then buffed up, tried on smirks,
and tramped past a bust of Jonathan Franzen.
If this was its coming-out party, it mainly peered in-

ward. It wanted to jostle a reader’s heart
into snare-drumming for bit
players on side streets.

Fidgety, bored, it donned cowboy hats
till it grew antennae and crawled
upstairs into your bed.

~ James Reiss

The post The Novel (James Reiss) appeared first on Carolyn Daughters.

Flight by Christian Wiman —

In the end we love the line love cannot cross.
In the end we fall for what we fail.

Forget friendship. Ardor.
Forget the years that only grow harder

as the soul recedes in what the years bring,
grown alien to any touchable thing.

Touch me. As I am. As you can.
My heart a bird’s heart just beyond your hand.

after Anna Akhmatova

More Poems

“Little Gidding” (T.S. Eliot)  |  “Leviathan” (George Oppen)  |  “Verisimilitude” (Stanley Plumly)

The post Flight by Christian Wiman (A Poem) appeared first on Carolyn Daughters.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences. The arrangement of the words matters, and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive. The picture tells you how to arrange the words and the arrangement of the words tells you, or tells me, what’s going on in the picture. Nota bene:

It tells you.
You don’t tell it.

~ Joan Didion

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Jeffrey McDaniel

You’re at a bus stop, wool hat
tugged down. Slush sprays

up from the trees of a bus
wheezing to a halt. You lumber onboard

and smell the nachos and beer breath
of the man who peers into the crevice

of your mostly zipped-up jacket.
You close your eyes and remember

being fifteen, your parents’ Baltimore
rooftop, the sun blaring down

like a golden trumpet. You stripped
to sunbathe on the asphalt

with three friends, the smokestacks
clearing their throats over the oak trees.

The face of Darius, the one black kid
in your class, froze as you lifted

your t-shirt and revealed
a Confederate flag one-piece

that you thought was a Union Jack
when you bought it on sale

at a strip mall in Virginia. Want to get high,
you asked in a British accent,

as his smile fled like smoke
from the pinched wick of a candle.

The post The Price of History appeared first on Carolyn Daughters.

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

~ Wallace Stevens

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When my mother’s third husband took me
thirty years ago to see his daughter
from his first marriage
smash the cymbals
with the high-school marching band,
he told me to be nice afterward because
she was “slow,”
which is not the same as retarded, he explained,
though I doubted the difference
as soon as the people in the bleachers
all around us began to point and laugh at the obese girl
who turned the wrong way and wandered
toward the goal posts, banging the cymbals at her whim, then
ran to rejoin the drum
line, completing circles at right angles,
forming figure eights at intersections,
bumping oboe players; one time falling down.
She twice tried suicide that year. She was smart enough
to know she would never feel at home
in a country overcrowded with parade critics.
My stepfather told her in the car that night
that all her miscues had been minor,
barely noticeable, even,
while I covered my mouth to keep from laughing.
I haven’t seen either of them
for twenty-five years. I made a shambles
of my first marriage. I’ve stumbled, repeatedly,
over the first twelve steps.
I want to be a better person.
Only now, from every side of me all at once,
do I hear the music she was marching to.

~  Matthew Deshe Cashion

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My love and I are inventing a country, which we
can already see taking shape, as if wheels were
passing through yellow mud. But there is a prob-
lem: if we put a river in the country, it will thaw
and begin flooding. If we put the river on the bor-
der, there will be trouble. If we forget about the
river, there will be no way out. There is already a
sky over that country, waiting for clouds or smoke.
Birds have flown into it, too. Each evening more
trees fill with their eyes, and what they see we can
never erase.

One day it was snowing heavily, and again we were
lying in bed, watching our country: we could
make out the wide river for the first time, blue and
moving. We seemed to be getting closer; we saw
our wheel tracks leading into it and curving out
of sight behind us. It looked like the land we had
left, some smoke in the distance, but I wasn’t sure.
There were birds calling. The creaking of our
wheels. And as we entered that country, it felt as if
someone was touching our bare shoulders, lightly,
for the last time.

~ Larry Levis

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One can’t help admiring
their rickety grace

and old-world feathers
like seasoned boardwalk planks.

They pass in silent pairs,
as if a long time ago

they had wearied of calling out.
The wind tips them, their

ungainly, light-brown weight,
into a prehistoric wobble,

wings’-end fingers stretching
from fingerless gloves,

necks slightly tucked and stiff,
peering forward and down,

like old couples arm in arm
on icy sidewalks, careful,

careful, mildly surprised
by how difficult it has become

to stay dignified and keep moving
even after the yelping gulls have gone;

even after the scattered sand,
and the quietly lodged complaints.

The post Pelicans in December appeared first on Carolyn Daughters.

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

~ Billy Collins

The post Some Days appeared first on Carolyn Daughters.

~ Anton Chekhov

The post The Glint of Light on Broken Glass appeared first on Carolyn Daughters.