planning the revolution

The Branches Are Full and These Orchards Heavy
by Anis Mojgani

gentlemen have you forgotten your god?

He weeps out loud
waiting for our dreams to grow like ears
while you are making ghosts out of people
making ghosts from your torah
your koran
your bibles

we have shaved our books down
swallowed them
so that the word of God
might flow through us
but the pages just sit in our bellies
speaking to us in dull murmurs as we sleep
we wonder what to do
make me understand
we wish to become one with our Lord
we hear the voices and think we know what they say
this
is the word of God
i hear this i heard this correctly
so we rise and try to translate this word
with the work
with the heart
we search the bed
through thighs
the blanket the leg the needle twist
fuck and the fuck you
curse of the moon
to find our Lord
and listen more proper-like
but our ears are too small
for our hearts to understand the humming of these sentences inside of us

we are trying to decipher the bang buck braille of Your silent throat Lord
but the voices grow and grow just as fuzzy
so we stand and go to the kitchen
and pick up knives to cut these voices out from inside
we stab ourselves
i must hear You
cutting the flap of our skins
the words twist on the floor of our homes
mixing their sounds with our blood
they drown
but it does not stop
i must hear you
we hear the same songs singing in the stomachs of others
so we grab more knives to cut those out
but there are more and more stomachs
—we need
bigger knives
we need soldiers tanks and missiles
but we still cannot make out the words
we need dead mothers
and children raped from searching
the hospitals are full and overflowing
from us trying to cut our God from our gut
with the blade the pipe
the fingernail twist of the drug
pushed and poked through the arm to the belly
to throw Him up
in the bang of the scream
we find our savior
the shell in the chamber
is a quiet plea to a distant God
asking for us to be remembered by Him
through the tire tread
through the smoke of the tank
the crunch of the skull
through the babies we bury beneath us
we empty their tiny limbs to see if a scrap of our Lord still lingered
somewhere inside there
we clutch throats pistols and palms in the same two handed clasp of prayer
staring into the mirror
we see crypts
fondling the marble of our hearts like they were mausoleums
we are ghosts hungry
for something bigger then what our mouths are kissing

let me see You
let me see You Lord
i have balanced in the middle of the question
black as my eye
beaten by Your hymn
i am holding still

so
go ahead
you gentle

men of God
you tender sinners

take your rifles
raise to my gut and fire on

hear the song more clearly
it does not sing what you wish it did

it is too big for us to see a letter of it
so do not even try

cut Him from me

i wish to drape His face with my kisses
and finally sleep softly

The Gardener
by Stephen Dobyns

After the first astronauts reached heaven
the only god discovered in residence
retired to a little brick cottage
in the vicinity of Venus. He was not
unduly surprised. He had seen it coming
since Luther. Besides, what with the imminence
of nuclear war, his job was nearly over.
As soon as the fantastic had become
a commonplace, bus tours were organized,
and once or twice a day the old fellow
would be trotted out from his reading of Dante
and asked to do a few tricks--lightening bolts,
water starting from a rock, blood from a turnip.
A few of the remaining cherubim
would fly in figure eights and afterward
sell apples from the famous orchard.
In the evening, the retired god would sometimes
received a visit from his old friend the Devil.
They would smoke their pipes before the fire.
The devil would stroke his whiskers and cover
his paws with his long furry tail. The mistake,
he was fond of saying, was to make them in
your image instead of mine. Possibly, said
the ex-deity. He hated arguing. The mistake,
he had often thought, was to experiment
with animal life in the first place when
his particular talent was as a gardener.
How pleasant Eden had been in those early days
with its neat rows of cabbages and beets,
flowering quince, a hundred varieties of rose.
But of course he had needed insects, and then
he made the birds, the red ones which he loved;
later came his experiments with smaller mammals--
quirrels and moles, a rabbit or two. When
the temptation had struck him to make something
really big, he had first conceived of it
as a kind of scarecrow to stand in the middle
of the garden and frighten off predators. What
voice had he listened to that convinced him
to give the creature his own face? No voice
but his own. It had amused him to make
a kind of living mirror, a little homunculus
that could learn a few of his lesser tricks.
And he had imagined sitting in the evening
with his friends the Devil watching the small
human creatures frolic in the grass. They would
be like children, good-natured and always singing.
When had he realized his mistake? Perhaps
when he smiled down at the first and it
didn't smile back; when he reached down to help
it to its feet and it shrugged his hand aside.
Standing up, it hadn't walked on the paths marked
with white stones but on the flowers themselves.
It's lonely, God had said. So he made it a mate,
then watched them feed on each other's bodies,
bicker and fight and trample through his garden,
dissatisfied with everything and wanting to escape.
Naturally, he hadn't objected. Kicked out,
kicked out, who had spread such lies? Shaking
and banging the bars of the great gate, they had
begged him for the chance to make it on their own.

The Manger of Incidentals
by Jack Gilbert

We are surrounded by the absurd excess of the universe.
By meaningless bulk, vastness without size,
power without consequence. The stubborn iteration
that is present without being felt.
Nothing the spirit can marry. Merely phenomenon
and its physics. An endless, endless of going on.
No habitat where the brain can recognize itself.
No pertinence for the heart. Helpless duplication.
The horror of none of it being alive.
No red squirrels, no flowers, not even weed.
Nothing that knows what season it is.
The stars uninflected by awareness.
Miming without implication. We alone see the iris
in front of the cabin reach its perfection
and quickly perish. The lamb is born into happiness
and is eaten for Easter. We are blessed
with powerful love and it goes away. We can mourn.
We live the strangeness of being momentary,
and still we are exalted by being temporary.
The grand Italy of meanwhile. It is the fact of being brief,
being small and slight that is the source of our beauty.
We are a singularity that makes music out of noise
because we must hurry. We make a harvest of loneliness
and desiring in the blank wasteland of the cosmos.

--

We live the strangeness of being momentary, / and still we are exalted by being temporary.

Cassandra's Ghazal
by Sharanya Manivannan

In the first hour of another life, I named you god and took to singing the glory of you.
Even the feral saints called me mad but I was intoxicated, then, with the glory of you.

But that was another life, and its echo my curse. Somewhere in time, a symphony stirs,
but my praise songs and prophecies are nothing more than a sad girl’s story of you.

When I said I would find you anywhere, I thought there was nothing I could not foresee.
But blindfolded, bereft, I cannot locate the name you live by now in my rosary of you.

Do you remember how I came to your door, a vagabond, night after night? You asked what
magic or weapon I dispelled wolves and fiends with, but all I had was the armory of you.

And, lover, if you only knew – the only demon I knew was you. Caught between your teeth,
losing my head between your thighs, my fate irresistible, even knowing the augury of you.

I inhabit the past now, I speak no more predictions. To forget is mere Cassandra wish – and
would I want to? The nights are so long, and there is no body warm as the memory of you.

Pier
by Vona Groarke

Speak to our muscles of a need for joy
-- W H Auden, "Sonnets from China" (XVII)

Saint Catherine of Siena to Mary-Kate Olsen
by Marty McConnell

what god stole your hunger? who demands this reduction
to vertebrae? it’s a specific treason, a case worth losing,
nobody can hear you with fingers or sticks between your lips,
nobody loves you in the bathroom, everyone’s in the kitchen
again, this is my body, broken for you, take and eat

the appearance of bones is not a miracle of the flesh
(take and eat) what do your visions say? who
marries you in the dream, Christ slipping a ring
on my thin second finger, my shorn hair all over
the floor, gold for gold, I was six when he first
came for me, who insists on this full-body stigmata,

how long have you been paying this penance? are you ready
to die for this? martyrdom’s a pretty notion until you’re nose
to nose with it and nothing to be done, the body rejecting water,
salt, fish, when you realize the devil’s the one who wants
you small, who told you the pus of a cancer was wine, said

sip, swallow, this is my blood, transubstantiation in three
degrees, when you have given your good body to a lie
Mary, when your bones turn to whispers they will bury you
under a stone that did not ask to be a stone, we do not ask
to be but we are and to live, Mary, to swear
on everything holy that these bodies are not vessels

but gifts, that’s the trick, to be an altar and not
another sacrifice, for what are you atoning? who is your
eucharist? I made men believe. brought a condemned man
to faith and caught his severed head in my hands, beguine
or not you have hands, a throat, the world doesn’t need

another dead-thin girl, your suffering is not special, offered up
to magazine covers and lip gloss endorsements, thousands
flocked to confession after I preached in public squares, what
are you winning? my mistake was believing the body
meant nothing, yours the opposite – Mary meaning bitter,
Katherine meaning pure, Christ and I died at 33, anvils

for the world’s beatings, vessels of the world’s sins, glue
your brittled bones into the face of a god who bids you
eat, our bodies broken into bread at your feet, chicory,
water lily, do this for you, rosemary, asphodel, do this
in remembrance of me.

--

I have been listening to this over and over again, and failing in all my attempts to ahem it, so, you know, have the text, and have the video, and maybe something, somewhere, will resonate. (The text above doesn't match the performance, which is a shame, because the performance is the better of the two, I feel.)

The Ghost of Frank O'Hara
by John Yohe

The ghost of Frank O’Hara taps me on
the shoulder whispering
                                    and what about
the humor what about talks with the sun
and things that happen at the movies out
of sight of parents don’t forget the thirst
of being in Manhattan in the heat
and Coke the drink
                            remember too your first
love passion music though it might not come out
in words it’s there in you but I was sad
and said what good is humor in a poem
when people die Manhattan Fire Island
we
      bought falafels which we thought weren’t bad
and walked to Central Park for space and some
children were laughing and he said ask them

Five Times I Lived by Water
by Adrienne J. Odasso

1. Cuyahoga

My father claims that the river caught fire
on the night I was born. My research suggests
that he is either lying or misremembers
and has conflated the strange event
with my slow coming. Whenever I ask
my mother, she says that I burned
worse than any brand on my sluggish way
into artificial light. I wonder
if the truth lies somewhere in between:
that the river caught fire at the sight
of my arrival, lent my eyes its gleam.



2. North Fork

Too slight to be a river, yet too large
to seem a creek. My grandfather led me
close by the water, explained the trick
of keeping firm footing out in the deep.
I proved a fast fisher of monsters
inside the first hour. One after another,
sunfish and trout, speckled catfish and chubs
foundered hungry on my hooks. We'd keep
only the ones deemed best for eating.
As for the rest, they'd earned their living,
having taught me how true weakness looks.



3. Charles

At least this place, too, has blue herons
and kingfishers that dive from shopping cart
to weed-bed, from bicycle part to pier
before rising again. I'll stay with you
here in this soft, polluted silence till
all the city sinks and water rises
past our door. After that, I'm uncertain
of where I will go. The ocean is far
from us, but nearer than it was when first
I came. Before I leave, I have one last
boon to ask, and it's this: return my name.



4. Ouse

I could hate this country for giving me
something to love—spired, frigid ruins
that fit my mind's frail landscape like a glove.
I'm told that her dear cousin, Mother Thames,
yields up pipe-stems and pots, even bodies
belonging to souls that London forgot.
For now, I'm where I am, biding my time
until our own tame river turns to flood,
swallows the high turrets' stones, even burns
my too-long dulled eyes with waves of blood.



5. Aire

I'm telling my father that the river
has turned to ice overnight, become
a landing hazard to every gull
within a twenty-mile radius.
If I could only see her smile, I'd tell
my mother what it looks like when they slide
in a blur of dull feathers. This is us,
my grandfather and me, separated
by fish-killing distance. My heart is full
like the ocean that bore me, or the hull
of this steamship, ablaze with remembrance.

There Were Footsteps in the Garden
by Frank X. Gaspar

I can’t figure out the earth, everything saying yes and no
at the same time, everything shedding its hair and licking
its teeth and waiting to be eaten. And then there are the
great wings of the galaxies I’m looking at as they shudder
through the wilderness like spirits until they stoop through
my garden of lenses and mirrors. What is the loneliness
of all those shattered islands, what is so lofty, so hungry,
so intelligent, so needy about them? I’m reading in a holy
book about how the color red shifts and retreats in this
sidereal world, as though the stars are trying to hide
their forms from one another, as though they are afraid
of their nakedness─they all race away, and only the distance
grows, only the distraction, as if that were the point. Now
the yard is so quiet I can hear the snails being pulled
through the long grass by some reckless force beyond their
snail imagination. There are sayings now that would help me.
They would be nothing by daylight. The words try to avoid
embarrassment too. How can you blame them? But in
these pure hungers of the night it is another story. Precisely
another story, and then another and another. Oh, there were
footsteps in the Garden, all right. There was a firmament
hung with lights. But that was then. This is now. That’s what
makes me ask for the next story. That’s what makes me curl
in the blanket on the shivering grass and stare outward. That’s
what makes tonight so safe for this one thing I’m trying to say.

Trucker’s Mate
by Liz Berry

The A1 is the loneliest. Four hundred
and nine miles down the spine of the country,
only the firefly of a fag tip to keep you steady.
A man needs some company,
an eye on the map, a hand on the radio.
Ten four, hammer down, breaker breaker.

He made a man of me, rubbed me
smooth with engine grease, taught me how
to pull a flatbed, take an unsigned route,
draw the curtains against the prying eyes
of headlights. As other lorries trundle home,
we push onwards, the road a romance.

I was a kid that first night. Birmingham
to Folkestone. The junctions looping
and racing above us, his hand on my leg.
In the woods beside the lay-by, I pressed my tongue
into the sap of a pine tree as I pissed;
already half in love with him.

Now belly to back in the cab, his vertebrae
like cat’s eyes guiding me down,
I think of the M6 Toll, lined with two million
pulped Mills & Boons; how love is buried
in unlooked for places, kept secret like us.
In the darkness his breath hums like an engine.