Poem of the Day: Hand Grenade Bag by Henri Cole

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend August 12, 2014   Hand Grenade Bag   Henri Cole

 

This well-used little bag is just the right size to carry a copy of the Psalms. Its plain-woven flowers and helicopter share the sky with bombs falling like turnips—he who makes light of other men will be killed by a turnip. A bachelor, I wear it across my shoulder—it’s easier to be a bachelor all my life than a widow for a day. On the bag’s face, two black shapes appear to be crows—be guided by the crow and you will come to a body—though they are military aircraft. A man who needs fire will soon enough hold it in his hands.            Copyright © 2014 by Henri Cole. Used with permission of the author.   About This Poem   “Over the past thirty years hand grenades, tanks, fighter jets, missiles, helicopters, and assault rifles have replaced traditional floral patterns in rug making and other textiles. Depicting these realities of war has helped the Afghan people to survive during times of conflict.” —Henri Cole   Henri Cole is the author of Nothing to Declare, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in March of 2015.  He teaches at Ohio State University in Columbus and lives in Boston part-time. Most Recent Book by Cole   Nothing to Declare (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015) "War Rug" by Henri Cole "Mosul" by David Hernandez "Bagram, Afghanistan, 2002" by Marvin Bell Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.   Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

Poem of the Day: America 2014

America 2014

 

America I have given you 44 years and you are nothing.

America I’ve got 28 cents in my savings account and a nineteen-hundred-dollar a month mortgage.
America you ring with joy at watching the smiling faces of the moneyed lenders
                tell me to make my pledge to NPR in my will.
America when I’m gone I will leave you nothing but the stain in my underwear.

America please let the border kids stay.

They came crawling through the desert on their knees, or by clinging to
to the hard rails of the Beast, rumbling through the furnace of a merciless Chihuahuan summer.

Now you keep them in dog cages in McAllen, and AM Hate Radio Fearmongers call these children

                diseased
                                call them
                illegal
                                call them
                drug mules
                                call them
                invaders
                                call them
                a flood.

 

America I still have not told you what Uncle Ronnie did to Archbishop Romero.

I took my son to a hospital to get a two-second x-ray of his hand to find out

why he’s only five-foot-three at the age of 14, and you
sent me a bill for two-thousand-six-hundred-eighty-three-dollars and fifty-one-cents.

America these are the same hospitals that
dump decrepit old white women out of moving cars in front of run-down clinics in Los Angeles.
These are the same hospitals that send the uninsured into the streets of Galveston
with tumors on their spine malignant enough to paralyze arms.
The same hospitals, dear America, that let Anna Brown die in a jail cell in St Louis,
when the emergency room could have stopped that blood clot from reaching her heart
               with some aspirin and a tiny dose of humanity.

America I’m not naming names, but

Israel – really?
Saudi Arabia – really?
Are these the two allies you want when you try to call yourself a Christian nation?

America I choke myself silly, laughing daily at your absurdities,

that you wear like baubles around your fingers that dig
deep into my pockets and pull out my sensibilities.

America you are your governors stump speeches in your Baptist megachurches.

America you are the fading glacier of the Sierra Nevada
America you are the algae bloom in Lake Erie.
                Toledo can’t drink the water any more, turn ‘em over, they’re done.

America you are a hornet’s nest that kills pregnant women.
Your pets take selfies and then their owners fight over the copyright.
You let your husbands shoot their estranged wives in the face with a shotgun in
the early morning high school parking lots.
 
America your factories have been converted into Ikeas,
America I think you have run out of ideas.
You are just not funny any more, and I want to cancel my subscription.

America do you hear me banging on my pot and my pan?
America can you see me through the stained-blood window in the mist of the dirty rain?

America will you please let me know the time and date when you plan to

            blow the lid off the top of the last mountain?
I wanna take a picture, upload it to Instagram,
tell everyone: this wasn’t a wimper –

this baby went out with a bang.

 

Poem of the Day: Could Have Danced All Night by Dean Young

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend August 6, 2014   Could Have Danced All Night   Dean Young

 

The wolf appointed to tear me apart is sure making slow work of it. This morning just one eye weeping, a single chip out of my back and the usual maniacal wooden bird flutes in the brain. Listen to that feeble howl like having fangs is something to regret, like we shouldn’t give thanks for blood thirst. Even my idiot neighbor backing out without looking could do a better job, even that leaning diseased tree or dream of a palsied hand squeezing the throat but we’ve been at this for years, lying exposed on the couch in the fat of the afternoon, staring down the moon among night blooms. What good’s a reluctant wolf anyway? The other wolves just get it drunk then tie it to a post. Poor pup. Here’s my hand. Bite.           Copyright © 2014 by Dean Young Used with permission of the author.   About This Poem   “I wrote this poem after being sick for a couple days and realizing I had yet again survived.  So it’s about the sort of cockiness one has about still being alive.” —Dean Young class=featured>   Dean Young is the author of Bender (Copper Canyon Press, 2012).  He teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. class=featured> Most Recent Book by Young   Bender (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) "Anxieties" by Donna Masini alt=read-more> "Plural Happiness" by David Rivard alt=read-more> "Lucky" by Tony Hoagland <![endif]--> alt=read-more> Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends.   <![endif]--> alt=Small-Blue-RGB-poets.org-Logo> Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

Soundtrack for Bethany and Co.

"So, I was thinking that for all my music aficionado tweepsters, I had, in the past few weeks, sent out a 'special' song-of-the-day to each one, except Ms. Bethany.   I felt bad about that, and I wondered why.  I mean, she's a rocker, a blues aficionado - it should be easy, right?

"Well, no, not really.  The others just came up at the right time, but when you try to 'find' a song for a friend it's like dipping your hands into a running river to try and catch a fish.

"For the kind of free spirit she is, I was thinking pretty much anything by the Allman Brothers Band.  Then, it hit me:  Bethany takes her family on a road trip.   A road trip soundtrack!  Then, songs just started popping up everywhere.  What we have here will fit on one CD.

"There is only one rule for choosing songs for a road trip:  They MUST NOT PUT YOU TO SLEEP.  (at least while you're not sharing the open road with Verble and the fam!)   So that means you cannot take this moment to relive your old college memories by playing Dark Side of the Moon.  Mazzy Star is right out.  and definitely NO TRANCE RHYTHMS.  But, once you understand that, anything goes, pretty much.

"Remember, it's also OK for a road movie soundtrack to have a little cheese, because this is fun!  And yes, there will be some tunes on here that you might say, 'those are on EVERY road song list' - well, yes.  Because some songs continually make those 'lists' by the simple fact that they perfectly exemplify that particular list!  So, here you are, the Soundtrack to Bethany and Co. ...

Los Straitjackets	Cal-Speed
Camper Van Beethoven	Sweethearts
Janis Joplin	Move Over
Iron Maiden	The Prisoner
Buddy Guy	Meet Me In Chicago
Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs	Repo Man
Beth Hart and Ray Bonnamassa	Sinners Prayer
Molly Hatchett	Flirtin' With Disaster
Luka Bloom	The Acoustic Motorbike
AC/DC	It's a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock n Roll)
Allman Brothers Band	Ain't Wastin' Time No More
Tom Petty	Runnin' Down a Dream
Chuck Berry	No Particular Place to Go
Poison	Nothin' but a Good Time
The Raveonettes	Here Comes the Love Crew
The Doors	The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat)
The Who	Join Together
They Might Be Giants	Ana Ng
Hoodoo Gurus	1,000 Miles Away

  
"Now you also gotta know, that by this afternoon I will probably have wanted to have replaced half these songs with others.  But, that's the blessing of living in an age of recorded music!

"Lastly, I was thinking 'well, if this is a road movie soundtrack, then what's the movie?' Glad you asked!  Yesterday I heard on the radio that developers want to make a god-awful casino-resort-hotel-theme-park on 420 acres of sacred Navajo land overlooking the Grand Canyon.  So, that made me think of this plot:

"Woman, wife, mother of two teenage boys in their late teens, living in New England, learns of the developers plan to destroy an American icon by building on the GC.  Being part Navajo, she knows she has  a say in the matter, so she gathers up her family, who haven't been on a road trip in years, and get them all to head out across country.  Along the way, they learn more about America, each other, she tells them stories her grandmother told her about the Navajo ways of life, of spirits of the ancestors.   Various hilarity ensues (as it always does in road movies) and eventually they come to the Navajo meeting where they infuse the proceedings with a strong dose of Yankee sass!

"But that's just the idea in my head.  It's your movie . . . make it yours!

"Here's to many wonderful adventures, Bethany and Co.!"

-Verble