I love you with that love floppy and large, As one of us a man – the other, dog; Involved, detached, our life’s a travelogue Of countrysides seen from a rented barge, “Travels With You” along some river’s marge, Failing at interspecies dialogue Till tries at talk are lost in night and fog, Drifting with batteries we can’t recharge.
Yet there’s no option but to travel on, Each varied day no different than before, Wondering if we’ll find some magic door Which, risking entry, gives communion; And if, by talking, love would be enhanced, Or if we’d then destroy all we have chanced.
*****
Sonnet originally published in Candelabrum in 2007.
I shut my eyes under the scalding stream, scrubbing off last night’s dream, when suddenly I hear your voice again as though it caught in the clogged drain
and was sent bubbling back up from the other world where you’re not my mother. This time, it’s really you. I’m really here. I blink. We do not disappear.
Dad left, you say, to shower at the shop so I don’t need to stop just yet—and yet I do, unable to resume old customs, unlike you.
In a one-bath four-person household, we learn what we mustn’t see, growing, in time, so coolly intimate with one another’s silhouette
behind the opaque frosted shower screen that once more stands between us two. While at the mirror you apply foundation and concealer, I
wash out my hair with rosewater shampoo, which means I’ll smell like you all day. Mama, I shout, I’m coming out, and as you look away I knot
around me tight your lavender robe de chambre, cinching my waist, and clamber out of the tub, taking care not to step outside the cotton mat and drip
on the cracked floor you’ve polished with such zeal we’re mirrored in each tile. Yet, you’d forgive spillage, or forget. What else will you love me despite?
*****
‘Coming Out of the Shower’ by Armen Davoudian is reprinted with permission from Tin House Books from the book The Palace of Forty Pillars (2024). The poem was originally published in Literary Matters.
Armen Davoudian is the author of the poetry collection The Palace of Forty Pillars (Tin House, US; Corsair, UK) and the translator, from Persian, of Hopscotch by Fatemeh Shams (Ugly Duckling Presse, US; Falscrhum, Germany). He grew up in Isfahan, Iran, and is a PhD candidate in English at Stanford University.
Bears are frustrated by their lack of speech, Their claws leave blackboards shrieking for repairs, And that’s why bears are seldom asked to teach And almost never get Distinguished Chairs Unless they come across one unawares Whose rich upholstery they quickly shred. Some of them have been known to have affairs With a man or woman lured into their bed— This often ends up badly with one dead, The other executed for the crime, Or given a life sentence in a zoo. Bears are familiar with existential dread, Bears put their pants on one leg at a time: The problems bears have are your problems too.
*****
Charles Martin writes: “The poem is written in a variation on the Spenserian Sonnet form, which I have been writing for several years now. In this case, I enjoy the contrast between the strictness of the form and the raucousness of its subject. As I recall, I began it on a morning walk, and I think finished it shortly after the walk ended.
“The poem will next appear in The Khayyam Suite this spring, published by The Johns Hopkin University Press, which has published my last two collections of poetry, Signs & Wonders and Future Perfect, both of which are still in print. (Future Perfect has a sonnet sequence written in the Spenserian form.) Poems have recently been published in Literary Matters, The Hudson Review, Classical Outlook, and in Best American Poetry, 2024.”
Charles Martinis a poet, translator of poetry, and essayist. The Khayyam Suite is the fifth of his eight books of poetry to appear in the Fiction and Poetry Series of the Johns Hopkins University Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Literary Matters, The Hopkins Review and, in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Ingram Merrill Grant, a Bess Hokin Award from Poetry magazine, and a Pushcart Prize. His residencies include the Djerassi Foundation and Ragdale, and he served as Poet in Residence for five years for the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. His translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses received the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets, and he has also translated The Poems of Catullus and the Medea of Euripides. He is the author of the critical introduction to Catullus in the Hermes Book series of Yale University Press and of numerous essays on, and reviews of, classical and contemporary poetry.
The car mechanic’s counting out his bills behind the E-Z Mart at one a.m.; he’ll toss rocks at beer bottles just for thrills until his dealer comes, it’s fine with him.
He draws in a deep breath and sees the light swerve from the highway, puzzling the back wall he leans against just to keep out of sight. A quarter bag and some fentanyl, that’s all.
His phone vibrates again though nothing’s wrong. For two years he’s been living in a trailer with a girl who works at Publix. They get along even if sometimes she says he’s a failure—
what can he say to that? Sure. He lives cheap. They’ll fight until she forces a decision, then roll around on the couch. Once she’s asleep he’ll take a dose and watch some television.
At night he dreams of cylinders and sprockets, the trucks and cars too busted up to fix; startled awake, eyes aching in their sockets, he’ll watch the clock hands grope their way to six.
A car pulls up but he can see it’s not his hookup. Just kids with nothing else to do but drink a six-pack in the parking lot before they head out to the lake to screw.
He had his share of mischief, too, Lord knows. The girls don’t eye him in the check-out aisle much anymore, the ones with painted toes. A few years back, at least, they used to smile.
The boys can see the grease that stains his hands; they all think, damn, who wants to work that hard? He spends the day beneath their dads’ sedans while they play tackle football in the yard.
Chasing a football blew out both his knees and broke his wrist. That was three years ago. Customers say, “go Stags,” and toss their keys, then look at him real close as if they know.
A text says no one’s coming. The BP sign flickers over the pumps, and though it’s half- past two now, and he’s tired, he’s feeling fine enough to think it’s all a bust, and laugh.
And, anyway, it’s good to be alone with the gas fumes and blinking traffic light and fifteen missed calls lighting up his phone. Later, he thinks, once he and his girl fight,
and once she falls asleep on his left arm, he’ll stare at the divots on the ceiling tile and wait to hear the clock sound its alarm while the night’s odometer counts one more mile.
*****
Morri Creech comments: “As Mark Strand once said, I write to find out what I have to say. I don’t start a poem with an idea; I start with a line, an image, a rhetorical stance. Then I write in search of context: how can I situate this in a situation, a narrative moment, an argument, a meditation? The language takes me wherever I end up. This poem was constructed like that. I started with a first line and then wrote toward trying to figure out the context of the line. In this case, it led me to a character sketch. It was fine to discover what this character was about; the decisions I made about his character and circumstances were largely directed by rhymes. They steered me in what I hope was the right direction.”
Morri Creech is the author of five collections of poetry, including the Sleep of Reason, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Blue Rooms, and The Sentence (published by LSU Press, and which includes this poem). A recipient of NEA and Ruth Lilly Fellowships, as well as North Carolina and Louisiana Artists Grants, he teaches at Queens University of Charlotte. www.morricreech.com
Wrap it, unstrap it, and rip it and strip it, then pollard it, top it and limb it and lop it, and lift it and drop it and turn it and flop it.
Then roll it out, slice it thin, weave about, build it in, spatter with sparkles and sprinkle with glitter: you win!
*****
I started this poem in 2008 and abandoned it. Running across it a couple of months ago, I worked on it and sent it in to George Simmers who has just published it in this month’s Snakeskin. Keep your scraps – you may find a use for them in the future!
And by the way: December Snakeskin will be a book fair. Any poets who have published a book or pamphlet of verse over the past year are invited to contact George Simmers: editor@snakeskin.org.uk and if he thinks your book is suitable, he will ask you to send a sample poem, a short introduction and a link to where the book can be bought – and these will go online on December 1st – in time for Christmas shoppers.
When our Quiz Bowl team of eighteen-year-olds snagged a berth in the finals, held in New York City,
my small-town Minnesotan brain cells dizzied— at last I’d be some place that mattered. Swag
was my teammate Anne’s fixation: knockoff bags peddled in Chinatown, affixed with glitzy
Kate Spade labels. Anne bought a sack of six, then forgot it on the airport shuttle’s shag
seats; someone swiped it within minutes. Kate, I learned a fact of womanhood that year:
even we knockoff girls, cheap, desperate to look like someone else, to imitate
a finer woman, have our value; we’re wanted, wanted, until we disappear.
*****
Jenna Le writes: “The anecdote narrated in the first ten lines of the poem poured out of me easily and naturally enough. It was an anecdote that had been knocking around inside my brain for many years, but it wasn’t until I sat down to write the poem that the incident’s metaphorical meaning — that is, the epiphany contained in the poem’s last four lines — seemed to crystallize in the air in front of my eyes — and, to me, made the whole poem worthwhile. Honestly, until I sat down to write the poem, it had never even occurred to me that such a slight-seeming anecdote might have any metaphorical meaning at all. I sat down to write the poem more or less on a lark, and then the sonnet form just sort of took over and forced me to look deeper, to see more depth in my own material. This is one of the reasons I love the sonnet form.”
Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), and Manatee Lagoon (Acre Books, 2022), the last of which is the collection in which “Purses” appears and which can be purchased here: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo185843950.html
I hope you will forgive me for having given you hope— Too late for youthful indiscretion, though I believed my story and felt young in it until the metal facts fell.
I’d still like to imagine some god would help, but that line looks broken like the water, the gas and electricity.
What we have is hours, and in them you should have the bread and fruit before they feed the rats. I am keeping the wine for myself. It is piss-poor, anyway, and I have far more to forget.
J.D. Smith, ‘Slant Psalm’
My right hand has never known cunning, yet I remember thee, O Jerusalem, not as others’ sacred city but capital and emblem of loss, origin of far wandering without prophecy of return.
My right hand has never known cunning. May I have, as recompense, forgetting.
Michael R. Burch, ‘Starting from Scratch with Ol’ Scratch’ for the Religious Right
Love, with a small, fatalistic sigh went to the ovens. Please don’t bother to cry. You could have saved her, but you were all tied up complaining about the Jews to Reichmeister Grupp.
Scratch that. You were born after World War II. You had something more important to do: while the children of the Nakba were perishing in Gaza with the complicity of your government, you had a noble cause (a religious tract against homosexual marriage and various things gods and evangelists disparage.)
Jesus will grok you? Ah, yes, I’m quite sure! Your intentions were noble and ineluctably pure. And what the hell does THE LORD care about Palestinians? Certainly, Christians were right about serfs, slaves and Indians. Scratch that. You’re one of the Devil’s minions.
Gail Foster, ‘On The Heights Above Jezreel’
War’s harvest then is of these bitter fruits Hot shards of shrapnel buried in the flesh Of children, olives ripped up from the roots The horrid cries that fly from the nephesh And blinded eyes. Who benefits from this? Warmongers, metal forgers, men who plan Whole cities while still smoking ruins hiss Black marketeers and strategists. Who can Sleep peacefully while others have to hide Their families beneath their mothers’ skirts And bury them before their tears have dried? When will this harvest of these bitter hurts Be over? On the heights above Jezreel The storm clouds gather. Over soon I feel
Martin McCarthy, ‘The Unkillables’
There’s no great reason here to sing, but still they sing and play once more … the filthy, ragged children of the poor, who shall, as always, inherit nothing.
There’s no beckoning paradise beyond these war-torn streets of dirt, where chalked slogans outline their hurt, and yet, the unkillables rejoice!
Robin Helweg-Larsen, ‘Photo of a Dead Palestinian’
Hard to describe blown-off-ness of a head: no head, neck, shoulder – only flopping flesh, unfinished ending of a smooth-limbed, fresh, strong, naked body on white-sheeted bed; a tangled, mangled churning; then, instead of the anticipated face (serene as marble statue, Christmas figurine) instead, disorganised meat, spilling red.
No face or brains or hair. We’re sick, confused. The torn-off torso seems to have the calm proportions of an adult – look again: the genitalia of a boy of ten. “Collateral damage” is the term that’s used. Beside the body, on the sheet, an arm.
Marcus Bales: Right-Wing Semite-Murderer’s Song
Netanyahu: I am the very model of a right-wing Semite-murderer, Since I’m a Semite, too, the thing cannot get much absurderer. My people were abused by every tribe and nationality, So I, instead of empathy, embraced provinciality. Because we were oppressed I’m now oppressing weaker other folks, It gives me cover that we’re killing our Semitic brother-folks. It isn’t ethnic cleansing if I swear that in my piety I’m killing and I’m maiming only folks of my variety.
Nazi Chorus: It isn’t ethnic cleansing if we swear that in our piety We’re killing and we’re maiming only folks of our variety. We’re killing and we’re maiming only folks of our varie- riety.
Netanyahu: The same way each religion has its zealots kill for true-ishness Islamic zealots have declared that they’ll erase all Jewishness, And we have trained our own to act with criminal lethality To counterbalance enemies of lethal criminality.
Nazi Chorus: And we have trained our own to act with criminal lethality To counterbalance enemies of lethal criminality. To counterbalance enemies of lethal criminali- nality.
Netanyahu: I play the left against the right. My politics are strenuous. I say “If you hate one Jew …” Well, the rest is disingenuous. That propaganda works so well is not much of a mystery By pointing out how badly Jews were treated throughout history. We’ve rarely had an easy time, with ghettos, rape, and slavery, Our holidays still celebrate the mass of unmarked gravery. But we survived because we had our own ulteriority — And now we’re in a place at last where I am the authority.
Nazi Chorus: But we survived because we had our own ulteriority, And now we’re in a place at last where we are the authority. And now we’re in a place at last where we are the authori- thority.
Netanyahu: The Stern Gang and the Irgun were the Hamas of their day and time They killed and maimed the British, and they justified dismaying crime, And now my brave Israeli right-wing zealots take that bow for theirs, And use exactly those excuses Hamas uses now for theirs.
Nazi Chorus: And now our brave Israeli right-wing zealots take that bow for theirs, Exactly with the same excuses Hamas uses now for theirs. Exactly with the same excuses Hamas uses now for now for theirs.
Netanyahu: When everyone is furious that everyone is furious, And injury is contemplating things yet more injurious; When money spent on arms and planning how to break the breakerage Could buy opponents whole, including buildings, stock, and acreage; When every group is cheering zealots’ grim religiosity And everyone is trembling with the fear of new atrocity, I stay in office by appealing to the prejudicial dumb — While filling my Swiss bank accounts just like Hamas officialdom.
Nazi Chorus: I stay in office by appealing to the prejudicial dumb — While filling my Swiss bank accounts just like Hamas officialdom. While filling my Swiss bank accounts just like Hamas official- licialdom.
Netanyahu: No policy’s absurd enough that mine is not absurderer. I am the very model of a right-wing Semite-murderer. It isn’t ethnic cleansing if I say that in my piety I’m killing and I’m maiming only folks of my variety.
Nazi Chorus: It isn’t ethnic cleansing if we say that in our piety We’re killing and we’re maiming only folks of our variety. We’re killing and we’re maiming only folks of our vari- variety.
Robin Helweg-Larsen, ‘Roots of Terrorism’
Step back a moment, and reflect: not saying that it’s good or right that chained, starved, beaten dogs would bite– but what did you expect?
*****
Michael R. Burch, ‘Starting from Scratch with Ol’ Scratch’, first published in The HyperTexts Martin McCarthy, ‘The Unkillables’, first published in The HyperTexts Robin Helweg-Larsen, ‘Photo of a Dead Palestinian’ and ‘Roots of Terrorism’ first published in The HyperTexts
Destiny blessed me. Kismet kissed me. Accident aimed, but the meteor missed me. Fate did me favors. Luck had my back For a leisurely picnic between the tracks. Joy was a contract I printed and inked. How could I know In the mountaintop snow Nemesis tiptoed behind me and winked?
*****
‘Charmed Life’ appeared in Literary Matters, and also in The Best American Poetry 2024, selected by Mary Jo Salter. That BAP volume carries Amit Majmudar’s statement on the poem in the back matter:
“Count no man lucky until he is dead,” said Solon, a lawgiver in ancient Greece. You never know when a friendly universe might turn on you: The monthlong dry cough that turns out to be a lung mass, the backache that turns out to be a bone met; a quick trip in the car to get bread and bananas that takes a left at the light into lifelong quadriplegia. Just days before that catastrophe: A wedding, or a book deal, or a Disney trip with the kids…. It’s not a tightly enforced law, but things do tend to cancel out when it comes to good luck and bad luck, good times and bad times. (At least that holds for those of us who crowd the middle of the luck distribution; certainly some people at either extreme have only one sort of luck in abundance.)
This dashed-off charm of a poem, ‘Charmed Life,’ reflects that sense of yin and yang, of scooping slop and caviar with the same spoon. The speaker plays life on easy mode until that turn at the end, but the first word of the last line embeds the idea. “Nemesis” comes from the Greek for giving someone what they deserve, and before that, from the Indo-European root *nem-, which means “distribute.” Everyone deserves hell yeah and oh no in roughly equal measures. And for the most part, that is what we get.
*****
Amit Majmudar is a poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. He works as a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), and the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025). More information at www.amitmajmudar.com
Form in Formless Times 