planning the revolution

The Chariot in Love
by Marty McConnell

there is a red box in my bedroom
for the disposal of needles.
there is a woman in my bed

with a body made of flowers.
they feel like thorns to her,
like weeds. part of me thinks

she is dying. another part says no,
that’s how we sleep now.
the hormones are new

but the story is old: Tiresius
was a man, then a woman, then
a man. punishment, prophecy,

redemption. I’ve begun guessing
at the gender of lamp-posts. of couches.
of calendars. watching the jaws of men

on the train, studying their shoulders,
the shrug in their lean. I’ve become
something different now, too. omnipresent

bystander, witness for the defense: the bed
is nothing like a coffin. the animal hair
at the end of her backbone has always

been there. I watch your body
square into itself and think, armor.
the temperature of your skin in sleep

says fever, flight, release. we leave
the windows open all winter. I am cold
but you are here. I never learn

to push the needle into the meat
of your thigh. does this make me
a coward, or the man in the moon?

You’re extraordinary. Don’t leave.
this spring, my sister ripped out half
a garden of blossomless poppies

because a neighbor told her
anything with thorned stems
and thorned leaves

is a weed. no matter what answer
you give the gods, something
will be granted and something taken

away. I would like someone to teach me
a new way to pray. I miss the sight
of your breasts in sleep. your knees

are the same. I fold photographs
of you as a girl into postcards
and mail them to orphans. you are

your own daughter, they say. everyone
earns their body somehow. what
do we do now?

2.
transform, metamorphose, transmute, transmogrify, convert, transfigure: to change a thing into a different thing. transform implies a major change in form, nature, or function {transformed a small company into a corporate giant}. metamorphose suggests an abrupt or startling change induced by or as if by magic or a supernatural power {awkward girls metamorphosed into swannish ballerinas}. transmute implies transforming into a higher element or thing {transmute lead into gold, body into deity}. transmogrify suggests a strange or preposterous metamorphosis {a story in which a frog is transmogrified into a photograph once thought lost, now reappearing as an ad for feminine hygiene products}. convert implies a change fitting something for a new or different use or function {converted the study into a nursery, the bed into a boarding house}. transfigure implies a change that exalts or glorifies {joy, or maybe it was the hormones, transfigured her face}.

3.
love. may the body you are becoming hold fewer
cruel boundaries. may its territories admit my hands,
hormones taking down fences like boys in cars
with baseball bats swinging at mailboxes.

dear mystery, dear mythological
shapeshifter, may I adore you
in any skin, inherited or built.
there is a hair below your chin

that I love to study. it is like
a small flag invented by an army
wildly outnumbered but with the very
best uniforms. their boots punched with holes

but polished to a sheen in which they can see
their gorgeous reflections. God’s perfect
monsters, they stomp through your bloodstream,
set up camp at the base of your spine where I tuck

my knee while sleeping. they are not sure
how to love me. a body untransformed, transfigured only
by time and afternoons at the gym. may you be able
to remind them, I was here first. or at least,

I loved you more.

4.
you are not a war. there is nothing
to be won here. you asked me once

what my ruin is. what could make me
a monster. I didn’t answer. the answer is,

fear. I am that ordinary. I was born
like this. but I have invented new ways

to pray. the clock is a liar who dissolves
in the light. the shower is resurrection central.

your mouth is a storehouse of surrogate
bones, you grow fruit trees and crocus

in the back of your throat. give me
your moonshoulders, the stars all over

your body, and the keys. hand over
the map. you choose the road. I can keep

both wheels on the ground, I can hold us.
the book says, remember. victory is just

the beginning. we’ll make a banner
from your binding shirt, collect my shed hair

for the seams. my love, my sphinx, my vanishing
point, I am not perfect. but I was built for this.

How Love Came to Us
by Eric Evans

Gradually, and working its way slowly, through all things,
beginning even long before we knew each other.
Through emptiness, through aimlessness,
the spirit’s daily wandering in the desert of the familiar,
fed by nights of exhaustion and driven by occasional despair,
by grief, loss compounded upon loss.
Through the patient forbearance of cruelties,
year after year, through folly, through faith and faithlessness,
through half-measures and weakness, through your and my
daily silent supplications and small acts of ordinary magic,
the spontaneous calling out to distant spirits,
each in our separate ways, and for answer the surge of the wind,
the circulation of the sun and the moon,
the churning of the far away oceans
that we each knew and felt in our own blood and breath.
So that when we first saw each other
finally that one July evening at twilight,
it seemed almost as if nothing happened.
A life had already grown up wild around us like a meadow,
was already waiting for us, silent, open.

The City
by Constantine P. Cavafy (trans. Daniel Mendelsohn)

You said: "I'll go to some other land, I'll go to some other sea.
There's bound to be another city that's better by far.
My every effort has been ill-fated from the start;
my heart--like something dead--lies buried away;
How long will my mind endure this slow decay?
Wherever I look, wherever I cast my eyes,
I see all round me the black rubble of my life
where I've spent so many ruined and wasted years."

You'll find no new places, you won't find other shores.
The city will follow you. The streets in which you pace
will be the same, you'll haunt the same familiar places,
and inside those same houses you'll grow old.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't bother to hope
for a ship, a route, to take you somewhere else; they don't exist.
Just as you've destroyed your life, here in this
small corner, so you've wasted it through all the world.

With thanks to the_grynne who posted this today.

Many Are Called
by Mariko Nagai

Underneath this city, there is another city, one more modern, more
recent in its origin. Here, in these dark tunnels where pomegranates
fall, all these thoughts fly around like moths, lured by light, by sweet
smell of decay, trapping themselves by their own free choice in the
confined space of their making: It can’t already be June, it can’t
already be Monday, that’s what they say, that’s what people keep
muttering to themselves this morning as they cradle the last of the
sleep in their coffee cups, for the precious moments in which they
huddle in themselves before they must sign off their lives to something
they don’t believe in, to something they think they cannot escape
from. As they rock in the rhythm of the train, someone thinks, A moth
in spider’s nest, though she does not see the intricate weaving of the
thin threads, ready to untangle between our fingers, snapping the
threads. But it’s like this: It’s already June, I’m already 28 and I
haven’t done anything, many are talking, comforting us in these
minutes of our lives when we descend down to darkness, to darkness
so dark that we are helpless, our bodies swaying left to right, left to
right as if we’re rocking in prayer, but we are not praying. We’re boxed
in the freight, we’re boxed in a subway car, this is the death train, but
unlike them, forced away from their homes because of blood, we
chose this train, we chose to be on it, we are boxed in, we’re as
helpless, we tell ourselves, positioning ourselves to the gravity, the
pull of the train. Our highest dreams thrown out like our last night’s
dinner, a woman’s dream flies past, landing silently on the subway
floor like the last note of an aria, I wish someone loved me, I wish He
loved me, a thought so light it floats quietly down, hovers an inch
or two above the floor, then lands, landing as someone steps on it. I wish
somebody loved me, but I’m not pretty enough, I’m not smart enough,
she closes her thoughts from us, she looks down to the book on her
lap, the thick one, heavy like her sadness, but she doesn’t stop her
reading, the thick book stays where it is, the woman, though, reads so
little, doesn’t really read, just daydreams, her hopes going where
we are going, she stays where she is, on the seat across. We are all
going somewhere we have to each day, pulled by the invisible strings,
and we say, I can go no other place, this is where I belong. No, we go
to places only if we must, but must is a habit, after all, we can go
anywhere as long as we let ourselves, anywhere we want to, only if we
want to, she can stretch her arms as if in flight, and leave, leave this
train, this city…only if she wants to. We think there’s no way out, our
lives guided by some invisible lines only fate has right to hold, right to
control. But we are closer to grace, we are closer to where we were
before we were born, before we forgot the songs, before we forgot the
promises, we are closer to grace in the darkness of our own making,
we are not of time—only if we let it, only if we let the watch unshackle
us, but we forget, as we have forgotten, as soon as we open our eyes.
Many are called and many do not hear.

The Forgotten Actress as Isadora Duncan in Russia
by Bridget Lowe

The Russians loved you. And for that
you loved them back. It was maternal in a way,
on both sides. A country needing love, a woman
with a hole as big as a country in her chest.
They asked you to dance and how you obliged them!
Each rib bowed in graciousness, each fingertip
stretched toward the ceiling of paper stars
cut by children to light your way across
the stage. When you finished, your black head
of hair falling all forward, falling out, your body long
and starved, they stood and wept
in honor of you. They decorated you with scarves.

The Soul Bone
by Susan Wood

Once I said I didn't have a spiritual bone
in my body and meant by that
I didn't want to think of death,
as though any bone in us
could escape it. Maybe
I was afraid of what I couldn't know
for certain, a thud like the slamming
of a coffin lid, as final and inexplicable
as that. What was the soul anyway,
I wondered, but a homonym for loneliness?
Now, in late middle age, or more, I like to imagine it,
the spirit, the soul bone, as though it were hidden
somewhere inside my body, white as a tooth
that falls from a child's mouth, a dove,
the cloud it can fly through. Like bones,
it persists. Little knot of self, stubborn
as wildflowers in a Chilmark field in autumn,
the white ones they call boneset, for healing,
or the others, pearly everlasting.
The rabbis of the Midrash believed in the bone
and called it the luz, just like the Spanish word
for light, the size of a chickpea or an almond,
depending on which rabbi was telling the story,
found, they said, at the top of the spine or the base,
depending. No one's ever seen it, of course,
but sometimes at night I imagine I can feel it,
shining its light through my body, the bone
luminous, glowing in the dark. Sometimes,
if you listen, you might even hear that light
deep inside me, humming its brave little song.

Vague Memories
by Hu Ming-Xiang

Flames chuckle over
The memory of lost forests
Old men around a fire
Speaking of love.

The Watermelon
by Hu Ming-Xiang

All through the Spring it grew
Secretly, staying close to the ground.
Today you carved it open
Ate the red flesh, spat out the seeds.

Grace
by Maxine Kumin

Hens have their gravel; gravel sticks
The way it should stick, in the craw.
And stone on stone is tooth
For grinding raw.

And grinding raw, I learn from this
To fill my crop the way I should.
I put down pudding stone
And find it good.

I find it good to line my gut
With tidy octagons of grit.
No loophole and no chink
Make vents in it.

And in it vents no slime or sludge;
No losses sluice, no terrors slough.
God, give me appetite
for stone enough.

Cartographies of Silence
by Adrienne Rich


1.
A conversation begins
with a lie. and each

speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart

as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature

A poem can begin
with a lie. And be torn up.

A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own

false energy, Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.

Inscribes with its unreturning stylus
the isolation it denies.

2.
The classical music station
playing hour upon hour in the apartment

the picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephone

The syllables uttering
the old script over and over

The loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lie

twisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word

3.
The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette

the blurring of terms
silence not absence

of words or music or even
raw sounds

Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed

the blueprint of a life

It is a presence
it has a history a form

Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence

4.
How calm, how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to me

though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract

without wounding myself or you
there is enough pain here

This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?

5.
The silence strips bare:
In Dreyer’s Passion of Joan

Falconetti’s face, hair shorn, a great geography
mutely surveyed by the camera

If there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank space or as words

stretched like skin over meaningsof a night through which two people
have talked till dawn.

6.
The scream
of an illegitimate voice

It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself

How do I exist?

This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer

I had answers but you could not use them
The is useless to you and perhaps to others

7.
It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything-

chalk it on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums

If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing

a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dew

If it could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn

till you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare

8.
No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words

moving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind child’s fingers

or the newborn infant’s mouth
violent with hunger

No one can give me, I have long ago
taken this method

whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack
or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue

If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciation to the eye

the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn

like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a single ear of grain

for the return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing

are these words, these whispers, conversations
from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.