BOSTON REVIEW

The Self Unstable is a forthcoming collection of poems by Elisa Gabbert

We can’t help wanting the pure word, though the corrupted word is better. Music is corrupted. Film is corrupted. The ’70s in particular were beautifully corrupt. I was born in the ’70s. As such, I am a kind of sublime porn. What is the sublime? I don’t know. I like sex, which is an approximation of porn. I like sports, which is an approximation of war. In the ideal human experience, we get as close as possible to suffering, veering away at the last second.

(o)

They slowed down Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony so it stretched over 24 hours. The effect was of a continual climbing, with no resolution—just an ever-building terror, the slowest imaginable scream. In a state of heightened time, everything reduces to fear, a sublime fear. Death gives us a reason to live.

(o)

I read about a man with severe amnesia, unable to form new memories, his diary filled with entries like I am awake for the first time … This time, finally really awake—the torment of perpetual now. I rarely transgress in a dream; I dream of the guilt that follows transgression. The weird double-bind of time: we don’t act in accordance with consequence, but we’d do nothing if we wouldn’t remember it. Our lives are lived in the past.

(o)

He said it was “an elegant scar.” My sex dreams are too realistic. We watch the sunset from a plane, and later, the city lights approaching in the dark, copper and green. Why are they all orange or green? My enemy. My enemy. If you tell me you love me, accidentally or automatically, I will always forgive you. How quickly the unexamined becomes the overexplained.

(o)

I was bitten by a feral cat, who left her fang behind in my hand. My dream life has its own past, memories I only access when asleep. When something hurts in a dream, where do you feel the pain? Is there an analog in the real world? And likewise, for the beauty? If we can’t change the past, regret is a waste of time, but not worry or longing. Still, I prefer regret. If time is a vector, we are passengers facing the rear of the train.

(o)

You can read a text just fine when the letters are out of order. This isn’t “my best work.” I admit I’m depressed for relief from depression; the effect doesn’t last. I say “Be careful flâneuring around with someone who loves you.” Happiness should be all that matters, but it’s not even high on the list. The hangover is one known form of regret that transcends culture.

(o)

Koans are used to provoke “the great doubt.” Contentment isn’t happiness. I told a student that desire comes from boredom. But I seek out desire, so why do I fear boredom? Maybe emotions are ideas. I believe in the end of history illusion but I also believe in the end of history, the failure of all imagination. The future isn’t anywhere, so we can never get there. We can only disappear.

This is the last offering from our National Poetry Month package.

A National Poetry Month poem by David Biespiel …

Author’s Note: From 2008–2010, Cesar Conda and I debated politics as daily contributors to Politico. Cesar has been instrumental in developing conservative polices in Washington, D. C. since the 1980s. From 2001-2003, Cesar served as Assistant to Vice President Dick Cheney for Domestic Policy. He stopped writing for Politico in 2011 when he became Chief of Staff for Senator Marco Rubio (R-Florida). Anaconda, Montana, population about 9,000, is located in Southwest Montana. The Anaconda smelter stack is one of the tallest masonry structures in the world. When the Atlantic Richfield Company closed the smelter in 1980, it brought to an end almost a century of mineral processing in Anaconda. Today, an 18-hole golf course in the town, designed by Jack Nicklaus, uses the contaminated black slag leftover from the smelter as the “sand” in the sand traps. Wendy and I were traveling trough Montana for several days with Daniel Kemmis who served both as mayor of Missoula and as Speaker of the Montana House of Representatives. While Dan and Wendy were meeting with Anaconda’s civic leaders, I wandered into the Locker Room Bar, owned by Wendy’s brother-in-law’s father whom I had never before met. He gave me a tour of the town in his Jeep. All told, we spent but three hours in Anaconda before driving to Bozeman. The joke told in the middle of the poem is pure Dan.

To Conda from Anaconda

                                    Montana

Dear Cesar —
                       Just off the highway
From here is Opportunity.
The town’s not living up to its name.
And no one’s singing O tempore O more
Not since the copper company
Gave everyone a day’s notice
Twenty-nine years ago next September.
What’s left is the smelter stack
That bricks up 585 feet closer-to-God high
Like an unfaithful steeple.
Even the stained glass
Inside the lovely St. Mark’s on Third Street
Honors the radial heights in its east windows.
From the highway, what you see
Is a sun-rusted mausoleum to 1919 masonry —
So tall and wide you can slip
The Washington Monument into it.
Say, Cesar, can you see the Anaconda stack
From your porch in old Virginia?
Or the rusty gas that spewed for 61 years
Across the hard land that accepts nothing?
There were four million cubic feet of gas per minute,
I don’t know how you could have missed it.
Like most tragedies in America,
It’s a state park now.
As for the town, it got splayed
In half and hasn’t got up yet.
All big government did was try to clean
The miles after miles of slagheap
Along the dark road into here,
Slag still black with the souls
Sold to the company store
Where what you get
Is another year older
                       and deeper in debt.
There are thirty bars in this town, Cesar,
And sixty percent of the folks are over sixty-five.
Eight miles from the Continental Divide,
The median income is $26K.
Lucille Ball lived here and so did Frank Cope,
Starting tackle for the N.Y. Giants 1938–1947.
This morning outside the Locker Room Bar
I met one old-timer with good hair
Who used a dollar to buy potatoes
To boil for dinner with salt and butter.
He told me about walking to the edge of Anaconda
When he turned twenty-four
Twenty-nine years ago next September,
Not far from where the back country squawks
At the night and the moon gathers
Over the mocking birds and company-built houses
Crammed onto the tree-named streets —
Oak, Pin, Chestnut, Locust, Beech, Cedar, Cherry.
They come at you like a song,
Like America the Beautiful,
Like ‘Taint Nobody’s Business If I Do.
Cypress, Dogwood, Cottonwood, Elm—
And he told me he dreamed of leaving Anaconda
For Butte where the political lords
Know how to shake the state for jobs,
Or else leave for Opportunity
Or West Valley or Phillipsburg
Where the degrees of gray
Blow into an utterance
Only a harpy can translate,
A squall, like some unknown language
That sounds like dirt mixed with dust.
Suddenly, there’s another man
Across Commercial Street
Talking openly about impotence—
Then about death and birth
And sorrow and gases and death
And rare clear nights from some other year
When the kids who have abandoned this town
                       used to get a dollar
At the Smelterman’s Day Picnic in July
And got to ride a pony for free
And later watch Legion ball in Washoe Park,
And where no one ever wanted to believe
In sorrow because it seemed anti-American.
Cesar, that old man stood on Commercial Street
Half in shadow, half in sweat, and half in fear
That fit him like a flannel shirt from 1974,
The year India got the bomb
And called it Smiling Buddha,
Where in Troy, Ohio, the first UPC code
Was used to sell a pack of Wrigley’s gum,
When Haile Selassie was deposed
As was George Foreman by Ali in Kinshasa,
When Derek Jeter was born
And Duke Ellington died,
And Nixon threw in the towel.
That was outside the Locker Room Bar.
Inside, it was 9 a.m., and the owner,
Joey Stranieri, aged 70 on tiptoe,
With the blue eyes of the old country
Around about near Napoli,
And a disease in his blood
So rare no one can name it,
Turned out to be the father
Of my brother-in-law
That works with cons
On probation two states away.
Joey poured us hot cups of coffee
And talked about his 26 years
Teaching biology at the Junior High.
Cesar, I want you to look closely
At the National Guard poster
Side by side with the World Beer Cup poster,
The video poker and the Keno
And the black and white 8 x 10s
Of Anaconda High’s great stars
From sixty years ago
Including 1956 U.S. Olympic boxer Johnny Rouse —
1956, the year Elvis made it
With “Heartbreak Hotel,”
My Fair Lady opened in New York,
“Under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance,
“In God we Trust” became the National Motto,
Martin and Lewis called it quits,
As did the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
Cesar, here’s a 1980 menu from the Copper Club,
Closed Mondays, and then forever,
Rib Steak, $4.25, Australian Lobster Tail, $8.50,
Ravioli for the Italians
Who immigrated here for crummy jobs
That let them raise a family on smelt copper,
Including Joey’s old man who was mezzo giorno
And died when the boy was in the third grade,
                       a la carte, for $2.25.
“Junior High’s condemned now,” says Joey,
Pouring in a little more joe.
That’s when my mind closes
Around its dead gymnasium,
Closes around the gates chained
To the top of the slag hills
And the small pocket park
That does not exist in the center of town
Because the State of Montana
Wouldn’t give the permit —
But if you want to plant
A kitchen garden in your backyard
And grow tomatoes and green beans
The state of Montana doesn’t require a permit —
My mind still closing around the barbed fencing
Meant to keep gawkers off the slag hill.
All of it now is like three cheers
For the hours of corrosion
And inertia and semi-success,
For the foundry makers
And the half-gassed vegetables
And the raspy eulogies on eternity
And the idle hands and the snow on the mountainsides
I looked at with curiosity while standing
Outside the Locker Room Bar
Before getting into my rented Chevy
To drive to Bozeman. —
Cesar, two nights ago in Missoula
At Pearl’s Bar on Higgins Street
I ate elk for the first time.
I don’t recommend it.
Stick with the Caesar salad.
But after Anaconda I was heading to Bozeman,
February snow chasing me from the west,
Sunlight in the east breaking through the clouds
Whining into the sky
With all the dust I’ve swallowed all these years.
On I-90, I saw two bald eagles
On two bald trees,
And I can’t say I felt unhappy,
But I can’t say I felt rich either.
— I was thinking, Cesar,
Someone should write a tanaga
About the towns of Montana
In Tagalog, a language I love but cannot speak
As my Anaconda friend cannot speak
The language of hope or change:
            Oh, be resilient you men
            And ladies. Anaconda
            Won’t come back. Do not cower.
            The market place will save you.
I didn’t see any Filipinos in Anaconda.
But I did see an Italian named Joey Stranieri
Whose mother came to America from Tuscany
And who drove me across town in his red Jeep
Even though we’d never met
But he’d just learned
That his son’s wife is my wife’s sister.
In Montana, that’s family.
In Montana, there are three fundamental principles
Given to the citizens: the right to due process of law,
The right to equal protection, and number three,
There’s a guy in Butte what needs a job.
At Mount Olivet the Catholics are buried
And rest atop the best view of the valley
And the town and the smelter smokestack
That no longer belches
Across the big airy
But sits like a high school trophy
Behind the glass case inside the Locker Room Bar
Where, from time to time, the dudes stop
Before they head home to houses
Where blossoms have fallen to nothing,
So to admire what the young people
Don’t stay long enough to notice,
The future slick and smiling
In a stiff-armed running back’s face from 1948 —
A year in which Mahatma Gandhi fasts in Dehli
And is killed eighteen days later,
In which the Hell’s Angels started in California
And the Marshall Plan started in France,
In which Israel was founded
And racial segregation ended in the Army,
In which Baryshnikov was born
And Babe Ruth died.
Cesar, I have no idea how to worship
At the steeple in Anaconda —
To be cynical or devout,
To sing a miner’s song
Or just breathe the airless air.
All this living without all these years.
That’s America, too,
Eight miles from the Continental Divide
Where no one leaves for work
And everyone returns to bed,
And not God or animal, man or child
Knows what to do about it.
What would you do with your theories
Composed by Jack Kemp
Who grew up among Jews
In the Wilshire section of Los Angeles,
Quarterbacked for the Buffalo Bills 1962–1969,
Who believed that wounded towns
Like this could come back
If they just wait long enough,
Stay patient, preserve the old buildings
In zones of desire,
What with good back country hiking nearby,
Or the right company to come along
And get the money circulating?
            Whatever’s here remains here.
            It’s nowhere else and nothing.
            Its name is Anaconda.
            Dirt, slag, and easy temper.
In the three hours I spent in Anaconda
I saw the earth eating the fence posts
And the ferocity of repose.
I saw one bowling alley
And one Veterans of Foreign Wars Hall,
And a guy named Dan who said,
“Take it easy, Dave” at noon
When I left the Locker Room Bar
As if I might came back later in the day
Same as the copper.
But I did not see you, Cesar Conda,
I saw only what the children will inherit.
I did not see you
Among the opened bellies
And the hidden bones,
Among the candor and rage and sudden
Red mountain flowers
Near where the rivers burn
And the stones are crushed
And the shadows un-flatten
From the wreckage of ground
In a mad dance.
No, I did not see you.
I did not see you.
Cesar Conda, come to Anaconda.
Come to Anaconda, Cesar Conda.

This is the six-year-old’s joke:
The father calls his daughter Daffodil.
Why Daffodil, his guest asks.

When she was a baby, says the father,
a daffodil fell on her head.
Then the dad calls the other daughter Rose.

The guest asks: why Rose?
The father shrugs. When she was a baby,
a rose fell on her head.

A boy tears into the room like a tiger.
Hey Cinderblock, says his father.
Slow down.

A poem by Susan Wheeler, part of our National Poetry Month package.

a poem by Marni Ludwig

I.

All the songs about the electric chair
sound like love songs. Weather

carries our Chevy to sea,
merrily, merrily, merrily.

A mariner with a stand-in moon
can’t quite stomach daybreak.

Two sisters twirl batons on the lawn.
The older holds the younger’s hand.

We raise our keys to a thunderstorm
by kite, track time on our arms

religiously. Control is comical.
The cineplex screens the worst meal

of our childhood. Anchor on your dress.
Only the waitress was meant for us.


II.

Every waitress is meant for us. Every meal
is final. The condemned make perfect guests,
light our comets with kitchen matches.

We say dead, but mean incarcerated.
A child’s story: father disappeared,
not mother. She’s still a homemaker
in Illinois. The jukebox sings Surrender

and the regulars listen. Gardener
is a gravedigger, plants our ice skates under
the elderflower. Snowmen make us dream
of summer. Picnicking ruins everything.

Scarecrow, distant isn’t shy.
Hands their own graspy animals.
Your room and my room are not the same.


III.

Your room and my room are not the same.
Welcome home, intrepid weatherman.
We are struck by lightning and now we play
piano prophetically, with both hands.

Skywriting makes me feel like a fake human.
Empathy is a lie. Forever lasts 24 hours
in the sun of the abandoned flashlight factory.

Blinking back the map, dreading the future
wholeheartedly. Happy birthday, windy
helicopter. Good luck, smoke.

An ocean liner the length of a full city block.
Directions scrawled on the paper hanger
of a dry-cleaned shirt. They’re predicting
ordinary cold. An umbrella opened and I died.


IV.

An umbrella opened and I died.
It wasn’t raining. It was remembering.
A rocketing back to a chillier sphere,
trapping lightning in a mason jar to exclude
the world. I was astronomically empty.
The robot microwaved dinner nightly.
Kissing a good, round zero in the planetarium

never made anyone an astronaut. Plant a time
capsule under the welcome mat, blow a birthday
cake into orbit. Moon podium, dead satellite,
the physical feeling of falling back
into favor. A novocaine sun stares down
the horizon, rehearsing its line in the sky.
Where I am flying it is yesterday.

Read more from our National Poetry Month package.

The new company logo is a torch inside an obelisk
inside a five-pointed star inside a sixteen-sided die
against a backdrop of blazing sunlight. It took years
of focus groups, an in-house creative team collecting
only the smoothest, flattest stones from the banks

of the minor tributaries of each river beloved by
our target demographic, research into their concentric
patterns of worship, the lives of their saints, Saint Flypaper
and the case of the missing anvil, miracle of the giant
tropical lake found on Saturn’s Titan Moon so like that box

of tissues in the conference room that never empties
in the face of ongoing organizational betrayal.
At the quarterly meeting of shareholders, the chief officers
unveiled several new prayers for the test markets: nothing
is impossible—it is your responsibility to make it so,

let us search for management in a stargazing field, let us
sustain new synergies among alleged victims, give us
this day our daily sales cloud. You are the blue arrow
pointing down to a box half-shaded in gray on the flowchart.
Here is your cubicle, your stapler. Burt is your team leader

though this period of consolidation. He developed
an upgrade that renders the old product obsolete
for which he received a fat raise and the right to keep
his desk utterly bare. The shareholders believe
he is an oracle, that he peers into that empty, elegant

veneer, his mind a crescendo underlying a persistent
musical pattern, the end of desire itself, one killer app
for the one Oregonian suffering under sunset’s vague lilac,
one step towards the eradication of mediocrity among
normal children. Your team emblem is a kitten,

your alibi is that you never watched an entire episode.
When the supervisor asks how the product has changed
your life personally, be vague, say you dream less
of free diving with dolphins in bloody water and more
about your fear of local elections. As you peruse

the company directory, try not to notice how many names
have been crossed out, be grateful for the key card hanging
around your neck even as the metrics tell a different story:
what the target audience had for lunch, dinner, dinner, lunch,
barriers to accuracy, ways to boost stamina. Dear co-workers,

let’s dress up in golf shirts and do karaoke with the unpaid interns,
let’s hold a séance on the lowest level of the parking garage,
rewrite the cost savings report in chromatic shorthand, go viral,
erase all the voice messages in the world, let’s paint zeroes
on our faces with printer ink and insist we are as impeccable

as executive letterhead in ivory, as close-knit and happy
as we appear to be in the video from last year’s Christmas Party,
more efficient than anti-crepuscular rays, more worthy
of outlasting the outsource, and lucky enough not to know
just how narrowly we escaped the meandering volcanic haze.

A poem by Heather June Gibbons from our National Poetry Month package.

a poem by Stephanie Strickland …

                                CAPTCHA

cranium chambered cairn and passage grave
bulging Neolithic earth mound enclosing the vault

calibrated stone to this standard surpasses us
lost too inner touch on bone pale solstice beam

dervish Snow Queen covens of raven rim her platinum
cloak downed traces of her sledge paused print a fine grid

on the peregrine’s pouring away world of no attachment
tilting wakes twisting falls sinking panes of land and water

dive-bomb raptor-force 200 miles per hour stoop!
copy and mod her aerial maneuvers map Northern core

rock extinct volcanoes lush with perforations cloak them
suspend them under numbers shadows from another place

                                           •

—or site : the Emerald Viewer marks an avatar invisible
as it visits strolls beneath the lindens the lime honey bracts

in the log-on Lab World structured from permissions where
who hangs at your space from your space’s erased from you

nor can you take your own movement for granted
earth and physics afterthought ( interface ) you install

an IM app in your dream equip folding but unfading
tutelary mesmerie with chat while falling as a peregrine

tinsel buttercup foil painted roof ruined roof of the Plaza
verdigris mansard copper slate rushing toward her she could tell

by a tension in the air wire-fine overhead—one rustling
shift—time to be swept back to sea so typed in mistakenly

( no peregrine eye ) randomly assigned CAPTCHA squiggle
Turing test box of twisted-letter text to tag her

                                                                             personhood denied

Click here to read another poem by Stephanie Strickland and here to read more from our National Poetry Month package.

A postcard that fell from a book about writing books
             of history
             bent double a beautiful man
             who handing it back to me said,
             “Here’s one for you:
             as a child I had no reason
             not to believe my mother
             when she claimed it was she
             alone could ignite the flames
             inside the cat’s eyes
             that with faultless timing
             unblinded the country lanes
             we rolled dimly through
             from swimming practice home.

Click here to read the rest of “Cats on Fire,” a poem by Caleb Klaces—part of our National Poetry Month package.

The desert isn’t a creature. It doesn’t have eyes nor ears, nor hands and feet, nor does it have a language. Always, strangers define it. (Anyone who doesn’t speak will be defined by strangers.)

Picking up small rocks and large stones, my mind calling them “rocks” and “stones” but also wondering there you are, who are you, how would you like to be held, would you like to be held, thrown over there, left alone, stepped on, flipped over, taken from here and collected and put on some table in front of a television with maybe some music playing?

Bounded to the west by the San Francisco Peaks, to the north by Mt. Hesperus, to the south by Mt. Taylor and to the east by Mt. Blanca, you are __________.

The well-meaning stranger’s tongue was cut off in A Distant Episode because he believed his brain was enough to tell the desert what it is.

The cold of the desert evening reaches my hands first. My fingers curl like a petal of one of those flowers that sleep and wake in the course of a day, that I’ve never been able to name.

I accept the significant things told to me by the Irish nuns and Jesuit brothers and think it right that there are people who can, on my behalf, complete my sentences and even my thoughts.

Strangers carry the desert from one side of a highway and dump it on the other side; but in a sudden snowstorm, at twenty degrees below seasonal normals and in freezing high winds, the desert flurries in an icy mix of snow and sand, remaking its own partitions.

“Framing,” one of four poems by Josey Foo published today from our National Poetry Month package.

I shift and contain varieties of awareness, in an almost subconscious moment when I try to perceive Eve the way Loni, who I haven’t seen in three years, might perceive her.

Caroline finds a single hair on her skirt as she sits in the backseat on the way to a party, and does not want to just throw it, imposingly, on the floor of Christine’s car.

Stacy could be described as a collection of rice paper boxes, feather baskets, linen envelopes sealed with thread; she locates and contains every subtle distinction—then packages and insulates with sympathetic curiosity.

When I go to lie on the sofa, six-year-old Sarah cups her hands around the portion of the pillow that is a shade darker, to protect me from lying there.

Eve says she couldn’t sleep for an entire week. So, when her eyes finally closed for more than a moment, and the construction crew outside began drilling into the concrete, Matt gently placed his hands over her ears.

As I maneuver through the crowd in the living room, on my way to the porch, my hand feels utterly un-held.

“My tears are all right here,” says little Sarah.

Caroline does not want to impose even the softest, frailest burden on the car floor.

When I return to the porch, Stacy has her hand lightly cupped over the top of my soda. “I didn’t want anything to get in there,” she says.

The act of lifting hair from fabric should be assigned a unique word. A word softer than pulling or picking—which more accurately describe extracting something firmly fixed. More vivid than getting. A word that indicates easy delay—the faint resistance of static. And then this word, because of its diaphanous sound, would be a homonym for the small moment that little Sarah altered the position of her hand, so slightly, to more accurately quarantine her tears. Both meanings would bear the implication of an unhurried tenderness.

I would enjoy this party food more, I think, had it all been arranged inside plastic eggs.

Sometime before we arrive at the party, while Elena and Lindsay are inevitably already talking about a guy named Bronson, how he always says the wrong thing, will still be talking about it long after we arrive, I watch.

Caroline, in the back seat, privately tilting her purse toward her, opening it, and putting one delicate hair inside.

A poem by Angie Mazakis. 

See more features from our National Poetry Month package.

a poem by John Gallaher

What Social Security means to me is that if I continue working
until the age of 70, my monthly payment would be about
$2,090. At some point we all have the moment, for me
it was this one, of standing there knowing the world
will be over. “You take your movie
to a new town, said the street on fire,” as they say. A feeling
of security doesn’t rise, seeing my benefits
estimated. I picture us there before the fish tank. “Speak up,
the fish can’t hear you,” you say. It’s never
convincing, is it? Telling them they’re dust and to dust
they shall return? I was talking to Paul’s wife
the other day, and she was saying he’s going to go another year,
and then decide if he’s going to retire. She’s
not sure he will. “It’s all he’s ever done,” she says. “And
I’ve no idea what he’d do all day with me going
to work.” Some actual things creep in, like Germans
in the 1930s. Formulas and stratagems. And suddenly
you’re 70. Your father’s a tourist now, in some other place.

What are the odds, do you think? “Your name is
no accident.” The advertisement reads. It goes on: “Numbers
govern much, if not most of what happens in your life,
relationships, and finances.” So there you are. From
K. calling to say the divorce is coming through,
to Brendan’s brother drowning 25 years ago … “Life, our /
Life anyway, is between,” John Ashbery says
in “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” the in-betweenest of all places.

Moments seem to always be doing that, though
the mimetic fashions change, and we come in and out
of relevance to the advancing narrative, even
as it’s ours, we think, and imagine ourselves at the award show,
thanking the little people. We’re thanking ourselves,
then. It reminds me of a show I was listening to a few weeks back,
about the Royal Shakespeare Company, how the question
was about realism, how we think now that we’re in a more
realistic age, but how all ages maybe think that
about themselves, it’s not that acting changes, but that the
communally agreed upon reality changes. Well,
there’s something, I guess, in a time of displacement,
finding myself somewhere I was unaware of.

Check out the rest of our National Poetry Month package, with daily content.