No, Don’t by Elena Karina Byrne

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend March 17, 2017   No, Don't   Elena Karina Byrne

for the two of me   the thing that eats the heart is mostly heart and there I wish, in the burly sun blossom-backwards garden I was hungry, so damn hungry and afraid again by full open-mouth-desire. Don't take this as a garrote good-bye, your airless thrive ride. I alone, fear being alone, far from the blood vocabulary. I wish I knew where I put my fear sitting in the childhood past, in it's zoo, sitting on the winding Escher stairs, saying this out loud to my dead mother, so loud a lion's head in the mouth loud it catches audience breath for breath measure, making us go home to say it to the father, dead and down, holding court with                    outbreak. You can't hear me say this, off as asymmetry cry.                                                                 You too are dead in the circus heart      alone because they really are all gone, and can't feed you anymore. You can't sit in the lap, on the headmouth, slow kneel on the floor; you can't sit in the cement highchair, sit in this landscape room, this come to crime test, alive here for feeling, or take me to nothing sound-past longing with the lion who won't eat you, who won't eat me, facing the animal garden, shaking his yellow haystack head.            Copyright © 2017 Elena Karina Byrne. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "'No, Don't,' beginning with a line by Stanley Kunitz, follows an imperative to mismeasure the speaker's askew placement in adult loneliness, if there is such a thing, caused by the double bind of fear and desire (the lion), separate from childhood loneliness. One must give an emotional nod to Philip Levine!" —Elena Karina Byrne   Elena Karina Byrne is the author of Squander (Omnidawn, 2016). She is the Literary Programs Director for the Ruskin Art Club and lives in Los Angeles.   Photo credit: Mark Savage Poetry by Byrne   Squander (Omnidawn, 2016) "Sundown" by Jorie Graham "The Layers" by Stanley Kunitz "At the Providence Zoo" by Stephen Burt Poem-a-Day   Launched during National Poetry Month in 2006, Poem-a-Day features new and previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets on weekdays and classic poems on weekends. If you enjoy Poem-a-Day, please consider making a donation to help make it possible. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038