Poems for July
When we started Blue Moon, I imagined I would put out a newsletter featuring a small collection of curated poems every month. What I did not take into account was that I was a junior in high school, and when you're a junior in high school, you have time to do nothing except schoolwork and the myriad of things you need to do to try and get into college. So I missed a couple (a lot) of months. The rest of the editors here at Blue Moon are in the same situation. We promise we're trying to get the first issues out as fast as possible! We already have a lot of work done behind the scenes, and we aren't slowing down anytime soon. Until then, I hope you enjoy the first of our monthly poem collections.
July is Disability Pride Month. Here are a few poems by some of my favorite poets who write about disability.
The first is "That's So Lame" by torrin a. greathouse, published by the Indianapolis Review. greathouse is the inventor of the burning haibun, the author of "Wound from the Mouth of a Wound," and an overall fantastic poet and essayist.
That's So Lame
He says when the bus is late, when the TV
show is canceled, when a fascist is elected,
when the WiFi’s bad. That’s so lame! I say
rubbernecking my own body in the bath
room mirror. See, every time lame comes
out a mouth it doesn’t belong in, my cane
hand itches, my bum-knee cracks, my tongue’s
limp gets worse. Some days it’s so bedridden
in the bottom of my jaw, it can’t stand up
for itself. Fumbles a fuck you, trips over its
own etymology, when all I want to ask is Why
do you keep dragging my body into this? When
I want to ask, Did you know how this slur
feathered its way into language? By way of lame
duck, whose own wings sever it from the flock
& make it perfect prey. I want to ask How long
have you been naming us by our dead? Baby
-booked your broken from the textbooks of our
anatomy? A car limped along the freeway,
a child crippled by their mother’s baleful stare.
Before I could accept this body’s fractures,
I had to unlearn lame as the first breath of
lament. I’m still learning not to let a stranger speak
me into a funeral, an elegy in orthodox slang.
My dad used to tell me this old riddle: What
value is there in a lame horse that cannot gallop?
A bullet & whatever a butcher can make of it.
This next poem is "Monet Refuses the Operation," by Lisel Mueller. I hesitate to include this poem because I want to highlight work specifically from disabled poets and while I know Mueller's vision did deteriorate, I'm not sure if she wrote this before or after that occurred. However, I think that this poem's use of language is extremely skilled and the imagery she employs here is beautiful and illustrates well the flaws in the idea of "cure" as necessary to "restore" the disabled person back to the state we have deemed as normal.
Lisel Mueller
Monet Refuses the Operation
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
The last poem I have for you is "In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down." by Andrea Gibson. I return to this poem at a minimum of once per month. It is beautiful and illuminating and deeply important to me, and I hope you love it too.
In the chemo room, I wear mittens made of ice so I don’t lose my fingernails. But I took a risk today to write this down.
Whenever I spend the day crying,
my friends tell me I look high. Good grief,
they finally understand me.
Even when the arena is empty, I thank god
for the shots I miss. If you ever catch me
only thanking god for the shots I make,
remind me I’m not thanking god. Remind me
all my prayers were answered
the moment I started praying
for what I already have.
Jenny says when people ask if she’s out of the woods,
she tells them she’ll never be out of the woods,
says there is something lovely about the woods.
I know how to build a survival shelter
from fallen tree branches, packed mud,
and pulled moss. I could survive forever
on death alone. Wasn’t it death that taught me
to stop measuring my lifespan by length,
but by width? Do you know how many beautiful things
can be seen in a single second? How you can blow up
a second like a balloon and fit infinity inside of it?
I’m infinite, I know, but I still have a measly wrinkle
collection compared to my end goal. I would love
to be a before picture, I think, as I look in the mirror
and mistake my head for the moon. My dark
thoughts are almost always 238,856 miles away
from me believing them. I love this life,
I whisper into my doctor’s stethoscope
so she can hear my heart. My heart, an heirloom
I didn’t inherit until I thought I could die.
Why did I go so long believing I owed the world
my disappointment? Why did I want to take
the world by storm when I could have taken it
by sunshine, by rosewater, by the cactus flowers
on the side of the road where I broke down?
I’m not about to waste more time
spinning stories about how much time
I’m owed, but there is a man
who is usually here, who isn’t today.
I don’t know if he’s still alive. I just know
his wife was made of so much hope
she looked like a firework above his chair.
Will the afterlife be harder if I remember
the people I love, or forget them?
Either way, please let me remember.
While July is Disability Pride Month, it is also something else—hot. The globe is warming more, and faster, than a lot of scientists were expecting, and with that in mind, here are a few poems about climate change.
The first is (First Trimester) by Craig Santos Perez, and while this poem is my favorite of his, he is a poet with a multitude of incredible meditations on climate change, and I heavily encourage you to read the rest of them.
Craig Santos Perez
(First Trimester)
[we] are watching a documentary about home
birth when [you] first feel [neni] kick // embryo
of hope // they say plastic is the perfect creation
because it never dies // litters the beaches
of o‘ahu, this “gathering place” // the doctor
recommends a c-section // in the sea, plastic multiplies
into smaller pieces, leaches estrogenic and toxic
chemicals // if [we] cut open the bellies of whales
and large fish, what fragments will [we] find, derived
from oil, absorbed into tissue // because plastic
never dissolves, every product ever made still exists,
somewhere, today // i wish my daughter was made
of plastic so that she will survive [our] wasteful
hands // so that she, too, will have a great future
The next poem is "A Story," by Philip Levine. It's a longer one, but the turn it takes you on is worth the time.
A Story
Everyone loves a story. Let's begin with a house.
We can fill it with careful rooms and fill the rooms
with things—tables, chairs, cupboards, drawers
closed to hide tiny beds where children once slept
or big drawers that yawn open to reveal
precisely folded garments washed half to death,
unsoiled, stale, and waiting to be worn out.
There must be a kitchen, and the kitchen
must have a stove, perhaps a big iron one
with a fat black pipe that vanishes into the ceiling
to reach the sky and exhale its smells and collusions.
This was the center of whatever family life
was here, this and the sink gone yellow
around the drain where the water, dirty or pure,
ran off with no explanation, somehow like the point
of this, the story we promised and may yet deliver.
Make no mistake, a family was here. You see
the path worn into the linoleum where the wood,
gray and certainly pine, shows through.
Father stood there in the middle of his life
to call to the heavens he imagined above the roof
must surely be listening. When no one answered
you can see where his heel came down again
and again, even though he'd been taught
never to demand. Not that life was especially cruel;
they had well water they pumped at first,
a stove that gave heat, a mother who stood
at the sink at all hours and gazed longingly
to where the woods once held the voices
of small bears—themselves a family—and the songs
of birds long fled once the deep woods surrendered
one tree at a time after the workmen arrived
with jugs of hot coffee. The worn spot on the sill
is where Mother rested her head when no one saw,
those two stained ridges were handholds
she relied on; they never let her down.
Where is she now? You think you have a right
to know everything? The children tiny enough
to inhabit cupboards, large enough to have rooms
of their own and to abandon them, the father
with his right hand raised against the sky?
If those questions are too personal, then tell us,
where are the woods? They had to have been
because the continent was clothed in trees.
We all read that in school and knew it to be true.
Yet all we see are houses, rows and rows
of houses as far as sight, and where sight vanishes
into nothing, into the new world no one has seen,
there has to be more than dust, wind-borne particles
of burning earth, the earth we lost, and nothing else.
The last poem I have for July is "Good Bones," by Maggie Smith, and while it isn't specifically about the climate, I think the sentiment is relevant.
Maggie Smith
Good Bones
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
Thank you for reading! I hope you're all doing well, and I'll see you in August.
Best, Ari