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W. S. Di Piero
Saturday Afternoon
"NOW YAHWEH ORDERED THAT A GREAT FISH SHOULD SWALLOW HIM."
Into my backyard’s six fat squares of concrete rigged with clothesline,
Charlie the Cop swung gunnysacks convulsed with Jersey chickens.
From the open view of other yards, unfolded down the block,
neighbor women watched ours boil tub water; the barechested men,
laying out knives and cleavers, fumbled the animals into daylight,
in the middle of my world, my certain place, not stump roots
on the cold Atlantic floor of mountains I’d imagined,
one week every summer, from the hot Wildwood boardwalk.
But just then Charlie lifted me above his head, saying
“O Billy Boy you've never in your life seen this! Want it?”
The ground gone, steep drag of thinned air, chicken squawk
tingling in my ears with dim human voices. Charlie threw me in the sea.
The underplace, swallowing my heart, opened like a horn of plenty,
blood channels lit blue and red like pinball arteries, flesh-motes,
mucus, sinew, pulsing viscera bits dripping from clothesline.
Missile tracks horned across the ceiling. In the ribcage,
stooped beggars crowded, kicking spongy gouts of something;
deeper in the tunnel, toward the tail, in files winding out of sight,
shaved heads, men and women in pajamas. Spear carriers paced the walls.
Into my vaulted space came words not really words: shades, images
with a worldly shape of meaning, but beyond me, aloof and hysterical.
The silence wrapped me like a prickly woolen sleeve knit
by my women’s voices, shouting, out there, unrecoverable, dense,
while their horny hands plucked and the sweaty men teased,
stuffing tacky down inside their headscarves. Inside,
blood cells combed my walls, unfinished patterns seeped through
as picturegrams that glided across the whale’s belly. A still life
with ginger jar and pomegranates. A flayed, ripening Christ.
An Ohio puddler stirring pigiron mash, whose back is the same one
in Giotto’s Gethsemane that stays the hand slicing off a soldier’s ear.
Mercury, my heart, the sickening beautiful shiftingness of things.
Kettles steamed, tin basins quivered with guts, my dear hell’s bloodglyphs
in things, in me. I’d not be whole in and of the world again.
Quills cracked when Charlie put me down. In my backyard, in my head,
women sang under a pier to the unformed sea, an unvoiced song
I’d heard inside the monster, breezing now through clotheslines.
Men scrubbed their hands at the spigot, the women sighing.
Flies left charcoal scrawls on the air and grazed old stains;
they lighted on my arms, not waiting, but constant, my familiars,
until their manic newsiness went away. Then, in that twilight,
slow, shadowless lightning bugs appeared, going on and off.
--
Saumendra Bajpai
Born to Gilda
Travelling,
through edicts
that merge,
into her sleeping winters,
Gilda drinks on warmth,
served in saucers,
baked tomorrow night.
***
With the carousel paused,
romeos turned around
and teased a somersault.
As she goes about now,
straining under throbs
of a restive autumn,
faces emerge
in the little whirlpool
that drowns no one.
***
At the mouth of rivers,
there abound rocks, gardens
bearing posies
for Gilda’s children.
They sputter like balloons, joyous,
bursting to wild winds
at every summer fair.
***
When the spiral broke off
from her body,
it peeled off skin
where rubaiyyat sang,
between rudy finger marks.
Moaning her love
for the last time,
she picked up her favorite child
and bid farewell.
"They go to bed with Gilda,
they wake up with me", hissed the shadow.
When the lights dimmed in eyes,
we gathered around our embers
and struck a waltz
to the final carnival.
--
All Good Things - Jobe