Author: litmag_admin

I first met Quenton Baker in La Conner, Washington when I attended a reading in an art gallery as a part of the Skagit River Poetry Festival. Quenton’s work was riveting. When he stood to read in his low melodic voice, the energy in the entire room shifted. His poems were a mix of high lyric and musicality with a powerful narrative and a deep intelligence that ignited the page and the audience. It’s a rare gift to discover a poet whose work makes you want to reexamine your own poetry, and make sure you’re twisting the knife in the right places, make sure you’re hitting all the high notes. His work does that for me. It brings me back to my own impulse for writing and makes me want to be better. You can sense that he’s a true artist, that it’s not only the page that excites him, but a way of looking at the world with a lens that is both capable of leaning into the microcosm and capable of singing about what is ever expanding in all of us. Quenton Baker is a phenom and deserves the ear of our nation.

—Ada Limón, winner of National Book Critics Circle award for poetry and current Guggenheim Fellow

still
yet we anthem toward altar

under such ambulatory pressure
rhythm should be rendered impossible

the whip burns in effigy of wound
lanterns at our hip
            so our steps warn the dusk

our nightmares fragment         into law
redolent phylactery of shell and discard
the world attuned to the fragrance
            of overfed levee as statute
            of preteen        warded to the current

hull anthology
shattered through our entanglement
under red moon/chaste lightning

we de-legislate latitude
envelop border in kink and curve
collapse the lungs to unlatch the hold
our breath         bends        all barracoon skyward

*

the coffle           grottos the blood
thrum language pumped subterranean
flesh made lexical
                         de-housed from fieldstone

we demand the earth return us

in the grammar         of bone-spitting oak
in the grammar         of limb-chewing wave
irrupt the firing pin
collapse trigger until it resembles an unlit

waning

an       unhitched                  wailing

we will not modulate or vary the tone
a suturing shout
in un-unison
broad stalactite of threat and futurity

the dirt is a dialect

we drip                 underneath

The General

He spots a fly

He walks across the tundra

He plays croquet with an antelope

Who uses his hoof

According to my anatomy

Those are nails, he says

♪ Croquet hoop! Hair

In my soup! ♪

He visits his brother

Sings an opera tune

Under the table

He watches as the black cars go by

He hosts a wedding

He makes bold pronouncements

Mimicking Bonaparte

And bemoaning Russia and Waterloo

As personal failures

He praises the bold secular laws

That legalized his bizarre habits

He makes large gestures concerning

His reputation in the capital

He returns to his mother

In utero, tutto intaglio!, he says, then

Hand me my coat!, to his date

And partner in revenge and theft

We have no hope of making it out

Of this country alive

Out of breath

Trying to hold the blood of his

Nightmares, his childhood in suburban France

In, the bullet in his belly

Fired mistakenly

By a checkout clerk

Who stares at the couple empty-handed

And lets them walk out with the wine

Free of charge due to wonderment

At such superb theatrics

And like a marathon runner

Or a rebel in a Godard movie, the General says

Just maybe, my love

On this grand escape—the last—

There’ll be more chances

To sing.

Modern poetry

Spring: a lovely time

to quit your job. The inevitable

is irrecoverable, but maybe there’s

no past behind those mountains—it’s worth the trip. All event

horizons meet somewhere spritzy

the language of innocence makes sense. I’m not a tractor

I don’t have euphemisms for sex.

Tiger meat, cilantro, & applesauce for breakfast.

Satisfy your hunger. What way your way.

What’s the sound the Cordyceps fungus makes

as it grows out of its host’s head? 

“Bazing, bazing, BOOM.

Hold me, mother.”

Dedication

I see Rowland S. Howard float

through hell

holding his own sun

or mirror

or liver

saying he’ll be out soon, it’s just

he was curious—

the ‘O’ in ‘Or’

he says, and the ‘O’ in ‘Ocean’

or ‘Ornithology’

are the same—

leaving myself

too

Rowland S. Howard has cheated

death, I say, counting my fingers

or passing my fingers through my lack

of a beard

or smoking a pine needle—

don’t ask me why I’m here

it’s personal

and you’d be surprised

how quickly they let you in—

the ‘O’ in ‘Cataclysm’

and the ‘O’ in ‘Happy’

I reply

like a blind priest:

are not so different

either, at any rate

two things

Rowland S. Howard also holds

as he floats in the afterlife

of his choosing

and I ask him how?

he says you just

have to keep your eyes open

when it happens

oh

and be brave

that helps

A Song About Bread

Here it is, the harsh brutality,

The full meaning of human suffering!

The sickle cuts the heavy ears of wheat

The way they slit throats of swans.

Since time immemorial, our field

Has known the morning shudder of August.

Straw is tied up in bundles,

Each bundle lies there like a yellow corpse.

Carts, like hearses, carry them

Into the crypt: a barn.

Like a deacon, the driver,

Barking at the mare, heeds the funeral rites.

After that, with care, without anger,

Their heads are laid on the ground

And little bones are pummeled

Out of their thin bodies with chains.

No one ever thinks

That straw is also flesh.

The bones are shoved in the mouth of the cannibal mill

That grinds them with its teeth.

And then, fermenting the dough,

They bake piles of tasty viands…

That’s when the whitish venom enters the jug

Of the stomach to lay eggs of spite.

Condensing all the beatings into a loaf,

Distilling the reapers’ cruelty into redolent brew,

It poisons the millstones of intestines

Of those who eat this straw meat.

And the charlatan, the murderer, and the villain

Whistle like autumn across the entire country…

All because the sickle cuts ears of wheat

The way they slit throats of swans.

 <1921>

* * *

I don’t regret, I don’t call, I don’t cry.

All will pass like smoke from white apple trees.

Overcome with the gold of wilting,

I won’t be young anymore.

Touched with cold, you will no longer

Beat in the same way, heart,

And the land of birch chintz

Won’t tempt me to gallivant barefoot.

Nomadic spirit! Less and less

You stoke the flame of my lips.

O my lost freshness,

Mayhem of eyes and deluge of feelings!

These days I’m stingier in my desires,

My life—or did I dream you?

I might as well have galloped on a pink steed

On a sonorous early spring morning.

All of us, all of us will perish;

Quietly, copper leaves pour from maples…

Therefore, blessed be, forever,

Everything that’s come to bloom and to die.

<1921>

Letter to My Mother

Are you still alive, my dear old lady?

I’m alive as well. Hello, hello!

Let that ineffable evening light

Keep streaming over your hut.

They write to me that, barely hiding your fear,

You’ve gotten awfully sad over me,

That you often wander the road

In your tattered old-fashioned coat.

In the blue dark of evening,

You often see the same thing:

In a bar fight, someone has stabbed me

In the heart with a Finnish knife.

It’s nothing, my dear! Please calm down.

Just a terrible hallucination.

I’m not so hopeless a drunkard

As to die without seeing you.

I’m as gentle as I was before,

And I only dream of one thing:

To come back from my rebellious anguish

To our squat house.

I will come back when our garden,

White with spring, outstretches its branches.

But this time, don’t wake me up at dawn

The way you used to do eight years ago.

Don’t wake up the old expectations;

Don’t disturb all that didn’t come true—

I’ve endured loss and exhaustion

Far too early in life.

And don’t teach me to pray. Please don’t!

There is no going back to the old.

Only you are my help and my joy.

Only you are my ineffable light.

So forget your anxiety,

Don’t get so awfully sad over me.

Don’t wander the road so often

In your tattered old-fashioned coat.

 <1924>

Winter

Woman wants forever
And man wants heaven
And sometimes not oftentimes
The two wants collide
And both become a cloud
Less often still but sometimes
They die, actually die
Before it can rain
And the world stays dry
And everything remains
Just fine

Rome, February 2015

Then a white bird comes. A big white bird. And it is close, closing like it is going to land on your head. After the rain has stopped. Wings level with your shoulders. On the rooftop before you’re due to leave. Exactly like it’s on your head. And you in the dark with no umbrella over you. The size of your suitcase. On the roof the night you’re due to go. Before getting lost at the station. The water running to your feet. And the sun lost in the light. And beneath a Roman column. The alleys that curl. And the wind which irons the umbrella. And the umbrella yawning. Life at both sides of the road. And life is always a life. And rain until departure. And the umbrella lifting in the wind. And the sound of the suitcase’s wheels. Gravel then tiles. And the dream of faces in the glass. The taste of thyme in the potatoes. A building the colour of a peach. Mounds of melon beneath shavings of mortadella. And the shavings which curl. And the blacks selling umbrellas. And on the thresholds of the restaurants. Speech a song sung over and over. And a white bird saying farewell. And the umbrellas at the entrances to the restaurants. And the wind at the entrances to the restaurants. And life at the entrances to the restaurants. The size of your suitcase. And life always a life. 

Shipping traffic

The grey ships come from the north,
The snow-white ships come from the pole,
The ships of the south are all broken down.
O harbourmaster sitting on the cloudbanks,
O harbourmaster walking on the water,
Tell those leaping on the equator line
How their flesh might turn to wood,
How their bones might turn to steel,
Until from out their bodies comes a ship,
Its black pushing through the swell. 

Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger.