The Corpses,
by Lynn Emanuel
hunched like poker players at my kitchen table,
under a seething stratum of cigarette smoke,
are unhappy
with the rewrites of the afterlife.
At their backs
even the wallpaper
has a story to tell
about a few stout houses
in a bower.
Is bad taste catching? They want to know,
What’s happening in this story?
Is the sea kissing up
to the shore? Are the whipped
egg whites of the clouds packed in the sky’s refrigerator?
They are tired of being on artificial art support;
the corpses are tired of being used to prop open the plot.
A searchlight opens a sky.
This is the police, bellow the police,
and the corpses stumble forward into a
dowsing of bullets.
They cannot escape me.
Even in death they have a faintly greasy,
slippery look. And even a corpse can be a disguise.
For Black Women Who Are Afraid
by Toi Derricotte
A black woman comes up to me at break in the writing
workshop and reads me her poem, but she says she
can’t read it out loud because
there’s a woman in a car on her way
to work and her hair is blowing in the breeze
and, since her hair is blowing, the woman must be
white, and she shouldn’t write about a white woman
whose hair is blowing, because
maybe the black poets will think she wants to be
that woman and be mad at her and say she hates herself,
and maybe they won’t let her explain
that she grew up in a white neighborhood
and it’s not her fault, it’s just what she sees.
But she has to be so careful. I tell her to write
the poem about being afraid,
and we stand for a long time like that,
respecting each other’s silence.
Halfway Through the Book I’m Writing
by Lynn Emanuel
This is the wonderful thing about art,
it can bring back the dead . . .
My father dies and is buried in his Brooks Brothers suit.
But I can’t seem to keep him underground.
Suddenly, I turn around and there he is just
as I’m getting a handle on the train-pulls-
into-the-station poem. “What gives?”
I ask him. “I’m alone and dead,” he says,
and I say, “Father, there’s nothing I can do about
all that. Get you mind off it. Help me with the poem
about the train.” “I hate the poem about the train,”
he says. But since he’s dead and I’m a patient woman
I turn back to the poem in which the crowds have gone home
and the janitor pushes the big mustache of his broom across the floor,
and I ask, “Dad, is that you in there?”
“No, it’s not.”
A black cloud in the shape of Magritte’s bowler,
plump and sleek and stark, hanging over the train station, says,
“I want to go to a museum; put one in the poem beside the station.”
where it’s morning and the ticket window is selling
tickets to a man in a hat and an enormous
trench coat, wrinkled and jowly, a woman
in white looks as cool as a martini in a chrome
shaker, a woman in red seethes in a doorway,
eager to become one of Those Beginning the Journey
and from the horizon’s molten light the trains crawl out.
“And when I get to the museum I want to see
Soutine, Miró, Picasso, or Dali, I want eyes in my armpits
and my fingers, eyes in the air, the trees, the dirt.”
“Father,” I say, “you already are an eye-in-the-dirt.”
It’s early morning. In the pine tree I hear the phoebe’s stressed
squeak, fee-bee, fee-bay, like the creak of the old guard at the museum
snoozing in his rocker before Soutine’s still life of the butchered cows.
“Father,” I say, “do you see them?”
And the phoebe says, Yes-squeak-
yes-squeak-yes-squeak-yes-squeak.
Manners
by Pamela Alexander
Sit, she said. The wolf sat. Shake, she said.
He held his face and tail still
and shook everything in between. His fur
stood out in all directions. Sparks flew.
Dear sister, she wrote. His yellow eyes
followed the words discreetly. I have imagined
a wolf. He smells bad. He pants, and his long tongue
drips onto the rug, my favorite rug. It has arrows
and urns and diamonds in it. The wolf sits
where I’ve stared all morning hoping
for a heron: statuesque, aloof,
enigmatic. Be that way, the wolf says.
There are other poets.
-Julie
