moments when
“...There must be
Moments when we see right through
Although we say we can’t.”
Archibald MacLeish
There must be — or how could I take my own
aimlessness. I love everything:
the man in the bar who says he builds boats,
plastic bags that catch in the branches,
rattling. Sometimes the city
shuts me out, or else I’m split,
or the things that I am are
stacked, I sing them out.
I should remind myself I’m lying about what I love.
Or I should say
how
the things that I love could shatter a thimble,
but not fill it.
This is my second-favorite riddle.
Lately — since August — nothing will signify:
not the East River,
not my dream of the city,
my bridge. Now the end of every sentence seems
unlikely. I even love
your likeness. I don’t know how the stanzas came off-‐center.
Every so often I widen my wingspan. I’m trying
to be modern. I love mangoes.
This is my immaculate magic.
I took all these months to write it.
____________________________________________________________________
NATALIA HOLTZMAN is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. She earned a BA in Philosophy from Kalamazoo College in 2010. Her poems have previously appeared in Grist: The Journal for Writers.
He sang /
like a gas station on a black summer night.
you stand a long time /
by the creek, then /
feed it two pennies, /
one for you, one /
for the love /
inside you that /
you can do nothing /
with or about.
A talisman against the agony /
in his knees and hips //
for which he was taking /
black-market fentanyl
I greet your gliding flight O wings of death / But there are other signs too
realizing that the horizon is a line constituting an intersection between at least two systems, the inner and the outer one. Between an observer on the move and the roads within the landscape ...
the story / the two white women will not retract, despite the fact /
that inside each story we tell another writes itself
the intoxicating ministry of dusk, the anchor of daylight lifting, sheets white / like a freshly crushed pill, // the vortex of the body and the clap of the / coral tongue...
Before we go any further, I want to publicly acknowledge //
that I love every person in this room. I mean it. /
We’ve traveled from all over to be here, and I love /
each of you, all of you, every last one of you, except /
Harold
I tithe 10% of my new underwear to my future /
self, the one who has fallen in love.
Along one river fell /
all the luck in the world.