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Sunday Rumpus Poetry

Jill Alexander Essbaum — Sun, 13 May 2012 13:00:52 +0000

Time

is a curve

with a caveat.

Love can’t stop it,

pause it, or posit

a theory of

recursive pasts.

Baby: Ain’t a entity

that lasts.

Carnations go mum,

tea turns cold,

all bright stars

become black holes

and even

paradise paroles

its tethers. Like

the man

who coos always.

But means for never.

The Run-Down

Cold, but she never wore overcoats.

Tired, but her cot was rotten and worn.

At a quarter to ten she tried every door.

She had two dry eyes and a mute, mocking pout,

And six dire doubts and seventeen heavens,

And a Jesus who wouldn’t commute her sentence.

She was taxed in a bracket and tossed in a bucket.

She cheated on husbands and sought out her exes.

They didn’t quite hate her so they didn’t quite hit her.

She sloshed through mornings with tonic and vodka.

And her coughs were chronic, her symbols iconic,

She rationed her reason in droppers and thimbles.

She wept when she walked and the law tried to bust her.

The library shushed her and slapped her with fines.

Her fingernails spiked like tines on a fork.

So she sated her sorrows in sewers and brothels

And hated the answers her brothers denied her.

She throbbed like a wound that swallowed its knife.

And her butters were margarine, her jewels were paste.

The worse the poison, the sweeter the taste.

National Poetry Month Day 38: “A Room in Cleopatra’s Palace” by Mary Jo Bang

Rumpus Original Poems — Tue, 08 May 2012 14:00:04 +0000

This brings us to the end of our National Poetry Month project, one poem short of a sestina’s worth. We close out this year with a poem by Mary Jo Bang, whose forthcoming translation of Dante’s Inferno will be our Rumpus Poetry Book Club selection for the month of August. You can find links to all the poems we’ve run during this project here. Thanks for reading along with us this month.

A Room In Cleopatra’s Palace

Flies and a fan and a pillar
in this or that arch of the empire.

Space is such a pain: cars shooting by like bullets,
a palm tree pinned against a wall,

a helicopter wasting away the above.
This is the world at one on a street

where the angles of architecture meet
and point west where the end of a tunnel,

unseen but assumed, is draped
with a blanket of crepe

that it’s easy to mistake for night—
[a woman’s mouth-made swearing]

CLEOPATRA: And I’m entangled with it.

And now: what to do with the fact
of the once-blue above, the mind-cloud

tinted pink with particulate matter—
a pollution that looks like a postcard.

CLEOPATRA: I’m saying yes to whatever
you’re saying: an asp in a basket,

betrayal and horror, a room that tilts inward,
natural vice, the smell of sweat,

wasted lamps, petty lives born to murder and war.
The delicate undid disaster of all good things.

-Mary Jo Bang

If you like what the Rumpus is doing for National Poetry Month, you’ll probably like this multimedia anthology of original poems we’ve run at The Rumpus over the last three years. Available only for iPad. Check it out!

National Poetry Month Day 37: “Two Lyrics from ‘Rondo’” by Janet Holmes

Rumpus Original Poems — Mon, 07 May 2012 14:00:55 +0000

Well I got to keep it going keep it going full steam.

Two Lyrics from “Rondo”

The boys pawing the ground are horses.
They will drag you between them.
Come, give them your arms!

They will push you where you don’t want to go,
the horses will. They will slide you there
and run away, whinnying.

You are so like a horse!
Toss your head again.
No one will harsh your soft mouth with a bit.
No one will ride you
if you keep that up.

Escape artist,
magician of morph:

The only way out will be through it.

Flung ashatter, each dashed edge sharpened—
hammered in, deformed, wrenched open—
scorched, blasted,
pelted—
it can’t be got around.
It does not fall from the sky:

you lift up to it to be wrecked.

Will it kill me?

Yes.
Your dead self remains inside you
from that day on.

-Janet Holmes

National Poetry Month Day 36: “The Lover’s Field Guide to Lesser Coinage” by Sandra Beasley

Rumpus Original Poems — Sun, 06 May 2012 14:00:52 +0000

Was National Poetry Month over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

The Lover’s Field Guide to Lesser Coinage

There are eight stycas in a penny, two pennies in a farthing, three farthings in a nearthing, and eight nearthings in a positutely.

The Russian republic of Tatarstan forgot to print any denomination at all.

In 120 BC the Han Dynasty inked Pai-Lu P’i-pi on white deerskin, laying groundwork for the modern unit of bucks. The Tang Dynasty spent what was known as Fei- Chen, “flying money.” It is not known where they found that many bat-wings.

The reverse of a $100 Federal Reserve Note shows Independence Hall’s steeple, on which the hands of the clock are set at 4:20.

The 100 yuan note features three secret kittens in various poses of prostration.

In 2003, Romania issued the 1,000,000 Lei. In 2004 the Bucharest Underground Mafia won for Best Hip-Hop at the 3rd Annual MTV Romania Music Awards. They disbanded. In 2005, four zeroes in the million-dollar Lei were dropped in a tragic forklift accident.

If placing a nickel on the train tracks outside Camden Yards, be aware that mutilated Thomas Jeffersons are unacceptable in consideration as United States currency. But in England one may flatten the queen’s head before spending her.

The 5-cent mark of Ceylon is rouletted for easy separation into 2-cent and 3-cent portions, convenient for small purchases and quickie divorces.

The first coins were invented by Turkey’s Lydians, who had an excess of electrum with no known value: a stater, a standard, one month’s pay for a military man. You could carry a 1/96 stater. My father carries a coin for the Fighting Blue Devils of the 88th Infantry. They call it a challenge coin. Soldier, if he slaps it on the bar you must have one in your pocket as well, or else buy him a drink: 1/96 of an army reservist salary.

-Sandra Beasley

National Poetry Month 2012 Lineup

Rumpus Original Poems — Sat, 05 May 2012 18:05:09 +0000

So maybe you’re following our National Poetry Month project and you want to know who else is going to be featured. You’re following, right? I mean, sure you get the tweets from Rumpus Poetry and The Rumpus, and you regularly check the Rumpus and Rumpus Poetry Facebook pages, but what you really want, what you yearn for, is a link list of this month’s poems, updated daily.

I’ve got what you need.

I’ll update this list throughout the month (and a little ways into May, because that’s how we roll, poetically-speaking, around here). Enjoy!

April 1: “Drop It Like It’s Hottentot Venus” by Douglas Kearney

April 2: “At the Book Shrink” by Brenda Shaughnessy

April 3: “Cousins” by Jonterri Gadson

April 4: “The Last Meal of the Iceman” by T.R. Hummer

April 5: “Záhrada” by Fady Joudah

April 6: “The First Kiss” by Carmen Giménez Smith

April 7: “Do You?” by Sophie Klahr

April 8: “Ghosts Keep Us Moving, Stella Said, Think About a Field At Night, How You’re Always” by Christian Anton Gerard

April 9: “I May Have Made Something Up” by Jennifer Perrine

April 10: “The Strangers” by Jennifer Chang

April 11: “On Style” by Ruben Quesada

April 12: “Semi-Aubade” by Elisa Gabbert

April 13: “15 Minutes” by Eileen Myles

April 14: “between the wolf and the dog” by Davis McCombs

April 15: “Alternate Ending: My Grandmother as Gretel” by Kate Schmitt

April 16: “Big Legs on the Bus” by George Ducker

April 17: “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [brushes with death]” by Jeannine Hall Gailey

April 18: “Mirror” by Rachel Richardson

April 20: “The Story Gets Away From Him” by Lewis Mundt

April 21: “Mnemosyne to the Poet” by Rebecca Dunham

April 22: “Terra Incognita” by David Roderick

April 23: “While John Berryman Drives In His Orange Chevrolet Through A Minnesota Rainstorm To Lecture On Don Quixote, Sylvia Plath Paints The Beehives of Court Green” by Amy Newman

April 24: “All is Love” by John Gallaher

April 25: “Letter To Be Wrapped Around a 12-inch Disc” by Jake Adam York

April 26: “14 Fragments/10 Muses [Re:Sonnet #38]” by Ana Božičević

April 27: “Barry Bonds on the Witness Stand” by Oscar Bermeo

April 28: “Nine Out of Ten Dentists Agree I Am Not an Octopus” by Gregory Sherl

April 29: “A Children’s Story” by Mary Biddinger

April 30: from “Sungone Noon” by Christian Wiman

April 31 (I know this is May 1, but play along): “Machine Song” by Bruce Snider

April 32: “Zoo” by Virginia Konchan

April 33: “Carpal Seeple” by Joyelle McSweeney

April 34: “Death is a Hysterical Dynasty” by Steve Kistulentz

April 35: “A Double Sestina on Happiness” by Cathy Hong

April 36: “The Lover’s Field Guide to Lesser Coinage” by Sandra Beasley

April 37: Two Lyrics from “Rondo” by Janet Holmes

April 38: “A Room in Cleopatra’s Palace” by Mary Jo Bang

National Poetry Month Day 35: “A Double Sestina on Happiness” by Cathy Park Hong

Rumpus Original Poems — Sat, 05 May 2012 14:00:03 +0000

We decide when National Poetry Month is over.

A Double Sestina on Happiness

Part 1:

I should never be happy, the Samsung Chairman’s eldest daughter Eunhee thought
as she picked up a capsleeved dress in Seoul’s only Marni boutique, and paid
for the delicate frock with her much beloved Centurion card. Just then, she sensed a message
and his pale, drawn face flickered in her e-contacts: I miss you so, what if I were to propose
that we elope, live pennilessly? She messaged: My father is monitoring my SMs. I must argue
that you not contact me until I give word; then we can discuss my impending marriage.

It was an unwritten rule that Fortune 500 Chaebol families set up arranged marriages
between their offspring. After all, they were Seoul’s elite and no one thought
differently, not even those vile Netizens, and rare was the child who argued
to choose without family counsel. She was promised to the LG Chairman’s grandson who paid
little attention to her during the last family dinner and only hashed out proposals
with her ailing father about taking over Samsung Group’s Virtual Sense Messaging (VSM)

Division. Only once, the affianced couple dined alone and he spent it messaging,
staring distractedly into the middle distance. I will waste my life in a loveless marriage
with a vulgarian, as she watched him gnaw on his Osso Buco. Eunhee proposed
that they see the Braque prints at the Hyundai Gallery in Samchong-dong; critics thought
it smartly curated. Please, art is as dead as mobiles, he said and laughed while paying
for her untouched dinner, and she stopped herself from half-hearted argument.

In fact, that is how she met the impetuous and bespectacled Junho: from an argument.
Eunhee was a senior studying Art History at UC Irvine and she was messaging
her two sisters Eunsun and Eunam, who were also studying Art History at UC Irvine, tuition paid
for by their father of course, who admonished that their studies not interfere with marriages;
they should stick together and not fraternize with any unseemly students, when she thought
she felt a stare. She turned around to Junho, who noticing her de Kooning e-monograph, proposed—

rather impudently, wasn’t he aware of her status from his e-contacts?—why he proposed
that de Kooning was a sham Abstract Expressionist which ignited a not unpleasant argument
about the figurative body in de Kooning and all the while she couldn’t help but think
that he bore resemblance to Harry Potter, an observation she later, in breathless confession, messaged
to her sisters Eunsun and Eunam. Jun-ho and she conversed in flawless English (an unmarried
governess from Canada taught her English since she was toddler), and after Jun-ho paid

for their iced Lattes in exact change (hard currency, she observed, a quaint kind of payment
one does not see anymore), they continued talking excitedly and then he boldly proposed
they drive an hour away to LACMA, where they will gaze at actual paintings that married
the Abstract with the Figurative. A museum? I can access any image from my e-contacts, she argued.
But can you see the artist’s hand? he asked and in that instant, she wanted to throw away her SM,
her econtact lenses, and disconnect herself entirely; what has come over me, she thought.

Junho, majoring in Global Relations, with a minor in Studio Art, thought
that art humanized reality which he considered a counterfeit operating system paid
for by multinational industries. He has the most capricious manners, Eunhee messaged
her sisters, he will talk like this knowing about our family business and then he will propose
to me. I confess his moody passions excite me terribly. Both her sisters argued
for caution, although the youngest, Eunsun, who was more sympathetic, conspired how marriage

could work: He can be introduced as a friend and slowly gain Father’s approbation and marriage
could be foreseeable. But their speculations were in vain; their father was stubborn, they thought
secretly, and his liver disease has made him even more difficult. It is arguable
that illness could soften a man, but after a third liver was grown and did not take, he only paid
attention to his own pecuniary fate. He is the way he is, Eunsun proposed,
because he must ensure that his estate is invulnerable and then ended her SM.

It was her middle sister, the sullen Eunam, who betrayed her with a secret message
to her father who then swiftly terminated her studies and ordered her back to Seoul for marriage
to the LG Chairman’s grandson. The son was fifteen years her senior, and stiffly proposed
to her through SM with the hologrammed family as witness. She was inconsolable and thought
Eunam’s duplicity was all due to envy and that Eunam perversely delighted in seeing her pay
for her indiscretion. But Eunam, in her usual contrary and sullen manner, argued

that Junho, the son of struggling merchants, only had eyes on the family fortune and argued
that she was trying to protect her sister from harm. For now, she has refused all SMs
from Eunam who was always lacking; Eunam had twice the enhancements as Eunhee to pay
for her plain countenance and even with facial and height enhancements, marriage
was still a challenge since Eunam’s manners were so disagreeable, Eunhee thought
uncharitably. But then, she slowly began to miss her sister and proposed

to Eunam that all was forgiven. She did not have energy for ire, and after her proposal
to reconnect, the sisters hugged and sobbed, and vehemently promised never to argue.
But Eunhee still felt a wretchedness of mind; she spent every waking hour thinking
about Junho and their dates where they would do things. Now she couldn’t even SM
him, let alone meet him for a fro-yo or a late night study session. Her dreaded marriage
to that supercilious grandson was a week away and she was stranded in Seoul, paying

for her indiscretion. She was feeling drastic; Junho urged her to blink off her econtacts and pay
attention to the material world but she was resistant. If only for a day, he proposed,
you must see this world; you will find it like de Kooning, a world that marries
beauty with brutishness, a world without scruples. She blinked off her econtacts, arguing
to herself that it will give her raw freedom, and saw not a world scrolled with saved SMs
from Junho, live streams of fashion chats, instant films, and bright daily thoughts

from starlets. But nor did she think it matched Junho’s perilous and alluring proposals.
Only snow, piling into higher drifts until she only saw grey. Is this how I’m paid, she argued
with Junho. Have you tricked me? She shut her eyes. Reader, she married.

-Cathy Park Hong

National Poetry Month Day 34: “Death is a Hysterical Dynasty” by Steve Kistulentz

Rumpus Original Poems — Fri, 04 May 2012 14:00:52 +0000

Because thirty days just isn’t enough National Poetry Month for us.

Death is a Hysterical Dynasty

Tonight we shall read from my personal book of lamentations,
sit shiva in a room lit with those overly perfumed candles as thick
as the aluminum bat I used just last week to flip away the possum
carcass I’d found collapsed against the house. Forensics tell us
the backyard is Panama before quinine, an ecosystem
unto itself, civil war of mongoose, snake, and cat. The cause
of the possum’s death was obvious, this near-Biblical dryness
that lasted the summer. This morning I found a carapace,
a palmetto bug in my shower, dead in his search for water.
He got flushed, a Viking funeral; minutes later I heard about
Rocky, 48, complications from a ruptured aortic aneurysm,
who went the same week as John, 47, though by less violent means.
I’d never introduced either to my family, and now I am covering
the mirrors. Pictures from a decade ago exist without context,
the bars in them closed, marriages shattered on the pebbly coast
of installment debt, bands broken up by midnight arguments
dead men can’t recall. Forgive us our trespasses, yes, but also
this literalism. Let us frame the only surviving picture of the three
of us in a rectangle of thorns before we take communion
out in the street. I will let those candles burn, burn, burn,
burn, burn to the wick, Barracuda, then tell you how
I would have laid down my life for either of those two men,
and I have nothing to offer now they have done that for me.

-Steve Kistulentz

National Poetry Month Day 32: “Zoo” by Virginia Konchan

Rumpus Original Poems — Wed, 02 May 2012 14:00:52 +0000

We’re never satisfied with the thirty days that April allots us for National Poetry Month, so we’re extending it a bit. Enjoy!

Zoo

Unbridled, the sick pony
traverses listlessly a circle.
Something something about
the indifference of crows.
Nature draws a crowd:
amateur photographers
drawn to the ellipsis
of weather, the dew point
of sumac and wisteria vines.
Cross the sturdy footbridge;
greet the slack-jawed child.
Do not tell me this is not
beautiful, the clay heart
of Nature in the throes
of inconsequence, before
its animation by mind.

-Virginia Konchan

National Poetry Month Day 31: “Machine Song” by Bruce Snider

Rumpus Original Poems — Tue, 01 May 2012 14:00:49 +0000

We’re never satisfied with just the 30 days that April offers for National Poetry Month, so we’re keeping it going for a little while longer.

Machine Song

I Xerox what I need to keep
(a sheaf of papers, taxes, real estate),
everything that once was ours.
I close the lid. The light flares—

a sheaf of papers: taxes, real estate.
This is what we were, divided in a tray.
I close the lid. The light flares,
then spits the pages neatly stacked.

This is what we are, divided in a tray.
(No more walking hand in hand.)
It spits the pages. Neatly stacked,
everything we loved is here—

no more walking hand in hand.
I copy one for you, and one for me.
Everything I loved is here
as your touch drifts back.

I copy one for you, and one for me.
As the gears grind and shift,
your touch drifts back—
the bed we shared those nights, a part

of us those gears. Grind and shift,
my breathing slows. The paper jams:
the bed we shared, those nights apart.
I clear the path and start again,

my breathing slow. The feeder jams,
the paper blank as sleep. What’s left?
I clear the path and start again.
Lost deep inside the machine,

what’s left: the paper, blank as sleep.
Was everything once ours?
Lost deep inside the machine,
I Xerox what I need to keep.

-Bruce Snider

National Poetry Month Day 30: From “Sungone Noon” by Christian Wiman

Rumpus Original Poems — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:00:20 +0000

Welcome to The Rumpus’s National Poetry Month project. We’ll be running a new poem from a different poet each day for the month of April.

From “Sungone Noon”

One raised
goats;

one raced
around barrels

(bareback
to teach me);

one liked it most
at midnight

on the pole-vaulting
mat

(or did she feign that
to reach me?);

one,
muddy-buttocked,

chigger-bit,
bit me.

Tank-topped
I rode

the rock
-n-roll

of my T-topped
Trans-am

down the drag
of that drag town

in which, I’m told,
one raised

four children
on her own;

one fiended
wine;

one roused
her roustabout

boyfriend
from her best friend’s

bed;
and one,

who laughing
slapping

leapt up
nude as dawn,

her backside
fossiled

in the lakeside,
died.

-Christian Wiman

The Rumpus.net » Rumpus Original Poems

Sunday Rumpus Poetry

Related Posts:

National Poetry Month Day 38: “A Room in Cleopatra’s Palace” by Mary Jo Bang

Related Posts:

National Poetry Month Day 37: “Two Lyrics from ‘Rondo’” by Janet Holmes

Related Posts:

National Poetry Month Day 36: “The Lover’s Field Guide to Lesser Coinage” by Sandra Beasley

Related Posts:

National Poetry Month 2012 Lineup

Related Posts:

National Poetry Month Day 35: “A Double Sestina on Happiness” by Cathy Park Hong

Related Posts:

National Poetry Month Day 34: “Death is a Hysterical Dynasty” by Steve Kistulentz

Related Posts:

National Poetry Month Day 32: “Zoo” by Virginia Konchan

Related Posts:

National Poetry Month Day 31: “Machine Song” by Bruce Snider

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National Poetry Month Day 30: From “Sungone Noon” by Christian Wiman

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