay is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Poet, translator, essayist, editor, and San Francisco native Francisco Aragón studied Spanish at the University of California at Berkeley and New York University. He earned an MA from the University of California at Davis and an MFA from the University of Notre Dame.

Exploring how language and genre both connect and diverge, Aragón’s poems locate personal experience within a wider cultural and historical...

Read Full Biography

Laura Villareal is an associate at Letras Latinas and the author of Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022).

Read Full Biography

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This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/articles/1625092/one-poem-festival-a-twentieth-anniversary-folio at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Carnivore

By Rigoberto González

Multiple sclerosis is a disease in which the immune system eats away at the exterior covering of nerves.

I’m consuming myself,

my doctor says, and I get

the urge each time I lift

a fork. How it rattles

with anticipation as I aim to

plunge it into the scar

tissue of my chest. No worries.

The heart is not where

the heart should be. Neither

am I. I’m supposed to be

upright and sturdy as a moose.

Better yet, a gazelle. I

used to walk so gracefully,

so elegantly in that animal

me. How my antelope

nose soothed my buck’s

neck before he stotted away,

stomping out my heart

like the last flame before

silence. I’m lonely. This entire

burnt forest has forgotten

my name. I bend to lick

the ash and remember

nothing. Not even the twitch

of my heart once pink and

alive as a nest of hatchlings.

He chewed it off just like

I’m gnawing at the dead

gazelle of me. At night I detect

thumping. Heartbeat or

hoofbeat, I can’t say. It creeps

further away, memory of

a man who once loved me,

hungering for the whole of me.

Oh I used to be more edible

than this. And so mealy.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625096/carnivore at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

JORDAN PÉREZ | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Searching

By Jordan Pérez

When the purple snap peas in the garden

couldn’t find anything to grasp onto, the shoots

ferned into something unrecognizable. That was

that. There was simply no more living. The tomatoes,

believing they were near death, rushed to birth

fruit, and the very production took

the last life from them. Even the squash

was nothing without the blossom, and so in return.

Can you show me a body that is itself

whole? I think daily about the spotted turtle,

who I found trapped under the boardwalk

and carried back to the water, only to later

read that, if she’s moved too far, will spend

the rest of her life searching for her eggs.

How is it possible to define yourself by waiting

for someone you have never met?

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625100/searching at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

DIANNELY ANTIGUA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Moon Is on Wellbutrin

By Diannely Antigua

After Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Why else would she lift her shirt every night

to show the world her one milky

breast? My sister says Wellbutrin

sparked her slut era. I say, I don’t need

Wellbutrin for that. The moon used to be on

Zoloft, before trying Prozac, before adding

Klonopin to her lunar chemistry. The moon is on

Propranolol. She’s an anxious bitch,

left to borrow light from the brightest

orb around. What she wouldn’t do

to be the sun, allowed to come

out during the day when the humans are awake

and buying things, and she—just a sliver

of existence, the distance of thirty Earths

away from touch. Who could be this cruel

to leave her wanting? The father was

probably an asshole, the mother some

aloof star. She’s been used by too many

singers, painters, and scientists, too

many witches and hipsters who absorb

her essence from bowls of water

left outside overnight. I’ve used the moon

in this poem, metaphor, hunk of rock.

I’m sorry little moon, my moonly

moon. You know, the moon can be

both super and blue. Tonight, let’s take

our moon-shaped pills together. Let me

carry the weight of you.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625098/the-moon-is-on-wellbutrin at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

XOCHITL-JULISA BERMEJO | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

God Was Not

By Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo

All that you touch, you change. All that you change, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.

—Octavia Butler, “Parable of the Sower”

in your kiss or fingertips,

or how you liked to say goodbye,

arms squeezing through my middle

to lift my body from the ground

till bones cracked up my back.

Like a child’s xylophone,

you played me into laughter,

but not in the good way giggles

crammed us happy in the Jack

drive-through for no reason at all.

Easy as air that one morning

we sat across from each other

at a diner. A waitress refilled

our coffee mugs and served us

a Mexican dicho like toast,

not knowing you had a hunger.

“My mom used to say that.”

“That’s the universe,” I replied.

Your green eyes turned tender.

God was in the moments we didn’t

touch, or even think to touch.

But the last time, you touched for me

out of a nightmare. I woke

at dawn to your hand pleading

with my breast—Awake!—Alive!—Stay!

I caressed your beard, but fear

persisted, so maybe god was not

there for you. Or maybe god was.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625104/god-was-not at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

YESENIA MONTILLA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

As Capitalism Gasps for Breath I Watch the Knicks Game

By Yesenia Montilla

For Cheryl Boyce-Taylor and her Malik, our Phife

& I immediately think of Cheryl, her Malik, his beloved

obsession with the team’s orange & blue, a sunset sky over

this city. The ruckus of these players’ sweet grit, the desire they

have to come in first. They rebound & strip like stickup

kids. They pound the paint as if their feet were wrapped in

Timbs, their lean torsos tattered & tapered in Coogi sweaters.

This is New York. Bodega filled with the aroma of a good

chopped cheese. Ambitions racing through our minds fast as

the 2 train during rush hour. I watch the reverie on TV, as

the Garden thrashes & quakes by the tectonic plate of our

steadfast fandom. Don’t get it twisted, capitalism is dying

& yet here I am rooting for boys bred to burn out their bodies

to make billionaires more billions. Was this what Rome felt like

toward the end? When the colosseums filled with gladiators

stirred the masses into a frenzy. How the people hungered for

food & freedom, but instead lost themselves in the carnal play

of sacrifice—reliable warriors, safer to believe in than

Caesar. No matter, I think Phife would’ve loved this team,

unflappable & carefree, anti-establishment, uncompromising.

What happens to the heart of a city when its people survive

on air; that space between the flick of the wrist & the swish

of a three-point buzzer beater? We fight for a win to fill

the ache of losing: Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Ayiti. We take

what we can, celebrate small victories until we win everything

we thought we never could—

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625102/as-capitalism-gasps-for-breath-i-watch-the-knicks-game at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

JASMINNE MENDEZ | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

My First Thanksgiving on Hispaniola

By Jasminne Mendez

Thursday morning in Boca Chica my beloved wonders

how this small mouth, pocket beach on a close-lipped island got its name.

Maybe it was a Taino word that was shaped into

something the Spaniards could say without spitting.

Or maybe when those invaders saw it from the sea they salivated

and said: “That looks like something small we could sink

our teeth into.” And so it was how they devoured everything.

How they dragged us out of paradise and into the mouth of ruin.

How they came and conquered flesh and cane and robbed

the earth and the land and the body of its sweetness.

How they whipped it out of us until we became cream—nothing

but something that dissolves under this endless summer sun.

If you love a place, at best you’re a patriot, at worst

you’re a nationalist and I wish to be neither of those things.

I am longing to return home, to find a bird or a flower bud,

a bison or a bosom that hasn’t been touched or tainted by tyranny.

I want to feast on what we cannot harvest—the wind and its song,

an ocean wave and the rain, an old man’s laughter and my hands

dipped in honey and soil soaked in what they stole from us.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625108/my-first-thanksgiving-on-hispaniola at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

DAN VERA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Instructions upon Arrival

By Dan Vera

Record the language as it is spoken.

Learn the local names they give their flowers

—Ignore the Greek and Latin— the cactus that grows

for a hundred years in spiny majesty.

They might take you one day to that pocket canyon where trees

each May become studded with flowers like trumpets

whose song must be the fragrance that hangs over the town

with a scent like nothing else in the world! they’ll tell you,

and the names they give a dawn like this one

when the clouds are broken like sheets of ice.

Record the shapes and the names of the birds,

the wing-shaped chorus of sparrow or wren,

the percussion of cricket and beetle,

their whistling tunes and melodious song.

Be warned: it will take great patience.

You must ignore the interference.

Do not simply call it cactus or blossom.

Record what the first people called it,

the dozens of names the immigrants brought,

the names given by infants and scholars,

the powerfully short and the linguistically long.

Imagine yourself arriving a hundred years ago.

Strip what has come since then and

with your eyes amend to see

the changes that have come.

Honor this point in this land’s story,

where people walk and run

and sleep and laugh and sometimes dream.

Most of all remember:

All of it is a way to proclaim home.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625106/instructions-upon-arrival at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

ADA LIMÓN | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart

By Ada Limón

In the Union Square subway station nearly fifteen

years ago now, the L train came clanking by

where someone had fat-Sharpied a black heart

on the yellow pillar you leaned on during a bleak day

(brittle and no notes from anyone you crushed upon).

Above ground, the spring sun was the saddest one

(doing work, but also none). What were you wearing?

Something hopeful to show the world you hoped?

A tall man was learning from a vendor how to pronounce

churro. High in the sticky clouds of time, he kept

repeating churro while eating a churro. How to say

this made you want to live? No hand to hold

still here it was: someone giving someone comfort

and someone memorizing hard how to ask for it again.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625112/while-everything-else-was-falling-apart at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

DARREL ALEJANDRO HOLNES | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Transcendental Love Song

By Darrel Alejandro Holnes

For Carl

This love dares not speak its name

in some states

until your eyes say it

on a beach in Ft. Lauderdale,

staring into mine

and the cosmos spins

out of my iris y nos nubla

y nos vuela into the postulated sky

of matted matter and sparkling light

safely in a haze of shadows and shine,

away from the marches against our marriages

and the congressional bills

against our histories being taught.

I cannot say how much I love you

in Brickell or Tampa

but I can look back at you

painting perfectly a thousand ways

for me to say, “be mine.”

Don’t you see? This is not

a barren love. Ours is a lust

like hydrogen or helium.

Once we have each other,

we need not be named

to be elemental, to be beyond

city or state. We need not

be named to be animal, raw,

and rocket shipped,

shooting through the universe

with the engine’s torque pulling us

even closer together than

“skin to skin” could ever describe.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625110/transcendental-love-song at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

ALEIDA RODRÍGUEZ | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Pamela Franklin’s Neck

By Aleida Rodríguez

The trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies. I’m not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are separate.

—Margaret Atwood, “Surfacing”

I’d recognize it anywhere.

Ever since it unfurled like a sprout reaching for light

in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie—

where her painter lover, kissing it,

says, “So sweet, the flesh of the neck.

If only it could be bottled and sold across a counter”—

I’ve been able to zero in

on Pamela Franklin’s neck.

Flipping channels, I can identify her

from behind within seconds,

even on mediocre reruns of

“The Six Million Dollar Man,” “Barnaby Jones,”

or “Circle of Fear,” where she plays twins,

one of them ghostly, draped in gauze,

a swamp orchid cloaked in haze.

I may not be the only one who admires it,

because the camera seems to linger,

ostensibly focused on the man’s face opposite her

but lolling dreamily—distractedly—the extended shot of her nape long

even for those taffy-paced analog days,

as if the camera had stopped listening to the guy,

lost in adoration of that reed holding aloft a dark bob.

Only twelve people in L.A., they say,

and it’s all done with mirrors.

Once, at the unemployment office on Las Palmas, up ahead

in a different line, I spied her neck angling upward

toward the watery banks of fluorescent light.

Only 5 feet tall, yet there’s something resolutely vertical

about her composure, her shoulders the definition of horizontal.

My eyes sipped long from that willowy stem

as she sported a brave bearing-up-in-public face.

Our eyes met once, fleetingly, as she glanced around

then slipped on her sunglasses with a pale tendril.

No matter—I was free to feast on the lovely nape

until she disappeared ahead in the stream.

She retired soon after, marrying a bibliophile

who pressed her like a bloom

between books.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625114/pamela-franklins-neck at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

HEIDI ANDREA RESTREPO RHODES | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Transgender opera for perpetual metamorphosis

By heidi andrea restrepo rhodes

As of October 2024, 658 anti-trans bills were under consideration across the United States, seeking to deny trans people access to basic healthcare, education, safety, legal recognition, and the right to exist (see translegislation.com).

I: My beloved is called an inconceivable beast, a spectacle diagnosed with teratoid genitalia, a chaos of pronouns, a body breaking the rules. Hair & suture & unexpected timbre, outside the map. My beloved is first in the firing line. In the active shooter drill, given no refuge. We are expunged from curricula, disallowed the toilet’s relief. Fascistic tendencies festering. National evangelism of binaries taken as daily bread. A congressman in Florida jokes about putting us all to death, a pastor in Texas gives Sunday Sermon saying every gay person in America should be executed—lined up & shot in the head. The Supreme Court stuffs its mouth with theories of religion. Police steel our kin down to concrete & coffin. A brass & parabellum cessation of breath.

Interlude: It is telling that Western science has a term for animal behavior called “deceptive sex signaling.” (See marsh harriers & hummingbirds, for example.) All malleability a criminal betrayal for panic defense. No opera for perpetual metamorphosis.

II: Neither Man, nor Woman, I am water & shorebird. Over tea, we ask the hard questions. How to reach beyond this periphery. Reverse the enclosures of mind. All bodies in theatre. All theatre, life.

III: My beloved says we are cosmic faggots, making new & better pleasures. Generations of illegible & exquisite. Extending possibility to the youngers. We are years of chrysalides, wild longings & wing. Among the immortelles: again, then again, & again. My beloved wields the syringe, a chemical & intramuscular intimacy. I kiss his pectoral scars, lick the summer beaded up in his clavicle. He carries me to the bedroom where we make an ambient weather, hold each other to the bone. My beloved suffocates in the bind. Passing: a difficult joy & sorrow. In the laboratory of our bodies, experiment cobbles glimpses of freedom. We tape our chests, we punk & drag. Leave norms in the gutter. Herald us a wreckage of genders. Name ourselves extraordinary monsters.

I take inventory in the holy hours & find:             we are a transgression

everywhere, beautiful & alive.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625118/transgender-opera-for-perpetual-metamorphosis at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

VALERIE MARTÍNEZ | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

between our legs all manner of

By Valerie Martínez

lamb’s ear      cliff rose petals      salt of dirt

here goes the murmuring      some word      shine

there is a table      a tin cup

you drop in coins      you drop

pilgrims alight              massive movement

hum says belly vulva back of knee

chime      like the neighbor’s blue-green metal      thing

deep in where sound goes slow-like      expanding

go      glow      blow      horny toad

hear them hear me      echoing

come again

salt tin coins dropping

refrain      the pelvis all field blood muscle hammering

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625116/between-our-legs-all-manner-of at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

EMMA TRELLES | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Brujitas

By Emma Trelles

Little witches, she calls them, appearing on the lawn in a snap, thumbelina morada at our feet and spiked crown atop a yellowing heart. I don’t remember what we talked about that visit, just the scurry of minutes with their many legs and the cauldron of sun and the memory of another house, where we had both lived a long time ago in the mute dread of his drinking and whims. Driving by I hardly recognized the shard of a porch and relentless walkway to the front door, bad luck then and always, and we turned to see the house, covered in ragged traveler’s palms, the wet sheet of evening air, and the all- at-once conversations in two languages hushed. I didn’t stop but slowed, all those years in that tiny box of concrete and roaches and heat and oblivion. I could write about the perfume of lime and mango trees in the backyard, our little boat piercing the bay waters on Saturdays with the peace of belonging somewhere, even if it never lasted. I could. But the past is a haunting and the best you can hope from a ghost is a sorrow that won’t kill you. We lived. Today she stands beside me admiring the weeds, resilient in high summer, and she tells me she is shrinking, how old age has diminished her. I tell you she only becomes more—more beautiful in her cutoffs and coral lipstick and flip flops with plastic daisies, more dear than my own escape across a country to a place where no one really knows me, and how I wear that blankness like a gown I keep making, bodice a tropical night and skirt trailing behind me no matter how many times I cut it away. She is more surprising than my own reinvention, more unwilling to speak of that time than any of us. She is more. I could say we stood with our arms around each other, admiring how color can crack the ground and insist on its turn. How my will prevailed. We are ordinary women and grow our magic as we need it.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625122/brujitas at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

NATALIA TREVIÑO | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Tempera at the Maria Novella Church

By Natalia Treviño

mi ’buelita Socorro

woulda loved this

basilica, un homenaje

for la Virgencita, the story

of her life, her elegant birth

among ladies and her tired amá:

a sacred comic strip,

consecrated graffiti,

renaissance graphic gospel

novel for the masses

to understand something

new about who is their God,

who is their Mary, all this done

by kids, including Michelangelo

when Ghirlandaio

showed them to draft

the human body

as illumination

so bright the color and the light

that my gut says

I’m not holy enough

to witness this ostentatious

prayer made of egg

and a crush

of gem.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625120/tempera-at-the-maria-novella-church at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

ALEXANDRA LYTTON REGALADO | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Negative Capability in El Salvador

By Alexandra Lytton Regalado

This morning the wolf did not want to get out of bed.

The moon ate the sun yesterday and we are all so very tired.

I cut my finger carving an angel and printed the moon’s face with my blood.

This is not a Bible passage.

I keep looking for ways to speak directly to God because Jesus, El Salvador del Mundo, keeps reminding me I have a body and that it is ephemeral.

When the day turned to darkness and the stars came out, dogs howled, and we thought we would die.

But now we think we know better.

The stars came out; dogs howled for ways to speak directly to me.

This morning I have a body and the wolf does not.

The Apophatic states the best way to speak to God is to make negative claims.

Such as God is not evil.

We can only say what God is not.

In a Bible passage, I keep carving an angel to see if it is ephemeral.

It is ephemeral.

We thought we would die.

Now we think we know better.

Day turned to darkness and with it, the want to get out of bed.

Yesterday we were all so very tired.

I cut my finger.

My blood.

So very tired.

Jesus just keeps reminding me: Your blood is not God.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625124/negative-capability-in-el-salvador at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

SHEILA MALDONADO | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

strategic

By Sheila Maldonado

I’m from the

monitor in

the middle of

the Americas

I am a monitor

in the middle

of the Americas

I monitor the

Americas

screen American

a scream

through a

screen

I see

unseen

I’m seen

obscene

a scene

I am a screen

on a seam

a fault

a flaw

fluid

fixed

followed

forgotten

forgetting

fall

in the

fault

I’m the monitor

the monster

the scream

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625128/strategic at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

GRISEL Y. ACOSTA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

flowers for Robert Waddell: an elegy

By Grisel Y. Acosta

we

kill by devaluation

ad(s) tell us who’s worth something

junct(ion) of

professors in a meeting

every person there knows one

day contingent faculty will tire

when they can’t visit five campuses anymore

I insist on

bring(ing) food, offering stipends

up for time in workshops

they don’t even know your

work, how you made a name

in Latinx expertise, they

have to pretend

their work is harder to

accomplish, but I remember

you journalist, the poets who(se)

talent you

lauded proudly, you are alive in me

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625126/flowers-for-robert-waddell-an-elegy at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

EDGAR GARCIA | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From “CANTARES”

By Edgar Garcia

XXXI

I’ll say it first:

These songs are worth

A flower in the purse,

Averse

To heaven’s universe—

Made for the earth

From its grim corse

And, of course, adorned

With what is interspersed:

Desire, hurt,

Endorsement, curse.

I’ll say it first:

I’m poor as a horse

w/

A flower in its purse.

And where are you?

You are entertained

By the bargain—

half-drunk self-disdain

liquid like paint

spilling into the margin:

a Barnett Newman,

Francis Bacon,

Or Elaine de Kooning

Of earthly ensign—

I, Totoquihuatzli,

Maligned.

I’ll say it first:

I’m poor as a flower

Intermittently

Consented sight of itself.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625132/from-cantares at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

LUIVETTE RESTO | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What the Moon Said to the Poet

By Luivette Resto

Your obsession is baffling,

with numerous stanzas dedicated to my phases

and the personification of my reflection off Lake Arrowhead

as countries figure out how to inhabit me

instead of caring for their own inhabitants.

Comparisons to the lover who left you intrigue me,

my imperfections remind you of theirs

as you write down this season’s intentions.

Rituals performed beneath my beauty,

punctuated by synchronized howls,

invoke those who have left us

and those in transition.

I live openly in the brightness of the day

when things are concealed like agony, blessings, and love.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625130/what-the-moon-said-to-the-poet at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

ADELA NAJARRO | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Poetry Told Me

By Adela Najarro

The week Poetry stayed at my house,

she kept a razor in a wooden box. Poetry

refused to abandon her ancestors

and paid homage to the octagonal black

tourmaline rising up from underneath

the burden of boulders. She joined in song

with La Virgen and burned down the barriers between us.

She was interested in rhyme and the metaphorical.

Her rhythm shattered glass, but she did not finish

what she began to carve into stone. She was fickle.

First she drank mead, then preferred a martini.

Poetry wore a new necklace every day. Still,

she prayed for us. Words as omens and talismans.

But she couldn’t really do anything. She never

made dinner or even brewed coffee.

She was horrible at baking.

Soon enough, Poetry abandoned everything,

left flour all over the counters,

the dough proofing unbaked in the oven.

On her way to the airport,

she texted one last entreaty,

something about an old oak tree

unfurling leaves, glossy and new

but with sharpened points

that can make a poet bleed.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625136/what-poetry-told-me at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

CARMEN GIMÉNEZ | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Screaming

By Carmen Giménez

In Lima, my mother screams from her bed and from a garden

and in the parlor of her nursing home, and she screams as they wheel

her down the street and when they change her diaper,

and my aunt texts me to tell me about her screaming, and I’m left

to imagine what’s at the core of her new tongue: a smattering

of grunts and cries; and, in the last video, she screams mis hijos, mis hijos,

which I cling to because it means we still exist in her, and she screams

in horror, like waking up in a dungeon—the yowl at the end of death—

she is the loud wail of all humans suffering, telling of our basest

truth, the barbaric yawp but divine as great whale song, yet, she calls from miles

away and I want to answer her call, so I scream back into the chirp

of cicadas, the rustle of trees, past the rush of highway toward

the clouds where planes zoom southward, over the thin air and Andean

peaks, the scream vibrating outwards, send it out to touch at the edge

of her scream, so she feels me, hija, inside her scream’s shudder.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625134/screaming at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

MICHELLE OTERO | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Communion

By Michelle Otero

After the stroke our father lost the word

light switch

asked me to

press the wall so a world       could                 open

He couldn’t go to mass so Jesus       visited       soothed

his gums con el dedo corazón dipped

in red wine

It was not      transubstantiation

Did Jesus believe all that anyway?

We rolled a hospital bed

into the room

where he once

composed church songs                                          in Spanish

talked of Easter eggs            at                          City of Rocks

Who carved them? All those nichos?

Said he rode a jackrabbit              said

I know you think it’s impossible but

I had a       tiny       saddle

Saturdays Mother left him

in our care

He lost the words       communion

santo

pecado

lamb      He lost

a grandson’s name

remembered the daughter

he       never    claimed

asked      why       she wasn’t

at                     breakfast

He made us

lock    the door                        keep out

the naked woman         who              snuck

into his bedroom at night

He soiled himself as Mother turned

her key in the door

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625138/communion at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

CARMEN CALATAYUD | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

In the Surgical Ward

By Carmen Calatayud

my body at the water’s edge of opioid comfort

under the brain’s night sky

rounding the blue curve of hallway

shuffle of gloved feet wheeling the gurney

to doors with a glass view of a butcher shop:

steel counters, twisted saws

the long drive into the amygdala

awakens memories of a five-year-old

who finds souvenirs

from the day they cut into her eyes

synapses insist she is about to be killed

heavy under oven-baked blankets

I calculate ways to jump the guard rails

with a morphined body—

three hours down, bones replaced by hardware

my hands on new hips

this body of screws, pins, titanium

molding into flesh

metal is my medicine

nothing left of hips of mother            hips of grandmother

except Neptunian dust

but together we carry our cartilage

their ghosts behind my wheelchair

we ride the solar freeway until our beings coalesce

make melodies out of silver

move through a trance of light

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625140/in-the-surgical-ward at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

GINA FRANCO | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

To Shelter Itself and, Sheltered, to Conceal Itself

By Gina Franco

What looks the ghosts have thirsted for, what love

they conceal

in their deep pails carried up the stairs

and emptied into the fire,

themselves air poured into fire,

far from what they do not know

they expect: to be

returned to time,

this time. To be allowed to make a real

point. To take staff in hand

and draw the line

that parts the water that drives the path that delivers the promise:

to land

a plot-shaped spot to seat myself and my other things above

all else, and to end—

(the life where the man who was

our father throws the woman who was our mother

over the fence and dumps her there where she drifts unconscious

in time and we stand, dispossessed, outside our own

house,

where the sprinklers, the wet green yard, hold the rear window,

hold so the light sets alight what little a little eye

apprehends)

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625144/to-shelter-itself-and-sheltered-to-conceal-itself at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

BLAS FALCONER | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Wake

By Blas Falconer

It looks like the sea, the sky where I have lain to dream of you.

—Julia de Burgos, tr. by Blas Falconer

In Francisco Oller’s El Velorio, a child lies

on a table as if sleeping. It is covered in lace

and blossoms, blossoms in what looks like

a boy’s curls, and in the crowded room,

what looks like a roasted boar is pierced

through the crown with a spear. There is no sea

in the window, the open door, only trees

on the hillside, an ox, thatched roofs

in the distance, the sky with its impression

of clouds going where clouds go. One night,

sitting on the curb, I watched a procession

carry a white coffin which must have been

a child’s—that small. I lie down in the dark.

When my son wakes up from a bad dream,

I make room for him on my side of the bed.

Close your eyes, I say. I’m here with you.

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625142/the-wake at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

RICHARD BLANCO | DEC 9, 2024, 6:21 PM EST | VIEW ON WEBSITE

/ FOR / AFTER / JAN BEATTY /

By Richard Blanco

After my third shot of tequila / chased by a lime

sour as my rant: fuck this-fuck that-fuck them-fuck

me-fuck it all / you slashed me / same as your poems’ slashes / slash

me / when you asked me: so, why the fuck don’t you

ever say it in your poems / I took another shot but couldn’t

shoot out a reason / until now, Jan / you’re right, so / fuck \

that my poems never shut out strangers’ glassy-eyed

guh’mornins / fuck their mumbles wishing me

a wonderful day / on not-so-wonder-filled days / fuck

my naïve belief that their mouths and mine

have a heart / fuck my similes that choose to bite

into pleasantries like / buttered bread

for me to taste all day / a lifetime, Jan / fuck \

that I can’t hate kids / that my poems love

the screeches of their awe-filled eyes / that I want

to see whatever it is they see / butterfly spots

as tigers’ eyes winking / moss-skinned stones

as emeralds / snowflakes falling as frozen

stars / palm trees as flagpoles fluttering peace, Jan / fuck \

that my lines don’t lose their patience with

old folks at check-out lines / double-checking the price

of every fucking item / that my poems don’t have eyes

to roll at their yesteryear chatter / Can you believe the cost

of living today? / fuck that I listen to them / see

their wrinkled eyes as maps / roads

I trace toward my own dead end, Jan / fuck \

my mother who’s eighty-six / fuck that I can’t curse

at her / for never reading the poems

I’ve written, aching / for her to sweep away

the ashes / of the Cuban homeland she chose

to lose / fuck that I can’t stop rendering her

as a martyr / who died so I could write

this fucking poem in this country, Jan / fuck \

my father too / who waited until the hour

of his deathbed to whisper: te amo / fuck my poems

that always forgive him / but never myself for

not / whispering back: te amo, papá / fuck that I will never

tire of gathering our silences / into rivers of words

that flow nowhere / spill into nothing, Jan / fuck \

the nightmare that was my grandfather’s dream

of me becoming some baseball superstar I was never

going to be / fuck that my poems only acknowledge

his love’s persistence / the popsicles he’d treat me to

after every game / no matter how many times

I struck-out at bat / at life, Jan / fuck \

the fuck’n faggot my grandmother slurred at me

every day fuck’n faggot / fuck that my poems erase her

words to write her into my best friend

for teaching me how to survive cruelty such as

hers, in such a brutal world, Jan / fuck \

Notes:

This poem is part of the portfolio “The Chorus These Poets Create: Twenty Years of Letras Latinas.” You can read the rest of the portfolio in the December 2024 issue.

Source: Poetry (December 2024)

This article was downloaded from https://www.poetryfoundation.com/poetrymagazine/poems/1625146/for-after-jan-beatty at Dec 9, 2024 at 6:22 PM EST.

Table of Contents

Poetry: December 2024

POEMS

Editor’s Note

Gratitude

Is This My Last Ferry Trip?

Self-Elegies

If Upon Me in My Garden

Portrait of My Father Mocking Sammy Davis Jr.

From “Arden las pérdidas”

From “Burn the Losses”

On Translating Antonio Gamoneda

The Apostle Paula

Lost Music

A Convolution of Astral Forces

In the listening room

From “Stretching Time Over the Sky”

From “carrying songs from the sky to crease the ground”

Julius Caesar

Icarus: A Self Portrait—1984

CODEX©

A Panel of Experts

Eroica 1

The Birth of Venus

Trot Song

After “Killers of the Flower Moon”

A Girl and Her Fireplace

Ars Poetica with Invocation

Code

Histories

The End of Childhood

Manuel Sánchez. Lavish

Manuel Sánchez. My Pregnant Wife Sleeps in a Boardinghouse Hallway

Manuel Sánchez. Our Demand

Everpresent Guest

Sink

Limerence

What You Need to Survive Vernon, OK

How to Incorporate a Town

Failing at the Exit Ramp, Icarus Jones Speaks True

THE CHORUS THESE POETS CREATE: TWENTY YEARS OF LETRAS LATINAS

One Poem Festival: A Twentieth Anniversary Folio

Carnivore

Searching

The Moon Is on Wellbutrin

God Was Not

As Capitalism Gasps for Breath I Watch the Knicks Game

My First Thanksgiving on Hispaniola

Instructions upon Arrival

While Everything Else Was Falling Apart

Transcendental Love Song

Pamela Franklin’s Neck

Transgender opera for perpetual metamorphosis

between our legs all manner of

Brujitas

Tempera at the Maria Novella Church

Negative Capability in El Salvador

strategic

flowers for Robert Waddell: an elegy

From “CANTARES”

What the Moon Said to the Poet

What Poetry Told Me

Screaming

Communion

In the Surgical Ward

To Shelter Itself and, Sheltered, to Conceal Itself

The Wake

/ FOR / AFTER / JAN BEATTY /