Julia Kasdorf

I learned from my mother how to love
the living, to have plenty of vases on hand
in case you have to rush to the hospital
with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants
still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars
large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole
grieving household, to cube home-canned pears
and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins
and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.
I learned to attend viewings even if I didn’t know
the deceased, to press the moist hands
of the living, to look in their eyes and offer
sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.
I learned that whatever we say means nothing,
what anyone will remember is that we came.
I learned to believe I had the power to ease
awful pains materially like an angel.
Like a doctor, I learned to create
from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once
you know how to do this, you can never refuse.
To every house you enter, you must offer
healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,
the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

Kate Light

There comes the strangest moment in your life,
when everything you thought before breaks free—
what you relied upon, as ground-rule and as rite
looks upside down from how it used to be.

Skin’s gone pale, your brain is shedding cells;
you question every tenet you set down;
obedient thoughts have turned to infidels
and every verb desires to be a noun.

I want—my want. I love—my love. I’ll stay
with you. I thought transitions were the best,
but I want what’s here to never go away.
I’ll make my peace, my bed, and kiss this breast…

Your heart’s in retrograde. You simply have no choice.
Things people told you turn out to be true.
You have to hold that body, hear that voice.
You’d have sworn no one knew you more than you.

How many people thought you’d never change?
But here you have. It’s beautiful. It’s strange.

Julia Alvarez

Tenderly she would take them down and fold
the arms in and fold again where my back
should go until she made a small
tight square of my chest, a knot of socks
where my feet blossomed into toes,
a stack of denim from the waist down,
my panties strictly packed into the size
of handkerchiefs on which no trace
of tears showed. All of me under control.

But there was tenderness, the careful matching
of arm to arm, the smoothing of wrinkles,
every button buttoned on the checkered blouse
I disobeyed in. There was sweet order
in those scented drawers, party dresses
perfect as pictures in the back of the closet—
until I put them on, breathing life back
into those abstract shapes of who I was
which she found so much easier to love.

Debra Spencer

He strolls down the middle of the sidewalk
leaving little room for me. I lag behind
to get around an open gate, to avoid
a fence post, a mailbox sticking out.
You don’t walk as fast as you used to, he says,
striding ahead on his personal red carpet,
feet turned slightly out, a spring in his step
like he’s about to go up for a jump shot.
I dodge a low branch and the open door
of a parked car. Just as I decide
to hip-check him out into the street
he stops and crouches to pet
a little white cat. He croons to her,
stroking her arched back. The cat
closes her eyes and I think of how he sleeps
nestled against me, turning when I turn
all night long, and never wakes me.

Ruth Stone

The elms stretched themselves in indolent joy,
arching over the street that lay in green shadow
under their loose tent.
And the roses in Mrs. Mix’s yard pretzeled up her trellis
with pink Limoges cabbage blooms like Rubens’ nudes.
My lips whispered over the names of things
in the meadows, in the orchard, in the woods,
where I sometimes stood for long moments
listening to some bird telling me of the strangeness of myself;
rocked in the sinewy arms of summer.

Phebe Hanson

You tell me when you were eight, newly arrived
from Czechoslovakia, your teacher made you memorize
a poem that began “I remember, I remember
the house where I was born.” Stranger
to our language you proudly learned all the verses,
practiced them over and over in front of your mirror,
but at the program when you stood to recite
in front of all the parents and other students,
you got as far as “I remember, I remember,”
and forgot all the rest and had to sit down shamefaced.

Now you live in this ten-story retirement center
where you cried most of the first month, so lonesome
for your son, transferred to another city, who couldn’t
take you with him because his new house wasn’t
big enough. Sometimes, you tell me, you slip away
from the recreation director who wants to teach you
how to turn plastic bleach bottles into bird feeders,
sneak up to your room, turn on the Bohemian radio station,
dance barefoot all by yourself, as you used to

years ago in the house where you were born.

Sam Sax

i’m bent
over the sidewalk weeping
outside the public theatre
you stand above me
horse built from a father’s beer cans
you still have that other man’s mouth on you
i can taste it
with the back of my hands
it’s my fault
always is
i say do what you will
+ your will is done
so what i was born drunk + mean with my teeth knocked out
so what my first noise was crying + i’ve been going-strong ever since
the other man has a name
i hate it
he has a mouth + fixed-gear bike + hiv
+ you sat on his couch waiting for him
to say anything
that you’re pretty
or nice
or have nice sneakers
then you leapt in his body + lived there a while
maybe brushed your teeth or ate a spoiled piece of fruit
you came back to me
with your house keys out
the ones i had cut for you
said you couldn’t stop
thinking of me
how he tasted too sweet
cut flowers in chemical powder
candy souring in heat
how glad you are to live
here
where everything feels safe
basic real-estate
my house + bed
a thin sheet of latex
my chest a coffin to store your futures in
how bad does the news have to be before you get to shoot the messenger / how can we bury the hatchet / when it always ends up in my back
when you tell me
he emptied you
like an animal hide
i’m fine
until i’m inconsolable
in public + you’re offering vacant comfort
how bad he was in his body
how much it hurt
you
how you used protection
+ i can’t help but think
how terrible the name trojan is
in the story the horse breaks
inside the city + war-crazed men spill out
thirsty
for revenge
so what people are staring
so what we’re on our way to the theatre
to see a play where everyone dies
i don’t know why i’m crying either
maybe i can’t bare to look at you
covered in mouths
maybe it’s just the sidewalk pulling the salt out of my head
maybe i can’t see you now without also seeing you dead