ace of hearts

 excerpt from slab by selah saterstrom (coffeehouse press, p. 191)

 

when she was brave enough, the girl harriet turned over the remaining card on madam surget's makeshift table.

 

something comes to an end, madam surget said. this is a gate card, the heart's path, but broken open, diaspora.

 

it is the story of people leaving their homes and never coming back. and the moon goes through all its phases at once.

 

it is what it is. the best you can do is accept it.

 

make an offering for what is lost without judging how that offering is received. always set a place at your table for the dead. know too that their number includes you. cast yourself as a figure, leaving. while you go, tell yourself stories you learned and made. it all enters memory, the watery grave of what you will, in other words, forget.

 

when you can, give the precious version, yourself as you are, the story of your survival after the death created through having loved.

 

there isn't time to pack a bag, you must be on your way.

red velvet classic

 excerpt from slab by selah saterstrom (coffeehouse press, p. 76)

 

 get a thorn from a white rose bush. and a box of betty crocker red velvet cake mix. acquire a jar of gold, magnetic sand. goat milk, fresh if you can arrange it, you will need a whole cup. and bowls: two small, one large, glass, and clear. we shall need a towel too. petition that the dram correspond to the nine conditions, and a bench, chapel length, and a man's bed. warm the wax. form one portion of the halved wax into the shape of him. form one portion of the halved wax into the shape of you. bake the red velvet cake using black hen eggs. after it springs from the pan, knife the red, steaming bread and slip in a dead relative's lock of hair. bury the cake in your backyard, under a tree, whole, with birthday candles on top, burning. balm, enough to coat the entire sarcophagus, and wash your slips in blue water that has within it one pinch of saltpeter. and after you have done these things, all these goddamned things, you will be done with it. you will be done.

weekend in the underworld

  by franz wright, from walking to martha's vineyard

 

once i held your face

in my hands, i saw through

space

poor spirit

drifting off now

like smoke in pouring rain

wait---

are you there?

everywhere. i'm 

everywhere

old story

  by franz wright, from walking to martha's vineyard

first the telephone went,

then

the electricity.

 

it was cold,

and they both went to sleep

as though dressed for a journey.

 

like addictions condoned

from above evening 

fell, lost

 

leaves waiting 

to come back as leaves---

the long snowy divorce. . . 

 

that narrow bed, a cross

between an altar

and an operating table. voice

 

saying, while i was alive

i loved you.

and i love you now.

on earth

 by franz wright, from walking to martha's vineyard

 

 resurrection of the little apple tree outside

my window, leaf-

light of late

in the april

called her eyes, forget

forget---

but how 

how does one go

about dying?

who on earth

is going to teach me---

the world 

is filled with people

who have never died

leisure-loving man suffers untimely death

 by max ritvo, from the final voicemails

 

you ask why the dinner table has been so quiet.

i've felt, for a month, like the table:

 

holding strange things in my head

when there are voices present.

 

and when the voices die,

a cool cloth and some sparkling spray.

 

i'm on painkillers around the clock,

and i fear it's always been

 

just the pain talking to you.

 

the last vision was of the pain leaving ---

it looked just like me as it came out

 

of my mouth, but it was holding a spatula.

it was me if i had learned to cook.

 

the pain drifted to the kitchen.

he hitched himself to the oven, was a centaur

 

completed by bread, great black loaves

bursting from the oven,

 

and then the vision vanished.

i followed, and stood where he had stood.

 

the knives rustled in the block,

the pans clacked overhead.

 

i'm sterile from chemo,

and thought of that.

 

sure, i wish my imagination well,

wherever it is. but now

 

i have sleep to fill. every night

i dream i have a bucket

 

and move clear water from a hole

to a clear ocean. a robot's voice barks,

 

this is sleep. this is sleep.

i'd drink the water, but i'm worried the next 

 

night i'd regret it.

i might need every last drop. nobody will tell me.

 

 

too much and not the mood

 from too much and not the mood by durga chew-bose [published by farrar, straus and giroux]

"being wowed by fruit or cake batter, i should add, yet fairly sure i'm okay with never seeing the grand canyon in person, ought to disqualify me from ever writing about wonder. then again, maybe that's why i'm drawn to wonder: it pays no attention to priorities." (12)

"i've come around to the conciliatory quality of untruths. memory fans out from imagination, and vice versa, and why not. memory isn't a well but an offshoot. it goes secretly. comes apart. deceives. it's guilty of repurposing the meaning of deep meaning and poking fun at what you've emotionalized.

and besides, it feels more covert to have no evidence. to believe that something you've experienced will build on your extent -- your extent as a person who sees things, and is moved by things -- without ever having to prove those things happened exactly as they happened. substantiating is grueling, monotonous. it's what life expects of you. memory is trust open to doubt." (31-32)

"i've been so young for so long and so old for longer -- so heart-wrinkled and naive all at once. so brow-furrowed but heart-open too; a detective. snooping yet easily sidetracked. i'll believe anything because i want to understand, yet understanding can sometimes organize itself like a series of false starts." (35)

"it's been months since i'd been to a museum, but watching this woman mechanically tie her hair was softly enormous." (57)

"going to the movies is the most public way to experience a secret. or, the most secretive way to experience the public." (191)

"i still confuse being misunderstood with feeling shame." (215)

"while my mother said, 'people don't change,' what she meant is, i'd estimate: i shouldn't try to change a person. that the effort exerted is often ineffectual and upsetting. nobody adjusts himself or herself, unless prompted first, by some interior gurgling. some deep mobilizing. urgency forms in the belly. and change, i've come to understand, rises up like nausea: the promise of relief is what makes it bearable. the body's clever ways for communicating shifts can make a person crazy, but also move a person toward life. 

in suggesting i shouldn't attempt to alter how this person from my past thinks or finds his focus, my mother also meant: be wary of overvaluing what he gives. be cautious of how proportioned my ability to love is with how impressionable i become. what moves him to create belongs discretely to him. what lights him up from inside and incites growth is what will ultimately specify his dimension. not me." (218-219)

common to whom

 from the introduction section (by anna della subin) in the hospital by ahmed bouanani  [published by new directions]

"in his manifesto the editor and poet adbdellatif laabi railed against the stagnation of moroccan thought and called for the total decolonization of culture and art. yet what foundation was left upon which to build a national culture? what bound moroccans together as a nation? after all, it was the colonizers, laabi wrote, who had come up with the boundaries of nations, artificial divisions that retraced the history of conquest and dismembered tribal zones. what made morocco a unity beyond a shared history of defeat? its conquerors had imposed an invented binary between 'berbers' and 'arabs,' for the french had seized upon linguistic differences to pit two imagined 'races' against one another. often, colonial administrators extended special protections to the berbers to alienate them from their arab neighbors, in a classic tactic of divide and rule." (16)

"the number fourteen conjures a conflicting way of measuring time, as the islamic fourteenth century a.h. corresponds to the twentieth century c.e. - the designation ever prompting the question, common to whom? the dueling systems of timekeeping destabilize any authority time itself might have, that 'invention of adults' which twists into absurd shapes in the eternity of a hospital ward." (24)