Archives of Tuesday Poem

with skin of dirt & honey
who climbs & clamors & clings to the cruel hole 
where their parents’ bodies were just minutes ago
whose skin the color of the Rio Grande I’ve never seen but Jovane once assured me is just as
wet & wistful as the mud of the Yakima River
wow I say to no one in particular
womp womp says a white-haired 
white collar ordering Mexican food
while the waiter reaches for her pen a knife a
wailing in the distance
what assholes
we all whisper at our phones
when we finally come up with anything at all to say
when words are worthless
why is a barren question so taking
wickedness at its word seems hollow so
wallow with me for a minute as
weeping nightly my son mourns the end of each day
wary that the overwhelming world will be here when he wakes
what child is this
with skin of dirt & honey 

Dujie Tahat is our Poet in Residence for December. This poem originally appeared in Tahoma Literary Review, Issue 13.

Previously: &, and leaving my therapist’s office after a breakthrough.

As soon as I unlock my phone,

out falls a tiny mother

asking her grown son to call

                                                          back when he finds the time plz,

out falls the strained voice of a debt

                  collector after several

                  attempts to reach you,

                                                                  out falls a school

                                              with a shooter & everything,

                  out falls a riot, out falls a child

texting another child how scared she is

          
                                        from under her desk

        with all the curtains

drawn, out falls

                                an election,

                                a special election,

                                a compromised election,
 
                                & another smoked quartz riot,

out falls a pair of unconcerned liquid gold legs at a hotel pool,

out falls Tommy Le’s pen,

                   Sandra Bland’s signal light

                   a stack of Alton Sterling’s bootleg CDs, out falls

                   a powerful man awash in disgrace & another terrible man

                                                                                           & another terrible man

                                                                                           & Jesus —

                             until out falls Janelle Monaé,

        plentiful & perfect

                                               -ly formed.

At what point, exactly, does grief start?

                                                                                   This onslaught of self-

                                                                                   portraits in convex mirrors—

                                                                                   each moment more upside down

                                                                                   was to know what time it was.

                                                      pǝʇuɐʍ I llɐ ⅋

                    ˙sɐʍ ʇᴉ ǝɯᴉʇ ʇɐɥʍ ʍouʞ oʇ sɐʍ

Dujie Tahat is our Poet in Residence for December. A version of this poem originally appeared in Sakura Review, vol. IX.

Previously: &.

Wife,


tomorrow, I’ll be 

farther than ever before from your hands & feet.

Wife, 

when I lay me down to sleep


I pray for us.
Wife,

I made a fuss

over time & frivolity, really.

Wife,


sometimes, I really,

really, really miss you.
Wife, 

there’s a tv show I’m into 

& the main character is you, pretty much.

Wife,

it’s amazing how little we touch 

now compared to before when it was all the time.
Wife,

I forgot to write you into the last line,

but I swear that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten anything.

Wife, 

there's an ampersand in everything

about you & me & you & me.


Dujie Tahat is our Poet in Residence for December. This poem previously appeared in the 2018 Jack Straw Writer’s Anthology. 

Between the membrane of fur

and muscle, blades fevered by appetite
dimpled the prairie with denuded bison.

The pick’s sharp interruption 
of the ground’s moss and prairie grass union

uncoupled Kansas soil.
A timber scribe,

small enough to hide 
in the curve of the palm;

portable instrument 
of the Great Reconnaissance,

subtle gouge for the lonely mind.

Laura Da' is our Poet in Residence for November. This poem was originally published in Da's book Instruments of the True Measure, 2018, University of Arizona Press.


Previously: Refusal of the Return, Centaur Culture, and Metes and Bounds.

Chilled thigh under homespun,
 
the weaver’s aching back

and yellowed finger pads,

quotidian aches bow to the sovereignty

of metes and bounds.

The length of cotton

stretched between brass tacks

weaves its own 
ledger-worthy autonomy.

Proceed from the blazed line

twenty chains to the southwest.

Dull needle through burlap.

Chilled holler of the axe’s

subtle swipe

through a scrimshaw of frost.

Under moss, an oak trunk is blazed 
breast high and skin smooth

to mark the end place.

Laura Da' is our Poet in Residence for November. This poem was originally published in Da's book Instruments of the True Measure, 2018, University of Arizona Press.


Previously: Refusal of the Return, and Centaur Culture.

  On the last day of the working week we stopped at the video rental store. It was right next to the Mar T Café; the second brightest storefront in my hometown. Movie titles bobbled inside their plastic sleeves. The pebbly brown clamshell cases imbued the store with a gently chemical tang. If you didn’t have a VCR, you had to ring a bell in the back and ask to rent one. I always carried it out to the car reverently, palms up and back straight.



   In The Neverending Story, Atreyu’s horse Artax sinks. I watched that scene in tense, sweet agony on Friday nights. Atreyu cajoled his horse to fight the quicksand then turned panicky. The horse, an elegant dappled gray, peered winsomely up at Atreyu and then bellied into the mud. The movie’s pitchy black swamp was full of bleak, foliage-stripped trees; my childhood home was a decades-long construction site. Sitting on subfloor in front of the TV, the sludge of Cascadia mud licked at my nostrils from the unfinished windows. The soundtrack’s uncanny chorus of mire-murmur was so like my rural bedtime lullaby, I thought the narrative was swallowing me.


   I had my first pony at three. By eight, I was breaking gentler mares and geldings to saddle. Atreyu was a warrior from the Grassy Plains. He was the figment of a German author’s infatuation with indigeneity. I went ahead and assumed he was Shawnee. For a very long time, I thought Atreyu was a girl. I thought she was Shawnee and maybe we were cousins somewhere down the line. I thought I could be them, so I imagined reaching up for that VHS tape every Friday was a ceremony. 



  Once I read that Shawnee scouts taught fur traders how to evade quicksand by staying utterly still. All that movement I assessed on the screen, Atreyu’s overt show of dismay, consigned that swift, slim horse to the mud. Hush, I remember whispering at the screen. Shut up and be still. Someone I loved best got drunk and babbled tell me about your favorite problematic movie. I would never do what you did. Look at your fingers, he said, they are actually blue. Unwrap your hands from all that before you are pulled under.



Laura Da' is our Poet in Residence for November. 


Previously: Refusal of the Return

Pale scattered

immunosuppressant ovals

chalky steroids;
dispossessed seedpods

tickle at the aural hum

of childhood sleep 
when I might hear

river rush in my right ear

(Burntboot Creek, forked

from the Snoqualmie River)

susurrus of waterfall

in my left.
Austere and ascetic nomenclature:

Lindeman crossing into Buck,

North Fork Railroad Trestle,

Rattlesnake Lake,

Joseph, Judith, Seneca, Astrid. 
Star women ambling

homeward without much fuss;

never begging for fast water

salt or skin or iodine,

not a meager sliver of apotheosis.
Tokul — darkest water,

utterly still.

Laura Da' is our Poet in Residence for November

The ice was always cracking

                        towards shore.

In its low thundering mist

we felt our own slick 
                        treacheries accumulating. We skated ‘til dark,

dodging in and out

                        of the groaning

weather, shivering forward 
like a train shuttering forever towards the horizon. 
And only for a moment did we hope

for the ice below us to peel back, for

the surface to rearrange itself beneath us. 
                        Then — we were falling, glamorously

into a black — splash of water. 
                        We couldn’t wait to be famous,

or simply to leave, 
                        to look back

upon it — our miniature landscape,
a diorama of who we’d once been,

where we’d placed our cold

red hands and

let out

                        our hot and hopeful breath. 

    Kim Kent is our poet in Residence for October.


    Previously: See you Later, Grapefruit, Just for Tonight, Walking Home in Rain, Waiting, and Luck, a Birthday Poem. 
    

The birds are making a nest of me

out there, from all the hair I’ve lost

to my hairbrush and rug, bits of skin

and grey fuzz from my skirt too —

and everyone tells me

this doesn’t look good. 
Am I shedding because it’s winter,

or because, as the Bad Luck Astrologer says,

Now at twenty-nine I’m finally completing

my first full twirl around the moon?

I think it must be both. 
I should have known better then to test

my weight on that cold limb, should have

known better than to buy you

new shoes. All night they danced
 
around the house and just before dawn
tapped like a black moth

right out the door.

And all night 
I brush my hair like a nearly dead plant,

letting the brown fall from its hard root

until it sings

like a sharpened knife

with its one sprout

of new life. 

    Kim Kent is our poet in Residence for October.


    Previously: See you Later, Grapefruit, and Just for Tonight, Walking Home in Rain, Waiting. 

Wayne would sit in front of the class

and tell us how it was to be afraid of death.

We called him the Mescaline Man

and not even behind his back. Before Wayne,

I thought mescaline was a bitter lettuce

I didn’t like. But Wayne made it seem fun

and then, not as fun. The ghosts he still saw,
 
the lost feeling on his left side, one leg

hanging from the stool two inches shorter than the other.

This was the way with adults then, with their slow

cautionary drums — the real dangers not yet ours to know. 
Under the power lines drinking warm beers

I felt it too. At the top of the world, the pulse

of electricity at my feet, a buzz that kept the world
 
moving, people going where they needed to go.

And there I was, standing still, listening to the hum

of my body in the late summer grass. 

    Kim Kent is our poet in Residence for October.


    Previously: See you Later, Grapefruit, and Just for Tonight, Walking Home in Rain. 

We’ll begin at the end —

move backwards toward the flickering light

that catches our skin like a spark.

I’ll call all men sweethearts

as their slim suits speed towards me through time. 
I’ll wear furs and smoke long cigarettes

and you’ll snap your thin suspenders

when you’re pleased with yourself,

swing your coat over your left shoulder

like a baseball bat. 
I’ll speak from an octave lower in my throat,

sing a bluesy note from time to time,

kiss the air around your head

as if everything about you

is a soft place to land. 
You’ll be tough and unwavering —

like the shadow of a stone, 
but no matter the bind it puts you in,

it won’t take long for you to turn

towards my legs as if

they were long strands of rope. 
Just for tonight,

we won’t care who done it,

or wonder how we’ve arrived 
at the edge of the pool,

looking down at the body

floating as bodies do in old movies,

or wonder which of us did this,

or which of us is already dead. 

    Kim Kent is our poet in Residence for October.


    Previously: See you Later, Grapefruit. 

Lately, exes have been sneaking into my dreams,

and other places of suspended thought. Like

when I’m swimming laps, my body blue

and liquid as the water holding me.

They wave. They smile. They flicker

along the blue-floor depths of the deep end.
One shows up to ask if I think he’ll look good

with dread locks. Another shows up with his dog

to ask if I still love her. And another
reminds me of the summer he made a movie

in which I played a young girl learning French,

my only lines words I already knew. And because

he was poor, or young, or in a hurry

there was only one take. And because

I was nervous, or lonely, or young

I remembered only two phrases,

which I purred,

again and again,

in my lowest,

breathiest voice,
 
the way I’d seen Jean Seburg whisper

to Jean-Paul Belmando in Breathless. 
And even in the final scene, in which
 
I was supposed to have been hit by a car and killed,

I wouldn’t die,

but looked straight into the camera

propelled by my too-sudden death —

and kept humming:

à bientôt, pamplemousse, à bientôt. 

    Kim Kent is our poet in Residence for October.

The boat, full hold,

runs in deep cold.

In dusk’s fo’c’sle

we crewmen wear
sheer sleep and hear

snores. Dream of beer,

the slightest fear

of dawn, the work
day brings, its jerk

hard. This murky

night, Skipper skirts

Olalla Point,
rubs swollen joints

and lucky coins,

wants to anoint

the autumn’s plum-

dark with light rum,

chooses milk, hums,

broods as it un-

ravels white threads
in coffee. In bed

we sleep, bugs feed,

skitter on heads,

hands, hearts, and sink
torch tongues in skin

glass smooth and thin.

Little beasts, pin

puncture mouths. Ache.
See how we wake

naked, how we find

the smallest butcher

making of us meat.
Sierra Golden is our Poet in Residence for September.

Previously: 30th Birthday Poem, Working Too Hard, and Intent to Vacate.

To the feminist karate union and the screeching

motorcycles on 1st Ave, burnouts a block long.

To the skater punk snapping selfies in the sun,

wearing a scruffed up t-shirt the same shitty

black as oblivion, not smiling, not even the eyes.

And also to the tangueras who drown oblivion

with their bodies, a terrible drone of beauty.

To the morning yogis I love to hate in their spandex

and grace making asanas before light. To impossible,

delicate hijabs framing the face of six-year olds

who skip in to an old brick school. To the kids,

the mother buying frijoles y tortillas for dinner again,

invisible men building and feeding and cleaning

the city to send dollars into walls of casas

they’ll never know. To the inherited, lucky wrench

in the mechanic’s hand, to the boozy cherry

on a toothpick, to the fruit trees no one picks clean,

the cherries and plums and apples. The blackberries

rotting on city brambles. To the spoiled kids, the quiet

kids and the angry kids and the yes kids and the no

kids, to all the kids who haven’t yet met oblivion

but are learning the ways to shape themselves

around it. To the techies who never really know

what to do with their money. And the few who do.


To the bus drivers. To the crackheads, the fishermen

weaving their nets and blackstacking North.

To the woman and her cart on the canal not leaving,

staying, how many days, under a broken umbrella?

To sail boats, to craft ales on sale, to jackhammers,

to cranes. To Seattle, you ache too hard, vibrate

at the seams. Like flint. Like caught breath.

Like NW’s finest weed burning a hole in the throat.

Once the moon was the minute hand, the seasons

the hour. What I miss most is stillness.
Sierra Golden is our Poet in Residence for September.

Previously: 30th Birthday Poem, and Working Too Hard.

For five nights a fat banana slug has come to visit me,
 
chugging up the window, stopping just at eye level.
In front of the chair where I sit to write most mornings,

he sleeps for the night. Or does whatever it is slugs do.
By sun up, he’s gone, leaving in his place a tiny pile of shit.

It’s hard to look past this. Drinking my tea and writing,
imagining this shiny, slimy creature I’ve come to call friend

exposed on a field of glass, making his morning constitutional. 
With no real predators—not even the bears or skunks

will partake of him—he appears entirely unworried.
His simple body, tentacles, mantle, anus, upsets me.

How easily it does exactly what it’s supposed to!
Sierra Golden is our Poet in Residence for September.

Previously: 30th Birthday Poem.

Warm dusks too hot to sip anything

but rum and look north & north & north
like cold nights when the aurora glows.
Meatballs, size of a small river stone

hand curved, roasted & frozen
saved like speckled marbles in a jar.
Cattails bent over their pond

as if signing a mortgage. 
Driftwood waving her wild bone

arms at the end of the sea
as if she untangled from nowhere, with

everywhere sprouting from her fingertips.
Boy perched on the rock above the cliffs above the river,

the second his pointed toes depart the rock.
The dive & the cold.

His wet head above the eddies.
The now & the now & the now

like the filly, top lip stretched so far above the brambles,
stomping to ram her fragile adolescent

chest against the fence
as if she could close the last hovering inches

between the taste of blackberries 
& empty air.
Sierra Golden is our Poet in Residence for September.

a bewilderment          I who was merely an afterthought


an obscure thing barely noticed among the giants


naked now to your scrutiny          I who lived surrounded


cloaked in others’ luxury          indistinct and anonymous


did not ask to be seen



what drifted down through their branches


what seeped into my roots


was enough



what seems to you like amputation          disfigurement


was for me my only body



one by one the others taken


their branches tumbling          the forest


disassembled by human hands

    Elizabeth Austen is our Poet in Residence for August.



    Previously: Shall Not Be Infringed, The Citizen, and [              ].

what was left to admire

something

                    meaningless as jangled


keys          a muscle twitching

aimless                              but alive


nothing recognizable except the blood


none of us wanted to say we were “with” him

when the news          trickled          in

local in the first days

                                                            then the smell of it


everywhere

how the hand                    on the revolver

was his          and hungry

and the shots


would not be undone

    Elizabeth Austen is our Poet in Residence for August.



    Previously: Shall Not Be Infringed, and The Citizen.

apologies to Wallace Stevens

one must have a mind of silly putty

acquiesce not

interrupt          combust at 35      one leaps

the other lies        deciding’s not for us

one must have a mind

of anecdote not data point        must

never mind the grope

one must have a mind of

antelope        one must have a mind

of wind        of pantyhose        one mustn’t

mind the mess or make a fuss

must mine the hive        believe the lies

one must have a mind      at least one

must

    Elizabeth Austen is our Poet in Residence for August.



    Previously: Shall Not Be Infringed.

We dove under a table, my bag

clutched in one hand, your hand in the other.

House rules: no politics. Who had slipped,

stepped aside, maybe only moments? Left

the door unbounced this summer

night? He fired, pointing first

at the other end of the room, shed

one weapon for another. Is that

how we had time to dive? We threw

our bodies down like castoff shoes,

like trash. He walked out. This happened, it

happens, it will happen again, maybe to me,

maybe to you, waking. Down he went

through each room in my house of sleep, from

attic to basement shooting out the lamps

making permanent the dark.