If I Could Tell Her What I Know Now

Tess Taylor•2024

There are training bras
of literature. In 1989,
I read Sweet Valley High,
a manual for being older that explained
that it would be
desirable to be size six
and blond; to have a mother
who never aged, who looked
just like my sister—
Training bras are
imperfect things. I don’t
pass these books to my daughter.
She’s 9, voracious, whip-smart, cheeky.
Gliding through our house
in roller skates with pale mint
stripes she sings for joy.
She’s a troubadour
a one-girl musical
of fierce bubblegum
desire. This spring
green plums ripen
& she climbs our tree
to watch her world.
She wants to make a version
of Romeo & Juliet, but, she says
“no kissing and no boys.”
I don’t bring up the suicide.
I know there’s so much
practice love, also
so much real breaking too.
Sometimes we love
even the heartbreak songs.
Some year not far from now
I’ll likely tell her how
I loved a boy and then the man
he was when he was grown.
I want her to know I know how real it is:
Even if later on we fail.
Even if we roll
and writhe in agony
because the tragedy is true.
Even when no story could prepare you.
You have to be inside the heartbreak then.
You have to read the urgent poems.
You have to let the days roll by.
How much we love
the ones we love
when we first love—
even when there’s nothing left
to do but sing
or dance or roller skate.
To try. To try again.
To cry and sing: to sing and cry.

I Am Trying to Love the Whole World

Jenny Browne•2023

is such a public display of affection, a flex even,
one the lone magpie staring back from the backside

of a badly shorn sheep finds suspect. I flap my arms
& blink three times. Bad luck to glimpse just one.

Magpie being the only creature rumored to have
refused the ark, preferring to perch high on the mast

& curse the rain. I too keep rewinding this mixtape
of the plague years until I can hear it snap like a tendon

or a tent pole. The world stays busy out there, hammering
itself into softer ground with a flat rock & yet, the sound

of wind softly shaking the stars awake. My world
I have missed your mouth, your morning

breath coming round the wild garlic, your fat
lilacs forgetting to be the flower of death.

I Am Trying to Love the Whole World

Jenny Browne

Cartoon Physics, part 1

Nick Flynn•2000

Children under, say, ten, shouldn't know
that the universe is ever-expanding,
inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies

swallowed by galaxies, whole

solar systems collapsing, all of it
acted out in silence. At ten we are still learning

the rules of cartoon animation,

that if a man draws a door on a rock
only he can pass through it.
Anyone else who tries

will crash into the rock. Ten-year-olds
should stick with burning houses, car wrecks,
ships going down—earthbound, tangible

disasters, arenas

where they can be heroes. You can run
back into a burning house, sinking ships

have lifeboats, the trucks will come
with their ladders, if you jump

you will be saved. A child

places her hand on the roof of a schoolbus,
& drives across a city of sand. She knows

the exact spot it will skid, at which point
the bridge will give, who will swim to safety
& who will be pulled under by sharks. She will learn

that if a man runs off the edge of a cliff
he will not fall

until he notices his mistake.

Cartoon Physics, part 1

Nick Flynn

From Blossoms

Li-Young Lee•1986

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

From Blossoms

Li-Young Lee

A New National Anthem

Ada Limón•2018

The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National
Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good
song. Too high for most of us with “the rockets
red glare” and then there are the bombs.
(Always, always, there is war and bombs.)
Once, I sang it at homecoming and threw
even the tenacious high school band off key.
But the song didn’t mean anything, just a call
to the field, something to get through before
the pummeling of youth. And what of the stanzas
we never sing, the third that mentions “no refuge
could save the hireling and the slave”? Perhaps,
the truth is, every song of this country
has an unsung third stanza, something brutal
snaking underneath us as we blindly sing
the high notes with a beer sloshing in the stands
hoping our team wins. Don’t get me wrong, I do
like the flag, how it undulates in the wind
like water, elemental, and best when it’s humbled,
brought to its knees, clung to by someone who
has lost everything, when it’s not a weapon,
when it flickers, when it folds up so perfectly
you can keep it until it’s needed, until you can
love it again, until the song in your mouth feels
like sustenance, a song where the notes are sung
by even the ageless woods, the short-grass plains,
the Red River Gorge, the fistful of land left
unpoisoned, that song that’s our birthright,
that’s sung in silence when it’s too hard to go on,
that sounds like someone’s rough fingers weaving
into another’s, that sounds like a match being lit
in an endless cave, the song that says my bones
are your bones, and your bones are my bones,
and isn’t that enough?

A New National Anthem

Ada Limón

If I Could Tell Her What I Know Now

Tess Taylor•2024

There are training bras
of literature. In 1989,
I read Sweet Valley High,
a manual for being older that explained
that it would be
desirable to be size six
and blond; to have a mother
who never aged, who looked
just like my sister—
Training bras are
imperfect things. I don’t
pass these books to my daughter.
She’s 9, voracious, whip-smart, cheeky.
Gliding through our house
in roller skates with pale mint
stripes she sings for joy.
She’s a troubadour
a one-girl musical
of fierce bubblegum
desire. This spring
green plums ripen
& she climbs our tree
to watch her world.
She wants to make a version
of Romeo & Juliet, but, she says
“no kissing and no boys.”
I don’t bring up the suicide.
I know there’s so much
practice love, also
so much real breaking too.
Sometimes we love
even the heartbreak songs.
Some year not far from now
I’ll likely tell her how
I loved a boy and then the man
he was when he was grown.
I want her to know I know how real it is:
Even if later on we fail.
Even if we roll
and writhe in agony
because the tragedy is true.
Even when no story could prepare you.
You have to be inside the heartbreak then.
You have to read the urgent poems.
You have to let the days roll by.
How much we love
the ones we love
when we first love—
even when there’s nothing left
to do but sing
or dance or roller skate.
To try. To try again.
To cry and sing: to sing and cry.

If I Could Tell Her What I Know Now

Tess Taylor

Belief in Magic

Dean Young•2014

How could I not?
Have seen a man walk up to a piano
and both survive.
Have turned the exterminator away.
Seen lipstick on a wine glass not shatter the wine.
Seen rainbows in puddles.
Been recognized by stray dogs.
I believe reality is approximately 65% if.
All rivers are full of sky.
Waterfalls are in the mind.
We all come from slime.
Even alpacas.
I believe we’re surrounded by crystals.
Not just Alexander Vvedensky.
Maybe dysentery, maybe a guard’s bullet did him in.
Nonetheless.
Nevertheless
I believe there are many kingdoms left.
The Declaration of Independence was written with a feather.
A single gem has throbbed in my chest my whole life
even though
even though this is my second heart.
Because the first failed,
such was its opportunity.
Was cut out in pieces and incinerated.
I asked.
And so was denied the chance to regard my own heart
in a jar.
Strange tangled imp.
Wee sleekit in red brambles.
You know what it feels like to hold
a burning piece of paper, maybe even
trying to read it as the flames get close
to your fingers until all you’re holding
is a curl of ash by its white ear tip
yet the words still hover in the air?
That’s how I feel now.

Belief in Magic

Dean Young

Sex Without Love

Sharon Old•1984

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

Sex Without Love

Sharon Old

My Father’s Birthday Is the Day Before Mine

Michael Prior•2017

The last train pulses across the pane
and fireflies spark beside the tracks.
Acne’s red wing flames my face:
I can’t take back

this skin. In the other room,
a drugstore Timex synchronizes
with the faucet’s drip. If I squint,
the fireflies align their lives

to map the summer’s migraine
of flowers that were weeds.
You say, but I think
they’re just trying to survive —

cheap bulbs, they burn out in two weeks.
The train rattles as its links shift
and scrape like the dark between days.
From across the continent,

my father texts:
your mother hiked halfway up the hill
behind the cabin / a graceful
mountain goat. Is this love?

Lately, I’ve been writing you letters
that I shred about that blood-orange eclipse —
sleep’s determined murmurs
of eyelid and lash.

The fireflies are sunset’s ash.
I realize I have no means
by which to make you a present of the past,
where my father once cowered

behind the June sunflowers,
bloodied by the dog chain his father
had swung — not at his son,
but at the fear

of being left without one.
The fireflies stutter like an apology.
I would be lying to you
if I didn’t admit I love them.

My Father’s Birthday Is the Day Before Mine

Michael Prior