George Yatchisin
(USA)
A Reading
“We find the body difficult to speak.”
–Jack Spicer
My best poem would have no words
but now I am writing.
Vacant at the mike she eyed over
the crowd, letting love lap in—
what a room of listeners can do for you.
While her work was like
truth in its kimono at dawn, colors in full light,
I could only latch on to one word,
as she twice misspoke “epitaph” for “epigraph,”
as if such gist, a hard-felt coming or going,
deserved merely a name.
There are numerous words one must weigh out like change,
that jingle on the tongue’s pocket
the way love tumbles
about us so much. My friend,
who had loved her alone but not for long,
he had to watch her words, the right and wrong,
leave lips his had touched. But no more for that.
Instead, he had to watch her with another,
watch hands at backs like fingers
at a typewriter, the alphabet
broken to keep favored keys from crashing,
and the first words coming slow.
That may be why we’re so eager to get in bed
with others, to hear one truth in silence,
to settle into that clatter of nothing.
That may be how she didn’t misspeak,
sensing words are for endings, epitaphs
when nothing else is left to say.
Auto Safety
Words, yes, them again. They’re always between
- And there’s no real need to mention love.
It waits on street-corners with four-way stops.
No one will give love a ride—they know.
It’s funny how strangers always want to
be friends, just to change their names, just to see
the four-speed transmission of your smile find
a new gear that’s then theirs. It’s all they want.
Until they want more—loose change, a brown button,
something like love. And unknown, it’s hiding
in the back seat, holding the lighter in.
Everyone’s in an unrecalled Pinto
when fate strikes for what must be the last time,
surely, until something else happens.
More Than Anyone Cares to Hear about Cashews
So I followed the link
to the “list of culinary nuts” but
it wasn’t as bitchy fun as I’d hoped.
It did lead to the mystery
of the cashew, which dangles
from its fruit like an appendix,
something waiting to be removed.
Poor pseudo-fruit, the actual cashew apple,
in Central American called the marañón,
shaped more like a pear, anyway,
its nut protrudes from it
like a tilde off an “n.”
The locals brew that easy bruising fruit
into a spirit, sweet, but not so much
you don’t want more.
Of course we’re in it for the nuts.
In consumerland they come clean,
shorn of the shell that’s kin to sumac
and rich with noxious oils that sicken
at as much as a touch. So for you,
others will roast them, outdoors,
hoping for their cents an hour
to avoid the acrid smoke.
What work this takes you think and
devour another, salt on your tongue
like Portuguese tan and fat,
roasting on a beach in Goa.
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BIO
George Yatchisin is the Communications Coordinator for the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at UC Santa Barbara and the author of the chapbook Feast Days (Flutter Press 2016). His poems have been published in numerous journals including Antioch Review, Askew, and Zocalo Public Square. He is the co-editor of the anthology Rare Feathers: Poems on Birds & Art, and his work appears in the anthologies Clash by Night and Buzz. He has a MFA from the University of Iowa and a MA from the Johns Hopkins University.