Potions

The old woman made mint
Candy for the children
Who'd bolt through her front door, 
Silhouettes for the great blue

Heron. She sold ten-dollar potions
From a half-lit kitchen. Chinese boxes
Furnished with fliers and sinkers. Sassafras
And lizard tongues. They'd walk out

Of the woods or drive in from cities, 
Clutching lovesick dollar bills
At a side door that opened beside
A chinaberry tree. Did their eyes

Double under Orion as voices
Of the dead spoke? They carried 
Photos, locks of hair, nail clippings, 
And the first three words of a wish. 

- from Talking Dirty to the Gods by Yusef Komunyakka.  

Listen to My Father's Love Letters
Listen to We Never Know
View more audio files of Komunyakka reading poems here. 


Excerpt from "Quiet Men" by Leslie Jamison and published in A Public Space, Issue III Winter 2007:

He came over that night to see my fire escape. I announced this to my roommate, vaguely breathless: 
"I met a guy and he's coming to see my fire escape."
She said: "Sounds like a euphemism to me."
I shook my head. "It's not like that. He writes poems about fire escapes." Which he'd told me that morning. I wondered what his poems were like. Perhaps fire escapes were a kind of code for sex, for him. Perhaps all of this metaphores sounded like punch lines. 
Half an hour after he was supposed to arrive, there was a knock at my bedroom window. He'd climbed up. He was holding a box of frozen fish sticks in one hand and a bag of gummy bears in the other. I opened the window and took them while he crawled in. I asked him how he knew which room was mine. 
"I took a guess," he said. "Things could have been awkard."
I handed the box back. "I haven't had fish sticks since pre-school."
"They'll be better than you remember."
"They were fantastic."
"They'll be even better this time. Trust me."
We burned them in the oven and washed away the taste of their charred edges with a bottle of cheap Shiraz, sharing my only real wine glass. We sat together on my small black couch, nibbling and watching late-night cartoons about mythological characters. In one episode, a shepherd boy went looking for gods. He was angry about something that had happened before we turned on the program. He called up the side of a cliff: "You don't know what it's like to be human!"

Excerpt from "Diving into the Wreck" by Adrienne Rich:

First having read the book of myths, 

and loaded the camera, 

and check the edge of the knife blade, 

I put on

the body-armor of black rubber

the absurd flippers

the grave and awkward mask.

I am having to do this 

not like Cousteau with his 

assiduous team

aboard the sun-flooded schooner

but here alone. 

There is a ladder. 

The ladder is always there

hanging innocently 

close to the side of the schooner.

We know what it is for, 

we who have used it. 

Otherwise 

it is a piece of maritime floss

some sundry equipment. 

I go down. 

Rung after rung and still 

the oxygen immeres me

the blue light 

the clear atoms

of our human air. 

I go down. 

My flippers cripple me,

I crawl like an insect down the ladder

and there is no one

to tell me when the ocean 

will begin. 

Listen to audio file here.