Noʻu Revilla
Outside a door in east Maui, a brindled dog sits.
No cars drive the dirt road.
No child appears with food to share or ask for.
There is only inside, today.
A telephone cries, and to each caller, a grandmother
chirps, Aloha. God bless you.
In a corner bedroom, a girl is kept in bed,
surrounded by mosquito nets & women
who take turns binding her wound.
Miles of violence in their eyes, they know
how to speed through marrow. They know
scars & stars, two things
a woman should never count in relation to her body.
The number of names, maybe,
wired around her stomach. The number of stomachs
opened like doors and not so much
cleaned as cleaned of secrets. Yes, there is something
better than the heart. A whirring
sent deep in the body. Like a girl in a house.
You are finally home.
No glorified organ, no heroic heart. Only guts.
Viscera. Ask any Hawaiian.
Drive the dirt road, follow my grandmother’s voice.
She will bless you. My aunties & cousins,
their long fingers pinned to the walls, they point
the way to a corner bedroom,
this poem. My sister is closing the mosquito net.
I am pooling in a bed of gauze.
New versions of the Bible will use the word “heart.”
Ask any of us where it really hurts.
Even my grandma, god bless you.
Ask the brindled dog guarding my stomach.
from the book ASK THE BRINDLED / Milkweed Editions
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"A Conversation with Victoria Chang"

"While I was writing these poems, I very much felt like I was outside of time or maybe inside time? Time was certainly not linear. The complications of the syllabics also forced the poems to leap even more than usual (during the writing process, at least). I think my poems might tend to leap a bit anyway, but the syllabics and the titles served as a kind of leash to the poems."

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What Sparks Poetry:
Donald Revell on James Longenbach's Forever

"To read the poems gathered as Forever is to walk beside Jim Longenbach along the banks of Lethe. We know the place, having been here before, with Dante in the most beautiful cantos of  his Purgatorio. We remember its perils—the perils of oblivion and forgetfulness. And we remember its allures—the garden on the farther shore and a reunion there with the unforgettable. But something has changed. Somehow, Longenbach has prepared an estate for us along the water’s edge."
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