To Ia, in 1993 (Poem of Address - Livia M)

To Ia in 1993

            I said, “I’m afraid of not existing.”

            “Millions and billions of years you did not exist—what was the problem?”

            “But now I’ve formed relationships,” I said.

                                    - Rachel Aviv

           

You won’t see anything

when you look out

                        so look up—

there will be hundreds of stars.

I’m not so sure what to make

of the sea and today

(a woman tells me

pineapples grow in her yard

and another takes fallen flowers

off the ground and puts them where her buttons

should go

and the whitecrested navy

races marble

            tested by thousands of years

                                                of existence)

but I think I know the night here.

You will see and be everything.

LM 2015

Marble - Livia M

Marble

know the marble

know the quiet

Taj Mahal and roses

crossed over canes

know Clio, goddess

of history carved

in shining stone

            mármaros

know the refined

taste of tradition

know that maybe

perhaps there is

Tuckahoe marble

in the Vatican

in the snake’s bite

in Laocoön’s battle

with his two sons

against the snake’s

bite, a portrait

of human agony

know marble will

make you famous

know I swam out

to a metamorphism

through navy

through royal blue

through teal

all for white

know that marble

looks like seashells

when it makes strides

with incoming waves

know the quiet

of sitting atop marble

and all around and over

you see interlocking

crystals and the sea

and you hear fishermen

say it will storm

tomorrow

LM 2015

Notebook Poem (Kamienska)- Hannah

THE HAPPY MASK

When you wake up everymorning it’s midnight.

*

When he was in the ninth grade, Brian Cloch pushed my father off a stage. He landed on top of his arm, it was S-shaped. I study the stitches that zip the bicep, a centipede buried beneath the skin.

*

We are in the parking lot, crickets like pebbles turning over. My mother has something in her hair.

*

I own the happy mask shop. I travel far and wide in search of masks.

*

You have no illusions. You rise at the earliest light to gold the bread and score the avocados. You rub your fingers together—the flour thinning—at the tips.

When he wakes,

you are goring

the lemons

of their sting.

*

You look just like your father. Yours is his nose. It is also

the wild look in your eyes when you are taken by rage.

It is the grating of your rage. The grasping of your rib cage.

*

Three of us in the room. Between exhaled smoke we talk about broken pairs.

*

The lemons are not ready yet, I tell you, though I am lying. If you pursued the truth you could smell it on my hands. My cuticles are thrumming from the citrus.

*

He asphyxiated from the exchange. Too much smoke, the room is too small, in this household, why have our eyes turned to pools rimmed with rust?

*

The lemons are in a sack beneath the stairs. One day we will beat each other with them like bars of soap in a bag, like bullets. But there are lies you must tell for protection.

*

You come in with coffee and a wild look. After you break the cornflower porcelain, we sit among the ruins.

*

We are in the parking lot, crickets simmering like an electric fence. There is a piece of avocado in her hair. I laugh and try to pick it out. She flinches at my reach.

*

My father used to pitch a fastball.

In athletics my arm was eternally disappointing.

In the kitchen, his was not.

*

There are no lemons or avocados in Illinois, not in the trees.

*

Everything is a gun used the right way.

*

Car parked, smoke blooming

out the windows. If we leave

the windows up, the pressure

will run our eyes to rust.

We crack them, though it disturbs

the ritual asphyxiation.

*

I practice stillness in my face. I prefer it with my eyebrows up, but this rustles my hair, and there must be silence. If I stare long enough I believe I am the bottom of a well.

*

The lemons are beneath the stairs, sagging in the paper sack.

The darkness makes them ripe, they are sweetening the air.

The lemons are becoming harder to hide. They are sagging

in the paper sack beneath the stairs.

*

She is shaking. She wants to tell me this is what it was like being shot, but she does not know that I know that she has ever been shot. She has discovered that not all bullets are made of metal. For example, lemons may be thrown. Avocados explode on impact.

*

Are we to hear the word bloom and think eruption?

Are we to smash avocado with our fists in the kitchen?

Are we to remember green flung onto the cabinets like intestines blown apart?

*

The writhing insect of his throwing arm. The avocado in my mother’s hair.

*

Journey Poem- Hannah

A VISITOR’S GUIDE

To get to the bone house

of Hallstatt, take the stairs.

Unless you start, of course,

in Switzerland. After the

conductor has announced

in French that the train is

deleted (the French have

no word for cancelled)

you must accept that the

ticket you purchased is paper,

not assurance; you will not

sleep tonight. Board instead

the train bound for Basel, run

to make the transfer to

Karlsruhe (which you will imagine

is somewhere in Germany,

though you do not know

for certain). Your next connection

does not arrive for two more

hours. You will be afraid

because you are alone, you are

a young woman, it is

night. You do not speak

whatever it is they speak

wherever Karlsruhe is.

After buying a water to appease

the shopkeeper so that you may

sit while she mops the floors,

ignore the man who looks and licks

his lips. At two-eleven, depart

for Salzburg. When you are told

you cannot sit in this section, you will

walk with your things from

the train’s first car to its last.

Look out the square window,

at the tracks splitting away

into the black between

countries. Do this until you

believe this is what hell looks like:

staring down this stretch of

iron forever, the train never

stopping. But you remember

your feet hurt, and also you don’t

believe in hell. You arrive

sleep-ragged and sweating

in the Salzkammergut. There is fog

but you can see the S.S. Stephanie

churning the lake’s glass, the steeple

punctuating the village’s slumped

skyline. (You are nearly there,

do not be distracted despite the cloud

swallowing the mountain). Place

money in the hand of the walrus

man. There is grime beneath his uncut

nails but he is the Stephanie’s captain and

accountant, so you smile and say

danke and try to find him authentic.

He will nod at you. There is rain running

the boat glass. But reader, you are

impatient. Where are the stairs, you ask.

Can’t you see them? No? Forget

what I have told you. You have no mind

for the bone house. You are no traveler

at all.

On the Boat

***

We wandered the waters for nearly three hours, hugging the border between ocean and rock, heading out, circling back, retracing, but always moving. The sea was only stillness. In some places, the mountains were so tall that they hid the sun. It was then we could look at each other’s eyes.

***

“So that now at dawn/ You must be attentive: the tilt

of a head,/

A hand

with a comb, two faces

in a mirror/ Are only forever

once, even if unremembered”

            - Czeslaw Milosz, “After Paradise”

***

The fisherman sat unbraiding his net, removing every rock and throwing them back into the Aegean. Two hands for two hours. There was never a question of patience or frustration. This was the work that had to be done.

***

Their eyes swallowed their lungs.

Waiting and leaping

the fish could not escape

the white bucket.

***

I love the water too much

***

I stood in front of the engine, drinking the fisherman’s wine. Looking out. I realized that I could not see the road. On this side of the mountain there were no roofs or farms. Only trees and rocks. I never thought I would see something that had looked the same for a thousand years.

***

When I did not catch more fish he told me Now go to another place.

***

He smelled of ocean and sweat

the skin of his hands smoothed

by fatherhoods. His grandson,

driving the boat, was young

because the hair on his cheek

matched the color on his head.

The back of the neck

will tell you how hard

a man has worked.

***

Asteri - starfish. I admired it in my hand.

***

“But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.

Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.

            -  D. H. Lawrence

***

You know you caught a fish

if you see the water glimmer

silver and blue.

The best time to catch a fish

is when there is no moon.

Swimming blindly

the fish will rush in a torrent

into the open net.

In English we use agape to say

an open mouth, expressing shock

or fear.

the net the fish the water

But in Greek agape means love,

the highest and deepest, most God-like

love.

***

“What use are you? In your writings there is nothing except immense amazement.”

-       Czeslaw Milosz

***