October - Poem 14

Amoria / Katerina Canyon

I was Agapia.
I resided next to a meadow
of sunflowers and honey locusts.
Their seeds held the definition
of passion.

Then Miseon came and cinched me
within bushels of snow
while carrying a hydra on his back.

I was tossed into the tar pit of
a kraken, unable to swim
to a sandbar
for sustenance—

punching the kraken away,
and nowhere I looked
could I find a callow hand
cupping the sunset.

The kraken swam the Salton Sea
to sit on its shore for comfort.

The ice trumpet called the
kraken to the Valley of the Dead,
and it carried me, comatose,
inside an oyster’s shell
while tonguing forest embers
in search of the definitions for affection.

Garden Notes /  Sam Calhoun

It’s late, every bloom 
on the loofah closed, 
everything that brings
light has left, save 
the viburnum, burning
like streetlamps all night, 

soft scent of smoke distant, 
the kind of scent you know 
the fire has since stopped, 
the kind of distance
it’s too late to check, start
the car, find the old shoes, 

search in the dark for fog, 
no, smoke, edge of every ditch, 
like this lone bee searches 
the small reservoirs above
the hummingbird feeders 

for water, takes its fill, 
flies away. 

Claw Machine Golden Shovel Haibun    /  at/om

“but my heart is like a claw machine, 

its only function is to reach 

it can’t hold on to anything.”

-Claw Machine, by Sloppy Jane

i need to stop writing about love as violence but 

there is a cannibal inside of my

torn apart heart 

and she is 

breaking her way out of my ribcage like 

a crouched over vulture like a 

poet with no hands only claw(s) 

that is to say she is a violence machine 

that is to say cruelty is her second nature its 

her only 

found function 

the cannibal in my heart defrosts in winter she is 

reborn by the cruelty of the natural system to 

leave behind the weak to turn from the reach 

and she knows better than I we can’t beat it 

no matter how I argue and say I am not her I can’t 

break apart her claws the hold 

on 

my neck as she screams out to

tell me she will do anything

(and she will survive 

the cruelty that kills me

she knows the winter)

unhired fired quit/a pantoum  /  Ellen Ferguson

  the peace corps said no if she’d pray in a crisis: unhired
  she dusted too slowly at the architectural gem: fired
  bookstore violating the equal pay act? quit
  we show up at work every day

  she dusted too slowly at the architectural gem: fired
  Nate sewed shoulders at the Bensonhurst ILGWU
  we show up at work every day
  the other Nate ran The Belle Shop

  Nate sewed shoulders at the Bensonhurst ILGWU
  Alice taught the mandolin
  the other Nate ran The Belle Shop
  Anna drew comics with her cerebral palsy friends

  Alice taught the mandolin
  bookstore violating the equal pay act? quit
  Anna drew comics with her cerebral palsy friends
  the peace corps said no if she’d pray in a crisis: unhired

They came to the trees /  Brett Gastineau

In the hustle they came to believe

they were living another pair’s life.

Anger dwelt in their pockets,

replacing the keys they had kept to their past lives.

They gathered in their separate corners of solitude.

They hungered and called out—“You fill me with desire.

I am afraid of you…

Hold me.”

They had tried the nighttime sky as a balm.

But moonlight broke their hearts.

The stars found their wishes incomplete.

And so they came to the trees,

those doors to a mystery religion.

They lay beneath them taking comfort

in the leaves’ quake above.

See how they thrill and shudder

one and then the other played

by the beautiful breath on their skin.

The two in each other’s arms look up

the sky a luminous study in blue;

the trees full of a golden wind.

When they closed their eyes

there was the same bright hue,

speckled by falling dark.

A Dialogue between the Typewriter and the Joy  /  Joy Johnson

(after Andrew Marvell’s “A Dialogue between the Soul and the Body”)

TYPEWRITER

The news ne’er rumour’d I was missing,

Though clearly I had gone skipping

’Til now, when found me shackl’d here:

In keyboard is where my feet are,

Sometime in notebooks too I’m locked:

Dismay’d, uncommitted, shipwreck’d;

I wait, I wait, to integrate

When hand driven through trauma’s gate

Meets my face, which is never seen;

I long to reconcile again.

JOY

Years in misery I survived,

Nothing holding me upright save

Mores.  The news ne’er acknowledg’d

How my soul from me abolish’d

Was.  Driven through trauma’s gate,

I drank wine until I was late,

Eventually I happened on

The key to this orangutang’s

Evolver:  words locked in notebooks,

missives breezing by, pussyfoot.

TYPEWRITER

She is there, where her pen scribbles

Down my chin; I can’t realise

Why I want her pain, why I’m drawn

To complete this connection, damn.

Our memory, a blank ’til now,

So why rush to (re?)join what’s maw.

Our hungers, falling, mirror each;

How can both be the lower piece?

Astounding to find new fetters,

With dread hist’ry, makes being better.

JOY

Now a fourteen to rejoice in

The parts that see each else again.

I find myself able to feel

The sense of the gravity pull

Which made falling into our well

Cert sure pleasure of flowerbed

In full bloom and abuzz with what’s

Meant to come together to test

How is it the Joy and hopeless

Yearning profound can coalesce

To coherence of existence,

To meaning with some persistence;

Or Joy is just a girl who dreams

Poetry is love she machines.

last day of the farm market  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

greens

turnip tops, beetroot tops, rocket

pesto

sauce tomatoes

turnips, kohlrabi

squash

cabbage

pickles, jam &

chutney

love the last farm market day

preserve what lasts all winter

gives me more to hope for in spring

TWO SONS  /  H.T. Reynolds

after Warrior (2011)

Timothy never wore a hat

like Paddy but shared

in the same ideology—

that a whisky-kissed

mind made for better

main events—two sons—

one underweight champion

in the minor division

we were two and five,

what were we fighting for

there was no purse

no sponsorship or home

to keep—only blood

running between us

dripping down

our quivering chins

hidden in the red

of our boxing gloves

I was told I was

like Tommy—unhinged

and rabid, a short-fused

firecracker with something

to prove, an attitude

but they didn’t see

my training—how I wanted

a father who didn’t drink,

who didn’t regret me—

who stayed

or a brother who didn’t

look at me

like I would devour him

even as I’d bare my teeth—

swing,

and bite down

Bed For the Nap of Shadows /  Gabriel Phillips

I’ve bargained my window

for a better view

of a short man eating

the shadow of the long man.

Nobody is nobody

and nobody keeps it that way.

Just sobbing once often. Fills

open spaces, therefore empty

spaces can appear. Green hats.

At the end of my bed

at the end of the better

window. Peter Pan

was a sleepless short shadow.

Nobody believed him. He lost

himself over the shade.

Crying, until he filled

the space of the empty room.

I am not an elegant color,

I have a gorgeous view.

lilac  / Colin Sturdevant

here, with the lashes of a whisper

i peel its innards until a fragrance bursts

vessels of liac petals

here, i imbibe motherliness

to stir you from my stomach

& hurl you out like a bad fever

for good

October - Poem 13

Speaking of Love / Katerina Canyon

I speak to my heart

as a policeman to a criminal.

It is not that I am

wrong or immoral.

I am just undeserving

and unexempt.

The muddy meaning of love upon the flesh—

outside the closed fist—

slits my throat.

I detest my heart—

its vulnerability—

the way it needs to be

protected behind a cage.

It is nothing but tissue

and blood, but it feeds

my brain, my liver, and my kidneys.

If I sit still, I can hear it call to me—

an almost steady rhythm,

slightly offbeat.

Must I always bend to your whims?

My mind burns a different candle.

The smell is sweet.

My heart is a stranger without logic.

It wants the fruit

when the meat is sweeter.

Terce /  Sam Calhoun

What can I offer that hasn’t already

been offered these twenty five years,

each one passing like an hour, 

as if today could be a new day, 

blue sky blue as the sky then, 

tall gray towers moving north, 

summer rain coming to break 

this long drought, coming to embrace 

the dust like old friends huddled in the dark.

Every breath drawn now is thunder,

every voice lifts like lightning.

Turn up the tv up until it rumbles. 

I can’t bear to count raindrops

hitting our red tin roof.

I’ll Believe In Anything     /  at/om

Little boy falling asleep in your papaw’s lap, though he will only ever know you as a granddaughter 

You deserve sunshine. 

Little boy sat between your mother’s legs while she brushed your hair and twists it into braids, like the tomboy girl on tv you so admire but still don’t want to look like

You deserve sunshine. 

Little boy who could never wear your catholic school shirts and jumpers quite right 

You deserve sunshine. 

Boy who played a prince rescuing a princess in the first grade, caught kissing a girl by his mother and though yes, you were too young they called only the fact you were both girls wrong. 

You deserve sunshine. 

Kiddo who declared you felt free the first time you had your hair cut 

You deserve sunshine. 

Learning to hide your hair in a hat and always playing the son in games of house and loving the way the word he left your friends mouths 

You deserve sunshine. 

Boy who heard the meaning of the word gay and thought it was incredible that love could be so strong people would still want it when others try to take it away 

You deserve sunshine. 

Boy who asked his father why it was that if god loved everybody why did the religion you were raised in have a problem with gay people and then cried when he barked out his answer 

You deserve sunshine. 

Boy who looked up every excuse for his friends to call him a man, boy who would laugh at jokes about his body not being his body 

You deserve sunshine. 

One of the first of your group of friends to come out, even when they laughed, even when nobody believed you. 

You deserve sunshine. 

Boy who flinched when they hurled a word at him he didn’t understand but grew to wear it like armor 

You deserve sunshine. 

Boy who would have rather died than be a girl. Would have rather died than keep up the lie. Would have rather died than explain it again to anyone else. 

You deserve sunshine. 

Young Man who’s had a hundred names before he found the one that fits 

You deserve sunshine. 

You who cried when your friend wrote your chosen name besides her and declared you her “bestie.” 

You deserve sunshine. 

Young man who strangled himself when he read the cruel words his father wrote on Twitter you deserve sunshine. 

Young man reading a coming out poem on an open mic and begging the audience not to react 

you deserve sunshine. 

Young man sharing his voice on mic after mic, saying time after time that you know who you are 

You deserve sunshine. 

Young man, with scars on your skin, deep in your head, and in your heart, you with all the weight of the sorrow and the joy, you who loves your community more than you’ve ever loved another person, more than you have ever loved yourself. 

It’s okay to step into the light. 

You deserve sunshine. 

Tuesday is the New Thursday  /  Ellen Ferguson

continued

A

Book, noticed on the table at Rizzoli; 
Caj brown sweater confetti flecked;
Dashing approach to pastrami;
Eye for photography;
Fire of your mind;
Generous laugh;
High appreciation for Snoopy;
Intuitive reading;
Joy in Manhattan;
Knowledge of presidential libraries;
Lost memories of Kansas;
Making me better;
Nimbly pivoting away from Shakespeare;
Open to opera;
Punctuality &
Quick planning;
Row upon row of front row seats;
Spark of eyes, flashing;
Thoughtfulness;
Untouchable understanding;
Visiting your child with glee;
Writing with style/clarity of thought;
X-ray vision upon spying pastrami someone else might enjoy;
Your patience;
Zero tolerance for cruelty.

  Happy Birthday

So glad you were born.
October 24th, yay!
Happy day to  you!

A

Book, noticed on the table at Rizzoli; 
Caj brown sweater confetti flecked;
Dashing approach to pastrami;
Eye for photography;
Fire of your mind;
Generous laugh;
High appreciation for Snoopy;
Intuitive reading;
Joy in Manhattan;
Knowledge of presidential libraries;
Lost memories of Kansas;
Making me better;
Nimbly pivoting away from Shakespeare;
Open to opera;
Punctuality &
Quick planning;
Row upon row of front row seats;
Spark of eyes, flashing;
Thoughtfulness;
Untouchable understanding;
Visiting your child with glee;
Writing with style/clarity of thought;
X-ray vision upon spying pastrami someone else might enjoy;
Your patience;
Zero tolerance for cruelty.

Things I know /  Brett Gastineau

Love brings you the best vision of yourself which, of

course, will be led to the slaughter.

We fail to hear past our own hearts.

Homes can grow in silence.

Kindness can come too late.

Sometimes the dead can seem more alive than the living.

The haunting of our wreckage is loud with voices howling

for their lost skin. They let us see our future scheming

to get back into our lives.

You will find yourself looking for kisses pressed in books.

Clouds are never late.

Old loves smile at us from jukeboxes.

Learning the simple diction of stones is beyond us.

The body seeks what it wants, regardless if you agree to

it. In the body begins everything, embrace the testimony

of the senses.

No matter what, there are butterflies and they have no

words for grief.

You’ll find good luck sleeping in the back of old pickup

trucks.

Constellations remain steady and form images regardless if

we give them names.

Each generation will claim to live at the end of a withered

century, waiting to fall off the edge of their story.

You won’t trust the ones that say they love you. You want

to place them up high and they ask only that you hold them.

You can find proof of God in a red nightgown. Maybe it’s

the sweet secret scent of sex.

Like trees, we strain to hear what we want to remember.

You will learn forgiveness when you welcome the ripening

yellow of autumn.

We are navigating by a grace we are always relearning.

I forgot to remember  /  Joy Johnson

My attention diverted, exploited 

by the system I swim in, by needing 

(and I've worked to need less and less, I swear)

while swimming in the screaming, avoiding 

all thinking through dopamine game screening,

wading to the shore, coming up for air, 

pen in hand, I think I'm ready to word

today's relevance -- am I mainstreaming 

the art of being?  Then my own software

is glitched by sun on leaf, by laughter and …

          class war. 

Brooklyn Holiday Traditions  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

Italian-American families serve a pasta course before a full Thanksgiving dinner. Ravioli or cavatelli and tomato sauce to show who they are before who they have become at the table. 

On the way to Bay Ridge, house after house had its small front yard and brick facade covered in lights and decorations, a sight for adults and children. Block after block of animated cherubs, Santas, reindeer, snowmen, red and green lights, and illuminated snowflakes. 

At Christmas dinner, it was either twelve or seven fishes. It depends how numerous the family is and how many cooks there are. If seven, symbolic of the biblical interpretation of  God’s week creating the world and everything in it; if twelve, symbolic of Jesus’ twelve apostles as well as twelve months in a year and twelve hours in a day or night.

All the freshly-caught fruits of the sea helping promise a merry Christmas to all. 

I was amazed at my husband's Brooklyn-born and raised family who brought out the first course, pasta with red seafood sauce or plain for the kids; clams oreganata, scungilli salad, calamari salad, crab legs, lobster tails, whitefish battered and fried, broiled salmon, broiled shrimp, fried shrimp, mussels in garlic and wine, and fried calamari. Desserts (!) included pine nut marzipan cookies, biscotti and homemade Italian rainbow cookies and black coffee, which is espresso.

There was also a competitive aspect to this crazy feast, that if you “only” made seven rather than twelve, you fell short, loved God less, or were a misfit outcast atheist (oops). Grandma Nanny presided over the table since Grandpa had died years before. She examined the table and the children to make sure everything was clean. She dozed in the chair as the cleanup crew sang carols while washing up, and amazingly the whole kitchen and adjoining dining room were soon as clean as possible, as if none of the cousins had worn lobster bibs and left piles of shells in the middle of the table minutes before. Children opened toys, played together and one by one were changed into pajamas to sleep on the long ride home to Jersey.

I CAN’T WAIT TO BE FINE  /  H.T. Reynolds

Mother tells me the gravestones come from discarded wishes—from a womb not yet ready to grant them. She says with me—the moon had leaked into the room between the pieces of a broken window, wrapped around her waist, and filled the bare room with a sickly shade of Halloween—like a rancid pumpkin or an expired jar of olives. She says I was a planted fist from a seed she held against her breast as she exhaled her last cigarette—shotgunning me to a man becoming—a broken bottle—a gaping wound on the thigh—the forehead—the small of the back. Mother says we shouldn’t worry about what’s not in our control—that God will provide more than the gap in the floor ever will—more than the soup kitchen could—the angels with their donated shopping lists, their full bellies leaking words from their perfect teeth. Mother says to stay still, that it'll all be over soon—to clench my fists together—and pray.   

small boy in my mind

whispers out from the darkness

don’t be what they made

The Many Aspects of Purpose /  Gabriel Phillips

And the crow calls out with silver lungs

until its breath is the size of the penny.

Ants bite. They collapse their tiny

hearts which they bite then use

their hearts as the shadows for

fire.

That sunset would have a lovely

violent birth. A cutting of leaves

against my back. And two trees

in the forest are kissing,

as the forest and floor around them

burn.

Halley’s Chapel appears once

every 75 years with its own choir. So that

deer can taste their tongues for the first time,

the gun in the hunter’s dream is sleeping.

They were the fastest and plainest

druids.

Unzip the stone which cuts

the sunrise with itself.

Then the yellow flower

whose sole purpose is to remain

nameless, can talk the leaves into

speaking.

Slow Pour  / Colin Sturdevant

made men mute mere miles

by a glass of whiskey tonight

until the flood comes

October - Poem 12

Batik / Katerina Canyon

I sit on a stool

too short for my long legs

and made myself dizzy

from the smell of hot wax.

I use an unfamiliar tool to draw

flowers onto cotton cloth.

It is not slow or meditative.

my flowers are smeared splotches.

This is not the art that I know.

I cannot help but think

of my mother’s sighs

when I failed at calligraphy,

and watercolors and needlepoint.

So instead, I stand, and watch

the real artist fix my errors

and boil the cloth, dye it

royal blue.

I kneel to rinse and scrub it clean.

As my batik suns on a bush,

I sit and breathe in the wind.

It is time for prayer somewhere

because I hear the Muezzin.

The tall grass dances in the breeze.

When my batik dries,

I realize messy art is still art.

Sleeping in the car at Kentucky Dam Village State Resort Park, KY /  Sam Calhoun

Wet tent stuffed in the back, 

crouched in the front seat

with cracked windows, 

no difference between 

the crack of the moon

and the cracks of my eyes, 

nor streetlights and the moon,

or the neighbor's headlamp,

his dog's eyes mixing 

with forest eyes mixing

with fettered stars.  

I trace their shadows

the edge of woods, 

how long can anyone

expect to follow 

something in the dark?

Every evening the sun 

chases the same shadows

to the forest, breaks 

for the intermission.

I lie awake waiting

for the red morning light.

And So The World is Saved by Tom Welling Accidentally Posting His Naked Reflection to His Instagram Story    /  at/om

Sometimes I think I’m not crashing out hard enough, and sometimes I think I should be meaner. Sometimes I think I am too angry, and in this world that is so cruel I should be meeting it with all the love I was born with. Sometimes I think I have clenched my jaw so hard I’m surprised that my teeth haven’t all shattered. Sometimes I’m surprised the boiling anger within me hasn’t melted my eyes out of my head, rotted the skin off of my numbing fingers, and exposed to the world that I am nothing but writing cruel thoughts stuffed into a human skin. 

But speaking of exposed. 

Smallville actor Tom Welling uploaded an Instagram story to show the New York skyline from comic con. He shared a beautiful moment with the world and in it did not see his naked reflection distorted in the window glass. And god do I know how it feels to have your distorted reflection shown to the world. 

And god, did it make me smile, even with my jaw clenched, even with the unkindness trying to crawl up my throat I smiled. I smiled and I laughed and my friends smiled and we laughed. 

And Superman was real, and Superman was watching over us, and Superman saved the day. 

Tuesday is the New Thursday  /  Ellen Ferguson

An Abecedarian Double Burning Haibun

By Ellen Ferguson

1. Since Sliced Bread

Not only are you

The greatest thing since sliced bread

You are also this:

A

Book, noticed on the table at Rizzoli; 

Caj brown sweater confetti flecked;

Dashing approach to pastrami;

Eye for photography;

Fire of your mind;

Generous laugh;

High appreciation for Snoopy;

Intuitive reading;

Joy in Manhattan;

Knowledge of presidential libraries;

Lost memories of Kansas;

Making me better;

Nimbly pivoting away from Shakespeare;

Open to opera;

Punctuality &

Quick planning;

Row upon row of front row seats;

Spark of eyes, flashing;

Thoughtfulness;

Untouchable understanding;

Visiting your child with glee;

Writing with style/clarity of thought;

X-ray vision upon spying pastrami someone else might enjoy;

Your patience;

Zero tolerance for cruelty.

(continued…)

A Witch’s Point of View /  Brett Gastineau

Hunger grazed my belly.

I had started sleeping in caves with bears again.

I have learned to enter their dreams by burrowing

my teeth into their necks.

There’s something of warmth there as I enjoy

the drinkable thread of life but

I wouldn’t say tender.

There is no love in my murderous heart.

I crave the coldness of the moon.

Bears dream of the sticky sweetness of berries

and the promise of more to come.

I find no comfort there, but the flashes of

the piercing and crunching of skin is

another of their joys (mine too!).

It was the woman their father had wanted them to call

mother that I first saw.

Her heart was already dust.

She was a creature moved by the blue winds of

jealousy, craving, and spite.

Her mouth was filled with the sugar of hatred.

The nearby village was full of death.

The fields remained barren, unyielding.

It was in an itchy Hell the family found themselves.

His tears that fell at night

became icicles on her eyelashes.

He took little convincing of what had to be done

for (to) the children.

She spoke of mercy but really wanted only

to throw them out like trash.

Her longing had soured long ago; she knew

he would never regard her as truly satisfying.

Let him fall into the emptiness she poured on their bed.

She would make his hurt golden, claim she spoke from a

place of honesty...“please, love, forgive it’s bite.”

The children found themselves caught in

what appeared to them a labyrinth of knives.

The boy tried his best to comfort his sister.

She cried out to the hateful sky above.

She bit her lip.

She cowered into his chest.

Watch out child, for your mind might run off and

leave your heart, vulnerable to the feast of thieves!

Like a cat, I can see far into the darkness.

I knew they would arrive the next day. And they did.

Not to a home of confectionery delights but to a gleaming

hearth and the promised kindness in an old woman’s eye.

How where they to know that after a warm meal and a

warm slide into a bed they would wake in a cage?

How heavy my happiness as I watched them sleep; their faces

like jars of honey I could look through and see everything.

The girl woke first and I put her straight to work

gathering wood for the oven.

Fear filled her eyes.

Fear is my beloved.

Fear is my blood. The meatiest part!

The fire grew and blossomed in its liquid violence.

The brain is not a safe place to get lost.

There is nothing thicker than one’s own sickness.

I was pushed into the delicious fire.

I became shredded starlight.

Fitting, I would die in a whirlwind of good rage.

But am I ashamed? Am I wanting of forgiveness?

One does not change the clothes their soul arrived in.

The simple answer is no.

Everyday Parting of the Ways /  Joy Johnson

Soldier I onwards though I do not know 

why.  There is a deep divide, like a house

which needs keeping with garden to tend, 

when the questioning gulf of "why" opens 

and I urgent write to fill its innards

because, seems to me, that's what satisfies

the beast -- what beast? -- figment of reality 

needs nothing from me.  Do I excuse my

continued breathing by a subterfuge?

Better perhaps to, tea in hand, simply

stand in the wind, feel my beating heart then

flip a coin.  Has my pen pitted nature

'gainst something akin to culture, has man?

What do we fight each other for: mischance?

Is solitude what battles with commons--

is't blind rancor at needing each other?

Dreaming of a purpose might be conceit

of a philosophic sort.  What hole this?

In the cone of causality we've rent.

bob for apples  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

On our deck when our kids were small. Water sloshes from a tub like when I was little. Hanging twine, a donut on each string. We try marshmallows, but they wouldn’t hold, so giggles carried me back and forth through the kitchen, oops don’t let the dog out, please and thank you. McIntoshes red and green cheeks facing up, down, up. More giggles and some “have fun but don’t get each other wet on purpose!” All while holding on because the blindfolds made them teeter. Once an apple gets fished out, the prize gets crunched and the cidery fragrance makes me thirsty and hungry, too. But I am too busy arranging kids’ snacks on a melamine tray. I will eat later.

MAMA IS THE WORM  /  H.T. Reynolds

Tupelo 30/30 Cento Pt. I with lines from Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco;

Gabriel Phillips; Brett Gastineau; at/om; Katerina Canyon; Colin Sturdevant

her tendrils

unplanted from my gums

through tendons and bone

—weightless as a shadow

I am small, I have fallen

from my mother’s back

and I am drowning—

an imperfect copy of Eve

duplicated over and over

putting your mouth

to the wound of my body,

the slices like a whisper—

that’s where my father swallowed me

to the womb

by hands of someone who means well

in a life as endless and narrow as an hour

and my death

pulls from my throat

a deep howl

            this is what the world will do

            to you—

in the middle of dying

perhaps I will be grateful…

Lengths to Which Madness Would Measure, Had Madness Been Left in the Wood /  Gabriel Phillips

(written in the woods of De Soto state park)

It’s the arch between the doorways

deep in the woods.

Where I lunge myself towards the pink.

I hurt the rocks that hurt, I hurl them

against themselves until they sour.

I am the apocalypse of the deep,

deep woods. When splinters grow,

they teach the trees. Where I have hurled 

myself towards anything stone.

Where the vine finds favorites, it finds

my feet pruning the roots of twilight. What woods

expect of man, is near what the burning cedar

describes as quiet noise. Near but far

enough to seek. In forms that

did not exist but could. In forms that

once had crawled. To the tops of trees

I plunder the words of their young.

I stash them in little matchboxes

in cracks in the backs of caves, where the fox,

the owl and the wintering bear,

dance together in the green terror of echoes.

Protecting the roe deer from evaporating

with the dew at midnight, every morning.

I have finished the bow. I have brought

my eyes to a close. I shudder at echoes

of deep childish metal, which tear asunder

both wood and soul.

all my tears have been used up  / Colin Sturdevant

& let's not speak of poetic lineages

& yet let's speak of poetic lineages

a different kind than we are used to

Darwin's poetry found in all life

how it's not too sad to be the loneliest

man among Men. each couple I see

as if making it off the ark of love

and it's now been 21 years o' solitude

the holding of hands. the parting of lips

casual dress. a Sunday morning

& artificial rain falls on the street

& what a species we are

October - Poem 11

Xanadu / Katerina Canyon

I look young,

but I feel old.

He feels young

but looks old.

That’s how we match.

The owl minds the mice

dancing in the dust

while the earth splits

between the trees.

We are satiated

and settled.

The owl swoops down

to steal the snake’s shadow.

It is gone. Just like that.

Like steam escaping from the cracks

of a volcano.

We no longer stand tall.

I’m an “S.” He’s a question mark.

The owl is fed.

The mice are hiding.

The trees still stand.

At the Tornado Memorial County Park, WI /  Sam Calhoun

North of the Ahnapee River

we stopped here, driving

up the Door Peninsula

the way meteorites 

from Biela's comet 

still move somewhere

in the night sky.

Were we here later

we could see the Andromedids, 

faint swishing of the trail

like these maples

burning like the Peshtigo fire,

the one that leapt

the Fox River.

At the old well where 

seven threw themselves

to hide from the firestorm

I dream of the water 

that once was,

and the mill 

now paved over.  

I want to write letters

on the back of receipts,

leave them like prayer

dolls in the grass,

let the leaves swarm

over them, forget them 

like those who perished.

From where we stand

we can't see the river,

nor the swampland where

old snags stand like scarecrows,

Across the old potato patch

a dust swirl marched 

into the highway.  

I could lay in the grass.

I too could burn in the sun.

Bloody Back Angel   /  at/om

Grief has always come to me in the words of a horror story I read online once, where a man’s ribs were pulled open from his spine, exposing his bloody back like angels wings, 

and maybe it is because I was never able to see angels as anything more than dead people, 

but when I grieve I do so with a scalpel and a saw, I do it with a cry that makes others ears bleed, I do it to the sound of bones breaking, 

I refuse to do it quietly. 

You are gone, 

you are still gone, 

and I am still bleeding. 

I just wish I was doing 

so with my bones pulled open, 

my bloody backed angel

DocuSonnet  /  Ellen Ferguson

When children make a movie, it's not art.

A fading theater cannot be their muse.

They star in their school’s play, they land a part

That’s the artistic role they get to choose.

In filming for an audience our loss

Of local cinema not-paradise

They overstep the lines drawn in mind's moss

We've relinquished the sticky floor to mice.

Maplewood is now front-row anarchy.

Neighbors yawn, "Huh? Is it that big a deal?"

Don't inmates run asylums recklessly?

When children tell the story, it's not real.

IF they make one more film about our town

They’ll get no popcorn even when they’re grown.

Wanting the new /  Brett Gastineau

I freedom from my chronology,

ignorance of my remembrances,

cleaned of the silences from the myths I created.

I want new bones, so I can be happy with my nothing.

I’ll glory in new flesh, being the meat.

My new body welcoming the effortless air

and containing a volley of heartbeats.

My self bending toward a sun-sweetened time to come.

A body is the story that makes us come true.

A body dreams the reality of our expectations.

Please, bones, let me splendor beyond the rain

and break from a new mouth.

I want to know how grateful feels again.

Subsuperconscious /  Joy Johnson

Subsuperconscious

self grows liquid silver feet

and runs to be me.

Recipe  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

ragù alla bolognese

ground beef leaves its juices in the pan

seasoned bed of sizzle

wine, tomato, milk

I always have to look up 

the order of liquid additions 

there’s trinity 

nutmeg, freshly grated

& if you’re lucky

fresh tagliatelle

to sauce

yes, sauce is a verb

UNTITLED 10/10  /  H.T. Reynolds

for he shall live whose name is named

—Isis, in James George Frazer’s

The Golden Bough

do not tell her

your name

the harm she

tucks in your back

pocket unzipping

the rain along

the sky’s corroded

edges inviting gaps

into your veins

like snakebites—

a push  her venom

a murmuration

pouring to the back

rooms, behind

your eyelids

within that cavity

you hide in

mouth stitched

refusing to give her

what she wants

Circles of Water /  Gabriel Phillips

Calm spikes of car silence.

Frogs that gaze at flies. Flies,

but covered in chocolate.

When walls are wet

there is forgiveness

the walls are wet

there is no forgiveness.

How does rubbish bloom

from seeds of waste

which climb in and out

of water, refusing

to pour.

There are leopards

in the driveway

eating rosemary

as if never being shot.

And stones

that remember themselves

as pebbles. Then a touch

which is merciful

under the microscope.

Then the organizing of wind

from smallest to hateful

under the hurricane eye,

which sees your hurt face

as I stab myself with

my own umbrella.

Will you hurt me

as I hurt you?

My paper boat

and the crowd

of water.

My fingers breaking

the rippled surface

waiting, for my turn to cry.

men speak in secret  / Colin Sturdevant

To their wives

Who are oars

Into their pillows 

At late night

Song of sobbing

All among sons

October - Poem 10

Seasons / Katerina Canyon

The clouds have fallen.

Mist speckles my skin like sand.

Two points of crisp autumn

pinch me

and let go.

This amber skin

is bruised.

I am sick, otherwise

I am healthy.

When my toes go numb

I will know it is winter.

Late At Spruce Bog Lake State Natural Area /  Sam Calhoun

We were late for the bogbean, 

later still for the glaciers 

in their retreat, late 

for the morning fog

rising from this kettle lake,

the sun low, ringed 

like coffee stains 

on the table edge, 

the lady's slipper gone, 

pink having slipped 

to the sky, and fading.

I wanted to see the Labrador tea, 

dip my finger in the pitcher plants 

to test the temperature, 

rescue the dead fly

from it's viking grave,

leave it beneath yellow

birch and leatherleaf, 

between boardwalk boards

where tamarack flashed 

their march toward 

the gold heaven above.

But the light kept changing,

I could hear it in the ground:

every step the cry

of the white-throated sparrow,

every tawny cottongrass seed

sowed to the sky a kind

of diacritic to the wind,

the lake so still, spaghnum moss 

embracing every step 

like night does a shadow, 

folding diurnal hands into the dark.

In Response to “I Am Afraid”   /  at/om

I ate my own words, actually. 

I am afraid of the dread in my heart, 

I am afraid of the unanswered messages 

and short responses and the thousand 

little deaths I live every day that I can’t 

kill myself just parts of me and the worst part 

is I love these parts of me, 

I don’t want them to die. 

I thought I would rather die whole.

And yes all these things scare me, 

but this haunted ass house is scarier, 

and that late night knock on the door 

scared me yes, and the man I met, 

but scarier was knowing 

some part of me still wants to live.

Logical Conclusion is an IPA  /  Ellen Ferguson

and something advertised as surprising but inevitable

for thirty years

your logical conclusion,

the teacher says,

should be surprising but inevitable.

both dogs: symphony on a blanket, opera on a chair;

seemed to sense the logical conclusion –

one knew the symphony had ended, the other la bohème

rising to tug at their leashes.

you can hear it in

the waiting on a sidewalk,

the voice of tables and chairs, so

why ask the waiter for it?

Why say, “I’ll have a logical conclusion,” with your fish?

Can’t we let it come, surprising but inevitable,

Like dogs do? Like the path?

I just died (Translation of “acabo de morir” by Jose Maria
Lima) /  Brett Gastineau

I just died

and my death

pulls from my throat a deep howl,

leaves me ablaze in its salt.

I just died

and my death

surges rough and strong through my hands,

a rising deluge in my veins.

Death came just like that—suddenly—

while I was twisted and flailing,

yearning to be something new.

This woeful dawn casts a

faltering and wavering light

across my lost footsteps,

over my furrowed brow,

over my “indelible” mark.

Death, a cudgel, careening toward me,

overturning my life.

My life!

With this dawn, I am overwhelmed with its pulse.

Burial /  Joy Johnson

Scared to death, or thereabouts, by these dreams

that keep visiting me, of tunnels close

and narrowing, speaking to me of war

and encroaching disambiguation,

I vacillate between fantasy and

escape in poetry and math, and anguish. 

How to navigate this tapering, this 

weakening of mood, of hope, of prospect 

all while acknowledging instilled beauty

of not only what was but what remains 

to luxuriate in but mindfully,

to, last kiss midst, deeply appreciate. 

If the muse sits alongside my writing,

today shall have been worthwhile balancing. 

friend divorce  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

I miss her at times. Like October, with the spooky season decor that reminds me we used to trick-or-treat together around her neighborhood. She was a dancer, and often dressed in her stage costumes. My costumes were clumsy, frugal and funny like me. Our falling-out came for us like The Scream: quick and ghoulish. Our girls had a playdate and I had to cancel. She pouted and criticized me for making her break childcare plans with her parents, then  it turned into a silent stone wall leading into an empty field. My daughter said, I never liked her girls anyway; they were mean. And a small demon spirit whisked away decades of chitchat & lunch dates in just one text message. I can’t un-remember all the bunches of autumn corn, hay bales and candy apples along her street. It’s my only friend divorce and it haunts me.

GRIEF COMES WITH THE RATTLE /  H.T. Reynolds

after “Silence,” by Brett Gastineau

an empty bassinet with a pink bow

behind a cracked open door

still reaching out its shadow

like a midnight pendulum

a coiled viper on a doormat

spelling out WELCOME

in textured vines against

autumn colors

it comes with a prescription label

without refills, an empty bottle

and a rigid spine—trembling

upon a fiberglass couch, a lamp

spotlighting from the corner, gravel

being served for dinner, that spider

web in the corner still occupied

with the husk of a fly you watched

transform a few nights, maybe weeks

ago, while your skin protested the size

of your bones and your stomach felt

adventurous like a cat wandering

through a gap in the basement wall

nobody remembered was there—

not since the skunk debuted

and the whole house reeked

it comes from the lungs—the depths

of a throat unburdened from plastic

tubing, the machine humming

beside a lowered railing

a palm clutching a waxen fist

skin like flypaper, eyes fixed

on the scuff in the ceiling

it’s that small thing

left trembling

long after the body

stops

Persistent /  Gabriel Phillips

This thought, it spins me. From my own voice

I do not hear my name, instead I’m thinking

about a whisper of you. First it undoes

the front buttons like a persistent

summer cough. Leaving, pretending to,

leaving but not left. When there is

even more salt next time. Tender

to the bones which is enough,

to crack my mind so early.

That the rest of the day is haunted.

It’s another season where the colors

of the heartbeat begin to change.

And there was a note that I mistook

as the presence of someone beside me.

It is just change, who wears a

dark hat, and is doing a terrible job

of hiding its weeping face.

Could I have been smaller, could I

have worn the holes as a necklace.

Even though wind is known to stir,

it lies dead in silence behind the open door.

dream debt  / Colin Sturdevant

let me lay out each tooth

unplanted from my gums

as thanks for the wrecks avoided

and to have had two more years

& a lost career

& a burned down home

& gutted car

with kin

how she was the moon now gone

the moon still Houdini-ly there

yet not quite there anymore

a coin picked from an ear & pocketed

oh, valence shell still here

carrying ash until the death of your husband,

my father,

how we once lived when

there were still fish & cattle

& we lived to see miracles

better than technology:

bison coming home

October - Poem 9

Avall / Katerina Canyon

Today I felt my ribs squeezing

my heart like an apple press—

tight enough to remind me

that blood needs to flow—

tight enough to stop my breath,

but I remember

this heart is still mine.

You never owned it,

though I let you hold it

for a while

when I bowed my head in prayer

and raised my head while singing hymns.

You never held it gently.

You squeezed hard and said,

“This is what the world will do to you—

squeeze you dry.”

I was supposed to be the apple

that did not fall far,

but I rolled down the hill

and landed in the gutter for a while,

but even in the gutter,

I found enough earth to take root.

The world does have pressure.

You were right,

but I learned to thrive between the seams.

Island Number One Hundred Seventy Two (Pool Ten, Mississippi River)  /  Sam Calhoun

Know what it is like to be nameless,

odd man in the small town, 

know to knock the dirt from boots

so your footprints aren't different, 

so your breath doesn't leave

your accent in the air, 

step between two worlds,

bridge joints shifting in the wind,

recrudescent detritus

in the old slough,

woodland sunflowers eddying

in this drought like stars 

in some far galaxy, smartweed

erupting like nebulae,

let one channel be declared non-navigable,

float trees there anyway, 

give rest to the crane, the egret,

prothonotary warbler in spring,

let the barges rush by like static in the other,

float trees there t00, 

bobbing like heartbeats of herons,

quiet chirps of grey tree frogs,

their last affirmations of fall, 

crawling like sturgeons 

in the depths of this dark river,

silt clogging sightlines,

every mussel a moon

in the night.

I am Afraid  /  at/om

I am housesitting 

in a big and empty home, 

and none of the lights upstairs 

are working. I think I could fix 

them if I went to the basement 

but its dark outside and it's dark 

down there and I watched 

a scary movie tonight. 

I am more scared of the empty, 

of course, than any of the ghosts 

or bloody faced creatures that 

could be in this house. 

The truth is, if the worst they can do 

is kill me, then they can’t do anything to me at all. 

But I am so afraid.

I am afraid of running out of snacks 

and needing to go to the store, 

I am afraid that my loved ones secretly 

hate me. I am afraid that one day the friends 

I have now will realize they would have 

made fun of me in high school. 

I turned on a cozy gay romance, 

I had to hunt for one this time. 

I am afraid one day I will run out of these too. 

I am afraid I will never fall in love, 

I am afraid I will never really get what love is.

Dagnabbit, 44th street  /  Ellen Ferguson

Two times in two days, you do the math:

Screwing up on you, 44th street.

First was the worst. Mumble/rambling something about heading east early, something about presidential libraries. No one knows what this means, not even that strange zip-up thing trying too hard to be Larry David at the time.    

Next night, having left the play at intermission,

Ambling forth, the same tragic nonentity said,

“I just care about you and want you to be all right.”

Her child replied,

“Oh, so now you like me?”

Time stood still on 44th and 6th.

Windy lights soft &

Remembering,

Early in the crossing,

The errors of the night before.

Traffic lights stopped to retort:

“We heard about you, you idiot,

From our corner one block west, 44th and 7th.”

“If it were up to us,” the crosswalk sputtered,

“We’d never let you walk these streets again.”

Erasure: Ralph Waldo Emerson Journals /  Brett Gastineau

Solitaire /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

does playing sudoku mean I’m old?

as an only child, I played solitaire and made up games

my father plays solitaire

nothing breaks my heart so much

his thin shoulders breaking through the plaid

hunched over the large-print playing cards

he slickly shuffles then sets them out, unrushed, orderly;

makes them wave then piles them into the drawer

many years later my grown children

know exactly where to find the worn out deck

AFTER MY ECHOCARDIOGRAM /  H.T. Reynolds

my heart is essentially unremarkable

a shopping list with substitutions

a generic apology recycled from Mother’s Day

when the back of my head met up with a rock

and I learned how to sleep on my stomach

how to breathe in synthetic air

she hummed through my chest

through my ribs, through my lungs

her wand pressed against me like a rifle barrel

my body surrendering to her voice

a porpoise drawing me a map

point to each unremarkable chamber—

this one is for those who were welcomed in,

notice the way the door slams shut

how quickly you push them to the next

you see how this one waits empty—

lets itself swell before they all disappear

returning in the next room like ghosts

hollowed out and depleted

to be buried in the last chamber

their absence resonating like wind chimes

perhaps that is what I’m feeling—

this unremarkable pain

 An Arch of Reaching Birds /  Gabriel Phillips

Window has the thorn bush,

torn with quilt and lace.

If the house where birds would live,

could shutter sheets of white.

Let my fingers wrap their eyes.

The rye will rise to perfect pitch.

No one here must doubt them.

No one here must know.

A fourth body appears,

bound in minted flesh.

Doves which fang are lovely.

Stoned by brick and wall.

Tongue and groove to swallow,

lonely writhe of worm,

but call below, both birds and whey,

which peppers salt with ashes.

I tap you twice

until you wake

to notice broken

quilt and lace.

& its 2026 and yet  / Colin Sturdevant

I’ve witnessed the sun spoil bodies of fruit in different ways

Like how a metaphor crows out violence & its 2026 and yet 

People pass like blind goats & the other day, there was news & footage

& a man pulled a woman from her car as if she were an oyster plied

From comfort. & he lifted his arm as if to butcher her at the roadside

With just that. again & again. And it's 250 years in this fabricated nation.

When will its neomythos of equality finally begin? 

October - Poem 8

Newborn / Katerina Canyon

I saw
your eyes open on the video screen
at the sound of my voice
like the first ocean wave,
sleepy
from swimming through
the channel
and your home of
nine months.

I know you.
You said
with your eyes,
turning over every
syllable of my voice
for some sign of where
you heard it before.

Your ears know grandmother
from where you are
to me,
3,000 miles away.

You said,
I know you
with your eyes,
knowing the vow
in my voice
that your
home starts with your mother
and continues
through to where
I stand, arms open,
promising shelter
and a home
where all children laugh.

And

why are you so far away?
You said
with your eyes
open like an oyster shell
before the first wave.

Where are you?
I will be home soon.

Late On The Mississippi  /  Sam Calhoun

A distant loon calls

echoing every barge,

I sit on the pier edge

past the breakwater

where every stone 

chokes on waves,

how they seem shallow,

distant, old lives 

remembering once 

how it always was,

the power to be heard 

coming in a flurry,

notice how the current moves 

like swifts toward no chimney, 

red sky at dawn breaking 

every horizon, 

the murmurating rain, 

still dark, hopeful,

rolling like scud clouds

through Andalusia Slough, 

rushing against the banks, 

released back as if  longbows

bending toward home.  

Tanka for the Starry Eyed Fawn  /  at/om

Born in a bear trap

trying to stay starry eyed

sinking my teeth in my leg. 

This skin was so beautiful 

but I never stood a chance. 

Salty Cat Fan  /  Ellen Ferguson

For Halloween I go as a salty can fan --

The salty cats are a band.

I carry salt, a cat and a fan.

One year, I want to go as something else –

Maybe a house of cards.

You could come over and work on me

Until I can stand on my own.

Silence /  Brett Gastineau

Silence is sweet and holy.

Silence is the language of snow.

Silence is like the love between strangers,

a grace upon the heart’s meat.

Silence is the practiced mathematics of clouds and ice.

Silence is where the beautiful is found by accident and

where one come to believe it might last forever.

Grief comes with the rattle of rain;

it’s smell lingers and won’t let go.

The warm luminous water of memory becomes a mystery,

a vague fractured religion.

Thoughts drift, find no place to land,

hover like flies over the wound.

The tender and the cruel can make no peace.

And what is silence now but a wild hunger.

unskilled labor  /  Joy Johnson

open sign flashing, comrade

come home with me, comrade,

make me your friend

we upend the way of polity,

me and iamyourcomrade 

bricks subtend

a world-changing 

scheme.  us comrades,

we watch the world changing 

try to stay with the plan, 

not comrade freak comrade

what can i

contain here

i need more comrades

to maintain me

beans on toast, comrade 

be of good cheer

Who Knows? /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

The Beatles’ song I Will was one of my favorites. The Beatles had a resurgence in popularity, sadly, when John Lennon was assassinated at the beginning of my 7th grade school year. I vacuumed and dusted wearing my WalkMan while working out the harmonies in the song. I didn’t know yet that I would get to know  I Will so well, I would audition with it and successfully join the Alto I voice part of an a capella group I sang with for seven semesters. That’s because I took the advice to wait and watch the first semester of my freshman year to absorb the activities then plunge in by January. We reunite after forty years in February 2027. The world took my life’s activities for those four decades and swallowed them in one loud gulp.

I REGRET /  H.T. Reynolds

putting the keys on top of the microwave

the butter dish three inches to the right

of where it usually is, or the loose screw

in the cupboard I never fixed

the cracked tile in the back room

when Larry convinced us all he could

still juggle bowling balls—our only

shared sport, a basket full of ten-pounders

collecting cobwebs and dust like snow

I regret not shoveling the driveway

when I still had my gloves, my scarf

not quite a noose—

Who Begs, Begs to Differ /  Gabriel Phillips

Tons of sheets with 100 thread count. Yes,

they wrap the feet because of thread count

not the experience of counting.

They give bricks to one person at a time,

in case another person is sleeping.

How do you know they are cannibals?

When the child was myself, I was

the grave robber and his grave. Neither

dead nor grieving but very much

an appropriate blessing. Long have

I gathered anything that bends.

And bends towards me.

If the sky detaches, does it turn black?

Roam, roam how Romans fell.

Actual inventors of color. In front of

the canopic jar, in front of the bathroom.

Muddy makes mince meat fresh.

Muddy is the golden. Let the goose

cook the chef.

Are you sound?

I am lengthwise. I am both stumbles.

I share my sleep (one is mine)

around the yellow wall. Even in fever,

never with skin and flavor, I reverb

with floating feathers. I will never catch

what can never fall.

Pluck  / Colin Sturdevant

-inspired by The Odyssey’s scene of Odysseus devouring a lotus from Calypso.

at the lip of the earth.

I tugged whatever shell

I could strip from

succulent flesh

to discover

I was playing

a lyre.

& to what I had sensed

was a lyre

were dilapidated perennials

long forgotten yet sought after.

each mouthful was a bloom

I took in:

a memory eroded.

my skin becoming kissed

by long daylight & sea

& such a way until I return home.

October - Poem 7

Hungry / Katerina Canyon

Into his stomach of paranoia,
that’s where my father swallowed me.
Into his lies,
where fear created me,
puncturing my chest like bullets
directed at me by his past experiences
with women, by what
he assumed my nature to be.

He abandoned the idea
that I was innocent.
In place of that concept,
he put before me a mannequin
to model my behavior.
And for my education,
a dog-eared issue of Penthouse Forum,
where nightly I fingered through the uncertain
bedroom linen of strangers.

From the models of my existence—
the blonde, the brunette, the redhead—
where white playmates reigned
over my bedroom sheets
and never opened their eyes
or offered tea and biscuits
or any sort of comfort
for the scared daughter
of a young, dying Black mother.

At the 45th Parallel, Meridian County Park, Wisconsin  /  Sam Calhoun

Eight hundred miles from home,

the only thing keeping me

from the fifth largest lake 

in the world is a thin woods,

midway between places

I'll never see in my life,

though I imagine them all

like this, a small edge of land,

the water stretching for miles

to the horizon both ways,

Polaris midway to zenith,

the start of the little dipper,

the star that sits still, still

as a three hundred mile lake.

and me, here, cupping cool 

spring water in my hand

in a roadside park, hemlocks 

brushing sunlight like dust

beneath the day's rug, 

how it shimmers on moss,

only eight hundred miles 

from this waymark to mine.

Eight hundred miles, 

and a road home.  

after Life is a Highway and I am a Raccoon in the Breakdown Lane by David Dougherty  /  at/om

In the state of New Hampshire 

driver’s education programs teach 

moose safety as a part of the curriculum. 

In 2012 they played a video specifically 

about moose and what happens 

if you hit one. 

I have lived in New Hampshire

for almost thirty years and never 

saw a moose, but I always wished I could. 

I’ve driven backroads looking for them, 

lived out in the sticks by the mountains. 

I saw my first moose today on my way to work.

Moose are a lot bigger than most people think. 

Even the young moose in Merrimack was well 

too large to be mistaken for a deer. A grown bull moose 

can easily stand over six feet at the shoulder, 

it can weigh well over a ton. Moose are so large 

they lack most natural predators. The safety video 

said in large flashing letters 

MOOSE HAVE

NO FEAR.

A moose in the roadway will rarely 

run away. A moose in the roadway 

is an obstacle. If your car was to strike 

a moose the car would be destroyed. 

If your car was to strike a moose it 

would likely be fatal for both of you. 

I guess luckily for the driver on 101A this morning, 

the moose was not fully grown. 

I guess luckily for me, the moose 

was already dead when I drove by, 

being removed from the median leaving 

nothing behind but a pool of blood 

to be soaked into the concrete. 

I have lived in New Hampshire 

for almost thirty years and never 

saw a moose until today. 

Most of the moose I have seen have 

been in my drivers ed program or 

pictured on postcards. 

I will be more careful what I wish for. 

At the moment I was serving a Pepsi upside down  /  Ellen Ferguson

At the moment I was serving a Pepsi upside down
To a professional bowler from the Bronx
Over by the Movieland where Apocalypse Now would play,
You were also near popcorn, more than once.

In the year I rode through the Great Salt Desert in the back of a truck, salt everywhere,

You were also salting something at the time.

This morning during Silent Ball, it was silent. You too watched something without speaking.

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

For A. /  Brett Gastineau

You come to me with your dark kindness,

putting your mouth to the wound of my body.

Your breath and detective fingers touch me from all around.

There is such exhilaration in the not knowing

where you are going and the ropes of scent

falling, falling down.

Let me be gripped in the claim of your hands.

Let them steal what has always belonged to them.

You remind me that the sublime is

something you sink your teeth into.

current  /  Joy Johnson

The dream I dreamt this morning became one pink streak in the dawning sky that paired with all the dreams looking for new sleepers to dissuade of the inconsequence of corporality.  My drummer and I making what was inconceivably more fullfilled than any two could make -- a youthful blush on my subsuperconscience.  How could community (radio) adopt this grander air, this anguished lyric of adulthood brought low to high, this felt need to leave a sigil floating in a melody through the currents of the world.  Once I was a girl whose curling sheep hills brought someone low and I'm glad, glad. 

Mischief Night  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

Mischief night October thirtieth. Kids like me who would never dare vandalize so much as the cover of our own brown paper bag covered textbook with a doodle looked around the day of Halloween wondering how they threw those TP rolls so far up to go over all those branches? And if October 31st was a rainy day, what a paper-mache like mess. We were busy making costumes like my recycled can robot. My dad and I threaded half gallon cans from pineapple juice on my legs and little tuna cans for my arms, the guts of an old radio duct-taped to a box around my torso and a silver colored colander on my head. My mother crocheted orange wigs and americana primary blue and red rickrack costumes for me and a friend, Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy. Only they weren’t raggedy since my mom carefully made each piece. I wonder if she started in July? The greatest act of mischief I recall was to eat most of the contents of my pillowcase of candy that same night.

MORE THAN YOU’LL KNOW /  H.T. Reynolds

A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life

when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.

—D. Elton Trueblood, The life We Prize (1951)

I wonder if classrooms were arranged like rows

of corn, like peach trees—desks like drills

with the blackboard arranging the plots

outlining the caliber of each seed to be nurtured

or if Horace Mann dreamed of apples,

endless baskets beneath a sea of trees

professionally plucked and organized

or if Philbrick created blocks, sorted

them by age like wine or cheese, the nanny

holding her place as nurturer

while the kids learned how to obey

or if those seeds ever found a ridge,

an horizon upon which to bloom

to extend themselves to the heights

of stars and whisper back to the wind

thank you for your labor

for the direction of your push

for allowing me to land where I may

without burying me too deep

without denying me the rain

or if the gardener, tilling

furrows with calloused hands

hunched over an almanac

wondering if tomorrow

it’ll rain, or if the sun will be

cruel, or if there’ll be respite

from his labors, will find peace

beneath the scorching sun

knowing there’ll be fruit

tomorrow

One of Us /  Gabriel Phillips

I still notice things. The lonely lemon river.

Your purple bangs belong.

From the mountain, cherries pour.

And over breast of hills. For

the harpies do we measure stiffness, with comb,

with posters in silhouettes,

decks of bridges. We come to knowledge

as a hammered gust. Without

time or the item to display, only

a stack of magazines with all the

smiles scratched out.

No idea of where we are

or if we are, we sing

out the rickets. Dancing under

a dying glow. Over the lake without

breakfast. We partially worry

with ruptured hands, the weight

of a hunted roar. How I trust your

comment on the stars, how you sleep,

how you forgot to

wake up. Between now

and noon we will open our mouths,

one of us will make room for

what remains of the shadow

of someone missing.  

October - Poem 6

At the Bar / Katerina Canyon

I think of Harlem’s street noise

as I sit alone in a sushi bar in Jakarta

observing little beyond my own thoughts.

I like to sit alone listening

to instrumental music

while the sushi chef slices soft tuna

with his bright steel knife.

The slices sound like a whisper.

The sushi chef speaks

and asks how I like my sushi.

I say it is good and how as a Californian

I maintain high sushi standards.

He tells me he used to work

in California.

He was a permanent resident

but is not allowed to return to the U.S.

because he stayed in Indonesia

too long, taking care of his dying mother.

I think there should be more to this—

a deeper meaning, a greater truth.

I have no solution for him

or this world we find ourselves in.

He gives me his card to contact him

in the future, but knowing me,

I will forget about it

and move on to the next poem.

I think of Harlem again

and remember that there are people there

I haven’t seen in over a year.

At Calumet Harbor  /  Sam Calhoun

Cold night at Calumet Harbor, 

far boats eddying to the marina,

my fingers drifting across the tower 

railing as the diurnal wind 

stretches like an old blanket, 

threads just beginning to break 

into small white caps across 

the breakwater, each rock

sipping sky like news of the day.

Behind us the harbor lights, rhythmic,

know how long to shine, and flags

become their own shadows,

a static whispered through the night.

Here a sky can break so hard 

it needs the moon to keep going.

I remember how birds face windward

so they know which way to lean,

their feet gripping cold wires, 

their bodies spaced apart 

to stave off the electrical 

current underneath.

Atop the cold tower I lean in.

If memory is a looking glass, 

any life can be this lake. 

I close my eyes, and listen

to the engines of dreams.  

American Horror Story: American Horror Story  /  at/om

We as a society 

have moved past the need 

to keep watching 

American Horror Story. 

Like it’s bad enough to just look at my phone every morning and see all the bad news, 

that there was another mass shooting in another state where my friend lives, 

that some old fuck elected into office a 

thousand years ago wants to ban my 

god given right to use a public bathroom, 

that there’s a superstorm forming on another coast where it previously never rained, 

that I couldn’t afford to go to the doctor but my tax dollars are funding weapons, and tanks for cops, and tear gas, and kidnappers in the street, and islands and gold courses for evil men in positions of power. 

So the last news I need is that I’m going to have to watch, 

Evan Peters still playing that seventeen year old ghost, 

(that yes had me in a chokehold when I was also seventeen) 

but we’re both far too old for this now. 

And this show has gone on so damn long 

and the plot has somehow been lost for longer. 

But I guess when America is always making new horror stories 

We have to punish ourselves somehow. 

Carpe Diem-y  /  Ellen Ferguson

You can have my Samuel Beckett and Edward Gorey book

But I’m borrowing a day today.                         

                                   You can have my Roz Chast portrait of Jonathan Richman

But I’m taking today for a walk outside now.

                                   You can have my Kafka T-shirt and my Easily Distracted T-shirt

But today and I are going out to play catch with a tennis ball.

                                   Those are the only valuable things I own. Consider them yours.

Now, today and I are making molasses cookies. Later, Hater.

Spark /  Brett Gastineau

The invisible hand reaches from the quiet cold

and places two embers in the mouth of a corpse.

The honeyed light grows and sprouts.

Her skin remembers what it is to be alone.

She breathes in the moon air teeming with laughter

and whispered affections.

Her heart—that bloody star—pulses with the beauty

of thunder.

The fire spreads with the softness of April meandering

through tendons and bone; its strange music

weightless as a shadow.

The refrain flowers as does the language in her heart—she

knows them as she knows dreaming.

She feels her legs like snow.

As the sun rises, at first, it obliges them to glisten

and then it makes them dance.

Her feet upon the dark earth,

she sets off to write her new myth,

to find what her questions are.

Forgot  /  Joy Johnson

In the midst of memories of the him

Who placed his palm against my sternum as

If to heal every broken bit within 

This frame, when you say 'hi' and then insist

There was a day when we happily sinned:

Each other's arms, mouths.  A day of passion. 

Perhaps when I was a drunk bassist in a band?

Oh-- I knew your brother from shared classroom. 

Embarrassment.  What is your name?  If only

We were young and could go at it again. 

Hope might spring up in the form of forgotten 

Betrayal (whose trace endures doggedly). 

Let it fade … replaced with you and me ablaze. 

Instead we kissed until I turned away. 

WITH THIS BEATING HEART /  H.T. Reynolds

tender beneath her teeth,

these minor moments

chambered & dislodged

like a grease fire

becoming aware,

choosing not to destroy

what frightens me

but don’t tell me

what I’m not—

this heart’s

heavy burden

Until the Street Lights Come on /  Gabriel Phillips

Dad showed me a bicycle

that had chased a cat into the tree.

He threw rocks at it until dinner

then we ate the tree.

Last I saw, the bike was skeptical

but didn’t rust. Since it didn’t rain.

I studied broken bicycles against

the tree’s permission. It wanted longer

pedals on shorter bicycles. It didn’t

want sap to erupt. The garage

had closed for winter. Rubber

was not on sale. So I promised

the dirty bicycle, that if he leaves

he will never be clean.

My father threw me at the bicycle,

one final time.

He visits me the last of every winter

and checks for signs of rust.

October - Poem 5

Tap a Vein / Katerina Canyon

Written in response to “Inkwell”
by James Evert Jones

Your anger resides in the black hues
of your inkwell.

Your blood, your soul
your legacy of language
make me mourn the October
poems you cannot read right now,
and I grieve you before you
write goodbye to the streets of autumn.

In fall and early morning
I think of how we wrote
through prompts. You know how
to “tap a vein” to keep writing.

I imagine that right now
you are dreaming in verse.

We kept writing across
thousands of miles
through letters, lines, and
phone calls.

To be a poet is to die
one pen stroke at a time—
leaving each fault
between the lines.

When our friends ask
“What is wrong with you?”
I will say I feel a void, and
I lament.

The midnight reaper is knocking.

At Gibraltar Rock  /  Sam Calhoun

All morning on 
the drive here, 
lane lines skipping
along with the sky, 
I wondered if clouds
count lines like sheep, 
if the sandhill cranes
danced as if alarm clocks
with the rising sun,
the shadows of wings
growing louder 
every minute.  

I Did Dance With the Devil   /  at/om

One. The episode of Shorsey where he is asked why, at his age, and his skill level, is he still this passionate about hockey. Shorsey answers 

“It’s the only place I can be me.” 

Two. Sitting on my porch, smoking a cigarette, and thinking about how I’ve never played a sport but my recent life has been run by hockey shows. 

Three. Wishing I was at Disney World with my mom again, where we were both care free and my worst problems was my feet hurting in a long line. 

Four. Trying to get to my drug test for a new job in a rain storm and some idiot in a white jeep wouldn’t let me change lanes. 

Five. The launch of the real Irina Foundation, looking at my comfort blorbo fake hockey player and asking him do you know how much you have changed the world? 

Six. Listening to the Festival of The Lion King. 

Eight. Listening to the Festival of The Lion King. 

Nine. Headache. 

Ten. Headache. 

Eleven. Wondering if I ever knew a life beyond how bad this headache is. 

Twelve. I am fundamentally unlovable. The reason I can never get along with anybody is because I was born with rows upon rows of teeth and I knew how to bite before I could talk. I am the center of all of my problems and I always will be. I could seek out the friends I have now but they’ll only learn to hate me too. It’s better to just curl in on myself, to let the walls collapse and bury me if they have to. I am always being buried in one way or another. 

Thirteen. Overstimulated at the farm stand. 

Fourteen. Nightmare. Best friend said she didn’t want to ever speak to me again, and I became a tornado of screaming and desperation. Woke up afraid to ask her if it was real. 

Fifteen: Brother moved away four months ago, looked at pictures of how happy he is now. I’ll probably never see him again. 

Sixteen: Wrote a poem wondering if I cry too much. Wondering if that’s why when I cry now, I only tell the page.

Sestina for the 18th  /  Ellen Ferguson

After lunch at Duchamp/Moma, tea at the Austen

Society! Pineapple reticule, bonnet

In hand, we made our way to Central Park

After. Leaving, Carol took care at the door

Of her car. Who makes their exit

By highway? Luckily, I found

The 6 train; it was found

Without further ado after Austen

Teatime ended, my exit

Significantly un-swift; bonnet

In hand, stuffed through the train door

After fountain time in Central Park.

 
In our slow crew. Central Park

Fountain time lingered, we found

Ourselves bouncers at the door

To a bookstore playlist. Austen

Forgotten for now, bonnet

Stuffed in Moma bag, beating an awkward exit

 
downtown. Not gowned but ruffled, exit

the train from Central Park

ruffled, sans bonnet,

turnstile found

still dressed like Austen

shoving a locking door

only to discover, beyond the door,

another locked, scaffolded exit

at 42nd. No more tea with Austen,

no more Central Park,

42nd Street egress elusive and unfound.

Just a mad, ruffled woman without her bonnet.

In retrospect, the lack of bonnet

Was lucky. Charlie Brown’s fortune teller, ever the door

To stout decisions, found

“Make a bold choice” the answer. Revisiting locked exit

Doors, trains leaving Central Park,

Crying “Help” & yes! Freed by the kindness of strangers! Goodbye, Austen.

We almost didn’t meet that day. No exit, silted Central Park, tea-drenched Austen,

Crazed bonnet, locked door.  But we did, didn’t we? Not lost -- found.

After Joe Brainard’s “I Remember” /  Brett Gastineau

I remember an afternoon riding a bike along the coast of

Chiloe as sheets of rain fell. I remember my water-logged

socks and the heaviness on my shoulders. I remember how the

wind was filled with the smell of mud and fish and pine

needles. I remember when I made it to a secluded beach

there was a herd of wild horses—their hair long and ratty,

covering their eyes. I remember how they sounded like

thunder upon the sand.

I remember a Greek Orthodox monk I became friends with in

San Francisco. I remember how easily I became his

confessor. I remember I have always had that gift of

putting people at ease and loosening their history. I

remember how affectionately he spoke of each of his secret

lovers and the map of their skin.

I remember the bombast of the first ABBA song I heard.

I remember the Challenger explosion; the lichen of smoke

and fire in the sky.

I remember stepping on a nest of yellow jackets and being

stung. I remember them congregating around my ears and

eyes. I remember the angry hum. I remember screaming and

stripping off my clothes as the cloud of them grew and

raged.

I remember every country road I ran along in Putnam County.

I remember the chorus of bugs and smell of grass in the

summer. I remember the cold blankness of the air in

winter.

I remember my first kiss with my wife in her car while Echo

and the Bunnymen’s “Lips like Sugar” played.

I remember my piano teacher telling me that I’d never be

able to play Beethoven’s “Pathetique.”

I remember my daughter’s first word was “good” and how I

thought she sounded like a happy toad.

I remember when a friend told me that there are more

outcomes from shuffling a deck of cards than there are

stars in the universe. And every time I remember this fact

I am giddy with awe.

I remember the first time I ate a pawpaw and how it tasted

like a banana and filled my mouth like a custard.

I remember taking dance lessons at Arthur Murray's. I

remember my partner’s full-teeth smile and how she smelled

of Dove soap and strawberries. I remember being extremely

aware of my Adam’s apple whenever I placed my hand on her

hip. I remember thinking how this must be what laughter

feels like when it flies.

I remember the first song I learned to play on the guitar

was “Every Rose has its Thorn” by Poison.

I remember going blind after a night of drinking absinthe.

I remember the dark echoing like cobblestone and the taste

of licorice that lasted for days.

I remember when I was 12 and a group of friends and I

chased each other in an open field as we shot of Roman

candles. How we didn’t manage to burn one another or start

a fire, I’m still not sure.

I remember the first time I noticed my daughter had my

father’s smile. I remember it was five years after he

passed. I remember thinking that perhaps this life still

had gifts it was willing to give.

Further More  /  Joy Johnson

Far be it from me to even try to reinforce or

Underscore how positively different civilisation, how

Remote and removed from now-ness, it must become

To hold any promise for continuation, perpetuation of

Humanity and a biosphere humans could still call home.

Either we leap or we die, taking great swaths of our

Reality with us. Or tomorrow I'll wake up and,

Moribund, nothing will have changed . . . for

One more day of steady march to obliteration.

Regretfully all the days of my life have been

Exactly that: lame-duck me limping to dying.

Impatience /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

When are we getting there? Why the delay? What’s going on here? How could we have gotten our wires crossed? Who made the original phone call? Where the hell is my order? Ugh…

CLOSER TO HAPPY /  H.T. Reynolds

a poem is a prism

unfolding flashes

with the precision

of a stonemason

bruising light

into form

shaping it like

silk bars spun

into a chrysalis—

a womb,

a wrapped cradle

hiding the dripping

sink, an overflowing

answering machine

pulsing its red dot

against bare walls

stripped of portraits

hung up like gravestones

a poem is a prison—

each cell

an air sac in my lungs

inflating

Glued Together /  Gabriel Phillips

Mixing us

with wallpaper patterns.

That you’d waited for no

other reason. Than the scalpel

of release. Waiting

100,000 times a second,

a heart that blinks. Then sometimes

needs reminding. I’d be

by your side should your side

be beside me. If only

I were more sideways.

I mimic the zebra,

the white piano. Hooves

scaling the walls, the

best spot to echo

beside paintings of you sleeping.

A calm abduction of your time.

Two things can be unrelated.

And the mice

holding hands

facing one another

dying in separate mouse traps.

So the only thing you listen to

would be the sound of your own reflection.

October - Poem 4

While Sitting in the Minneapolis Airport Waiting for My Flight to Incheon, I think of Mary Tyler Moore

/ Katerina Canyon

Everything I know about Minneapolis
I learned from Mary Tyler Moore
who brighten the city
with a toothy grin that chased
off winter and left our memories
living in eternal spring.

I learned Minneapolis was a place
where hats lived midair
in permanent twilight.

Mary’s city was childlike,
a place where she played in the streets
with a spin and a smile.

She must have been dead three years
when George Floyd was murdered.

I learned from George Floyd.
He died on the sidewalk—
childlike with pleas to spare his life.

I learned the Twin Cities were split
as sharply as Jacob and Esau.
George Floyd may have had a toothy grin
but I never saw it.

The officer who killed him
pushed the city into an eternal winter
which has the power to snap out
a life with a sustaining pressure to the neck.

An Open Road  /  Sam Calhoun

So thin a life

an open road,

the only music

rumble strips, 

the world

a low cloud,

the dreamers 

so small

we squint,

sun at our backs,

collect like

fogbows

across the long

arch of sky, 

colorless, 

so small 

we shine as one, 

so heavy every 

foot shuffles

the ground.

I Did Dance With the Devil   /  at/om

I did dance with the devil, 

and not in the fun way I learned to years later, the way where I have had a couple drinks, and I’m laughing with my friends. 

but in the way where the devil tells me, 

he is my only friend. 

I danced with the devil with claws in my skin, 

with his teeth tearing my ear as he whispered that he can tear me 

apart at any minute. 

(and I know it is not a threat, I know because he has done it) 

I know the feeling of holding your heart in your hands, I know how ugly the organ is when you look at it in the light. 

I know so because the Devil told me 

it would not help me dance, I know so 

because he took my heartstrings 

and tied them around my wrists, a 

marionette for his desires. 

Puppetmaster made me dance for him, 

it was the only time he said I was any good at it. 

I danced for the devil, 

he called himself God. 

Bookstore  /  Ellen Ferguson

Past lives /  Brett Gastineau

Such a simple mistake—a dress folded and put on a shelf
instead of hung on a hanger. But my days were marked by so
many small missteps, a tally you kept—a dish left in the
sink, the keys you couldn’t find, two library books
overdue, the house too clean, our daughter’s naps that went
too long and kept her from you when you got home, a tomato
plant from your aunt that failed to grow, the Thanksgiving
dinner I cooked without needing your help. I thought (I
hoped) I could manage the chaos of your moods. Not be
scared as your eyes grew black.
Perhaps you found a sweetness in your hatred. For you,
there was a release each time you called me garbage, each
time you struck my face or punched my arms. Each slight
and insult I held close to my skin. I gave you the leash.
I gave you the knife. Maybe I believed that fear was
another face of love, a necessary leap into madness. No
longer did you touch my name like a kiss. No longer was my
body a home. You told me I had taken your life. You would
leave a room and I would slap myself.
And then that frantic search for the dress. How you
screamed. Charging from our daughter’s room, you slammed me
into a door frame. My head, my shoulder connecting. I
wish I could say next came a brief interlude of pain. I
can’t. I wish I could say that I have left that moment.
There is a thought, a personifying of the door and its
desire for a past life as a bird. This body moves on, cross
town, cross years spent sleeping poorly. There is no
flight through white, white clouds. Rage and love are
stories that have no end.

biome pome:  dirt  /  Joy Johnson

comes a point when inside worm and out are 

hard to tell apart, but time:  it imparts

a juice to my seeming inevitable 

existence in this few teaspoons edible —

or so the plant roots insist as they dine

on what worm, wood, and fungus leave behind.

i like to feel the wet that clings me to 

my mates, though dust bowls have happened too,

and sent me to new places to re-home.

soon enough old’s forgot in new biome

where in-and-out-of-worm and root-the-plants 

become my raisons d’être again and

i’m happy when feet of ants and sleeves

of larvae are what i feel morn and eve. 

Love unlimited  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

How did welcoming children complicate our lives? Firstly we thought our love for each other had no bounds. Then we found out we loved our firstborn more fiercely than a bear with her cubs, a fox with her kits, a mythological creature and her wiggly baby monsters. Second we expanded that love for our second born, and life changed again, for the better. It was man-on-man defense; still ok for our fortyish faculties. And we had sleepless nights, the pediatrician visits, the matching outfits, the enrollment in school, the lost teeth, the new puppy, the birthday cupcakes the high school dances. Whoosh! Fast-forward. Our children are adults making their way. We love them like cats love their kittens, like mantises love their mini-mantises, like ducks love their ducklings, and they don’t seem to need us anymore. In reality,  I believe they do. And I am always so happy when we see them. That’s love unlimited.

SLEEP WITHOUT GHOSTS  /  H.T. Reynolds

you taught me not to

grieve the things we never had

so I won’t

I shall imagine you a stranger,

mother—telling everyone

how I was born from ashes

how my closet never hid

bruises beneath turtlenecks

or brittle bones—

            it’s easier that way

while I teach my children

how there’s no such thing

as monsters—but that isn’t true

is it      it’d be easier

if monsters had claws,

had fangs,

had glowing eyes

but they smile—

they buy you toys

and new clothes

and keep

little secrets

then devour you

in your sleep

it’s easier that way

but this day,

heavy with your ghost,

I rest in bed

Laws About Love But Underwater /  Gabriel Phillips

Back up the brains, poet. Walls have backed up

against you as you yourself said you were warm.

It is fortunate we all look through the same hole,

every quarter. That undressed around exposed lips

prevents waste from hatching. But do lovers

climb together even though they share two

different mirrors, one each above each sink.

Luckily, copy cats start in nature, her lover

told you. But yet you aren’t wasted! You

catacomb the sound like a cove of dove

bones, when wedding season is near. The candles

pastel with broods of soggy cake, of which

none is tasted. Tongues were divorced.

That breeds are tied to wax, that wax should

should choose to celebrate. As a hot of reptile.

Double invertebrates mate with their clones.

Laws for sea creatures never evolved

to the laws of land walkers.

Do you wonder then, if the sea

is truly a better place for me

and for me?

psalter's song of serpents  / Colin Sturdevant

I poured oats from my mouth
as a gift unto the earth.

For I had trod with gluttony
satiating each thread of my body

& made a den of my bed.
Each body had a name

that sought warmth
& my forked tongue

sang each cunning note
to praise legs apart.

& they go forth at dawn
& I lament that they aren't the one.

How I dispirit their bodies
as a curved bottle emptied:

[I] make their tongues
as sharp as a serpent’s;

the poison of vipers 
is on their lips.

October - Poem 3

Message in a Bottle / Katerina Canyon

The ocean drums
while I dive beneath the waves.
tar sticks between my water-logged
wrinkly toes.

Peeling away the bubblegum stickiness
purifies me. It leaves the bottom
of my feet white—a contrast to the brown
that starts above the arch.

These sun dwindled beyond horizon.
My legs never tired of running through the surf.
My feet sucked more tar to its heels,
and I peeled it away—
all clean again.

I scream as loud as I want
because I can never
out scream the ocean.

My hair wild—
inspired by sand dunes;
electrified by the sunset.

My body tangles in kelp.
It slows me down,
but it does not keep me
from dry sand.

My father tilts his head
and empties his wine bottle.
He tosses it to me.

I inset the note:

“Help!”

and I throw my screams

Into the waves.

For A Dekays Brown Snake At Wildcat Den  /  Sam Calhoun

It's your church 
here in the rain,

here in the middle
of the road, double 

lined, gold flaking
into rivulets in worn

asphalt, paths wanting
to be as old as these hills,

mouth agape, rushing
with the wind, 

preaching silence,
my cold ears 

listening to every 
word not spoken, 

knowing how 
the sermon goes,

how the world 
will offer a branch,

how the world
will rope you 

into the grass,
thick with weeds,

yours to decide
as the cars rush by,

to stay here, in
unfamiliar woods,

the slow way 
back to light,

or cast back 
into the road, 

how each way is right,
but maybe wrong,

how the sun always
finds a way home.

Movie Where a Man Falls In Love   /  at/om

I watch a lot of movies nowadays 
where two men fall in love and 
run away together, and I think about 
all the boys I dated in school before 
I could bring myself to admit that I was one. 

I wonder if they knew, 
would they have run away with me? 
Would they have run from me? 

My body was never really molded to 
host what I would become, but I doubt 
any of those boys loved me for my body. 
I doubt any of those boys loved me at all. 
I don’t think they could, they didn’t know me.

The difference is now I am loved by 
my own transformation, I am loved 
as the ever changing seasons. I am bounding 
like Icarus into the sunset at the end of my own 
movie where a man fell in love with himself.

the coffee after the coffee  /  Ellen Ferguson

Let’s drink a cup of coffee
After that cup of coffee;
unlike other coffee near Christopher Street
in September,
the coffee we shared was cold.

Let’s drink a different coffee
After that coffee across the avenue;
unlike that cup of coffee
Another coffee would be delicious.

Whenever coffee comes by these days,
Casting a cold eye, frothing at the mouth,
We pay it no mind, until it bangs on the door,
The metal door,
And we let it in            hesitating less             over time

Bed  /  Brett Gastineau

There is no such thing as a bed without history, but
a bed where sleeplessness becomes obsession,
a bed marked by shadows and teeth,
a bed housed in the fire of evening,
a bed heavy with happiness that almost makes you believe it
is our natural state,
a bed where morning’s cruel light falls,
a bed that does not forget rogue tenderness or whispers of
caution,
a bed that can not answer what we should do with the
darkness between us,
a bed where the body may learn to forgive but never the
hunger that hands are capable of,
a bed where the dreams of yesterdays come in blue,
a bed where you can remember yourself but lose words,
a bed that reminds you that you have lived a life you did
not choose
are the beds I have known.

A moment  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

A moment too late
Traffic’s screech

A moment too soon
Watched pot

A moment away
Boils over, spilling

A moment in time
The last story you told me

A moment of remembrance
Your constant, welcome presence

Dear G**  /  H.T. Reynolds

when I was in seventh grade,
I wanted to be a witch—

I asked Jeeves for a spell book
but he said he couldn’t suffer
a witch to live

so I unplugged his throat,
buried his motherboard in salt,
arranged his keys into an array
and prayed over the blood of
another descending

day before Claude found me
around a conclave submitting
our invocations like an inquiry
carved out in the proper tongue

his most regal voice proclaiming
I will be a swift witness against
the sorcerers, this cloak, this thumb
snuffing out their pulse like embers

but why should gold be reserved
for death, for the brittle bones
of kings and tyrants spelling out

the destination of living,
to toil among the immobile
collecting happiness like diseases,
like the lacquered casket swapping
a dream for an empty space

but what’s the point
in feeding your kid
a shit sandwich
before cake

Tart of Acid Rising /  Gabriel Phillips

So hungry, I went to bed and dreamt of eating
instead of dreaming. I couldn’t even carry

the apple to bed. It hung on the highest limb.
My birthing spot. Which was in August,

is still the highest limb. Therefore, we should
hang the paint on monkey grass, restless

without a glance of color. Without
that brings more without. The sound of trees

escapes my mouth, I open my mouth
and a dream steps out. Coughing. With three thumbs,

two hands. Even though it
is busy there is room for more hair,

which is horizontal. It cries like a canary.
The birdcage cages only the kudzu.

Somewhere, along the garden,
the flavors of lemon echoes.

And then I think of stomping them.
And then I think of liberating the garden.

October - Poem 2

Mirror / Katerina Canyon

Echo is the flesh
that lives in each child
who follows me.

Hunger reverberates
through the mouth’s tunnel
to the womb.

The body imitates my flaws
as if reflection is a gift.
It turns itself over in the
curves of your body.

Are these my hands or yours?
It is hard to recall the exact
moment the first wrinkle
betrayed me.

I am an imperfect copy of Eve—
duplicated over and over.
Eve did not have a spare digit.

Mine was chopped off
at birth.
I can still feel
its echo.

Dust  /  Sam Calhoun

at Field of Dreams Park

What else is here but dust?
I can wander the field,
count corn kernels 
like talismans, 
dust
stalks winding up
to the dark blue sky,
long cirrus streaking above
like dust across the diamond, 
hold the chaff in my hands
from some distant harvest,
pretend this all goes on
to some end, cup
dust 
like time here, 
like a cold drink 
with an old friend, 
like corn sweat in summer.

Ilya Fights the Loon   /  at/om

for Jess Tønseth Gleason 

Inspired by Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid

i am small, i have fallen from my mother’s back 

and i am drowning.

i know how to swim but the storm brings waves 

over my head and i can only see her when

i fall under the water. 

and the only sound i hear is not mother’s sweet song 

but the distant cries of wolves and i have loved enough

now to know the difference between the loon song and a 

predator licking its lips 

but the giant black bird that bobs over the wake 

does not call anything kind. 

it sings out

“He will never really love you. 

Nobody has ever 

really loved you.” 

nobody but the bones at the bottom of the lake 

has ever held me like he has. 

the man i love has loved enough to try to teach me 

how to sing to the birds but when i open my mouth 

the wolves howl, the waves pick up, i am pulled back under. 

i call for him in the sound hunters make when trying to attract prey 

and the dark bird grows bigger. 

the grown bird knows which little ones are tainted 

by the hands of someone who means well. 

they know when something is to be left behind. 

the dark bird tells me creatures who can’t fight 

their way above the waves deserve to become 

the rocks at the bottom of the water. 

i know how to swim and i know how to fight 

and i know the dark bird is not the only thing 

here with teeth. i reach out for the loon 

and grab its neck in my teeth, i can climb onto its back 

to stay afloat but i still hear all around me. 

“He will never love you.

Nothing can ever love you”

even when the bird is limp 

the wolves are howling. 

telling me to come home.

the bird was never the monster 

in this story, nor was the body 

at the bottom of the lake. 

it was the wolf who thought singing 

like a bird could turn him into one, it is 

my bloody reflection staring back at me

from the edge of the water, it is the sun 

coming out through the clouds and the 

feathers floating on the surface of the lake,

it is knowing that when he comes out 

and finds this slaughter scene he will tell me 

he loves me. he will understand. he will hold me, 

and remind me of the differences 

between birds and wolves. 

and i will love him enough to believe 

the water won’t swallow me.

Bench  /  Ellen Ferguson

Come curve with me and be my bench
And we shall all the benches prove
Like curves on benches benches curve
And benches curving benches curved
And we will all a broken pencil
A pencil breaking in two pencils
If pencils break and broken pencils
With pencils, pencils, pencils, pencils
If after all the rulers rule
And all the rulers also rule 
Then curve with me and be my bench
Like benches curve and benches curve.

In Conversation with Goethe  /  Brett Gastineau

To hope that those who follow would not have to travel
the same roads of love is not wise.
That is just a shunning of the constellations
of need that fill the sky and
the nameless avenues that lengthen in shadows.
Is there a happiness older than water
to be found here and a love that can
be taught to gentle? Yes.
But what of the parts of you in these night-years
that are most alive?
Those that have teeth!
The world breaks upon this wild flesh
and we become guardians of the bloody
in a life as endless and narrow as an hour.
Desires that have no names carry us, lead us
from the time we inhabit and leave us to
paint in past tense.
There are those that wish to carve their name
into your skin and drag you into their wilderness of
hunger—Perhaps it is you who are culpable. Perhaps you both
harden and are no longer each other’s delicious friend.
Left asking for things no human can give.
Peace does not come in a nest of arms or moments
where cheek meets chest and mouths part to vow tenderness.
A lover’s nature is as fleeting as mist.
Give your song to the wind, after the hollowing made by
loss...to be empty is to know.
You will find yourself nude in a divine rain. Returned to
the skin of the earth.

Earth's Prayer  /  Joy Johnson

He tills the ground from which he was taken;
the thistle-borne seed he too plants;
he eats the bread with his sweaty face. 
It's from my wound that he lives. 

I rejoice in his feasting, undertaking 
the give-and-taking that's meet, life
upholding -- my pledge to support as much!
But then Adam incipient 

comes to believe it is he who owns
what's I, instead of properly reversed. 
And for said presumption, he will drop bombs,
not seeds!, and I am astonished,

dumbfounded:  who might I approach for redress
of the wrongs, the throngs of alchemy 
he has unleashed?  O poetry, my
prayer, become song of my deliverance. 

Sunny  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

thank you, Tracy

sun glimmers off rooftops across the water
buildings of glass, slate, steel

sunny today and an arc of light reflects
landing in my eyes as I look

love to read on a sunny day
warm my skin outdoors

the sun sails behind cloud cover
reappearing till sunset pulls my gaze

to the west where it sets
and rests

AN INERT OBJECT  /  H.T. Reynolds

running away from fear is fear; fighting pain is pain;
trying to be brave is being scared
—Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

I imagine inviting my blood
to fresh air
my skin
to some time apart

picturing myself
barefoot—
toes gripping the concrete
edge of a rooftop

arms an outstretched cross
head tilted against the rain
open palms praising the sky
holding its water like a font

an unkindness—
a revolving black halo
placing their bets

how long I’ll stay

standing

falling

alive

The winner gets its pick—
my tongue
the ligaments
of a thigh
the meat of my heel…

when their litany falls silent,

I open my eyes—
my mouth,
and defy them
to speak 

The Bellow of Lugosi /  Gabriel Phillips

Do flowers cover up the impenetrable
wrinkle? Do they drift apart when the oil
misses the water? For there are many
stacked ways to spill a mess, there
are kittens touching the steps. Alone,
barricaded but comfortable. The vision
of white and baby peppers saunter
over the horizon, into coffins
for baby birds. Mama makes the worm!
Mama is the worm! Her tendrils reached
every predator with trepidation. Predators
wash themselves unevenly, askew. Cooking
with dimes of wet breeze. They don’t
salt, they pay bills. Many bills. Then
another bill after that bill was paid.
The vampire wakes up, surely his car
payment is due. It’s the detonation
above the clouds that seeds the people.
Cauterize their shelves of hot china
and drifts with a limp across the Baltic sea
into the base of a conch shell.
That a rather dull child has crushed
with a metal toy truck.

apocrypha (& demi-cento)  / Colin Sturdevant

from each loosened nail bed, I pull a chapter
In full velvet
& all you can make out from my lips are simple words:
There, There
Your consciousness stirs into dawn as you look up at me
Saying your name three times underwater

(3 lines are book titles belonging to Jenny Johnson, Tommy Orange, and Sam Roxas-Chua)

October - Poem 1

Camelops / Katerina Canyon

The original camels
walked the sands
of California.

I imagine them
seven feet tall
looking tiny
beneath the redwoods

Eventually they walked
south. The rest
died out.

I moved east.

Californians can only thrive
in places where tar
sticks to the soles.

No one warned us to
be wary of the middle—
the settlement of mud
that holds you like quicksand.

We aren’t used to rivers.
We thrive in oceans and deserts.

We etch our history in sands
that have kissed the Pacific.

We sift through the ashes
of our ancestors for signs
that lead us forward.

The moon looks the same
no matter where we are.

The stars shift as we walk.

The seduction comes from
the forests we cannot see—
the oasis we imagine.

The camels are gone.
We tried to bring them back,
but they died a second time.

Problems At Night  /  Sam Calhoun

All evening the road 
unwound like an old cassette,
the serpentine belt whine
the only sound above
radio static.

Eyes tired as the stars, 
my head chokes on 
distant cumulonimbus,
pretending they're 
not there.  

Soda cans shake 
like dance rattles
across the floorboard, 
boot-prints carved
like glyphs, 

and outside tires grind
asphalt as combines 
tear through fields, 
corn husks falling 
like snow.  

for Pumpkinistra, Seabiscut, and War Admiral  /  at/om

For the last few months I’ve been 
watching this girl on reels 
grow a giant pumpkin named 
after a race horse, 
learned she was also growing 
a giant squash, and zucchini, 
and now as the air gets colder 
and the weigh off approaches. 
I am more invested than I have
ever been in another person’s
vegetable garden.

And oh isn’t it so beautiful to watch 
something grow, and oh isn’t it so 
great to cross your fingers that 
something gains weight? And what 
feels more like fall than caring so much
 for another person’s harvest 
you forget that this year you did not 
grow a single successful vegetable. 

But there is still food on your table. 

And though you may not have grown it 
your heart is a harvest and the love is 
more abundant than the meat carved 
out of the pumpkins thrown into rivers 
for regattas and months of hard work 
is sailed away.

Autumn is here, the days are colder, 
and you still have something to root for.

MOMA  /  Ellen Fergusun

                                        elevator,
                           on the 

Up to the sixth floor      

Arrive.

Study: "Now that I am in Madrid and I can think I think of you."
Think: Now that I am in MOMA and I can think I think of you.
Think: Now that I am on the street and I can think I think of you.
Think: Now that I am and I can think I think of you.

Study: Will we arrive this very night, this very this?
Think: Will we walk through these doors, this very this?
Think: Will we walk up the stairs, this very this?
Think: This very this, will it?

Study: What if Frank O'Hara had not said it first?
Think: He said it first so it could.
Think: He said it first so you could.
Think: He said it so it could you could.

The elevator came because you the elevator arrived on the sixth floor because you.

bewilderment [bih-wil-der-muhnt] n.  /  Brett Gastineau

1. a physical condition when heart palpitations and
shortness of breath may occur
2. the sensation of a playful madness on your shoulders
3. finding yourself in awe when the stars prick the dark
4. a warm confusion in the belly
5. when the topography of the day shifts and you are
certain you understand the dreams of trees
6. to come to know it was a mistake to grow up

No Shit, Shakespeare /  Joy Johnson

For those who will forever see surface
As the only beauty, and so beauty
That must fade, I shall stand service
And reminder of truth (therefore beauty)
So much more than skin deep, so much driven
Into the crannies (evidence of age).
I offer opportunity of vision
Into science of math and verse per page
Gorgeous enough to stop a heart open
To what's not advertised, not exploitive.
If you would persist in your mere token
Interpretation of what's -poietic,
I only pity, turn away, resume
An incandescent exploration bloom.

 I will  /  Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco

In the middle of winter I will
wish to see jewel tones of fall

In the middle of spring I will
Stop for rain and be glad it isn’t hot

In the middle of life I will
Be myself and hope it is enough

In the middle of dying perhaps
I will be grateful

DERELICTION  /  H.T. Reynolds

I love you like a cat
loves a door

that is to say arched
along trim mewing

claws trembling
handles and locks

holding the weight
of an empty room

a dial tone pulse
for a forgotten body

receding into shadows
firelight and burn

my throat like whisky
numbing night sober

reaching for missed
calls empty streams

flowing images
collected without me

I looked so lovely
beside you

like a decomposing church
carved up and weeping

Picnics Where the Moon Can’t See Us /  Gabriel Phillips

Listen to your comfortable rising.
It shakes the tall grass as though
grasshoppers were moving through it.
Light through the blanket. And grass.
And crickets that battle themselves
with lullabies. The fear of sleep
itself. None to rise to in the mornings,
but comfort, its peaceful groan.
The sun is not the grass. But it does
make the day shrink. Throughout
the yellow of each impatient breath.
You are the first of every fifth breath.
Unlike the sun. You are the calling
of wheat when there is no wind.
Unlike the sun and unlike the sunbeams.
You are the comfortable rising,
I fall into exactly one thousand pieces
trying to lie on the blanket beside you.

brotherhood  / Colin Sturdevant

I know little about Dionysian
& Apollonian behavior,

but I’ve seen love. Not romantic
in the sense you’d think. It involved
a broken pipe,
            a bloodied ebony lip, a set of twins.

One mild and one a bit less mild
the way the wiry hair on my chin
is latticed in salt and pepper, opposites.

How as one brother was to be carried off
with cuffs behind his back,
                                                each drop
of moon pouring out like his sobbing mother
from his brown eyes,
                                    the other brother slowly
caressed his sharp chin and asked: why?

Because we all know in American streets
how when you’re caught with a bit of kush
nothing ends well, especially when you’re
not white. How daylight stayed longer.
How boyhood was drawn shorter. How some
red-faced copper made me think ACAB.

I’d never known brotherhood until that afternoon.
Knew how beauty doesn’t stick around very long.
Made a spectacle into an ode. Now gone.

September - Poem 30

If This Was a Letter, I’d Ask How the Weather Is / a Cento composed by Laura Bandy

with lines chosen and written by: Connor Simons, Jesse DeLong, Veronica Vo, rob mclennan, Piper Rasmussen, Alicia Boemi, Shelly Krehbiel, Laura Bandy, Melinda Wilson

The radio is stuck on half-heard. The windows are down
and ancestors speak through this ground you stand on.

These scraps of humanity, assembled. Chorus, yes
but you are sleeping. You do not want to believe.

It is
the end of a haunted night,
as no party lasts long enough to keep us
and the bruise waits ‘til morning.

And so,
fall progresses to winter
all of this
the kind of thing you commit to in November,
when the rains come in.

Didn’t you pray to your maker?
Didn’t you plead that there might
be another day waiting for you?
Didn’t you seek out the sun,
which will light your path to safety
like in the aisle of an airplane 
in uncontrolled descent?

Because calling this survival is generous.
It’s just
Death blowing you a kiss.

So I’ll wrap you around my neck,
and take you everywhere with me
the heart wafting, sort of like the blood in water.

Who is speaking, please.

Moon Dream / Laura Bandy

The moon
followed me to work this morning. Then
I saw a sun-toasted cornstalk shooting up
through concrete on my two-lane commute.
“You don't belong here,” 
I scolded both
night star and field crop,
for finding themselves out of place. 

When
teachers gave me a bathroom pass
in secondary, I would take it,
intentions pure, then somehow end up 
at the in-between spaces:
stairwells, wood shop alcove, rooftop door. 

There would be 
no one there but me,
and once, a baby possum
wedged down between concrete columns
outside the art class darkroom.
"Beat it," I said, "this is my turf."
"I'm here for the still life class,
he replied, lighting up a cigarette.
"No one can freeze like me." 

“You shouldn’t smoke in here,” I said,
but you can't tell a talking possum anything.
Just like you can't
scream in a dream, not really.
Or like when you're driving 
And realize you've gone 50 miles
but you don't remember any of it—
cracked road, semis and tractors
out for harvest, even crossing the bridge
over the Illinois River, dotted with barges.

You know
you were there 
because now you're here, 
on the other side—

moon disappeared, highway smooth
from where yellow vests came in overnight
and covered holes over with new pavement.
Some say green cheese or Swiss the surface
all those fissures, lobes, ravines, even lunar seas
which are dark, low-lying, and fathoms deep.

A Chill  / Alicia Boemi

Here we are again.
Borrowed 

light, 

time,  

space.

Fall becomes us. 
Winter is approaching soon. 

The water is colder;
the ice will form against the shoreline;
against the rocks’ will.

And I take cover.

Teaching Lessons in Pest Control /  Jesse DeLong

The termite inspector noted that the hydrangea
is growing too wild
too close
to the house, and must be pruned,
and so too do I
put on this nice, collared shirt
and khaki pants
unless the wood-rot of my personality
decides to feed. 

After On the Nature of Daylight (Max Richter) /  Shelly Krehbiel

Are you the sunrise-oranges just above
the mountains? I’m driving through the valley.
It’s been less than an hour, but it feels like
the whole night. It’s gone from dark to foggy
to now – this light starting with a brilliance
I never wake to see. And though I can’t
see the river, I know it’s near, because
fog follows the path it makes. Fog is still
here, but close to the ground now. It feels blue,
though I know fog doesn’t have a color.
Are you the blue-drifting fog of morning?
Are you starlight that’s not here anymore
breaking through? Do you know what I mean-
like just after it’s too light to see stars?

It's just after it’s too light to see stars,
but they still seem close, like a flash-echo
after the photo is taken. I am
taking a photo of these colors now
without a camera, without a phone, with
just my whole self. Like when I memorized
sunrises as a kid. I still keep one -
violet purple behind a single tree.
Was I the tree? Was I the purple sky
not knowing I could hold all that amaze
around a tree’s silhouette on flat plains
of earth still mysteried with night? I do
not have to remember this. It’s here:
your sunrise-oranges wondering the sky.

Cento, September,  /  rob mclennan

Dear poets of September. All the same trips, story. Goodbye, melodramatic. Propel, had blown a kiss. This, a generative. Bread, baked fresh and hero, dinosaur. Glorious, and grey. A dead sparrow, hyssop shoots. So many, in relation. In relationships. Impervious to sky. Omnipresent. Another wanting, itself. Held, as promise, sonnet. Dear, what have you done for. Impulse, to forgive. Dear John. Asleep, am through with you. Each figure, soars. The title of this poem, elephants. Positions, in. The lake, still. Another warning. To save our whole lives. On three good paws, silence. A cinematic future. Can I get a hell, yeah.

final words. It’s simple, really. Stay  / Piper Rasmussen

Cento with lines & title from Laura Bandy, rob mclennan, Connor Simons, Melinda Wilson, Alicia Boemi, Veronica Vo, Jesse DeLong, and Shelly Krehbiel

Mark every beat, set everything aloud.
to cram that yellow into a lightless space
breath, heavy and rough without delicacy 
beyond the pines into the needle-filled forest floor,
The fallout is terrible. Trust me, I know,
Not the pill and its euphoric promise, but the hard, chalky 
memory. Or maybe some memories upside down, some still becoming. 
Step over, no need for mercy, the cicada, rattling its death song on the walkway. 

an ekphrasis from the land of Uz  / Connor Simons

Same old story / Veronica Vo

We were just girls
the time she told me
or didn’t say it directly,
not really, just that
she had been at a frat house.
The drink she drank was
not the drink she thought.
There was a couch.
There were men. Boys.
There is blue in my memory.
I think I put it there.
My party girl always
beautiful, brilliant.
The sun might have been out.
Who knows. I wish
it mattered.

When You Cite the Book of Revelations    /  Melinda Wilson

We suspect you’re in a cult.  
If you want to die in a cadre,  
go ahead. You will still be alone.  
You can follow a moon and get  
lost. We won’t attempt to find you.  
To begin a sentence with the phrase,  
For holy reasons, is to prepare a red carpet 
for the lie. The truth is that the local church boys 
think guns are cool, even after the parishioner’s spine 
is split from its stem. The paranoia of the mass only grows,  
bores deeper into the rod of iron and settles into your porous bones.  

September - Poem 29

Dead Mall / Laura Bandy

At the dead mall the plants are missing and the people, too.
But oddly not the
Carousel that cantilevered frozen horses
Downward on poles from a rotating ceiling
Exquisitely lit and pulsing, effulgent
For fiberglass stallions to prance beneath—
Geometrically pleasing, the eternal circle
Hosting children to ride in place for years,
Infinities, even, as the turning never quit
Just slowed down a bit when the brick and mortars closed.

Kill the lights, pull down those metal security grilles,
Let the mannequins dance together, romantic-like, to the
Mall’s
Night music, a mix of crickets, scrabbling rats and
Organ song or calliope, depending on the mechanics
Peculiar to that whirligig spinning. It's true, the
Queue of humans is non-existent of late.
Reduced to plastic people lingering who,
Some would say, are simply specters
Turning up at a familiar haunt, lonely and longing to
Undulate as they once could, credit cards
Vibrating in pockets or purses,
Waiting to be called up for action most
X-static, most time-honored, most American orgiastic;
You know the drill. But where to buy, now, when capitalist
Zoos are abandoned? Oh, go ghost your own machine.

Floating in Space  / Alicia Boemi

What do they say about us?
That we walk among the stars. 
Float across space. 
Travel time.
Hand in hand.
Mirrored souls.
A fire that burned away the others.

I Say This Plainly Because I Lived Plainly /  Jesse DeLong

My friend sent me a picture
of a blank check
I’d written her in 2012. I lived
in a two-bedroom house with duct tape
on the windows and a dead animal
in the walls. On room had a window
unit, the other a heater,
so that I migrated
depending on the season. I told her
she should have cleaned
me out of the $300 I had
at the time. She could have lived
for a brief time, for us, anyways,
like royalty. 

Bird-Listening (A Ladder) /  Shelly Krehbiel

Andy Weaver, Burlington,  /  rob mclennan

Sleepless, loom. Perambulate. We learn, learn. Every planet on earth. This suburban, expanse. These two young gentlemen, both alike in dignity. Wakes early, late. A noise on the stairs. No record. Still, impossible to parse. A hard precise. To hold, the middle distance. But we can walk. Quite miraculously, barely. Evening, through clear air. How Robert Bateman, Batman. Don’t tell anyone. What the dog knows. Ancient magic, sworn and stable. Hinterland, paved. Some roads, inlay. These are not the droids. A frayed knot. Everything, you might project. Away from, stand. What happens in Oakville. An open book. To live in the present.

"Miseducation" on Aux  / Piper Rasmussen

Miss Lauryn says the isms in a row, euphemism-euphemism-euphemism unforgiven
even as the tower teaches how to write the words, the discipline of -ism is concrete

the water tower gushes high-to-low, relies on gravity to handle the distribu
-tion & -ism & -cracy, the nounization of the fluid movement

when one is married the next compulsion is to find Knights of the Round Table
with whom, over dinner, you can decide how to feel, sloshing with courtship:

Chivalric Romance is a neglected form. Let's add -ance to the noun-izers, don't you
think? Presenting your ideas under the water tower is something like irrigation

lets it settle. Too much thought in a drought simply slips off, floods, saturates
the hard crust of airwaves & no more. Communal meals and slight sipping slippage

roto-till the conscience. -age. -ence. The French did these suffixes to us, the eliteness
(-ness!) brought to shore by conquerors! Before that, the Anglos were all guttural

nouns. More fun that way -- suck, etc. But let's be inclusive. How does Swahili work?
Igbo? Has anybody checked lately? Google it. Water, water, everywhere -- sink in.

a climate crisis tanka #5  / Connor Simons

no sweat like the sweat
that pours from your crooked nose
onto my breastbone –
a wave, thousands of miles long,
hurtling toward the shoreline

Job application / Veronica Vo

The Mother God   /  Melinda Wilson

I’m watching a documentary  
about a cult from the early 
aughts and I suddenly  
remember that the poinsettia 
flower is native to Mexico.  
It is tempting this season,  
but poison to my dogs, so I  
go without. The Mother God 
can’t go without her colloidal 
silver, her vodka, just as Father 
God can’t go without his meth.  
And there it is, the things 
we cannot go with / out, we kneel 
before them or we let them 
drive us out.  

September - Poem 28

Migration / Laura Bandy

The rare birds came and I scared them away. My mother
                        had gathered our girl scout troop in her station wagon
some girls lying flat like Shrinky Dinks in the back, to go
                        see Cedar Waxwings gather in the branches. An ear-full
they were called in a flock, for their trill. Not rare in other
                        areas, but hardly seen in the Midwest; Audubon called them
“winter uncommon,” and indeed, it was cold. Even in our
                        badged-up vests and beanies, the wind was frigid, red-leaved
trees in the Emma Mae Leonard Nature Sanctuary not stopping
                        October gusts from peeling layers off like plastic mistakes we
tossed in the trash after crafts class.

Once in a lifetime that the Cedar Waxwings would come, land
                        in our town and blend in dense bushes, nibble sweet berries
away from soiled human hands, eschewing feeders. Nomadic
                        and secretive by nature, still, I was able to sneak around back
of the thicket while my mother lectured the girls on biodiversity
                        and protecting the birds from soda straps and milk caps that
would make them choke. I could not say, at that moment, why I
                        did it: slid fingers between bramble and rattled the branches
while screaming, “Fly, waxwings, be free!” They rose like smoke
                        from a plastics factory, gray phosphorus shroud with pinions,
and blew away to their own migratory pattern while I stayed
                        below to walk my own: mother’s eyes on me, gathered girls
shrilling high-pitched whistles, thrilled. Scouting was rough,
                        did not come to me easy. But I wanted to see what would happen;
I wanted to make something happen. I wanted to know what I was
                        capable of. 

Star Bright  / Alicia Boemi

I plucked you from the stars,
you were shining brightly,
you were shining true;
too bright for me to bear,
so my light went out. 

A Golden Shovel: “Feet,” by Ross Gay /  Jesse DeLong

You first have to find a place you’re comfortable in
knowing that whatever it is you want or wherever the
last red moon rose above the factory

of your ambitions, it really always was about the where
of it all. Standing in a place your father stood is the opposite of loss,

which is probably why it makes
you want to run all

around and gather the things
you once thought were beautiful.
Like laying different soils in a garden bed so something will grow. 

Advocating Abandon (Abecedarian in Blue)  /  Shelly Krehbiel

Because broken can’t capture delight – dance!
Even eclipsing fluorescence finds good ground here.
Have it! Indigo joins judiciously, keeps keeping light
like midnight might need naming, opening or permission.
Please, quit questioning! Relax! Release something smashing!
Turn toward ultramarine uproar! Vanish vigorously!
Which wonderous “x” exposes you - your zaffer zenith!

Note to reader: I’ve always hated abecedarians. They seem contrived, false, full of themselves. So here I am, trying one that probably is all of that. But across the street is a blue car, the man walking by wears a blue jacket, the wall behind them is a mural of wings that contains every color, but its blue begs attention, pulls the blue - the brilliant, holy, blue of the sky - down where I can almost touch it, where I want to sing it, release myself to it as my grey eyes turn blue in its light – and all I have is a cup of coffee, an empty screen, and twenty-six letters.

First, in freshwater,  /  rob mclennan

In case you wondered. Tarriff, tariff. Annexation: threats, insults, one-sided aggressions. The 51st state. Such grand tradition. To assault who they don’t understand, wonder what it is went wrong. We are who we are, and never the twain. The Siege of Montreal, Invasion of Quebec. The War of 1812. This is what we remember. Madison, sir. Your document is ready, your house is on fire. Orange monster, betrays. A signature, pencil. A kindness, of plenty. To sacrifice a deal. Hard-headed, entropy. The nicest people on earth.

why choose/Webtoon ekphrastic   / Piper Rasmussen

in this romance, make me
all your lovers: I am the pale,

leached-white child of illness
writing poetry to the moon. Another

glance and burning ruby, flame-haired
warrior with no grace, growling at

the laugh-you-androgynous
fan-dance flirt & spy, kept in check

by the best friend, tree
in your childhood heart --

from your throne, observe 
the rich jewels I bring

the glitter of your crown
in choosing every day

facet by facet -- each face
more & less than what I am in fact.

a climate crisis tanka #4  / Connor Simons

your hand is in my
mouth and poppy blossoms will
rupture from my tongue –
a state of emergency
is declared months in advance

For all my friends / Veronica Vo

I am not the same / as I was / but you know me / as myself / I could become anyone / anything I want / because of this / and it would still be true / people I meet / will love me / and know me / as this person / but you knew me / as the one / that came before / I knew the things / about myself / I know now / I was still me / all this time / you knew / I am not always good / and not always kind / and not just that / but in knowing / still choose to love me / always a choice / if the world ends / as long as I have you / I’ll be fine

Bread & Butter   /  Melinda Wilson

It’s my move:  
2 Xanax & a  
bj before bed 
They call it 
“The Maneater” 
Or maybe  
that’s the name 
of a drink 
at the Stumble 
Inn / I laugh 
because I  
can / it’s  
my move 
my bread
& my butter

September - Poem 27

That’s No Moon: On Not Watering the Succulents / Laura Bandy

I don’t want them to die but I do
want to see how long they can survive.
Cactus has the best shot, obviously.
The one with fat shiny leaves also seems
as though she’ll pull through. Poor spider plant
looks dry, desiccate. Not even a
real succulent though, what’s she doing on
my dedicated shelf? Wooden, thin, no
dusting cloth for months. Suspended like
Luke’s hovercraft in A New Hope and
framed by a blue milk sky in my window
high up the stairs. I don’t know if Michael
liked Star Wars or any other sci-
fi films—he never talked about it.
What seemed to interest him were black windows
and what snuck in them or was reflected
there. Look from the lighted kitchen, see
a face: your own or someone else’s,
something else’s, maybe. Because I could
not imagine a time when he’d be gone
I did not ask for things: keepsakes or
final words. It’s simple, really. Stay
planted in the earth and long for water,
moisture farmers to save you. Or rocket up
to heavens’ place, incandesce with the
Northern Lights, become one of many
glittering bodies, including the moon
half shadowed—first a grin, then her true face. 

Motherhood in America  / Alicia Boemi

I am brave enough to walk among you,
without spitting in your face.

I am courageous enough to raise my children alongside you,
without tearing you limb from limb

I am audacious enough to reach out my hand to you, a handshake
without cutting off your fingers

I am bold enough to enable strong girls to become stronger women,
without you ruining their innocence

I am daring enough to live in this chaos,
without cowering and crumbling.

Men. They are not safe.

I am not foolhardy; 

I am a mother.

The Nice Hotel has the No Vacancy Sign On /  Jesse DeLong

The radio is stuck on half-heard. The windows are down.
You see its name, white on green, eighteen miles to town.
There are only two available hotels in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

Leaves in the pool of the Motel 6 have camouflaged it to brown.
The cashier asks you if you prefer cash. The lobby has an alley aroma.
The radio is stuck on half-heard. The windows are down.

The AC works in the room, but the TV  has no sound.
The next room has the game on, but the humidity would put you in a coma.
There are only two available hotels in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

The next is a Super 9. You’ve never seen those around.
The manager is an Indian in a polo shirt and has glaucoma.
The radio is stuck on half-heard. The windows are down.

There is a roach, the shape of a bullet, on the ceiling’s crown.
He must have crawled through where the door’s bottom forms a stoma.
There are only two available hotels in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

Step outside into the humidity and begin to drown
in anxiety, your brain a blaring of chroma.
The radio is stuck on half-heard. The windows are down.
There are only two available hotels in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. 

Maybe the garden  /  Shelly Krehbiel

will give you the poem today, she says.
She knows me. I am grateful to be known,
grateful for the garden, for legs and back
that let me tend it. Though often I forget.
I sit inside the house, don’t want to change
my clothes, don’t think I can afford the time.
I forget there are poems out there, ripe, ready.
Purple figs. Red apples. Green everything
turning so quickly into yellow. I forget
how it tastes – fruit warm in the sun.
I forget how my fingers feel against
the bark of trees.

In the first garden, did she, for a moment,
taste pure sweetness? Did the juice run
slippery down her fingers, stain the corners
of her lips? Did she wake to something then
that had been inside her all along, her
gratitude tangled with her fear, the strength
in her arms with the fragility of her breath?
Did she ever miss that time when all of it
was one and her self was just her self,
no good, no evil, no separation? The garden
will give you the poem, she says. She knows
me. I am grateful to be known. 

The DC Cinematic Universe,  /  rob mclennan

Refresh, refresh. Just hit refresh. Keep hitting. Tantric. Thus. To wag the dog. You’ll get there.

Parenthesis   / Piper Rasmussen

The parenthetical in word and deed is an ethical way of life.
Florence Hazrat, On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World
 

as with programming languages (i.e. Lisp) (designed for symbolic AI, back in the day)

(or maybe I'm wrong, I'm not an expert) just one way of saying things

that lives & lets live in divergence (commutative property) (change the order not the operation)

self-contained units, little cell-wall-bubbles (peptidoglycans) (unless of course you mean

monastic cells (or animated ones) solid (unless split (so I hear) with a great bang))

as an explainer, it is ethical to persuade on behalf of doubt

& sidebars, to note alternate ways (that is to say

to show not everything can be explained away

the wildfire in horse heaven hills  / Connor Simons

ravines are filled with spiked bent
grass & mounds of wild horse
teeth bloom beside the sunflower
mimicry of sere balsamroot
these ashdrunk hills compress
the wind & besides the freeway
wood settler crosses     a name
signals desertion disaster or taut
ribs piercing paperthin flesh   heaven
& desiccated roots       houses
abandoned for the promise
of dense alfalfas & domesticated water

Her Name Was Eve   /  Melinda Wilson

Even before the moment of her 
awakening, she was aware of her  
cunt. The undeniably feminine  
curl of its hairline. Nothing could  
make her or let her forget 
this crude animal fact of her design.  
She was woman.  

She spent her days of sin and freedom  
from form in the butterfly gardens,  
delighting in the soft touch of chitin  
wings, brush feet moving like tiny  
brooms along the ribbed worms of her  
arms. She licked the grooves of her skin  
to test her own sweetness. She wanted  
badly for it to please them. She contrasted  
her own form with their fragility  
and concluded she was a mountaineer,  
traversing alpine foot trails to sleep 
 alone and not alone in the rookery.  
And many times, the carrion birds 
visited to peel long ropes of flesh  
from her cragged body.  
She was woman.  

September - Poem 26

Tibetan Prayer Flag / Laura Bandy

Let’s begin by telling about the spiders. She hangs
a flag across basement vent-windows to try
and forget that she lives in a basement, however 

prettily named a garden flat. You can picture it—
squares of thin fabric—cotton, maybe—blue, white,
red, green, gold, swung on a slender thread of hemp,

precisely the kind of décor you would expect from
a small-town girl transplanted to the big city and eager
to demonstrate that she gets what matters. Peace 

and freedom for Tibet and its fine people all the way 
across oceans in … Asia, maybe? Soon she needs 
to figure out where the L is, and how to ride it, but there

are cinder block walls and low-hanging ceiling pipes
to paint first, in the brightest shades she can find
on sale—terra cotta for the kitchen, pool blue

for the lounge as her new Australian friend calls
the living room which is also the whole apartment.
“The worry is the coyote,” Evan says, having stopped

off in Santa Clara for a few years before landing
in Chicago, and lost his small dog, Pablo, to howling
brush wolves. She agrees—there are some things

that trouble—like how her car doors won’t open anymore
and hoisting body through the rolled down glass
in her first city winter is getting dicey, icicles sharp

and snagging on her clothes, still: when she looks up
at tall buildings lit within and stamped against gray late
November clouds, feels the brisk wind off Lake Michigan

that bends her body back nearly in half, the sense of what
could happen (anything, anything) always stops her breath,
steals it right from her mouth like helium sucked from a

party balloon to make a voice squeak. One side of the flag
is wavering but there is no breeze, windows closed against
the cold, so she goes to adjust, reaches up to fuss with how

the wind horse prayer panel hangs crooked, and as she
touches, so lightly, the cloth’s edge, it dissolves, liquefies,
and 1000 parachuting baby spiders launch beside her Midwest

apple cheeks: some brush skin, catch in her hair, most ride air.

 —quoted line by Evan Harrison, from Sham City

Take Hold  / Alicia Boemi

The waves hold me 
the depths I feel
clinging tightly
underwater
take hold
please never let go

On Minor Talents /  Jesse DeLong

1.

“If you ask me, that’s another ‘not-deer,’” she said, “Look carefully at its coat.” But of course the photo I was looking at was just a deer in molting season and she wouldn’t explain what she meant by “not-deer.” There was mold growing over a half-eaten bowl of casserole, the mold not unlike the clumps of deer fur. “My son took this photo,” she bragged.

2.

Every Christmas her mother made a special cake, layerings of decoration, for them to sing happy birthday to Jesus. “That is,” she said, “if my mother came out from under the bed that day.” Some days she would just bend over, speak to her mother under the frame.

3.

Mushrooms grew out of the wall near her bathtub. They curled up, looking for the sun. She was a raw foodist who believed you could absorb the entirety of your nutrients from walking outside on a cloudless day. I once watched her roll off a couch, wine glass in hand. She stood, bowed, and took a sip of her drink. Not a drop on the floor. 

We’d love to know what you think! (an email)  /  Shelly Krehbiel

My absence will be my presence,  /  rob mclennan

A subject of, instep. Of galaxies. Flesh. Each structural division. To enter one’s skull. Only language, seduces. Doomscroll. Place the body a book, a displacement. A handful, of coin. Having never received. This trick, to be literal. This line has a skin, epidermal. A hard rain might fall. This poem, concedes. Conjectures. To the nature of moon, sun surface. A line in the sand. Pockmarked, with cloud. Sifting hands, sight. Repeating, the singular. Not everything empties. Canadian hybrid, incorporating. Unfolding a portrait. I wish to hear, hear your voice. Speak.

My Life Flashes Before My Eyes   / Piper Rasmussen

the Goldberg Variations as performed by Glenn Gould  / Connor Simons

it is 8:04 PM on a Friday and i’m listening to the Goldberg Variations while my spouse is stretched out on the couch watching George Santos collapse into a mud puddle for money and camera time   he’s such a sack of shit and the Variations are odd because they aren’t religious   no mass or homily here   no Luther glowering from a pulpit   just the way we want the heart to be a tunable machine capable of being what we need it to be   the dog next to my spouse is getting older   at the park today her hips seemed to turn inward and she would just stop and stare at nothing or maybe stare at whatever trace the geese leave behind as they head south   does he ever stop lying? and do i? if my fingers could speak i would want them to always have the perfect tension between the tenor and the alto but these fingers have made mistakes   played keys disastrously out of tune and dissonances designed only to hurt and not resolve and now George Santos is sliding off the pier into the water and oh my god is he fucking smiling as the British drill sergeant screams at him and the hand crossing of the fifth variation begins

T-minus / Veronica Vo

I keep looking for the bomb, can hear the ticking
No one in the house acknowledged it until today
I could have asked why but I didn’t, couldn’t feel my hands
If I ask, that means I know she knows, which means we all know
The thing is that the bomb can’t be dismantled
You just have to live with it and listen to it tick,
can only learn about how how to prepare for the inevitable
So I didn’t ask where the bomb is – I know she knows I know

My Own Desert Places   /  Melinda Wilson

with thanks to Robert Frost 

I met a young writer today. 
She was writing about solitude 
The solitude in Dickinson 
compared to the way it presents 
its thesis in the writing of Simone  
Weill. The imagination has not  
space to imagine itself  
when we need each other’s  
company. I want You to feel  
distracting, like all I can look 
at is you standing against 
the door jamb.  But Simone.         
Simone would have us  
alone. According to Simone, 
we need an empty room to be 
stable or aware of our conscience. 
We couldn’t let a lover distract  
our rational mind. The clarity  
of loneliness. Yet—-some would  
argue that being lonely is distraction,  
it’s own lark to disguise the hole 
in the heart that will- eventually-  
kill you. Or, I mean, will kill me.  
I hope our death will not be lonely.

September - Poem 25

The Lighter Longer / Laura Bandy

(An imitation poem in honor of Catherine Wing’s “The Darker Sooner”) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55154/the-darker-sooner

Next came the lighter longer,
arrived the sooner higher.
Life was no more a darker-ever,
night-all-eras. We were over never.
We were closer and calmer.
Remembrance was the word we used for gorgers.
Commence was our torchbearer.
Our longings were listened harder,
and held gentler.
The stars were seers, seers
all was clearer. Our bond was foster.
Instead of ruler we had revolters,                                 
instead of torpor, heeders. And beneath these waters
slouched the rough beast's sure labor.

Diving Practice  / Alicia Boemi

The open air,
the beauty in the stars.

And here I am,
lost in your ways.

Tangled, tortured,
a web we weave

Beauty above,
Darkness below.

The water feels cool,
to the touch.

I dive.

I Wrote and Then Threw Away a Poem Complaining /  Jesse DeLong

but instead, I’ll tell you about the egrets
I saw this morning grazing
along some cows. They crave
a common grain, I guess. Maybe
you’re more interested in how
I always turn off the main highway
and take the river
road cause there are no
streetlights
and the hills alongside are green.
This morning I turned off the air
and rolled the windows down.
There were no sounds
from the stereo,
neither mine nor yours,
and no one honked as I slowed
and stopped in the road
to watch a flock of geese
flying towards me
their wings
their wings
their wings

Pterodactylic  /  Shelly Krehbiel

Because it’s just me here tonight and the end
of the world hasn’t happened yet, I’m relying on
the pterodactyl to get me through. Except.

Pterodactyl is not even the right word. The winged
creatures who left their bones behind are not even
dinosaurs, but pterosaurs. And that hawk out there

beyond the fenceline, she is not their descendant.
Her ancestors were small, feathered, stayed
on the ground. Who are you, giant of flight, and

why are you the only one with me and this blank page?
Little kid me would have known to call you Pteranodon.
She would have been able to draw your picture.

She had a worn book on her shelf that named you.
She knew your story. She trusted that book, had no reason
not to yet. She trusted the answers in her head too.

Great being of my here and now, of my forty years after,
it is so dark sometimes. It is so light sometimes. The end
of the world still hasn’t happened, though I know

yours has. She would have known where you ended.
She would have been able to call you into her dreams
and fly. It’s just me here tonight. Let’s go somewhere.

For George Bowering,  /  rob mclennan

Wisdoms, pearl. Okanagan peaches. Divergent. Like a fly ball, pitched. Hand, over time. My grandfather’s grandfather clock. Speak, the name of your religion. Something that catches. Make a note, dictate. In a drawing room. How many times, this one small body. A subset, of paired grace. A perfect view. The boy, by the kitchen. Jack Spicer, tuned. This writing life. To close one’s eyes. An unbroken sentence. Foreshadow, enough. Copilot, these untroubled hearts. As it began. And as sweet. Goodnight. Start with a word. (25)

Seated Figure (Djenné peoples)   / Piper Rasmussen

unbuilt and rebuilt homes
seventy in a ring
hillocks gently grow with
terracotta statues at the heart.

five hundred years
of ancestors --
tell me, wrapped in snakes,
what the bowls around you held

while I imagine a lady dressed in a costume
telling children how she made pie
for the Nation's 250th, white hot face open
in petticoats, ready to tell, tell, show --

never buried, or built
unbuilt and buried, surrounded by
the mud of ancestors

the shards of broken wheels

a petrarchan erasure  / Connor Simons

Love in such a novel fashion
that from her cruel side I would draw by force
a thousand sighs a day, kindling again
in her cold mind a thousand high desires;

I’d see her lovely face transform quite often
her eyes grow wet and more compassionate,
like one who feels regret, when it’s too late,
for causing someone’s suffering by mistake;

And I’d see scarlet roses in the snows,
tossed by the breeze, discover ivory
that turns to marble those who see it near them;

All this I’d do because I do not mind
my discontentment in this one short life,

Adirondack / Veronica Vo

two things can be true only if you can’t
look it was interesting until it wasn’t
the world of story time and space
isn’t that what they say we need you
have to be careful or it will become
interesting again survival
because of or in spite of story
sharing something means you lose a bit
of what you have what is it you gain
caution interest a world for existence 

The Breath Before the Verse  /  Melinda Wilson

How easily comes the breath before the verse. 
The impulse to emote carries it forth all husk  
and alert like the branched hairs on the legs  
of a solitary bee that hovers above the asters  
and daisies, teasing the stamens that lean forward  
ever eager and aroused. When I rise and open  
my mouth to speak, there is first a short inhale,   
a beat to gather my thoughts and my courage  
to meet a new day that deserves my arousal,  
but for which I cannot muster much more than 
my breath, heavy and rough without delicacy  
or elegance. The inhale itself draped in worldly 
burden and disgrace for our kind. Nevertheless...