We, too, feel uneasy alone; we believe we exist
to keep you safe and self-contained, at the cost

of making you seem, or feel, like you might not matter,
or not from the outside,

or not much.
We try to protect you. We have nothing to hide.

We can adjust
ourselves to look straighter, or flatter,

or more like sharpened claws, but we largely prefer
the state in which we resemble finger-

nails, or a French manicure,
reaching out with both our hands, your cure

for shapelessness, for your persist-
ent feeling that you will forever

remain immaterial, that you are better
off that way, that there is nothing or

nobody you are ready to let yourself touch.

Stephanie Burt

We have a soft spot for drama,
    and for memorization;

we like to share whatever we have been told.
    We liken ourselves to tadpoles, to works-in-progress,

to fishhooks, to earbuds, to loquacious
    teens, and to their vintage Princess phones.

We used to believe that, being so good
    at belatedness, we might never have to get old,

which was our mission, or our curse;
    though our true age is unclear, we have had equivalents

in nearly every civilization,
    both in our efforts at sarcasm and our attempts
at protests. Leave our single sisters alone.

We come in several shapes but are never
    heartless, or pointless, and never entirely straight

If you ever see just one of us,
    wait.

Stephanie Burt

   Honestly astonishing
the first time you see them unless you grew up with them,
   they look prickly enough
        to cling to your clothing. Instead

   they are a soft
unsettlement, their promise
   of sweetness more than justified
        inside, like the way

    you told me you once
got to pet a porcupine, nibs
    relaxed and folded back for better
        nuzzling, or the first

    time (after waiting and
waiting) you let me hold
    your hand. Cliché
        means clench, clutch and

    predictable, but also
sometimes true. Sometimes I feel tenderly
    opened up, wet and revealed as if cut
        in two. I want to spend
            today with you.

Stephanie Burt

What if you really had never heard it before?
The throaty voice, the credibility
And strength of a man who could always pick you up
And bring you to that one place and keep you there
And never abandon you, who would move only slowly
And never in circles, a man who would hold your hand

Gently and yet unrelentingly, whose very
Hairline crept up to a heart-shaped peak
Whose gentle curves matched black-tea-colored eyes
And as-if-penciled brows, so that those farewell-free,
As-long-as-you-need-me tones of reassurance
In him and him alone could be believed. There is so little

On this Earth you can trust, so little that comes around
And never goes away, but we will always
Have this gem, this constant
Companion, this life preserver whose love is a promise
You should have seen coming: he is, indeed, never
Gonna give you up, never gonna let
You down, never gonna run
Around and desert you.

Stephanie Burt

When the wind picked up, the field dried.
The window. The sound
of apples blowing from a tree.

Sex was the first thing
someone else took away from me.

Taneum Bambrick

Eating beside the wives of all his friends, I quietly order three oysters. Disgusting, the person beside me laughs when the half shells come over ice on a little glass plate. That smells like a dirty woman. Leaning together, they wonder how nauseating it must be for their husbands to go down on them. I am sitting across from a man who, in bed, turns to ask, Are you ready? Sometimes I am. Other times he reminds me of all the women who came so quickly with him. There is no productivity in imagining the people of my lover’s past. Or to saying, here, that I am queer in a way that might puncture the conversation.

Taneum Bambrick

Lay my figures bare
              and give them no rest,

I can relate to his premise, that he was born on Jupiter

and must be getting back soon,

that the earth is a failed planet,

that rehearsal itself
              becomes a ceremony.

Cedar Sigo

I think I forgot to turn
off the radio when
I left my mother’s
womb

In Hasidic Judaism
it is said that before we
are born an angel
enters the womb,
strikes us on the
mouth
and we forget all
that we knew of
previous lives—
all that we know
of heaven

I think that I forgot
to forget.
I was born into two
places at once—

In one, it was chilly
lonely physical &
uncomfortable

in the other, I stayed
in the dimension of
Spirit. What I knew,
I knew.
I did not forget
Voices
The world of spirit
held me in its arms.

Diane di Prima

They do not fit their given name. They glow
all day in the sun, without
ever opening up; they are able to retain
their shape and their seal under even the weightiest rain.

They may assert, or believe, that any problem
they notice among themselves must be a low
priority next to the crocuses, always picked first,
or compared to the unwell maple, whose phantom limb,
as recently as last summer, could provide
an afternoon of unreliable shade.
Their practice at holding their own
has made them feel less cultivated or planted
than like something they themselves have made.

Nevertheless it is tough for them to remain
so sanguine; they have arranged
to keep themselves together in almost the same
way they keep other people’s secrets,
even when shaky, at dawn, or nearly asleep.

They dangle and dodge in light wind
as if they were windchimes. They are, also, perennial,
able to outlast frost: they can insist
that the most important fact about them—more
than photosynthesis
or chromosomes, varietals or
Latin names—is just
that they continue to exist.

As well as the overfamiliar valentine,
the thumbnail spade for archaeological digs,
they duplicate the alphabet: a V
for victory, as well as a sort of X
wherever two or three will overlap.
Their bone-white, surprisingly durable
extensions resemble parentheses,
or quills, or claws. Once I heard
them claim that they were eggs,
dragon eggs; one day they would, supposedly, split,
detaching the bloom from the ornamental top,
so that the V-shaped part would drop
to Earth, and low-to-the-ground observers could see
the dragonets discover their feet,
their solarized scales, their yet-to-be-sharpened pairs
of retractable talons. The adults who share, or repeat,
these stories must be, not gardeners, but magicians,
the kind who understand how to escape
from anything, whom you hope
can teach you, too, how to do that.

Some renegade botanists
believe the cultivars can be regrown
from even the slightest cutting: one tendril, one stem.
Other experts think this trick can work
for closely related species, but not for them.

V for vigilance. V for vindication.
After a hailstorm, either V in survived,
in visible and invisible. They are the kind
of students who ought to teach, but will not give lectures,
having determined what parts of their own life cycle
are worth trying to explain
to the outer world, what to reveal from within their clusters
of shoots, their extracellular architecture,
and what belongs, for now, on the inside.

Stephanie Burt

Dad said if I didn’t graduate from high school
he’d buy me my own beauty shop. And that’s pretty
much how it went. I worked on heads.
      My students gave me wise advice.
One said the best critique came from a friend
who just wrote Wonderful! Keep going! on every poem.
Another said his favorite mentor
      simply put a giant X on any page he didn’t like.
Some had studied with lyric pooh-bahs
who taught them to be coffee wallahs.

Do birds theorize flying? I believe the best poetry
      instruction leans toward the oblique.

“This seems to be a ransacked candle.
This tastes like lowa. This reads
like the shortest building in the world
      trying to be tall. This syntax feels kissed.
This is like a bandage
that takes the skin off with it.
These lines look laser-cut;
      these need to be debrided, flayed.
Forget Esperanto. This is written
in Blackwatch Plaid. Did you use a protractor
or a pen to compose it? That school
      of poetics is called ellipsograph tech.

Lyric poets give their words to the wind.
It’s how the wind stays alive. To riff
on Miles Davis, you don’t have to write
      your poem every day.
You just have to touch your poem
every day. Even if it sounds like mucus
made for the glory of God
      or twinkles like a pissed-off
harpsichord. Even if it groans like a medieval
cathedral, eroded at the groins. You’ve heard

how flaws authenticate a gem? Usher in a stir
      and weird the real. Forget the celestial

and remember the celeste–
an organ stop that’s tuned to dissonance
to torque the note. Tone
      is the soul of poetry.
If you need a title ‘Lonely Consort
Of Wandering Phenomenon’ works
for almost anything. When revising think
      how a robin throwing himself against the glass
won’t change it into air.”
Poetry is never finished.
Only poets are. Some must be
      wrapped in burlap to survive.

Some must flash their stitches ==
though the deepest scars
are hidden, the damaged infra-
      trauma they intend to tell.
One bent her lines backwards
like the ankles of a sandhill crane.
One unzipped his surface to reveal
      his furtive fretwork. They all held their breaths
until their tongues turned blue.
Wonderful! Keep going!

Alice Fulton