I Have A Horse
I have a horse. My horse has four legs.
I have a record player. On my record player I sleep.
I have a brother. My brother is a sculptor.
I have a coat. I have a coat to keep me warm.
I have a plant. I have a plant to have green in my room.
I have Marushka. I have Marushka because I love her.
I have matches. With matches I light cigarettes.
I have a body. With a body I do the most beautiful things that I do.
I have destruction. Destruction causes me many troubles.
I have night. Night comes to me through the window of my room.
I have fun racing cars. I race cars because car racing is fun.
I have money. With money I buy bread.
I have six really good poems. I hope I will write more of them.
I am twenty-seven years old. All these years have passed like lightning.
I am relatively courageous. With this courage I fight human stupidity.
I have a birthday March seventh. I hope March seventh will be a nice day.
I have a friend whose daughter’s name is Breditza.
In the evening when they put her to bed she says Salamun and falls asleep.
Tomaz Salamun
Melancholia
The black dog approaches?
I pry open the crooked jaw.
Inside?
A heady odor, elemental.
And then?
I spin through my life again.
How so?
Slow and fast, fast and slow.
What follows?
Time, the oil of it.
What direction?
Solitude throws me off the scent.
And what lies ahead?
Even the future recoils, long as it is.
What points the finger?
All of my eye’s mistakes.
And what were they?
Level.
Jenny Xie
The Shifting Dapples of Sunlight
Julie was painting my portrait. I
had been sitting for her for two weeks.
We barely talked, and of course I tried
not to move. My neck ached, my back was
killing me. At the end of the day we
drank scotch and laughed and sometimes
rolled around on the floor. That was
about the only exercise I got. My
impatience was killing me. All during
the sitting my own thoughts swarmed my
brain with a turbulence that was down-
right nauseating, surfing through the
rough waters of time without a map.
When the painting was finally finished
I shuddered to imagine what grotesque
creature she might have captured–
old pipes obstructed by sludge, the
dreams of Russian peasant women and
utter sloth, a swimmer’s pale yellow
teeth. But, alas, there was none of
that. There was just me, looking happy
with my hair thinning and my big blue
eyes saying whoopee I’m alive.
James Tate
Let Everything Happen to You
As a girl I made my calves into little drinking elephants,
I would stare at the wonder of their pumping muscles,
the sup of their leg-trunks. I resuscitated a bunny once
from my cat’s electric teeth. I was on neighborhood watch
to save animals, as many as I could. My damage was easy.
My plainspoken voice is a watercolor. I’m afraid of it
as I’m afraid of what the world will do to color. I don’t
think I’ve done much. A table leans against itself
to be a table. I hold nothing but this air. I give it off.
I want a literature that is not made from literature, says Bhanu.
Last night my legs ached a low-tone. I imagined the body
giving itself up for another system. Dandelions tickling
out of my knee. The meniscus a household of worms.
It is okay to bear. My apartment hums in a Rilke sense.
A pain blooms. I am told that it’s okay to forego details
of what happened. I am told it doesn’t matter now.
I want to write sentences for days. I want days to not
be a sentence. We put men in boxes and sail them away.
Justice gave me an amber necklace. I tried to swallow
as many as I could.
Natalie Eilbert
Work, Sometimes
I was sad all day, and why not. There I was, books piled
on both sides of the table, paper stacked up, words
falling off my tongue.
The robins had been a long time singing, and now it
was beginning to rain.
What are we sure of? Happiness isn’t a town on a map,
or an early arrival, or a job well done, but good work
ongoing. Which is not likely to be the trifling around
with a poem.
Then it began raining hard, and the flowers in the yard
were full of lively fragrance.
You have had days like this, no doubt. And wasn’t it
wonderful, finally, to leave the room? Ah, what a
moment!
As for myself, I swung the door open. And there was
the wordless, singing world. And I ran for my life.
Mary Oliver