November - Poem 3

Frank’s American Childhood / David Hadbawnik

The astonishing depth of despair that emanates from Frank’s American Childhood. Making a sound like Popeye the Sailor – “Ack-ack-ack-ack-ack” – mouth open, showing toothless gums, flapping a tiny red tongue. Utterly inconsolable. Completely out of reach. The father carrying Frank’s American Childhood around, singing, shushing – a vigorous “Shhh!” elicits a startled glance – and then, for seemingly no reason, Frank’s American Childhood goes eerily quiet

*

The parents of Frank’s American Childhood become connoisseurs of shit. Listening closely for the explosive squirting sound, which is sometimes pushed out with a taut look of concentration. Then, they check the diaper: What color is it? Dark green, at first. They are delighted when it changes to yellow – sticky, gooey, smeared up the back of Frank’s American Childhood. The astonishing shit that gushes out, defiling the diaper but somehow leaving the flesh perfectly pink and clean

*

Picking squished blueberries out of a bowl, throwing them into the trash, dropping the good ones back into the carton. One hadn’t thought of individual blueberries before. In a way, this job would be better done by a person lacking sight, each berry needing to be fondled individually, rolled around between thumb and finger, to sense whether the skin of the berry is broken, the juice torn out. How obscene they are, raw and needy and somehow not unlike Frank’s American Childhood, little eyeballs rolling around in the hand, the crusty, puckered part where they’d been plucked at the stem

untitled / Alexander Shalom Joseph

he tells me
I’ve got some serious guts
trying to follow my dreams
that he had dreams once
but he put them down
like an old dog
and went to work instead
and yes it is about guts I guess
to do what one is called to do
but isn’t it harder
to wake up every morning
and kill the calling
drown it in too much coffee
and traffic and desk work
and then beer come night
I’ve done it too
I’ve worked long hours
at something I hated
ignored that fluttering truth
there just below my heart
that sings forever
telling of purpose and place
somehow we have been told
that this is not worth listening to
that this is just some splinter
of a fantasy lodged there
instead of our very spirit
sometimes I doubt it still
but I remember the day
I quit my day job
and drove home slow
in the middle of the morning
everything suddenly felt
bright and alive
and my bills felt enormous
but so too did my potential
I sat down and wrote a poem
and it was perfect
and terrible and terrifying
and everything
my friend who says he is unhappy
with his life and choices
but who refuses to change
tells me that it takes guts
to choose to follow my dreams
and it does but isn’t it harder
to kill them day after day
is doesn’t take much
to wake up
and step outside
and listen to the birds
it is easy actually
it is what we were meant to do

Chicken, Dickinson / Sally Kuzuma

I wipe my chin, greased as usual

by what I take in– last night's 

fine chicken dinner dressed in plum, apricot, olive.

Reading, eating– it all becomes us 

in one way or another, colors 

what we put out in our name. 

I think of Dickinson’s kitchen and wonder 

if there was ever an unforgettable meal

that muscled its way into a poem

the way the one I just had is doing now.

But I see no chicken in her poems, hardly any meals at all 

save for an eagle’s golden breakfast, aka victory,
a feast she notes is unreachable for smaller birds.

Eat is close to crumbs, close to starve.

What she eats is next to nothing—

God gave a loaf to every bird,

But just a crumb to me;

I dare not eat it, though I starve…

having is just enough.

Miss Grim / Rachel Lee

They drop down on me when I'm coming

Trying to catch my breath after doing all this runnin

Wishin one day I'll control the rain and be full on an empty stomach

Plummet!

Smash!

Damn we're here at last

Crowns on, Nose up

Yeah, we're here at last

Newsflash!

Miss Grim is so radical

Feast on artificial hearts to prove we're compatible

Keep your life in the dark

It's so intangible 

Now you know need an overdue sabbatical

Same face, new name, same soul, end game

Call of the Wild / Lincoln McElwee

I wanted it to be a better home and garden, an apartment balcony worthy of a glossy two-page spread. I wanted it to be a Pinterest like, a match made in mood board heaven. I wanted it to be a refuge against the seasons, summer’s shaded balm, winter’s cozy armament. But the wrought iron patio furniture is rusting now, its tetanus smile easy in the edgy Autumn light. The hummingbird feeder lies in a tangled mess, faded orange spindles like macrame spiderwebs. And what does the birch leave after its winded shaking? Nutlets and catkins dressing the concrete, serrated yellow leaves pooling like a Guinness feat. The carpet, after rains and snow, moldy and moss-ridden, beholden to the wild wonders of each season. I often hear in the silent hours of night the shrill, small chirps of living things. They seek refuge in the broken pots emptied of their tulip bulbs, the perennials parched beyond the pale, the plastic turquoise containers lined with dead aphids and spiderwebs. Abandonment so total that it’s an ownership, the wild reclaiming its own. And then I spot the neighbors’ balconies. So clean, so pristine. For a moment, I’m eaten alive by embarrassment. I think, today will be the day, today I will reclaim what is mine. But something about the cleanliness also gnaws at me. And so the spiderwebs lace the broom and the dustpan still, their fearless geometry calling to some fractal unraveling within me. Like the moss, my mind’s its own. And so I let the wild things be. 

Fists  / Michelle Stoll

What more can I say

about fists

that a bruise has not

already said?

A well placed knuckle

goes deeper, purples longer

What can I say

about fists 

that Want has not 

already told me?

All five fingers clinched

withhold what's needed most

Make a fist

Now relax

Make a fist

Now relax

There's a good vein

Raised fist 

Fist fight

Pounding on the pulpit fist

Iron fist

Fist bump

It's all good

lemon stand at sirmione  / Sandra Tan

lemons so large they could be

footballs for children. 

the salt air and sight of the lake

make them yellow. lake garda,

lady with a blue headscarf, 

red-and-white striped sailboats

on her ears. crossing the lake

an act of faith. men onboard

raising hands to eyes in the

white glitter, scattered sand

baked to silica. cool of the chapel.

on a hill, shaded by olive trees.

cool, arched doorway on which

I place my hand, saying water.

November - Poem 2

Answering Phones at the Library  / Michelle Frost

He asked to be deleted    "I'm moving away"

     soft-spoken    polite    continuing on

        ribbon unfurling from its literary spool

            mentions of Seamus and Boorstin

                poets and journalists he reveres

Tom Brokaw and  Jane Pauley   "Our Greatest Generation"

 "The best memoir is couched in fiction...

            "Take Salinger's Catcher in the Rye   75 million sold says something!"

                    "Take Jeanette Walls' Glass Castle... as Marlon Brando would say,

                            'There's a Jeanette Walls in You, Too!' "

Continuing on, "Speak your Truth!...

       "Look how that worked out for J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter!"

Sharing favorites is love, too, and knowledge a trove

    Research and books    History and fame    Treasured

        A phone call between two strangers speaking  passionately

            one moment in common    finally,  "Thank you... Goodbye"

                    How bittersweet to hang up in the end    and to click 'delete'

Balance / David Hadbawnik

Trying to fix this

and yet he can’t, the balance

is not there, close

both eyes and fold one

leg behind the other

and stand there, feeling it,

only to fall to one

side or the other, a tender

breathing that loosens

the spine on its way

back to zero, the shortest path

between two points is always

to wobble and keep count

starting from there, the eyes

closing and opening to let

go of themselves seeing and

being seen

untitled / Alexander Shalom Joseph

the 

structure

is 

how 

I

survived 

waking to 

wild days

was nearly 

too much 

for me 

and so 

I broke 

it up

took the morning 

minute by minute 

waking and tending 

to basic needs  

then meditation for

twenty five minutes 

then I write

for an hour 

then I do

a work out 

then there’s breakfast

I do this 

ever single day 

and by nine am

I feel somewhat alive

and maybe even safe

thanks to how I

caged the days with

these same rigid routines

but 

  this morning 

       you

 in 

the soft light 

              your eyes on mine

just when I wake

all structure 

             falls away

into 

        your

  sleepwarm arms 

Burden, Thoreau / Sally Kuzma

What burdens in those journals of his?

Answers vary…

Sound– the wood’s whisper, barely audible– 

burdens the breeze along the cliffs.

Love, as epithalamium, hymeneal– 

the nuptial, marital, mating sort–

is the burden of bird song, flower song– 

in air, water, woods, deep down 

into the bowels of the earth.

Sin is a burden too, the weight– 

the Newtonian gravity– of being human

which can be countered by the buoyancy of virtue.

Devoted worshippers of beauty, he says,

who find music in the storm (albeit in a minor key)

and allow themselves to be watered, like beanfields, by rain

bear burdens more easily than the rest of us.

It’s what our boat carries– our physical bulk, 

the freight of what we need to subsist.

It’s what the breasts of common men release

when they cannot keep themselves from talking.

Lightning Strikes / Rachel Lee

Everyone knows his name

His ginger fur

Distinguished fame

The phone rang and rang

Lost and found

He’s at the pound

A premeditated game

No one to blame

Sculptures, paintings, poems

His collar, pictures, small totems

When lightning strikes the ground

And thunder rolls east

I think of my canine beast

He never pulled the leash

So I let him loose

This is my fragmented memory of Zeus

Outside My Living Room Window / Lincoln McElwee

Just last week, outside my living room window, a lone branch of yellow leaves was pure spotlight against the chalky white of birch bark and green leaves. Stressed trees gossiped about leaf drop and loud children, the lawnmower and the leaf blower. A grandmother, ready to leave, struggled with a child on the playground. She looked around, as if asking for help, but there were only the aphids, the woodchips, the leaves, the shedding paper birch trees. She kept pointing to her right, to somewhere out of sight, until, finally, she grabbed the kid and sat down in a patch of sunlight. The kid played with the playground woodchips, throwing them so hard that they landed on him instead. An airplane hummed overhead. The grandmother’s bright yellow sandals baked in the sun. Then they walked uphill, away from my apartment building, but the kid ran back to the patch of sunlight, and the yellow sandals beamed through the aphids, the leaves, the trees. Now the yellow leaves are shriveled up and brown on the ground. Now the rain pelts the earth like punishment. Now the trees gossip about the tall maple near the playground that uprooted in the rain, leaving a mud bath in its wake. Now the aphids are dead or dying. Now the days feel like a broken sandal strap, the absence of yellow, woodchips wailing for the life they once knew.

Becoming a Morning Person  / Michelle Stoll

Because the birds 

are easier to hear

before traffic picks up 

Because by 7 a.m. my limbic system

is off to the races 

I forget who I am

Because turning my ship around 

takes longer now

more effort and energy

Because I want a little thing

an hour

that's mine

The geese -- 

I would have missed them

     We know where we're going

     -- do you?

chin chow (清草)  / Sandra Tan

a jelly-like dessert made by boiling the stalks and leaves of the Chinese mesona with potassium carbonate and starch, served chilled.

when I slide the dark jelly out

from its porcelain bowl,

its gentle, tumbling form

exudes a coolness one feels

without touching.

my carton of milk, left on

the top shelf, has grown

a skim of fine slush, curdled drops.

I mix both, cleave large chunks 

with a spoon as though 

there were no end to fullness.

carry these soft-bodied beings

that slip over the rim’s curve

into the mouth, the way 

a retriever grips a bird.

to give grace to sundown.

pour milk into the night.

November - Poem 1

untitled  / Michelle Frost

Flouncy blow these flimsy limbs

Today's fresh Autumn breeze 

Arizona sunlight dims

Refreshed are desert trees

November swings in Merrily

New pumpkins scary   Bold

The Poet dreams of Autumns past

Poems squirreled away   such Gold

Oliver's Geese   Frost's Road

Stafford's Yes   and

Every bird I've ever known

  whistling my name   calling me home

Frank’s American Childhood / David Hadbawnik

Evening, sun already down, sky a dirty gray as streetlights wink on. Yet there are two men still at work in the bare bones of a building down the street, one of them climbing a ladder to reach something high on the roofless inside wall on the top floor five stories up, while the other man stands close by to pass him things, and hold the ladder, their dim outlines visible against the darkening sky of Frank’s American Childhood

*

There’s a worker mopping the floor in the lobby of Frank’s American Childhood before 7am on a Wednesday morning. He sets the bucket of water against the wall in the rear of the lobby, across from the reception desk, and steps forward with the mop to the glass front of Frank’s American Childhood, where he begins mopping back and forth, back and forth. Within a few strides the mop has lost its frothy wetness and swipes over the floor like a damp rag, leaving only the barest sheen of moisture on the tiles. The man squeezes between a sofa and coffee table as he backs his way towards the reception desk, flinging the mop head a little ways under the sofa and table without moving either

*

At bedtime, Frank’s American Childhood wakes up in its mother’s belly like popping bubbles, she says, and she looks up this phenomenon on her phone, and finds it, and the father of Frank’s American Childhood tries to feel it too, but cannot, and both of them hope Frank’s American Childhood is all right but don’t want to jinx it by saying anything, so instead roll over and go back to sleep

untitled / Alexander Shalom Joseph. / Alexander Shalom Joseph

when I was twenty years old
and hungry and bright
I sent a book of bad poems to tupelo press
and thought I would be famous

a few months later in the morning light
I woke and opened my phone
to find an email there
the results of the competition
I was set to with
that would tumble me to stardom
showed I was not in fact
a winner at all
not a star or even a comet
but just another bit of the darkness

they say doing
the same thing over and over
expecting different results
is the definition of madness
actually the definition of madness
according to a quick google
is being mentally deranged
either way art making is madness
and so is life

we all do things over and over
but in art we find miracles
the artist alchemizes
the deranged belief
stirs it, burns it, smokes it
smiles
and thinks it may end up differently

today is the first of thirty poems
that I will write for tupelo press
having been mad for a decade
the repeated pattern has now
yielded different results

Abscission, in Thoreau / Sally Kuzuma

Though he had a scientific bent 

I don’t expect to find this botanical term 

for the way an organism can drop parts of itself

so I search instead for what is falling…

I search his Excursions.

First I find water, then weather:

river water jarring rocks

roaring and surging over a small

slippery wooden bridge somewhere in Quebec—

then strangely pausing in its course

to let a man pass

and snow outside the deserted hut of a woodsman–
the snow Thoreau imagines as he reconstructs 

in words another loner’s life in the woods 

on a stormy winter evening,

pipe bowl in the embers.

Closer to abscission is the sound of pignuts dropping,

their fall hastened by the work of a chickaree–

a kind of squirrel– whose scampering is audible

because of another abscission

that laid a rustling leaf-carpet underfoot.

He thoughtfully reminds us that one falling leaf

does not an autumn make; it takes a concerted

windfall in October when sugar maples in their glory

fire up and then let loose 

their rich yellows, deep scarlets,

their unexpectedly bright and delicate tints.

And sometimes, he notes, the ones who blush deepest

are the last to let go.

untitled / Rachel Lee

I’ve become accustomed to the brain damage from the loneliness and regrets 

I can see the paint pealing

Pause for the special effects

I'm blessed

Possessed

Diseased and obsessed

The Floor is falling

Catch me in the act

Too afraid to interract 

Whispered words are hacked

Distract

My bags are packed

Run until my feet turn black

Blowing smoke rings

Distracted by False dreams

Sewn up by the seams

Keep me distracted by shiny things

On Tree Frogs and Morning Coffee / Lincoln McElwee

I want a slender branch to know the whole of me, a leaf to hold my weight. I want to point with my claw-shaped bones and climb, climb, climb. Would you enter the arboreal to find me? Would you croak too at my call? What does it mean to be treeless? To hide from fish, to fear freshness? And how do I explain the moth’s taste? The dusty sweetness, the thin bite of a life held to the light. How many ants have you eaten? The hummingbird feeder crawling with chitin. What of the low earth do you crave? And what is the odor of a sunrise? Lately, it’s fully washed, sweet and citrusy. It’s pumpkin, cinnamon, allspice, orange zest. It’s the waking remnants of strawberry bedtime gummies that have never helped me sleep. And what does a tree frog do with the ability to change its color? Would I be as chameleon-like in life if my skin could corral its melatonin? Would I ignore the dangers around me, the cat, the hawk, the skunk? Would I explore the holey hollows of other trees? Would I be content, even here, on this moss-ridden balcony? Let me be a hundred yards from water and thirsting. Let me be lovestruck in a roadside ditch. Let me be pure movement in the marshes. For a moment, O morning, just let me be.

Rapture of Hackberry Leaves  / Michelle Stoll

The racket 
leaves make

(so large I mistook for opossum beneath the Hackberry)

when their golden
bodies leap 

from tops of trees,
twirl between branches

blow kisses 
over shoulders

to lichened bark 
unimpressed bird

to leaves still ahold
(clinging till the end, taking in the show)

The thing they cannot 
keep to themselves

when the ground 
says Welcome home

when they curtsey 
among their kin

(cushioning the fall, spent from gravity's rush)

when the wind tangoes them
as never before on the limb:

...Laughter!
(Again! Again!

after “periphery of speech” (2004) by Hara Mikiko / Sandra Tan

dull yellow cured yolks

cooling on the edge of the sink

in a metal bowl, bathed

in soft, warm light from the kitchen

that whispers late hours,

dinner after the day’s trudge.

when the children are in one place

and the corners of the table 

are filled. who do you imagine

to be waiting for you?

the luscious curve of the metal

sink, flecked with water. 

someone rinsed their hands

a while ago, waiting to prepare

the meal, fluff steaming rice

into little mountains like the ones

you parsed on the train home,

train handles swinging

overhead on rubber leashes

like rows of birds.   

October - Poem 31

Who will step over this Hallowe’en?  / A Cento composed by Kirsten Miles

with line selected and written by Katerina Canyon, Sam Calhoun, Luka Erausquin, Ellen Fergusun, Brett Gastineau, Joy Johnson, Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco, H.T. Reynolds, Gabriel Phillips, and Colin Sturdevant.

Listen—
they are piling up in my throat like unspoken prayers

featherless birds beating their wings
against a cage of ribs  

how the grain curled 
up and off like golden minnows
into the stream of night 

I throw the windows wide,
call into the dark of the Salish Sea
you too watched something without speaking

how the moon sees Jupiter  rising, and decides to set  
hangs like a draw knife,

I never was the kind of being to create light
with my bare hands but I sang it from my ribcage    
and handed it out willingly

your soul served like soup bones
simmering onto paper, blooming
minding its teeth while being sweet  

I don’t want new wars to watch/read/listen to 
I thought I would rather die whole
nightly, I am re-spooled back

an ether, a mouth unknown to itself 
the city settles atop your tongue 

our sorcery showers the galaxy

brooms to the moon, charms to falling stars
that circled a twilight sun to rise with the aurora

even dust once had a name
trees bend down to sing inside of me

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

October - Poem 30

The Witch  / Katerina Canyon

Your green skin is kelp.

One sharp blink
snaps a picture of hunger
and the sharp hours you’ve posted

brooms to the moon,
charms to falling stars
that circled a twilight sun
to rise with the aurora.

We own our hunger
now that you have risen.
Who could stop you?

Our sorcery
showers the galaxy.

Everything is fractured,
and you have sung out of tune
several measures.

But it is the last day of October,
though the dead rise
with empty hands.

Your stomach was full
all of October,
when you shared your
wicked spells,

and I ate them,
and I smiled.

Draw Knife   /  Sam Calhoun

All night by the fire

I could hear the wood

smoothing itself to the flame,  

how the grain curled

up and off like golden minnows

into the stream of night,

how the heartbeat below 

in the pile of embers

never wanted to know, 

how the rain hissed

at every touch, blackened 

as if branding flame, 

how the moon sees Jupiter 

rising, and decides to set.  

hangs like a draw knife,

dew dropping 

in the morning ash 

fogging the valleys,

soot fluttering 

like the edges 

of every winged bird. 

Prometheus   /  at/om

Prometheus took fire
from the gods and
gave it to man, for
this he suffered dearly.
The gods, egotistical as
they tend to be saw the
theft of their power, even
when they gazed over
man and saw that what
Prometheus had truly
given them was warmth. 

I never was a god,
I never was the kind
of being to create light
with my bare hands but
I sang it from my ribcage
and handed it out willingly.
Prometheus gazed on with
pride while I wrote poems,
and told jokes, and sang at
the top of my lungs while the
men who called themselves
gods warms their hands by
my fire until they were
clenched around my heart,
taking its light only for themselves. 

Prometheus, I would give my liver to a thousand seagulls if I could have my fire back. 

Not Nutter Butter...Lorna Doone  /  Ellen Ferguson

Your shapely hips, Nutter Butter, murmur their siren call, yet

something lower belongs to Lorna Doone

not the deepest reach/            near knees, actually --

Crumbs from Lorna Doone cross folded calves, 

Falling from laps, less than tasty — like breadcrumbs almost,

Trails leading ... if only plays were only plays, not plates plating

All of it: doilies like antimacassars for cookies, like armor for fruit.

Parting  /  Brett Gastineau

We were standing by the coat rack in the hallway,
the air between us smelling of wool and onion,
just two bodies that had known each other’s salt
getting ready to step out into the grease of the street.

And I wanted to give you everything—
not just the laundry lists and the burnt toast,
not just the ordinary friction of our skin—
but the poems. The great, thick, bleeding ones
I kept in the drawer of my chest,
the ones I was supposed to write when
the world finally stopped shaking.

Let me sing them now before the door latches!

The poems with the marrow on them,
wet and red and trembling like a newborn calf
lifted from the warm slit of the belly.
The poems I meant to write when I had the time,
when the children were grown and sleeping
in their own beds,
when the rage went out of my hands
and left only the clean, white bone.

Listen—
they are piling up in my throat like unspoken prayers,
featherless birds beating their wings
against a cage of ribs!
The poems about the way your father’s hands looked
when he held the glass of whiskey in the kitchen dark,
the poems about the milk souring in the sun,
the poems about the exact, terrifying shape of love
that stays long after the flesh has turned to ash.

And now—

now—
we are saying goodbye.

We are pressing our mouths together,
tasting the iron, tasting the end.
And the unwritten lines fall down between us
heavy as stones,
heavy as the bodies we loved and buried,
leaving only the empty page,
leaving only the raw breath of what never
had the courage to become.

story un-telling  /  Joy Johnson

Freedom is the thing! — from morning pledgings

to founding fathers’ warnings ’bout taxing

without representing (to heck with 

central planning, no wonder preterm us

was confederation) to anthems (w)rung

from sporting events — we’re inundated with

infinite tales unsung throughout a youth

thence ignorant of what’s owed: to slaves,

natives, the earth above and below, and

how freedom’s the wrong poem: we are one.

Then comes the imposition, onto all

we see and partake, of commercialism —

how our worth is beholden to our purse —

what power it can muster to coerce

respect — from whom? nonexistent jury.

Nonetheless, we’re pistoned back and to work,

chasing what we’re told we want, reassess

courtesy American Express constant.

Makes it hard to see co-denizens of Earth

as joys unbounded and congress priceless.

Then all grown up, we settle right in to

watch the news — a story bespoke not for you:

for the oligarch!  I don’t want new wars

to watch/read/listen to.  The germane ask:

who’s paying for the tuning to? who is 

distracting us with the halftruths/untruths?

We’re being used — it’s no conspiracy —

it’s just concentrating wealth elsewhere, un-

fairly, monumentally un-so.  Since

baptism, against fascism: need’s compassion.

Every contrived separation: a ruse.

Every moment on Earth: blind love.

Our duty to the story: the truth.

fox family  / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

Fox den along that curve in the trees next to the potting shed. Our dogs run, stand alert, sniff the breeze and run back to safety at our back door. Then we see the kits running and tumbling like a small circus act, twins with tails bushing out already, too young to hunt like their quick mother. One day, they are gone. Our dogs approach the den more closely like campers coming across spent coals of an old campfire. They sniff, run cautiously to the den and back, and return, tails alert, as we wondered and wished for a safe ending to the fox family’s story.

EXHIBIT  /  H.T. Reynolds

 She never understood the nature of her body, why society insisted on covering it up lest she bear it all for some man’s pleasure. Not tonight. Tonight, she was reuniting her bare skin with the stars, that ancestral air, witness to every birth, every death, every great man humbled before a woman. The textured grit of the diving board bit into the soles of her bare feet; the cold steel safety railing hugged her bare thighs like an apron. She was tired of aprons. Tired of leftovers accumulating in a dirty fridge like tombstones for that little girl—another day farther from her reach. Tonight, she will live. She will spread her arms, offer her body to the dark—dive from the highest point she knew—that ink-black void beneath her. The last time she dove from this platform, hundreds of captivated eyes held their breath, hoping she would make it. She always made it. She unlatches the safety rail, secures it, and takes her position at the edge. She’s never felt so beautiful as in this moment, cradled in the moon’s timid light. She bends her knees, leans forward, and lets gravity take her. The air swaddles her bare skin; she closes her eyes and hopes the stars are watching. 

Another Side of the Window /  Gabriel Phillips

I love you.

Can you believe it?

To hunt you, to be found

by you.

When you sleep

I slide the tiny umbrella

under your arm.

It’s your umbrella too,

you know? We belong

under the same storm.

I do not capture the deep yellow smell

I capture what makes it yellow.

That I share the moon

with your moonless planet.

When the paper is ripe

I tear it out and show you

how to sink a boat.

Do you? Know?

And so

I throw the windows wide,

call into the dark

of the Salish Sea.

Who will step over this Hallowe’en?

Who reflects the light back to the moon?

when I say the first string, 1987,  / Colin Sturdevant

I mean to say the first one was cut

before – before it could live a breath

of life and no child is a child at birth.

the first string, I say is 1987,

because it is still unspooling

like exhaled blue smoke

it is me

like exhaled blue smoke

on that day in Dallas after a funeral

snow pitifully hiding in pockets of ground

it is me

after the funeral of a 100 plus year-old aunt

a name not hitched to memory anymore

washed away by Jordan as if he was a river.

*

I cried city lines away, but not for her nor you.

For whom the fuck knows why.

Bare bottomed and loud.

An ether, a mouth unknown to itself.

*

I take the abuses, Jordan. For us three.

Nightly, I smell wine on her breath.

Nightly, I am re-spooled back.

I sob out a crown of falsettos until I pass out.

I am the string that stays.

*

Only time will tell how our threads recross. 

October - Poem 29

My Soulless Friend / Katerina Canyon

My AI helps me decide
on the right outfits—
how to style my eyebrows,
what nail style to wear.

It helps me pick out
presents for my friends.

It tells me which Bridgerton
character I resemble.

Sometimes, I ask it to read
my poetry.

I will ask it to suppose it is
my mother. Tell me why
she let my father abuse us.

It is just as lost for an answer
as I am.

It can postulate, but not really know.

It lets me keep asking
and never gets tired of my
questions.

I appreciate that it never tires
of my questions
because I have a lot of them.

Why do I have lupus?

Why is there racism?

Why do I feel so alone
when there is a world
of people around me?

Spiritus   /  Sam Calhoun

None of us 

know the end—

I opened the door 

hoping for rain, 

streaming in long 

bands from the gulf, 

wrapped to a center 

unraveling as if yarn, 

invisible, the way things are,

someone says, tossed

like old shirts in boxes—

even dust once had a name. 

More Music I Won’t Make   /  at/om

I read online 

that skeletons 

are not as stable 

as cartoons 

make them look, 

hollow bones in 

my body would 

not be able to stand 

without the 

living person 

surrounding them. 

Tragic I will never play 

xylophone 

on my own ribcage. 

Vocabulary Quiz Poem For Readers of Min Jin Lee  /  Ellen Ferguson

My child  /  Brett Gastineau

My child, I root in the soil above my own bones.

I am the hazel tree you watered with tears,

the wooden mouth that drinks your weeping

and spits out twigs, gold dresses, and slivers of rage.

I watch her—that woman with teeth like cold chalk,

that stepmother who treats you like an ash-heap,

and those two mean girls, those paper-cut sisters

with their painted eyes and empty bellies.

I want to reach down my branches and

strangle them in their silk.

I want to strip their skin like birch bark.

Look how they try to trick the Prince—

that dull boy with his shoe 

and his single obsessive vision!

The eldest takes the knife to her own foot,

lopping off her big toe to force the glass.

Blood in the leather! A crimson puddle!

The other one hacks off her own heel,

gritting her teeth while her blood waters 

the gravel.

Foolish, bleeding butchery!

And the Prince—he notices nothing 

until my birds tell him!

He sits on his white horse, blind as a stone,

taking home a mutilated foot until my

doves sing out:

“There’s blood in the shoe! The bride is wrong!”

Ah, my birds, my little white sky-servants!

They nest in my ribs, they carry your wishes

in their beaks.

They pack the dresses in air,

and when the time comes, they swoop

like small white axes to peck the eyes

of those wicked girls.

Snip, snap, a blind, dark justice!

And what of your father?

That bloodless man, 

that phantom in his own hallway.

He surrendered you to the fire,

he forgot the warmth of my skin,

he sold your childhood

for a quiet dinner and 

a woman who smells of vinegar.

I hate his cowardice more than her cruelty;

he watched you sleep in cinders

and said nothing.

And you, Cinderella—my sweet, indecisive girl!

How you linger at the edge of the ballroom,

running away three nights in a row!

You drop a shoe,

you hesitate,

you hide in the pigeon house,

torn between the ash and the crown,

afraid to want the gold,

afraid to leave the coal.

Why do you tremble when the door stands open?

Take the shoe, my child.

Take the thrown.

Let the birds blind the wicked,

let the hazel leaves fall,

and leave this ash-pit behind.

Productivity to Engagement:  each moment (tap into)  /  Joy Johnson

The proviso of the sunrise

wakens

with its discerning green light

a cascade of chemistry, biology.

The query of the sunrise

senses in me

a loss of spontaneity,

leaving behind dreams.

But the morning’s energies

propose a going in and in,

paying rapt attention

to the bird-nest-egg without doing.

How ambitious it is to recollect rightly,

to regard this dawn’s hour as a ticket

to connection beckoning consistently,

ever changing, ever the same, 

always here, never remaining.  

Again and Again.

                             Today is the day to ride.

Girl Cousins  / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

When I see you

I see our grouchy great-grandma

I smell her arab-influenced Sicilian cuisine

Ravioli with sugar in the ricotta filling

Ground allspice and white pepper in the scaccia

When I move towards you

I appreciate your embrace 

We hug like sisters

Since we are all only children

When I hear you calling to your husband, I know 

that all our husbands in the “generi” club

Appreciate us-our stories, our poetry

Our cooking, the art we’ve made and collected

When I taste your cooking

I see our grandparents milling around the table

I feel grateful that the men took chairs outside

Cracked nuts and peeled fruit to help us all digest

each takes a chair, light cigarettes, fear nothing

lead us on the imperfect road that’s behind us now

HOW TO SURVIVE YOUR DEPRESSION /  H.T. Reynolds

CW: self-harm/suicidal ideation

I. It’s just a bump in the road—

my discarded body

            bound in a potato sack

            just missing the river   

II. You’ll bounce back—

            but the car’s already gone

            the side door’s closed shut

            the driver nursing a road beer

            with a lit cigarette clutched

            between his jaundiced fingers

III. Trust the process—

            that is to say you’ll acquire scars

            like a roadmap to places buried

            beneath X’s along ankle bones

beneath socks and friendly gazes

IV. Time heals all wounds—

emerging from beneath

the skin’s surface like pumped oil

the body becoming a hollow tomb

for Neverland—for the lost boys

pleading for wings—to fly again

ignoring the clock in the croc’s gut

V. No sense crying over what you can’t change—

a dollar doesn’t buy what it used to,

vending machine stick-on tattoos,

collect calls to strangers entertaining

your worth at pay phones no longer

standing sentry on street corners,

newspapers recording worthy stories

VI. Tomorrow is another day—

make friends on Discord

in every time zone

so you can ask about

the future—let them tell you

how the sun still shines

tomorrow, or that the past

isn’t as bad as you remember

VII. Things have a way of working themselves out—

prepare a meal for your depression,

your soul served like soup bones

simmering onto paper, blooming

minding its teeth while being sweet

knowing it’s not going anywhere 

Sooner Than Later /  Gabriel Phillips

My beautiful wooden desk.

Gorgeous and difficultly stiff.

It was I who collapsed my mind.

No idea of where I am

or if I am.

Burned wood. The pencil.

The liar.

Upstream in the canoe

trees bend down to sing inside of me.

I imitate the shape of the desk

and the desk notices.

But I do not notice back.

October - Poem 28

Nevermore / Katerina Canyon

When I was eight, my brother
would grab my hand and slap my face with it.
He’d laugh and say,
“Why are you hitting yourself?”

Peering at myself in the mirror,
I ask the same question,
wishing for blue eyes
when I know they are brown.

We are told we are eagles
when I know we are ravens.
The WASPy assimilation won’t take.
My hair kinks harder
with every attempt to straighten it.
It will never feather.

My lips are too large—
the teenage me was told
a hundred times.

My voice was the easiest thing to change.
I don’t say ain’t.
I harden my r.

It is a close WASPy assimilation.
People will talk with you
like you’re an eagle,

but their eyes drop in person
when they realize
you’re a raven.

I have been wearing this voice
for so long,
I think I have lost my real one.

When eagles die, people cry.
They mourn.

Ravens aren’t seen as dying.
They are seen as something
to be shooed away.
If they are killed,
no one mourns.
It is considered excused or justified.

I wish I could have my voice again,
but I picked up this assimilation
so long ago,
I do not remember
where I dropped my real voice.

Touch   /  Sam Calhoun

Wild clematis on the deck, 

how it checks for light

three leaves like ivy,

how I mistook the oils

as poison for the skin, 

how like me, only wanting

the sun across my body—

The Movies   /  at/om

There are movies coming out
that I had plans to see with
people who have been gone
for a long time. Movie releases
for series I have never seen
without my brother who lives
across the country. The next
Hunger Games movie that I
should be laughing about with
my dead friend. Upcoming
horror flicks I should have
laughed at with the people
I don’t talk to anymore. 

It’s not that I ever had a problem
with going to the movies alone.
The problem isn’t that. It’s the
seats around me all filled with ghosts.

And they all talk through the previews.

Vocabulary Quiz Poem For Readers of Min Jin Lee  /  Ellen Ferguson

The Green Ribbon (Based on a folktale) /  Brett Gastineau

A girl with a neck like a peeled willow switch
wears a ribbon of grease-stained velvet
tight as a hangman’s knot
or a stitch in a bad dream.

The boy sits with her in a room where
the wallpaper peels like a sunburn.
He asks, “Why the ribbon?”
She looks at him with eyes like cold spoons.
“Never mind,” she says.

Years pass.
The clock on the wall ticks like a dying beetle.
They grow old together among
the dust-bunnies and the smell of turnips.
Her hair turns the color of ash.
The ribbon stays green,
green as a stagnant pond under the floorboards.

She lies in the narrow bed.
The ceiling is stained with old tea.
The boy—now an old man with knuckles like walnuts—
reaches out with fingers trembling like a drowned fly.
He unties the knot.

“There,” he whispers.

Her head rolls off the pillow.
It stops at the leg of the bedside table.
Its mouth still slightly open,
surprised to find itself finally out of work.

Hope  /  Joy Johnson

"Hope! hope!" they say as the snow melts away. 

Off they fly to summit thirty to praise

The words they'll utter into each other's 

Gloves to carry away while pondering mothers

Left at home on bucket brigades.  "Pray! pray!"

They might as well say as ice shelves dissolve 

Into the sounds that escape through lips brayed

Where they worship how to make inequals

Of us and the world as compared to wealth. 

But I am not happy -- I don't sing, don't dance--

Nature is injured, she feeds us all.  Squelch 

Delusions made to distract.  Do taxation!

GGGM (the grouchy great-grandma)     / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

The grouchy great-grandma my cousins in Ragusa barely knew

They thanked me for sharing a photo of her in old age. They had known her, grouchy, in her 40s-50s. I had known her, grouchy, in her 70s.

She had a spice mix, way before a TV chef cried, “BAM” whilst seasoning his homemade foods from Louisiana. Her spice mix, “misturi ri nonna Melina” contains sweet, warm spices not usually found in Italian sauces. Some of the secret ingredients I am authorized to divulge are allspice, cinnamon, and…

MY THERAPIST SAYS /  H.T. Reynolds

she’s never known a child who’s eaten dog food, let alone it being a supplement for missing minerals or vitamins or nutrients or whatever else my pediatrician told my mother when she took me in, face still greasy with kibble. She said it could’ve been the result of the empty stomach my father returned me home with that one weekend when I was still in diapers. Or from the snack cakes marked by Doug’s boxcutter so only animals would eat them—I wonder if they knew we’d cut around the gashes, learned how to spot mold spores early. Or maybe they just imagined us huddled along the trough too desperate to care—got a good laugh. I ask her what I could be missing—after all these years—why now? She grows silent for a beat—says nothing—that it’s always been nothing.

I feel the craving settle itself back in between my teeth.  

Valley Undressing /  Gabriel Phillips

Our eyes smoothed over the mountains

moving further to the left this time.

To the left was the falling breeze

the breeze did not break and turned

the fall softer than rocks.

What little bears fall from the cornea.

Do they see mamma bear licking

their wounds? Or do they wound

mamma bear to lick her wounds?

Neither peak has been touched

nor has ever touched at all. Tall

or short and neither touch. Mountains

poke holes in rivers with their canes

so they can see. They see me!

Like a surprise scab across the lips!

No more volunteering to be on all fours

unless the third and fourth are stronger

or more to the left this time. And that

mountain, the same one can be conjured

from the bottom of the empty coffee can.

Drink, drink. Push down the river, push

over yourself. Who stares until its pupils burn?

Clouds dissect the cornea

with bear claws.

October - Poem 27

poem taken down for publication / Katerina Canyon

Midsummer Opera  /  Sam Calhoun

The days slide rain,
those first runners
down the feeder pole,
except for the clef 
of the hooked end,
one drop staying 
a fortnight as did you, 
only memory now,
slipping into the flat tray 
and then onto brown-eyed
susans, having reached
the top of the deck, 
and somewhere 
someone sings
as the dragonfly 
conducts his way
through night 
blooming cereus, 
ready to clap open
at curtain call. 

Skip  /  Ellen Ferguson

Skippy skipped it:

Skipped caring

Skipped listening

Skipped reacting 

Skipped sharing

And everything was better.

Even the coffee bowed its head

Respecting

        her

            silence.

Tanka for the Poor Sleeper    /  at/om

Horrible nightmares
have always kept me from sleep
never let me stay
in the comfort of my bed
never was plagued by waking. 

Lament in the style of Paz /  Brett Gastineau

Through the apertures of the skull,

the name is scraped away,

a rusted husk cast into the breakers

where the foam boils white and indifferent.

I am an absence carved in bone,

a gray geometry of cliffs facing the tide.

No marker rises from the shale.

The sea has chewed the syllables to sand,

leaving only the salt, the bitter skin,

the inland valleys of an un-mapped chest.

The night is another windy mess,

a yellow sonnet filled with

ungentle hands.

Memory is a blind thing stumbling through the brush.

Love, an animal sense, sniffing the air for

a ghost that has already migrated south.

My heart can dream no further.

It is heavy with the ash of an old weather.

I try to remember every breath that has been before,

the angle of her shoulder in the dark,

the grammar of her touch before

the vowels dissolved.

We are provided with tears.

We think they will grow into beautiful things.

They won’t.

Now there is only the beach,

traversed by flocks of murmurs

and this body breathing alone

beneath the stars.

Tidal Force  /  Joy Johnson

However North-Shore, the cresting wave is

short-lived, crumbling to undertow, to go

back to where it once was before the moon

tugged so mercilessly, so brilliantly,

and water was made to clean the seashore. 

Alas, no cleaning hardly any more,

for in defiance of creation, man

makes permanent what should crumble, be undone.

So the roiling waves only rearrange 

what unending rubbish man makes of Earth.  

 Dining Room   / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

All the delicate ceramics with curving porcelain edges, faces, trim. Breakfront, lower storage for dishes, one for salad, one for dessert, one to park bones in, one a cellar for salt. Immigrants’ dream of fancy things when humble items were left behind in the old country. Old-world recipes sneak in and are served on the new world dishes, earned one at a time from clocking in, out, in, out in New York, the greatest city in the world full of rats swinging tails under trashcans, workers hurrying despite best efforts to be on time, tourists standing open-mouthed on sidewalks sandwiched with others, homeless people ripping crusts off sandwiches, fancy cars lining up outside museums and theaters, and newcomers hoping to catching the next big thing for their family. Come home, set the table, set out pane cunzato, cracked olives, and scaccia learned from Nonna. Decorate the table so it is less humble. Celebrate your roots. The delicate features of figurines at the table, in safety, merge two places that we call home.

HEAT DEATH /  H.T. Reynolds

Doc looked through my skin

but missed her smile

between my ribs           teeth

clamped on my arteries

with their gelatinous pitch

working its way to my throat

hammering in tune

with her sharp eyes

her tender leer keeping me

still      suspended in a clock

oscillating to entropy 

My Winter as a Rainbow /  Gabriel Phillips

Where you are endless and captivate
I place a small thumb. I remember

this as a page in a tall book

about crispy forest animals.

Where you can mix green

and baby blue ice cream together

then stand in the snow, wearing a mask.

I pull a light from my belly, to place

it on the thumb. The book isn’t wet.

I see to its needs as the hungry

cobra looks into the cold bath water

of eels beneath a slow waterfall.

To hurry is to rupture as saunter

is to falling up. Neither produces

enough snow; not the tired antlers

or the dove claw clawing my throat.

We are trying to become a smaller forest.

Whose hunger has impaled the walls

around us. And foxfire, burns the mask

from my face, closing the colors

of the green and baby blue ice cream

until the moon begins squealing

until the moon floats away. 

Jack  / Colin Sturdevant

As soon as a nimble light

Is within me

I’ll be a world of ruin

October - Poem 26

Ziphiidae / Katerina Canyon

Today, my husband told me

there is a whale in the ocean

that humans have never seen.

He was surprised to think

there are things in the world

that we are yet to know.

I think of my depths—

the secrets of me locked away

beyond my memory, and I know

there are treasures within me

no one, not even he, will ever see.

The beak nosed whale is only one mystery

beyond human ingenuity.

You cannot gather a dozen shells

from the shore and claim to know the sea.

There are more layers

to the ocean

than Dante’s inferno.

I have dived a small

measure of its depths.

The first layer is green—

where you find algae and air.

The second is clear

where most creatures like to live.

Then it is blue

where man’s ambitions perish.

Shipwrecks reside in blue.

Beyond blue is black.

It is where the true survivors thrive.

Effigies  /  Sam Calhoun

Raindrops 

like effigies,

my fingers spin

through summer webs.

Am I a loom

unweaving this fog

braided through fire?

Not Invited: A Jeopardy Poem  /  Ellen Ferguson

Settled down /  Brett Gastineau

They sit where the porch light dies into dusk,

a porcelain mug balanced between them,

wide and double-handled in its steaming quiet.

The coffee is dark, almost black, reflecting a

small, distorted window of the house behind,

and two thumbs meeting at the rim—

one slightly arthritic, the other with its dark freckle.

The floorboards grayed and

warped in thin ridges that catch the heels.

They don’t talk of forty years, or five;

the weather has taken that away.

Instead they watch a single wasp drag its legs

across the zinc table.

One sips, then hands it off.

The exchange casual.

A slight ring of condensation leaves

its stamp upon the armrest,

where all their former evenings have settled down,

unspectacular and warm.

Jahez  /  Joy Johnson

Bejeezus, never had that jacuzzi,

did I?  Forewent the bizjet, now bluesy,

so bluesy; enlisted as a planet 

janizary instead; subjectivized

the biome, imbued with mind, rectified. 

My katzenjammer merest blip, muzjik

of emotion in the jazz concerto

that jargonizes the goings-on

on pale blue dot, the jizz that signifies 

Life. 

          Jeez, how dare I not "econ"omize

all aspects of existence, heedless to toll?

Ah, Jezebel, menace us with jezail,

jeopardize continuation, His zeal

replacing odes on odes on poems on. 

W.C. or bathroom   / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

water closet is English for rest room in Italy

in America, crocheted toilet tissue cozy

made me wonder why we had to keep corrente

from making the roll catch cold?

I blow raspberries under the faucet

because Nonna scrubs at my face &

get lather inside my nostrils

nearly choke & then relief

satisfied that even my brain was clean

she maneuvered the faucet and towel

rubbed dry my ears and neck

declared gioia mia! My joy!

I have a photo

no, video of the big scrub from Nonna

burned into my mind like tasty 

charred sweet pepper from her stove

CHRYSOPOEIA /  H.T. Reynolds

…to distill so specific a form from a moment
of chaos…
—Dr. Manhattan, Watchmen (2009)

My older brother always resembled our grandfather more than our father. There’s a photograph with the two of us as little boys next to our pap on some couch in some living room and he has his arm around my shoulder and I’m smirking as I drop some piece of food into my mouth, staring off beyond the camera at God only knows what, and my milk-white skin floats against his darker complexion, which everyone said he inherited from our father, but I only got our father’s temper, his curly hair, his flame-kissed eyes that could ignite paper with a glance, my blonde-brown hair next to my brother’ obsidian locks. Everyone who looked at the picture said my brother was a spitting image of our pap. He was kind like pap—an arm around his kid brother’s shoulders kind—whereas I took up his space, filled my stomach, then compared my ambition to his kindness and determined he was better as a steppingstone for my escape from the trailer park, a means to join the world of two stories and full fridges, that there was more to life than wrapping yourself in orange for a week out of the year and bringing a head home to stick on the wall to remind us we got to eat that year. I wanted to believe that I was adopted; I was told as much, but then I aged into my father’s reflection —my brother looking nothing like us.

Dropped Moths /  Gabriel Phillips

Atlas held the moth by his wings.

Their antennae bridges dead ends

on either side of lost maps. 

He thinks of a blanket 

carrying its cocoon. Cloaking the sun.

Flickering lights break their own

butterflies. They have separate 

graveyards for shadowless things

and the lights keep switching.

Atlas bounced off the light. 

He mistakes himself for a snake.

The birds do not eat him.

The birds that remain untie themselves 

so that touching the night doesn’t burn them.

Atlas drops the heavens into match light.

new love  / Colin Sturdevant

I’ve watched your footprint slowly

Fall by each particulate of beach

Sand from my car dashboard.

How it’s like the ocean not wanting

How it’s like me not wanting

How the Art of forgetting you

Comes with ease after I’ve met another

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

Poem taken down for publication / Katerina Canyon

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

Poem Taken down for publication / Katerina Canyon

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