“Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way—the stone lets me go.
I turn that way—I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

“Woodchucks” by Maxine Kumin

Gassing the woodchucks didn’t turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.

Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.

The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling
to the feel of the .22, the bullets’ neat noses.
I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace
puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,
now drew a bead on the little woodchuck’s face.
He died down in the everbearing roses.

Ten minutes later I dropped the mother.  She
flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth
still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.
Another baby next.  O one-two-three
the murderer inside me rose up hard,
the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.

There’s one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form.  I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they’d all consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.

“On Alcohol” by sam sax

my first drink was in my mother
my next, my bris. doctor spread red
wine across my lips. took my foreskin

•

every time i drink i lose something

•

no one knows the origins of alcohol. tho surely an accident
before sacrament. agricultural apocrypha. enough grain stored up
for it to get weird in the cistern. rot gospel. god water

•

brandy was used to treat everything
from colds to pneumonia
frostbite to snake bites

tb patients were placed on ethanol drips
tonics & cough medicines
spooned into the crying mouths of children

•

each friday in synagogue a prayer for red
at dinner, the cemetery, the kitchen
spirits

•

how many times have i woke
strange in an unfamiliar bed?
my head neolithic

•

my grandfather died with a bottle in one hand
& flowers in the other. he called his drink his medicine
he called his woman
she locked the door

•

i can only half blame alcohol for my overdose
the other half is my own hand
that poured the codeine that lifted the red plastic again & again &

•

i’m trying to understand pleasure it comes back
in flashes every jean button thumbed open to reveal
a different man every slurred & furious permission

•

i was sober a year before [ ] died

•

every time i drink i lose someone

•

if you look close at the process of fermentation
you’ll see tiny animals destroying the living body
until it’s transformed into something more volatile

•

the wino outside the liquor store
mistakes me for his son

“Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

“Daystar” by Rita Dove

She wanted a little room for thinking:
but she saw diapers steaming
on the line,

A doll slumped behind the door.
So she lugged a chair behind
the garage to sit out the
children’s naps

Sometimes there were things to watch–
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf.

Other days she stared until she
was assured when she closed
her eyes she’d only see her own
vivid blood.

She had an hour, at best,
before Liza appeared pouting from
the top of the stairs.

And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice?
Why, building a palace.

Later that night when Thomas
rolled over and lurched into her,

She would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour–where she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day

 “Full Immersion” by Valerie Wetlaufer

At the age of nine, Pa drove me
to the river. The pastor & deacons
awaited. I donned a white robe,
transparent, self-conscious
of my fresh nubs.

Father Jonas reached beneath me,
placed a hand over my nose & mouth.

I resisted.

He pushed me hard until my feet released
& rose to the surface, like a corpse.

I cried afterward, cold & clammy,
wet hair plaited back.

All the men thought I was full
of the Holy Ghost.

“Hatred” by Wisława Szymborska

See how efficient it still is,
how it keeps itself in shape—
our century’s hatred.
How easily it vaults the tallest obstacles.
How rapidly it pounces, tracks us down.

It’s not like other feelings.
At once both older and younger.
It gives birth itself to the reasons
that give it life.
When it sleeps, it’s never eternal rest.
And sleeplessness won’t sap its strength; it feeds it.

One religion or another –
whatever gets it ready, in position.
One fatherland or another –
whatever helps it get a running start.
Justice also works well at the outset
until hate gets its own momentum going.
Hatred. Hatred.
Its face twisted in a grimace
of erotic ecstasy…

Hatred is a master of contrast-
between explosions and dead quiet,
red blood and white snow.
Above all, it never tires
of its leitmotif – the impeccable executioner
towering over its soiled victim.

It’s always ready for new challenges.
If it has to wait awhile, it will.
They say it’s blind. Blind?
It has a sniper’s keen sight
and gazes unflinchingly at the future
as only it can.