October - Day 2 / Poem 2

The Closet / Lilly Frank

Like a dog, I know it is better to be violent
than dead. I will claw my way through this
cage if it is the last thing I do, taking my
last breath as I tear open the metal bars
above. Using my every ounce of malice,
spite, and grief to fuel this endeavor. I
refuse to let the words that you left
lingering inside of me be the last I hear. I
refuse to let the hands of you be the last to
touch me. Devastation is usually found in
the chest; a hollow frame that once held a
heart now sits, labored with this plague of
disappointment. Clamoring to be released
from inside of you, it turns into anger. It
turns into bitterness and distrust. It eats
you alive until you are practically skeletal,
flesh hanging from the bone, clinging to
the most familiar home it has ever known.

St. Louis Sonnet ​/ Anna Ojascastro Guzon

Who would want to read about another
suburban religious school
like the one you grew up in. In the 1980's
the lady, who lived by the playground
gave out chocolates from a box. 
She had hair like a Charlie's Angel. 
It was ok to take the candy. 
Whether one-hundred degrees or fifteen, we were locked outside until it was time
to go in. In winter, we'd race inside 
to hug the warm pipes, once the doors
finally opened again. In summer,
we'd fight over squares of shade, a slight
relief from the heat of the blacktop. 

geosmin / Kathryn Johnson

Each time I encounter the word
petrichor is like the first time—
the rush of delight at its beauty, with the soft sigh
for a word that is as lovely as the reality it describes.

It’s easy to forget that words are signs, indicators
of something else in the world. Like petrichor,
the sweet, savory, dusty scent of rain on dry earth.
The smell is beautiful, yes, but
it exists only to point the way to
what is needed. I learned today
that the perfume of rain on soil
is the perfume of bacteria,

those little pieces of living matter that go ahead
and trail behind us. Microorganisms,
tiny beings, that require water, like we do.
And isn’t it interesting, fascinating, amazing that
we have this in common with dirt dwellers?
That they send us a sign, like little smoke signals,
microplumes of dust rising from the ground
with each drop of rain, to point the way
to our common good?

I want more little moments like these.
Don’t you?
Small, natural efforts to show I care
and have concern for my fellows.
Men, women, bird, and beast.
And even the tiny denizens beneath our feet,
who remind me that we all—all of us—
share common needs.

Our forms are different.
Our purposes may diverge.
Our paths may never cross. 

But why should that keep
me from releasing good into the air?
Or slow my hand when it needs extending, open and ready?
Or pause when I can share the tiny talents
I am blessed to tote around with me in my travels?

How much better to scatter them wherever I go,
and shower the Earth with signs that tell you
someone cares. To spread a sweet offering,
like drops of rain, that will let you—let all of us—
breathe deep the earthy, heady scent of petrichor.

How to Climb an Apple Tree / Kimberly McElhatten

You must know the bark of its trunk, the bends of its branches. You must know its intersections and how the tree comes together, how it stands. You must be sure of the weight its branches can bear and be sure to measure its flexibility against your own weight. You must know the tree will hold you, and you, in return, can hold the tree. You must know the best time to climb is August, when the sun blushes the apples red and before its boughs slump under the burden and drop the fruit taken with sweet rot. Know the more you climb, the easier your eyes will decipher the map of Ys and help you ascend higher and higher to where you imagine you can reach your head above the canopy and peer across the whole orchard to the peaches and cherries and beyond to the willows and chestnuts. Know you’ll continue to hear the words—That’s high enough—hold you and hold you back. Know you’ll remember your grandfather’s papered hands teaching you to make out the map of footholds that you’ll eventually navigate alone, with limbs so heavy in harvest you’ll imagine that perhaps the tree bears enough fruit to feed you there forever and never have need to return home, where there are no branches like these branches to hold you.   

ENTER LADY EGGDRED / H.T. Reynolds

abashed the chicken stood
and felt her awfully thick thighs
the balding patches—blistered hind
twitching next to her bare basket,
her oozing garden of pin feathers
matted yolks and receding cluck,
a reverberation in her beak
split and jaded jaundice

her glycerin eyes seep corrosive
drops tinkling to boiling splotches
of brimstone filling her basket
foul, glazed down—slick red

“There ain’t no coming back,”

she wheezes—wisps of smoke
like tendrils of miasmic string
lassoing the space between her crown
and heaven above—the sizzling hop
down—a tipped over stool after father
had found her out of the house,
out of breath, shivering sweat—smiling

“I know,”

A voice sublimes from the
scorched stone below her feet,
a reverberating heat she no longer
feels, the blood a lattice of glass
within her webbed feet.

“So be it.”

The chicken gasps—
the city resumes its motion,
reilluminated by the noon sun—
bodies racing for food, like streams
of ants she tastes with her rancid beak
gauged toward the sky like a vane.

The sidewalk settles.

The chicken settles—
a collection of black feathers
drifting to her feet,
erupting into embers
none in the human crowd sees.

She empties her basket,
proceeds forward,
leaving the blooming darkness
behind her—knowing not to look
back…

TO BE CONTINUED

October - Poem 1 / Day 1

Joanne / Lilly Frank

I come from a generation of women, as we all do. Mothers, who are daughters, and inside of them, little girls. I come from a generation of women who experienced heartbreak, as we all do. Adolescence, kindling a warmth that will become a fire, which evolves into the deep passion and love they hold closely to their chest, bellies, and fists, for their daughters. My mother, arguably, the bravest girl of them all. I recall during my teenage years, my lack of acknowledgement for her triumph, for her strife. While I was wrangling my girlhood experience, I regretted to remember that my mother, yes, growing older, and yes, older than me, was still in her heart, wrangling her own experience with girlhood. Because the little girl you once were never leaves you. She is your home; her undertakings live inside of you. While many of the stories are silent, and she remains stoic, there is a young version inside of her who is still, in a scrambling attempt to understand how life could become so much bigger than yourself, attempting to survive. My mother has always been beautiful, radiant, and tenderhearted. I often reflect on the sliver of experiences in which she has shared with me in times of weakening – they serve as a reminder to show your teeth when backed into a corner, but never bite. My mother, to me, is still a girl. She is just as human as I am. My mother, my mother. The little girl who lives in me, will always see her as her mommy. The little girl who lives, the young woman who lives in me, the grown woman I am, all in a synchronist rhythm, have grown to understand that my mother is not only the woman who raised me, but she too, is just a girl. And she too, will carry that young girl inside of her for the rest of her life. Motherhood, while a responsibility, is also a choice. My mother chose motherhood in every instance, selflessly, thanklessly, and bravely. Her mother chose motherhood in a different way from her, and her mother, I’m certain the same. There are no guarantees, there are no handbooks or wishes. How lucky I am to experience girlhood with her, my mother, the girl she once was, and still is. 

 ​A Mentor, a Mirror ​/ Anna Ojascastro Guzon

I want to go in the back yard now
This game is foul,
How it picks you up and drops you back down
Even swans got boxing gloves for heads
I am everything classic and true

How dreary - to be - Somebody!
Performances, assortments, resumes -
Vulnerable how my fire sways
Boy wonder becomes Boy Wanderer
A new life is a mirror, it is a pair of glasses.

A cento made from lines of poems from The Oxford Anthology of Poetry (2006), poetryfoundation.org,diodepoetry.com, and Brick by Brick: Dreams We Build, Volume 5, written by some of my former students. Authors in order: Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Worth, Cathy Park Hong, Sch’erica Wilson, Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, Patick Gutierrez, Gerald Burton, Apollo Chastain.

 ​speleothems / Kathryn Johnson

When you close your eyes,
is it dark? Dark like night,
with little sequin stars reflecting
in the sky of your eyelids? Or
like a movie theater, lights dimmed
before the film rolls, unspooling a story
in the glow of carefully-lit exit signs?
Or is it dark like a cave is dark?

 The first time I spent a weekend caving,
and the guide told us to turn off all our lights,
I waited for fear to tap me on my shoulder
and whisper little stories of death and other dangers
in the dark. Imagine my surprise when it never
took a seat on the rock beside me.

 And instead of feeling a shrinking, sucking dread,
I felt my heart, my head, my whole self,
expand to fill the dark. I became the cave,
holding bats, spiders, rocks, water,

 and even people. Those tiny spelunkers
crawling downdowndown
past my cave-mouth,
using little lights to show the way.
Lights that flicker like stars in the sky,
that lead them to the exit and out again
into the woods, with eyes wide open and
blinking in the sun. When our guide
switched his headlamp back on,
I was predictably disoriented.

 Was I still the cave? Was I now afraid?
Was I still home to little flying and crawling thoughts?
Do I still hold the lights inside me? Or

must I now crawl my own way up and out?


Remember Him Before / Kimberly McElhatten

Remember him with his hair tied at the nape and it falling forward over his shoulder in dense, black waves over his hospital gown. Remember you, just after you exhaled from the womb, held in the heft of his hay-heaving arms and his hospital gown. Remember his wide, white-toothed smile. 

Remember him before he wrote the captions for a comic that got him fired just ahead of the plant closure, how there wasn’t a severance or another job at another plant, and how when you started kindergarten, he was there every morning to make soft-boiled eggs;  

Before the attic bedroom smelled like the dog after a good skunking, his friends making quick and frequent visits, the day a cop car turned into our driveway, and he escaped through a back window and into the woods before the police noticed; 
Before the welfare checks and the line for rice and cheese and powdered milk, the seventeen percent interest mortgage, the whiskey and beer and Anbesol on his breath, and the fury he carried in his fists and feet;
Before he stopped brushing his teeth and holding your mother’s hand and kissing you and your brother good night, and before he spent evenings and weekends in the basement smoking Marlboros in front of a twelve-inch TV watching Roseanne and Rush Limbaugh; 
Before the joke he liked to tell, the one where he said, when he found out you were a girl, he had wanted to throw you like a kitten into a sack with rocks and then toss you into French Creek, and how this joke seemed funnier to him the more he told it and how it started with throw and ended with toss and the care and carelessness of these words; 
Remember him through the memory of photographs, the way they track memories before you have memories, and remember, he had wanted you once before.

ARE WE SURE THIS IS DEATH / H.T. Reynolds

@ Lhasa De Sela “Soon This Place Will Be too Small”

Submerge yourself back into that slick
existence of wrinkled skin and blooming bones—

if you were to experience that again—
your birth in reverse,
a dehydrating vocabulary
weeping from your pours,
your stories mother will mourn,
nursing you back at her breast
her palms clutching the sun’s sickling
grief

—be still, mother
he will become again
that blister
consuming your golden locker

draw him back
like a cigarette,
open your purse,
tuck him at the bottom—
be whole, again.

Small mush.
dwindling boy.

This is death—

You are stardust becoming
diamond—a nucleus of someday I will—

can you hear her speaking,
cradling your wilting body,
her hand palming you flat
—someday I will…

Would your last memory be
the chill of the world receding,
submerging into weightlessness,
an imploding body