Champagne In A Paper Cup

There Is Wind, There Are Matches

A thousand times I have sat in restaurant windows,
through mopping after mopping, letting the ammonia clear
my brain and the music from the kitchens
ruin my heart. I have sat there hiding
my feelings from my neighbors, blowing smoke
carefully into the ceiling, or after I gave
that up, smiling over my empty plate
like a tired wolf. Today I am sitting again
at the long marble table at Horn and Hardart’s,
drinking my coffee and eating my burnt scrapple.
This is the last place left and everyone here
knows it; if the lights were turned down, if the
heat were turned off, if the banging of dishes stopped,
we would all go on, at least for a while, but then
we would drift off one by one toward Locust or Pine.
- I feel this place is like a birch forest
about to go; there is wind, there are matches, there is snow,
and it has been dark and dry for hundreds of years.
I look at the chandelier waving in the glass
and the sticky sugar and the wet spoon.
I take my handkerchief out for the sake of the seven
years we spent in Philadelphia and the
steps we sat on and the tiny patches of lawn.
I believe now more than I ever did before
in my first poems and more and more I feel
that nothing was wasted, that the freezing nights
were not a waste, that the long dull walks and
the boredom, and the secret pity, were
not a waste. I leave the paper sitting,
front page up, beside the cold coffee,
on top of the sugar, on top of the wet spoon,
on top of the grease. I was born for one thing,
and I can leave this place without bitterness
and start my walk down Broad Street past the churches
and the tiny parking lots and the thrift stores.
There was enough justice, and there was enough wisdom,
although it would take the rest of my life - the next
two hundred years - to understand and explain it;
and there was enough time and there was enough affection
even if I did tear my tongue
begging the world for one more empty room
and one more window with clean glass
to let the light in on my last frenzy.
- I do the crow walking clumsily over his meat,
I do the child sitting for his dessert,
I do the poet asleep at his table,
waiting for the sun to light up his forehead.
I suddenly remember every ruined life,
every betrayal, every desolation,
as I walk past Tasker toward the city of Baltimore,
banging my pencil on the iron fences,
whistling Bach and Muczynski through the closed blinds.

-Gerald Stern

Love Poem on a Monday Morning with Mock Complaints, Unreasonable Wishes, Your Name and the Earth for Good Measure

Darling, it’s this binary morning futzing all
I’m trying to say. Clouds glide away.
The sun is pantomime. I can’t understand
an atom of creation. I can’t raise
the garage door with my mind,
the better to escape today’s apocalypse,
the better to fade through all
America. I’m thinking of molten asphalt
and the rorid grass running beside
the roads like deer. I’m thinking of Las Vegas
because I’m thirsty, because
everything there is not free
at all and that’s the precise spot
on the map we should marry
all our troubles. I’ll complain of my bones,
I think it’s safe to say
and I’ll worry the miles
we never drive. I’ll say your name
when I shouldn’t
to every door barred before us
as if you’re known in Belize to be the password
to tumble the last lock
and loose the last bolt.
Ruth, look at the sky peeping down
like an adjective for angels
I really don’t want to use
so I won’t. No one will promise me wings.
There is a simplicity
in such desire
I think you should love
but you don’t.
To bravely want the sky is
to bravely want the sky
despite all the forecasts of rain and sleet
and, oh, yes, gravity,
to which we keep speaking
like vaguely lost travelers,
we are just passing through, we are just passing through.

-Paul Guest

Avalanche

• • I haven’t had sex like that since:
    Aspen, snowed-in,
    
    your thumb
    deep in my anus, heart
    
    half out of water.
    Complete—
    
    you skiing Pyramid Peak, leaning into
    turns, body swooshing the summit. Sky unzipped.
    
    At your age, my father says he scaled icefalls, and played trombone
    on Ithaca rooftops. We can never
    
    wholly take in the art
    we become, or remember
    
    quite how it happened. Did we really make it to Mount Elbert,
    over 14,000 feet, or did
    I wait at the bottom?
    
    You love like a child
    rolling down a snowy hill.
    
    What, if anything, is blinding?—
    
    Moths release from rangy grasses.
    
    
    Hold nothing back. The earth
    cracked open, rain—
    
    a great truth lets in.

    -Jennifer Chapis

Siren Song

I phone from time to time, to see if she’s

Changed the music on her answerphone.

‘Tell me in two words,’ goes the recording,

‘what you were going to tell in a thousand.’

I peer into that thought, like peering out

To sea at night, hearing the sound of waves

Breaking on rocks, knowing she is there,

Listening, waiting for me to speak.

Once in a while she’ll pick up the phone

And her voice sings to me out of the past.

The hair on the back of my neck stands up

As I catch her smell for a second. 

-Hugo Williams

I Saw A Man

I saw a man pursuing the horizon; 
Round and round they sped. 
I was disturbed at this; 
I accosted the man. 
“It is futile,” I said, 
“You can never — “ 

“You lie,” he cried, 
And ran on. 

-Stephen Crane

The Quiet World

In an effort to get people to look

into each other’s eyes more,

and also to appease the mutes,

the government has decided

to allot each person exactly one hundred  

and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear  

without saying hello. In the restaurant  

I point at chicken noodle soup.

I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,  

proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.  

I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond,

I know she’s used up all her words,  

so I slowly whisper I love you

thirty-two and a third times.

After that, we just sit on the line  

and listen to each other breathe.

-Jeffrey McDaniel

The Diner

The short-order cook and the dishwasher

argue the relative merits

of Rilke’s Elegies

against Eliot’s Four Quartets,

but the delivery man who brings eggs

suggests they have forgotten Les fleurs

du mal and Baudelaire. The waitress

carrying three plates and a coffee pot

can’t decide whom she loves more—

Rimbaud or Verlaine,

William Blake or William Wordsworth.

She refills the rabbi’s cup

(he’s reading Rumi),

asks what he thinks of Arthur Whaley.

In the booth behind them, a fat woman

feeds a small white poodle in her lap,

with whom she shares her spoon.

“It’s Rexroth’s translations of the Japanese,”

she says, “that one can’t live without:

May those who are born after me

Never travel such roads of love.”

The revolving door proffers

a stranger in a long black coat, lost in the madhouse poems of John Clare.

As he waits to be seated,

the woman who owns the place

hands him a menu

in which he finds several handwritten poems

By Hafiz, Gibran, and Rabindranath Tagore.

The lunch hour’s crowded—

the owner wonders

if the stranger might share

my table. As he sits,

I put a finger to my lips,

and with my eyes ask him

to listen with me

to the young boy and the young girl

two tables away

taking turns reading aloud

the love poems of Pablo Neruda.

-Richard Jones

Miss You

After the affair, we didn’t speak again for two months.
When we saw each other again, he hugged me and whispered in my ear, “Miss you.”
Too stingy to include the I.

Miss you. Like he was a fragment in search of a pronoun.
Miss U! Or he was at a football game rooting for Mississippi State.
Miss You I have just won a beauty pageant in the State of Myself.

So I push him away and say, “That’s Ms. Me to you.”
No I don’t.

He says “Miss you” and my heart goes carousel and jackhammer, because he misses me—or ostensibly, he is the one missing me, at least someone or possibly something misses me and it feels good, the way cold chicken tastes
like steak when you’re starving.

So, I ask myself, what is the least I would settle for? What if he just said “Miss…”
and looked at me pointedly? What if he just pushed out the 
“Meh.” Could I scrape
together the missing letters until he missed me in three phantom syllables,
the ghost of my desire to be longed for?

After he leaves, I pull the words from my ear, fold them,
put them
in my purse. I might be hungry later.

-From Ceremony for the Choking Ghost by Karen Finneyfrock

Work

I wanted to be a rain salesman,
carrying my satchel full of rain from door to door,
selling thunder, selling the way the air feels after a downpour,
but there were no openings in the rain department, 
and so they left me dying behind this desk—adding bleeps and subtracting chunks—and I would give a bowl of wild blossoms, some rain, and two shakes of my fist at the sky to be living.

 
-John Engman

Ode to Carbonation

You taste like what I imagine
swallowing radio wires
feels like all sparks and pop
music in my throat.

-Sierra DeMulder

“Mingus at the Showplace”

I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen, and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,

and it was miserable, for that’s how I thought poetry worked: you digested experience and shat

literature.

-William Matthews

Never Underestimate the Power of a Sandwich

Somehow Not Aware That She Was Heaven-Born

The sun was shining through the rain thus creating the effect of a second coming not of Christ but of some eerie one-eyed beast, bodiless save for the eye, which in itself is bleary and sad.  A thunderclap scared me half to death.  I was just sitting in my chair growing a beard, my brain lit up like a pinball machine and I prayed for order.  Yolanda asked me if I wanted a sandwich.  ”A sandwich is perhaps our only hope, our best hope, our last chance to survive this big blow.  You are a saint and a genius, Yolanda,” I said.  ”Get it yourself,” she said.

-James Tate