2006
Claire McQuerry – Claire McQuerry is
from
Kelli Russell Agodon – Kelli
Russell Agodon is the author of two books of poems, Small
Knots (2004) and Geography, winner of the 2003 Floating
Bridge Press Chapbook Award.
Janet Norman Knox – Janet Norman Knox’s poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize
and have appeared in journals such as Red Mountain Review, Diagram, Rhino, Diner,
Seattle Review, Cranky Literary Journal, Pearl, Adirondack Review, Can We Have
Our Ball Back? and in the anthologies Pontoon
6, 7, and 8 and Red, White, and Blues (Iowa
University Press). Her chapbooks were finalists in the Concrete Wolf 2006 and Red
Mountain Review and New Michigan Press 2005 contests.
Poem for the
It was Sunday's last
run, day nearly
gone,
she drifting alone on the platform
at
Varenne (beside Rodin's Penseur
in
bronze), sad in her raincoat. And I don't
know
why I should recall her now, except
that
faces have stopped making
sense,
have turned to floating debris
at
the end of a tunnel's dark throat.
I've become like the
catfish or any
skimmer
of murky depths whose
j
a
glimmer of scale amid the shiftings
of
dark particulate. It's the perpetual
unlight that makes you work
your
gills, crave a cigarette against
the
tightness that is not caused by lack
of
oxygen, but absence of sky. Charonne,
Voltaire, Ambroise- aretes like beads,
jabber
down a rosary of track in profane
prayer.
And the morning crowds
that
ebb to afternoon trickle, swell
with
evening's rush, and the doors that sigh
and
close with a shudder, the capsulate fluorescence,
leave
always the same impression:
dark
coats, pale cheeks, dirty walls. Until, after
a
time, desire dissolves to one
insistent
dream-le reve le plus beau-
undying
day.
June. Mademoiselle in
her raincoat
beside
me. We sun ourselves at
and,
even in summer, our toes freeze in floating
light. Shallows of a glacial lake.
Claire
McQuerry
I Stay Up All Night and Grieve for the
Future
You make me vegetable
curry
and
I am too hungry to taste it.
You love my garden.
I plant a fence.
There are lentils on
your shirt
and
while the untouched roasted
garlic
is the moon, the moon
is
the unsaid Gaelic prayer
I whisper when you are
sleeping.
Let me be your
absentminded lover,
the
split wishbone
confusing
broke for misery. I sing
in
your dreams- Ar n-aran laethuil
tabhair duinn inniu-
and
when your hands open,
I look from your
emptiness-
everything
and too much, half
a
fig and you give me more.
I sew poverty to my
blouse
and
blame you for providing
the
thread and needle. You stitch me
a
new shirt, the pockets are full
of
spices. I open my lips and your breath
fills
me. Tonight it is enough.
Kelli Russell Agodon
Note: Ar n-ardn laethuil
tabbair duinn inniu is Irish Gaelic for "Give us this day our daily
bread" from
"The
Lord's Prayer."
The Beauty of the Husband in Fall
When you called to ask
me
to
give you more time I was sure
we
were new lovers breathless
with
chance unsure unsure
afraid
when one button unthreads
itself
through its hole a wrist
a
forearm wanting
to
run from the room avert
eyes
or danger or making
mistakes
and now you bare
your
need for patience
to
change adjust to what
befalls
you
need
in running
a
family because
I can only bear
seeing
one part of your body
again
for the first time.
Janet
Norman Knox