Vero Beach, Florida
By Hannah Brooks-Motl
My boys were fat and thin
and in their rooms
all day. I left them roam
and loved the nights
as best I could,
with what I had: not much.
When the days
were muggy, we'd slink
home to get away —
I was so tired those days,
awake was work
I couldn't manage.
My boys both grew fat.
They used to ask
me questions
I wouldn't answer
except to say I don't
know or Please just go…
Some nights I'd dream
their fathers came
and took them both
away. I'd wake up sad,
but feeling calm,
and sometimes I'd be that way
for days and days.

I did things wrong or not
at all or just too late:
once the air
conditioner broke
for real and stayed that way.
I tried to learn to cook
again. I left for work
and listened to the Stones,
and I'd go to sleep
when I couldn't stay awake.
My boys left their rooms
one day. I came home
early, just after lunch
to change.
The house, I knew,
was empty. I didn't guess
it would stay that way.

I washed my face
and waited
while the neighborhood turned
leafy-dark and far away.

Still, there's dinner time
when it's almost like nothing's
even changed;
I remember how they never
ever came.
Instead of eating
I go outside to look for signs:
a storm somewhere, my boys,
one fat, one thin,
thinking (just once) of me.
I see them stealing home—
I don't care how—sneaking
in just before. I keep
their beds unmade and leave
their rooms alone; the doors
stay closed. The nights
these days are peaceful
to a fault: who loves us now
loves in vain.

To Julia de Burgos
By Kristin Shaw
Famous now, but in feminist circles,
your birthday was announced to me
through a "This Day in History" email.
What else happened on February 17?
Marion Anderson was born,
and the first woman was honored in statue form
at Washington DC's Statuary Hall;
I don't remember who, some temperance leader.
That was in 1905; you were born in 1914.
Nothing else has happened since,
but at least you are the second most famous.

But you were not completely unfamiliar to me,
your poem "To Julia de Burgos"
having appeared in a high school Spanish textbook,
translated of course, because it was only the second year.
I remember reading, "You are not in command of self
everyone rules you. . .But not me, I am ruled by my heart alone"
and thinking it was funny that there you were,
your heart being ruled by some editor's fluency in Spanish.

Your poem was also rendered into a misleading drawing
of a homely brown haired woman (you, I suppose)
looking into a mirror and seeing a pretty blonde reflection.

If not in mirrors, then where can you see yourself?
In water, in "El Rio Grande de Loiza"?
You said it was where you could spill yourself,
congeal yourself in its ice crystals,
be as blue as that fallen piece of sky. You can be
undressed from your white skin, made to black
at the night puts you both to bed.
You were his a thousand times.

"You belong to your husband," you said.

But you, Julia, belong to no one and to everyone.
Even me.

Your biography read, "Julia de Burgos (1914-1958) was a
Puerto Rican poet who wrote about women, minorities,
and the working class.
She lived in New York City, where she died poor and alone."

Your older brother was a poet, too;
he died last year. He had three children, and
every obituary mentioned your name before his.

I am glad that English does not use genders;
I couldn't stand to see the "a" at the end of sola.

Mason City, Texas
By Josh Nissenbom
My girls they feed,
they feed like ducks,
in times too torrid
too told, to tell.
I brush their hair with
combs and rocks
to touch their head
and let them mold.
Out of their rooms
where bunnies perch
where birds do not hop
on gravel too cold.

At parks on sunny,
swelling nights,
I wink at them to hold
them close;
on bedroom floors then
waterbeds in satin
pajamas with slough
gruff men:
we love the snow
and naked nights
where emerald ghosts
speak deep
and slow.

And through our arms
run twiney blue ridges
and sinewed bone
down molten flesh;
left with the grain
of bruised paint flakes
and through
bald windows,
my girls they go with
wind through hail.

I wait for where
they oughtn't come,
they oughtn't speak of
or peak at too long;
their beds get tended
in normal routine
by maids and me,
we all get made.

In caverns too strong and
windy and long
from a root
runs love that
storms our veins.
This poem is in reponse to Hannah's poem, which is great. I am just playing around… Josh