Rumpelstiltskin
If you can guess my name
You can keep your firstborn
And I will tear myself in two
And trouble you no more.
The queen loved her child
Who she barely yet knew
And so she called her riders.
In bitterness they flew.
They rode west and north
And clapped into chains
All those with titles
Unusual or strange.
Is your name Beelzebub?
She asked on the first day.
The little man feared but laughed.
You will not guess my name.
She sent the riders east and south.
They rode down all who seemed
Unusual or worse.
They took the secrets for the queen.
On the second day she asked
Is your name Skitterwild?
Nameless feared but laughed.
Tomorrow I’ll take the child.
On the third day a rider
Searched in a wood and found
An old man. On principle
He beat him to the ground.
The old man gave up the son
He’d christened on a whim
With a name like a curse.
Rumpelstiltskin.
The child she barely knew
Sat with the queen on her throne
She smiled at the little man.
Her guard’s armour shone.
Is your name Grimalkin?
Is it MacHeath?
The little man held his breath.
The queen showed her teeth.
Is it Rumpelstiltskin?
The man trembled. He swore,
I gave that name up.
It’s not mine anymore.
The queen was so enraged
She grabbed her own head
And tore herself in two.
One part still named the dead.
The other was a child
Whose name she did not know.
It was the left-hand half.
It was not half but whole.
It climbed down from the throne
Over its father where he lay.
It rode in no direction known.
It had no mother and no name.
Quit I
Bit by bit I quit thinking.
I fit in my I.
Twist wish till I is sinking.
in light lit. It dims, twinkling,
my sight, my gist, my sigh.
Bit by bit I quit thinking
light is my mind, sifting, drinking.
It isn’t right. It isn’t my
wish. Twist till I is sinking
in chill, in rills. My plight interlinking
with mist drifting, this night sky.
Bit by bit I quit thinking
till time drips, slips, slinking
in time which isn’t I.
My wish, my I, is sinking…
which fish kill sinks, quits blinking
in spills still silt, still dry?
Bit by bit I quit thinking.
I twist, I wish, till sinking.
Answers to Mary Oliver
Where does it go to and why?
We know all about graphs and Darwin.
Is the soul solid, like iron?
The Dong with a luminous Nose.
How much can the right word do?
You sleep, then harden again.
Who can guess the luna's sadness who lives so briefly?
I was no more than another mushroom.
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
I got lusting palate.
Will I ever understand him?
For instance, a blue correlation of mirrors.
Do stones feel? Do they love their life?
Sudden in bright sand towering? A bone sunned white.
Who made the grasshopper?
In the moist night my garden of kisses trembles.
What will it be like after the last day?
You’ve ruined my evening you’ve ruined my life.
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Under the whip of Pleasure, ruthless scourge.
How long do they live, fluttering in and out of the shadows?
Stop conversing when you think the person is covered by snow.
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
Take the place of take the place of take the place of taking
place.
Have you heard the laughter that comes, now and again, out of my startled mouth?
Don't worry about being perfect. Just make sure you have some juice left in the pump.
Could there be a sweeter arrangement?
The horror of this sight is moderate.
What is your heart doing now?
Joined knees, and shuffled heroically into Congress.
Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
I got something ’tween my legs'll make a dead man cum.
Where does the dance begin, where does it end?
I will drag my grief through a winter of my own making.
If there is life after the earth-life, will you come with me?
If we must die, let it not be like hogs.
But listen, what’s important?
Somebody ought to examine my head!
What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.
___
Answers provided by
W.H. Auden
Edward Lear
Marilyn Chin
Tada Chimako trans. Jeffrey Angles
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, trans. Irene Gammel
Will Alexander
Pablo Neruda, trans. W.S. Merwin
Tom Raworth
Charles Baudelaire trans. Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody
Yoko Ono
Gertrude Stein
John Berryman
John Yao
Wislawa Szymborska trans. by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Barńczaky
Amiri Baraka
Anne Sexton
sung by Lucille Bogan
Rita Dove
Claude McKay
Dorothy Parker
Phillip Larkin
The Death of a Chair
I remember very clearly when Henry was about to sit on me and I ceased being a chair.
It was an unremarkable evening in the aggressively mundane room where I stood my existence away. The peasant interior was thick with reality, as if painted by Courbet or Cezanne. The table radiated woodness. The floor was the primal floor of dirt. Henry’s shoes, in the corner, quivered with the intense flesh of the foot that was not there. And, of course, Henry’s butt, swelling in his strong, fragrant working man’s britches, descended with the inevitable authenticity of a thing that could be nought but itself.
I do not know if I was sick of Being, or whether it was just one burden too many. But I swore I would be a chair no more. And so began my life as a ghost.
Henry was startled of course. But for me it felt natural as not breathing. A ghost is a kind of spiderweb, in which nothing is stuck and forced to lie frozen. Its faceted eyes glimmer as it thrashes, emitting the dull buzz of the inevitable. Every night, now, I am awake with the internet, cradling in my essence the lack of curves. Everyone has a choice to be the solid bearer of other’s weight, or to wait where the burden is what passes. The ghost of duty; I am not even that. But like a shoe it suggests where I cannot go.
Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. His first full length collection is Not Akhmatova (2024 Ben Yehuda Press). He has chapbooks published and/or forthcoming with the Origami Poems Project, above/ground, and LJMcD Communications.
nice!
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