Dailies 6/29/17: Toughen up! A nocturn for a botched youth, “Blackness” after the last election, & seeing one’s parents kiss

Paula Cisewski – Nocturn for a Botched Youth 

Nightmare where I wanted to return
********to childhood, but when I looked

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Ann Iverson – Waves and Wet Kisses

–

I had only seen my parents kiss twice.
The first time after my father’s ear surgery.
I was seven or so, don’t recall the nature of the kiss

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Shane McCrae – America Gives Its Blackness Back To Me

The shadow I had carried lightly has

Been forced upon me now and heavy since

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Todd Boss – When My Father Says Toughen Up

it’s like the clop of the walnut
block beneath the gavel of the

judge who fits the punishment
to the crime, or like the pop of the

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Dailies 6/26/17: old cats, condoms, the Common Wealth & jazz

Ann Iverson – Plentitude

–

Even near the very end
the frail cat of many years
came to sit with me

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Yusef Komunyakaa – from “The Last Bohemian of Avenue A”

Here’s the End of the World
mobile with its shiny bullhorn
& platitudes among drawings
tattooed across the beige hood

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Nancy Chen Long – The Common Wealth, Cash and Carry 

Everyone*********sells out. Someone somewhere
*****is shilling. Ammunition
sells like water

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Kathryn Nuerenberger – The Real Thing

Sir John Mandeville, the great explorer and liar,
claimed “there grows a kind of fruit as big
as a gourd, and when it is ripe men open it
and find inside an animal of flesh and blood
and bone, like a little lamb without wool.”
He called this the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary.

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