April - Poem 10

The Bridge / Maureen Alsop

PAX it stands in my mind. I call her back.

Reenact the day

But you can mitigate the spirit only so many times

Attack Of The Giant Ants   / Bob Bradshaw

    I skidded to a stop, mere feet
    from THEM!

    —monstrous rust
    colored ants swarming 
    in the middle
    of the road. 

    I couldn’t
    see anything, the things 
    crawling over my car, 
    my hood, peering
    into my windshield
    with huge, fiery red
    compound 
    eyes.

    A huge hiss!
    They’d punctured

    my left front tire
    with their huge jaws!

    Far ahead helicopters
    were circling a brute,
    its antennae
    waving angrily.

    I turned the radio on. 
   “Everything is normal.
    There were reports
    of giant ants,
    but the reports 
    proved false.

    There is no need 
    for concern. 
    If things change,
    the public 
    will be notified. The pregame

    for tonight’s Dodgers game
    will return shortly.”

Menelaus Upon Missing Helen / Stan Galloway

Did I not know:
not with the mind
no words or tones betrayed her –
instead, in my very liver
dread that precedes any utterance
her need to bathe
               to travel
               to sleep apart
live life in pieces of her own
spend time on her own diversions
all the things she tired of sharing with me
Flirtatious looks abounded
Then the words:
You’ve got to let me see
where this thing with Paris goes.

And now she’s out to sea
thinking all life’s eddies will be smooth
that oars dipped in the water
leave no pain
that unspoken promises can’t simply drop behind
not seeing there the seeds of fire and sword.

Ark / Ava Hu

*

We vanish 
under waves.

Salt on the skin.
The earth swallows you.

The marrow of cypress
reddens the water.

Lamentation, the bending
of boughs.

Have we lost favor 
with the gods?

Plant, wind,
body and bone.

The moon crashes 
into the earth.

Salt enters
the lungs.

Is there still time 
to build an ark?

*

Twin Hazelnut trees   / Kirsten Miles

leak leaf-light through
a century of rain 
crowns splayed and wide under
light of the sky’s blue weight
roots explore an architecture of dark
seasons moss a language of limbs.

Stellar’s Jay’s perch—that blue spark of noise—
all sapphire and arrogance
chickaree darts a jagged thread
through latticed branches
deer fold themselves into our shadow
noses damp against the mulch 
breath rising like a slow, white prayer

and they who stand— arms stretched high
where the sun breaks into coins
think to name the way we endure.
a story  in the branches
reaching out to touch the wind
the work we do in secret
the ancient braid of wood on wood
the two of us, tangled at the bone 
in the quiet geometry below—

how two people, a century gone, once stood
with mud-stained palms and a single bucket,
turning the soil until it tasted like a promise.
planted us side by side 
now  gone names softened by moss
the compass points of a life
tucked our feet into 
this dark pocket of the earth.
now a single knotted pulse

The Barbell  / Sergiy Pustogarov

man and woman in the gym.
girl straightens her hair in the mirror.
man flexes his biceps.

the man laughs with his girl,
plotting their next move.
then reaches around her front 
to tussle the hair,
she had just laid down.
he smiles.
returns to the bench.

the girl turns around to say 
i hate you.
i read the lips because 
i can’t hear.
no other words were legible
during these deaf moments
in the gym on a monday night.

they turned back to the benches, 
smiling.

i said 
i hate you 
to the barbell 
just to return and smile.

i looked in my own mirror 
and told the demon next to me,
i hate you 
just to smile again.

auto-destructive asphyxiation / nat raum

cw: BDSM/kink

a hoe phase would break me and heal me 
all over again, emphasis on the fission, but i think

i’m oversimplifying it. i wouldn’t have envied

myself in past timelines, peeling off a black oxford
in the understated amber streetlight streaming

through a mt. vernon window frame—back then

my body didn’t belong to me, but the night 
and the bottle and the hand around my throat. 

i’d say i could be the same shell of myself, but i am 

one already, just a different flavor. i have gone
so long without touch that i bristle at the thought.

i know which thumb i want to trace my trachea—

that’s the problem. i never draw blood from the hand
that sustains me. i just want to choose the hand.

Parco / Daniel Avery Weiss

Graffiti in its homeland,
swaddling the aqueducts,
cooing lullabies to the great
dead snake. Porco


dio, it whispers. Porco dio—e
vaffanculo, Meloni. On the other side,
umbrella gyrates slow across
the pasture, interrupted by slippages of


collapsing Roman tufa.
Down, down, down, they must have
thought—we all go
down in history, rust or

ballad kill us. 

I need you to at least pretend you’re helpful / MK Zariel

I say out loud to a computer while running on
six hours of sleep and no hours of rest,
after the crushing realization that finals week lasts approximately
ten weeks. i still don’t know how to feel sane
nor is that a standard to aspire to, or so

a very earnest work of theory says. i melt down and call it liberation.
i look into my todo list like a collage—a planning thread full
of difficult personalities, a shame circle, a harrowing truth,
a heart-to-brain-to-deflated-heart for people with more
commitments than named feelings. i need you to at least

pretend you care, i say to most institutions, knowing full well
that they won’t. in a way it’s easier when structures
are abhorrent enough to almost penetrate
the glassy-eyed sheen of assimilation—i wish i could take comfort
in knowing that even normal people see this as a problem. i can’t.
i still pretend i’m helpful.
i need you.