Lunchbox Poems

YOU WERE AN ELEGY

whitneyricketts — Sat, 18 May 2013 01:13:19 -0400

Fragile like a child is fragile.

Destined not to be forever.

Destined to become other

To mother. Here I am

Sitting on a chair, thinking

About you. Thinking

About how it was

To talk to you.

How sometimes it was wonderful

And sometimes it was awful.

How drugs when drugs were

Undid the good almost entirely

But not entirely

Because good could always be seen

Glimmering like lame glimmers

In the window of a shop

Called Beautiful

Things Never Last Forever.

I loved you. I love you. You were.

And you are. Life is experience.

It’s all so simple. Experience is

The chair we sit on.

The sitting. The thinking

Of you where you are a blank

To be filled

In by missing. I loved you.

I love you like I love

All beautiful things.

True beauty is truly seldom.

You were. You are

In May. May now is looking onto

The June that is coming up.

This is how I measure

The year. Everything Was My Fault

Has been the theme of the song

I’ve been singing,

Even when you’ve told me to quiet.

I haven’t been quiet.

I’ve been crying. I think you

Have forgiven me. You keep

Putting your hand on my shoulder

When I’m crying.

Thank you for that. And

For the ineffable sense

Of continuance. You were. You are

The brightest thing in the shop window

And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw.

MARY JO BANG

THE TRUTH THE DEAD KNOW

whitneyricketts — Sat, 18 May 2013 01:07:49 -0400

Gone, I say and walk from church,

refusing the stiff procession to the grave,

letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate

myself where the sun gutters from the sky,

where the sea swings in like an iron gate

and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones

from the whitehearted water and when we touch

we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.

Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes

in their stone boats. They are more like stone

than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse

to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

ANNE SEXTON

IN PRAISE OF THE DEFECTIVE

rickettttttts — Wed, 15 May 2013 20:40:43 -0400

When the best of it is prized from the dung
of the Sumatran common palm civet,
sweetened like a cherry in the gut
of this little island cat, I feel better
about not drinking coffee, sipping instead sweet
tea crude as a hammer. I feel
better that I never read much
Tolstoy, stopped at the bulwark of so much
French. I should begin
a second life. I should not dream
of my macrobiotic afterlife
in which I am what I do not eat
and the animals I loved enough
to eat grass, to pretend one thing was another,
purr and sing and chirp
sweet hosannas outside my bedroom window
where sometimes we made
love but never continuances
of our selves which we’d name
Hank or Emily while saving up for Harvard.
I feel better that none of me
works well at all,
that for twenty years the fog
has never lifted
from the landscape I mean to cease defiling
someday. Thank you
cards I should have mailed
and gifts given
and favors repaid with crippling interest
I grow to love
the way I once loved
shame. What will I do with my days
now that my nights
are sublimely alone
and how will I make use of this wound
I carried like a map
so that I would never, never
lose you?

PAUL GUEST

THIS STATE

rickettttttts — Sun, 12 May 2013 11:17:11 -0400

of motherhood is splintered, frenzied, but struggling to sound calm,
it’s soy beans on the door mat and raspberry jam on the baseboard,
it’s relinquishing utopian desires for quiet and cups of tea,
it’s never finishing a meal but eating scraps of your child’s food
after he has chewed it thoughtfully and you believed gratefully only
to disgorge it into your outstretched hand, his saliva your saliva,
it’s him reaching for your face in the dark and sinking back relieved,
it’s that first, longed-for kiss, slow and premeditated, laying aside
his things and walking up and kissing you full on the lips with his
tiny, soft, wet mouth, completely by surprise, total abandon,
it’s thinking that your mind will never have sharp edges or straight
lines again, it’s being beaten and kicked by a screaming, back-
bending, contortionist, hair-pulling dervish who later subsides into
swollen-eyed, red-faced, runny-nosed calm in your arms,
it’s the sink full of dishes, plastic cups, bibs, tea-leaves, peach-peel,
pasta shells and peas, it’s ketchup at every meal and wondering
how a body can survive on no meat or vegetables, ever,
it’s the way his body curves into yours and how your arms are
strong enough to lift all twenty-six pounds of him over and over
again at all the wrong angles, it’s shocking wide awake each time
he murmurs in his sleep next door, it’s the invisible rubber band
between you, the pain in your belly and chest when you’re apart,
it’s seeing your life upended, its contents strewn around as if by a
tornado, and picking your way through the wreckage with no time
to care because something like passion is driving you on.

CATHERINE JAGOE

Happy Mother’s Day!

LET ME EXPLAIN

whitneyricketts — Wed, 08 May 2013 23:08:48 -0400

Spring, and the tulips urged me
stick to schedule, flower furiously.
I asked for mountains but settled
for some flood-buckled linoleum.
Air was the only sure thing
and even she put up a fight.
I called my eyes near-sighted,
my hands near misses, my arms
close calls, my face old hat,
my head a bluff and raised
my body, a wishing machine.
Stars, thanked. Days, numbered.
I wore a coat because you can’t trust
weather and I looked like rain.

DORA MALECH

from FALSE SPRING

rickettttttts — Tue, 07 May 2013 19:23:07 -0400

The death toll continues to rise. My friends

displaced. Trees destroyed part of Kerry’s house

but everyone is safe. I’d like to get a dog

as long as it would never die. Today: the clouds

like a tattoo. Wanda believed she was going

to get better. For weeks after her death

packages arrived in the mail—all things she’d

ordered before she was on hospice:

a vegetable steamer, a juicer, a new healthy life.

Weddings & funerals in the span of a week.

Each year, the family grows & shrinks.

I search the classifieds for a new job,

a new place to live, a change. This happens

every two to three years, but I imagine

three years from now I’ll be too old to keep

this up. I should settle down, start a family,

do all those things that people once

expected from me. Basically, give up.

“Living with the Blues.” If I could survive

here, with these simple wants, I’d be happy.

I just want to listen to music, read books,

eat food, drink beer & occasionally whiskey,

dance, and travel, see my friends & spend

my time with you. It sounds like I’m fifteen,

believing this could actually be possible.

The Idiot’s Guide to Living.

Last day of April. Early morning sun,

open windows & birdsong. Saturday quiet

as the city sleeps in. Momentary stillness.

A cup of coffee & a book equals peace.

At least right now. The temporariness of it all

doesn’t matter. True spring on the horizon.

The mistake of placing hope in seasons,

to look forward to the days to come &

expect things to be better.

GINA MYERS

FRIDA KAHLO TO MARTY MCCONNELL

rickettttttts — Sat, 04 May 2013 18:12:15 -0400

leaving is not enough; you must

stay gone. train your heart

like a dog. change the locks

even on the house he’s never

visited. you lucky, lucky girl.

you have an apartment

just your size. a bathtub

full of tea. a heart the size

of Arizona, but not nearly

so arid. don’t wish away

your cracked past, your

crooked toes, your problems

are papier mache puppets

you made or bought because the vendor

at the market was so compelling you just

had to have them. you had to have him.

and you did. and now you pull down

the bridge between your houses,

you make him call before

he visits, you take a lover

for granted, you take

a lover who looks at you

like maybe you are magic. make

the first bottle you consume

in this place a relic. place it

on whatever altar you fashion

with a knife and five cranberries.

don’t lose too much weight.

stupid girls are always trying

to disappear as revenge. and you

are not stupid. you loved a man

with more hands than a parade

of beggars, and here you stand. heart

like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas.

heart leaking something so strong

they can smell it in the street.

MARTY MCCONNELL

Photo

rickettttttts — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 09:48:08 -0400

EULOGY

rickettttttts — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:28:44 -0400

Settle into the earth and spread out

thin in every direction, your eyes closed

till birds shout carelessly in your ears

and you forget your ears,

and rabbits and deer and automobiles

walk on the dirt your body

which feeds the tree which becomes the stone

to mark you

crumbling. If you concentrate,

a button and a hair disintegrate so softly

you never knew they belonged to you

and never will again.

MELISSA KOOSMAN

THE WAY THINGS ARE

rickettttttts — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 15:05:15 -0400

My dreams no longer disguise themselves
as dreams.

In this one, my parents
are telling me the ways I’ve shamed them.
In this one, I am getting drunk
and spilling dirty dishes from my handbag
in front of everyone I know.

In this one, somebody I know has died; it doesn’t matter who.
I row alone to the middle of the lake
behind the house where I grew up.

The entire sky is gleaming pink
and purple, inexplicably. How did this happen? I ask,
as if an answer will come. I cry,
a little bit.

The waves sway me gently in the small boat,
a blot, the apex of the lake.

BRETT ELIZABETH JENKINS

WE SAY

rickettttttts — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 13:27:51 -0400

a stick, maybe, or a bottle
or a wave. But it seems
more like the field clump
that crackles upward from a match
and collapses, grass filaments
sparking in the ash-dust,
then going out. Today
I take myself down by steps,
one at a time, into the sadness
I admit I can’t always reach.
There should be a room
at the bottom of the black stairway,
my friends sitting with strangers,
waiting, but there’s no one,
only the memory, when
the pale air flickers as if
it were an invisible flame,
of my aunt in her hospital bed
and beside her, about to be left
alone—the last sister, and so soon—
my mother, bent over
the purse in her lap, eyes closed.
I can see the patent leather gloss
and the shiny clasp that until
just now she has been
snapping open and shut, till—
just now—it broke. That breaking—
like a voice that cracks, cursing
or crying, or the song that falls,
out of thinking too far ahead,
into a smouldering loneliness—
was that the sound of the heart?

REGINALD GIBBONS

BOO, FOREVER

rickettttttts — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:50:52 -0400

Spinning like a ghost

on the bottom of a

top,

I’m haunted by all

the space that I

will live without

you.

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN

CARDBOARD URN

rickettttttts — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:09:44 -0400

After the funeral, your hair
and skin baked to ash,

your body brought back in a gray box
with a bag of soot inside,

box and bag on a pedestal by the table,
your brother came to see you.

He asked where you were,
and when I said By the table

he thought I said On the table
and he said Here?

peeking under the lid
of an empty drinking cup,

as though we had gone
to the local Kwik Stop

for gas and fountain drinks
then decided what the hell?

and used a cardboard Pepsi cup
for our mother’s urn.

He actually thought that,
and his eyes got wide

as he stood in the dining room,
unspeakably appalled,

staring at that cup

and mother, oh sweet jesus
how I wanted to laugh.

MICHAEL MEYERHOFER

HOW IT ADDS UP

rickettttttts — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:31:38 -0400

what they don’t tell you
is how it all ends. sure it was
spring:
                             volcanoes exploding
in the opposite hemisphere. moon
was igneous and adrift
                               while they cheered
your airship dreams of love
and you felt soft
                          and scared like a child
lowered into a well or some balloon
returning to a vast ocean.
                           you are in the kitchen
peeling garlic when it sneaks up
while the pots
                  stutter
                         boil
                             burn
                                    and you hate it.
you hate it. you hate how it comes
from all directions
                            like breathless rhinos
chasing clouds you are already old
pushing this perpetual engine
                of grief waiting at the window
for that letter to arrive three years
late so you
                   could write back “come home
my love, see how your departure
has unbalanced this air.”
  but it is now summer and no one writes
               to you anyway
so you
                             just keep on waiting.

HEMANT MOHAPTRA

from INSTRUCTIONS FOR A BODY

rickettttttts — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:35:28 -0400

we’re gone / in a blizzard of seconds
love the body human
while we’re here, a gift of minutes
on an evolving planet, a country
in flux / give thanks

for bone and dirt
and the million things that will kill us
someday, motion and the pursuit
of happiness / no guarantees / give thanks

for chaos theory, ecology, common sense that says
we are web. a planet in balance or out, that butterfly
in tokyo setting off thunderstorms in iowa,
tell me you don’t matter to a universe that conspired
to give you such a tongue, such rhythm
or rhythmless hips, such opposable thumbs –
give thanks or go home a waste of spark

speak or let the maker take back your throat
march or let the creator rescind your feet
dream or let your god destroy your good and fertile mind

this is your warning / this
your birthright / do not let
this universe regret you.

MARTY MCCONNELL

A Dandelion For My Mother

whitneyricketts — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 22:42:13 -0400

How I loved those spiky suns,

rooted stubborn as childhood

in the grass, tough as the farmer’s

big-headed children—the mats

of yellow hair, the bowl-cut fringe.

How sturdy they were and how

slowly they turned themselves

into galaxies, domes of ghost stars

barely visible by day, pale

cerebrums clinging to life

on tough green stems. Like you.

Like you, in the end. If you were here,

I’d pluck this trembling globe to show

how beautiful a thing can be

a breath will tear away.

JEAN NORDHAUS

BEHIND THE DOOR

rickettttttts — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 13:40:18 -0400

Letter left in a pocket, strange
earring in a glove compartment—
such simple things—and the world
implodes. Wife rattling around
a house that used to be home,
child staring at her plate, picking
through her peas. The lover lost
without love’s current that had
like a river carried him so long:
the sweet rush he’d lived in—
tent in the woods, motels in
how many towns. And, of course,
the unnamed, the dear someone
somewhere sitting by a phone,
daring it to ring. Do not think
I am a stranger to this story:
the promises, the required apologies,
the ritual baring of the jugular.

Oh friend, be warned. The heart
may not stay in storage long,
riding an iron track, obedient
as a shooting-gallery duck.
A heart wants to be used, fed,
nourished on nuzzle and whim,
practicing the skills it’s learned
of whisper and cunning. It needs
to believe that on any ordinary night
before the pitiful throbbing stops
and the body—that new amazing toy—
is laid out and displayed like a plastic
floral arrangement, a rocket
will slip in low under the radar,
roaring and flashing lights: the stars’
own emissary. And why, but to test
the line of Do Not Cross, the line
of unprofitable, for the heart is not
mollified by notions of safety nor apt
to thrive on a diet of crackers and milk.
It wants what it wants: what’s behind
the door, knowing full well the key
swings on a rope hanging from one’s
own neck. That’s the place, isn’t it?
Such sweet skin, there in the neck’s
hollow where she’d lay her mouth,
cupping the pulse as if to drink
and hold inside her all that ecstasy,
that mad hammering before it dies away.

ALICE FRIMAN

YOU CAN KNOW THAT WAIT MEANS STAY

rickettttttts — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 11:47:34 -0400

Right away there’s thinking. Right away.
No matter how much I want my face to moon
with no contortion, leave all talk to voiceovers.
Hands take after purrs. Nicknames remind us
mostly of the fun inventing them. Every beach
fire is a kind of desperate flag. Cops pull over a
riding lawnmower, and the man won’t turn it off.
We walk the dike that crosses I-91. Headlights
pan like reasons. We’re keeping warm. Cars aren’t
fireflies, which is not even how I feel. “Funny isn’t
the same as being happy,” I tell you. Duh. Neither is
that. A family of tiny arsonists live in burned out
delivery trucks behind your neck. They are your
bad pillow. Hands wobble. It’s never been infinity
with me. Infinity is something I can fist bump.
It’s more like when I chew the top off a lightbulb,
and there’s no blob of light to hold. Carry. Get
close. Let me eat your eyelash like a mission.
If we plant it in a divot on my cheek, maybe I’ll
grow your love of coats. The lay of your wrist
when you’re tired. What plays in your head after
you gnaw my finger, look at me, teething the skin like
wrapping paper you want to save for next Christmas.
Sometimes I know that I don’t know what’s going to happen
next, but I know exactly who I’m going to be with when it
does. This feeling is called kiss me. This feeling is called hi.
But maybe you’re not thinking of anything. I’ve thought
about that. We’re on a hillside. Night grass. Grass face.
And the sky is clear enough to see exactly how you feel.

MIKE YOUNG

THE GOD ABANDONS ANTONY

rickettttttts — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 10:11:01 -0400

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.

C. P. CAVAFY

ELEGY

rickettttttts — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:42:32 -0400

What to do with this knowledge
that our living is not guaranteed?

Perhaps one day you touch the young branch
of something beautiful. & it grows & grows
despite your birthdays & the death certificate,
& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful
or makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out
of your house, then, believing in this.
Nothing else matters.

All above us is the touching
of strangers & parrots,
some of them human,
some of them not human.

Listen to me. I am telling you
a true thing. This is the only kingdom.
The kingdom of touching;
the touches of the disappearing, things.

ARACELIS GIRMAY