Regret
(Poem on the Death of Elvis the Cat)

Elvis won't eat. He's twenty years old. Mostly he sleeps,
staggers off to the litter box, drags himself back - - -

fur like a thrift-store suit, rumpled, bagged at the knees.
You've been avoiding the trip to the vet - - - the news will be bad.

"For Christ's sake," your wife says on the third day.
"I can't stand it." So you grab an old sweater, wrap up

the shivering cat, put sweater and cat in a cardboard box.
He hates the car, still has enough chi left to yowl the whole way - - -

he knows where he's going, knows he's not coming back.
The office is bright, toxic with Lysol, sharp funk of animal fear.

You hold the box on your lap. Elvis papoosed in your sweater,
panting, eyes dull. Whatever love is, it's not what you feel

for this cat - - - sprayer, shredder of chairs, backhanded gift
from a breakup - - - your ex moved in with her girlfriend,

no pets allowed. Two seats down a woman shushes
her mutt: it yaps at the end of its leash. Then it's your turn.

"Good night, old boy," the vet says. The needle slips in.
Elvis sighs, his flat skull in your hand. He purrs for a second

or two and then stops. You can't love what you don't love;
you try to be kind. But the sweater is Brooks Brothers,

cashmere. You've had it since grad school - - - it's black
and still fits. Not really thinking, you lift the dead cat,

unwrap the sweater, lay the lank purse of bones
back in its box. You leave him there at the vet's - - -

no little backyard service for you. You drive home.
Your wife says, "That's it?" and you nod.

There's not much that keeps you awake anymore:
the future all rumor and smoke, a bus that never comes

until it comes - - - the past already published, out of your hands.
So what do you do with it, then? Shoved into the closet,

moth-reamed, way in the back. Crouched in its dark corner:
the thing that still fits. The thing you can't throw away.

--- Jon Loomis
©2015 Poetry Daily

---

My Brother is Busy

My brother is busy packing for jail. I sit on his bed and watch him
set aside a blank notebook, pen, copy of Genet's "Thief's Journal."
Jean Genet did some of his best writing in prison, he tells me.

I want to say, he was a glamorous playwright in Paris, France,
you are a drug addict-sometime singer in Bakersfield, California.
Jean-Paul Sartre will not be coming to your rescue. Instead,

I say, I'm not sure they'll let you have that fountain pen.
The romance of jail, of positive spins, has captured my brother
in the June-addled San Joaquin Valley. He's hoping that this time

the judge will sentence him to a prison rehab unit. I'm done caring
what he hopes, or so I think, only here to pick up what's left of mine
that he hasn't pawned, then return to school. My first summer

on parole from stomach pumpings, bail bondsmen, high dramas
in the house on Occidental Street. I can write with anything. He removes
the pen from the stack. I can write in dust, I can write with my mind.

Here is the part where the sister laughs, where she may later wish
for a chance at revision. We don't know it, but this is our last conversation.
My brother will be dead in two weeks, I'll be in some other city

when he overdoses on downers as our parents drink double
vodka tonics in another room. I'll get a call at 2 am. Someone
will say, This is your mama speaking. And I'll answer, Who?

--- Candace Pearson
From Wide Awake:
Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond
©2015 Pacific Coast Poetry Series

---

When Tony Hoagland Says
My Maternal Instincts
Are Impressive

I think maybe he means my plumage
does not distract from my talons.

How in the requiem of my ovaries
I am building a barn full of pianos.

Or perhaps my fears still wear
their oversized clothing?

I don't know what he means.
Some people will eat anything.

I wish I dreamed of wild horses
instead of hamsters.

When Persephone fell down
off the bathroom counter

I tried all night to bring her back.
She had six babies to feed,

each smaller than my pinky.
So even after her sister Luna

chewed off half her face, I let
those blind squirming erasers suck

their dead mother until I had to
pluck them off one by one by one.

--- Jenny Browne © 2015
The Boston Review

Dumpsters
Patti White

I met her in the Public Library, reading Sir Thomas Wyatt,
the Elder, the Renaissance court poet you know, you know the one
about the deer, they flee from me, like how tourists scurry away
only in the poem it's the beggars, the lovers, the deer
who run after having fed, the deer refuse to return to his hand,
it's a sad story.

An educated woman, and a clean one: she bathes in the restroom
on the third floor; when she begs on 42nd Street she's a queen,
a rock in the current, impeccable, correct, her open palm
smooth and dry as a hen's egg. Her knitted cap covers hair
I've combed out with my own fingers. She comes to me

after rush hour, and we walk like in the movies, down alleys;
she recites poetry, she wears moonlight and neon like a crown,
and we eat whenever we please. Sometimes I find an empty dumpster,
not one near a restaurant but a business dumpster, one that held
shredded printouts, canceled checks and memos, fax paper, forms,
and we climb inside, concealed, sheltered, and make love. Once

when she was angry, she crawled out of the dumpster and beat
on the metal with an abandoned chair she found outside, thunder
whispers in comparison; it was the sound of absolute hell, utter
destruction; my head hurt for a week. I know I'm not the man

of her dreams. I'm King Lear on the heath, crazy, cold with
despair; I rave; my clothes are shabby. With my kingdom
divided, there are no more decisions to make, and my mind
gets weak. She is a scholar; I am afraid of books. I rave
and she listens to me, comforts me, tells me my daughter
will save me one day and I believe her.

--- From Tackle Box
©2002 Ashinga Press

---

Good Girl

Look at you, sitting there being good.
After two years you're still dying for a cigarette.
And not drinking on weekdays, who thought that one up?
Don't you want to run to the corner right now
for a fifth of vodka and have it with cranberry juice
and a nice lemon slice, wouldn't the backyard
that you're so sick of staring out into
look better then, the tidy yard your landlord tends
day and night --- the fence with its fresh coat of paint,
the ash-free barbeque, the patio swept clean of small twigs ---
don't you want to mess it all up, to roll around
like a dog in his flowerbeds? Aren't you a dog anyway,
always groveling for love and begging to be petted?
You ought to get into the garbage and lick the insides
of the can, the greasy wrappers, the picked-over bones,
you ought to drive your snout into the coffee grounds.
Ah, coffee! Why not gulp some down with four cigarettes
and then blast naked into the streets, and leap on the first
beautiful man you find? The words Ruin me, haven't they
been jailed in your throat for forty years, isn't it time
you set them loose in slutty dresses and torn fishnets
to totter around in five-inch heels and slutty mascara?
Sure it's time. You've rolled over long enough.
Forty, forty-one. At the end of all this
there's one lousy biscuit, and it tastes like dirt.
So get going. Listen: they're howling for you now:
up and down the block your neighbors' dogs
burst into frenzied barking and won't shut up.

--- ©2011 Kim Addonizio

---

In Our Stairwell

In the evenings,
a bunch of youths
dwelt in our stairwell.
They drank vodka,
pissed up the wall
and jeered humankind.
Every morning, as I went to work,
there was an empty bottle
on a landing,
and it smelt of urine.

Once I said to the youngsters,
"You may drink vodka if you wish,
but it would be better if you
refrained from urinating here,
it's not a nice thing to do.
As for humankind,
we should not laugh at it
but mourn it."

Since that day
the youths in our stairwell
drink vodka,
lament bitterly over humankind
and exhaust themselves
abstaining from urination.
They would rather die than take a piss.

- - - Gennady Alexeyev
Translation ©1987 Anatoly Kudryavitsky
From A Night in the Nabokov Hotel

---

Death(having lost)

death(having lost)put on his universe
and yawned:it looks like rain
(they've played for timelessness
with chips of when)
that's yours;i guess
you'll have to loan me pain
to take the hearse,
see you again.

Love(having found)wound up such pretty toys
as themselves could not know:
the earth tinily whirls;
while daisies grow
(and boys and girls
have whispered thus and so)
and girls with boys
to bed will go,

--- From 50 Poems
E. E. Cummings

---

Isabel's Corrido
Para Isabel

Francisca said: Marry my sister so she can stay in the country.
I had nothing else to do. I was twenty-three and always cold, skidding
in cigarette-coupon boots from lamppost to lamppost through January
in Wisconsin. Francisca and lsabel washed bedsheels at the hotel,
sweating in the humidity of the laundry room, conspiring in Spanish.

I met her the next day. Isabel was nineteen, from a village where the elders
spoke the language of the Aztecs. She would smile whenever the ice pellets
of English clattered around her head. When the justice of the peace said
You may kiss the bride, our lips brushed for the first and only time.
The borrowed ring was too small, jammed into my knuckle.
There were snapshots of the wedding and champagne in plastic cups.Francisca said: The snapshots will be proof for Immigration.
We heard rumors of the interview: they would ask me the color
of her underwear. They would ask her who rode on top.
We invented answers and rehearsed our lines. We flipped through
Immigration forms at the kitchen table the way other couples
shuffled cards for gin rummy. After every hand, l'd deal again.

Isabel would say: Quiero ver las fotos. She wanted to see the pictures
of a wedding that happened but did not happen, her face inexplicably
happy, me hoisting a green bottle, dizzy after half a cup of champagne.

Francisco said: She can sing corridos, songs of love and revolution
from the land of Zapata. All night Isabel sang corridos in a barroom
where no one understood a word. I was the bouncer and her husband,
so I hushed the squabbling drunks, who blinked like tortoises in the sun.

Her boyfriend and his beer cans never understood why she married me.
Once he kicked the front door down, and the blast shook the house
as if a hand grenade detonated in the hallway. When the cops arrived,
I was the translator, watching the sergeant watching her, the inscrutable
squaw from every Western he had ever seen, bare feet and long black hair.

We lived behind a broken door. We lived in a city hidden from the city.
When her headaches began, no one called a doctor. When she disappeared for days, no one called the police. When we rehearsed the questions
for Immigration. Isabel would squint and smile. Quiero ver las fotos.
she would say. When the interview was canceled, like a play on opening night
shut down when the actors are too drunk to take the stage. After she left,
I found her crayon drawing of a bluebird tacked to the bedroom wall.

I left too and did not think of Isabel until the night Francisca called to say:
Your wife is dead. Something was growing in her brain. I imagined my wife
who was not my wife, who never slept beside me, sleeping in the ground,
Wondered if my name was carved into the cross above her hand, no epitaph
and no corrido, another ghost in a riot of ghosts evaporating from the skin
of dead Mexicans who staggered for days without water through the desert.

Thirty years ago, a girl from the land of Zapata kissed me once
on the lips and died with my name nailed to hers like a broken door.
I kept a snapshot of the wedding: yesterday it washed ashore on my desk.

There was a conspiracy to commit a crime. This is my confession: I'd do it again.

--- From Poetry of Resistance
Martín Espada
©2016 University of Arizona Press

---

Men as Trees, Walking

I learned early what that verse
meant, "For now we see as through a glass
darkly." My mother wouldn't buy me any
glasses because then I'd be a foureyes
maybe even play in the band like the rest
of the pansies, or like my father, polishing
his lenses, head bent, hands
before his face as if
praying, no football
hero. Teachers tired of my leaning
in from the front row, chalk dust in
my hair, begged her in notes: like the blind
man in the Bible miracle, he sees men
as trees, and trees as lime
jello. Going out for passes, I was
lost like the end of the world when
everybody running sees the sky but me.
The coach threw his hat in the dust, "Son,
have you EVER caught a pass?" I never
did, but when she gave in, let me have
my specs, it was like heaven, she even more
beautiful with wrinkles, people gross
as bears now limber as hickory, spare
as willows. And the trees, firmed up,
erect at last, were like emerald fish
with each scale whole and succinct,
as if they would never, ever drop a leaf
or a pass.

--- William Greenway

---

Talking Big
John Bricuth

We are sitting here at dinner talking big.
I am between the two dullest men in the world
Across from the fattest woman I ever met.
We are talking big. Someone has just remarked
That energy equals the speed of light squared.
We nod, feeling that that is "pretty nearly correct."
I remark that the square on the hypotenuse can more
Than equal the squares on the two sides. The squares
On the two sides object. The hypotenuse over the way
Is gobbling the grits. We are talking big. The door
Opens suddenly revealing a vista that stretches
To infinity. Parenthetically, someone remarks
That a body always displaces its own weight.
I note at the end of the gallery stands a man
In a bowler and a black coat with an apple where
His head should be, with his back to me, and it is me.
I clear my throat and re (parenthetically) mark
That a body always falls of its own weight.
"whoosh-WHOOM!" Sighs the hypotenuse across,
And (godknows) she means it with all her heart.

--- From Words Burnished by Music
©2004, Johns Hopkins
University Press

---

When I Was a Tiger
Translated by Lisa Rappoport

When I was a tiger
I hunted in the forest

My claws struck me as quite beautiful
when I tore into gazelles with them

At night I dreamt of red flesh, white teeth,
my lover's ebony eyes

During the day I wandered, hunted, and listened
for a signal from my heart

The whole world was striped
like me

---

Cuando era tigre
[Lisa Rappoport y Sasha Ryerson]

Cuando era tigre
cazaba en la selva

Juzgaba mis garras muy hermosas
cuando las usaba para atacar las gacelas

Las noches soñaba en carne roja, dientes blancos,
los ojos negros de mi amor

Los días caminaba, cazaba y esperaba
un señal de mi corazón

Todo el mundo era rayado
como yo