Bird
Joy Harjo
The moon plays horn, leaning on the shoulder of the dark universe
to the infinite glitter of chance. Tonight I watched Bird kill himself,

larger than real life. I've always had a theory that some of us
are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies. Out to here,

farther than his convoluted scales could reach. Those nights he
played did he climb the stairway of forgetfulness, with his horn,

a woman who is always beautiful to strangers? All poets
understand the final uselessness of words. We are chords to

other chords to other chords, if we're lucky, to melody. The moon
is brighter than anything I can see when I come out of the theater,

than music, than memory of music, or any mere poem. At least
I can dance to "Ornithology" or sweet-talk beside "Charlie's Blues,"

but inside this poem I can't play a horn, hijack a plane to
somewhere where music is the place those nerve endings dangle.

Each rhapsody embodies counterpoint, and pain stuns the woman
in high heels, the man behind the horn, sings the heart.

To survive is sometimes a leap into madness. The fingers of
saints are still hot from miracles, but can they save themselves?

Where is the dimension a god lives who will take Bird home?
I want to see it, I said to the Catalinas, to the Rincons,

to anyone listening in the dark. I said, Let me hear you
by any means: by horn, by fever, by night, even by some poem

attempting flight home.
from the book WEAVING SUNDOWN IN A SCARLET LIGHT/ W. W. Norton & Company
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I’ve always admired Charlie Parker, the harbinger of bebop. His arpeggios were wily cascading notes and his solos defied gravity. Yet, his personal life challenged his artistry. Genius is difficult to carry. No one understands and even the artist doesn’t fully comprehend the gift and what it requires. His horn was how he kept going. It was the music that held tight to the center even as it explored the edge.
Color photograph of Bernadette Mayer from the photographic and verbal project, Memory
“There is a Life Here”: On Bernadette Mayer

"'A process fills its old bed,' Mayer wrote at the very end of Memory, '& then it makes a new bed: to you past structure is backwards, you forget, you remember the past backwards & forget.' Mayer experimented with the uncut account of a life—sure that if she captured a day, a month in its totality—the truth of memory and forgetting would surface."

via N+1
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Color image of the cover of the journal Copper Nickel, Fall 2022
What Sparks Poetry:
Layla Benitez-James on Two Poems by Beatriz Miralles de Imperial

"Bea has been described as 'a poet of silence, of everything unsaid which is suggested through language,' and translating these poems opened my eyes to the immense possibilities of brevity, inspiring me to begin a book-length project in small bursts. How Dark My Skin Is Left by Her Shadow taught me the strength of distillation, how intensity rises, and pressure builds when a substance is compressed."
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