The Adroit Journal Summer Poetry Workshop is free, and what you want it to be. There will be a community. There will be casual poetry assignments. There will be casual poetry instruction by experienced staff members (2013: Caleb Kaiser, Sarah Fletcher, and Emma Townley-Smith). Through this workshop, admits will share the opportunity to hone their current and future writing while discussing the writing of others, all from the comfort of their own homes, and in the company of the Adroit Staff & Founder/Editor-in-Chief Peter LaBerge. Look out for an application form next year in the spring!
JULIA ALLEN, YOUTH.
Polaroids from an Art Museum
I.
The rain runs deep in Philadelphia, filling up gutters and blessing wishing wells. Inside, two men holding hands peruse the Warhol collection in polished oxfords and green blazers. Campbell's Soup suspend off colorless, submissive walls and cheers in glee. Come morning, the men will pilgrimage to Capitol Hill.
II.
A baby grappling his mother's chest, the African art section hums a contented tune last heard years ago. Tribal masks and vivid paints made of flower extracts bat their eyelashes like seductive goddesses at passing guests. The mother and her teething infant son have never visited the city before. He fits to her chest like the frames meet the walls.
III.
A history class in the Greek section sheds its extraneous parts between the porcelain sculptures and Hellenism. They scamper like orange monarchs, flitting off to Van Gogh and Weissenbruch. Preferring daylight, the rest trudge on. They'll meet Romans soon enough.
IV.
A priest lingers in the medieval era, brushing his eyes from painting to painting of Jesus and Mary and countless winged angels. A manor here and a manor there feed some oncoming Crusades. The priest glances down at his silver sterling watch and exhales. Mass begins in an hour.
V.
In a dusty hallway off the cafeteria, a black-and-white photography collection seeds the mind of a pianist. Notes transcend the common language of what he was taught as a boy. Whole note, half note, staccato! Treble clef, base clef, bravado! Tonight, he will burn old school primers with lighter fluid.
EMILY BURNS, YOUTH.
Defensive Driving
A street camera, one of those
that the police put out to catch
the DWI felons, might have your likeness
stored in it, your hands clutching the wheel
like it is at once your firstborn
and the child that will destroy you.
You are a Titan, gnashing your stony teeth
and riding the brakes.
You might be a warrior, one day,
with a Happy Family bumper sticker collection
and lacrosse stick twins,
but now you think This is nothing
like a videogame and the errands
your mother passes for practice
never featured on the pixelated race course,
even when she insisted on wiping down
the joystick with antibacterial wipes.
The car lunges, jumps a little,
could throw the small body
of an unfastened boy through the windshield,
a doll, in sneakers and sweat. The glass
would erupt in showers and sparks
would lay down the road in gold.
It would be the great betrayal,
first of the boy, then of the warrior,
and then the quart of milk in the back
would seem redundant.
You grip the emergency brake:
it is an instinct, it is an instant,
but the sun shifted out of your eyes
and there is really nothing there.
You hope the streetlight will never
change to green when so little
separates the sacred from the scared.
BRITTANY CLARK, ADULT.
Waiting in Line at the Holiday Travel Park - Virginia Beach, Virginia
Amidst skateboarders dragged behind rusted mopeds,
I wait. The body in the back of my Civic
makes a comment about the woman in the red
bikini--bright like his sister's lip shade before the tragic
night her boyfriend hit her--it's that kind of
red, he said. The raindrops race across
the dashboard, someone fries hashbrowns, and it's 4
in the morning. If we were rich, we'd stare at oceans.
Nothing flows here. Save for the waves
some 10 miles away, carrying those tanned
bodies on boogie boards, the shaved
foam of the Atlantic brushed clean against the sand.
The tattooed gatekeeper walks to us, my Discover
Card denied, and we reverse back to the highway--washed up.
LAUREN DA PONTE, YOUTH.
Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy
Def.
noun
(Common name: Broken-Heart Syndrome)
Sudden temporary weakening of
the myocardium (muscle of the heart).
When eighty approaches,
superficial changes are complete.
Noses dull to a blunt point,
eyes, watery and fading.
Skin wilts dispiritedly,
regardless of bone structure.
Old and couples, old and gray, old and same.
[1] Diagnosis
Coronary angiogram—
will not reveal any significant blockages
that would cause left ventricular dysfunction.
Two tin soldiers, survivors,
two abandoned nests in the cradle of a fir.
Years of too little room and crackling caws,
then empty aeries.
Deadness interrupted only
by the wind’s pokes and jabs
between the eyes and dead-center
in the solar-plexus.
It is enough to make any two
creatures too alike.
[2] Causes
Triggered by emotional stress,
ie. the death of a beloved, etc.
Beneath twigs and trying tendons
the reconstruction is greater.
Two hearts, welded to one.
Until a thief in the middle of the night,
a hot scythe searing valves.
Tweed-shrouded shoulders,
grief-spun cobwebs disintegrating
in 9.0 Richter quake sob shouts.
[3] Treatment
Reversible. Intra-aortic balloon pump,
fluids, and negative inotropes.
Aspirin seems to help,
even in severe cases.
One tin soldier, now.
One trembling nest.
He thinks,
silence should be easy.
Feathers gather on his chest,
pound by pound, wisp after wisp;
twigs and dander and time
congealing in his throat.
[4] Mortality rate
In-hospital study, 4.2%.
No tin soldiers left
to man the roost.
KATHERINE FRAIN, YOUTH.
Locket
What makes the roe tremble in the clear jelly of
the egg-eye, more than the nightmares of sand-
gritty bread and the rich red splotch
stained against clanking tines. What is more terrifying
than dryness. Than arms and legs. Than the azalea
that blooms too quickly in the waterlogged
light, the boat propeller. More than Sun. The shadows
that anemone-tendril in darkness. Stalactites of
surgeonfish bone; the hazard-painted
spine. Blood cirrus. Watch: they resolve
like disturbed water into smooth, once ankles
have been dragged on. Sedna’s grease-hank hair, ten fingers
dragging through anchor hitches, constrictor
knots. The priest’s back an accident of
shears. A polaroid carved into a rust-strafed
aorta, twin chains that would break if
they even glimpsed the Sun. Beneath the rust she forgets
the words for a world that was not cold.
That had air. But if there’s no warmth
then nothing here can leave her. Nothing here
can leave here. Nothing here can leave.
MILES HEWITT, YOUTH.
Sonnet for an Empire
My friend Stone, upon hearing my plans
of dominion made strong by ampersands
(and harmonies, and vibraphones),
looks at me, folds up his smile, intones:
“Haven’t empires kind of been done?”
Then I travel to New York. The domes,
the rustic, all melted--here the wind smacks
the pavement and the pavement gets right back
up. Were I to drink deep from the East River and gain
its power, I think the first thing I’d try
to climb is the Empire State Building. After all,
I’m scared of heights, and New York’s refrain
reminds me of the climb, or possibly why
they build the walls so high. Because they fall.
ALICIA LAI, YOUTH.
Regarding the Sunrise in Kiribati
Mother did not want a generation of fresh sunspots
replacing the freckles that slipped off the bridge
of her nose. When her womb swelled,
she refused to unfold her shutter-closed blinds,
then moved her potted garden to the windowsill.
But her daughters carved their initials on doorframes,
pressed their palms against the Pacific panes,
and inherited the sun’s affliction through the hair
—one with a wheaten braid,
the other’s curling like the rinds
of summer squash.
OWEN LUCAS, ADULT.
359
How out of its trajectory the project
Turns now, that in our later colouring
We appear, shy, each with a cigarette,
To speak a while and haul our memories in,
Before the Fuller Building's grey façade!
No more, that music of selfconsciousness
I long had known in your voice. What we shared
Then of blarney, of romantic address,
Must have atrophied while you were away.
You are become that sad old master we
Once lampooned, who spoke of his own day
As it should compass every fire, every
Farflung grandeur. I cannot see you through
The smoke : a person stands in place of you.
REISS McGUINNESS, YOUTH.
Lucinda 7: The Close Friend.
These brick walls are enough;
even in this wretched capital city,
to keep us in,
alone.
Only a few cars
and occasional voices
echo off the walls either
side of the road outside.
It fades under
the low hum of music:
Dark Sanctuary.
The neoclassical unknown,
the kind for rain dreaming,
the kind for a moment like now:
on a bed,
in a hotel room,
in sodium orange,
brushing a freckled arm
as if I could collect
ginger biscuit crumbs.
Nibbling hair;
wild ginger twirls,
then with a finger
I'd walk the nose bridge
to fall past two caves,
landing on the soft base
above lips,
sliding over
the plumb smooth
roads.
She moves her head,
her searching ear
looking for a heart-beat.
She whispers:
“du-dum-du-dum-du-dum”.
She's the only one short enough
to hear it.
She jokes that I'm ill.
My heart shouldn't
move too fast
to the slow scrape of cellos,
the groan of sad violins
and high-note pianos.
My heart shouldn't volt
at the comfort of a friend,
perhaps if touching you
wasn’t as platonic to you
as it is confusing to me;
I want to know this moment
not as a partner,
but as a lover.
Not together,
but together now,
and in all moments
we could share like this:
not limited by being “friends”,
nor walled by the requirement of a relationship.
AMANDA PRAGER, YOUTH.
Small Talk Party Conversation
Eye contact leaves me hanging by my retinas, scorch me sun-blind. Blink twice, swallow softly - absinthe is a gift. Our relationship is made of barren plateaus, occasionally mountains and in our embrace I taste saliva, the spray of watermelon, a garden hose. The ex and the boyfriend are fucking upstairs and you laugh like wet sand, fat worm, a curvy cavern in that electric-toothbrush of a man. You think I won’t hear the twist, the pinch, the cry; the wordless punch of the golden whore. You chose to map this shore, burn my birch trees, fleck my veins a land-locked maroon. Drink my wine and drown in wire smiles. Normalcy is running your tongue over with a scythe.
CHRISTINA QIU, YOUTH.
For Livelihood / To Live
And I am still dreaming of your tugs, your
cried, tumultuous rhapsodies. We sit by the
bank, peering over the trains so small to hold,
in this ancient archaic building of bats and blue
boxes, while you tell me St. Patrick’s Day dyes
Superior green; or on Patric’s Day, the superiors
are green; or today, the Superior is green with me. Today, I
tell you I dreamt of you last night, but I don’t
talk of its borrowed origins, the unvirgined
contraception of words. Our sin is developed,
overwrought pride, the innocent chest bumps of
youth, the stability of shoulder blades, the
immortality of immorality. Our fault is the dead
belief in truth, the expectation of inexperience, this
man’s mindful glance, the pure and chaste youth.
You tell me that you raced eighty-five
miles an hour on this Chicago highway to hold
my waist like this and kiss my hips like that, to
blame my resistance on laziness, as a succumb
to comfort. From the way your tongue moves in your
mouth, then in mine, I know you will die in
humbling hubris and part will realize too late while
the other realizes too soon. I am still and waiting
for something and circadian to continue with the
wrong reasons in the wrong ways with prideful
inversions, me above you and you above me
simultaneously. I am moving and moving for
something and cellular to give this clear climax
sustenance. Carelessness with the high
way, eighty five beats per minute, so I can live
once and you can die soon. We are dead
to each other. You talk only in my dreams
through borrowed words I answer when I wake.
ABIGAIL SCHOTT-ROSENFIELD, YOUTH.
Fugue on the Road
Time quivers on a nervous,
soundless speedometer.
Those bushes with the cheap pink flowers
blur down the center of the road;
left and right, four million
brand-besieged towns.
Through the wall at home
I can hear the neighbor’s dogs
whining, lonely, at the window.
The dog gives up and goes to his dish;
I can hear his wet, resentful breathing full of kibble.
Jody must be attended to,
it’s only humane.
The house must be cleaned
or it will come out in court.
His big plan: the shotgun.
In the corner of your glasses,
the wires, the flowers, the other cars
are transformed into smoke sweeping across panes.
Tuck your shirt in, sonny.
I pad to the window to watch the mist come in
rollers in my thinning hair (why?)
and the skin sagging against my veins.
Your daddy can’t survive like I can. The redwoods
sigh because they are too big to fall
in a little wind. In the wind, dry dust
flies off the tar into the wet roadside dirt
and sinks down.
LUCY WAINGER, YOUTH.
Yes, Henry, This Poem is About You: Reprise
D’you sleep inside a butchery? Your ears
are pink as packaged pig feet near the edges.
It’s always in the face, the taste, the tears
but you don’t cry; you’re morse code, not the message.
Just tell me when you’re playing chess at Whole
Foods. Swear, I’ll find you, come and watch you lose.
There’s something wrong with you, a piece of soul
where brains should be; a god where sang a muse.
Lyova in my dreams, my stomach bared
This city’s a thief and you misunderstood:
though I am not the only one who cares
I am, in fact, the only one who could.
Go home, Henry. For the first time in three days.
Henry, take me home.