Table of contents

1. One Source of Bad Information – Robert Bly
2. Piosenka o końcu świata / A Song on the End of the World – Czesław Miłosz
3. Lies about sea creatures – Ada Limón
4. How to Be a Dog – Andrew Kane
5. Moon – Kathleen Jamie
6. Revolutionary Letter #26 – Diane di Prima
7. Obligations 2 – Layli Long Soldier
8. I know the truth – Marina Tsvetaeva
9. The Dry Season – Hannah Gramson
10. Sometimes, When the Light – Lisel Mueller
11. The First Trans Poem – Amy Marvin
12. For Henry, Who Has Just Gone – Neil Hilborn

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One Source of Bad Information – Robert Bly

There’s a boy in you about three

years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty

Thousand Years. Sometimes it’s a girl.

The child had to make up its mind

How to save you from death. He said things like:

“Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”

You live with this child, but you don’t know it.

You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy

At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy

You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.

Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.

(source)

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Lies about sea creatures – Ada Limón

I lied about the whales. Fantastical blue

water-dwellers, big, slow moaners of the coastal.

I never saw them. Not once that whole frozen year.

Sure, I saw the raw white gannets hit the waves

so hard it could have been a showy blow hole.

But I knew it wasn't. Sometimes, you just want

something so hard you have to lie about it,

so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute,

how real hunger has a real taste. Someone once

told me gannets, those voracious sea birds

of the North Atlantic chill, go blind from the height

and speed of their dives. But that, too, is a lie.

Gannets never go blind and they certainly never die.

source: Bright Dead Things, Ada Limón, Milkweed Editions, 2015

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How to Be a Dog – Andrew Kane

If you want to be a dog, first you must learn to wait. You must wait

all day until somebody returns, and if somebody returns late, you

must learn to wait until then. Then you must learn to speak in one

of the voices available to you, high and light or mellow thick and

low or middle-range and terse. Whichever voice you learn to speak,

you will meet somebody who does not like you because of it, they

will be wary or annoyed or you will remind them of something or

someone else. Once you have learned to speak you must learn not to

speak unless you absolutely must, or to speak as much as you feel

you must regardless of how many times you are told to stop, or sit,

or placed behind a door—this will depend on what kind of a dog you

want to be. And indeed there are many kinds. It may not feel as though

you get to choose, and that too is a kind of dog. Next you must learn

to relinquish all control over everything you might wish to control. You

must learn to prefer to be led about by the neck on a piece of string,

or staked to a neglected lawn by a length of chain. You must learn, once

you have sampled the freedom of a life without a chain, that it is better

to return and be chained again. Or you may learn that it is not—

a fugitive is also a kind of dog. Of course you must learn to love, to

love always and love entirely and to be wounded by nothing so much

as the violence of your own love. You must learn to be confused but

never disappointed by a deficiency of love. You must give up your

children and not know why. You must lose yourself wholly in activity;

you must never feel an itch that you do not scratch. You must learn how

to wait at the foot of the bed and hope, silently, that somebody is drunk

enough or lonely enough to invite you up, and you must learn not to show

your excitement too much or overplay your hand. If you want to be a dog,

you must learn to believe that you are not in fact a dog at all.

(source)

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Moon – Kathleen Jamie

Last night, when the moon

slipped into my attic room

as an oblong of light,

I sensed she’d come to commiserate.

It was August. She traveled

with a small valise

of darkness, and the first few stars

returning to the northern sky,

and my room, it seemed,

had missed her. She pretended

an interest in the bookcase

while other objects

stirred, as in a rock pool,

with unexpected life:

strings of beads in their green bowl gleamed,

the paper-crowded desk;

the books, too, appeared inclined

to open and confess.

Being sure the moon

harbored some intention,

I waited; watched for an age

her cool gaze shift

first toward a flower sketch

pinned on the far wall

then glide down to recline

along the pinewood floor,

before I’d had enough. Moon,

I said, We’re both scarred now.

Are they quite beyond you,

the simple words of love? Say them.

You are not my mother;

with my mother, I waited unto death.

(source)

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Revolutionary Letter #26 – Diane di Prima

‘DOES THE END

JUSTIFY THE MEANS?’ this is

process, there is no end, there are only

means, each one

had better justify itself.

To whom?

(source)

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Obligations 2 – Layli Long Soldier

(This one isn’t optimized for mobile, sorry! If you’re on mobile, check out the image version instead)

(source)

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I know the truth – Marina Tsvetaeva

I know the truth — give up all other truths!

No need for people anywhere on earth to struggle.

Look — it is evening, look, it is nearly night:

what do you speak of, poets, lovers, generals?

The wind is level now, the earth is wet with dew,

the storm of stars in the sky will turn to quiet.

And soon all of us will sleep under the earth, we

who never let each other sleep above it.

source: Selected Poems, Marina Tsvetaeva, Penguin Publishing Group, 1994

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The Dry Season – Hannah Gramson

Yeah, this poem’s not optimized for mobile either. Here’s the image version.

Billboard in Iowa says:

                                    HELL IS REAL.

      Fine. Okay. There are worse things than this.

A death, for instance,

                      of something you can’t touch. Only feel in your

                      throat

                                   when you wake up in the morning

                                                          and it’s gone.

HELL IS REAL.

           Fine. Okay. What about the kids though. The

kids on the sidewalk

                      drawing flowers with pink chalk. Pink like any

            thing tender and blameless.

                                               Pointed at the flowers and said, “Look.

                      These aren’t ever going to die! Hallelujah!

                                                          here is eternity.”

HELL IS REAL.

           Fine. Okay. A house, then. Somewhere flat and

                                  endless. Flat and lifeless.

                     When the house cracked down the middle like a rotten

tooth and the opposite of love spilled out,

                                                           left stains on the carpet.

HELL IS REAL.

           Fine. Okay. We already knew that. Of course

                                  we knew that.

                      We even sort of hoped for it.

(source)

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Sometimes, When the Light – Lisel Mueller

Sometimes, when the light strikes at odd angles

and pulls you back into childhood

and you are passing a crumbling mansion

completely hidden behind old willows

or an empty convent guarded by hemlocks

and giant firs standing hip to hip,

you know again that behind that wall,

under the uncut hair of the willows

something secret is going on,

so marvelous and dangerous

that if you crawled through and saw,

you would die, or be happy forever.

(source)

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The First Trans Poem – Amy Marvin

Every two years a trans person

who came out two years ago

declares herself an old school

transsexual. Every trans elder is

like so old now, in their thirties or

even late twenties. Every rich

trans person who just came out

is a new hope for trans people, the

one to finally get this right. Every

trans person who got a media job

invented gender fluidity a year ago.

Every trans person who tracked

tenure before transing out is the leading

intellectual. Every trans person speaks

for every trans person, which is to say

there is only one trans person. Every

decade is a new trans moment, the

first trans literature, the first talk

show interview, the first trans billionaire,

the first transsexual polemic, the first arrival

of trans arrival. Every older transsexual

is problematic. Every trans discourse is

the new discourse. Every trans joke

is the new joke, told over and over.

source: We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, Nightboat Books, 2020

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For Henry, Who Has Just Gone – Neil Hilborn

Henry was my pet rat, and he died

last night in my hands. He was three

years old, which is way longer than

an albino rat is supposed to live. To be

honest, he wasn't a very smart animal,

but he was so sweet that now I wonder

if intelligence has anything to do

with leading a good life. He had been sick

for a few months, and every twelve hours

I had to apply antiseptic and lotion

to both his back feet. By the end

they didn't really work anymore,

so he would just drag his feet behind him in a way

so cute and sad that I started calling him my little

sea lion. When he died it was, somehow,

a surprise: you would think that when your rat

is older than older than dirt and has been sick for months

you'd be sort of prepared: after I had laid out the towel

and mixed the solution, I picked him

up and noticed his breathing

was so slow. I lay down with him

on the towel, the towel where we'd spent

the last few months, where I think we

finally, really, completely loved each other,

not like humans do: humans always want

something from you and he and I

would rather just be together than apart,

and I pulled him toward me, and he chittered in that way

that always meant he was wind coming in after a rain,

his head fell forward, and there was so much less

light in the room. The lamp was so far away,

like the light of a house to which there is no

road. I know, he was just a rat. So many

just like him, all white, red eyes,

die every day and only one or two people

in white coats are even there to see it.

He was all in white, he was always there

to see me. When I would wake from a nightmare,

so many nightmares, I would turn on the light

and there he was, holding on, a constant companion

to a prisoner, the prison being the apartment,

the world being inside his cage. Once I was crying

in bed because of who knows why, and he sat beside

my face and licked my tears away. I had a rat

once, named Henry. Named Buddy. Named Mr. Big

Mouse. Named proof that something could need me

and still love me. Named please

can I have some of your apple? Or I know

you're sad but I'm hungry. Don't go; if you go

I won't survive: a child reaches for her father;

a couple, buried in ash, dies holding each other;

a man and a woman in an office, crying slightly,

sign sheets of paper; sparrows fall out of the sky together.

Some day I'm going to have a child. She's going to have

eyes like mine and such small hands. Just like

she'll need me alive then, she needs me alive

now; I can't say goodbye before I've had a chance

to say hello. I don't stare off bridges anymore.

I don't count out little blue exit signs and even today,

with Henry buried under a tree, a tree somewhere so far away

it feels like someone else buried him using my body,

today I came home and only wanted to sleep

for twenty minutes instead of always. Something needed

me once, and I know something will need me

again. One day I'm going to have a daughter.

She's going to sleep through the night

sometimes. She is a light on a rock

at the edge of a lonely sea. You see that light

out there? That's where I'm headed. That's home.

source: The Future, Neil Hilborn, Button Poetry, 2018

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