January - Poem 3
At the end of the lane, a house with staining carpets / Haley Bosse
At the carving fork’s furthest tip,
The graveyard where my sister shattered stone,
The borders of letters long softened
Into a face tucked away from fall rains
And gazing down into the fairy circle
Thumping stone by stone
From our palms into the moss,
Small weights sifted from the dust
At the edge of the nearby field,
Plucked from the ever-crowning Earth
And piled by whoever tended the wheat
Shushing as we layered upward,
Ring becoming clicking fence
And then a leaning wall,
Any calls back for dinner muffled
With the fading light
Weaving through the Old Man’s Beard,
The drooping arms of oaks brushing sweaty hair,
My sister’s arms cast out to catch the stone
Between them as she fell,
The snap and scrape of one more body
Throwing shadows through the shade.
resolution / Jess Bowe
out the window, the backyard is barely breathing.
i wonder whether i am looking out or looking in
the mirror between us.
she yawns in the darkened morning
and stretches her pale face against
the sky. i stretch thin
and flat against the night.
across the hall
i see you in memory, your small body
hollowed with song. it’s been years
since you saved me
from the frostbite of winter,
kept my heart warm and rhythmic.
across the hall, i see you,
handfuls of tears, a fear so high
i wonder what you might look like
behind its walls as you
stand there in front of me.
as close to death as she appears,
a mother’s silence has a sound,
a primal birthing-place of what eventually
crescendos through the orchestra green.
i am a mother
in the quietest places,
a daughter adopting the patterns
of Her seasons.
she taps her cold fingers
on the walls of my room, to say:
we wear teeth, even in the snow,
a necessary danger born
of unquestionable love.
Tanka as Dream Sequence / Joanna Lee
Up at Dad’s
Up at Dad’s, the deer
curl heavy into daylight,
their white plumes bright flags
to break his long loneliness
into tolerable waves.
Three snows come and gone
before an old year passes
leaving its sharp breath
etched in echoes of regret,
cold hands reaching for cold stars
Leaffall of decades
lingers in the woods’ hollows
collarbone-deep like
swimming holes for winter fear,
cannonballed oblivions
Not the same, you say,
this season, its bright baubles
that hum and lie flat
since your chest rises even,
and dying feels further off.
Still
My hand holds heavy
to yours in the hospital
elevator, sinks
like gravity each checkup,
each new smirk of a season
God’s laughing, maybe
into the wind that howls round
the parking garage
outside the cancer center—
it is always colder there.
We take the long way,
valley road by the old tracks,
the way you don’t like
me to drive at night alone,
where I pretend fearlessness.
Reprieve
Methodical plunge
blunt knife into midwinter
red flesh excisions
then tie stems with summer tongues,
make cherry margaritas
Home again
Yard sleeps, unlovely
and hard in its winter coat,
still-thorned roses climb
past the windows, penciling
there is no escape from rest.
The white lights you strung
and taught to shine through the night
flicker a welcome
against the cold long darkness
of a city rigid shut
It’s the same, I say,
the loneliness, the cold star
reaching back across
bent midnights to find heartbeats—
to find us, in the moonlight.
Later
Neighbor’s porch chimes fall
into stillness as you sleep
with untroubled breath;
wind has died just a little—
silent prayer of gratitude
Dr. Pepper Shot Tips / Thomas Page
It takes about a month to fill one bottle—
one empty bottle—of Dr. Pepper with shot
tips. I have to be careful not to pierce
a hypodermic needle through my fingers
as I juggle the alcoholic prep pads
to moisten the germs from your skin.
Every so often, I do puncture
the skin I inherited from your side
of the family—pink and white and freckled—
skin I have to keep shrouded in cotton
and wool; skin labeled “rice paper”
by the makeup company; skin possibly
sold in stores under the label “bruised peaches”
or possibly “plum flesh; too ripe to eat;”
skin that my mother slathered in spf
one hundred because of your time
in the ultraviolet rays; the skin I lived
in when I impersonated your mannerisms
when I played the dad in The Pajama
Game when my mother pointed out
who exactly I was pretending to be.
LOVE / Sarah Paley
Blindfolded, we know the way. We’re familiar with the shifting
landscape. Our well-worn boots know those overgrown roots –
there just to trip us up. We know the streams with their sudden
drop-offs, slippery rocks, and, of course, we know where the quicksand lies.
We know who lives where and how to find them and there they’ll always be –
at the kitchen table, dancing in the bar, sleeping in the den, hiding up that tree.
The one we climbed together and where I knew you’d never leave.
We didn’t know the steady breeze would turn into a gust and blow away
the permanent, the for-granted and the dear. So much for popping
by for a drink, to shoot the shit, to play canasta, to roast a chicken, to tell a joke,
to sing that song, to tell what only you would get or to remind you of the time…
Intern at LoveMoney Clothing / Amy Snodgrass
for Tyreik Prentice
Because money follows love, the website says.
Not because you’re supposed to love money, right?
I told you about the salmon in Alaska.
You were mad I was gone. Remember?
You are so full of love in a world so full
of frantic upstream flipping and frenetic
addict flailing. The salmon. They flap and flip
like the hands of the man on the corner:
just as red, scales and scabs, desperate,
not knowing they are about to die,
both knowing they are about to die.
The man’s name is Chester, you tell me.
“Chester,” you say, “You come on in, old man,
and you eat. Eat for free. Eat because I love you.”
You hold his hands inside yours and they still.
My heart son, please, when everyone—
like the almost-dead— pale blood-red— salmon
like the crack-fueled shaking— death of nature’s making
—when everyone is all on about the money
stop—
hold the fiending until it stills into love
—hold the love — hold it to heal
the obsessive money-fueled drive to death—
