Welcome to the 30/30 Project, an extraordinary challenge and fundraiser for Tupelo Press, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) literary press. Each month, volunteer poets run the equivalent of a “poetry marathon,” writing 30 poems in 30 days, while the rest of us “sponsor” and encourage them every step of the way.
The volunteer poets for December are Kate Bowers, Katie Collins, Ellen Ferguson, Chris Fong Chew, Davis Hicks, Victor Barnuevo Velasco, Jen Wagner, and Stacy Walker.
If you’d like to volunteer for a 30/30 Project month, please fill out our application and warm up your pen!
December - Poem 9
This is the day when I say Velociraptor / Kate Bowers
And all the magic falls down.
Fossil fanning
A McDonald’s meal on the bluff
Everywhere to go and nowhere to be
If you were to ask. And I were to answer. The worst thing you could have in this world is a biology. Erase that from your passport and you could go anywhere.
Aliveness is the trade value. The dollar mark. Beyond the blood, beyond the youth. The inhale wanted is that spark, the vermillion bird nested in your heart they no longer know, the very candle of your eye that will fly rather than be crushed.
Imagine
One’s disappointment at arriving at table only to find crumpled and scarred tin foil and thin meat juices left in the Pyrexed bottom of a glass casserole dish
WHEN—————————-YOU
had been expecting a newly roasted leg of lamb fresh from the field this morning, traces of its pulse still palpable to one’s hanging tongue, one’s unclosed mouth.
Such careful grammar in this interspecies convo, is this not true?
This is the season of the monster, the ungainly at any size. Who can love a film accreting on glass, a bun turned to mold?
70 million years is a long time to await the return of an unusually clawed, unshod foot to stamp you down, delicately offset with balance on the other.
Left. Left. Left, right, left.
6 feet.
100 lbs.
Heretofore a child’s plastic toy.
A cartoon.
A sticker on a roll of bandaids beside the grocery checkout belt
Now alive, engorged by your fear.
Winged…
I Have an Idea for a Book / Katie Collins
I have an idea for a book
A woman finds out she has cancer
And goes off in search of the children that came
From the eggs she donated
To update their family history
She didn't know what she was passing on.
An outline comes easily, but the draft is caught on the fifth page
That stares blankly out on my color-drained face.
I have an idea for a book
There's a princess in a tower that's waiting for her prince
Only for a whole team of knights to storm the tower.
Twelve men coming in at all once overwhelms her
So she jumps out of the window.
To her shock, she flies and sees her face in the lake below.
Like Medusa before her, she's frozen as she realizes she's been a dragon all along.
An outline comes easily, but the draft doesn't fill more than a paragraph
Before I'm sketching the wordless characters.
I have an idea for a book.
I have an idea for a thousand.
The thoughts spill out of my brain.
A few break containment.
Some even get to the page.
But very few capture my imagination long enough to bind me to my keyboard.
A men's wool blazer - Italy Design size 38 (maybe worn once) / Ellen Ferguson
Let’s go somewhere better
I’ll wear your sweater
You’ll wear my blazer
Your hair in a bun
Let’s go to Vegas
No one will catch us
We’ll live life
With no wife
Two kids on the run
Get rid of my blazer
No need for your sweater
I’m back in a family way
But just for a minute
Since I’m still stuck in it
Like traffic in downtown LA
Wordsearch / Chris Fong Chew
Within the space of the sentence
there is the word within
the letter and shapes,
within shapes, within shapes.
Break down the shape of the sentence
and find its most basic parts. Meaning derived
from shaped lines on a page, lines communicate
sound, communicate meaning, communicate
Definition: in the space of a dictionary, the sentence
is a definition, a part of speech, a meaning of a word
defines the meaning of a word.
Rebuild the space of the sentence, follow Bachelard
transforming words, descriptors, infinitives, conjunctions,
architect the sentence, derive feeling from meaning.
Search for words in the vastness of the body. Find definitions
in the vastness of the mind. Find vastness in the space
of the world.
Keep expanding the line, increase in length, reaching across the page
Stretching the limits of the language, the words, the meanings, the ideas.
The nonsensical is created in the space between knowing and not knowing.
Profundity is found in knowing what you do not know. And in here, I don’t know.
The snow knows / Davis Hicks
In the softest off-set steps,
which accept any presence
and even hug it back
you can hear the honesty
of listen-light,
the presence of pushing-powder.
Even when exhale is smog,
Inhale is the clearest clean there is,
the moonshine of winter breath.
With drawn-in shoulders,
the screech-screen of wild things
two-stepping in their places,
following silence-song’s paces.
Inside is the tight-built wasp nest,
clinging to all edges.
There,
when all scrambling things are asleep
and none but the birds are talking,
you will be heard
with the constant continuance
of an attentive sky.
Saturday is for hanging laundry / Victor Barnuevo Velasco
She declares, like it is the eleventh commandment. Saturday is for drying outside. The best time to start is before the sun climbs up the ipil tree. Before it casts shadows on the corn drying on the mat on the ground. She loves to watch the gray leaves form like clouds on the clothes. The clothes heave wearily; the breeze is inviting but they cannot escape. Their shoulders are pinned to the lines that tie the house to the fence that encloses the whole yard.
Sometimes she sees a thread dangling from a shirt. She thinks the stitches will unravel, and the pieces will fall on the ground, where they will reassemble and form an army of shirts and pants and underwear and socks. They will form a line behind her. She will march them past the bougainvillea that has not been hedged for months. Past the gardenias and roses that have not bloomed for three summers. Past the wooden gate, into the streets. Through the bamboo groves. Down the river, where other shirts and pants are waiting. They have already taken a plunge in the deepest part of the water; floating. She will take a plunge. The depth of the water carries her back. She is suspended among armless shirts and pants missing their torsos. She will stretch her arms and bask in the sun.
But first there are bed linens to strip. And pillowcases to check for blood, from her children scratching their scalps in sleep. And mud to scrape from the pants of her husband. And holes to mend. And shorts to hem. And school uniforms to iron. And church clothes to starch. Because Sunday is for church. Church begins her week for Saturday.
Amen / Jen Wagner
God.
Please.
Not again.
Not another one sliding into my DMs.
Thinking…
I’ll hit her her up—
Tell her all the things she wants to hear.
Pretend.
Then back away slowly.
Start the process of ghosting.
Until she’s bitter,
And it ends.
Please, God.
Just spare me.
From another mediocre conversation with a man
Only wearing
Patagonia,
And flannel.
Because that’s the uniform.
Wing tips and dark denim
with the creases still in them.
In Jesus name,
Please hear me.
Lord…
Please, don’t make me have to say no.
That never ends well.
They call me a bitch
And a “ho.”
Oh, and…I’m ugly now.
As though
I don’t know
Exactly what brought them here.
It was pretty eyes.
And a smile that’s wise.
But…!
I am not a woman that will be owned.
God…
They don’t like when I shun their cages.
Even though they’re the ones that “don’t want to label it.”
So I’m off…
To much safer spaces.
Ones that I’ve created.
A place for us—
That we don’t have to be brave in.
And Lord…
You’ve delivered for what I’ve been praying.
So…
Thank you.
And goodnight.
Amen.
form and function / Stacy Walker
Scientifically,
It seems,
A body functions to support
Its survival,
A self-sustaining machine,
Built to support
Its own needs.
A body requires nourishment,
Completing the necessary tasks
To discover,
Vet,
And ingest.
A body carries
Its organs,
Precious cargo
Supporting its life,
Managing,
Contorting itself,
To protect
Its most vulnerable parts.
A body supports the lives
Of other bodies,
Built to create,
Grow,
Protect,
And nurture.
Spiritually,
The body carries
A soul,
Home to a spirit
Passing through.
A body supports
A spirit’s purpose,
Moving to create
What is meant to be,
Empowering,
Allowing
A spirit
To contribute its gifts
To this earthly realm.
What I’m learning,
Though,
Is the purpose of a body
Is not
To prove something,
Is not
To be used
To do endlessly,
Simply endeavoring
To endlessly
Do more.
In doing for doing’s sake,
In proving,
A body must relinquish
Its purpose,
And repurpose
To become
An ever-evolving thing,
Manipulating itself
To be something else,
To do more,
To look different,
To serve something else.
When a body’s repurposing
From its purpose
Pulls it away
From itself,
It breaks down -
As a body
Does not wish
To manipulate
Itself.
You see,
A body
Does not care
What other bodies
Think of its form.
A body wants to serve
Its purpose,
A function
That matters,
Each body its own,
Knowing it existsAs more than a vehicle for a soul,
And more than a case for organs.
A body’s purpose
Is its own.
December - Poem 8
How Much Breakfast Can Santa Realistically Eat? / Kate Bowers
Artist: Laura Jean McLaughlin, Pittsburgh, PA, 2025, Private Collection
For Tom
There were several Breakfasts With Santa scheduled around town that Saint Nicholas Day back in the aughts. Father arranged for us to be at them all, studying the paper with Mother those final November evenings to pinpoint the schedules then buying blocks of tickets for each event.
We were so young at the time occupied with puzzles and dolls, Tonka Trucks and Legos scattered there on the braided rug under his feet, television cartoons filling our eyes.
What did we know of love?
We quieted, listening closely without looking their way as they murmured, possums we knew how to play while struggling fiercely to decode a hint, a glimmer of what it all meant, how they pointed at the page, mentioning money and times specifically before going back to their spelling game, letters instead of words they didn’t want us to hear just yet.
DECEMBER 6. THE DAY OF DAYS ARRIVED
That morning Father surprised us with the news, and after we had finished tumbling, Mother pressed us into dresses and miniature suits then sent the five of us off walking down to Main Street with Father, who had taken the precaution to staple an itinerary inside each of our coats just in case we happened to stray. He had a lot of faith in the under age 8 crowd to figure it all out.
· Saint Kilian’s 9 to 11a.m.
· Highlands Golf Course 8 to 10 a.m.
· Rotary 7 to 9 a.m
· Kiwanis 7:30 to 9 a.m.
· Cummings Candy Shoppe 8:30 to 10:00 a.m.
That morning, we ate it all while Santa grew plumper and plumper at the head tables with every swallow, never questioning how he somehow managed to stay where we had been as we were leaving and still arrive at the next stop before we walked through the door.
Our Father shepherded us along, hailing other parents in the background of all the clatter wherever we went, many of them yet unaware how their own children had come to be invited for free that year. All of them bursting with delight.
“You can never have too much Santa,” our father told us years later when asked about that day. “And certainly never enough bacon or pancakes for that matter.”
That same afternoon, my 6-year-old Lisa was found holding her 8-year-old brother Jeff in a headlock and shouting “He’s a Christmas spirit!” again and again over her brother’s “No he’s not!” We broke it up, but later I caught my father giving Lisa an extra sweet and a nod.
Santa, she had learned from her Pap, was the most important meal of the day, every day, a long and open invitation to which she heartily subscribed.
I can’t say that I blame her. Though she is little, she is fierce.
And really they’re both absolutely correct. Breakfast With Santa is happening all the time. The world is full of his breakfast, a menu large and inclusive, pancakes everywhere
bubbling up into the mouth from the griddle
warmed purely from the joy of these tendernesses,
these touch points,
the father there, the child, the mother all in three, sealed in magic, a way of being.
All this joy edged in sugared flour and eggs. Who would have thunk it really?
Well, I mean, other than the obvious one of course.
The moon, the tides, and trash tv / Katie Collins
The stars I claim are misaligned.
I know no constellations.
Mercury’s in retrograde
And my first period lasted two weeks straight.
I don’t leave my bed.
In my head, I have 51Minds
All focused on my hairy legs
And ever rising dress size.
The television feeds me well
A diet of distraction.
I’ve outgrown my first real bra
The wires stab my chest
Will Kirby rode in on a meteorite
Free Alba Self Tanner/Easy Pickup in the Infirmary / Ellen Ferguson
You tell students Romanticism responds to Neoclassical/
Realism romping past Romance, yet
You blink false as your lashes, lashing out
Against Swift’s beautiful young nymph, who also came assembly required
Slathering me mind over limbs --
My name, self-tanner, implies you built this house.
You land in the infirmary,
No surprises there.
Like Sir Walter Scott’s wretch, “unwept, unhonored, and unsung,”
I join Hall’s lemon menthols down the hall.
Your tan, fake; your fragrance, last week’s coconut oil:
Rancid, removable, unsunned.
Under the New Moon / Chris Fong Chew
I sat in the stillness pondering
as cars drove by, rattling the blinds
like bells and people laughed
and shouted and stomped in the street.
What remains when the voices disappear?
When the street has turned silent
night, when people no longer walk
the dogs stop their bark
and the moon has risen to its full.
What remains when light has disappeared?
The eve of a new moon, the sky
dimly lit, like a fading bulb
darkening the streets as the lamps
shine so much more against the
black canvas sky.
What happens when a star goes out?
Does anyone notice, the slightly bigger
hole in the sky, where a small glimmer
once existed, now millions of light years
away, a catastrophic event is seen as a small
flash and then a flicker of a bulb burning out.
When all there is left is you, who are you?
When the voices disappear into the dark
night and light no longer illuminates
the street from the sky, when stars
burn out and we are plunged
into our own darkness.
Do you finally see the light?
The Reason for the Season / Davis Hicks
The day after long-cooked meal
the sirens came.
Their shifting silhouettes willing to shapeshift
copy-cat calls of hunger,
growled or whispered, sultry or raged or clever,
whatever would call us to move our eyebrows,
move all of our bodies and all of our not-bodies.
It’s towards the travel-time, twisting out
after digesting the slow-cooked and the well-meant.
Always anticipation,
after hands have held and thanks have been said
I witness their bombardment.
It’d been warned about for days, perhaps weeks,
that annual reminder of the gluttonous
call of so many shock-scalding scally snakes,
who only consume the self,
who only produce waste.
The binge-purge,
what an advent.
It’s on sale, as if cheapness promotes quality,
as if more is ever enough.
Deals, I fear, are always with the devil.
Burnt Rice Tea / Victor Barnuevo Velasco
In Grandmother’s house, every accident is a gift. Another child is another unprayed-for answer. They fill up rooms. They raise their palms to heaven. They leave behind rolled mats and crumpled pillows in corners.
Grandmother counts the children around the table. No one starts their meal when one is missing. When a child burps at the end of dinner she says, Thank you God. Thank you, God, we answer. A skinned knee and a stubbed toe are a break for benediction. Bless the Lord, she says. Bless the Lord, we bow in recognition.
In Grandmother’s house, every mishap is a fortune. A pot left too long on fire scorches the bottom of rice and becomes a present. She scoops out the steaming pearly grains. She keeps the burnt part longer until it is charcoal black. She scrapes and crushes the crust, mashes brown sugar, pours water, and watches it boil in silence. She pours the syrupy liquid in our cups, empty as our stomachs. She tells each child, drink up, you need to walk faster; when you leave, you need to outrun the monsters.
A grain of rice makes its way down my throat. I choke. She slaps my back. I fall forward. She picks me up; the pain of her palm is absent from her eyes. Bless the Lord, she says. My mouth opens but I choke before I can reprise her blessing.
tell me you love me / Jen Wagner
Just tell me you love me already.
I can feel the words on the tip of your tongue.
Every time I kiss you.
They sit on the edge,
Waiting.
Patiently.
To jump.
Let them slide down my throat.
Slow and lovely.
Like warm honey.
Let them nest in my heart.
Burrow in belly.
And make their home in my skin.
Just tell me you love me already.
so I can tell you too.
So we say
Every time we part ways…
“I love you.”
And…
“I love you too.”
What I hope to learn from my eight-year-old / Stacy Walker
A clear no,
A full-body yes,
The inability to fake it,
Absolute adoration
For friends,
Unbridled excitement
At every reunion,
Pure awe at the moon,
The stars,
The ocean,
A roly-poly,
Unfiltered feelings,
Insistence upon comfort,
How to let curiosity free,
Regularly asking,
“Wanna see something cool?”
Long hugs,
Believing it will all work out,
A willingness to ask someone
To be my friend,
The bravery to tell someone
They’ve hurt my feelings,
The ability to take my time,
To take what’s mine.
December - Poem 7
Prayer to St. Frances the Free / Kate Bowers
For Patsy Ann Walsh who always let the House Wrens’ nest in the pipe drain be
Oh dear one, lend me your spectacles,
I need their steel,
The clear eyes behind them
Even better.
Lend me your fine white shirt
Striped with blue, rolled at the wrists,
One size too big and
Fragrant with juniper,
Sun dried
From the line,
Fresh.
Let me inhabit your
Mercy for all things small,
All things secret
A garden requires to thrive.
Keep them clear
As this earth churns
Itself roiling, stripping,
Cracking open against
Its own advice beneath my feet,
Not even a honeybee willing
To fly through these gathering clouds,
Not even a bird of discreet song,
My spade still unflecked
With clay.
Obit / Katie Collins
There's an obituary in my pocket for a woman I never met.
I don't know how it got there.
Her life is three paragraphs long.
Birth, death, and those that survived fill the first and third paragraphs.
But that second paragraph tells me more than everything else combined.
She became a lawyer because she liked fighting people.
She wore her mother's pearls to every case.
She never accepted that anything was over.
I like to think her ghost is still out there
Putting her obituary in the pockets of strangers.
Two Great Barstools. Make Me an Offer. / Ellen Ferguson
Do you say, "After the sun rises, it sets? Or, after the sun sets, it rises?"
It's a half empty/half full question, with time added.
It's the only question.
A person can ask, "How could you have wanted me so much and then not at all?"
But a thing can only wonder.
How, though?
We were sitting on the corner of 45th and Main, both of us great barstools.
You ran home, got your car, ran back — all the while saying something to the dog about
How everything had changed now — that we were exactly what you wanted and needed.
What happened? There's this:
You thought we were what you wanted and needed
We weren't as comfortable as we looked
We weren't as stylish as we appeared
You didn't enjoy us as much as you did in your head
You missed the space we took up.
Yet in saying, "Make me an offer," you acknowledge our value.
Our friend the breastfeeding sign was given away for nothing;
Our buddies the Chobanis were abandoned for free on their last day.
If we have value, why not to you?
We were told people don't change.
If we complete your pathology, don't you need us?
If we enhance your pathology, don't you want us?
If we resemble someone with whom things are unresolved, don't you want them resolved?
That's all we know about love. We're barstools. We know what we've heard around town.
Power Grid / Chris Fong Chew
Do this and you’ll get There / Davis Hicks
Promises echo
as all hollow-hounds howl,
that quiet reply of all that
eventually whisk-whispers itself away.
Volunteered with that false
victim-value of all
dainty things.
Ask in a step-down stairwell,
calling once and again
for another
and another
and another,
each call younger and more valuable
offers of the great
or the strong half-wound
or the valor-value
of something brighter,
flashing to counter-offer even as the first
still rides the ear,
still lives on flickering scroll-screen.
Earn and
Do and
Be that
One more, one more, one more,
as if pick-pocket and picket fence together
could actually
build neighbors
out of one and only one,
that the final and gentle and honest
could be fairly traded,
could be anything above
the stolen.
What Remains / Victor Barnuevo Velasco
Forgive me, brother.
I will not walk
just yet
the streets where
we once ran.
The cemetery
where we hunted
dragonflies must wait.
In the broken tombs,
the bones must spill
farther into the sun.
The grasses must grow
taller than your youngest child,
who knows my name
only as a promise
I cannot make.
As you do
every night before he sleeps.
Forgive me, brother.
The years between us
have become hills,
the hills mountains.
And mountains cannot cross
borders drawn by men.
Do you remember
the fiery flowers of the dapdap
where we hid
until we saw mother crying?
Was the rhythm of her palms
on our hands more painful
than her fear of losing?
Did etching your names
on my chest
promise that I can keep
you both forever?
My shoulder has grown heavy
with your names, brother.
I carry the sack
of unhusked rice we spread
to dry on the cement road.
We arranged each grain
as if sifting sand.
Unquestioning,
as if raking an ocean.
We hoped for bone-white sun
and burning wind.
We ended up hunting
beetles and dragonflies,
as mother hunted us
through the trees.
And the rain
poured everywhere.
Unannounced.
Sometimes I Cry / Jen Wagner
Sometimes I cry
Not often
But when i do it comes it’s like a flood
As though every ounce of liquid in my body is trying to escape and find a home in my pillow.
Sometimes I cry
Not often
But when I do it’s on the floor of the shower so I can’t tell the difference between my tears and the scalding water running down the drain.
Sometimes I cry
Not often
But when I do I prefer to be alone.
Unless it’s your shoulder I can cry on.
Because that’s one place I feel safe to let go.
Sometimes I cry
Not often
But when I do I apologize over and over and over for being a burden and showing my weakness when all I want is to be strong.
Sometimes I cry
Not often
If I’m lucky it’s because I heard a song that that touched a part of me that hasn’t been felt in a long, long time.
Sometimes I cry
Not often
But every once in a while it’s because I am bursting with love that I can no longer contain.
Why tears though?
Sometimes I cry
Thank God it’s not often
But sometimes it’s because I’m filled with such rage that it will eat me alive if I try to contain it.
Sometimes I can’t cry
No matter how much I want to.
No matter how bad it burns in the back of my throat, the release will not come.
And those are the worst times.
When such sadness strangles me and all I want to do is let it go but it chooses to stay with me.
Sent from my iPhone
runneth over/ Stacy Walker
“containing or holding
as much as possible…”
cabinets, pantries,
closets, drawers,
purses, tables,
nightstands, desks,
cupholders, pockets,
countertops, calendars,
it all feels
full.
phone storage,
computer memory,
my memory,
my brain,
notifications flash,
“storage is full.”
“my cup is full,”
or even
“runneth over,”
no longer
sounds like
satisfaction.
all I’m holding
is holding me
hostage,
“…having no empty space,”
too full,
too easy
to spill,
every bit of me
overflowing,
the next
thought
need
feeling
question
moment,
with nowhere
to go.
December - Poem 6
Where does the branch veer? / Kate Bowers
For Kirsten
The last thing to grow on a tree is fruit,
The first dirty thing you will wash before eating,
Discard entirely if worm eaten still alive alive within it or at level just breach breached.
Where does purity dwell or begin,
At front of mouth, back of throat?
The mouth a proscenium?
I have questions about the tongue as serpent, a tie-er of stems,
Seemingly ungovernable yet clearly demarcated,
Its teeth a cage, snapping, a whale at sluice
Its edge unconscious, locked in motion
Opening to the tongue only for air?
food? gossip?
the stride?
The stutter, the pace, the brevity of the area. . .
“Of the fruit of thy body . . .” (Psalm and Psalm again 132:11-12
I once read in The New Yorker
— do not ask me when or where, nor the title, I’ve forgotten it all—
of New York City’s vast underground network of gates and tubes, tunnels almost,
Meant only to be traveled by wastewater out to sea,
Hundreds of miles according to the Sandhogs unfurling them under the bedrock,
How when they stepped away, a group of young boys ignored the yellow caution signs,
the orange cones, the peligro,
Daring each other, laughing, until the taunts moved aside the manhole cover,
one youth sliding in, down
Not even a whoosh or echo,
Not even a splash.
Not even a decent school picture yet
To keep in a drawer.
Merriam Webster:
Middle English purete, from Anglo-French purité, from Late Latin puritat-, puritas, from Latin purus pure
First Known Use
13th century, in the meaning defined at SENSE
Noun and Verb
Middle English, from Anglo-French or Latin; Anglo-French sen, sens sensation, feeling, mechanism of perception, meaning, from Latin sensus, from sentire to perceive, feel; perhaps akin to Old High German sinnan to go, strive, Old English sith journey — more at SEND
First Known Use
Noun
14th century, in the meaning defined at SENSE 1
Verb
1598, in the meaning defined at SENSE 1b
Where does the soul take hold of the body? Where release?
Saturation
The first known use of saturation was circa 1530
Trees Used to Grow Here / Katie Collins
Trees used to grow in this field of ash
But the farmer found their fruit bitter
It was funny
The farmer had seen the strong, healthy trees
and climbed right up to pick the fruit green
The whole grove went ablaze last Tuesday
He plans to start again
But he'll never quite rid himself of the bitter taste
Of unripened fruit
From a tree too young to bear much of anything
I knew the tree and the farmer
I snuck onto his land one night and painted the side of his barn
Trees once lived here
No one else will ever know what it means
But he knows
I hear her sometimes
The way the wind used to rustle through her branches just so
I know it couldn't be her
But I like to think a seed or two survived the fire
Carried by a bird into safer soil far from hungry eyes
6 Chobani blueberry yogurts in the conference room fridge that expire today / Ellen Ferguson
Oh Chobani
You are made in upstate New York
Near one of the state universities.
I felt so close to you
When I set you free
That's sweet of you to say
But we all know it wasn't like that
You love the dairy farm
Or love to say you do
When you left me in the conference room fridge
On my last day
It wasn't a gesture of goodwill
It wasn't anything --
Just an afterthought
Put out to pasture
Like cows you never really loved
But said you did.
Waterways / Chris Fong Chew
- For Ludovico
ribbons of water flow
through the creek slowly
meandering its way around
little waves slowly
eroding at the sediment
one piece after the other
pebble after pebble
sand after sand
debris after debris
a new pathway
is forming in the earth
connecting previously
disconnected bodies
of water that feed
the creek, keeping it
running as the creek
becomes river becomes
delta becomes
sea becomes
ocean / planet
galaxy / universe
dive into a sea of stars
fall asleep to the crashing
of waves as they lap
the shore gently
meandering its way
and sand by sand
pebble by pebble
debris by debris
a new pathway is created
to previously unknown land.
AmTrak’s train stole my voice / Davis Hicks
Not on purpose,
I think.
His is going where he is going,
being what he is being
and has been since before I was.
I just didn’t double-check the compartment,
left behind in the break meant
for stretching legs and
dragging cigarettes.
I don’t smoke,
but I prefer the deep cool breath
touched with the exhales of trees,
backed by the humble-hush of settling metal.
This concrete platform-perch
is the dunes just before
that evergreen ocean.
There is no beaten path to wander towards,
no feel-good pathway towards Walden’s Pond.
But this is the pre-aligned track towards pre-determined
comings and goings,
pre-assigned seating and all.
It is as close as I come
to Chris McCandless’ bus.
I have traveled alone today,
and only while taking that
evergreen wildbreath
did I hope to remember
what I left,
tucked under felt seats
and unfeeling stranger's feet,
and know what is only real
in the sharing.
Father of Mercy / Victor Barnuevo Velasco
I asked Father how he decided on my name.
Take these men, he said, thrusting at me
Charles Martel, Don Juan of Austria,
William Longsword. Lawrence of Arabia.
All bastard sons named by their fathers.
As I was. Because he was hardly present,
I was fathered by words. They took the shape
of men. Their thighs were thick like warriors,
their arms like kings. At night, their hands
combed my hair. I was blessed by saints.
I hugged their loneliness like my own.
In the morning, I am shamed by their pain.
Their mercy was my swords and axes.
Who held their hands when they cried?
Father snapped, You missed the point.
In order to love, they had to be alone.
To live, they had to sever throats and limbs.
They destroyed, he said, so you would earn my name.
Begin again / Jen Wagner
Your actions speak louder than your words.
And though it’s not what I wanted to hear
It is what I needed to heal.
words wielded as weapons in self defense
Of a self image
Another lie you hide behind
We calll it the “good guy”
Calm and sweet on the outside
And we lick and lick until the center is found
Sour and selfish
And tightly wound.
A silver tongued devil
A wolf in sheep’s clothing
Peace and love you say.
but the world ceases to exist
Three inches from your face.
And as long as I stayed close
You would not forget me
And so I clawed and crawled
My way to your approval.
Begging for you to see me
To love me.
To tell me I’m pretty.
But you would never.
God forbid the power tip to my favor.
So instead you entertain others
Because my ego stroking would never suffice
It was too easy
And I was too needy
For want of your time and affection was sleazy
A turn off as it turns out
To have love freely given
By a woman committed
And the weight of that love was suffocating
So I hid it.
And still you ran.
More like a boy than a man.
The rhetoric ridiculous
Unbelievable at best
More likely lies that weighed on your chest
Too heavy to forgive
So you find someone else to begin again.
Gold Star / Stacy Walker
I’ve spent my life chasing
The next accolade
Or accomplishment
That would prove
I had something
To offer.
If I was offered
A gold star
To go above
And beyond
Any reasonable expectation
And achieve
The impossible,
I would jump at the chance
To earn two.
Now, I wonder
If anyone is giving gold stars
For taking the coziest nap,
Or giving the longest,
Tightest hug,
Refusing to be the first
To let go.
I’d wear a gold star
On my t-shirt,
Like my heart
On my sleeve,
For feeling
My feelings,
And another
For voicing them.
I’d take the biggest
Gold sticker
Next to the bright
Red rejection stamp
On a piece of work
I love,
Just for trying.
I think I’ll find
A tiny gold star
And give it to
My heart,
For loving me
Through
The pain,
And into the healing.
December - Poem 5
Giant Amateur Baby Born at Ketone Safari/ Kate Bowers
Imagine the world outside your lens,
The many ways of going and doing
Beyond the ant farm and how it would be
For them if the glass were to crack,
The sand filled with thoraxes and abdomens, siphoning out softly
In studious measure onto the Persian-fringed floor,
Wisping and with a low whistle akin
To a long sigh from a debutante confined
To a library there looking out on a rain-filled day
As she lies couched, her broken ankle un-danceable, propped
And laced with comfort in the plush throw across her legs,
Partial visions of cushions behind her back low to the rib cage
Bolstering those exhales, each more superlative than the last,
A discarded newspaper spilling down her lap along with a printed
Screenshot of a Web search she had run earlier and had held now
For some time this afternoon, many hours really,
One lens cracked in two across the spectacles
She dangles from her left hand while peering
Over her right shoulder away from the shot, dodging integration
Between the drips, the drabs, the sighs on the window
Into the space where the love of things turns pro
Abdomens and thoraxes continue to march, now across the cracked spectacles
Up her last finger on her left hand then onto her wrist,
Her caramel scent drawing them nearer and near,
Her breath almost a trace,
The smallest sound the wind makes for the ear chimes suddenly hard through her lips:
“If you have a baby, you won’t be the baby anymore.
Breath Control / Katie Collins
When I was a baby, I’d scream like a banshee whenever a stranger would hold me
Good instincts, strong lungs.
Unfortunately, it made the world difficult for my mother.
She tried as best she could to contain my cry, to soothe my sorrows, but even her motherly powers had limits.
The limits were stringed peas, diaper changes, and someone new.
As I grew up, the crying didn’t change much.
If something became too much for me to handle, I would wail wildly.
My mother was no longer always with me. Now, I had to handle my crying alone.
Heads turned, I tried to will away my sobs and their attention, but I didn’t know how.
As an adult, I took voice lessons.
I learned my posture sucks and breath control is a wonderful way to pull your body into focus.
Because if I’m focusing my mind and my breath on sustaining a song, there’ll be none left to screech with.
As an adult, I finally mastered the art of not crying.
I’m not sure if it’s helped me.
Free Cheese Grater, Never Used, See Photo / Ellen Ferguson
Not baby shoes never worn, and yet –
Untouched
Waiting expectantly
Another day passes, night rides a warm pizza
Rumors fly/ this time no doubt…
But no.
Children devour Ratatouille for a birthday,
whiskers, crumbs,
lights flicker
I soar from my shelf, but no.
This time, my family says, they will show their love by letting me go.
Large rocks of Parmesan call me to my window.
Storyline / Chris Fong Chew
Here the sentence is created.
Subject, object and verb connected
by punctuation and infinitives.
Here words are beginnings.
/
Here the sentence is respected
followed, understood, listened.
Here the words hold power.
\
Here the sentence is interpreted
studied, analyzed, read.
Here words contain action.
/
Here the sentence is trusted
believed, loved, and known.
Here words maintain integrity.
\
Here the sentence lies
deceives, and misleads.
Here words are weapons.
/
Here the sentence destroys
demolishes and deconstructs.
Here words turn violent.
\
Here the sentence is misread
distorted, twisted, contorted
Here words become corrupt.
/
Here the sentence is destroyed
Subject, object and verb disconnected
by punctuation and infinitives.
Here, words are an end.
Unemployment is being both the wall-painter and watching it dry / Davis Hicks
There’s no shame in it,
in the waiting.
At least, that’s what I tell my rap-tapping foot,
what I whisper to wilting jitter-jabber muscles
each mumbling back to
get out
Get Out
GET OUT
to vanish as the blooms do,
one pedal at a time.
My fingers ever fight for focus, one over the other,
ongoing struggle for my right even as my left attempts the work it's been given.
They fiddle-fumble with whatever they find,
coins and pens and the rest of us forgotten things.
Their grumble-rumble is echoing back
try it again
Try It Again
TRY IT AGAIN
every single syllable a desperation
about the desecrated truth of stolen time.
They argue with my eyes,
which claim one after another
just stop
Just Stop
JUST STOP
and wish I’d build the den of bears,
would curl into myself and let them
study dreams,
to grasp at reigns for fairy foals
and ride the rings of Saturn.
Even as the body tells stories the soul knows
all too well, tales etched in skin and memory,
in synapse and essence,
I must put it aside.
I must tear physicality asunder,
as the salmon do,
and dare to swim upstream.
My mother, sitting / Victor Barnuevo Velasco
next to boxes,
in a photograph,
smiling at an emptiness
in front of her
that was me.
She seemed happy.
I would have delivered
the boxes myself
but the oceans between us
had expanded.
She, among children
she could not leave.
I, filling up rooms
with their photographs.
I would have opened
the packages myself
and told her how the flour
would make better bread,
that the bedsheets
were for her alone,
and the vitamins
were for her bones.
But I could not remember
if I packed flour or pots
or pillowcases or hair dye.
Each box I sent, I left to her
to decide what to keep.
Each time she asked,
I forgot to write down
the happiness to ship.
Heavenly Bodies / Jen Wagner
Hold my hand.
Let me carry your sword for you as I walk you home.
Tell me…what makes you most afraid?
Tell me everything.
Empty your woes into me.
Let me gaze longingly at you.
As I imagine forever.
Let me hear the sound of your steps.
The way your breath quickens
As we walk.
Side by side.
I want to watch your cheeks turn pink from the sun.
And then I want to kiss you there.
Let the mark of my lips remain.
Red.
And stained.
To let the sun know that you belong to me.
I will not share my love.
Even with heavenly bodies.
Side Effects May Include Quitting Your Job / Stacy Walker
Lexapro was the beginning
Of the end
For my job.
Once afraid,
Clinging to approval
And peace,
That hunger
To please
Now sated by sanity,
No longer starving
For safety.
The desire to comply,
Obey;
Disassociating
To survive,
Now replaced
By a mind
That knows.
Trusts
Itself,
Won’t sacrifice
Itself
For a false sense
Of security.
December - Poem 4
Drinking Microplastics in the Space Age Tabular/ Kate Bowers
Your Voice / Katie Collins
Your voice reverberates around the room.
I haven't heard it in a while.
Your ever running mouth was the soundtrack of my youth.
I never thought I'd miss it.
Six months ago, I called your phone.
You didn't answer.
I didn't really expect you to.
But I called anyway.
Then I heard your voice on the answering machine.
I cried in a way you'd tell me not to.
If you could tell me anything.
And now you can tell me things.
A few, select things.
Names, places, curse words.
Progress is slow, but it feeds the hope we need to keep going.
Free Small Bluey House: It’s smaller than a cereal box for reference. No characters, but some furniture. Picture attached. Let me know if you’re interested - pickup on campus. / Ellen Ferguson
When you were young
You played with a dollhouse made of metal that resembled your house.
When you were old,
You parked a dollhouse made of wood on the windowsill in your classroom.
But me? Me, you jettison?
Is it the plastic?
I couldn’t help but notice you stopped coloring your hair.
You also do that weird thing where you buy nothing. Narcissistic tendencies: you think you matter.
Why don’t I?
Some things are made of plastic – we last, you know, your plastic enemies.
Like cockroaches carpeting the earth, we’re not going anywhere.
Origin Story / Chris Fong Chew
Our drying houses are dying / Davis Hicks
Cedar-siding, that’s kind to the eye
and gentle to the hand,
not clapboard but gabled,
unpainted and untainted,
the ones who remove from the rain.
Who hold with two-story frame,
even to protect the cancer-carrier.
The deep green of July had aged them,
broad, fleshy leaves crowned as days grow shorter,
dancing to the flue-cured flute.
Sides-shuttered,
Hewn timber is the signature
of our tobacco belts.
Golden leaf left as laurels,
drying in the handful of barns
still willing
to altar.
My brother, the collector / Victor Barnuevo Velasco
My brother, the collector.
Of bottles he emptied.
Of shoes he wore out.
Of old shirts he folded
but would not wear again.
Of letters he drafted
but would never send.
Of feelings he filed away
but could not name.
Of scraps he swept
when the dinner was done.
Of stares he kept
when everyone was gone.
Shadow Dancing / Jen Wagner
Rambling voice messages
for hours on end.
Heard.
But never seen.
It’s OK by me.
May the reputation of the intensity of my being
Always precede me.
Dim lighting
where darkened thoughts
finally come to play.
Our shadows
Dancing.
Gripping
With bloody fists
So the night may never escape.
Don’t fall in love with my face.
She will deceive you.
The shape shifter that she is.
Instead—
Dance with my shadow,
Until the morning sun chases them away.
Put me to bed in hopes we can dance again,
Some other day.
Just Go / Stacy Walker
I am envisioning
A quest
Towards freedom,
An adventure
Where I’m willing
To take a chance
On me;
A journey
Beyond seeking,
Further
Than discovery,
Where my path
Takes me
On a pilgrimage
To the abundance
Inside me.
December - Poem 3
3 Seconds Flat / Kate Bowers
For Mae and Lane
Here I am reading Moby Dick again in all my privilege, knowing all the things I know that Ahab did not:
· You can only hold a basketball for 3 seconds once you step inside the key before taking a shot
· Ferrari’s Spider 488 takes you from 0 to 62 in 3 seconds flat—dead on
· Flat has been used as an adverb since the sixteenth century to indicate precision, as in a watch’s second hand flat against the 12
· Batman’s 3 Seconds Bat Vault Combination Unscrambler was much envied by Commissioner Gordon and most 8-year-olds across the U.S., particularly from 1966-1968
Of course, Ahab knew plenty of things I do not:
· How to read the stars using astronomical tables and a sextant to find their latitude
· How to grant no latitude to staff and make them think that it was their own idea to abandon logic
· Dead Reckoning means using an hourglass and observing the speed of random objects floating past you to determine where you are. This may or may not include acknowledging without qualm that people can be objectified and serve as floatation devices when necessary.
· Hands of a Compass technically are needed not in order to sail through a typhoon and stay on course.
· A life of purpose can consist of impurely pure concentration on prioritizing a singular personal hurt and seeking to assuage this by obliterating all around oneself — including oneself
As you may have noted, precision was the least of Ahab’s worries, but that 0 to 62 thing? So him.
· His take on these matters will hold particular and lifelong power over men who are not sailors per se but know of the sea, women too, same.
· Because it will be retold and told again by a poet of great gifts talking to God from a place where he still trembled.
I think these things while:
· dressing carefully for my day,
· winding my hair up with a scarlet ribbon after perfuming it,
· smoothing Bulgarian rose balm across my skin,
· feeling my cats still unwatered and unfed,
· hearing the clock tick for many seconds, minutes really, over a tower of several days mail unopened shivering to fall.
Daily Agenda / Katie Collins
7:30 AM-Wake Up. Get Ready. Try not to give in to bed rot. Wash your hair. Shave your legs. Don't forget your deodorant.
8:30 AM-Leave for work. On a good day, you'll be ten minutes early. On a bad day, you'll be five minutes late.
9:00 AM-Start work. Do what needs doing and then find a way to keep your inner world alive while you do it.
12:00 PM-Eat Lunch. Try not to feel guilty for the time you take to eat. Try not to count the calories. If you have your headphones, avoid thinking entirely. It sets a dangerous precedent.
5:00 PM-Leave work. Think about stopping at the cute little shop, but don't let yourself give in to the fantasy.
5:30 PM-Get home. Make dinner. Eat.
6:30 PM-Rest. Read, relax, do anything that makes you feel alive. As long as it's not too tiring.
7:30 PM-Clean your house. Wash the dishes, scrub the toilet, fold the towels. Whatever needs doing.
8:30 PM-Call your mother. Your father. Your brother. Your friend Molly. You ex-coworker to find out what exactly happened because you saw the slack notifications and now you need to know what you missed. Don't let yourself be cut off from community. You need people.
9:30 PM-Exercise. 10,000 steps a day. 1,000 steps a day. 100 steps. Just as long you -look good- feel good.
10:30 PM-Write. Anything you can. 10,000 words. 5,000 words. 100 words. Five words. Anything to not lose what you love. Even if there's less and less space for it.
11:30 PM-Lay down. Try to stay off your phone. Try to sleep. Hope you've done enough.
“I’m flawless” multi-use perfecting concealer – Shade 2.5 “Woke Up Like This” Flawless Foundation – Shade 35 / Ellen Ferguson
Over the years, I remained flawless: woke up like this, I guess.
Yet your excitement waned.
It’s to be expected. What once thrilled, fades.
Remember when we met?
Lingering in the shade between 2 and 3.
Resisting decision. Two? Three? Shade 2.5 your dream, or so it seemed.
Your dream at the time.
Dreams change.
When once you thought you wanted to wake up flawless, shade 35, wake up like this,
It turned out you cared more about nightfall.
When once you thought those back stairs, the ones up from the pantry,
Led to years of multi-use perfecting, you changed:
You wanted something new. Perfect in my shell, flawless in my shine, you wanted to order again.
Not a purchase, but a rental. Flawless, forgotten, forlorn.
Haibun in the shadows / Chris Fong Chew
The color drained from the city as night fell on the empty street. I watched as reds and oranges, yellows, and greens slowly turned into shades of grey, black, and white. I walked between the lampposts watching my shadow move, forward and back, forward and back, the distance from each streetlight moving my shadow forward and back. Every so often I would peer over my shoulder watching out for a second shadow, the unexpected shadow, the dangerous shadow. The one that would be swooping in for the kill. I watched the bushes, listened for any movement, the slightest rustle. The occasional car would come by, headlights blinding, elongating my shadow from a few feet to a few meters long. How malleable light is. This street has become a film noir, harsh overhead light, dim black, white, and grey. As the rain poured, I could not shake the feeling that something, someone, was waiting somewhere.
the clock ticks forward
as the shadows move on back
light plays tricks on me
Rain loves napping on my glasses / Davis Hicks
There are no bundles of clouds,
only the quilt-wash of blue-gray haze,
blessing us with the wet-sweet and the cool-crisp.
It does not quill-cut,
only pat,
dappling all available, all present.
There are shower-shimmers,
stars twinkling on my lenses,
out of focus reminders
of the still-falling sky.
I could shake it off, as the dogs do,
but it is not such
unpleasant company. Water is soft,
if only in the landing.
The grasses are dried,
as colorless as they are waterless,
ready for the spice cabinet in all
but the grinding to dust.
The rain, ever chivalrous, undoes such shriveling.
Offering instead that gentle circling comfort,
a hand on the back of so many days
never meant to be tearless.
But they pass either way, and jitter invites me inside.
I hear them play their gentle drummings, fingers fiddling across arched roofs.
They sing their strike-song in step-stutter,
dancing the dance of distance, muffled yet fluttering,
and chair becomes throne-nest, becomes where they hold their chorus-court.
Eyelids become curtains, and I know there is
such a thing as sleep.
A Vesper for Rosalio / Victor Barnuevo Velasco
Here is the body of Rosalio.
Bless his hairless crown,
his hollowed eyes, the nails
he splintered, the teeth
he ground. Bless his bones —
snapped like twigs.
Bless his skin —
worn to paper.
Here is grandfather. Bless
his veins that no longer carried
the rivers he crossed. Bless
his lungs that no longer fueled
the fields he burned. Bless
his heart that no longer
swore and cursed.
Bless his hands that could
never stitch the wounds
of work. Bless his mouth
that could not describe
what was true. Or what
was loved. Bless his muteness.
His rigidity. Bless what he
had done and what he
had failed to do. Bless
what was lost
and what remained. Bless
everything one day no one
would remember.
Bless his name.
Sisyphus in a Traffic Jam / Jen Wagner
The modern man,
Is Sisyphus in a traffic jam.
Waiting,
In neat lines,
For the light to turn green.
They no longer flinch at the sunrise.
That blind (unprotected) eyes.
Their lives are
Wash.
Rinse.
Repeat.
The modern man,
Is Sisyphus with a life that’s a sham.
Working,
In unending loops.
For the white picket fences
and two and a half kids.
(How does one have a half child?)
Every Friday is
Pizza.
Beer.
Sexless.
The modern man,
Is Sisyphus with golden cuffs around his hands.
“Good job.”
They tell him.
For achieving the things they told you, you wanted.
Only to wonder.
Did you
Ever
even
Actually
Want them?
The modern man,
Is Sisyphus running the same race the rats can.
Empty hearts and dirty hands.
It’s time to turn that truck around.
Find another way around.
Before it’s too late…
Take.
A.
Stand.
Buzzy / Stacy Walker
Between a question
And an answer,
I wonder
How many options
Exist.
In that pause
Between the two,
I feel a need,
A desperation
For what’s next.
A buzzy feeling inside
Tells me to hurry,
I fill the moments
With a scurrying body
And brain.
Tormented
With the waiting,
I squirm
Through the space
Of the unknown.
But maybe,
An answer isn’t the goal,
In waiting,
The question becomes
Another,
And the stillness
Can tell a story.
December - Poem 2
The Soul Cannot Be Loved For Its Labor / Kate Bowers
for Moriah Cohen
Tough news for Miss Universe contestants, for sure, in the midst of all the gym time they’ve been logging. But there it is in Ecclesiastes. 6:7. Black and white. Et al. concur:
“All labor is for the mouth.”
Really? The one place that causes most if not all the world’s trouble?
I’d like to talk without speaking, without words or even consonants or syllables for awhile. May I fashion you a sigil in the shape of a heart? Draw you a tree? Perhaps place a newborn beetroot of sizable girth on your work desk as a greeting, moist soil still clinging here and there to the bulb, topped with greens as high as a fan dancer’s headdress in those old films about Vegas?
I once met a man at a May Market who sold tomatoes of every size, all types underneath a small tent on the edge of the field. He called out to me thoughtfully, feeling my eyes on the leaf heads stirring with the tiny whispering sound of the wind that day.
“What are you looking for in the way of the tomato?” he asked.
Shyly, I demurred. He paused then turned placing before me a 4-inch-thick binder filled with photos of various tomatoes. Underneath each photo was a full writeup—the genus, growing conditions, best cooking and eating combinations, and daily care.
They were laminated and three-hole punched. They were stoned. Immaculate.
“Pick out a few that you like,” he said then turned to wait on another customer.
I tagged my choices, and when he returned, he brought his wife and mid-40ish son along to advise. Now all four of us were locked onto the binder as they so carefully and courteously debated in great detail what other species I might need, offered up recipes, shared their pedigrees as growers, pointing to specific pages along the way.
Honestly, I think they forgot about me for awhile as the discussion deepened. Somehow four elegant plants were chosen, carefully wrapped in brown-handled bags with tissue and ribbon and a card and handed to me. Turns out, this man had grown tomatoes for a nationally recognized Italian food company for thirty years—DeLallo’s if you must know—and had just retired.
“Now,” he said as he let go of the bags into my hands, “I can do what I really love—grow tomatoes at home and share them with people.”
He used his mouth when he said that, all the syllables and letters. And he looked into me eye-to-eye as he let go, welcoming me onto the vine and said “Just don’t forget to take care to water them now. Plants grow their best for you when they know you love them.”
This proved later to be true, each summer salad more glorious than the last.
Ring Ring / Katie Collins
Three calls in five minutes. You haven't changed much.
I remember hundred hour weeks and panic attacks.
But that's not my life anymore.
You're not my life anymore.
I guess I can understand how you got this way.
When everything you've ever wanted was at your fingertips,
it can be hard to learn to wait.
But why would you expect me to need a moment?
When I took a moment for court,
you called, emailed, and somehow lost the DVD's power cord.
When I took a moment because my father was in the hospital,
you called, texted, emailed, and broke down.
Eleven months ago, you let me go.
For one month after, there wasn't a day when someone didn't mention you.
Then it was twice a week.
Then once a week.
Usually, the people reaching out are tangentially related.
They ask me because, when they think of you, they think of me.
So I redirect. Politely. Delicately.
Pretending it doesn't bother me.
When they think of me, they think of you.
That's why I still get calls.
But you don't get to be one of them.
Not anymore.
Three calls in five months. You haven't changed much.
I remember hundred hour weeks and panic attacks.
But that's not my life anymore.
You're not my life anymore.
I let it ring.
2 boxes of Bustelo coffee pods. Pickup in the finance office. / Ellen Ferguson
In 1922, Eddie Cantor first performed “Yes, we have no bananas”
In the play Make it Snappy
on Broadway
Like Eddie you skipped over where I waited
In Aisle 9
Turning to Max from HR to say,
“I found it!”
You found me,
Just the thing to make it snappy,
Down the long hall to Finance,
you thought.
Eddie Cantor laughed about the things we lacked
Like you, hoping to offer espresso not bonuses
Pretty little cups lined by the wall, not checks;
Oh Denise from Finance, the dreams we had.
Waiting like in Aisle 9 for the big checkout:
You told James, from Payroll, that you’d only give it until Christmas, otherwise –
Under the radiator, a pack of pink slips reaches deep like cats climbing walls for heat.
(re)written / Chris Fong Chew
in the building / words / were being / traded / shaped / written / (re)written /
morphed / molded / shaped / (un)shaped / collected / trashed / mangled /
(de)stroyed / (de)constructed / (his)story / (her)story / cursory / glances /
broken / bits / words / (re)worded / (re)written / in the building / called /
archive / (arc)hive / story / (be)came / history / be(came) / national /
narrative / (found)ing / (found)ation / nation / building / patriots / in the /
building / history / was / (is) / be(ing) / re(written) / and I / written (out) /
Meeting in the Middle of the Water Moon / Davis Hicks
I see you, as few do,
sitting on top of a lamppost,
that light-leaker.
You are the only embellishment
the new ones could dare to hold,
the single belief slipped into the drawers
of hotel side tables.
I’d looked up for stars,
and there you are.
Looking up, where silhouette and solar flare
cascade,
you are their meeting place.
I can almost imagine our meeting place,
somewhere atop the benches and other
park placements.
But this is not a park,
and we are not known.
You have your water bottle,
the dented one with all the stickers,
those external tattoos ostomy-bagged
wherever you could find the room
for unresting eyes.
I should use mine- they’re shoved into journals,
unattached like so many unstamped passports.
Yours still makes its way to work,
carrying your soul-scratches across its side
despite the coating starting to peel;
the beginning of many unbecomings.
It hangs loose from fiddling fingers,
clacking their canon-call.
I can almost imagine climbing up,
seated next to you on our private-public lantern,
sharing sips under snipe sky.
I wonder what you hold in there,
the place that carries the cold,
double-walled like so many souls.
Squinting eyes cannot stay studying,
and I find the lamppost’s unsteady base.
There’s a climbable truth, somewhere.
I wipe my hands on jeans already fraying at the seams,
and wonder when I did forget myself.
No, I would not make it.
But would you save a sip for me?
Your throne is tall but my throat’s dry.
So please, even if to my coward’s cry,
tip your finger as Adam at creation.
Let gravity give.
Look with what lives purer than pupils
and see. See,
and save,
save,
save some for me.
Pilar, before the altar / Victor Barnuevo Velasco
On her knees, her fingers travel the rosary.
She implores her saints before the dawn breaks.
Before the dark recedes inside the strangler fig.
On each bead she pauses to name a child.
The eldest daughter who will be married
to a stranger. To preserve the honor of her father.
The youngest who will marry a man she loves.
And lose him again and again. The son who
will outlive his wife and all his children.
The daughter who will never be called by her name.
All these will be years later. Right here, right now,
her children are lined up on a mat. They glow
in the candlelight. Tucked in blankets by her faith
and fears, safely, as though there is no difference.
Finish What We Start / Jen Wagner
The day won’t end without me telling you I love you.
Because falling in love truly is my absolute
favorite
thing to do.
And I have been waiting for more than half of my life
For the reason that I’ve fallen in love…
To be you.
And now here we are.
Finally.
Face to face.
Grown.
And changed.
But so much remains the same.
I know that smile.
I’ve heard that laugh.
And I know it belongs to you.
I’ve felt those lips
Against my own.
Warm.
And Soft.
And True.
If I were half as smart
As I usually think I am,
I would let you go.
Walk away.
And never once look back.
But not tonight.
Because the voices inside are constantly talking back.
“Do not leave him.
Not again.
Or this time will be your last.”
So the voice inside that I choose to heed
Is coming from my heart.
Telling me to pull you closer
So we may never part.
But the voice in my head keeps saying to me…
“Girl this isn’t smart”
But The memories flood.
And I come undone
This time.
We finish what we start.
when is it grief / Stacy Walker
When the muscles below my eyes
Give out,
Give way
To the heaviness
Of the tears,
All gathered there,
Pulling me down,
Slowing me down,
Waiting for release.
When the ache in my chest
Tightens,
A grip on my heart,
Not ready
To let go,
Holding on,
Wishing, wanting
One more moment.
When my body,
Carries tons,
Like dragging sandbags
Behind me,
Slow, the only option,
Weighed down,
They keep me
From floating away.
December - Poem 1
First Used In Print / Kate Bowers
For Rajh
Spoken before yes, that prior time
Dark, medieval, true
In 1565 now early and modern, printed
This word gratitude.
Silent, felt in the body
Of the little cat, calicoed, precise
Living under the Chinese restaurant wall,
Not welcome, much sought,
Coming forward taking plump, hot shrimp
From my cardboard, moaning
At the pleasure of it sliding into,
Expanding the belly, her eyes half closed.
Abracadabra, “I create as I speak,”
From the Hebrew, the Aramaic, appears
On the page this same year
455 annums ahead of another plague,
Toxic with separation
Felt in the heart. Queensland dolphins
Adrift without visitors
Carried by mouth that year
Corrals and sea sponges, shells,
Barnacle covered bottles
All to shore, gifts lining a path,
A threshold silent to play
Thanking humans vanished.
Unbounded comes out of the air
Onto the page in 1565, soaring,
Feathered with possible, flying
Still a risk, saying spontaneous what you feel
Grace from gratis, gratia,
The Latin you say before a meal,
Prints itself in 1596,
The body, the heart
Practice this way, learning the brain
Down through repeatedly
The word gratitude into action
Generosity appearing as text in 1566,
Reflexive, raising its head amid daily clouds
Of sound thank you’s echoing
like an Angelus bell across fields.
A Pushmi-pullyu, so coined in 1920,
not one without the other.
*Merriam-Webster
Unraveled: / Katie Collins
I pulled a thread in my dress and my hem came undone.
I wish that was the worst of it.
I could explain a hem that unfolds to a raw edge away with a self deprecating joke and a smile.
But the thread kept going.
The more I pulled, the more unraveled I became.
My dress, once a woven fabric cut and sewn into elaborate shapes to cover my body was now a pile of threads on the floor.
I had destroyed it entirely, but the thread was still there, now coming from my very body.
Something in me had to keep pulling.
So I pulled.
I pulled out my hair from legs to eyelash.
I pulled off my skin from the chapped sections of my thin lips to to mole on my right elbow to the soft tissue at the core of my epidermis.
I was tearing myself apart more and more with every pull, but the thread was still there and I had to get to the end of it.
Not long after my blood and muscles lost their casing, they too are pulled into a spool of thread.
I have successfully stripped myself of every quaff and every calorie, but there is still more left to unwind.
I pull and pull until my heart unravels.
My mind is left surrounded by ill-used string.
I've never left well enough alone.
1. Pumping/breast feeding door sign up for grabs: double-sided (see pics). / Ellen Ferguson
Of all the feel ings of all the th ings
Given away on Swapcandy, all feelings of things in parts, in boxes
You are challenged to a duel over me, sign of the breast of times:
You’ve never been food, have you?
You’ve never been cans clinked for cats coming running, leaving
perches under porches -- you’ve never been better than rafters of carcasses.
You’ve never been plates perched midair, spiraling fanfare napkin, woman gasping, man heart in hand,
Will you marry me?
Go ahead, clamor for marathon adrenaline, cvs oxy, sure --
Decant your spirts with abandon, knowing this:
I was the sign
of woman as food,
sacred
exchange in which a woman behind a closed door (that I signified)
transformed
into a meal
for worshipful devouring learning in that moment to crave nothing ever again:
Not his touch, her companionship, their accolades, cash for trade:
only to descend again: brain into breast into mouth.
A Winter Elegy / Chris Fong Chew
The first track of December yields
back time, as flurries are
spinning through turbulent air.
Shaking leaves, trees threadbare,
a chill runs down your spine.
Somewhere, a family huddles
for warmth in an empty room.
Warmed by promises unfulfilled
in their collective hope and misery.
Across the way, a furnace
devours coal for flames, black
smoke rises from the chimney
as a child decorates a tree.
A lady says, “merry christmas”
you reply, “happy holidays.”
You have learned to read
into words too much.
The winter cold brings a darkened hope
as death renews, restores, and reshapes
the space of the living.
Time is slowed, frozen as ice crystals
form on the windowsill and you question
when the cold will stop, pouring in.
Near the edge of the woods I remember to look up / Davis Hicks
As I step aboard crunch-frost
clouds form as exhales,
and the chill makes me dragon.
Cold, that distant angel,
invites every cell to participate,
calls every hair to attention.
Hollow echo is the morning church bell, all cracking.
Sound-swallows seize my senses.
Invasive, even as worship.
The birds, in their drifting density-storm
silhouette the staggered sky.
Those common grackles spackle-sparrow the air,
their bodies building, becoming arrows
in their rapid false-falling flight.
I wish to know their names,
if only as a fae does.
Remedios, in the garden / Victor Velasco
At midnight, the crape myrtle vanished
with the fireflies that burned its branches.
The night was shattered but far from over.
In her bedroom, mother wound silence
around her waist. She slipped grief
under the pillow and dreamt of father,
who she had not seen in decades. In daylight
the myrtle flowers fell, staining the gravel.
A frog lay on its back, stunned by the sun.
In the backyard, mother stripped the hibiscus
and wrenched the ixoras she tended with care.
She dug up a box she buried before I was born.
She handed me the secrets she feared
for twenty-two years. I received her losses:
a photograph of a man, his letter, money
bundled in a rubber band. She begged that
I pack them for my journey. It was a good day
to learn how to box up what remains.
Had a black-naped oriole appeared, that, too,
would have been a loss. Its yellow in the golden
bamboo, burning like her shadow.
The missing bird, the box, my mother in her garden--
I have visited this scene a hundred times.
Each time, she said it never happened.
No Cheating / Jen Wagner
The story prompt asked for the last photo I took of the sky.
“No cheating.”
It says.
(Politely)
But what if the last photo I took of the “sky”—
I saw it in the blue of your eyes?
Not a single cloud in sight.
Just shifting hues of sparkling blues.
Is that cheating?
I wonder.
As I drift into a dream.
I could lay all day and stare.
At the shape
Of your face.
The way it moves
As we laugh
As we reminisce.
As we remember.
As we embrace.
The blue of your eyes.
For me—
Is the only way
I ever again
care to view
The sky.
a life / Stacy Walker
I’ve come to believe we’re never really
gone;
Another life, another plane of existence;
Who knows?
This gave me peace
when he died.
But now, as I consider,
he was still alive
a year ago,
and without him here,
the world goes on.
Whether he’s been reborn,
is looking down at us,
or is the cardinal
or the rainbow
or the familiar song on the radio,
He’s not here.
The daily witnessing
of him
is no longer.
For a while,
I’m sure,
he crossed the minds of many;
over time,
less
and less so.
Even the nurses and aids
who likely cursed him
under their breath
as he cursed them
over his,
Saw him.
His presence,
undeniable,
but a year ago
tomorrow,
he was gone.
Is he somewhere
that’s not here?
Remembered by some,
a few,
fewer.
What does that mean
about an existence?
What does that mean
about what matters?
What does that mean
about what’s next?
What does that mean
about love?
I don’t know.
November - Poem 30
Unceasing Hunger (A Cento) / Jada D’Antignac
composed by Jada D’Antignac, with lines from Megan Bell, Alison Lake, Maya Cheav, Jada D’Antignac, Laurie Fuhr, Dominic Leach, Dawn McGuire, and Samantha Murphy
Our talks. They ask hard questions.
We take the long road because the long one
peels the paint off memory.
We laugh too loud. Then not at all.
There is an unceasing hunger,
it’s torture for my flesh
There are four hearts beating within my chest.
The stressful, precious inner library,
empty of the shield.
I don't know how to miss you any other way,
you teach me things i didn’t know i never knew.
Still there is a rhythm to loneliness.
Darkened nights filled with darker schemes,
bravely, I drove into dying light.
Tell me what you are chasing, what you are facing, what you are craving. Tell me about the lost years.
Love me. Sing something. Quote me to me.
Regret is different than disappointment. Shame is the origin.
Maybe you are my harmful prayer.
I found myself falling into the depths
for something safe, something suitable.
I seek God kneeling among tall vines and tangled weeds.
The river floods into all the cracks it remembers inhabiting.
The hills look down on her like neighbors, but they are weeping, silently and wildly.
We try to kiss the sky.
What's Your Shade? / Megan Bell
Give me
the artists,
the earth lovers,
the poets,
the creatives.
I'll take them any way I can!
For, we are
the change-makers,
the bell-ringers,
the emotion-bringers.
We are the many shades of gray!
And, collectively,
we are powering the universe.
Reflecting (A Cento) / Alison Lake
with lines from Meg Bell, D.C. Leach, Jada D’Antignac, Maya Cheav, Dawn McGuire and Samantha Strong Murphy
Today I am a long way from that night;
my thoughts are a line of geese.
I search for a map I've never had,
all it is is my moonlight,
the double vision you get staring into a well.
To save and feed every creature might shatter me.
evolution / Maya Cheav
in a perfect world
no one was hurt
and everyone survived.
but there is no utopia
and no saving
to be done,
to scoop us up
and take us away
from all of our pain.
I am shedding my skins,
a year turning over,
watching myself grow
out of my old exoskeleton.
gone are the days
where I’ve been trapped
in the same place
someone has left me in.
tell me,
what’s waiting for you
on the other side
of fear?
Making a Quilt / D.C. Leach
my body a needle shuttling up and down
this block of fabric—our wedding night; my arms
two moons orbiting my body your dress
a white satin ring hugging the blue jewel
of your body the both of us revolving
around the bright star of this new life—
my feet and my mother’s feet piecing
an eight-pointed star to “The Great
Pumpkin Waltz”—
and at our friends’ wedding their bodies
(our bodies among them) dancing in a line
forming loops in a long basting stitch glowing
and pulling the mountains of West Virginia
into our solar system—
or as the best man
the groom and I cutting
our hands and knees this way and that
beside the pool cutting fabric
on the bias shoulders and hips
binding it all—
or at Beach Bunny
The Wombats
The Districts my head
and fists become appliqués of birds
and meteors—
the batting you ask? the marrow of us. each
of us, our lips pulling tight the last few
hand stitches, wrinkled shape of love.
Field Notes: It’s 3 a.m. / Dawn McGuire
and William Blake
is heaving his hulk from my bed,
wearing the night’s bristles
like a bruise.
His sleeve
drags across my page.
“I try not to fool myself,”
he shouts from the john.
His beefy finger squeaks
across his teeth.
“But these pages plot!
They write better endings than I do.
And my stylus — that Judas! —
just sliced a comma on the knuckle
of my revision hand.
How do you spell tiger
again?”
I vacuum up and bleach the ink
from the sheets before it sets.
Under my eyes, his thumbprints,
dark as coal.
Soon he’ll be back in Albion,
and I’ll be late for work again.
We count little sheep
until we sleep
December / Samantha Strong Murphey
The sun sinks low, lower than I remember.
She is tired, loose, defiantly bright, poorly sedated
under layers of soft corroboration. I tuck her in
and she asks how do I know if God is proud of me?
The ground is cold. Nothing grows. Turtles have sucked
their heads into their echoes and are happily almost dead
and asking no questions. And where is she getting this God?
The shorter day was so long. The days before were cropped
and fevered with hoeing. We feasted, and in exhale, we feared.
We labored in fake fields, type and slog and nothing is real,
not money. Not the calendar. Though primal shadow does arch
itself over us like a clock. It’s all too late and too soon.
At the closing, our panicked animal bodies too ask
too-big questions—What if nothing grows ever again?
God, the drama. O’ to grow nothing, to make nothing, to answer
nothing. So close I am to the unlit brush pile, so close to the part where
I get to lie down. I close the fridge door covered in cave paintings,
dim the kitchen lights low, lower than I remember, blurring
the tracing of each spread hand.
November - Poem 29
Funeral Pyre / Megan Bell
There's a place
at the end of dreams
where earth and sky
crash together, it seems.
A yawning abyss
devouring your voice.
The aftermath of terror -
you weren't given a choice.
Darkened nights filled with darker schemes.
Weary hearts ripped at worn seams.
You were destroyed at the end of those dreams.
Alone with your pain -
you searched for foundation.
Letting it go -
you became your own creation.
At the end of dreams
there's a funeral pyre.
Laying it down-
you set the world on fire.
At the end of dreams.
Formless / Alison Lake
What then is formlessness? Can it even be so? Even the breath of the trees has form, the negative space of the sky between the stars. My love for you could never be formless and yet it has no form, only the way my heart beats when I see you, the way my hands tingle at the urge to feel your hair, place my lips near the form of yours. No metaphor will suffice to give my love a form and yet it is there nonetheless, waiting, impatient even, for you, singing to you in the night as you sleep and wrapping around you in your weary, breaking days. Our love would have one form, changed and shifted though it is, yet constant, recognizable and always, ever ours.
never in this life / Maya Cheav
have I once been doomed.
the culling rain
narrows us down,
us rotten few,
with acid plumes
that pierce through skin and bone.
it sours the sky
with a frothing madness
to boil us alive
and make us tender flesh.
it’s just
bovine excision—
a reduction
to primordial soup.
tell me,
is violence the only language you speak?
tell me,
are you willing
to die by the sword?
still, like dust, i'll rise (a cento) / Jada D’Antignac
composed with lines from Maya Angelou
we long, dazed, for winter evenings.
playing romantic games
just like hopes springing high
in southern fields
and half-lighted cocktail bars,
or any place that saves a space
for life and all that’s in it.
your mind pops, exploding fiercely, briefly
hanging on your words.
i sip the tears your eyes fight to hold.
won’t you pull yourself together?
the sun struck like an arrow.
the gold of her promise
pleased me for a while.
she’d find a hidden meaning,
that’s where i found your hands
saying bye now, no need to try now.
it’s the fire in my eyes.
it’s in the reach of my arms.
i’ll help you pack, but it’s getting late.
does my sassiness upset you?
a cool new moon, a
deep swan song,
a signal end to endings.
the awful fear of losing
someone who adores you.
i had an air of mystery
and found my senses lost.
but still, like dust, i’ll rise.
did you want to see me broken?
I Can’t Believe My Eyes, Darling / D.C. Leach
sits on the floor, leans
against the wall in the basement,
not the first time he’s
sat like this—palms pressed
to his eyes wondering how love,
poppies, anger, drifting apart could all
be the same color. maybe heaven
was 86 the other pigments the day
it cooked these up. he could hear Saint Lawrence
calling through the food window, tell your tables
we only have red, the angels on expo sprinkling
red over foreign policy, pouring red
in globs into the souls of spies, like ketchup
into metal ramekins. Snoopy rubs
his eyes so hard it all goes
black-and-white, then negative.
dark stars in a white night.
fireflies above a pool of clotting blood.
or does he see himself?
My Patient’s Chronic / Dawn McGuire
She says, “I saw the panic hit him in the chest.
He was twitching like a cartoon cat,
paw in a socket. Eyes bulged out,
lips split in a rictus.”
My patient hears the buzz inside the drywall.
It waits to torch the house.
He calls her Mama Bear—
like she’s a knockoff mascot
from a discount outlet.
I see a split-knuckle mother
swinging a sword.
Her garden’s about to green.
She leaves it anyway.
Mugs in the sink—she leaves them
to the life that should be hers by now.
She’s done this before—
again.
At least, this time
it isn’t smack.
That’s the refrain.
Her burnt offering
to whatever bastard god
keeps boys from overdosing,
pants around ankles,
face on the tile.
16th and Mission: Ms Xanax
waits with her palms outstretched—
Peace in the valley, baby boy.
She can tell when he’s scored:
his body no longer hisses
like a radio tossed in the bath.
How long this round
til rehab—
My patient carves the dark into a door.
She guards it open
just as she’s done before.
A Room of One’s Own / Samantha Strong Murphey
the mouth was too wide the begging mouth
of the clouded crystal vase was too wide for the bouquet
the stems all flopped to one side bruising
she thought she had picked enough enough, a minnow
between her fingers glittering quickly and always away
the clumsy hands expectation
fumbling the moon dropping the moon the moon cracked
on the roof pitch oozed yellow light down the house the house pressed her
hand against its glass she pressed infinity into four taut walls timid knuckle knocking
on her neck she worked her feet into the creaks of old longing older than her
for months she’d been walking knock knock across pine needles looking for
pine needles she’d gotten the tattoo with a singular intention: to entice
a singular thumb to graze admiringly across her wrist she pushed
wrinkles off the pilled electric blanket on the bed her pilled body
swaying across the room how now, the room the cord dangling
at the foot there was no outlet close enough to ever make it hot
November - Poem 28
Grand Canyon Country / Megan Bell
Broken down in Arizona, you died.
Stripped naked, bereft, alone, I cried.
My final goodbye came as we drove on red, rustic earth.
The sky was high and blue.
My world, broken and bruised.
I was, irrevocably, done with you.
Desert spirits and ancient voices
held my hand, propped me up,
witnessed my re-birth in a battered sedan.
Bravely, I drove into dying light.
The vast sky peering down through violet eyes made me sigh.
Just a gypsy and a rally cry, I stitched my wounds and bid your ghost goodnight.
Talking to the Bean Sprout / Alison Lake
I am surprised at you.
To be honest, I didn’t
expect you to sprout,
let alone push
four small leaves up
through the bag’s top.
Her grass died, as did
her succulent, and all
but one of my green plants.
We need so little you see,
a moistened towel,
a window to the sun,
belief.
When my daughter saw you
she screamed, twirling to me
and showing you as proof
of her magic.
As she is proof of yours.
orion and the river the night before the rapture / Maya Cheav
1:06 AM - O: sometimes I wish I was a bird so I could just fly away.
1:06 AM - R: come to LA. you can stay at my place, I’m sure my dad won’t mind.
1:07 AM - O: that would be great if I could just figure out how to get the hell out of here.
1:08 AM - R: birthday?
1:11 AM - O: birthday.
1:11 AM - R: just be safe, okay?
1:11 AM - O: I don’t know if I can, with my dad. I don’t think there’s a safe option. but I can’t live like this anymore. I need to get out.
1:11 AM - R: once you’re out here, I promise you, you’ll be safe with us.
1:11 AM - O: I wanna be more than just safe. I wanna be happy.
i can be that too / Jada D’Antignac
i hate to think of how content i’ve grown with being alone. i see a single bird and admire how freely it flies.
i think to myself, i can be that too. the bird sits alone on a weakened branch of a healthy tree, still and balanced. it stands firm with its chest up, doesn’t waver when a breeze blows. i wonder if the bird ever had to emotionally detach from those it loved to gain its strength. i wonder if it ever had to be weighed down in order to find the power of its wings.
On Thanksgiving Day / D.C. Leach
oven space a hot
commodity no space
for my thoughts beside
the turducken or on the tray
with the brussels and carrots—
invisible spy
invisible translator
everyone wants me to be
a grapevine in the forest bearing
fruit before it fruits—
plausible deniability—
never heard of it. am I a bottle of wine
to be drained?
Shadow Practice, Thanksgiving Eve / Dawn McGuire
Thank you for song, for fresh lists,
for random rhetorical fragments, unstable speakers,
for enjambment—for enjambment as wound
and suture.
Thank you for what is recursive,
postmodern, ironic, shocking,
in time with the times—
and for what is earnest
as dew on a bud.
And thank you for ancient songs—
epic, and reckoning.
Tonight, it’s Grendel—
border-stalker, exile,
breaker of heroes.
Wrath and ruinous rage:
the maker of heroes.
Bold Beowulf is a no-show,
three sheets to the wind.
The lyric can do what it can with him
when this is done.
But tonight—
the air is honest.
Grendel’s mother keens in the dark.
She knows what the Singer knows:
Our monsters forge
our heroes.
No one is safe.
Grendel is tearing the Mead Hall
down to its bones.
He amputates cowards and heroes
all the same. They share
a splatter pattern on the wall.
Give thanks.
Grendel has work to finish.
Don’t we all.
Laughing so I don’t— / Samantha Strong Murphey
Can we laugh at this?
Let’s laugh at this.
I’m laughing at this.
I’m laughing
so hard.
November - Poem 27
The Last Coal Train / Megan Bell
Grabbed a fistful of dirt -
there was earth,
sin, and men already halfway to hell.
They left it all right there
in upturned soil -
even darkened souls.
Black thoughts
Black lungs
Black tills
A sooty sea of hills in Ohio
Squeezed by the men till they bled dry.
Damn the coal!
Hillbilly's savior, hillbilly's curse.
Didn't care where it came from -
with shovels raised, eyes shut tight -
the men shouted, More! More!
Fat fingers, filthy minds
diggin' at what was already gone.
Money flowing like manna, wasn't no big choice.
Wide wallets kept em' ignoring that still, small voice.
With blunt edges sparkling like diamonds
the tainted rocks kept rollin' into our village.
Dusty cash registers coughin' for their dime
All those pretty homes under layers of grime.
(Didn't know our insides were turnin' sooty, too.)
Damn dirty rock-
Burnin' hot,
Spewin' ash
Leavin' scars that still smolder.
Didn't take long till the land was hollowed out.
Breathin' fire, belchin' flames -
God roared, Enough!
Then... the men looked up and watched
as wounded hills fell to their knees.
Beat down...
the terrain changed.
Nothing remained
once the coal hopped the last train,
and disappeared round the bend.
But, as life does, we carried on.
Replanted, the hills healed -
our souls did too.
Daily, we rise with the sun,
greeting the day wild-eyed hopeful, wickedly revived.
After My Daughter’s Friends Called Me Weird / Alison Lake
I know they think I am weird,
even your father does, but I have
Many reasons this is so.
Most people don’t like
Otherness, that feeling
That someone doesn’t
Belong, or can’t. People like
boxes, and placing other
people inside of them.
When you don’t fit, when
what you say, how you
think, what you love,
is different, it makes
others afraid and that fear,
that fear my girl, leads often
to hate and most times to ridicule.
I don’t fit. I have edges
Where I should be smooth,
And am too soft and curved
In other places that should
Be rigid. I dance with language,
Mourn even moss, and I have come
To love that about myself.
Whether you fit or not,
I hope you always know
I will love who you truly
are and I will make a house,
a house that fits just right,
for your spirit to rest in,
rest in and grow strong.
a loss of faith / Maya Cheav
the heart is loud
but the mind is louder.
words crumble in midair
as they are spoken,
just thoughts unrealized.
they exist only in sound waves
before they dissipate
and so quickly
disappear.
more of this / Jada D’Antignac
after Emily Sernaker
a strip of sun peeking through the clouds after needed rain
a meal that tastes just as good as it looks
a girls night out full of twists and turns keeping the energy high
a cozy coffee shop with a good playlist
a laugh that hurts due to jokes being added
a forehead kiss
an honest conversation that goes well
an arrangement of words coming to me unexpectedly
an elder dropping a random piece of wisdom
a book where the characters fall in love and don’t climb out
a song with a levitating bridge
a homemade birthday card
a handwritten note
a God-wink
a moment to tend to the details
a moment to pause and practice gratitude
The Last Supper by Tom Everhart Has Hung / D.C. Leach
over my bed on Riverside Dr
my bed on Calamo
my desk off 14th St NW
it hangs now over the china cabinet
in the dining room off Edmondson watching me
sip coffee from a cup bearing
the likeness of Mt Fuji little sun peeking
over the mountain’s shoulder
metonymy to the warm ideas
between my hands I’m drifting now
he’s always seemed aloof alone a war hero mouth closed
and I took solace in the lone candle burning low
—shape of the melted candle, shape of my mind—
in the lone bottle on the table lone cake
pushed to the side goggles pushed
to the forehead taking life straight to the eyes watching
as it passes unfiltered just out frame
me in bed with books lovers
at my desk fondling pencils at my dining room table
always others supping in kinship always the finger
of his loneliness finding harmony on the wet rim
of me but today I resonate
noticing for the first time that I
am seated at this end—this the end—of his red
and white checkered table cloth and he
not so much sad as forlorn
arms folded on the table I think waiting
for me to stop peering
into all the mirrors of this world the only darkness
in frame bleeding
stage right from the corner of another
clouded mirror he says look at me look
at the flame dancing
songs speckle the air
whose supper did you think this was?
if you’d only look at me.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING! / Dawn McGuire
I, Doctor Dreidel,
African Gray, age 37, of sound mind and sharp beak,
mimic, part-time oracle, full-time judge of character,
resident of this household since before the second Bush left office,
do declare this my Last Will and Testament.
Item One:
I leave my cage
—not the travel crate, not that fluorescent nightmare—
but the grand wrought iron ark with the swing I never used—
to no one.
It is a throne.
And I do not believe in monarchies.
Item Two:
My food dish,
chewed and cracked,
goes to the woman who never tried to cover it with pellets.
She gave me pistachios.
She can have the dish.
Item Three:
My words.
Everything I ever repeated,
intentionally or accidentally.
Including but not limited to:
She’s a runner, Katie.
Don’t trust the pretty one.
Shame! SHAME!
and the one perfect line from Mary Oliver,
that made two people put down their weapons
and pick each other up:
To love what is lovely, and will not last.
I leave these words to both of you.
You know who you are: met in a bar
that smelled like disinfectant
and regret, and made a life
with a bird who never stopped heckling.
Item Four:
To the one who whispered poems to me
after every heartbreak—
I leave all the silences we shared.
Item Five:
To the one who said “I don’t like birds”
but loved me anyway—
I leave the sound of your laugh
when you caught me quoting Pablo Neruda
during the dishwasher cycle.
You can never un-hear it.
Item: Final
When I die—
and I will,
though frankly I plan to outlive both of you—
do not bury me.
Scatter me
somewhere slightly profane.
The bar where you met.
That tiny pond, Grass Valley,
where someone said I love you
and you both panicked.
Scatter me somewhere that matters.
Last thing—
don’t replace me.
No cockatoos, no parakeets,
no tragic little rescue parrots
with French names and trauma.
If you miss me
go outside.
Look for something loud,
smart, a little bit broken.
Tell it your secrets.
It may not talk back.
But it will stay with you.
Like me,
until the end,
against all odds.
with talon and attitude,
Dreidel
Cabaret / Samantha Strong Murphey
As I tuck her in, she tells me about last night’s nightmare:
her in a heavy outfit inside one of those tall scary fences
with loopy things across the top. Earlier, she’d danced
around the kitchen table while we ate risotto. I lowered
the lights, lit a candle while she high-kicked, hands spread
wide trying hard to shimmer. Ambiance instead of attention.
I hoped she couldn’t tell. Years ago, I was with a boy in Argentina
outside a soccer stadium being flippant with my good
camera. A group of kids grabbed the strap, pointed a broken
bottle at my throat. The boy yelled drop it! run! so I dropped it
and ran. Nothing had ever been easier. Over lunch, a friend
tells me about a memoir she can’t shake. Hard, hard life.
The guy’s mom became an alcoholic. I related to her so
deeply—this from a woman who has never had a drink
in her life. When she couldn’t hold our feelings any longer,
my mom microwaved our bath towels. Three minutes on high.
She wrapped us in the hum of invisible wavelengths,
carried us like logs down the hall. We stiffened our limbs
for affect. She lowered us into our beds like bodies.
We didn’t want to sleep. She didn’t want to make us,
fight and flight playing chicken in our chests.
November - Poem 26
History Lesson: The Lost Years / Megan Bell
I
What lessons must I impart to my kids?
And will I have, in fact, parted with them?
When it’s all said and done,
will the well of my soul
have grown feet
and danced in our living room?
Will they have seen my joy?
Will they know where they came from?
II
Will they know I loved their gram
more than breath itself—
but I couldn’t save her,
so I saved myself instead?
She sowed seeds in me which continue to bloom.
Even now, I can't lift a hand
without brushing a flower
she nurtured when I was young.
III
Will they know for a while
I didn’t thrive—I survived?
When mom felt her job was done
when I was fourteen,
all I could do was hold on:
wrestling with the sky,
fist clenched in pain
praying, excavating
for something safe, something suitable.
Every hole was shallow and blue.
IV
Will they know life is a dance,
time a thief,
love more actions than words?
That life gives little,
and when it does
it is a gift from God -
they must follow where it leads.
V
Will they understand life is unfair
and will dump a mess in your yard?
Mind the piles, keep moving forward.
Try not to get it on your hands;
it wants on everything you own.
VI
Will they know they are enough?
That the person beside them
is asking the same questions,
grappling with the same shadows—
but they, too, are enough.
In fact, my precious, perfect loves:
you are more than enough.
You are all my hopes and dreams
encapsulated in tanned legs
and blue eyes that reflect the summer sky—
the same eyes your gram had.
Her parents never told her she was enough.
I pray she knew in the end.
VII
I do wonder if you hear my voice, anymore.
I talk too much, maybe—
but who else will tell you
the truths that marked me
in this holy, capricious life?
Who else remembers
what was given and taken
during the lost years?
VIII
I know the scent of my ancestors.
They marked the walls
with their piss and spit.
Smell that? I ask them.
It’s whiskey, lies, and money.
Pawn shops, cigarettes, and money.
Piggybanks, food, and money.
I could scrub the scents
from your path,
but what good would it do?
This road may stink of weeds
and dirty denim,
crooked lines
and curving feelings—
but I will walk it with you,
hand in hand,
pointing out the minefields.
These are our cave carvings,
our chapel hymns.
Pay attention!
IX
Some men want only
to watch the world burn—
and you’re related
to half of them.
Chaos makers:
bewitching, shapeshifting.
Pave a path away
from these ancestors.
Don’t follow the jagged, rutted road
that fills your belly with dust.
Find sustenance elsewhere.
Trust this:
better to stand alone
among raggedy weeds,
sustained by earth,
than stand among filthy men
stained by dirty deeds.
X
Kids, you are my benediction.
I wrestled these demons so you might one day fly.
Possible Endings / Alison Lake
It is possible
I will awake one day
and not suck in
a panicked breath,
not feel dread
at its possibilities.
It is possible
I will arise to song,
the birds I need to learn
the names of as they welcome
the new day’s light.
I will arise and not tremble
as I turn away from
my daughter at her school,
my husband to his job,
the news on TV.
I will wake not in fear,
not waiting for the worst,
but thankful that I again
get to live this day,
the gratitude seeping
well past the afternoon.
And all the small catastrophes,
the numerous ways we are being
closed in, curtailed, silenced,
will be like a dream I almost
cannot recall, and glad of it.
trying to be go[o]d II / Maya Cheav
1. how do you resurrect a six-year-old boy from the dead?
call 911
resuscitate with all your might
trap yourself in a time loop until you get it right
scream at the people responsible for all of his suffering, even if that’s you.
2. how could you have prevented this?
I’m responsible. I’m responsible. I’m responsible. I’m responsible. I’m responsible.
I was supposed to be his caretaker. I’m supposed to be the one who looks after him.
make sure to read the allergen label on the cookie jar next time
there won’t be a next time.
3. does clay’s death mean anything?
yes
no
sometimes bad things happen to good people.
does anything have meaning?
4. are you sure about your previous answer?
no
no
no
yes. do not ask again.
ghazal for home / Jada D’Antignac
we know soul music, soul cooking, soul laughs.
we were raised up on this bright green grass.
mastering code switching by ten or so,
we grew in multiples through this green grass.
most at school did not have my skin but we
all owned color back at home on the grass.
home wasn’t uppity or nothing high.
we know ‘bout a drought, here on this grass.
wondering what the rest of the world is
about—J, you were made you on this grass.
Notes from the Field, mcmxxv / D.C. Leach
a list of birds seen in St. James’s Park:
Egyptian goose, moorhen, coot, pigeons (many colors), Canadian geese,
rogue wiener dog, parakeets, Grue—
the afternoon has gone someplace—
I pretend to be an owl made of saffron—
my heart is stuffed with moss and dried leaves—
the universe falls apart. nakedness is dead in its branches—
in Welsh, the beginnings of words mutate depending on what precedes them—
I mutate in collocation with you—
I’m watching ladybugs live their lives through a screen.
they call their mothers, have affairs, forget the milk
on grocery runs, this one has terminal cancer but tells
no one. I’m pretty sure I’d tell my wife—
the nuns are in the yard again watching the cherry blossoms sail around—
I’ve taken to photographing all the plants in my neighborhood growing in hardy places:
tomato plants from sidewalk cracks, mulberry trees from gutter drains, crepe myrtles
and nightshade from potholes. oh, look, it’s me. I’m sitting on a cedar bench. I’m
smiling—
have you ever removed classified information from a classified environment?
no, but I think the secrets have displaced something from me—
I learn the roses’ names: focus, success, persistence
and work to forget them. too many tasks. too much
dirty laundry—
the dishwasher eats a little more of the color
each time off the flowers on this Japanese
stone-ware cup—
everything in the late, bright morning, and the lone fly
on its back, cold on the white windowsill—
Brooding / Dawn McGuire
When young
my song
fought death
Now old
death nests
in it
hatching
little
deaths
Shoebox Diorama / Samantha Strong Murphey
I carry groceries inside. There are girls in places.
They walk for miles, water buckets balanced across
their backs. I decide what everything means before I
feel it. My daughter grabs my face, whispers into my
mouth. I name today’s pain. I call it transcendent.
There is a setting for bedding, one for delicates.
It’s not until I sit in the movie theater, that I remember
why I’ve heard of Aurora, Colorado. All evening I leave
little piles of little belongings on the stairs. Ribbons sashed
around the bellies of all the trees in the neighborhood are sashed
around the bellies of all the trees in the neighborhood so no one
forgets what happened last summer. The dog pulls me past them.
I am baffled, now that I’m allowed to want, how much I do.
The scenes. They fit inside the shoebox. I cannot feel
the story beyond its edges. I scan my own house for
emergency exits. I can leave the poem at any time—
November - Poem 25
Dear Mary, / Megan Bell
I find you again at dawn while rambling with Scout in summer woods.
The deep dew which formed overnight drips slowly from wild weeds with ease,
wetting the ground and us.
As Scout prances along the rumpled path, his whole body vibrates with questions.
His curious nose hoping what's hidden might be revealed.
Mary, we did not know one another so you might think it odd I invite you on our morning sojourns.
Your sacred book tucked in my back pocket -
your word and testament, worn out, creased,
cherished as a handwritten letter.
I make no apologies for wanting to be your friend.
Lingering, I let go the leash of days picking wild blackberries,
listening for the twitters and garbles of the Goldfinch.
Your words always at the edge of my mind, come into sharp relief,
as we cross the threshold into nature's temple.
The poem was made not just to exist, but to speak - to be company.
It was everything that was needed when everything was needed.
So, I say, thank you, Mary, for the company.
How Not To Hate / Alison Lake
It isn’t easy,
this task, or rather,
this practice
of again and again
relinquishing the hate
that oozes up
each time
you see a
rebel flag, or hear
someone spout off
another untruth,
for the people yelling
slurs, or the way
some men cover
women with their sticky
lust; toys to play with
then throw aside.
The hot bile
of hatred so easily
rises in the throat.
It takes time
and repetition to lance
the infection, let
the poison weep
from unclenched hands.
Over and over
you must try
to let the feelings
come then go,
like rain falling
in late fall or early
spring, washing
as it does
all that corrupts
into the ground,
to be filtered
clean by years
of sinking through
layers of time,
back to the aquifer
of peace.
self portrait as the atlas moth's burden / Maya Cheav
I am pipe dreams stuffed into skin, / belief personified, / feeling electrified, / bridled with an anger that persists. / one that stands on the backs / of centuries of people born into the wrong body, / war-torn survivors / ducking through open fire / and tiptoeing through minefields / among the banyan trees, / people who have been punished / for loving wrong, / for dressing wrong. / an anger that is always there / because I’m too much girl / and not enough girl / and too much boy / and not enough boy, / because there are people in this world who would rather kill themselves / than have a child like me / and if you think that is an exaggeration, / be grateful you have never heard those words. / I have an anger in pursuit of justice / for me / and for you, / for the black and brown bodies / that belong to those I know / and those I don’t / because their suffering / is tangled up in mine. / my love drags behind me, / like viscera dripping into the dirt / even when there’s a hole in my stomach / leaking out intestines and blood. / no gun will bring me to the ground. / no weapon formed against me / will leave me without hope. / the world burns a black hole / into my throat / culling a scream that makes silence crumble / as though it were moth wings under mortar and pestle.
“maybe if I were more oppressed like you, I’d make art as good as yours.” / or maybe I’m just hungrier than you.
unknown / Jada D’Antignac
i want to write about things i haven’t done
feelings i haven’t felt
spaces i haven’t gone
people i haven’t met
i can feel the distance
growing shorter and shorter
there are emotions creeping
anxious to blanket my heart
there’s a room with a seat
ready to welcome me
there’s a hand nearby
waiting to shake mine
i can feel this newness inside of me
screaming to be born
i want to write about this
yearning for the unknown
this longing for a place
i know i belong
76 Dog Salute (#?) by Tom Everhart Hangs by the Window / D.C. Leach
Baseball / Dawn McGuire
From a little ball of cells, these doublings
unleash a disorder
that makes sense only to math.
You forget tenth-grade log equations
as your metastatic headache doubles
and crowded little neoplastic sideshows
start to consume you.
The hatchet-faced nurse working overtime
says your pain is out of proportion
"to the real estate involved".
Your perspective?
Falling naked
down an endless steam vent.
But just until the morphine kicks in.
Then up through the vent, you're a little kid
holding out a glove that eats your hand—
a sweaty borrowed glove
from a sweaty borrowed dad.
Wrigley Field is transfixed:
Sammy Sosa in the batter’s box
with a 3-seamed sphinx spinning chest-high
|right over the plate.
Even now, Sosa’s homer
is heading toward your glove.
You have all the time you need
You have all the time in the world.
Oh, World without end—
Bad Prophet / Samantha Strong Murphey
he inserts himself into dreams
glowing like a cave worm.
when they wake, he’s glowing
in real life. he reads blank napkins
like maps, tells fortunes from familiar
lines in movies they can’t quite place.
he presses all the buttons
in the elevator. when the doors open
on every floor, the people waiting think
he knew they were waiting. amazed,
they get inside.
November - Poem 24
Raising a Life / Megan Bell
Pick your battles. Save your energy for those who show up. No doubt you will make mistakes - forgive yourself. You aren't the only one occasionally stroking out and committing absurdities. There's more than enough to go around.
Keep the mystery alive, don't tell him all your secrets. Coffee, brush your teeth, then stretch. It's okay to feed your kids fast food. You can tell me anything - I, too, know the pinch of a tight roof.
Get enough sleep. Don't be afraid to say no. The kids won't remember dirty carpets when you dance across them in love. When the night arrives, show up to greet it like the dawn.
In the end, you are the only thing holding you back.
Waiting For You To Light the Fire / Alison Lake
I squint into the weak sunlight
that stumbles through autumn’s clouds,
see no sign of the dandelion of spring,
only the gnarled roots of the patient,
resting trees. I am alone and yet
I can feel your spirit bubble into
my brain, speaking the sweet
gibberish of love’s remains.
I am cold and I long for your flame,
the roiling fire of your hand
placed on my knee or the crook
between chin and flashing throat.
How soon until you’re home?
soldier boy / Maya Cheav
he’d rather split an ocean
in half with his sword,
move a mountain range
on horseback,
shift tectonic plates
in the heat of the battle,
than admit the blood
coursing through his veins,
pulsing through his heart,
a steady beating
for him
and him only.
he can beat it out of himself,
he can.
if not with words and shame,
than with fists.
his body is not short of blood
to bleed.
through self-inflicted torture alone
there’s enough to feed a vampire
for a half century.
but it is not enough.
there is no forgetting.
there is no change in feeling.
his eyes,
no matter what form he takes,
he can always recognize him
by his eyes.
blend / Jada D’Antignac
sunlight screams through my curtains
blending into my alarm
ready to flow with the mystery of a day
i blend from night to morning
in the car
my soul blends into music
at the coffee shop
my dragging spirit blends into flavorful warmth
in the salon
my bare nails blend into marigold
walking past a stranger
my face blends into a smile
soft white blends into deep blue
as day blends back into night
showerhead blends into reset
my hands fold as thoughts blend into prayer
my arms wrap pillows as i blend into a dreamstate
until morning returns
Notes from the Field, iv / D.C. Leach
I bought lady bugs to devour the bark scale that’s
suffocating the crape myrtle
through the front window; hung them
from its branches, but they
all flew away—
this is a pneumotube. it measures respirations—
mimosa tree. fuck. I love you. too close
to the house, unfortunate
invasive roots. I need
to chop you down, but oh!
mimosa tree, such pink flowers!
which part of me is this I cut down?
this is a blood pressure cuff. you know what it does. I may
move it at times from your arm to your wrist
to your calf—
the weeping cherry has been dying year on year
crown down. apical buds along its trunk hucking
for sunlight—
these straps on your fingers measure the galvanic skin response…
your sweat glands—
even touching the mirror, I cannot close the distance between finger and reflection—
do not stare at the doorknob or meditate or say prayers or think of a happy place or—
we let a meadow grow on our hillside, for the bees to meditate in:
flocks of bees
thickets of bees
hoards of bees all buzzing about the aster flower
murders of bees hiding their knives in the tall grass
kettles of bees coming to boil over a green flame
a congress of bees filibustering
whole grocery store aisles of bees stacked liked cans
neuronal clusters of bees ruminating on the aster—
these pads under your butt and feet will measure movement. do not
clinch your anus—
my mother gifted me a fear
of fishbowls, so I planted a row
of arbor vitae atop our hill to block
the night view into our windows
from the street—
do you consent to this test?—
I have this theory of mirrors in which each of us shatters
a mirror at birth, the shards glinting back at us from everywhere,
every day—
The Fix / Dawn McGuire
I fail, but will to stay close by your side.
You teach me how to love; to listen cleaner.
Each day I lose, and still I will to try.
You tried to tame the storm and climb the sky.
Your wings now scrape the floor. I’ll never know
what failed. Each day: love harder by your side.
Your ravaged veins collapse, and then I lie:
I say I’m not afraid. I wake in terror.
Each day I lose, and still I will to try.
I see the light extinguish in your eyes.
Regret’s a house I’ve furnished room by room.
What’s failed? Today: love harder by your side.
I dream of rooms without exhausted sighs.
Your name—I say it softer with each call.
Today I lose, and still I will to try.
Love’s not a fix. The daily act is this:
a tourniquet, so that the wounds may close.
What failed? Tomorrow may be hard, or harder.
Today, I failed. Tomorrow—is tomorrow.
Something was off in her head / Samantha Strong Murphey
she knew this suspended at the angle of repose
where unmet need and entitlement meet Arthur was
well Arthur was perfect, wasn’t he? he is all fault
who hath no fault at all is there nothing about my land
that appeals to your heart? his question the answer
what land could rival a body? beneath the beveled armor
chains mesh slapping against muscle in a thousand years
myth will tell us that when Arthur dies Guinevere lives out her life
as a nun piety denial cold virtues round the round table
what the hell she thought watching the knight kneel
before her helmet removed locks tumbling down
she was already a nun
November - Poem 23
How High Can I Jump? / Megan Bell
Working day's for the man
ain't always easy.
Being tied to any desk
can make you crazy.
Thirteen years standing steady, playing it straight and,
every pair of shoes I got, give me a crooked walk.
Lordy, I felt sure this was the land of milk and honey.
So do they....
Every morning, nine am swarming our doors, an army of men, women
burrowing - warm in winter, cool in summer.
It's why we're here.
Knowledge is power - this is what I've learned:
Digging for El Dorado on dirty floors just leaves a gaping hole.
Even our tables have a hangover
Broad shoulders don't mean I'm strong
Librarians aren't saints - there will be no laying on of hands.
My patience, too, spills over
drip
drip
drip
On turned-up pages of well-worn books, I hide inside.
Snarled by the shadows of the day, men stay.
Staring at walls they won't climb.
Sauntering about like they own the place,
telling puppets how high to jump.
Dyeing / Alison Lake
“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” Marcus Aurelius
For so long I lived
In the barren darkness,
More like a crypt,
Than a bed of soil.
My thoughts stained,
Black with despair,
Black without hope,
Black with self-hatred.
I thought pain
Was the mordant,
Fusing the color
Into all the fabric
Of myself, even
As I envied
The colors of others,
Longed for a different dye.
It was only once
I started tending
To myself as a sick child,
Smothered by thick blankets,
Offering it the chance
To feel true air, bathing
It in cool water, scented
With herbs, that I
Began to bleed away
The dark, as dye bleeds
From yarn, that I found
the black give way
to a burnished silver,
there the whole time.
bloodletter / Maya Cheav
have you not grown tired
of the war
in your mind?
the one you waged
against yourself?
in antithesis of love
and tenderness.
you can only be
half-hearted for so long.
softness is a muscle,
flesh and tendon.
you cannot
beat it out of you,
no matter how hard you try.
if i could go back to 2017 / Jada D’Antignac
i’d say to my younger self
keep doing the winged eyeliner
it adds to your character
straighten your hair less
learn more styles for its natural state
use the dog and flower crown filter as much as you can
one day you will outgrow snapchat and delete it
hold onto the soundcloud gems
the era will soon be over
don’t linger on the idea of boys
they’ll always be around
the one you’re always upset about
won’t even matter later
be more expressive
speak up a little more
embrace the weirder parts of you
they will form you
keep your heart close
it will hold you
keep your mind focused
it will need you
keep the pen close
it will save you
Notes from the Field, ii / D.C. Leach
another nightmare. rope like snow wrapped
around his throat. eyes still clinging
to their branches with the oak leaves.
scarlet. as a last act he painted
his suicide and sent it to Laura.
would Petrarch? abc and I quiet today.
asdfgh and asdfgh laugh by the coffee pot.
no one talks about losing the aphids
we, for years, have lived
vicariously through—
skulls in the Catacombs de Paris with their backs
caved-in; the occiput covers
the occipital lobe; the region
of sight—
two pumpkins slouch under the hot sun on the front porch,
their eyes rotten shut. the universe and things
turn gently—
dark. catacombs. limestone scrapes at my head as I walk. to be a fish
here in the bowels of the earth. to go blind, swimming
in circles in a black well someone dropped me in
so they could see—
is it all this watching warping me, or is it being watched?
perhaps it’s more flamingos. flamingos religiously
performing their pinks from the green waters
at the Baltimore Zoo—
dead mouse. neck broke in the mouse trap in the cupboard. been there
so long its eyes have sunken in, innards crusted
to the cabinet floor. Grue asks with tears if I can
bury it, in the yard, under the weeping cherry—
isn’t it like this though? naked mole rats in the National Zoo.
bumping our noses through tunnels not of our making.
eyes and fingers beyond a glass wall tracking our
discoveries of crumpled newspapers, yam slices,
each other—
Sunday. Tenby. walking the beaches, Grue and I pass
a dead seal just past the rocks. white fur. holes
in place of eyes—
on the way back from the Pembrokeshire coastal path:
dead horse, dead jelly, dead sea-bird on the rocks,
the bird, its eyes, filled with flies—
shadows nestle in the eye sockets of the dead. eyebrow ridges
on skulls, flexed as if still expressing or a photo
set to slow exposure
for life—
Catherine asks if I think my poems of late
are about watching or being watched?
the first five drafts of this poem
were about fire…
the tea candles in the pumpkins;
pumpkin rind, orange (the color of fire!);
the blaze at the end of The Thing, which we watched
while carving eyes into our pumpkins’ ghosts;
I even had this line cooked up like
“heavenly fire, hellfire,
O fire in the crucible.” but here I am,
lights off, watching the candles
in the pumpkins flicker
and my mind sinks like a pebble
into the dancing shadows of what look to be
on the floor and the walls
hundreds and hundreds of candlelit eyes
all blinking back at me.
First Quest / Dawn McGuire
I hovered over him with my white
med student’s coat full of needles of every gauge,
tubes for every orifice, little balloons to inflate
to keep in place the Foley in his penis,
the G-tube down his nose.
They found him at the Harlem Meer
where homeless go to fish,
in septic shock, a fish hook in his groin.
Assigned to me.
I lanced his pus, picked maggots from his scrotum;
the guys on the team, they just couldn’t—
A week of triple drips, Kayexalate®, packed diapers.
The trees outside the unit lost their last Fall leaves.
Day 8, I stuck the EKG leads to his chest,
their little sparks alive—this poem’s Volta—
as one carmine eye broke its seal.
Mr. McMurtry—welcome back!
The fluorescent lights shimmered like a benediction.
I raised his head and pressed a cup to his scabby lips.
He took a sip. The other eyelid opened with a jolt.
He pushed the cup away and croaked,
Why didn’t you let me go to the Great Beyond?
His voice clanged against my head like a bell clapper.
I rearranged the sheet under his chin. I had no answer.
The week’s sweaty lab sheet slipped away
and stuck to the bottom of my shoe.
Queen of Hearts / Samantha Strong Murphey
Only her tribe could see the way she had quietly shifted
across time. Alice arrived long after the real queen was
dead. It began with roses, no red quite red enough
to quell the brain’s intrusive darts. The king shrunk smaller
with every outburst, the mind he’d loved disappearing
deeper into the garden maze. He quietly passed out pardons
behind her back. Cans of paint stacked toward the celling
in the palace. A spade is a spade is a spade. Every natural thing
brushed raw in crimson. There was a short window of time,
before she slipped fully into tyrant, that she could sense the
thorns choking her away. She talked to the mirror. She knew
she was broken. She wept—Off. Off with my head.
November - Poem 22
A Cento / Megan Bell
A Cento composed by Megan Bell with main lines contributed by Mary Oliver
And from his nap he will wake into the warm darkness to boom, and thrust forward.
Walking like a woman who is balancing a sword inside her body.
Then a voice like a howling wind deep in the leaves said: I'll tell you a story about a seed.
All the while this was happening, it was growing lighter.
How everything shines in the morning light.
I read the papers; I unfold them and examine them in the sunlight.
What dark part of my soul shivers: you don't want to know more about this.
death and death, messy death -
death as history, death as a habit -
The silence then the rain dashing its silver seed against the house.
I scarcely had time to see it gleaming.
Two Roads Diverged / Alison Lake
“Too much fire gives birth to nothing. Fire can reduce a forest to ash, while it takes the water and the wind a hundred years to grow one anew” Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
I.
The path had led
through the woods once,
before the trees were taken,
their stumps left
to rot as the soil
eroded. It had led
past a river, sparkling
and rushing over
slick rocks, casting
diamonds into the sky.
Now, thick with sludge,
dyed orange and frothing,
the water trickled,
moving like a sick lamb,
burning the shore and we,
we must cover our faces
lest we breathe
the poison that is the air.
II.
For so long
we didn’t know
how to be human
animals enmeshed
in the web
of the universe.
We butchered, we
burnt, we blasphemed.
It was only after
we came to
the abyss’s edge
that we saw our blood
and bones in the earth,
the sky, the sea.
Now all paths lead to home.
body litter / Maya Cheav
in the mausoleum
of augustus,
I think about the bodies
housed inside the tomb.
those who belonged here,
for years
longer than their lives,
buried in the dirt.
what becomes a
fortress in time
was formerly
a home
for lost souls.
I wonder
if they wander the halls still,
their shades detached
and in a second state.
freedom song / Jada D’Antignac
after Maya Angelou
the caged bird collects keys
keeps them safely under the tongue
this caged bird sings a freedom song
until freedom comes
a free bird knows no clippings
or ties that hinders its route
a stalking bird creeps at the cage
waiting to learn what a caged bird is about
there’s always a place of the free
there’s always wind carrying a tune
there’s always a cage holding a heart
that will feed us a freedom song
Notes from the Field, iii / D.C. Leach
between rock walls. rock ceiling and rock floor. deep
beneath the cobblestone streets of Paris lie
skulls. more skulls than stars in a country sky;
stacked here, against their former wills.
cold water drips on them from nipples on the low ceiling—
ladybug husks, hundreds and hundreds of spotted brown shells,
some still orange, some now dust, whole piles
of their corpses lying between the panes of RF-shielded
windows, in a building I can’t say much more about.
some of them still holding each other. I’ve drunk
coffee with them for years. been since Obama, no Clinton,
a coworker says, since at least Reagan, chimes another—
hollowed-out pumpkins side by side on the stone steps
of the front porch rot and sag into each other between
the unrelenting sun and southerly wind—
all these strangers, their bones piled together like this—
I sit beside a hunched body who sits beside a hunched body who sits beside…
all of us before flashing screens, between
vault doors, in a windowless room, 8+
hours a day 5+ days a week year on year watching life
move by on a screen. assess, exploit. this one
a stallion in bed, this one a thing for boys—
before Halloween. these pumpkins. I imagine they came
from different farms, or fields, or opposite ends
of the same field, and now their guts
lie together in the same white,
plastic bowl on the cold basement floor—
someone once put three fish in a stone well at the bottom
of the Catacombs to see what would happen (before lightbulbs).
the fish swam in circles. went blind. died—
there’s a new ladybug between the panes! where did it come from? it’s watching
the sun set! it’s looking for a way out—
I walk the Catacombs with my desire, ask if she thinks the bones,
being together this way, get their particles entangled. look, I say,
they’re weaving a net, they’re casting it back over their old lives; the fish,
they’re being drawn up to the boat—
Quadratics Haibun / Dawn McGuire
In junior high we had to memorize the quadratic formula. Mr. Floyd, his face pink on a calm day, heraldic red under exasperation, threatened to call our homes at all hours and make us recite it, waking everyone up to our laziness.
So I memorized b and c and their relations, and how there are always two different solutions for x. Except when the whole bit under the circus tent √ is zero. That’s when you get a single solid answer. That would have been reassuring, as my dad was moving out and nothing was for sure.
It could have been a useful formula, like when Mom needed to rent part of our house to cover expenses. I could have told her we needed 50 boxes of bamboo floor, not 100 like the squirrely contractor tried to charge her for.
Instead, I learned how to find the maximum height of a Tomahawk missile with initial velocity v and launch angle θ. And Mom took on two jobs. And the x’s split in opposite directions.
Mr. Floyd called
to ask Mom out
Even his voice was red
Mormon Pioneer Village / Samantha Strong Murphey
it wasn’t a question it was water
in our bellies our lungs slopping under our feet dripping
from the gutters on the buildings we felt safe inside
all the girls in Sunday School sat in front of a chalkboard
CHASTITY pushed hard into the wall we watched
as the teacher hammered nails into a piece of wood
then pulled them out one by one she pointed to the holes
said there will always be holes it was my tenth summer
life was soft enough that i could act tortured without fear
of it coming true i stood with my cousins squinting into the prairie
light caught in the fuzz on the grass the fake blacksmith glistened
Chuck Taylor’s untied beneath his costume he swung
a hammer in the glow of the stove he read a script i don’t remember
he asked each of us to hold out a palm he closed
my fingers around a warm rough-hewn nail a souvenir
November - Poem 21
The Girl / Megan Bell
At the corner of Goddamn
and Good I stood with
my hair on fire in a little white
dress stitched by momma.
Hands itching, body twitching
I turned up the swagger to catch his eye.
A tall drink of water with a red convertible -
I was desperate for a ride.
He asked for my number, bought me a Coke,
told me I was everywhere he'd never been.
I laughed and said, I know
exhaling cigarette smoke in his amused face.
Then, I turned, sashaying away
tossing my head, my Virginia Slim
over my shoulder with a raw ease
that belied my trembling gut.
I wanted to hit his body like a rush of nicotine -
To take him from 0 to 60 in 2.3 seconds -
To rock his world with the swing of my hips.
And, I did.
Friend, I thought about him again as
lust thread its ways through my limbs.
When my hot body was pressed to cool bricks,
When he was licking my thighs, my feet
worshipping me with mad hands,
my name a song on his grinning tongue.
I forgave him his sins right there, offered atonement
for the boy he was; thanks for the man he was becoming.
We crossed into the promised land in dry, dusty alley.
He was never the same.
And, as I pulled my dress down, still without a blemish,
I blew him a kiss, drifting off with the breeze.
Leaving him to wonder if I was only a dream.
Missing / Alison Lake
My days tend to unfurl rather quickly; time falling off the spiral of my life, going somewhere I cannot see or follow. It’s not that I cannot keep busy; my list never seems to shorten no matter what I cross off. I rise before the sun, drive in darkness to my daughter’s school, search the clouds for assurance she will be safe. These days, with my husband waiting in the cold for a doe to cross his path, giving meat to our freezer, I spend most of my time alone, but for my cat. I look at the clouds, their grey weight, as I fill my days, waiting for the sounds of those I love to draw near. The darkness of November slipping early into my skin, reaching up into my warm core and letting it all in. I drive away from my daughter, sending prayers to the sky and watch for an answer.
unwound cotton clouds
stretch the distance between
crows sent in frost
HEEL / Maya Cheav
in grotesque bravery
and all the failings
of trying to be strong,
he could not—for a second—
put aside his shame.
you are not innocent
in this either—
your pride bloom, always.
he would rather die
with his secret
tucked between his fingers,
but you had to pry
them open,
in a last act of hunger,
of a desire
to know his truth—
the explanation behind
why his eyes were colored
an unruly shade of blue.
flesh and hunger / Jada D’Antignac
these days i’ve been fighting myself. no,
fighting my flesh.
the nighttime melancholy is taunting
but the daylight tortures me too.
foolishly, i assumed i was clean from you. no,
cleansed of you.
who am i to think i could ever escape myself?
it’s humiliating to feel this strong of a need
to know you again. no,
let you know me again.
i’ve tried distractions
but at some point distractions leave too.
i’d be neglectful to not care
about the parts of me i’d lose.
it's torture for my flesh
to be so hungry for you.
Shoulder to Shoulder at the Kitchen Sink / D.C. Leach
we scraped the sharp edge of our spoons across the skin
of the ginger root, strip after strip of silence falling
into the drain catch.
only we’d left the ginger in the fridge so long its skin
grew hard, and so we dug and dug the edges of our spoons
into the shriveled skins, whittling away the wordlessness,
its juices stinging at our scraped knuckles, watering
eyes, until at last our fingers were lumps of ginger, our lungs
and hearts were ginger too, and the space
below our navels was aboil.
Urgent Care / Dawn McGuire
Everywhere I look,
a wound rehearses
inside an object
Sly scalpels knock together
on the cart like sibs
afraid to go to separate homes.
You’d think a thing with wheels
would outrun hurt—
but objects don’t forget.
The gurney remembers every spine
laid down on its metal tongue.
It doesn’t run. It catalogs.
In the corner, a bag of saline
sulks like a middle child.
It wants to be the solution.
It wants to count.
And the chair—
all vinyl authority—
grips my hips so sternly
I feel slandered.
I try to leave,
but my body won’t have it.
It leans in.
It leaves my smudge on the wall.
The instruments keep an eye on me.
Not just the monitors
that incessantly schrei down the hall.
The blood pressure pump
has its fat eye on me.
The EKG leads on the crash cart
pucker their tiny mouths
in my direction.
They all know I’ve come with a headache.
A lion’s paw on my heart.
A loss of agency.
The IV poles in the corner,
trying to be friendly, say:
We roll with the damage, pal.
What wheels are for.
Reparenting / Samantha Strong Murphey
I was the kind of kid elected fourth grade class president
without having to promise anything stupid. The gym teacher
called me out of the dodgeball circle to tell me
cowgirl boots were not appropriate footwear.
We had the same birthday. I thought that meant something.
I can see that the size of the shame of this strange failure,
still holding its knees in my body, doesn’t make sense.
The river floods into all the cracks it remembers inhabiting.
Regret is different than disappointment. Shame is the origin
of shrinking. I take control of the memory. I coax her out
from behind the dumpster. I polish her little boots.
November - Poem 20
Backwards Movements / Megan Bell
Evocative. Memories, some broken, some blessed
& every moment in between. All those feelings left on the page,
full of movement,
licked by strain.
Hard times, good times, all of it.
Running mature hands over a worn clock,
struck dumb by the turns of the hour glass.
My existence bleeds into fiction,
as I work the words from way back.
Today, I am a long way from Warsaw, Ohio in 1994.
A village set back in the hills, set back in time.
Backwards movements, forward crimes -
every which way an uphill climb.
Today, I am a long way from that night -
Indiana bound, I listen to tires hit cold pavement,
Whomp, whomp, crunch, crunch -
over & over.
Dad handles the steering wheel,
fingers clenched, jaw tight, he commands
the car, rawdogging our lives.
Hard times, it's hard times.
Sweet mercy, I had the blues -
a stillness, half-naked on the rental couch,
assailed by sunlight. It took me several
turns of the Earth to stop playing those
moments like a riff, to remember
your love wasn't crazy.
To use your front door and breath for fun.
When I Imagine My Anxiety As A Small Creature / Alison Lake
The therapist said this would help,
and so I close my eyes, imagine
some strange cross between a mouse,
a squirrel, and a kitten, huddling
at the doorway of my mind
its yowl so much larger than
its little, trembling shape. I can’t
help but kneel down, softly
quietly, extend my hand so slowly,
and croon “Shhh, it’s okay, your
okay. I won’t hurt you, Easy, easy.”
My anxiety looks up, untrusting,
full of fear. I have been trying
to conquer it for so long, squash
it, erase, it, make it go away, that
it needs time to be won over. I crouch,
hunched as small as I can get, whisper
how sorry I am, thank it for doing what
it is that it is supposed to do, nothing more.
This odd creature quiets, stops shaking,
puts its wet nose into the air near my hand,
sniffs and lets out a tiny sneeze, so much
quieter than it has always been. I don’t
know how long it will be before I can
cuddle it against my heart, carry it
with me throughout my days and ease
its skittish fear. I only know I will try.
amicitia / Maya Cheav
friend,
how long
will it take
you to recover from this plague
so that you are well enough
to rejoin us
in the land of the living?
it is perfectly human
to believe you are a burden,
but I promise
the wretchedness
is not something you have to hold
alone.
wretchedness is plentiful—
there will hardly ever be a year
you go without it.
the good thing is that
hands are plentiful too,
and there are many ready
to carry it alongside you.
put it down,
the grief now.
ask yourself
how long can you survive
in the land of living
without your shade,
friend?
preferably fall / Jada D’Antignac
i was born in june, the height of summer.
i know my skin looks magical
when it reaches its deep shade of brown.
i know i look powerful in a yellow,
orange, or lime green bikini
but unfortunately i do not identify with summer.
i love the sight of autumn trees.
i love leather jackets, boots,
pumpkin flavored coffee.
i love how cool air
mysteriously creeps in
pushing you to search for warmth,
forcing you to lean into comfort.
it may seem that i should
want to belong to june,
to commit more of myself to her
but i resonate more with fall
and the world of octobers and novembers.
NOTES FROM THE FIELD, i / D.C. Leach
another helicopter circles my block low, looking for something, rotor wash shaking
the dining room windows—
I circle the floor, peer into half-finished bisques, beers, risottos,
or they peer into me—
winter. outside a building I can’t name, on no such street, a ladybug
crawls in circles inspecting every tulip and rose
on my collared shirt—
blue sky. year? turkey vultures circle my zenith in this endless parking lot—
I orbit my notebook—
a green dragon undulates its long body in circles around a rectangle
of turf between windowed buildings.
no one follows—
the polygrapher asks if I’ve ever made disparaging comments about small hands
in the presence of foreign nationals.
he circles something on his paper—
Field Guide to 3 a.m. / Dawn McGuire
Oh, stalk with chakras,
secretor of seeds, stalk
with six exchangeable headpieces,
one filled with straw,
Oh, covalent carbon crowd,
flash mob of doubt, oh infrared
subscriber to this account —
it’s 3 a.m.
This poem’s Boss is still at the seedy bar
she prefers when she’s lonely.
You — the stupefied secretary —
are tied to the chair.
A dark stranger rifles the files.
You don’t even struggle
(which isn’t like you). His fingers
run down each page
from top to bottom.
So far, he puts everything back.
You like his hands.
You find yourself hoping
he leaves with whatever he came for.
Notes / Samantha Strong Murphey
there is a skin-taut tomato plumping on the vine outside my window
it’s November and it won’t stop growing red she wrote me letters
my mother and left them on my pillow she faced
every difficult conversation in deliberate type at 16 a boy
left a note on my windshield precisely folded I left one back
I guess you could call him my boyfriend it was all so slow
everything is intentional when a face is only in your head
why won’t it just freeze already? die there is no face to face
the idea of a good tomato can ruin the taste of every root everything
hauled up from the cellar in winter years later a different boy
knelt in my parents’ kitchen with a ring box and read a speech
that I’d written I was not surprised but there was something puzzling
about the way the words died when they touched the floor
he was better unscripted which I couldn’t make sense of
which I still can’t make sense of