highlighting the life and art of illumine community members

Here’s the poem I wrote the first time I attended the Illumine hour.

 

 

This one’s for my stepdad, Norm,

who started me betting                

the longshots in spring.

 

We dressed for the races, back then—

I wore curls

and a skirt with lace edging,

 

and black shoes that buckled

and clacked,

 

and sometimes

lace tights

and a hat.

 

I loved betting longshots—

 

was happy

with losing some contests,

 

then my twenty-to-one

would come in,

 

and I’d spread out my winnings,

stacking and fanning my loot,

 

unfolding the dog-ears

and flattening creases

               until I knew each bill by touch.

 

I loved betting longshots

in spring—

 

I’d stand

at the window,

 

age six,

 

and collect what I’d earned.

 

My sisters thought

it was luck. There’s more:

 

I wasn’t too timid to lose.

 

               I’m still not.

 

Look at this odd longshot

of life—

 

               I live

               in perpetual spring.

 

My hair is straight,

uncombed,

just like a girl’s hair,

though I am grown,

 

               and still I have

               a girl’s clear-sightedness,

               unwavering will.

 

The years

haven’t broken me—

a thoroughbred bought

by a farm—

 

they’ve

preserved me, like an ether,

an oil.

 

Girlhood

stilled

in its dreaming,

its faith.

 

What am I betting on now?
World peace.

 

Let them guffaw

in the stands.

 

Let the buoyant jockeys

make jest in the stables.

 

It’s May

in my rooms.

 

Call it a thousand to one,

if you want,

 

my dream

that we will choose

to live from love,

 

that I will live

to see that choice.

 

Here’s what I’ve learned:

 

sometimes your spring horse comes in,

whom nobody bet on,

 

your Fire in the Moonlight,

 

your Faery’s Call,

your Tall Auspicious Lady,

Your Cherries in Dew.

 

Look at that child,

counting and folding

the bills they said

had come from luck.

 

Not luck, or God, or patience. No.

 

Belief.

Mandy Kahn is the author of two poetry collections, with a third forthcoming in the fall of 2022. Her work is included in The Best American Poetry anthology series and was featured in former Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s newspaper column American Life in Poetry.

 

Kahn presented a program of interactive and immersive poems at the Getty Center in 2019. She’s given readings at Cambridge University, London Review Bookshop and Shoreditch House in England, at Motto in Berlin, at Colette in Paris, at Printed Matter in New York, at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and at many venues in Southern California, and has been interviewed by BBC Radio, Flaunt and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

She is the subject of filmmaker Courtney Sell’s documentary “Peace Piece: The Immersive Poems of Mandy Kahn,” which was released by IndiePix and is available on DVD and on Amazon Prime.

 

She frequently collaborates with composers to create new works that combine verse and classical music; she’s made several works with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Reid and was a librettist for Yuval Sharon’s immersive opera Hopscotch.

 

Mandy Kahn is the Writer-in-Residence at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles, where she teaches a weekly online class on the nature of peace.