Colleen J. McElroy, “Remarks Beneath the Visiting Moon”

tell me how you get here I say
I want the map to keep in my head
tell me when do you turn inland
off the highway and what
houses what lights lead the way
tell me how you remember and what
lets you navigate I want
to be with you when the road
curves bends and dances

in the rearview mirror
tell me if my smell taste
lingers on your mouth hands
tell me how I fall into
the shape of your words
your breath beside me
on the pillow tell me how
in the dark I can write
your name shamelessly on every

window tell me how
I can assume the shape of your
body holding me tell me I say
I am hopelessly helplessly
in love at 60 still going on 16
and no sunset moonrise will
ever be the same

From Sleeping with the Moon, which also includes “Photolinen: La Push Beach.” Older poems published in Ploughshares include “Paris Subway Tango” and “Caution: This Woman Brakes for Memories.”

11 November 2007 | poetry |

Stephen Cramer, “Curses”

Gleamed from gutter mouths, we knew their musicle before
meanings, the monosyllables raised to hallowed refrains
on our tongues. We glorified it, the older world of vice
& impiety. So just as we both wanted to be the fugitive
in cops & robbers, my best friend & I hid downstairs
& scrawled out a barrage of vulgarities—the heavy hitters,

of course, but then the half-dozen declensions of ass,
the lumped phrases of defecation,
the whole shameful lexicon
of anatomy. Then, those white
sheets defiled (microcosm
of our own soiled tabula rasa),
we crumpled them &—like shoving a bottled note to

the sea’s blind tug—threw them to the ditch at wood’s edge.
It was the same fertile gully where I’d picked, years before,
palmfuls of fruit &—the words monk’s hood, nightshade
still a decade off—swallowed them. I hardly even remember
being sped to the ER to have my stomahc pumped. Of course

our ink-spangled pages
never went anywhere,
though I wish I could hold
one now, dim record
of childhood’s vast
testing ground—the
necessary absurdity & litter
of it all. Instead, those lost

notes were draped with stray
leaves, coiled with briars
which could never quite
keep from reach those
sweet-looking berries
we were told not to touch
but had to. And did.

From Tongue & Groove. A previous collection by Cramer, Shiva’s Drum, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Grace Shulman. Other poems of Cramer’s online include “Fuel” and “The Ark.”

In an essay on the University of Illinois Book Blog, Cramer describes how moving to Vermont changed his writing, following the poems in this collection about life in New York City: “My breathing slowed, and I could feel my shoulders drop. Poetry, I’ve always believed, but could never, until now, prove, takes cue from your musculature. So my poems were relaxing a bit too, both in their syntax and their diction.”

9 November 2007 | poetry |