PI 17 Sampler

Featuring over 600 pages of poems from around the world. Read portfolios by Anna Swir and Amy Gerstler, new translations of Paul Celan, Bertolt Brecht, and more, and a Caribbean poetry feature, edited by Ishion Hutchinson. 

Amy Gerstler

Housebound

When we fuck, stars don’t peer down: they can’t.
We fornicate indoors, under roofs, under wraps:
far from nature’s prying eyes—from the trees’
slight green choreography, wrung from rigid trunks,
that leaves unmoved. In full view of the shower
head and bookcases, we lick and tickle each other.
Every stick of furniture’s a witness. We’d like
To believe love’s a private sentiment, yet
how many couches, cots, and benches have soaked up
some? Lust adheres to objects, becomes prejudice
instilled in utensils by human use. How can I blind
these Peeping Toms—silence the libidinous whining
of these sipped-from paper cups and used toothbrushes?
I can’t. I wait for the outspoken adolescent spoons
to rust and hold their tongues so we can be alone.

Michael Dumanis

State of Union

We paint the bedroom walls Quixotic Plum.
We paint the bedroom ceiling Foggy Day.

You paint your nails and eyelids Powder Blue.
We drive to photograph the flying buttresses

of the flamboyant oil refinery
and stay through the dusk to catch the glimmering

reflections of its lights against the Ship Channel,
and also the striated moon in the water,

rippling alongside, an incontrovertible fact.
You whisper, How much would it cost

to reupholster the Chrysler? You are as elegant
as a grand piano. You throw tantrums

for a living. You make a good living.
Everyone is rich, for a little while.

Everyone is happy, for a little while,
even a day is a very long time,

and for a while the spoons and butter knives
continue to reflect our sunburnt masks.

For years we act astonishingly lifelike,
Running one’s lips across the other’s thorax,

painting the stairs and hallways Golden Fleece.
It would be nice to believe in God.

Children step out of our curtains
and ask us to hold them.

Ours is the only of possible worlds:
femur, pubis, ribcage, clavicle.

We close our eyes when we get tired
of looking at each other. In my dream,

it is always the same: having painted
my breath Frost and my hair Quicksilver,

I stand with my luggage outside, getting ready
to board the slow train to Albania.

The night is heavy, though her skin is soft.
She comes at me across the lawn until I fall.

She covers my mouth with her novocaine mouth.
Little torpedoes of grass shard my back.

Night paws at me with her five thousand hands,
then rubber-bands her limbs around my neck.

She prays into my ears. They turn to moss.
Possibly, this is the only end: dust,

the star-addled, wind-saddled black
flag of sky waving over us.

When I grow up, I do not want to be a headstone.
When I grow up, I want to be a book.

Anna Aspell

The Poet at Seven

examines her conscience:

1. She swallows the watery ends of drinks
after her parents have left for dinner;

2. loves in secret the neighbor boy Mike;
a. searches the pockets of his coat hoping to find a declaration
b. multiple times;

3. leaves notes in the dark for invisible ones demanding proof.

None of these things have been forbidden her,
but she knows, to protect them
she will lie.

The Book of Poetry

Sam Taylor

A friend, in Thailand, helping to build straw bale homes
was riding with four Buddhist monks on the back of a truck
piled high with musky bales. “I love water buffaloes,” she burst out
in broken Thai. The monks laughed. I guess that is
a strange thing to say, she thought, but insisted.
“No really, I really love them,” trying to unfurl herself
clearly, practicing the Zen Garden of making converstation
with only a few words. “They are so beautiful, so strong.
Don’t you love them?” But the monks just kept laughing.

Every traveler in Southeast Asia has her own story
of tonal confusion: the same syllable spoken different ways
becomes four, six, seven words. In China, Ma
means mother, but also hemp, horse, scold—depending if
it is flat, rising, dipping, falling. Sometimes context helps,
as when ordering food: No one is likely to confuse
“I want to eat” with “I demand an ugly woman,”
unless one is dining in a brothel, and even then “I want an eggplant”
though mistuned “whirlpool shake concubine twins”
is likely to produce only strips of sauce-smeared nightshade.

Everyone in China wants to know what you do.
It’s not easy even in English, for a poet to say that.
When they asked, I said first, “I write,” wo xie,
or sometimes, after I had learned the word, “I am a poet.”
Wo shi shi ren. Often, I was met by puzzlement,
strained foreheads, awkward laughter, Chinese people
glancing at each other for cues, uncertain how to react.
Not so different really from the response in America.
“A poet,” I’d repeat. Wo shi shiren. Then,
“I write poetry,” trying to make the most
of my miniscule vocabulary. “I write books of poetry.”

Wo shi shi ren: literally, I am a poetry person.
Wo means I; ren means person, or man.
Near the end of my travels, someone told me
shi—which is pronounced “sure” and means poetry
in the high flat tone, as well as the verb “to be”
in the falling tone—also means shit
in yet another tone. So, all along I must have been saying
I am a shit man. I write shit. And repeating it.
A shit person. I write books of shit. Understand?

To be—poetry—shit. Something fitting in how these words
Were assigned the same syllable, the same address.
Later, looking the word up, I discovered for each tone, shi
was ten or twenty words, a whole apartment complex
sharing one mailbox. Corpse, loss, world, history, time, stone
life, to begin, to be, to die, to fail, to be addicted to,
rough silk, persimmons, raincoats, swine, long-tailed marmot,
clear water—all crowded into the same syllable—sure,
sure, sure. It was also coincidentally the word for yes.
So, perhaps I had said something else entirely.
I thought of the combinations I might have said.

I am a shit person. I write life.
I am a death person. I write being. I shit history man.

I history being person. I write time. I write books of failure,
books of corpses, books of loss, books of yes.

I am a being person. I write to be.
I am addicted to being a man.

I write books of shit, books of clear water,
I am a poet.

It seemed all the world could, even should, have one word
for everything—table scales, taxis, bicycles, stones, cities,
time and history and death and life. It was all shit.
It was all poetry. As for my friend, she found out later
water buffalo was a variation of the word for penis.
So, “I love penises” she had confided to the Buddhist monks,
the truck jostling, the potholes throwing her knees
against theirs. “I really love penises,” she had insisted,
looking into their celibate eyes. “Penises are
so beautiful, so strong. Don’t you love them?”

Since the syllable for monk is also the syllable
of my name on fire in a world of loss, I will answer. Sure,
I love penises and water buffalo, and the smell
of wet hay, and vaginas and sautéed eggplant and concubine twins,
and I want to tell the Buddhist monks, and the Chinese bureaucrats,
and the official from Homeland Security
who stopped me in customs to search my computer, and my mother
the Sechezuan horse: I am a shit man writing books of stone
and the clear water has failed, but I am addicted
writing yes in a city of corpses and swine and persimmons,
here at the end of history, now at the beginning of time.

Melih Cevdet Anday

Silent Stones

Evening is your village where we arrive on mules
I see your salt your flour your cattle
Your heart darkened in its crackling seeds
Like a writhing caterpillar
Dreams come heavily to us like life
Gathering your visions piece by piece
You extract the provisions of your beauty one by one
And spread your skirts out at your side
Like a flight of birds dragging the ground

I see old pictures in your eyes
Your rain your sea in the brimming dawn
I see masts in the dark and in the sea
Your protected old forests and glaciers
I’ve had enough leave me the courtesy
That your gaze has filled like a river
Now I’ll line your silent stones
Up to the summits of your breath-taking knees.

Translated from the Turkish by Sidney Wade and Efe Murad

M.A. Vizsolyi

[and now you must follow ah snowfall is]

and now you must follow ah snowfall is
gone we no longer need prayers the junk
floating about the ocean yesterday
when your mother strolled down
to meet us we were lying in the sand
in the picture you can see it floating
past us in the picture you tightened
your little woman muscles &
kissed them i lifted you up & the sun was
behind you in the picture the question
i never asked i meant to ask your mother
to take her shirt off i meant to see
what your breasts would look like
in forty years i may not live that long

Jaroslaw Mikolajewski

My Wife’s Spine

And when my wife’s pregnant
her spine is a bough
breaking under the weight of apples

humble all the way down to earth
from lack of resistance

On nights of keeping watch
her spine is a scarf
tightened around a slender neck

On nights of animal love
it is a zipper in a suitcase
that won’t close, even under a knee

On nights of human love
it is the steel rope
rustling in the wind, at the highest voltage

On the noon walk
my wife’s spine is the flag
carried by the pilgrims’ guide in a crowded church

In the evening, reduced by the march,
her spine is a bunch of frightened kids
who broke the kindergarten’s piano
it is the keyboard
of the broken piano

When she takes a shower
her spine is a viper
lazing watchfully on a sizzling road

Under the midnight comforter
my wife’s spine is like a splinter burning in the oven
from which I’ll pull out warm bread at dawn

Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk

G.C. Waldrep

Another Day at the Festival
—in memoriam Craig Arnold 1967-2009

The tour guide walks up to you
and asks, politely, Do you want to die by falling
or do you want to die by drowning
or do you want to die by burning.

You say, I want to eat healthier foods,
get more exercise.
I want to spend more time with the kids,
thinking about the environment.

The tour guide nods, and gestures
towards the deep wooden bins
where they’re throwing the corpses of dogs.
The shadows from the bins,
from what’s in the bins, look just like
other shadows, you notice.

The wind is picking up again.
You can hear the stridor of the steel cables
attached to the bridge, that hold it up.

In your wallet you find photographs,
but they’re all of things
you don’t feel any special relationship to:
empty beaches, conveyor belts,
rice left over from someone else’s wedding.

The tour guide is walking
away from you, in the direction
of the large building
to your left. You follow the tour guide.

It was along time ago
when we began to mistake the motions
children made
for the children themselves.

Yes, you call out after the tour guide,
but she doesn’t turn around.
You’re running after where she used to be.

It’s spring. Nobody knows where you are.

Derek Walcott

The Season of Phantasmal Peace

The all the nations of birds lifted together
the huge net of the shadows of this earth
in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues,
stitching and crossing it. They lifted up
the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes,
the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets,
the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill –
the net rising soundless at night, the birds’ cries soundless, until
there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather,
only this passage of phantasmal light
that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever.

And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew,
what the ospreys trailed behind them in the silvery ropes
that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear
battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries,
bearing the net higher, covering this world
like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing
the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes
of a child fluttering to sleep;
it was the light
that you will see at the evening on the side of a hill
in yellow October, and no one hearing knew
what change had brought in to the raven’s cawing,
the killdeers’s screech, the ember-circling chough
such an immense, soundless, and high concern
for the fields and cities where the birds belong,
except it was their seasonal passing, Love,
made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth,
something brighter than pity for the wingless ones
below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses,
and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices
above all change, betrayals or falling suns,
and this season lasted one moment, like the pause
between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace,
but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long.

Anna Swir

Poetry Reading

I’m lying curled up
like a dog
that’s cold.

Who will tell me
why I was born,
why exists this monstrosity
called life.

Suddenly, the phone rings.
I’m to give a poetry reading.

I’m to tell them
why they were born,
why this monstrosity called
life exists.

I show up.
A hundred people, two hundred eyes.
They watch. Wait.
I know what for.

Translated from the Polish by Piotr Florczyk

Chard de Niord

The Animals
They bring me tokens of myself.
—Walt Whitman

I talked back to a cow in the upper field.
Patted her brow as she lowed in the barn.
I was mesmerized also by the chickens
in the yard as they strutted and pecked the ground.
I sat at the tables of all the animals to learn
their letters: the long e of the hawk,
the broad a of the crow, the diphthong
of the moose. I grasped the goodness
in their natures, whether wild or tame.
They were the blessed, dumb angels of earth.
Why was I so moved by the mere opening
of a beak, twitch of a flank, wiggle of a tail?
They brought me tokens of myself—a cold eye here,
a Christlikeness there. I was enlarged by a bee,
enlightened by a mouse. Nothing I did
returned to them what they brought to me.
They were the geniuses of paradise still.
I watched them half the day long as they swam
and leapt and crawled in their going forth.
I called each one by name, although
they did not come, except for the dog.
I pulled them from a thicket and prayed
as they lay on a stone and bled.

Steve Scafidi

The Butcher-Block and the Fawn

Here in the wilderness of my room
deer walk through the quiet
of words on the page on the ash
butcher-block table of this house
in the woods where we live, love,

and the moon moves and it shines
and the fox in the tree and the crow
in the stream and the fish dream
all of them, I believe, of the world
before the world and the one after

this magical one we can see—
And I share in the old fairytale
shares of the sun and the moon
that are one and the same tonight
for the lamp in the sky—it warms

as it brightens. For the fear of death
moves me as it frightens. For love
of energy is clarity and magic
and the fox in the tree and crow
in the stream and the deer in the woods

move through the quiet of words here
in the wilderness of my room.
Let the going on of what is—go on.
Let the criss-cross old table top
of the butcher-block be. Let the fawn.

Carol Frost

The mind is no tunnel deepening

to a pent element, perhaps an underground lake
of undrinkable waters,
bottom silted over
with names of objects and the people
she has known all her life. She can recite
Die Loreli and recognizes the Dali Lama
but not you. Sure, you want to know how
she can talk politics and laugh
but not ladle up a family memory.
It helps to read a book,
change her prescription,
see in her clouded eyes
breezes of light,
think of the myth of the mantis,
who in its exhaustion was laid
on a floating flower. In its thigh
a seed was left, the bee flew on,
all people came to life,
and nothing yet themselves
drank minutes shut in the water.
“Why am I here?” they asked,
and answered then, “To see what comes,
beginning first faintly to look like
something, some parts missing,
fish fins, for instance. We almost see it:
turning into gilly, or red butterfly
in water, on black sand. Crisp gills,
insect petals, rose-red, and the even darker,
accurate rose of blood. Then words
rooted at the bottom of the lake,
or agitating the heart.”
Said so (their heads dripping with water),
it will be hard to turn away.
But remember the woman
in her dementia who is half dead.
The myth is too pretty.

 
Betty Adcock

At the Fair

Before even the glorious ferris wheel,
we wanted the animals. “Wild!
Exotic!” yelled the menagerie man.
Inside, we watched the molting hawk ignore
for the third year in a row,
boys and their sticks. The fox
caressed his cage door with a furious muzzle.
He was new, unused to noise.
We counted splinters in his nose.
The giant bat uncloaked himself, a mouse-mouthed yawn
and wing-tips touching wire on either side.
One old wildcat stalked his shadow
while his eyes stood still.
When we had seen them all,
we moved to the music and wheeling lights
where people were passing each other.
Behind each fixed look something quick walked,
jerked at the end of its chain, turned
to cross a face again.

Radu Vancu

Summa ethilica

Once I wished with all my heart, almost religiously,
to become a committed vodka drinker.
I would have given even my soul for this.

My alcoholism reared from the most respectable cultural sources:
each glass of vodka made me think,
above all, of Thomas Aquinas:
40 percent liquid hell in iridescent light
forced me to see the meaning of
integritas, consonantia, claritas.

Then suddenly you appeared before me,
Cami, you painful teetotaler.
Your missionary ways converted me to the monotheism of hops.
Alcohol would now cap off at five percent;
I resigned myself to this ethylene ice age
because our love prefers proletarian sand in the urethra,
cultivating in its place class hatred for the aristocratic cirrhosis.
The only Marxist accent of a mystic love.

I remember more of Thomas Aquinas
having only my ever expansive belly
to seriously rival the Angelic Doctor.
But I accept this in good graces,
because I have gone far enough to desire
to be a good man, not an interesting one.
For that, now, I would surely give my soul.

Jose Saramago

If I have no other voice...

If I have no other voice that doubles me,
This silence of echoes of other sounds,
It is to speak, speak again, until I flay
The hidden speech of what I believe.

It is, shattered, the said between detours
From the arrow that has poisoned itself,
Or a high sea coagulated with ships
Where the drowned arm beckons us.

It’s to force a root to its base
When the rigid stone cuts off the way,
It’s to hurl all that one says
Because the more a tree is a stump-the more lonely.

It will tell, its words discovered,
Tales of the habit of living,
This hour that tightens and loosens,
The not seen, the not had, the almost being.

Translated by Margo Berdeshevsky.