Young Writers Society

“Akhmatova writes poems as if a man is watching her, but you have to write as if God is watching you.”
Marina Tsvetaeva, 1932





“And if I woke, I never knew it.”
D. Nurske, “Psalm to be Read with Closed Eyes”

SACRAMENT


Pallets of peaches are winched up.
The heavy cream goes in throes and throngs.
Ascend a staircase of salt: O luckless meat, knowing
spices are linked to other spices only by olive or accident.
Snow obliterates; you know. The shin whack is an almanac.
A potato in a sock is a weapon.
Any way you cut it,
the berry is still a wound.
A sill flocks with cheese. The onions hustle
over and over that same phrase of paper.
The body swerves to avoid itself.
The spirit has a scoop and a burner.
On the lower-most shelf:
Friendship bread. Amish oat spreads.
The texture of yogurt and the thin turn
of caramel. Microns of chocolate.
Grains and pulse. Cornstarch and a fried wing. Dice.
Insert the knife
under the flap and rug through vigorously.
Whip until risen. Do with the heart
what you will. Grace with glaze, stuff the breast.
Pluck until golden brown. Use meat
scissors. Wrap your hunks
in waxed paper. Bring the jaw over.
Come to a simmer, singe, shout.
Your almond slivers are burning.
Bread is that heavy host in the belly:
a breathing draped in cloth,
a salt sore rubbed in the stomach.




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RE-RECORDED


I hear part of some laughter on an old recording:
a scratch of joy.
A thin city siren caught there too, far
away as a snagged string from your blouse.

It's none of my business:
what softened you as a kid:
lemon water and rituals.
I'm just listening to you laugh

hearing that white stain on your tooth,
that first bruise,
what happened to your lungs in London,
that race from hunger to hunger to the end of the room.

It doesn't matter how many times
you record over the sense of light from behind.
Dancing just means limping around,
snarling in somebody's arms,

hearing whatever warmth wasn't
washed over by half a sound or smile
in a strange home I've never been to.




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Re-Recorded:

This is wonderful (as usual). It flows perfectly and your imagery is unique and gripping. I love the structure. I especially enjoyed "Dancing just means limping around,
snarling in somebody's arms,

hearing whatever warmth wasn't
washed over by half a sound or smile
in a strange home I've never been to."

A pleasure, as always.

REAL PRESENCE


“Touch, however, is a language to believe.”
—Evan Zimroth, 'Notes toward a Semiology of Dance'

Only porn or church can come of this:
the slang of grace and graze,
the tongue of a hand inside the neck giving
the small rushed gifts of a merger.

So it happens that your voice
becomes nothing more than the shape of a myth,
an elaborate Chinese braille,
a rarity in air, whooping out to nobody.

That is not where my mouth sucked.
Call it instead a psalm-mark—a wound in leaden benediction.
It's where I prayed as on a high place.
And no one has prayed harder for anything,

or thought more frequently:
is this the Other I was promised?
This booklet of hair and hankering
with muscles that read like unseeable Japanese poems?

God forgives you for your skins.
What else would we write on? Pulped
bark? Gouged tablets? Instead, take the
joined letters of these scars, carrying the thought of it out

stroke by stroke: the scraped, illuminated letter
of your hand filled with apricots, or
your breath around my wrist.
What was that sermon I felt against my ear?

A kiss? A new word for shame?




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BALM


She is running to anoint me—
fats and oils for the shoulder blade

some rub that would glisten on a mother,
glycerins and rosewater

in holes of gumming clover.
Tucked over and over

into a shameless lamplit thinness,
I am relieved only when bent

into a posture letting water
veil down the back, into basins.

I am nothing without this bowl.
I am nothing without the hand

that points to my stricken lobes and says
it's only weather burning there.




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DEVOTION: QUENTIN TARANTINO


Blood is an intellectual thing—
it strips the room of its color.

Two stylized swords skirt through the clamp of meat on the shoulder.
Stuck but falling blossoms foreground a scene with a horse and a clansman.

There is cruel work in this spurt.
You call that begging?

You stiffen around where the cut used to be,
a wound to the hips, your hand just around it like an unexpected bigness

as if you couldn’t lug this thudding any further.
There was action and a tongue licking honey from a chest

in the way you pressed the tight bud open,
or spoke sufficiently in an ornamental garden with egrets.

I have created “something that kills people”—a love of hanks and hunks.
The blood threads precisely. I care more about the show robes

than the sliced stomachs, the tucked in necks.
So you will all know the seriousness of my warning

I will say this in English:
I am entranced by the strange nearness

of your flood to the surface.
[in Japanese] However, the limbs you’ve lost:

they belong to me now.
This glistening style of dying is getting me nowhere.

All you cut-open and ungathered:
I’ve the emptiest arms.

I’ve spun around three times on the spot
falling for you wet

and barely heaving.



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HOLY LANCE


"We dipped the blossom in the batter and fried and ate it." - Bruce Smith


There's a shyness to being heaven-
bound, crowded with a summer's-worth
of scars, cloth the only honest thing
about me, and around me: angels

shearing: the duties of the sweetened wing.
It takes more than pumice and smithereens
to smooth a heel, to rag away a snag,
gouging that age-old cadence: from rib

to head to crotch,
the burble of suck marks,
the male slash female
triumph of being lit finally from behind.

To go from leg scrapes to a chute
of glory, a mandatory reduction of blood:
a hunting down to honey, a gumming up
to taste, to tarry in the flesh.

Down here, everything's a knife.
I've slit myself on inundations.
I've sliced my thumbs on ladder rungs.
There are blessings thudding on the roof,

there is calmness on the battered knee.
My softness sags in rucksacks.
The cost accosts me for what's little left
of smoothness, of holes unstuffed with prayer.



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BAPTISM


Washed of sight, the way a day's work
rubs right off. A green river without a mouth—

the bodies burning for a second douse.

I've taken to bottling mud and spit
and a hand pressed to the eyes—

some shit seraph triple-mixing miracles.

I can't hear the water through the sound of wings,
the radio Jesus saying touch

the TV screen.

I ease in like an intercessor's knife,
the water all the way up to the wound in my hip,

the heart for the first time a jar, a pitcher to bathe with.

That spring, they tried burning the oil from the water,
the crude in the sound,

with the tip of a match, or a lip—

and scores of believers scrambled to the beach
to be saved.



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BEARING THE HEART


Our only real hope: the elegist
can't hang himself.
Bees will not come for the flesh
of this left out wretch.
Dogs will not pad to worry
this liar hawking over his cuts.
To him, everything smells of jasmine anyway
or the inside of a riot.
Who else would teach us how
to cup our hands
or kick out from the stool,
our open mouths just awaking,
our arms spread like a bottom-most prayer,
swearing: take, take, take.



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VARIATIONS ON A HOLY CITY WITHOUT YOU


Your streets are scorched with gold.
Palaces remain unsundered from other palaces.
By this I mean your tits are bored with gold,
and your rooms could last forever.

*

It's a lot to take in.
Doors lost on their way to boyhood wars.
Your little breasts a shadow of light blue—
the city's domes a poor decoding of eclipses.

*

I wish you all the aloneness you hunger for.
I have gutted every echo I've trapped of yours—
groped inside after the clustered core of softness,
while in the plaza: God: a flock, shot at.



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IN THE HOUSE OF THE LORD


I am beginning to become your blouse,
each button vying
for a push through the slit

then stuck at the neck like a dog in a trap.
I am beginning to become the way you stare
into your window as if you know it from somewhere.

The landmark I choose to find my way back
is a chandelier the breadth of my fear,
quelling in unflappable light.

Entranced by your nearness,
I offer my locker of hip bones.
Then there in the hallway, I forget

the begetter—I could be a wild iris
for all I know, or a kettle scraping out heat,
or a phone off the hook.

My heart sips at your shirtsleeves.
Where would I be without the one way banter
or the bruises raked where no one can see?

I am nothing more than my posture at dinner,
a squad of cut lillies for someone,
a fold-out bed—

a nestling for a guest.
It's gotten to the point where
I've named the hours after scars.

My full name,
tucked into the utmost eave,
is the last remaining stain.



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UNRIPE


It all rots in the safest spot.
My skin veers off into bangs
at the bend in the year, shit-spent
on the sleeve and the shoulder.

I come dropping into basins, into
round numbers, into soft jolts at the knee.
The wings of the table angels looked unalarmed,
but my head was mashed in the uplift.

A burn is a deep, long look into bone,
an ugly spurt of softness nagging for knives.
The plum gives at the softest push,
like a thumb through an indecorous crotch.

What I need to learn
is that fine art of juicing—
of coaxing nectar out of
skin slipping from skin.

But again, I caught God in his off season.
He was green and barely skinable.
and yet I ordered him in crates, the candles
a clicking inventory of losses,

a manifest of mush.
Of course, the trick is unlocking
the pit from its slit,
selling in stands by the road-side

unfit fruit by calling it almost, not far from,
nearly pocket perfect.
The trick is saying here, here
am I, Lord,

as the other one pinches and profits from ripeness.



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THRESHOLD


At this threshold of proxy,
I am running out of doubles to thrust into traffic—

brutes I've battered into blossoming.
I am unsurprised by budding or rented thrums.

What I left with you
is a copy of a copy.

But eventually, even loss scrapes away,
slips out with overuse.



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SEASON


I scrap my elaborate trap and start over.
I set my dogs after it.
I come back to you mouthing something that once had meat on it.

After yanking nests into a haphazard heaven, I find
God's a trace of a feather, a fetch of red breast,
still squirming when returned.

I have been fed so long by stone, by a batch of reeds,
by the span of simpering oil—
couldn't I break bones with you on occasion?

Couldn't I bring you clover and cinnamon
and set to dressing
this gently blasted heart?




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