Three Lies and a Truth

Gail Martin
We live in a world where some lies sink
to their knees in the bottomland. Others
unsheathe wings, lift and ferry their seeds, drift

up like the down of angels. My mother believed
selling vacuum cleaners and eternal salvation

were both honorable. I agree. It doesn't matter
if you're slicing limes for your fancy gin or tossing
the rinds under the porch to ward off feral cats,

you can still sever what you need the most.
These days, it's the need that interests me.

Not once have I told the kind of lie that flew away.
Like pine sap on fingers, mine have fused and clung,
tacky, awkward. And sometimes you just don't know

what you don't know. For years I said I was in love
with windows but it turned out what I loved was light.

To be honest, I'm in it for the tomatoes and the flowers.
I can't go on harvesting carrots in the rain forever.
Where the road forks right toward the meaning of life

and left toward cheese and crackers, I go left. And
in the end we will die like the cedars, wet, with cold feet.
from the journal THE SOUTHERN REVIEW 
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This poem rose from weary astonishment at the political lies that seemed to be raining on us daily. I was at our 95-year-old cottage in northern Michigan—which literally has no foundation—trying to discourage with kindness a feral cat who was living in the crawlspace. We read cats dislike citrus. In times of upheaval and uncertainty I get through by asking myself, “OK, what do you know for sure?”

Gail Martin on "Three Lies and a Truth"
Illustration reading Please Send Flowers I Am Forgetting Them in black over pastel pink and yellow flowers
"An Artisan in Verse Whose Poems Shimmer and Resound"

David Orr explores This Afterlife, A. E. Stallings' selected poems. "The main thing Stallings has going for her is that she’s good at writing poems. In particular, she’s good at writing the sort of poetry that evokes the word 'good,' rather than, for instance, 'brave' or 'disorienting.' Stallings’s work imagines the poet as an artisan, and her poems satisfy in the way a handblown glass bowl satisfies; they have heft and shape; they rest solidly in the palm." 

via THE NEW YORK TIMES
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Cover of the issue of New Humanist in which Brian Henry's translation appears
What Sparks Poetry:
Brian Henry on Tomaž Šalamun's "Sutra"

"Though Šalamun would leave the interview format behind, he continued to ask many questions in his work, sometimes building poems upon a series of questions, as in the poem featured here. Although the title, 'Sutra,' implies the imparting of wisdom or knowledge, Šalamun was more interested in the interplay between the questions and answers than in satisfying the expectations of a conventional sutra."
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