PRATIK LA SPECIAL: CATI PORTER POEM, "Revival"

 

CATI PORTER

Revival

In the garden there grows an argument

beneath the apples, apocalyptic

hydrangeas exploding into blue fumes,

roses ripe as a picked-at scab,

the salt-studded path burbling

with snails’ fresh foam.

 

In the garden there it grows,

behind the toolshed, between

the tines of the rustled rake, the mucked

wheelbarrow, the brown thick of the shovel,

the garden’s profusion of chokecherries,

raspberries, amid the ground’s sullied gold.

 

In the garden, a home to worm and bone,

beetle hulls, chassis of vehicles protruding

from the mulch, busts and torsos

marbling in the sun, and shining,

wheat chafing the thighs of those who rise here—

whole groves of us breaking the soil, cracking beneath the sun.

 

In the garden we grow, impertinent weeds,

whistling reeds, diseased trunks, a whole litany

of assertions; electric poles tilting, telephone wires

wringing silence from the clearing, reawakening

the chiming and chirruping birds, the sunflowers

performing their yellow mysteries.

 

In the garden, a blunt elbow, an artist’s wrist,

a pubic bone, a rush of hair, a globe

glistening on the dismissed surface,

leaves greening and unrolling their deep need.

What goes to seed in this holy erasure

grows, the burning bush extinguished.

 

In the garden, this awe, this expectation

of rough beauty, this supple white hope, raw

and clinking in the air, the tossed coin’s messy

aspirations; this disaster, a revival;

the gloss and sheen of love like vaseline, lubricating our fall.

 

Cati Porter is the author of eight books and chapbooks, most recently, The Body at a Loss (CavanKerry Press, 2019). She lives in Riverside, California, with her family where she runs Poemeleon: A Journal of Poetry and directs Inlandia Institute, a literary nonprofit. 

 

 

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PRATIK LA SPECIAL ISSUE HIGHLIGHT: AMERICAN POET VANDANA KHANNA's "Creation Myth"

 

VANDANA  KHANNA

 

Creation Myth

 

You’re a different kind of girl, one

only a god could love, one the animals

spurn because they like you better lonely.

 

Creation isn’t for the faint of heart.

 

Let him fashion you from sandalwood

and stardust and soap. From navel and seed.

 

Give up all the thin hymns you once knew.

Become a bird that never shuts up, a river

that won’t bend easily to drama.

 

Become a tangle of wives, the tight clutch

of girls, a swarm of goddesses.

 

Wake from the tiger in your dreams

and with all the hands you are given,

pull at the thick, gold scruff of this world.

 

Vandana Khanna is the author of two collections of poetry, Train to Agra and Afternoon Masala, and the chapbook, The Goddess Monologues. Her poems have won the Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize, The Miller Williams Poetry Prize, and the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition, and has appeared in publications such as the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, New England Review, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner and Guernica. She is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review.  

 

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PRATIK LA ISSUE SPECIAL : ALICE PERO's "The Parts"

 

ALICE PERO

The Parts

 

Sticky fingers, sticky-icky time, like molasses, sticking us

Or not sticking, sliding, not knowing who or how

just slipping along, no control and we flop

our ski legs floundering

then our ice cracking and falling into pieces again

 

No point in pointing fingers, no one knows why

these are places we go or who we are

We aren’t in place

Just placed

 

There are plenty of dogs who would tear us apart

if ever they found us

down that long corridor of history

and when we became meat in all its various parts

the dogs loved all the parts, the flesh, the parts that cry and moan

the gluey sinews, the wing bones, the toes

 

But then we break away again

and we just sing, we sing

and those notes hold

We are outside skin

We are whole

 

Alice Pero’s first book, Thawed Stars, was praised by Kenneth Koch as having “clarity and surprises.” Her poems have recently been published in the anthologies, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, Coiled Serpent, and Altadena Poetry Review. She is founder of the reading series “Moonday” and the chamber music group, “Windsong.” She is a dedicated dialoguer with poets around the country, having produced work with over 20 poets. 

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