"In Cities, Be Alert" by Annie Finch

In Cities, Be Alert

by Annie Finch

You may hear that your heartbeat is uneven

and let new tension climb around your shoulders,

thinking you've found the trick for going mad.

But try to keep a grip on where you are.

Remember: all around you is pure city;

try to stay alert. On the wide streets,

so empty late at night, streaking in glass,

the color of an alley, or the fall

of a sideways flicker from a neon sign

may utterly and briefly disconcert you—

but as you go, you'll find that noise is worse.

Prepare for noise. But never scream. Even tensing

ears too far in advance can sharpen sirens,

and as for horns. ... When you're back to

your normal rhythm after such encounters,

just try to stay alert. You'll never know

exactly who is coming up behind you,

but the sudden movement of pedestrians

will finally, of course, be what disarms you.

Read, listen, share, create, and be on watch.

"Boston Year" by Elizabeth Alexander

Boston Year

by Elizabeth Alexander

My first week in Cambridge a car full of white boys

tried to run me off the road, and spit through the window,

open to ask directions. I was always asking directions

and always driving: to an Armenian market

in Watertown to buy figs and string cheese, apricots,

dark spices and olives from barrels, tubes of paste

with unreadable Arabic labels. I ate

stuffed grape leaves and watched my lips swell in the mirror.

The floors of my apartment would never come clean.

Whenever I saw other colored people

in bookshops, or museums, or cafeterias, I’d gasp,

smile shyly, but they’d disappear before I spoke.

What would I have said to them? Come with me? Take

me home? Are you my mother? No. I sat alone

in countless Chinese restaurants eating almond

cookies, sipping tea with spoons and spoons of sugar.

Popcorn and coffee was dinner. When I fainted

from migraine in the grocery store, a Portuguese

man above me mouthed: “No breakfast.” He gave me

orange juice and chocolate bars. The color red

sprang into relief singing Wagner’s Walküre.

Entire tribes gyrated and drummed in my head.

I learned the samba from a Brazilian man

so tiny, so festooned with glitter I was certain

that he slept inside a filigreed, Fabergé egg.

No one at the door: no salesmen, Mormons, meter

readers, exterminators, no Harriet Tubman,

no one. Red notes sounding in a grey trolley town.

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"Famous" by Naomi Shihab Nye

Famous

by Naomi Shihab Nye

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,   

which knew it would inherit the earth   

before anybody said so.   

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds   

watching him from the birdhouse.   

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.   

The idea you carry close to your bosom   

is famous to your bosom.   

The boot is famous to the earth,   

more famous than the dress shoe,   

which is famous only to floors.

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it   

and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.   

I want to be famous to shuffling men   

who smile while crossing streets,   

sticky children in grocery lines,   

famous as the one who smiled back.

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,   

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,   

but because it never forgot what it could do.

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"Closing Hours" by Ann Lauterbach

Closing Hours

by Ann Lauterbach

This trace, if it exists, is alms for delusion.

An arch uncurls from the floor

scented with the scent of a tapestry, housed here.

I recall the hour but not its passage

unless dream captures and ties it to sleep:

a fat bellhop smiles, shows me to the tower

where I can watch the departure.

But some days settle so that nothing

crosses the horizon; stare as I will, no star

needles the air. Now I am left

on the outskirts of a forest hemmed in by wheat

where plump trees hide the image, its symmetry

shot up and blown across the ground like feathers.

The unicorn, the grail, blue and red wings

of kneeling musicians, these are embroidered

elsewhere. Perseverance was crowned.

Hope and Pity prayed for success.

How fast is this camera? Can it record a trace?

There was a voyage. Four mounted horses

strain against centuries.

To each is allotted: dust kicked up, smoke, plumage.

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"Burn Lake" by Carrie Fountain

Burn Lake

by Carrie Fountain

For Burn Construction Company

When you were building the i-10 bypass, 

one of   your dozers, moving earth 

at the center of a great pit, 

slipped its thick blade beneath 

the water table, slicing into the earth’s 

wet palm, and the silt moistened 

beneath the huge thing’s tires, and the crew 

was sent home for the day. 

Next morning, water filled the pit. 

Nothing anyone could do to stop it coming. 

It was a revelation: kidney-shaped, deep 

green, there between the interstate 

and the sewage treatment plant. 

When nothing else worked, you called it 

a lake and opened it to the public. 

And we were the public.

Read, listen, share, create, and be on watch.

"Mother's Closet" bu Maxine Scates

Mother's Closet 
by Maxine Scates

This is everything she ever closed a door
on, the broom closet of childhood
where no one could ever find a broom.
Here, layer upon layer, nothing breathes:
photo albums curl at the edges, books
she brought home from the library
where she worked, handled by thousands
of other hands before their final exile
where they’ve waited, paper and more paper
taking in the ocean air, about to sprout.

Mother’s sitting on the bed
with her tattered list of dispersals—who gets
what among the treasures she hopes
I’ll find, but I know I’m seeing
what she doesn't want me to see,
the daughter cleaning doing what the son
would never do. After an hour of excavation
the console TV emerges from beneath
forgotten sweaters and balled up nylons
saved for stuffing puppets, a long ago church project—
the TV arrived in 1966 same day I crushed
the fender of the car, upsetting
the careful plans she’d made for payment.

She wants to leave so much behind. Hours later
I’ve found nothing I want but the purple mache mask
I made in the fourth grade. I like its yellow eyes.
She looks at each magazine I remove, saving
every word about my brother, the coach. He’s sixty
and a long dead mouse has eaten the laces
of his baby shoes. I want order. I say
I’m old myself, I’ve started throwing things away.
I’m lying. I’ve kept everything she’s ever given me.






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"How You Know" by Joe Mills

How You Know
by Joe Mills

How do you know if it’s love? she asks, 
and I think if you have to ask, it’s not, 
but I know this won’t help. I want to say 
you’re too young to worry about it,
as if she has questions about Medicare 
or social security, but this won’t help either. 
“You’ll just know” is a lie, and one truth, 
“when you still want to be with them 
the next morning,” would involve too 
many follow-up questions. The difficulty 
with love, I want to say, is sometimes 
you only know afterwards that it’s arrived 
or left. Love is the elephant and we 
are the blind mice unable to understand 
the whole. I want to say love is this 
desire to help even when I know I can’t, 
just as I couldn’t explain electricity, stars, 
the color of the sky, baldness, tornadoes, 
fingernails, coconuts, or the other things 
she has asked about over the years, all 
those phenomena whose daily existence 
seems miraculous. Instead I shake my head. 
I don’t even know how to match my socks. 
Go ask your mother. She laughs and says, 
I did. Mom told me to come and ask you.

Read, listen, share, create, and be on watch.