Webcam the World

Get all of it. Set up the shots
at every angle; run them online
24-7. Get beautiful stuff (like
scenery and greenery and style)
and get the ugliness (like cruelty
and quackery and rue).
There’s nothing
unastonishing—but get that, too. We have

to save it all, now that we can, and while.
Do close-ups with electron microscopes
and vaster pans with planetcams.
It may be getting close
to our last chance—
how many

millipedes or elephants are left?
How many minutes for mind-blinded men?
Use every lens you can—get Dubliners
in fisticuffs, the last Beijinger with
an abacus, the boy in Addis Ababa who feeds
the starving dog. And don’t forget the cows

in neck-irons, when barns begin
to burn. The rollickers at clubs,
the frolickers at forage—take it all,
the space you need: it’s curved. Let
mileage be footage, let years be light. Get
goggles for the hermitage, and shades for whorage.
Don’t be boggled by totality: we’re here to save the world

without exception. It will serve

as its own storage.

by Heather McHugh

Do Not Mind the Bombs

In Belgium, I remember
they called this day White Monday. Belgium was my
home when I was learning words like God
and doubt and faith. Belgium was my home
when I entered the country called Man. There,
in that land where I’d learned to fall in love
with learning, winter always stayed and stayed,
the days too dark, the rains incessant, pounding,
pounding—and all the sleepers dreamed of sun
and shirtless days. Shirtless, shoeless days.
I remember: trains, leaves, trees. Remember
too that aging, tired woman who’d told me why
the trees grew straight and tall in rows
in Belgium’s rain-soaked earth.
I remember what she’d said: “The trees,
we planted them in rows. When the war
was finally won.” I pictured her young,
a handsome husband at her side. At last the war
was done! At last! And before they planted crops,
they planted trees—the trees the war had stolen
from the earth. “What the bombs had not destroyed,
we chopped for fuel. Their stumps and branches
gave us warmth. The land was bare and spent.
The earth, it reeked of guns and blood and rotting
flesh. And so we planted trees. And as we worked
we found reminders of the war. A rifle, empty
shells, the remains of a man, a bullet through
his chest, his uniform turning to dust. We called
the priest and blessed the bones. A boy! I knew
he’d been a boy. Belgian, English, French! Bah!
He was a boy! I cried that night for all
the world had lost—then woke and finished
planting. And through the years, we watched
the growing trees. Before my mother died, she went
from tree to tree, kissing leaves and branches.
‘Have you gone mad?’ I yelled. And she screamed
back: ‘I am, at last, in love!’ She smelled of leaves
and bark the night she breathed her last. The day I buried
her, I leaned against a tree and wept. I swear, I swear
I smelled her breath as I leaned against that tree.”
Today, I hear that woman’s voice as I
read the morning news—the news of bombs,
of all the deaths, Americans, Iraqis, children, women,
men. Dead. Like π the blood and bodies
run into infinity. I walk outside, the sky as clear
as simple boyhood words mamá, papá, y agua. Oh
for a day when this would be my only task—to sit
and memorize the blueness of a sky.
Better now to study
trees that grow on desert sands than to study war.
So I begin to count the leaves on limbs
of waking trees. I know that wars are raging
everywhere. Even in my heart. Do not mind
the bombs. Do not mind them, not today.
I wander through my yard,
examining the plants. I lost some to the freeze—but
most survived. I touch and kiss the tender leaves
and speak to them, half lost, half crazed,
and half expecting trees and plants
and shrubs to kiss me back. Perhaps, today,
they’ll kiss me back. I touch a desert bush—yellow
flowers bursting like a flame, spring’s first blaze
of light. The dog running up and down and up
and down the yard, then rolling on the grass
to scratch her back. I laugh and speak
to her. The wars are everywhere. I’ll plant
another tree. Something to survive the torture
of the sun. Something to withstand a thousand
years of drought.
I touch a tree I planted
years ago. I touch and touch. Oh, do not mind
the bombs today. Kiss me, kiss me back.


by Benjamin Alire Saenz

Ten Months Later

It begins so cold,
so professional in tone
as if to hide the intimacy we shared,
restless in its shallow grave.

Buried, yes, but far from dead-
I can feel it rising up
with ease through my resistance.
I remember everything about your voice.

There are certain things we talk about
and certain things
we can't, or don't.

Again and again
I am amazed and afraid
by how well we know-
and will always know-
each other.

I listen and I think about
all that we are missing
in each other's lives.

Helpless now,
I fill my phone with tears.

by Harley Woodhouse

Spell (excerpt)

Editor,

Here are the lines my mind fathomed.
They are tar-dark. I wrote them on pages
Breathless and blank, as beneath water
Men's minds are blank but for needing
A next breath. Sir, turn
This page and the thick door opens
By growing thinner, ever thinner,
Until the last page turns and is turned
Into air. Don't knock. The ocean knocks
Ceaseless on my little craft, and I am
asking you, Will my craft hold? I send me
To you on paper-thin hull. Don't knock.
I'm in there. I breathe on one lung
For both lungs' air; my hand is wet
With knocking my knuckle to wave, and
Though the wave opens, I am never
Let in. I promised you the deep wave
's inner chamber, I'm sorry.

by Dan Beachy-Quick