How You Know

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.

Joe Mills

Love Story

The kitchen door opens onto dirt
and the second half of the country
all the way to the Pacific. Rusted
prairie trains out of the tall weeds
elbow the last century aside, rumble
from every direction towards Chicago.

My great-grandfather, who would be
150 years old today, put on his one
tall hat and took the big trip
to Omaha for my great-grandma
with the family ring on his vest
and winter wheat lying wait in seed.

He gave her all the miles he had
and she gave him the future I walk
around in every day. The mountains
were too far west to count so they
doubled back over the land and century
and the real weather kept coming from them.

James Doyle

Waterwings

The mornings are his,
blue and white
like the tablecloth at breakfast.  
He’s happy in the house,
a sweep of the spoon
brings the birds under his chair.  
He sings and the dishes disappear.

Or holding a crayon like a candle,  
he draws a circle.
It is his hundredth dragonfly.
Calling for more paper,
this one is red-winged
and like the others,
he wills it to fly, simply
by the unformed curve of his signature.

Waterwings he calls them,  
the floats I strap to his arms.  
I wear an apron of concern,  
sweep the morning of birds.  
To the water he returns,  
plunging where it’s cold,
moving and squealing into sunlight.
The water from here seems flecked with gold.

I watch the circles
his small body makes
fan and ripple,
disperse like an echo
into the sum of water, light and air.  
His imprint on the water
has but a brief lifespan,
the flicker of a dragonfly’s delicate wing.

This is sadness, I tell myself,
the morning he chooses to leave his wings behind,  
because he will not remember
that he and beauty were aligned,
skimming across the water, nearly airborne,  
on his first solo flight.
I’ll write “how he could not
contain his delight.”
At the other end,
in another time frame,
he waits for me—
having already outdistanced this body,
the one that slipped from me like a fish,
floating, free of itself.

Cathy Song

*****************************
Cranes in August

They clutter the house,
awkwardly folded, unable
to rise. My daughter makes
and makes them, having heard
the old story: what we create
may save us. I string
a long line of them over
the window. Outside
the gray doves bring
their one vowel to the air,
the same sound
from many throats, repeated.

Kim Addonizio

“how to write a love poem”

Just today, telling a boy in juvee
how to write a love poem,
I’m stammering over ideas
of detail and unique, trying
to get him not to say happy
or sparkling eyes but to talk
about what is his love’s, only
hers, and no one else’s
like how the first time
I picked up something from
somewhere, a book maybe
a phone, and on the train platform
you smack it straight down
out of my hand and we stare
at each other dead-faced
for a millisecond and then bust
out laughing – like that, I tell
him and he’s cracking up; he’s
dying in this jail, where he doesn’t
know how soon he’ll be out
even though he’s just eighteen
but right now he’s full belly
doubled over and I describe it
to him again and who knows
what this beautiful, tethered young
man has done to forfeit his life
in this place but I remember
again, as he pounds the fused plastic
table how I want sometimes secretly
to hold your head in my hands again
and tell you that a castle of a brownstone
in Brooklyn is yours, that we’ll
be sweet forever, and make
outlandish things from fish and
peppers; and this time I’ll mean
it, except I don’t tell the boy that
part, but he only needs the part
where, when I least expect it,
you’ll slap something out of my
hands and we’ll roll on the floor
laughing and that’s what I want
to remember if you’ll remember
that too, except I worry you don’t
but the boy tells me, still chuckling,
his eyes glassy, that he gets it. I get
it, he says; detail, I get it, yeah
and shows me the part he’s already
written to his girl about how
he’s not mad that a new man
is holding her and how she deserves
that because she is beautiful
and if he was the new dude, he’d
hold her too, and he respects dude
for knowing how deserving she is
and I say yeah, I get it, like that,
you’re on it. You already know
what to do.

Roger Bonair-Agard

To We The People
Lake of creatures and malady
People sometimes flourish
under the sun
The moonlight creatures come out

Micah (Age 9)
4/17/2011

How to Spot Someone in Love with You

They tell you you’re brilliant.
They bother you.
They say, “Do you want some of my cookies?”

They are timid around you. They avoid eye contact.
They stare at you when you aren’t looking.
They pause when you talk to them.
They’re spying on you. They’re hiding from you.
You find out they hide a picture of you under their pillow.

They act like they are MACHO!
They pretend they have a six-pack but really they have a six-roll.
They MAKE SURE they say hi to you EVERY DAY.
They bring flowers that you are allergic to. They stand up for you in front of the teacher.
They carve your name in a tree. They throw rocks at your window.
They bring you cookies with hearts on them.

The suspect will blush when you talk to them. Maybe they will faint when they talk to you.
They pretend to faint so that you have to give them mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (CPR)
They pass you notes. They write your name on all of their binders in cursive.

Jumping up and wiggling around me, pleading to be scratched behind the ears.
People hugging, dogs licking, horses nuzzling. Skunks stick their tales up very straight and stiff.

They tease you about something they like about you.
They talk about so-and-so. They pretend to like somebody else.
If they think someone else likes you, they hate them.

They try to make you laugh.
They laugh at your dumb jokes.
Their girlfriends giggle around you.
They sing songs that don’t make sense: “I’m a bee spreading my wings, I’m a bee doing my things...”

They blush.
They stick up for you.
They write you a poem.

P.S. They really do stare at you!

by Sarah’s 3/4/5 class

Late Poem

" . . . a matter of changing a slide in a magic lantern."
Nabokov

I wish we were Indians and ate foie gras
and drove a gas-guzzler
and never wore seat belts

I'd have a baby, yours, cette fois,
and I'd smoke Parliaments
and we'd drink our way through the winter

in spring the baby would laugh at the moon
who is her father and her mother who is his pool
and we'd walk backwards and forwards

in lizard-skin cowboy boots
and read Gilgamesh and Tintin aloud
I'd wear only leather or feathers

plucked from endangered birds and silk
from exploited silkworms
we'd read The Economist

it would be before and after the internet
I'd send you letters by carrier pigeons
who would only fly from one window

to another in our drafty, gigantic house
with twenty-three uninsulated windows
and the dog would be always be

off his leash and always
find his way home as we will one day
and we'd feed small children

peanut butter and coffee in their milk
and I'd keep my hand glued under your belt
even while driving and cooking

and no one would have our number
except I would have yours where I've kept it
carved on the sole of my stiletto

which I would always wear when we walked
in the frozen and dusty wood
and we would keep warm by bickering

and falling into bed perpetually and
entirely unsafely as all the best things are
—your skin and my breath on it.

Cynthia Zarin