WE CAN DO VERY LITTLE, BUT I WILL DO THIS

by Annie Stenzel

 

 

 

Starting now, I propose to use GOOD, instead

of good when I talk about a Good thing,

and to say PRETTI rather than pretty, when I am struck

by how pleasing something looks to me.

 

I want this murdered woman, that executed

man, to live on in my speech with their names

alive and visible, notwithstanding their absence from

what should be a Good world, where so much is Pretti.

 

I could do nothing to save them from the horror

of their deaths. Nor can I do anything

for their loved ones, or the people whose lives they graced

every day. Grief won’t allow me to turn back

 

the hands of time, restore someone who was Good

and someone who was Pretti to this frightening world.

 

 

Annie Stenzel (she/her) is a lesbian poet who was born in Illinois, but did not stay put. Her second full-length collection, Don’t misplace the moon, was published in 2024 by Kelsay Books. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in print and online journals in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., including Action, Spectacle; Gavialidae; Innisfree Poetry Journal; Pine Hills Review; Rust + Moth; Sheila-na-Gig; SoFloPoJo; SWWIM; St, Katherine’s Review; Thimble Lit Mag; and Whale Road Review. A poetry editor for the online journals Right Hand Pointing and West Trestle Review, she lives on unceded Ohlone land within walking distance of the San Francisco Bay.

JANUARY BOUQUET

by Katherine Smith

The only antidote for America 

is to go outside in the freezing cold winter

and dream of the most beautiful city on earth

or even this universe (there may not be any other). 

This city is Granada.  Inside my house 

I think only of Minneapolis, of winter.

Outside my house I dream of Grenada and spring

on the slope leading towards the white limestone caves

where the pink dusk hovers over the Alhambra and the Sierra Nevada.

By day I once walked through the summer palace of the kings of Spain.

By night I listened to flamenco and the percussive shoes of dancers.

By day the stained glass of the cathedral blossomed

like the roses in the summer palace. Beauty softened the blow

of the inquisition six hundred years before

just as a memory of joy softens the blow of the shootings,

and the military on the streets of Minneapolis. Nothing 

is more consoling than the dream of a beautiful ruin,

for the ugliness happening to America. I lay memory

like a wreath on the roadside 

where Alex Pretti and Renee Good died.

Katherine Smith’s poetry publications include appearances in Southern Review, Boulevard, North American Review, Ploughshares, Mezzo Cammin, Cincinnati Review, Missouri Review, and many other journals. Her first book Argument by Design (Washington Writers’ Publishing House) appeared in 2003. Her second book of poems Woman Alone on the Mountain (Iris Press), appeared in 2014. Her third book, Secret City, appeared with Madville Press in 2022. She works at Montgomery College in Maryland.