CITY COLLEGE FACULTY

A BODY’S LEXICON 
 
In this warren of our bed, 
My hands are useless, no cincture 
For the dark on your rough belly. 
 
Like a famished lamp, bereft of moths and empty 
Of fire, my eyes are the brighter flame on you, 
After a wine-wry evening. 
 
There are other thirsts in this masked world, 
I have heard mouths learning a new language. 
Hands and lips are in abeyance. 
 
I barter for a dowry of affection;  
The least of it, a frail banter 
Over this sleeping flesh. 
 
Arm and leg, neck and clavicle 
I know so well. I recognize desire. 
But the lexicon is lost. Memory fills with ash. 
 
I trick the dark into speaking. 
My mouth to yours, I illumine the risk, 
Knowing that touch has its cautions.  
 

Philip F. Clark

 
PHOTO OF MY FATHER STANDING NEXT TO HIS GRAVE 
 
We knew what we were doing 
Though we did not say what we were doing 
Though my father, a well of a man 
Inside of whom words echoed directly, knew 
More than he would let himself think, whereas 
For me every grievous association 
Thuds like earth’s church bell. 
We knew he would share this double bed  
With his wife my mother dead three months. 
He did not stand like a man who caught a fish.
He did not plant his feet like a man before the Capitol. 
This was no equestrian battlefield. 
His pants dragged, his jacket slid to the right. 
He looked at me squinting, me 
Whose idea this probably was, 
Witness and instigator, though he was willing, 
This man of mementos whose edges 
He held like pictures of portent.   
Now I am here in the vertical space 
His body took up beside the stone, 
And he’s down there, prone below this baby grass. 
Nobody’s around to take my picture.  
 

David Groff 
Originally published in Humanities Review

 
COVID 2021 
 
My house is filled with fake plants 
since they don't die 
 
the leaves are green and radiant 
they never die 
 
I do not have to water them 
they will not die 
 
they think of me a botanist 
they never die 
 
with other shrubs my thumb is black 
they always die 
 
more than half a million dead 
they all have died. 
 

Pamela Laskin 

LEARNING THE MUSIC 
 
I still recall that muddy suck-muck dance 
of boys’ shoes near the airport back in Queens. 
The war was over. Radio-reported guns 
still crunched across our heads. Torn skeletons 
of bomber-flattened towns filled magazines. 
To flip their glossy pages meant to chance 
a peek at wounds or fields of supine skin 
in deeper-sucking mud than we played in, 
where men lost gallons more than just one shoe 
as we did—grimmer muck-ups than we knew 
or even guessed about:

and yet those sounds

rose rhyming in my ears to intercede 
with hard-edged words: keen music that abounds 
in all those honest poems I still need. 
 

Paul Oppenheimer 
from In Times of Danger 
(Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2010)

 
HOME, AGAIN

Inspired by a writing residency on the Mary A. Whalen

I bob in the captain’s cabin 
watch the puddle on the steel deck 
quiver and move. 
In the Atlantic Basin the ferry comes in 
the wind rises and small sparrows 
hurl at great speeds 
above the mast and moorings. 
 
We all begin in the ocean 
of our mother’s womb. 
During a heart exam I heard 
my heart roar, the waves and swish 
the gurgles of currents and blood  
the sea within me.  
When they diagnose arrhythmia 
I am at ease … an extra beat 
for the missing home country,
the migration from there to here over sea— 
the state of perpetual explanation, 
neighborhood where you are new  
and foreign from different currents, hemisphere. 
 
The sea has its own rhythm.   
Here only 100 feet from my car 
in the parking lot I’m on the water. 
I sense currents.  Waves from the Atlantic  
find their way into the boat basin,  
before they surge up the East River.   
 
Each day I drive to work in the boat  
of my car,  the road clings to the East River  
curves and bends 
the ten miles to Harlem. 
 
We are all sailing on a ship— 
only some of us know it, 
call portside—home.   
 
Malcom built a canoe  
from a tree trunk, once as a boy. 
I kept asking How did it stay afloat? 
The wonder of so many built things  
we use in our a floating city, 
The Mary A. Whalen 
this deck, this ladder. 
Our planet is an earth/ocean 
land floats on lava, 
currents move us. 
In this ship’s cabin surrounded  
by books on boats and the sea, 
I’m momentarily,  
home, again. 
 

Michelle Yasmine Valladares

 
LUMINOUS DANGER 
 
The Wolf Moon, full of itself, 
looms over this January field, 
snow-covered and sparkling. 
The creatures are silent 
careful not to shatter the spell.  
 
Some lie snugly asleep 
in their hibernated dens, 
caves and cavities; others 
test the silence 
with their stealth. 
Their paws leave prints 
no human will follow.   
 
There’s no one visible, 
but the pack lurks around 
imagining ways to intrude. 
 
Here’s a lonesome cabin  
deep in the valley. 
The shades are drawn  
against the moonlight. 
Outside the Wolf Moon 
illuminates all paths  
of possible flight. 
 

Barry Wallenstein 
Emeritus

 
HELL IS MURKY  
 
A little water                                                               Will all great Neptune’s 
clears us                                                                        ocean wash this blood 
of this deed                                                                  clean from my hand? 
 
                                                          Wash your hands, 
                                                          Put on your nightgown, 
                                                          Look not so pale. 
 
 
What, will these hands                                              Here’s the smell 
Ne’re be clean ?                                                          of the blood still.  
                                                                                      All the perfumes 
                                                                                      of Arabia will not 
                                                                                      sweeten this little hand. 
 
 
                                                         What need we fear? 
                                                         Who knows it when none can call our power 
                                                         to account? 
 

Estha Weiner

 
 
BATTLEFIELD 
 

I shed that thick-shelled turtle back thing long ago                        long 

before you 

rumbled into my open ears with your rhythm and song                         your lyrics 

frozen in my mouth                (I know all the words)                   I don’t 

want to admit                                                                           that I sing 

along in my sleep                                                                  that I imagine 

your body pressed against mine        

the soft fur of our skin                       molecules electric and tingling 

the only open space between us I vacated long ago 

(I abandon myself in my greatest times of need)       and now          you  stomping around 

that open field                                                                    that desecrated land   

your heavy boots pressing                                            into vulnerable tissue and mud 

please don’t try        to carve out remains of the land mine            

don’t attempt to defuse the bomb                                            I am never ready 

for what comes next                                                  let the explosion 

happen on its own 

 

Alyssa Yankwitt

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