Poetry

by

2 Poems by Jessica Madison

In Fairness, she was

naked except for that fur

(the one from Orient Furrier), she said You’re only kind

to me when- and pricked

him with her mothy needle.

He walked all the way home in the rain.


He thought he might as well have

shot her in the stomach, since it was raining

and the world was almost over


___________________________________________________________________________________________

Sun Chariot

As I said last time

I left in chains,

I will not make salt of you

this time, friend.

[My horses require no water.]

“You’ll find them in a place

beneath the freeway.”

They said,

and threw it open.

[My horses require no water.]

It’s.

It’s someone. This is what they told me.

They told me this.

Someone

told me.

[My horses require no water.]

So what is this about–

it is so hot everywhere.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

Jessica Madison lives in Brooklyn.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

by

2 Poems by Karin Gottshall

Original Photo by Karin Gottshall


The Victorian Age

One thousand lockets minus a lace handkerchief
equals a flock of passenger pigeons, each
carrying a Valentine heart. Seven hundred

ladies’ gloves plus a fishing village
amounts to one temperamental swan and a missing
engagement ring. The alphabet backwards

equals the cemetery on the hill. Marzipan
equals almonds, eggs, sugar, and a scullery maid
weeping into her apron. We’ve lost count

of cravats, hair brooches, and riding boots, traded
a deck of cards for two gentlemen playing
at charades. Top hats can be added to tapioca—

flavor with rum. Two hundred and fifty
petticoats multiplied by twelve chimneysweeps
equals a shattered femur. One locomotive

plus a dozen headmasters comes to a bakery
on Easter morning: hot cross buns with currants.
A dirge equals a dirge. Twenty-seven

daguerreotypes times three overwrought aviaries
is a solar eclipse. Christmas divided by deep mourning
equals burnt porridge. Thirteen hundred orphans left over.


 

_________________________________________________________________________________
Love Poem with Ebb Tide

I mistook strangers’ gestures for yours—
strangers walking toward me in the sun. Lilacs

tossed by the wind. The tiny bones
of our wrists sometimes ached when it rained,

and Sundays I bought books and artichokes,
thinking why do I have to be so fragile,

I am too fragile. You held my face
in your fingers; pantomime of a wedding

enacted by fireflies. We shielded our eyes
when the harbor was filled with sails. White

sails! And the long breaths of cool wind
from Quebec. I had a feeling someone

was looking for me, but searching the wrong
century. When I went to sea—but I didn’t,

I never went. I just stood on the pier.
You walked by, carrying a lantern.


_________________________________________________________________________________
Karin Gottshall is the author of Crocus, published by Fordham University Press in 2007, and the chapbook Flood Letters, forthcoming from Argos Books. Recent poems appear in Field, The Southern Review, Harvard Review, and in the online journals Memorious and La Petite Zine. She lives in Middlebury, Vermont, and teaches poetry writing at Middlebury College.
_________________________________________________________________________________

by

On Divination by Birds by Kimberly Johnson

We have long esteemed the work of Kimberly Johnson and so we are thrilled that she agreed to let us post this incredibly appropriate (and lovely) poem.

On Divination by Birds

I don’t need that black

wind of crows kicking up from flax to tell
heavy weather coming, white days to drop
barricades across the interstate,

against two hundred miles of trackless white.
(The crows so obvious then against the miles
of trackless white!) More tricky the magpies

flicker and croak at the sunken carcass
of a roadkill deer, raveling with beaks
the rubbery guts, picking gravel

from scant meat: there must be in their turn-taking
some pattern, some elegant design
beyond need, something in the raw trouble

of jays, the ragged braying geese flown south.
I gaze at their weightless wingbeats daylong
working to discern whether V might stand

for valediction, or vigilance, or
the blank indifference of velocity.


_________________________________________________________________________________
This poem first appeared in the Harvard Review and later was in her book A Metaphorical God (Persea Books, Inc. New York, NY 2008).


Kimberly Johnson is a poet, translator, and Renaissance scholar. She is the author of a previous collection, Leviathan with a Hook, and a translation of Virgil’s Georgics. Her poems appear widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Slate, and The Iowa Review. Johnson has received prizes from the Merton Foundation and the Utah Arts Council, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Salt Lake City.
_________________________________________________________________________________

by

Poetry at the Rubin

Augury Books is co-curating an evening of poetry at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan.

150 W. 17 St., NYC 10011

Wednesday January 26, 2011 @ 7:00 PM
Price: $12.00
Member Price: $10.80

Poets Kimiko Hahn, Saskia Hamilton, Noelle Kocot, David Lehman, Ben Lerner, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Stacy Szymaszek read poems by themselves and others on the themes of absence, emptiness, and…nothing.

“if there’s nowhere to rest at the end how can I get lost along the way?”

–Ikkyu

For more information and to buy tickets in advance please visit the Rubin Museum website.