Excerpts
Miss Saigon
My mother was Miss Saigon of 1973, two years before the fall and capture of the city by the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Viêt Công. There is a solid silver trophy, its height the length of my torso. The cup itself is the circumference of a basketball, and its S-shaped handles are molded …
Emergency Brake by Ruth Madievsky, Tavern Books, 2016.
Lungs, throats, doors: these images recur throughout Emergency Brake, the debut collection from poet Ruth Madievsky. Each names a portal, an opening where smoke or speech or someone may pass between inside and outside. "I think the body is a door," muses one poem’s speaker. Emergency Brake makes brilliant use of this insight, that to …
Comptrollers
Morning after the twentieth anniversary of environemental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa's murder Did you just say why do the heathens rage? My head is a woven reed of traffic lawsbut my legs on the pedals seem to be sayingtoday is not the day. Perched as I am on this wheel, slantingthrough the streets like a swift …
Tyehimba Jess. Olio. Wave Books.
Tyehimba Jess’s 2016 Olio is mammoth. Comprised of letters, interviews, sketches, architectural and mathematical poems, "Jubilees," songs, conversations, and formal poems, and accompanied by a playlist of musicians, Jess’s second offering introduces us to (reminds us of) thirteen "first-generation-freed voices" plus the Fisk Jubilee Singers, all of whom "coalesce in counterpoint, name nemeses, summon tongue …
Crush
Why do they call it ‘‘crush’’?The man strapped in horizontal on the hydraulic lift, then tipped vertical,bellowing, I am standing up. The nurses trying to cantileverhim into the bathroom so he can brush his teeth.Greg described my dad’s menu as ‘‘mechanically softened.’’They actually take the entire rib-eye steak, or chicken parmigiana,and put it through a …
Bees, Honeycombs, Honey
Bees, thousands and thousands,surviving in a hiveunder the soffit; bees,honeycombs, and honey,and dampness, and old woodsticky in the sunlight; and the beekeeper’s hand,carefully, and slowly,vacuuming, and taking;the bees tumbling, gently,into the makeshift hive;honeybees, and honeycombs, and honey, glistening;honey, the only foodthat will not spoil; honey,pulled from the pyramids,still sticky, and sweet,thousands of years later; I …
Garter, Copper, Water
He’s my age, and for once in Wise, VirginiaI believe it: same confused complexion(baby pimples nose and chin,around the eyes first fine contrails scratchingvacant sky), same dislike to sitwhile others stand. Same no gold band.He’s clean: I like the way he preened todaybefore clinic, though he circles usmost warm days in oily T-shirts, mowingour field, …
My Bricks Be Foul
It smelled like that potbellied rat, sprawled on its bloodied side for at least a month and ground partway into the alley floor by a steady succession of Rivieras and 225s. It stank like the sweaty, fuzzed pocket between all of everyone’s toes. It smelled like the gusts of musty air between Elder William’s old …
In the Name of the Tongue
Come Sunday afternoon and I sat back hunchedin the car, thumbing my father’s Bible, the door slamming behind him, as though his gun had burst a nest of birds.I fingered the grime into my hair and sat rehearsing, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witnessThou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, my …