Thu, 11 Dec 2025 08:49:27 -0700WeeblyMon, 13 Nov 2023 23:11:51 GMThttp://www.nmliteraryarts.org/poetry/because-the-road-rises-to-meet-their-feet~ Anne Valley-Fox
(In deep reverence to the Syrian refugees, January 2016)

​
Our driver lifts his hands from the wheel to point out a group 
of refugees walking along the road in the warm night. 
“Did you see them?” His voice is rough and sad. 
“Every night a hundred more land on our shores in Turkish rafts.
Mostly they come from Syria. They’re walking to Mytilini hoping 
to cross to Athens. And then? They don’t know. Our own children 
are leaving Lesvos—here there are no jobs. The EU has Greece 
by the throat. What can we do? There is nothing we can do. 
And still they come, every night they come.”
​
                                              ***

They walk in clusters of 20 or 30 along the road’s shoulder. Hum of their talk 
as we pass. A woman turns to a man; her soft laughter 
strums the dark.

July’s full metallic moon spangles their headscarves and hoodies, 
the sable heads of small children carried in their arms. 

How dark their joy!

Because of the bottomless sea. 
Because landfall was cushioned with smooth pebbles.
Because the road rises to meet their feet. 

Because they walk in the open with sons and daughters and brothers.
Because they have honey and figs in their packs to feed the children.

Because their neighbors are corpses. 
Because bombs whistle as they fall.
Because all praise belongs to Allah. 

Because blood darkens outside the body.
Because of Christ nailed on the cross in roadside shrines.
Because of the viper coiled in the dark of the solar plexus.

                                             ***

Each dawn two or three innkeepers greet the refugees with food and water. 
“I’m sorry,” a woman exhales as she climbs off the raft. 
“We don’t need anything,” a man answers. “—only your prayers.”

Because of the pile of life vests, plastic bottles, a child’s pink inner tube 
abandoned on the shore. Because the dingy is already deflating.

                                             ***

Young men call out Hello (not Yassou) as we pass on the road by the sea. 
They can tell by my walk, my claim on ground and air
I come from America.

Because there is no safe harbor. Because we are all on our way.

                                             ***

Sun melts the back of my heart as I climb the olive-studded hill to the yoga hall. 
Yoga mats float melodically on the polished floor. 

Racket of mating cicadas just outside the window—pushed in on a breeze, 
the ribbons of my teacher’s voice come undone. 

                                             ***

Late in the day I bob in the sea, instinctively keeping clear of the channel 
where Turkish rafts, sagging with human cargo, cross the dark water. 

                                             ***

Sun sinks low in the ancient pine winging between the sea and my balcony.
Trio of crows swoop to the field where eight goats graze.

I dream of the sea on its soft wheels rolling towards us.

                                             ***

Because birds puncture the dark with their bright song.
Because sky ricochets off the Aegean.

Mid-afternoon when I walk into town I pass a group of refugees sprawled 
on the ground at the bus stop under an awning. Now it’s too hot 
and they are too weary to smile.
]]>Mon, 13 Nov 2023 23:06:25 GMThttp://www.nmliteraryarts.org/poetry/the-wearing-of-a-brazilian-carnival-crown-as-cure-for-separation-caused-by-a-deficiency-of-knowledge-of-others-language-and-culture~ Stella Reed


Symptoms:    Inability to stretch beyond the boundary of skin, tongue and ears
                     Lack of sufficient power to dream in another language


Rx:                This helmet fell like a yod
                     from the Tower of Babel
                     when god was lightning
    
                     Worn while sleeping it will imbue
                     the seeker with dreams of old women
                     feeding bread to pigeons in every city
                     in every country in every world.
                     Bread becomes pain, arán, chléb,
                     brood, brot, duona.


                    Worn upon waking it will enable
                    the seeker to hear the voices of pigeons
                    in every city of every country in every world.
                    Cooing becomes dove becomes sparrow becomes
                    crow becomes hawk flying back to dove.


                    Translating the scent of pine, bamboo, oak,
                    eucalyptus, boab, willow, and mahogany
                    will be effortless. 


                    The festive ribbons, held in the mouth
                    (taste of corn, saffron, curry, milk, sour plum)
                    allows the seeker to speak in dialects
                    previously unknown, unbinding the tongue
                    oiling the lips, the ears, eyes, fingers, hinges
                    of the closeted heart will swing open,
                    patience will preside, understanding
                    create equanimity.


                    To further lessen symptoms:
                    feet shall be unshod
                    shoes shed on a Swedish mat
                    (woven mountains of mouths, fanged yet friendly)
                    and left overnight.
                    Upon waking, the seeker shall examine.
                    Have the shoes changed?
                    Place the shoes back on the feet.
                    Do they fit?
                    Walk a mile.
                    What does the seeker feel?
                    Is it right? Left?
                    Circular, ether, above, below
                    betwixt, between?


                    Circumambulate the waters
                    Any waters.
    
                    Do the shoes fit?
                    Wear them.
    ]]>Mon, 13 Nov 2023 23:03:07 GMThttp://www.nmliteraryarts.org/poetry/five-poems-from-tony-hoagland-gratitude-awardee-2016Romantic Moment

After the nature documentary we walk down Canyon Road,
into the plaza of art galleries and high end clothing stores

where the mock orange is fragrant in the summer night
and the smooth adobe walls glow fleshlike in the dark.

It is just our second date, and we sit down on a rock,
 holding hands,  not looking at eachother,

and if I were a bull penguin right now I would lean over
and vomit softly into the mouth of my beloved

and if I were a peacock I’d flex my gluteal muscles to
erect and spread the quills of my cinemax tail.

If she were a female walkingstick bug she might
insert her hypodermic probiscus delicately into my neck

and inject me with a rich hormonal sedative
before attaching her egg sac to my thoracic undercarriage,

and if I were a young chimpanzee I would break off a nearby treelimb 
and smash all the windows in the plaza jewelry stores.

And if she was a Brazillian leopardfrog she would wrap her impressive
tongue three times around my right thigh and 

pummell me lightly against the surface of our pond
and I would know her feelings were sincere.

Instead we sit awhile in silence, until
she remarks that in the relative context of  tortoises and iguanas, 

human males seem to be actually rather expressive.
And I say that female crocodiles really don’t receive

enough credit for their gentleness. 
Then she suggests that it is time for us to go

to get some ice cream cones and eat them.





Hard Rain

After I heard It’s a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet 
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
then I understood:  there’s nothing 
we can’t pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can’t turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes 
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been 
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

You can’t keep beating  yourself up, Billy
I heard the therapist say  on television
                                                               to the teenage murderer,
About all those people you killed--
You just have to be the best person you can be,
                                                                  one day at a time -

and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
that the power of Forgiveness is greater 
than the power of Consequence,  or History.

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers 
                                           are covered with blood-
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
                                                Signed, America.

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,
but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth-

whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking thorough the Springdale  Mall.



​

Lucky

If you are lucky in this life
you will get to help your enemy
the way I got to help my mother
when she was weakened past the point of saying no.

Into the big enamel tub, 
half-filled with water
which I had made just right, 
I lowered the childish skeleton she had become.

Her eyelids fluttered as I soaped and rinsed
her belly and her chest,
the sorry ruin of her flanks
and the frayed grey cloud
between her legs.

Some nights beside her bed,
book open in my lap,
while I listened to the air 
move thickly in and out of her dark lungs,
my mind filled up with praise
as lush as music, 

amazed at the symmetry and luck
that would offer me the chance to pay
my heavy debt of punishment and love
with love and punishment.

And once, after her bath, 
I held her dripping in the uncomfortable 
air between the wheelchair and the tub, 
until she begged me like a child to stop,

an act of cruelty 
which we both understood
as the ancient, irresistable rejoicing
of power over weakness.

If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to raise the spoon
of pristine, frosty ice cream
to the trusting creature mouth
of your old enemy

because the tastebuds at least are not broken
because there is a bond between you
and sweet is sweet in any language.




If I Stay in Santa Fe
 
If I stay in Santa Fe,
I think I will end up with a red string knotted to my wrist,    
tied there by a Tibetan rimpoche,
as a means of proving that I am holy.
 
If I stay, I know I shall require a profession:
becoming an apprentice, in succession, for jobs 
as a woodworker, a shiatsu masseuse,
a permaculture expert, a hospice volunteer. 
and a Better-Dream facilitator.
 
If I stay in Santa Fe, the chances are good that
I will finally take the tango lessons
my first two wives wanted me to take,
 
and I will look fucking fantastic on the dance floor,
--my body tilted like a French accent,
my forearm displaying the tattoo I got
soon after I met wife #3, to cover up the tattoo I got with wife #2.
 
If I stay in Santa Fe, I will have to be on guard,
knowing that I am susceptible 
to the rhetoric of transformation

in the way that certain other people are susceptible
to summer colds or lung infections,  
and if I stay in Santa Fe, 

I know I might be tempted
to change my name to Diego or Joaquin,       
to qualify for the arts grant from the Heritage Council
--but on the other hand, why not?
 
But if I stay in Santa Fe, I wonder
if I will become shallow, or predatory?
Will I haunt the gallery openings on Canyon Road
in a black silk shirt and gold earring,
 
filling my mouth with white wine and canapés 
while chatting up the divorcees,
and trying to read the aura of their stock portfolios?
 
Will I glance in the mirror one night in my apartment
and burst into tears because 
I look like an ad for a tequila company,
 
with my little goatee and skinny ponytail?
and my line about living for bliss,
which was the embarrassing hypothesis
 
of a younger man who did not know himself
in the way I hope I will know myself
    someday, if I stay in Santa Fe.




​
Hostess

All I remember from that party
is the little black dress of the hostess
held up by nothing more
than a shoestring of raw silk

that kept slipping off her shoulder
—so the whole time she was talking to you
about real estate or vinaigrette,

you would watch it gradually
slide down her satiny arm
until the very last moment
when she shrugged it back in place again.

Oh the business of that dress
was non-specific and unspeakable,
and it troubled all of us
like the boundary of a disputed territory
or the edge of a borderline personality.

It was like a story you wanted to see
brought to a conclusion, but
it was also like a story stuck

in the middle of itself, as it kept on
almost happening, but not,
then almost happening again--
It took all night for me to understand

the dress was designed to fail like that;
the hostess was designed to keep it up,
as we were designated to chew

the small rectangles of food
they serve at such affairs, and to salivate
while the night moved us around in its mouth.

This is the way in which parties
are dreamlike, duplicitous places
where you hang in a kind of suspense
between the real and the pretended.

All I remember from that night
is that I had come for a mysterious reason,
which I waited to see revealed.

And that, by the end of the evening,
I had found my disappointment,
which I hoped no one else had seen.




Tony Hoagland's fifth and most recent book of poems, Application for Release from the Dream, was published by Graywolf Press in 2015. His next collection, Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, is scheduled for publication in 2018. His collaboration with Martin Shaw of translations from Anglo Saxon and Celtic literature, titled Rough Gods, will be published in 2018. He has published two collections of essays about poetry. He has received the James Laughlin Award, Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and the O.B.Hardisson Prize for teaching. He teaches at the University of Houston and elsewhere, and lives whenever he can in Santa Fe with his partner, the writer Kathleen Lee.]]>Mon, 13 Nov 2023 23:01:27 GMThttp://www.nmliteraryarts.org/poetry/in-the-face-of-the-uplift~ Cirrelda Claire Snider-Bryan

My grandma steps out every morning 
in her canvas rubber-toed sneakers &
blue denim dress. Pins holding curls in her short straight gray hair
and tosses the pitch    High fly ball
to center alfalfa field    hits the Sandia 
mountains    smack in their hazy hulk
hundreds of black wet coffee grounds 
spin out, land between green
blades    settle to mingle with valley
clay, cottonwood/elm detritus. 

My grandma’s passion for living here
in the face of the uplift - on top 
of 5 mile trough, nested among shade trees, 
apple orchards, parallel dirt roads running back
to ditches of cool river water - went with
her to the hospital.  Saw her gall bladder 
removed under harsh lights - cried when
she gave up driving and sat there mouth agape when the son his wife & 2 
granddaughters loaded up each box
into the U-Haul. This passion wept silently
from apartment bedroom, staring out at replacement
butte surrounded by Colorado bedroom community.
It lived in her butterfly dreams during afternoon naps,
in her conversations with teenage granddaughters while
making apple pies, drinking MJB coffee,
smoking a cigarette after chicken fried in bacon grease.
It rebelled, refused to join the blasted senior
citizen group in the Rec Room.
It reflected in tales of stopping to look down at rushing
Clear Creek on the walk back from Safeway.
It watches 2 middle-aged granddaughters
six miles to the east and south
step out to greet     each morning this mass of pink granite under the dawn.]]>