October - Poem 25

William / Katerina Canyon

I cannot catalog

our time together

because we were young

and my memory is old,

but there are a few things

I remember.

Your arm over my shoulder

after grad night.

Your height made me feel short.

So few boys did that

and I liked it.

Redondo Beach,

The way you kissed

me. Your skin salty

like my favorite snack—

salditos.

I broke up with you

for a love bomb

That damaged me.

I bear scars to this day.

You thought you could

forgive me,

but you couldn’t.

We moved on.

Now you are gone—

too young. I wish

I had taken better care

of your heart.

Fishing  /  Sam Calhoun

Every pier easing into the dark,
harbor lights miming the sun,

minnows huddle in shallow
water searching for warmth.  

Quick to cup a hand, I catch a few,
iridescent scales sticking to my fingers, 

I dream of mackerel skies, 
how these scales are like stitch holes

across my palms, my shadow 
eclipsing their lives,

they shimmy out, seeking
consciousness in the act, 

water catching on our feet
like diamonds in the dark,

our mistaking the scene 
for waking, or having woke,

our lives driftless as moored boats
in the fog rolling gray as our hair.  

We too minnows beneath stars,
and worlds beyond.  

What can be said on these 
late shores not already said?  

We too huddle in the crackle
of campfire, waiting for daylight.

Late Night Youtube Bender    /  at/om

content warning: references to self harm and suicidal ideation 

I was so sick back in 2015,
my mind a floor coated in
broken glass for a body that
could not afford a broom. 

The night before my flight to a
residential treatment center my
loved ones held me as though I
would never come home. I held
my home as though I would
never return to it. 

My sister stayed up all night
in my bed watching our favorite
YouTube channel and laughing
and not talking about the fact I
was flying away with no return
ticket booked. Not talking about
the night two months earlier I went
to the hospital with no intent on
coming back. 

We just watched the videos and
laughed at a man who sometimes
hurt himself while making art projects. 
His videos aren't the same anymore
though sometimes I still watch late into
the nights when my heart aches the most
and I wonder if I am safe here. 

I feel the hurt again, remember the things
I wanted to hold more than I wanted to get
better and I wrap myself in my blankets and
pray that the man on YouTube and I can
finish our projects without hurting ourselves. 

Chester, for the relief of unbearable urges, digs a hole in the yard and eats the root he finds  /  Ellen Ferguson

Nathan Englander wrote the story “For

The Relief of Unbearable Urges,” from

The Talmud, maybe, or the Torah

But it’s in there – a rule for

Us to follow in stepping away.

Rules for the breaking of rules, how

Delicious. When it’s time to break

The rule, here’s how to do it, according

To the rule. Silver Linings Playbook, that’s

A crazy one – rules aligned so you can

Dance and win, according to someone’s

Ways to win, someone’s list of ways to

Dance the right way.

Chester, for the relief of unbearable urges,

Digs a hole in the yard and eats the root he

Finds, then chokes, cannot breathe, and John,

Flying over the fence, removes the root while

Danielle, Chester’s mother, watches him struggle

To breathe. Just stands there. Watching.

Questions /  Brett Gastineau

Is it better to live un-surprised

or to love from a distance?

Why must the night feel like an empty room to fill?

Who is it that scratches at my dreams?

Is it the same one who placed a wolf in my heart?

Has anyone ever tried to wish the stars away?

Why do Mondays feel so washed out?

And why do they tromp about on boredom’s puffy toes?

Why is March ambivalent?

And why does terror come at three in the afternoon?

What was that minor curse you laid across my shoulders?

What was that minor tenderness?

Perhaps the curse is being the last one to feel anything?

Isn’t it funny that lovemaking must be proceeded by

the cursing of buttons and stubbornly stuck zippers?

And why must I always be under the influence of your 

sleazy vowels?

Has anyone figured out how to close the door on grievances?

If they have would they mind being the last gust of wind slamming

me closed?

Why do the lips of a wound never speak of love?

Do trees envy the patience of grass?

Is there harmony in death?

Or is it just suffering’s white bed?

Why does memory not pass away easily?

Why must each thought of the past become a forest?

Will we always be lost in this blue dream of yesterday?

Do silhouettes have interior lives?

Why do people always talk about the weather with cats?

What questions do you ask of an orange?

Do birds sing simply because no one will write them poems?

Why has “belonging” always felt like such a strange word, 

like a way to feel “to be longing for”?

In dreams, are trees like us, just ghosts walking roads that stretch

beyond their lives?

Is living just not asking permission?

Or is it a light bulb in the chest asking to be turned on?

What is that special kind of grief when I find myself missing something I’ve forgotten the name of called?

Where does meaning go when words are forgotten?

My museum of Italian-Americana series:    / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

II: living room

grandfather who never got to be

a grandfather made these tables, 

chairs, sideboard and cabinet by hand

cabinet-maker, a job, an art

& when they met, my Nonna

had already made a handcrafted round doily that fit on top of his round table

after he died, attempts to save what seemed precious

Nonna lined up knicknacks on the bay window’s curve

one couch, one chair encased in clear vinyl

against sticky grandkids’ hands

could we have saved him, tucked away & treasured

rather than the upholstered seating

AMBITION /  H.T. Reynolds

there is a window in the middle

of the day

somewhere between

the lamppost

and the garden

with a sash hung up

loose against the light

so that your eyes sizzle

with each refraction

a tilt of the head and

poof

over the channel

the snapped rail

the head

beckoning you

to aspire…

you pass

through the pane

and into—

what’s beyond

a likeness

unwelcome

Camp First and then Dinner /  Gabriel Phillips

Little apple links to Dresden like flames and fur.

I can see it counting out loud,

stuck inside bits of cabbage.

How closely it remains untied together.

In front of us, I wander.

Far from voice reach and grope.

To the cabin. To the fire inside.

Where I ride the rocking horse for hours.

Where the cabin and the rocking horse burn

for hours. I don’t touch fire.

I caress it.

That apples would cook before boiling

in their own little juices. How do we boil instead

without caressing the fire?

Char is the father of glitter.

I want the size of the window to pulse

then throw out the light bulbs to catch

and kindle and crackle.

I make light

without the light’s permission.

Then abandon the light for fitted sheets

to warm the smoldering cabin.

There, there, autumn is so striking.

Unlike the gear which holds me together,

I unfold the tiny space between the stones.

Someone tries to experience my name at night.

Someone goes to sleep beside me

breathing.

absence soon to be  / Colin Sturdevant

at the lip of the world,

tell me what’s left now

October - Poem 24

Heavyweight / Katerina Canyon

Humans are water and oil—

simply blobs of carbon

In their proclivity.

My life now has

an artificial ankle,

torn meniscus, and arthritic

joints moving out of

rhythm with the music I play

in my head—It’s the end of the world

ss we know it, and I feel fine.

One day I will fall into dust.

The night my father fell,

he was too high to stand.

It was late at night

in the Perris, California

cold desert. I wanted to leave him.

“Let him freeze to death,” I said.

My mother begged me to help him.

The day my father fell,

I was 135 pounds soaking wet.

He was 325,

but I picked him up

and carried him into our trailer.

He lived to abuse another day.

Both are dead now.

Mother in a family plot

in Wisner, Louisiana.

Father in a mass grave

in Los Angeles.

The moment my mother died

I wasn’t there, but I felt it—

a rock sitting in my belly—

crushing pain in my pelvis.

The day my father died,

I felt it, as if I had lost something.

It was like that moment

when you walk into a room

for something, but you cannot

remember what you were

looking for.

I felt lighter in that moment,

but I didn’t know why.

Humans are dust and stone—

simply bricks of carbon in

their proclivity.

Moving Into the Cosmos  /  Sam Calhoun

The first cool morning, 

frost speckled like stars 

across the glass, birds

busy learning highways

they’ll never see again.  

Later, bees searching 

for the cosmos blooms 

taken by the cold, frantic, 

finding only the snow aster 

wedged like star clusters 

by the gate. 

Soon the ice ribbons will erupt 

like receipts across parking lots, 

when the world gets too cold. 

Soon I’ll retreat to the far corner, 

my corner of the galaxy, 

and slowly burn Heaven.

Cider    /  at/om

I look up a kitchen witch recipe 

for apple cider, I clarify I don’t 

want a love potion I just want 

my home to smell like I love it. 

I couldn’t go out to the orchard 

this year. I couldn’t force my tired 

legs over the small hills and roots. 

I could not pay the heightened 

prices for the farmer allowing me 

to pick even the smallest bag of apples. 

I don’t know how much if effects 

the magic of it all when I buy the 

apples at the grocery store between 

errands. When I plug in the crockpot 

I wonder when I started to prefer my 

spell work be countertop rather than stove. 

I lay down little gods around me, 

I close my eyes and I chop and I 

measure and I declare my intents 

aloud and I cast them into my 

crockpot cauldron and I can see it all 

become something new. 

I can smell the spell simmering 

throughout the entire house, the 

bones of my home rest, the walls sing out 

praise of the goddess Hestia. 

The hearth lights itself. 

My blankets smell like 

brown sugar and honey.

no words  /  Ellen Ferguson

Though Isabelle joked she was

(Her mom) married to

(Even if) she were kidding

The gift brides give

Early bestowed upon her

She really was

Though it would have been great

from here /  Brett Gastineau

the room smells of stale tobacco and

yesterday’s bad luck

the radio is busted or playing a song

about goodbye

and I’m sitting on the edge of the cot

looking at my hands

calloused and stupid

trying to figure out what it was all for

people talk about finding meaning

like it’s a dollar bill dropped on the sidewalk

you bend down, you pick it up, you buy a

cup of coffee

but it’s never like that

you reach out in the dark

hoping for skin, hoping for a pulse, hoping

for anything

that doesn’t taste like ash

the more I touched the more I learned and

the more I broke

and now there are pieces of me scattered

in motels from here to nowhere

leaving fingerprints on things that don’t

care

you try to love a woman or a city

or the way a stray cat looks at you

through a chain-link fence

and everything turns to dust or bills or

silence

pour another glass

let the world burn down in its own grease

we’ll sit here and watch it

until the light goes out

and nobody remembers our names

Sweaty surprise  /  Joy Johnson

Amidst the ungodly unrest of forests

On fire, hotter than Hades summers,

Flash flood warnings and hail looming so large,

I find my way to tragic Greek chorus 

And moan in my existential gutters:

I know sorrow profound with my whole heart. 

But yesterday I woke to a red cat 

Lounging smartly against my sweaty arm. 

Jackson regarded me and I, wonders!,

Had forgot for a moment all my angst,

Knew peace. 

II: living room  / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

grandfather who never got to be

a grandfather made these tables, 

chairs, sideboard and cabinet by hand

cabinet-maker, a job, an art

& when they met, my Nonna

had already made a handcrafted round doily that fit on top of his round table

after he died, attempts to save what seemed precious

Nonna lined up knicknacks on the bay window’s curve

one couch, one chair encased in clear vinyl

against sticky grandkids’ hands

could we have saved him, tucked away & treasured

rather than the upholstered seating

THAT RED DOOR /  H.T. Reynolds

her red nails

that baptism

her jaded lips…

if the light were to stay green

would that mean she will smile

tonight—heavy with its echoes,

a day gone septic

but it’s a blessing

without consent—a hail Mary

etched along her breast

bone, that curvature of her rib

plucked and planted like a fig

satiating his appetite

that red door

her stripped nails

that alibi

her faded eyes…

Cluster of Rain Drops /  Gabriel Phillips

 When I think of leaving, I think of the portable drum. How I put the portable drum into the closet. How the portable drum is in a closet. When I think that gathering sounds measure the same as words, I recognize the lack of violence within me. At least where the surface breaks there is tension.

It would be a wait longer than waiting, waiting to know that waiting has a value. Or that some unspeakable treasure lies in the dead hands of a coffer. I am not neglect, and at the very least this is thankful. There are tribes of impatient winds circling blank pages. Pages with directions that are unfollowable but promise, again, a treasure underneath a since-removed ‘X’.

A good place to rest is like a blanket of snow on a bed of ocean. The promise of demise. Peaceful. Glorious and romantic enough that stars would sacrifice the heavens to live among the crabs as seashells. But then the stars would see unremarkable me sleeping and understand a mortal regret which would send their madness into an unholy defiance. I’d shatter into a pillar of salt to know that there was peace within this bed of sleep.  

all that’s not nonce  / Colin Sturdevant

Is when we realize
we are the waking labyrinths

In each others body
when snow falls and fails

To be corrected by the law 
every plum a distinct tune

Kiss the gun goodnight
lock it up so the ringing stops

& a crying classmate wakes
to the complexity he is inside

October - Poem 23

Photograph at 14 / Katerina Canyon

Hair chopped short by nerves,

styled by no one,

body—lanky,

eyes—cut hard,

green band uniform.

Kids called me

Jolly Green Giant.

Long black bass clarinet

in my hands

Musical notes dance

from my fingers

and float into the

desert air

between my depression

and thoughts of

jumping off the bus

at high speed.

I rarely smiled.

My lips often bit hard

around my mouthpiece.

I blew my instrument

loud enough to drown out

Insults—magic.

Baby Elephant Walk was

my jam.

God bless Henry Mancini.

Happiness hid between

the lines on quarter notes

and eighths.

There’s an incantation

in the keys when you strike

them right.

The sickly, gawky nerd

of a girl could play

a badass woodwind.

I can’t believe

I was ashamed of that photo.

Dreaming at Horicon National Wildlife Refuge, WI   /  Sam Calhoun

The whole sky one day 

would open, and a tree 

pulled taut like a slingshot, 

long condensation trails 

migrating north would echo

my breath far beyond 

any mountains.  

Deep in the marsh we ebbed

along the boardwalk catching

webs, fishing spiders anchored

like balloons before drifting 

like years we lost as kids 

to the sky, our dreams 

tucked like talismans

to every meteor.  

I want to bless 

every moment here,

drift with the coontail

sleepwalking like memories 

past the ever dwindling 

waters of youth, cattails 

dancing like candle flame.

For Miss Wefers    /  at/om

I think we both know I am no longer built for my Catholic school upbringing, but something that has always stuck with me is the saints. 

The people who we could know and touch and love, who embodied the tangible teachings of God. 

A title given only after somebody dies. 

When I was in sixth grade I already feared your age, worried I would be within your last classes before your retirement but you taught another twenty years after I was gone. 

Your bell collection probably sitting soundly on your desk, your competitive Jeapordy games causing students to leap with joy in the classroom, with the Liberty’s Kids theme ringing in the halls. 

I am so happy you saw a lonely sixth grader, obsessed with a historical cartoon, and listened when I told you it was my favorite. 

I am so happy you saw a lonely sixth grader and introduced me to a new student who became my best friend for the next decade. 

So happy you saw a little sixth grade friend group form and did all you could to keep us together. Twenty years later we still talk, we still share stories, and we all miss you so much. 

I am so happy that in your forty years of sharing your wisdom you sent hundreds of kids like me into the world knowing somebody cared about us. 

The last time we talked was last autumn, you called me the name I picked a few years ago, never bound me to the one you knew me by. 

Because for twenty years you kept knowing me. 

And with a lifetime of incomplete assignments, failed classes, and more detentions than I could count, 

A few of which were yes, from you. 

I was more than just a grade, 

and you were more than just a teacher. 

You were a saint. 

Vaso Vagal Vegas Syncope, a Villanelle  /  Ellen Ferguson

Bookstore bombshell Martha fell today
Bronxville ladies suddenly abuzz
Vaso vagal Vegas syncope

The news hit Clementine worst, the ladies say
Landing like Vegas on Claudia because
Bookstore bombshell Martha fell today

Claudia’s cardiac arrest hit late in May
“It rounds up to June!” – oh sure it does
Vaso vagal Vegas syncope

“It’s our pretend honeymoon!” It was Monday.
Alone in Jersey, Claudia, like she was…
Bookstore bombshell Martha fell today

Clementine, Claudia’s Mom, had to listen all day
To Claudia, reliving her own fall, her hus-
Vaso vagal Vegas syncope

“Moms suffer till they die” was Clementine’s way
Of saying you were always married to us!
Bookstore bombshell Martha fell today
Vaso vagal Vegas syncope

Night thoughts /  Brett Gastineau

At midnight I fly once more,

not upon the wing of a bird,

but astride the dark wood of my father’s coffin.

My father sleeps inside, wrapped in shadow.

This silent vessel crosses the invisible tides.

Above us, the stars are thick and smeared,

like greasy oil lamps weeping over a kitchen table,

shimmering through a film of solitude.

I remember the walls of my childhood,

the old paper where silent faces lived and breathed—

strange, twisted figures with long, accusing noses

and brows furrowed deep,

their cheeks swelled like trumpet players blowing

that sudden, untamed happiness that only

jazz and the heartbroken know.

Where are those players now, those swollen figures

that flowered from the walls?

They have put down their brass into a well;

they have surrendered their golden breath.

The night has swallowed them in its great green mouth.

Yet here I ride, through the vast and star-choked sky,

carrying the quiet weight of my father into the wind.

Let the world sleep.

I am flying and the music of those forgotten trumpets

echoes softly inside my blood.

Delinquent  /  Joy Johnson

Venus, made of Love and close-by twin,

On whom I consternate each day, forlorn,

She wears an atmosphere for blanket warm

And shelters naught but stone in her storm's wind. 

'Tis true her light is bright both eve and morn,

But seen from Earth where life can recognize 

Her star-like form that wanders through ski's barn

So we can write to her poetic sighs. 

Lurking under every pretty word is,

Pernicious, truth of our sibling stillborn

And how close she is to Earth's own verges:

But unresponsive to our no return. 

No monument can endure forever,

But my faith's in Nature -- that She'll long term. 

SPLIT PEA SOUP /  H.T. Reynolds

after the Great Smog

of December 1952

twelve thousand people died

when the thick viscous breath

left the throat of the mine

the shaft of a baron’s cigar

holding the night captive

in its baleful glow

they prepared the cauldron

beneath the smokestacks

collected the husks like cairns

added in the remnants of pork

from an expired shoulder

exchanged for a pound of tea

nobody went outside

while the soup simmered

stirred by death’s cold finger

Affordable Housing /  Gabriel Phillips

And with that they were off to bed

a clang of their forks on blackest china.

Beds are rolling closet darkness.

Kicking webs from walls, loosening

the seventy-five-year mortar. Cracks

they can snuggle into.

What would whispering do, what

do people do to(for) whispers? What

kind of person throws a bed

without pretending to be an animal?

I don’t doubt the scurry

of light or the child’s bubble

that shapes itself as a hidden

reptile, which shivers.

I don’t doubt it. Though

I doubt I could eat another bite

from the surface of the table. Excuse

me. The bed is hungry

and darkness ruins after midnight.  

October - Poem 22

For God and His Followers / Katerina Canyon

We kill each other
in attempts to prove
who loves God more.

God has a face we have never
seen, but we bet rubies, diamonds,
and emeralds
to prove his existence.

They tell me denying God
is denying the universe,
but I cannot accept the love
of someone who has never held my hand.

I am, however, grateful for the gift
of language, reason, and this planet,
and if it is from God, thank you.

I do not understand working
toward an unknown heaven
when Earth is already
alive beneath our feet.

We trade the bird in our hand
for two we cannot see
beyond the clouds.

We are provided milk and honey
and leave it in the sun to curdle
rather than share
with the hungry.

We feel the weight
of our own oppression
while standing
on another's belly.

Is this faith? The belief
that you can throw others
away because they aren't like you?

Because we believe in a
heaven somewhere beyond
the ark of the rainbow.

I believe
Earth is heaven, and I believe
humans make it hell.

At Castle Rock State Park   /  Sam Calhoun

High above the Rock River
trees cast their leaves like pennies
to the water, the morning cold,

the current taking wishes
so far downstream 
before registering 

them to the dark
the trees began 
to ask again.  

Low to the sky 
I cast my breathe to the river
of clouds, the sun warm,

long cirrus like party streamers
catch them in passing, 
so far to the horizon 

I am afraid my words 
have been forgotten.
I ask again. 

Shark Attack   /  at/om

When I am asked 

how I would want 

to die the answer 

is always simple: 

Shark attack. 

There is often a 

laugh about how I 

needed no time to 

think about it. 

I always remark how 

it would be so cool, 

how it would probably 

be on the news, 

how if I died in the jaws of a shark 

that means two things are true: 

One: I probably deserved it. 

Two: I died doing something I love

The only problem with 

this ideal final scenario 

of mine is that I worry 

about the shark. 

I worry about the people 

who would not know 

how I have always 

loved a monster. 

How rows upon rows 

of razor sharp teeth 

are a curse I’ve known 

all my life and they have 

already been the death 

of me a hundred times over. 

How i would never 

want these beautiful 

beasts to be harmed 

in my name and how 

I know so well sharks 

do not seek out 

humans to hunt. 

They do not like the way we taste. 

I fear I will leave 

this world the way I lived in it: 

leaving a bad taste 

in something’s mouth. 

The dialogical self takes the form of a fox and boards the bus in London, requesting a transfer  /  Ellen Ferguson

No doubt you’ve seen photos: the fox is small and red

descending steps, disembarking multi-voiced --

A history teacher on the fifth-grade corridor said transitions are difficult because when we were little they were terrifying.

Not for the fox, bushy-tailed version of polyphonic self —

we’re saying it in our heads,

that same history teacher reminds us,

we’re saying it in our heads.

Myth /  Brett Gastineau

From the deep where all began,

dark clouds laid heavy on the trees

of these home was made.

We rose.

Dark clouds were at the door.

Dark clouds, were a path along the sky smelling of snow.

Dark clouds were songs returned in old voices

we used to know, coming to us so we may learn

to let them go. We let them go so they may come again.

We were saddlebags of rain

bound to the tides.

Yet time is a vibration, calling us higher.

Out of the ancient water, into fire.

Up through the burning ash.

Higher still just before night’s rambunctious black

to stand with the jagged lightning.

We were willing to be with the dust.

We climbed the sparks.

We entered the realm of air.

We knew the quiet, that holy state

even the rain knows about.

We heard the trees speak

the words of their mystery religion.

Here let us walk in days dense with rain.

Let us walk embraced by teeming plants.

Let us walk dusted by pollen, golden by the

sun’s daily droppings.

We are hues on the skin of the earth.

We are children of the sky.

We will walk happily.

All around us home.

Healer Summit Vow  /  Joy Johnson

To outlive the drive thrust upon, isothermal-wise,

one and all; to overhaul the warmouth ethic, 

warehouse of overtime, multiverse of hourlies:

New avowals of altruism!  - - timeshare the wearisome. 

The heavisome immolated in favour of mirthsome,

in favour of whatsoever springs forth, heartsome. 

Right now the hoariest limewood provokes

loverwise work with lummiest hammer,

tongs, atomizers, semimetals, pencils, weapons

of better drives to cultivate communication of

what earthlies already know how.  Bringing up bevies

of babies that sing, speak, pique, and underpin 

our healer summit vow:  down with overwhelm,

satisfy commons-drive, make-n-take per needsome. 

Thank you Elisabetta    / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

Americans can’t pronounce it but love

to eat it. Melty telefono cord 

stretches from inside arancine

you hide behind your hand to your mouth.

It's added to the inside of lasagne

even served cold in caprese

where slices layer jewel-red slices of

tomato. Basil leaves compete the flag.

mozza a bit, a piece

Torn from a mass of curds collected

stirred in warm whey, a milk water

formed into a delicious ball.

NEVER TRUST A FART OVER FORTY /  H.T. Reynolds

he’ll squint at you between pillows

curled over his skull like full-face

headgear—a closed fist discovering

his artificial teeth between the gaps

he recalls the days of streetlight

ball, how Timothy found a golden coin

in the sewer drain that turned out to be

chocolate from last Easter

how it endured in spite of itself

how none of the boys could play ball

until Mary lent her purse for safekeeping

and the ball ran onto the freeway

exploding beneath an eighteen-wheeler

the coin melting into her purse’s lining

the boys stained their hands helping

but it was over—they never spoke of it

until now—

he waits for the lights to settle

for the window blinds to begin

unfolding, inviting the darkness

into the room, his periphery

its shadows dancing in play

rings with a flame in the center

a spotlight hung from the ceiling

used to investigate the strangeness

of his curled knees, the lump

on his thigh he’s ignored since turning

thirty—the scope of the horizon only

beginning to fill his lungs with shallow

sand seeps into the grooves of skin

his palm’s eroding seems stitched

dirty, broken lines still scabbed

over and forgotten

then the medical bill

and aging becomes

an inconvenience

and the youth push

him aside—burying him

in a dark room

Keeping My Hands to Yourself /  Gabriel Phillips

Even a dry mind drinks its own

syntax.

Paint the glass breakfast,

in the belly of the window

there is silt.

Scroll through the book

take my undiscovery,

find what makes your hands cordial.

You’ve two hundred twenty-two times

the dampness of glass.

Am I allowed to sleep

on the path?

My palate itches.

I’ve shoved the glue

with my tongue

behind my nose.

Aren’t you remember

hungry then?

Aren’t you capture.

Aren’t you capture?

Drowned in bowls

of feathers.

Everyone I know swallows

their drinks.

Mouth isn’t stained.

I’ll even discourage sound.

Together I crash into the ordinary
salamander.  

October - Poem 21

Can a Name Predict the Future / Katerina Canyon

Now that the newborn

with the stark black hair

and blue eyes has been named,

what can we predict of his future?

Is the die cast by his name?

Large,

unique,

royal.

A name to live up to.

Dark, imposing,

not grim,

but waiting to be proven—

a great name.

Will he be great?

Can he see how many people

weighed their souls on his name?

He seems to be a peaceful child.

His name is a conqueror of nations.

Let’s hope that he is a mender of hearts.

Untitled After A Storm   /  Sam Calhoun

Then it was over—
nothing but the click
calls of hummingbirds,
their dizzying soirée, 

the drip of rain from 
string light globes 
into wind blown
plant saucers, 

the pirouette of petunia 
blooms onto the deck, 
loose canna hanging 
like wet clothes, 

crape myrtle strewn 
like firecracker casings 
after the celebration, 
no rainbow, no goodbye,

and my heart tugged 
to the far field, watching 
robins, stop, stepping forward, 
stopping again. 

Two Big Dogs   /  at/om

Heavy breath sounds from 

two giant dogs have been 

my lullaby this week, and I 

have been trying to share 

a bed with these great behemoths 

which is to say I have been 

folding myself into absurd angles 

so these beasts can sleep most 

comfortably. My back hurts when 

I wake in the mornings

but today they let me sleep a half 

hour past their usual breakfast time. 

It’s been days since their parents were 

home and I wonder if this big middle 

of nowhere house

has been as scary to them as it has been to me. 

I am sharing a bed with two great big dogs, 

and I am glad for their deep heavy breaths 

lulling me to sleep. 

I am glad for the company, and I am glad to 

be breaking my back for creatures that 

won’t let me spend a night alone and afraid.

Hypervigilance  /  Ellen Ferguson

Peanut Butter & Mary hang around like

Frank O’Hara used to/funny a

couple would persist like that, nature

of the beast --                 coming home

4:50 saw this:

closed door

wild hair and softer smile, thought this:

it’s time

thought, money in the bank, good timing like he had.

thought, we know how to do this, park place bagels for

shiva, thought: get grades in get grades in, thought

Peanut Butter & Mary had friends, they had the

Dark, the cave where they said “who can write the

Scariest story, Mary wins!” thought, “Power in

Likeness of the Arve,” PB wins this round, thought

Wickelfisch, thought save me, thought river, yet –

Turkey loaf for lovers once again, Duraflame crackling,

Mary wins this round.

From one to another /  Brett Gastineau

From one twilight to another, mouth to mouth,

our tongues taste like salt and late October.

We sink into the abyss of the bedroom,

the chord’s of Page’s guitar strum the floorboards,

the beat a second heart matching

the persistent rhythm of our hips.

For hours, the silence in the room had

been woven tight—

a stiff, folded cloth—but now it splits open,

pronouncing itself aloud, expansive,

wet with our breathing.

Where did this come from?

From where no one knows,

before we were born, before we ever touched,

we were already companions in this fierce hour.

Let the moon bark outside the window like an irritated dog.

Let it sting our eyes with its cold, yellow light

which fills the room with the metallic smell of night.

The weavers have grown silent.

Their solemn pilgrimage along the dust

of old trails is over—back when joy was just a thin suspicion,

stunted, and waiting to bloom.

Let us abandon their pale sorrow.

We are the disciples of tree and stone now

and the tiny, stubborn flower opening in the night.

We are subjects of this urgent, flesh-bound light.

We are creators of new verbs, mouth to mouth,

fulfilling whatever is radiant, heavy, and never-ending.

The evening comes down and we refuse to stop.

The Inventory of Good-bye  /  Joy Johnson

To know a last time of drinking some wine 

that happened just past nine one evening 

years ago;  and how about that last fuck

that I groused about but maybe now miss?

A ready good-bye nod I offer to 

that couch I would recline on when time was 

I watched television, or, still working 

on the first degree, benediction was

shunned forever thence (meditation seat

then took up is mostly drainage basin 

gone dry now too).  One by one by twos and 

more, good-byes line up on my brow

to have their poignancy reviewed and scored:

sinusoidally up and down, five stars

to one or even none.  But can I hope 

for a bed of fresh linens when day comes

that I bid farewell to what's closest to

my heart:  my heart, whose death knell will be un-

felt as soon as it's felt, and the line on

my brow dissipates precipitous.  Through. 

What is no longer present   / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

sandbox makes them chase away stray cats

abacuses and boxes filled with misfit toys

graham crackers and milk

babysitting jobs made her feel grown-up

being felt up in a borrowed car

scowled at after curfew

twirl to a tune in the living room

place the LP back in its dustcover

freshman dorm, columns, blonde roommate

space for us to park the rusty chevy

out front as she grasps the picnic basket

filled with hometown treats stuffed in foil

summer jobs just to try them out

summer flings, the same

faraway parent responsibilities

faraway assist her parents as they did for her          

Fig trees thank you to the Carr family LaMarca-Sacco Day 21

leaves’ trefoil shape cover shame

in historic stories & paintings

fruit a teardrop

sweet, plump, seedy

branches appear dead

trimmed, support fruit

a fall treat

humble in the old country

Dad warns, take care

of our figs! & I wonder how long 

I will have with them

silent sentry trees

enough fruit to share when it’s sunny

longing nostalgia when they are gone

in the frigid season

back to welcome spring

THE LAST STORY YOU TOLD ME /  H.T. Reynolds

Tupelo 30/30 Cento Pt. 2 with lines from
Brett Gastineau, Sam Calhoun, Colin Sturdevant,
Joy Johnson, Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

before her ghost inhabited this world
before I became godless
each body had a name
that comes with the cold
here, with the lashes of a whisper
practicing voodoo that turns
the sky to bone

Who can tell me the river’s original name
how they seem shallow,
distant, old lives like a weighted net
the shape of glass
an instant folding upon itself

I let the water catch my feet
her language is not strange to me
but she breathes, even broken
there are those who touch a body
and leave it graceful

With this dawn, I am overwhelmed
with its pulse—I thought I’d rather die
whole…

I am afraid of you

 Inez¹, /  Gabriel Phillips

Christmas became a drooping haunted house.

From such an innocent debt.

I heard stars bend from a ripple as a child,

my father told me things were fine. That

the attic was full of blind mice

who could also hear the ripple.

But why? Even mice play and time

is so bright that it isn’t measured

by the sun. Attics shield the light

but the heat escalates. Our attics

have at least one window. Which

we look out once a year.

The mice who aren’t blind

have chosen to burn. They burn

forever. Since their blindness is cold.

But why? If I touch the edge of the pond

I can count up to the final ripple.

But I can’t count, what I can’t see

and sound is measured in heartbeats.

Which is wickedly deceptive.

I dream of answers

I do not have. What I have is

history. Which is a small,

silent thing. I am a mouse.

I have an attic. I do not burn.

It isn’t the ripple,

it is the star who made the ripple.

Christmas is the sound

that attic mice can hear.

When the memory of someone

I’ve never met, sleeps in the light

of every Christmas tree.

¹ Sleeping since 12/25/1938. A star black-holed by a cowardly worm who ate himself. The gift that keeps the pale starlight from fading.  

October - Poem 20

Funk / Katerina Canyon

My memory says you will empty

me into the drumbeat of us.

We are so  far apart

at the back field

that a twitchy horse could

have emptied its shape.

My memory says you must not break

the melody as we shape the wind.

We have not known one another

that well in joy.

It holds me when you listen.

No one you were with

was quite so lost

that I will recall this and

remind you at length.

I am out of my own mind

which is not certainly out

of the sky.

I cannot turn on my head

without noting some time

you estranged my sun.

Run through the field, head

pounding and carving my bass.

I don’t hope you will lose your music.

At the most

I hope some of the empty, shapeless

notes that carve you

run after the treble outside you

whole inside the measure—

one for each sky.

On The Rock River  /  Sam Calhoun

See them dance on the Rock River, 
ghosts of the Sauk in fog
where every sandhill 
knows their song.  

They perch on boulders
like trivets keeping 
them from the cold
oven of earth,

catch fish in the pools beneath 
the Black Hawk statue,
warm bowls in the sun,
eyes mirrored like stars,

see how every twig 
tangled with detritus
from every flood 
waves like flags,

how the fish, captive, 
flash into morning,
scales listing every
color of the rainbow. 

Cinquain for the Rotten Apple   /  at/om

Apple: 

the smell dances 

in the hairs of your beard 

I am far too bitter a fruit, 

tainted

I Can’t I’m Grading Papers Until I Die  /  Ellen Ferguson

A rough angel on our mantel

Left a small sign in her dust:

“I Can’t I’m Grading Papers Until I Die,”

the sign said.

Shelley noted as we know,

sticking knowledge on our minds,

that the knowledge that we know is

“Like a lichen on a rock.”[1]

This, our embedded epigraph

Our framed epigraph, stuck epigraph

Stuck like a lichen, like a lichen on a rock.

[1] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, but also, consider whether it was worth it, or as T.S. Eliot asked in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,

“And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me”

[1] Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, but also, consider whether it was worth it, or as T.S. Eliot asked in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, “And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me”

Alchemy /  Brett Gastineau

You wander ways I do not understand,

practicing a voodoo that turns the sky to bone.

Is it a fearsome grace, born of stone,

you bring from far that draws you?

Do you argue with spirits

to release their memory-sickness

and the butterflies of their broken dreams?

They are punished by an absence

that fills every vein

binding phantom sinew

to forgotten muscle.

They are marred by the mechanics of pain

that disturb their rest inside their grave.

Yet as you face them, their exquisite hurt pours into your hands.

Missives  /  Joy Johnson

Picture to be wronged by one not be 'scaped;
A daughter and her mother mayhap or
Mother Earth and the species will doom. 

When every letter is a lie or tries
To explain the one before that impugned,
What way t'wards the truth can be constitute?

Look a daisy in its eye to espy
(No daisy can you find, you say?  Us scourge)
The potency of this world to bring forth. 

Believe me, now's the time for amends and
Time there is though more and more thinly 
Each and every.  Write to future:  "existence".

ACCLIMATING TO THE DARK /  H.T. Reynolds

it’s like remembering

the terrain of your body

how far my arm could bend

before becoming yours

how you’d lean into it—

like you’ve always been there

capable of seeing everything

The Immortal Nine To Five /  Gabriel Phillips

Gabriel let a puppet sink into the Coosa.

Gabriel painted the bridge purple.

He can hold bags up to light

to tell if insides are lonely.

Gabriel predates the dinosaurs

by walking with fish.

He doesn’t believe in water

and swims when he has to.

Gabriel wakes up on time.

Gabriel borrows the soul of Pluto.

He doesn’t know what people wait for

then leaves the metal chair outside.

Gabriel doesn’t stop sitting,

building his home inside the moth.

He is the purple grape

and the clubbed foot that smashes it.

Gabriel was a golden heifer.

Gabriel was the breath of many people.

He cannot find socks

then the left shoe is missing.

Gabriel is quiet

unless he is waiting.

He holds himself up to the light…

Gabriel moves his mouth without making a sound.

drowning  / Colin Sturdevant

our own history whitened out & washed

all I know is a quarter or third of truth

our ancestors didn’t come by wooden boat

but left ports with names like Messina

holding our breath for what seemed like two weeks

cradled in steel floating lungs, pow’r’d by breath

all to make to Ellis submerged below deck

how to finally come up and inhale promise

and be seen out of that black, roasted as

immigrant. as being. as bean. as hardened

as black water, what keeps one going

in the night, in the day, like a lark

to crown a new land, sing, in words

unheard to English speaking ears

October - Poem 19

Afterbirth / Katerina Canyon

What had been our marrow
burned between our bones—
a shared, broken promise
pressed against my neck.

Carry my daughter.

Finally,
I pass,
lonely,
prepared with lead
gnawing into myself.

I talk teeth into the uvula.

The tongue expels itself
in soil.

My bloodlines choose suicide and unravel
as waters hunt
voices on my forehead.

When no more kisses come,
I burn myself lightly—
carrying my head
between my knees
staring and praying
against my eyes.

Wood fires
I start
tomorrow while
kissing charcoal.

My chapped lips gnaw
through neurons.

Always handstanding
and never building.

I honeyed my lips
while waiting for cornbread
that never comes.

I strike the stomach
and never did I die
believing
I would return whole
to my home
again.

Upon Viewing Ray Kobald's sculpture “From the Waters Comes My Bounty”, Kiwanis Park, Oregon, IL  /  Sam Calhoun

I am every fish 
thinking home 
is somewhere above
this low head dam, the illusion believing 
we can swim as
alive as the river,
my arms touching cold water
in the islands of chaff 
left from summer, 
knowing spring is far
down river, long since past, 
the mountains carrying
the future like a mask,
all day I carry the world
like a weighted net, 
a web of stories
I can't bear to cast
from my chest,
meanwhile, the world
goes on.

You can't ever get back upstream.  

The Things I’ve Swallowed / The Things I’ve Spit Up   /  at/om

cw: emetophobia

There are tough 
pills to swallow 
and then there is 
the daily cocktail 
prescribed to me 
to keep myself sane, 
and my blood sugar 
an acceptable number. 

I throw up more times 
than most people would 
think that I do. Less than 
I used to no longer once 
a day but I still can’t name 
the last week I made it 
through without vomiting.

I try to keep my meds down, 
try to avoid the clutches of 
nausea when it strangles 
its way upwards through 
my pill rattled insides. 
I promise I don’t make myself 
sick anymore, I just don’t know
how to be healthy. 

Maybe the pills would help more,
if I could hold them down. 

Wagon Wheel  / Ellen Ferguson

old crow medicine show covered
                                     Dylan’s song
        about a mom,                         a rocking mom
    a rocking mom                                who calls the shots
   like a train,                                     like the rain. Moms like
  this song --
 many moms --              moms               reading Dostoevsky’s
“White Nights” --                                                         accept their fate
rocking wind, rocking rain,                   rocking trains, knowing
   what Fyodor said:                    you get one moment, maybe
       on a sidewalk,                                           and it better be

                                                 
                                               enough.

A Story of Thorns /  Brett Gastineau

Around the tower, time stumbles through the dusk
watching the castle lost in a century of sleep.
Over the wall, a willow weeps silver,
begins its slow and tangled sway.
Beyond the briers, a lame prince hobbles
following a lone and bloodied swallow.
His torch invokes the sacred flame
of the breath the maiden gave
before her world was turned to green,
before her ghost inhabited this world,
before she was born into dying.
Surrounded by thorns of iron, the spindle sleeps.

Pædophobia  /  Joy Johnson

Yesterday my mother came to me from
the curling fog of years gone in what
my brother said about abuse my father
lived at the hand of his step-dad.  Oh but
had Mom evinced a caring about me 
like the sweet sympathy she poured out for
Dad when she shared that tale refrained
again yesterday by a brother who 
couldn't have known that sensitive lever
he'd happened upon-- poor man.  Better to
keep away entirely from the topic
of children when nearby me:  mother goose,
all that, and I'm sweating, clammy, less logic/
more panic.  Abuse:  phobia's dowry. 

It should be To Life They Were Dedicated   /  H.T. Reynolds

after Neon Gravestones by Twenty-One Pilots

I.        Amelia Boynton Robinson
August 18, 1911 –
August 26, 2015

Never hopeless—always marching across

the bridge between the promised land

and a redacted history, casting her voice

at the ballot box below the crow-cocked

eyes below Billy clubs that Bloody Sunday

on Edmund Pettus Bridge—

then again—

marching

and again—

marching,

an ocean of twenty-five thousand

souls beaming through the darkness—

            and then again—

fifty years later with the first

Black president—never hopeless

II.                 Irena Sendler

                        February 15, 1910-

                        May 12, 2008

Jolanta, mother of Neverland,

bless these stray children drowning,

bury their names at birth

in apple tree jars,

put them to sleep in body bags,

tuck them into suitcases,

bury them beneath stretchers,

pull them through sewer pipes,

deliver them by ambulance,

a trolley,

through the courthouse—

whatever it takes to let them fly

on the other side of a Warsaw fence,

give them their happy thoughts,

be their star upon their arm,

a faith they’ll wear straight till mourning

when lightning knocks on your door

takes you to Pawiak for a talk

but their names remain buried

beneath your clasped tongue

despite breaking your legs,

their awaiting firing squad,

you kept silent, wished

upon a Zegota star…

then Kansas kids

excavated your own secret

jar and found you

in Neverland

III.              Dr. Wangari Maathai

                        April 1, 1940-

                        September 25, 2011

We all breathe easier now, professor,

with your green belt, your first degree

preventing land from receding

into government pockets,

planting tree shade and fruit

for weary mothers from millions of roots,

while private hands held the seed bag…

you believed in the people—

your class of foresters without diplomas

and we all breathe easier now, professor.

Eventually Unity /  Gabriel Phillips

Someone begins to cut the wedding cake.

For the bride and groom haven’t been born.

Imagine the fuel needed to propel a marriage.

Some marriages can spit over the equator

since they are short and caked in rust.

Gowns are not dangerous.

Names of people are hard to find

there must be two which isn’t a number,

not a real number and two of them

haven’t been born yet.

Life makes life rich. And empty.

Glasses that emit small bell sounds

when the vibrations of close running trains

rattle out single strings of light.

Make a pathway of

chandeliers and candelabras

so the rings can roll side by side.

Into the pillow of the bridesmaid.

Popa arrived 10 minutes early

with white line fever.

He’d never seen a marriage before,

then summoned a train to nap in.

While someone began cutting the wedding cake

now that the bride and groom were going to be late.

October - Poem 18

A Rose Has Thorns / Katerina Canyon

I have a garland

whose leaves are tinged

at every turn but agitation.

My marigolds have

bright orange petals,

but cannot sit still

beside eucalyptus,

and I am exhausted

beyond skill.

At Baileys Harbor Boreal Forest State Natural Area  /  Sam Calhoun

On the shore mist

hung from grass

like bellflowers, 

waves ringing 

a rhythm from ships

too far to see,

my footprints

echoing highways

of sanderling prints,

our shadows 

like sundials

darting home.

I want to wait,

let the water 

catch my feet

like driftwood, 

yellow here

in the sun,

let me slip

into the nothingness

that comes with the cold,

where the tamarack

turn to torches,

and fail, 

I too, will fail.  

I too will light the world,

and move on.  

Mortality   /  at/om

One morning I read an obituary for another friend I so dearly loved, 

I remember a woman a few years older than me said 

“This means you’re growing up.” 

Growing up queer and mentally ill means your friend group 

comes with a high mortality rate. 

What a wonder it is to see someone you love grow old, 

how beautiful it must be to see somebody die old and healthy and happy. 

I don’t know if I’ve seen it yet, but I imagine it’s pretty nice. 

Wickelfisch /  Ellen Ferguson

“Where Power in likeness of the Arve comes down”

• Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni

The Mississippi River rolled through town

When you came home for lunch

From the funeral parlor to call an old flame. Every day.

Meanwhile, your roommate ruminated whether Shelley,

In “Mont Blanc,” described the Arve, a tributary of the Rhône, or

Power that resembled the Arve, perhaps Holy.

Years later you and your roommate would have a child.

Those two would float down the Rhône, wearing Wickelfisch.

At no time during the preceding would anyone call your roommate

The Sweetest of Peas, prompting her to ask, “Am I the sweetest of

all possible peas, or just the sweetest of peas yet encountered?”

That had already happened.

What remains after these occurrences:

untethered waves of thought, no

Wickelfisch anywhere, just the rivers bearing down.

Molecule of our last goodbye /  Brett Gastineau

Who can tell me the river’s original name

before stone captured the sound of snow

before our sorrow became a figure of speech?

The body is capable of storing memories—

a few bright naming words—much like

the sudden spark where water strikes the root.

Between your breathing and the silence

of the bank, a single green syllable suspends:

not a word, but the motion of light

undoing its own shadow.

We live forever in our wounds.

Did we ever think of the consciousness of trees or

their reflection in the river? Did we ever pause

to wonder if there was an etiquette to their dying?

The river flows inside the memory of the dry bed,

telling us that time is not a line—

time is the shape of glass.

Silence becomes our most holy text

Light becomes a word for knowledge.

An instant folds upon itself,

endless, like water entering water.

S.W.A.K.  /  Joy Johnson

At infinity is the aquamarine

line:  across it beings like mermaids stretch

to be between worlds. Frogs legs subtend.

That between-beings die means all’s not fine.

Utter darkness: deep sea vents are the place

the life-giving water and fire conspire.

Everywhere else glows the radioactive

radiance of a half life: man has made

arrowheads and he naps skins, partakes of the

wholeness of a fire after a flood in

flour. 

          Between-beings exist to evanesce.

Wake to freedom, comrades -- flags are not this! --

the shared fate of living marginally.

Don’t fiddle. Get ready, 

                                        get ready to die.

Count in magic sevens, still written on 

every face is fate. The goddess inhabits

the underworld from whence she seals deals with

a kiss ... employs an intelligence sublime.

Make no mistake: a drowned stone is fine.

A WINTER SOWING /  H.T. Reynolds

nothing blooms below a February snow

but the primrose, the snowdrops

around the hellebores moodily sulking

like witch hazel ensnaring each crocus cup

with their slender arms like ten monsters

erupting from the sun—from a little boy’s

closet, the handle chewed off by a crocodile,

its leathered hands like dragonhide, its breath

scorching like geyser steam,                 go to sleep,

and he did

but nothing blooms below a February snow

this mound of dirt freshly returned

with a sleeping body,                a box,

a chiseled rock with his name

carved out like his cheekbones

his heart,

pieces of lung

still pretending

they enjoyed working

he’s careful now

with his ghost steps

avoiding the puddled rain

held atop his grave like soup,

an offering—a holy water font

abandoned—dirtied, forgotten

like his shoes,              

nobody will see

beneath the casket lid

—closed

in the dark

his own words a reverberation

in the space between blades of grass

that gap like a mattress—

they are a waste

of money and there’s no reason to,

so I’ll just buy my own flowers—

He perches like a raven

beneath the cemetery yew

watches each season pass

‘til he’s purchased his own flowers—

Sun and the Labor Underneath /  Gabriel Phillips

We just danced on the top of my hair

after inventing the speed wagon.

Keeping our legs restless

now has double advantage.

1. Horse. 2. A place for horse to rest.

Looks like oak isn’t the death of us

after all. It’s cedar.

When I laid my hand on a blank

sheet of paper, someone started over

with a brush this time. No one

in particular was around us.

Not even Pledger. Always leaning

against the blue barn to pick

the paint off of my shoulders.

My hat had a hole in it

where the birds would lay their eggs,

nest of my hair. They know this

because I was once a tree.

Now I am a speed wagon.  

October - Poem 17

Go / Katerina Canyon

We sloughed bespoken

after the tree drifted.

Yellow leaves along the river

are run down.

The city settles atop your tongue

once oil has taught

the eel out of its charm

aside the morning clouds—

neglected against time.

After the bed licks your toes—

fold.

Without their delayed covering,

I see

the tree complete

its denial no more.

I wake now with the silt-dragged river

bedraggled, the wind-drifted

trees

released

and the

hot city

never

settled

how the

dwellers

praised God

when

your oil-layer

was ablaze—

cool

as the

tail of

your chin

and as

biting.

Pause  /  Sam Calhoun

Now I get the quiet after, 
storm moving off and I breathe, 
the trees shake in the downdrafts 
but they breathe, even broken
they breathe—

It is not the cadence of crickets, 
or the sharp trill of water 
from the loose gutter, singing
against the sidewalk,

or the long distance rattle 
of pileated woodpecker
who’s home building 
has no off days, 

even though it is summer 
the cold will come soon enough, 
sending us mail still postmarked 
little winters—

it is the break of rhythm, 
the liminal space between
small talk ends and real
conversation begins, 

like the cabbage white 
butterflies visiting cuttings 
in the old bucket, wanting
water, both wanting blooms 

I’ve trimmed, spent ends
cast to the ditch past thistle, 
seed head sending spells 
to the sky—

For the Preacher at my Best Friend's Funeral   /  at/om

Sometimes I try to tell the story of how

at my best friends funeral the
value, budget, Craigslist preacher
eulogized her to be an angel.

And I knew right then this man did not know her.

Literally in his eulogy he quoted. 

How to Save a Life by the Fray 

MULTIPLE lines of How to Save a Life

I can not stress enough… the entire chorus

As if we were in a Grey’s Anatomy episode.

Fighting back laughter was so hard at that moment.
even harder was knowing that she was not there to 

laugh with me and she never would be again. 

Where did I go wrong?

Depression Sambas in at the Fortieth Reunion  /  Ellen Ferguson

Depression said I’ll have one of those little steak things. Everyone wants to play Reunion Trivia Jeopardy except for Depression who’s like forget those mini grilled cheese and tomato soups forget the sliders I want something like chocolate sushi like a raw chocolate mouthfeel thing and everyone gives Depression some space and the night continues.

not really a dance

more like dancing without feet

like chocolate shoes

Untitled (variant) /  Brett Gastineau

Death lurks among the fireflies

a shadow with smiling contours.

Her mouth filled with children’s teeth

and pieces of a tomb.

In her eyes a winter’s sunlight through empty branches.

I make to speak but my voice

has become a wandering part of my body.

Listen! (A shout of pain, a laugh,

the panting of a fire, a sigh tangled in roots)

There are those who touch a body and leave it graceful

but she does not practice this wonder.

She has come for my heart.

She sings and her song sprouts from my spine.

Her crazy smile blossoms as my life breaks loose.

My discomfort is her peace…

But then, no, I understand that we should

all be so lucky to taste this wicked love…

No, these are the wrong words but…

I am free of a body

that had covered my life in its strangeness

uzzlement  /  Joy Johnson

Puzzle meant just for me

Scrabbling brainteaser of

Mystery spells and

Spelling out what

Quandary we find

Us two in, across rooms

Predictable predicament

Fomenting pickles to

Snag and more,

Keep us apart.

Gordian knot!

Stickiest wickets of

Existence.

Yearning glitchiness,

Heart’s itchiness,

Crux of my delighting,

I poser.  You alighting?

Catch me up.

WE SHOULD LEARN /  H.T. Reynolds

how to play poker

from an esthetician

for nobody bluffs better

except for maybe a priest

telling us he’s holy

and we believe him

we should learn about life

from a mortician

trained to bring color back

to dead things

convincing us they’re just

sleeping and we believe them

we should learn about love

from a magician

sawing us in two behind a curtain

manifesting roses from cards

showing us they’ll always return

and we believe them

Humpty's Entropy /  Gabriel Phillips

Had I a moment more of courage

Had I kept the king’s sin tart and mute

Had I shed silence and given her my name

Had I known how heavy the tongue could be

Then the knights showed me entropy

Then the wall was one and I of many

Then she finally saw me, as disorder

Then the silence became a daylight vampire

Now she hears my name in crowds of laughter

Now the sin will purchase their favor

Now the stench of breakfast falls on the square

Now the peasants wake with fork and appetite

October - Poem 16

Fountainhead / Katerina Canyon

Hearts crack.
The admirer and her
soap operas orchestrate
in the center of judgment.

Cursing.
I neglect the animals of summer—
leave off their gospel
to bleach the sky milky
with death
while outside the intimate
centers of copulation.

The animals of sunset
are sewing their own
fountainheads out of
sheets of love.

When I am surrounded
away from different
occasions
without the white sky,
water,
I break
my tomorrows,
and impotence is
silent
hate at work.

Satiated does not mean always
or crowded.

When I am famous,

I will hope again.

An Open Road (The Road Home)  /  Sam Calhoun

It's the tipped cooler, 

highway rushing 

like cool water 

away from this, 

nothing left but bones 

of the trip rattling 

like the log jammed 

dam behind us,  

the sun rising 

like a coda,

every tree whispering

echoing highways

every motor running

like wind is meaningless,

every wave to shore

passing into dark earth, 

the white knuckled drive,

my fingers gibbous moons

waiting like worry stones 

for the night.  

Two Skulled Elk  /  at/om

I am a bull elk, antlers intwined 

rivals skull hanging in front of my 

sobering eyes, reminder 

this world is cruel and so

I must be as well. 

Standing tall, King 

of the forest

I never 

was a

fawn.

Minimundus  /  Ellen Ferguson

Build me a minimundus

Klagenfurt my head

Lake Wörtherseeing among us

Wake to my unknown bread

Out back by Mahler’s cabin

In the dense Austrian wood

Solve me like a problem

Lift me like a mood

Klagenfurt’s a bestial town

Terrifying holidays  

Krampuslauf is all around

winding, wild ways –

But the minimundus in my mind

Is stranger than the Klagenkind.

Untitled /  Brett Gastineau

The sky is what the dead woman expelled from her mouth,

a twilight that never turns to night.

My mind does monster me.

And she is the beast ever stalking me in this dream.

Her eyes opaline—a milk glass.

A faint dusting of blue around her mouth.

Her skin a brutal brilliance against the vague landscape.

And she is getting closer.

The bees in my stomach have stilled.

And I am sluggish, slowing, stopped.

The struggle has slipped away from me.

Here I am, the dead woman clinging to me.

Her weary lips kiss me obstinately.

Her hands slice me; she is frantic in this act.

My flesh opens to her easily as my dying begins.

My wounds leak in silence.

My blood is silent and dripping from my finger too.

I am dislodged from myself, looking back at myself.

My gaze, like hers, is already lost.

Pup’s First Birthday  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

My first dog ever. 

Name: Pupcake. Alternate names: Puppaccino, the Pupster, Canuzzo, & Smalls. 

8 pounds of chaotic unresolved anger. Fangs and fur. 

On his first birthday, we ran down to Tractor Supply and got him a plate of turducken. He placed his front paws on either side of the dog dish and menaced us with growls till every bite and every drop of gravy was safely saved aside in his tummy. Even when our clothes rustled gently as we sang happy birthday like silly humans, he startled and growled. And he kept it up for 15 more years. 

Died last October, three months after turning 16.

Poly Double Burn /  H.T. Reynolds

shout out to Ellen Ferguson for introducing me to her
abecedarian double burning haibun—I just had to try it!

continued

Addict—you birthed the sinner from sand, embalmed him thoroughly until
Beads of acrid sweat coagulated along his skin, pulsed from his veins with every
Caliber of self fading alongside dream, alongside singeing bone dissolving to ash
Dispersed like a breath, that crystal in his back pocket, the baby in the basin
Ether, dissolving into stars—that luster corroding that cinnamon morning
Fragmented into shards—a gasping raven—a decomposing body like
Gasoline vapor hollowing him out—deflagrated by the palm of a white-handed
Hierarchy. But you, father, looked upon your child, devoured him like an
Inhalant, a whippet reserved for when the paint can becomes empty, the pipe
                        jagged shards of glass piled up like albums vibrating through a 
Kinetic night laced with ghosts strung up by gossamer nooses—
Lines like wisps of smoke recoiling from an open mouth, a gaping space
Malformed by a lover’s lurid palm, his loaded tongue cocked and trained
Nuclear. Father, you’re flaring at each crumbling edge, exposing your 
Organic charm tinged with your hoarded stories—myths forced upon us like 
Pills deposited down our throats while you committed to our decline
quietly stripping away the tethers we inherited. We were
Resistant to smiling, to joy found in days with an untempered sun, a
Semantic program executing decades later, at the mall, the salon, at
Therapy with your presence stitched to me like a shadow—disobedient and
                        unruly floating through Neverland waiting for morning’s
Variant, that mythical silver liner that whisks father, his bottles, his appetite away.
Word is he was found beneath his newspaper stacks, that the bottles kept his
xanthic skin, his matching liver, the rings around his eyes 
                        yearning to consume him like Charon’s obol
zipping the body bag closed, the cause of death unremarkable.

father wore many
faces, was many things, but
my father is gone

Addict—you birthed the sinner from sand, embalmed him thoroughly until
Beads of acrid sweat coagulated along his skin, pulsed from his veins with every
Caliber of self fading alongside dream, alongside singeing bone dissolving to ash
Dispersed like a breath, that crystal in his back pocket, the baby in the basin
Ether, dissolving into stars—that luster corroding that cinnamon morning
Fragmented into shards—a gasping raven—a decomposing body like
Gasoline vapor hollowing him out—deflagrated by the palm of a white-handed
Hierarchy. But you, father, looked upon your child, devoured him like an
Inhalant, a whippet reserved for when the paint can becomes empty, the pipe
                        jagged shards of glass piled up like albums vibrating through a  
Kinetic night laced with ghosts strung up by gossamer nooses—
Lines like wisps of smoke recoiling from an open mouth, a gaping space
Malformed by a lover’s lurid palm, his loaded tongue cocked and trained
Nuclear. Father, you’re flaring at each crumbling edge, exposing your  
Organic charm tinged with your hoarded stories—myths forced upon us like 
Pills deposited down our throats while you committed to our decline
quietly stripping away the tethers we inherited. We were
Resistant to smiling, to joy found in days with an untempered sun, a
Semantic program executing decades later, at the mall, the salon, at
Therapy with your presence stitched to me like a shadow—disobedient and
                        unruly floating through Neverland waiting for morning’s
Variant, that mythical silver liner that whisks father, his bottles, his appetite away.
Word is he was found beneath his newspaper stacks, that the bottles kept his
xanthic skin, his matching liver, the rings around his eyes  
                        yearning to consume him like Charon’s obol
zipping the body bag closed, the cause of death unremarkable.

Captive /  Gabriel Phillips

Cat

some source

of dribbled light

Sundrunk

to death

around bent fabric

Denim

then smiles

length of rope

Hangs

quick frost

frozen over desire

Wants

to purr

carpet of sight

Eye

where iris

stabs both nights

Mare

which manes

wheat then pain

I

am caught

red and slave

The unhoused youth I gather with beneath a steeple  / Colin Sturdevant

Tonight, I heard a young man

Sing of birds together and not 

Together, tethered by his vocals

In a Vietnamese ballad.

Tonight, I witnessed a forest

among you that felt it didn’t

Belong in the body it wore

What needles that felt foreign,

My children cast out to the road. 

How dysmorphed your journey 

to grow into a glove 

that doesn’t quite fit right.

Tonight, I remove the hummingbird 

off my neck & chain smoke brush 

to bring you luck

I hope the fumes rise as a song

To some heaven of some kind

Where your wishes will be heard 

like a foreign-to-me song

All songs sung in solemn 

are not strange bodied to any 

of us tonight. Not even the hummingbird 

I give up to loosen fortune for others 

October - Poem 15

Ides of October / Katerina Canyon

Chase the stubborn bloom

butterfly smooth-eyed bush brown or dark

grass brown. The darkness

you welcome

found

floating into your classroom

lighting innocent wings

that flutter and float

in your humid air.

Your kipas souvenir opens

in a red-hot flicker

while the imbued notes

hover and penetrate

through rigid desks without

repercussion.

You do not sing.

You do not flap your arms.

Your hands clasp

between tightened fingers.

Keeping

closed

in the season of unmooring,

I chant with the wind

breathing

razing again.

You do not explain.

You do not conceal.

After a Summer Shower /  Sam Calhoun

How quick the cardinal 
returns to song, slips 
to feeder, rain feeling
it’s way listing to earth—

Just a tuft of wind now, 
the sun as if only waking,
touching grass himself
across a lone marigold bloom—

Bees breaking loose from limp
night blooming cereus, 
petals shuffling like clothes
forgotten on lines—

Sob Story    /  at/om

(I) worked somewhere labelled “essential” 

most of my coworkers were laid off and 

were paid more to be at home with their 

loved ones than I was to keep going. 

I lived in a small home of people who were 

as nervous as I (was) and I was afraid to leave it, 

I felt guilty when I would come home, change 

clothes and disinfect the ones I had stripped off.

I would shower and go right to my (isolated) room.

They didn’t make me do this, but the unease 

of looking at other people then, when every 

step (I) took already (felt so) unwanted it was best. 

I would go for drives on Saturday mornings in the 

Honda Accord I had for years, and these were our 

best days and these were our last days and God, 

driving (alone) through the mountain region with an 

energy drink, a pack of cigarettes, and a sad playlist.

Those were the days I learned of my Mamaw’s dying

in a phone call. They were the days (I had nobody) to hold me. 

I got addicted to watching Monk, 

I think he made it all feel alright. 

(I think) if I was asked how it felt to live like that I would 

talk about how that Honda accord, all those cigarettes 

and energy drinks, all of those hours or days long tv benders

acting like (the only person) I could see myself (in). They were 

(my support system) that saw me through a time I can’t talk about. 

Nobody wants to hear about 2020 anymore, 

and I never (was) one of those anti-mask conspiracy creeps, 

and I think now I should probably be a little more 

conscious than I am. Maybe I should go back and be 

a little more like (Mr. Monk), he always made me feel right

I am still waiting for those big thanks for essential workers, 

I am still waiting to hear I did a good job.

Leslie from Michigan pulls away: a villanelle  /  Ellen Ferguson

As part of a study on impulse control here

This year the team studied children aged ten

Some boys, some girls. The findings were clear.

We learned lessons galore from Leslie; in fear

she pulled away as she started to leave, when

As part of a study on impulse control here

Beth left for Anchorage to research brown bears

After our marriages, we were tired of men.

Some boys, some girls. The findings were clear.

One was a highflier who liked to pour beer

On all of our hearts, then burn them again

As part of a study on impulse control here

Once we posed as Angels, Charlie’s. Mere

Fire escapes could not stop us again.

Some boys, some girls. The findings were clear.

Last spied playing a voice on a wire.

Lord those days. Lunch with two real friends.

As part of a study on impulse control here

Some boys, some girls. The findings were clear.

Unfolding /  Brett Gastineau

From the congregation a weepy conjuring,

words of faith practiced pretty,

prayer remnants on the wind.

The pair before them playing at bride and groom

they hoped would convert sorrow into music.

Each as pale as soap.

In their eyes a look that suggested

the other was the answer to the homesickness they suffered.

At the alter was a rusty sign with the word LOVE printed in box letters.

In the pews the mothers rest their sheltering hands on their children’s shoulders.

The old men fingered the tarot cards in their suit pockets

and wished they could be reaped.

The groom whose heart somersaulted was overwhelmed by his bride’s

gleaming and wanted nothing more than to crawl beneath her veil.

He looked up into the sky and recognized that the time for rain had arrived.

Afterward there would be the long walk absent of prying eyes to watch them.

The evenings would spread like shadows and they would be left

to share in the common wreckage of it all.

Belle Dame  /  Joy Johnson

"I met a lady in the meads,

     Full beautiful -- a faery's child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

     And her eyes were wild." -- Keats

The lady whom I did espy

     With haunches of a watery hue

Was none other than our Mother:

     Earth, readily in view. 

She is festooned in garlands green,

     Bracelets of all the colours,

And looks on all with love each day:

     To wit, air smothered!

Her language is not strange to me 

     Or to a one who'd listen close,

And between the rustlings of spring leaves 

     I hear her gasp. 

This vernal day the buds burst forth 

     Again so as to say, "… go on …"

But still we loiter deaf and blind, 

     Not honoring our home. 

We adored her for a while, so fresh;

     Now we do presume o'ermuch:

She falters in the waves that crest

     Yet bears no grudge. 

We meet her tears in rising seas --

     Her teardrops are glaciers that calve. 

She moans as one by one they fall:

     Love's cry and badge. 

By her salty kisses, numbered

     Many more than four, we've slept. 

End of plenty, now our perfidy--

     Regard her new aspect. 

So, says the world, that what begins 

     Will also find its end.  This dream

We'll waken from and be surround

     By our legacy. 

In between start and end, splendor 

     Invaluable and … cargo 

Of awful pain -- she holds it all. 

     (Much: man-made sorrow)

Might Art add beauty to the ache 

     We must endure whilst laboring 

To mother souls to see anew 

     And wakening. 

Ofttimes find me alone and pale 

     And turning pages of Palgrave 

Wondering for ways to save us 

     From a climax grave. 

Long indeed she's shown us mercy 

     Though it is said she’s us enthralled. 

But come what will, no matter scores, 

     Death-pale we'll all. 

mylar balloon /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

Wonder what the celebration was?

Melancholy mylar balloon twists crushed and creased over a wire above my head. It moves only when two birds flap and jiggle the wire. 

Fewer people use helium balloons. They’re dinosaurs like glitter. Many people celebrate with soap bubbles instead.

Eeyore would love this one. No more rice thrown at brides because birds can eat the rice and die. Confetti is better for brides anyway. Hard to imagine when the weather churn forces that mylar balloon to the ground that its microfibers might find their way into the water we drink.

POLY—  /  H.T. Reynolds

shout out to Ellen Ferguson for introducing me to her

abecedarian double burning haibun—I just had to try it!

            I. AKA Duality

father wore many

faces, was many things, but

my father is gone

Addict—you birthed the sinner from sand, embalmed him thoroughly until

Beads of acrid sweat coagulated along his skin, pulsed from his veins with every

Caliber of self fading alongside dream, alongside singeing bone dissolving to ash

Dispersed like a breath, that crystal in his back pocket, the baby in the basin

Ether, dissolving into stars—that luster corroding that cinnamon morning

Fragmented into shards—a gasping raven—a decomposing body like

Gasoline vapor hollowing him out—deflagrated by the palm of a white-handed

Hierarchy. But you, father, looked upon your child, devoured him like an

Inhalant, a whippet reserved for when the paint can becomes empty, the pipe

                        jagged shards of glass piled up like albums vibrating through a 

Kinetic night laced with ghosts strung up by gossamer nooses—

Lines like wisps of smoke recoiling from an open mouth, a gaping space

Malformed by a lover’s lurid palm, his loaded tongue cocked and trained

Nuclear. Father, you’re flaring at each crumbling edge, exposing your  

Organic charm tinged with your hoarded stories—myths forced upon us like 

Pills deposited down our throats while you committed to our decline

quietly stripping away the tethers we inherited. We were

Resistant to smiling, to joy found in days with an untempered sun, a

Semantic program executing decades later, at the mall, the salon, at

Therapy with your presence stitched to me like a shadow—disobedient and

                        unruly floating through Neverland waiting for morning’s

Variant, that mythical silver liner that whisks father, his bottles, his appetite away.

Word is he was found beneath his newspaper stacks, that the bottles kept his

xanthic skin, his matching liver, the rings around his eyes  

                        yearning to consume him like Charon’s obol

zipping the body bag closed, the cause of death unremarkable.

(continued…)

Cologne /  Gabriel Phillips

Tragedy, tragedy

what colors are the colors of tragedy?

I paint this woman over sleep,

dreams are terrible painters.

I paint her with water from boiling puddles.

I wait.

I poke her dimples with fresh torn thorns.

I wait.

I smear her flesh with a parliament of owls.

I wait.

My wife, my wife

my fallen angel of thorns.

How she hated the woman

how she left the attic window open

how she tested her broken wings

how she doesn't blink at the gnashing stars...

I wail for the woman to take me.

She moves.

I lumber towards her hither.

She moves.

I let her pull me closer.

She moved.

She doesn’t smile

because he didn’t paint one.

She hushed his eyes

with a couple of faces.

Then left him,

beside her silhouette.

“Tragedy, tragedy

what colors should I smear on his tragedy?”

Omens  / Colin Sturdevant

were something I believed in

before I became godless

if you were to prick my eye

as I sleep, blackbirds would swell

& breach as never before heard music

October - Poem 14

Amoria / Katerina Canyon

I was Agapia.
I resided next to a meadow
of sunflowers and honey locusts.
Their seeds held the definition
of passion.

Then Miseon came and cinched me
within bushels of snow
while carrying a hydra on his back.

I was tossed into the tar pit of
a kraken, unable to swim
to a sandbar
for sustenance—

punching the kraken away,
and nowhere I looked
could I find a callow hand
cupping the sunset.

The kraken swam the Salton Sea
to sit on its shore for comfort.

The ice trumpet called the
kraken to the Valley of the Dead,
and it carried me, comatose,
inside an oyster’s shell
while tonguing forest embers
in search of the definitions for affection.

Garden Notes /  Sam Calhoun

It’s late, every bloom 
on the loofah closed, 
everything that brings
light has left, save 
the viburnum, burning
like streetlamps all night, 

soft scent of smoke distant, 
the kind of scent you know 
the fire has since stopped, 
the kind of distance
it’s too late to check, start
the car, find the old shoes, 

search in the dark for fog, 
no, smoke, edge of every ditch, 
like this lone bee searches 
the small reservoirs above
the hummingbird feeders 

for water, takes its fill, 
flies away. 

Claw Machine Golden Shovel Haibun    /  at/om

“but my heart is like a claw machine, 

its only function is to reach 

it can’t hold on to anything.”

-Claw Machine, by Sloppy Jane

i need to stop writing about love as violence but 

there is a cannibal inside of my

torn apart heart 

and she is 

breaking her way out of my ribcage like 

a crouched over vulture like a 

poet with no hands only claw(s) 

that is to say she is a violence machine 

that is to say cruelty is her second nature its 

her only 

found function 

the cannibal in my heart defrosts in winter she is 

reborn by the cruelty of the natural system to 

leave behind the weak to turn from the reach 

and she knows better than I we can’t beat it 

no matter how I argue and say I am not her I can’t 

break apart her claws the hold 

on 

my neck as she screams out to

tell me she will do anything

(and she will survive 

the cruelty that kills me

she knows the winter)

unhired fired quit/a pantoum  /  Ellen Ferguson

  the peace corps said no if she’d pray in a crisis: unhired
  she dusted too slowly at the architectural gem: fired
  bookstore violating the equal pay act? quit
  we show up at work every day

  she dusted too slowly at the architectural gem: fired
  Nate sewed shoulders at the Bensonhurst ILGWU
  we show up at work every day
  the other Nate ran The Belle Shop

  Nate sewed shoulders at the Bensonhurst ILGWU
  Alice taught the mandolin
  the other Nate ran The Belle Shop
  Anna drew comics with her cerebral palsy friends

  Alice taught the mandolin
  bookstore violating the equal pay act? quit
  Anna drew comics with her cerebral palsy friends
  the peace corps said no if she’d pray in a crisis: unhired

They came to the trees /  Brett Gastineau

In the hustle they came to believe

they were living another pair’s life.

Anger dwelt in their pockets,

replacing the keys they had kept to their past lives.

They gathered in their separate corners of solitude.

They hungered and called out—“You fill me with desire.

I am afraid of you…

Hold me.”

They had tried the nighttime sky as a balm.

But moonlight broke their hearts.

The stars found their wishes incomplete.

And so they came to the trees,

those doors to a mystery religion.

They lay beneath them taking comfort

in the leaves’ quake above.

See how they thrill and shudder

one and then the other played

by the beautiful breath on their skin.

The two in each other’s arms look up

the sky a luminous study in blue;

the trees full of a golden wind.

When they closed their eyes

there was the same bright hue,

speckled by falling dark.

A Dialogue between the Typewriter and the Joy  /  Joy Johnson

(after Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body”)

TYPEWRITER

The news ne’er rumour’d I was missing,

Though clearly I had gone skipping

’Til now, when found me shackl’d here:

In keyboard is where my feet are,

Sometime in notebooks too I’m locked:

Dismay’d, uncommitted, shipwreck’d;

I wait, I wait, to integrate

When hand driven through trauma’s gate

Meets my face, which is never seen;

I long to reconcile again.

JOY

Years in misery I survived,

Nothing holding me upright save

Mores.  The news ne’er acknowledg’d

How my soul from me abolish’d

Was.  Driven through trauma’s gate,

I drank wine until I was late,

Eventually I happened on

The key to this orangutang’s

Evolver:  words locked in notebooks,

missives breezing by, pussyfoot.

TYPEWRITER

She is there, where her pen scribbles

Down my chin; I can’t realise

Why I want her pain, why I’m drawn

To complete this connection, damn.

Our memory, a blank ’til now,

So why rush to (re?)join what’s maw.

Our hungers, falling, mirror each;

How can both be the lower piece?

Astounding to find new fetters,

With dread hist’ry, makes being better.

JOY

Now a fourteen to rejoice in

The parts that see each else again.

I find myself able to feel

The sense of the gravity pull

Which made falling into our well

Cert sure pleasure of flowerbed

In full bloom and abuzz with what’s

Meant to come together to test

How is it the Joy and hopeless

Yearning profound can coalesce

To coherence of existence,

To meaning with some persistence;

Or Joy is just a girl who dreams

Poetry is love she machines.

last day of the farm market  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

greens

turnip tops, beetroot tops, rocket

pesto

sauce tomatoes

turnips, kohlrabi

squash

cabbage

pickles, jam &

chutney

love the last farm market day

preserve what lasts all winter

gives me more to hope for in spring

TWO SONS  /  H.T. Reynolds

after Warrior (2011)

Timothy never wore a hat

like Paddy but shared

in the same ideology—

that a whisky-kissed

mind made for better

main events—two sons—

one underweight champion

in the minor division

we were two and five,

what were we fighting for

there was no purse

no sponsorship or home

to keep—only blood

running between us

dripping down

our quivering chins

hidden in the red

of our boxing gloves

I was told I was

like Tommy—unhinged

and rabid, a short-fused

firecracker with something

to prove, an attitude

but they didn’t see

my training—how I wanted

a father who didn’t drink,

who didn’t regret me—

who stayed

or a brother who didn’t

look at me

like I would devour him

even as I’d bare my teeth—

swing,

and bite down

Bed For the Nap of Shadows /  Gabriel Phillips

I’ve bargained my window

for a better view

of a short man eating

the shadow of the long man.

Nobody is nobody

and nobody keeps it that way.

Just sobbing once often. Fills

open spaces, therefore empty

spaces can appear. Green hats.

At the end of my bed

at the end of the better

window. Peter Pan

was a sleepless short shadow.

Nobody believed him. He lost

himself over the shade.

Crying, until he filled

the space of the empty room.

I am not an elegant color,

I have a gorgeous view.

lilac  / Colin Sturdevant

here, with the lashes of a whisper

i peel its innards until a fragrance bursts

vessels of liac petals

here, i imbibe motherliness

to stir you from my stomach

& hurl you out like a bad fever

for good

October - Poem 13

Speaking of Love / Katerina Canyon

I speak to my heart

as a policeman to a criminal.

It is not that I am

wrong or immoral.

I am just undeserving

and unexempt.

The muddy meaning of love upon the flesh—

outside the closed fist—

slits my throat.

I detest my heart—

its vulnerability—

the way it needs to be

protected behind a cage.

It is nothing but tissue

and blood, but it feeds

my brain, my liver, and my kidneys.

If I sit still, I can hear it call to me—

an almost steady rhythm,

slightly offbeat.

Must I always bend to your whims?

My mind burns a different candle.

The smell is sweet.

My heart is a stranger without logic.

It wants the fruit

when the meat is sweeter.

Terce /  Sam Calhoun

What can I offer that hasn’t already

been offered these twenty five years,

each one passing like an hour, 

as if today could be a new day, 

blue sky blue as the sky then, 

tall gray towers moving north, 

summer rain coming to break 

this long drought, coming to embrace 

the dust like old friends huddled in the dark.

Every breath drawn now is thunder,

every voice lifts like lightning.

Turn up the tv up until it rumbles. 

I can’t bear to count raindrops

hitting our red tin roof.

I’ll Believe In Anything     /  at/om

Little boy falling asleep in your papaw’s lap, though he will only ever know you as a granddaughter 

You deserve sunshine. 

Little boy sat between your mother’s legs while she brushed your hair and twists it into braids, like the tomboy girl on tv you so admire but still don’t want to look like

You deserve sunshine. 

Little boy who could never wear your catholic school shirts and jumpers quite right 

You deserve sunshine. 

Boy who played a prince rescuing a princess in the first grade, caught kissing a girl by his mother and though yes, you were too young they called only the fact you were both girls wrong. 

You deserve sunshine. 

Kiddo who declared you felt free the first time you had your hair cut 

You deserve sunshine. 

Learning to hide your hair in a hat and always playing the son in games of house and loving the way the word he left your friends mouths 

You deserve sunshine. 

Boy who heard the meaning of the word gay and thought it was incredible that love could be so strong people would still want it when others try to take it away 

You deserve sunshine. 

Boy who asked his father why it was that if god loved everybody why did the religion you were raised in have a problem with gay people and then cried when he barked out his answer 

You deserve sunshine. 

Boy who looked up every excuse for his friends to call him a man, boy who would laugh at jokes about his body not being his body 

You deserve sunshine. 

One of the first of your group of friends to come out, even when they laughed, even when nobody believed you. 

You deserve sunshine. 

Boy who flinched when they hurled a word at him he didn’t understand but grew to wear it like armor 

You deserve sunshine. 

Boy who would have rather died than be a girl. Would have rather died than keep up the lie. Would have rather died than explain it again to anyone else. 

You deserve sunshine. 

Young Man who’s had a hundred names before he found the one that fits 

You deserve sunshine. 

You who cried when your friend wrote your chosen name besides her and declared you her “bestie.” 

You deserve sunshine. 

Young man who strangled himself when he read the cruel words his father wrote on Twitter you deserve sunshine. 

Young man reading a coming out poem on an open mic and begging the audience not to react 

you deserve sunshine. 

Young man sharing his voice on mic after mic, saying time after time that you know who you are 

You deserve sunshine. 

Young man, with scars on your skin, deep in your head, and in your heart, you with all the weight of the sorrow and the joy, you who loves your community more than you’ve ever loved another person, more than you have ever loved yourself. 

It’s okay to step into the light. 

You deserve sunshine. 

Tuesday is the New Thursday  /  Ellen Ferguson

continued

A

Book, noticed on the table at Rizzoli; 
Caj brown sweater confetti flecked;
Dashing approach to pastrami;
Eye for photography;
Fire of your mind;
Generous laugh;
High appreciation for Snoopy;
Intuitive reading;
Joy in Manhattan;
Knowledge of presidential libraries;
Lost memories of Kansas;
Making me better;
Nimbly pivoting away from Shakespeare;
Open to opera;
Punctuality &
Quick planning;
Row upon row of front row seats;
Spark of eyes, flashing;
Thoughtfulness;
Untouchable understanding;
Visiting your child with glee;
Writing with style/clarity of thought;
X-ray vision upon spying pastrami someone else might enjoy;
Your patience;
Zero tolerance for cruelty.

  Happy Birthday

So glad you were born.
October 24th, yay!
Happy day to  you!

A

Book, noticed on the table at Rizzoli; 
Caj brown sweater confetti flecked;
Dashing approach to pastrami;
Eye for photography;
Fire of your mind;
Generous laugh;
High appreciation for Snoopy;
Intuitive reading;
Joy in Manhattan;
Knowledge of presidential libraries;
Lost memories of Kansas;
Making me better;
Nimbly pivoting away from Shakespeare;
Open to opera;
Punctuality &
Quick planning;
Row upon row of front row seats;
Spark of eyes, flashing;
Thoughtfulness;
Untouchable understanding;
Visiting your child with glee;
Writing with style/clarity of thought;
X-ray vision upon spying pastrami someone else might enjoy;
Your patience;
Zero tolerance for cruelty.

Things I know /  Brett Gastineau

Love brings you the best vision of yourself which, of

course, will be led to the slaughter.

We fail to hear past our own hearts.

Homes can grow in silence.

Kindness can come too late.

Sometimes the dead can seem more alive than the living.

The haunting of our wreckage is loud with voices howling

for their lost skin. They let us see our future scheming

to get back into our lives.

You will find yourself looking for kisses pressed in books.

Clouds are never late.

Old loves smile at us from jukeboxes.

Learning the simple diction of stones is beyond us.

The body seeks what it wants, regardless if you agree to

it. In the body begins everything, embrace the testimony

of the senses.

No matter what, there are butterflies and they have no

words for grief.

You’ll find good luck sleeping in the back of old pickup

trucks.

Constellations remain steady and form images regardless if

we give them names.

Each generation will claim to live at the end of a withered

century, waiting to fall off the edge of their story.

You won’t trust the ones that say they love you. You want

to place them up high and they ask only that you hold them.

You can find proof of God in a red nightgown. Maybe it’s

the sweet secret scent of sex.

Like trees, we strain to hear what we want to remember.

You will learn forgiveness when you welcome the ripening

yellow of autumn.

We are navigating by a grace we are always relearning.

I forgot to remember  /  Joy Johnson

My attention diverted, exploited 

by the system I swim in, by needing 

(and I've worked to need less and less, I swear)

while swimming in the screaming, avoiding 

all thinking through dopamine game screening,

wading to the shore, coming up for air, 

pen in hand, I think I'm ready to word

today's relevance -- am I mainstreaming 

the art of being?  Then my own software

is glitched by sun on leaf, by laughter and …

          class war. 

Brooklyn Holiday Traditions  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

Italian-American families serve a pasta course before a full Thanksgiving dinner. Ravioli or cavatelli and tomato sauce to show who they are before who they have become at the table. 

On the way to Bay Ridge, house after house had its small front yard and brick facade covered in lights and decorations, a sight for adults and children. Block after block of animated cherubs, Santas, reindeer, snowmen, red and green lights, and illuminated snowflakes. 

At Christmas dinner, it was either twelve or seven fishes. It depends how numerous the family is and how many cooks there are. If seven, symbolic of the biblical interpretation of  God’s week creating the world and everything in it; if twelve, symbolic of Jesus’ twelve apostles as well as twelve months in a year and twelve hours in a day or night.

All the freshly-caught fruits of the sea helping promise a merry Christmas to all. 

I was amazed at my husband's Brooklyn-born and raised family who brought out the first course, pasta with red seafood sauce or plain for the kids; clams oreganata, scungilli salad, calamari salad, crab legs, lobster tails, whitefish battered and fried, broiled salmon, broiled shrimp, fried shrimp, mussels in garlic and wine, and fried calamari. Desserts (!) included pine nut marzipan cookies, biscotti and homemade Italian rainbow cookies and black coffee, which is espresso.

There was also a competitive aspect to this crazy feast, that if you “only” made seven rather than twelve, you fell short, loved God less, or were a misfit outcast atheist (oops). Grandma Nanny presided over the table since Grandpa had died years before. She examined the table and the children to make sure everything was clean. She dozed in the chair as the cleanup crew sang carols while washing up, and amazingly the whole kitchen and adjoining dining room were soon as clean as possible, as if none of the cousins had worn lobster bibs and left piles of shells in the middle of the table minutes before. Children opened toys, played together and one by one were changed into pajamas to sleep on the long ride home to Jersey.

I CAN’T WAIT TO BE FINE  /  H.T. Reynolds

Mother tells me the gravestones come from discarded wishes—from a womb not yet ready to grant them. She says with me—the moon had leaked into the room between the pieces of a broken window, wrapped around her waist, and filled the bare room with a sickly shade of Halloween—like a rancid pumpkin or an expired jar of olives. She says I was a planted fist from a seed she held against her breast as she exhaled her last cigarette—shotgunning me to a man becoming—a broken bottle—a gaping wound on the thigh—the forehead—the small of the back. Mother says we shouldn’t worry about what’s not in our control—that God will provide more than the gap in the floor ever will—more than the soup kitchen could—the angels with their donated shopping lists, their full bellies leaking words from their perfect teeth. Mother says to stay still, that it'll all be over soon—to clench my fists together—and pray.   

small boy in my mind

whispers out from the darkness

don’t be what they made

The Many Aspects of Purpose /  Gabriel Phillips

And the crow calls out with silver lungs

until its breath is the size of the penny.

Ants bite. They collapse their tiny

hearts which they bite then use

their hearts as the shadows for

fire.

That sunset would have a lovely

violent birth. A cutting of leaves

against my back. And two trees

in the forest are kissing,

as the forest and floor around them

burn.

Halley’s Chapel appears once

every 75 years with its own choir. So that

deer can taste their tongues for the first time,

the gun in the hunter’s dream is sleeping.

They were the fastest and plainest

druids.

Unzip the stone which cuts

the sunrise with itself.

Then the yellow flower

whose sole purpose is to remain

nameless, can talk the leaves into

speaking.

Slow Pour  / Colin Sturdevant

made men mute mere miles

by a glass of whiskey tonight

until the flood comes

October - Poem 12

Batik / Katerina Canyon

I sit on a stool

too short for my long legs

and made myself dizzy

from the smell of hot wax.

I use an unfamiliar tool to draw

flowers onto cotton cloth.

It is not slow or meditative.

my flowers are smeared splotches.

This is not the art that I know.

I cannot help but think

of my mother’s sighs

when I failed at calligraphy,

and watercolors and needlepoint.

So instead, I stand, and watch

the real artist fix my errors

and boil the cloth, dye it

royal blue.

I kneel to rinse and scrub it clean.

As my batik suns on a bush,

I sit and breathe in the wind.

It is time for prayer somewhere

because I hear the Muezzin.

The tall grass dances in the breeze.

When my batik dries,

I realize messy art is still art.

Sleeping in the car at Kentucky Dam Village State Resort Park, KY /  Sam Calhoun

Wet tent stuffed in the back, 

crouched in the front seat

with cracked windows, 

no difference between 

the crack of the moon

and the cracks of my eyes, 

nor streetlights and the moon,

or the neighbor's headlamp,

his dog's eyes mixing 

with forest eyes mixing

with fettered stars.  

I trace their shadows

the edge of woods, 

how long can anyone

expect to follow 

something in the dark?

Every evening the sun 

chases the same shadows

to the forest, breaks 

for the intermission.

I lie awake waiting

for the red morning light.

And So The World is Saved by Tom Welling Accidentally Posting His Naked Reflection to His Instagram Story    /  at/om

Sometimes I think I’m not crashing out hard enough, and sometimes I think I should be meaner. Sometimes I think I am too angry, and in this world that is so cruel I should be meeting it with all the love I was born with. Sometimes I think I have clenched my jaw so hard I’m surprised that my teeth haven’t all shattered. Sometimes I’m surprised the boiling anger within me hasn’t melted my eyes out of my head, rotted the skin off of my numbing fingers, and exposed to the world that I am nothing but writing cruel thoughts stuffed into a human skin. 

But speaking of exposed. 

Smallville actor Tom Welling uploaded an Instagram story to show the New York skyline from comic con. He shared a beautiful moment with the world and in it did not see his naked reflection distorted in the window glass. And god do I know how it feels to have your distorted reflection shown to the world. 

And god, did it make me smile, even with my jaw clenched, even with the unkindness trying to crawl up my throat I smiled. I smiled and I laughed and my friends smiled and we laughed. 

And Superman was real, and Superman was watching over us, and Superman saved the day. 

Tuesday is the New Thursday  /  Ellen Ferguson

An Abecedarian Double Burning Haibun

By Ellen Ferguson

1. Since Sliced Bread

Not only are you

The greatest thing since sliced bread

You are also this:

A

Book, noticed on the table at Rizzoli; 

Caj brown sweater confetti flecked;

Dashing approach to pastrami;

Eye for photography;

Fire of your mind;

Generous laugh;

High appreciation for Snoopy;

Intuitive reading;

Joy in Manhattan;

Knowledge of presidential libraries;

Lost memories of Kansas;

Making me better;

Nimbly pivoting away from Shakespeare;

Open to opera;

Punctuality &

Quick planning;

Row upon row of front row seats;

Spark of eyes, flashing;

Thoughtfulness;

Untouchable understanding;

Visiting your child with glee;

Writing with style/clarity of thought;

X-ray vision upon spying pastrami someone else might enjoy;

Your patience;

Zero tolerance for cruelty.

(continued…)

A Witch’s Point of View /  Brett Gastineau

Hunger grazed my belly.

I had started sleeping in caves with bears again.

I have learned to enter their dreams by burrowing

my teeth into their necks.

There’s something of warmth there as I enjoy

the drinkable thread of life but

I wouldn’t say tender.

There is no love in my murderous heart.

I crave the coldness of the moon.

Bears dream of the sticky sweetness of berries

and the promise of more to come.

I find no comfort there, but the flashes of

the piercing and crunching of skin is

another of their joys (mine too!).

It was the woman their father had wanted them to call

mother that I first saw.

Her heart was already dust.

She was a creature moved by the blue winds of

jealousy, craving, and spite.

Her mouth was filled with the sugar of hatred.

The nearby village was full of death.

The fields remained barren, unyielding.

It was in an itchy Hell the family found themselves.

His tears that fell at night

became icicles on her eyelashes.

He took little convincing of what had to be done

for (to) the children.

She spoke of mercy but really wanted only

to throw them out like trash.

Her longing had soured long ago; she knew

he would never regard her as truly satisfying.

Let him fall into the emptiness she poured on their bed.

She would make his hurt golden, claim she spoke from a

place of honesty...“please, love, forgive it’s bite.”

The children found themselves caught in

what appeared to them a labyrinth of knives.

The boy tried his best to comfort his sister.

She cried out to the hateful sky above.

She bit her lip.

She cowered into his chest.

Watch out child, for your mind might run off and

leave your heart, vulnerable to the feast of thieves!

Like a cat, I can see far into the darkness.

I knew they would arrive the next day. And they did.

Not to a home of confectionery delights but to a gleaming

hearth and the promised kindness in an old woman’s eye.

How where they to know that after a warm meal and a

warm slide into a bed they would wake in a cage?

How heavy my happiness as I watched them sleep; their faces

like jars of honey I could look through and see everything.

The girl woke first and I put her straight to work

gathering wood for the oven.

Fear filled her eyes.

Fear is my beloved.

Fear is my blood. The meatiest part!

The fire grew and blossomed in its liquid violence.

The brain is not a safe place to get lost.

There is nothing thicker than one’s own sickness.

I was pushed into the delicious fire.

I became shredded starlight.

Fitting, I would die in a whirlwind of good rage.

But am I ashamed? Am I wanting of forgiveness?

One does not change the clothes their soul arrived in.

The simple answer is no.

Everyday Parting of the Ways /  Joy Johnson

Soldier I onwards though I do not know 

why.  There is a deep divide, like a house

which needs keeping with garden to tend, 

when the questioning gulf of "why" opens 

and I urgent write to fill its innards

because, seems to me, that's what satisfies

the beast -- what beast? -- figment of reality 

needs nothing from me.  Do I excuse my

continued breathing by a subterfuge?

Better perhaps to, tea in hand, simply

stand in the wind, feel my beating heart then

flip a coin.  Has my pen pitted nature

'gainst something akin to culture, has man?

What do we fight each other for: mischance?

Is solitude what battles with commons--

is't blind rancor at needing each other?

Dreaming of a purpose might be conceit

of a philosophic sort.  What hole this?

In the cone of causality we've rent.

bob for apples  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

On our deck when our kids were small. Water sloshes from a tub like when I was little. Hanging twine, a donut on each string. We try marshmallows, but they wouldn’t hold, so giggles carried me back and forth through the kitchen, oops don’t let the dog out, please and thank you. McIntoshes red and green cheeks facing up, down, up. More giggles and some “have fun but don’t get each other wet on purpose!” All while holding on because the blindfolds made them teeter. Once an apple gets fished out, the prize gets crunched and the cidery fragrance makes me thirsty and hungry, too. But I am too busy arranging kids’ snacks on a melamine tray. I will eat later.

MAMA IS THE WORM  /  H.T. Reynolds

Tupelo 30/30 Cento Pt. I with lines from Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco;

Gabriel Phillips; Brett Gastineau; at/om; Katerina Canyon; Colin Sturdevant

her tendrils

unplanted from my gums

through tendons and bone

—weightless as a shadow

I am small, I have fallen

from my mother’s back

and I am drowning—

an imperfect copy of Eve

duplicated over and over

putting your mouth

to the wound of my body,

the slices like a whisper—

that’s where my father swallowed me

to the womb

by hands of someone who means well

in a life as endless and narrow as an hour

and my death

pulls from my throat

a deep howl

            this is what the world will do

            to you—

in the middle of dying

perhaps I will be grateful…

Lengths to Which Madness Would Measure, Had Madness Been Left in the Wood /  Gabriel Phillips

(written in the woods of De Soto state park)

It’s the arch between the doorways

deep in the woods.

Where I lunge myself towards the pink.

I hurt the rocks that hurt, I hurl them

against themselves until they sour.

I am the apocalypse of the deep,

deep woods. When splinters grow,

they teach the trees. Where I have hurled 

myself towards anything stone.

Where the vine finds favorites, it finds

my feet pruning the roots of twilight. What woods

expect of man, is near what the burning cedar

describes as quiet noise. Near but far

enough to seek. In forms that

did not exist but could. In forms that

once had crawled. To the tops of trees

I plunder the words of their young.

I stash them in little matchboxes

in cracks in the backs of caves, where the fox,

the owl and the wintering bear,

dance together in the green terror of echoes.

Protecting the roe deer from evaporating

with the dew at midnight, every morning.

I have finished the bow. I have brought

my eyes to a close. I shudder at echoes

of deep childish metal, which tear asunder

both wood and soul.

all my tears have been used up  / Colin Sturdevant

& let's not speak of poetic lineages

& yet let's speak of poetic lineages

a different kind than we are used to

Darwin's poetry found in all life

how it's not too sad to be the loneliest

man among Men. each couple I see

as if making it off the ark of love

and it's now been 21 years o' solitude

the holding of hands. the parting of lips

casual dress. a Sunday morning

& artificial rain falls on the street

& what a species we are

October - Poem 11

Xanadu / Katerina Canyon

I look young,

but I feel old.

He feels young

but looks old.

That’s how we match.

The owl minds the mice

dancing in the dust

while the earth splits

between the trees.

We are satiated

and settled.

The owl swoops down

to steal the snake’s shadow.

It is gone. Just like that.

Like steam escaping from the cracks

of a volcano.

We no longer stand tall.

I’m an “S.” He’s a question mark.

The owl is fed.

The mice are hiding.

The trees still stand.

At the Tornado Memorial County Park, WI /  Sam Calhoun

North of the Ahnapee River

we stopped here, driving

up the Door Peninsula

the way meteorites 

from Biela's comet 

still move somewhere

in the night sky.

Were we here later

we could see the Andromedids, 

faint swishing of the trail

like these maples

burning like the Peshtigo fire,

the one that leapt

the Fox River.

At the old well where 

seven threw themselves

to hide from the firestorm

I dream of the water 

that once was,

and the mill 

now paved over.  

I want to write letters

on the back of receipts,

leave them like prayer

dolls in the grass,

let the leaves swarm

over them, forget them 

like those who perished.

From where we stand

we can't see the river,

nor the swampland where

old snags stand like scarecrows,

Across the old potato patch

a dust swirl marched 

into the highway.  

I could lay in the grass.

I too could burn in the sun.

Bloody Back Angel   /  at/om

Grief has always come to me in the words of a horror story I read online once, where a man’s ribs were pulled open from his spine, exposing his bloody back like angels wings, 

and maybe it is because I was never able to see angels as anything more than dead people, 

but when I grieve I do so with a scalpel and a saw, I do it with a cry that makes others ears bleed, I do it to the sound of bones breaking, 

I refuse to do it quietly. 

You are gone, 

you are still gone, 

and I am still bleeding. 

I just wish I was doing 

so with my bones pulled open, 

my bloody backed angel

DocuSonnet  /  Ellen Ferguson

When children make a movie, it's not art.

A fading theater cannot be their muse.

They star in their school’s play, they land a part

That’s the artistic role they get to choose.

In filming for an audience our loss

Of local cinema not-paradise

They overstep the lines drawn in mind's moss

We've relinquished the sticky floor to mice.

Maplewood is now front-row anarchy.

Neighbors yawn, "Huh? Is it that big a deal?"

Don't inmates run asylums recklessly?

When children tell the story, it's not real.

IF they make one more film about our town

They’ll get no popcorn even when they’re grown.

Wanting the new /  Brett Gastineau

I freedom from my chronology,

ignorance of my remembrances,

cleaned of the silences from the myths I created.

I want new bones, so I can be happy with my nothing.

I’ll glory in new flesh, being the meat.

My new body welcoming the effortless air

and containing a volley of heartbeats.

My self bending toward a sun-sweetened time to come.

A body is the story that makes us come true.

A body dreams the reality of our expectations.

Please, bones, let me splendor beyond the rain

and break from a new mouth.

I want to know how grateful feels again.

Subsuperconscious /  Joy Johnson

Subsuperconscious

self grows liquid silver feet

and runs to be me.

Recipe  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

ragù alla bolognese

ground beef leaves its juices in the pan

seasoned bed of sizzle

wine, tomato, milk

I always have to look up 

the order of liquid additions 

there’s trinity 

nutmeg, freshly grated

& if you’re lucky

fresh tagliatelle

to sauce

yes, sauce is a verb

UNTITLED 10/10  /  H.T. Reynolds

for he shall live whose name is named

—Isis, in James George Frazer’s

The Golden Bough

do not tell her

your name

the harm she

tucks in your back

pocket unzipping

the rain along

the sky’s corroded

edges inviting gaps

into your veins

like snakebites—

a push  her venom

a murmuration

pouring to the back

rooms, behind

your eyelids

within that cavity

you hide in

mouth stitched

refusing to give her

what she wants

Circles of Water /  Gabriel Phillips

Calm spikes of car silence.

Frogs that gaze at flies. Flies,

but covered in chocolate.

When walls are wet

there is forgiveness

the walls are wet

there is no forgiveness.

How does rubbish bloom

from seeds of waste

which climb in and out

of water, refusing

to pour.

There are leopards

in the driveway

eating rosemary

as if never being shot.

And stones

that remember themselves

as pebbles. Then a touch

which is merciful

under the microscope.

Then the organizing of wind

from smallest to hateful

under the hurricane eye,

which sees your hurt face

as I stab myself with

my own umbrella.

Will you hurt me

as I hurt you?

My paper boat

and the crowd

of water.

My fingers breaking

the rippled surface

waiting, for my turn to cry.

men speak in secret  / Colin Sturdevant

To their wives

Who are oars

Into their pillows 

At late night

Song of sobbing

All among sons

October - Poem 10

Seasons / Katerina Canyon

The clouds have fallen.

Mist speckles my skin like sand.

Two points of crisp autumn

pinch me

and let go.

This amber skin

is bruised.

I am sick, otherwise

I am healthy.

When my toes go numb

I will know it is winter.

Late At Spruce Bog Lake State Natural Area /  Sam Calhoun

We were late for the bogbean, 

later still for the glaciers 

in their retreat, late 

for the morning fog

rising from this kettle lake,

the sun low, ringed 

like coffee stains 

on the table edge, 

the lady's slipper gone, 

pink having slipped 

to the sky, and fading.

I wanted to see the Labrador tea, 

dip my finger in the pitcher plants 

to test the temperature, 

rescue the dead fly

from it's viking grave,

leave it beneath yellow

birch and leatherleaf, 

between boardwalk boards

where tamarack flashed 

their march toward 

the gold heaven above.

But the light kept changing,

I could hear it in the ground:

every step the cry

of the white-throated sparrow,

every tawny cottongrass seed

sowed to the sky a kind

of diacritic to the wind,

the lake so still, spaghnum moss 

embracing every step 

like night does a shadow, 

folding diurnal hands into the dark.

In Response to “I Am Afraid”   /  at/om

I ate my own words, actually. 

I am afraid of the dread in my heart, 

I am afraid of the unanswered messages 

and short responses and the thousand 

little deaths I live every day that I can’t 

kill myself just parts of me and the worst part 

is I love these parts of me, 

I don’t want them to die. 

I thought I would rather die whole.

And yes all these things scare me, 

but this haunted ass house is scarier, 

and that late night knock on the door 

scared me yes, and the man I met, 

but scarier was knowing 

some part of me still wants to live.

Logical Conclusion is an IPA  /  Ellen Ferguson

and something advertised as surprising but inevitable

for thirty years

your logical conclusion,

the teacher says,

should be surprising but inevitable.

both dogs: symphony on a blanket, opera on a chair;

seemed to sense the logical conclusion –

one knew the symphony had ended, the other la bohème

rising to tug at their leashes.

you can hear it in

the waiting on a sidewalk,

the voice of tables and chairs, so

why ask the waiter for it?

Why say, “I’ll have a logical conclusion,” with your fish?

Can’t we let it come, surprising but inevitable,

Like dogs do? Like the path?

I just died (Translation of “acabo de morir” by Jose Maria
Lima) /  Brett Gastineau

I just died

and my death

pulls from my throat a deep howl,

leaves me ablaze in its salt.

I just died

and my death

surges rough and strong through my hands,

a rising deluge in my veins.

Death came just like that—suddenly—

while I was twisted and flailing,

yearning to be something new.

This woeful dawn casts a

faltering and wavering light

across my lost footsteps,

over my furrowed brow,

over my “indelible” mark.

Death, a cudgel, careening toward me,

overturning my life.

My life!

With this dawn, I am overwhelmed with its pulse.

Burial /  Joy Johnson

Scared to death, or thereabouts, by these dreams

that keep visiting me, of tunnels close

and narrowing, speaking to me of war

and encroaching disambiguation,

I vacillate between fantasy and

escape in poetry and math, and anguish. 

How to navigate this tapering, this 

weakening of mood, of hope, of prospect 

all while acknowledging instilled beauty

of not only what was but what remains 

to luxuriate in but mindfully,

to, last kiss midst, deeply appreciate. 

If the muse sits alongside my writing,

today shall have been worthwhile balancing. 

friend divorce  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

I miss her at times. Like October, with the spooky season decor that reminds me we used to trick-or-treat together around her neighborhood. She was a dancer, and often dressed in her stage costumes. My costumes were clumsy, frugal and funny like me. Our falling-out came for us like The Scream: quick and ghoulish. Our girls had a playdate and I had to cancel. She pouted and criticized me for making her break childcare plans with her parents, then  it turned into a silent stone wall leading into an empty field. My daughter said, I never liked her girls anyway; they were mean. And a small demon spirit whisked away decades of chitchat & lunch dates in just one text message. I can’t un-remember all the bunches of autumn corn, hay bales and candy apples along her street. It’s my only friend divorce and it haunts me.

GRIEF COMES WITH THE RATTLE /  H.T. Reynolds

after “Silence,” by Brett Gastineau

an empty bassinet with a pink bow

behind a cracked open door

still reaching out its shadow

like a midnight pendulum

a coiled viper on a doormat

spelling out WELCOME

in textured vines against

autumn colors

it comes with a prescription label

without refills, an empty bottle

and a rigid spine—trembling

upon a fiberglass couch, a lamp

spotlighting from the corner, gravel

being served for dinner, that spider

web in the corner still occupied

with the husk of a fly you watched

transform a few nights, maybe weeks

ago, while your skin protested the size

of your bones and your stomach felt

adventurous like a cat wandering

through a gap in the basement wall

nobody remembered was there—

not since the skunk debuted

and the whole house reeked

it comes from the lungs—the depths

of a throat unburdened from plastic

tubing, the machine humming

beside a lowered railing

a palm clutching a waxen fist

skin like flypaper, eyes fixed

on the scuff in the ceiling

it’s that small thing

left trembling

long after the body

stops

Persistent /  Gabriel Phillips

This thought, it spins me. From my own voice

I do not hear my name, instead I’m thinking

about a whisper of you. First it undoes

the front buttons like a persistent

summer cough. Leaving, pretending to,

leaving but not left. When there is

even more salt next time. Tender

to the bones which is enough,

to crack my mind so early.

That the rest of the day is haunted.

It’s another season where the colors

of the heartbeat begin to change.

And there was a note that I mistook

as the presence of someone beside me.

It is just change, who wears a

dark hat, and is doing a terrible job

of hiding its weeping face.

Could I have been smaller, could I

have worn the holes as a necklace.

Even though wind is known to stir,

it lies dead in silence behind the open door.

dream debt  / Colin Sturdevant

let me lay out each tooth

unplanted from my gums

as thanks for the wrecks avoided

and to have had two more years

& a lost career

& a burned down home

& gutted car

with kin

how she was the moon now gone

the moon still Houdini-ly there

yet not quite there anymore

a coin picked from an ear & pocketed

oh, valence shell still here

carrying ash until the death of your husband,

my father,

how we once lived when

there were still fish & cattle

& we lived to see miracles

better than technology:

bison coming home

October - Poem 9

Avall / Katerina Canyon

Today I felt my ribs squeezing

my heart like an apple press—

tight enough to remind me

that blood needs to flow—

tight enough to stop my breath,

but I remember

this heart is still mine.

You never owned it,

though I let you hold it

for a while

when I bowed my head in prayer

and raised my head while singing hymns.

You never held it gently.

You squeezed hard and said,

“This is what the world will do to you—

squeeze you dry.”

I was supposed to be the apple

that did not fall far,

but I rolled down the hill

and landed in the gutter for a while,

but even in the gutter,

I found enough earth to take root.

The world does have pressure.

You were right,

but I learned to thrive between the seams.

Island Number One Hundred Seventy Two (Pool Ten, Mississippi River)  /  Sam Calhoun

Know what it is like to be nameless,

odd man in the small town, 

know to knock the dirt from boots

so your footprints aren't different, 

so your breath doesn't leave

your accent in the air, 

step between two worlds,

bridge joints shifting in the wind,

recrudescent detritus

in the old slough,

woodland sunflowers eddying

in this drought like stars 

in some far galaxy, smartweed

erupting like nebulae,

let one channel be declared non-navigable,

float trees there anyway, 

give rest to the crane, the egret,

prothonotary warbler in spring,

let the barges rush by like static in the other,

float trees there t00, 

bobbing like heartbeats of herons,

quiet chirps of grey tree frogs,

their last affirmations of fall, 

crawling like sturgeons 

in the depths of this dark river,

silt clogging sightlines,

every mussel a moon

in the night.

I am Afraid  /  at/om

I am housesitting 

in a big and empty home, 

and none of the lights upstairs 

are working. I think I could fix 

them if I went to the basement 

but its dark outside and it's dark 

down there and I watched 

a scary movie tonight. 

I am more scared of the empty, 

of course, than any of the ghosts 

or bloody faced creatures that 

could be in this house. 

The truth is, if the worst they can do 

is kill me, then they can’t do anything to me at all. 

But I am so afraid.

I am afraid of running out of snacks 

and needing to go to the store, 

I am afraid that my loved ones secretly 

hate me. I am afraid that one day the friends 

I have now will realize they would have 

made fun of me in high school. 

I turned on a cozy gay romance, 

I had to hunt for one this time. 

I am afraid one day I will run out of these too. 

I am afraid I will never fall in love, 

I am afraid I will never really get what love is.

Dagnabbit, 44th street  /  Ellen Ferguson

Two times in two days, you do the math:

Screwing up on you, 44th street.

First was the worst. Mumble/rambling something about heading east early, something about presidential libraries. No one knows what this means, not even that strange zip-up thing trying too hard to be Larry David at the time.    

Next night, having left the play at intermission,

Ambling forth, the same tragic nonentity said,

“I just care about you and want you to be all right.”

Her child replied,

“Oh, so now you like me?”

Time stood still on 44th and 6th.

Windy lights soft &

Remembering,

Early in the crossing,

The errors of the night before.

Traffic lights stopped to retort:

“We heard about you, you idiot,

From our corner one block west, 44th and 7th.”

“If it were up to us,” the crosswalk sputtered,

“We’d never let you walk these streets again.”

Erasure: Ralph Waldo Emerson Journals /  Brett Gastineau

Solitaire /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

does playing sudoku mean I’m old?

as an only child, I played solitaire and made up games

my father plays solitaire

nothing breaks my heart so much

his thin shoulders breaking through the plaid

hunched over the large-print playing cards

he slickly shuffles then sets them out, unrushed, orderly;

makes them wave then piles them into the drawer

many years later my grown children

know exactly where to find the worn out deck

AFTER MY ECHOCARDIOGRAM /  H.T. Reynolds

my heart is essentially unremarkable

a shopping list with substitutions

a generic apology recycled from Mother’s Day

when the back of my head met up with a rock

and I learned how to sleep on my stomach

how to breathe in synthetic air

she hummed through my chest

through my ribs, through my lungs

her wand pressed against me like a rifle barrel

my body surrendering to her voice

a porpoise drawing me a map

point to each unremarkable chamber—

this one is for those who were welcomed in,

notice the way the door slams shut

how quickly you push them to the next

you see how this one waits empty—

lets itself swell before they all disappear

returning in the next room like ghosts

hollowed out and depleted

to be buried in the last chamber

their absence resonating like wind chimes

perhaps that is what I’m feeling—

this unremarkable pain

 An Arch of Reaching Birds /  Gabriel Phillips

Window has the thorn bush,

torn with quilt and lace.

If the house where birds would live,

could shutter sheets of white.

Let my fingers wrap their eyes.

The rye will rise to perfect pitch.

No one here must doubt them.

No one here must know.

A fourth body appears,

bound in minted flesh.

Doves which fang are lovely.

Stoned by brick and wall.

Tongue and groove to swallow,

lonely writhe of worm,

but call below, both birds and whey,

which peppers salt with ashes.

I tap you twice

until you wake

to notice broken

quilt and lace.

& its 2026 and yet  / Colin Sturdevant

I’ve witnessed the sun spoil bodies of fruit in different ways

Like how a metaphor crows out violence & its 2026 and yet 

People pass like blind goats & the other day, there was news & footage

& a man pulled a woman from her car as if she were an oyster plied

From comfort. & he lifted his arm as if to butcher her at the roadside

With just that. again & again. And it's 250 years in this fabricated nation.

When will its neomythos of equality finally begin? 

October - Poem 8

Newborn / Katerina Canyon

I saw
your eyes open on the video screen
at the sound of my voice
like the first ocean wave,
sleepy
from swimming through
the channel
and your home of
nine months.

I know you.
You said
with your eyes,
turning over every
syllable of my voice
for some sign of where
you heard it before.

Your ears know grandmother
from where you are
to me,
3,000 miles away.

You said,
I know you
with your eyes,
knowing the vow
in my voice
that your
home starts with your mother
and continues
through to where
I stand, arms open,
promising shelter
and a home
where all children laugh.

And

why are you so far away?
You said
with your eyes
open like an oyster shell
before the first wave.

Where are you?
I will be home soon.

Late On The Mississippi  /  Sam Calhoun

A distant loon calls

echoing every barge,

I sit on the pier edge

past the breakwater

where every stone 

chokes on waves,

how they seem shallow,

distant, old lives 

remembering once 

how it always was,

the power to be heard 

coming in a flurry,

notice how the current moves 

like swifts toward no chimney, 

red sky at dawn breaking 

every horizon, 

the murmurating rain, 

still dark, hopeful,

rolling like scud clouds

through Andalusia Slough, 

rushing against the banks, 

released back as if  longbows

bending toward home.  

Tanka for the Starry Eyed Fawn  /  at/om

Born in a bear trap

trying to stay starry eyed

sinking my teeth in my leg. 

This skin was so beautiful 

but I never stood a chance. 

Salty Cat Fan  /  Ellen Ferguson

For Halloween I go as a salty can fan --

The salty cats are a band.

I carry salt, a cat and a fan.

One year, I want to go as something else –

Maybe a house of cards.

You could come over and work on me

Until I can stand on my own.

Silence /  Brett Gastineau

Silence is sweet and holy.

Silence is the language of snow.

Silence is like the love between strangers,

a grace upon the heart’s meat.

Silence is the practiced mathematics of clouds and ice.

Silence is where the beautiful is found by accident and

where one come to believe it might last forever.

Grief comes with the rattle of rain;

it’s smell lingers and won’t let go.

The warm luminous water of memory becomes a mystery,

a vague fractured religion.

Thoughts drift, find no place to land,

hover like flies over the wound.

The tender and the cruel can make no peace.

And what is silence now but a wild hunger.

unskilled labor  /  Joy Johnson

open sign flashing, comrade

come home with me, comrade,

make me your friend

we upend the way of polity,

me and iamyourcomrade 

bricks subtend

a world-changing 

scheme.  us comrades,

we watch the world changing 

try to stay with the plan, 

not comrade freak comrade

what can i

contain here

i need more comrades

to maintain me

beans on toast, comrade 

be of good cheer

Who Knows? /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

The Beatles’ song I Will was one of my favorites. The Beatles had a resurgence in popularity, sadly, when John Lennon was assassinated at the beginning of my 7th grade school year. I vacuumed and dusted wearing my WalkMan while working out the harmonies in the song. I didn’t know yet that I would get to know  I Will so well, I would audition with it and successfully join the Alto I voice part of an a capella group I sang with for seven semesters. That’s because I took the advice to wait and watch the first semester of my freshman year to absorb the activities then plunge in by January. We reunite after forty years in February 2027. The world took my life’s activities for those four decades and swallowed them in one loud gulp.

I REGRET /  H.T. Reynolds

putting the keys on top of the microwave

the butter dish three inches to the right

of where it usually is, or the loose screw

in the cupboard I never fixed

the cracked tile in the back room

when Larry convinced us all he could

still juggle bowling balls—our only

shared sport, a basket full of ten-pounders

collecting cobwebs and dust like snow

I regret not shoveling the driveway

when I still had my gloves, my scarf

not quite a noose—

Who Begs, Begs to Differ /  Gabriel Phillips

Tons of sheets with 100 thread count. Yes,

they wrap the feet because of thread count

not the experience of counting.

They give bricks to one person at a time,

in case another person is sleeping.

How do you know they are cannibals?

When the child was myself, I was

the grave robber and his grave. Neither

dead nor grieving but very much

an appropriate blessing. Long have

I gathered anything that bends.

And bends towards me.

If the sky detaches, does it turn black?

Roam, roam how Romans fell.

Actual inventors of color. In front of

the canopic jar, in front of the bathroom.

Muddy makes mince meat fresh.

Muddy is the golden. Let the goose

cook the chef.

Are you sound?

I am lengthwise. I am both stumbles.

I share my sleep (one is mine)

around the yellow wall. Even in fever,

never with skin and flavor, I reverb

with floating feathers. I will never catch

what can never fall.

Pluck  / Colin Sturdevant

-inspired by The Odyssey’s scene of Odysseus devouring a lotus from Calypso.

at the lip of the earth.

I tugged whatever shell

I could strip from

succulent flesh

to discover

I was playing

a lyre.

& to what I had sensed

was a lyre

were dilapidated perennials

long forgotten yet sought after.

each mouthful was a bloom

I took in:

a memory eroded.

my skin becoming kissed

by long daylight & sea

& such a way until I return home.

October - Poem 7

Hungry / Katerina Canyon

Into his stomach of paranoia,
that’s where my father swallowed me.
Into his lies,
where fear created me,
puncturing my chest like bullets
directed at me by his past experiences
with women, by what
he assumed my nature to be.

He abandoned the idea
that I was innocent.
In place of that concept,
he put before me a mannequin
to model my behavior.
And for my education,
a dog-eared issue of Penthouse Forum,
where nightly I fingered through the uncertain
bedroom linen of strangers.

From the models of my existence—
the blonde, the brunette, the redhead—
where white playmates reigned
over my bedroom sheets
and never opened their eyes
or offered tea and biscuits
or any sort of comfort
for the scared daughter
of a young, dying Black mother.

At the 45th Parallel, Meridian County Park, Wisconsin  /  Sam Calhoun

Eight hundred miles from home,

the only thing keeping me

from the fifth largest lake 

in the world is a thin woods,

midway between places

I'll never see in my life,

though I imagine them all

like this, a small edge of land,

the water stretching for miles

to the horizon both ways,

Polaris midway to zenith,

the start of the little dipper,

the star that sits still, still

as a three hundred mile lake.

and me, here, cupping cool 

spring water in my hand

in a roadside park, hemlocks 

brushing sunlight like dust

beneath the day's rug, 

how it shimmers on moss,

only eight hundred miles 

from this waymark to mine.

Eight hundred miles, 

and a road home.  

after Life is a Highway and I am a Raccoon in the Breakdown Lane by David Dougherty  /  at/om

In the state of New Hampshire 

driver’s education programs teach 

moose safety as a part of the curriculum. 

In 2012 they played a video specifically 

about moose and what happens 

if you hit one. 

I have lived in New Hampshire

for almost thirty years and never 

saw a moose, but I always wished I could. 

I’ve driven backroads looking for them, 

lived out in the sticks by the mountains. 

I saw my first moose today on my way to work.

Moose are a lot bigger than most people think. 

Even the young moose in Merrimack was well 

too large to be mistaken for a deer. A grown bull moose 

can easily stand over six feet at the shoulder, 

it can weigh well over a ton. Moose are so large 

they lack most natural predators. The safety video 

said in large flashing letters 

MOOSE HAVE

NO FEAR.

A moose in the roadway will rarely 

run away. A moose in the roadway 

is an obstacle. If your car was to strike 

a moose the car would be destroyed. 

If your car was to strike a moose it 

would likely be fatal for both of you. 

I guess luckily for the driver on 101A this morning, 

the moose was not fully grown. 

I guess luckily for me, the moose 

was already dead when I drove by, 

being removed from the median leaving 

nothing behind but a pool of blood 

to be soaked into the concrete. 

I have lived in New Hampshire 

for almost thirty years and never 

saw a moose until today. 

Most of the moose I have seen have 

been in my drivers ed program or 

pictured on postcards. 

I will be more careful what I wish for. 

At the moment I was serving a Pepsi upside down  /  Ellen Ferguson

At the moment I was serving a Pepsi upside down
To a professional bowler from the Bronx
Over by the Movieland where Apocalypse Now would play,
You were also near popcorn, more than once.

In the year I rode through the Great Salt Desert in the back of a truck, salt everywhere,

You were also salting something at the time.

This morning during Silent Ball, it was silent. You too watched something without speaking.

Glory be to all of us: finding signs as if they were.

For A. /  Brett Gastineau

You come to me with your dark kindness,

putting your mouth to the wound of my body.

Your breath and detective fingers touch me from all around.

There is such exhilaration in the not knowing

where you are going and the ropes of scent

falling, falling down.

Let me be gripped in the claim of your hands.

Let them steal what has always belonged to them.

You remind me that the sublime is

something you sink your teeth into.

current  /  Joy Johnson

The dream I dreamt this morning became one pink streak in the dawning sky that paired with all the dreams looking for new sleepers to dissuade of the inconsequence of corporality.  My drummer and I making what was inconceivably more fullfilled than any two could make -- a youthful blush on my subsuperconscience.  How could community (radio) adopt this grander air, this anguished lyric of adulthood brought low to high, this felt need to leave a sigil floating in a melody through the currents of the world.  Once I was a girl whose curling sheep hills brought someone low and I'm glad, glad. 

Mischief Night  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

Mischief night October thirtieth. Kids like me who would never dare vandalize so much as the cover of our own brown paper bag covered textbook with a doodle looked around the day of Halloween wondering how they threw those TP rolls so far up to go over all those branches? And if October 31st was a rainy day, what a paper-mache like mess. We were busy making costumes like my recycled can robot. My dad and I threaded half gallon cans from pineapple juice on my legs and little tuna cans for my arms, the guts of an old radio duct-taped to a box around my torso and a silver colored colander on my head. My mother crocheted orange wigs and americana primary blue and red rickrack costumes for me and a friend, Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. Only they weren’t raggedy since my mom carefully made each piece. I wonder if she started in July? The greatest act of mischief I recall was to eat most of the contents of my pillowcase of candy that same night.

MORE THAN YOU’LL KNOW /  H.T. Reynolds

A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life

when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.

—D. Elton Trueblood, The life We Prize (1951)

I wonder if classrooms were arranged like rows

of corn, like peach trees—desks like drills

with the blackboard arranging the plots

outlining the caliber of each seed to be nurtured

or if Horace Mann dreamed of apples,

endless baskets beneath a sea of trees

professionally plucked and organized

or if Philbrick created blocks, sorted

them by age like wine or cheese, the nanny

holding her place as nurturer

while the kids learned how to obey

or if those seeds ever found a ridge,

an horizon upon which to bloom

to extend themselves to the heights

of stars and whisper back to the wind

thank you for your labor

for the direction of your push

for allowing me to land where I may

without burying me too deep

without denying me the rain

or if the gardener, tilling

furrows with calloused hands

hunched over an almanac

wondering if tomorrow

it’ll rain, or if the sun will be

cruel, or if there’ll be respite

from his labors, will find peace

beneath the scorching sun

knowing there’ll be fruit

tomorrow

One of Us /  Gabriel Phillips

I still notice things. The lonely lemon river.

Your purple bangs belong.

From the mountain, cherries pour.

And over breast of hills. For

the harpies do we measure stiffness, with comb,

with posters in silhouettes,

decks of bridges. We come to knowledge

as a hammered gust. Without

time or the item to display, only

a stack of magazines with all the

smiles scratched out.

No idea of where we are

or if we are, we sing

out the rickets. Dancing under

a dying glow. Over the lake without

breakfast. We partially worry

with ruptured hands, the weight

of a hunted roar. How I trust your

comment on the stars, how you sleep,

how you forgot to

wake up. Between now

and noon we will open our mouths,

one of us will make room for

what remains of the shadow

of someone missing.  

October - Poem 6

At the Bar / Katerina Canyon

I think of Harlem’s street noise

as I sit alone in a sushi bar in Jakarta

observing little beyond my own thoughts.

I like to sit alone listening

to instrumental music

while the sushi chef slices soft tuna

with his bright steel knife.

The slices sound like a whisper.

The sushi chef speaks

and asks how I like my sushi.

I say it is good and how as a Californian

I maintain high sushi standards.

He tells me he used to work

in California.

He was a permanent resident

but is not allowed to return to the U.S.

because he stayed in Indonesia

too long, taking care of his dying mother.

I think there should be more to this—

a deeper meaning, a greater truth.

I have no solution for him

or this world we find ourselves in.

He gives me his card to contact him

in the future, but knowing me,

I will forget about it

and move on to the next poem.

I think of Harlem again

and remember that there are people there

I haven’t seen in over a year.

At Calumet Harbor  /  Sam Calhoun

Cold night at Calumet Harbor, 

far boats eddying to the marina,

my fingers drifting across the tower 

railing as the diurnal wind 

stretches like an old blanket, 

threads just beginning to break 

into small white caps across 

the breakwater, each rock

sipping sky like news of the day.

Behind us the harbor lights, rhythmic,

know how long to shine, and flags

become their own shadows,

a static whispered through the night.

Here a sky can break so hard 

it needs the moon to keep going.

I remember how birds face windward

so they know which way to lean,

their feet gripping cold wires, 

their bodies spaced apart 

to stave off the electrical 

current underneath.

Atop the cold tower I lean in.

If memory is a looking glass, 

any life can be this lake. 

I close my eyes, and listen

to the engines of dreams.  

American Horror Story: American Horror Story  /  at/om

We as a society 

have moved past the need 

to keep watching 

American Horror Story. 

Like it’s bad enough to just look at my phone every morning and see all the bad news, 

that there was another mass shooting in another state where my friend lives, 

that some old fuck elected into office a 

thousand years ago wants to ban my 

god given right to use a public bathroom, 

that there’s a superstorm forming on another coast where it previously never rained, 

that I couldn’t afford to go to the doctor but my tax dollars are funding weapons, and tanks for cops, and tear gas, and kidnappers in the street, and islands and gold courses for evil men in positions of power. 

So the last news I need is that I’m going to have to watch, 

Evan Peters still playing that seventeen year old ghost, 

(that yes had me in a chokehold when I was also seventeen) 

but we’re both far too old for this now. 

And this show has gone on so damn long 

and the plot has somehow been lost for longer. 

But I guess when America is always making new horror stories 

We have to punish ourselves somehow. 

Carpe Diem-y  /  Ellen Ferguson

You can have my Samuel Beckett and Edward Gorey book

But I’m borrowing a day today.                         

                                   You can have my Roz Chast portrait of Jonathan Richman

But I’m taking today for a walk outside now.

                                   You can have my Kafka T-shirt and my Easily Distracted T-shirt

But today and I are going out to play catch with a tennis ball.

                                   Those are the only valuable things I own. Consider them yours.

Now, today and I are making molasses cookies. Later, Hater.

Spark /  Brett Gastineau

The invisible hand reaches from the quiet cold

and places two embers in the mouth of a corpse.

The honeyed light grows and sprouts.

Her skin remembers what it is to be alone.

She breathes in the moon air teeming with laughter

and whispered affections.

Her heart—that bloody star—pulses with the beauty

of thunder.

The fire spreads with the softness of April meandering

through tendons and bone; its strange music

weightless as a shadow.

The refrain flowers as does the language in her heart—she

knows them as she knows dreaming.

She feels her legs like snow.

As the sun rises, at first, it obliges them to glisten

and then it makes them dance.

Her feet upon the dark earth,

she sets off to write her new myth,

to find what her questions are.

Forgot  /  Joy Johnson

In the midst of memories of the him

Who placed his palm against my sternum as

If to heal every broken bit within 

This frame, when you say 'hi' and then insist

There was a day when we happily sinned:

Each other's arms, mouths.  A day of passion. 

Perhaps when I was a drunk bassist in a band?

Oh-- I knew your brother from shared classroom. 

Embarrassment.  What is your name?  If only

We were young and could go at it again. 

Hope might spring up in the form of forgotten 

Betrayal (whose trace endures doggedly). 

Let it fade … replaced with you and me ablaze. 

Instead we kissed until I turned away. 

WITH THIS BEATING HEART /  H.T. Reynolds

tender beneath her teeth,

these minor moments

chambered & dislodged

like a grease fire

becoming aware,

choosing not to destroy

what frightens me

but don’t tell me

what I’m not—

this heart’s

heavy burden

Until the Street Lights Come on /  Gabriel Phillips

Dad showed me a bicycle

that had chased a cat into the tree.

He threw rocks at it until dinner

then we ate the tree.

Last I saw, the bike was skeptical

but didn’t rust. Since it didn’t rain.

I studied broken bicycles against

the tree’s permission. It wanted longer

pedals on shorter bicycles. It didn’t

want sap to erupt. The garage

had closed for winter. Rubber

was not on sale. So I promised

the dirty bicycle, that if he leaves

he will never be clean.

My father threw me at the bicycle,

one final time.

He visits me the last of every winter

and checks for signs of rust.