Lauren Levin
Passion Vine Academy
Because my bells are ringing
Touching the leaves
Of the passion fruit vine where they tangle
In a trellis
Of flowering maple
The green passion vine curls at its tendril-tips
grows through
The maple stems (green with coral bells)
Into a crystal lattice of
Eager tendrils vs groping stems.
Passion fruit, fallen and on the vine, wrinkling as they ripen
Deepening plum skin, bruise, purple atmosphere
The unripe ones light lavender dotted with green
Sliced in half a split oval, cups with white rim
Gold pulp with greenish seeds, or green pulp
Mixed with yellow, a taste orange-raspberry
Tart and sweet, inspiring a swallow.
Sweet fruit is better
With a little tart
Or so sweet that it’s silly
Sweetness to swoon
And then something else
A morsel
Bracing sour.
Guavas and oranges
Lemons and tangerines
Raspberries, small and crushed into my fingerprints,
Blueberries, blackberries. Figs, jammy and forward
Vulgar and ancient. Regal in double crops,
Summer and fall. Green apples the squirrels bite
Green apples the turkeys bite
Golden delicious
I bite when they’re ready
with sweet yellow cheeks
And brown freckles.
“What are you passionate about?” I asked the passion fruit vine. “Group sex,” it said reasonably.
Or maybe “Rigor, I’m passionate about rigor.” It’s a young vine so it gives a young answer,
feverishly pure.
Thom Gunn’s tomatoes were “dark red...sweet
As SIN.” As the ‘5-way’ he had on his 64th birthday...
“Age is apparently exactly like youth. How reassuring!”
Two New Yorkers at the party
Befriended each other
The Bay is too decadent.
Life should be harder.
Isherwood and Auden
On the steamer out of Berlin
Bearing in their shirt sleeves
Ashes and embers.
It was 1933.
For Isherwood’s lover
A hard labor sentence.
After then, all my joys.
After now, destruction
Again. One scents it
On the wind.
Nerves bad, I grab a pruner
Humming don’t interrupt the sorrow
Darn right
A bee fizzes out of the salvia
Its threats are for me
I’m the one with the shears
The rusty pruners sit
By the keyboard, Momo vomits a whole
Fig onto his bed, and a bird sings chee chee chio
And trills and screeches, if it’s one.
A-whirp a-whirp a-whirp it might be one
Or seventeen.
The irrigation failed in the tomato bed –
The vines shriveled and yellowed,
Turned into crisp straw, the mint dried
in bristly clusters like hair and black rot-powder.
Jamaica Kincaid’s garden went
To a “party in Hell”.
Our gardens succeed again
libraries of deathly pleasures
bat guano and worm castings
vexation and fret.
My hopes extinguished
Yet to flare again. Not what they were.
But only new.
Guavas, pineapple
like plump little arrowheads
A funny white-fuzzed green
Dull as an olive leaf
Their insides are yellow,
A creamy pastel
The Persian mulberry fruited its first year
Heavy dense fingerlings
Deep sweet as looking up at a blackberry
from the bottom of a well.
Eat the small green stems
If you’re in a hurry.
The potted black mulberry
Offered two crops.
BLUEBERRY QUEEN WANTED
Wrote Jimmy Schulyer to Ashes (Little JA).
Laura was perishing
for sweet fruits
She couldn’t buy twice.
I haven’t seen my fruit become bitter in surfeit
But I have sources of replenishment
The soil, for plunging the manure and the seaweed
And the bat shit the dogs snuffle for
To renew sweetness when the fruit gets pale and tired;
And the disappointment
Gardener’s fruit is twinned with:
The apricot tree, so foamy and snowy,
broke its leg
like a racehorse
lost the whole crop.
Troweling under the winter chaff
Sweating for the new fruits
I lust to lose
I lust to tend
I lust for what comes back again
The big, dense peaches that never seem to ripen
On the neighbor’s branches
Always a bit of green in their blush
A memory of the tree.
The waxy pomegranate flowers pucker
Into toothed orange cups and swell
Only one became a pomegranate this year
But it had its gleaming blood seeds in it
Just as it’s supposed to
The plums their dried skins and crusted pulp
Everywhere on the sidewalk
Ramona scrapes at them with her teeth in a frenzy
These memories of plums
Gunn worked on his Goblin Market poem
For years. “Dipping thick
slices of sourdough bread
into the baths of Eden”
Years after the bathhouses
One recollects
Where Eden was
unfinished.
All my plaisance
my sweet sexual joy
came after
Historical
Death, the Shoah,
the Nakba
Dusty, I thought – oh youth! –
As a Sam Spade fedora.
It’s back, it’s here
As bitter
As wormwood and fear
And I’ve lived in moments
When a break was coming
But there was none
Or the break broke back
And at some point one dies waiting.
Will the next break come
When I‘m not living. I haven’t seen the wind
but I heard it pass by
Overhead
sighing
You can’t have life back
It has to be new
So what will you do?
Ramona in sphinx pose
Guards her slime green ball
Between her paws
While I plant fruit everywhere:
The back border, in tubs and wine barrels.
The far corner, the hell strip
Where wanderers can lift it –
Come take it! I cry. It’s not to buy
Perfumed loquats
Grapes red small and round
Hung over the fences
Branch-candelabras
Glowing with quinces,
Persimmons
Picked and stored til they blacken
To eat when they’re bletted.
And the figs this year! Mouth-stainers,
Guts wine-red
Falling faster than I, and the dogs
And the turkey flocks
Can eat them.
The guava flowers, white and red,
A something almost being said –
I trim the vines.
A scattering
of dry tomato leaves
Across the threshold
Wait a full year, the garden guides
Advise, before you decide
What’s dead.
I lost the poor man’s orchids
But surprise, they grow, wobbly pink slippers
Up through the geranium.
“Borrow my fruit picker”
Calls the neighbor
She tends her own front yard, plus
Across the street, gardens the grounds
That were her dead father’s, keeping his ghost
In plums and strawflower.
Humming don’t interrupt the sorrow
to passion fruits dangling from their stolen trellis
like glowworms, their lights inside out
I would like to say
Lust can come again
After regret
I would like to be this direct.
The seasons interlocking
Circles swell into each other
Winter-summer today,
Yesterday Spring-fall.
The artichoke fronds are starting
Palest green, frilled like sea slugs
I smell smoke, I smell salt:
Prospect Cottage. Jarman’s garden with no walls
Or fences. Pointillist with its red poppies, green gorse
green sea-kale
Coming into focus in little clusters
On the approach
A place that hardly exists
A place you have to trust
Anti-Translation
That's why I'm sharing with you my secret knowledge
we have to write we have to think have to argue have to despair
This is my secret knowledge in plain language that’s why
We can't give up our ability to separate to judge to understand
I can’t lose your ability to understand your knife blade of reason
or what, its binoculars I'm sharing it with you our secret knowledge
in plain language that we can’t lose our theories our lucidity but
judgment too is a temptation how it not be when we know
so little and want more when we want it all explained so we can
cast it aside – it? It: our ability to change and be changed
My secret knowledge is that our minds don’t work the same
What’s direct is most veiled – when words are simple it’s easy
To forget we need to look, to delve, to think
How does time work how does mind work how does electricity
how many times did Patroclus fuck Achilles how did the Pythagoreans
Do their laundry so please listen hear without you
I’ll forget my secret knowledge why I keep it forget
the subtle currents of reversal in directness
confusion in lucidity the great clouds in the sky the jostling
floods of atoms and the clouds within the atom forget
the alien intelligences I conceal forget my verb forms
please don’t let me, don’t let me forget the possibilities
Of change, founded on my ability to think
I remember Juvenal once wrote it on my tombstone
to be changed is what separates us we animals
we hounds from those fools who think they are gods
My Life with Money
I’ve always been bad at money
What I'm good at is marrying
Someone who makes money
Or at least, I did it once
Tony is an architect
Like in a rom-com but not
Once he met an architect who
During the Great Recession
Turned to architecting scent environments
For hotels – like, I don’t know
A lychee lobby in Hawaii
We thought, how stupid
She made a billion dollars
And we thought, how bad we are
At money! Though Tony makes it.
How bad at audiences.
I had a dream that R went to space
To become the consciousness
Of a sentient rocket ship
And secretly I was envious
Wondering how he got it
Like, that’s a good gig!
Like it was a residency.
Sophie said “Did he still need money?”
I love my brother more than anything
Except Tony, Alejandra, and poetry.
When we were children, I was productive
And he was useless, but how the tables
have turned! He is a journalist,
got an advance for his non-fiction book
And a National Book Critics’ Circle Award!
He has helmed many a prize-winning podcast.
There’s a story my brother and I
Want to tell together. We really, really
Want to tell it. We have written a pitch
We have great interviews and
Archival material that no one’s ever heard.
We’ve had meetings with major media outlets
At the top of Mt. Olympus
That you can’t even see from experimental poetry.
I thought I would be a nepo baby
upon my brother’s coattails – but it turns out
I’m so bad with money that
I even messed up my brother’s ability to get money!
We like the story. We think you would like it.
His agent says the story is dead in the water.
His agent says we are barking up the wrong tree.
But that’s the thing! Anyone can choose not to pay me
But they can’t stop me from telling the story
In an experimental poem that no one will read.
After all, dogs cost money
Children cost money
Poetry does not cost money
But it costs time
Which costs money
And money costs time
That is the story. I didn’t need money
To tell it, but also
You won’t hear it.
Lauren Levin is a poet and mixed-genre writer, author of three full-length poetry collections and a number of chapbooks. Their first book, The Braid, won the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Book Award. With Eric Sneathen, they edited Honey Mine by Camille Roy (Nightboat Books, 2021). Recent work appears in the chapbooks Dear Em from eyelet press and A Little Chat with the Sun from Clones Go Home. From New Orleans, LA, they live and work in Richmond, CA.