ISSUE 9 - JUNE 2014

CONTENTS

Eloise Stonborough wrote a highly inspiring paragraph for Lavender Review, in which she says in part: “That’s why a journal devoted to lesbian poetry and art is vital: ...it makes visible the common themes between otherwise dissimilar writers and artists...” With Issue 9, I’ve decided, for the time being, to drop my practice of assigning themes to issues, and to let “common themes” emerge naturally. To tap into the lesbian collective unconscious of a group of my most-loved poets and artists, I invited them to contribute a poem or artwork of their choice. Would the poetry and art cohere into a unified issue? Would the poems speak to each other? Would the artworks speak to each other? Would the poetry speak to the art, and the art speak to the poetry? I'm deeply honored to include a poem by, and selected by, Naomi Replansky, who was born in 1918 and lives in New York (!!!!!!). The poems of a more historical nature on the page called “A Parisian Roof Garden in 1918” are in the public domain. The poems by Colleen McKee, Eleanor Lerman, Janice Gould, Judy Grahn, kathryn l. pringle, Nicole Brossard, Risa Denenberg, Rita Mae Reese, Robin Becker, and Suzanne Gardinier are making their first appearance here.

This issue is dedicated with love and thanks to Eloise Klein Healy. Here’s an excerpt from her poem “Working Towards Sappho”:

Whatever emerges, a poem
written by a lesbian poet
has a heritage of flame,
and no matter what Sappho was,
any woman who “comes out”
springs from a burned life
as a poem.


Mary Meriam, Editor
Lavender Review

ISSUE 9 - JUNE 2014 - CONTENTS

POETRY

ART

COLLEEN MCKEE Howard Street, San Francisco,  Sunday Afternoon ELEANOR LERMAN Hello, By the Way JANICE GOULD Waking in the Dark JUDY GRAHN Magda: KATHRYN L. PRINGLE temper. NICOLE BROSSARD [brushing the song in you] NAOMI REPLANSKY The Oasis RISA DENENBERG Before world RITA MAE REESE At 36, Hulga Speaks of Love ROBIN BECKER The Black Bear Inside Me SUZANNE GARDINIER Atlas VARIOUS POETS A Parisian Roof Garden in 1918

ANNE BENTLEY Yellow (this is not a vase) (2013) COLLEEN MCKEE Weird Orbits (2013-2014) DIANE TANCHAK Desolation Tree (2010) HANNAH BARRETT The Help Desk (2013) JANE LEWIS Sketchbook (2014) JANICE GOULD Pulpit Rock, Colorado Springs (2012) JEN P. HARRIS untitled (blue cups) (2014) JESSICA BURKE Angëlle as Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford  of Mommie Dearest (2014) MADY (MARIE BOURDAGES) Mcp et Mady Gambettent et placottent à la nuit tombante (c. 1999) MAURA MCGURK Treehouse (2013) PATRICIA CRONIN Female (After Rodin) (2010) LAURA GILPIN Black Mesa (1952)

Colleen McKee

Howard Street, San Francisco, Sunday Afternoon

At 8th

This gal waits for the light with spandex galaxies
painted on her legs


Across the way

A mural in which a ghost
shows a child how to fly
from a broken room

Real pigeons peck
at the kid’s hands


Looking left and right

I want to stop, to write
but the only bench on Howard
has this posted sign:
No Loitering!
We Will Call
SFPD!


On the corner of 7th

A teenage girl sleeps
in nothing but fuchsia
bra and panties
her thumb in her mouth

Gold curls sweat
a storm around her face
focused on a difficult dream

I want to wake her but what
would I say?

This is the question
I’ll carry home

---

Colleen McKee is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and memoir: My Hot Little Tomato and A Partial List of Things I Have Done for Money. She is also co-editor of an anthology of personal narratives, Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak About Health Care in America. Her most recent book is called Nine Kinds of Wrong. It includes poetry, fiction, and memoir. Colleen lives in Oakland, CA and teaches at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. You may visit her blog or contact her.

Anne Bentley

Yellow (this is not a vase)
2013 © Anne Bentley
from the 2014 exhibition, Kitchen Sink and Other Domestic Disturbances.
50cmx40cm Lambda archival print.

Eleanor Lerman

Hello, By the Way

It’s true that this story could easily start out
pretending to take place somewhere suitable
for the dawning of those long-awaited revelations
about the meaning of your life that were
anticipated but actually, were never really
going to bubble up, and so we find you—

hello, by the way—sitting in your trailer
by the side of the highway, doing nothing much,
or maybe in an apartment in the kind of neighborhood
where you have to walk ten blocks just to buy
a light bulb, and by the time you get back,
the city is already charging you more for electricity
More and more and more. (And here’s an
important note: the following information isn’t
going to help a bit if you expected the costs that are
extracted from you were ever likely to go down)

So, girl, this is what we suggest: take off those damn boots
that everybody is clunking around in now because they
think they’re so tough and put on a pair of comfortable shoes
Pack a lunch and a small weapon and go get that
big dog of yours, the one the landlord keeps telling you
all the neighbors are afraid of—yes, that dog,
who sleeps at the foot of your bed and barks
at ghosts—and both of you, go stand by the window

Now do you see what’s coming? Maybe it’s still too dark
and you’re probably mesmerized by all those falling stars,
but don’t believe anything they say because we all look alike
to them and they don’t know you, they don’t know
what you’ve been through or where you should be heading
Besides, in a moment, they’ll all be gone and a
certain sort of light will begin slipping through the cracks
in the world; not too insistent but still bright enough
to illuminate the kind of story this really is:

one in which there is a car parked outside, so that
when the moment comes—or more likely, is wrestled
to the ground by you, armed and ready to extract a
confession—you will be the first of those who get away

---

Eleanor Lerman is the author of six books of poetry, Armed Love, Wesleyan University Press, 1973; Come the Sweet By and By, University of Massachusetts Press, 1975; The Mystery of Meteors; Sarabande Books 2001; Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds, Sarabande Books 2005, The Sensual World Re-emerges, Sarabande Books 2010, and Strange Life, Mayapple Press, 2014. She has also authored two collections of short stories, Observers and Other Stories, Artemis Press 2002, and The Blonde on the Train, Mayapple Press, 2009. Her first novel, Janet Planet, was published by Mayapple in 2011. She has been nominated for a National Book Award, received grants from the Puffin Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts and won the 2006 Lenore Marshall Prize for the year’s best book for poetry for Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds. In 2011, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Her second novel, Radiomen, will be published by The Permanent Press in 2015.

Colleen McKee

Colleen McKee
Weird Orbits
ink, watercolor pencil, and oil pastel on a 4" x 6" index card
2013-2014

Janice Gould

Waking in the Dark

                    For Marta Snow

Waking in the dark, I lie in bed near the open window
and stare at the sky.

Stars pass by like migrants,
each one bent with a burden of light,
each one murmuring a little song
remembered from childhood.

The road they tread is long, their feet dusty,
hardened by the persistence
and permanence of passage.

Night wind rushes past
cool as velvet, smelling faintly
of lilac and sand.

It nudges the stars along,
and when they begin to wane
whispers encouragement, explaining
the necessity of movement,
proposing a purpose:

that simple relativity sustains us,
that the force of gratitude connects us on our journey,
watchers of skies and stars.

Waking in the dark,
I lie in bed near the open window
and stare at the sky.

---

Janice Gould’s tribal affiliation is Koyoonk’auwi (Concow).  She grew up in Berkeley, California and attended the University of California, Berkeley, earning a BA in linguistics and an MA in English. She completed her Ph.D. in English at the University of New Mexico, with a concentration in Native American Literature. In 2008, she earned a Master’s degree in Library Science at the University of Arizona, and also completed work for a certification in Museum Studies.

Janice was recently named the Pike’s Peak Poet Laureate for 2014-2016 and, as a result, was recognized with a “Spirit of the Springs” Award from the City of Colorado Springs. Her poetry is published in over sixty journals and reviews. She has earned awards for her writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Astraea Foundation, the online journal, Native Literatures: Generations, and from the Pikes Peak Arts Council. In 2012 she was the Native American writer in residence at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, the second person to hold this honor. Her most recent book of poetry, Doubters and Dreamers, from the University of Arizona Press, was a Colorado Book Award Finalist and a Milt Kessler Book Award Finalist. Her other books include Earthquake Weather, also from the University of Arizona Press, Beneath My Heart from Firebrand Books, and Alphabet, an artbook/chapbook published by May Day Press. The University of Arizona Press also published a volume Janice co-edited, Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. 

Janice is an Associate Professor in Women’s and Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, where she developed and coordinates the program for certification in Native American Studies. Her many other talents include music performance, music composition, and photography. You can view some of her photographic work here.

Diane Tanchak

Diane Tanchak
Desolation Tree
2010
22" x 15"gouache on paper

Judy Grahn

Magda:

But if you’re going to go
dying on your tree
don’t forget to come
back to me, give me this

Send me a cloud of birds
messages of mist
and dreams, dreams I can
remember, vivid and real
dreams I can tell

How we used to go strolling
down along the beach
to watch the early morning light
walk upon the water
That’s you, I would say, that’s your spell

As we were talking
you would reach for my hand
you know I can’t stand
not to see you again
not to feel your body near
not to hear your voice

But I need the choice
not to follow your pain
I want to stay here
for as long as I can
I don’t yet want to cross
to wherever you are

Wasn’t it bad enough
I had to watch you
meet your nails
wasn’t it bitter enough
I had to solace others
over your travails

Wasn’t it sad enough
I had to accompany your mother
while we washed you
the prescribed number of times
the prescribed prayers and herbs
I, who never prescribed anything
except you and your words

Don’t forget to come back again
don’t forget to give me the kiss
to last a lifetime
if you’re going to go dying
on your cross
don’t forget to come back to me
at least toss me a lifeline
don’t just leave me, give me this

---

Judy Grahn is internationally known as a poet and cultural theorist. Her writings helped fuel second wave feminist, gay, and lesbian activism, as well as women’s and queer spirituality.  She has received two American Book Awards, two Lambda literature awards, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Triangle Publishers, who also established the Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award. This year she was selected Lifetime Achievement Grand Marshall for the Gay Pride Parade in San Francisco.

She has published three poetry collections, eight chapbooks, and two book-length poems, and four nonfiction books, including Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds, and Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World.  Her latest collection of poetry and prose is The Judy Grahn Reader, and her memoir, A Simple Revolution: the Making of an Activist Poet. 

Judy is a professor in the Women’s Spirituality Master’s Program at Sofia University in Palo Alto, Ca. She co-edits an online journal based in her theory of ritual origins: Metaformia Journal.

Judy’s poem “Magda” in this issue is a venture into her third book-length poem, “The Queen of Cups”.

Hannah Barrett

Hannah Barrett
The Help Desk
2013
76" x 42" acrylic and oil on canvas

kathryn l. pringle

temper.

“We could forgive the person who handcuffs our love to a fence over a roaring river, but not the one who rips nine bullets through the Body of our love and tosses our love in.”
Ancient and Anonymous


it is suspected that in time and with time are interchangeable—token—phrases, standing by and readily applicable for any montage depicting healing themes, suitable for any audience and especially useful in matters of the heart. this I feel I must correct. or, if correct I cannot, at least clarify.


I fear there is a universally accepted image of healing that is not truly healing, simply good enough. will do. stuffed with gauze to slow the bleeding. a thin layer of skin grown over.


= a tightrope. 


across which my temples can be found.


I’ve tried to sever the suction cups of the tentacles from the bottoms of my feet with a blade, gauze, and medical tape. I think it could work if I had a higher tolerance for pain and less attachment to place, however, as it is it is like my pain and the tentacle’s pain are both my pain—a haunted Body: I cannot now risk extraction without considering the possible homicide of myself. maybe even someone else [I have yet to prove that I am not attached to some number of others]. the they has more than me. there is more than me.

---

kathryn l. pringle is the author of Temper & Felicity are Lovers (July 2014). fault tree (Omnidawn, 2011), RIGHT NEW BIOLOGY (Factory School, 2009) & The Stills (Duration Press, 2006). A new book, Obscenity for the Advancement of Poetry, is forthcoming from Omnidawn in 2017.

Jane Lewis

Jane Lewis, Sketchbook (2014)

Naomi Replansky

The Oasis

I thought I held a fruit cupped in my hand.
Its sweetness burst
And loosed its juice. After long traveling,
After so long a thirst,
          I asked myself: Is this a drought-born dream?
          It was no dream.

I thought I slipped into a hidden room
Out of harsh light.
In cushioned dark, among rich furnishings,
There I restored my sight.
          Such luxury could never be for me!
          It was for me.

I thought I touched a mind that fitted mine
As bodies fit,
Angle to curve; and my mind throbbed to feel
The pulsing of that wit.
          This comes too late, I said. It can’t be true!
          But it was true.

I thought the desert ended, and I felt
The fountains leap.
Then gratitude could answer gratitude
Till sleep entwined with sleep.
          Despair once cried: No passion’s left inside!
          It lied. It lied.


1987

---

Naomi Replansky was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1918. Ring Song (Scribner, 1952) was a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry. The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems, 1934-1994, was published by Another Chicago Press in 1994. Her Collected Poems (Godine/Black Sparrow, 2012) won the William Carlos Williams award of the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for Poets’ Prize. She lives in New York; her partner is the writer Eva Kollisch. “The Oasis” was published in Replansky's Collected Poems. 

Janice Gould

Janice Gould, Pulpit Rock, Colorado Springs  (2012)

Nicole Brossard

[brushing the song in you]

brushing the song in you
till smooth lively semaphore sounds
signals love or skin of certitude
till dawn till you
feel that blue surfing horizon
retina enlighten

and again
brushing the real in you
so it could if it could

dissolve time
into spacious mysterious sounds
of throat

let me see that translation again
from the angle of ardor

---

Born in Montréal. Poet, novelist and essayist, twice Governor General winner for her poetry, Nicole Brossard has published more than thirty books since 1965. Many among those books have been translated into English: Mauve Desert, Lovhers, The Blue Books, Museum of Bone and Water, Notebook of roses and civilization (trans. by Erin Moure and Robert Majzels, Shortlisted for the Griffin international poetry prize 2008), Fences in Breathing (novel) and Selections : the poetry of Nicole Brossard, University of California Press, 2009. She has cofounded and codirected the avant-garde literary magazine La Barre du Jour (1965-1975), has codirected the film Some American Feminists (1976) and coedited the well acclaimed Anthologie de la poésie des femmes au Québec, first published in 1991 then in 2003. She has also won le Grand Prix de Poésie du Festival international de Trois-Rivières in 1989 and in 1999. In 1991, she was attributed le Prix Athanase-David (the highest literary recognition in Québec). She is a member of l’Académie des lettres du Québec. She won the W.O. Mitchell 2003 Prize and the Canadian Council of Arts Molson Prize in 2006. Her work has influenced a whole generation and has been translated widely into English and Spanish and is also available in German, Italian, Japanese, Slovenian, Romanian, Catalan and Norwegian. In 2010, she was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 2013, she received le Prix international de littérature francophone Benjamin Fondane. Her most recent book translated into English is White Piano. Nicole Brossard lives in Montréal.

Jen P. Harris

Jen P. Harris
untitled (blue cups)
ink and gouache on paper
38 x 28.5 inches
2014

photo credit: Pete Mauney

Risa Denenberg

Before world

Birds don’t sing. Jazz doesn’t sing. And then
birds teach hominids to jazz.

Before trees, goats don’t climb trees and trees don’t bare
leaves. And then, trees teach birds to nest.

Before seas, men don’t build boats. Life swims before
it flies. And then, birds teach frogs to hop.

Before fences, coyotes don’t kill chickens. And then
earth is partitioned and frogs teach girls to skip rope.

And when I unearth your face like sun-scorched earth,
the sun hides her face. And then faith restores the sun.

Before faith of words is faith of trees. And songs sing
before sin. And then songs teach us to pray.

Before prayer Negroes don’t swing from trees. Landmines
don’t amputate boys. And then prayers teach hate.

When women sing, the wind sails free
through trees and makes love to the sea.

---

Currently living in Sequim, Washington, Risa Denenberg is an aging hippie poet who earns her keep working as a nurse practitioner. Along with Mary Meriam, she is a mistress at Headmistress Press, dedicated to publishing lesbian poetry. Her poems have been published in online and print journals over the past 30 years. She has three chapbooks, what we owe each other (The Lives You Touch Publications, 2013); In My Exam Room (forthcoming 2014, The Lives You Touch Publications) and Blinded by Clouds (forthcoming 2014, Hyacinth Girls Press), and a full-length book, Mean Distance from the Sun (Aldrich Press, 2013). She blogs here.

Jessica Burke

Jessica Burke
Angëlle as Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford of Mommie Dearest
2014
16 x 20”
Graphite on Arches HP 

Rita Mae Reese

At 36, Hulga Speaks of Love

In wine is truth and in rum freedom,
            the freedom to get up from the porch
   with her mother still talking.
In rum is the Judge in her room,
          sitting beside the books behind glass.
   Love should be full of anger, he intones,
         and she nods, sits on the bed, takes off her shoes.
Judge weighs evidence against Hulga day and night,
                         mostly night.

Love, she repeats, but behind her absent gaze
         at the saint in the corner
    she is parting a pink gold shower of hair,
          dividing it upon a back bare its length.
    She had thought she was all done with asking
but in rum is (God help her) the consent to love.

In rum is a radio playing
            so far away she can’t make out the tune,
   a shadow of sound slipping toward Hulga
            through years and hundreds of miles
   from the girl in the apartment downstairs.
This the only music she listens to.

She is bending to kiss exactly the hollow of her back,
                        exactly the spot
   best suited to receive first [her] lips
         and then [her] cheek.
   Love, and do what you like, he mutters. Hulga is
         multiplied by the dozens of women
she has never seduced. She is cast into a legion of swine
         sailing over a cliff.     And she is flying.

---

Rita Mae Reese is the author of The Alphabet Conspiracy. The title poem from that book was turned into an animated video by Flavor for the Association of Independent Commercial Producers Midwest Trade Show. She has received numerous awards, including a “Discovery”/The Nation award and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. Visit her here.

Mady (Marie Bourdages)

Mady (Marie Bourdages)
Mcp et Mady Gambettent et placottent à la nuit tombante (c. 1999)

Robin Becker

The Black Bear Inside Me

All summer I elude them—
who think they want to see my

three cubs someone
said she spotted

on the gravel road that severs
thick woods

near a row of mailboxes,
by the stream;

who take the path down
and up the mowing

with baskets on their arms,
fearful

when they hear me
huff or blow.

They know
I will outrun, outswim,

outclimb, bluff-charge,
and in winter

drop my heart rate
from 40 to 8 beats a minute

in my den of
wind-thrown trees.

They know they will take
me in the September

kill, harvesting
my kind with dogs

and guns, and they know
we haven’t taken one of them

since 1784 in this state
where 5,000 black bear

clear carcasses
of deer and moose

and sow
fruit trees and shrubs.

They know they need us
who are so like them

our numbers tell
the story, yes, the land

that supports us
supports them; without us,

adapted to scarcity and woodland
loss, they’re going down.

---

Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State, Robin Becker has published seven collections of poems, five in the University of Pittsburgh Press Poetry series. Her most recent, Tiger Heron, appeared in 2014. Becker serves as Contributing and Poetry Editor for The Women’s Review of Books for which she writes a column on contemporary poetry called “Field Notes.”

Maura McGurk

Maura McGurk, Treehouse (Digital Collage, 2013)

Suzanne Gardinier

Atlas

Ole Roustabout ain't got no home / Make his livin on his shoulder bone

Work song

                                                            1
He sleeps on one knee One eye open / Taking back part of what the day took
Dreaming of feast & caress & waking / to the sting of the sores on the back of his neck
In a city someone said brown labor lifts / three feet off the ground every day
An hour until dawn & the government / shall be upon his shoulder in the morning

Power in the gloved hand that rests there / & tells him where he can & can't live
Power in the boots over feet like his / kicking feet like his to say Move
Power in the atlas of his body marked / where the state has touched him The scars on his head
His crouch His exhaustion His cursing the day / Little bits of power in the litter at his feet

                                                            2
His stripped back His hands raised for hours / The cuts on his hands sweat stings
Carrying cane to the mill by moonlight / His baby in a furrow of dirt
The arc of his hammer in sunlight What / he sang with his brothers when he was young
I got a rainbow Tied round my shoulder / Ain't gonna rain baby Ain't gonna rain

                                                            3
Can you make it out of ripped warrants & washers / A dream written backwards on a newspaper sheet
Written on pavement with spraypaint & gravel / What the surveillance forgets to delete
Fingernail clippings Where she sprained her ankle / Cigarette butts Eggshells Teeth
Someone whispering to her newspaper pillow / Someone curled sleeping in the belly of a street

                                                            4
Her closed eye dreams they want her papers / They make her wait in a long line
& put her sweat & marrow in vials / & draw numbers on her arm
She dreams she tries to put it down / but they beat her until she picks it up again
While her open eye watches this night into morning / This transit camp This world

                                                            5
Atlas coordinates A1 Olduvai / East to a map of safe houses in Dar
To the fugitives making sweetness from treason / East to a litter of leaflets in Dhaka
Jabbering under the boots of the soldiers / after the dispersal of the demonstration
South to the gassed Jakarta widows / weeping as their state tries to break their linked arms

North by jerry-built boat to the forests / the empire burned nursed back to life
The Mekong tunnels The temple triangle / of justice framing whose unblinking eye
The map of the lines of the people facing / the king's proxy line of village-breakers
Resistance atlas A sheaf of redacted / maps you spent your life trying to write

                                                            6
Made of spit & piss drunk & sober / Sweat bought & paid for Blurred holy writ
Jism on napkins & a woman's wetness / from reminders of what freedom is
What you called wreckage, dreck & waste / my beloved intransigent compañera
I don't want to know you said Whetting the sword / of your listening For her black messages For his

                                                            7
The night he was born he came too early / & the place for him wasn't ready yet
So his place was a place between places / A borrowed bed in a borrowed room
His mother between a girl & a woman / His tree of life a sapling leaning
Against a brick wall on her break smoking / Trying to think up his name

A note from another world & she answered / all that long first night
Singing to him His lips at her breast / Her smell of smoke & sweat & milk
Singing Baby I'ma buy you shoes / I'ma buy a car for you to ride in
I'ma buy a house with a hundred rooms / Come the day Come the day

                                                            8
One body partitioned The parts sent separate places / Calling which of them which garbled name
Assault Saltless Psalter Tell us / Lattice Alter Tallest At last
Someone's cradle scored with the lines she crosses / to find the source of the smoke in the distance
Someone's cradle burned & the ashes made mortar / for buildings he has to pay to get in

                                                            9
Colonial quadrillage V6 Delta / village's stripped young man made to kneel
Then lie down Facing the sky that knew him / as they wrap a cloth around his face
The king's boys from across the water / laughing Crouched in their equipment
Two holding him One filling with water / the hat his mama made

A day's work To remember the messenger / who came down to tell them how to grow food
& made them palmleaf hats like hers / To protect them when the rain came back
The bought boys pour water where they think / his breathing is Someone's whistling
Atlas of the gathering of intelligences / Tiny Womanly Savage Village Black

                                                            10
The yoke harness fit to her shoulders / like the captain's hands when he comes before dawn
Opening sores by nine in the morning / The command to keep on till noon
Dragging a harrow Before sleep bent / over children's clothes caked with shit & puke
& they wear the stiff shirts laced with her fury / Fury in her touch Fury bread Fury soup

                                                            11
Made of chalk & salt fog & See you, girlfriend / Scaffold bolts Putty Nectarine pits
Seeds to scatter & split the pavement / where the statue of the captain is
Mixed with the thin layer of island dirt / over the rock that remembers the glaciers
Mixed with the last words you wrote me And work? / Your version of a goodbye kiss

                                                            12
Grid coordinates Z26 Past lack / & theft & the hidden bridge between
The house to evict you The market to confiscate / The map to make you lose your way
To where the kapok becomes the ceiba / The old ones waving from up ahead
A tear in the seed-coat streaming honey / América In some new day

East to the Algiers of the deconquista /  To the moon coming up over Sidi Bouzid
Surveil this How she changes her mask / every ungovernable night
To Tahrir To Ramallah To every sedition / of being getting born as you left us farera
To the place of uprising The geography of morning / The refractory return of first light

                                                            13
To colonize Verb To create To begin / To develop Discover Establish Explore
Instigate Institute Launch Map out / Originate Prepare Spearhead Show the way
Trailblaze Invent Lay the groundwork / Inhabit Open Pioneer Found
Put down roots Locate Lodge Settle / Abide Dwell Make one's home Live

                                                            14
Looking down Three women Quarried Discarded / Watching now Elbows propped on the sill
& three shamed boys Behind high barred windows / Who can't hear the tv for the roar
& three village-breakers At a long table making / new atlas divisions Interrupted
By the racket making the steel & glass tremble / What the fuck's going on down there

                                                            15
A gapped moon comes up over the curfew / Thinner Did they buy you cheap & sell dear
To hide the notes tucked in deerpath crevices / I was, I am, I shall be
The pigeons' faces smeared with pollen / A block from Columbus where the police horses
Press their breasts against the restraints / & we elbow each other in the ribs & press forward

                                                            16
& move Sending up an old voice we'd forgotten / big & ragged through the streets
Banging the sound against the ziggurats / to figure out where we are
To make a map of a new place As they goad / the horses to teach us what a city is
A many-headed thing with feathers Gale-sweet / Running from armed horsemen leaning down

                                                            17
A man running who said I have no sister / Who you call my sister is dead
But he keeps beside her & she who scorned him / helps wash the gas from his eyes
In the dance of looking for a sister to stay with / To lean on when the horsemen come
Of looking for a brother to be true to / A brother who would be true

                                                            18
Pockets full of matches & lemons & leaflets / A line of dancers & a line of shields
You're up all night watching Coffee & lesions / on the bones that ease looking away
The riffraff covey's archipelago swagger / Strangers yelling across barricades
Baby I got you & All night Till morning / Sweet things only lovers say

                                                            19
& you're with us You & Muriel laughing / in the streets of a city whose sweet names you knew
You with Rosa's sharp eye on the fledglings / On the old world's days numbered one by one
The rain on your hands in the prison garden / You'll know her by her walk someone said
You who never took one grown step without pain / Deep movement sister who taught me to run

                                                            20
For that we kept beside each other / In a place they said wasn't ready yet
For that I knew you Your verve & persistence / Your laugh in the pit Your dance in the yoke
As you made your living The traces lasting / generations in all directions
As you locked arms & turned in the bitter wind / toward what you lived for A glimpse of a free place

                                                            21
Toward flesh In its clenched or loosened beauty / In its integrity In its needs
Toward the streets Calling to where Rosa heard / the sycamore nightingale after the rain
& toward words Baby I'ma help tear this shit / up End to swindled end Tear it down
to the free place to come & all flesh / shall see it together Come the day

for Adrienne 1929-2012 & for Isaiah 2012-

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Suzanne Gardinier is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Iridium & Selected Poems 1986-2009, & a book of essays on poetry & politics called A World That Will Hold All the People.  Her essays have appeared in The Progressive, Parnassus & The Kenyon Review, her fiction in The Paris Review & Fiction International Artists in Wartime issue.  She's received awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts & the Lannan Foundation.  She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College & currently runs the Sarah Lawrence study abroad program in Cuba, & lives between Manhattan & Havana. You can find her on Twitter at @SGardinier & via her website Fruitful Place.

Patricia Cronin

Patricia Cronin
Female (After Rodin)
watercolor on paper
41" x 30"
2010

A Parisian Roof Garden in 1918

Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972)

As I must mount to feed those doves of ours,
Perhaps you too will spend nocturnal hours
          Upon your roof
          So high aloof
That from its terraced bowers
We catch at clouds and draw a bath from showers.
Before the moon has made all pale the night,
Let's meet with flute and viol, and supper light:
A yew lamb, minted sauce, a raisined bun,
A melon riper than the melting sun—
A flask of Xeres, that we've scarce begun—
We'll try the « lunar waltz » while floats afar
Upon the liquid night—night's nenuphar.
Or else, with senses tuned alike perchance,
Reclining love will make the heavens dance;
And if the enemy from aerial cars
Drops death, we'll share it vibrant with the stars!

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Since There Is No Escape
Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)


Since there is no escape, since at the end
     My body will be utterly destroyed,
This hand I love as I have loved a friend,
     This body I tended, wept with and enjoyed;
Since there is no escape even for me
     Who love life with a love too sharp to bear:
The scent of orchards in the rain, the sea
     And hours alone too still and sure for prayer—
Since darkness waits for me, then all the more
Let me go down as waves sweep to the shore
     In pride, and let me sing with my last breath;
In these few hours of light I lift my head;
Life is my lover—I shall leave the dead
     If there is any way to baffle death.

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Full Moon
Elinor Wylie (1885-1928)

My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
The ermine muffled mouth and chin;
I could not suck the moonlight in.

Harlequin in lozenges
Of love and hate, I walked in these
Striped and ragged rigmaroles;
Along the pavement my footsoles
Trod warily on living coals.

Shouldering the thoughts I loathed,
In their corrupt disguises clothed,
Morality I could not tear
From my ribs, to leave them bare
Ivory in silver air.

There I walked, and there I raged;
The spiritual savage caged
Within my skeleton, raged afresh
To feel, behind a carnal mesh,
The clean bones crying in the flesh.

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Defeated
Sophie Jewett (1861-1909)

When the last fight is lost, the last sword broken;
The last call sounded, the last order spoken;
When from the field where braver hearts lie sleeping,
Faint, and athirst, and blinded, I come creeping,
With not one waving shred of palm to bring you,
With not one splendid battle-song to sing you,
O Love, in my dishonor and defeat,
Your measureless compassion will be sweet.

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A Bird Song
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

It’s a year almost that I have not seen her:

Oh, last summer green things were greener,

Brambles fewer, the blue sky bluer.



It’s surely summer, for there’s a swallow:

Come one swallow, his mate will follow,

The bird race quicken and wheel and thicken.



Oh happy swallow whose mate will follow

O’er height, o’er hollow! I’d be a swallow,

To build this weather one nest together.

Laura Gilpin

Laura Gilpin, Black Mesa (1952)