POEM OF THE DAY BY ROBERTO BOLANO

The Worm

Let us give thanks for our poverty, said the guy dressed in rags.
I saw him with my own eyes: drifting through a town of flat houses,
built of brick and mortar, between the United States and Mexico.
Let us give thanks for our violence, he said, even if it's futile
like a ghost, even if it leads to nothing,
just as these roads lead nowhere.
I saw him with my own eyes: gesturing over a rosy background
that resisted the black, ah, sunset on the border,
glimpsed and lost forever.
Sunsets that enveloped Lisa's father
at the beginning of the fifties.
Sunsets that gave witness to Mario Santiago,
up and down, frozen stiff, in the backseat
of a contrabandist's car. Sunsets
of infinite white and infinite black.

I saw him with my own eyes: he looked like a worm with a straw hat
and an assassin's glare
and he traveled through the towns of northern Mexico
as if wandering lost, evicted from the mind,
evicted from the grand dream, everyone's dream,
and his words were, madre mía, terrifying.

He looked like a worm with a straw hat,
white clothes,
and an assassin's glare.
And he traveled like a fool
through the towns of northern Mexico
without daring to yield,
without choosing
to go down to Mexico City.
I saw him with my own eyes,
coming and going
with traveling vendors and drunks,
feared,
shouting his promises through streets
lined with adobes.
He looked like a white worm
with a Bali between his lips
or an unfiltered Delicados.
And he traveled, from one side to the other
of dreams,
just like an earthworm,
dragging his desperation,
devouring it.

A white worm with a straw hat
under the northern Mexican sun,
in soils watered with blood and the mendacious words
of the frontier, the gateway to the Body seen by Sam Peckinpah,
the gateway to the evicted Mind, the pure little
whip, and the damned white worm was right there,
with his straw hat and cigarette hanging
from his lower lip, and he had the same assassin's
glare, as always.
I saw him and told him I have three lumps on my head
and science can no longer do a thing for me.
I saw him and told him get out of my tracks, you prick,
poetry is braver than anyone,
the soils watered with blood can suck my dick, the evicted Mind
hardly rattles my senses.
From these nightmares I'll retain only
these poor houses,
these wind-swept streets
and not your assassin's glare.

He looked like a white worm with his straw hat
and a handgun under his shirt,
and he never stopped talking to himself or with whomever
about a village
at least two or three thousand years old,
up there in the North, next to the border
with the United States,
a place that still existed,
only forty houses,
two cantinas,
and a grocery store,
a town of vigilantes and assassins
like him himself,
adobe houses and cement patios
where one's eyes were forever hitched
to the horizon
(that flesh-colored horizon
like a dying man's back).
And what did they hope to see appear there? I asked.
The wind and dust, maybe.
A minimal dream,
but one on which they staked
all their stubbornness, all their will.

He looked like a white worm with a straw hat and a Delicados
hanging from his lower lip.
He looked like a twenty-two-year-old Chilean walking into Café la Habana
and checking out a blonde girl
seated in the back,
in the evicted Mind.
They looked like the midnight walks
of Mario Santiago.
In the evicted Mind.
In the enchanted mirrors.
In the hurricane of Mexico City.
The severed fingers were growing back
with surprising speed.
Severed fingers,
fractured,
scattered
in the air of Mexico City.


-Roberto Bolaño

POEM OF THE DAY BY DENISE DUHAMEL

The Bottom
I stopped drinking on my way down the hill to the liquor store when two guys pulled up and tried to drag me into their pickup. I crossed the street then ran in the opposite direction, puffing against the incline. The stranger thrust into reverse and, when I wouldn't talk to him, threw a bag of McDonald’s trash at me, Stuck up bitch. I stopped drinking when I realized I was fighting for the vodka at the bottom of the hill more than I was fighting against the terrible things that could have happened to me inside the cab of that rusty Chevy. I stopped drinking before cell phones. I stopped drinking after Days of Wine and Roses. I stopped drinking even as I kept walking to El Prado Spirits and the guy behind the counter who recognized me asked if I was alright. I didn't tell him what had happened because he might have called the police and then I would have had to wait for them to arrive to fill out a report, delaying my Smirnoff. I stopped drinking even before I had that last sip, as I ran back up the hill squeezing a bottle by its neck. -Denise Duhamel

POEM OF THE DAY BY FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA

The Interrupted Concert

The frozen sleepy pause

of the half moon

has broken the harmony

of the deep night.

The ditches, shrouded in sedge,

protest in silence,

and the frogs, muezzins of shadow,

have fallen silent.

In the old village inn

the sad music has ceased,

and the most ancient of stars

has muted its ray.

The wind has come to rest

in dark mountain caves,

and a solitary poplar—Pythagoras

of the pure plain—

lifts its aged hand

to strike at the moon.


-Federico García Lorca (Translated By W. S. Merwin)

POEM OF THE DAY BY HARLEY ELIOT

Changing A Tire By The Missouri River

Turning the nuts one at a time
at midnight on a country road
the cold clear black air
pours into my body

and a mile away the invisible
Missouri River slides along.
You stand in the headlights yellow
corridors of light

wrapped in a blanket
impenetrable fields on either side
where farm dogs call and
the distant coyotes answer.

We have one child asleep
in the car another turning
with stars in your body.
On the giant billboard a dreamy

cowboy is lifting a slice
of bacon to his mouth.
I see my hands glow
with the lovely moment
of changing this tire.

The four way wrench slowly revolves.
I am entering my life.


^__Harley Elliott

POEM OF THE DAY BY A.J. RATHBUN

In Ithaca

Before arriving in Ithaca, pass

the whatever river, whatevering

around the dusty credit spring

loans summer, where men off

ante meridian to relieve water

of any but the wiliest trout.

Sweat drips as simple syrup down

gawky morning chins of lost tourist,

invited visitor alike as they amble

past the poetic Wendy’s, sing

of how five gorges cater breeze

over hot May noons. 1942’s

Comprehensive Pictorial Encyclopedia

in the public bathroom on Seneca

says scenic beauty expands

out of nightingales and bees

and a picture of John Wayne.

Lunch is orange and sweet. Porches

restrain sheep, become kernels

of early Iranian cinema dialogues

for the burled tri-state area.

In Ithaca, no one calls Ithaca

the Switzerland of America.

Deer multiply into stars, stars

replace deer, but evening light,

nostalgically golden brown, is hard

for me to remember, once borders

are crossed. The Cayuga dreams

of Tioga, from a distance, and, 

as an heiress to an empty estate,

State Street woos New Jersey state

while iced Italian Soda served

under fans at Home Dairy want savoring,

if the flavor is Kiwi, the tropical

component of 4:30, here, in Ithaca,

where astronomical observations

reveal to even jaded passers-by

a street, a city, a moon, an ocean

papier-mached with glacial confetti

from a million legendary parades.


-A.J. Rathbun

SOMETHING TO SAY

Consider a moment
those dank, primeval basements
and mud-flooded sub-basements of the brain

where the fish and lizards

and monkeys of our formative years

still wriggle and skitter and scurry about.

If we peer deep enough inside ourselves

we can see them, there, still completeing

their respective lengths of circuitry,

still telegraphing up their two-cents worth,

from time to time, despite all our attempts

at processing and refining them away

down the spiral staircase of the spine

out into the Big Nowhere.

Look, for example, how the Gar

with their jagged, maniacal grins

are all lustfully eyeing the little pink toes

of our haplessly bobbing frontal lobe,

while the Catfish are fatly content

to sift and slither in the rich,

fertile muck of prehistoric memory.

And the skinks and Geckos and Chameleons,

all contoured and layered together

in their crevices, are dreaming of the days

when they ran the show.

And the Monkeys,

that coffee and smoke saturated

back-room gaggle of gag-men

and speech writers, all hunched and contorted

over their cranky, old Underwoods,

are up against a bitch of a deadline.

For the Alpha Male needs something to say,

something witty and charming,

yet, still somehow mysterious and aloof.

And he needs it yesterday.

-Jason Ryberg, 2009