April - Poem 15

The Bridge  contd/ Maureen Alsop

In the grass, the sun a beleaguered invocation—
Blank sun virtual sun simulated flame
Crude sun
Erudite sun
Native sun
Static sun
Since brightness. Your body is live.

Baedeker sun
Bastard sun
Another sez so sun
Then there is the blind wayward sun

When Did Old Age Arrive  / Bob Bradshaw

  Old age shuffles into my life
    with wide box shoes.
        

    Large print books 
    more and more arrive 
    from the library.  
           

    I thought losing my youth
    would be okay.  
    But here I am,
    mysterious bruises
    on my hands.
    I bruise as easily
    as I once flirted,
    as if it came
    naturally.


    And my hair?
    It's like a white powder wig
    Mozart would wear
    —and Ben Franklin
    before he chucked his.
    

    Oh, if only I could discard
    old age as easily 
    as Ben dispatched
    his white hair!


    Shouldn’t I have been warned
    of old age’s approach?
    Where was the alert
    in big fonts on my laptop?
    

    Who will address 
    this egregious, 
    this unforgivable error?
    Who will fix this problem
    of old age? Who
    will make things
    right again?

Cats Online / Stan Galloway

Why is half my Insta feed composed of cats?
Cats climbing
                             jumping
slapping
                             tunneling
                                            pin          ball
                                                                ing
opening doors
investigating paper bags
impersonating owners’ voices
or giving form to AI witchery
     singing on American Idol
     making pizza
                  pancakes
                  pierogies
Whatever happened to the cat
                                            who ventured
                                            from the deck
                                            into 90 centimeters
                                            of snow?
At least                 online
I have no mess to clean.

Infidel / Ava Hu

*

Infidel, my heretic,
beautiful bleeding

canyon, your hands,
gloss of blackbirds,

your hands, the lean
of saguaro,

the pink disappearing
Flower Moon,

collision, violet mountains,
the light changes so quickly

it’s hard to hold
the language

of birds
come morning.

*

mapping a brown eared bat in Tom’s Cave   / Kirsten Miles

the mouth of a cave is a gangly invitation
for the limbs of an undomesticated girl
skin, muscle, and knobby knees undaunted
by bruise or scrape 

three lamps lit the little limestone 
pocket that summer, together a traverse 
to a crawlspace, a lake of liquid 
mud on the other side, two explore

she waits with lamp and notebook, 
alone but for a small brown bat
a hanging knot of fur
and muscle, frosted in cave-dew
each droplet sparkling in the flame
an hour of spare carbide
ligh snuffed for the return

she gives the silence an hour
trades her eyes for the weight of dark
internal machinery, left without a task
begins to sing to itself in the dark

silence here is not empty
a crowd roars, waves break
press against her eardrums
strain to hear companions 
the lap of a muddy lake

fingertips on damp rock
hard ridge against her spine
more tangible than still air 
the bat and girl small cargo
of this windless ship of stone
yearning for the compass
of a breeze

her lamp a stored reserve
promise in the inky dark 
touch now an illusory sense
listens with her skin
kindles her inner light

At The Grave During War   / Sergiy Pustogarov

Remember the names of Palestinians killed in the conflict. 

a mother

knelt at her son’s 
grave
two hours after 
the dirt 
was shoveled 
over his remains.

his thin arms and legs
had been 
too mangled 
to even 
hold a viewing.
the family 
forced to 
mourn without 
a final kiss 
goodbye.

the wooden sign 
stood there 
with the words etched into it 
with a burning torch
already desecrated.

10 year old boy
Ahed Bakr.

shrapnel still 
burning down 
even the war
never kept enough time
to say goodbye.
war never cared 
for the process we call grief.
the fury of destruction 
never said a mother could mourn. 
next to this grave 
lies another 
grave dug.

destroyed before it 
could even be filled.

another life 
doesn’t even        
have a place to rest
after all this fighting. 

Flight of the Mack Trucks / Daniel Avery Weiss

Spring emerges with seven trucks
trundling on the riverbank.
Almost named,
they spit rubber into pot
holes and bump their grim beat, 
bouncing, their dumb
founding, smoking parade exquisitely between.

Scores of water
logged trees, entirely
stumped at the rhythm pulsing
in their legs, consider the steel boxes
twisting onward nearby.

The Des Plaines,
flooded,
shivers as they pass.

closure / MK Zariel

i googled you and saw nothing but a little
bad design and a healthy dose of LinkedIn grifting,
somehow meeting expectations when the bar is at the core of the earth.
the air feels thicker now, pressing down like futurity—the trees wilt low
embracing the ground you used to walk on—and i reread your goodbye note
watching you carve a caricature for yourself, a creature made of
anxieties and things discarded. you try to tell me that

you just aren't that into me, and for some reason
you think i need to hear your critique of egoist anarchism instead.
i don't. i walk through the monoculture of your mind, the impeccable
groomed lawns, the wildflowers trimmed down—my house of stone, your ivy grows
and now i'm covered in you croons a mixtape—and nothing could be further
from who you were. why grow when you could stay conveniently small,
you'd say, asking me to do the same. i googled you

and saw prose that may as well have been written
by the large language model you call your brain,
and saw repression congealing around one all-important image
and saw earth waiting to crack open,
to bloom, to burn.