“Pantoum with Lines from Virginia Woolf’s Diary” by Angela Narciso Torres (poetry, ’09)

An excerpt from “Pantoum with Lines from Virginia Woolf’s Diary” by Angela Narciso Torres (poetry, ’09) published at Swwim:

Pantoum with Lines from Virginia Woolf’s Diary

Truth is, one can’t write about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes.

Why have I so little control?

One wants to finish sentences.

To go adventuring on the streams of other people’s lives.

 

Why have I so little control?

This is the normal feeling, I think.

To go adventuring on the streams of other people’s lives.

I take a census of happy people, and unhappy.

 

This is the normal feeling, I think.

Happiness is a little string onto which things will attach.

I take a census of happy people, and unhappy.

How Vita’s inkpot flowered on her table.  […continue reading here]

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“And Someone Said ‘Forever'” by Trish Reeves (poetry, ’83)

An excerpt from the poem “And Someone Said ‘Forever'” by Trish Reeves (poetry, ’83) published at Crab Orchard Review (page 192):

And Someone Said ‘Forever’

  1. The Republic

Say we got off to a bad start; women

fallen upon by the most restless

of men, the wrong creation story

tucked under their arms; not a legend

of a turtle, her children resting

upon her back of green diamonds,

but an earthen statue of a god

thundering through the likeness

of a man who knew the power of his fear

something to hide, and a woman the place

to put this if only she would

not feel his trembling […continue reading here]

 

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Kaveh Akbar reads Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Groundhog”

An excerpt from the transcript of  a New Yorker podcast in which faculty member Kaveh Akbar reads Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Groundhog.” Also, the podcast itself:

 

Kevin Young: Hello. You’re listening to The New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I’m Kevin Young poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine on this podcast we asked poets to choose a poem for the magazine’s archives to read and discuss along with a piece of their own that we published in The New Yorker. My guest today is Kaveh Akbar who has received a Ruth Lily and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship a Pushcart Prize and the 2018 Levis, that’s Larry Levis, reading prize. Welcome Kaveh.

Kaveh Akbar: Thank you so much for having me on. Great pleasure to be here.

Kevin: We’re happy to have you. So the poem you decide to read for us is Groundhog by Ellen Bryant Voigt.

Kaveh: Yeah.

Kevin: What in particular drew you to this piece.

Kaveh: Yeah I encountered this piece early in my relatively early, in my, I mean I’m still early in my poetry journey but I encountered it years ago when it first appeared in The New Yorker and it was one of those poems that just arrives like an angels blaring trumpet, you know it just sort of absolutely ripped the top of my head off and it was just my first encounter with language that felt so charged in that played with momentum so intelligently in the centripetal force and the inertia in this poem is just so incantatory and so magical.

Kevin: Well let’s hear it let’s hear it. Here’s Kaveh Akbar reading “Groundhog” by Ellen Bryant Voigt.

Kaveh Akbar reads “Groundhog.”

Kevin: That was Groundhog by Ellen Bryant Voigt which ran in the February 14th, 2011, issue of the magazine. So I can hear what drew you into it. I mean there’s this discussion of language and what we call things that sort of strikes me first but also nature I think as nature you know she’s trying I think in a poem to or the poem is trying to make us feel it. You know it’s enacting the thing that it’s describing sort of describing a groundhog. It is a groundhog.

Kaveh: Yeah. You think of the great deep familiars pronouncement to make the stone stonie right. Victor Shalosky an artist’s technique and I’ve never felt a groundhog to be so groundhog-y as in this poem right. You never feel, you never feel the groundhog-yness. It’s never so apparent as it is in this poem but just all of nature is like that. Right. And you encounter the way that taxonomy kind of flattens and the way that a poem can kind of really give texture and really give life. It does the opposite of what taxonomy does. […continue reading here]

 

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“Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out” by Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10)

An excerpt from “Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out” by Reginald Dwayne Betts (poetry, ’10), published in the New York Times Magazine:

Could an Ex-Convict Become an Attorney? I Intended to Find Out

One afternoon in the fall of 2016, I sat in a windowless visiting room at the Manson Youth Institution in Cheshire, Conn. A recent graduate of Yale Law School, I was a certified legal intern on a fellowship in the New Haven public defender’s office. J., a lanky 18-year-old brown-skinned kid sitting across from me, was my first client. He didn’t talk. Instead he stared at me as if I were the police. Sanford O. Bruce III, my supervising attorney, listened as I explained to J. (one of his initials) what we knew of the charges against him. A young man with whom J. attended high school had claimed that J. and another kid he didn’t know had threatened him with a pistol, then robbed him of his cellphone and a couple of hundred dollars. Officers arrested J. minutes later, but the other suspect, who supposedly held the gun, was never found.

The prosecutor thought he should serve time in prison. I let J. know this and described what would happen next: a series of court dates, a bond-reduction motion, plea-bargain offers. After remaining silent for nearly 40 minutes, he leaned forward in the blue plastic chair, cutting me off, and asked, “Aren’t you the one who did time in prison?” With a single question, this kid reminded me of what a law degree, even one from Yale, could not do — make my own criminal history vanish.

On Dec. 7, 1996, a month and two days after my 16th birthday, I climbed with four other people into a beat-up ink-colored sedan in Prince George’s County, Md. During that year, I’d read the Evelyn Wood guide to speed reading and J. California Cooper’s novel “The Wake of the Wind.” My Advanced Placement U.S. history teacher at Suitland High School had nicknamed me Smoky after he spied me rolling a blunt before his first-period class. I hadn’t won a fight since second grade. Had been suspended half a dozen times — once for setting off a stink bomb, but every other time for what teachers called being disruptive but was really just talking too much. People knew me for finding four-leaf clovers, doing back flips and making too many jokes. I didn’t know who I was.

[…continue reading here]

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“Exclusive in New York for Bergdorf Goodman” by Cammy Thomas (poetry, ’99)

An excerpt from “Exclusive in New York for Bergdorf Goodman” by Cammy Thomas (poetry, ’99), published at Nixes Mate Review:

Exclusive in New York for Bergdorf Goodman

So it says on the back of the ashtray.
On the front, a mysterious girl sits on an elephant.

She looks large or he small,
his fan-like ear brushing her knee.

Her long hair loosely braided,
she holds an elephant hook before her,

the way pharaohs hold an ankh.
The beast’s tusks are curved and short,

its trunk long, open at the end,
twisted back toward her. This elephant

has toes like a cat, and his back knees point
backward, unlike any elephant ever seen. […continue reading here]

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“Pour Out Your Heart Like Water Before Me” by Abby Horowitz (poetry, ’15)

An excerpt from “Pour Out Your Heart Like Water Before Me” by Abby Horowitz (poetry, ’15) published at The Collagist:

Pour Out Your Heart Like Water Before Me

Before I had the rabbi, I had a dog.

And one day, the dog died.

The dog was old and had been sick, and I believed in proportional grief.

I loved that dog, but it was not a devastation.

And my dog’s body, still on the exam table.

My hand combing through her fur.

We were talking about next steps, the vet and I.

(I could already imagine moving on to whatever might come next.)

(I was not struck prostrate on the floor.)

(I did not hide for days afterwards in bed.)

And the vet said: Many people like to bury their pets right in their backyards.

But I did not have a backyard then.

I lived in an apartment that overlooked a lot of cars.

And so my dog’s life ended in a crematorium for pets.

I did not have a backyard and so I scattered my dog’s ashes around her favorite park.

It was May and there were some sunbathers by the park’s fountain and I scattered the ashes in such a way that when the wind blew, the ashes would blow onto those sunbathers, lying half-naked and carefree in the grass. […continue reading here]

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“God’s Work, Women’s Work” by Abby Horowitz (fiction, ’15)

An excerpt from “God’s Work, Women’s Work” by Abby Horowitz (fiction, ’15) published at Waxwing:

God’s Work, Women’s Work

God pulls on a pair of latex gloves, the points of His fingernails poking sharply at the ends.

God moves like a lover, rolling down the comforter, rolling up the sleeping woman’s shirt. God peels off her underwear. God spreads her legs apart. Then, closing His long-lashed eyes, God blows a mighty breath into His cupped hands. The curtains tremble with the air that overspills His grasp, the woman stirs a little in the breeze.

God bends down above His target until He’s so close that His lashes brush the insides of the woman’s thighs. Then He opens the woman with His gloved pinky, and guides His handful of divine air inside.

God says, “Let there be —” and names the child who then begins to grow.

The woman sighs a little in her sleep, and God sighs with her, pleased with His labor. He tugs off His latex gloves and cocks His ear towards the bed, listening for the whispers of the new creation growing and singing God’s name.

✼

Weeks later, the angel comes to Him in tears with the report: that the woman, at the doctor’s office — how there was silence where the heartbeat of God’s creation should have been.

God’s face turns dark. God tries to remember the woman over whom the angel cries. God tries and tries. The Gods pulls up his suspenders and heads back down to work. […continue reading here]

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“Currents” by Tracy Winn (fiction, ’02)

An excerpt from “Currents” by Tracy Winn (fiction, ’02) published at Waxwing:

Currents

No one else swims in this river, but Leo follows a course where the sculling shells slide through the shadows of city buildings. The rowers in their brightly colored jerseys are as accustomed to seeing him as they are the cormorants that pop to the surface just beyond reach of their oars. With each butterfly stroke, Leo fights the suck of the dark water. His head is large, his limbs long. He surges up, defying gravity for a split-second. Clumps of birches on the shore leap and wheel — subsumed by water as he sinks. Riverfront buildings rise and fall as he falls and rises, their murky gray-brown foundations under water, their whitewashed balconies in the sunny air above. His heart thuds; his lungs empty and fill. He is in the rhythm, working toward numbness. Breathe in. Let it go, a silver bubble at a time. Do not think back, do not plan forward. Breathe in. Let go. Let go. He needs to lose himself, to bear — for a breath at a time — that he lost her. He swims until he is desperate with cold, almost too cold to recover.

On a stretch where there is no beach, just nubbins of worn grass, he emerges, dripping. He has stashed his towel and uniform in a neglected strip between apartment buildings. He flattens himself against a sunny wall and shivers until his blood responds and his fingers and toes come tingling back to life.

Leo hops on one foot to keep from tipping over while he pulls his pants on. “I lost my wife,” makes it sound as if he had misplaced her like a lighter or a pair of reading glasses. He didn’t need reading glasses when she vanished. Now, to re-read the consoling words of the philosophers, he does. She disappeared a year to the day after their wedding. […continue reading here]

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“Afterlife (Jaipur, 2008)” by Chloe Martinez (poetry, ’09)

An excerpt from “Afterlife (Jaipur, 2008)” by Chloe Martinez (poetry, ’09) published at Waxwing:

 

Afterlife

Agar Firdaus bar roy-e zamin ast,

hamin ast-o hamin ast-o hamin ast.”

          — couplet by Amir Khusrao

          inscribed on the tomb of the

          Mughal Emperor Babur, Kabul

 

If there is a paradise

we arrived, as if at the far bank

of a river, and sat on a cool verandah

upstairs among leaves and

more shady leaves

                                         on earth,

it’s not mango season, they keep telling us,

so I settle for mosambi, sweet lime, for now.

Every day I drink half, leave the rest

for you to finish

It is this,

our hotel used to be a haveli; the family

still lives in one wing, the women

veiled like proper Rajputs, like

ghosts, sweeping the courtyard

                         it is this,

we have no family here, observe no holidays,

and I have given up my phone. Our

life back home takes on the warm

glow, the softened edges of myth […continue reading here]

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Two Poems by Adrian Blevins (poetry, ’02)

An excerpt from “Exile Status,” one of two poems by Adrian Blevins (poetry, ’02) published at Waxwing:

Exile Status

All my life I’ve been a stupid little runaway

& tried therefore to like philosophy

as beauty pageants

really wouldn’t work

though smoking yes & beer & sex

a speck I guess.

But dipping tobacco no

& pink trucks sorry no

& no football either

or deer assassination or coons up trees

or weekends gutting pigs

& geese. Which is why

I tried with ideas to escape myself

like ideas are Black Eyed Susans

or mice. But ideas

are not the Mason jars & homemade jams

of the Apocalypse

& ideas are not

the shredded roosters & sourdough starters

of the Apocalypse, & knowing that means

I’m just an old farmer […continue reading here]

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