Also by BRETT FLETCHER LAUER INTRODUCTION Most poets begin writing poetry in secret. As with love and other experiences, there is a first time and it is remembered. The first poem might be written on the back of something else, or in a notebook shown to no one. It might be a poem where someone falls in love with someone but that person falls in love with someone else . It might be a poem about floating alone / in the cold blue , or about sex or the distance / between a missed train and love . The poet begins to understand that when she picks up her pen, she doesn't know what's going to happen. The poet knows only that when he's writing, his true self is speaking on paper or in his thoughts, strangely and without fear. This anthology is a collection of such poems. They are filled with ending up in the wrong adventure , and with the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts . One poet writes, Inside here are many moments , and it is true: the neighborhood, summer boredom, handsome drugs, suburban rabbits // and warrens of junkies and the number of clips emptied / into an unarmed Guinean man / on a dark Bronx stoop . A father's embrace is here, and a grandmother who only wants to tell . . . who died / and how . Another poet writes, I hope we all die just like this, in someone else's arms, young and beautiful and true . In these poems, we sleep under the stars, get stopped by the police, and hang from trestles as the trains come. In these poems a good way to fall in love / is to turn off the headlights / and drive very fast down dark roads . Inside the poet there is the burning chandelier . . . where the language begins . The poet tries to dance like firelight / without setting anyone ablaze . Inside, the poet is dreaming of tornadoes again, too many for the sky to contain . Another spent all night / collecting your photographs / and cutting them up . These poems were written young, but death isn't absent here: there's a dead woman in the river / dead baby in the cradle / there's a dead soldier in the desert / & three crows wonder over and over / whether to cry out . Most poets continue to write in secret until they trust someone enough to show her a poem, and this sharing continues one to another until the poems are strong enough to be sent out into the world, as these poems have been, the poems you are holding now, and as your poems may someday be sent, because why not? When you look down / inside yourself / what is there? It is a question any of us can ask ourselves as poems begin within us. There is often a feeling that precedes or accompanies the poem as it is born, and the poets write, I can't shake that something is coming. I opened wide my door to it . I'll sleep when I'm dead . These one hundred poems, drafted by one hundred younger poets firmly launched on their careers, will provide writers with inspiration and aspiration, and all readers with exhilaration. In poems you will never run out of ways to say I am here . And having read this far, you also know what it means to be waiting, like an animal, / For poetry . Carolyn Forché JAKOB Dorothea Lasky I am sick of feeling I never eat or sleep I just sit here and let the words burn into me I know you love her And don't love me No, I don't think you love her I know there are clouds that are very pretty I know there are clouds that trundle round the globe I take anything I can to get to love Live things are what the world is made of Live things are black Black in that they forgot where they came from I have not forgotten, however I choose not to feel Those places that have burned into me There is too much burning here, I'm afraid Readers, you read flat words Inside here are many moments In which I have screamed in pain As the flames ate me BARBOUR STREET Samuel Amadon My junior year of high school I had to go all spring to this middle school on Barbour Street for an afterschool thing for college applications or whatever & I tried to look like I wanted to be there but those kids knew I didn't & they could see I didn't know shit about them or their neighborhood so it's not surprising they didn't wave that summer when Spencer & I rode past them day after day on the way to the gym where we were getting ready for football season or fucking off on our bikes & Spencer kept pointing out to me how even though a block out there was about twice as long as my block instead of there being three hydrants evenly placed along it there was only one at the end of each so there had better not be any fires in the middle of those streets which I would think about the summer I was back from school when I'd drive Ray Rose home from work at this Italian restaurant where Kenny got me a job. Ray had a tear tattooed by his eye & somebody had told me by then what that meant so I never said no to him & every night I got to be the white kid in the North End past dark parked on the edge of some huge project waiting for Ray to finish whatever lesson from jail he was teaching me since everyone from jail always has some endless lesson they want to teach & so I learned a little more about the ghetto than I was supposed to & I kept Ray friendly & even got the chance to teach him something I'd just learned about Hartford which was that there used to be a field where his mom lives now & when the circus came to town they put up these tents which were rainproofed in gasoline & then all these people died in a fire which it turns out is actually the first thing after insurance Hartford is famous for. IN DEFENSE OF SMALL TOWNS Oliver de la Paz When I look at it, it's simple, really. I hated life there. September, once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes or the farmhands' breeches smeared with oil and diesel as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action happened on Friday nights where the high school football team gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone's son and despite that, we'd cruise up and down the avenues, switching between brake and gearshift. We'd fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken's neck with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel. But I loved the place once. Everything was blond and cracked and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor's argument. Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant's steam or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits. If I've learned anything, it's that I could be anywhere, staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls against each other in a bar, and hear my name. Indifference now? Some. I shook loose, but that isn't the whole story. The fact is I'm still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there, to the small town of my youth, and hold the book of wildflowers open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses, to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there, rising slightly and just out of reach. WARNING Leigh Stein There are better ways to break a heart than Facebook, such as abandoning your pregnant girlfriend at Walmart like that guy did to Natalie Portman. If you read this book sequentially, bad things may happen to you, but only as bad as the things that would have happened to you anyway. If, however, you do not read this book sequentially you may find that you are suddenly aboard a sunken pirate ship, staring into the deep abyss, and wishing you had chosen not to chase the manatee in your submarine after all. Do not panic. If you end up in the wrong adventure just go back three spaces and draw another card. Or go back to bed. Or read up on the side effects of the medication taken by your loved ones. The great R. A. Montgomery once wrote, "Suddenly you're surrounded by eleven Nodoors," and I guess what I'm trying to do here is ruin any hope you may have had of coming out of this alive. AT LAST THE NEW ARRIVING Gabrielle Calvocoressi Like the horn you played in Catholic school the city will open its mouth and cry out. Don't worry 'bout nothing. Don't mean no thing. It will leave you stunned as a fighter with his eyes swelled shut who's told he won the whole damn purse. It will feel better than any floor that's risen up to meet you. It will rise like Easter bread, golden and familiar in your grandmother's hands. She'll come back, heaven having been too far from home to hold her. O it will be beautiful. Every girl will ask you to dance and the boys won't kill you for it. Shake your head. Dance until your bones clatter. What a prize you are. What a lucky sack of stars. THERE I WAS UNREQUITED Kate Litterer Your door is like a war plunked haphazardly between us. It is true and horrid, it gets in my vision of you so tell me, don't you agree you never look mucked up. Tell me what you're reading in there, baby. I want to hear your sweet throat tell me what's on every page. I want to hear your train voice surrender. You get me there like a single night of rain. There are birds out here forever and we will wait while you lick your fingertips. I promise I will never stop writing poems outside your door and making everything up. So I guess I am your necessary pause. Before there was rain everywhere, I started off blasé feminist but I grew prouder of my writing you your door treaty. I have less clothes now and it never rains more than when I want to hurt near you and share that with you. Sometimes I hope for pauses in your breath because pauses are your lips. You are the sexiest bird I have ever stood outside. You get me on a wet page. I need to hear you say it. Press your naked little bones to the other side and tell me these birds and rain and pages are war. TALK Terrance Hayes like a nigger is what my white friend, M, asked me, the two of us alone and shirtless in the locker room, the bones beneath my skin jutting like the prow of a small boat at sea, the bones beneath his emitting a heat that turned his chest red and if you're thinking my knuckles knocked a few times against his jaw or my fingers knotted at his throat, you're wrong because I pretended I didn't hear him, and when he didn't ask it again, we slipped into our middle school uniforms since it was November, the beginning of basketball season, and jogged out onto the court to play together in that vision all Americans wish for their children, and the point is we slipped into our uniform harmony, and spit out Go Team! , our hands stacked on and beneath the hands of our teammates and that was as close as I have come to passing for one of the members of The Dream, my white friend thinking I was so far from that word that he could say it to me, which I guess he could since I didn't let him taste the salt and iron in the blood, I didn't teach him what it's like to squint through a black eye, and if I had I wonder if he would have grown up to be the kind of white man who believes all blacks are thugs or if he would have learned to bite his tongue or let his belly be filled by shame, but more importantly, would I be the kind of black man who believes silence is worth more than talk or that it can be a kind of grace, though I'm not sure that's the kind of black man I've become, and in any case, M, wherever you are, I'd just like to say I heard it, but let it go because I was afraid to lose our friendship or afraid we'd lose the game--which we did anyway. FOR THE FAINT OF HEART Ben Mirov When you return from the asylum be sure to gaze at the trees covered in snow. When the train enters the forest ask the waiter for tea with milk. When in darkness take seriously the lesson of fluttering hands. If it is offered take the class they call Ornithography for it will teach you something about love. On the subject of love I have only a single observation-- if you love a grapefruit, you cut it open and eat its flesh. Take my advice. Take it home to your husband or wife. Slip into bed. Turn off the lights. THE CROWDS CHEERED AS GLOOM GALLOPED AWAY Matthea Harvey Everyone was happier. But where did the sadness go? People wanted to know. They didn't want it collecting in their elbows or knees then popping up later. The girl who thought of the ponies made a lot of money. Now a month's supply of pills came in a hard blue case with a handle. You opened it & found the usual vial plus six tiny ponies of assorted shapes & sizes, softly breathing in the Styrofoam. Often they had to be pried out & would wobble a little when first put on the ground. In the beginning the children tried to play with them, but the sharp hooves nicked their fingers & the ponies refused to jump over pencil hurdles. The children stopped feeding them sugarwater & the ponies were left to break their legs on the gardens' gravel paths or drown in the gutters. On the first day of the month, rats gathered on doorsteps & spat out only the bitter manes. Many a pony's last sight was a bounding squirrel with its tail hovering over its head like a halo. Behind the movie theatre the hardier ponies gathered in packs amongst the cigarette butts, getting their hooves stuck in wads of gum. They lined the hills at funerals, huddled under folding chairs at weddings. It became a matter of pride if one of your ponies proved unusually sturdy. People would smile & say, "This would have been an awful month for me," pointing to the glossy palomino trotting energetically around their ankles. Eventually, the ponies were no longer needed. People had learned to imagine their sadness trotting away. & when they wanted something more tangible, they could always go to the racetrack & study the larger horses' faces. Gloom, #341, with those big black eyes, was almost sure to win. WE FALL IN LOVE WITH TOTAL STRANGERS James Allen Hall We were stopped in her car in the parking lot at Winn-Dixie. It had begun to rain, the wipers wouldn't work. The red neon sign failed to illuminate the darkness the storm brought. My mother turned to me and said, "Will you forgive me?" We hadn't been talking before the storm. I was barely fifteen; I didn't even know how to blame her yet. She said it again, her voice hoarse and religious in the overdramatic rain. Just one week before, I'd been kissed by a man. In an empty hospital bathroom he pressed me against the sink, my back bending toward the mirror. The light seemed to gasp. The man--a nurse?--flattened his hand against my zipper, lowered it until I emptied out. And then the kiss, like steel softening in wettest dark. I kept my eyes open. When he stopped, I told him I loved him. He was bending to kiss me, I was closing my eyes when he lurched back. His hand became a memory on my ass. Whatever throbbed in him flickered. He saw me for what I was: a flood of need. I said, "I didn't mean that." But will you forgive me is an incurable question. The rain stopped. In the wet stillness I slid my hand to my mother's. It was cold and she was crying, the man had hurried out on her too. In the well of my throat, everything I wanted to say was dangerous. She was cold. The words a boy says to comfort his mother swam closer. I drew them slowly out of me. I left the rest to drown. NEW YORK BOYS I MISS KISSING YOUR FACES IN THE BACKSEAT OF CABS Angela Veronica Wong dudes it is possible that i will make out with you after reading your poetry but then i've kissed some unforgivably awful musicians. liesel asked me if i knew how many hours she's spent watching some guy mess around on his guitar. i wish this question weren't so relevant to my life. maggie packed body glitter when she moved to paris and amy is just fantastic. i found hairspray here and already feel more grounded. when i was younger i hoped to grow up and spend a day on far rockaway beach talking about how much i like morning sex. the bangs situation in asia is serious. years ago we spent a weekend with ghosts in the mountains. the ouija board made us promises. i hope we wrote them down. leaving is only leaving in the context of returning. the letters i sent out can stay unacknowledged. POSTCARDS TO THE OTHER BROWN GIRL IN MY WEIGHTLIFTING CLASS Tarfia Faizullah Let's say the word saffron out loud, say sari --do you see me as a slut, or a good girl? I do not want to ask, where are you from-- your friend beside you is tan, freckled, pearls at her ears, a silver cross at her throat. * Does your mother show you pictures of eligible bachelors from Jaipur, Mumbai, Canada? Does your kitchen house unused monuments of your mother's immigrant heart: packets of mixed spices, canisters of rice, discarded coconuts? * If I must be the hand pressed against the window, let there be salt water waiting Excerpted from Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation by Brett Fletcher Lauer, Lynn Melnick All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
