Best Poems - Self-Flagellation

Best Poems – SELF-FLAGELLATION

Tariff – Michelle Boisseau

“It takes time to appreciate how I once
made a friend so unhappy the next night
on the road from Chauncy to Amesville, Ohio,
she steered her Fiat Spider head on
into an on-coming truck. Her boyfriend
identified her waitress uniform.
She’s been dead now for more than twenty years.
What I did to hurt her I won’t tell you—
so you’re free to imagine any vicious,
self-indulgent, hapless blunder or crime

while I go about turning this into a poem again,
turning over heavy marl, the garden
in spring, and the wind picks up, flinging soil
against my neck, behind my ears, into my teeth.
You have to get dirty: what appreciate
means is to price. After living a while
you understand the ways you have to pay.”

The Mother – Gwendolyn Brooks

“Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

The singers and workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb

Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized

Your luck

And your lives from your unfinished reach,

If I stole your births and your names,

Your straight baby tears and your games,

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine,

Whine that the crime was other than mine?—

Since anyhow you are dead.

Or rather, or instead,

You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid,

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?

You were born, you had body, you died.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you

All.”

Forgive Me – Vibiana Aparicio-Chamberlin

“Mijo, I did not abandon you there
at the border where new life is hoped for.
The men, the men with badges and
ICE uniforms ripped you from my arms.

Forgive me.

I held you tight, but I had to release you
or they would break your little legs.
To quiet me, an agent slapped and bloodied my mouth.
Another butted his rifle to my back.

My body aches for you.
I know you cry for me and I need you
to comfort and lighten the burden
of my milk swollen breasts.

Who will play this little piggy and
tickle cosquillas under your chin?
Who will play peekaboo with you?
Who will reque reque on your soft fontanel?

My eyes, my hands, my arms
serve no purpose without you.
Is someone singing to you our lullaby?
Arrorró mi niño. Arrorró mi sol.

I suffer the memory of you sleeping in
my arms and the memory of the sweet smell
of the milk you spit up. And most of all,
I miss your tiny soft brown hands.

I am a nest without a bird.
I need you safe back in my womb.
No safety back in our village.
No safety there or here.

The chamber of my heart no longer cradles you.
Now I’m empty, empty, an empty nest.
No reason to gather twigs, thread, and cotton.
My little bird, fly back to me.

Forgive me.”

Too Blue – Langston Hughes

“I got those sad old weary blues.
I don’t know where to turn.
I don’t know where to go.
Nobody cares about you
When you sink so low.

What shall I do?
What shall I say?
Shall I take a gun
And put myself away?

I wonder if
One bullet would do?
As hard as my head is,
It would probably take two.

But I ain’t got
Neither bullet nor gun—
And I’m too blue
To look for one.”

Reflections at Dawn – Phyllis McGinley

“I wish I owned a Dior dress
Made to my order out of satin.
I wish I weighed a little less
And could read Latin,
Had perfect pitch or matching pearls,
A better head for street directions,
And seven daughters, all with curls
And fair complexions.
I wish I’d tan instead of burn.
But most, on all the stars that glisten,
I wish at parties I could learn
To sit and listen.

I wish I didn’t talk so much at parties.
It isn’t that I want to hear
My voice assaulting every ear,
Uprising loud and firm and clear
Above the cocktail clatter.
It’s simply, once a doorbells’ rung,
(I’ve been like this since I was young)
Some madness overtakes my tongue
And I begin to chatter.

Buffet, ball, banquet, quilting bee,
Wherever conversation’s flowing,
Why must I feel it falls on me
To keep things going?
Though ladies cleverer than I
Can loll in silence, soft and idle,
Whatever topic gallops by,
I seize its bridle,
Hold forth on art, dissect the stage,
Or babble like a kindergart’ner
Of politics till I enrage
My dinner partner.

I wish I didn’t talk so much at parties.
When hotly boil the arguments,
Ah! would I had the common sense
To sit demurely on a fence
And let who will be vocal,
Instead of plunging in the fray
With my opinions on display
Till all the gentlemen edge away
To catch an early local . . .”

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