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Frank Bidart

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Mother Talks Back to the Monster | Carrie Shipers

“Mother Talks Back to the Monster” Carrie Shipers

Tonight, I dressed my son in astronaut pajamas, kissed his forehead and tucked him in. I turned on his night-light and looked for you in the closet and under the bed. I told him

you were nowhere to be found, but I could smell your breath, your musty fur. I remember all your tricks: the jagged shadows on the wall, click of your claws, the hand that hovered

just above my ankles if I left them exposed. Since I became a parent I see danger everywhere— unleashed dogs, sudden fevers, cereal two days out of date. And even worse

than feeling so much fear is keeping it inside, trying not to let my love become so tangled with anxiety my son thinks they’re the same. When he says he’s seen your tail or heard

your heavy step, I insist that you aren’t real. Soon he’ll feel too old to tell me his bad dreams. If you get lonely after he’s asleep, you can always come downstairs. I’ll be sitting

at the kitchen table with the dishes I should wash, crumbs I should wipe up. We can drink hot tea and talk about the future, how hard it is to be outgrown.

#poem #poetry #motherhood #Carrie Shipers

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Rain

by Jack Gilbert

Suddenly this defeat. This rain. The blues gone gray And the browns gone gray And yellow A terrible amber. In the cold streets Your warm body. In whatever room Your warm body. Among all the people Your absence The people who are always Not you. I have been easy with trees Too long. Too familiar with mountains. Joy has been a habit. Now Suddenly This rain.

#reblog #jack gilbert #poem #poetry #gloom

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burning food is an inherited trait

#reblog #poem

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I Walked Past a House Where I Lived Once

by Yehuda Amichai

I walked past a house where I lived once: a man and a woman are still together in the whispers there. Many years have passed with the quiet hum of the staircase bulb going on and off and on again. The keyholes are like little wounds where all the blood seeped out. And inside, people pale as death. I want to stand once again as I did holding my first love all night long in the doorway. When we left at dawn, the house began to fall apart and since then the city and since then the whole world. I want to be filled with longing again till dark burn marks show on my skin. I want to be written again in the Book of Life, to be written every single day till the writing hand hurts.

#reblog

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i will never stop thinking about this poem my greek professor showed us

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Alexis Sears, “September” [ID in alt text]

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My sister puts glasses away upside down.

Because our mother does,

Because her mother did,

Because her mother lived through the Dust Bowl.

One day my father sat me down and told me about epigenetics.

How the trauma he went through

As a child in an abusive home

Wrote itself into his DNA

And, in turn, into mine.

How he and his brothers,

In various ways,

Are all sick from it.

How I might be too, someday,

And I’m not sure I’m not.

I hear people say,

When will we get back to normal?

And I think of a woman born in the twenty-first century

Who puts her glasses away differently

Because of what her great-grandmother endured

Ninety years before.

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house poem - jane cooper, the paris review 

#reblog

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Alex Dimitrov, “August,” in Love and Other Poems [ID in alt text]

#reblog

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Derrick Austin, “Lilting” [ID in alt text]

#reblog

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“Of a Certain Friendship” - Elsa Gidlow

Odd how you entered my house quietly, Quietly left again. While you stayed you ate at my table, Slept in my bed. There was much sweetness, Yet little was done, little said. After you left there was pain, Now there is no more pain.

But the door of a certain room in my house Will be always shut. Your fork, your plate, the glass you drank from, The music you played, Are in that room With the pillow where last your head was laid. And there is one place in my garden Where it’s best that I set no foot.

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There wasn’t a time I didn’t have a brother. By the time my eyes opened, he was already here, but there’s so little time between us, he also can’t remember a time before me. Our origins blur into a single birth between us and so between us is a world and its beginning. I tell myself there’s not a world without my brother in it. I tell myself I’d follow him anywhere to keep the world from ending.

- Dustin Pearson, The World at its Beginning.

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"What Kind of Times Are These," Adrienne Rich

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light— ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees.

#Adrienne Rich #poem #poetry #abortion #women's rights #reproductive health

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"the mother," Gwendolyn Brooks

Abortions will not let you forget. You remember the children you got that you did not get, The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, The singers and workers that never handled the air. You will never neglect or beat Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. You will never wind up the sucking-thumb Or scuttle off ghosts that come. You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. I have contracted. I have eased My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized Your luck And your lives from your unfinished reach, If I stole your births and your names, Your straight baby tears and your games, Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths, If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. Though why should I whine, Whine that the crime was other than mine?— Since anyhow you are dead. Or rather, or instead, You were never made. But that too, I am afraid, Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? You were born, you had body, you died. It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all. Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you All.

#Gwendolyn Brooks #poem #poetry #abortion #women's rights #reproductive health

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"I Tell My Son to Cover Himself in Someone Else's Blood," Rachel Mallalieu

Last night, I told my son that if he sees a shooter coming, he needs to hide in a file cabinet or underneath a covered table. If he’s in the bathroom, he should stand on the toilet and lock the stall door. If there’s nowhere to go, I asked him to paint himself with someone else’s blood and play dead. Give him a break my husband murmured. Let him relax a bit. Simon needed extra prayers at bedtime.

Say my name out loud. Tell God to keep me safe, or at least don’t let him come while I’m in art class. During shooter drills, my teacher forgot to lock the door and the window is too big to cover with paper.

I smoothed the circles under his eyes while I begged God to keep him here, with me.

Today, the forest is a cathedral and cedar trees waft incense. The blossoms are a riotous crowd —tulip poplars, mountain laurel, dogwoods and wisteria.

The “About Me” poster outside Simon’s fourth grade classroom says he loves our dog Theo and tacos. His favorite color is green. He wants to be a doctor.

The trees hush the sirens and only the flowers hear the whispered coda to my prayer.

If he comes, God, and Simon can’t hide, please

please God,

                      let me be there too.

The blooms, mute gods, bend their faces toward my cries

and promise nothing.

#Rachel Mallalieu #poem #poetry #response to mass shooting #uvalde

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"The Insurrectionists Were Right," Alison Luterman

something was stolen—not the election, counted and recounted, nor their livelihoods, abandoned, it seems, without a second glance; not their womenfolk who turned their cell-phone boasts and Facebook posts over to the FBI, nor the Confederate statue, lassoed by a million ropes and toppled into the river, not even the fewer and fewer white children playing cowboys and Indians in vacant lots, or the more and more Black youth winning Merit scholarships—but something aches, a phantom limb, the tongue searching for its gone tooth, the stomach ringing hollow no matter how many Big Macs were eaten—something has been mislaid, like a wallet or the one set of keys that unlocks the only car that still runs; something once thought valueless, handed over too easily, the way we relinquished our wildness as children to sit behind little desks made of molded plastic, miniature businessmen in training. Something that has vanished like youth, elusive as a coyote’s howl; open the door, there’s nothing in the bare back yard but plundered American desert where even now a jackrabbit pauses to sniff the air—where is it where is it, do you miss it too? I do. I miss knowing what belonging to the land might have felt like, long ago. I miss the honor of shaping my footsteps to the pine needle path— so even if I hate what they did, I understand that something is missing in the maelstrom of the lie that made us American, something like an umbilicus connecting us to this earth, something like innocence; once gone you can never get it back.

#Alison Luterman #poem #poetry #loss