Poem of the Month

A Subscription to Dwell

My tongue was frozen, the alphabet deserted
A shadow disguised my public sloping;
The mouth near me sat in the mouth of the sill.
The room where language died
Left me outside inside.

Far from my stillness
The cars ramble on
My mourning tongue

Through Philadelphia

But for him it was his first answer to himself
An answer of persons and rooms;
The cities of his psyche removed,
The square footage of his phenomenology,
One room insisting his sanity,
The current of his failing stopped; he aligned himself.

Now I am sacrilegious among a hundred Buddhists.
And who lies to me over the familiar infections,
To find in returning another kind of nothing?
And be punished under a feeble kind of conscience.
The words of a new me
Are diagrammed in the guts of function.

But in the importance and boredom of survival
When the movers are moving like insects under the floor
the instinct to suffer, to which I am fairly accustomed,
is partitioned into reasons not to suffer, and convinces me
A few thousand deaths and dreams in the day
That I cannot eulogize; there is no time.

II

In Philadelphia
He is sudden like me; his gift of survival:
The gift of a subscription to Dwell.
Maybe when I’m
Made and whole, then I’ll have poetry again.
For when I had it before, I had no designs.
As Auden wrote:
Poetry makes nothing happen

-Nina Alvarez