BathHouse Journal 26 designed to be viewed on laptop/desktop.
Patrick Flores-Scott, Editor
Carla Harryman, Advising Editor
“There are things known and there are things unknown,
and in between are the doors of perception.”
-Aldous Huxley
Sarah Riggs
from collection, Lines
November 15
The assured rise in expectations
Flurry of the soul to fault
More candid in the aftermath
Telling repercussions lest we be
A haunted sort of twangling
Zero carve under: a minus zone
Where to the time of splinter
Agree in space sleet of thought
Thicket of removal whether used tickets
Sure padding along containment
Sixth trajectory at finger wave
A scuttle of myriad individual feelers
Carry the weight of know-how
Frankly abutting loss of minute gestures
So to the wind or trolley, jump on
Going to a scene inside of one
Strength of meander not lost
Eventually to find a response
Torn the tether of intuition
A register of mind temperatures
Callously pick at the center
It cannot hold this widening gyre
Everyone’s death on your tongue tip
Prefer laughter to extinction
The least rope around speech
Tway it true, spitious trackle
Trein in fitps washt
Crusp tanglest feep
Tallp ofn qwirp
Frip tway trusilience
Mwart tisper clotps
Shpreverst tumple
Frape quindlsnatch
A froth of quipperwill
Designated framember
Quick to the will of coughing
Mented clucking and zane
Fortuitous further duck
Planned along colors
A zepiter mouth timin
Shuckle and haste to backwards bobbin
Frickle zumious bandersnatch
Zupittle carving blade beyond
Tumble worth twer match
February 21
It was generative and telling
The whisper at the bridge
Several in quick fusion
Taper the sands
Frontal the imagination and a squeeze
To wind at the street
At the mouth, at the front
The issue with saying, tempt
The word relayed an event or question
Some talk in the mouthful, deranged
Back to that degree
And the investment in submerged feelings
All those fears coming to the surface
& being dealt with
People talking about what things felt like
Further along dementia an open conversation?
It was a choice, telling how it was
Alisa Golden
Redacted
Cristina Pérez Díaz
from collection: From the Founding of the Country
She said we need a new verb She said it and she found it It took time and experience The passage of hours months Maybe years without writing Yet listening every morning to the news Immersed in prose She has been using the dictionary exhaustively Elusive meaning frequently reminding her This is not your language There’s beauty in dictionaries She reckons Elation even In the swift pace of the passage from one word to another And the risk of never coming to an end And I am keeping it to myself How much time has elapsed between the previous page and this one What the two lovers have done How they’ve felt Whom else they have loved What they have read How they’ve been sleeping And the contents of their dreams The unexpected changes in their skins and shapes of their bodies The exercises they’ve practiced And how often the perception of the passing of the seasons And the mood swings attached Have made them look at the sunset And go places Board cars Trains Planes Horses or the changes In the landscapes outside their windows And why I said that in the plural Plants have grown in their home And plants have died in that same home To where they’ve also brought groceries And the content of the bags and whether they were plastic Or paper Or tote bags And the food they’ve cooked somehow matters And what kind of light entered the kitchen At what hour in the spring And how often they’ve cleaned the house And the toilet or how their digestion Has been working as a matter of fact And what kind of showers And baths They enjoyed together or individually And if the difference is semantically charged Or if one of them has failed and then passed An exam and why are there exams in this country where they themselves have made the laws of song, and how many times each one of us has looked at herself in the mirror and fixed, ever so delicately A lock of hair that was flying And whether my hair has grown and I lost count Of how many times they’ve clipped their nails Out I leave as well the money spent and how it was earned in the first place And every single item they have purchased And the packages they have discarded into the trash bin And walked away Without even a comma Or raising the sort of obvious question such an occasion should be bound to raise For this is in fact our country Or if love withered and died Or was it Josephine who died and I am still calling the lover Josephine For the sake of narrative coherence Or was it because she wanted it that way And it is still an act of love Still moving the poem and the landscape forward As the powerful engine by which one page bleeds into the next But with time they found the verb they’d been looking for Just as they were reading some haphazard document That did not happen to make it into this record
Inna Krasnoper
Unknown People
Onna Solomon
The Mother of Sons Imagines a Young Man
Urgently, she would cross the room
to sit and face him
at his small deli table. He is alone
eating his corned beef sandwich.
What is it like, she would plead, to be
what you are? Do you know your
young white face will bring you
almost anywhere safely?
She watches peripherally
how neatly he eats.
What do you think
when you see a woman
walking at night? What are you
grateful for? Do you still
allow your mother
to run her fingers through your hair?
Do you remember resting
your fevered head on her chest
when you were a boy?
She ponders him, wonders where
he has to be and what stride
will take him there.
Cease Fire
“…and the stars
will hang above them and not one bomb
will be heard through that night”
—Ross Gay, “Prayer for My Unborn Niece or Nephew”
On their honeymoon, my grandparents
came up to a Traverse City hotel concierge
to find a sign that read
No Dogs, No Jews. Because it’s not yet
against the law in Michigan, I take my kids
to drag story time. My son says,
I look like a boy on the outside
and I feel like a boy on the inside too.
This morning, I felt in me
some great-great-grandmother shaking me
to wake up, be vigilant!
My animal heart quick to fear
quick to pick up my pups
by the scruff and carry them
into some illusion of safety. My kids
still asleep in their room above me—
soon I’ll hear the weight of
their bare feet on the floorboards.
At night, I make the mistake of scrolling
before bed. I see the smiling face
of the synagogue president from Detroit,
stabbed to death. Amid endless
gray rubble, a Palestinian reporter holding up
a giant red teddy bear. All the children—
some bleeding and covered in dust, some buried
in heaps of golden leaves—look like
children from the outside, feel like
children on the inside too.
maryhope|whitehead|lee
Have You Ever Felt Invisible (Welcome Home)
Peter Markus
There is Always Something Making Some Small Sound
You can’t go down to the river
thinking the water is going to have an answer.
It’s true the river has a mouth
but it can’t talk. The voice you hear
lives inside your head. It’s not your father.
And your father isn’t some bird singing
or not. Your father is dead. You couldn’t stop
that from happening even though it made you feel
more alive inside each moment. You hold on
to the frayed dock-line so you don’t fall in.
Don’t worry, the river wants to say. We will catch you.
You wonder why the river is suddenly a “we.”
Maybe there’s some comfort to find in that.
“My father and I” you want to say back,
but that’s no longer true either. The river flows
around both sides of this two-bridged island.
You think back to when he was still here,
able to walk and talk. What the two of you didn’t say
could fill a book. You stop now and listen
to the river, which has disguised itself
as silence. There is always something making
some small sound: some bird, some fish.
Your father’s mouth when it refused
the food you spooned up to it.
The sputters of his last breaths.
The splash of water when the white tern
breaks the river’s surface looking for
a minnow to eat. What it takes up and holds
in its curved beak. You can’t speak
to what you want now. Why say anything
when it’s always best to listen? You once believed
it was possible to walk across water.
Now you’re content standing on the rocky shore.
When you decide to step into the shallows
the river bottom is softer, muddier, than even you imagined.
The two swans nearby give you a look.
Their necks are curved into question marks.
What do you think you’re doing? their look is asking you.
Imagine that look.
What She Calls Water
It is sometimes difficult to see
what his mother sees as she looks out
through the empty room and the clear glass
of the window that birds often fly into.
The river is always there for her to see,
what she calls water. The birds that come often
to eat at the wreath of seeds hanging
from the tree are either big ones or small.
They do not need names other than this.
His father whose failing body once
filled this room and house knew the river,
knew the swifts and the swallows
that swam through the air like winged fish.
He who liked to call it a pickerel when his son
always said walleye and they both knew
it meant the same thing. When he trimmed
the trees or cut them down to the roots
to better see the river, it was never only tree
but was instead: hickory, poplar, red bud or pine.
A boat was never just a boat but was instead
a Chris-Craft or Sea Ray and the size of it
always mattered. The father took pride
in his thirty-two-foot Carver but what the son
remembers most is this small moment:
the two of them standing side by side
in their thirteen-foot Boston Whaler
and his father telling him this: we could cut
this bad boy in half with the two of us sitting in it
and still this boat would never sink.
Denise Leto
Familiar in Anomaly
Leah Flax Barber
from collection, The Mirror of Simple Souls
Ballad
Full moon tonight
And these clouds are a dune
A 24-hour gong
The louder the better
To love see everything as time
And time as obsession
A pain like chewing gum
In the subarctic
You chase your demon
Across the breaking ice
Will it be different
From perfection?
Death so moral
And outsiderly
A black pomade in my hair
No a clear red
Like an embryo
In oily glass
I am tired now from the meal.
I want to touch you
With my eyes closed
Like someone learning
Not every word is saved
By its ending
Columbina and Pedrolino
In the river
You rinse your painted face
Repent an insect
We cull flowers
You eat spiders shuddering
At the crowd I slide the light inside
If I could invent a family
Whom I belong to again
There might only be
Water and how little water heals
I descend with my hideous
Sister a young voice
Moves mesh through a curtain
Fevered we are with disgust
Being an actress I touch your hand
Without touching it
Kent Shaw
A FOREST WITHOUT A FATHER FIGURE IS LIKE DUST DISINTEGRATING, OR
A STORY WHERE DUST DISINTEGRATES
And someone comments if only there was a father figure
who could make sure dust disintegrates with some predictability.
It would be like a poetry made only of consonants,
and then the consonants became friends with one another,
and there was no need for vowels.
The famous French novel that had left out the e wasn’t really that experimental.
Vowels can be such caffeinated jerks.
They just want to change things around,
says every consonant I know.
It’s like growing up. Or it’s like going to grad school.
Except in the end you don’t know if you graduated as a consonant or a vowel.
*
But, then, it’s always useful to be confused.
Read Paradise Lost.
Each of the angels has no idea what he should be doing.
Which is by design.
God had handed them all envelopes,
and they were afraid to see what was inside.
Like a reality TV show set in “the wilderness.” Called Exodus.
With God dressed in envelopes and Moses behind Him holding a train of envelopes.
And the people with him dressed in sand,
sometimes making a mountain from sand,
and sometimes it’s just circles of sand around the catwalk,
telling the judges, “My life is sand.” And it really is.
Which is why God sent the manna every morning.
“Shut up about the sand already.” God was saying.
*
The thing with poems is they can go almost anywhere.
They can look like a dog and barely walk like a dog.
But you can still refer to it as the most dear little dog you’ve ever written about.
Like that art installation by Robert Frost,
that wasn’t a poem but pretended
to be a poem about people listening to someone on the other side of a wall.
It was in this one motel.
And they closed the breezeway over so the voices from inside the room would echo.
It sounded so much like pronouncing consonants.
Living so easily with the consonants two doors down.
And the title of the installation was “Good Neighbors,” of course.
But without any vowels.
*
Like when my daughter was learning to ride a bike, she wanted to call it a bicycle.
Like learning to ride something simple didn’t feel like it felt
to be riding a bicycle in circles.
Drawing a circle in the parking lot we live next to
and following the line.
You don’t just ride a bicycle.
You pronounce it. You practicality it.
It’s like praying to God.
The famous American poet who had a prayer bench in his private office.
Where he presumably prayed to God before writing his poems.
Or he imagined a posture for “praying,” and God would form him into a certain tone of voice.
Or maybe it was God who was praying to him.
A three-personed God.
A God that would bend at the waist to offer Himself to the poet.
And then the poet regretted it all.
“But, of course, that’s not it at all.” God said.
“That’s not what I said at all.” The poet replied.
The Men Held a Rope
The men held a rope among them,
sometimes between them,
like it was connecting them to whatever it means to live in a city.
Trees with ropes hanging from the lower branches.
Street lamps with a rope tied between them.
Do you know that television show called Eight Is Enough,
where the family dresses in white for the opening credits,
and the camera follows them around with candid shots of each child being tackled by Dick van Patten,
who would raise himself up, swing a rope over his head
before charging another one of the children,
his new wife, the neighbors.
So much of TV from 1977 featured troubled men
dealing with questions the show had no interest in answering.
What if everything in our lives had already been filmed by David Lynch?
The deformity of self-consciousness,
the deformity of everything trying to live with itself.
Do you remember how the Elephant man used a rope to tie the sack over his head?
Do you remember falling? The world has been falling.
This morning I woke up at 3am.
I was falling out of my chair.
I was supposed to be at my watch station thirty years ago.
It was supposed to be my turn to get up when my daughter called us in.
The rocks holding up the corner of our house were being removed one stone at a time.
*
There was a whole architecture of past behaviors.
Down at the bus stop.
I was reading a book about the past.
The past for weeks had been filled by the past.
Like the President was waiting to be our past President.
The people kept searching their past for something.
Like it was their future. Something like that.
*
A sculpture of Jesus designed using ropes,
tied to other ropes,
so he’s a male body in the body of a male.
Like the sculptor was making his own comment on the Incarnation,
but I still don’t understand.
Like Channing Tatum in Magic Mike 2 when the guys are driving to Myrtle Beach,
and they’re so contemplative.
Channing Tatum as Christ-figure, just thinking.
A ball of knots tied into knots, like when Jesus wept.
And we saw him there with the other disciples.
What were any of us supposed to believe?
Just try not to, the Bible says in response.
Manifest a destiny of not.
Build an ark and the not can wash over the world.
Build a temple, and a voice will whisper the word “not” each day.
Until the temple is destroyed.
*
There is a not that that has been waiting inside the Bible for thousands of years.
But it’s really not.
And we weren’t not doing all that bad. Waiting.
Which is like a short story set in the 21st Century. Somewhere downtown.
Many years of not, until it was the name of every street.
The not me connected to this version of me who is desperate for sleep.
In our bed there is not in all the sheets.
Not my turn to do anything.
A not had roosted in the trees outside our house.
It was not a bird or a rodent. It was not even a large animal.
It was not.
Daniel C. Remein
from Occupations and Sayings
Inna Krasnoper
However
Matt Hetherington
Dialogue for One Person
For Nathan Sheperdson
i said we shall become where we meet
|| ||
i said you worked all week stroking wicks
|| ||
i said the eye of the spare bed is lazy too
|| ||
i said we have the same desire to be born
|| ||
i said two finds out later about the lost one
|| ||
first one to forget wins an arrow to suck on
|| ||
proud to note an absence of the word absence
|| ||
had managed to write a poem without mangroves
|| ||
something lent me what you think you are thinking
|| ||
while innocently a synthesis dribbles from a colon
|| ||
we don’t act as if numbers don’t have secrets do we
|| ||
people in glass houses should not grow shadows
|| ||
but perhaps in a sense you don’t want to touch
|| ||
the heart is made to destroy charity with more charity
|| ||
a good idea got lost reversing up a one-way street
|| ||
behind three eyelids i am still only half myself
|| ||
one deaf the other mute both want to be left alone
|| ||
i think we have completely untongued the same verb
|| ||
you had to put your ear to the floor of another
|| ||
he lay down and a tree grew out of his bush
|| ||
i follow a line until it falls off the edge of the world
|| ||
you can’t hold me responsible for murdering a song
|| ||
the night then passes before we disagree to agree
|| ||
it is well known that we tamed time in a biscuit tin
|| ||
you hid our intersections in the back of his mouth
|| ||
an organic lime costs more than two blue lines
|| ||
so why do i pretend you have a brow to your eye
|| ||
occasionally he hits my target with an accidental dart
|| ||
you believe your finger is balanced on the end of you
|| ||
thoughts i once had to think now thought for me
|| ||
with time i would sweep the whole beach into the sea
|| ||
he said you remembered a fish leaping into a hole
|| ||
he said that his back was often more like n than i
|| ||
he said every brain should retaliate against its shape
|| ||
he said the easiest way to close a door is behind you
|| ||
he said at birth the handle came off in your hands
|| < > ||
Second-Best
Twenty-two Aphorisms for Antonio Porchia
I think therefore I mind.
** **
They are so mad, they hide what they don’t want.
** **
Wisdom is the love of what is above you.
** **
The few above you are also near the bottom.
** **
Pain is the second-best teacher.
** **
Learning is like cleaning.
** **
I eat thoughts instead of meat.
** **
To the innocent, blood is green.
** **
Whenever I lie down, something in me wakes up.
** **
I want to forget it all, even that summer I lived a thousand years.
** **
When you are lost, you are close.
** **
The sun hides my sadness, even from me.
** **
Keep going, even though you’re past it.
** **
I always try my second best.
** **
After a week of rain, you feel how much the sun loves you.
** **
Nothing makes us lazier than work.
** **
Why postpone what you can cancel?
** **
Again and again, I try to avoid repetition.
** **
Listen to your ears.
** **
When you have vertigo, you can’t stop reading the whole world.
** **
Even the end is unfinished.
** **
Every second is the best.
** ** ** **
Alisa Golden
Would He Hide Me?
Henry Goldkamp and Adele Elise Williams
Sermon on Poppy Seeds
Henry Goldkamp
VOLUTION VOLITION
last words last a millennia
long the water does the forgiving
no wonder tastes like garbage
stars shine down certified pre-owned
first you invent the knife
then you invite the wine
had the fig gone unplucked
it would have eaten itself
noticing the moon
like noticing your couch
in your own living room