Words That Burn

The Reservoir, by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge (1947-)

The Protest, by Grace Cavalieri (1932-)

I was supposed to make a five minute speech

so I took a tranquilizer

but the speech was cancelled.

I was to give another speech but

this too was cancelled.

As you can imagine, I stayed

tranquilized my whole life without speaking,

When the fire and blood came up

in thin spouts

through the kitchen floor

I called the manager

but it is never his fault

if we are speechless and in exile,

He said the problem in the floor

comes from being too emotional,

I had another chance to speak once

but the mashed potatoes lay thick

on my tongue and my indignation

sounded less than noble,

All the audience learned that night

is how anger sounds

through mashed potatoes,

“The physical is spiritual”

I said hotly, but

other people’s impressions

had already brushed off on me,

By the time the audience left

I was a widow in a nightgown

and I had not told what

I’d come here to say.

With Changing Key, by Paul Celan (1920-1970)

With changing key

you open the house in which

the snow of the unsaid is drifting.

And with the blood that may run

from your eye, or your mouth, or your ear,

your key will be changing.

Changing the key is changing the word

that may drift with the snowflakes.

And in the wind that rejects you,

Round the word gathers the snow.

(Trans. by Ingo Seidler)

On the Home Front — 1942, by Edwin Denby (1903-1983)

Because Jim insulted Harry eight years previous

By taking vengeance for a regular business loss

Forwardlooking Joe hints that Leslie’s devious

Because who stands to lose by it, why you yourself boss.

Figures can’t lie so it’s your duty to keep control

You’ve got ot have people you can trust, look at em smile

That’s why we’re going to win this war, I read a man’s soul

Like a book, intuition that’s how I made my pile.

Anybody can make it, that’s democracy, sure

The hard part’s holding on, keeping fit, world of difference

You know war, mass hysteria, makes things insecure

Yep a war of survival, frankly I’m off the fence.

The small survivor has a difficult task

Answering the questions great historians ask.

Winter Dawn, by Kenneth Slessor (1901-1971)

The Room in Which My First Child Slept, by Eavan Boland (1944-)

Because our waiters are hopless romantics, by Amy Beeder (1964-)

Morning Arrives, by Franz Wright (1953-)

Milk Snake, by Thomas Dillon Redshaw (1944-)

Wild mushrooms know their names.

We call them toadstools while they crouch

in the invisible daylight under

the birches that lean over a yellow field

you cross into the sun

ahead of me.

A stone wall sways behind us.

You picked the rush pannier, I the book

of identities, and dry stone

made grey slipshod noises under our shoes,

or do grasses whisper by

a path you made?

What you forget is this shadow:

not scrap cellophane or a day-lily leaf here,

but the curled and lucent skin

of a milk snake that stretched out of itself

into the wheaten sun

of slow August.

Oh that snake mopes in the barn.

Cows won’t give it milk, nor the hen an egg.

Shadowless beings spook them.

When I forgot the book by draping the skin

on my shoulder — empty jaws

biting an empty tail —

did this long creature in its new

and mottled skin circle quickly in old straw

and lick its diminishing tail

with the flickering tongue you call with

from the nameless mosses

of the white wood?

Belly Dancer, by Diane Wakoski (1937-)