When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving - Reginald Dwayne Betts

When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving

by Reginald Dwayne Betts

in the backseat of my car are my own sons,

still not yet Tamir’s age, already having heard

me warn them against playing with toy pistols,

though my rhetoric is always about what I don’t

like, not what I fear, because sometimes

I think of  Tamir Rice & shed tears, the weeping

all another insignificance, all another way to avoid

saying what should be said: the Second Amendment

is a ruthless one, the pomp & constitutional circumstance

that says my arms should be heavy with the weight

of a pistol when forced to confront death like

this: a child, a hidden toy gun, an officer that fires

before his heart beats twice. My two young sons play

in the backseat while the video of  Tamir dying

plays in my head, & for everything I do know, the thing

I don’t say is that this should not be the brick and mortar

of poetry, the moment when a black father drives

his black sons to school & the thing in the air is the death

of a black boy that the father cannot mention,

because to mention the death is to invite discussion

of  taboo: if you touch my sons the crimson

that touches the concrete must belong, at some point,

to you, the police officer who justifies the echo

of the fired pistol; taboo: the thing that says that justice

is a killer’s body mangled and disrupted by bullets

because his mind would not accept the narrative

of  your child’s dignity, of  his right to life, of  his humanity,

and the crystalline brilliance you saw when your boys first breathed;

the narrative must invite more than the children bleeding

on crisp fall days; & this is why I hate it all, the people around me,

the black people who march, the white people who cheer,

the other brown people, Latinos & Asians & all the colors of   humanity

that we erase in this American dance around death, as we

are not permitted to articulate the reasons we might yearn

to see a man die; there is so much that has to disappear

for my mind not to abandon sanity: Tamir for instance, everything

about him, even as his face, really and truly reminds me

of my own, in the last photo I took before heading off

to a cell, disappears, and all I have stomach for is blood,

and there is a part of me that wishes that it would go away,

the memories, & that I could abandon all talk of making it right

& justice. But my mind is no sieve & sanity is no elixir & I am bound

to be haunted by the strength that lets Tamir’s father,

mother, kinfolk resist the temptation to turn everything

they see into a grave & make home the series of cells

that so many of my brothers already call their tomb.

Mr. Darcy - Victoria Chang

Mr. Darcy

by Victoria Chang

In the end she just wanted the house

                and a horse not much more what

        if he didn't own the house or worse

                        not even a horse how do we

separate the things from a man the man from

                the things is a man still the same

        without his reins here it rains every fifteen

                        minutes it would be foolish to

marry a man without an umbrella did

                Cinderella really love the prince or

        just the prints on the curtains in the

                        ballroom once I went window-

shopping but I didn't want a window when

                do you know it's time to get a new

        man one who can win more things at the

                        fair I already have four stuffed

pandas from the fair I won fair and square

                is it time to be less square to wear

        something more revealing in North and

                        South she does the dealing gives him

the money in the end but she falls in love

                with him when he has the money when

        he is still running away if the water is

                        running in the other room is it wrong

for me to not want to chase it because it owns

                nothing else when I wave to a man I

        love what happens when another man with

                        a lot more bags waves back

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

by Robert Duncan

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,

that is not mine, but is a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,

an eternal pasture folded in all thought

so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light

wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am

I say are likenesses of the First Beloved

whole flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

She it is Queen Under The Hill

whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words

that is a field folded.

It is only a dream of the grass blowing

east against the source of the sun

in an hour before the sun's gone down

whose secret we see in a children's game

of ring a round of roses told.

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

as if it were a given property of the mind

that certain bounds hold against chaos,

that is a place of first permission,

everlasting omen of what is.

Wild Geese - Mary Oliver

Wild Geese

By Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

Thoughts of the California Desert

Thoughts of the California Desert

by Reed Whittemore

Under palm trees, oranges, olives and pears

The indolent desert slouches, half an eye closed

And half an eye out for men of affairs whose cares

Keep them from keeping their gaudy gardens hosed.

Slouches and yawns, that clown.  Leaves in disdain

Gaseous dragons their nauseous knights to nettle.

Flips his tail coyly, rolls over, says he would fain

Die a dry death.  Haw! browning a petal.

Has it too good, too good.  Is vastly diverted

Watching his merchants and bankers stumble out doors.

Parries their blows, says he loves, loves to be squirted

As at him they fiercely empty their reservoirs.

Sleeps a great deal, drinks deep, drinks deep and makes hay,

Thinking he'll swallow the bankers and all one day.

Anne Sexton's Poetry

Many a writer has said they write to save their lives. And many a writer has died by suicide. In few cases has the connection been so direct as in that of the poet Anne Sexton. Encouraged in 1957 by her therapist to write poetry to stave off her suicidal ideation, she eventually joined a group of mid-century “confessional” poets based in Boston—including Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath—whose personal pathos, family pain, and severe bouts of depression provided much of the material for their work. Despite Sexton’s tremendous career success at what began, more-or-less, as a hobby, she became overwhelmed by her illness and committed suicide in 1974.

There are those who wish to debate whether so-called “confessional poets” were truly tormented individuals or navel-gazing narcissists. This seems fair enough given the willing self-exposure of poets like Plath, Lowell, and Sexton, but it kind of misses the point; their losses and transgressions were as real, or not, as anyone’s, but we remember them, or should, for their writing. Instead I find it interesting to see their public selves as performances, whatever the autobiographical connections in the work. A former fashion model, Anne Sexton was particularly adept at self-presentation, and as her fame as a writer increased—she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 and a succession of grants and awards throughout the sixties—her poetry became less focused on the strictly personal, more on the cultural (she has become well-known, for example, for a sardonic, feminist perspective in such poems as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”). A good deal of her work was pure invention, despite the illusion of intimacy.

Nonetheless, the short, 1966 film "Anne Sexton at Home" (top, with Spanish subtitles, continued below) lets us engage in some voyeurism. It begins with Sexton’s irritation, as she’s interrupted by the dog. Then the film cuts away, the scene has changed, and she frankly acknowledges the poet’s voice as a “persona” (from the Greek for mask); her poems are “monsters,” into which she has “projected herself.” When we cut back again to the first scene, Sexton confidently reads her “Menstruation at Forty.” And we cut away again, and Sexton, her familiar cigarette never far away, riffs on “family & poetry” as her husband Alfred tries to avoid the camera. We see the poet with her daughter, their interactions playful (and also a little disturbing). Throughout it all Sexton performs, seemingly pleased and enjoying the camera’s attention.

This is my favorite Anne Sexton poem. Rowing

by Anne Sexton

A story, a story!

(Let it go.  Let it come.)

I was stamped out like a Plymouth fender

into this world.

First came the crib

with its glacial bars.

Then dolls

and the devotion of their plastic mouths.

Then there was school,

the little straight rows of chairs,

blotting my name over and over,

but undersea all the time,

a stranger whose elbows wouldn't work.

Then there was life

with its cruel houses

and people who seldom touched--

though touch is all--

but I grew,

like a pig in a trenchcoat I grew,

and then there were many strange apparitions,

the nagging rain, the sun turning into poison

and all of that, saws working through my heart,

but I grew, I grew,

and God was there like an island I had not rowed to,

still ignorant of Him, my arms, and my legs worked,

and I grew, I grew,

I wore rubies and bought tomatoes

and now, in my middle age,

about nineteen in the head I'd say,

I am rowing, I am rowing

tough the oarlocks stick and are rusty

and the sea blinks and rolls

like a worried eyeball,

but I am rowing, I am rowing,

though the wind pushes me back

and I know that that island will not be perfect,

it will have the flaws of life,

the absurdities of the dinner table,

but there will be a door

and I will open it

and I will get rid of the rat inside me,

the gnawing pestilential rat.

God will take it with his two hands

and embrace it.

As the African says:

This is my tale which I have told,

if it be sweet, if it be not sweet,

take somewhere else and let some return to me.

This story ends with me still rowing.

The Meaning of Zero: A Love Poem - Amy Uyematsu

The Meaning of Zero: A Love Poem
by Amy Uyematsu

--Is where space ends called death or infinity?
Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions

A mere eyelid's distance between you and me.

It took us a long time to discover the number zero.

John's brother is afraid to go outside.
He claims he knows
the meaning of zero.

I want to kiss you.

A mathematician once told me you can add infinity
to infinity.

There is a zero vector, which starts and ends
at the same place, its force
and movement impossible
to record with
rays or maps or words.
It intersects yet runs parallel
with all others.

A young man I know
wants me to prove
the zero vector exists.
I tell him I can't,
but nothing in my world
makes sense without it.