goodpoems

Elizabeth F.A. Meaney

The Class of 2009

The winter the squirrels starved,
we were scared seniors without jobs.
In a secondhand suit and shoulder pads,
you went on forty-three job interviews.
Your resume was well-printed, and they liked you,
of course; your curly hair and eager words,
your salary demanded lower each time,
as if your financial security was a limbo
and you could hover between the bar and your
breaking point, careful not to bend your back.

Of course, Notre Dame squirrels didn’t starve.
They had dining hall bananas, Subway foot-longs,
and biodegradable trash we were taught to worship.
We didn’t starve there, either—college, king of abundance—
and held overwarmed bunks, palms of cocoa-mugs;
black men in chef’s hats with carving knives and hot soup.
But our ribs clung to us in anxiety, anticipating us as
those curving urban squirrels, scratching pavement
bare of crumbs or coins.

Two rooms were ruined when your pipes burst,
which sent Kelly seeking law school down south.
She rewrote her personal statement on loose-leaf
because in Times New Roman she didn’t sound like herself.
Meghan, anointed actress-turned-waitress,
hid Midwestern hope behind sunglasses.
She bleached her gritted teeth.
The verdict? “We’ve seen two hundred and ninety-seven
girls who look like you.” Her spotlights cut out,
while in the dorms we conserved sunlight.

In four wool coats the President’s family was sworn in.
Between the shivering walls and stubborn furnace we watched,
Our ankles fighting for crevices in the couch cushions–
Your TV fighting for reception—
Chicago chants fighting the rain—
The broadcast fighting static, but we still heard, “Yes we can.”

For a moment even cold held promise.

But in New York the ECONOMY melted:
an ice sculpture on Wall Street where ‘E’ and ‘C’ went first.
I think it was the smoke from the seventh-floor curtains
where the stockbrokers got their palms read and wrists slit.
We called Ms. Cleo once, a childhood friend and I, but
her brother Sam caught us. Her father sweated, “Eight dollars an hour?”
In the nursery above, our future was left on the line—
bounced on the curly phone cord–
calling out to us, “Hello? Hello?”

Stolen from XENITH.net

Jan Richman

Driving Out of Providence

I can’t see anything at first. My eyeballs are air-drying in the night’s fake leather interior. It’s like I’m backwards crying, the tears sucked out from behind my eyes into the chamber of my head, sloshing there amongst the already wet deception-sensors and the spongy flowers of incorrect assumptions. But the front slits, the parts that saw you & wanted you, are parchment-dry. Gummy-dry. Amnesia-dry. Suddenly the road jabs its little white stick noodles into my area of expertise. You will always be hungry, the white beats say, but you will not die of hunger. Hunger feeds you. That’s when the radio kicks in and some rough edge writes itself into the smooth concrete of a summer sidewalk, carving deep & spitting out gray peels of what gets left behind. I don’t know what to do with all the remainders.

Hours later, my window rolled down, I realize I am on the precise border between away from and toward. And then I’ve crossed it, despairingly. I stop at McDonald’s but the restroom key breaks off in the lock and I pitch the pancake-sized Hamburglar key ring out into the lonely bushes and squat behind a turquoise Tracker in the parking lot, watching my pee collect blackly like oil spill under its wheel.

No amount of coffee can cut through last night’s whiskey, but the sun elopes from the water exactly the way I would want to emerge from bad luck, slickly and fatly, like a cell squeezing out of another cell. First you thought I was joking, because you imagine silence as cunning, whereas in my case it’s only shrugging, a goodbye waiting to happen. Those few wordless moments are heady, though; they taste like you, like plums & beer.

Stolen From Ploughshares Online

Jeffrey McDaniel

Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back

I wanted you to be the first to know - Harper & Row
has agreed to publish my collected letters to you.
The tentative title is Exorcist in the Gym of Futility.

Unfortunately I never mailed the best one,
which certainly was one of a kind.

A mutual friend told me that when I quit drinking,

I surrendered my identity in your eyes.

Now I’m just like everybody else, and it’s so funny,

the way monogamy is funny, the way
someone falling down in the street is funny.

I entered a revolving door and emerged
as a human being. When you think of me
is my face electronically blurred?

I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest
satellite dish in the universe, your smile
as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed.

Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder.

I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash,
how I once held the soft audience of your hand.

I’ve been ignored by prettier women than you,
but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence
so far, without spilling a drop.

————————————————————————————-

The Day It Rained Splinters

Lady Liberty, I understand your confusion, watching
that first plane smash into the skyscraper, but surely

you could’ve swatted the second one from the air,
or at least leaned forward and caught the people

who leaped. They jumped as humans and landed
like meat. If only we’d put a hose in your fingers,

not a torch, you could’ve doused the flames. And where
was God? Perhaps blessing some other country

for a change, as our fifty lucky stars sank into us
like shark’s teeth. The sky was a big black cloud,

and the cloud had feet. Now the celestial scoreboard
reads: Allah 1, God 0. Soon the blood will flow,

but with so much dirt in our throats, how can revenge
taste sweet? Carnage Asada is what they served

in the voluptuous borough of grief, lifting the hem
of mayhem, feeding us a glimpse up the skirt of eternity.

Photos of the missing taped to every phone booth.
Operator, call Batman, tell him we’re stuck

in the first act of a blockbuster, and there’s no
normal to return to. Normal is entombed in the debris,

the l demolished like a building, the O a fireman’s mouth
opened in scream, as F-15’s scrape like the nails

of a prostitute down the sky’s chalkboard. What
yardstick gets used to secure a measured response?

Already scuba divers have plunged into the melting
pot. I hope they dig with sacred shovels, for there are spirits

in that rubble, the closest thing we have to holy
land. But maybe those buildings were phoenixes. Doesn’t

our language suggest that mess is merely a stop
on the way to messiah? Before squashing all Arabs

into a sentence, like a four syllable word, with only
one meaning, we should see what becomes of the ashes.

Maybe a dab of those cinders will make irises
bloom in the retinas of the blind, hair sprout

on a bald man’s scalp, tulips erupt through
sidewalk cracks. I mean, haven’t they already

succeeded in making compassion gush from
the tough leather of every New Yorker’s heart?

inaugural post: Matthea Harvey

The Future Terror/7

From the gable window, we shot
at what was left: gargoyles and garden gnomes.
I accidentally shot the generator
which would have been hard to gloss over
in a report except we weren’t writing reports
anymore. We ate our gruel and watched
the hail crush the hay we’d hoped to harvest.
I found a handkerchief drying on a hook
and without a hint of irony, pocketed it.
Here was my hypothesis: we were inextricably
fucked. We’d killed all the inventors and all
the jesters just when we most needed humor
and invention. The lake breeze was lugubrious
at best, couldn’t lift the leaves. As the day
lengthened, we knew we’d reached the lattermost
moment. The airlift wasn’t on its way. Make-believe
was all I had left but I couldn’t help but see
there was no “we”—you were a mannequin
and I’d been flying solo. I thought about how birds
can turn around mid-air. About how
the nudibranch has no notion it might need
a shell. Swell. I ate the last napoleon—
it said Onward! on the packaging. There was one
shot left in my rifle. So this is how you live
in the present. I polish my plimsolls.
I wrap myself in a quilt. I re-ink
my note (for nobody) and I’m ready.


Terror Of The Future / 7

Sweetheart, there’s no one on the street.
I attached the speakers to the steeple
but even on its loudest setting, the stereo
gets no reaction. If you ask me, (ask me,
please) the split screen of the brain
needs a sounding board, doesn’t like the only
signals in the skyway to be its own synapses,
doesn’t want to go solo in the sandbox.
You’re. Not. Breathing. Let’s see: memories.
I remember the rocking chair that was always
in the repair shop for liking to rock backward
but not forward. I remember the price
of a pressurized suit. I remember the red ribbon
in your hair. I remember when pandemonium
was possible. O there’s no way to nectarize this moment—
it’s entirely without sweetness. In just a minute
it’ll be match point and of course the world wins.
It’s not a matter of life-and-death, it’s life or
death. Here in the grove, after jar after jar
of grain alcohol, the sun looks like a halo,
then a noose. Give me a helping hand,
historian. Help me with that “or.”

Stolen From BOMB/ Best American Poems of 2007