Highlights of Year One
Jonathan Ukah
A Second of Your Life
A Second of Your Life
If you give me a second of your life
I could show you how to win a medal,
how to become a champion without a fight,
show you the different fingers of your hand
and how they form the constellations of victory;
though the day has gone into the gloam
you become smaller and smaller each day.
To be reborn is such an easy thing
that we can run naked and still be champions,
if we keep on running when our heart is on fire,
or when we start climbing the hill of age,
your knees failing; your teeth clattering,
your breath coming in like a tree climber's sigh;
or the bush throws its fireballs about;
or the moon suddenly withdraws its light,
throwing you into the deepest darkness.
Be not dismayed when the sky collapses
across your path to weigh you down;
to win a race, you must keep on running,
jumping over hurdles and rocks of old age,
until your body gets used to its lightness
and growing old becomes a closed hole in a wall.
The walls of Jericho fall at the seventh trumpet,
after dreams have accumulated vapours
and the air becomes denser than moisture.
Judith Janoo
Fall Song
Fall Song
Vivaldi of falling leaves, violin strings,
symphony of all summer has come to—
last juices leaving limbs, drawing in,
leaf crackle of our vinyl 33 needle
note-pressed in grooves of your goodbye.
Birch leaves yellowing into brown curls
like your arms closing around me, maples
out-glowing their green, saying *notice*,
saying *whoop-tee-doo*, saying don’t waste
this change, savor what will drop, grant cover
from frost, like sheets we slept between. The beeches
hold on as you did at the end—your showy splendor
measured in shadow, your flare too much to last,
like sunflowers painted by your namesake.
Nothing plain in you, not one cell
gave way without sparks from the bow.
How much you passed on to our children,
tender as leaf veins, coloring the world after you.
I stand listening to the blinding of leaves,
their commanding shiver.
Phil Montenegro
Cathedral
Cathedral
*Escuelas Pías de San Fernando, Lavapiés, Madrid*
For a moment
the bomb enlarges the cathedral.
Its belltowers rise and burst
as if to proliferate the news of God,
the dome riven like an egg
against a cast-iron sky.
Brick and stone constellate the air.
Confetti of silica and pumice
plumes above terracotta rooftops
and the cathedral collapses inward
upon itself in a gesture of supplication.
A bomb is never allowed choice.
It falls in undiscerning grace
to burn and become anything
it meets, a momentary, ardent
armature of all it destroys.
What took years to build
is undone in an instant
leaving neither the bomb
nor the cathedral, nothing
but a silence mistaken for
the speechlessness of ghosts.
Devon Brock
Inheritance
Inheritance
To do poor well,
take down granny’s
black skillet, its mettle
keen with decades
of scrapple and cheek.
Take its heft in your wrist.
Mix fistfuls of onion
and greens with salt
and wilt them as the iron
ticks with heat. Then,
take cornmeal and eggs,
milk and oil and whisk.
Whisk until your batter
is smooth and your will
is as sturdy as johnnycake.
Cela Xie
Salt for Sodom
Salt for Sodom
I was fired at one on a Friday afternoon.
What else could I do, in my reverie,
but drive to the beach? I wanted the sea.
I saw a woman half-bared in the tide,
bronze with the last laugh of the light.
I only looked so long against the wind
before the sun left signal flares in my
closed eyes, and I turned for home.
You should pray to be changed by God—
so said my father the night I confessed.
I waited for sand to rise through my hands,
but only the waves came to ruin with me.