her voice is a whole choir burning

Art by Kristina Closs

catatonia mercy / or what i learned from mother
by Kemi Alabi

i was raised by the ghost who haunts the house i grew up in / she calls at least once a week
/ are you okay? / yes it’s sunny / i say from the closet / curled between a suitcase and the
wall / she’s fourth generation spoiled fruit ‘neath the poplars / born in the basement of a
bombed-out church / i’ve inherited the snapped neck / the smoked lungs / the terror / have
you eaten?/ the ghost smooths her dress over a billowing cough / yes / i yell / fists stuffed
into my mouth / i don’t ask about Charleston / if she tastes the bullet meal / are you lying?/
her voice is a whole choir burning / i don’t know / my voice is the shot that missed the
child / we survive / the ghost mistakes her chill for breath / i know / i lie / staring straight
through my chest / and we /the lucky ones / have never known greater mercies

from Against Heaven

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There is no world in which I am not haunted

My copy of the new chapbook TUNSIYA/AMRIKIYA by the Tunisian-American poet Leila Chatti (1990-) arrived just in time for the weekend, and it was so hard to choose just one from this stunning collection.

“Night Lament in Hergla”

This is what the fearful do:
when a burning star torments them, they go to the sea.
–Mahmoud Darwish

There is no world in which I am not haunted,
no willing God to relinquish me.
My mother taught me death comes
wailing from the shadows, my father
all ghosts exist in smoke. I search
the sky for light long extinguished,
make wishes on their bright graves.
In the dark I try every language you might
recognize but nothing calls you back;
the words hang in the air, their own
brief phantoms. The ocean offers
no solace; I stand at its black edge
as it retreats, draws close, backs away again.
Like this, your memory wavers
in the threshold. How many nights
your name appeared on my lips
like an incantation, how many times
you’ve arrived in a dream pale
as prayer at dawn–your absence
burns its hole through my waking.
I stalk the shores of your sleep,
which allow no entry. The moon
reveals nothing of heaven, a brined window.
You are gone, in this country and all others.

I sift the shards of you

This gorgeous poem from the incredible writer, editor, translator, and former tenant lawyer Martín Espada (1957-) moved me in ways I cannot even begin to articulate this morning.

“Haunt Me”
              for my father

I am the archaeologist. I sift the shards of you: cufflinks, passport photos,
a button from the March on Washington with a black hand shaking
a white hand, letters in Spanish, your birth certificate from a town high
in the mountains. I cup your silence, and the silence melts like ice in a cup.

I search for you in two yellow Kodak boxes marked Puerto Rico,
Noche Buena, Diciembre 1968. In the 8-millimeter silence the Espadas
gather, elders born before the Spanish American War, my grandfather
on crutches after fracturing his fossil hip, his blind brother on a cane.
You greet the elders and they call you Tato, the name they call you there.
Uncles and cousins sing in a chorus of tongues without sound, vibration
of guitar strings stilled by an unseen hand, maracas shaking empty
of seeds. The camera wobbles from the singers to the television
and the astronauts sending pictures of the moon back to earth.
Down by the river, women still pound laundry on the rocks.

I am eleven again, a boy from the faraway city of ice that felled
my grandfather, startled after the blind man with the cane stroked
my face with his hand dry as straw, crying out Bendito. At the table,
I hear only the silence that rises like the river in my big ears.
You sit next to me, clowning for the camera, tugging the lapels
on your jacket, slicking back your black hair, brown skin darker
from days in the sun. You slide your arm around my shoulder,
your good right arm, your pitching arm, and my moon face radiates,
and the mountain song of my uncles and cousins plays in my head.

Watching you now, my face stings as it stung when my blind great-uncle
brushed my cheekbones, searching for his own face. When you died,
Tato, I took a razor to the movie looping in my head, cutting the scenes
where you curled an arm around my shoulder, all the times you would
squeeze the silence out of me so I could hear the cries and songs again.
When you died, I heard only the silences between us, the shouts belling
the air before the phone went dead, all the words melting like ice in a cup.

That way I could set my jaw and take my mother’s hand at the mortuary,
greet the elders in my suit and tie at the memorial, say all the right words.

Yet my face stings at last. I rewind and watch your arm drape across
my shoulder, over and over. A year ago, you pressed a Kodak slide
of my grandfather into my hand and said: Next time, stay longer.
Now, in the silence that is never silent, I push the chair away
from the table and say to you: Sit down. Tell me everything. Haunt me.