August 25 - Poem 25

Cabin Theory

I used to think if I locked someone in a cabin 

they’d just have to love me. Obviously I hate to admit this 

online. Probably everyone at my high school 

already knew. 

I’m allegedly still young. Each night 

I say a prayer to the gods of standing still. I lock myself 

in a cabin. Now I love my poem and my poem loves me. 

Look how lucky we are to not 

escape each other. No handles on the doors. 

For Your Drive / Dahhee Chung

Wake up and stare until the first song pops up,

“Friends, how many of us have them.”

Whodini tops the charts forty days now. 

Curate a playlist for your day,

Mood like Cortex,

A scene with James Blake,

Add something bumpy, groovy, funky and

A joint with your coffee. 

Get dolled up,

Fill the bottles,

One peanut-butter bar just in case.

Ignite the car and blast your tunes,

The clouds in the front drop

Like rad racer  sped up 8-bit pixels.

Maybe you’re not moving, but Tailored side peripheral’s are racing to an infinite horizon. 

Head bopping’ cuz Olive Jones is swooning Planes while

Two men under a tree talking with their arms, 

And a girl crossing the street in syncopated shoes marching two coffees in both hands,

I hope they know how much she likes them. 

Does anyone else imagine body parts when driving past black trash bags on the street?

Walter white was here 

Sharpie on the wall. 

Get lost, feel free,

The airline flight was a double feature. 

Sivans Estrada’s Un Rayo De Luz evoking pictures of you driving to the end. 

The last song Godspeed,

Frank Ocean will make you cry every time. 

What's more fascist than fat shaming? / Ashley Kemp

after a line from Harryette Mullen

The body

unconscious

devours itself.

Take a little pill,

inject a little liquid,

you will feel

so much... less.

Susurrations / Hannah Page

Follow

me          down

                                     to the boundary             where waves unfurl where I have prayed

the rosary over the fifty-nine small

scallop shells I unearthed with my curled

toes & pressed back

into the sand

in patterns contrived by the mariners

or perhaps the sirens with their slick

songs which seep far beyond

their visibility, beyond

the whole dark sea to brim at the shoreline

a high, pulsing murmur: a melody

simultaneously invented  & recalled

Balcony House / PF Potvin

as you climb the ladder

imagine above

this sandstone slab

patches of corn, squash,

beans and sunsparked faces

put your hands in the holds

your feet in the grooves and squeeze

between walls cut, stacked

mortared and etched

a millennium ago when

ledges held high enough

earth turned rich enough

seeps dripped long enough

to wet thirty tongues

until one day

enough was just not enough

anymore

Hotel meditation / Janette Schafer

This bed is lovely. It’s 5:39 a.m. 

and the world outside my window

in Jefferson County is already

awake and alive, the highway

buzzing, its own kind of wilderness.

My mattress, dense but soft—

my back feels delicious, tells me 

I need a new boxspring when I 

get home. 6:19 a.m. now, dawn 

creeping in, awakening the shapes

inside—outlines of a small table

a tiny refrigerator, a television 

I never turned on, a desk I wrote 

two centos from, and some white

frosted lamps, now disco balls 

by this refraction of sun.

Spent the afternoon in sturdy

farmhouses in need of paint 

and blueprints, drove by fields of

pastoral green—the clean bright 

smell of them. But the hotel is near

I-80, a few miles and mindsets

from the Pennsylvania Wilds

through which I just wandered,

an anonymous mammal burrowed

inside a temporary den, done

what I’d set out to do, sold a home

and time to return to mine. 

DUNSCAITH CASTLE / Kate Thuma

Standing in Dunscaith 

on same-but-different floors, 

our eyes form a human chain of origin, 

where our pupils connect 

to form a single dark hallway

for passing letter-locked messages through time. 

A blue silk ribbon 

runs between each eye-door; 

it flutters when I blink.

My end is woven 

into a slender braid behind my ear, 

so I can feel you first. 

Yours hangs loose 

to catch on thistles hidden in the heather. 

Each tug of the ribbon whispers 

original truth in an old language: 

we were, we are, we will be. 

August 24 - Poem 24

I cannot remember the wind making a choice /Zoe Berger

and yet it blows one direction 

Foolish to think because I cannot observe 

its shape or define its edges, that it makes no difference 

to what it touches

I have been watching from inside  

A tree falling to its knees, its limbs rearranged

Dunes shifting side to side on their desert feet

How can I be above that which moves an immovable object

I have to agree 

I am in the path of affection 

Preserved / Dahhee Chung

Grab me by my ankles and hoist me up  

Until the clicks clack down my spine, 

Bleed me dry then paint me pretty, 

Pluck my eyes, a glass one will do.

I’ll even sing you a tune, if you’d like.

My limbs so heavy, I’m useless anyway,

Nail me to the wall, before I fade away. 

untitled / Ash Kemp

Deafening silence

The dark side of the moon 

Leaf in the puddle 

Sandhill Song / PF Potvin

Behind the barn

in the field where dawn

yawns orange and gray

a crane pitches

its head and shrills

vibrato like a rubber ball

tossed between birches,

pines, and oaks then echoed

back down into its own

waiting throat

Marital Bliss / Hannah Page

We watch Pawn Stars 
in sweatpants like 
anybody’s neighbors
spewing weed smoke 
onto the green faux
velvet loveseat that I 
ordered on Wayfair,
assembled myself 
over both discs
of the Taylor Swift vinyl 
that skips a few times
now when I spin it 
on the same daisy-print
suitcase player you sent 
to my old apartment – 
one of few objects
that have practiced 
permanence through 
these many timelines.

I forget when I first
left the bathroom door 
open with you; when you 
first asked me to make
a decision with 
consequence. I recognize
patterns. Small picture
means small potatoes
to the girl who never kept 
the ring. Now I am
stacking them up my
finger, weighing down
my left hand until I am
able to drown myself
in our bedclothes,
in your redolence,
in the essences you
draw out.

Lotus / Janette Schafer

a demi sonnet after a photograph by Erin C Murphy

Every living thing carries a version 

of themselves that is drowning. Consider

the lotus, opening in sunlight, closed

to the moon. We bloom despite our darkness. 

I never knew I needed green and blue

without black. Loved buoyancy of floating

without slipping beneath a still surface. 

Fibonacci / Kate Thuma

The 

world’s 

perfect 

math triggers 

apotheosis 

of the wind – an oracle who

speaks holy truths and prophecy into the curl of

a leaf that catches in my wild hair. You untangle me with reverence, as foretold.

August - Poem 23

Icarus fell at the end of it / Zoe Berger

I swear I’m trying 
to turn grief to light 

I too want to see 
a bright thing
and I’m laughing 
at the kitchen table 
with you because really 
what else is there to do

Out the window 
the leaves let go, finally
(dancing as they fall)
(light beaming through their skins)

taos to denver    / Ashley Howell

can i hold another ring
wear another piece of heart
we saw the last moments mountain

after we burnt our skin in the desert sun
how we move from one plain to another sky
with what seems like ease
knowing death comes with letting go

The Destroyer (for Appa on his birthday) / Dahhee Chung

A little tornado with untamed roots sprouted out of…
Who can say, 
With the same fury and fire 
As my unbound procreator 
Who has howled at the moon 
And fought with the sun.
“Seventy nine.”
He sighed,
“I thought I would be happy if this was my last one,”
Then cried,
“But that little boy kissed the freckles on my arm
And his sweet voice said I love you,”
The peace he felt,
Destroyed,
Cause now he wants more time.  

Patron saint of hopeless causes / Ash Kemp

Nightly we endure
Not silence, exactly,
But an absence of other sounds
Outside ourselves

Patron saint of delirious dreams

Daily we ask you 
Can a dream become reality
Even when it’s been crushed and forced to be forgotten?

Poetry / Hannah Page

is not a commodity but
I am rich on reams of it, excessively
draping ink-wet paper lengthwise
across the dining room carpet over
the table set with thrifted china
scalloped and gilded between the
chips and I scotch taped together
a dress for our courthouse wedding
out of my most sordid laments
because all the words strung together
to the resonance of the ocean’s
pull were emptied of their gravity
in the laser light of our third
and final homecoming.

At the Desk / PF Potvin

honestly, from here there’s not much to see
unless you’re a boring-o who’s into watching dad
close his eyes and stare at the ceiling
with his head back like a zombie guy
breathing just enough
to keep his sooooo slow heart from actually stopping
I love my cousin’s graduation picnic picture though
when we hung out with our papa, nana, uncle, aunts, and cousins
they had those mini cakes you top and played tons of cornhole
I had vanilla frosting, marshmallows, hot fudge, and rainbow sprinkles
my uncle almost hit nana in the head like 20 bazillion times with beanbags
she wasn’t even playing the game
he really needs to learn how to throw
actually, my dad IS like me
unfinished projects everywhere
these framed paragraphs signed by someone named Lydia Davis
one about going to the bathroom and seeing the moon
the other about a monk and a train
what I don’t get is after 5 years why it’s still on the floor
next to his acoustic guitar
leaning against the wall with the other frames
one of my brother’s school pictures and another of mine
speaking of, dad’s nuts, he’s too skinny to be santa
but linz is the perfect mrs. clause
she can handle anything
dad’s always so dramatic
scrunching up his face
so you can’t see his eyes
I bet it’s not even sour
everybody has scrunchie eyes in that picture from gg’s funeral
weird and sad
we used to visit her all the time
eat treats, do puzzles, play games, and listen to that bear
sing butterfly kisses
which reminds me of our old house
and my yellow submarine shirt
nana’s washing something in the sink behind me
I’m cuddling my stuffie horse that’s actually still on my bed
did I tell you my frame’s bigger than my brother’s
he can always have mine though, if he wants

Slow motion /  Janette Schafer

A cento composed from lines/phrases from
Jason Irwin’s memoir, “These Fragments I Have Shored”

I was about to reach out to her—
my mother had lost a lot of blood.
I thought of the times we drove across
town. I imagine she assuaged herself
with coffee and cigarettes and music.
I felt the desire to just drive away.
Together we ran down the hallway—
slow motion style. Some nights
as I lay in bed, I could hear it ticking.
I considered my prayers had been 
answered. I painted the shutters.
Our new home became a sanctuary.

NIGHT MIRROR  / Kate Thuma

We can be invisible in daylight, 
but I’m collecting bioluminescence 
in imperceptible tracks 
your fingerprints have swept over me. 

Every brush of your shirt, hands, nose 
sends a spray 
of whatever these little lives are 
out into the universe, 
so my shoulders and back 
are faintly lit like a star 
on the very edge of death. 

You glow me, still. 
I sparkle you.

Long after I’m consumed 
by the hopeful, accidental wormhole 
that brought me to this time, 
the parts of you that twinkle on me 
will just be reaching distant planets 
with their own watchers looking up 
at a fraternal-twinned night sky, 
wondering at the brilliant pinpricks 
in the shape of the history of love.

August - Poem 22

Joy Machine/ Zoe Berger

Our joy machine 
keeps pumping out tickets 

     I could spit right there 
and something would grow 

     Love keeps 
going like that 

     Hope is a chain 
no one can break 
     Not even me 

     I do not plan 
on dying 

½   / Ashley Howell

two half rainbows

on my drive home 

a promise broken

across half the sky 

Murmur / Dahhee Chung

Mysteries in the mundane moments
Make memories, 
Which once felt mute,
Marvelous.
Like the new moon,
A phantom in the dark,
Smiling madly,
Mocking,
As eyes scan the sky
For a spot to still their stare,
Until specks spark arrhythmically,
Reliving the memories of the dead. 

I Almost Cried Watching Drunk Shakespeare / Ash Kemp

Asked my friend if she wanted water and realized it was already leaking out. 

Pouring from a girl afraid to laugh for being seen. 

Afraid to draw attention with an ounce too much emotion. 

She has nine lives but is on the last one. 

Making it count, listening to Kat regret being born in this body, with this brain, with this

Feeling. 

Over Jersey City / Hannah Page

Tonight the sun melted
into an orange bar above the
horizon, stark moon
in profile against
faint neon scribblings
in the clouds, and after
I yawned and yawned
to the rhythmic march
of the oncoming dark.

At The Desk / PF Potvin

pic of a phone
pole with 3 boards
black painted
SLOW DOWN
PEOPLE
BREATHING
Van Gogh straw
hat magnet The Writing
Forge podcast clip holding
niece’s high school graduation
picnic pic siblings ordered
randomly left to right
same as Thanksgiving
45 years before gray rabbit
magnet holding Grammie’s hair
contagious beaming glasses
beaded necklace Christmas
card shy of 99 th bday academic
year calendar sea
turtle pig goat zebra
llama holding pics
red tongue stained
|out eyes wincing
sour raspberries Halloween
Santa & Mrs. two dogs
grinning sun on backs
sticky note class
credit permutations
daughter radiant in Yellow
Submarine tee clutching
plush horse
black mohawk son
blue striped tie on red onesie
hand resting on thigh
flipping the bird
drawn colored frame wedged
father’s day kindergarten
cutout fish backs carrying secrets
(pink) “Thank you for cooking stir fry!”
(green) “Thank you for teaching me cursive.”
(black) “Thank you for letting me plant the last seed.”

A kami in Appalachia  /  Janette Schafer

after a photograph by Keith Hileman

This morning, a tree in the wood
near our homestead let me see
his face, gazed at me a moment
with his black hollowed eyes
before the kami hid again,
disappearing into wet bark.

SELKIE    / Kate Thuma

Stepping over mermaid’s nipples 
reminds my skin of its second, 
sleekly furred spirit, 
the way I am when there’s nothing 
between me and the questioning, 
opening sea. 

When my toes tangle in bladderwrack, 
my metatarsals slide like tiles 
into stronger, more seaworthy shapes. 
I can make myself beautifully monstrous
to live both lives. 

She is me and I am her, 
and we will lure a thousand sailors 
to the rocks to feel once more 
the slipping waves transform us 
to a being that watches with eyes 
only half above the surf, 
whose blood rises and falls
to match the moon.

August - Poem 21

Poem of Poor Translation, a Cento from the Hall of Immortal Poets / Zoe Berger

The star belongs 
‍ ‍To know the taste
‍ ‍Of the bitter end 
‍ ‍Singing

It’s already gone, the feeling 
Of rejoicing in the drizzle
The song of the early self-hearted 
Wind and rain, falling
Leaves in the evening
Where is the empty place?

In the cold light, the clouds are full 
Of sweet water escaped from the world
If you can find the blue,
Hold on to it
This meridian dream

Late August   / Ashley Howell

A brown leaf fell on my windshield today
Late August and the kids are going back to school

Someone sent me a video of us from 10 years ago
We were smiling, you were laughing 
That laugh I’ll never unhear

And I remember briefly how quickly things change
The person in the video looks like me, but I don’t remember much of her

I know she was unhappy 
I know she thought she was home
I know she loved you 

What would she think of us now
One of us dead 
The other far from that home
Missing it, but finally happy

West Door / Dahhee Chung

Halmuhnee brought me to Suh Moon Presbyterian Church before I knew which tongue I spoke.
I learned to read music notes before I learned my abc’s
And never learned my ga na da’s
Until English became primary.
     Suh Moon, West Door
A psychic once stopped me at a donut shop and prophesied,
“Your veil is thin. You have one foot in the living and one in the dead.”
She must have seen my foot on the west and the other on the east. 
Service held at a little home the first few years,
A Jindo barked in their backyard,
As the pastor’s older children taught us “Jesus Loves Me”. 
They didn’t know which language I sang,
Because my mouth was sewn shut
Except I could perform John 3:16 in English, Hangul and my hands
In front of the congregation,
And my Halmuhnee was proud. 
A fiery four year old was the only one who heard my voice.
The uncertainty of who we were
Knitted us together for her lifetime. 
Late night drives,
A pack of smokes and the “what if” talks till dawn,
Repeat again next day at dusk
When we both just woke again from late night escapades. 
We visited West Door every Christmas Eve,
Before our ritual midnight feast at Denny’s. 
A club sandwich with ketchup and Tabasco for me, 
and Moons Over My Hammy she chose every time. 
I had a baby and She died.
The coroner confirmed it natural at twenty-seven as divine intervention. 
I oscillated between denial and bargaining,
And the West Door God became my enemy.
My Halmuhnee outlived her a year,
Her brain forgot her cancer.
And the pastors and worshippers of West Door,
Visited like angels holding trumpets her last day here. 
Appa said she cried then saw her fly until her face turned white.
Briefly, her mind came back before hymns carried her to 
The Father, who art in 
that place with 
Her Husband, Twins,
And Debbie.
I finally cried,
And moved forward. 

Visitor / Ash Kemp

after Joseph Fasano

I have been the hot embers 
cooling among the scattered fires of this world
I have been the silence in the fog. I have been the thread in the spool,
The mist in the morning after the storm. 
But it is time. It is time. 
 Reunion is knocking at my door,
wearing its  sentient mask of flames. 
Life, my visitor, admit it. 

Getting My Navel Re-Pierced In Times Square / Hannah Page

Not a fresh prick; a
repurposing: scar blooming
around gleaming bar

Until You Know / PF Potvin

A man in red sandals, Speedo, and robe looked down into the pool. “It’s gone,” he said to  the bald man who didn’t look up, just scooped it out of the water. “You can’t really know until you know.” He let it down smooth like a blanket on the warm concrete. After a few seconds, Speedo turned and left, slamming the gate. The bald man lowered his goggles, dove back into his laps, and didn’t think about the bee again until he sat down at twilight to write a poem.

The sentinels /  Janette Schafer

after a photograph by Keith Hileman

Two pale trunks—
gateposts to 
the narrow dark
between them.

Those who 
know the signs
will turn around
and not look back. 

Those who enter 
through these ribs
may hear a whistle call—
and if they whistle back,
you will not see them at all. 

A DIAGNOSIS   / Kate Thuma

There’s an ocean stone
stitched behind my navel,
buttoning me to the ground
with my knees up,
big toes brushing. 
I can peer through the 
hazy window between 
my thighs and see the world 
with only soft edges 
as long as I don’t move.

August - Poem 20

I’m not balding / Zoe Berger

I’m just getting more head, reads the shirt I’m wearing, 
which makes you giggle, which reminds me 
we’re both on hair-loss medication, which brings up 
how my mother said she’d recognize us on the street 
by our matching whiskers, which makes us snort and start 
and roll onto our backs with our bellies up—
two stray dogs, following the smell of blood. 

Fracture  / Ashley Howell

Bones break and heal and then we forget they were ever broken, forever changed inside us and yes, you can say the same for hearts what a silly, lovely analogy for the thing that calls us out of ourselves love and heartbreak-heartache-heartsick I walk again on my broken ankle my arm healed after the kid pushed me off the jungle gym and I don’t think about it until my elbow hurts as I age or I need to balance on one foot but I think about how love broke me every day, yes, every day, my love

Fractal / Dahhee Chung

If I stare at my garden for days and weeks, every morning,
Will I understand this reality? 
Stare at the dried up blooms ready to move into the cycle of dying,
Bright baby leaves play merry-go-round beneath their elders,
A crown of paper white and dead brown flowers. 
The same bee circles its path between the third and fourth plant
Back and forth, while. 
Sprouts all look the same until they’re grown,
Like babies. 
If I stare at baby Pharaoh sleeping and count his lashes,
Will I unlock the mystieries of life? 
His breathing rhythmic,
Still down to his belly,
At night his pose matches his daddy’s.
Will reason one day click?
My eldest son  told me once,
I didn’t choose to be born,
You chose it for me,
So you’re responsible for why I feel bad. 
Can I also blame my parents for his melancholy? 
How long should I stare at the patterns before the grand pattern makes sense?

Kemp day 20- It’s Like an Owl Daydreaming He’s a Kingfisher / Ash Kemp

Which is to say, days go by without human contact. 

Days to go buy canned goods are few and far between. 

Which is to say, our stores are running low. 

The stores are below ground, hard to find if you don’t know what you’re looking for, or who. 

A king fishes in a rotten pond. 
Which is to say, I don’t have time for daydreams anymore. 

Time is running low, or down, or out, maybe. 
Maybe it was never there at all. 

I did everything all the way / Hannah Page

I smoked
each cigarette to
the acrid nub, brought
men crashing
to their knees with
the gravity of
the Colosseum
crumbling or my favorite
scheme unsewing.

Sometimes it means 

losing the
thread. Backtracking
blindly, selecting
different triggers. Pick
your battles, darling.

So much
anchored in the space
between my keystrokes
and you 

sleep safe and 

protected beside
me – my poetry
raining from my lips
and fingers, blossoming
like ink on our mattress.

Prometheus / PF Potvin

when you’re old
enough & finally see
the movie, study how
it opens at the same
waterfall in the photo
I left on your desk
with my papers
years ago when we
used it for changing
diapers & your river
washed the ink from
my black pants, green
wool sweater while
I sat crosslegged, eyes
closed in the rim
roar of Europe’s largest
prize before it all
crumbled & we found
ourselves swept
over the brink
onto rocks below
where next lives waited
in the dark scars
of eddies for a spark

Listening to Jeff Buckley in the car /  Janette Schafer

burning up my expensive gas
but I just finished a good parking lot
poetry session, wrote about 
remembered kisses, encountered bears,
how I’m still here after so many 
close calls. Start the car,

the engine turns, Jeff Buckley is next
in the music queue, “Lover, You Should
Come Over.” I dare you not to listen,
not to give that voice and song your
full attention while you are on earth

and he is not. Think of that person you
wish for. Let the gas burn. You can
refill your gas tank. You can’t 
refill time. 

An Eye in a Jar   / Kate Thuma

Inside the tree that held
a nest that rested on branches
becoming pages,
I’ve held the memory
of so many eggs hatching
in my hands
behind every poem
that’s taught me how
to be alive.
Another reason crows bring gifts
to people near them —
they can see with an eye in a jar
inside the book I pressed fingerprints
into in the Athenaeum Drum,
remembering its childhood home.

August - Poem 19

Cantor’s Theorem / Zoe Berger

when it began / no one thought to start counting / as in every set of numbers / contained another set of numbers / and so on / forever / didn’t matter if no one was looking / no / nobody kept scor

Monaco  / Ashley Howell

There’s a street in Denver
That reminds me of the East
Big trees and old houses

I dream of living in each house
Each life a new chapter of mind
And heart I listen to a song:

“It’s nice to hear your voice again”
“I like the way you say my name”
I wonder if the me in these houses

Also loved you

There Will Be Time to Murder and Create / Dahhee Chung

after T.S. Elliot

I take my vacations in spoonfuls each day,
Change the scope of eternity into one single day.
Eight to one, four days a week,
An episode can last up to an hour, each one.
Limit sleep to six hours tops,
Break fast at noon,
White rice measured two cups in the cooker,
Washed three times,
Five minutes to rest, thirty minutes cooked, 
Ten minutes rest while
Watering plants with the rice water.
Delicately scoop and fold the rice fluffy, not molded to the pot, but
Steaming hot topped with a silky six minute egg.
Sustenance in eight spoonfuls. 
The remaining minutes sitting, 
      scrolling, scrolling, scrolling
 Knowing time is up and flying out the door,
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”
Stirring the cup though it’s black through and through. 
Otherwise go stir crazy knowing
I’ll never have time
Past the hours of the afternoon,
Each day a repetition of alarm clocks and snooze,
Hit one, two, three times. 
Vacation done. 

New Release / Ash Kemp

The perfect book just came out for you today!
Thrilling, compelling, heart-pounding, page-turning,{insert line skip} word mix
                                                          wait

  is this ai?

Practical Magic / Hannah Page

For Shevy

They say love isn’t easy.
But it’s like falling
asleep – waking up to your
warm breath on my
cheek, your overgrown
tousle spread on your pillow
beside me at 3am and I
rustle up string
cheese with the hot sauce
you keep in ready supply for
me or a strawberry muffin
dunked in the milk
your post-surgery body is
just allowed to carry now
that you picked up on
sale from CVS when you
filled my medications with
yours today. And I never
sent for you (that’s the best
part, truly). The spells,
the anchors I cast over lovers
past – They dissolved
when your downturned
eyes pinned me beneath
that subway sign and all the
fated tragedies became
my favorite stories.

Humane Society / PF Potvin

eyes enter the room
white lab with blue
pouncing
chomping
balls to bits then.
snap

back into hallways another.
show begins with black.
& white shivers
each trial a match.

stick like a test.
struck hard.
on the box.
as you peer through

your mask your shakes your head
in my hands

That which feeds us /  Janette Schafer

We like to believe
we make our own food—
but what if independence
is a failure to notice 
what feeds us? 

We are heterophytes dining on
photographs, memories,
conversations. 

Basking in light from
forests, myths,
lovers, scripture.

Poems pretending
to rise unannounced. 

A HAIKU   / Kate Thuma

Ear to my eyelid,
I can see what you’re hearing —
synesthesia loop.

August - Poem 18

untitled  / Ashley Howell

we came, 

made. made.

 admitted

we[‘]re humbly made.

made. continued.

sought
having.

Poltergeist (haiku) / Dahhee Chung

Someone is whistling
A haunting tune heard throughout
Three blind mice, slowly.

Dead Languages Sing to One Another / Ash Kemp

after Christina Gosnay

I hardly have a formal education
in language, meter, or rhyme. 
I can only describe and observe and occasionally meditate on this beautiful world.
If dead languages sing to each other,
wouldn’t you like to make some harmony?
A rhythm between us—
across oceans and boulevards—
songs of want and wander, awe and despair. 
Every dead language eventually evaporates into thin air. 
Who can find the time 
to make a meager rhyme
Stand the test of time?

Anne / Hannah Page

Invisible ink
revealed in her blood after
lifelong research in

living. Grandmother
awoke pen in hand – bursting
with ink and people,

places, things to re-
animate in black and white.
In her head, movies

in sepia, in
black and white. And in her heart,
ineffable light.

Praising La Jument / PF Potvin

You may have seen it. The man with the orange winter beanie. Some might say sailor. Some keeper. Others crazed. But it’s clear he’s outside the lighthouse door. And the colors may have been different or maybe it wasn’t a hat at all, hard to tell sometimes from the angle, a straight-on shot, center frame, blue waterwalls curling around as he stands in the middle, staring straight through the lens, which may have been mounted or held, but must have been snapped via copter in that pre-drone era, a day after he’d radioed for help and surfaced after hearing the whirling but realized it wasn’t his ride, so spun and flashed back through the door, just as the walls gave way and came down clapping.

We called them fireflies /  Janette Schafer

“The lightning bugs were out last night,
just past the gloaming, before the night sky
whisked the light away.”

—Byron Hoot

On that trail before midnight
when I could not sleep,
near the swamp I once 
befriended,
a bit of cosmic magic—

The sky, spotless black—
the stars reached down 
and joined the fireflies,
the two light sources touching

beneath a bright gibbous moon.
I laid on my back in the wet field,
shut off my flashlight, watched
as the two strands of light—
the mating bugs, the too-low stars,

reached out to one another,
joined hands, swung them back
and forth in reckless embrace.

Sometimes when I remember,
it still pierces me, that dancing 
light, swirling en pointe above
my head, my clothes gloriously

ruined in the wet grass. 

UNTITLED   / Kate Thuma

I can compel my heart 
to beat differently for you –  
marshaling the muscle 
and triggering forming neurons
to link a wish to a maneuver. 

I want my blood 
to signal your arrival 
and rush through veins 
and arteries and ventricles 
fast enough it forces goosebumps 
out of my arms. 

My blush is every cell, 
at the same time, 
reaching to touch you.

August - Poem 17

Heat / Zoe Berger

What can I say. I was young 
It was hot
The goat outside yelling 
Sounded a bit like a girl I knew
Who cares if the boat driver wanted to fuck me 
I didn’t do it but I did do worse for less 
I had lemons for eyes 
I turned months into men
A dark sky was a blanket to tear through
Something to kick my feet out from under

memory   / Ashley Howell

passion only stays as long as desire
and ghosts of friends only linger
when the mind calls or nights alone

i suppose we are the ghosts of yearnings
and while mountains shift with each step,

and each step melts in snow,
and each body moves to clay,
clay reforms to mountains

and i suppose i’ve lost control
boots sliding in mud

Monophasic Sleeper / Dahhee Chung

I took a nap today
No dreams 
The heatwave,
Taught two classes, 
Took a heated sculpt class for the cherry on top,
Last night’s double feature
Slasher films and fog,
Two hundred fifteen unchecked messages,
Eleven thousand seven hundred eighteen unopened emails,
And wedged between the breeze from my window and
The oscillating fan at the foot of my bed,
My little boy running in and out between consciousness,
“Mommy are you ok?”
Downing the ice cold water from my emotional support water bottle,
Gurgling from the straw, “I’m done, fill me up.”
“Mommy are you ok?”
“I’m done, trying to fill up.”

But I’m Just a Frog / Ash Kemp

The pond is full of sound and fury,
but I’m just a frog. 
I see them across the clearing
leaning closer, closer—
She cups his tiny cheek and pecks him 
right on the lips!
A blinding light,
And then…
I don’t know what I was doing. 
I’ve forgotten who I am. 
Where is my mate 
Do I have any children?
Chirps and caws,
reeds swaying, a heavy sigh escapes me,
I see the two unfamiliar people walking hand in hand
out of the meadow. 

Arts & Crafts / Hannah Page

One of my ex
best friends taught
me how to apply
press-ons with super
glue rather than nail
glue because then
my coffin-shaped
fakes would hold           up
for a month rather
than two weeks max
like all the sets
promised on the box.
My sharpest
pinky nail unpeeled
from concealed flesh
and nub on the day
she cut me out
like vinyl letters on her Cricut:
messily. Without regard
for proper borders.
My body is still a craft
project but I buy
proper supplies.

Beyond the Field / PF Potvin

when coyotes sing
the dog searches the house for
babies in blankets

finding only kids
he lowers his back and pulls
hair from the Barbies

but stops when someone
in the kitchen barks his name
and whistles his song

Sensei /  Janette Schafer

The way I see blades of grass
has awakened. I hear the crackle
as they emerge through the dermis 
of the ground.  Can you hear that
music? Feel their green tips stretch
towards the light. How each sweet
tender green nib delights in, makes
love with liminal dawn-water. Oh,
I never knew. No, I never knew. 

BRAIN ROOMS   / Kate Thuma

The feeling 
of sending my heart
outside my body 
and letting it make 
a safe room 
to be free in.

This is how I built a new brain room. 

It didn’t have a door, it had veins. 

The door didn’t open, it bled. 

And I filled 
every corner and crack 
with softness. 

And sounds bounced off 
the padded walls 
and back into my body 
in echoes.

August - Poem 16

Sailboats / Zoe Berger

Yawl
Sloop
Schooner
Cutter
Ketch
Smack
Junk
Dhow 
Carrack
Frigate
Cog
Pink
Snow 
Brig 

Can you believe these are all types of sailboats 
Can you imagine loving something so much 
you use up all the letters naming them 

august   / Ashley Howell

tell the truth to the ocean
drink each other like you want to drink tides

until you are all tree
swallow each other like bags of saccharine and dopamine

make a list like red waves
roll your words with her tongue like wet salt

or only foundations
shiver your cravings like orgasm through slender toes

tell the truth to the rain
that you still aren’t well

until you are granite
release your poetry in monosyllables

oh
god 
yes

let the earth cry
even though it won’t

Grey Moth / Dahhee Chung

In the days that tigers smoked,
A primordial beast with
Black-gray wings with folds highlighted by fuzz and a peak a boo
Little flare of orange flame and monarch markings,
Eat and burrow deep from when they were like green plump finger grapes,
Gripping her finger like a snake,
Until it’s coat shines like leather,
Polished by young boys from harder times,
Still breathing before it’s time
Palpitating in it’s suit,
Like her finger pulsing to the same micro beat from the proper palmer artery pumping from the palpable heart, 
Holding on to life. 

this is what I got / Ash Kemp

when I went to the store
this is what I got
a brush
reusable paper towels 
with little daisies printed on them
a brush with the lady around the corner who looked at me like I was a ghost
baking soda
lemon oil
an oily feeling that settled on my shoulders when I tried to find one more word to say thank you, but said I’m sorry, instead
vanilla 
one small bag of candy coated chocolate 
a coating of regret for all the times I never believed in myself
when I went to the store, I got lost 
Can you help me checkout, please?

Lepidopterology / Hannah Page

At my first and only big-girl job
at a crystal shop (but make it high-end)
behind the jewelry counter hung an accent
wall of taxidermied butterflies. The bluest
wings (Menelaus blue morpho) exhibited
more natural magnetism than
the punchiest reds or yellows
something cliché about swallowtails
and fresh about enigmas, about deep
deep blue suspended
between glass
panes in shadow             box frames

Filming Danaus plexippus on your
iPhone today’s long                    afternoon
tracing its orange trajectory along
the edges of the park
where verdancy flourishes   liminally
floral sprigs pushing past
filigreed fence      trembling, alive

Night Courier / PF Potvin

we abandoned the path
with our dog choosing
our own beneath an elm’s
arms muscling clouds
across the sky and stooped
here and here and there
to balltoss returning
at dusk to the locked
car key a ghost we retraced
our steps down
gullies through fields
up slopes   over bridges
while cicadas
passed their round
singing to katydids
until the light of a jangling
bike finally cut
a hole in our waiting

Wealtheow thinks of Grendel /  Janette Schafer

I think of the “monster”
outside my window
as I lie in bed.

There was something in the
soft amber of his eyes, not fire
but marsh-anguish, as if to say—

Who could love me?

Make me worthy of love—
of its heat without burning,
its touch without fear and blood.

Why does his strength spare 
when his claw could have 
destroyed me? His hand,
gentle when it comes
so near my face.

Hrothgar snores;

I turn toward
another sleepless night—

dream of mercy
ripples—tenderness 
that hides
underground,

out of reach. 

CORVIDS   / Kate Thuma

Corvids have a kind of demonic whimsy 
achievable only 
by a creature who gifts 
perfectly round white pebbles 
with blood still on its beak.  

Keep them safe – 
They’re talismans against 
ordinary living. 

Maybe this is why 
crows can be lured 
by metals and meat: 
Thought and Memory 
are still accepting sacrifices.

August - Poem 15

Tug of war / Zoe Berger

Life is teeming around us
And still everything is embarrassing

I’m convinced my dentist hates me
Anyhow I smiled all the way through

Too bad we can’t sort of die
In an attempt I went somewhere warm

I was looking for a single source of truth 
Living is a conversation with your body that never ends 

“Hey Stanley” (Letter to a stranger) / Dahhee Chung

In corpse,
 I glimpsed your water bottle,
a Clackamette Skate Park sticker
Slapped on dead center.

I was conceived there and rode down the Pacific in Umma’s belly,
I can’t remember what I saw.

I like the dings and dents,
What do you like to do?
Yeah, I like this class too.

Sometimes, I just stare at your tattoos,
And the shadow on the ceiling
Of the little girl’s frolicking profile holding a big balloon,
“Inhale, wiggle your fingers and your toes.”
Okay, until next time.

Have You Ever Seen a Baby Vape? / Alison Henderson

It’s not like I don’t care about babies. One crawls across the living-room hardwood. Maybe I don’t want one. I know I don’t. Her mother asks, Have you ever seen a baby vape? Then they leave. Dana walks into my room and suddenly I’m not angry at all. Five women, one teenager, one baby: yelling, laughing, moving furniture while I try to nap. I didn’t sleep last night. I’m trying to sleep enough for yoga, then the fire show. Last time I tried poi, they gave me two sticks with fire on the ends. I swayed while everyone watched. It was humiliating and boring. Bella was there, so I wasn’t cynical. We had fun. I ran into Robert again. The next day or the day after, we ate Caribbean food in Santa Monica. It was authentic. I thought I liked him. At the time, I did. His house was a Sprinter van. His face five inches from mine, his bare chest against mine, he said he wanted to wait before sex. I said I hadn’t in six months. So we did. I came. He didn’t. Afterward he read me his poem. He roared and wept like a bad method actor who had cast himself. He wanted it as the closing voice-over of his film about twenty years in prison for trying to kill his wife. After that, I didn’t want to fuck again. There were still hours before curfew. He kept coming on to me. I asked for a cigarette. He said, I have a cigar for you. It was not a cigarette. Then he told me Rapunzel. The tower was what made her irresistible, he said. In the story, she lets down her hair. In mine, the hair doesn’t leave the van.

Future Acrobatics / Ash Kemp

(uplift speed poetry prompts)

limbs tangled/sheets askew/arms reaching/
pulling/taking/ accepting/ breath synced/
stuttered/sighed/moaned/a
fullness/ a space/a moment/more/
music seeps from every pore/
falling back/ out of breath/
grounded/connected/bodies/inside and out/
screen goes dark/ windows shuttered/
the VR headset back in its drawer/
until next time

Ode to a Stranger in Times Square / Hannah Page

Bedtime Wonder / PF Potvin

Under the wailing boom of sirens, she huddled in the single bed each night with her daughter as the buildings shivered, telling tales of the grandmothers and inventing what she didn’t know, and when she knew but couldn’t say, she’d squeeze her hands together until the veins danced like shadow fires and repeat, “that’s good my love, that’s the way to ask a question.”

To the woman lying down on the sidewalk /  Janette Schafer

The sidewalk feels cool against your hot cheek
you’ve spread your length out from head to toe
let people stare as they walk past, go about 
their day.  No one has stopped yet and truth be
told I almost didn’t either except that you are 
young and I am old and eventually the one who
will pick you up is never the one you want if you 
just wait for them.  Sometimes we can be angels.
Someone was an angel once for me.  Today I
thought I forgot my wings, but here they are again
right where I left them, these stunted nubs at 
my shoulders underneath my skin.  I touch the 
back of your head, say: I don’t know you—
I am here.

THE RED   / Kate Thuma

After Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” 

Before she knew he arrived, 
the red sensed him. 
It surged forward, ungovernable, 
reaching out the tips of its fingers 
to kiss the edge of his collar 
into the exact shape and shade
as the hole hidden behind her knee. 

He loosens his legs to shake free 
the dust of love travelling in his cuffs. 
She’s silent, tethered, whole, controlled, 
even as the red leaps and screams and 
throws its severed edges wildly. 
It knows beyond knowing: 
there are too many threads between them. 
They weren’t ever meant to be 
anything but sewn together
into the most exquisite knot. 

She opens her eyes 
and a string of holy phenomena unfurl. 
The red sighs and softens, 
warm, bleeding, somehow carrying a heartbeat 
to a phantom limb. 

She still is. 
They both still are.

August - Poem 14

If I met you at the Bone Museum / Zoe Berger

I’d put my skeleton next to your skeleton
I say over dolma, moussaka, lamb, 

at the family-run Greek spot on Flushing. 
In a real matter of the heart you tell me of the grocery store with your mother, 

how your aunt bled her dry for thirty years, the flippant way 
your mother called you sister in the produce section, 

and stopped examining lemons to smile to herself, 
the same crowded grin as yours, a little passing fantasy. 

How you imagined being hers, stepping away 
from the fruit to cry. Over a beer 

you let out the real nasty stuff: 
your friends’ fathers, after prom 

when one of the boys got into your bed, 
how you walked home barefoot in the middle of the night, 

decided leaving would keep you safe 
but not clean. I want to know more of your insides 

so we go to the bone museum. There are signs pointing to cranial fractures 
labeled “Unknown Trauma”, bones sliced sideways 

and longways, exploded heads suspended 
in golden contraptions, every hard white thing 

tagged dutifully, precisely, with care 
to the original owner. I look at the lucky skulls 

all lined up in smudge-proof glass 
and I wish neither of us had skins. 

(to carry a plant)   / Ashley Howell

knit and cloth winds touching
point of hook
moss mountains thinning 
sprawling toward sky
will it hold
as chair
sits softly with 
pillow stagnant as cloud
cup clasps what will burn
to vapor 
to purity
hold firm small warrior
you carry so much

Crustless Sandwich / Dahhee Chung

Peanut Butter and Apple Jelly
Smeared to each side,
Cut the crusts,
Cracked open rambutan shells,
Sally sold sea shells by the sea shore,
Rolled some salted seaweed and rice,
Wrapped rice rolling, rolling rolling,
Three, four, five…
Containers of cashews and chips,
Crackles for your chomp,
We can crack down gizzards after school, son.

First day without holding my hand,
But the nice stranger’s.
My first teacher was Mrs Lake.

Brave and bold, but
Question marks furrow your brows and the crinkles of your nose,
A cacophony of crows cawing, a child crying,
And the harsh cough of the boy barfing.

I wonder if you’ll like your lunch. 

Loveseats / Alison Henderson

The horsehair loveseats
smell like cat piss,
even here, in the new condo
in South Florida,
where the walls are white,
the carpet beige,
everything else pink and green.

My mother sits, legs up,
on the long white couch,
watching the news,
then repeats what she hears
later as opinion,
like I didn’t hear it too.

I want to know what she thinks
when she paints,
but the canvases hold
only flowers,
pink opening into green.

I sit on a loveseat
writing by the window,
the golf course kept green
beyond the sliding glass.

Between us,

the beige ocean is vast.

They face each other,
a pair from the old house
before the divorce.

Instead of Self-doubt / Ash Kemp

After Andrea Gibson

call it wonder.
You can take it with you,
You can mold it,
Harness it for creativity,
Nurture it on nature walks
And bookstore trips.
Talk to your friend attention,
Take some vitamin hope,
Drink it down with a glass of warm acceptance.
Stay awake all night
And write what you might have dreamed.
Submission is not an ending,
But a chance to face a different direction.

Breaking / Hannah Page

We’re exposed to
violence every morning over
breakfast: a new
carousel of crime &
stupidity repetitioning through
the late afternoon until
enough fresh
dirt has been
spat through
the pipelines into the frigid
studios where putty
people wear too much or too
little fabric depending on
where. And on, a new
montage – hideously   ordinary
in the way we can’t feel
the heat of the car on
fire, the warm
blood pooling in the
A/C of the studio where
they excavate harder than
the forensic specialists
at the scene. They’re fighting
to keep alive
the heart of the
story economy – however
twisted where
it nestles
in the collective chest.

Ode to the Peanut / PF Potvin

smush you

cut you

cream you

gut you

boil you

into paste

strain you

ink you

oil you

crush you

sprinkle you

on the face

pickle you

pinch you

curry you

grind you

layer you

round the waist

coat you

blend you

candy you

press you

meat you

in that space

perking ears

flaring eyes

sniffing for a trace

widening mouth

wagging tongue

begging for a taste

Missing crow /  Janette Schafer

It’s been three weeks
since I’ve seen Chuck—
the crow that visits 
my porch.

I hope he has another
“girlfriend” feeding him
bread crusts and blueberries 
to explain his absence 

and hasn’t been swept
away by a hawk—
although sometimes,
wild things just leave you.

The robins and
a lone cardinal 
appreciate
the bounty he has
left behind. 

[6:32]   / Kate Thuma

I’ve been waiting for you my whole life. And for the five days of breakneck stillness before the six hours of frenetic frozenness, which are both as long as any lifetime. There are ways I’ve never met this stranger, but it feels truer to say I didn’t know I’d always known you. It makes sense to me now that it snowed when you first knocked, flakes dampening the sonic boom. 

You open your eyes 
And I’m instantly cosmic. 
You cry and I’m born.

August - Poem 13

Body Shop / Zoe Berger

Don’t have anything to regurgitate. 
Blinkers pulsing at the light. 

Dad’s cold in his puffy blue coat, tells me 
Living is hard but dying is harder. 

At the body shop— 
my mechanic wrings his hands, 

hopes it’s okay 
if he asks me something,

How’s your dad, give him a message, even 
the atheists are praying, okay?

After your dad died,
the neighbor took your mom’s trash out 

every week in secret. 
Kindness is just love with its work boots on. 

At the bus stop I still think about jumping. 
You know this,

understand how the metal 
would weigh on me like a blanket. 

You continue existing though I look away
which feels good

like grabbing the right key on the first try. 
You happen to me every time. 

there is no name yet;   / Ashley Howell

noun: for what you can’t hold and always carry
verb: holding what you no longer carry
adjective: as if weighted with something one used to hold
adverb: to move through weight knowing you hold what you cannot carry

No Bread / Dahhee Chung

Bought three trout for 
Ten dollars,
If Jesus could feed his people with two,
I can feed mine too,
Bellies full.

Patted dried,
Lightly salted,
Fried whole 
Till the eyes pop and the fins crisp,

Crack  between our teeth,
Fish Chips
Without the chips 

A slurry of starch
To thicken the sauce,
peppers, garlic, ginger and oil, 
Poured and served,
Ten minutes fried
Five minutes gone 
Heads, tails and all.

Catfish / Alison Henderson

Anywhere else
you’d call it a pond.

In West LA
they built a lake.

It smells of carcass,
oil and eucalyptus,
the cries of disturbed geese
and a waterfall.

Catfish.
Bullhead, sunfish,
trout.

Men in T-shirts come with rods.
I take pictures of them—
they hate that,

turn quickly back
to the water.

The sign in the reeds
says a woman should
eat only one catfish a week

because of the chemicals,

higher in the skin,
fat and guts.

One.

I wonder if their wives
obey the sign.

I breathe what rises
off the surface.

Fish jump,
oblivious to
the life of an inner-city culvert,

not knowing
what the water has put in them.

The men watch me.

Dinner Among Friends, a Mad Lib Poem / Ash Kemp

Shirt stained with oil,
Verdant cabbage to shred into the pan,
Spindly onions glazed copper,
Open the next ingredient.
Forget to turn off the burner.
Weave a cloth around the finger
You foolishly burnt.
A scab an offering on your pillow.
A syncopation of kitchen and bedroom,
Sizzle and snore.
What are we but proverbial soup?

Under Construction / Hannah Page

In my haziest
recalling, I feel your height
curved over my spine
your pieces slotting 
into my pieces smoothly
like the highest end
Ikea tableau:
a modular set of
particle board shapes
varied in color
like something sturdier than
a room for a while.

Spring Rooting / PF Potvin

I’m sorting and folding
shirts into piles – tees, dress,

polos – packing them into paper
sacks topped with too skinny

jeans bound for the resale shop
heaping and huffing

books (after permanent
markering our names) to the free

little library two doors down
under the eyes of the squirrelly

oak that leaves me wondering
what to do with this ziplock

full of teeth

Sushi /  Janette Schafer

Lunch
and we do not 
talk about Nate
or how it’s been

a year and we
do not talk 
about it’s just
that the salmon

is so fresh and 
we do not talk
the roe bouncy
pops salty in

your do not
talk about 
Naturally my
sister has 

only just tried
sushi and we
do not talk 
about nature

walks we used
to take when
we were young
or how people

knock on your
do not talk about
now they bring
out the pickled

ginger you see
they forgot and
we do not talk
about Nate

Being Alive in Maine   / Kate Thuma

In the skinny triangle of time between sunset and dusk, 
cranes, spent from soaring, tuck themselves into sharp nests, 
leaning their long necks into downy corners. 
Edgecomb grey edges peel back to open doors for fireflies 
(and mosquitoes we hope the bats will find). 

Three small heart-level heads bob along the coastline, 
soft toes scrabbling against rockweed bubbles and shards of mica.
I’m just dying for a breath of their unselfconsciousness in space. 
Kids just live, you know? 
Music has never meant more than its sounds, 
and the creeping-inward ocean doesn’t trigger thalassophobic sweats yet. 

The randomness and profound intention here sleep entwined
in the soft s-curves of a twisted pine: 
that somehow, we all found each other in time, 
under the newly-brighting moon, 
where we unsay vows of solitude and separateness. 
Where I belong to myself and to everyone, at once.

August - Poem 12

Ngoc, like what you do to a door / Zoe Berger

  In memory of Ngoc Ngo

Please pick up the phone it’s me 
I’m almost ready to be myself
you don’t have to die to haunt me
I’m only in the next room 
pick up can’t you 
hear me through the walls don’t you 
understand the phone ringing
    and ringing 
is a door
?

Deer   / Ashley Howell

I’m thinking of a poem 
About the deer I hit
Driving down the highway

How it most likely 
Died alone in the 
Brush shortly after
Our parting

While I continued
Driving to my own
Dying in the smoky
Summer sunset 

Parting is a Such Sweet Sorrow / Dahhee Chung

You’re dying
I smell it,
  your vodka bottle marked
  with a dry erase marker
  each night,
Sweet over-ripe bananas
And I don’t like sugar.
The spoonfuls in your coffee,
Crystallized insides,
Stalagmites and Stalactites 
Threatening to puncture
Your tender pink life.
Four horizontal tally marks
And a slash when it’s done,
Counting down the days,
Or tracking what remains.

Family Portrait / Alison Henderson

There are five chairs,
but we learn early
who may sit.
Father at the head;
nobody ever remembers
selecting one.
Mother moving dishes
back and forth
gathering the storm
before it bursts.
One of us proves evidence.
One of us becomes good.
One of us learns the skill
of not being there,
while still being seated.
Years down the road,
we shall disagree about everything.
The color of the kitchen.
How it started.
Whether the door was slammed
or shut.
Whether anybody was frightened.
Memory becomes
our last family asset
to partition.
Christmas is yours.
The cottage is yours.
The picture of us smiling
since happiness lasts
a hundred twenty-fifth
of a second.
I shall take the silence
following my mention.
I shall know what is said
since nobody shall tell me.
Years pass.
The chairs stay
where they were placed.
The good one remains good.
The missing one missing.
The difficult one continues to try
to explain why
the house was burning,
to people holding pictures
of a house
which had never caught fire.
At times I believe
that is what a family is:
five people standing
in five separate ruins,
each claiming
they are home.

monostitch, untitled / Ash Kemp

The atoms in me recognize the atoms in you, even if we can’t see any stars. 

Bravery / Hannah Page

Moving in the face
of fright, drawing
near and past the shadows
against the cave wall
which Fearlessness flees –
They’re cast off of me:
shapely Forms of the Poet,
the Priestess, and the
Beast. I have
thrown out all pretense
from my cavity.
It is streaming behind
me      vital red.
Until now I never knew
a sunrise so close
on the stiletto
heels of midnight; so
eager to cast autumnal
tones over fresh-tilled
rolling earth.

Daily Reminder / PF Potvin

blue  rain
gold  rain
pink  rain
rust   rain
drip paint down the white
wall in the Banksy
print above the bed where the black
suit man with briefcase
hurryscowls under an umbrella
while a kid
on the other side stands
rust boots and jacket
eyes tight
face upturned
tongue and arms extended
each moment a choice
man
kid
or
rain

Midnight sermon /  Janette Schafer

It’s 11:56 PM, 
and as I grow older, 

I don’t see 
too many midnights.

I think of my dad now, 
how he preached at 
the Lansing Rescue Mission, 
the same place
he once slept after 
the Vietnam War. 

He volunteered there
twice a month, never forgot
how he was one of them.
Two Friday midnights,
he was their chaplain—

and though his voice was soft,
they leaned forward, listened.
Some remembered when he slept 
on those same cots, ate that same
thin soup and bologna sandwiches.

When I was tall enough to reach
past his elbow, sometimes I came too,
sang church hymns, The Old Rugged Cross,
my innocent treble reaching out,
a gift I couldn’t comprehend. 

ABIOGENESIS   / Kate Thuma

In August, the microbiome of a pond 
presses into windows closed against
the feeling of being too alive 
to be contained in our skins. 
Like peaches 
barely holding their seams together 
around all that undripped nectar, 
cold and sweating through their fuzz
and leaving peach-prints on the paper bag. 

When I crack the kitchen window 
the sea pours through the rupture
and I breathe it in, remarkably, without gills. 
This close to the coast, 
humidity returns us through time 
to the precambrian sea 
we unwillingly crawled from, 
ushered out with a sigh and a stern “go.” 

In August I long to be a mermaid – 
For a high-gone simple past 
of drifting in a foam and seaweed nest 
like Venus, unrising from the sea, 
with a sticky peach pit in her pearly teeth.

August - Poem 11

Control / Zoe Berger

I have been holding very still so as not to change
Meanwhile the leaves in the park admit defeat

I once loved a baby for what it could be
then cursed it for throwing a fit

If winter must come then at least let it stay
Forgive me for thanking Death for his consistency

New Mexico  / Ashley Howell

Always smells like 
smoke and rain
And I saw writing
On the sidewalk
“Free Palestine”
So I took a picture
Walking downtown
With music dancing
Through the Plaza
And centuries of 
Occupation
Revolution
Occupation

Free Palestine the 
Streets of Sante Fe
Scream
We must all
Scream
Free Palestine 

Alien / Dahhee Chung

Those who raised me stuck in the past from their home,
Black and white.
While I’m stuck in technicolor,
Marching the yellow brick road. 

I write for myself,
My country of one,
The language you call metaphors,
The only one. 

And so,
No translation, 
Dap! Fist pounds my chest
No destination,
Dap! Fist pounds my chest
No explanation,
Hae! Fist pounds my chest
Just
Exhaustion 
Frustration 
Pounding my chest
Dap! Dap! Hae!

I. / Ash Kemp

After Rudy Francisco

Pilryk: noun-
The incandescent, tingly and warm feeling left behind after a kiss that makes you believe in love

I used to chase that feeling,
That experience of being wanted.
Now I exist in limbo—
Part want, part dissatisfaction,
Always a body close with pain.
The feeling retreats so quickly
After a kiss,
Can I get another?

Desire / Hannah Page

I am damned
to embody my
artistry on and off
the stage: draped
in velvet, dripping
pearls and
poetry
all
the
way
down
to the
floor

I want more
than tepid water late
at night in a cool
glass on a
rooftop — more
than what’s good
for me, probably
Certainly more
than what’s
allowed because
I am more
than what’s allowed
in most states and
in all minor territories
More than the
words I assign
to my person; collect
like puffy stickers across
my arms like all my
tattoos from assorted
shops on St. Mark’s
I couldn’t name
any of them no

2,000 Year Prayer / PF Potvin

let me be today
like Giacomo De Mola free

diving near Sicily’s coast
with snappers and eels 

in prep for a spear
fish competition with calm

control and wind full
in the chest for as long 

as it takes to discern my Roman
ship gone drowned

and parse a large rock
from a fortune of amphorae

On the occasion of staying in my car during a thunderstorm /  Janette Schafer

First, there’s the practical matters—
I forgot my umbrella, didn’t want to wreck
my hair or dress—
not when the pleats are neat as a pin, 
fresh from the dry cleaner. 

There is also the calm I feel today.
from a lovely meditation on my porch—
The squirrels were holding conversation,
and the robins, a lovers’ quarrel, 
all of which they let me overhear—

I know this will disappear once
the car door opens and I walk across
the parking lot into the office.
Besides, Poulenc’s oboe concerto still plays
through the car stereo, his delightfully strange

dancing harmonies kissing the raindrops.
The torrents come and lightning
crackles against the sky, water falling 
in layers. Orisha is stopping by Pittsburgh, 
and I’ll spill from my Subaru soon. 

DYING IN FAIRY CIRCLES   / Kate Thuma

When they’re close to death, 
Redwoods release thousands of seeds, 
and the lucky ones root into the ground 
in a circle around the dying tree – 
when you come upon a stand of Redwoods 
in a fairy circle around nothing, 
it’s not a cursed place, 
it’s children holding vigil over their mother. 

The seeds drip down in ponding ripples 
until eventually one drops into the exact place 
a long-dead tree (her many-times-great-grandmother)
once vined her roots just beneath the surface, 
shallow so she could link arms under the dirt 
and send blood to a distant cousin
through the fog. 

Caring is so much a part of her biology
That it’s impossible to tell if she does it against her will, 
or if she can push a choice through her bark 
and open herself to sacrifice. 

She holds brain and heart and agency 
in a form unrecognizable to humans. 
There’s so much we don’t know yet – 
there’s more love in the carotid arboreal transfer of water
than some are capable of passing through hands. 

They’re burning all around us and screaming smoke for miles, 
and we don’t know how they honor their dead, 
but we know it’s something about a circle. 

August - Poem 10

Good girls go to heaven bad girls go to Roku City / Zoe Berger

bad girls light candles and leave bad girls are kissing in front of their boyfriends bad girls are building an inn for the coven bad girls are at the afters maximizing their surface area to the exposure of luck bad girls are laying in blood but not bleeding

Santa Fe   / Ashley Howell

As we drove through the ghost mountains
Green fields
My ankle bone aching
From carrying too much

A deer, sign of peace, intuition
Ran into the barren highway
Right as we passed, slowed, 
He swerved, head strong into 
Our car, a crush of hair and metal

What does that tell me in the land of magic?
What peace is trying to find me?
Why am I running? 

My Left Brain Talking to My Right Brain / Dahhee Chung

“What’s your favorite song?”
“I can listen to Frank Ocean all day!”
“Well, I want to hear everything, and never know a thing.”
“I know it in my sleep, I wake up singing it.”
“I’ve heard you. You need practice.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
             text message incoming
“What were we saying?”
“I forgot.”

Hiragana Sequence / Alison Henderson

A Japanese daycare
in the back room of a pottery studio
on Venice Boulevard.

Hand-building across the hall,
wooden door ajar—
a green room,
map of Japan on the wall.

Two women teach a seated group
the fundamentals of Japanese:
あ　い　う　え　お
a      i      u      e     o

Five vowels, a map of sound.
Breath shaped by the mouth.

In the other room
I glaze a palo santo burner,

clay shaped by the hand.

A shallow bowl,
small chimney hole
for smoke to escape.

I paint it white.
Through the open door
the children repeat:

あ　い　う　え　お

Later, a piece of holy wood
will burn inside the shiny vessel.
Wood becoming smoke,
smoke becoming scent,

entering the body.

Aubade in Perimenopause / Ash Kemp

My sleep paused, arrested, interrupted, unfinished. 

My skin tacky in the dark morning sheets. 

Make of this what you will—
A dream delivered to the one who delivered you and continues to deliver your meals and your emotional support. 

What can I say to the day when I cannot rest before it breaks?

A struggle, a loss, overwhelming exhaust-ion
No. I do not think I love this new season. 

Online Shopping / Hannah Page

This morning arrived the scale
my husband ordered online
like he does so many things
to cater to my fleeting
obsessions. Softened by snake oil 
ads on Facebook and the news 
(this time the real deal, 
this time from the 
skinniest 
snakes), 
I say I’ve caught 
wind of the shortcut anorexia 
false-promised in my youth.
Everything and the scale indicate buying [in].

Joke on Us / PF Potvin

Squished on the love seat

munching

chips the kids

sprinkled with olive

oil, salt, garlic, pepper,

cayenne, a little snack

before books and bed, but first

a science show where my son

flings up his hands,

observes, “Bill Nye is so crazy

because he falls down all the time,”

and my daughter replies

without turning an eye. “Yeah,

even when he’s not

tired.”

I wish I could name the storms inside of me  /  Janette Schafer

after Byron Hoot

We name hurricanes,
refuse what’s inside us

delight in thunder
terrified of our own

watch trees bend
resist bending

see lightning as illumination
hide love in shadow

darkness as necessary 
deny turning inward

heart as barometer
ignore storm warnings

cover our heads
smell clean after rain

Untitled  / Kate Thuma

In a one-card tarot reading 
I drew The World, 
which you had already given me, 
unstringing it as a pearl 
from its invisible thread in orbit
and into my too-small hands, 
leaving noon and the witching hour mixing 
in a brackish aerial estuary. 
A nursery of the universe.

August - Poem 9

Heavy Night / Zoe Berger

Burning without burning 
a deliberate wind takes me 
to a party in search of 
an empty place

Everyone’s faces 
are lively with decision
Their self-heartedness 
Guilts me

I know I should begin 
to realize my heart
I’ve heard it before:
the answer
is blind and new

Find Your Own Lineage / Dahhee Chung

Expectations genetic,
Birthdays feel generic,
Say, “happy birthday to you”
I’ll only sing it,
      if I love you.

I hated presents adorned with bows and fancy paper,
The thing inside often,
More you than me.

A forced smile and a thank you,
It’s the thought that counts,
Umma says.
But I’d rather you cry and shout,
“Why can’t you know me?
 What was the thought?”

So I got you a promise,
In an empty Trader Joe’s bag,
I watched you sleep
One more time,
And asked,
“Can you tell me how to fill it?”
The anxiety of expectation,
The quiet consternation,
Tell me how to fill it,
So we can both love celebrating.

Cell D45 / Alison Henderson

1.

The library had holes in it—
a steel rolling rack
carrying mostly fiction, donated.
Atwood, Hoover. Gone.

Covers torn off like lost limbs,
pages missing.
Inmates write letters in block print
over the stories.

But the bottom shelf—
hardcover and oversized:
Spanish-to-English dictionaries,
cookbooks, Aesop’s fables.
Murder mysteries wedged at the end.

I slid a softcover from under
outdated textbooks,
federal statutes swollen with dust.

Fore-edge scratched blue and black:
P. Willis D45.

Patricia? Pauline?

I turned it over:
Claiming the Spirit Within.

I carried it out
in a manila folder
with my court documents.

2.

I read from it
like scripture—
corners curling,
pink-and-white striped duvet
traded for incense.

My favorites circled:
“I Go Back to May 1937,”
“The Necessity,” “The Swan.”

Mornings I read
to women gathered
for meditation.

Laura sits upright
like it’s her first time at church.
Kelsey turns her phone face-down,
black coffee balanced on her lap.

All of us careful not to move
while the words move.

Not watching the watcher—
watching language
arrive one paper cup at a time.

3.

We ride the swan boats
in Echo Park Lake.
I steer, turning the handle
counterintuitively.

We paddle the perimeter,
in and out of shade
beneath imported palms,
past lotus beds.

As we pull in to dock,
someone says
people have died here—
drowned, drunk.

A man in a blue vest
waves us over.
We step out,
bookless, sober,
still turning the wrong way
to come in.

Hourglass / Ash Kemp

I pick up the glass and wood, 
turn it over 
once, 
twice, 
the mound of grains disintegrates then reforms. A new question each time, weighted with the promise of the future.  
Have we been here before, 
staring into the unknown, 
wishing it could tell us 
everything is okay and nothing hurts?  What hope do any of us have of holding on to the shifting grains 
in a world aflame with self-righteous anger and condemnation?

Stationary Objects / Hannah Page

I wish on so many 
stars for us.
Sometimes, they are 
stationary objects; 
sometimes, airplanes
just taking off 
into the abyss
pitching headfirst into
starless skies above
cities so luminous it is
as if the whole 
population is working
together to register
on alien radar and
the pilots cannot see
out the windows in
front of them for all
the pointlessness of
indefatigable blackness
or maybe for all
the potential.

Interpreting Artists / PF Potvin

“check the magic” his friend nudged

across the stage
on a platform

adjacent the folk band a woman signed
her black dress swinging
weaving dipping as her face
sounded

gamboled lyrics

hands twirling
drums words bass guitar
setting space

into action like storms of barn
swallows ponding behind the stage blue crowns
cinnamon faces tails forking

original theater

Route 60 between Barboursville and Huntington  /  Janette Schafer

after a photograph by Greg Clary

We began believing we were a road.
There are roads built for leaving, rails built for the same.
We mistook the crossing for a route.

All I know is the lay of the land,
key in my hand, turned on the ignition.
We began believing we were a road.

He leaves and returns; leaves and returns.
I no longer know when to turn on the light.
We mistook the crossing for a route.

What did I know of love then
but the leaving behind?
We began believing we were a road.

What did I know of cartography
except for drawing lines?
We mistook the crossing for a route.

Objects are closer than they appear,
a blurring sign in a rearview mirror. 
We began believing we were a road.
We mistook the crossing for a route.

Untitled  / Kate Thuma

There’s a science to weather formations 
that can only ever be a percentage accurate. 
I think I like only ever being seen 
in parts of almost right. 

There are mysteries hunched 
in my kneecaps held bent 
to spring in unexpected moments. 
When my knees and ankles ache 
before a storm it isn’t rheumatism 
or keep-your-heels-down echoes, 
it’s the pressure of so much rain 
held against cartilage unflexing,

of an Achilles tendon 
wrapped around a bolt of unstruck lightning. 

August - Poem 8

Iris / Zoe Berger

You look naked in your clothes you with your 
bicycle tee shirt and a key around your neck 

We take a walk in the woods and chirp a song 
off a cliff I do not tell you I love you because 
I don’t but something feels unsaid just the same 

A robin landed on our windowsill this morning but
I may be imagining tender things again
again I do not tell you I love you
again I don’t

hummingbird   / Ashley Howell

to colors
like chakras
root to white
wings to whisper

nibbles at sugar
hunger to bread
beak to needle

sewing the air 
into quilts of  hums
threading colors 
to patterns of 
spine and snake 

Lion’s Gate / Dahhee Chung

(Dedicated to Elijah,
My son born 08/08/08)

Eighteen years eve,
A portal opened in me,
A dying star between my legs,
Imploded from the other side.
The prophet,
They said would be a girl
For nine months.
The doctor said, “Who lied.”
Yet all along
I knew he’d be the prophet,
Never died,
but flied,
Both of them with two names,
Their second name the same name,
Fighting demons and spewing curses,
For a God,
Who tells them,
“I am the night.”
Lion’s Gate open,
Each year relived
 I step out-
 That same
 gray
 cold
 room,
Sanitized  dull,
Except for the blood
And almond eyes,
That stared bright,
As I sighed,
“An alien… “
Before the portal died.

Forest Service Road 151 / Alison Henderson

Jagged gravel, thirteen miles one way. New Mexico mountains, high desert sun, worn cattle grates interrupting winter wilderness. Chama River Canyon cutting through open pasture, charcoal blue, a choir breaking over boulders, bursting into impossible high notes. Towering sandstone, walls of red clay like raw cathedral. Roughed-up corners, edges crumbling vertical into gentle rapids.

Ten, maybe fifteen times I drove it fast, barely braking, black leather and blonde. On purpose. If I had no fear down to the ground of my subconscious, I could do anything. I could move mountains: Christ in the Desert.

At the end of the road: PEACE. The road dead-ends at the abbey, where a BMW man sits beside the Father on a bench beneath the portico, the front doors black and looming. Heavy.

On my way out, he is shuffling back to his car. I slow, lower my window.

What are you looking for?

He looks at his feet, takes a step back. Finally, our eyes meet.

Purpose, he says, like it’s a question.

You already know, I say.

I say it like I know, like I already know his purpose. I accelerate, whipping rocks into a grayish bloom, blasting the Stones. I retrace the canyon.

And again.

I transfer my earthly belongings to the one in the yellow hat, / Ash Kemp

after Desireé Dallagiacomo from prompt by Ollie Schminkey

I transfer my earthly belongings to the one in the yellow hat,

who made me laugh carrying on with a monkey like that.

Home Again / Hannah Page

Today, we soldiered on
picking up again our burdens
tearing again at our hair
when the pattering of our own
hearts became an unbearable
reminder pitched just so
to startle back into motion

your eyes the shade of
my eyes the shade of
the sky between the trees
outside the City Clerk’s –
lapis against my white
dress with the faux
pearls that kept
falling off even before
I put it on that morning

your favorite jam band
on stage and in
the kaleidoscope of tinsel
and acid with you
at my back, I
never felt more    home

&
the marks on my
thighs grow
less angry as the days
go by

& this is the most
satisfying rabbit hole:
the kind
where everything is right
sized at the end
of the tunnel.

Last Coast / PF Potvin

santa and mrs. twin golden labs six of us grinning at a funeral all

blowing in the fan’s shimmer but one pic sits tauter pinned by antelope

magnet a mother in blue wool beanie plaid coat his semiquincentennial

cap and solid red jacket crinkle with collars popped to shield breezes

off napes no teeth but lips pulled up like bananas someone’s snapping outside

frames of tomorrow they look left and can’t break from staring

Hymn to a buck  /  Janette Schafer

A friend of mine who hunts once told me
he dreams of deer come August. I think
of a lame buck who once took refuge in my yard.

I think of a buck who once took refuge in my yard.
It is early August and the worst of the heat
is behind me. Autumn is its own kind of sanctuary.

For me, September is its own kind of sanctuary.
I count my life in autumns, in turning of leaves,
when crispness in the air greets me.

The crispness in the air greets my skin, a lover
remembered, who comes behind me, whispers,
Hey, old friend. I still think of us. 

Hey, old friend, I still think of us. I recall the lame buck
who slept near the oak, gone now for three summers.
I wonder if my friend who hunts has begun to dream. 

GHOSTED  / Kate Thuma

Where there was something 
and suddenly isn’t, 
the air still holds your shape
with the surface tension 
of a real ghost. 

I can run my hand 
through the fog of it-you 
and unfeel the nothingness 
of your unpresence, 
but my hand still comes away wet 
with the proof of your living.

August - Poem 7

Waterfall / Zoe Berger

12:02 AM (7 hours ago)
to me
Trust you 
to surprise me 
with a place I’ve been 
before. In the underground 
Moroccan restaurant 
the hostess asks if we’d like 
the waterfall table, why yes, 
of course, so we eat our lamb 
and drink our tea in the bedrock 
holding up the building 
as water creeps down the walls 
and into the moss that
I assure you is real—
no drugs and alcohol today. 
On the walk home we pause 
on the curb 
to examine a dollhouse 
veiled in plastic, love scrawled 
on the walls in bleeding 
purple marker, a wooden moon 
framing the second story window. 
Who would throw away 
their daughter’s dollhouse, 
you say. Who cares 
how old they get. 
Maybe they got a bigger one, 
I offer. Rivulets of rainwater 
slip down the plastic valleys. 
Your face wets with disbelief. 
You run your fingers over the moon. 

Bad Day / Dahhee Chung

Ironically blessed,
A burn blistered
And scabbed 
Cured meat dried
      by Friday
Picked flat 
The  died parts
Not the alive parts,
Pink and smooth spots
R.I.P.
the fun parts
The hard parts
Except that one part
The ripe part,
That might give my fidgets,
One more for the night.

Ode to Peaches / Ash Kemp

for Renee

Oh Peaches,
The cutest little alligator,
The hottest hot dog,
Soft and fuzzy and juicy, too!

Your bright color
Like the sunshine
Brought to life—
We value your contributions
To the pile of fluff
And your steady presence,
Which was more than enough.

We see effigies to you
At every craft store,
We want to play fetch with you
Just a little bit more.

We miss the little noises
And the tummy rubs,
We think of you often,
And will never really give you up.

Annotated Syntax / Hannah Page

I write against
the grain because it  isn’t
like me to leave
stones unturned or
uncollected. It isn’t
like me to leave
lines of poetry
unparsed. I have never
not been enough. I
have never
not been found bursting
with potential/enthusiasm/ideas
like a boil or a blood
blister ripely reaching to outsize the container – beyond
the capacities of the
human membrane.
Speech & breath hold
natural rhythm; to
manipulate the
lungs like an accordion
played and stopped at
will to notes that are cutting against –
That is art. That is power.
That is
love.

When You Hear Sifting / PF Potvin

feet like sand creak
open the screen
step & stoop

down as two ravens
wheeze past your mother
takes another nap
wonder about peering
behind blinds

pinch & pluck red
weeds from bricks black
fluff tossing along

snagging in discard pile
you glance about

lower your head
both now pretending

nobody’s home

On the occasion of remembering the last time we made love  /  Janette Schafer

There are times you want your lover to go slow,
to pluck you like a piano tuner with the meticulous
task of resetting strings and voice hammers, 
making each note correct, perfectly balanced

That day, I wanted you veloce, our bodies
a cacophony on the black and white keys
of our desire, a pounding rhapsody
I said: presto agitato faster my love my body
is agitated incalzando chase pursue urge me
stringendo press together together together 
with fire con fuoco hurry affrettando hurry

Let Me Burn Bones: a Burning Haibun  / Kate Thuma

My father helped me perch on my swingset trapeze bar. I felt like a bird whistling in a cartoon cage. I was

three, and soft, and smiling. He ran inside to tell my mother to look out the window at me, soaring. In that

second, I remember pride, then weightlessness, then nothing at all. My brain won’t let me keep the burn

of snapping still-small bones. It wakes up again on the x-ray table, where a technician tells a toddler to be

still so he can find the exact place my body ripped apart on the inside. I remember a door with a window,

and being held down by bigger things. I cannot see my mother’s face, but I want to be certain she is there

in my memory, that she came with me. It’s dark again in the pieces of the story I still hold, then sparkles

around a bathtub, a green sandbox, an inflatable pool, all places to keep my swaddled leg away from

while living half-in-half-out of my last baby summer. Still, when the buzzing saw finally eats down to my

now-thin leg, it’s buried in sand. That leg is still smaller. It still remembers falling.

My father helped me perch on my swingset trapeze bar. I felt like a bird whistling in a cartoon cage. I was

three, and soft, and smiling. He ran inside to tell my mother to look out the window at me, soaring. In that

second, I remember pride, then weightlessness, then nothing at all. My brain won’t let me keep the burn

of snapping still-small bones. It wakes up again on the x-ray table, where a technician tells a toddler to be

still so he can find the exact place my body ripped apart on the inside. I remember a door with a window,

and being held down by bigger things. I cannot see my mother’s face, but I want to be certain she is there

in my memory, that she came with me. It’s dark again in the pieces of the story I still hold, then sparkles

around a bathtub, a green sandbox, an inflatable pool, all places to keep my swaddled leg away from

while living half-in-half-out of my last baby summer. Still, when the buzzing saw finally eats down to my

now-thin leg, it’s buried in sand. That leg is still smaller. It still remembers falling.

My father helped me perch on my swingset trapeze bar. I felt like a bird whistling in a cartoon cage. I was

three, and soft, and smiling. He ran inside to tell my mother to look out the window at me, soaring. In that

second, I remember pride, then weightlessness, then nothing at all. My brain won’t let me keep the burn

of snapping still-small bones. It wakes up again on the x-ray table, where a technician tells a toddler to be

still so he can find the exact place my body ripped apart on the inside. I remember a door with a window,

and being held down by bigger things. I cannot see my mother’s face, but I want to be certain she is there

in my memory, that she came with me. It’s dark again in the pieces of the story I still hold, then sparkleles

around a bathtub, a green sandbox, an inflatable pool, all places to keep my swaddled leg away from

while living half-in-half-out of my last baby summer. Still, when the buzzing saw finally eats down to my

now-thin leg, it’s buried in sand. That leg is still smaller. It still remembers falling.

August - Poem 6

Don’t get me wrong / Zoe Berger

I don’t really want to be writing. 
I’d rather lie next to you in silence 
and not say what I mean. 
I mean what I say. I just don’t say 
all of it. You wouldn’t want 
me to. We made it this far 
because I shut the fuck up. 
I know. First time for everything. 
Let’s not ruin it with words—

a burning   / Ashley Howell

I used to bite my nails until they bled bandaids on every other digit I couldn’t let my skin I started getting manicures to help with the biting because the picture I took of holding my fathers hand as he died has fingers covered in bandages and when I picked up his ashes my nail polish matched the grey in the sky and in the urn there was no blood to be found 

I used to bite my nails until they bled bandaids on every other digit I couldn’t let my skin I started getting manicures to help with the biting because the picture I took of holding my father’s hand as he died has fingers covered in bandages and when I picked up his ashes my nail polish matched the grey in the sky and in the urn there was no blood to be found

the picture of skin
my father’s hand grey ashes
used nails in the sky

Strawberry Fields Forever / Dahhee Chung

My weed garden is beautiful,
Tall green stalks wild with tips of white fluff seeds and yellow quotation marks stamped aggressively by a five year old playing god,
In a galaxy far, far away,
An open crawl of 
“Strawberry fields 
                  forever” thick and low,
Pitch slowed,
Surviving beneath the day,
Once meticulously cared for by a hyper-focused Gardener
Who had time
To nourish the soil 
And the clowder of cats,
Like orange swirls and creamsicles 
melting down the brick wall,
“…temperatures  in the high 90s”
      butterflies and bees swarm   the prolific weed blooms,
Then scatter as the hummingbird zips down and side eyes 
The gardener 
                 who thought 
The world couldn’t thrive without her. 

The Cowgirl and the Physicist / Alison Henderson

I see us crossing bridges in Saskatoon.

You shift gears,
low to the ground,
in your mother’s old Mazda.
The dashboard rattles.
Red paint flashes
off the hood.

I open a window.
You tell me it’s called flutter
and crack yours.

Grain and gasoline.

Mohawk razed,
collared shirt, leather belt,
ghosts of neon clothing.

You are quieter now,
listening 
to my music.

Your profile
in the flat sunlight.

We stop 
because I ask you to.

The Joni Mitchell plaque
on Broadway Avenue,
bronzed and unremarkable.

We are singing
Wheat Kings
instead of Blue.

I trace the arrow of time
on your calf
as you drive us 
out of the city
where at night,
stars covered the ground.

The fields ran on. 

At night,
stars covered the ground.

You said you were
a side character
in the story of a woman
who loved life so much
it killed her.

You fell in love
with my corpse.

I drove to California
in a stolen rental.

Mission Control Told Her / Ash Kemp

Once, mission control told her communication lines were jammed.
They could no longer hear her detailed report of her body
rejecting synthetic foods and missing human touch.
Leery of a slow death,
lone soul on a desolate ship
in the outer reaches of space,
waiting to be devoured,
She returns to her reports,
as if the world isn’t behind her,
forever out of reach.

Mission Control Told Her

Once, mission control told her communication lines were jammed.
They could no longer hear her detailed report of her body
rejecting synthetic foods and missing human touch.
Leery of a slow death,
lone soul on a desolate ship
in the outer reaches of space,
waiting to be devoured,
She returns to her reports,
as if the world isn’t behind her,
forever out of reach.

Mission Control Told Her

communication lines were jammed.
They could no longer hear her body
rejecting synthetic foods and missing human touch.
Confined to a desolate ship
in the outer reaches of space,
waiting to be devoured,
connection just out of her reach.

Lip Reading / Hannah Page

Some days, my bedroom
is enough of a world.

(The womb is a very tiny
universe btw.) 

Slivers of nightstands
decorated with daily
treasures carried home
in denim pockets with
widening holes. Wan
daylight slicing the air
like a mirror, slanting
over safe landscape.
My red and black pilled
comforter becomes my
swaddling-clothes, my
amniotic sac, and all my
sustenance – food; coffee;
marijuana – materializes
atop the covers.

I am not so alone here.
My husband in the other
room and over my shoulder
the disintegrating, spectral
forms of every past
entanglement. This morning
a friend requested
space but I was looking
backwards and I heard it
as the promise of betrayal.
Sometimes I can’t understand
the words as they're meant
unless I watch the mouth
expel them.

Taking a Break / PF Potvin

On my hands and knees painting the porch the dullest of grays, the kind you lose yourself in and almost stop thinking about painting or where the mind goes when you’re not looking, which, let’s be honest, happens much of the time, especially if you’re like me and getting older, which probably begs a different question but one I won’t get into here because I’m actually taking a break and typing this instead of painting, but all work and no play and all that, but seriously, where’s the mind right now? slipping out the side door of the shop and sneaking a smoke while I’m busy here working on a poem, or maybe it’s just slunk out on an errand and will return before I know it, which can’t really happen because I’m thinking about it now, but who really knows how many levels this person in the mirror’s got or how many tiny sprinkled cakes and coffees might be offered on this table and devoured before the projects can be deemed all done?

On the occasion of waking to a dream  /  Janette Schafer

I stirred to a phantom hand on my hip.
A ghost pressed close, his coarse hairs
tingling the back of my thigh. He gentled
my hair from behind my ears, swept it
to the side. What he whispered, I do not
remember except I could feel the icy dew
from his breath. He found that space
between my neck and shoulder, that inch
of nerve and life that shuts out all thought
and outside space, save for that bundle
of electric that makes the whole of me
cry yes…yes this. Awake, I kept my eyes
shut, holding on to the specter until it was
time, until I made my legs shake.

PHOTOSYNTHESIS  / Kate Thuma

I’m so of the earth 
that moss grows happily 
in my lungs, 
and every breath 
I exhale transfers oxygen 
back into the atmosphere. 

When I kiss you, 
I am keeping you alive. 

You and I could form 
a closed system 
together at Point Nemo, 
our own biosphere
at the point of inaccessibility. 

When you breathe 
back into me, 
it’s all I need.