Ally Malinenko

The Eight of Cups by Ally Malinenko

Posted in Ally Malinenko, tagged poetry on December 17, 2009          

I always thought I should have been a Pisces, a water sign
but I am horribly earthbound.
Behind me, I can hear the static hum of last year
and tonight, I search through my little archives
trying to grasp all the symbols,
because I only have so much time
before I’m back at the original question.

This is winter so the ocean is getting restless.
Back when Erika told my fortune
it was spring, nearly summer and
we were just stupid kids
I got the Eight of Cups
upright
which she told me meant that I was wishing things
would have been different
and I wondered,
who wasn’t? How could anyone put any stock in that nonsense?

Ten years later, I am sitting
on the floor with my journals thrown about
trying to find some kind of meaning in the choices I didn’t make.
Some repetition in the pattern, some kind of icon that makes sense.
Wondering, in fact why things hadn’t been different.
Each tattered book, is opened, the scrawled ink leering at me, offering stoic silence
and in my hand I have found the only letter of yours that I kept.
Over the years, no matter what paper I pick up,
eventually it turns into your letter
almost, naturally

Like the tea growing cold at my side,
the purring cats,
the wine bottles that have been emptied,
the things that come about naturally
unlike your death
which was so horribly unnatural.
At first, your body was so dense, all that thick black hair
until you started to dry out,
evaporate and shred apart, paper-thin.

Your ghost, oh Christ,
it won’t stop showing up
no matter how many tattoos I get
no matter how many poems I write over the years
no matter how many nights I piece together the
broken necklace. The one you gave me
a thousand Christmas’ ago, with a wink
like you knew how it was going to end.
It’s that time I’m trying to get back to now,
Sleepwalking down to the water, to hear the waves,
with a letter
and a tarot card
and a coiled snake of silver,
buried in my pocket.
I’m trapped inside this wheel
the moments soaking together, blurring the ink.
Nothing has changed, and blindly, I’m still wishing things were different.
This time, like all the others, I don’t have any answers,
I just want to say I’m sorry.

Irving Layton (1912-2006)

Divinity

Were I a clumsy poet
I'd compare you to Helen;
Ransack the mythologies
Greek, Chinese and Persian

For a goddess vehement
And slim: one with form as fair.
Yet find none. O,love, you are
Lithe as a Jew peddler

And full of grace. Such lightness
Is in your step, instruments
I keep for the beholder
To prove you walk, not dance.

Merely to touch you is fire
In my head; my hair becomes
A burning bush. When you speak,
Like Moses I am dumb

With marvelling, or like him
I stutter with pride and fear:
I hold, Love, divinity
In my changed face and hair.

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

Bowery Blues

The story of man
Makes me sick
Inside, outside,
I don't know why
Something so conditional
And all talk
Should hurt me so.

I am hurt
I am scared
I want to live
I want to die
I don't know
Where to turn
In the Void
And when
To cut
Out

For no Church told me
No Guru holds me
No advice
Just stone
Of New York
And on the cafeteria
We hear
The saxophone
O dead Ruby
Died of Shot
In Thirty Two,
Sounding like old times
And de bombed
Empty decapitated
Murder by the clock.

And I see Shadows
Dancing into Doom
In love, holding
TIght the lovely asses
Of the little girls
In love with sex
Showing themselves
In white undergarments
At elevated windows
Hoping for the Worst.

I can't take it
Anymore
If I can't hold
My little behind
To me in my room

Then it's goodbye
Sangsara
For me
Besides
Girls aren't as good
As they look
And Samadhi
Is better
Than you think
When it starts in
Hitting your head
In with Buzz
Of glittergold
Heaven's Angels
Wailing

Saying

We've been waiting for you
Since Morning, Jack
Why were you so long
Dallying in the sooty room?
This transcendental Brilliance
Is the better part
(of Nothingness
I sing)

Okay.
Quit.
Mad.
Stop.

 

Jack Kerouac :

Julia de Burgos (1914-1953)

Farewell from Welfare Island

It has to come from here,
right this instance,
my cry into the world.

The past is only a shadow emerging from
nowhere.

Life was somewhere forgotten
and sought refuge in depths of tears
and sorrows;
over this vast empire of solitude and darkness.
Where is the voice of freedom,
freedom to laugh,
to move
without the heavy phantom of despair?
Where is the form of beauty
unshaken in its veil, simple and pure?
Where is the warmth of heaven
pouring its dreams of love in broken
spirits?

It has to be from here,
right this instance,
my cry into the world.
My cry that is no more mine,
but hers and his forever,
the comrades of my silence,
the phantoms of my grave.

It has to be from here,
forgotten but unshaken,
among comrades of silence
deep into Welfare Island
my farewell to the world.

Lauren Tivey

Passing through Galveston by Lauren Tivey

June 19, 2011 by Scot

Memories of highways,
truckstops and trailer parks,
when I kept you moving, moving,
in those wide-eyed delicate years,
with your trusting blond head,
your bag of dolls, fatherless.
What chance did you ever have?
Misfortune of a teenage mother, me
full of juvenile incompetence,
one shitty boyfriend after another,
food stamps, social workers.  I tried,
kid, I tried, while you deserved
swingsets, playdates, dance classes;
you know, decent foundations.
What have I ever given you, except
the skill of packing a bag, the art
of running?  Economy of subsisting
on a pack of fettucine noodles for a week?
I keep going back to that Texan café,
during our last cross-country escape,
us two in a cracked vinyl booth,
surrounded by truckers in worn jeans,
as I taught you how to blow bubbles
in your milk glass—the happy puff
of your face over the straw, how the sun
lit up your hair.  If only I could pass back
through Galveston, beyond that day,
to rewire your youth, to fix California,
Colorado, our days on the road:  no excuse,
that I was just a kid myself.  Now I watch you
with your daughters, with your stable life,
your kind and firm ways, natural mothering.
Planted in one spot, flourishing like a flower
in a sunny window, like all my wishes come true.
Beautiful girl, I wonder, how you ever beat my odds.

Wislawa Zymborska (1923-2012)

Hunger Camp At Jaslo

Write it. Write. In ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they were given no food,
they all died of hunger. "All. How many?
It's a big meadow. How much grass
for each one?" Write: I don't know.
History counts its skeletons in round numbers.
A thousand and one remains a thousand,
as though the one had never existed:
an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle,
an ABC never read,
air that laughs, cries, grows,
emptiness running down steps toward the garden,
nobody's place in the line.

We stand in the meadow where it became flesh,
and the meadow is silent as a false witness.
Sunny. Green. Nearby, a forest
with wood for chewing and water under the bark-
every day a full ration of the view
until you go blind. Overhead, a bird-
the shadow of its life-giving wings
brushed their lips. Their jaws opened.
Teeth clacked against teeth.
At night, the sickle moon shone in the sky
and reaped wheat for their bread.
Hands came floating from blackened icons,
empty cups in their fingers.
On a spit of barbed wire,
a man was turning.
They sang with their mouths full of earth.
"A lovely song of how war strikes straight
at the heart." Write: how silent.
"Yes."

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman    

By Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

Take the moral law and make a nave of it

And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,

The conscience is converted into palms,

Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.

We agree in principle. That's clear. But take

The opposing law and make a peristyle,

And from the peristyle project a masque

Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,

Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,

Is equally converted into palms,

Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,

Madame, we are where we began. Allow,

Therefore, that in the planetary scene

Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,

Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,

Proud of such novelties of the sublime,

Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,

May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves

A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.

This will make widows wince. But fictive things

Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.