"There Is No Word"
Tony Hoagland

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store
with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack
that should have been bagged in double layers

—so that before you are even out the door
you feel the weight of the jug dragging
the bag down, stretching the thin

plastic handles longer and longer
and you know it’s only a matter of time until
bottom suddenly splits.

There is no single, unimpeachable word
for that vague sensation of something
moving away from you

as it exceeds its elastic capacity 
—which is too bad, because that is the word
I would like to use to describe standing on the street

chatting with an old friend
as the awareness grows in me that he is
no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,

a person with whom I never made the effort—
until this moment, when as we say goodbye
I think we share a feeling of relief, 

a recognition that we have reached
the end of a pretense, 
though to tell the truth

what I already am thinking about
is my gratitude for language—
how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up;
how it will move, if not inside, then
around the circumference of almost anything—

how, over the years, it has given me
back all the hours and days, all the
plodding love and faith, all the

misunderstandings and secrets
I have willingly poured into it.

--

i have been thinking this: if language has a limit then i am giving up. all i want is for certain words to spill out of your stubborn mouth, for its letters to light us a path to safety & knowledge of what is right, but you refuse to open your lips, i can hear the words tumbling around inside as you shake your head, 'i don't know', all the time, 'i don't know'. perhaps it is futile, trying to talk about this. perhaps something else is birthing in the absence of our verbal exchanges. a growing, pregnant realization that hasn't quite popped -- that there is really nothing left to save, thus, nothing worth talking about. will i one day thank language for failing me? maybe. it is because of its limitations that i cannot do certain things i would be fully capable of did emotions not have to use language as its conveyor belt. you know the feeling of being hurt but at the same time wanting to accept the pain in order to save something you cherish so dearly is a powerful force. if it gained sentience on its own and assumed a physical form it would destroy so many things. but the fact that language must be utilised for it to be released, and given language's limitations, it remains thrashing about in the chest, in the heart, and you live with it. but i suppose eventually, as well, you come to control it. and its fists on your ribs, its kicks against your gut get weaker, or you get stronger, and you feel less like a failure. 

i hope one day i will thank language for its limitations 

“One Art”
Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—-Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

“The Failure of Language”
Jacqueline Berger

First day of class, I ask the students, by way
of introduction, what they believe:
Language is our best tool, or language fails
to express what we know and feel.
We go around the room.
Almost everyone sides with failure.
Is it because they’re young,
still find it hard to say what they mean?
Or are they romantics, holding music and art, the body,
anything wordless as the best way in?
I think about the poet helping his wife to die,
calling his heart helpless as crushed birds
and the soles of her feet the voices of children
calling in the lemon grove, because the tool
must sometimes be bent to work.

Sitting next to my friend in her hospital bed,
she tells me she’s not going to make it,
doesn’t think she wants to,
all year running from the deep she’s now drowning in.
I change the flowers in the vase,
rub cream into her hands and feet.
When I lean down to kiss her goodbye,
I whisper I love you, words that maybe
have lost their meaning, being asked to stand
for so many unspoken particulars.

The sky when I walk to the parking lot
this last weekend of summer
is an opal, the heat pinkening above the trees
which dusk turns the color of ash.

Everything we love fails, I didn’t tell my students,
if by fails we mean ends or changes,
if by love we mean what sustains us.
Language is what honors the vanishing.
Or is language what slows the leaving?
Or does it only deepen what we know of loss?

My students believe it’s important
to get the words right.
Once said, they can never be retrieved.
It takes years to learn to be awkward.
At their age, each word must be carefully chosen
to communicate the yes, but also leave room
for the not really, just kidding, a gateway car
with the engine running.

Inside us, constellations,
bit thread knotted into night’s black drape.
There are no right words,
if by right we mean perfect,
if by perfect we mean able to save us.

Four of us pack up our friend’s apartment.
Suddenly she can’t live unassisted.
I remember this glass, part of a set
I bought her years ago
when she became for a time a scotch drinker.
I bought it for its weight, something
solid to hold, and for the way an inch or two
of amber would look against its etched walls.
I wrap it in newspaper and add it to the box marked Kitchen.

It’s my friend herself who is fragile.
When I take her out to eat, each step is work.
The restaurant is loud and bright.
She wants to know if she looks normal.
I make my words soft. Fine,
which might be the most useless word in English,
everything is going to be fine.

-- 

This poem has triggered a thought. 

Language is what honors the vanishing 
Or is language what slows the leaving? 
Or does it only deepen what we know of loss? 

I've talked so much about us and our problems and hashed it out over and over again in my head. I've talked to myself in the mirror trying to rationalize and just. put into words. so that maybe, maybe, things will make sense to me. But I just get caught mid-sentence realizing nothing is working, that it is what it is, what happened is an undescribable, wordless, irrational rock that has crushed me and continues to still. The more I talk about it, the more it will last. 

Isn't that what it is? Whatever we keep speaking about, reading about, is what lasts. Legacies are formed like that: through language. Word of mouth. Gigantic monuments with plaques of achievements embedded in stone. 

If we stop speaking about the holocaust, won't it eventually fade from memory? We speak about it to remind future generations of what not to do, and in the meantime, we suffer from this hole bored into our brains: 6 million dead, racism, gas chambers, torture. The unpleasant face of humanity that we must spend our lives co-existing with for the sake of future generations. 

But I don't care about the future generation. I don't care if some girl in 50 years makes the same mistake as I do and falls into this pit of shit. 

So I should stop speaking about it. Language is what honors the vanishing, but the vanished don't always deserve to be honored. 

“A Sonnet of Invented Memories” by Miles Walser

1.I told you that I was a roadway of potholes, not safe to cross. You said nothing, showed up in my driveway wearing roller-skates.

2.The first time I asked you on a date, after you hung up, I held the air between our phones against my ear and whispered, “You will fall in love with me. Then, just months later, you will fall out. I will pretend the entire time that I don’t know it’s coming.”

3.Once, I got naked and danced around your bedroom, awkward and safe. You did the same. We held each other without hesitation and flailed lovely. This was vulnerability foreplay.

4.The last eight times I told you I loved you, they sounded like apologies.

5.You recorded me a CD of you repeating, “You are beautiful.” I listened to it until I no longer thought in my own voice.

6.Into the half-empty phone line, I whispered, “We will wake up believing the worst in each other. We will spit shrapnel at each other’s hearts. The bruises will lodge somewhere we don’t know how to look for and I will still pretend I don’t know its coming.”

7.You photographed my eyebrow shapes and turned them into flashcards: mood on one side, correct response on the other. You studied them until you knew when to stay silent.

8.I bought you an entire bakery so that we could eat nothing but breakfast for a week. Breakfast, untainted by the day ahead, was when we still smiled at each other as if we meant it.

9.I whispered, “I will latch on like a deadbolt to a door and tell you it is only because I want to protect you. Really, I’m afraid that without you I mean nothing.”

10.I gave you a bouquet of plane tickets so I could practice the feeling of watching you leave.

11.I picked you up from the airport limping. In your absence, I’d forgotten how to walk. When I collapsed at your feet, you refused to look at me until I learned to stand up without your help.

12.Too scared to move, I stared while you set fire to your apartment – its walls decaying beyond repair, roaches invading the corpse of your bedroom. You tossed all the faulty appliances through the smoke out your window, screaming that you couldn’t handle choking on one more thing that wouldn’t just fix himself.

13.I whispered, “We will each weed through the last year and try to spot the moment we began breaking. We will repel sprint away from each other. Your voice will take months to drain out from my ears. You will throw away your notebook of tally marks from each time you wondered if I was worth the work. The invisible bruises will finally surface and I will still pretend that I didn’t know it was coming.”

14.The entire time, I was only pretending that I knew it was coming.

Marty McConnell, “Miniature Bridges, Your Mouth”

what we do in the dark has no hands. no
crossover effect, no good-bye kiss after the alarm.
what we carry in, we carry out, end of story. this
doesn’t even want to be love. except in minutes
when your face has the shape of my palm and I think
lungful. let want out with the cat. returns
and returns, something dutiful. persistent.
hold your breath, let it build, let go. this is practice.
I’m losing weight, a bad sign, I’m happy. serious,
you say. contained, I think. the cat comes back
with a dead bird to the doorstep, an offering. bloodless
this should be easy. a two-step to cowboys. you’re beautiful
but that’s not the point.

x

I know my way back perfectly well. like the back
of my hand, as it were. but look, the labyrinth walls
are high hedge and green. this also could be joy.

xx

I literally don’t know your middle name. does that
matter? what systems we arrange for intimacy, small
disclosures like miniature bridges, your mouth. not
what I’d anticipated. softer. to begin with,
I should tell the truth more. I could miss you,
and that’s a liability.

xxx

I am not often off-kilter. but you’re so silent, even
naked, and almost absent. I hush too, why
are we here. go. want to throw things, you, the clock,
break windows until something bleeds and you finally
scream. I tell you too much; we are not
those people. or nothing—maybe I say
utilitarian fuck. how would that be. I want you
to want to fall in love with me and that’s
unhealthy. wrong. leave your shoes by the door
and pretend it’s about the movie. it’s love
in the movies it’s casablanca and toy story
and water no ice come here. pockets need
to be untucked, drawers thrown open,
nobody’s safe. there, I’ve said it:
someone I was could have loved you.

"I Keep Trying to Leave but the Sex Just Gets Better and Better"
Ali Shapiro

This is not what the door’s for—slamming
you up against, opening
your legs with my knee. And it isn’t
leaving, the thing I keep doing
with my shoes still on, or in the car
in the driveway in broad
daylight after waving
goodbye to your neighbors
again. But my body’s a bad
dog, all dumb tongue
and hunger, down
on all fours again, tied up
outside again, coming
when called but then always refusing
to stay. I know what I’m trying
to say, but it isn’t
talking, the thing that I do with my mouth
to your ear, even though
we got the orifices right. To leave
I would have to put clothes on,
and they’d have to fit better
than all of this skin. To leave
I would have to know where to begin:
like this, pressed up
against the half-open window? Like
this, with my foot on the gas? If seeing
is believing then why isn’t touching
knowing for sure? I just want my nerves
to do the work for me, I don’t want
to have to decide. There’s blood in my hands
for fight and blood in my legs
for flight and nowhere
a sign. Believe me, I’ll leave if you just
let me touch you again for the last
last time.

"What Year Was Heaven Desegregated?"
Jeffrey McDaniel

Watching the news about Diallo, my eight year-old cousin, Jake,
asks why don’t they build black people
with bulletproof skin? I tell Jake there’s another planet, where
humans change colors like mood rings.
You wake up Scottish, and fall asleep Chinese; enter a theatre
Persian, and exit Puerto Rican. And Earth
is a junkyard planet, where they send all the broken humans
who are stuck in one color. That pseudo-
angels in the world before this offer deals to black fetuses, to give up
their seats on the shuttle to earth, say: wait
for the next one, conditions will improve. Then Jake asks do they
have ghettos in the afterlife? Seven years ago
I sat in a car, an antenna filled with crack cocaine smoldering
between my lips, the smoke spreading
in my lungs, like the legs of Joseph Stalin’s mom in the delivery
room. An undercover piglet hoofed up
to the window. My buddy busted an illegal u-turn, screeched
the wrong way down a one-way street.
I chucked the antenna, shoved the crack rock up my asshole.
The cops swooped in from all sides,
yanked me out. I clutched my ass cheeks like a third fist gripping
a winning lotto ticket. The cop yelled,
White boys only come in this neighborhood for two reasons: to steal
cars and buy drugs. You already got wheels.
I ran into the burning building of my mind. I couldn’t see shit.
It was filled with crack smoke. I dug
through the ashes of my conscience, till I found my educated, white
male dialect, which I stuck in my voice box
and pushed play. Officer, I’m going to be honest with you: Blah,
blah, blah. See, the sad truth is my skin
said everything he needed to know. My skin whispered into his pink
ear, I’m white. You can’t pin shit on this
pale fabric. This pasty cloth is pin resistant. Now slap my wrist,
so I can go home, take this rock out
of my ass, and smoke it. If Diallo was white, the bullets would’ve
bounced off his chest like spitballs. But
his execution does prove that a black man with a wallet is as dangerous
to the cops as a black man with an Uzi.
Maybe he whipped that wallet out like a grenade, hollered, I buy,
therefore I am an American. Or maybe
he just said, hey man, my tax money paid for two of the bullets
in that gun. Last year on vacation in DC,
little Jake wondered how come there’s a Vietnam wall, Abe Lincoln’s
house, a Holocaust building, but nothing
about slavery?  No thousand-foot sculpture of a whip. No
giant dollar bill dipped in blood.
Is it ‘cause there’s no Hitler to blame it on, no donkey to stick it on?
Are they afraid the blacks will want a settlement?
I mean, if Japanese-Americans locked up in internment camps
for five years cashed out at thirty g’s, what’s
the price tag on a three-hundred-year session with a dominatrix
who’s not pretending? And the white people
say we gave ‘em February. Black History Month. But it’s so much
easier to have a month than an actual
conversation. Jake, life is one big song, and we are the chorus.
Riding the subway is a chorus. Driving
the freeway is a chorus. But you gotta stay ready, ‘cause you never
know when the other instruments will
drop out, and ta-dah—it’s your moment in the lit spot, the barometer
of your humanity, and you’ll hear the footsteps
of a hush, rushing through the theater, as you aim for the high notes
with the bow and arrow in your throat.