August - Poem 2
MVP / Zoe Berger
The need to party is stupid and constant. Your brain on drugs. In some neurological sleight of hand I convince myself I’m the world’s Most Vulnerable Person and commit to becoming worse. Night slides dark into dark. Hell bends to me. I am crying in the Ferrari. Better than in the Honda. See? I am worse. Twisting my own arm.
Fire Season / Ashley Howell
Some days I can see the sky
and the mountains no longer
haunt the city–ghost and gray.
Some days the smoke clears
enough to forget about
the end of the world.
I’ve been racing up the hill
toward sundown in the
summer mornings.
I remember 19 and Rome
with hot concrete, cigarette
smoke, and good espresso.
Tonight we made love in the
hot air and then ate lemon pie
straight out of the tin.
Only forks and tongues
licking the remainder like
a dog licks a wound.
Blood Fruit / Dahhee Chung
The old pomegranate tree cascading
Teardrops of elliptical green,
Adorned with red bulbous fruit,
It’s arms sign in ASL
“When did the magic disappear?”
Emote from the breeze,
Until it settles into a memory of red rubies glistening 16 miniature skies
Infinite reflections off the faces of it’s sacred geometry,
Popped them between my tongue and the roof of my mouth,
Fed one by one,
absorbing potions,
Casting flying spells,
Spitting out the little tooth from each jewel,
Delicately plucking each spell into my mouth
So as not to stain my nails.
Except now,
They faintly allude to the blood of my first kernel.
Was it when I first saw my dad bite into it like a fruit?
A mad man with blood trickling down his cheek to stain his white linen shirt,
Not any fucks given as to who will mumble rebukes while scrubbing it raw with dawn soap,
As he demonstrates,
“This is how you eat a pomegranate!”
Biting down on it’s rindless partitions
Like it is just a delicious red,
Spitting out the bitter remains of the hide that even the white crowned sparrows hesitate
Plucking hollow,
Hallowed by its name,
The life from
It’s pericarp.
Conch / Alison Henderson
He'd never seen the man
with the conch before.
Every morning
he'd walk his dog along the shore,
stuffing bits of trash
into his jeans pockets.
He lived in a green bungalow on a cliff
above the bay.
Behind,
winding backroads
reaching toward the redwoods.
I was drinking Pacificos by a fire
with some guys up from the city
when he came up to me,
dog nosing the wrack line.
The town fire marshal
took me home to make grilled cheese.
There was wine and fire.
Thick sourdough.
He did not know
I was homeless.
He did not see
my fingernails.
He told me about the man with the conch.
Said he'd lived there twenty years
and never seen him,
but that week he’d come twice.
We slept in a loft with no door
under white muslin.
His skin smelled of wood smoke.
His eyes stayed shut
while we whispered in the dark.
I would not let him
open mine.
The sun, almost round again,
I watched the fishing boats
from his balcony,
the dog's head heavy on my lap.
The sea spoke back.
And it did—
when the conch
broke through the fog.
Sonnenizio after a line from Terrance Hayes / Ash Kemp
It is not enough to love you,
to want you, destroyed, your existence so separate,
Yet tangled in mine. Again I tell you,
It is not enough, your pain brings me pleasure,
And I want all your selves to hurt me in kind.
Mutual destruction our inevitable end,
You claim you never want to hurt me,
Frequently, you handle me with
Worn satin gloves, while I, without your love,
Never would have been destroyed.
Your mask of a gentle nature slips,
Revealing bruising in the shape of your hands on my hips.
Hips that held my weight and yours,
Wishing to rewind time and take back our hours.
Out of Focus / Hannah Page
If it isn’t the little things, the camera
settles on the certainty of
beauty rather than the beauty
of potential: the fully blooming
jasmine (its ethereal
scent hovering
hot and hazy overhead), the rust-
laden swing set backlit against a rust-
orange sunset. The man behind
the lens cannot keep liminality
in focus: the perilous gaps in
between cumulus clouds, the budding
weed-flowers in the cracks between
sidewalk concrete – audacious
in acid greenery. Instead of clear
focus his lens renders
smears of color, impressions
on glossy canvas.
Stacks on Stacks / PF Potvin
One morning she awoke on the couch to the dog prancing and sniffing circles in the air. At first she thought he was ghostchasing. Then she focused past the fur out the kitchen doorwall where her partner crouched on a concrete slab that once contained a kennel. The screen door on the ceramic hearth, the kind you might spy indoors in AZ or Cali, the sexy kind like a perfume flacon or hobbit potion decanter, stood ajar, its belly blazing crackle. She rose, ushered the dog out, and approached the ceremony with arms crossed. "What's all this then?” But he didn't turn, just kept feeding. "They're always demanding more money. I already gave, but they keep sending letters." She thought about the shredders she’d bought in his office and his stacks on stacks on stacks of papers. She shook her head and waved the dog back inside to find something for breakfast that hadn't yet expired.
On the occasion of contemplating Elk in Benezette / Janette Schafer
On an unmarked gravel road,
follow the mist, drive slowly.
Let your headlights be two
gleaming eyes. Remember when
two Seneca lovers found each other.
God carved for each a flute
that sang like the piercing
autumn call of the bull elk—
amorous medicine to woo across
the hills into the valley below.
Remember how the song carried through
Appalachian thickets, notes heavy enough
to be heard. God pulled his ivory teeth,
sewed them into the maiden lover’s dress.
It let her move with stealth through
the forest, her large body, brown as wet bark.
In this form she could leap to her beloved,
her legs cutting through the Pennsylvania Wilds
like a sharp sickle through so much wheat.
ORCHARD / Kate Thuma
I didn’t know
there was an orchard inside me.
My hair braids into snakes
that firmly hold every curious apple
like new rabbits they want to terrify
before killing,
to tenderize the meat.
So the fruit goes unpicked,
the harvest falling anyway,
and deer get drunk
on the softest, sharpest version
of what would have been
something sweet and ready
and knowing.
