National Poetry Month

Given the erudition and intellect of our readership, I'm certain that all of you know that April is National Poetry Month. I celebrated by writing a little verse that drew comparison to Ogden Nash. I published it on Facebook, but it's reprinted at the bottom of this post.

My work, though, quakes before the poets lauded by Flavorwire as 10 of the Most Badass Contemporary American Poets. Badass poets? Badass poets.No shrinking violets, these, tucked behind a desk pensively looking out a window on a verdant tableau. Rather motorcycles, skulls whiskey, blood, guns, and grit. A few of my favorite verses follow:

You Asked How (formerly Even Now She Is Turning, Saying Everything I Always Wanted Her to Say)

At the end there were straws
in her glove compartment, I'd split them open
to taste the familiar bitter residue, near the end
I ate all her Percodans, hungry to know
how far they could take me.
A bottle of red wine each night moved her along
as she wrote, I feel too much, again and again.

You asked how and I said, Suicide, and you asked
how and I said, An overdose, and then
she shot herself, and your eyes filled
with wonder, so I added, In the chest, so you
wouldn't think
her face was gone, and it mattered, somehow,
that you knew this. . .

Every year I'm eight years old and the world
is no longer safe. Our phone becomes unlisted, our mail
is kept in a box at the post office,
and my mother tells me always
leave a light on so it seems
someone is home. She finds a cop
for her next boyfriend, his hair
greasy, pushed back with his fingers. He lets me play
with his service revolver while they kiss
on the couch. Cars slowly fill the windows, and I aim,
making the noise with my mouth, in case it's them,
and when his back is hunched over her I aim
between his shoulder blades, silently,
in case it's him.

Nick Flynn (author of Another Night of Bullshit in Suck City)

Disappointments of the Apocalypse

Once warring factions agreed upon the date   

and final form the apocalypse would take,   

and whether dogs and cats and certain trees

deserved to sail, and if the dead would come or be left   

a forwarding address, then opposing soldiers   

met on ravaged plains to shake hands   

and postulate the exact shade

of the astral self—some said lavender,   

others gray. And physicists rocketed

copies of the decree to paradise

in case God had anything to say,

the silence that followed being taken   

for consent, and so citizens

readied for celestial ascent.

Those who hated the idea stayed indoors   

till the appointed day. When the moon   

clicked over the sun like a black lens   

over a white eye, they stepped out   

onto porches and balconies to see   

the human shapes twist and rise   

through violet sky and hear trees uproot   

with a sound like enormous zippers   

unfastening. And when the last grassblades   

filled the air, the lonely vigilants fell   

in empty fields to press their bodies   

hard into dirt, hugging their own outlines.

Then the creator peered down from his perch,   

as the wind of departing souls tore the hair   

of those remaining into wild coronas,   

and he mourned for them as a father   

for defiant children, and he knew that each   

small skull held, if not some vision

of his garden, then its aroma of basil

and tangerine washed over by the rotting sea.   

They alone sensed what he’d wanted

as he first stuck his shovel into clay

and flung the planets over his shoulder,

or used his thumbnail to cut smiles and frowns   

on the first blank faces. Even as the saints   

arrived to line before his throne singing

and a wisteria poked its lank blossoms

through the cloudbank at his feet,

he trained his gaze on the deflating globe

where the last spreadeagled Xs clung like insects,   

then vanished in puffs of luminous smoke,

which traveled a long way to sting his nostrils,   

the journey lasting more than ten lifetimes.   

A mauve vine corkscrewed up from the deep   

oblivion, carrying the singed fume

of things beautiful, noble, and wrong. 

 

Mary Karr

 

a poem for spring

dandelion, so beautiful
I sing your praises
now please die

 

rob