national poetry month, day 14

Dutch Elm Disease When Danny Johnson’s big brother was killed in Vietnam, Danny ran around the block five times. I counted. Ran as if when he stopped his brother would be back in their driveway washing his car. But nobody knew anything about time travel back then, Star Trek hadn’t even come out, Lieutenant Uhura still on Broadway doing Blues for Mr. Charlie. And even if Danny did understand the space-time continuum, his parents weren’t having it, his mother on the porch yelling his name, his father tackling him on the front lawn, all us kids, the whole block standing there on pause. Which didn’t exist either. No fast forward, no reverse. We weren’t even Black yet. Was Milwaukee even Milwaukee? Is the Lincoln Park Bridge still there, do boys like Danny still climb over the rail, hug their bony knees to their narrow chests and plop into the river as if there’s no way his parents could lose two children? Which is all I know about Vietnam, that and the way the sun hung in the faded sky as Danny ran around and around and held the air hostage, that and the way the thick August air ignored the leaves of all our doomed elm trees and let itself be held hostage. The streets were like ghosts when they cut down those trees. —Valencia Robin

national poetry month, day 13

how to catch a god the river god Ilissos, from the west pediment of the Parthenon It’s all about desire, you have to get that, you have to find a way to push it into the stone — make it big because there’s so much of it and it keeps moving and flowing like the river. There’s his, to pull himself out of the water onto the land, there’s ours, to watch him, to see him in the act of making a new gorgeous line of himself, and there’s yours, to show us, to draw the desire from its source, to spin it and circle it, so its truth ripples through the marble and we feel it in the slant of him, as we circle him and see his breath move like water through his lungs, and the space between his thighs and the cracked scar that cuts across the back of him and imagine, for a moment, that it’s us — no, not us, me — he is turning towards, my body that will feel the weight of his. That’s what you have to do to beckon him down from the mountain and push the warmth and the ease of him into your cold stone. Start with that notch at the base of his throat, carve that thimble where the bone coves. And then follow and hollow out the line that runs from there as it meanders and trickles through his pectorals and under the swerve of his ribs. Open up the space between rib and hip until we hear them call out to each other across the smooth stone of his skin. Slow time with your hands so it pendulum hangs heavy and suspended in that moment before movement, when the muscles are still and soft, waiting to harden and contract. Make his torso lean on a hand that’s no longer there. Splay its rays so we think we see him press down on its palm to catch the mass of himself and haul it up like a magnificent fish pulled dripping and gleaming out of the river. And when you’ve done that, you’re nearly there. All you need to do now is seal out death, it has no place here. It casts no shadow on this stone. —Laura Scott