October - Poem 5

Tap a Vein / Katerina Canyon

Written in response to “Inkwell”
by James Evert Jones

Your anger resides in the black hues
of your inkwell.

Your blood, your soul
your legacy of language
make me mourn the October
poems you cannot read right now,
and I grieve you before you
write goodbye to the streets of autumn.

In fall and early morning
I think of how we wrote
through prompts. You know how
to “tap a vein” to keep writing.

I imagine that right now
you are dreaming in verse.

We kept writing across
thousands of miles
through letters, lines, and
phone calls.

To be a poet is to die
one pen stroke at a time—
leaving each fault
between the lines.

When our friends ask
“What is wrong with you?”
I will say I feel a void, and
I lament.

The midnight reaper is knocking.

At Gibraltar Rock  /  Sam Calhoun

All morning on 
the drive here, 
lane lines skipping
along with the sky, 
I wondered if clouds
count lines like sheep, 
if the sandhill cranes
danced as if alarm clocks
with the rising sun,
the shadows of wings
growing louder 
every minute.  

I Did Dance With the Devil   /  at/om

One. The episode of Shorsey where he is asked why, at his age, and his skill level, is he still this passionate about hockey. Shorsey answers 

“It’s the only place I can be me.” 

Two. Sitting on my porch, smoking a cigarette, and thinking about how I’ve never played a sport but my recent life has been run by hockey shows. 

Three. Wishing I was at Disney World with my mom again, where we were both care free and my worst problems was my feet hurting in a long line. 

Four. Trying to get to my drug test for a new job in a rain storm and some idiot in a white jeep wouldn’t let me change lanes. 

Five. The launch of the real Irina Foundation, looking at my comfort blorbo fake hockey player and asking him do you know how much you have changed the world? 

Six. Listening to the Festival of The Lion King. 

Eight. Listening to the Festival of The Lion King. 

Nine. Headache. 

Ten. Headache. 

Eleven. Wondering if I ever knew a life beyond how bad this headache is. 

Twelve. I am fundamentally unlovable. The reason I can never get along with anybody is because I was born with rows upon rows of teeth and I knew how to bite before I could talk. I am the center of all of my problems and I always will be. I could seek out the friends I have now but they’ll only learn to hate me too. It’s better to just curl in on myself, to let the walls collapse and bury me if they have to. I am always being buried in one way or another. 

Thirteen. Overstimulated at the farm stand. 

Fourteen. Nightmare. Best friend said she didn’t want to ever speak to me again, and I became a tornado of screaming and desperation. Woke up afraid to ask her if it was real. 

Fifteen: Brother moved away four months ago, looked at pictures of how happy he is now. I’ll probably never see him again. 

Sixteen: Wrote a poem wondering if I cry too much. Wondering if that’s why when I cry now, I only tell the page.

Sestina for the 18th  /  Ellen Ferguson

After lunch at Duchamp/Moma, tea at the Austen

Society! Pineapple reticule, bonnet

In hand, we made our way to Central Park

After. Leaving, Carol took care at the door

Of her car. Who makes their exit

By highway? Luckily, I found

The 6 train; it was found

Without further ado after Austen

Teatime ended, my exit

Significantly un-swift; bonnet

In hand, stuffed through the train door

After fountain time in Central Park.

 
In our slow crew. Central Park

Fountain time lingered, we found

Ourselves bouncers at the door

To a bookstore playlist. Austen

Forgotten for now, bonnet

Stuffed in Moma bag, beating an awkward exit

 
downtown. Not gowned but ruffled, exit

the train from Central Park

ruffled, sans bonnet,

turnstile found

still dressed like Austen

shoving a locking door

only to discover, beyond the door,

another locked, scaffolded exit

at 42nd. No more tea with Austen,

no more Central Park,

42nd Street egress elusive and unfound.

Just a mad, ruffled woman without her bonnet.

In retrospect, the lack of bonnet

Was lucky. Charlie Brown’s fortune teller, ever the door

To stout decisions, found

“Make a bold choice” the answer. Revisiting locked exit

Doors, trains leaving Central Park,

Crying “Help” & yes! Freed by the kindness of strangers! Goodbye, Austen.

We almost didn’t meet that day. No exit, silted Central Park, tea-drenched Austen,

Crazed bonnet, locked door.  But we did, didn’t we? Not lost -- found.

After Joe Brainard’s “I Remember” /  Brett Gastineau

I remember an afternoon riding a bike along the coast of

Chiloe as sheets of rain fell. I remember my water-logged

socks and the heaviness on my shoulders. I remember how the

wind was filled with the smell of mud and fish and pine

needles. I remember when I made it to a secluded beach

there was a herd of wild horses—their hair long and ratty,

covering their eyes. I remember how they sounded like

thunder upon the sand.

I remember a Greek Orthodox monk I became friends with in

San Francisco. I remember how easily I became his

confessor. I remember I have always had that gift of

putting people at ease and loosening their history. I

remember how affectionately he spoke of each of his secret

lovers and the map of their skin.

I remember the bombast of the first ABBA song I heard.

I remember the Challenger explosion; the lichen of smoke

and fire in the sky.

I remember stepping on a nest of yellow jackets and being

stung. I remember them congregating around my ears and

eyes. I remember the angry hum. I remember screaming and

stripping off my clothes as the cloud of them grew and

raged.

I remember every country road I ran along in Putnam County.

I remember the chorus of bugs and smell of grass in the

summer. I remember the cold blankness of the air in

winter.

I remember my first kiss with my wife in her car while Echo

and the Bunnymen’s “Lips like Sugar” played.

I remember my piano teacher telling me that I’d never be

able to play Beethoven’s “Pathetique.”

I remember my daughter’s first word was “good” and how I

thought she sounded like a happy toad.

I remember when a friend told me that there are more

outcomes from shuffling a deck of cards than there are

stars in the universe. And every time I remember this fact

I am giddy with awe.

I remember the first time I ate a pawpaw and how it tasted

like a banana and filled my mouth like a custard.

I remember taking dance lessons at Arthur Murray's. I

remember my partner’s full-teeth smile and how she smelled

of Dove soap and strawberries. I remember being extremely

aware of my Adam’s apple whenever I placed my hand on her

hip. I remember thinking how this must be what laughter

feels like when it flies.

I remember the first song I learned to play on the guitar

was “Every Rose has its Thorn” by Poison.

I remember going blind after a night of drinking absinthe.

I remember the dark echoing like cobblestone and the taste

of licorice that lasted for days.

I remember when I was 12 and a group of friends and I

chased each other in an open field as we shot of Roman

candles. How we didn’t manage to burn one another or start

a fire, I’m still not sure.

I remember the first time I noticed my daughter had my

father’s smile. I remember it was five years after he

passed. I remember thinking that perhaps this life still

had gifts it was willing to give.

Further More  /  Joy Johnson

Far be it from me to even try to reinforce or

Underscore how positively different civilisation, how

Remote and removed from now-ness, it must become

To hold any promise for continuation, perpetuation of

Humanity and a biosphere humans could still call home.

Either we leap or we die, taking great swaths of our

Reality with us. Or tomorrow I'll wake up and,

Moribund, nothing will have changed . . . for

One more day of steady march to obliteration.

Regretfully all the days of my life have been

Exactly that: lame-duck me limping to dying.

Impatience /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

When are we getting there? Why the delay? What’s going on here? How could we have gotten our wires crossed? Who made the original phone call? Where the hell is my order? Ugh…

CLOSER TO HAPPY /  H.T. Reynolds

a poem is a prism

unfolding flashes

with the precision

of a stonemason

bruising light

into form

shaping it like

silk bars spun

into a chrysalis—

a womb,

a wrapped cradle

hiding the dripping

sink, an overflowing

answering machine

pulsing its red dot

against bare walls

stripped of portraits

hung up like gravestones

a poem is a prison—

each cell

an air sac in my lungs

inflating

Glued Together /  Gabriel Phillips

Mixing us

with wallpaper patterns.

That you’d waited for no

other reason. Than the scalpel

of release. Waiting

100,000 times a second,

a heart that blinks. Then sometimes

needs reminding. I’d be

by your side should your side

be beside me. If only

I were more sideways.

I mimic the zebra,

the white piano. Hooves

scaling the walls, the

best spot to echo

beside paintings of you sleeping.

A calm abduction of your time.

Two things can be unrelated.

And the mice

holding hands

facing one another

dying in separate mouse traps.

So the only thing you listen to

would be the sound of your own reflection.

October - Poem 4

While Sitting in the Minneapolis Airport Waiting for My Flight to Incheon, I think of Mary Tyler Moore

/ Katerina Canyon

Everything I know about Minneapolis
I learned from Mary Tyler Moore
who brighten the city
with a toothy grin that chased
off winter and left our memories
living in eternal spring.

I learned Minneapolis was a place
where hats lived midair
in permanent twilight.

Mary’s city was childlike,
a place where she played in the streets
with a spin and a smile.

She must have been dead three years
when George Floyd was murdered.

I learned from George Floyd.
He died on the sidewalk—
childlike with pleas to spare his life.

I learned the Twin Cities were split
as sharply as Jacob and Esau.
George Floyd may have had a toothy grin
but I never saw it.

The officer who killed him
pushed the city into an eternal winter
which has the power to snap out
a life with a sustaining pressure to the neck.

An Open Road  /  Sam Calhoun

So thin a life

an open road,

the only music

rumble strips, 

the world

a low cloud,

the dreamers 

so small

we squint,

sun at our backs,

collect like

fogbows

across the long

arch of sky, 

colorless, 

so small 

we shine as one, 

so heavy every 

foot shuffles

the ground.

I Did Dance With the Devil   /  at/om

I did dance with the devil, 

and not in the fun way I learned to years later, the way where I have had a couple drinks, and I’m laughing with my friends. 

but in the way where the devil tells me, 

he is my only friend. 

I danced with the devil with claws in my skin, 

with his teeth tearing my ear as he whispered that he can tear me 

apart at any minute. 

(and I know it is not a threat, I know because he has done it) 

I know the feeling of holding your heart in your hands, I know how ugly the organ is when you look at it in the light. 

I know so because the Devil told me 

it would not help me dance, I know so 

because he took my heartstrings 

and tied them around my wrists, a 

marionette for his desires. 

Puppetmaster made me dance for him, 

it was the only time he said I was any good at it. 

I danced for the devil, 

he called himself God. 

Bookstore  /  Ellen Ferguson

Past lives /  Brett Gastineau

Such a simple mistake—a dress folded and put on a shelf
instead of hung on a hanger. But my days were marked by so
many small missteps, a tally you kept—a dish left in the
sink, the keys you couldn’t find, two library books
overdue, the house too clean, our daughter’s naps that went
too long and kept her from you when you got home, a tomato
plant from your aunt that failed to grow, the Thanksgiving
dinner I cooked without needing your help. I thought (I
hoped) I could manage the chaos of your moods. Not be
scared as your eyes grew black.
Perhaps you found a sweetness in your hatred. For you,
there was a release each time you called me garbage, each
time you struck my face or punched my arms. Each slight
and insult I held close to my skin. I gave you the leash.
I gave you the knife. Maybe I believed that fear was
another face of love, a necessary leap into madness. No
longer did you touch my name like a kiss. No longer was my
body a home. You told me I had taken your life. You would
leave a room and I would slap myself.
And then that frantic search for the dress. How you
screamed. Charging from our daughter’s room, you slammed me
into a door frame. My head, my shoulder connecting. I
wish I could say next came a brief interlude of pain. I
can’t. I wish I could say that I have left that moment.
There is a thought, a personifying of the door and its
desire for a past life as a bird. This body moves on, cross
town, cross years spent sleeping poorly. There is no
flight through white, white clouds. Rage and love are
stories that have no end.

biome pome:  dirt  /  Joy Johnson

comes a point when inside worm and out are 

hard to tell apart, but time:  it imparts

a juice to my seeming inevitable 

existence in this few teaspoons edible —

or so the plant roots insist as they dine

on what worm, wood, and fungus leave behind.

i like to feel the wet that clings me to 

my mates, though dust bowls have happened too,

and sent me to new places to re-home.

soon enough old’s forgot in new biome

where in-and-out-of-worm and root-the-plants 

become my raisons d’être again and

i’m happy when feet of ants and sleeves

of larvae are what i feel morn and eve. 

Love unlimited  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

How did welcoming children complicate our lives? Firstly we thought our love for each other had no bounds. Then we found out we loved our firstborn more fiercely than a bear with her cubs, a fox with her kits, a mythological creature and her wiggly baby monsters. Second we expanded that love for our second born, and life changed again, for the better. It was man-on-man defense; still ok for our fortyish faculties. And we had sleepless nights, the pediatrician visits, the matching outfits, the enrollment in school, the lost teeth, the new puppy, the birthday cupcakes the high school dances. Whoosh! Fast-forward. Our children are adults making their way. We love them like cats love their kittens, like mantises love their mini-mantises, like ducks love their ducklings, and they don’t seem to need us anymore. In reality,  I believe they do. And I am always so happy when we see them. That’s love unlimited.

SLEEP WITHOUT GHOSTS  /  H.T. Reynolds

you taught me not to

grieve the things we never had

so I won’t

I shall imagine you a stranger,

mother—telling everyone

how I was born from ashes

how my closet never hid

bruises beneath turtlenecks

or brittle bones—

            it’s easier that way

while I teach my children

how there’s no such thing

as monsters—but that isn’t true

is it      it’d be easier

if monsters had claws,

had fangs,

had glowing eyes

but they smile—

they buy you toys

and new clothes

and keep

little secrets

then devour you

in your sleep

it’s easier that way

but this day,

heavy with your ghost,

I rest in bed

Laws About Love But Underwater /  Gabriel Phillips

Back up the brains, poet. Walls have backed up

against you as you yourself said you were warm.

It is fortunate we all look through the same hole,

every quarter. That undressed around exposed lips

prevents waste from hatching. But do lovers

climb together even though they share two

different mirrors, one each above each sink.

Luckily, copy cats start in nature, her lover

told you. But yet you aren’t wasted! You

catacomb the sound like a cove of dove

bones, when wedding season is near. The candles

pastel with broods of soggy cake, of which

none is tasted. Tongues were divorced.

That breeds are tied to wax, that wax should

should choose to celebrate. As a hot of reptile.

Double invertebrates mate with their clones.

Laws for sea creatures never evolved

to the laws of land walkers.

Do you wonder then, if the sea

is truly a better place for me

and for me?

psalter's song of serpents  / Colin Sturdevant

I poured oats from my mouth
as a gift unto the earth.

For I had trod with gluttony
satiating each thread of my body

& made a den of my bed.
Each body had a name

that sought warmth
& my forked tongue

sang each cunning note
to praise legs apart.

& they go forth at dawn
& I lament that they aren't the one.

How I dispirit their bodies
as a curved bottle emptied:

[I] make their tongues
as sharp as a serpent’s;

the poison of vipers 
is on their lips.

October - Poem 3

Message in a Bottle / Katerina Canyon

The ocean drums
while I dive beneath the waves.
tar sticks between my water-logged
wrinkly toes.

Peeling away the bubblegum stickiness
purifies me. It leaves the bottom
of my feet white—a contrast to the brown
that starts above the arch.

These sun dwindled beyond horizon.
My legs never tired of running through the surf.
My feet sucked more tar to its heels,
and I peeled it away—
all clean again.

I scream as loud as I want
because I can never
out scream the ocean.

My hair wild—
inspired by sand dunes;
electrified by the sunset.

My body tangles in kelp.
It slows me down,
but it does not keep me
from dry sand.

My father tilts his head
and empties his wine bottle.
He tosses it to me.

I inset the note:

“Help!”

and I throw my screams

Into the waves.

For A Dekays Brown Snake At Wildcat Den  /  Sam Calhoun

It's your church 
here in the rain,

here in the middle
of the road, double 

lined, gold flaking
into rivulets in worn

asphalt, paths wanting
to be as old as these hills,

mouth agape, rushing
with the wind, 

preaching silence,
my cold ears 

listening to every 
word not spoken, 

knowing how 
the sermon goes,

how the world 
will offer a branch,

how the world
will rope you 

into the grass,
thick with weeds,

yours to decide
as the cars rush by,

to stay here, in
unfamiliar woods,

the slow way 
back to light,

or cast back 
into the road, 

how each way is right,
but maybe wrong,

how the sun always
finds a way home.

Movie Where a Man Falls In Love   /  at/om

I watch a lot of movies nowadays 
where two men fall in love and 
run away together, and I think about 
all the boys I dated in school before 
I could bring myself to admit that I was one. 

I wonder if they knew, 
would they have run away with me? 
Would they have run from me? 

My body was never really molded to 
host what I would become, but I doubt 
any of those boys loved me for my body. 
I doubt any of those boys loved me at all. 
I don’t think they could, they didn’t know me.

The difference is now I am loved by 
my own transformation, I am loved 
as the ever changing seasons. I am bounding 
like Icarus into the sunset at the end of my own 
movie where a man fell in love with himself.

the coffee after the coffee  /  Ellen Ferguson

Let’s drink a cup of coffee
After that cup of coffee;
unlike other coffee near Christopher Street
in September,
the coffee we shared was cold.

Let’s drink a different coffee
After that coffee across the avenue;
unlike that cup of coffee
Another coffee would be delicious.

Whenever coffee comes by these days,
Casting a cold eye, frothing at the mouth,
We pay it no mind, until it bangs on the door,
The metal door,
And we let it in            hesitating less             over time

Bed  /  Brett Gastineau

There is no such thing as a bed without history, but
a bed where sleeplessness becomes obsession,
a bed marked by shadows and teeth,
a bed housed in the fire of evening,
a bed heavy with happiness that almost makes you believe it
is our natural state,
a bed where morning’s cruel light falls,
a bed that does not forget rogue tenderness or whispers of
caution,
a bed that can not answer what we should do with the
darkness between us,
a bed where the body may learn to forgive but never the
hunger that hands are capable of,
a bed where the dreams of yesterdays come in blue,
a bed where you can remember yourself but lose words,
a bed that reminds you that you have lived a life you did
not choose
are the beds I have known.

A moment  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

A moment too late
Traffic’s screech

A moment too soon
Watched pot

A moment away
Boils over, spilling

A moment in time
The last story you told me

A moment of remembrance
Your constant, welcome presence

Dear G**  /  H.T. Reynolds

when I was in seventh grade,
I wanted to be a witch—

I asked Jeeves for a spell book
but he said he couldn’t suffer
a witch to live

so I unplugged his throat,
buried his motherboard in salt,
arranged his keys into an array
and prayed over the blood of
another descending

day before Claude found me
around a conclave submitting
our invocations like an inquiry
carved out in the proper tongue

his most regal voice proclaiming
I will be a swift witness against
the sorcerers, this cloak, this thumb
snuffing out their pulse like embers

but why should gold be reserved
for death, for the brittle bones
of kings and tyrants spelling out

the destination of living,
to toil among the immobile
collecting happiness like diseases,
like the lacquered casket swapping
a dream for an empty space

but what’s the point
in feeding your kid
a shit sandwich
before cake

Tart of Acid Rising /  Gabriel Phillips

So hungry, I went to bed and dreamt of eating
instead of dreaming. I couldn’t even carry

the apple to bed. It hung on the highest limb.
My birthing spot. Which was in August,

is still the highest limb. Therefore, we should
hang the paint on monkey grass, restless

without a glance of color. Without
that brings more without. The sound of trees

escapes my mouth, I open my mouth
and a dream steps out. Coughing. With three thumbs,

two hands. Even though it
is busy there is room for more hair,

which is horizontal. It cries like a canary.
The birdcage cages only the kudzu.

Somewhere, along the garden,
the flavors of lemon echoes.

And then I think of stomping them.
And then I think of liberating the garden.

October - Poem 2

Mirror / Katerina Canyon

Echo is the flesh
that lives in each child
who follows me.

Hunger reverberates
through the mouth’s tunnel
to the womb.

The body imitates my flaws
as if reflection is a gift.
It turns itself over in the
curves of your body.

Are these my hands or yours?
It is hard to recall the exact
moment the first wrinkle
betrayed me.

I am an imperfect copy of Eve—
duplicated over and over.
Eve did not have a spare digit.

Mine was chopped off
at birth.
I can still feel
its echo.

Dust  /  Sam Calhoun

at Field of Dreams Park

What else is here but dust?
I can wander the field,
count corn kernels 
like talismans, 
dust
stalks winding up
to the dark blue sky,
long cirrus streaking above
like dust across the diamond, 
hold the chaff in my hands
from some distant harvest,
pretend this all goes on
to some end, cup
dust 
like time here, 
like a cold drink 
with an old friend, 
like corn sweat in summer.

Ilya Fights the Loon   /  at/om

for Jess Tønseth Gleason 

Inspired by Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid

i am small, i have fallen from my mother’s back 

and i am drowning.

i know how to swim but the storm brings waves 

over my head and i can only see her when

i fall under the water. 

and the only sound i hear is not mother’s sweet song 

but the distant cries of wolves and i have loved enough

now to know the difference between the loon song and a 

predator licking its lips 

but the giant black bird that bobs over the wake 

does not call anything kind. 

it sings out

“He will never really love you. 

Nobody has ever 

really loved you.” 

nobody but the bones at the bottom of the lake 

has ever held me like he has. 

the man i love has loved enough to try to teach me 

how to sing to the birds but when i open my mouth 

the wolves howl, the waves pick up, i am pulled back under. 

i call for him in the sound hunters make when trying to attract prey 

and the dark bird grows bigger. 

the grown bird knows which little ones are tainted 

by the hands of someone who means well. 

they know when something is to be left behind. 

the dark bird tells me creatures who can’t fight 

their way above the waves deserve to become 

the rocks at the bottom of the water. 

i know how to swim and i know how to fight 

and i know the dark bird is not the only thing 

here with teeth. i reach out for the loon 

and grab its neck in my teeth, i can climb onto its back 

to stay afloat but i still hear all around me. 

“He will never love you.

Nothing can ever love you”

even when the bird is limp 

the wolves are howling. 

telling me to come home.

the bird was never the monster 

in this story, nor was the body 

at the bottom of the lake. 

it was the wolf who thought singing 

like a bird could turn him into one, it is 

my bloody reflection staring back at me

from the edge of the water, it is the sun 

coming out through the clouds and the 

feathers floating on the surface of the lake,

it is knowing that when he comes out 

and finds this slaughter scene he will tell me 

he loves me. he will understand. he will hold me, 

and remind me of the differences 

between birds and wolves. 

and i will love him enough to believe 

the water won’t swallow me.

Bench  /  Ellen Ferguson

Come curve with me and be my bench
And we shall all the benches prove
Like curves on benches benches curve
And benches curving benches curved
And we will all a broken pencil
A pencil breaking in two pencils
If pencils break and broken pencils
With pencils, pencils, pencils, pencils
If after all the rulers rule
And all the rulers also rule 
Then curve with me and be my bench
Like benches curve and benches curve.

In Conversation with Goethe  /  Brett Gastineau

To hope that those who follow would not have to travel
the same roads of love is not wise.
That is just a shunning of the constellations
of need that fill the sky and
the nameless avenues that lengthen in shadows.
Is there a happiness older than water
to be found here and a love that can
be taught to gentle? Yes.
But what of the parts of you in these night-years
that are most alive?
Those that have teeth!
The world breaks upon this wild flesh
and we become guardians of the bloody
in a life as endless and narrow as an hour.
Desires that have no names carry us, lead us
from the time we inhabit and leave us to
paint in past tense.
There are those that wish to carve their name
into your skin and drag you into their wilderness of
hunger—Perhaps it is you who are culpable. Perhaps you both
harden and are no longer each other’s delicious friend.
Left asking for things no human can give.
Peace does not come in a nest of arms or moments
where cheek meets chest and mouths part to vow tenderness.
A lover’s nature is as fleeting as mist.
Give your song to the wind, after the hollowing made by
loss...to be empty is to know.
You will find yourself nude in a divine rain. Returned to
the skin of the earth.

Earth's Prayer  /  Joy Johnson

He tills the ground from which he was taken;
the thistle-borne seed he too plants;
he eats the bread with his sweaty face. 
It's from my wound that he lives. 

I rejoice in his feasting, undertaking 
the give-and-taking that's meet, life
upholding -- my pledge to support as much!
But then Adam incipient 

comes to believe it is he who owns
what's I, instead of properly reversed. 
And for said presumption, he will drop bombs,
not seeds!, and I am astonished,

dumbfounded:  who might I approach for redress
of the wrongs, the throngs of alchemy 
he has unleashed?  O poetry, my
prayer, become song of my deliverance. 

Sunny  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

thank you, Tracy

sun glimmers off rooftops across the water
buildings of glass, slate, steel

sunny today and an arc of light reflects
landing in my eyes as I look

love to read on a sunny day
warm my skin outdoors

the sun sails behind cloud cover
reappearing till sunset pulls my gaze

to the west where it sets
and rests

AN INERT OBJECT  /  H.T. Reynolds

running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain;
trying to be brave is being scared
—Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

I imagine inviting my blood
to fresh air
my skin
to some time apart

picturing myself
barefoot—
toes gripping the concrete
edge of a rooftop

arms an outstretched cross
head tilted against the rain
open palms praising the sky
holding its water like a font

an unkindness—
a revolving black halo
placing their bets

how long I’ll stay

standing

falling

alive

The winner gets its pick—
my tongue
the ligaments
of a thigh
the meat of my heel…

when their litany falls silent,

I open my eyes—
my mouth,
and defy them
to speak 

The Bellow of Lugosi /  Gabriel Phillips

Do flowers cover up the impenetrable
wrinkle? Do they drift apart when the oil
misses the water? For there are many
stacked ways to spill a mess, there
are kittens touching the steps. Alone,
barricaded but comfortable. The vision
of white and baby peppers saunter
over the horizon, into coffins
for baby birds. Mama makes the worm!
Mama is the worm! Her tendrils reached
every predator with trepidation. Predators
wash themselves unevenly, askew. Cooking
with dimes of wet breeze. They don’t
salt, they pay bills. Many bills. Then
another bill after that bill was paid.
The vampire wakes up, surely his car
payment is due. It’s the detonation
above the clouds that seeds the people.
Cauterize their shelves of hot china
and drifts with a limp across the Baltic sea
into the base of a conch shell.
That a rather dull child has crushed
with a metal toy truck.

apocrypha (& demi-cento)  / Colin Sturdevant

from each loosened nail bed, I pull a chapter
In full velvet
& all you can make out from my lips are simple words:
There, There
Your consciousness stirs into dawn as you look up at me
Saying your name three times underwater

(3 lines are book titles belonging to Jenny Johnson, Tommy Orange, and Sam Roxas-Chua)

October - Poem 1

Camelops / Katerina Canyon

The original camels
walked the sands
of California.

I imagine them
seven feet tall
looking tiny
beneath the redwoods

Eventually they walked
south. The rest
died out.

I moved east.

Californians can only thrive
in places where tar
sticks to the soles.

No one warned us to
be wary of the middle—
the settlement of mud
that holds you like quicksand.

We aren’t used to rivers.
We thrive in oceans and deserts.

We etch our history in sands
that have kissed the Pacific.

We sift through the ashes
of our ancestors for signs
that lead us forward.

The moon looks the same
no matter where we are.

The stars shift as we walk.

The seduction comes from
the forests we cannot see—
the oasis we imagine.

The camels are gone.
We tried to bring them back,
but they died a second time.

Problems At Night  /  Sam Calhoun

All evening the road 
unwound like an old cassette,
the serpentine belt whine
the only sound above
radio static.

Eyes tired as the stars, 
my head chokes on 
distant cumulonimbus,
pretending they're 
not there.  

Soda cans shake 
like dance rattles
across the floorboard, 
boot-prints carved
like glyphs, 

and outside tires grind
asphalt as combines 
tear through fields, 
corn husks falling 
like snow.  

for Pumpkinistra, Seabiscut, and War Admiral  /  at/om

For the last few months I’ve been 
watching this girl on reels 
grow a giant pumpkin named 
after a race horse, 
learned she was also growing 
a giant squash, and zucchini, 
and now as the air gets colder 
and the weigh off approaches. 
I am more invested than I have
ever been in another person’s
vegetable garden.

And oh isn’t it so beautiful to watch 
something grow, and oh isn’t it so 
great to cross your fingers that 
something gains weight? And what 
feels more like fall than caring so much
 for another person’s harvest 
you forget that this year you did not 
grow a single successful vegetable. 

But there is still food on your table. 

And though you may not have grown it 
your heart is a harvest and the love is 
more abundant than the meat carved 
out of the pumpkins thrown into rivers 
for regattas and months of hard work 
is sailed away.

Autumn is here, the days are colder, 
and you still have something to root for.

MOMA  /  Ellen Fergusun

                                        elevator,
                           on the 

Up to the sixth floor      

Arrive.

Study: "Now that I am in Madrid and I can think I think of you."
Think: Now that I am in MOMA and I can think I think of you.
Think: Now that I am on the street and I can think I think of you.
Think: Now that I am and I can think I think of you.

Study: Will we arrive this very night, this very this?
Think: Will we walk through these doors, this very this?
Think: Will we walk up the stairs, this very this?
Think: This very this, will it?

Study: What if Frank O'Hara had not said it first?
Think: He said it first so it could.
Think: He said it first so you could.
Think: He said it so it could you could.

The elevator came because you the elevator arrived on the sixth floor because you.

bewilderment [bih-wil-der-muhnt] n.  /  Brett Gastineau

1. a physical condition when heart palpitations and
shortness of breath may occur
2. the sensation of a playful madness on your shoulders
3. finding yourself in awe when the stars prick the dark
4. a warm confusion in the belly
5. when the topography of the day shifts and you are
certain you understand the dreams of trees
6. to come to know it was a mistake to grow up

No Shit, Shakespeare /  Joy Johnson

For those who will forever see surface
As the only beauty, and so beauty
That must fade, I shall stand service
And reminder of truth (therefore beauty)
So much more than skin deep, so much driven
Into the crannies (evidence of age).
I offer opportunity of vision
Into science of math and verse per page
Gorgeous enough to stop a heart open
To what's not advertised, not exploitive.
If you would persist in your mere token
Interpretation of what's -poietic,
I only pity, turn away, resume
An incandescent exploration bloom.

 I will  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

In the middle of winter I will
wish to see jewel tones of fall

In the middle of spring I will
Stop for rain and be glad it isn’t hot

In the middle of life I will
Be myself and hope it is enough

In the middle of dying perhaps
I will be grateful

DERELICTION  /  H.T. Reynolds

I love you like a cat
loves a door

that is to say arched
along trim mewing

claws trembling
handles and locks

holding the weight
of an empty room

a dial tone pulse
for a forgotten body

receding into shadows
firelight and burn

my throat like whisky
numbing night sober

reaching for missed
calls empty streams

flowing images
collected without me

I looked so lovely
beside you

like a decomposing church
carved up and weeping

Picnics Where the Moon Can’t See Us /  Gabriel Phillips

Listen to your comfortable rising.
It shakes the tall grass as though
grasshoppers were moving through it.
Light through the blanket. And grass.
And crickets that battle themselves
with lullabies. The fear of sleep
itself. None to rise to in the mornings,
but comfort, its peaceful groan.
The sun is not the grass. But it does
make the day shrink. Throughout
the yellow of each impatient breath.
You are the first of every fifth breath.
Unlike the sun. You are the calling
of wheat when there is no wind.
Unlike the sun and unlike the sunbeams.
You are the comfortable rising,
I fall into exactly one thousand pieces
trying to lie on the blanket beside you.

brotherhood  / Colin Sturdevant

I know little about Dionysian
& Apollonian behavior,

but I’ve seen love. Not romantic
in the sense you’d think. It involved
a broken pipe,
            a bloodied ebony lip, a set of twins.

One mild and one a bit less mild
the way the wiry hair on my chin
is latticed in salt and pepper, opposites.

How as one brother was to be carried off
with cuffs behind his back,
                                                each drop
of moon pouring out like his sobbing mother
from his brown eyes,
                                    the other brother slowly
caressed his sharp chin and asked: why?

Because we all know in American streets
how when you’re caught with a bit of kush
nothing ends well, especially when you’re
not white. How daylight stayed longer.
How boyhood was drawn shorter. How some
red-faced copper made me think ACAB.

I’d never known brotherhood until that afternoon.
Knew how beauty doesn’t stick around very long.
Made a spectacle into an ode. Now gone.

September - Poem 30

If This Was a Letter, I’d Ask How the Weather Is / a Cento composed by Laura Bandy

with lines chosen and written by: Connor Simons, Jesse DeLong, Veronica Vo, rob mclennan, Piper Rasmussen, Alicia Boemi, Shelly Krehbiel, Laura Bandy, Melinda Wilson

The radio is stuck on half-heard. The windows are down
and ancestors speak through this ground you stand on.

These scraps of humanity, assembled. Chorus, yes
but you are sleeping. You do not want to believe.

It is
the end of a haunted night,
as no party lasts long enough to keep us
and the bruise waits ‘til morning.

And so,
fall progresses to winter
all of this
the kind of thing you commit to in November,
when the rains come in.

Didn’t you pray to your maker?
Didn’t you plead that there might
be another day waiting for you?
Didn’t you seek out the sun,
which will light your path to safety
like in the aisle of an airplane 
in uncontrolled descent?

Because calling this survival is generous.
It’s just
Death blowing you a kiss.

So I’ll wrap you around my neck,
and take you everywhere with me
the heart wafting, sort of like the blood in water.

Who is speaking, please.

Moon Dream / Laura Bandy

The moon
followed me to work this morning. Then
I saw a sun-toasted cornstalk shooting up
through concrete on my two-lane commute.
“You don't belong here,” 
I scolded both
night star and field crop,
for finding themselves out of place. 

When
teachers gave me a bathroom pass
in secondary, I would take it,
intentions pure, then somehow end up 
at the in-between spaces:
stairwells, wood shop alcove, rooftop door. 

There would be 
no one there but me,
and once, a baby possum
wedged down between concrete columns
outside the art class darkroom.
"Beat it," I said, "this is my turf."
"I'm here for the still life class,
he replied, lighting up a cigarette.
"No one can freeze like me." 

“You shouldn’t smoke in here,” I said,
but you can't tell a talking possum anything.
Just like you can't
scream in a dream, not really.
Or like when you're driving 
And realize you've gone 50 miles
but you don't remember any of it—
cracked road, semis and tractors
out for harvest, even crossing the bridge
over the Illinois River, dotted with barges.

You know
you were there 
because now you're here, 
on the other side—

moon disappeared, highway smooth
from where yellow vests came in overnight
and covered holes over with new pavement.
Some say green cheese or Swiss the surface
all those fissures, lobes, ravines, even lunar seas
which are dark, low-lying, and fathoms deep.

A Chill  / Alicia Boemi

Here we are again.
Borrowed 

light, 

time,  

space.

Fall becomes us. 
Winter is approaching soon. 

The water is colder;
the ice will form against the shoreline;
against the rocks’ will.

And I take cover.

Teaching Lessons in Pest Control /  Jesse DeLong

The termite inspector noted that the hydrangea
is growing too wild
too close
to the house, and must be pruned,
and so too do I
put on this nice, collared shirt
and khaki pants
unless the wood-rot of my personality
decides to feed. 

After On the Nature of Daylight (Max Richter) /  Shelly Krehbiel

Are you the sunrise-oranges just above
the mountains? I’m driving through the valley.
It’s been less than an hour, but it feels like
the whole night. It’s gone from dark to foggy
to now – this light starting with a brilliance
I never wake to see. And though I can’t
see the river, I know it’s near, because
fog follows the path it makes. Fog is still
here, but close to the ground now. It feels blue,
though I know fog doesn’t have a color.
Are you the blue-drifting fog of morning?
Are you starlight that’s not here anymore
breaking through? Do you know what I mean-
like just after it’s too light to see stars?

It's just after it’s too light to see stars,
but they still seem close, like a flash-echo
after the photo is taken. I am
taking a photo of these colors now
without a camera, without a phone, with
just my whole self. Like when I memorized
sunrises as a kid. I still keep one -
violet purple behind a single tree.
Was I the tree? Was I the purple sky
not knowing I could hold all that amaze
around a tree’s silhouette on flat plains
of earth still mysteried with night? I do
not have to remember this. It’s here:
your sunrise-oranges wondering the sky.

Cento, September,  /  rob mclennan

Dear poets of September. All the same trips, story. Goodbye, melodramatic. Propel, had blown a kiss. This, a generative. Bread, baked fresh and hero, dinosaur. Glorious, and grey. A dead sparrow, hyssop shoots. So many, in relation. In relationships. Impervious to sky. Omnipresent. Another wanting, itself. Held, as promise, sonnet. Dear, what have you done for. Impulse, to forgive. Dear John. Asleep, am through with you. Each figure, soars. The title of this poem, elephants. Positions, in. The lake, still. Another warning. To save our whole lives. On three good paws, silence. A cinematic future. Can I get a hell, yeah.

final words. It’s simple, really. Stay  / Piper Rasmussen

Cento with lines & title from Laura Bandy, rob mclennan, Connor Simons, Melinda Wilson, Alicia Boemi, Veronica Vo, Jesse DeLong, and Shelly Krehbiel

Mark every beat, set everything aloud.
to cram that yellow into a lightless space
breath, heavy and rough without delicacy 
beyond the pines into the needle-filled forest floor,
The fallout is terrible. Trust me, I know,
Not the pill and its euphoric promise, but the hard, chalky 
memory. Or maybe some memories upside down, some still becoming. 
Step over, no need for mercy, the cicada, rattling its death song on the walkway. 

an ekphrasis from the land of Uz  / Connor Simons

Same old story / Veronica Vo

We were just girls
the time she told me
or didn’t say it directly,
not really, just that
she had been at a frat house.
The drink she drank was
not the drink she thought.
There was a couch.
There were men. Boys.
There is blue in my memory.
I think I put it there.
My party girl always
beautiful, brilliant.
The sun might have been out.
Who knows. I wish
it mattered.

When You Cite the Book of Revelations    /  Melinda Wilson

We suspect you’re in a cult.  
If you want to die in a cadre,  
go ahead. You will still be alone.  
You can follow a moon and get  
lost. We won’t attempt to find you.  
To begin a sentence with the phrase,  
For holy reasons, is to prepare a red carpet 
for the lie. The truth is that the local church boys 
think guns are cool, even after the parishioner’s spine 
is split from its stem. The paranoia of the mass only grows,  
bores deeper into the rod of iron and settles into your porous bones.  

September - Poem 29

Dead Mall / Laura Bandy

At the dead mall the plants are missing and the people, too.
But oddly not the
Carousel that cantilevered frozen horses
Downward on poles from a rotating ceiling
Exquisitely lit and pulsing, effulgent
For fiberglass stallions to prance beneath—
Geometrically pleasing, the eternal circle
Hosting children to ride in place for years,
Infinities, even, as the turning never quit
Just slowed down a bit when the brick and mortars closed.

Kill the lights, pull down those metal security grilles,
Let the mannequins dance together, romantic-like, to the
Mall’s
Night music, a mix of crickets, scrabbling rats and
Organ song or calliope, depending on the mechanics
Peculiar to that whirligig spinning. It's true, the
Queue of humans is non-existent of late.
Reduced to plastic people lingering who,
Some would say, are simply specters
Turning up at a familiar haunt, lonely and longing to
Undulate as they once could, credit cards
Vibrating in pockets or purses,
Waiting to be called up for action most
X-static, most time-honored, most American orgiastic;
You know the drill. But where to buy, now, when capitalist
Zoos are abandoned? Oh, go ghost your own machine.

Floating in Space  / Alicia Boemi

What do they say about us?
That we walk among the stars. 
Float across space. 
Travel time.
Hand in hand.
Mirrored souls.
A fire that burned away the others.

I Say This Plainly Because I Lived Plainly /  Jesse DeLong

My friend sent me a picture
of a blank check
I’d written her in 2012. I lived
in a two-bedroom house with duct tape
on the windows and a dead animal
in the walls. On room had a window
unit, the other a heater,
so that I migrated
depending on the season. I told her
she should have cleaned
me out of the $300 I had
at the time. She could have lived
for a brief time, for us, anyways,
like royalty. 

Bird-Listening (A Ladder) /  Shelly Krehbiel

Andy Weaver, Burlington,  /  rob mclennan

Sleepless, loom. Perambulate. We learn, learn. Every planet on earth. This suburban, expanse. These two young gentlemen, both alike in dignity. Wakes early, late. A noise on the stairs. No record. Still, impossible to parse. A hard precise. To hold, the middle distance. But we can walk. Quite miraculously, barely. Evening, through clear air. How Robert Bateman, Batman. Don’t tell anyone. What the dog knows. Ancient magic, sworn and stable. Hinterland, paved. Some roads, inlay. These are not the droids. A frayed knot. Everything, you might project. Away from, stand. What happens in Oakville. An open book. To live in the present.

"Miseducation" on Aux  / Piper Rasmussen

Miss Lauryn says the isms in a row, euphemism-euphemism-euphemism unforgiven
even as the tower teaches how to write the words, the discipline of -ism is concrete

the water tower gushes high-to-low, relies on gravity to handle the distribu
-tion & -ism & -cracy, the nounization of the fluid movement

when one is married the next compulsion is to find Knights of the Round Table
with whom, over dinner, you can decide how to feel, sloshing with courtship:

Chivalric Romance is a neglected form. Let's add -ance to the noun-izers, don't you
think? Presenting your ideas under the water tower is something like irrigation

lets it settle. Too much thought in a drought simply slips off, floods, saturates
the hard crust of airwaves & no more. Communal meals and slight sipping slippage

roto-till the conscience. -age. -ence. The French did these suffixes to us, the eliteness
(-ness!) brought to shore by conquerors! Before that, the Anglos were all guttural

nouns. More fun that way -- suck, etc. But let's be inclusive. How does Swahili work?
Igbo? Has anybody checked lately? Google it. Water, water, everywhere -- sink in.

a climate crisis tanka #5  / Connor Simons

no sweat like the sweat
that pours from your crooked nose
onto my breastbone –
a wave, thousands of miles long,
hurtling toward the shoreline

Job application / Veronica Vo

The Mother God   /  Melinda Wilson

I’m watching a documentary  
about a cult from the early 
aughts and I suddenly  
remember that the poinsettia 
flower is native to Mexico.  
It is tempting this season,  
but poison to my dogs, so I  
go without. The Mother God 
can’t go without her colloidal 
silver, her vodka, just as Father 
God can’t go without his meth.  
And there it is, the things 
we cannot go with / out, we kneel 
before them or we let them 
drive us out.  

September - Poem 28

Migration / Laura Bandy

The rare birds came and I scared them away. My mother
                        had gathered our girl scout troop in her station wagon
some girls lying flat like Shrinky Dinks in the back, to go
                        see Cedar Waxwings gather in the branches. An ear-full
they were called in a flock, for their trill. Not rare in other
                        areas, but hardly seen in the Midwest; Audubon called them
“winter uncommon,” and indeed, it was cold. Even in our
                        badged-up vests and beanies, the wind was frigid, red-leaved
trees in the Emma Mae Leonard Nature Sanctuary not stopping
                        October gusts from peeling layers off like plastic mistakes we
tossed in the trash after crafts class.

Once in a lifetime that the Cedar Waxwings would come, land
                        in our town and blend in dense bushes, nibble sweet berries
away from soiled human hands, eschewing feeders. Nomadic
                        and secretive by nature, still, I was able to sneak around back
of the thicket while my mother lectured the girls on biodiversity
                        and protecting the birds from soda straps and milk caps that
would make them choke. I could not say, at that moment, why I
                        did it: slid fingers between bramble and rattled the branches
while screaming, “Fly, waxwings, be free!” They rose like smoke
                        from a plastics factory, gray phosphorus shroud with pinions,
and blew away to their own migratory pattern while I stayed
                        below to walk my own: mother’s eyes on me, gathered girls
shrilling high-pitched whistles, thrilled. Scouting was rough,
                        did not come to me easy. But I wanted to see what would happen;
I wanted to make something happen. I wanted to know what I was
                        capable of. 

Star Bright  / Alicia Boemi

I plucked you from the stars,
you were shining brightly,
you were shining true;
too bright for me to bear,
so my light went out. 

A Golden Shovel: “Feet,” by Ross Gay /  Jesse DeLong

You first have to find a place you’re comfortable in
knowing that whatever it is you want or wherever the
last red moon rose above the factory

of your ambitions, it really always was about the where
of it all. Standing in a place your father stood is the opposite of loss,

which is probably why it makes
you want to run all

around and gather the things
you once thought were beautiful.
Like laying different soils in a garden bed so something will grow. 

Advocating Abandon (Abecedarian in Blue)  /  Shelly Krehbiel

Because broken can’t capture delight – dance!
Even eclipsing fluorescence finds good ground here.
Have it! Indigo joins judiciously, keeps keeping light
like midnight might need naming, opening or permission.
Please, quit questioning! Relax! Release something smashing!
Turn toward ultramarine uproar! Vanish vigorously!
Which wonderous “x” exposes you - your zaffer zenith!

Note to reader: I’ve always hated abecedarians. They seem contrived, false, full of themselves. So here I am, trying one that probably is all of that. But across the street is a blue car, the man walking by wears a blue jacket, the wall behind them is a mural of wings that contains every color, but its blue begs attention, pulls the blue - the brilliant, holy, blue of the sky - down where I can almost touch it, where I want to sing it, release myself to it as my grey eyes turn blue in its light – and all I have is a cup of coffee, an empty screen, and twenty-six letters.

First, in freshwater,  /  rob mclennan

In case you wondered. Tarriff, tariff. Annexation: threats, insults, one-sided aggressions. The 51st state. Such grand tradition. To assault who they don’t understand, wonder what it is went wrong. We are who we are, and never the twain. The Siege of Montreal, Invasion of Quebec. The War of 1812. This is what we remember. Madison, sir. Your document is ready, your house is on fire. Orange monster, betrays. A signature, pencil. A kindness, of plenty. To sacrifice a deal. Hard-headed, entropy. The nicest people on earth.

why choose/Webtoon ekphrastic   / Piper Rasmussen

in this romance, make me
all your lovers: I am the pale,

leached-white child of illness
writing poetry to the moon. Another

glance and burning ruby, flame-haired
warrior with no grace, growling at

the laugh-you-androgynous
fan-dance flirt & spy, kept in check

by the best friend, tree
in your childhood heart --

from your throne, observe 
the rich jewels I bring

the glitter of your crown
in choosing every day

facet by facet -- each face
more & less than what I am in fact.

a climate crisis tanka #4  / Connor Simons

your hand is in my
mouth and poppy blossoms will
rupture from my tongue –
a state of emergency
is declared months in advance

For all my friends / Veronica Vo

I am not the same / as I was / but you know me / as myself / I could become anyone / anything I want / because of this / and it would still be true / people I meet / will love me / and know me / as this person / but you knew me / as the one / that came before / I knew the things / about myself / I know now / I was still me / all this time / you knew / I am not always good / and not always kind / and not just that / but in knowing / still choose to love me / always a choice / if the world ends / as long as I have you / I’ll be fine

Bread & Butter   /  Melinda Wilson

It’s my move:  
2 Xanax & a  
bj before bed 
They call it 
“The Maneater” 
Or maybe  
that’s the name 
of a drink 
at the Stumble 
Inn / I laugh 
because I  
can / it’s  
my move 
my bread
& my butter

September - Poem 27

That’s No Moon: On Not Watering the Succulents / Laura Bandy

I don’t want them to die but I do
want to see how long they can survive.
Cactus has the best shot, obviously.
The one with fat shiny leaves also seems
as though she’ll pull through. Poor spider plant
looks dry, desiccate. Not even a
real succulent though, what’s she doing on
my dedicated shelf? Wooden, thin, no
dusting cloth for months. Suspended like
Luke’s hovercraft in A New Hope and
framed by a blue milk sky in my window
high up the stairs. I don’t know if Michael
liked Star Wars or any other sci-
fi films—he never talked about it.
What seemed to interest him were black windows
and what snuck in them or was reflected
there. Look from the lighted kitchen, see
a face: your own or someone else’s,
something else’s, maybe. Because I could
not imagine a time when he’d be gone
I did not ask for things: keepsakes or
final words. It’s simple, really. Stay
planted in the earth and long for water,
moisture farmers to save you. Or rocket up
to heavens’ place, incandesce with the
Northern Lights, become one of many
glittering bodies, including the moon
half shadowed—first a grin, then her true face. 

Motherhood in America  / Alicia Boemi

I am brave enough to walk among you,
without spitting in your face.

I am courageous enough to raise my children alongside you,
without tearing you limb from limb

I am audacious enough to reach out my hand to you, a handshake
without cutting off your fingers

I am bold enough to enable strong girls to become stronger women,
without you ruining their innocence

I am daring enough to live in this chaos,
without cowering and crumbling.

Men. They are not safe.

I am not foolhardy; 

I am a mother.

The Nice Hotel has the No Vacancy Sign On /  Jesse DeLong

The radio is stuck on half-heard. The windows are down.
You see its name, white on green, eighteen miles to town.
There are only two available hotels in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

Leaves in the pool of the Motel 6 have camouflaged it to brown.
The cashier asks you if you prefer cash. The lobby has an alley aroma.
The radio is stuck on half-heard. The windows are down.

The AC works in the room, but the TV  has no sound.
The next room has the game on, but the humidity would put you in a coma.
There are only two available hotels in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

The next is a Super 9. You’ve never seen those around.
The manager is an Indian in a polo shirt and has glaucoma.
The radio is stuck on half-heard. The windows are down.

There is a roach, the shape of a bullet, on the ceiling’s crown.
He must have crawled through where the door’s bottom forms a stoma.
There are only two available hotels in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

Step outside into the humidity and begin to drown
in anxiety, your brain a blaring of chroma.
The radio is stuck on half-heard. The windows are down.
There are only two available hotels in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. 

Maybe the garden  /  Shelly Krehbiel

will give you the poem today, she says.
She knows me. I am grateful to be known,
grateful for the garden, for legs and back
that let me tend it. Though often I forget.
I sit inside the house, don’t want to change
my clothes, don’t think I can afford the time.
I forget there are poems out there, ripe, ready.
Purple figs. Red apples. Green everything
turning so quickly into yellow. I forget
how it tastes – fruit warm in the sun.
I forget how my fingers feel against
the bark of trees.

In the first garden, did she, for a moment,
taste pure sweetness? Did the juice run
slippery down her fingers, stain the corners
of her lips? Did she wake to something then
that had been inside her all along, her
gratitude tangled with her fear, the strength
in her arms with the fragility of her breath?
Did she ever miss that time when all of it
was one and her self was just her self,
no good, no evil, no separation? The garden
will give you the poem, she says. She knows
me. I am grateful to be known. 

The DC Cinematic Universe,  /  rob mclennan

Refresh, refresh. Just hit refresh. Keep hitting. Tantric. Thus. To wag the dog. You’ll get there.

Parenthesis   / Piper Rasmussen

The parenthetical in word and deed is an ethical way of life.
Florence Hazrat, On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World
 

as with programming languages (i.e. Lisp) (designed for symbolic AI, back in the day)

(or maybe I'm wrong, I'm not an expert) just one way of saying things

that lives & lets live in divergence (commutative property) (change the order not the operation)

self-contained units, little cell-wall-bubbles (peptidoglycans) (unless of course you mean

monastic cells (or animated ones) solid (unless split (so I hear) with a great bang))

as an explainer, it is ethical to persuade on behalf of doubt

& sidebars, to note alternate ways (that is to say

to show not everything can be explained away

the wildfire in horse heaven hills  / Connor Simons

ravines are filled with spiked bent
grass & mounds of wild horse
teeth bloom beside the sunflower
mimicry of sere balsamroot
these ashdrunk hills compress
the wind & besides the freeway
wood settler crosses     a name
signals desertion disaster or taut
ribs piercing paperthin flesh   heaven
& desiccated roots       houses
abandoned for the promise
of dense alfalfas & domesticated water

Her Name Was Eve   /  Melinda Wilson

Even before the moment of her 
awakening, she was aware of her  
cunt. The undeniably feminine  
curl of its hairline. Nothing could  
make her or let her forget 
this crude animal fact of her design.  
She was woman.  

She spent her days of sin and freedom  
from form in the butterfly gardens,  
delighting in the soft touch of chitin  
wings, brush feet moving like tiny  
brooms along the ribbed worms of her  
arms. She licked the grooves of her skin  
to test her own sweetness. She wanted  
badly for it to please them. She contrasted  
her own form with their fragility  
and concluded she was a mountaineer,  
traversing alpine foot trails to sleep 
 alone and not alone in the rookery.  
And many times, the carrion birds 
visited to peel long ropes of flesh  
from her cragged body.  
She was woman.  

September - Poem 26

Tibetan Prayer Flag / Laura Bandy

Let’s begin by telling about the spiders. She hangs
a flag across basement vent-windows to try
and forget that she lives in a basement, however 

prettily named a garden flat. You can picture it—
squares of thin fabric—cotton, maybe—blue, white,
red, green, gold, swung on a slender thread of hemp,

precisely the kind of décor you would expect from
a small-town girl transplanted to the big city and eager
to demonstrate that she gets what matters. Peace 

and freedom for Tibet and its fine people all the way 
across oceans in … Asia, maybe? Soon she needs 
to figure out where the L is, and how to ride it, but there

are cinder block walls and low-hanging ceiling pipes
to paint first, in the brightest shades she can find
on sale—terra cotta for the kitchen, pool blue

for the lounge as her new Australian friend calls
the living room which is also the whole apartment.
“The worry is the coyote,” Evan says, having stopped

off in Santa Clara for a few years before landing
in Chicago, and lost his small dog, Pablo, to howling
brush wolves. She agrees—there are some things

that trouble—like how her car doors won’t open anymore
and hoisting body through the rolled down glass
in her first city winter is getting dicey, icicles sharp

and snagging on her clothes, still: when she looks up
at tall buildings lit within and stamped against gray late
November clouds, feels the brisk wind off Lake Michigan

that bends her body back nearly in half, the sense of what
could happen (anything, anything) always stops her breath,
steals it right from her mouth like helium sucked from a

party balloon to make a voice squeak. One side of the flag
is wavering but there is no breeze, windows closed against
the cold, so she goes to adjust, reaches up to fuss with how

the wind horse prayer panel hangs crooked, and as she
touches, so lightly, the cloth’s edge, it dissolves, liquefies,
and 1000 parachuting baby spiders launch beside her Midwest

apple cheeks: some brush skin, catch in her hair, most ride air.

 —quoted line by Evan Harrison, from Sham City

Take Hold  / Alicia Boemi

The waves hold me 
the depths I feel
clinging tightly
underwater
take hold
please never let go

On Minor Talents /  Jesse DeLong

1.

“If you ask me, that’s another ‘not-deer,’” she said, “Look carefully at its coat.” But of course the photo I was looking at was just a deer in molting season and she wouldn’t explain what she meant by “not-deer.” There was mold growing over a half-eaten bowl of casserole, the mold not unlike the clumps of deer fur. “My son took this photo,” she bragged.

2.

Every Christmas her mother made a special cake, layerings of decoration, for them to sing happy birthday to Jesus. “That is,” she said, “if my mother came out from under the bed that day.” Some days she would just bend over, speak to her mother under the frame.

3.

Mushrooms grew out of the wall near her bathtub. They curled up, looking for the sun. She was a raw foodist who believed you could absorb the entirety of your nutrients from walking outside on a cloudless day. I once watched her roll off a couch, wine glass in hand. She stood, bowed, and took a sip of her drink. Not a drop on the floor. 

We’d love to know what you think! (an email)  /  Shelly Krehbiel

My absence will be my presence,  /  rob mclennan

A subject of, instep. Of galaxies. Flesh. Each structural division. To enter one’s skull. Only language, seduces. Doomscroll. Place the body a book, a displacement. A handful, of coin. Having never received. This trick, to be literal. This line has a skin, epidermal. A hard rain might fall. This poem, concedes. Conjectures. To the nature of moon, sun surface. A line in the sand. Pockmarked, with cloud. Sifting hands, sight. Repeating, the singular. Not everything empties. Canadian hybrid, incorporating. Unfolding a portrait. I wish to hear, hear your voice. Speak.

My Life Flashes Before My Eyes   / Piper Rasmussen

the Goldberg Variations as performed by Glenn Gould  / Connor Simons

it is 8:04 PM on a Friday and i’m listening to the Goldberg Variations while my spouse is stretched out on the couch watching George Santos collapse into a mud puddle for money and camera time   he’s such a sack of shit and the Variations are odd because they aren’t religious   no mass or homily here   no Luther glowering from a pulpit   just the way we want the heart to be a tunable machine capable of being what we need it to be   the dog next to my spouse is getting older   at the park today her hips seemed to turn inward and she would just stop and stare at nothing or maybe stare at whatever trace the geese leave behind as they head south   does he ever stop lying? and do i? if my fingers could speak i would want them to always have the perfect tension between the tenor and the alto but these fingers have made mistakes   played keys disastrously out of tune and dissonances designed only to hurt and not resolve and now George Santos is sliding off the pier into the water and oh my god is he fucking smiling as the British drill sergeant screams at him and the hand crossing of the fifth variation begins

T-minus / Veronica Vo

I keep looking for the bomb, can hear the ticking
No one in the house acknowledged it until today
I could have asked why but I didn’t, couldn’t feel my hands
If I ask, that means I know she knows, which means we all know
The thing is that the bomb can’t be dismantled
You just have to live with it and listen to it tick,
can only learn about how how to prepare for the inevitable
So I didn’t ask where the bomb is – I know she knows I know

My Own Desert Places   /  Melinda Wilson

with thanks to Robert Frost 

I met a young writer today. 
She was writing about solitude 
The solitude in Dickinson 
compared to the way it presents 
its thesis in the writing of Simone  
Weill. The imagination has not  
space to imagine itself  
when we need each other’s  
company. I want You to feel  
distracting, like all I can look 
at is you standing against 
the door jamb.  But Simone.         
Simone would have us  
alone. According to Simone, 
we need an empty room to be 
stable or aware of our conscience. 
We couldn’t let a lover distract  
our rational mind. The clarity  
of loneliness. Yet—-some would  
argue that being lonely is distraction,  
it’s own lark to disguise the hole 
in the heart that will- eventually-  
kill you. Or, I mean, will kill me.  
I hope our death will not be lonely.

September - Poem 25

The Lighter Longer / Laura Bandy

(An imitation poem in honor of Catherine Wing’s “The Darker Sooner”) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55154/the-darker-sooner

Next came the lighter longer,
arrived the sooner higher.
Life was no more a darker-ever,
night-all-eras. We were over never.
We were closer and calmer.
Remembrance was the word we used for gorgers.
Commence was our torchbearer.
Our longings were listened harder,
and held gentler.
The stars were seers, seers
all was clearer. Our bond was foster.
Instead of ruler we had revolters,                                 
instead of torpor, heeders. And beneath these waters
slouched the rough beast's sure labor.

Diving Practice  / Alicia Boemi

The open air,
the beauty in the stars.

And here I am,
lost in your ways.

Tangled, tortured,
a web we weave

Beauty above,
Darkness below.

The water feels cool,
to the touch.

I dive.

I Wrote and Then Threw Away a Poem Complaining /  Jesse DeLong

but instead, I’ll tell you about the egrets
I saw this morning grazing
along some cows. They crave
a common grain, I guess. Maybe
you’re more interested in how
I always turn off the main highway
and take the river
road cause there are no
streetlights
and the hills alongside are green.
This morning I turned off the air
and rolled the windows down.
There were no sounds
from the stereo,
neither mine nor yours,
and no one honked as I slowed
and stopped in the road
to watch a flock of geese
flying towards me
their wings
their wings
their wings

Pterodactylic  /  Shelly Krehbiel

Because it’s just me here tonight and the end
of the world hasn’t happened yet, I’m relying on
the pterodactyl to get me through. Except.

Pterodactyl is not even the right word. The winged
creatures who left their bones behind are not even
dinosaurs, but pterosaurs. And that hawk out there

beyond the fenceline, she is not their descendant.
Her ancestors were small, feathered, stayed
on the ground. Who are you, giant of flight, and

why are you the only one with me and this blank page?
Little kid me would have known to call you Pteranodon.
She would have been able to draw your picture.

She had a worn book on her shelf that named you.
She knew your story. She trusted that book, had no reason
not to yet. She trusted the answers in her head too.

Great being of my here and now, of my forty years after,
it is so dark sometimes. It is so light sometimes. The end
of the world still hasn’t happened, though I know

yours has. She would have known where you ended.
She would have been able to call you into her dreams
and fly. It’s just me here tonight. Let’s go somewhere.

For George Bowering,  /  rob mclennan

Wisdoms, pearl. Okanagan peaches. Divergent. Like a fly ball, pitched. Hand, over time. My grandfather’s grandfather clock. Speak, the name of your religion. Something that catches. Make a note, dictate. In a drawing room. How many times, this one small body. A subset, of paired grace. A perfect view. The boy, by the kitchen. Jack Spicer, tuned. This writing life. To close one’s eyes. An unbroken sentence. Foreshadow, enough. Copilot, these untroubled hearts. As it began. And as sweet. Goodnight. Start with a word. (25)

Seated Figure (Djenné peoples)   / Piper Rasmussen

unbuilt and rebuilt homes
seventy in a ring
hillocks gently grow with
terracotta statues at the heart.

five hundred years
of ancestors --
tell me, wrapped in snakes,
what the bowls around you held

while I imagine a lady dressed in a costume
telling children how she made pie
for the Nation's 250th, white hot face open
in petticoats, ready to tell, tell, show --

never buried, or built
unbuilt and buried, surrounded by
the mud of ancestors

the shards of broken wheels

a petrarchan erasure  / Connor Simons

Love in such a novel fashion
that from her cruel side I would draw by force
a thousand sighs a day, kindling again
in her cold mind a thousand high desires;

I’d see her lovely face transform quite often
her eyes grow wet and more compassionate,
like one who feels regret, when it’s too late,
for causing someone’s suffering by mistake;

And I’d see scarlet roses in the snows,
tossed by the breeze, discover ivory
that turns to marble those who see it near them;

All this I’d do because I do not mind
my discontentment in this one short life,

Adirondack / Veronica Vo

two things can be true only if you can’t
look it was interesting until it wasn’t
the world of story time and space
isn’t that what they say we need you
have to be careful or it will become
interesting again survival
because of or in spite of story
sharing something means you lose a bit
of what you have what is it you gain
caution interest a world for existence 

The Breath Before the Verse  /  Melinda Wilson

How easily comes the breath before the verse. 
The impulse to emote carries it forth all husk  
and alert like the branched hairs on the legs  
of a solitary bee that hovers above the asters  
and daisies, teasing the stamens that lean forward  
ever eager and aroused. When I rise and open  
my mouth to speak, there is first a short inhale,   
a beat to gather my thoughts and my courage  
to meet a new day that deserves my arousal,  
but for which I cannot muster much more than 
my breath, heavy and rough without delicacy  
or elegance. The inhale itself draped in worldly 
burden and disgrace for our kind. Nevertheless... 

September - Poem 24

Road Trip Noir / Laura Bandy

To get to Vermont, you first must pass some time in Akron. At the hotel,
two Dobermans in shock collars guard the desk where the owner stands, gray

ink over hard arms and crawling up his neck onto a shaved head. He tells me
he's in recovery when he hands me my room key, then reminds me the ice 

machine's out of service. I ask where I can get a pop and he blinks twice, like
an eye agreement you make when your tongue's cut out. "Stop and Go

across the way," he says. "Watch yourself crossing the highway." I dodge
cars like Frogger and make it okay. The cashier says she can tell I'm not

from around here. I ask what gave me away and she huffs while handing me
my Squirt and a lighter. "You got that lost look," she says, then winks before 

 
waving through the next in line. It's nine or ten at night, moon sliced right
in half and hole-punched in the black sky. Back in the hotel parking lot, I squat

on a thin stone parking block, yellow paint faded into the gray, and start up 
a cigarette before bed. No one knows exactly where I am, no one could find me

if they tried. Tomorrow, I'm meant to arrive in a different state but the smoke
I'm blowing seems to ring me in place. It's only temporary, though. No trace. 

The Sunset Continues in Another Part of the Country /  Jesse DeLong

Cento Title and Lines from Wetherington, Ford, Alam, Arendt, Alam, Graeber and Wengrow, Lin, Brown, Simmonds, Simmonds, Persson, Graeber and Wengrow, Tolbert, Fontaine, Tokarczuk translated by Croft, Tolbert, Jess, Khajavi, Miranda, Bennett, Brooks, Tsushima translated by Harcourt, Herbert, Cowles, Plumly, Leilani, Roberson, Sharma, Tsushima translated by Harcourt, Fontaine, Wetherington, Ford, Graeber and Wengrow, Boyle, Boyle, Ward, Ford, Leilani, Dimkovska, Morrison, Als and Leilani

1.

After the long, warm night of their drive,
proximity to the ocean always made her so tired.
Rootlessness as a conscious aim,
the kind of story they didn’t want their life stories to be:
(fir, spruce, redwood, yew and cedar)
the trees took up more space at night; the shadows added to their volume.

2.

Shore birds have taken to the porch, again.
Each voice shapehifts
exits the body a procession of elemental sonances,
quiet if there is one.

There is no doubt that something has gone terribly wrong with the world.
The conclusive shape of happiness/ is a triangle
a kind of collective story they told together.

3.

Exotic as a salamander,
confession is the logical opposite/ of light.
A writhing, and then a rapture—
the ground why we desire  our own room
any language so long as they all say goodbye.

But what values?
Life must be aromatic,
desire must be released with no resistance—
a blister, all that was left of some lost yesterday. 
High enough for landscape.

4.

And, finally, an apology:
of a call, of a conversation, of a girl on the other end.
The dark drawer
of dreary, ugly ideas, of nonsense.
Yet he didn’t even have the name he needed
to carve you out of your life.

The carrion birds help/ still their circle,
master of flouts and jeers,
the pomp and circumstance of some kind of grand seasonal theatre.

5.

The moon is a parched place.
The moon pulls water towards itself.
The termites writhe in their ruined home.

He was killed, two months later, cleanly, by a bullet.

Even as we look at each other through borrowed faces,
we forget that we exist
there is a cold place one-half inch in any direction.
That is the true nature of difference.

All of it, even the love, is a violence. 

Aubade to Autumn (A Demi-sonnet) /  Shelly Krehbiel

Is it sacrilegious to choose the sun
instead of weeping, to crave abundance
instead of blaming myself for dancing
in the grass for no one, not even bees,
not even love. I resist the question.
Often, I am too tired to dance, and soon
it will be difficult to find warmth too.

The Buffalo Poetics Program,  /  rob mclennan

Dismantled. An insistence, shrill. How much gets purposeful, destroyed. A wall of nothing. To rebuild, lay out defeat. Crafted, dissolution. Lay down, think a speech. A long line takes a line long down. What plenitude, such twilight soup. Clemency, requires witness. Wellness, thus. By no means, heart. Pull, pull up. Distinguished chair. Of fireworks, or cunning. Fate. Lament, to rest in silence. Urgent. Strive for wanting, bitter. Further, pints. Of Robert Creeley, Steve McCaffery, Susan Howe. Charles Bernstein. Jessica Smith, where I first heard. An autopsy, words.

ZINEMAKER CENTO   / Piper Rasmussen

Lines from The East Village Inky #71, Thirteen Facts #26, Pencil Revolution Vol. 1 No. 5, Misfit Cinema Journal July 2025 aka Workprint #4, and Simple Steps to A Life Less Shitty: The Big Sad Sequel by Adam Gnade

You're home. 
experiences and obscure cultural

created over 300 paintings of mushrooms
on view to anyone visiting today

real fun -- dealing all the
safety harness, helmet, & experienced guide

may or may not have been “published” out of their offices after-hours
could possibly cure

and I would definitely be first in line to
get up to the front door.  

a) Salisbury steak on a plate b) Mom's homemade Beef Stroganoff
we left no stone unturned in our hunt for graphic smut! 

(Dodo : 1960s = Polar bear : now.)
the child stars of ZOOM! 

is awesome and kind of adorable, but it
all do it for you,

working constantly
melonfarming long. I got caught up

eight thousand copies
pencil factory, pencil aficionados

It occurs to me that I could ease up a 
Like Kenny Loggins once sang, "I'm going

down on the floor. She looks up at me with her little face and tells me "rheeeeeeeh" (I
you just gotta

the best in the land
I am chemically allergic to the phrase "my happy place”

and what the smell of wood and river water
5) Be a warm, golden sun to those around you.

FIENDISH IS THE WORD FOR IT
Diligence, clear perspective, and good ideas will

their level. They are meant to be a fun
Whatever, it's fine. 

love poem (after Hayes, after Lorca)  / Connor Simons

I want to walk and notice always the way a child
toddles towards its future. I want to name birds.
I want to wear a shirt made of morning glory petals.

I want to one day be older than my mother was
when she died and then outlive her father as well

and to forget that goal when the day passes. If squirrels
remember where they cached winter’s food, then I want
to wake each morning and see the sweet down that pastures

the point where your neck becomes chest. I want to
kiss you. I want you to laugh your stained-glass laugh

when we wait for the bus. I want you to see how
your hair won’t ever gray but will become summer
lightning. I want to feel lightning on my tongue

and I want to hide in the basement when the siren
blares and the sky turns green, the thrum and blare

sending the cat to wherever it scuttles behind the drywall
and I want to be that prefabricated cavern, that place

we never see but sense anyway the lure of quiet
and dark, spiderwebs and a feeling of rightness in being
there. If a honeysuckle can return each year, then I

want the name you would give me, to roll it in
on the ground like I would the marbles my father gave

me so kids in the complex wouldn’t think I’m weird.
I want to know what rain knows and be the constancy
of mason bees building mud homes each November. I

want to be in a room and know you where there. I want
to be the oddness of your fingers holding a sewing

needle. I want your mouth in my palm and to see
how my flesh can blossom into the first lilac sprig

of spring. I want to be the vase, but not the water.
I do not want to be pages left curling in the sun,
ink wilting into a dry liquid blur. I do not want

to be a book. When I let go of this body, my love,
I want to be the first breath of morning in your mouth.

Everyone went to bingo / Veronica Vo

There’s a zombie outbreak in Raccoon City. It’s obvious to anyone that’s not a character in the story but not to the characters. People never call things what they are before they’re sure. So there’s just an outbreak. We don’t know what’s wrong, only that something is wrong. Very wrong. Your mom starts forgetting words to everyday things. It only happens every once in a while, so nothing’s really wrong. Yet. A regular guy is dispatched to Raccoon City to deliver a package. He doesn’t know what he’s about to get into. He doesn’t know his life is about to have a before and after. That there’s quite some time between when he gets bitten and when he turns, time in which he knows what will happen but is still able to ignore it. Proceed as usual. Your mom starts calling you the wrong name. It takes her a minute to correct herself. It’s interesting because she named you. When regular guy sees the zombie virus at work, up close and personal, he says interesting. Interesting as another way to say heartbreaking, even if he doesn’t realize it yet. There’s really nothing he can do besides live until the virus controls him completely. In that kind of situation, when all the buildings are on fire and the cars have piled up onto each other in the roads. No time to ruminate. If you stop moving you die. The once-human, once-familiar creatures will get him with their tentacles and teeth and faces that unfold into flowers. Your mom watches informational videos on Alzheimer’s out loud. Your friend has just pulled up outside to take you to the movies. In a city far away, beyond the scope of being your problem, something is very wrong. Some kind of outbreak in Raccoon City. There’s nothing we regular guys can do.

Das Lied von der Erde    /  Melinda Wilson

When Gustav Mahler sat down at his Larkin Secretary desk  
to write The Song of the Earth, he knew it would be agony.  
Dipping his pen into the inkwell, he pulled from deep memory  
the days each of his six siblings had died. Then, from another  

lockbox of the mind, the day his own young daughter died  
of scarlet fever materialized. Her sandpaper rash, a pink-red 
eruption growing down her neck and chest. Her strawberry 
tongue could have been a product of the pear drops she sucked, 

but not this time. Dark is life, dark is death. Mahler wept. 
To get out of his head, he retreated to the seclusion  
of the Austrian countryside, to walk and walk and walk 
among the tragedy of the Alpine peaks. The ancient forests 

would soothe his aching heart. There the sky is forever blue,  
and the earth / will long stand firm, and blossom in spring. 
There Mahler wrote and wrote and wrote. Such contrast 
to the days he spent on the stage conducting his masterpieces. 

Rapt audiences overcome with grief as they listened to his 
composition. Controlling the orchestra using only his piercing  
eyes, Mahler bred pure tension, until, conducting the New York  
Philharmonic, he collapsed and said, I am coming to you,  
homely place of rest. 

September - Poem 23

When I am Asked What It's Like Being a Stepmom and Instead of Answering I Tell a Story / Laura Bandy

—for Titus

Sara was my favorite barista at the Chicago coffee shop I managed in my twenties. Eyes so light a blue it seemed you could walk through them like a waterfall, freckles everywhere as though someone had blown her a kiss with a handful of turbinado sugar, and a wild crop of curls the color of dusty corn cob, husk stripped, usually on the top of her head in a teetering mop. She was electricity in human form, a live wire who seemed to do the lindy hop while steaming milk, pouring perfect cappuccinos with the froth forming a white apple just so. Once, she came into the café for a shift wearing a hot pink tee that said TATE on it, and I asked if it was a band I’d not heard of yet. She pulled my face to her own so that our foreheads touched, her hands cupping my cheeks, and whispered, “It’s art, Bandy, on the modern tip.” Then, slowly, punctuating each word like a balloon popping, her breath hazelnut from the sweet lattes she sipped all through her shifts, she said louder, “Art. ART!” then shrugged and stepped back. “That’s what we’re here for.” She was a set designer for plays and sometimes drew murals for the café, patrons sipping and watching while she created strange vistas in muted colors—mossy greens and bloodletter reds, chatting amiably with coffee heads all the while—sometimes pausing to laugh with her whole body, bending backwards and whooping at the ceiling, hair flying everywhere, even into the paint.

One evening, the night crew invited us morning workers to a barbeque. They were so much cooler than us, real Chicago kids, unlike the early birds like me who all seemed to be transplants from elsewhere. They were known to be a fast crowd, vampiric in their hours and partakers of all the 90’s party drugs, living in city neighborhoods, never the suburbs. When we arrived, someone was grilling radicchio which turned out to be a bitter-buttery perfect bite, and candle-lit lanterns hung on origami strings above our heads; crane, boat, lantern, the pattern. The tree branches that swayed above were leaf-festooned as though in fluttering party frocks—a secret green space that felt our own little lush islet.

I was surprised by Sara, usually so voluble and effervescent at parties, a bubble water in the flavor everyone most wants to drink; but that night she was quiet, shy-seeming, sitting at the table patiently with a piece of paper naming a celebrity taped to her head. The game was loud, all the night crowd shouting over each other, and Sara’s smile was one I’d never seen on her face before, like an apostle just favored with a holy task. Our hosts were meeting her for the first time and seemed to enjoy teasing her: nudging her shoulder, asking about her most recent play, wondering how she was rolling in Rogers Park, where another barista had just been held up at gunpoint walking home but it had all turned out okay.

Sara smiled through the ribbing, sometimes looking above our heads at the lanterns, swaying back and forth in the black night sky, and at the stars like iridescent fish swimming above us in time to Charles Mingus on the hi-fi. Later, we rode home together on the L, both heading north to our beds. I asked if she had had a good time at the party and why she had been so quiet. Sara was drawing on the windows of our train’s car, her forefinger making shapes in the condensation: kites, stars, even an octopus. “I’m the youngest, you know,” she said, “the family surprise—my sisters and brothers have over a decade on me.” Her window art became loops, spirals like an ocean’s whirlpool. “They had whole lives before I arrived,” she said, “and so I waited until they asked, always.” She drew a little boat on her ocean, gave it a sail. “I wanted to be in the game, so I stayed quiet until they chose me.” Turning in my direction, Sara drew a wet heart on my forehead with her fingertip, then another on her own. “I’m so glad to be here,” she said. “I’m just so goddamn glad to be here.

Dark Force  / Alicia Boemi

I often forget,
I lose myself in your arms.
Why do I keep coming back?

In the darkness, I try to let go,
but
something always propels me,
at you,
a dark force.

And so I ask-
is this the only love I get in a lifetime?

Jesus Loves Me This I Know /  Jesse DeLong

The mom of my friend ran
a daycare in her house where
I wore a red cape all day.
Her sister that worked there told me
she didn’t believe
in hell, though I watched her son string up
and torture a grasshopper,
and later that day the grandmother
told me I could eat the crust
because the bread was baked fresh,
but they stopped letting me
write stories with their son
because of the violence in them.
The only line
I remember is our hero running
from a cave where he’d just encountered
a dinosaur, yelling, “It’s godzilla’s dog.”
They took me one weekend
to their church and after asked the pastor
to save my soul. They’d let me
place the five dollar bill in the collection plate.
I don’t remember anyone singing.
Later, they would sell the house
to a family that raised wolves
and we would drive by and watch the animals
pace the fence, their coats shiny
and glorious and grey.

Let me give this to you /  Shelly Krehbiel

He stands between harmony and exile
as though it is a choice. Let me give this to you,
he says. If anyone was there, they could not
be seen. He is only a boy. He is a good,
grateful boy. Why must every good thing
be broken, be taken away?

If anyone was there, they could see a stone
in his hand, a piece of quartz, rose quartz
with jagged, shiny edges. Did you think
it would be smooth, that stone?
Did you think he had found it in a park,
a stream? I thought so.

I want him to have a round stone, want
him to be giving it to someone he sees, a kind
ghost-dog, an invisible angel. A round stone
would fit so easily in his hand, would keep
its warmth and hold it like a gift. I want
him to know kindness.

He stands there a long time. He cannot
choose who he goes home to. He is not
holding out his hand. The points of stone
are pink in his palm, his fingers. Let me
give this to you, he whispers. Did you think
someone would answer?

Shine on, you crazy diamond,  /  rob mclennan

A moral commitment, to trees. This post, totally verbs. A continued, accumulated need. Contradictions are many. Infinite, newsy. Earl Grey Arnold Palmer. Tacky, rude, and beloved.

Prose Pilot III   / Piper Rasmussen

The pilots on this commercial flight are twins. They like to riff off one another. They both went to the Air Force Academy, but one went to the Academy to be an engineer, and the other wanted to fight a war. Neither got what they wanted, but they both got licenses. They decided to take their show on the road on the preflight announcement circuit in 1999. One tells only the truth and one likes to ask the passengers to hold elections. Sometimes one will use a high voice and the other will use a low voice. When they have different voices, different people laugh, and they share a goal of fair skies. 

what i don’t say when someone asks if i want children  / Connor Simons

yesterday   a dead sparrow tangled in hyssop shoots   a case of avian flu and the parched darkness on drought maps deepens every day   here’s the thing   speaking to the dead doesn’t take much practice   their voice has already burrowed in the dark of my ear and bringing up the body is no different than humming a lullaby my mother sang for me when my tired arms beat back sleep   but speaking to the never-to-be is something else   like the way making a heart a metaphor is easier than seeing it for what it is   a sinewy vessel sustained by air-suffused blood and electric current   so i use what tongue i have and know that some gaps are never closed   easy words like confession or sorry and confession comes from confiteri to acknowledge and so i acknowledge you now outside the quiet spaces where one partner says to the other no and the other nods and there’s no need to explain because look around   i acknowledge you and take away the public demurrals and the world will see the way a wildfire can keep burning underneath snowpack   will see the way people instinctively gather together when they flee   will see the way soil can crack at angles that destroy any hope of soft   but the world will never see you   because there’s nothing there except this acknowledgement and the bone deep knowing of every poem’s lack

Closed mouth that gets fed / Veronica Vo

after Little Shop of Horrors

People are too easy. They just want things
and the mere act of wanting makes them think
they deserve it. I knew this guy that liked a girl
in a bad relationship. He never would have been
brave enough to do anything about it. But after
the abusive boyfriend died, the guy fed him
to me and acted like he was doing something
righteous. All justification happens in retrospect.
Then he fed his own father to me. And eventually,
the woman he loved. Some love. What he loved
most was what he wanted, which is another way
to say what people love most is the wanting itself.

Lovesick Teen Shoots Up School   /  Melinda Wilson

We can say that our impulse is to forgive. 
Austin Bomber Was Nerdy and Kind. 
Or we can tell the truth. The police bought  
Dylann Roof a hamburger, after he killed  
nine people in a local church, because  
he said he was hungry. Nine Black  
parishioners dead at Bible study because  
he wanted to ignite a race war. But sure,  
the bug-eyed boy with a bowl haircut who  
came from a broken home and attended  
at least seven schools in nine years was  
hungry, so get him a hamburger. Get him 
a hamburger, but don’t forget that Evaline 
Hilda Burkitt was force fed 292 times 
for the crime of political agitation.  
A state-sanctioned torture called the Cat  
and Mouse Act, established to punish  
women who wanted the vote. And don’t  
forget that after ICE agents murdered  
Alex Pretti, firing ten shots in under five  
seconds into the ICU nurse, the Trump  
administration repeatedly referred to him as a domestic terrorist. So, please forgive me,  
but the title of this poem is actually  
After months of Aggressive Advances,  
Incel Targets and Kills Classmate  
to Feel Powerful Like a Fucking Prick.  

September - Poem 22

Word Play / Laura Bandy

Elephants fear a bee up their trunk.
Truncate a message, something is lost.
Losing’s no disaster, as we’ve been taught.
Tauten up those emotions, life is strange.
Strangers are just friends in process.
Proceed with caution, that last was a fib.
Fibonacci sequence? Who are we kidding?
Kids get it early—nothing will come of nothing.
No thing Cordelia says will please her father.
Fathom a king who rules justly—laughter heals.
Helium rises like a good joke told to a crowd.
Crows gather in branches outside the sleeping house.
Whose house is this? Who’s in charge here?
Hair down to your waist is just asking for trouble.
Treble is high pitch of a scream when you’re grabbed.
Grubby, those hands. Someone’s been in the mud.
Muddles are made when we don’t use our eyes.
I know, I know—sight lines grow smeary in trenches.
Trenchant, the king’s fool—truth’s a dog must to kennel.
Kin can be so tiresome. Well, you can’t choose your family.
Familiarity with the text is optimal but optional.
Options abound—Shakespeare, Bible, Quran, Seuss (Dr.).
Doctor it up, but alone is something you'll be quite a lot!
Lot’s wife was alone when God turned her to salt.
Salting your food is key, but white people forget.
Forgetting is something we’re very good at.
“At this time, I do not recall.” So say we all.
All of this down to playing war. Toddlers with napalm.
Aces palmed. Find a way out of here once crops are planted.
Plant pollinators, let the bees come. And over the Alps, elephants.
Quoted lines from:
Act I, scene 1 (King Lear)
Act I, scene 4 (King Lear )
Seuss, Oh, the Places You’ll Go!

Underwater  / Alicia Boemi

Fall has arrived, 
chills in the air;
the lake is now still.
Ice forms around its edges.

Fall progresses to winter, 
ice blankets the lake.
Crackling, bubbling, noisy,
underneath the surface

A whole world underwater starts to develop,
waiting to be set free.
I’m reminded of...
me.

Maybe We Shouldn’t Have Let Each Live So Free Their One Wild and Glorious Life /  Jesse DeLong

The first one my grandfather shot
while he was trying to break through
the mesh wire of the chicken coop. That rooster
pecked my ankles for years after. An australian shepherd
with one blue and one brown eye got caught
in a bear trap. After my grandfather saved her,
she limped for days before the leg turned
gangrene. Still, on three good paws
she nipped the tires of passing cars
and was allowed in the mudroom
during storms
since she saw our cousin shoot a dog dead
inside our shed. I remember my mom moving
nervously around it but wouldn’t enter
before my grandfather cleaned it.
A brown lab so fat she ate a whole pack
of sausages died from some sort of cancer,
and later for my grandfather’s birthday
we gathered around his hospice bed
as he died, probably from the morphine.
He was embarrassed once when I,
just a child, caught him
smoking a cigarette beside his car. A smaller one,
a terrier, had its guts ripped open
by larger dogs, by other unleashed dogs,
while trying to protect the mother
of its pups, and she, not long after, would be hit
by a car on the same dirt road
where the shepherd harassed our neighbors
on their way to work. And this one, this one
here, can you believe it,
this one who is taken best care of,
who stays inside
most days and sleeps on the couch
and see’s regularly the vet—this one’s allergic to grass. 

Tilcayo (A Wayra) /  Shelly Krehbiel

We say discovered
as though your snarls were silence
without us. Small one, do not
trust us, keep secret sounds
shadowed in forests beyond us.

Notes:

1.   Leopardus tilcayo is a species of tiger cat, the first novel cat species identified in the last 100 years. It lives in the Yungas region of Bolivia.  (https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(26)01110-3)

2.    The wayra is a poetic form of the Quechua people originating in Peru/Bolivia. Wayra is the word for wind in the Quechua language. It is a syllabic form of five lines. Syllable count is: 5/7/7/6/8. Traditionally it incorporates onomatopoeia within the lines. (https://christinebialczak.com/2024/04/08/looking-at-poems-around-the-world-the-wayra/)

The Marvel Cinematic Universe,  /  rob mclennan

For the endless, refurbished. Whisper, an approach. Casting decisions. At intervals, directed. Teasers, trailers, leaks. Revisions. Cast, or recast. Not like the books, no. Great, responsibility. Gendered, revelatory. Character driven. Stakeholders, plenty. Buildings topple, rewrite, cameo. Background, purpose. Rhythmic. Echoes, great responsibility. We can begin. To still, get up. To know the scope. Hulk hates fascists, corporate toadies. Refresh, detach. To let clouds enter. (22)

Prose Pilot II   / Piper Rasmussen

After Leslie J. Payne Flight Log, circa 1950

I met Airplane Payne on a cloud. He started his usual spiel, telling me to take no chance, but I said just a sec and I took a dive toward the earth. I swooped back up without my plane. Had to drop that off. After that, he decided that we should train as acrobats, so our bodies could be impervious to the sky and the ground. Why would we need planes if we could loop the loop? No more grabbing engines off old crab boats, etc. He promised to make us costumes for it, but he never got the chance. His life went his way, and mine went mine, but it's okay -- last time we talked, he was pitching white lace, and I wanted to dress in harlequin. Our act was doomed from the start.

what a drowned bike doesn't teach  / Connor Simons

the first thing you notice is the omnipresence of gray –
what was called life is made into a rotten tooth too

stubborn for extraction – the warped whitewash of multi-
family homes a dazzler of muddied light and sky that

in its blue once held the now-defunct promise
of a glacier’s constant growing and receding   the second

thing isn’t color or scene but a muttered ‘jesus’ as you
wonder what would happen if the mountains you know

just gave up one day   or even now when the mountains
are a memory what if the river by your house just said

‘enough’ and stopped? so the second thing is your own
fear and the way you’ve always ran to control   prep

the sandbags now   look up the cost of solar panel
installation   plan out your garden and a build a green

house and the third thing is a bike handle jutting up
from a deposit of soil embanked along the contours

of disaster’s temporary river as it flows downhill until
it reaches a terminus of drowning   you don’t know

the size of the bike and can only guess its use
maybe a child rode it while hawking sweets to

tourists determined to take pictures from the top
of the world or maybe a mail carrier brought

the news on these wheels   threats of ice buckling
in heat   rumors of war   sodden rice paddies

refusing to drain   or more likely it was just laid
there the night before by someone coming home

from work and was simply waiting to become
tomorrow’s rust   something piled up with

other drowned things as our refusal to learn’s
body count gluts the expanse of earth

tumbling from highland to low and back again

What rhymes with bad ghazal / Veronica Vo

My parents met her in college, but they had a story
that let them avoid the truth: that we, too, had a story.

One not fun to tell, somewhere between tragic and funny,
but maybe one day I’ll let go of it, this sad story.

For a long time I was afraid, then I wasn’t, and thought
this meant I was cured; my mistake, an iron-clad story.

Funny how the brain rewires itself without you knowing.
Believing I’m in control – just another bad story.

And I know about bad stories. Been telling one for years.
The girl gets the boy/girl. You know the rest, just add story. 

Quid Pro Quo / Quid Quid Quid    /  Melinda Wilson

When the apothecaries of the 14th century, furtively swapped  
one drug for another, they excused the abuse by saying they  
would go broke if they did not deceive those who required  
the medicine just to gut it out for one more day. Even Erasmus  
admitted, “quid pro quo, one thing for another. They do  
otherwise sell this thing for that.” And so, it would go. Those  
who had resources would hoard them and those that did not  
would mortgage their homes to find a way, to knuckle down,  
and carry on. And so, it went for centuries. Until one cold  
and dry winter morning, a man stood on the sidewalk in front  
of a Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan and thought, “quid  
pro quo, one thing for another,” and then he pulled the trigger.  

September - Poem 21

Hammers / Laura Bandy

On a podcast, a Gen X comedian mentions, offhand, a game he played in grade school. “It’s just what it sounds like,” he said. “We threw them at each other.” The young host laughs, assuming a joke from the funny man. “Can you even imagine,” he says. “What if that were really a game kids played?” You can hear the sound guy laughing in the background too, hear the static when he shakes his head and the episode’s audio quality briefly falters. “I don’t have to imagine it, I lived it,” says the comic, and host, sound guy, probably listeners on their commutes, laugh even harder; love it when a guest doubles down on a joke. “Okay,” says the comic eventually, a shoulder shrug in his voice, “okay,” and the conversation moves on to other, less generationally confounding topics, while I’m thrown back in memory to a favorite game of my own childhood wherein my older brother would line my sister and me up against our backyard shed—wide, two stories high, white paint peeling with hoop at the top, crumbling concrete slab of a  basketball court in front, you get the general 70’s-era idea—and explain that we had to keep our backs touching the wall but could move side to side like rooks on a chessboard as fast as we liked. Do try, he advised, to avoid slamming into each other, inevitable while also evading the tennis balls he would hit at us as hard and fast as possible, one after the other after the other, until the afternoons became cooler, the late summer sun sank, and our mother called us in for dinner. We loved this game, loved any attention from our kind but necessarily distant over the range of his six-year lead on us, brother. “Practice,” the game was called, for his spot on the tennis team which was always in question since our family didn’t belong to the country club; or maybe practice for us, pre-teen twin girls in pigtails and terrycloth play clothes, sliding sideways with strict rules under the gaze of a man who made them; or perhaps practice for the wind bisected by an unasked for projectile splitting the airflow and becoming missile in the spin; or even practice for the ball taking a hard hit twice, from the catgut strings of a taut racket to its impact at the wood shed destination, only possibility of rescue to land against soft bodies that, from time to time, just could not, would not learn until much later how, to get out of the way. 

When Mourning  / Alicia Boemi

I can’t bear to lose you, 
even if you're already gone.
So I’ll wrap you around my neck,
and take you everywhere with me.

The Unclaimed Baggage Facility Is Real /  Jesse DeLong

And it’s in Scottsboro, Alabama, and claims
to be “the only national retailer of lost luggage.”
There you can find the Perfect Moment
Corentine Denim Jacket that Jackie has forgotten
after she let an older woman use it as a pillow
on a long flight from Tucson to Bainbridge.
You don’t like that? How about the Lipstick
Pink La Cagole Shoulder Bag that Linda left
when, ironically, applying her own lipstick, not pink,
as she boarded the plane and hoped to cajole
the stewardess into an early glass of Moscato.
No? You already have a bag? How about the “Jesus
Loves You” Silver Sterling Charm? If you turn it around,
its assures you: “This I know.” Though, Mellissa didn’t
when it slipped from its chain and fell
onto the grey carpet next to an empty
M&M’s wrapper. If for some reason
you can’t see yourself
in any of these, how about a pair of Tortoise
TF5959-B Square Prescription Eyewear.
They have that
awkward brown and black blend of shades
that only comes in frames. When Jonathan
set them down to chat up a woman behind him,
he never picked them back up. Anyways, here’s
the links, if you like, since I’m lost
on how to end this poem profoundly:

https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/collections/jackets-coats/products/dl-1961-excellent-womens-jackets-coats

 https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/collections/handbags/products/crossbody-balenciaga-good-womens-handbags-1

 https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/collections/jewelry/products/james-avery-misc-womens-jewelry-25

 https://www.unclaimedbaggage.com/collections/eyeglasses/products/prescription-eyewear-tom-ford-good-mens-eyeglasses-36

 a2 + b2 = c2 /  Shelly Krehbiel

The DC Universe,  /  rob mclennan

Endless, interrupted. Start again. False starts, and ethos. Golden age. Elsewhens, dither. Dangle. Disappear. Flash, echoes. Hero, sidekick, hero. Hard hat, wings. Solid, unchanged. Start again. Which is it? Half-through, ultimatum. Superman, electric. Dies. Batman, wanes. Star City: Cleveland, Chicago or Seattle? The last Clark Kent story. Start, again. Until. Such endless, interrupted. Source wall, glory. Crisis, kingdom come. Reboot, reboot. Grounded. New gods thunder, wisdom, patience. Endless, gesture. Kirbyesque, square-fingered. Behold! Barricades. Interrupted, start. Half-measure. Endlessly, begin.

Prose Pilot I  / Piper Rasmussen

I am a pilot. I once fueled up a yellow Aeronca and aimed it toward Albuquerque, which I believed at the time was mythical. My father was teaching me how to fly. He fed me undercooked chicken thighs so I could understand birds better. He never pushed me off a ledge, but I'm sure he thought about it. After I took off, I realized my father had been in the back seat of the plane the whole time. He scolded me for not checking weight and balance properly. He was heavier than I was, so it was hard to land. There were shear winds. I was tempted by a sideways loop-de-loop into the green but chickened out. The grass-strip airport staff and my father nearly clipped my wings after that, but I distracted them by drawing cartoons in my logbook. 

fire sermon  / Connor Simons

The creation of boundaries is a kind of imagination; this not that. First a tryst then the marriage of self and exclusion. And if the fire line keeps moving, closer and closer, spanning the river, devouring the rye stalks – is that our unloved child? Our rough beast?  Its sleepless eyes a heat-borne whirlwind of hinterland’s lack and centuries of certainty?

In ignorance of desire / Veronica Vo

‍ ‍after Obsession

enough time passes this life that wasn’t supposed to be yours
and you don’t know what you want anymore what you’re watching
bodily autonomy horror-comedy
taken for granted true to form
what kind of person wants that the slasher isn’t the biggest evil
desire without free will a figure devoid understands
two things that must coexist innocence and performance
but does anything really matter in the end
real you screaming on the phone fake you smiling
will you speak to her like you always wanted to

Message in a Bottle   /  Melinda Wilson

I don’t have room for it all      all the letters I will write to the oneday world  
all the sentences to say    that I’m sorry we weren’t better      the words: 
I’m sorry    I’m sorry    I’m sorry          for everything I’m sorry 
The bottle is full and I am empty    and you    were most likely never  
even born because this beautiful earth couldn’t survive our gluttony
our violence      our disregard     And I am sorry      for my part in it all    
for not knowing  what to do when our neighbor countries burn      are on literal
fire and we  want to tax the smoke      and so what is to be done now    but light
a joint and rejoice    crack a beer and cry out     
                                           into the long night that is to come 

September - Poem 20

Nature Poem / Laura Bandy

The news is ugly, so I go outside. I decide
to write a nature poem. Most often when
I scribble, my poems contain humans.

Not this one. Who, then, is speaking?
Let’s begin with the trees, specifically
the new maple shooting up its sap green

leaves that teeter on a spindly stalk. We
brought him in as a replacement when
the most recent Midwest tornado took out

our beloved oak, split her massive 100-year
plus trunk like a wet toothpick, then shoved
her blooming arms through our window. See

how one becomes two? We want to root for
this baby tree to make it, want to care that he
bursts forth blazing orange growth in fall,

so that when the sun hits be-leaved branches
just right, our house is bathed in honey glow
as it was every autumn before the storm. But

we, weary beings, know this sapling can’t
deliver. Maybe turn this over to the birds who
find any high perch sweet, or the late summer

clouds that seem Nimbus today, rain-bearing,
ready to water any and all roots. Nature doesn’t
judge, has no opinion on past or future; only

present resonates—where the nuts and berries,
when the lightning strike, what furred creature
to run from in the dark—there is no why, no

how. Out this window, my husband’s car backs
down the driveway, fender drooping from when
I borrowed it and hit that deer that darted, as they

do, into the road at night. They leap that way
because they have to, nature demands it, then go
blind in bright headlights. You know who, now.

Worth the Money  / Alicia Boemi

The last time I saw my dad, he had yellow eyes.
I thought to myself: He will die; he is sick.
He handed me my grandmother’s straw hat and said,
“This hat is worth money.”

Everything worth something needed to be worth money,
to him.
Growing up, I just wanted to be worth something
to him.
He died five days later.
Sometimes I wear that straw hat.

Today, my toddler wore that straw hat,
crookedly on her tiny head,
it made us laugh and smile.
Worth it? I think so.

Marginal Notes on Calculations by Judith K. Walker /  Jesse DeLong

“The statements in mathematics are permanent, so really, they’re about your own inevitable death.”

When people experience a beautiful piece of music or a particularly moving piece of art, a specific area of the brain will activate. Neurobiologists have shown that this same area activates when mathematicians are fascinated by an equation.  

“He knew about the MIT study. He’d read about how they’d asked participants to pick a number between 1 and 20. He was aware that, mathematically, 17 was the most common answer. But no matter how many times he’d presented this choice to people he was familiar with—his wife, his son, his colleagues in other departments—they’ never fall in line.”

Like that Cohen Brothers' movie, A Serious Man, where a physicist up for review is asked what he’s published, and he looks at them stupefied, as if he’d never even thought about it, and responds, “I haven’t published anything.”

That one renga where the clapping of erasers is linked to thunder.

Grocery stores don’t even carry that brand anymore.

“He’d calculated the probability of the major events of his life, how likely they were to happen, and came away with the depressing realization that he was, like most of us, ordinary.”

Like the time in Geometry class when you noticed the line of ants running along the tiles towards a crack in the wall, and your teacher, careful not to disturb their order, stepped over them as she filled the board with equations.

“When his son turned 17, he told him about the commonality of the number. His son simply looked down at the greasy egg on his plate, fried so hard the ends were dry, and flipped his hoodie over his ears.”

The word choice of ears, here, instead of head or hair.

How high school wrestlers will wear garbage bags and spit into plastic cups to make the perfect weight, and how, if at a meet, they find a scale more generous than others, they will form a line for the more lenient numbers.

“The number of years his parents had been married. His state rank on the high school chess league. The number of school’s he’d applied to. The amount of dates he’d had with his wife before asking her to marry him. The number of months they’d tried before conceiving. The amount of people he could count as actual friends. The distance, in kilometers, from his house to the university.”

That’s nice. But will you really use that in the real world?

Between Continents /  Shelly Krehbiel

Reykjanes peninsula, Iceland

this place says that when we leave each other, it will be a little at a time. sand filling in the gaps

until it can’t anymore. until it falls through. what then? do we just keep moving further and

further apart, millimeters at a time? look at how the shadows trail behind you for a while, like

oak branches shedding their first leaves in september wind. when the sun passes over it will be

my darkness stretching back, like the crow feather as it floated near the river. imagine what it

will be like when there is enough room for the ocean between us. a whole ocean. maybe it is

possible, unimaginable years from now, for us to meet again on the other side, versions of us

crashing together into a horizon of new mountains, an island no one expected.

For Fred Wah,  /  rob mclennan

What if we said we were. Pressure-treated, commonplace. Iron, shale. The treeline this morning. Confirmation. This, question. Turns, smooth and snow. Separation, dialogue. Monologue. Monolith. Walking path, trail. Further footsore, streaks. Eating weeds. You know what the continent. Hillside, or into a forest. A staircase, descends. Upon cobbled stone. Branches, fossil. Microscopic. History professors, the sweet summer wind. To set out as numbers. History, professes. All out of sequence. Glimpses, direct. Don’t speak, pause. Erosion, gathers. Ecocaution. Current threat level: high. These sticks, held in lake mud. The rear wheel. Vancouver loves you. Some feathers wet, Kootenays. I’ll have what he’s having.

Mesostic on Electricity, Sound, and Light,  Chapter 4: Galvanometer Constant of a Moving Galvanometer  / Piper Rasmussen

iT is seen
may not Remain constant
restAtement of definition

a unit magNetic pole
Since action and reaction are equal

51. The Motor rule.
imagined merely as an aId to thinking
elaStic
bandS endowed
with the followIng properties

pOles
repulsioN
one single lOop
toward the reader with a Force of [] dynes and the right
Side is urged away

suppose thaT
equilibRium is
Established
the result is precisely the Same
whatever itS shape
Expression
showS

Alpine/Nippon  / Connor Simons

NAME: Alpine COMMENTS: Near Skykomish
COUNTY: King ‍ ‍REMAINS: Nothing. 
ROADS: 4WD
GRID: 1
CLIMATE: Snow in winter, hot in summer
BEST TIME TO VISIT: Summer, early fall before snow

Nesting Doll Poem / Veronica Vo

Tears welling under fluorescent parking lot lighting,

say you love me and mean it,

even if you remind me of someone else.

The girl before you broke my heart and so will

the one after. You deserved more than me wanting you to

say you love me and mean it,

even when I couldn’t do the same, no matter

how much I wanted to. And I wanted to.

Growing up, my parents didn’t tell me they loved me,

but things changed and I can’t remember when. I used to

think it needed to be rationed. The more you

say you love me and mean it,

the less it means. I used to think like that. I used to think

a lot of things that were wrong. I still do, but I can’t tell

what time will tell. All I know is that it will.

My childhood best friend used to bring me nesting dolls

from Russia. She was good to me, but now she is

someone I don’t know and we don’t speak anymore.

The worst part is that I will always have her in my heart.

Saying you love me and meaning it,

that’s not the hard part. The hard part is knowing

rather than remembering. A friend asks if she can ask

me about my mother. Do you feel less close to her now,

because of memory? I ask her what closeness means.

I watched a video of someone breaking open

a container of red liquid on their chest with a hammer.

I don’t know what it means to know someone. There is so much

about me my parents don’t know. Does any of it matter?

Does loving require knowing? Knowing does not require loving. She

says she loves me and means it.

I know she means it. If I was born from her, raised by her,

does that mean she knows me? Even if we

spend so much time in silence. Even if she doesn’t want to know

that I will never love like she wants me to, my muse. A nesting doll

will always know where it came from, even if removed.

No Moonlight / No Moonshine     /  Melinda Wilson

No lumens tonight.  
Only stars’ blurry glow from  
behind cushion clouds.

September - Poem 19

Nocturne / Laura Bandy

On a dusk stroll down
our town’s prettiest street,

I pressed my nose
into plush petals of cream

hydrangeas, and a bee
blew out as though

I’d breached her home.
But a flower is not a home

any more than a holiday
party you attend on Christmas

is. Yes, there are chairs, tables
festive greenery that feels

familiarly domestic, yet
the photos in their frames,

the fussy canapes, even
pets you would like to stroke

and recognize as your own
are alien here—an interstitial

space, temporary transition
between you and your eventual

destination. Soon, the sun will drop
and moon rise in her white dress.

I get lost often, even on common
paths I’ve known all my life long.

When I walk back all my wrongs and
all the steps to my door, I know music

will be playing, usually a new tune
that my guy has found and spun

so that notes float out through nudged up
windows on this nearing autumn evening—

oh, you knew it all along. Home is a song.

True Love  / Alicia Boemi

 I lost my eternity with you.

Teardrops form,
but no noise comes out.

A sad song. 
Ooohh—Ooohh

It’s all a reminder of how deeply and desperately I miss you.
I can still hear your last heartbeat.
A noise I won’t forget.

ooohh—ooohh
Can you come home?

Now,
I know what true love is.

I Was Supposed to Write a Poem Today /  Jesse DeLong

I Was Supposed to Write a Poem Today, but Didn’t, And So Here Is a Blank Page That Represents My Shame, Though the Symbolism Doesn’t Really Work, Because Shame Feels More Astringent, Like a Hangover From Rut-Got Gin, Which Also Makes Me Wonder Why the Blank Page Often Represents Hope, a Feeling Also Unlike the Emptiness of No Words, And More Like the High Point of That Same Cheap Gin—That’s It, Maybe Gin Is the Thing We’ve Really Been Looking For.

[Kirsten, can you please give me enough blank space to represent a blank page?]

Cento for the Pale Princess /  Shelly Krehbiel

  (lines from Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins), H.D., W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot)

No apologies ever need to be made
for your chance smile.
How I envy you this.

I’m on my own.
I should have been a pair of ragged claws.
I’m the face in your dreams of glass.

All those angels with their wings glued on --
I have met them at close of day.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

What moonsongs do you sing your babies?

Graceful swans of never topple to the earth
And indeed there will be time
To find they have flown away.

Incomplete passage,  /  rob mclennan

Lord Elgin, what have you. A forest of English, the first stanza of listen. Sapper’s Bridge, Biddy’s Lane, Miss Harmon’s School for Girls. The Royal Sappers and Miners. Points, for a purchase. Such tangible counterpart. I wish for this book. How many heads, sunk. To grammar is born. The first round is simple, revolt. I’ll have a second. Combustion. As a reasonable centrist, what kind of hysteria. My present state, echoes. Of dirt roads and lines. A dispersion, pronouned. This wildlife of settlement. Iambic feet, Somerset, Cooper. Walks down. Above, all these seraphim. Conyer Livingston Clayton. This kind of translation. Scribe, you may slip. I think often, most likely. Sometimes, in sleep. Paralytic. Crows of Gloucester, John Smith’s Lane. Permanent dead links. Close the window display. Man says, give a twirl. Let me see you.

Annie Dillard's Writing Life  / Piper Rasmussen

When she sat in a windowless cabin
in the cold on the beach,
            and wrote

The line of words is a hammer. You hammer
against the walls of your house. You tap the walls,
lightly, everywhere.                 I was knocked & shaken.

A friend says, write from the wound.
Another says, write from                      the scar.

And at a party for writers,
other recs include:
                   write
‍ ‍like the man in the cage
and the children around him, also in the cage;

write like a dog, early, often,
begging for notice;

one holds off to the end like a key, taunting its lock
                    (or, when acknowledging the inevitable
                              or the deadline)              a puddle sinking into its mud

                                            & another warns that the more orgasms he has
the less he writes (he has accepted this quote from another
                                                                                                          into his body)

rumbles from another table           in the distance     suggest
write like a hailstorm, sudden
        ice-marbles    skittering

and seated, I learn it is
like     breathing,     effortful    when     sick    &       tired   
when done        just like     (& by the way I'm going)      home        

each direction                 reflects bright little mirrors 
inside           cataracted eyes    -- postmodern
                              alteration and absorption --
    a process    of processing    

but no party lasts long enough to keep us
from a windowless room   the hammer & I

Catullus writes Clodia a letter on the road to Bithynia  / Connor Simons

when we are tangled together   your leg between my thighs – odi et amo – there are languages i won’t speak   nameless of course – quare id faciam – isolates found only in the space between the nail and a palm   the frog’s eyes when it notices the first simmering bubble – fortasse requiris – and if your tongue ran across my clavicle – nescio – it might want to master the dialects of a country where lakes have evaporated overnight – sed fieri sentio – but find only the native’s glare   the one for when a tourist smudges glass panes with the pudgy oils filling the wrinkles of their fingerprints – et excrucior – 

What comes after / Veronica Vo

After Life asks, if you could bring one memory
with you into the afterlife what would it be.
My impulse is to choose one with a lover.
Instead, I settle on one with family: all five of us
in Vietnam at a restaurant by the beach, or maybe
in the city, I can’t remember exactly. Only that
it was night and it was cool. I’m making a face
I just found out I can make and it’s funny and
they’re all laughing so hard they’re crying
or barely breathing. This kind of moment
that can’t be orchestrated. A gift life gives you.
That only life can give you. Meaning,
that you have to be alive to experience. 

Dream Baby Dream     /  Melinda Wilson

Today the city exists in sepia tones— Wildfire smoke  
spreads and drapes a thick curtain over the island. Wild- 
flowers wilt, and I miss the blue skies over the peaks  
of the Catskills. At Inspiration Point, where we stop  
for a picture, the haze threatens to erase it all, the most  
ancient of our structures, and our purest desires. Can a planet  
commit suicide, rest hold of its future from our greedy hands?  
When Alan Vega sings, keep those dreams burnin’ forever,  
keep that flame burnin’‍         ‍keep those dreams baby, 
those dreams keep you free       I imagine the Earth’s  
canyons as smiles spread wide across its blue green face,  
and I think               dream, baby, dream.  

September - Poem 18

Body Count / Laura Bandy

My friend says he never got his license
since autos coming at him on the road
all to him just looked like coffins with wheels.
When he moved to L.A., city of end-
less freeways, it felt like the death drive. What
was it Freud said? In all organic things,
inherent tendency to return to
an inorganic state exists, in part-
icular when it comes to muscle
cars, drift battles, and high-stakes scrambles. That
last has Fast and Furious verbiage (I
did not know Freud was a fan). Fast cars and
sex go together like waterbeds and
charcuterie boards with tiny silver knives—
the combination seems a fine idea
at the time. Los Angeles County racks
up around 800 car wrecks per year,
while waterbed punctures are too rare to
track. You see the smart play here. Another
friend asked my body count and seemed surprised
at the number, though I’m not sure in which
direction. Ever heard of the pleasure
principle? Freud attributed most of
human behavior to the seeking of
sexual pleasure—libido in the
driver’s seat, y’all, or maybe backseat
depending on space and time. Dominic
Toretto would beg to disagree. He
uses cars as God and Dodge intended—
to race, to chase bad guys, and to drive his
family from place to place. In college,
all my friends were down the hall or across
the Quad. Now we’re spread from the start of Route
66 in Chicago, to the end
in California, and some even jumped
the pond. Love, death, family, final beds—
my sister is my twin, like the poet
Philip Levine had. In “How to Get There”
he said, the day will become something
it’s never been before, something for which
I have no name. I count on my fingers
but forget the math, forget who asked. 

Roll the Rock  / Alicia Boemi

Steady as the rock that rolls...
beyond the pines into the needle-filled forest floor,

I wonder...
have I told you I love you?

The trees won’t share my admission, only silence from them.
And so I melt into the moss without saying a word.

Maybe I need a bigger rock to roll.

People Who Wake Up to Fish Stews Every Morning /  Jesse DeLong

Cento titles and lines from Graeber and Wengrow, Boully, Pollan, Earling, Earling, Tokarczuk translated by Croft, Wetherington, Plumly, Davis, Ford, Joudah, Arendt, Moshfegh, Miranda, Ford, Brooks, Okada, Orange, Göransson, Sharma, Lundy Martin, Graeber and Wengrow, Long Soldier, Ford, Persson, Brown and Drake

Death would indeed involve luna moths and lilacs,
so let’s begin at the beginning, with fire.
I huddle over my belly like it is a fire that will go out.
The People died like rotten plums,
like a purple coat worn on holy days.

What does it mean to witness in language?

That was the moment I began to wear my father’s body.
The hummingbirds had been replaced by large moths that arrived at dusk.
The owls kept closer to the ground.
Still they shared the dead among them.
The mob was flesh,
an ominous kind of stillness, like a slingshot being pulled back too hard—
these new names for hunger.

What was to be said against that?
Pray, to pray?
People forgot and, in forgetting, forgave
how everyone lives in different states now.

This is how art works, through infection, contamination.
How it can crush me into bits how everything can.

What other place is possible besides
theatre or history,
winter water cold-steeped in pine needles,
hairbrushes, frying pans, and copies of Sappho?

The morning of the fish and roots.
Still, as the dead do
in our language full of light. 

Cheyenne Bottoms on the 17th /  Shelly Krehbiel

Some places feel like they shouldn’t exist. 41,000 acres
of wetlands in the middle of Kansas. If you don’t know where to look
you would never know it’s there. Unless you drive that particular road,
happen to notice the road sign. Unless you also follow the sign
and find yourself on a road with water on both sides and reeds and where
did it come from - this water? Maybe you arrived just at the right time
to see the cranes, whooping cranes on their 2500-mile journey
from north to south or back again. How do whooping cranes even exist –
white wings carrying their long bodies from far-from-here to another
far-from-here? You know there aren’t that many left, right? Cranes. Stopping places.
Three hundred sixty-four other kinds of birds use these waters too, one
name for each day of the year. What if you knew them, the names, the feathers?
What would come to you in the middle of the night? What dreams would show you
water and sky so far away you’d never know it existed if
you hadn’t woken in time to remember? There probably weren’t any
cranes that day. It was the wrong season. I didn’t even know cranes
could be there. I had to be somewhere, didn't I? It was just a sign.

First weather,  /  rob mclennan

An age of melancholy, rotation. Routine. Every few months. Blue Moon Café, this poutinerie. A wealth of nations. Uppercuts, into the air. The attention of sleep, infamous slices. What out-of-phase syntax. A corner, we round on. Against, or obscene. Kids, when the clubs hollow. Contrary. One lobbies for windmills, an ambient passage. Parodistic. Turbulence corridor, straight south from Wellington. What meaning, holds. The sheer force. Where the palm reader sat. By the window, just there. To procrastinate, panel. Great Canadians. A pure matter, faith. As the wind blows. I believe in you not at all. 

after C. P. Cavafy  / Connor Simons

no room to remember except in memory
and even then it’s mostly shades and senses   a stretch
of hair running down from the belly
button   nourishment’s first locus   desire’s starting point

and now   what can be familiar?

maybe a futon laden with throw pillows
an acrylic tapestry nailed into a wall
the swirling hues smudged by the first embrace
of moan   or maybe not that   maybe it was
a bed and maybe it was only
posters on the wall   now just items heaped
beside others in a rural landfill but there is
the scene of rodeo boys scowling when he held my hand

some part of his palm’s warmth   is that heaped too?

some afternoons   the arid sunlight still
tangles the dark hair on his calves

…   one night he decided to put me
wherever it is the ghosts of a bedroom go
a place contained in the dark space
where breath and tongue pass through lips

According to the Gospels / Veronica Vo

Jesus was tempted three times in the desert. Hunger, life, and splendor.
One of the stories I remember most from a lifetime of Catholicism.
I remember it again in a restaurant, telling a friend about my diagnosis
for the first time. The temptations to make friends tell me if my relationship
was working. I succumbed every time. I want things to be different.
I want to prove I can do it right. There it is again. Only belief.
Satan tests Jesus’ ability to feed himself and resist worldly splendors,
but the one that sticks with me the most is his ability to overcome death.
Devil takes Son to a cliff and tells him to jump. If God is real the angels
will catch him. Jesus says not to test God. Imagine that: a faith so strong
it doesn’t need to be tested. The crux of the problem: a feeling mistaken
for fact. Each temptation a test. They say if it’s hard it isn’t right. I said
this wouldn’t be easy. In the desert, any mirage can become reality.

The Infant Perdita    /  Melinda Wilson

Finding herself in the stormy wilderness of a shoreline 
that could not have existed and without a soul to take  
up her care, the infant Perdita turned to her instincts. 
Unable to speak beyond the babble of a babe, she broke  
into an expeditious crawl toward the tree line, joining  
her insect brethren under the elliptical leaves of the beech  
trees, where she pondered her condition. Her new  
and capacious consciousness whirled with quandaries:  
hunger and thirst, shelter from elements and predators,  
but chief among these agita was loneliness. Who would  
teach her the ways of this world? Who would take her  
in their arms, so she would know love? Who would help  
her bear her pain when it came for her? Who would  
be hers? Having exhausted herself with doubt, she fell  
into a numbing sleep and, in the mist, came upon a bear  
and a wolf. The bear, who called himself Spinoza, told her  
that the universe and the divine are one and therefore  
she could never be alone. She looked quizzically from  
Spinoza back to the wolf, who told her that there would be  
no survivors from this world, so in the meantime, she must  
rely on only herself, for every heart vibrates to that iron  
string. When she woke, she knew she must begin the work  
of living,  
ready herself to meet  
any joy, any terror. 

September - Poem 17

Sin Tax Triolet / Laura Bandy

My brother asks for a poem about either tax indexing or
the fragility of life. I confess—I know nothing of the first
and have politely ignored the second as a philosopher’s chore.
Why worry? Why contemplate how lickety-split our exit? Or
am I hiding… Time here is short: a wink, really, on God’s face, torn
wing of the angel who fell from father’s favor to father’s curse.
The tax for loving and being loved was always thus: play safe alone or
risk it all, let those brackets creep cloud high. And the last shall be first. 

Hollow  / Alicia Boemi

And I did love you at one moment in time.
Remember looking over the lake?

Longing,
wishing,
hoping.

You’d lean over,
seal it for us both.

But,
silence.

Love, it washed away in the waves.
What followed: a hollow heart on fire.

For My Birthday All /  Jesse DeLong

I want is to watch the Twilight Zone
while you fall asleep next to me
and for our child to sleep, soundlessly,
without disturbance, next to me,
and for the dogs to sleep,
without howling, and for me,
eventually,
to fall asleep,
and for this to be all
I ever really want. 

At the Corner of 18th & Friendly /  Shelly Krehbiel

As evening comes in, September sun crashing
into the rattling oak tree feels like an accident.

Then there it is, yellow everything.  

I said I’d never use the word crash casually again.
Yet there it is, in the same sentence as accident

making golden with the same words

that mean metal and smash and broken
and pain and bruises and not quite sure

what’s memory, what’s shadow, what’s now.

It’s equinox season. Two halves of horizon, two
hands raised into the air to feel warmth before

warmth is lost like shattered leaves.

It’s okay to be nervous, she whispers, takes
my hand in hers. And we go together,

to the place where it happened. 

The book of questions,  /  rob mclennan

Repetition, reset. Inarticulate. The man in the moon. Copy, fold, staple. Copy, fold, staple. A path marked in stone. My teenaged mother saw movies, the theatre next door. This was back in the fifties. A bare lot, might wither. Panopticon, gravel. A fire burns layers. Copy, fold, staple. Copy, fold, staple. Wood planning and turning, mill. Old colonial. Grandfathered, shadow. The walls might collapse. Abiding. Context: a chaise lounge in hell. At the season, flustered. Undefinable realms. Marking chairs, ottomans. Side tables, tasteful. A fire burns, layers. Copy, fold, staple. Copy, fold, staple. This is not where I started. If I am to emerge. Unscathed, if you will. A claim of last words. My freak is unmatched.

Othello  / Piper Rasmussen

is onstage in the parks
in Harlem & Columbus Ohio
like the cities' cycles
have synced up (a myth,
by the way, that menses
are more than a shared

anatomical habit). It's been years
since DC did Red Velvet, back
to back with Black Shylock.
James Shapiro's Shakespeare
has been in America a few years
now. A. Van Jordan's When I Waked

I Cried To Dream Again barely
saw the day, each of them
a More Than Ever to ride
like a wave. My kingdom 
for a horse that doesn't bolt
so quickly on, herald to a Lear

or Winter's Tale.
The following slot a vicious 
Richard, or a Bloat
of Henries. Then following 
the dogs of war 
a Midsummer reward, just As they Like It.

Back-to-school will flirt with Juliet,
or grown-up Cleopatra with her snake. Only then
might The Audience be Ready
for another Issue Play: a Caesar,
or a Merchant, or Othello Most Profound.
Pick 1 of 3.

The arc of justice bends
around again:
a slowly-bleeding public
sits and spins. 

a climate crisis tanka #3  / Connor Simons

mandible-wrecked ash
trees – emerald jaws girdle
and gnaw on sapwood;
if i put my ear to your
chest would i hear snowless months?

day of unbearable lightness / Veronica Vo

after Carl Bergstrøm-Nielsen’s score: Towards an Unbearable Lightness (1992)

red Icee stain and beaded bracelets
shapes in the enclosure your hand
reaching through me on the other
side the reaching the reaching
the reaching my hand on your
knee and you smiling so hard
my light in an eternal summer
in conversations with myself
gradually every note changes
in this version a fermata at the end
you don’t let go and I never ask you to

Attempting to Regain Myself after a Long Period of Destruction    /  Melinda Wilson

The first mistake I made was to desire the past. The following mistakes  
were all repetitions of that initial error. When I looked in the mirror, I wanted 
to see the girl of my youth or the young woman of the not-so-distant 
past who thought she was on the right path. Foolish girl, but pretty and thin, 

and happy in her way to float from one day to the next without concern  
for her sins. The second mistake I made was to desire the past. Powerless  
in the unshakeable grip of nostalgia, I worked to replicate and remake feelings,  
which are autonomous interior spirits that will not be told how to fashion  

themselves. Products of the present, they laughed in my face, and I begged  
forgiveness and took my lashes. But still, I persisted.  The tenth mistake  
I made was to desire the past. With a bottle of E&J brandy in hand, I emptied  
our photo albums one by one. Removed every old ornament from the Christmas  

tree and delicately laid them in a felt-lined box because still I would not admit  
that they were trash. The one hundredth mistake I made was to desire the past. 
Visit the places where I knew the ghosts would be about, read Ashbery & Bishop  
in Tompkins Square Park. Believed in a future that would arrive with no scars,  

having simply pressed fast forward to a clean part of the tape. The one thousandth  
mistake I made was to desire the past.  One morning in Marble Hill 
I woke to the first mark of progress, a desire to admit the erosion of what once 
was. A willingness to endure the discomfort of agnosia that would come with each 

small switch. Instead of Dresden or Berlin, I would be like Rotterdam after the war,  
bearing less and less resemblance to the buildings that had been there before.  
I would not attempt to recapitulate myself but build a new self no matter the time 
that would pass in this process or what plague of growing pains. I let go of before.  

September - Poem 16

September  - Poem 16 / Laura Bandy

When the young woman sitting at the table next
in this small plates upscale bistro, Curate,
takes photos all throughout her dessert and ‘grams
them, making kiss-lips peace-sign influencer-
worthy selfies as she holds tidy forks-bites to
her face, then begins to slide down, slowly,
the way I imagine a 70’s waterbed might undulate
as you place a cautious limb on the mattress,
trembling, perhaps, after too many Bees Knees
cocktails out with friends: her flower of a mouth
already turning blue, cheeks waxen and eyes
aflutter in her skull’s slot machine, when… Forgive
me. Forgive the way my body freezes while
my brain continues on, like an alcoholic blackout in
reverse, spits out similes as though that might
help the girl on the floor right now, seizing, and my
hand considers extending, maybe to do some
thing other than hold a pen, I hear a woman’s voice
[clear as the water in my glass I asked be refilled
over and over, and could you add a lemon slice this
time, please, could you keep bringing me that
which makes this body go, flow forward, in contrast
to a body stopped] shout the phrase I’ve only
heard before in films and; what do you know? A
nurse in heels and sequins comes from back
of the shot, a long take, they call this, blonde
blowout floating up like (I’ll say it) angel
wings as she kneels, places purse between teeth and
tongue to save from the slicing bite, cradles
a stranger as if her own newborn, and then, then
I can move. And she, she, she. All three—
background, middle-ground, deep focus—all three
women (whose story is the eternal one)
begin again.

Howling  / Alicia Boemi

C h a n g e

m e.

C h a n g e

m e.

You, in your enormity, can do that,
right?
I howl.

Awoooooo

My neck splinters to look at you.
We’re in purgatory down here.
The ripe and rotting moon sees all.

Because Jonathan Franzen said a Book is Allowed One Cliché /  Jesse DeLong

I open the drawer in my office for snacks
but find only a millipede
scuttling over an empty M&Ms bag,
and earlier I read the passage
in Dracula where Renfield feeds
a fly to a spider to a bird
and hopes for a cat so that each
accumulation of life will add together. Maybe
there is a lesson there—not about the grotesque
fooderies, no, but about adding to and layering
experiences. How the millipede
is a gift on this lonely morning early
where no students will visit
and my wife and child are elsewhere.
Last night a perfect
rainbow (please, allow me this
cliché because it’s true) arched
out of a puff-ball of a cloud. I had never
seen that, not out of a cloud
like that, and I was glad I didn’t
have my phone on me to take
a picture. 

Ghazal for the Lost /  Shelly Krehbiel

Let’s get in the truck. You’ve got country
on your mind and on the radio: country.

Music still plays behind the bars of memory
though many things are lost in the country.

County roads are a way of counting. One tree,
miles until the next in straight-line country.

It’s not a question of losing myself. I’m hungry
whenever wind blows. I want to see country.

Don’t forget how it felt to stand, though angry
others have the power to bend good country.

Tip your hat, if you still have one, to the lost, see
their faces, the ones no longer left in this country.

Hawks and vultures ride the updrafts, so free,
while rabbits run for cover in open country.

Though I feel old dust in my throat, I must sing
for wide skies and wings, as I lose my country.

Love, love the Lax’yip, /  rob mclennan

To rend the earth. What are we doing. A line, on Prince Rupert. What is your truth? Bliss fulfillment. The hub, of the north coast. Skeena, Grand Trunk, Ts’msyen. Of the Rhine, Duke of Cumberland. My second language, is steps. Out, stretch the length. Pipeline, pipeline, shale. We will never admit we are buried. Such savagery. Historical, sequence. You can’t come into language, as into a mountain. Eras, end. What is fragile, we mangle, we purposefully break. Diagonals, research. Facts matter, notions. What the lungs suffer. Word, approaches the word. A subversive poetics. Predictable, loss. A sound toward leanness. Antiphonal, trees. To outlive, the company. Hudson’s Bay. What if we stopped. Just, stop.

Bob The Reader  / Piper Rasmussen

Bob didn't help to build the bigger house
even when his siblings heaved the spongy
wartime lumber. He was Bob the Reader --
the family's Encyclopedia.
When he tried to go outside to help,
he got himself bit by a frothing dog.

The mastiff ran away until his brothers
gunned it down, & until his sister dragged
the lumpen body home for rabies tests.
It was heavy, and Bob had to take
the Greyhound bus that left just after class
to a city with vaccines in stock.

When Uncle Bob enlisted, he was smart:
studied radios, and met the mark
to be assigned Technician on the spot:
a bookish man who'd had enough of shots. 

a climate crisis tanka #2  / Connor Simons

you bite at my neck
and the bruise waits ‘til morning
to ripen itself.
somewhere a wildfire smolders,
waiting for april’s first thaw.

Is it bad that I (still) want it / Veronica Vo

The lesbian pulp ending even if there’s all that
screaming and crying and heartbreak
in the middle. And at the end.
Doesn’t it all feel worth it, those moments
of bliss. Like trying to find beauty in the mundane
but instead of the mundane it’s the electrifying
feeling of simple connection. So easy.
The fallout is terrible. Trust me, I know,
been threatened with beheaded stuffed animals,
stalked, written about slanderously, ghosted in person,
on the clock, straight up left on heard in real life,
made the rounds of the tumblr shit-talking circuit,
seen the ex’s new girl that looks just like me, still,
it’s worth it, the moment when you feel understood
for a moment – seen, through the flecks of light
filtering through the green or brown of someone else’s eyes.
Sunlight coming through the trees.

Treehouse    /  Melinda Wilson

Call it a hole.  Call it a home. 
Call it a wound or a birthing canal.  
Whatever we’ve called it,  
we can’t seem to fill it.  

Philosophers muse over the void,  
but if we could build skyscrapers 

like termites – mountainous ruins 
of saliva and feces – all the holes 
in the walls would not jar us.  

We are not the only architects,  
erecting fixed homes of maximum 
stress. The little long-tailed tit 
integrates its nest with the landscape,  
hopeless to go undetected.  

Nature offers perspective 
on primates who won’t build: 
we are evolutionarily driven by fear,  
which drives all animal action,  
like the way I don’t want to live 

with you, but I value not being alone. 
Like coral polyps bound to our reefs,  
I can’t ever touch you. When worn down 
and dead, we’ll settle as sand on the sea- 
bottom, and then, we can be together 

with no fear of the future. For now,  
we must safeguard our weakest flesh. 
Shells are one of the most common 
and primitive forms of protection.  
Sometimes I fall in love with shells.  

None of us is as brave as the naked 
hermit crab stealing a mollusk shell 
that just might be perfect. 
It considers the decision carefully: 
should I change or not change? 
At most, we can remove obstacles 

to lie like lungfish in a pile of muck,  
taking awful gasps when the ponds 
have dried. We have been building 
this home all our lives. The sad part 
is that we never get more skillful,  
so our last work will be almost 
identical to our first.