Good Bones by Maggi Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful. This poem originally appeared in Waxwing, Issue 10, in June 2016. Used with permission of the author.

THE NO MORE APOLOGIZING, THE NO MORE LITTLE LAUGHING BLUES by Lyn Lifshin

apologizing for going to school instead of having a job that made money or babies pretending I took the bus to an office, paper clips in my ear and never that I was reading Wyatt, writing my own dreams in the dust under the bed apologizing for my hair, wild gypsy hair that fell out of every clip the way the life I started dreaming of did. Apologizing for the cats you know, if someone said my skirt was too short, I explained or said sorry, but never that I finally loved my legs I spent years apologizing for not having babies, laughing when someone pulled a Baby Gerber jar out of the closet and held it in front of my eyes like it was some damn cross or a star I should have thrown that thru the glass, I didn’t need to explain the music I liked. One friend said that’s noise. Another said isn’t denim for children? Well I laughed the apologizing oh I don’t want no trouble laugh over the years, pretending to cook, pretending to like babying my husband the only place I said what I meant was in poems. That green was like some huge forbidden flower that grew so big it couldn’t even fit in the house, pulled me out of a window with it toward Colorado I apologized for being what they thought a woman was by being flattered when someone said you write like a man and for not being what they thought a woman, for the cats and leaves instead of booties, for the poems When someone said well, how much do you get paid? you know I pretended, pretended, pretended, I couldn’t stop trying to please the A, the star, the good girl on the forehead. The spanking clean haunted half my life. But the poems had their own life and mine finally followed where the poems were growing, warm paper skin growing finally in my real bed until the room stopped spinning for good the way it used to when I dressed up in suits and hair spray pretending to be all those things I wasn’t: teacher, good girl, lady, wife. I was writing about cocks and hair for years before I’d felt, when I was still making love just on the sheets of paper When the poems first came out, one woman I drove to school with said, I can’t take this. Another said, I don’t know, this can’t be the you I know, so brutal, violent. Which is the real The man I was with moved to the other side of the bed. This was worse than not having babies. His mother said they always knew I was odd my clothes, my hair, the books I brought to bed. They said I never seemed like one of them My own family thought it was OK but couldn’t I write of things that were pleasant? They wanted to know how much I got paid and why I didn’t write for The Atlantic Look, I still have trouble saying no. I want all of you to care about what I’m thinking, maybe even to want my hair It's true, I put a no smoking sign up on the door but twice I have gotten out ashtrays But I have stopped being grateful to be asked to read or to always have some lover right there beside me it's still not easy to get off the phone, tell a young stoned poet it’s a bore to lie with the phone in my ear like a cold rock while he goes on about the evils of money, charging it to my phone But now when I hear myself laughing the apologizing laugh, I know what swallowing those black seeds can do and I spit them out. Like tobacco. (something men could always do) Nothing good grows from the I’m sorry, sorry, only those dark branches and they will get you from inside Lyn Lifshin

2 poems on GRIEF: Dorianne Laux's 'For the Sake of Strangers' and 'The Thing is' by Ellen Baas

2 poems on Grief: ‘FOR the SAKE of STRANGERS’ BY DORIANNE LAUX No matter what the grief, its weight, we are obliged to carry it. We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength that pushes us through crowds. And then the young boy gives me directions so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open, waiting patiently for my empty body to pass through All day it continues, each kindness reaching toward another- a stranger singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees offering their blossoms, a child who lifts his almond eyes and smiles. Somehow they always find me, seem even to be waiting, determined to keep me from myself, from the thing that calls to me as it must have once called to them this temptation to step off the edge and fall weightless, away from the world. *** ‘THE THING IS’ by ELLEN BAAS to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again. ***

For the Sake of Strangers BY DORIANNE LAUX

No matter what the grief, its weight, we are obliged to carry it. We rise and gather momentum, the dull strength that pushes us through crowds. And then the young boy gives me directions so avidly. A woman holds the glass door open, waiting patiently for my empty body to pass through All day it continues, each kindness reaching toward another- a stranger singing to no one as I pass on the path, trees offering their blossoms, a child who lifts his almond eyes and smiles. Somehow they always find me, seem even to be waiting, determined to keep me from myself, from the thing that calls to me as it must have once called to them this temptation to step off the edge and fall weightless, away from the world.

San Antonio by Naomi Shihab Nye

San Antonio Tonight I lingered over your name, the delicate assembly of vowels a voice inside my head. You were sleeping when I arrived. I stood by your bed and watched the sheets rise gently. I knew what slant of light would make you turn over. It was then I felt the highways slide out of my hands. I remembered the old men in the west side cafe, dealing dominoes like magical charms. It was then I knew, like a woman looking backward, I could not leave you, or find anyone I loved more. -- Naomi Shihab Nye, from Is This Forever, or What? Poems and Paintings from Texas.

Calling All Grandmothers by Alice Walker

We have to live differently. or we will die in the same old ways. Therefore I call on all Grand Mothers everywhere on the planet to rise and take your place in the leadership of the world. Come out of the kitchen out of the fields out of the beauty parlors out of the television Step forward and assume the role for which you were created: to lead humanity to health, happiness and sanity. I call on all the Grand Mothers of Earth and every person who possesses the Grand Mother Spirit of respect for life and protection of the young to rise and lead. The life of our species depends on it. & I call on all men of Earth to gracefully and gratefully stand aside & let them (let us) do so.

Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry by Howard Nemerov, (1920 – 1991)

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned to pieces of snow Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow. There came a moment that you couldn't tell. And then they clearly flew instead of fell.