Fluent

Before you write a love letter, learn a new language, not to understand the vulnerability of wordlessness, I mean be fretful at dawn in a flurry of words unspoken, I mean find a new alphabet, one which delineates with virgules and diacritics to the heart, throw out phonetics, abandon letters that wail into the night, never imagine this sentence again, abandon sound, I mean find a new system entirely, ideographs that imprison your heart’s spill of ink, abandon your beloved implements for bristle-weeping, choke on smoke signals, smite the light from your eyes, go back to caves where writing was just counting what was owed, don’t forget that, how much your bones were worth in the cold, how there was starvation before there was poetry, cut out your hands if they long to describe things, there is nothing to touch where you are going, blast your ears if they start to hear music, there is no music, remember, no sound, you are dying organ of sense by sense, a full glottal stop, there is no tremble at the back of your throat, not where you are, there is a gag reflex, there is the whole world you want to spit out, there is sticky on the ground, don’t read this coagulation for substance, your phlegm is not communicating, there is no sentiment in lacunae phlegm suspends to not be liquid.

– Kim Hagerich

Language Lessons

In the dead kitchen the girl reads the calendar
as, might say, related old people rot on the duvet.
How many things can be salivated upon before
the last installment of the new televised Ramayan?
Last night she was kicked off the rimose linoleum
by all of us, drunk and disorderly and smutty rich.
I think she sleeps in front of their lidless latrine.
I gave her all my hotel combs and miniature shampoos.
It was opprobriously embarrassing for the both of us,
and my defeated grandfather thinks this reason enough
to cut her meager salary this month, and therefore the next.
After dinner, her bellish voice drifts from the pantry,
declaring some sort of February, some sort of March.
My grandfather drives me slowly, with true intention.
We throw blankets at the piebald poor, around fires.
They smother us; that woman’s clawed face was waiting.
Beaten old man, we are assaulted by their violent greeds.
Die here near the underpass, so they’ll take your empty wallet.
I’ll drive the car to dump your charity in the River Yamuna,
my face, invisible in the (argue with me) adiaphorous pudding waters,
reminds me of what is best about piranhas, why they are necessarily good.
Little sister, how will I find home: rickshaw, metroditch, tender love?
When I get there I’ll wake Meena to save me: alu poori, pickle, and rice.

– Anjali Khosla

Red-Headed Woman

          In the gallery of eighteenth-century art Mindy squats abruptly, then falls on her rump and lets both legs lie askew on the sleek black marble. Trevor watches, mortified. His fingers drum. Next Mindy tucks one foot up by her crotch, like a runner stretching, and lackadaisically ties a shoe. Her shoes are tattered pink tennies.  Around her courses a nattily attired crowd and nearby stands watch a guard. This is not how one behaves! Trevor feels a headache come on.

He takes a step back, then two more, until he comes to a low granite bench. Here he sits staring into middle space. On the floor? This is just like her. After a while Trevor fishes out of his inner coat a pocket watch, toying with the fob, but does not look at it. Patience, he thinks.

            They’ve been together two months now, Trevor and Mindy, ever since meeting in a night school ceramics class. Trevor had enrolled strictly for relaxation, while Mindy was serious about throwing clay. All her pots though were lopsided. From the first day Trevor had been drawn to Mindy’s blithe eccentricity, her imperviousness to decorum, which from afar looks charming. It is charming, he tells himself, but there are limits. Of course she is so much younger, almost a child – twenty-two. Trevor is forty.

            Trevor is a free-lance writer. It’s haphazard work and ill-paying; debts accumulate. He feels though that he harbors artistic sensibilities. Oils and watercolors, grease rags and brushes litter his garage; his easel he bought on a backpacking trip in Spain. Each year he hangs on the wall an art calendar. Mindy, a recent college graduate, works as a substitute teacher; the grade she likes best is kindergarten. Harry Potter is her favorite book.  On their dates she’ll sometimes read aloud a picture book. This aggravates Trevor. Mindy’s ambition, she’s told him, is to write one – a one-hundred word bestseller.

On My Bowels as Cognitive Resources (And Unassuming Moral Compass)

Have I earned this pain

this dark acquaintance with the recesses of my pelvis?

Pain is a guide. It charts a detailed cartography

of the intimacy of the bowels

with the bladder and the prostate;

of their mysterious connection with the tip of the penis,

a burning trail that enables me to understand

the improbable link between my perineum and the end of my urethra;

of the intricacy of this and other tubes, sins and sinews.

 

Pain has shown me this.

But again, this knowledge is not the issue — have I earned it, I want to know.

Have I earned this shit I shat

this pain and this blood

coming from a swollen belly, from irritable bowels

reduced to a tumultuous nothingness,

a tumescent heaving of waters and worms.

Or have I drunk and eaten idly, my pain a well-deserved

sword for my gluttony and greed?

 

I stare deeply at the toilet-bowl

and try to grasp

behind my feces

my face

my crimson face in the now quiet bowl.

In a fragment of a second I see it:

a perfectly intent look passing behind imperfectly formed stools

to reach my face distorted and shredded and blooded

like an ingrate replica of my intestines.

 

I could compose an ode

an odd ode to my bowels

for I was given my insides like Borges or Tiresias their blindness,

as a living clepsydra,

a measure of time and courage and discipline

discipline–not rigidity

but a delicate balance

a diffuse limit for the untrained eye

a skill you must learn to master

its strictures not altogether apparent

but tangible or reachable or hopeful

for those who seek.

– Gustavo Llarull

A Space to Exhaust

The oily neighbor woman
Wants me allied.

Her moans in the back
Hallway shuffle in
Under the door and bully
My attention.

I tell her yes, her indignation
At the sad state
Of our dumpster is sane,
Righteous, calculated.

The growling never goes away.
It mosses my home, grows
Insolent and bushy over my escape.

–Emily Renaud

Re: Global Widespread Panic

I cannot address this growing
Urgency, civilian fireworks, or
Your current desire for me to
“Make a difference.”

It’s not because I’m eating grapes
Or because I’m hurriedly pruning
A domesticated animal.

It’s because I’m only using
Language to lie, and my callous
Words would be too splendid,
Too joyful to touch the infirm.

So I must ask you to refrain from
Thinking of me if ever the time
To act is now, or only I can help.

–Emily Renaud

Teapots

There used to be a difference
Between a teapot and a kettle.
The Kettle a fiery stuntman—

As time went on, you claimed
This distinction was irrelevant.

You now speak as if they
Are the same, think pots and
Kettles can both withstand the fire,
Can both be polite t company.

You tell me to put the teapot on,
And I don’t know what that means.

The problem is not that this distinction
Isn’t useful anymore, the problem is
Your inability to tell me the truth
About the objects that keep us together.

–Emily Renaud

The Powerful Society

I bought an umbrella and it rained. 

I bought a car and they built a road.

I bought a door and I won a house.

When I stole my lunch

The owner of the cafeteria died. 

When I visited his grave

The wind untied my shoelaces

And arranged them into a white rose,

And I left it for a tip. 

The leaves that fell from the stem

Bought me another car

And the powers that be paved my way.

When I looked out my office window

I thought to phone you and tell you

But you rung me first to profess your love

And that was how we settled it. 

– Jono Tosch

Walking in the Woods

I found a couple bogus hands
Lying under a tree in the woods.

I had been walking for a while
Listening to the sounds I made

As I tapped the tree mushrooms
I call the bookshelves of the woods.

The hands looked new and peculiar.
I poked one and then the other,

And finding both suitably clean,
I decided to take one home.

The other I left for the future,
To another such as myself.

Appetite.

It is neither your tongue nor thigh
For which I long
But your singsong sigh

It is the sweetness of milk
The bone whiteness
Under freckled sinew

The plumping of peaches

Pluck!

Not consummation
But the giggling, the slurps, the untied shoe
the hand fidgeting with the cabinet knob
a thumbprint on our white wall

The memory of it
the downiness of teeth
on the tree
solid-soft and dew-dappled
suspended in light and air-

I can’t get at you

Are you there when our children flutter their eyelids just before sleep?

Listen to the pit-less wind whoosh!
Fill me up.

 – Michael Carolan