Editor’s Choice Award: Melissa Downes
Melissa K. Downes is a professor of English at PennWest University. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cutthroat, the Women’s Review of Books, Vine Leaves Literary Journal, and Poet Lore.
OKEYDOKEY
for Philip Levine
Factory-belt rivers assemble themselves
nightly, scraping and screeching against iron
banks, trundling flotsam that drifts in the murk
of an industrial sewer, an industrial memory
of the grimed, Midwestern blue collar ringing
the Great Lakes, past an inky, oily sky, a darkened
Detroit of the imagination, always dirty:
the crisp, white tuckers of shopgirls grayly grim
by the time night sends them home again.
Never write an okeydokey poem, he says. Bad
poetry on its way to something else, fine. Lines
fumble to become something beyond—a boy’s
bony hands the first time round a breast—but not
the okeydokey, those where someone says, yes,
of course, yes, and promptly settles for a nap.
In lives long as long naps,
the poem creeps and clutches
from under the bed, lurches, looms
from mirrors, strives up, stroking
heavy water to surface in a life
of pale days and nights, not even
twilight. In the busy, humdrum,
stressful, jolly mess of every day,
in the hospital corners of a life
surgically removed, in this okey-
dokey life one bends one’s will to,
the poem swaggers, staggers,
jousts and jingles, rips and romps,
not hedged, not reined until
the mouth is bleeding.
We forge this new millennium,
where foundries pour liquid
to the last bitter lip. We smudge
our sky: the bruises an aesthetic
fifty shades of something. We welcome
the violence of fracked earth shifting
under our feet. We drop our quarters
and slip our dollars in penny arcades,
sip neon energy drinks in old soda shoppes.
We step through this war and the last
and the next, as if war is our daily
bread, our dead no longer
coffins lining Dover, no Walter
on TV, but a parade of shiny
plastic, blow-up dolls who wear
false ribbons brightly, read prompted
words, polished like dentures.
If I jazz my Scottish jig, my penny-whistle
mouth, if I blues Detroit in awkward,
frozen hands, I’m just wearing someone
else’s beard, but everything is iron now,
stealing every day from now on, steeled
against every day from now on, flattened
and pressed by every day, iron-souled
and iron-sided, rigidly unaltered except
at the edges, which wear, and chip, and rust.
AFTER TEACHING GAWAIN
On a blue night, the Green
Knight laughs. Spit stars his fine
ivy beard from the foolish joy
of it, the bursting broken breast
of it: the shame we feel at being,
the shame we feel at being real,
not romance or hero or man but
blood and fools and bloody fools,
when the blood is rising. Leaving
the windows of dark-voiced women,
you hesitate under an open moon,
hearing the red-throated
sound, dark as oceans. Who would
step away, claim to be something other
than the lover of wine-voiced women,
smoky as pears, brandy, the drag
of breath against body, against need?
Foibled, feebled, flawed, we go,
with our girdles on, our garters, our
emperor’s clothes, our birthday
suits, our finest nothings whispered
on. Bow your head before the axe,
redolent with pine, dripping sap tears.
You hear the fox and hart fear the heart
of day. You fear the red running through
a navy night, through a scatter of stars.
The stunned moon shatters all shields.
