Archives of Tuesday Poem

- after Gregory Pardlo
It was leap year, on a Thursday, I was born

                upstate New York, Borsch Belt small town.

To a family of farmers, where covered bridges crossed

                creeks. Twenty miles to the racetrack in

Monticello, our nearest city, where father worked

                for an air conditioning installation firm.

The Evergreens of the Catskills.

                A mother off seeking four-leaf clovers.

Born to arrowheads and quartz, to blueberry

                bushes in back fields. I ran to frogs

and salamanders across stone fences

                through wild woods, no eyes followed me.

It was during the cold war red scare, but I,

                a wild barn child was unaware. Daddy’s little girl

I wore patent leather shoes at Easter and

                blue velvet at Christmas. The cameo necklace,

Mother gave me, fell into a stream. I was a wild thing

                from go, feeling the velocity of wind. The night

I came a fierce push. I was born clear white,

                pastel perfect skin, with spit-on Irish blood

and German ancestry I was told to never

                acknowledge by a direct line uncle. The year

I came, there was a storm brewing in the guts

                of women to have climaxes they’d never reached.

There was a surge to land on the moon. The

                Atom bomb was introduced from Britain. Born

in the year of the Dragon, I knew it would be rocky

                not a song in the rain, nor the cotton candy

fun world where mother resided.
Julene Tripp Weaver is our Poet in Residence for March.


Previously: Ordinary Essentials.

We may have been young and stupid

We tried things this life

We survived to tell or hold our tongue
I only wanted good teeth
It was the kind of day that kissed

my adrenals, I was in love but didn’t

know, I forget his essential nature
Looking at altars I swim the undersea 
Our art, how we breathe it

becomes our moment of forgiveness
Everything essential dies or disappears

Fear takes us out of our body
I waited forever to sing
They wrote a song with ordinary

words about an ordinary man

I could not stand to listen
The whole world cries each day

Let the bells ring
Julene Tripp Weaver is our Poet in Residence for March.

Step 1. Show up on Inauguration Night

Leave your pretensions at home this time,

you will not be saving anyone here.

There is a surge of black-clad bodies that will quickly take your stubborn

Berniecrat and I’m With Her shirts out of fashion.

You have a bleeding heart

pinned to your sleeve by a safety pin

Huffington Post told you to wear it

Your well-meaning aunt told you,

with the force of a whole rich neighborhood association’s facebook group behind her, that this

tiny piece of metal

will save the poor and wretched

welcome them to your teeming shore —

No.

Don’t get caught up in pretensions.

Step 2. When you see notorious white supremacist Richard Spencer being interviewed by the news,

make sure your safety pin is visible.

Wait for a poor, victimized Person of Color to approach you for help.

You’ll grow so tired

of waiting for an opportunity to show off your allyship you might learn something.

Step 3. Here is the hard part

While Richard Spencer is talking about the Pepe the Frog pin on his lapel

his face

will be interviewed by a fist instead.

He, all bigotry, hair gel, and bloated pride

stumbles from the well-placed blow, lands on the concrete a couple yards away

Suddenly, the assailant’s fist is Lady Liberty’s torch, blazing a trail for us to march on.

Suddenly

we are all the fist

humiliating white supremacy at its own inauguration.

In the universe of this small victory,

no one is president.

No cop tear gasses a restaurant without resistance

and bigotry

bleeds from biting its own eager tongue again.

Someone punches Richard Spencer and hope blooms a tangible thing in me.

Hundreds of miles away

I breathe just a little easier>

so before you yell,

“just sign a change.org petition!”

Think of how long we have been waiting.

How you say,

“we’ll survive these four years”

as if we

have not been trying to survive for centuries.

Think of you love watching us swallow when we want to spit.

Pressure hosing a panther and reprimanding her when she bites.

Think of how you pulled the nine inch knife out six inches, stared at the wound, and called the bleeding progress.

Think of where you were

when an islamophobe tore off her hijab on the bus,

and you did not do anything.

Think of the community centers that shook with death threats

and you

did not do anything

Think of the cops that gunned a black kid

into memory and you

did not

do

anything.

Step 4.

I will not come to you for help.

Take off the safety pin.

Know that fascism does not arrive with a name tag,it arrives as your friend.

It arrives as Richard Spencer, well-manicured and well-behaved, speaking poison into cameras spinning it acceptable.

Do not allow this by any means necessary

Leave your pretensions at home.

Practice

making

a fist.

Azura Tyabji is our February Poet in Residence.



Previously: Missing Persons Report Filed for the Knife of Charleena Lyles: June 18, 2017, Healing in Golden Repair, and Bunker.

Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole says,

“My hope is this will be the community’s police station”

and every inch of black girl resistance in me becomes a tremor becomes palpitation of heart and earth,

a bullet in barrel,

Earth’s crust eager to rift itself into a beast that breathes fire.

Experts say,

a .9 earthquake will hit Seattle within the century.

Police union says it needs a new facility able to endure eventual catastrophe and I think


if cops need building material,

there’s nothing more able to endure fission than a black or brown body.

There’s nothing that holds up guilt, greed, and excess more than a back that is used to being broken,

but I’m glad

I get a seat at a table I’ve set

A community space a floor above a shooting range:

a court to practice the de-escalation technique of killing people who look like my family Thank you, officer, for this concession.

Capital will never become full enough to not steal the fruits of our labor. Will never sacrifice beyond what it can get away with spitting up. Capital

harvests stolen crop

until mouth twists into gallant smile, blood on leaves and blood at root Strange

Fruit

O’Toole wants the new precinct host a farmers market.

What can grow in a fortress besides a pedestal to hang a noose? What good is a community that bonds over lynching?

Is this what a safe city looks like?

Is this

Emerald City progressive showing us the man behind the curtain and expecting us to pay no mind?

Government ain't the wizard we hoped

but a coward pretending to be better than he is

Is this the fraud I'm expected to call progressive?

Is this the shooting range I am expected to call my community?

Tell me,

O’Toole

What's a new precinct to Oscar Perez’s grieving family?

What's a new bunker to the 10,000 homeless people in Seattle besides another place they can't live in?

This is excessive force

of the most insidious kind

I don't know which will hurt me first:

a building collapse or a cop mistaking my mother’s body for a weapon Either way

I know whose lives matter in this city

and it's not black lives.

Seattle is prepared for us to die

Seattle making a refuge for people who already get away with killing us, too.

Insurrection will be the next major disaster this city faces

Will resurface all the lies and empty promises it was told

Pulse from the streets up, radiate the heat of magma Molotov and bitter history, no longer latent and cowering,

but surging, dangerous, and revolutionary.

We will be hammer to the coffin of every cruel and fragile thing that has wronged us and tool to every dream we want to build in its place

A table where capitalism is not welcome

A city my mother can feel safe in

A city where all lives actually matter

Where hands reach out to hold mine instead of to the gun in its holster

I know

it's hard to stay hopeful

in times where death seems to lurk around every corner But we are unstoppable

and another world is growing within us

I am prepared to fight

for a community

That is real

Azura Tyabji is our February Poet in Residence.



Previously: Missing Persons Report Filed for the Knife of Charleena Lyles: June 18, 2017, and Healing in Golden Repair.

forget your perfect offering

just ring the bells that still can ring

there is a crack in everything
 
that’s how the light gets in

- Leonard Cohen

there is a crack in everything

my professor shows us kintsukuroi tea cups on the projector the Japanese to English translation means

“golden repair”

she says

traditionally, the same tea cups are used in ceremonies for generations, their cracks filled in with gold.

it’s the damage that makes them beautiful

that’s how the light gets in

i am glass half empty

my heart is the size of my fist too often i give myself beatings

potential
 
leaking through cracks i make

i say, “my idealized self would have fixed these by now” wouldn’t have made cracks in the first place
 
her, some kind of invincible spiritual plumber
 
heals as a pastime & is never late
 
her confidence doesn’t have an asterix at the end all her cracks
 
are endearing
 
and forgivable

she gets a red ribbon cutting when they’re fixed within a
 
two day weekend.
 
meanwhile, no one throws a ceremony when i manage to get out of bed

do cracks even deserve gold when they take this long to fix?
 
i imagine liquid motivation spilling on bedroom floor, bus seat, hallways
 
all the countless hours wasted trying to find the newest, quickest method of being alone

when my wounds heal and shut into thicker skin i dig into my heart’s topsoil
 
— cracked & barren —
 
for feeling
 
try to rip this numbness out like a bad root
 
try to hold onto
 
feeling
 
like scarce nuggets of gold never seem to be worth enough

so i let my wounds be tender, golden & feeling instead
 
it’s own type of healing instead

my mother writes
 
“if light could speak,
 
It would say your name”

forget your perfect offering

the Latin to English translation of the word

patience
 
means “quality of suffering”

there will never be a time when i’m untouched by hardship
 
this world don’t have much patience for self care that interrupts the work week yet here i am
 
reclaiming my time
 
forgiving myself for all i’ve let slip
 
I stop missing my idealized self because i will never meet her

i call recovery
 
“healing” instead
 
because i know how it feels in my hands

because i don’t look for it in a mirror
 
just trust how it beats in my chest,
 
never as fast as i want,
 
but patiently doing the work nonetheless

just ring the bells that still can ring

i throw a small ceremony when i get out of bed
 
I decide, that’s its own kind of beautiful ritual of patience

the kind able to be used for centuries

Azura Tyabji is our February Poet in Residence.



Previously: Missing Persons Report Filed for the Knife of Charleena Lyles: June 18, 2017.

police

glanced her tongue & saw blade

conjured gun

from the cockiness

of her throat dare breathe

saw vertebrae of her quaking spine

/ grenade keys
 
mistook her words

as / gunpowder

every

blink

a

/ trigger

she

pregnant ticking

/ bomb.
seattle police call this nightmare-making

“Training Policy”

(using a taser “wasn’t protocol”.

“hands on approach” would have

“put them at risk”

pepper spray was “tactically counterproductive”

could have endangered

the officer’s ability

to

breathe.)


“There was no viable alternative,”

department says,

besides twisting her body — black & alive —

into a banshee
a black woman’s body

is always gleaned more weapon

than mother

as if nothing

can harvest here but

husks of babies

& bullets.
Charleena Lyle’s knife last seen:

cutting the ribbon on Inauguration Day of Seattle’s new mayor

whose glass-ceiling womanhood

— like her title “trailblazer” —

is also steeped in whiteness.
Charleena’s knife last seen:

cutting the limestone of this

Glittering Republic

skyscraper

by

skyscraper

headstones in a city she might

have once called hers

but would never hug

her back
Charleena’s knife last seen:

haunting the guilt of officers & a city too infatuated

with its own reflection

to see her

gleaming in the corners of

their Trumped-up nightmares.
Seattle,

after all,

only has so much patience

for those who are black and angry

trauma longer than a soundbite

and a week of headlines
“how awful they must feel,” someone pale & alive tells me,

“to have killed someone by mistake. To have to live with that.”

police brutality ain’t supposed to happen here, right?

not in this safe space city

its liberals are so heartbroken.

too bad their bleeding hearts don’t feed justice, just-stain hands.

too bad their guilt never makes it to the courthouses, somehow.

“too bad” “too bad” too bad”

Charleena’s knife last seen:

cutting umbilical cord of

uniformed men

babied by a society that will always

call their fist an open palm

who will never teach them how to pronounce

a c c o u n t a b i l i t y

in front of a mirror
“maybe they feel guilty,

but she’s still dead,” I say.

Missing Persons Report for the Words I Did Not Say:

I CAN’T MAKE IT

THROUGH AN ARTICLE ABOUT THE SHOOTING

WITHOUT CRYING


THE SOBS BEATING MY CHEST

FEEL LIKE GUNSHOTS


Last seen:

shattering every,

heart of glass
 
& blood too dark

to bring up at dinner.

GUESS WHAT?

YOU’RE REELING FROM THE KICKBACK OF A GUN

YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW YOU SHOT.


Charleena Lyles is still dead.

Seattle thrives & she is still dead.

Mayor sharpens her reputation on her headstone at the MLK rally & she is still dead
 
Police try holding her knife

up to a mirror

it shrivels into ash

yet she is still dead.
she is still dead.

she is still dead.
Azura Tyabji is our February Poet in Residence.

Wind kicks a few cups down the alley.

Pocketful of stones, a greasy lot.

Morning chill in fleeting sunlight.
You’d rather stay under this blanket agreement.

Not any storm can house you off the cuff.

The troposphere brushes your cold turned cheek.
Wake up. Get the child to school.

Now you are alone in this story

of cornflakes and Tuesday frost.
If you smell gas leak, all the more reason.

If you can walk back your talking point

happier still. Confusion in the hypodermis.
Poverty of whiteness

or hostile witness —

you’ll need a hole to crawl into
soon enough. Who lingers

finds the daylight wary. Who wavers

stands for nothing still. Hyper
nation state of being always out of

reach for the sky. Though you thought

your silence golden. 
Though you felt like running

until your feet grew wings. This very morning

a crooked heartbeat stalked you out the door.

Oh Wednesday

Full of rain

An argument

With no one
Junk mail

In the mailbox

Hummingbird

In the fall smoke tree
Waiting it out

Coffee going

Cold again

In the untouched
Cup

My father

Not my father

Gone since June
His voice a message

On my phone

Everything

Sounds like rain
In the living room

Of his greeting

When I rewind

Or fast forward
Or gather in stillness

Like smoke

In a hummingbird’s

Tinfoil throat
Who would listen

Like the rain listens

Tap tap

Like late season
Apples fallen into

The middle of

This week polishing

Their green disbelief
Kevin Craft is our Poet in Residence for January.

Previously: A Few Preexisting Conditions, Lesson Plan, and Banana Res Publica.

So the candidate

Is less than candid

And the office holder

Heavy handed,
While the Senate

Dabbles in senility

And the city feeds

On incivility.
When fact is fiction,

Faction fact,

What tribute

Should the tribe exact?
Few words follow

Veni vidi vici veto.

Forensics

Stuffs its face with Cheetos
Like rodents

Gnawing at a rostrum.

The Social Wars —

Now there’s a custom
Any pleb can get behind.

Time again to face the nation.

One in ten

Is decimation.
Kevin Craft is our Poet in Residence for January.

Previously: A Few Preexisting Conditions, and Lesson Plan.

Let’s practice getting under the desk.

Let’s practice barricading the door, turning the blinds

in our eyes. Shhh now. Let’s demonstrate

in utter silence. Every desk is a bunker in disguise.
I must have walked a hundred miles

in a single afternoon. No one followed,

pacing myself. Sunlight stained the leaves like glass.

Vine maples tangled in an avalanche of shine.
The protocol is not what you think.

The protocol is run hide fight. Step by step

the trail cut from granite

bleached and gleaming, strewn like the bones
of old calamity. Varied thrush

or rush hour radio, call note drowsy like a long fuse,

like pure denotation. Sometimes I hear guns

in the valley — pick-up trucks, tin cans, shattered bottles,
trigger trash. Sometimes I hear bullets

marching down the hall. Today there is no question

and answer. Today is only multiple choice —

the field trip wire lying in wait, mare’s tails combing the ridge
like movie weather. Crescendo of mountain.

Is this a classroom or a mortuary? Who can catch

a bullet in the mouth? Bullet points for extra credit.

Bullets for teeth, for the all above.
Kevin Craft is our Poet in Residence for January.

Previously: A Few Preexisting Conditions

We drank too much.

Stayed up too late

watching elephants disappear.

The beer was flat. The ice

receded. The moon

tracked its footprints into the house.

Bases loaded, the batter struck out looking.

The kicker shanked the field goal wide

to the right. The wide receiver took a knee.

The drone strike found its target.

The drone strike missed its target.

The drone strike turned the village to dust.

We stood in line for hours

waiting to vote.

We stood in line for hours

to procure a gallon of gas.

The hurricane struck out looking.

The hurricane stripped our limbless roofs.

The car swerved into oncoming traffic.

Traffic thickened in our veins.

The DNA test came back negative.

The DNA test came back positive.

The father never came back.

The father started smoking again

after the heart attack.

We ate too much red meat.

We ate too much corn syrup.

Our vote wasn’t counted after all.

Our vote was packed into safe districts.

We lost track of the days

we didn’t have to work overtime

to make rent. The rent woke up.
 
The rent went up in smoke.

We ignored the lump in the lymph node.

Doctors hit the lymph node hard.

Not our doctors. Too expensive.

Someone brought us a pot pie instead.

The dog ate it. The printer jammed.

Dandelions took over the yard.
 
Smoke took over the sky.

We drank too much. The world was flat.

Poachers took out the last rhino.
 
Few understood the news.
Kevin Craft is our Poet in Residence for January.

and sink into her smooth white hollow

run the pads of my hands along

her cool slopes admire the curves

that cradle my naked skin

as the water runs I’ll stick my toe

into that brass faucet and accept

a spray of water sifting

over my thighs and shins like sugar

the heat                      a rising redemption

misty and heaven-bound as water

folds over my hips my belly

the rising and falling of my chest

buoyant with each exhalation this rest

quiet above a porcelain body

    Sarah Jones is our December Poet in Residence.


    Previously: Relish, Poem About Bugs, and Therapy.

I tell my therapist that I do not want to cry

because it’s two in the afternoon
and there’s a turtle

sunbathing on a felled tree
in the marsh outside of her office window.

A Great Blue Heron hobbles close,
and it’s probable that the two are holding

a silent confessional barred in by a community
of water lilies that are tethered to mire.

She asks, how I feel when I talk
about home — I hold my rib cage close

to her ear so she can hear the wind howl. 

    Sarah Jones is our December Poet in Residence.


    Previously: Relish, and Poem About Bugs.

Let’s begin with bark beetles, sugar pines and sap. I am twelve,

and as high as I can get in the tree behind our double-wide

mobile home. I’m peeling bark back by my bare hands
to see bug tracks, small iris-like engravements canyoned

into the tree’s meat like a secret message or a promise

from the maker of trees: Your eye will not purple
like your mother’s. Her cries are faint from this lofty height —

breezy, though more shrill than moan. My aunt has a soft whine

when she’s dragged by her hair down a hallway. I don’t cry
for her or for my mother. I’m too scaly to know

that the tree’s diseased, that these gnawings are evidence.

    Sarah Jones is our December Poet in Residence.


    Previously: Relish.

It’s summer in Sanger, California,

and there’s a volcano

between my mother’s lips

as she stuffs me

into tiny shoes and a cotton dress.

Ashes powder my pointy bits —

nose, elbows, training bra.
Instead of running in grapevines,

I sit in mahogany pews

at a Methodist church and stare

at the heavily blushed face

of my grandmother —

her gray head juts

out her coffin

like a matchstick from a box.
She used to force relish

into tuna — I said

I didn’t like it, she said

I didn’t know

how to brush my hair

and even if I did

it wouldn’t brush right.
I want to strike her face

against flint

and ash her body into a jar —

cover the condolences of strangers

with I never liked Nona

and she never liked me.

    Sarah Jones is our December Poet in Residence.

To make the banana naked, crack

its neck and peel its jacket. To make

the bed naked, throw back the sheet

and the cotton blanket and the down one, too,

along with whatever's been whispered to

them in the damp minutes around midnight.

To make the dog naked, let the mange

rake and ravage, the tiny mites like

humpbacked handmaids, plucking a hair,

dropping it overboard, scraping away the skin. 
To make the moment naked, take a look

right at it: Under your gaze, the wrapping

of what might happen slides down

its shoulder and slumps to the hardwoods,

drowned in a pool of shadow. Nakedness
means now, the very is-ness of being. Time

is nippling toward us and we dare not

glance aside, dare not toss the subject

out the window, flip the page to stop

the topic of how to bear so much to bare. 
Branches in January are naked.
The inside of eggshells is naked. 
Wrong notes on the cheap guitar

when the child is tired and sad are naked.
The bike, bound to the stop sign

by a spiral of steel, shorn of its tires,

stricken by the nightglow: naked. 
The man's face at the graveside

of his child, a nakedness sheer

enough to tear the fabric of everyone

nearby and leave them dangling there,

threadworn and bleeding out memory,

skinned by the minute that is now upon us,

shaved of everything but the we that are in it.
Emily Bedard is our Poet in Residence for November.


Previously: Finale, Once Upon an Accountant, and Inside/Outside.
   

The cantaloupe sits

on the counter like

a little moon

                                swatted

off its course. 
Outside, grassy

undertones

and modest navel, 
inside, a wall
 
of pale orange fruit

and inside that

a child's night terror
of seeds and guts and string.

It is no matter:

The kitchen has

its own astronomy.

The instant the cutting edge
pierces the rind — flesh
 
yielding to steel —

the gig is up.

We simply eat.
              Outside the rain

arrests itself. A false sun

flourishes for the afternoon.

              Inside his bus
the busdriver sighs

ignoring if just

for an hour, the terrible

pair of pants

              knockkneed and

abandoned in

the empty seat.
How to hold it

all together: the violence

of the harvest, the embarrassment

of the blade. In his heart
of hearts, the buzzard

knows he is digestible.

He scans the plain:

Too much wild life.
He shakes the daylight

off his wings

and waits for the earth

to cough up the fruit,

for the night to bring

the knife. 
Emily Bedard is our Poet in Residence for November.


Previously: Finale, and Once Upon an Accountant.

Once upon a time

an accountant there was

who numbers loved 
And every day

numbers flew in

and numbers floated away

and days were numbers

and also gloves and boots and

numbers counted the noodles 
in his soup as he ate it
Until one day began

the numbers to slip

their shapes, to stand

up off their stools, to spool

into nests of number

and start to nap
And grew afraid the accountant

and strung up by elbows

the numbers and

to their chairs

he tied them with garden

twine and wire
And could not move

the numbers now or wave
 
or cartwheel their dance,

their fountaining over

each other all over, forgot,

the way they rose to the top

and tumbled down

began to be a dream
Until at last sneaked out

the accountant from his corner

to cut with nail scissors

the bonds, to filch

from the window an inch of air

to nudge a number, struggling,

to the sill and watch it, gasping,
toss itself out over into

the hedge. And then its brother.
 
And then its mother. And then

its son. Each number went.

Except for one.
And since that day ever

holds he the zero

to himself, at center chest,
 
hand over its open mouth

so hear he cannot

the tiny ringing cry: alone,
 
alone, alone,
 
alone.
Emily Bedard is our Poet in Residence for November.


Previously: Finale.
   

It was hours and then the end is almost over.

Velvet curtains all in rustle at the borders

of the stage. Our eyes are dry, our knees numb,
our temples dull. Nothing is left to be begun:

No tearing at the breasts of hairdoed birds,

no smooth unscrolling of the Italian words
for love and loss. No garden froth, no castle wall

to knock the sword against, no impossible

extension of the slenderest ankle in its arc.
The lights on stage will dim and so we feel the dark, 

feel how the real — real sex, real pain, real meat —

awaits us in the car. We feel the purses at our feet.
Onstage the voices call but we are half-

way back to home by now, numbering the claps,

saying the bravos that we hope are minimum.
We are adding up the babysitter's sum.

We are watching for the last breath of the lover.

We forget to be the ones who don't recover.
Emily Bedard is our Poet in Residence for November.

I go out to smoke but first

To get my lighter from the Jeep &

Walking past I see a lady

Leaning against a silver car in front of the bldg

She’s on the phone

She’s talking

& leaning is that her car
 
A crow is very upset

Calling & cawing & gargling it seems

A branch in the tree the lady

Does not notice me I see

Her pink hood & black hair her

Yellow bag leaning against

The silver car OK

That sounds very good to me

She says & leans fwd toward

The thread between her

& another lady it must be
 
On the other end a thread

Stretched like the two plus

Hundred years of silence
 
Btwn Emily & the shepherd
 
Begging live with me come be

My love the silence

Is the most important element of

Any poem according to Allen

Grossman she’s discussing the

Details of meeting somewhere else if

I’m not there then  
No I cannot
Kary Wayson is the Seattle Review of Books Poet in Residence for October.

Previously: My Subjects, My Own Hikmet Poem, Farthermore, and Glugs of Amber Winelight Lay.