Poem: “Wedded”

This poem of mine was chosen by Chris Forhan as a runner-up for the 2008 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry from The Broome Review, and also appears in their Spring 2009 issue and on their website.

Wedded

Why can’t the dog and the cat get married,
the postman to the bishop, the nurse to the queen?
In the days when mud was chocolate
we could march the egg cups down the table,
humming that universal tune.
The teddy bear and the piggy bank,
the lightbulb and the tomato.
Not all of these relationships would work out,
as we knew from the sound
of cloth tearing in another room.
Still we imagined,
in those days when peppermint was money,
that a bit of lace thrown over
the cat’s spitting head would make her beautiful,
and a dropcloth would stop the parrot quarreling
with his mirror mate.
We were dizzy with weddings,
even when the books fell to the floor
inky and torn, face-down like bridesmaids
with their mascara running.
Why do the things that were sold together,
the obvious salt and pepper,
rows of rolled socks like dull neighbors,
always go missing?
So we married the glove to the mitten,
in those days when morning was bedtime,
when lunch was rice flung in the street
after the tin-can fugitives,
we matched the boot to the baby’s shoe
and no guests came.

Poem: “Zeal”


I want the truth or
quiet, you can’t have both
in daylight, in company,
from the baby-blanket sky we turn into rooms
you can’t have if you’re human meaning
no desire without its rind of talk, I want
that orange uncut
better than to sit here with knives
spinning the sun in a bowl,
I want the truth like a fat lady
wants cake, sticking her sweet fingers in her mouth
in fecal shame,
I want quiet like letting the beaver
alone who nibbles on the neighbor’s lettuces
because in her world she is right,
pines hushing in the dark and insects gold
dust in the last beams, how could any
great hand that shaped the clover
fall harder on us
poor toads, I want to turn it
all off, the lingual grid gone black
and only hands left, right
in the sag and salty hair of us,
dear fatigue, lift me at last    I want
to forgive whoever
asks me and maybe others.


    published in Fulcrum #6 (2008)

Poem: “Picnic”


My icebox lover, let us sit at opposite ends
of the blanket, pass a single egg back and forth,
the salt, the pepper, the tiny bites.
Let’s admire the suspended sunset of blueberries
in the jelly, decide not to open the jar.
The ants are making words on the checkerboard
of red cotton, like foreign newsprint shrilling its mysteries —
words of thunder, words of weather.
The future is obvious; let’s not puzzle
too long under its clouds.
Sharing this postcard sandwich, cucumbers and butter,
a hint suffices us for the whole.
The lemon slices smile sagely in the glass
and the bees waver between us, buzzing like knives,
ready to wound for their sugar.
We could fold our napkins, we could leave hungry,
not wait till the rain skins us in our clothes,
pushes us down in the soil like plants.
Lover, don’t grab for that last plate.
To be struck
once —
I’ve had enough lightning.

    This poem won a Commended award in the 2008 Cyclamens & Swords Poetry Contest. Read the winners here.

Poem: “Nature Morte, Palm Beach”


The orange inside the orange is gold:
in this juice the wealth of labor,
its sunshine the ring-decked gleam of the ladies
whose skin is tough and bronzed like the orange,
whose soft thoughts are hidden from their men.

The palm inside the palm burns like a cigarette,
the addict’s love that cannot breathe.
The ladies wave their resilient hands
with their burning wands, and along Cocoanut Row
the palms thrash in the hurricane.

The ocean inside the ocean is a spaniel
endlessly racing, drooling foam for joy.
Again, again, the senile sea
claps at each baby-blue crash.
The ladies own the view behind glass,
shutter the sun in pastel rooms
where the piano and the wheelchair sleep.

The album inside the album has no name
or too many. All the smiles and their objectives blurred
like a glitter of stars without constellation lines.
Look, these were your friends. Look, trophies,
grandchildren, the news. Whose is the charity
for this season?

The woman inside the woman lifts a match to her lips
that hold no cigarette. The burning stick
one more thing not to see, the flame familiar
as her late husband’s golden apologies.
Down her breast, a dribble of flame like fresh juice.
And still she stares at the expensive sea,
matches it breath for amnesiac breath.


This poem won a third prize in the 2008 Dancing Poetry Contest, and is included in my chapbook Hound of Heaven, forthcoming this fall from Southern Hum Press. (Their website is down again…arrgh.) “Nature morte” is the wonderfully evocative French name for a “still life”.

Recent Publications: “Leaving Olympus” and “Poem Written on a Dirty Stove”


My poem “Leaving Olympus” has just been published in the new issue of Conte: A Journal of Narrative Writing. This handsomely designed webzine also includes great work by David Wright, Eliza Kelley, John N. Miller and others I have yet to explore. “Leaving Olympus” is a poem about Julian, or possibly by him. He’s not telling.

In other news, my poem “Poem Written on a Dirty Stove” appears in the Summer 2008 issue of Heartlodge: Honoring the House of the Poet, a quarterly journal edited by award-winning writers Cheryl Loetscher, Leta Grace McDonald and Andrea L. Watson. As the issue is not available online, I’m reprinting the poem below.

Poem Written on a Dirty Stove

With the last cherries crushed on his tongue,
he says the pie reminds him
of autumn at Welch Lake, the eye-watering tang
of consummation in the air.
My spoon scrapes the dish like an oar
stuttering in unexpected sand. It’s slipped his memory
it wasn’t me he laid down in those reeds.

Later, the stars rise like a thousand cranes
and water babbles over soiled plates.
So much longer in the planning than the baking,
longer the baking than the savor.
The furniture we invited in
now rubs up against us, insistent as stray cats.
Only position differentiates the pinhole stars.

My eyes would hoard the spear of every darkening tree,
each faultline of needles in the snow,
green stitches the next day’s weather will unpick.
Vertigo to realize he is speaking,
a voice too familiar to notice,
like your own limb before it’s wounded.

Our bodies twined, like gorgeous bread egg-slick,
we feed and disappear. A case of manna.
Where are joys stored? I want only
to see what I see.
Darling, it was so good I never
need to do this again.
One star, one meal, one night – till dawn
dissolves the sky like lemon ice,
and kind amnesia brings our hunger back.

Poem: “Called Out”


The baker, said Luther, glorifies God in bread.
He was a fat fellow, knew good beer from a bad sermon.
Enough of these piglets in neckcloths
sweating through bare words never meant
to be dragged up from belly to lips.
Inside every man I want, I want
cries like a baby, but ashamed
of bread sopped in milk,
choleric to grab his father’s knife.
The helmsman glorifies God by seeing sharks.
The constipated scholar can afford to toss his ink
at demons in the frost,
his own chamber glass cracking.
But bluff sailors, their red hands freezing to the wheel,
need gloves, not Latin.
Bless the tanner and his scrawny boy
who sleeps in the horse-hay,
wakes to crack the trough’s icy skin
and offer the first bite
of an ordinary apple to the steaming mare.
Let him be too young to dream of whores
like Reason, Luther’s false bride.
She is all painted with vocations
of monk and knight and merchant,
pale halo, priapic spear,
the great ships laden with lemons.
The leper glorifies God by losing
his fingers. Luther counted beads
but could not count his dreams
where his shadow-self barreled through Cockaigne,
poor paradise without bakers
where sugar drops from trees and women
are all thighs and stopped mouths.
The beggar glorifies God by opening his hand
to the butcher and the nailsmith, the fool
by singing his cradle song over stones and pennies
flung round him like stars in the dirt.


This poem won third prize in the 2008 Utmost Christian Writers poetry contest.

Jendi Reiter’s Chapbook “Hound of Heaven” Forthcoming from Southern Hum Press


My poetry chapbook Hound of Heaven was a runner-up for the inaugural Women of Words Award from Southern Hum Press and will be published this fall. Thanks, Southern Hum! I’ll include a purchasing link on this site when the book is out. Below, a sample:

Hound of Heaven

            for Fran

It had been raining days when the voice
asked me to pull over by the river.
Not a voice to be heard but simply a must:
the arm moves with the thought, no word says Move.
The branches cocked like muskets, spearing the sky,
were soaked black, clouds wind-whipped dogs
cringing like cavemen placating
the weather of doom they thought was God.
Is that all I am, that bared animal neck?
I had let the pearls roll from my hands like water,
thinking anything precious could save itself.
I was silently wed to the clever,
dazzled by small explanations.
Still I turned the car, slowed, stood under the fall
of cold silver needles like a sick child praying
be good and it’ll soon be over.
There were the reed-clotted banks and the fists of trees
and in the river only a projected world
no gentler, no more likely to change.
Till a soft wind, someone, ruffled the waters
and the trees cracked apart, lovely as first tears after a death.

****

Dendrobatidae

Most deadly, most delicate, the jewel-toned frog
like a crown behind museum glass
tempts a perverse grab. Once name it rare,
monkey-mind will do anything for more.
The tiny scarlet body barely breathes,
on limbs like sapphire mined from colonies
to mount in a tourist-dazzling diadem.
Is power in the plough and jungles hacked
and spill of oil like pavement on the sea –
or clinging softly underneath a leaf
as our murky water, crowded air,
flows through the tree frog’s bright defensive skin?
Beauty-mad, how could we not lick and stroke
and die? Soft as a fruit and berry-red,
it tempts us to devour what we love,
to steal the crown of knowing everything.


        first published in The New Pantagruel (2005)

Poem: “The Common Question”


My poem “The Common Question” appears in Issue #11 of The Other Journal, an online review of Christianity and culture. The Other Journal features scholarly essays, creative writing, and artwork; themes change with each issue. Currently they are accepting submissions on Education.

Also worth noting in Issue #11, “The Atheism Issue,” are Randal Rauser’s essay on the proper roles of apologetics and personal testimony in making Christianity seem plausible to a skeptical audience, and Somanjana C. Bhattacharya’s article on how activists are pressuring Craigslist to stop running “erotic services” ads that sell trafficked women and children.

The Common Question 

    “What does Charlie want?” – John Greenleaf Whittier


Oh, the unfairness of being myself.

There ought to be a rule.

So many days as a little boy, so many days as a deer, a centipede, a Masai warrior, a wealthy old lady with too many rings, on an ocean liner.

And as a blacksnake, a woman with cold red hands hanging laundry, a boy picking dried corn out of the dust, a thirsty fox.

Myself even, or especially, on a good day: unfair, unexplained.

I want to be God, only without His mailbag.

Just an instant to see the plan from His mountain.

Then I could lie down satisfied in my reasons.

Because this world I am in is not the world.

And never will be more than my racing-away circumstance, my rain barrel.

Filled by the weather that happens here and leaking into the soil where the man of the house set it down.

Poemeleon Prose-Poem Issue Now Online

 

Online literary journal Poemeleon has just released its latest issue, which is devoted to the prose-poem. In addition to poetry by Jimmy Santiago Baca, Christina Lovin, Eve Rivkah, Cecilia Woloch, yours truly, and many others, Ann E. Michael contributes a thought-provoking essay about typography as a conveyor of meaning.


Poetry has been represented through the typographic art for several centuries; but until recently, few poets have spent much time considering how typography affects the form of the poem. After all, the printed page seems “merely” physical, inanimate, without the breath, rhythm and music that vivify the poem in performance (even if the reader performs it silently, while reading). The printed page has traditionally been the realm of the editor or designer, not the poet who is more accustomed, perhaps, to confrontations with the blank page. But now that we can, essentially, typeset our work as we compose, poets are becoming more aware of how margins, line spaces, and tabular settings can be indicators in the work and alter the form in which the poem is presented—can animate it further. I think prose poets, in particular, could discover in typography a tool with which to push this flexible form in interesting directions.

In verse, a good poem is more effective with its line breaks intact. Even lacking line breaks, the form will peek out from the justified margins because the rhythm, the rhyme, the breath is imbedded. A verse-poem’s line operates on rhythm (and, when read aloud, breath) foremost, with phrasal pacing as a sort of minor premise. With prose, semantic pacing, and the sentence as a unit, have the upper hand. Pacing and rhythm are dependent upon syllabic stress, word choice, sentence length, punctuation, and line breaks, which act as visual cues. In prose poems, the writer/editor’s choice of margins on the page may also be used as visual cues.

With prose poetry, perhaps even more than with free verse, because the formal structure is not on the surface, traditionalist detractors may assume that the form is a thoughtless free-for-all. Prose poetry removes the familiar cues of rhyme, meter and line breaks that tell us “this is a poem”. Like abstract painting, this can foreground other aspects of the artist’s materials that we formerly overlooked. Though it risks becoming gimmicky (a flaw I find in much “concrete poetry”), creative typography can illuminate the significance of the visual choices we make when writing and reading.

Aficionados of the prose poem can read more examples and essays on the subject in the journal Double Room.

Recent Publications: Juked, Fulcrum and Others


A roundup of my recent publications news:

I just learned that I won an honorable mention in the 2007 Juked Fiction and Poetry Prize for my poems “Confession” and “The Opposite of Pittsburgh”. (Partial credit for the latter poem goes to “Ada Porter”, the character in my novel who actually wrote it. I just do whatever the voices in my head tell me.)

In other news, my poem “Zeal” was accepted for the 2008 issue of FULCRUM: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics, an exciting journal edited by my old Harvard classmate Philip Nikolayev and his wife Katia Kapovich. (But as George W. Bush said when he went to Yale, I got in solely based on merit.) Philip’s latest book is Letters from Aldenderry.

Another poem, “Delivered”, will appear in the prose-poem issue of Poemeleon next month. I’ll link to it here when the issue comes out.

Finally, the University of Texas School of Law has made available online some poems I had published in the 2004 collection Off the Record: An Anthology of Poetry by Lawyers, a special issue of the journal Legal Studies Forum. I also have a prose-poem, “Goodbye Capistrano”, forthcoming in their 2008 anthology.