Category Archives: Great Poems Online

New Poems by Conway: “Chill” and “Meditation Room”


My pen pal “Conway”, who is serving 25-to-life in California for receiving stolen goods, returns this month with two striking new poems. He writes that “Meditation Room” was composed during a recent stretch in solitary confinement.


Chill

Prisoners of lost sands
swing upon a string
of pearls becoming strands.
Remnants of time;
Like: Cheap laundry,
strung up on the line;
Tethered
to chafe in the weather…

The Sun has blinked
His suspicious eye
once again–
darkness falls on all…

That heavy piss-stained kiss
was unable to fend off
the wind’s bite
and its whistle, cold embrace,
greedy fingers
frostier than jealousy…

While mountains drift away
from these windblown years
our sandbottles treasure
contains an epic measure…

In this moment
that last breath
or, first draft inhaled
when time accelled
before you and I laughed
then a cry expelled…

In this noiseless silence
that could wake concrete
the quiet was complete
it would take only a whisper
to break this spell;
But me
I’d like to yell…

****

Meditation Room
-Yoga 101-

There’s no place like–
Ohmmmmm…
Here, in the meditation Rooms
we are on our–
Ohnnnnn…

Relax, set aside your thoughts for a moment
adjust to the surrounding sounds.
The breeze flows over your body
at an abnormal velocity, all day
all night, it whispers, with the same exacting force.

Let this sound comfort your mind
it will not change–
it is there to fill your Lungs desire.
Now, tune into the jingling bell notes
of brass keys, chains on hips
as they Rhythmically flow into your vibrating eardrums
then calmly fade away (isn’t this serene)

Think warm happy thoughts, as
the cold Concrete walls, caress
your sense of claustrophobia.
No need to panic, it will do no-good
you’re not imagining this paranoia
you are Dead-locked inside, from the outside.

There is No-way
that you can open the thick solid steel doors.
Even in your wildest of dreams.
So, maintain my fellow prisoners;
Embrace your incarceration.
Enjoy the solitude of this tomb
            inside your Meditation Room.
            Ohmmmmm…

Stuart Kestenbaum: “Prayer for the Dead”


The column below is reprinted by permission from American Life in Poetry, a project of the Poetry Foundation.

American Life in Poetry: Column 181

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Stuart Kestenbaum, the author of this week’s poem, lost his brother Howard in the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. We thought it appropriate to commemorate the events of September 11, 2001, by sharing this poem. The poet is the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, Maine.

Prayer for the Dead

The light snow started late last night and continued
all night long while I slept and could hear it occasionally
enter my sleep, where I dreamed my brother
was alive again and possessing the beauty of youth, aware
that he would be leaving again shortly and that is the lesson
of the snow falling and of the seeds of death that are in everything
that is born: we are here for a moment
of a story that is longer than all of us and few of us
remember, the wind is blowing out of someplace
we don’t know, and each moment contains rhythms
within rhythms, and if you discover some old piece
of your own writing, or an old photograph,
you may not remember that it was you and even if it was once you,
it’s not you now, not this moment that the synapses fire
and your hands move to cover your face in a gesture
of grief and remembrance.


American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2007 by Stuart Kestenbaum. Reprinted from “Prayers & Run-on Sentences,” Deerbook Editions, 2007, by permission of Stuart Kestenbaum. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

John Amen: “Reconciling with Stillness” and “In Praise of Us”


The poems below are reprinted by permission from John Amen’s poetry collection Christening the Dancer (Uccelli Press, 2003). John is the editor of The Pedestal Magazine, a notable online journal of poetry, short prose, and book reviews.

Reconciling with Stillness

It is not enough
to follow a map to familiar temples,

I need
bulldozers in my stomach,
my spine bent to its breaking point,
secrets ripped from my groin
like sequoias uprooted in a hurricane.

I am filling holes, but also
crawling into them,
refusing to suck distraction’s oozing nipple,
even when my nerves
vibrate like a cheap doorstopper,

I feel loose dirt piling over me,
thirteen gravediggers burying me alive.

****

In Praise of Us

We are the winners, you and I,
traveling dirt roads that lead to junkyards,
hurling the thermometer into the crocodile’s mouth.

Always, their voices have been behind and before us,
that we have not walked by the tape measure
or turned our songs to science.

They gave us maps and exiled us,
laughed when we arrived at dry waterholes,
shook their heads as we ran with cheetahs.

But you and I,
we live in the center of the web,
feasting on our heartaches,
turning stone to water, icicles to lava,
using crosses as kindling.

We stand in the fusillade,
refusing to camouflage ourselves.
Every bullet swallowed turns to gold in our bowels.

“Conway” Reflects on Writing and Mentoring in Prison


My prison pen pal “Conway” writes in his July 17 letter that he has begun reading Dag Hammarskjold’s Markings:


A very good book. It was a manuscript found in his house in New York after he died. Sort of a diary. Very poignant thoughts….

I wrote two poems inspired so far by his words. I’m sendin’ them along — “Sacrifice” and “Interrogation” — plus a couple more. But I would like to share a quote from this book…


Having breathed a atmosphere filled with the products of his own spiritual combustion, he remembers reading somewhere that, in the neighborhood of a sulfur works, even a sparse vegetation can only survive if it is sheltered from the wind — ‘When did this happen?’ he asks himself — ‘and through how many generations will the effects still be traceable?’

–And then what will all earthly joys be, compared to the promise: ‘Where I am, there ye may be also’ (John 14:3)?

In an early July letter to Conway, I had confided in him about a difficult family situation, and my struggle to believe that my personality was not permanently warped by past choices and relationships. I think that’s what moved him to send me this tender story of the vegetation in need of shelter — as if to say, the need for support and consolation is not a weakness to be ashamed of, but a universal precondition of being alive, like sunlight and oxygen. And even where that precondition wasn’t always present, what God has in store for us will ultimately outshine our past deprivations.

Conway has been mentoring at-risk youth in the EDGE Program, which pairs delinquent teens with older prisoners who can de-glamorize the criminal life and guide them to better choices. He shares this story of one youth who was difficult to reach until they started talking about books:


In our last session (EDGE), I had this 15 year old kid, and he never knew his pops, and his mom was a crankster gangster, and lost him to the State. Then when he was 12, she got custody back, for about a year. Then she overdosed. 🙁

The young man is very withdrawn, and the “Group Home” he’s at, there is some chump who’s been harassing him and the rest of the young men in his charge. So, he’s been “Boning out” with one of his “Home boys” and they got caught smokin’ weed. So, they got in trouble for running off.

Bottom line The kid’s just trying to survive and retain some freedom & sense of self.

I got him to open up & he told me that he liked to read, or used to, until Dude started making his life miserable. I convinced him that reading was more rewarding than smokin’ weed, and asked him, and found out, that he had written a few short-short stories to escape his boredom. (cool)

He was last reading Harry Potter, but hadn’t finished. I convinced him that he could benefit by reading more, and maybe writing some more stories, and he agreed that he enjoyed writing them, even if “they were goofy”

Any rage, I sent him a letter last weekend, and sent him some Raymond Feist books. Three in the “Riftwar Sagas” series, good wizards stuff, and I had one of the c/o sponsors drop the letter & books off, to him….

I hope he’s doin’ better, it just sucks to see the kids, making mistakes, and getting passed around, with no real direction or trustworthy guidance from his adult supervisors.


Conway’s letter has gotten me thinking about resilience. Why do some people seem to have more of it, and what (like sickle-cell anemia) might be the hidden benefits of having less? I feel ashamed to dwell on my own early wounds from childhood bullies and flawed authority figures, when I always had the basics (food, shelter, education, life with parents instead of strangers) that Conway’s friend and so many others are growing up without. And yet these middle-class grievances have marked me so deeply (and, I fear, so visibly) that sometimes I feel like the circus child in Victor Hugo’s L’homme qui rit.


Yes, I know, sensitivity is the price of being an artist, blah blah. I’d feel better making that claim if I could finish my !#$*%&! novel(s) instead of waking up at 5 a.m. with palpitations more often than not, to pray the rosary for two hours as a way to stop obsessing about enemies who haven’t thought of me in thirty years. Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving? If Margaret still “spares a sigh” for those “worlds of wanwood” when she grows up, is she a prophet or a case of arrested development?

I’ll end with some poems from Conway’s letter:


Wring Your Wrists

Over the Earth
under that mud
where the earth rescinds
then turns to blood
when back from earth

For what I am, for what we trust
the difference claims
disturbs the unjust
like the past
shall we be dust

So, don’t become
so mortified
the destruction timed
was fortified
in stone

Destruction brings
the domination
construction sings
as does
Abomination, alone

Children declined
treated unkind
living in dread, of Laws’ so blind
too many bad deeds
too good, but a few

counting the past
what could they do
and what of you?

I live in a box
covered by locks
held steadfast
stumbling over the past

All these sands’
alone to kill
if I saved but one
a beach would spill
a million…

****


Interrogation

As July’ sky
Blaze Hot & High
Bright sunlight blended
where the concrete ended
with barbedwire
Imprisoned souls on fire..

Not one cloud
dared to shadow this crowd
Stretched out, laid bare.
Naked heat, waves in the air
embraced by torsos’ of stone,
an endless chain to atone…

Conway: “I Already Know”


The latest poetic offering from my prison pen pal “Conway” arrived on the back of a masterful drawing of grotesque comedy and tragedy masks haunting a grey prison cell. I admire his determination to get his artwork out to the world, despite the the prison bureaucracy which often bounces back his mail based on ever-changing criteria about envelope size and penmanship. Sadly, I don’t possess a scanner large enough to reproduce it here, but the poem is below. I’m still looking for a publisher for his chapbook, so please contact me if you have a lead.

This poem resonated with my own struggles to keep God’s grace and liberating promises in sight when others’ harsh judgments fill my daily awareness. To “learn what I already knew” and feel in my heart what I believe intellectually–that is a big part of what it means to “work out your salvation”, I think. And perhaps the first priority of Christian communities should be to show one another what it feels like to be forgiven, so that grace becomes as believable as shame.


I Already Know

Some day; I hope to shake off this wrath
exactly as a dog shakes off his master’s bath
unwanted film of rules, rough cuffs and regulations
fences stretched tight to keep people in, dogs out

You know what I’m tryin to say, but not talk about
Just a quick retort, inside another useless sally port
    before, after the doors crack
exposing the exit, entrance, monkey on my back
    peering out, into this promised land
spilling from an unrevealing hand, manacled.

The blue sky, only open door, dangling above me
    Taunting, “come to me” where everyone’s free

If only I believed the rhetoric, the delivery
    of phrases, phases and useless words
spewing from mouths of deadeyed mocking birds
Some day, one day I’ll learn what I already knew
    come to see your view, go to see you…

Chris Abani: “The New Religion”


The body is a nation I have not known.
The pure joy of air: the moment between leaping
from a cliff into the wall of blue below. Like that.
Or to feel the rub of tired lungs against skin
covered bone, like a hand against the rough of bark.
Like that. The body is a savage, I said.
For years I said that, the body is a savage.
As if this safety of the mind were virtue
not cowardice. For years I have snubbed
the dark rub of it, said, I am better, lord,
I am better, but sometimes, in an unguarded
moment of sun I remember the cow-dung-scent
of my childhood skin thick with dirt and sweat
and the screaming grass.
But this distance I keep is not divine
for what was Christ if not God’s desire
to smell his own armpit? And when I
see him, I know he will smile,
fingers glued to his nose and say, next time
I will send you down as a dog
to taste this pure hunger.


    reprinted by permission from the PEN American Center website

Cyclamens and Swords Journal Launched, Another Novel Chapter Published


Israeli poets Johnmichael Simon and Helen Bar-Lev have just launched Cyclamens and Swords, a new online journal of poetry, prose and artwork. They are also offering a poetry contest with prizes up to $300, and a self-publishing service for poetry chapbooks.

The title of the press is taken from their poetry book published by Ibbetson Street Press in 2007. Read excerpts and ordering information here. The book is illustrated with Helen’s luminous watercolor landscapes of Israel, whose tranquility forms a counterpoint to the authors’ poignant explorations of their beloved country’s political strife.

The first issue of their thrice-yearly webzine includes work by Magdalena Ball, Doug Holder, Zvi Sesling, Rochelle Mass, Ellaraine Lockie, Susan Rosenberg, and many other writers from around the world. Among the fiction offerings is another chapter from my novel-in-progress. “Career” is a flash-fiction piece in which Julian recounts a formative childhood memory. Here’s the opening paragraph:


It was one of Daddy’s happy nights so he was driving too fast down the hill that came after the school but before the golf course, with me and Carter strapped in the back seat screaming like we were enjoying ourselves, because that was what we were supposed to do. The air in the car was bourbon, it was the heaviness of the clouds before rain. We opened the windows and let the wind slap our faces, we yelled out like dogs.

Read the rest here.

Nancy K. Pearson: “Thought Thinking Itself”


Nancy K. Pearson’s first collection of poetry, Two Minutes of Light, is the latest winner of the Perugia Press Intro Award. She has kindly permitted me to reprint a poem from her book below. Read more of her work and buy the book here.

Thought Thinking Itself

Suddenly, all the things I do not understand
discreetly twinkle below a surface.

A gristle of duckweed gleams through a thick chop of ice.
The green wafer of a fish drifts up through a pudding of eelgrass.

For 10 years, I lived mostly on psych wards & nothing burnished 
    more
than my overestimated connection to grief.

One year, my roommate consumed small amounts of arsenic 
    for a week.
Everyday, she stirred it through her warm brown soup.

Three blood transfusions later, she lit two portable charcoal grills
in the back seat of her Subaru & died.

We reassemble our lives & discover nothing.
Just under the skin, a tiny wick of green ignites a garlic clove.

In the early 1990’s, something went terribly wrong.
All around me, young women were diagnosed & diagnosed.

After a month on a psych ward, doctors discovered I had fifteen 
    personalities.
I was twenty. I made them all up. This is a true story.

If I could live my twenties again, I would not sever to untangle—
flight is a single ligament balanced between two forces.

In the snow, the geese link chains & I follow their past.
There is nothing at the end to unravel.

Dan Bellm: “Practice”


Dan Bellm is the author of the poetry collections One Hand on the Wheel (Roundhouse Press, 1999), Buried Treasure (Cleveland State University Press, 1999), and Practice: A book of midrash (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2008). His work has appeared in several anthologies, including Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (Talisman House Publications, 2000) and The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004 (Houghton Mifflin, 2004). He has kindly given me permission to reprint the title poem from his new book below. I discovered Bellm through Image Update, the e-newsletter of the literary journal Image, which has an excellent review of Practice here.

Practice


Every seventh year you shall practice remission of debts.
Deuteronomy 15:1
How simple it ought to be, to practice compassion
on someone gone, even love him, long as he’s not
right there in front of me, for I turned to address him,
as I do, and saw that no one’s lived in that spot
for quite some time. O turner-away of prayer—
not much of a God, but he was never meant to be.
For the seventh time I light him a candle; an entire
evening and morning it burns; not a light to see
by, more a reminder of light, a remainder, in a glass
with a prayer on the label and a bar code from the store.
How can he go on? He can’t. Then let him pass
away; he gave what light he could. What more
will I claim, what debt of grace he doesn’t owe?
If I forgive him, he is free to go.

Re’eh, Deuteronomy 11:16–16:17


Read more of Dan Bellm’s poetry online at PoetryMagazine.com.

Jeff Walt: “The Life You Want”


Award-winning poet Jeff Walt has been published in many well-regarded journals such as New Millennium Writings, Runes, Dogwood: A Journal of Poetry & Prose, The Comstock Review, and The Ledge, plus several anthologies. The poem below is reprinted from his website with his permission. Read more of his work on the NMW and Gival Press websites (the latter uses frames, so no direct link is available; click on “Authors” in left-hand sidebar).

The Life You Want

Everywhere you look you see it
thriving: running by every morning in Spandex,
resting in a hammock sipping tea

most afternoons. The songs you adore rush
mellifluous from someone else’s mouth.
A Humvee, a log cabin in Montana, and a body

that would make you feel
complete cut from chic magazines.
Your sorrows grow faster than your garden.

The flowers understand serenity better—that’s why
you resent their beauty, their quiet knowledge.
Anxiety a dog that always needs walking. Envy

a hive in your head. So, again
you read the self-help books, repeat
the angelic affirmations. You forget it all

standing in line at Wal-Mart, wanting to kill
the clerk because she’s slow, hating
the guy in front of you for buying so much stuff, pissed

because they haven’t discovered a way
to squeeze enlightenment into your shampoo;
because you can’t order it off a drive-thru menu, get it

SuperSized. You’ve seen the life you want
pulling fruit from its orchard, losing weight
and making friends, humming sweetly

on the other side of the hedge—giving freely
what you can’t understand. How? and Why not me?
rotting like bruised apples inside your head.