Always to long for someone else’s gift— To blow that blistering alto sax, to lift Into the flash-bulbed air
For a reverse slam dunk while stunned guards gawk, To have a punster’s cheek or porn star’s cock, To capture, share by share,
Gold-plated Wall Street fame, to meditate Beyond nirvanic depths or radiate Beatitudes of prayer
Like any frescoed saint, even to make A perfect triple-decker dark-fudge cake Or master the éclair—
Means answering a roguish shout we follow Down some smashed-bottle alley to a hollow Recess, a doorway, where
If luck has tailed us on that lonely walk, When we knock, because we have to knock, No one will be there.
*****
‘Someone Else’s Gift’ was first published in Literary Matters, and then in Best American Poetry 2024. As I was unable to capture the original indentation, I have taken the liberty of introducing line spaces as an alternative way of clarifying the structure; it will sound the same when read aloud… – RHL
Stephen Kampa has three books of poems: Cracks in the Invisible (Ohio University Press, 2011), Bachelor Pad (Waywiser Press, 2014), Articulate as Rain (Waywiser Press, 2018), and World Too Loud to Hear (Able Muse Press, 2023). He teaches at Flagler College in St. Augustine, FL and works as a musician.
They rubbed two sticks together and made friction. They made a fist but couldn’t make a hand. Their dictionary wasn’t made of diction. Their diction made them hard to understand.
Trying to make a poem, they made a list. Trying to make the team, they made the choir. They made up stories whose protagonist would rub two sticks together and make fire.
Mistakes were made, and mixtapes to go with them. They made a couch their bed and made their bed. They tried to make a joke at the expense of love and money. “Make me,” money said. They made up stories but they made no sense. They rubbed two cents together and made rhythm.
*****
Eric McHenry writes: “Strangely, I remember almost nothing about writing this poem, except that I was thinking about the etymology of ‘poet’ (‘maker’) and about the versatility of the verb ‘make’.”
Eric McHenry is a professor of English at Washburn University and a past poet laureate of Kansas. His books of poetry include Odd Evening, a finalist for the Poets’ Prize; Potscrubber Lullabies, which received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and Mommy Daddy Evan Sage, a collection of children’s poems illustrated by Nicholas Garland. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife and two children. Eric McHenry – The Waywiser Press Eric McHenry, Author at The American Scholar
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.
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
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 