Poetry

Wrong Number

I am the bomb. And by “the bomb” I mean I am some incendiary device hell-bent on destruction.

I know this, because I can hear the ticking as I walk down the hallway to her room.

“There was another bat in the house” I tell her.

My daughter is peering through the din of her iridescent midnight bedroom while I speak this hasty lie through lips that feel as cold as my brother’s limbs grow.

just a few miles away.

Lips that lie because I awoke her with my screaming. Though it seems like an echo now.

I am the bomb. Because the night that phone rang, it was mine.

Numb fingers find stored numbers, familiar to me as family. it goes: Asher, Broderick, Carter. ABC. Three pieces of what used to be five.

I am the bomb. And with every passing ring the ticking grows louder until I explode their phones, and their quiet homes. I gut their faith and any hope they still had left.

My calls are over before the dispirited paramedics can pull the needle from his ravaged arm. It’s all business now, this shit ain’t new in my town. Our beautiful, broken brother is dead.

This time there is no simple solution. No chasing this out the front door. No quick and dignified death.

This bat is going to stick around for a while.

—Stephanie Carter

On a Distant Prospect of the Zen Mountain Monastery

I speed past you, silent one, admire your far-off gaze tranquil as a sky lake,

and long for order in the jaws of desire as the kids scream in the back seat.

Thelma Z. Lavine

Thelma Z. Lavine, fascinating philosophy Professor in college she said once that she Had Infinite Husbands Thelma Z. Lavine told us that every Single story has to have a beginning a middle and of course an end. From there to here. Most people begin with arriving or leaving She said. If they arrive, they leave in the end. Not me I said so many years ago. If I like where I am I’m going to stay. Well said Thelma Z. Lavine. You’d be wrong.

—Esther Cohen

Deliver Us from this Department Store, Amen

My father throws up in the Sears parking lot on the day we plan to shop for my communion dress. I think God wants him dead.

It is Sunday afternoon, a baseball game static on the radio. Our secondhand station wagon is nosed into a spot overgrown with nettles and weeds.

In the shadow of the driver’s side door, he is hunched on all fours. The reflection of his altered face on display in the bumper’s rim. He becomes undone behind the department store, body pressed against hot pavement, hacking until there is nothing left at the back of his teeth. He rises, slow, from broken asphalt. Wipes the corners of his mouth on his shirt. Nods at the passenger seat. Now you must learn how to pray.

—Samantha Spoto

Pre-Pandemic Lust

I wish your eyes would / Linger just a bit longer / And undress me slow.

—Sage Higgins

A Lesson from the Dog

you can feel it

He wolfs down his meal And totters into the next room Where he snuffles and wipes His mutton chops vigorously On the side of the footstool, As if its sole purpose is to Provide a napkin for the moist remains Stuck to his whiskers. Then he dashes into the next room, Launches himself sideways Onto the plush carpet, where he skids To a stop. Rolling and thrashing about On his back, he grunts the whole while. Now he stands, shakes, and saunters To his bed, tail wagging along the way. Circling its soft confines, He collapses in full contentment. His exhale reminds me of what I sometimes forget: A full belly, a place to lay your head, And the company of those that love you Are all you really need. subtle soft like when someone special slips their fingers into yours, caressing you absently, intimately. that’s fall, autumn, time passing in adagio, stepchild of summer. a life lived in sunsets and evensong, twilight, and moons over harvest fields

—Thomas Riker

The Best Ones are the Crazy Ones

I’ve tried to love the good women. The kind who talk about their day with a vacant smile on their perfect lips, who cook me delicious healthy dinners and enjoy watching soap operas, while resting their head on my shoulder. The women who answer questions frankly, honestly when I ask them. Women who make me feel content and confident.

But I always find myself going back to the kind of women who disappear some nights, their phones switched off. The type of women who will text me the sexiest photographs when we’re apart and then send them to others when I’m in the shower. Or the women who lie about what they ate for lunch, who they met yesterday afternoon and the men who are messaging them while they are in bed naked with me.

The women who fake birth control or are sleeping with me because they’re still angry with their ex boyfriends or their absent fathers. The kinds of women who cheat with me and then later cheat on me. The ones I have to warn that they’re making a scene and then they try and slap me, miss and knock things that smash onto the floor. That run off into the night threatening to throw themselves off a bridge or threatening to call the cops or both. Or worse. The kind of woman, I know, that’ll see me swing from the end of a rope one day and smile a little.

I could say I love these kinds of women because I just can’t love myself. Maybe there is some truth in that but maybe it is they’re just a euphoric kind of self harm that I inflict on the ragged soul instead of on the flesh.

—Stephen J. Golds

Yellow Leaves

The shiny ginko tree stood in its yellow gown In the fall and curtsied.

Accepting the dance with the wind, it embraced some very dark cloud shadows.

Our Vendetta with Trees

“Want to know why I love eating broccoli?” the boy asks.

His eyes go wide as I verbalize his answer.

I was a giant, too once.

—Michael Vahsen

Masks

“Republicans don’t wear masks, Democrats do. Sometimes I wear a mask, sometimes I don’t.”

—Taylor Steinberg

Serendipity

If we could make it ours, cut shapes from the horizon to form a patchwork of mountains and trees and use the clouds that billow above as pillows, I think we could be happy

—Meagan Towler

A Little Bite of Heaven

His little shack Way out in the yonder Grassland and weeping willows Oak trees along the creek Sky wide with a hazel dome Blue-belly lizards on the sun rail An occasional gopher snake Sparrows darting around his stick garden No one else but him on a wooden porch Built for his rocking chair He retired early to enjoy solitude Drives forty miles to town Mail and groceries once a month Sometimes a hundred miles to the city To walk the streets where he use to work Then inside to the Valley’s Restaurant An old friend there With a young smile….

Epiphany

Loop of snake. Flax drupe of a hawk on the white cedar’s longest arm. Two swallowtails love dance traces again and again the bow of infinity in the humid air.

I thought I would love once, twice, precise as a comet’s rare streak across the heavens in a human lifetime.

But here I am, dawn-struck, wonder-hushed, seeing my heart wasn’t saved or whole, but made to be split open like the milkweed pod, and scattered.

—Sophie Strand

October Driveway

1 End of September cat walks down my driveway. She has ended her hunt, Disappears into the wood. The squirrels are gone.

2 My driveway in October is busy with: Leaves Squirrels.

3 Cat tracks in early October snow Won’t last long. Morning squirrels scurry in my tire tracks.

4 Sunrise deer visit my late October driveway Way before Leaves and squirrels appear.

5 Cat in November will disappear. The wood, the tracks, the hunt Will all be gone.

6 October driveway Is the passion of the season. Squirrels know.

7 Squirrels and cat and leaves and deer Will reappear My next October driveway.

These (Mournful) Shores, Jennie C. Jones, powder-coated aluminum, wood, harp strings, 2020 Courtesy of the Artist and PATRON Gallery, Chicago and Alexander Gray Associates, NY Photo: Thomas Clark

The Clark Art Institute’s first outdoor exhibition, “Ground/work,” features six artists—Kelly Akashi, Nairy Baghramian, Jennie C. Jones, Eva LeWitt, Analia Saban, Haegue Yang—the museum commissioned to create site-specific works of art in active dialogue with Clark’s surrounding landscape. These Mournful Shores, by Hudson-based artist Jennie C. Jones, uses two turbulent seascapes by Winslow Homer that the Clark owns— Eastern Point (1900) and West Point, Prout’s Neck (both 1900)—as a point of departure. “Ground/work” will be on display through October 21.

An installation view of Lois Dodd and Shara Hughes's two-person show at Parts & Labor in Beacon.

Lois Dodd is 93. Shara Hughes is 39. Their ages are mirror images, and their art is also, to some extent. Dodd came of age during the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism and rebelled against its pure existential bareness. She painted snapshot-like images of daily life: pine trees glimpsed through the skylight of a barn, a sheet drying on a clothesline. Hughes creates fantasy landscapes in vivid, impossible colors. Hughes’s paintings look like Dodd’s canvases if they literally burst into flame.

There is a mother-daughter dynamic between them, on an artistic level. Maybe it’s the music they listen to. One can imagine Dodd playing cool jazz on a stereo, and Hughes listening to techno on headphones. But both artists seem to point toward buried memories. Dodd specializes in moments so small we don’t quite notice them. Hughes delineates dreams so disturbing we immediately suppress them. How did the two artists unite for an exhibition?

“We came up with the idea through speaking with Shara, who very much wanted to do an exhibition with Lois,” explains Franklin Parrasch, cofounder of Parts & Labor Beacon. This artistic conversation between Dodd and Hughes began with a real conversation. Dodd visited Hughes in her studio in Brooklyn. (Both artists paint in oils.)

The two artists have clear affinities. Dodd’s Forsythia, April (1976) is an explosive blast of yellow, with a few gestural gray branches. Dodd captures the way you look at the blaring yellow of a forsythia and for a moment see no shape—the color overwhelms your sense of form. Hughes’s Clearing (2018), with its dazzling blue-violet sky, has a similar charge.

Nearly all the shows at Parts & Labor pair a young artist and an influential elder (or historical figure). The paintings of the two artists are hung alternately, so that they “communicate” across the room. The gallery itself is a collaboration, between two successful Manhattan gallerists, Parrasch and Nicelle Beauchene.

Parts & Labor opened in May 2019 in a building that had been an auto shop for vintage Porsches. “There’s an indie band called Parts & Labor; I love that name,” Parrasch admits. “And I figured, we’re in an auto shop— let’s go with it!” He also has a gallery in Los Angeles, Parrasch Heijnen.

The gallery reopened in July, as part of the cautious reanimation of the art world. “People are buying art all over,” Parrasch remarks. “The gallery in LA sold out two shows in a row, and it’s quite busy in New York.” Clearly a certain number of the quarantined feel that if they have to stare at a wall all day, they might as well put something lovely on it.

The gallery is only open Saturday and Sunday. Parrasch suggests making reservations, but if the gallery is empty one can walk inside. (No more than four people are allowed in at a time.) —Sparrow

Dreams & Daydreams

“LOIS DODD AND SHARA HUGHES” AT PARTS & LABOR BEACON

Through October 25 Partsandlaborbeacon.com