Sharing

The wave is pulling toward the rock's edge.
The crash is heard
miles away.

The children playing in the sand feel the sudden chill;
they gather their shovels and pails
and begin to dig a grave.

Privilege of Being

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy—
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed—
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man's shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shutter pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation is offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.

Robert Hass (b. 1941)

What We Know

When he says, "I love you,"
he means,
"I'm alone and it's all right, but
it's nice that you're listening."

She should know this by now.

When a woman loves a man
she's in Seoul working;
he's in Brooklyn writing.

Or she is in a cab to Sinchon,
on her way to fill the void,

while he is stuck in traffic on
the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway

on his way home
to himself.

Sometimes when he has lovers,
she feels it and cries;
he empties himself out,
bucketfuls.
So much so that when
his sister visits,
she tells him
he feels like a funeral home.

When she loves him,
he's been gone for years
but still writes daily
to the remembered features, gestures
the songs and sounds of the other,
to the faithful words now finally said

and there's such clarity
in distance and in silence.

When he says, "Ours is destined for distance,"
"I believe you," she replies yet
holds her breath,
and waits.

Their love must be a silent film,
the two sitting with
a table of ocean between them
faces vacant,
eyes freckled with small brown
shoe footprints;
when she calls him late at night,
there is no answer.
The prompter holds up a sign card,
"Clap."

When he loves her,
he's trying to sleep,
he wishes her goodnight
hours before he is ready.
Otherwise,
she might worry.

Cars fade from the streets
one by one.
Blinking headlights
eyes closed to
the roaring wind
over the East River.

기다리는 마음 (三秋之思)

Your silence is a field of fish
I want to gather into my arms and
float along the Han (漢江.)
I'd ask them to find their way to you.

The soft soil beneath their small,
dried bodies
needs rain, tides.
I fear your quiet,
like this.

I'm always waiting
for the rain to flood
to sea
to shore
to your door.
And as you open,

you'll know
all that I'd do
though you've
not yet asked.

Needs rising like jang-ma season waters
marking the sides of the Baekdu Mountain.

Watermarks
along your sides
with my voice.

your airplane © by Rachel McKibbens

I.

over breakfast,
my father asks what you see in me.

I bite the inside of my cheek,

shove a forkful of pancakes into my mouth,
notice the salt shaker eyeing my wounds.

II.

you launch "I love yous"
from a Brooklyn fire escape.

they travel 3,000 postcard miles
and collapse into my ear, exhausted.

I pinch their noses,
breathe new life into their lungs,
fold them into airplanes,

send them back to you
and wait.

III.

there isn't a building
taller than two stories
here in Orange County.
not a single fire escape.

no point in jumping.
the worst that could happen
is a broken leg or heart.

this is why the sad kids get
so goddamn creative around here.

the mayor's son rigged his noose
to raise with the garage door
when the Mercedes came home.

a nine-year old leapt into the lion's cage
at Prentice Park Zoo after
her dog was hit by a car.

IV.

on our wedding day,
when I tell you "I do,"

it's because I do.

it's because you understand
how ten-thousand dollar apologies
still keep fathers worthless,

it's because my ribcage expands
every time I think of you,

it's for all the things
you see in me

and pretend
not to notice.

untitled by Rachel McKibbens

To my daughters, I need to say:

Go with the one who loves you biblically.

The one whose love lifts its head to you despite its broken neck.

Whose body bursts sixteen arms electric to carry you, gentle, the way
old grief is gentle.

Love the love that is messy in all its too much,

The body that rides best your body, whose mouth saddles the naked salt
of your far gone hips, whose tongue translates the rock language of
all your elegant scars.

Go with the one who cries out for his tragic sisters as he chops the winter’s wood, the one whose skin

Triggers your heart into a heaven of blood waltzes.

Go with the one who resembles most your father. Not the father you can
point out on a map,

But the father who is here. Is your home. Is the key to your front door. Know that your first love will only

Be the first. And the second and third and even fourth will unprepare you for the most important:

The Blessed. The Beast. The Last love. Which is, of course, the most terrifying kind.

Because which of us wants to go with what can murder us? Can reveal to us

Our true heart’s end and its thirty years spent in poverty?

Can mimic the sound of our birdthroated mothers, replicate the warmth of our brothers' tempers? Can pull us out of ourselves until

We are no longer sisters or daughters or sword swallowers but, instead,

Women. Who give. And lead. And take and want

And want

And want

And want

Because there is no shame in wanting.

And you will hear yourself say: Last Love, I wish to die so I may come back to you new and never tasted by any other mouth but yours.

And I want to be the hands that pull your children out of you and tuck them deep inside myself until they are

Ready to be the children of such a royal and staggering love. Or you
will say: Last Love,

I am old, and have spent myself on the courageless, have wasted too many clocks on less-deserving men, so I hurl myself

At the throne of you and lie humbly at your feet.

Last Love, let me never roll out of this heavy dream of you.

Let the day I was born mean my life will end where you end.

Let the man behind the church do what he did if it brings me to you.

Let the girls in the locker room corner me again if it brings me to you.

Let the wrong beds find me if it brings me to you.

Let this wild depression throw me beneath its hooves if it brings me to you.

Let me pronounce my hoarded joy if it brings me to you.

Let my father break me again and again if it brings me to you.

Last love, I let other men borrow your children. Forgive me.

Last love, I vowed my heart to another. Forgive me.

Last Love, I have let my blind and anxious hands wander into a room and come out empty. Forgive me.

Last Love, I have cursed the women you loved before me. Forgive me.

Last Love, I envy your mother’s body where you resided first. Forgive me.

Last Love, I am all that is left. Forgive me.

Last Love, I did not see you coming. Forgive me.

Last Love, every day without you was a life I crawled out of. Amen.

Last Love, you are my Last Love. Amen.

Last Love, I am all that is left. Amen.

I am all that is left.

Amen.

Gravity

Dear Boy I Masturbate to:

Remember I told you I had to write about gravity?
I just looked it up and it says that
Gravity is
the fundamental force of attraction
that all objects with mass have for each other.
Like electromagnetic forces,
gravity has an effectively infinite range
and obeys the inverse-square law.
At the atomic level,
where masses are very small,
the force of gravity is negligible,
but for objects that have very large masses
such as planets, stars, galaxies,
my heart raised to the power of your body
multiplied by my lips, your touch and
your deepening eyes.

You are feathers falling upwards in a forest fire.

I will unfold to your body's whim.

I'll move on you with the purr of old engines
placed carefully into new cars.
I want to ride you gently like that.
Your belt buckle will loosen at my smile
and I will find you with your pants as anklets
upon the ceiling.

Lay my body before yours
as land does before a bulldozer.
Flat-line my contours,
or just flat line the buzzing
between my lips and knees
or lift me into the ground
(or into your mouth)

because you think it is the sky;
(it's heaven and)
you want to teach me to fly so I'll learn
how to wade in the air.

I want to sweat-fuck your talisman,
empty your pants of all their jewels and
place them into my mouth
watch your knees give,
those bent boomerangs.

I want to be bitten and bound
throttle throated and
exhausted wet,

combust like supermarkets hurling fresh fruits and detergent
upside-down in the rain with sprinklers on.

You won't be able to shake my skin's taste
from the open-air.

May I be the face you make when you're cumming alone?
Subtle ecstasy like dogs dreaming of white bone.

I'll breathe into your inner-thigh, and
finish you quick,

so will you
drift your cock into my mouth?
I wanna be high from smoking it.

I wanna do you in your soccer cleats
until the hardwood floors
become matchsticks,
and set you ablaze.

You make my heart as nomadic as
petals lost at sea.

I sleep each night waiting for your voice,
so I can reach down
and

purify myself with the holy water of your voice
and my wetness.
So
will you harbor my screams in your mouth,
dreaming of mornings of quick cumming?
Say my name. Now say it again

and I'll cum like a crate of fragile flutes
wrapped in cellophane dropped upwards
from the 63 building.

I will do
whatever you ask.
Unless you are drunk
then I'll take advantage
and ride your face.
But I must say
I think your tongue is a flower
your mouth pronouncing my name into my skin.

In return,
my fingertips will unveil the braille of your body's bible;
miracles like (my) water (wetness) cumming from your
rock,
I've been thirsty
for you
all my life.

And yes. This gravity, the fundamental force of attraction that all objects
with mass have for each other. Your body raised to the power of
your heart multiplied by my lips,
your touch.

Yes,
I touch myself to you at night.

Yours truly,
Heather

My Mirrors

My mirrors
are always lying.

They tell me
my face would be missed
but
no one ever calls for me

so I call myself out loud,

trying to remember
what I was called
and
I wondered,

if the last time he kissed me
did I taste
good

or just

good enough
for now?

I wanted to tell him
I was all out of that flavor

My mother once told me
that girls like me
are like airport waiting areas,

only for the time in between
only for the nodding off after
a red-eye flight,
nodding off to
florescent flashing
and
sticky stains

of the child who was left for too long
by himself calling for his father;

my mother said
that girls like me are the
dingy chairs of
passing through,

for a stranger
who is waiting for a
connecting flight
on his way to someone
who matters

or someone he calls
permanent.

He looks at me
from the vending machine;
I imagine his hunger
as he fumbles for
change.

It's funny that he pushes
B4 for chips

and gets
cookies instead
but smiles anyway.

He sits
and c(r)um(b)s all over me.
and I can't help but taste
with him,

this passing
through.