Poem of the Month

Is published in the Hugo-award-winning literary magazine Electric Velocipede.

Cheers!
Nina

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For R, For Whatever Reason

Across a pond
A swan came into view
And dipped her head
Too low to the chest, the beak
Went under
the mirror

I watched with you, this loop of white
pierce black water, like
floating in tar, but her head came up.

And the world was restored.

I wonder how I could have missed it. I am sure
When it happened, I did not register it, but
Afterward, something eerie ticked to awareness
Just above my belly, something beautiful had
Become deformed, and only quickly, and only
As illusion, but what the eye sees is true.

It is your birthday, or it was. You are 43. I am
Supposed to be a better friend to you, but it
Reminds me, when I care for you, too much of
The time when I loved you. I cannot worry anymore
Why you cry so much; you cannot worry anymore
Why I cannot sleep. You were right all along. That’s
It. I said it wasn’t fair and I made you feel it. But
You were right, that we were something different
Than maybe I thought, than anything inside us could have.

I don’t want to make a weeping, sweeping statement
About what is lost or not lost. I may have been wrong
At every turn, and maybe now I need to right myself,
And this may mean I am not what I was.

But I want to see what the ugliness and beauty is
All together. To be far enough away from it
So I can make sense of those burritos,
Kisses, talks, plans. Falling asleep holding hands,
But beyond these things, the way we fused our lives
Together, for whatever reason, for whatever time.

-Nina Alvarez

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Solitaries

A half-golden window. Lined, shadow-speckled
The gray corona’s eye lay, paling at the sill
There must have been roaches, cicadas, air, squirrels,
Oriels and ants almost dancing to breezes.
Higher in fronds of gold, among stones,
Youth among the many-hidden lives.

Her yard under years, a foot stirred the stones.
Though she is planted in the morning room.
There God and his greenery are dreams powered down.
In this little box streams the golden rod
The air in nodes of hay, poking
The finer draperies. The art is rich.

Here is ache in shinola, nomadism canned –
And here death isn’t as dark. Just a flash, a dampening.
Embarrassingly numb, an easy affliction. Solitaries
keep hours on this side of the glass, knees buckled
Eyes set to horrible peacefulness, metered and
round, blue, discernable only as a tear
in the fabric of the reclining chair by the ottoman.

-Nina Alvarez

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2.14.09 etre-vouloir-dire

To be tired; tied to oblivion. To be outfoxed by mediocrity. Seduced by law. To be the last sure thing you knew, and to let that go, trading it in for tighter straps that only sometimes worked.

To be so full of something, call it conviction, that you knew language would be yours. To be so full of something to say, and to not say it, to not know what it is or what it needs, to be blocked from the heart up.

To want, more than anything, to say something real, Realer than real. To say it all and say it once and say it.

To say how hard it is, all of it. Every ounce of it.

To say how slow it is, how long, how the small things that breath is us become shallower.

To say how much like a dream, like a play. How real we believe our acting to be, how vague our lines, how indecipherable our motivation. How quickly we can turn farce into fantasy, parody into paradise, and then back again. And how we are always poised for the turn, whether we admit it or not.

To say that I once was…something. Alive, bold, barren of tedium, a biter of flesh, a caller of ancient names. To say that I gave it up for a more restful night, for the paradigm sold to me in a package of virtues. To say I was eclipsed by what I was.

To say I don’t need you, stander on this stage. You in your purple garments, you with one hand to a powdered lady singing falsetto, and one eye to me with my broom and bodice. I don’t need to be so consumed in the play as to betroth myself to vapors.

-Nina Alvarez

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Waste is not possible
Like molding bread
What we do not eat
we are not fed

Choose large portions
more to savor

Choose  company now
Solitude later

Make more words
long, willowy wands

And dance with the dharma
on samsara ponds

-Nina Alvarez

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Orange

At the beginning of my life, all dwelt in orange. I swear the womb, my first room, my mother, my eyes were orange. I used to call out to the places on that warm light surface, depth was in the surface, surface and depth, one.

Yet how is it that we think we can articulate childhood at all? It was a different country, a different eon. We lived in fascination always. Fascination of the breast, of orange walls, of mother, of the enormous house, the back porch that rocked like a high ship, the front door to the outside where jungles and strange playfellows grew.

Fascination of tadpoles and small frogs, minnows and silver light in the creek, rainbows in oily puddles. Fascination of the hill that fell for years of running down the long back of our house. Fascination of grasshoppers and never any real separation, never outside of me, never me other than it.

In this way children are like animals: in love with their prey.

They say it is practical and imperative to structure the singularity of childhood, when god was an enormous distant white man who loved me even more than my parents. It is practical to structure God, ask why he never showed up but never stopped floating around the rafters of our church.

I have a mind to go back to the haunts of my first six years and sit as silently as possible, make myself stiller and stiller until the chaos of my eons since distills and I can hear the echos of my original thoughts. That hunger that knows no separation from the plate.

-Nina Alvarez

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Prometheus: Behind the Music

Prometheus loved the afternoon
and took his drink with goat meat then.
And shook the rawness of his hands
on his big thighs and wiped them clean.

The giant man held conference
with intangible or tiny things.
Once a woman stayed the night,
He scared her with his offerings.

Prometheus watched television,
two channels from a long dead wire.
One of heaven, one of hell
Both claimed to fear his fire.

What say you, said the billy goat,
Rumor, said the ancient man
Of my liver’s destiny
has gotten out of hand.

Foolishness or fascism
imagines horrors blindly.
But he also said beneath his breath,
You’d think they’d try to find me.

He supped at evening languidly,
The raw meat of sheep and elk.
He drank fermented honey
And slept on arid silk.

His hands smelled of animals,
His land smelled of blood,
And though he was immortal,
He was often sick and cold.

At night he hung his hut
With every kind of fur
Prometheus had seen no gods
Since he invented fire.

He never saw an eagle,
His liver never quivered,
No horror ever chained him by
A rock or cliff or river.

He simply went away,
From fame and flames and heat
to sup at quiet mountains
a cold and bloody meat.

-Nina Alvarez

This poem uses slant rhyme.  Can you find it?

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