Category: Issue 136

Transubstantiation

I made a deal with myself and went to Rome
to buy a rosary.

Being the good Catholic I am, I married
ritual and desire

to see the Pope’s ruby slippers, the Vatican
archives, the yellow

bright road of redemption. What is salvation
without original

sin? Badness before being bad. When Michael
sang I’m bad,

I’m bad, you know it, he meant good, good,
so sublime.

He knew the heat of sin, the pontiff’s cassock
under which

cherubim and choir boys, sweet angels sang
the glory

of the Lord, sang the body of Christ, sang
the blood,

bungled the beads of the rosary, witnessed
the smoke

of the faithful going up, up, up.

 

Note:  this poem’s first two lines are drawn from Savannah Sipple’s lovely poem “Cheap Dreams” 

 

 

DANIELLE LEGROS GEORGES is a writer, translator, academic, and author of several books of poetry including The Dear Remote Nearness of You, winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motten book prize. She directs the Lesley University M.F.A. program in creative writing. Her awards include fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, The Boston Foundation, and The Black Metropolis Research Consortium. In 2015 she was appointed Boston’s second Poet Laureate. Jennifer Waddell photo.

 

The Daybook

       Written after watching
       Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf

Who is Silvio? what is he?
M.’s Titian eyes prosecute.
She discovered his name in
my diary, the composition

book in the bottom drawer,
under my Jazz New Orleans
and Luxor Las Vegas T-shirts.
“Silvio” in red amid the black,

there, in a dozen daily entries,
“Silvio” in printed capital letters
beside the cursive. Why printed?
Why in red ink? M. counted

forty-nine Silvios. Forty-nine,
she said, is divisible by seven.
There are seven days in a week.
“How many belong to Silvio?”

Seven sacraments. “Which is he?
Baptism? Penance? Confirmation?”
I go and walk along the shoreline.
It’s late January in the Northeast.

M., chiding angel, tails me.
Her breath-clouds transmit
“Silvio!” to my frozen ears.
At five, I’m back home in

the warmth home provides.
M. stays outside, knocking
on the window, mouthing
“Silvio! Silvio! Silvio!”

Reader, please don’t pity M.
There is no Silvio. And don’t
pity me. There is no diary.
There is no M.

A Poem for the Euthanized

Black & Buckskin tones reflect golden rays of sunny days blessing
smooth coats of fur. Chocolate poured over an athlete’s body bred
To fight. To protect. To survive. A body built to intimidate
a world it wishes to love, running under Magnolias & between
Daffodil laced fields. A body built to live in steel ropes hidden
behind the house so as not to scare.

Grey, blue, green, & brown jeweled eyes make
this beast an enviable animal. Curves & power doctors dream
to study & to mimic & to claim as their own creation
as if God themself did not conjure these shapes only found in nature. 
Envy & dreams clearing vision to see a justice system voided
against their beautiful black & brown colors.

Over 20 countries have laws against Pit Bulls. 
The Americas. Europe. Asia. Segregating. Sterilizing. Euthanizing. 
Locked in chains. Their kind a crime. Undeserving
of mingling with others. Undeserving of living. Illegal 
to be Black, I mean a Pit Bull. Stolen from their homes
like property sold owner to owner. 

Once America’s breed, symbolizing strength & courage. Flags tied
around her throat like a bandana. Or maybe a noose? Collar bleeding
as knots grow tighter.  In a time of war, defending
a nation against a globe. Defending patriotism that would one day repaint
her into a bitch worth leaving in the streets.

Pit Bulls. The abused. The abandoned. & still the second most tolerant.
Test patience & a Chihuahua will bite first. & I read
German Shepherds attack more people & have one of the strongest bites.
Strong enough to break a bone like how a lightning bolt cracks a tree.
& I know German Shepherds are police dogs. Obedient I’ve heard. & smart.
Imagine something you cannot stop patrolling your city. Protecting & serving.

Pit Bulls. The abused. The abandoned.
& the most killed. 40%. & the most common in shelters. 50%.
20% of Black women raped. Nightmares silenced by questions & more silence.
40% of Black women abused. Bruises blending into foundation & concealer.
90% of Black women know their killer. Death promised inside a home.
I couldn’t find these numbers for German Shepherds.

Once called the Nanny dog. Because the Pit Bull is loyal. She is caring.
Because she gives from her own milk to nourish a child lighter than her.
Not like her. Not like her own pups who die because she has a job to do.
Because a Black woman is 3 times more likely to die from labor.
& she remains a mother, a martyr with no statue in her honor 
because she is a slave to this society not molded for her.

She is told to not feel pain. 
She is gagged until her voice forgotten.
She is shadowed & her face blurred.
Her name scratched from stories.
Her body pushed into shelters & graves. 

Pit Bulls. Black women.
Do not say Black women deserve to be erased.
To be raped. To be abused. To suffer in your place.
To carry a generation they did not birth. 

Do not say any Black woman deserved to die. 

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in the mainland United States,
TATIANA FIGUEROA RAMIREZ (www.sincerelytatiana.com) graduated with a B.A. in English literature and is a VONA Voices Alumna, having worked with award-winning poets Willie Perdomo and Danez Smith. Tatiana primarily performs, teaches poetry workshops, and hosts events in the greater Washington, D.C. area, and she has also done so nationally and in the Caribbean. You can read her work in The Acentos Review, Here Comes Everyone (U.K.), and other publications. She is the author of Coconut Curls y Café con Leche and Despojo. Jazmin Samora photo.

Maximus, at Tyre and at Boston

Honor?
It is October. 
The sunflowers have dropped their seeds.
It is the season of husks, of harvest.
We are getting ready for a dark time. 

1

I am change averse.
Averse to change. 
But it is not my decision.
What we do, 
what is done around us.
What is done to us.
The world is changing. The world is changed.
She is fighting back.
Our armour, our honor
Will not save us. 

2

 Some expect her face
To color with shame. 

3

The throwing down of hierarchy
Has become a hierarchy itself.
We still live in the weeds, pick seeds
From the ground. 

We are casting our armour down. 
Our skin shines in the autumn sun. 

II

Tut-tut, Tuttle, and the Negress Maria.
How dare she.
How dare they.
How dare we. 

III

We carry more than our selves.

 

A Plantation a beginning

It is winter now.
Not by the calendar, but
by the snow underfoot,

the delivery of oil,
the free parking
at Stage Fort Park.

It is winter.
The whole world 
seems cold. 

On the radio politicians
are ruining language,
among other things. 

Ideals.  I only go 
to the kitchen
when I need more coffee. 

30,000.
It took $30,000 
to get Gloucester started up. 

We have stayed there,
with the coming and going,
for years. 

30,000 people 
on this thin soil.
What is changing

is who 
this 30,000
are. 

Ask the mayor
who makes Gloucester.
She will tell you. 

Not Dorchester. 
Not Plymouth.
She will list 

different cities altogether.
Or no cities.
She will list families. 

And people. 
She may even list
women. 

Gloucester is changing.
Everything
is changing.

That landing,
in 1623 or 1624,
that $30,000, 

that was not 
the beginning.
That was a change.

 

Maximus, to Gloucester

I don’t have anything against history, really, 
except for what it leaves out.
And what it allows.
History lets us justify, protect, venerate.

I realized, as my mother was losing her mind,
that nobody could tell me the truth.
The truth had, as it will, diffused
into hundreds of stories, kept in memories, 
boxes of things in the basement, 
vectors whose original force 
nobody could name.

The man who owns my bar 
doesn’t  know, for instance,
that Tiger Marston’s mother,
who lived in that house at the end of Dennison
where you spent time with Ed Sanders and Robert Creeley,
Tiger Marston’s mother was my grandmother’s best friend,
and her llama would spit at us as we would swing
on a tire near the stone house.
When he tells me who Tiger is I don’t tell him I know. 

And when Tiger tells me, at that bar, 
how he just managed to get to shore, through the howling wind
(I can still smell it on him)
and the waves in the Annisquam were such
that he had to come downtown, down the canal, 
instead of heading toward the mouth of the bay,
I don’t remind him of the house he visited, looking across 
from River Road to Wingaersheek Beach.
But I am writing it here, so it isn’t lost. 

I don’t speak ill of the Babsons, though
they surely have some skeletons in their closets.
I doubt anybody will know
the story of my friend Amanda Babson
dressing Joanie on the Pony 
and the Fisherman at the wheel
in drag. Unless I write it here.
That’s not a skeleton, really. But a memory.
I am not rustling bones right now. 

My house is the worst on this block.
The cheapest thing with floors,
when we were looking.  

We have no yard
but the streets and a small garden.
Fifteen minutes’ walk to the harbor.
When my children were babies 
we walked to the park near your house,
and the park out your other eye.
Stage Head. 

The problem with it, where to out the poor and the poets–
this too is subject to change.

 

So Sassafras

We are still using it up, taking
what we can, what we will,
the people in power,
their houses on hills,
those are still the names we know 

And it’s beautiful, driving down from Blackburn 
to Grant Circle,
even that little stretch of highway
is a treat for the eyes. 

At high tide the water in the marsh
is so high
you can just see the top
of the marsh grass. 

2.

Fish.  It’s not like that, anymore–
the silver isn’t in the fish, but the land,
the idea. The silver is Gloucester, so
beautiful, so close to the city, so nice
to live here.  The names we know,
the people who pay the lawyers,
they make sure the others
(I won’t use your words here)
don’t get too close.
Not in my back yard,
they say, without saying.  
Character. Tradition. History.
I think of your scream to the editor.
I’ll fight for the living. 

 

 AMANDA COOK is changing in a changing world. She lives in Gloucester, Mass. with her husband James and her children Ais and Sam. Cook has traded sourdough starter for sour beers, back up singing for ukulele sets online, and social events for succulents. She is thankful it took Olson so long to write the Maximus poems, as it may take as long for her to respond. Her book Ironstone Whirlygig was published by Bootstrap Press in 2018. 

 

 

The Swallows

Told to bear all kinds of hurt,
I gulped the whole bird down.

       Fluttering inside, 
       a fearful animal become me.

       Its dread still flit feather, 
       I hope the flock ends here:

rafters of rib too far apart to roost.

I breathe in this anxious bird,
its caw and keel—

       its beak and claws 
       are sure to shred my lungs.

 

Vermiculture

When he launched the shot glass at my face,
      the ant farm flinched.
      The moths rose from the wool 
                     like frantic sentinels,
      snakes writhed from stoop,
      cockroaches strewn like
                     a fresh bed of mulch,
                     a sea of stale toffees,
      bats flapped farewell, beetles galloped, 
                     spiders sauntered,
      and on the porch, unlit with fireflies,
               a crickets’ ballad faded.
This riddled habitat—this not-a-home—
       now heavy with the rot
       of once before. Of ended.

 

Landlord

I feel this body is not my body.
         It’s more like I’m custodial staff, 
expected to maintain this building forever.
The construction might be impressive,
but I spend a fortune on wood polish, 
         brass cleaner, industrial vacuums.

The floors creak. My spine is a stairwell
         and my mind is a skylight.
I think of the emergency exit
         when it’s too much to manage 
         for an unpaid position.

When visitors complain, I say I’m sorry,
         I merely work here,
the conditions are what they are.
I can only change so much.
I can’t rebuild; the demolition is too costly.
         I don’t know who would pay for it.

 

The City Dump

I visit to admire what I’ve made:
a colonnade for rats and flies.
A gallery of human wants.

This foothill, the ambition of a god—
       a decade for a ridge
       and a lifetime for a peak.

We assemble our annual elephant 
of trash, admire our hall 
of misplaced wonders.

Here, the earth is heavy
with the labors of its former loves.

Arthropod Underbelly

Gutter crabs mostly eat cigarette butts 
and slide around sewers on slime trails. 

They have no natural predators 
       but breed slowly, couples decreed 
by glorious crustacean nation.

They’ve seen no sunsets, but hear tales 
      from their grandfathers.
They daub the tunnels’ flap gates 
with rust and moss. They painstakingly
      depict the world; these pungent,
             tobogganing Picassos.

Gutter crabs don’t pretend to have a purpose.
      They don’t bother.
Jubilant;
      they work, they cry, they dream.
      They crash into waste treatment systems
and poison the soil. They become radioactive.

There is no logic to happiness.
It might be a learned trait,
      or something in the water.

CHRISTINA BEASLEY (www.christinabeasley.com) is a D.C.-based writer, civil servant, poetry editor for Barrelhouse, and amateur cryptozoologist. Her work has appeared in Copper Nickel, Hobart, Atlanta Review, The Pinch, The Southampton Review, and elsewhere. She has participated in residencies with Virginia Quarterly Review, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Southern Illinois University. She is pursuing her M.F.A. with the Bennington Writing Seminars.

 

 

The Daybook

       Written after watching
       Ingmar Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf

Who is Silvio? what is he?
M.’s Titian eyes prosecute.
She discovered his name in
my diary, the composition
book in the bottom drawer,
under my Jazz New Orleans
and Luxor Las Vegas T-shirts.
“Silvio” in red amid the black,
there, in a dozen daily entries,
“Silvio” in printed capital letters
beside the cursive. Why printed?
Why in red ink? M. counted
forty-nine Silvios. Forty-nine,
she said, is divisible by seven.
There are seven days in a week.
“How many belong to Silvio?”
Seven sacraments. “Which is he?
Baptism? Penance? Confirmation?”
I go and walk along the shoreline.
It’s late January in the Northeast.
M., chiding angel, tails me.
Her breath-clouds transmit
“Silvio!” to my frozen ears.
At five, I’m back home in
the warmth home provides.
M. stays outside, knocking
on the window, mouthing
“Silvio! Silvio! Silvio!”
Reader, please don’t pity M.
There is no Silvio. And don’t
pity me. There is no diary.
There is no M.

JOEL ALLEGRETTI (www.joelallegretti.com) is the author of, most recently, Platypus (NYQ Books), a collection of poems, prose, and performance texts, and Our Dolphin (Thrice Publishing), a novella. His second book of poems, Father Silicon (The Poet’s Press), was selected by The Kansas City Star as one of 100 Noteworthy Books of 2006.

He is the editor of Rabbit Ears: TV Poems (NYQ Books). The Boston Globe called Rabbit Ears “cleverly edited” and “a smart exploration of the many, many meanings of TV.” Rain Taxi said, “With its diversity of content and poetic form, Rabbit Ears feels more rich and eclectic than any other poetry anthology on the market.” Jon Paul photo.