March 19, 2024

Denise Duhamel

POEM IN WHICH BARBIE QUALIFIES FOR MEDICARE

May 9, 2024

Barbie never thought too much about her eligibility.
She’d loved AARP—the discounts at Sunglass Hut
and Outback Steakhouse—when she waved
her bright red card. She’d been born to shop,
but the medical world was still a mystery to her.
Sure, one of her first careers was as a Registered Nurse,
and a decade later, she became an MD. But she had
little experience being a patient except when children
made her a papier mâché arm cast or shaved off her hair
in play-chemo. Without vertebrae or femur,
Barbie never took a bone density test or had to worry
about osteoporosis. Menopause had been a breeze—
no hot flashes, no bleeding to miss. She was spotless
when it came to age spots, even after all those years
in the sun. No pee when she sneezed. No cataracts
despite the fact that she never blinked. She still drove
at night but was considering trading in her convertible
for a cushy Lincoln town car to arrive in Medicare-style
for her annual checkups. She was looking forward to a ride
in an MRI then consulting a podiatrist to see if anyone could
at last help ease her feet into New Balance sneakers.
The dermatologist told her Botox was covered if Barbie
suffered from migraines. Her smile had never given way
to laugh lines or crow’s feet. Still, Barbie lifted her hands
to her temples and told a white lie—why yes,
those headaches have sometimes been so fierce I’ve had to retreat
into my dark box to rest. After all, Barbie
was a American boomer and wanted her fair share,
what she thought she deserved, what was coming to her.
 

from Poets Respond

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Denise Duhamel: “I didn’t think I had another Barbie poem in me! (I thought I’d put her to rest in 1997 after the publication of my book Kinky.) But I couldn’t resist the idea of Barbie being eligible for Medicare.” (web)

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March 17, 2024

Tishani Doshi

KILL THEM IN THE MORNING

I’m trying to find where it says,
If your enemy comes to slay you at night,
kill them in the morning. What happens
in the hours of waiting? Do you sing
to one another across the trenches,
stargaze from casements, then set off
to duel at first light? What is it about the sun
rising that’s so self-righteous? The firstness,
the lightness? There’s an allegory somewhere
about a girl holding scissors encircled by soldiers
with guns. Don’t we know that the dragging
from trains takes place after dark, that wars
always happen offstage until they’re not? Summer
is almost upon us, romantic and lonely. I know,
I know, no tightrope-walking allowed between our house
and the neighbour’s. Haven’t you dreamed
of disappearing for a day, then returning
to life, triumphant? Wouldn’t you want
to know who missed you, who rejoiced?
The idea that there are no innocent people.
What colour would you call this hair
under the rubble? My enemy’s enemy
is an Ottoman couch. But we’re here now,
those of us alive, standing on the beach,
facing the rosy dawn—how it slip slaps us
into forgiveness, how we turn the other cheek.
 

from Poets Respond
March 17, 2024

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Tishani Doshi: “Not sure there are any explanations. How must we be alone, how must we be together?” (web)

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March 10, 2024

Erin Murphy

MAN WITH BIRDS AND BREAD

a cento

On the edges of the afternoon
we lie on the beach, gray waves
 
the only language,
the gun-gray curlings of salt-tongue.
 
A man slogs through the soft sand
with an expired loaf of bread.
 
Look how he kneels,
holding out his palms as if catching snow.
 
Seagulls peep like Erinyes wearing
white linen suits, sky-jockeying
 
into a swinging web of flying sound
on their parameter of hunger.
 
A cacophony of needs—
synonym for human, perhaps.
 
His home is an ocean away.
 
There / the moon hangs like a golden mango.
There / the beach is the wind’s body
 
flecked with violet
where the light, aflame,
 
used to hum in the siesta’s honey,
donde la luz zumbaba enardecida
 
en la miel de la siesta,
There / a song curls inside you,
 
songs of children, songs of birds,
cantos de niños y de aves.
 
All of a sudden:
a call, loud and mean, while flashes of light
 
rise just over the beach grass at our backs.
A four-wheeler.
 
Birds scatter
like fireworks on el Cuatro de Julio.
 
Hatred glosses
in the cave of the mouth—
 
a mouth as a cold wind.
Above, in the yellow sky, a phrase drifts
 
to us like smoke from distant fires.
The breeze isn’t silent.
 
Look how he kneels,
face toward the light,
 
a man who tilts his bread in the sun,
the bag of bones:
 
I am I am still here still here.
How bitter is the bread of bitterness.
 
If I burn the world around me—
el mundo que me rodea—
 
until it shines beautiful and brown,
how does one undrown?
 

Cento credits: John Hoffman, Pia Täavila-Borsheim, Erin Coughlin Hollowell, Linda Bierds, Peter Makuck, Rodney Jones, Dana Levin, Jennifer Foerster, Garrett Hongo, John Ciardi, Eva Alice Counsell, Reginald Shepherd, Julie Marie Wade, Michael Broder, Lola Ridge, Huascar Medina, Jonathan Wells, H.D., Olga Orozco (trans. from Spanish by Mary Crow), BrandonLee Cruz, Gabriela Mistral (trans. from Spanish by Ursula K. Le Guin), Juan Felipe Herrera, Lily Darling, Noelle Kocot, Ron Silliman, Emanual Xavier, Cynthia Hogue, Ellen Bass, Canisia Lubrin, Alexandra Peary, Marilyn Nelson, Myronn Hardy, Forrest Gander, Chase Berggrun, Joseph Fasano, Chim Sher Ting, Mahogany L. Browne, Khaled Mattawa, Ashley M. Jones, Niki Herd

from Poets Respond
March 10, 2024

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Erin Murphy: “Whenever I visit the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I see a Latino man feeding seagulls on the beach after work. He speaks Spanish to the birds, gesturing with his hands for them to come down to eat. The birds seem to recognize him and swarm around him for bread. This week, I witnessed a vehicle speeding along the beach and coming dangerously close to the man. The driver and passenger were yelling at the man and pumping their fists. The birds dispersed. I don’t think it’s an accident that this happened the same week that Axios reported that Latino activists are concerned about increasing hate crimes against immigrants. I chose the cento form for this poem because the experience called for a multiplicity of voices.” (web)

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March 3, 2024

Micah Ackerman Hirsch

A KADDISH FOR AARON BUSHNELL (1998-2024)

after Father Daniel Berrigan

Praise beyond all conception of praise the things we cannot understand,
this thing that doesn’t want to be praised, this tragedy laid over tragedy to stir the watching,
misunderstanding crowd from their pulpits. From their bedsides. From their phones.
Praise my shaking hands in the California light, praise the shaking light that soars to Washington,
praise I can’t comprehend, what I can’t comprehend, what we cannot comprehend, praise
the hands of Gaza’s fathers and its mothers’ sweat. Praise beyond capacity for praising
things that cannot be, that will not be, that stand before what is and cry peace to the heaven all
around us, made from the praising of our hands around one another, around the sidewalk and the
gate, around the world you would speak into being. I am tired of understanding praise in this
house of heaven built on shining shores, built on shining hills, built by shining states—must we
again praise the shining city and its shining bombs? Must my children? Must yours? Praise the
hands that must be God’s in the darkness, that must be light, that must see you on every street
corner wearing the face of the peace come down to where it cannot understand. Praise beyond all
conception, or mourn, or scream, or swear. Gaza’s children, praise them too, you who praise the
voice of thin silence. Praise the driven that cannot understand, praise the way you cannot
understand them, praise the way you can. Praise understanding renewed, the speaking out against
this multiplied a thousand-fold, praise only understanding what is left to do in city halls in city
streets in conversations in protest signs in graffitied signs in holy signs upon the remaining days
that repeat themselves how we can never hold down. And I praise. I cannot understand. I praise.
 

from Poets Respond
March 3, 2024

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Micah Ackerman Hirsch: “As a Jew opposed to the ongoing genocide being committed in Gaza, I struggled with how to commemorate Aaron Bushnell. Judaism has very little to say about concepts like martyrdom, theologically valuing existence and struggle in this world over seeking the next. So much do we focus on this Earthly life over Heaven that our prayer for the dead, the Kaddish Yatom, says nothing about death at all. Instead, it asks the mourners to praise God beyond all humanly conceptions of what it means to praise something, and expresses our longing for the day when the peace embodied by divinity exists permanently in our world. And so, following Father Daniel Berrigan’s poetry of protest and the long Jewish tradition of rewriting prayers to meet our contemporary trials, I wrote this Kaddish, a mourning prayer, a poem, for Aaron.”

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February 25, 2024

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

TWO YEARS LATER.

The last thing I want is another poem
about war and dead children and how
we’ve forgotten their names.
My children are learning to count: bones
 
and wars and dead children and how
many days are left, Now? they ask, now?
My children are learning to count bones—
twenty-seven in the hand, twenty-two in the skull.
 
Many days are left now. They ask, now?
The last thing I want is to imagine them dead,
twenty-seven, twenty-two, their hands, their skulls.
I keep counting to make sure they’re all there.
 
The last thing I want is to imagine the dead
we’ve forgotten. Their names,
I keep counting to make sure. They’re all there.
The last thing I want is another poem.
 

from Poets Respond
February 25, 2024

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Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach: “I’m at a loss for words for the continued violence against Ukraine, my birthplace. And yet, I keep finding more insufficient ones. I keep turning to form to provide some semblance of order amid atrocity that resists sense or comprehension. War analysts thought Kyiv would fall in two days, but February 24th marked two years. Two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion and still, Ukraine remains standing. Two years of fight, resistance, and endurance. If you are able, please consider contributing to an aid organization that helps those who are in Ukraine and refugees trying to flee. I recommend Ukraine TrustChain. An all volunteer-run nonprofit started by Ukrainian immigrants in the U.S., they work with local volunteers on the ground, going directly into areas hard to reach by larger international organizations. TrustChain provides urgent food, medical supplies, and transportation to safer regions. Poetry is often criticized for making nothing happen in the real world, but poetry has raised thousands of dollars for Ukraine. You reading this poem and asking questions about the global violence that continues is the beginning of action.” (web)

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February 20, 2024

Chera Hammons

ASTEROIDS AS BIG AS SKYSCRAPERS

We should come up with better ways
to define the size of an asteroid.
One headline likens Asteroid 2008 OS7
to a football stadium, as if we are in the habit
of measuring distance in sports arenas set end-to-end;
as if they are all the same,
the small-town stadium like the professional one
in its acreage, parking lots, and concessions,
and how many disappointments it can hold.
 
Asteroid 2007 EG is said to be the size
of sixty-four Canada geese,
with no indication of whether those geese,
for purposes of this illustration, fly in formation,
or rest beside each other in the grass,
or are stacked like sandbags in a heap.
 
The asteroid in the news today
is a city-killer the size of two love boats, they say,
but we must guess at what a love boat is,
whether it means the cruise ship in an old sitcom,
or a swan boat on a white-flowered pond,
or any yacht or rowboat or ferry or aircraft carrier
capable of carrying someone affectionate.
Some readers must assume two boats to move in tandem,
others side-by-side, through water either
calm or white-capped, or blooming with blue light.
 
Minor planets mix too many metaphors.
This is an imperfect knowledge, impossible to manage.
Today is both Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day.
To observe one, you must give up the other.
There is an asteroid hanging above us
right now, annihilation the size of two love boats,
and the Wordle answer today happens to be TALON,
which took me five turns to guess.
I almost arrived there too late. A talon
clings to a bare branch in the winter wind.
 
A talon slices through slippery muscle to the bone.
Everywhere, we find signs that show we must pass
through a world full of people
who had believed there would be no surviving the loss
of someone they loved, until they did it;
 
people who have Googled the stages of grief
to find out how much more there is to get through,
 
only to find there are either five or seven stages,
depending on who you ask, and they are not in linear order,
and the best guide to the process of mourning
is the map of a forest with no paths,
only landmarks you must pass again and again
during a single journey.
 
And always above us, somewhere in the darkness,
the silent weight of metal, mineral, and undrinkable water,
a strange stone frozen and airless and alone,
hurtles fathomless past the green warm places where life is.
Like holiness, the only way to measure it, a guess
based on how brightly it appears to us,
translated into what little we already know—
 
We, who can’t even define the boundaries of our own grief,
though it carries the heft of a high school football stadium
once the crowds have gone, the empty parking lot,
the unnoticed dandelions growing in cracked cement.
Though it is the height of the Empire State Building,
and sways the way it sways.
Though it is the size of sixty-four Canada geese,
flying in a V toward a far horizon.
Though it is the size of two lifeboats
which pass each other in the night,
and the dark water moves
like a mystery between them.
 

from Poets Respond
February 20, 2024

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Chera Hammons: “There was a weird confluence of events this week. The Super Bowl. Another high profile mass shooting. Valentine’s Day and Ash Wednesday were the same day. I saw several different stories about asteroids (one saying that water had been found, but the water molecules are chemically bonded to the minerals in the asteroid; one about how an asteroid might hit earth on Valentine’s Day 2046; and one about an asteroid ‘the size of two love boats’ passing by). Every time there’s a story about an asteroid nearing earth on my news feed, I take a screenshot because the measurements used to define them are so bizarre. I have quite a collection now, but my favorite is the asteroid said to be the size of 64 Canada geese.” (web)

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February 18, 2024

Alixa Brobbey

COCOA GHAZAL

Metaphor: my skin and my hair taste like cocoa.
Real life: grandparents kiss under trees heavy with cocoa.
 
As girls, we’d creak down the steep Dutch stairs,
return with mugs bursting with creamy hot cocoa.
 
Before the tasting date, I drench my skin
in pale butter squeezed from fatty crushed cocoa.
 
We tour the factory and learn in each room
how sweetness is squeezed from bitter beaned cocoa.
 
I think of the videos on my screen: scythed
children harvest but have never tasted rich cocoa.
 
When we moved home, everything sat strange on our
tongues. Took months to adjust to the new, brittle cocoa.
 
In another life, our family tree hugs the equator.
So, I learn to harvest pulpy raw cocoa.
 
In this life: the air conditioned room. Spirited
debates about abstract supply chains of cocoa.
 

from Poets Respond
February 18, 2024

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Alixa Brobbey: “There is currently a cocoa shortage. I cannot think of chocolate, or Valentine’s Day, without thinking about child labor in my father’s homeland, Ghana.” (web)

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