POETRY

"River Gods Bend"

DAVID BLAIR

RIVER GOD BENDS

 

“Sad grows the river god as he oars past us.”
—John Ashbery, Flowchart

If you have never cooked up
cheapo fiddleheads
turning black in their
soft blueberry cartons,
the green pulp of them
smells, and so tastes
like green riverbanks
of scrubby weeds
for the entire spring,
or maybe this should be
the other ways around,
and the riverbank
smells (tastes)
like fiddleheads,
and then recesses
away from this alertness
that has a tough
weasel on a rock
saying, “Dare me,”
which is how my friend
the game warden
described a stare-down
with a bad twist
of muscle on her beat,
the shock of river again
can really get to you,
put your nose out of joint.
You can get crop-dusted
by the combined
overflow of Watertown.
Smell though is not
an accident, the start
of the imagined,
substantial grease
in the hair held
by the pony tail’s cinch
where the sweating
musician joins
the chorus
of “Mustang Sally”
for the abstracted
drunks in the summer
citronella
of the patio with a stage.
That fog was weird
glasses of cold water.
I missed Sabrina
so much.
I would
write her letters
that all went, “Hey, listen.”

A river goes by a palace,
what a dump.
These parochial types
need a grand tour
about as much
as the Danube River
needs a hairpiece.
Who could have
a broader swath
of glitter or more
astonishing sleeves
knit with mirrors?
The birds, the fish,
the muskrat head
that fishes around
with unfair advantage
the lily pads,
none of these
in the water smell,
and so from the river
somehow that has
no consciousness
and won’t jump
out like a river god
to complain about death.

I get suburban nervous
as exurbias encroach on cities
here. I don’t want flour
to get all over my pants
if I need bread,
but I do want
to see woodchucks rolling
along or even a chipmunk.
We’re all accidents.
The July bushes
smell of anisette
by the Mystic in Medford.
How did I learn lore,
to see these people
except I felt welcome
and was not cuffed but
confided in, kidded
and not killed. Not yet.
Take a bit of nature
back with you, the river
and the weird birds.
The baseball diamond
in the park by the river
smells of dandelion
and mown clover dust
named for dead aldermen.
Now full sails of cut grass
ride the mowers. Ride on.

DAVID BLAIR is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of essays, and he teaches poetry in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire. His most recent collections of poetry Barbarian Seasons and True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems, 1998-2021, are both available from MadHat Press.

Want to read more great poetry and prose from Issue 70? Great River Review now offers individual issues for sale. You can purchase a copy of GRR 70, or a number of other back issues, here.

"If You Slice the Moon", "Miraculous", and more

JAN BEATTY

winner of the 2023 Pink Poetry Prize

IF YOU SLICE THE MOON

 

If you slice the moon in half
shotgun pellets will spill into sky
and rename beauty.

That’s what I’ve seen.
People running away from their inside fires.
You can’t blame them—

But they are losing life-color,
becoming patterns of their former selves,
into the blueness that’s not really blue.

I’d rather be terrified.
In the moving life
that’s running without me.

I can hear it.
I’m breathing in it.
Right now.

Now I call this my new beautiful
because the terror is too large,
too unseemly.

Can I flip the moon over and name it
a piece of cloistered beauty?
If I do, will it leave me?

MIRACULOUS

 

As a child I spent a lot of time in the closet. I sat, bent like a finger in arthritis.
Here I could become anything: a cloud, a C note, Michael Jackson’s rhinestone hand.
By the time my mother would finally unlock the door to say, “Had enough?”
I was able to imagine her as someone miraculous, someone saving me
from my mother.

LEAVING SANTA FE

 

I’ve known disappearance, but never
4 AM corner dark with months of clothes
on my back. Past Nino’s near St. Michael’s
and Smith’s grocery where I went daily
to trash talk with the bag packers
about hair and magazine covers, maybe
all those years of waitressing.

I’ve fucked men for years to disappear,
drugs for years to go missing,
hungry to be institutionalized
to have my choices removed—
looking for a pathway to sky
without dying, a way to not be here.
5:10 AM driving on Cerillos, the GPS

says Sá-ril-oss in the black dark.
No traffic but homeless people
on the sidewalk. One man pushing
a shopping cart piled high with stuff,
hard to make out in the shadows.
He’s wearing a long raincoat, gloves,
even though it’s 73 degrees.

Another guy on the corner just standing,
staring. I pull up beside him at the light,
his clothes hanging, pants dragging,
no movement. Some kind of Mexican
rap comes on the radio, one click and
my door locks. The DJ says it’s
Roaring Lion doing Spanish Calypso.

The knife pulled on me in the backroom
fucking him to avoid calling it rape,
living in my car—but not for long.
I’ve known disappearance,
moving 14 times in a year,
but what was the man on the corner
staring at?

I came to—in rooms I didn’t recognize
with people I didn’t know.
Never 4 AM corner dark
with months of clothes on my back.
I drove away from Cerillos
in my rental car, wishing him mercy,
my privilege running over me like water.

JUNKIE

 

...the first day i shot dope/
was on a sunday./I had just come/
home from church/got mad at my mother
cuz she got mad at me. u dig?
—Sonia Sanchez

There’s light along the stripline tonight: this is your new family, same as the old—cold, not

there, spot the dealer at 50 ft, shady deal behind the van/side lot, know the city solitaire—5am

light after all-night drugs/don’t look straight in the eye/movement to the corner/same as the

old/don’t acknowledge/who to look at & when/ get the dope don’t be stupid friendly/ shut up &

listen/know the main player/walk away/not too far/the way some one holds their head/behind the

van/same as the old/study the movement/don’t look like you give a shit/night after night/don’t

acknowledge/they know you saw them already/behind the van/shut up & listen/walk away/not

too far/gangster lean doesn’t mean gangster/same as the old. cold, not there/get the dope/walk away

I RAN INTO WATER

 

Last week I ran into Water on the street,
said, What’s up?

I’m fighting the dragon, he said, trying to blend
male and female.
It’s a big job, he said.

Later, at the hairdresser, I said, Kill it, cut it all off,
stepping to the measure of my own cavalry.
Because inside my body, there is no home/and I
want to say to anyone:

It’s like there’s no body
I can live in,
so I walk around in the one I have.
I’m wearing striker boots
to kick the straight men away,
spit-shined, with heel irons.

SCARLINE

 

On any given day, they would lock me up.
I miss those hills of the body,
the line bruises from slamming the edge
of the dresser—

Those lines of demarcation are the scarlines
of hurricanes:
new continents rising to the surface:
this happened here
this girl lived

——

I was a split baby/
half a body here, half
nowhere
—asylum baby

split off
with the dull
tools
of the cutters.

——

I stayed
until birds flew out of me
until words became animals

——

Mothers
selling us to
strangers with a wallet—

and the walking bodies say:
when I saw you, I knew
you were mine.

I’m not yours.
You can’t own a split thing.

——

I found the cheap gold cross you sent,
buried under papers and books.

The letter where your priest told you:
Adoption is God’s work.
I don’t know if you’re still alive.

Bloodmother, finding you was like finding religion,
but without the cruelty and deception—
but then, what’s left?

——

Only:
Continents landforms upsurges

In this split kingdom
this body walk of life,
I’m the scarline.

JAN BEATTY’s seventh book, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award. The Body Wars was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2020, and a new chapbook, Skydog, was just released by Lefty Blondie Press. In the New York Times, Naomi Shihab Nye said: Jan Beatty’s new poems in “The Body Wars” shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters. Beatty worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. For years, she directed Creative Writing, the Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and the MFA program at Carlow University.

Want to read more great poetry and prose from Issue 70? Great River Review now offers individual issues for sale. You can purchase a copy of GRR 70, or a number of other back issues, here.