Stephen Dunn

 THE GASOLINE SPORTCOAT

                  Slow? He so fast he run through

                  hell in a gasoline sportcoat, and

                  live to tell about it.

                                          - Cassius Clay on Sonny Liston

 

At parties, women with skirts

     slit up to their thighs

have been known to touch it,

 

and men of all kinds turn suddenly alert

     in its presence,

seemingly envious or wary.

 

I call it my gasoline sportcoat,

     my live-to-tell-about-it

antidote to what’s shy in me.

 

With it on, I’m able to challenge

     those who Jesus us

beyond all sympathy, laugh at others

 

who, in the glare of daily atrocities,

     say it’s hell

having this ache, this head cold.

 

Without it, when I walk into a room

     it’s as if Anonymous

has preceded me and stolen the spotlight,

 

his amazing fame on everyone’s mind.

      A man like me needs help

to get through a day and the long slide

 

into evening. Which is why at home

     I push its hanger

deep into the closet as if it might gather

 

strength there, in darkness, be ready

     for a next time.

It’s mingling now with my ties and shirts,

 

it’s influencing the sweaters on the topmost

     shelf, it’s becoming

its story, the story I’m now telling.

Timothy Liu

 PRINTED ON ARCHIVAL QUALITY PAPER

 Our century’s spiritual epic written in a hand

we cannot read. Impossible

                                              to counterpoint

the apolitical dream reduced to an apple

without design

 while icy cosmic chatterings

orbit the earth, filtered through the radio’s

intermittent fuzz —

        history taking on shape —

a diary scrawled into by a child’s hand. Few

are given a shiny penny

                                       let alone carte blanche

to do as they please — this isn’t a primetime

pilot freed from costs —

    one can’t just watch

ratings plummet. Welcome then to the new

upheaval ushering in a day

        so dishwater dull

one can’t help acknowledge some grand design

buried in the backyard dirt

                                            as the landscape

slides on its native blood like messages left

unopened

      suddenly retrieved from the trash-

Katharyn Howd Machan

THE WOMAN WHO WON’T DANCE WITH GOD

says No thanks, my card’s full.
She slips out of her crystal slippers
and sets them on a window sill
next to a glass of flat champagne,
a strawberry someone tasted, spat.
Barefoot now she crosses bright tiles
of a balcony facing the sea. Her dress
is red, the simplest crimson. Alone
where night birds sing names and poems
she moves this way, she moves that,
her arms above her naked head
finding music in her own breath.

Carmen Firan

delirium

I woke up with a dry mouth
in my dream I’d told you everything that could be said

rain kept falling upward and the water dissolved
my enemies’ names with shoe polish labels
all were floating, sodden and swollen, on a street where I once strolled
for the sole pleasure of the conspirators of dream
with such loneliness my men stretched out their necks
and flew in fluttering capes
like bats scattered over the city

I was the only inhabitant
of a blue cup
terribly thirsty

    (Translated from the Romanian by Adam J. Sorkin and Carmen Firan)

Katherine Lien Chariott

 FOREIGN QUARTER (TAIPEI, 1968)

This place is not home. Here people sleep through the day, and wake with the night, as if they were ghosts, all out of this world, and all waiting. Here, the moon shines in small slivers; it tells shadows to slide from their rooms, and then slide out the door. I watch as they go, and after they have gone. I can see across this city: places I have been to, places I will be again. There are red lights in the dark, pants thrown across chairs, and room after room after room, all waiting.

Eyes closed, I still see: watch ghost-girls go out. They leave this place that’s not home, to duck into darkness. They float to the foreign quarter, turn red with the lights, let white hands guide them down dangerous paths. Green uniforms and green dollars lead the way. They find the thin-walled buildings; they open the doors that never quite close. They bring the ghost-girls inside, where they land on their feet, but just barely. High heels tap unsteady rhythms down empty hallways, and up dimly lit stairs. I can hear their echo, even now. It is the music of my own feet, from those nights that have passed, when I followed the moon. From the nights that will come, when I will float to the foreign quarter, a ghost-girl again, in search of green men and green money.

It is only tonight I am human. Only tonight I will stay where I am. Sit with the cold, and think about ghosts. Stare at the floor, and let it reflect me in fragments, faceless and strange. I am waiting for the screams that come from the street. It is only the cats, scratching across roofs, but the sound is like the baby that should have been mine, calling me to another world. I go there to meet her, in that place without ghosts. I go there to join her, in that place that reminds me of home. Together, we play in rice paddies, steady on bare feet, and safe where the men in green can’t find us.