Making Things Right

For My Father

By, Barbara Bloom

Driving through the apple orchards
heavy with fruit,

I realize I have let the anniversary of your death
slip by-ten years already, or is it eleven?
It's a gray morning, and the clouds press down,
obscuring the sun.


I wonder if you knew

when you had to be helped on with your shoes

for the ride to the hospital

that you would never again
stroke your cat
or walk into your lab room
with its walls lined with antique instruments and books.



What I remember most from that time

is standing by your bed

as you grew smaller and smaller,
less and less of you

who had so frightened me as a child,
and looking down at you

lying there quietly

when it was too late to talk.

I just held your hand 

and told you I loved you.

I don't know what you heard 

or what you knew,
but those words were all that was left
that could matter
before you leapt off
from your bed

in that tiny white room
into something huge.

Practicing, by Marie Howe

I want to write a love poem for the girls I kissed in seventh grade,
a song for what we did on the floor in the basement

of somebody’s parents’ house, a hymn for what we didn’t say but thought:
That feels good or I like that, when we learned how to open each other’s mouths

how to move our tongues to make somebody moan. We called it practicing, and
one was the boy, and we paired off- maybe six or eight girls- and turned out

the lights and kissed and kissed until we were stoned on kisses, and lifted our
nightgowns or let the straps drop, and, Now you be the boy:

concrete floor, sleeping bag or couch, playroom, game room, train room, laundry.
Linda’s basement was like a boat with booths and portholes

instead of windows. Gloria’s father had a bar downstairs with stools that spun,
plush carpeting. We kissed each other’s throats.

We sucked each other’s breasts, and we left marks, and never spoke of it upstairs
outdoors, in daylight, not once. We did it, and it was

practicing, and slept, sprawled so our legs still locked or crossed, a hand still lost

in someone’s hair…and we grew up and hardly mentioned who
the first kiss really was- a girl like us, still sticky with the moisturizer we’d
shared in the bathroom. I want to write a song

for that thick silence in the dark, and the first pure thrill of unreluctant desire,
just before we made ourselves stop.

Fragments

On napkins, in notebooks, or scraps

shoved away in drawers,

the phrases like shirts draped over chairs,

tried on but never worn.

Thoughts that had a chance,

but were discontinued like ice cream flavors

you had loved but not enough people did:

the wildflowers from the farm

bursting from a tin pail,

and how the summer disappears.

How at age six I first saw Monet's waterlillies,

and after, all I could paint were

textureless waterlillies.

Five foot fourth grader grows normal.

Sex ed videos with people eating peaches.

Disaster du jour.

Claiming our innocence long after it's gone.

The conversations of our past

that we were too passive in.

In church, small and suffocated amongst

Polish women plump in fur and rouge.

And all of those will be lost in time,

crushed between pages of books

I'll never flip back through.

Thoughts with ellipses

that went untouched.

Alexandra Ustach

Dulce et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! –An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime. –
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Married Love, by Liz Rosenberg

The trees are uncurling their first
green messages: Spring, and some man
lets his arm brush my arm in a darkened
theater. Faint-headed, I fight the throb.
Later I dream
the gas attendant puts a cool hand
on my breast, asking a question.
Slowly I rise through the surface of the dream,
Brushing his hand & my own heat away.

Young, I burned to marry. Married,
the smolder goes on underground;
clutching at weeds, writhing everywhere.
I’m trying to talk to a friend on burning
issues, flaming from the feet up,
drinking in his breath, touching his wrist.
I want to grab the pretty woman
on the street, seize the falcon
by its neck, beat my way into whistling steam.

I turn to you in the dark, oh husband,
watching your lit breath circle the pillow.
Then you turn to me, throwing first one limb
and then another over me, in the easy brotherly lust of
marriage. I cling to you
as if I were a burning ship and you
could save me, as if I won’t go sliding down beneath you
soon; as if our lives are made of rise and fall, and we could
ride this out forever, with longing’s thunder rolling heavy in our arms.