I’d like to cap this pen, lock the drawers,
and take my coat off the chair. I’d stop
the clocks at half-past two, then grab my keys
and drive away—no notes, no calls, the lights
still blazing from every room. I’d start no cults,
I’m sure. There’d be no acolytes who swear
they’d seen me drinking beer in Mexico,
no sunburnt tourists saying Yes! I saw him
at a truckstop in Des Moines. I’d just be gone,
like stars swallowed by the mackerel-light of dawn.

-Rob Griffith

Read the Rumpus Review of Rob Griffith’s The Moon From Every Window.

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• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Announces…

Bloody lullabies soothe the centuries.
Can’t see the cradles for the tops of trees
but you know the rest: you can’t rest, poor babies.

Keeper must feed the open mouth of less than,
promise sweet imminence lest its equation
flash its vast imbalance. All you can count on

is its truth is false. Tired of penance-
as-usual, its subjects take their chances,
lob bottles onto logic’s premises,

throw garbage at the ever-guarded gates.
The grid goes down: the city burns now less
symmetrically. Volleys of rubber bullets,

real bullets, as cell phone videos
catch, like bloody butterflies, howls (souls?)
rising from the fallen. Chants of life goes

on until it doesn’t, or so the slogans
sound mid-madness, around the salvoes’ din.
This is test without constant, the red duration,

mothers hurling rock-a-byes: my son died
a hero. In an unspecified inside,
sanctum sanctorum, a kettle cries

for order or gives voice to its dissent,
rails against the status quo or against
chaos, depending on who’s left.

-Dora Malech

Read the Rumpus review of Say So.

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• “Scissor Half,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Jacqueline Waters
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• “Death, Is Always,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Amy King
• “Kināyah,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Marthe Reed

You were telling me your dream
at some point you started
just making it up

Thus believer and unbeliever are brought to heel

I hate it

But allow it like a veil between my heart and mind it would be boring to lift

Really I’ve got to find a place
to lie down and go to work

I’m OK, I stand up and take my time
which I also accrue

Regret fixing the problem
but persist

I feel good about my persistence which I also ridicule

Do-over

You can have it

You couldn’t make
the connection

Much less
all of them

-Jacqueline Waters

Read the Rumpus Review of One Sleeps The Other Doesn’t.

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• “Kināyah,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Marthe Reed

Don’t imagine me as the woman
        who you replicated
                from the Vermeer

and placed next to the male beauty
        in the blue shorts
                using Grinder. I can’t tell

who’s more bored with whom. No
        gay man wants
                anachronism. We’re dis-

oriented enough. All we want is the here
        and a blow job
                done with at least as much

technique as Van Mieris. I miss
        the old-
                fashioned days of pressing

buttons to a rotary desk phone as green
        as the frocks worn by
                Vermeer’s women.

In another of your paintings, a shirtless man
        readies himself to take a photo
                Caravaggio’s angel. We can see

he’s biding his time until he takes one
        of himself for display at the most current,
                hip pick-up site.

Does he ever wonder
        why the otherworldly would
                want to take a picture

of itself in someone else’s lens?
        Isn’t it one of God’s miracles
                that He allows us

to reveal our transient bodies with the
        carelessness of a blemished
                photograph?

Don’t ask this thirty-something
        Rubenesque faggot such questions.
                All I do is pray

that someone asks me to my first art opening
        where someone will mistake me for you
                and be a star-

fucker with a huge dick. As we admire your art,
        he will put his hand
                on my ass and I will

finally learn the earth-bound question
        you already know:
                How long

should you look
        at a painting before
                you know you’re done?

-Steve Fellner

Read the Rumpus Review of The Weary World Rejoices.

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• “Kināyah,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Marthe Reed

Turning my hair inside out, I only see
Emma Bee making sense of excess,
making something of it online, via high fashion,
which shouldn’t be but is,
along with every other thing,
both uber- and central- Pacific—
Turns out the world is a big one. So,
This is where I am tonight:
between bourbon and eggnog,
thinking in laps about the exquisite gap
of macro to micro evolutions, that is,
relativity to quantum mechanics,
and I don’t know if string theory will tie us together
as shuffled and promised,
or if we ever will truly transport, Spock-like,
but I like the guy who keeps going at it,
hacking away at the “only game in town,”
not mine. I’m in the wilderness, undoing math
from mechanics. Michio Kaku and Richard Dawkins
should probably sit down
over drinks, not coffee, in the inebriation way
and have at it. Symbiosis ensues, hatchets in and out,
and we all get rowdy in their afterglow.
Somehow I think this type of fire query,
this instigation of what gets roughed
up —not in the bar-brawl fashion—
in the fray of how we go next
to each other without any truth or absolute
might be Beauty too. Picasso and Da Vinci
and Kahlo and Tanning ventured other routes,
as did many others and still. The boat rocks
on and gets moored, even sinks—but it all floats up
in outer space, these giant rocks of glowing stars
and asteroids exploding wormholes.
The calculations look back at us
too, making out with the abyss
that is also mute with questions,
and laughs a guttural song that sounds
not unlike Britney Spears mouthing
“Till the World Ends” in the background.
Even the theorists lean back to wonder what
it’s like to be the difference
between what is heralded by prophecy versus
what settles the corners
of their own bedroom cushions.
Not usually concerned with mass appeal
or content, they admit to the occasional
wilderness call, as easy as passing
water or making more humans to live through.
Much comes to those who can displace
the public lust and place it back in their beds,
though, even in that, we’re uncertain as to just what.
Which artist is it that explores
exactly how bodies intersect
and which ones attract in their distance?
In this equation, we meet with other equations
that resemble tattoos to astronauts
looking up close from the distance of personal planets.
Until our moons collide, when we speak
the languages of foreign entities, we remain in orbit,
camped up in our own gear, walking separate runways,
lipsticked and watching others turn on high heel,
as we spin about, toe to toe, quiet on our own.

-Amy King

Read the Rumpus Review of I Want to Make You Safe.

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• The Short History of Summer

“[concerning] women, the sexual organs, defecation, various forms of
uncleanliness and everything which is a bad omen” –Sandra Naddaff

“when a woman desires something, no one can stop her” –The Thousand
and One Nights

her “slit”
different forms of discourse

basil of the bridges
in the interests of narrative variety

we move away from the door
(threshold

spying a black juniper couch, a girl—
already

probity
signaling possibility

pool and fountain beckon
set with gems and pearls

metaphor
a realm entirely other: we must

learn its rules
“metonymy”

necessary enigma
speech comports as sex

penetrating her remark
her bearing

like an alef
fullness of her belly

her text
a body (em-

bodied) scroll of a book
ours

“speak not of what concerns you not”
yet how construct

a meaningful translation
privileging the narrative universe

she forestalls death
“stroke your head and go”

Chinese spheres
embedded mirrors, leaves

fictions
an appropriate ransom for a life

both forestalling and inviting
a ritual multiplicity

the number 8 recurs
pressure of repetition, inescapable

she twists the strands
sections

her own long hair
A night of gloom before a dawn of joys

undoes linearity
time

turning back on itself
we

are returned to the beginning
a moment

just preceding
the law of conservation

women’s desires
her ifrit is instrumental

their losses
compensated against the un-

anticipated
(heretical)

a specifically feminine space
appropriation of power

driving
against the status quo

a number without count
neither nights nor

days matter
anti-mimetic

alternation a form of
emendation

composing her own
source and design

:: radical metamorphoses
animating the lifeless
endless and exact multiplication
a petrified city

hers an
arabesque composed of words

lineaments
of the future assured

-Marthe Reed

Read the Rumpus Review of Gaze.

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• “Death, Is Always,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Amy King
• Manifests Both Terror and Dis-Ease

When I was little
we ate a meal
at my great-grandmother’s farm.
She prepared it like she had
for over 80 years. Corn
bread. Bacon. Fried chicken.
Green beans. Lines of black ants
draped over everything
and led across the table
down the legs
across the floor.
She was what others
would call blind.
But they said stubborn.
My parents made a little sign
and we sat there
while she ate her ants.

-Matthew Rohrer

Read the Rumpus Review of Destroyer and Preserver.

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• “Scissor Half,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Jacqueline Waters
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• “Death, Is Always,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Amy King
• “Kināyah,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Marthe Reed

April 1: Shane Book
April 2: Sandy Longhorn
Click more to get to the rest of the poems!
April 3: Kirsten Kaschock
April 4: Reginald Dwayne Betts
April 5: Barbara Jane Reyes
April 6: T. R. Hummer
April 7: P. Scott Cunningham
April 8: Aimee Nezhukumatathil
April 9: Camille Rankine
April 10: Amy Letter
April 11: Noelle Kocot
April 12: Oliver de la Paz
April 13: Neil de la Flor
April 14: Randall Mann
April 15: Jena Osman
April 16: Kelli Russell Agodon
April 17: Oscar Bermeo
April 18: Samiya Bashir
April 19: Ely Shipley
April 20: Michael Klein
April 21: Amy King
April 22: Peggy Hamilton
April 23: Dean Rader
April 24: Emma Trelles
April 25: Paul Lisicky
April 26: Alison Pelegrin
April 27: Shara Lessley
April 28: Saeed Jones
April 29: Ariana Reines
April 30: Joseph Harrington
April 31: Johnathon Williams
April 32: Tracy K. Smith

Related Posts:

• National Poetry Month, Day 32: “Sacrament” by Tracy K Smith
• National Poetry Month, Day 31: “Single Lane Bridge” by Johnathon Williams
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• National Poetry Month, Day 29: “I’m a Poet and I Don’t Know It” by Ariana Reines
• National Poetry Month, Day 28: “Casket Sharp” by Saeed Jones

Sacrament

The women all sing when the pain is too much.

But first there is a deep despairing silence.

I don’t know what rocks in them, what wants

To knock them clear. Not just the child,

Who knows only to obey. This something

Takes them from chatter, to a silly dance,

Down to all fours begging to die. Then

It drags them up by the hair, or lays them out flat

And strikes them on the head. Then they see it,

So bright it should be death, commanding now.

And again, after a pause. Now. Nothing else

Is there between it and them. It burns the air,

Singes sound. Their voices sink deep into themselves,

Down through flesh into the body’s own hell. Sometimes

It takes forever for that song only the animals know

To climb back up into air as if to burst the throat.

–Tracy K. Smith

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• National Poetry Month, Day 30: “Out of Office Reply: Why Do You Seek the Living Among the Dead” by Joseph Harrington
• National Poetry Month, Day 29: “I’m a Poet and I Don’t Know It” by Ariana Reines
• National Poetry Month, Day 28: “Casket Sharp” by Saeed Jones
• National Poetry Month, Day 27: “The Accused Terrorist’s Wife” by Shara Lessley

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