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Mostly life is life and kitchens
filled with lovers who don’t put their cups

in the sink. Mostly life is people who don’t
believe they’ll be a corpse

and those who write poetry
while drunk and in love with loss.

These are the ones who flourish—
the mice in the cookies nibbling until dawn.

Mostly life wears a mask of contentment
and a tie of jasmine reaching down

into pleasure. Forgive the thunder
and the neighbor who left zucchini

in your unlocked car, forgive the oysters
without pearls and all those years we wasted

being young. We are grouchy, but trying,
so when your bent body glows

in the refrigerator light, I hear myself
whispering to dark, to the mice

we’ll never catch—please forgive me,
then kindly place your mug into the sink.
                                

The gray-haired woman in the locker room
sits naked on the bench, applying lotion.
Once, long ago, her belly-skin stretched
wide over a baby’s head,
stretched and thinned
and never came all the way back,
so there are hills, now, little ripples and folds,
including the hidden places under her breasts,
which droop, like tulips
on the fourth or fifth day,
nodding their heads over the lip of the vase.

A decade after my mother’s death
I’m greedily watching this stranger
rub cream into her skin,
its smoothness and swells
and mottled jiggly bits,
its secret pains and pleasures.
I want to speak to her, though etiquette
of the locker room forbids it.
I want her to adopt me, old as I am,
and exhausted from feigning adulthood.
But the world doesn’t stop
for such longings. Nothing stops,
including this woman, who pulls on her pants
in silence. In silence I dry off my hair,
zip up my own jacket,
walk out into motherless air.

All afternoon the west wind
has been blowing its heavy gusts

bending the elm and alder branches
over the clover and fescue grass

where we watched the two snakes
entwine and mate

like the strands
of a high voltage cable.

If you left me
where could I go in this world

and not feel like a stranger?
World of mourning

things left behind, of turning around
and not going back.

I waited two hours in Emoryville
keeping watch over the tracks

till you finally stepped from
the southbound Coast Starlight

carrying the same small notebook
all the way down from Oregon,

wishing you had a cigarette
and holding the damp green skin of night

darkly against your body.

Kelli Russell Agodon’s newest poetry collection is Accidental Devotions from Copper Canyon Press. She is the author of five books of poetry and the recipient of the Dorothy Rosenberg Poetry Prize and a prize from the Poetry Society of America. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press, teaches in Pacific Lutheran University’s MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop, and cohosts the poetry series Poems You Need with Melissa Studdard. Kelli lives in a small seaside town in Washington State where she writes poems and occasionally keeps company with the ghost of Emily Dickinson. Visit www.agodon.com.

You can order an inscribed copy of Accidental Devotions from Seattle’s Open Books Poetry Only Bookstore: AccidentalDevotions.
Also available from bookshop.org and Amazon.

Alison Luterman’s latest collection is Hard Listening from Wildhouse Publishing. She has published poems in  The New York Times Magazine, The Sun Magazine, Prairie Schooner, The Atlanta Review and many others. Two of her poems are included in Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 Project at the Library of Congress. Her personal essays have been collected in Feral City (www.shebooks.net & available on audible.com). She has also written half a dozen plays, including several musicals. She has taught and/or been poet-in-residence at California Poets in the Schools, New College San Francisco, Holy Names College in Oakland, The Writing Salon in Berkeley, at Esalen and Omega Institutes, and at various retreats, workshops, and conferences all over the country. Visit www.alisonluterman.net

Hard Listening is available from Wildhouse Publishing and bookshop.org.

Joseph Millar’s poems arise from the currents of felt experience: work, love, filial connection, poems of life and death. His work has won fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. Millar is the author of several poetry collections, including Blue Rust (2011), Fortune (2007), and Overtime (2001), which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Shine is his sixth collection. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Montalvo Arts Center, and Oregon Literary Arts. His poetry has been featured on Garrison Keillor’s National Public Radio program The Writer’s Almanac and won a Pushcart Prize. He teaches in Pacific University’s low residency MFA Program. Millar lives with his wife, poet Dorianne Laux in Richmond, California. Visit www.josephmillar.org

Shine is available from University of Chicago Press and bookshop.org.

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