September - Poem 3

Grandmother Theory / Laura Bandy

The grandmother hypothesis reframes menopause as an evolutionary adaptation rather than a loss. It suggests that women who lived long after fertility ended helped care for grandchildren, improving child survival and allowing daughters to have more children. —Dr. Emilė Radytė, Samphire Neuroscience

I guess it never ends.
When I climbed Arthur’s Seat on an ill-planned study abroad,
I did not listen to the guide’s description of what lay beneath my feet—

an ancient extinct volcano—key peak of a hill cluster in Scotland. I was primarily
focused on not being shamed, lagging behind the other, younger girls on the trip,
my sometime smoker’s lungs protesting every upward step. There was a breeze,

thankfully, maybe blowing from the Firth of Forth estuary on its flow to charming Kincardine,
and cooling my plodding way up 1500 steps to the highest point in the city. At the top
I paused, ambler alone, as the rest found a field of yellow gorse and rock rose

just over the hill’s tip and made their way to frolic. Someone stayed to snap a shot of me
(strange in the age before selfies), a ghost behind the camera, catching my thin arms, tossed
bag, shy grin. Behind and below, Edinburgh, and clouds dyed blue like Cub Scout’s shirts

my mother, a Den Mother, used to wash for my brother. Girl Scouts wore green once they
ascended past Brownie status, and the ground beneath me was brown and green, all August
earth and summit tufts of deep clover. Seat’s peak was lush, and I could see far across the land

all the way, it seemed, to the cold North Sea. What anyone wanted or could reap from knowing
me was a mystery. The girls and our guide had already started down the South side, eager to
see Samson’s ribs, vertical basalt columns holding up the hill. Do with us what you will.

Saving Dogs / Alicia Boemi

How lucky was I to rescue you—
and hundreds of dogs who
came with their own lessons on life,
so
I could learn,
and be saved, too.

Marginal Notes on Youngstown by Evelyn Green /  Jesse DeLong

America loves a dead blonde girl.

Something about swans, a velvet dress draped on a pool chair, pink wine left undrunk in a long-stemmed glass stained with lip gloss.

“The atmosphere of a crime noir, but deprived of its clues: no killer, only victims.”

Twin Peaks. Veronica Mars. Pretty Little Liars. Jawbreaker. Even, in reality, Jon Benét.

“A tin voice, void of language, with as much grace as prom decorations.”

Somewhere, Bruce Springsteen is telling you that your life was better in highschool. You poor creature, you believe him.

It’s not that we want to save her. It’s that we want her ravishing to be continuous, over time, and in a way predetermined by art and the economy.

Or, that we want to say it’s in our genetics, the way a praying mantis will feast on her lover’s head after copulation.

Meanwhile, there were over 10,000 missing indigenous women in 2024. And though they are ten times more likely to be murdered than the national average, ninety-five percent of their cases will pass without major media coverage.

This isn’t true. Pedophiles cannot be offered the death penalty because it makes it much less likely that their families will report them.

“Why would she,” he said, looking into the camera, his eyes bright as a bowling ball, “cook me dinner six days later if I hurt her? She wouldn’t.”

This bird isn’t actually native to Youngstown, Ohio, and would be just migrating through at the time.

“His revenge, he’d decided, and revenge isn’t the right word, because it’s more about what he’d determined she’d earned, would be to hold onto the Kermit the Frog stuffy, his daughter’s emotional support buddy, during the custody exchange. Let’s see if she thinks she’s a good mom at midnight when her daughter is crying in her crib, he thinks.”

Some critics claim this is a symbol, a chimera the detective hallucinates due to the repressed trauma of his mother’s death.

There’s a reason we want Daddy to drive a corvette that’s blood red. 

Midnight Sudoku /  Shelly Krehbiel

Emma and Andrew: married, /  rob mclennan

A perfect day for it. Rhetorical, cleave. Reception. His parents’ new house, the compound, the yard. Cunning, not fireworks. How I choose to believe. To address every object, tumbler. Wine glass. Stitch into one’s name. Any technique. As cut with a knife, this grain of salt. A path in the Martintown bush. He, to the left of me. Apprenticed. One, as in English. Shoeless. Gilbert Blythe, carrot. What languages choose. A damp cloth, sleeve. Spark. Speaks, into microphone. Make their way through the crowd. Earmark. As exciting, as punctuation. The magnificent, rise. Weather, imposes. Intercedes. A way with words. Aflame. Huzzah! Lift up, repeat. Cheers.

Nereid  / Piper Rasmussen

LA is low on water & therefore
she's putting off doing the laundry, doing without before she's asked. No surprise: an Earth Mother

in California. Dressed up nice
today, out of other clothes & enthralled 
by the white fringe on a green party dress.

Foam on surf. She waits 'til night & finds a party & someone willing to bunch her satin at the waist, 
to texture her until she's crushed,

profligate, & shining. Afterward, within
concentric circles of salt, she remembers
why it was so important to forget -- 

the moon that once moved her. 
The reef
gone, uninhabited.

unsent letter written during a heatwave  / Connor Simons

manic clouds span the distance between us   a connection
of vaporous expectation and sometimes dread   are they
coming to me or going from you   if this was a letter
i’d ask how the weather is but there wouldn’t be time
for any warning of rain or ash   the tornado siren blares
once a month but only the dogs seem to notice it
and where you are the scoliotic length of mountains
ache the clouds into forgetting how to hold water
until they disperse into gales that   each year   drive
desperate cows into the tangled murk of algae-choked
drainage canals and of course whatever i’d write to you
would hinge on memory to understand the teetering
balance that promises some kind of predictability
in where the rain falls and where it doesn’t   you might
remember the first time i explained why i didn’t like
going home   the 2 am doorslams   the bruises on
my chest   the sorry buried somewhere beneath
unpaid electric bills   pain doesn’t inspire dread
anymore but unknowing still does   the same
questions stretch across a continental distance
will the car pull into the drive tonight becomes will
every summer be like this now   i’m a child again
when i look at the forecast   doubtful of any
promises and locking the door to my room where
the shouting from the house is muffled   the pea
blossoms   dead as soon as they bloom   don’t shock
they disappoint and the clouds continue to tear
their way between you and i    someone’s mother
covers their child’s mouth and the waters leave
mud-caked bicycles and tennis shoes in fresh
embankments where there used to be market
stalls and between the two i thread myself into
anxious poems and this letter i won’t send

Ponyo Poem / Veronica Vo

silly girl, that boy is not your friend, and

narratives are for people who know endings are not destined.

he is going to hurt you when the tide swallows the shore

the fact is life goes on water teaches us that after all.

the truth your father never told you: we have no power over endings

he knew this would happen all along but you are magic

unstoppable, unknowable, you light a flame fish can’t resist

creatures with no language your self in another life

from the first taste of blood never able to return to sea

you will never swim again but you will love

How to Live in the Shadow of a Tottering Skyscraper /  Melinda Wilson

As you leave in the morning, sing softly to the foundation to soothe its aching knuckles, but only songs 
with vapidly optimistic lyrics that won’t antagonize the monster within.  
Tiptoe down the sidewalks to avoid jostling the structure with your tremendous weight. 

Seek out the sun, which will light your path to safety like in the aisle of an airplane in uncontrolled 
descent. 
When you return home in the evening, avoid watching television shows featuring fire-breathing dragons. 
There is only room for one monster in this disaster. 

If it is autumn, collect the falling leaves and press them into the pages of your favorite poetry books. 
This will do nothing for the building but will remind you that each organism is 
worth remembering in the hereafter. 
If it is autumn, visit the reflecting pools and read each poem marked with a leaf to our dead. 

Whatever you do, do not read the news, which seeks to allay your fears with talk of new 
  support structures and other modern fantasies. 
Accept the truth that today or tomorrow, the empire will fall.  

September - Poem 2

The Fisher King / Laura Bandy

What we have done often can’t be unmade.
This means doilies, or hearts made doily through
careful tatting of the organ into
“a pattern of rings and chains over a
core thread.” Why we might want to shred the hub
of love is a query for another
day. When on or around a quest, one must
pay close attention to the goal. Eyes on
the grail, hand on your scabbard, ready for
whomever might be guarding the prize. I
was fishing when they came for me, a spot
shared by my teacher, who loved it there. He
would often leave desk, pen, paper, poems,
classroom behind and go to the water,
back boat into Lake Limbo, drop a line.
What I thought was mine only ever lived
in my mind, my mind’s eye—stories told low
and hopeless—dragons and knights, mortal wounds.
Even if you wish to keep fishing, just
leave off the interminable watch for
those who would destroy whatever you hold
most dear, even if you yield your post, the
worst will still occur. Kings mean nothing. Myth,
legend, constellated down through ages
so to mend unruly threads, human dreads
such as angling with rod, line, hook, only
to pull up a comb, a boot, a rusted
chalice someone once thought (mad!) to drink from.

A Mass on the Soul / Alicia Boemi

The grass was too green, bright, fresh.
Venomous droplets adorned its blades.
Toxic, killing, cancer-causing burns.
in between your toes. 

I was scared. I was brave. I was hopeful. 
Too much hope filled my tepid ego.
“You were untouchable,” I thought. 

Until that day, the world crumbled around us. 
Like hot red ash scorching pale skin. 
Blood. Mind. Yi. 
Denial waves at me like an old friend

You went in and never came out
I died there, too. 
Never came back,
to myself, 
to my home,
 to my comfort.

Marginal Notes on The Real Identity of Kim Il Sung by John David Lerner /  Jesse DeLong

“In a dusty corner of the office, in a drawer seldom opened, in a manilla folder dulled from the years, the docket resides. And make no mistake, the CIA docket is very clear on this—that this man is actually Kim Song Ju, an orphan boy, poor child, who killed his friend to avoid the shame of stealing some food, and who, coerced by the soviets, took on the name of a Korean war hero.”

Other than the final line, Kim does not have a single instance of dialogue in the novel, but continues to affect, like the laws of physics, every movement of the story, such as which direction the prose can muscle or whether a character’s arc will adequately resolve.

Obama had woven into an Oval Office rug this campaign slogan: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Though as he stitched it into the cadence of his speech, the US was barely 200 years old—a mere “ummm…” in the monologue of earth. Martin Luther King Jr., phrasing it more poetically, said, “so in Montgomery we felt somehow that as we struggled we had cosmic companionship.”

We think of mountains as a source of power, a stability formed up out of the oceans, so of course this is where Kim built his prison camps.

The isolation and the snow alone would break you.

“Some would say we look up at the same stars, the same half-crescent moon, but all this laborer saw when he looked up was the sweat and dirt running into his eyes.”

Similar to the argument in this passage, Graeber and Wengrow, in The Dawn of Everything, lay out the argument that civilization is not a progression, not a building up in levels like a stone fence along the borders of a labor camp, but a movement here, then there, then back here, sort of like the shedding and regeneration of cells in an aging body.

So that we haven’t so much as evolved to be where we are as a society, but that we just happen to occupy this space. This is where we are doing things now, I guess, and these are the things that we’re doing.

Lerner ended up murdering the owner of a bar over the ten dollars he’d put in the jukebox on karaoke night.

The suicide and alcohol rates in regions that winter are higher.

You can see, in all that snow, in all that white and grey, that you yourself have no real color.

“The feeling of gin in his chest is warm and at least the cigarette tip glows briefly red.”

Posthumously, he would be named “The Eternal President” though the most you can hope for is a few generations of your offspring forgetting how you ruined the family cruise ship.

The military demarcation line, where this defector was shot five times, still marks the separation of uncles from nephews.

In 1976,  North Korean soldiers, during a tree-trimming exercise, killed with their own axes a pair of U.S. Army Officers who refused to stop pruning a poplar tree.

Choi’s DMZ Colony does a better job of holding history accountable.

“Snow, like the shed dander of a dog, continuously fell as the prisoners, mostly bone now, worked. When the cold froze his eyelid shut, the prisoner waited for the warmth of his eyeball to melt the crystals. Later, Kim Ill Sung’s birthday would be known as ‘Day of the Sun.’”

“Kim turns, head bowed, and his hands, clasped at his side, unfurl so that his fingers spread, and as he lifts his chin to look up at me, he says, “And what about any of this do you think will really matter?” 

Sonnet for the Makers /  Shelly Krehbiel

How I wanted you to be kind. How could
you not be – you who made the sonnet song,
the telescope – you who waited so long
watching for comets to come, who made wood
and strings into music? Didn’t you pray
to your maker? Didn’t you too crave warmth?
Every map you left behind points to north,
so maybe cold wind was the thing you craved
until all was frozen at last. Is that
why you made me? Were you alone there? When
everything melted, you were sorry. Then
you blamed me, said I was the urgent threat
to your existence. You wanted to kill
me like tigers, like lambs. Yet I live still.

Half-hearted pronouns, /  rob mclennan

Who is speaking, please. The kitchen knife. Withness. The sparrow, says density. A wooden spoon, stops. Teeth closed and damp. From one language, another. So many fine tales. What one sees in the mountains. Clearly articulate. When I consider. Molecules, grammar, weak limbs. Pattern. The western barbarians, a late country road. How one’s night is spent. On difficulty, the difficult. Peach trees, require pruning. The hot mic moment. Square kilometres of wildfire. Out of their homes, many properties. I am having difficulty. Scatter, the clouds. Left open, defeat. Performs, what provisionally. Again, and again. Whatever the reason. Dawn, nearly broken. You are sleeping. You do not want to believe.

coffee caddy  / Piper Rasmussen

twenty-two and newly-weaned off mochas
the girlboss era peeking up my skirts, I
learned of affogatos, gained some weight,

corrected, clock-work boiling eggs each morning
with Bustelo from a cheap machine, half-
descaled & picked up at the thrift --

sat at a desk which I was told might raise
or lower me. ran back and forth to the Nespresso,
aspired to sip & to sip faster --

lonely, grabbing lattes with old friends
of friends & flirting & then fleeing

by the ends -- each day a thump-tha-thump
of nearly-- syncope--

those were years the coffee carried me.

someone was kidnapped here  / Connor Simons

someone was kidnapped here   across the street from your daily bus station   months out and you’re surprised that the choice of pink for the sticker’s background is what surprises you   what surprised you then was just how many SUVs are on the road at a given time   keeping yourself warm by using your fingers to count each one passing by and nurturing the hate in your heart as landscape becomes a threat   keep an eye on the pedestrian bridge   someone needs to post up at the rec center parking lot   does anyone recognize that van   in negative twenty degrees there’re only so many ways to kindle a flame   the breath behind words can try   promising that with spring we’ll all pitch in for a community garden or backpack drive or gatherings where we learn how to be better neighbors   or even promises told to oneself to be better   be less reclusive   be quicker to respond to a text   be a little more patient as the old woman who walks by your house each day needs to be reminded of your name while you’re trying to remove a burdock without snapping the taproot and letting it come back next year   but then there’s hate and maybe its heat is the surprise now, too   you hate the way commercials for a chevy tahoe hinge on an expanse of wild grass beneath a somehow American sky   you hate the way a hand seems designed to perfectly cover a mouth   you hate the fact that you eventually lost countt somewhere around thirty and had to start over  that now in our outside summer where wounds are slowly disinfected by sun and breeze you still feel that heat and that the sticker still needs to be there   needs to catch the eye with its artificial pink   as in a child’s dream of a heart   because someone was kidnapped here 

Instructions on ROCD / Veronica Vo

carve a circle where there always was one
now it appears only after carved
fill it then empty it then let the body remember before the mind
let the mind circle it

shape yourself into a question
look for the answer
spend the rest of life looking

rest your head in someone’s neck
feel warm
force yourself out of it
be born
be forced out of it

try to tell if you’re having fun
when unable to tell, carve a question out of bone
listen to your bones, even though
plastic replaced broken glass

find rightness in someone else’s warmth
mistake wrongness for solitude for loneliness
for desire for what is real that is real

trust an instinct that doesn’t know itself
let neither mind nor body remember
make peace with the hazy image
don’t know the words but know the song

search in dreams for the answer
for a north star without knowing what a star is
find something close enough
call it a star
let it teach you to breathe
let the answer be enough
let the answer be maybe

My Animal Familiars  /  Melinda Wilson

When I think about the familiars that populate my life, those  
currently at the front of my mind are a pair of domesticated 
mammals of a kind. One white with brown spots like a cow 
but certainly not. The other charcoal ash black, curly of coat  
with sad eyes so emotionally sharp they puncture like a tack.  
There were two before them who occupied my heart, a some- 
what similar pair of black and white partners in crime, but how  
easily angels become thieves when they pass. They took with 
them a love I can never get back, a love so particular to them 
that I needed to find a brand new kind of care when the others 
arrived. Early this morning, I leashed and walked my present  
animal familiars, and as we strolled in the quiet streets, most people  
still asleep, I found it right there in the sidewalk cracks, a tiny  
weed poking through to find its own sun, to drink the night’s dew,  
and to grow and grow until there is no space left for the feeling of loss.   

September 1 - Poem 1

The Fountain / Laura Bandy

A new friend, Bob, recommends a film and
all I know of it is a reputation for grief.
The filmmaker, said to be a difficult man,

wrote the movie to work through early cancer
diagnoses for both of his parents. Bob is a runner.
Over the summer he lost a parent and found

their eulogy while out on a run; “All the way
to Lake Michigan,” he said, “the words  
just appeared in my mind when I most

needed them.” Traveling in Switzerland
this past same summer, I hiked with my 85
year-old mother and her same-aged Swiss friend.

They left me in the dust, these fit women, gasping
in their wake while impossible landscapes of green fields
dotted with sheep and aquamarine Lake Geneva shimmered

in the distance. At a castle on a high hill, I sank
to a bench outside steel gates and pled for a drink,
hoping one of the spry ladies would walk final distance

to concessions. “Drink from the fountain,” said our Swiss friend,
gesturing towards a stone statue with a metal spigot spitting
water into a deep granite bath. It looked like what it was—

something from another century. I, leery American, made noise
about rust and germs until our friend took my hand, dipped fingers
into the pool. “This is snow water from the Alps,” she said,

“we all drink here.” I made an inevitable joke about the fountain
of youth, then drank bone-cold water I can’t describe, then our friend
told a story she had told that morning and the night before. My own

mind is slipping. As I sit down to write these words, summer
nears her end: Demeter preparing to lose her daughter
to the unimaginable as she has before and will again. 

Topple/ Alicia Boemi

The lake waves topple each other. 
Sparkle blue on top of deep blue tide. 
               One… 
                   after the other. 

Always moving, but ever so patient. 

Much is unlike the man who is impatient—
                   toppling,
                        each… 
                              other,
                                 one… 
                                    after the other. 

No sparkle blue, just deep red ooze. 

Your Whole Body is Heavy with a Need to Emote Infinitely /  Jesse DeLong

A Cento with lines taken from Jenny Boully, Ford Madox Ford, Don Mee Choi, Hannah Arendt, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Peter Handke translated by Ralph Manheim, Ginger Ko, Kazim Ali, Layli Long Soldier, Rebecca Boyle, Tommy Orange, Catherine Breese Davis, Joanna Klink, Robert Kloss, Michael Pollan, Eric Bennett, Kathryn Cowles, Tiana Noble, Brandi Wells, Alfred Starr Hamilton, Raven Leilani, Lidija Dimkovska, William Bronk, Cole Swensen, Toni Morrison, C.J. Box, Ann Jäderlund translated by Johannes Göransson and Prageeta Sharma.

In every man there are two minds.
I lived on sesame porridge for a year—
parasite upon a corrupt body,
the last cells of my body.
No owl had hooted in the woods behind the house
nor was it my own breathing that I had heard
and then at last I heard the wind in the pine tree,
the empty cup of the tea left behind.
The human debris,
rootlessness,
always a gift also.

Each day is another chance to try
breaking down like the rest of us wanted to.
What were all the remaining hours going to do?
The moon had an acrid aroma like fireworks that have just gone off.
The world, after all, is porous.
Sunny or sunless or in
those nights when nothing catches, nothing also is artless.
It is better to be a man singing to no one.

We end up trying to nourish ourselves on images.
farmyard animals about to be slaughtered.
Like roosters, men.
Women with short hair
like rotting snow.
The sun is
some loose bits of matter, the dregs,
some background mumbler.

If you meant
there are grey, anonymous hours like this,
let us now eat rolls with salami and cheese.
The nevertheless, the yet.

The world is made of sound
deepened by the constraints of the format.
Orphaned words,
the noises were hollow.
In language there are only distances.
It makes me want to find a bar stool as fast as I can.
Gin is white, for awhile.
The grass is naked,
it is against the snow.
See it in the window acting as trees.

Long Term Care /  Shelly Krehbiel

Today was the first call. The broker introducing himself,
introducing the product: long-term care insurance.
The kind of thing you commit to in November, when
the rains come in, when people put up pretty lights
and suddenly children seem everywhere. I don’t have

children. And it’s August. A good time of year, still
three months from the long and longer darkness.
Now, the mid-season apples are predictably falling,
the late ones barely starting towards deep red,
towards golden. They say it will rain later this week.

Tonight I went out to gather the purple grapes, plump
and perfect, so I could keep whatever rain comes from
splitting them into yellow-jacket heaven. And so I could
sprinkle seed beneath the vines hoping a brief summer
shower will be enough to start the clover I’ve wanted

to plant for a year. I’ve wanted something that will turn
into green cover for beetles and flowers for bees, something
to stand on in sandals, in bare feet next summer
as I pick new grapes, as I show the neighbor kids how
to know when they’ve ripened. Maybe those kids

will remember the taste when they get older, remember
the sticky stains on their fingers. Maybe they will plant
their own green vines for their own good fruit, wherever
they are, whatever rains do or do not come, whether or not
I buy the insurance. There’s so much to read, to decide.

Maybe the perfect time, /  rob mclennan

To read ancient classics. The sound of the press. Curved, thunder. A myth, of high tempo. Rocky terrain. Drifting periods of reflection. All season, fell. A false etymology. Animate. The Greek of Odysseus. How many fine shortcomings. Tales, open windows. Widening. Islands, rings. What carries each surface. The front edge of empire. Solstice, the back end of cover. These weary psalms. Friends you might know. What’s on your mind? Sense, and syntax. System build, the middle, slows. A trove of continued. Have you any questions? Translated into Latinized Roman, Odysseus converts to Ulysses. James Joyce, The Ulyssey. Such a long sentence. He nearly arrived.

Sourdough Aubade  / Piper Rasmussen

The end of a haunted night
the end of rain & spiders washing through
the gutter catchment in a twitching flow, 
perfectly feeding a bright garden I've never had.
The tomatoes were big as horses
& the spiders mounted up, were children 
on a merry-go-round. As I watched at the window, 
a mysterious dough began to rise
in an earthenware bowl on the kitchen sill, & the light 
grew stronger, & the sun rose round,
like a loaf made from scratch. 
That's what I woke to: the sun 
in its witching hour. At least the spell it needs
is easy: water, milk, flour. 

at the corner of Griggs & Dayton  / Connor Simons

five years sober and now – the stubborn pimple
in my right thigh          the left eye that grows
lazier by the year          the sense of simple

times making meaning    the beebalm shows
the mason bees the purpose of a hive
and when the schoolbus stops children flow

out like swirling eddies in the Mississippi – Alive!
yes   the ache in my knee when i tear out weeds
the way rock doves whirl from ash trees and dive

into meltwater and the way i’ve learned to need
my neighbors’ chickens and their brooding hum
the thrum of a pickup truck   the wind’s gentle speed

I'm still going / Veronica Vo

because Mary Oliver said it is no small feat being alive in this broken world
because someone told me in China, shyness is a kind of subtle beauty. beautiful
because someone can be your parents’ age and all you can think of is loss
because memoir from such a young perspective must be interesting
because this is the only form of survival I know how to do
because calling this survival is generous
because crying in front of strangers who are good people forces the honesty out
because I started and I can’t stop
because I was offered a heavy rock to throw in the river, to release grief
because I feel so lonely all the time
because I made martyrs out of people I love who still live
because making someone a muse means you can never touch them
because this is the only form of survival I know how to do
because if I stop it will all be over

When the Work Begins /  Melinda Wilson

What God must have thought on that first day,
gazing into the white abyss of absolute absence.
To design from void is incomprehensible to the
modern mind. Where is the blueprint, the scaffold, 
the clay? What to do with an immeasurable lack. 

Then lightning strikes, 
but from what heavens?

There is no one to care about the how. 
So, giddy with his manumission, God begins
the inconceivable work. Inconceivable because
there is not a soul to conceive. 

When I regard such privacy, I shudder.
I tremble at the thought of blank spaces, 
taught by Frost to fear my own desert places. 
Feel like a zero when unable to produce, 
incapable of connecting mind with pen, 
which is often and unfulfilling but somehow 
not hunger-inducing. I know the human 
urge to yearn, the futile desire to bring forth 
something from nothing. 

Whereas God need only drowse 
in the great empty, siesta in the time before time, 
knows nothing of painful silences nor the cold 
of missed touch. God’s position is such 
that existence is enough.            But without us— 

God would be nullity, nonentity, nought.

August - Poem 30

Thank You For Letting Me Plant the Last Seed  / Dahhee Chung

A cento from Zoe Berger,Ashley Howell, Dahhee Chung, Alison Henderson, Ash Kemp, Hannah Page, PF Potvin, Janette Schafer, and Kate Thuma

A cacophony of the black and white keys of our desire, 
A pounding rhapsody
coat you,
blend you,
candy you.  
You cry and I’m born. 
I smoked each cigarette to the acrid nub  

The lotus, 
Opening in the sunlight, 
Closed to the moon,
We bloom despite our darkness, 
Wear another piece of heart, 
Scar blooming around to gleaming bar, 
A blue silk ribbon runs between each eye-door. 
Night we endure
Not silence, exactly
But the absence of other sounds outside ourselves, 

I didn’t choose to be born,
You chose it for me. 
Living is a conversation with your body 
Wedged between the breeze from my window,
And a phantom in the dark smiling madly. 
Widening mouth, wagging tongue,
Begging for a taste 
Looking for a single source of truth 
Swallow each other like bags of Saccharin and dopamine. 
Can you imagine loving something so much,
You use all the letters naming them? 
Ear to eyelid, I can see what you’re hearing. 
You open your eyes and I’m instantly cosmic.
My blush is every cell,  
At the same time, 
The picture of us smiling,
Since happiness lasts a hundred twenty-fifth of a second, 
Knitted us together. 

You’re dying.
I smell it 
I don’t think about it until my elbow hurts,
Think about how love broke me everyday,
Yes, everyday, my love. 
Nine lives, but is on the last one,
Life my visitor, admit it.
Time is running low, or down, or out.  
Can I hold another ring,
Wear another piece of heart?
A promise broken across half the sky. 
I forgot my wings, but here they are again right where I left them,
These stunted nubs at my shoulders underneath my skin. 
Thought and memory are still accepting sacrifices,
Yawn to the rhythmic march of the coming dark, 
& we found ourselves swept over the brink on the rocks 
Next to lives waiting  in dark scars  
Listening to Jeff Buckley in the car. 

They weren’t ever meant to be anything but sewn together 
Into the most exquisite knot. 
And I never sent for you
(That’s the best part, truly)    
Every dead language eventually evaporates into thin air 
One of us becomes good,
Memory becomes our last.

Hats Off” for the Tupelo Press 30/30 project  / Dahhee Chung

Twenty-one days to form a habit,
So they say.
This is my last one for the month.
I smoked a whole tree in thirty days.
I read The Vegetarian by Han Kang,
And I am now a tree.
My breeze whispers food strung together with bizarre analogies,
The month is over and I’m feeling like that taste,
You know the one everyone says,
Like how I love to eat my semi-sweet dark chocolate and wash it down with,
Don’t say milk, that’s gross,
That would be like numbing the intensity,
Black coffee. 
It brings the intensity to life and allows it to linger,
Because memory is melancholy,
And I’d rather feel uncomfortable,
And when the taste begins to fade,
There’s always another pot 
And one more bar.

What is the true meaning of a shirt / Ash Kemp

After Cypher

Yes, it holds you in its arms,
But what is its favorite sound?
Yes, it covers your top and sometimes 
Brushes allllllll the way to your legs,
But what about her laugh?
Has it ever heard anything so beautiful?
What is the meaning of a garment
Full of soft compliments and bracing seams?
Can anyone know the true meaning of a thing within a dream?

Party Games / Hannah Page

Listening to Lover with headphones in and shades on behind you in the far back seat of the mini van my friends rented to take us all to the Poconos this weekend

One of my biggest life goals was to become happily married

During Never Have I Ever you tell the table that your wife has done it all and our nonverbal exchange is that of pride 

You see you raise up all of me, including the object I (used to) like to become once in a while

Maybe we met on Snapchat and I tried to sell you XXX content

Maybe our first date I blew you in the park next to Yankee Stadium 

after you held a rolled up $20 bill to my nostril after scooping up powder with it — 

We have undergone many deaths. Transformation is nothing less 

than the casting off of everything that no longer serves, and somehow 

beneath the shedding we fit together better

Meeting Jim Again / PF Potvin

Yes, we'll gather by the river,
in the lilac grove in the back yard

counting the mind, counting crows
startled at the diamond back beneath the mesquite,

the early history of Australia. But then the movie
in the river was a trout, and I was on the bank, my heart in my

brain at boil now with heat, afternoon glistening
playing the game of becoming mountains.

I see from the air the rumpled green and beige,
with a thousand colorful birds sweeping in a circle.

Now they live inside me.

I’ll follow you down /  Janette Schafer

after “Silver Spring” by Stevie Nicks

There’s a white flag 
above my door. Somewhere
between the hors d’oeuvres and a look
you gave when you helped
with my coat, I got lost. 
Your silver-brown curls kept falling
in your eyes. Sometimes lovers
change, a hummingbird flit,
a dip in a flower, suddenly across
the way to another nectar.
Maybe they will drop a seed of warning.
I know I could have loved you,
but you would not let me. The sound
of my voice will haunt you. Never get away.

SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION   / Kate Thuma

When the rooms in my brain fill up with dry pens 
and bits of petrified wood and old paper, 
the knowing overflows into my bones, 
hollow like a bird. 

When they’re under enough pressure
a million memories can be measured 
with a bathroom scale – 
the weight of it is what keeps me from flying. 

All the bones in my fingers and toes 
scrunch together to try to stem the leaks, 
and my kneecaps screw more tightly 
to keep the heaviest in. 
Our holding arms and shaking legs 
and back-of-my-neck kisses and closed-eyed declarations
are stacked together so tightly their somehow-bones 
are kissing through a veil. 

A spark from a skinny candle 
leaps into my sternum. 

And, finally, flight.

August - Poem 29

11   / Ashley Howell

I keep looking at the clock and its four pillars like I’m pulling you out of time or trying to make a mirror out of loneliness and they say twins and multiple sea creatures and flames all mean something and I hope so as I look at the clock and see you 

through

***

the blessing of space and the burden of knowing we all fed each other umbilical and that we all move and heave grief as the clock continues to twelve it passes just like this was the first time I’ve ever loved spring and then the snow returned

***

Sublime Fugue  / Dahhee Chung

Three feral kittens played near my flowerbed,
As I sat in a lounge chair
Ritualistically blowing prayers like a steam engine screaming for help,
Watching intently.
Mama cat and I
Made eye contact for forty-five seconds before she turned her head,
Forfeiting her win this round,
And so I fed her babies,
Three like last time,
I hope they’ll survive the streets. 
My friend warned don’t name them this time,
Periwinkle, Mugwort, and Lilac gone,
So I omitted that I already call her Creamsicle. 
The news reports everyone is dying today. 
I see a face in the sky,
Illusory like her mother 
moon revealing Mama’s been watching all this time. 
An eclipse punctually arriving, 
One face dispersing, and the other dying,
Then resurrecting in three hours, slowly brightening.
My eldest boy stood by with his arm permanently tagged
Ephemeral,
When his favorite number was infinite.
A nuance Fitzgerald might have elaborately called first-rate
In so many, many more words. 

My grief at midnight is a mirror / Ash Kemp

My grief at midnight weighs me down
Shows me the other side of a life I don’t want but often feel trapped in. 
A mirror to the grief of my past
My unattainable present 
Sitting on my shoulders like
What.     Am.    I. 
Doing.    Here. 
Where does the midnight go when I’m still awake but not seeing?
Is my grief a reflection of yours?

Mundanities / Hannah Page

Today I did yoga, clipped my toenails
sanded my callouses & drank 40 ounces
of water
in a row, scrubbed my face with harsh
teas & took a shot
          of Apple Cider Vinegar
              of collagen
             of 99% isopropyl alcohol

If only if only the woodpecker cried,
the bark on the tree was a little bit softer
I could carve into it both our names
with my galactic blue fingernails,
inscribe them in a heart – a token
of an homage to our mutual
adoration blossoming from that eternal wound

Found Art / PF Potvin

As the children
splashed and swam and shrieked
with voices echoing ripples
across the blue back of lake

two women with walkers
approached and eased their spines onto the bench

laughing to themselves
about the graffiti
carved on the backboard
“Enjoy the Little Things”

hermetic /  Janette Schafer

finger-point wiping venom off the chin
hazel eyes not quite jade—concentrated

i curse the mind-disease that makes me
misunderstand; should my hand be in your hair
or folded on my lap?

A AAAC CC DEEEEEEEEE FFHIIIIK MM NNO OOPPRR RS SSSTT TTTUUUX    / Kate Thuma

(after “I Used to Experience Memories of the Future as Panic Attack) 

All of the rooms in my brain that aren’t a part of consciousness –
an insistent throbbing pinky knotted in thread 
and enacting what has been ordained.  
And I am here, 
and I’m feeling it through tears. 
And that pinky blue at the tip from the thread 
between us thrumming with the coiled tension of 
extracting the always-was with silver fingertips. 

I received your message. 
I think we were decided by an Old Testament angel.

It dulled the sound but kept the sensation, 
my body couldn’t hold such bigness then.   
She is holding our mouths.  
Snap awake. Look at you, 
spider-drawn over trembling keys of ivory spine  
stretched under my bedroom door.  
String in the moment of attack, 
suspended in the wisps of the feather moon. 

The angel in the corner tells me to stop screaming,  
tongue pressed against a twisted backwards eye tooth, 
When we speak with voices that aren’t ours, 
when you taptaptap goodbye, 
you were still far and long away, but I heard you. 

You’re sending love down the line. 
You’ve been tapping messages to me through time. 

August - Poem 28

Mosquito Poem / Zoe Berger

& if I trust you what would I do with my mouth / what if I said I need you alive / I don’t mind being jerked around by strong wind and avoidance / & what if I like the candles you light for me / a reminder of all the other hot-blooded creatures that do the same / always lighting candles and believing in them / all the sweeter when I smell out your warm body through the smoke / I am thirsty for the river worming through you / I find great pleasure in keeping you up all night / I’m in the room with you now and your cursing is just turning me on / if I could get inside you I would / I was never drawn to the light / I am hiding under your bed and in all the dark / I earned it / give me your neck / I can hear your heart / I will try not to think about the heat breaking or the attention I demand fading / I will do my best to disturb you after I’m gone / let me bloom onto your blushing flesh 

Im/balance  / Ashley Howell

I don’t dream of you much anymore
I’ve stopped inserting myself into yours
I’m just waiting to see if you will come find me

In reading the feminine
There is  much talk of  lactation
One breast always produces more milk

My own, my friend’s, the speaker of the poem’s
There is imbalance in giving life
Life is not symmetrical, and it shouldn’t be

So I’ll let my dreams drip out in ounces
One side 7 and the other 1
Giving imperfect life to our past selves

Running together through the mountains
As the sun set behind the foothills
And then walking our separate paths

Borrowed Words Today  / Dahhee Chung

For Dolly Parton

“Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair
With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green
Your smile is like a breath of spring 
Your voice is soft like summer rain.”
“Islands in the stream, that is what we are
No one in between, how can we be wrong?
Sail away with me to another world
And we rely on each other, ah-ah
From one lover to another, ah-ah”

Oof,
*a moment of silence 

Legislation / Ash Kemp

I am reading the news on my phone,
Barely recovered from another migraine,
Seeing they are pushing hemp beverages off the market again. 
We were sold wine mommy culture and now the wine business are whining that
They are losing their customers. 
In a country that would rather poison its populace than provide safe food,
Is it any wonder they want to line the pockets of alcohol companies rather than let people get California sober?

Clean / Hannah Page

Tits out on the couch next to
my husband scraping
the basin of my skull
for the dregs of an idea
worth pumping up the color
on or ornamenting with all
the trappings of a good word
painting and all that’s flowing
forth redirects my childhood
trauma to the shower
chair we recently installed
after his surgery. I still
wash his back where he
cannot reach the bisecting
scar, and after I deflate
onto polyurethane – stable
in the cleansing rain.

Crossing Cuyahoga / PF Potvin

it’s been seven years since
we sprinted the bridge
passing each of the eight
shirtless guardian pillars
stone faces, eyes set, foreheads
crowned with laurels
looming fourtythree feet
above the span, each
clutching a transit
creation e.g. wagon, stage
coach, car but none
moving how we crossed
on our own legs
with our own steam
racing to the finish
in first form

Late August /  Janette Schafer

oday, the first nips of fall, 
sun beats on my window
like a tappy snare drum, 
wind rattling the panes 
like small melodic percussion—
a triangle or chime. 
No rain today, only breeze
only Bob Ross fluffy clouds
and happy little trees
and I’m catching up on work
and writing gauzy poems—
happy little me, happy little me. 

PRIME    / Kate Thuma

There’s a lot I don’t understand 
about robots. 

In some ways they’re no different 
from a semi or a Camaro. 
And in others,
they do the biologically impossible 
and become a father, 
with something more like blood 
warming a metal hand 
on your thin shoulder. 

A boy needs his father’s voice in his ear: 
be strong enough to be gentle. 

I’d hold a funeral for a sound 
when it’s the voice 
that taught you about being human.

August 27 - Poem 27

Cheers / Zoe Berger

Why would I die? 

Tits up, heart 

pushing 

through my chest

Why 

should I die? Gotta be 

in that cave 

making sense of the shadows

This brief visit 

goes fast enough

Thank god we didn’t find a way 

to make it go faster

12 / Ashely Howell Bunn

I know two people

who broke their jaw

falling off electric

scooters riding through

the city and now I 

won't let my child

ride one I know the

wind would feel so

good in her hair and

I know she needs her

freedom and there are

so many things in the

world that can hurt and

are hurting and I can't

stop all of them but I

can walk along this

cracked sidewalk with

her and hold her hand

for at least a little 

longer

Mother Sea / Dahhee Chung

A cartographer beside your etherized body stretched and mounted to the cardboard backing,

Pinned you

Poked you,

Prodded you 

With every contamination of earth,

Noting the fingerprints of 

Djinn and faeries

That plucked you from the salty waters, satirically labeled Sirius B,

Call you siren,

Afraid to find evidence that they,

Not you,

Are the trespassers. 

Marked with grids sixteen dimensions, 

Protracted and scaled every emerging mountain, 

And measured the streams of bleeding nile,

Bright  red  plague 

Gridded laterally across your body, 

Subjected to the self proclaimed pioneers who

Sinned  on you.

After Ars Poetica / Ash Kemp

When writing an after poem,

You are a runner, with a stolen voice,

Or maybe I should say borrowed?

You are taking inspiration

And turning it into a new piece.

You are running-

with your own thoughts and limitations-

trying desperately

not to sound

like a sad imitation

of the voice that gave you

the idea in the first place.

Demi Sonnet for Dolly - Hannah Page

The new fan for our bedroom arrived today.
I was not her biggest fan, but I liked her quite a bit.
Sometimes mounting something on the wall
is the sturdiest display of love – especially when
the switch flips and I cannot hear you.
Not in the dark, not where her swan song echoes still.
She will always love us, and we’ll never have our fill.

Testimony / P.F. Potvin

screech owl whine in

bushes beyond the fence where

coyotes descend

twisting, yapping, leaping through

the pale pool of the blood moon

You know things are bad when / Janette Schafer

a smart phone tarot deck app makes clear
that you should sell your house, move to

New Hampshire 

a concrete floor looks like a boon or beacon,
beckons to rest the heavy limbs

fear is the tie that binds
fear is the tie that binds
and fear is the tie that binds you

the day is made of one more step one more step

one more step

when Glen Campbell & Dolly Parton  are now dead
and nothing lies gentle on your mind

and you know I will always love you 

and I am weeping when I never even knew them

Untitled / Kate Thuma

2     There are 

4     ways you know me 

6     better than I know me. 

8     More than my own brain lets me see. 

10    I show my bones to you without trying.

8     They creak and flex without pushing. 

6     Trees are stronger in wind. 

4     Are there glimmers? 

2     (There are.) 

August 26 - Poem 26

NO GOING BACK TO THE VILLAGE / Zoe Berger

We try, man. Throwing clouds upwards hoping they won’t come back down. Siphoning water from the moon, storing it in black tanks to cook and shower with, irrigating our moon gardens with our runoff. Selling our moon vegetables for the small suns of coins, which we use to buy horses, not because they can take us farther but because they can carry the people we love too. Tying horses to trees on the beach,  their weathered hooves pawing the ground. We are all asking for more. All of us standing in the bed of your truck. More riders. No going back to the village. No going back to the village now. 

retrograde|retrograde / Ashley Howell

appears moving backwards|backwards moving appears

uncover: apocalypse of definition | definition of apocalypse: uncover

 only way I can recover is leaving| leaving is recover can I way only 

  moving the definition way I can recover|recover can I way definition the moving

apocalypse is leaving|leaving is apocalypse

uncover backwards appears|appears backwards uncover

to leave|leave to

Gadfly / Dahhee Chung

It’s getting dark! 

It looks like the moon destroyed the day!”

Young Pharaoh,

Same as the gadfly and pupil 

Asking questions,

Writing his thesis like Socrates,

With questions,

Through my fingers.

“But what will destroy the night?”

“Bad dreams.”

“And good dreams?”

“I ate them.”

From a phantom plate of whimsy and 

hemlock 

His mouth opens wide,

Eyes turn to crescents,

Mumbling sky. 

Subway Poem / Hannah Page

Your emergence back into 

life has been an unfurling

and tonight you rode into Brooklyn 

with me to my writing group at the fair 

trade coffee shop with all the ugly 

art on the walls in all the colors 

I have dyed my hair before. I used to 

belong to collectives as a second

thought; Now, I bring you 

with me into places once navigable 

through loneliness. This space

is blistering and luminous 

and smacking of a home         everywhere 

you come with me.

Lingering Question / PF Potvin

I can understand

swaddling a pig

in banana leaves

after slathering it

in orange and spice

burying it in coals

underground for hours

before pulling it out

to dress a tortilla

but admit to knowing

nothing about why someone

in the adjacent campsite

started a perfectly good

fire and wasted it on trying

to grill a watermelon

Just Across the Creek / Janette Schafer

A cento using lines from “Poems of the Mad Hunter 

and Other Tales” by Byron Hoot

There is nothing like the stillness of the woods.

What will I dream about?

The low ground wind sound,

the difference between the deer and me.

We do not miss the grace of first light,

the soul needs a broad expanse of country.

I know something of art and what is true of it—

heaven and earth created for us.

Each knows the value of going our own way,

where the possible is limitless, 

the promised land just across the creek. 

WE DON'T KNOW WHAT OYSTERS ARE  / Kate Thuma

Oyster (adjective): 

unknowable; alien; 

the "other" paradigm 

Ex: I held your

oyster heart in limitless

hands -- it filled them up. 

August 25 - Poem 25

Cabin Theory

I used to think if I locked someone in a cabin 

they’d just have to love me. Obviously I hate to admit this 

online. Probably everyone at my high school 

already knew. 

I’m allegedly still young. Each night 

I say a prayer to the gods of standing still. I lock myself 

in a cabin. Now I love my poem and my poem loves me. 

Look how lucky we are to not 

escape each other. No handles on the doors. 

For Your Drive / Dahhee Chung

Wake up and stare until the first song pops up,

“Friends, how many of us have them.”

Whodini tops the charts forty days now. 

Curate a playlist for your day,

Mood like Cortex,

A scene with James Blake,

Add something bumpy, groovy, funky and

A joint with your coffee. 

Get dolled up,

Fill the bottles,

One peanut-butter bar just in case.

Ignite the car and blast your tunes,

The clouds in the front drop

Like rad racer  sped up 8-bit pixels.

Maybe you’re not moving, but Tailored side peripheral’s are racing to an infinite horizon. 

Head bopping’ cuz Olive Jones is swooning Planes while

Two men under a tree talking with their arms, 

And a girl crossing the street in syncopated shoes marching two coffees in both hands,

I hope they know how much she likes them. 

Does anyone else imagine body parts when driving past black trash bags on the street?

Walter white was here 

Sharpie on the wall. 

Get lost, feel free,

The airline flight was a double feature. 

Sivans Estrada’s Un Rayo De Luz evoking pictures of you driving to the end. 

The last song Godspeed,

Frank Ocean will make you cry every time. 

What's more fascist than fat shaming? / Ashley Kemp

after a line from Harryette Mullen

The body

unconscious

devours itself.

Take a little pill,

inject a little liquid,

you will feel

so much... less.

Susurrations / Hannah Page

Follow

me          down

                                     to the boundary             where waves unfurl where I have prayed

the rosary over the fifty-nine small

scallop shells I unearthed with my curled

toes & pressed back

into the sand

in patterns contrived by the mariners

or perhaps the sirens with their slick

songs which seep far beyond

their visibility, beyond

the whole dark sea to brim at the shoreline

a high, pulsing murmur: a melody

simultaneously invented  & recalled

Balcony House / PF Potvin

as you climb the ladder

imagine above

this sandstone slab

patches of corn, squash,

beans and sunsparked faces

put your hands in the holds

your feet in the grooves and squeeze

between walls cut, stacked

mortared and etched

a millennium ago when

ledges held high enough

earth turned rich enough

seeps dripped long enough

to wet thirty tongues

until one day

enough was just not enough

anymore

Hotel meditation / Janette Schafer

This bed is lovely. It’s 5:39 a.m. 

and the world outside my window

in Jefferson County is already

awake and alive, the highway

buzzing, its own kind of wilderness.

My mattress, dense but soft—

my back feels delicious, tells me 

I need a new boxspring when I 

get home. 6:19 a.m. now, dawn 

creeping in, awakening the shapes

inside—outlines of a small table

a tiny refrigerator, a television 

I never turned on, a desk I wrote 

two centos from, and some white

frosted lamps, now disco balls 

by this refraction of sun.

Spent the afternoon in sturdy

farmhouses in need of paint 

and blueprints, drove by fields of

pastoral green—the clean bright 

smell of them. But the hotel is near

I-80, a few miles and mindsets

from the Pennsylvania Wilds

through which I just wandered,

an anonymous mammal burrowed

inside a temporary den, done

what I’d set out to do, sold a home

and time to return to mine. 

DUNSCAITH CASTLE / Kate Thuma

Standing in Dunscaith 

on same-but-different floors, 

our eyes form a human chain of origin, 

where our pupils connect 

to form a single dark hallway

for passing letter-locked messages through time. 

A blue silk ribbon 

runs between each eye-door; 

it flutters when I blink.

My end is woven 

into a slender braid behind my ear, 

so I can feel you first. 

Yours hangs loose 

to catch on thistles hidden in the heather. 

Each tug of the ribbon whispers 

original truth in an old language: 

we were, we are, we will be. 

August 24 - Poem 24

I cannot remember the wind making a choice /Zoe Berger

and yet it blows one direction 

Foolish to think because I cannot observe 

its shape or define its edges, that it makes no difference 

to what it touches

I have been watching from inside  

A tree falling to its knees, its limbs rearranged

Dunes shifting side to side on their desert feet

How can I be above that which moves an immovable object

I have to agree 

I am in the path of affection 

Preserved / Dahhee Chung

Grab me by my ankles and hoist me up  

Until the clicks clack down my spine, 

Bleed me dry then paint me pretty, 

Pluck my eyes, a glass one will do.

I’ll even sing you a tune, if you’d like.

My limbs so heavy, I’m useless anyway,

Nail me to the wall, before I fade away. 

untitled / Ash Kemp

Deafening silence

The dark side of the moon 

Leaf in the puddle 

Sandhill Song / PF Potvin

Behind the barn

in the field where dawn

yawns orange and gray

a crane pitches

its head and shrills

vibrato like a rubber ball

tossed between birches,

pines, and oaks then echoed

back down into its own

waiting throat

Marital Bliss / Hannah Page

We watch Pawn Stars 
in sweatpants like 
anybody’s neighbors
spewing weed smoke 
onto the green faux
velvet loveseat that I 
ordered on Wayfair,
assembled myself 
over both discs
of the Taylor Swift vinyl 
that skips a few times
now when I spin it 
on the same daisy-print
suitcase player you sent 
to my old apartment – 
one of few objects
that have practiced 
permanence through 
these many timelines.

I forget when I first
left the bathroom door 
open with you; when you 
first asked me to make
a decision with 
consequence. I recognize
patterns. Small picture
means small potatoes
to the girl who never kept 
the ring. Now I am
stacking them up my
finger, weighing down
my left hand until I am
able to drown myself
in our bedclothes,
in your redolence,
in the essences you
draw out.

Lotus / Janette Schafer

a demi sonnet after a photograph by Erin C Murphy

Every living thing carries a version 

of themselves that is drowning. Consider

the lotus, opening in sunlight, closed

to the moon. We bloom despite our darkness. 

I never knew I needed green and blue

without black. Loved buoyancy of floating

without slipping beneath a still surface. 

Fibonacci / Kate Thuma

The 

world’s 

perfect 

math triggers 

apotheosis 

of the wind – an oracle who

speaks holy truths and prophecy into the curl of

a leaf that catches in my wild hair. You untangle me with reverence, as foretold.

August - Poem 23

Icarus fell at the end of it / Zoe Berger

I swear I’m trying 
to turn grief to light 

I too want to see 
a bright thing
and I’m laughing 
at the kitchen table 
with you because really 
what else is there to do

Out the window 
the leaves let go, finally
(dancing as they fall)
(light beaming through their skins)

taos to denver    / Ashley Howell

can i hold another ring
wear another piece of heart
we saw the last moments mountain

after we burnt our skin in the desert sun
how we move from one plain to another sky
with what seems like ease
knowing death comes with letting go

The Destroyer (for Appa on his birthday) / Dahhee Chung

A little tornado with untamed roots sprouted out of…
Who can say, 
With the same fury and fire 
As my unbound procreator 
Who has howled at the moon 
And fought with the sun.
“Seventy nine.”
He sighed,
“I thought I would be happy if this was my last one,”
Then cried,
“But that little boy kissed the freckles on my arm
And his sweet voice said I love you,”
The peace he felt,
Destroyed,
Cause now he wants more time.  

Patron saint of hopeless causes / Ash Kemp

Nightly we endure
Not silence, exactly,
But an absence of other sounds
Outside ourselves

Patron saint of delirious dreams

Daily we ask you 
Can a dream become reality
Even when it’s been crushed and forced to be forgotten?

Poetry / Hannah Page

is not a commodity but
I am rich on reams of it, excessively
draping ink-wet paper lengthwise
across the dining room carpet over
the table set with thrifted china
scalloped and gilded between the
chips and I scotch taped together
a dress for our courthouse wedding
out of my most sordid laments
because all the words strung together
to the resonance of the ocean’s
pull were emptied of their gravity
in the laser light of our third
and final homecoming.

At the Desk / PF Potvin

honestly, from here there’s not much to see
unless you’re a boring-o who’s into watching dad
close his eyes and stare at the ceiling
with his head back like a zombie guy
breathing just enough
to keep his sooooo slow heart from actually stopping
I love my cousin’s graduation picnic picture though
when we hung out with our papa, nana, uncle, aunts, and cousins
they had those mini cakes you top and played tons of cornhole
I had vanilla frosting, marshmallows, hot fudge, and rainbow sprinkles
my uncle almost hit nana in the head like 20 bazillion times with beanbags
she wasn’t even playing the game
he really needs to learn how to throw
actually, my dad IS like me
unfinished projects everywhere
these framed paragraphs signed by someone named Lydia Davis
one about going to the bathroom and seeing the moon
the other about a monk and a train
what I don’t get is after 5 years why it’s still on the floor
next to his acoustic guitar
leaning against the wall with the other frames
one of my brother’s school pictures and another of mine
speaking of, dad’s nuts, he’s too skinny to be santa
but linz is the perfect mrs. clause
she can handle anything
dad’s always so dramatic
scrunching up his face
so you can’t see his eyes
I bet it’s not even sour
everybody has scrunchie eyes in that picture from gg’s funeral
weird and sad
we used to visit her all the time
eat treats, do puzzles, play games, and listen to that bear
sing butterfly kisses
which reminds me of our old house
and my yellow submarine shirt
nana’s washing something in the sink behind me
I’m cuddling my stuffie horse that’s actually still on my bed
did I tell you my frame’s bigger than my brother’s
he can always have mine though, if he wants

Slow motion /  Janette Schafer

A cento composed from lines/phrases from
Jason Irwin’s memoir, “These Fragments I Have Shored”

I was about to reach out to her—
my mother had lost a lot of blood.
I thought of the times we drove across
town. I imagine she assuaged herself
with coffee and cigarettes and music.
I felt the desire to just drive away.
Together we ran down the hallway—
slow motion style. Some nights
as I lay in bed, I could hear it ticking.
I considered my prayers had been 
answered. I painted the shutters.
Our new home became a sanctuary.

NIGHT MIRROR  / Kate Thuma

We can be invisible in daylight, 
but I’m collecting bioluminescence 
in imperceptible tracks 
your fingerprints have swept over me. 

Every brush of your shirt, hands, nose 
sends a spray 
of whatever these little lives are 
out into the universe, 
so my shoulders and back 
are faintly lit like a star 
on the very edge of death. 

You glow me, still. 
I sparkle you.

Long after I’m consumed 
by the hopeful, accidental wormhole 
that brought me to this time, 
the parts of you that twinkle on me 
will just be reaching distant planets 
with their own watchers looking up 
at a fraternal-twinned night sky, 
wondering at the brilliant pinpricks 
in the shape of the history of love.

August - Poem 22

Joy Machine/ Zoe Berger

Our joy machine 
keeps pumping out tickets 

     I could spit right there 
and something would grow 

     Love keeps 
going like that 

     Hope is a chain 
no one can break 
     Not even me 

     I do not plan 
on dying 

½   / Ashley Howell

two half rainbows

on my drive home 

a promise broken

across half the sky 

Murmur / Dahhee Chung

Mysteries in the mundane moments
Make memories, 
Which once felt mute,
Marvelous.
Like the new moon,
A phantom in the dark,
Smiling madly,
Mocking,
As eyes scan the sky
For a spot to still their stare,
Until specks spark arrhythmically,
Reliving the memories of the dead. 

I Almost Cried Watching Drunk Shakespeare / Ash Kemp

Asked my friend if she wanted water and realized it was already leaking out. 

Pouring from a girl afraid to laugh for being seen. 

Afraid to draw attention with an ounce too much emotion. 

She has nine lives but is on the last one. 

Making it count, listening to Kat regret being born in this body, with this brain, with this

Feeling. 

Over Jersey City / Hannah Page

Tonight the sun melted
into an orange bar above the
horizon, stark moon
in profile against
faint neon scribblings
in the clouds, and after
I yawned and yawned
to the rhythmic march
of the oncoming dark.

At The Desk / PF Potvin

pic of a phone
pole with 3 boards
black painted
SLOW DOWN
PEOPLE
BREATHING
Van Gogh straw
hat magnet The Writing
Forge podcast clip holding
niece’s high school graduation
picnic pic siblings ordered
randomly left to right
same as Thanksgiving
45 years before gray rabbit
magnet holding Grammie’s hair
contagious beaming glasses
beaded necklace Christmas
card shy of 99 th bday academic
year calendar sea
turtle pig goat zebra
llama holding pics
red tongue stained
|out eyes wincing
sour raspberries Halloween
Santa & Mrs. two dogs
grinning sun on backs
sticky note class
credit permutations
daughter radiant in Yellow
Submarine tee clutching
plush horse
black mohawk son
blue striped tie on red onesie
hand resting on thigh
flipping the bird
drawn colored frame wedged
father’s day kindergarten
cutout fish backs carrying secrets
(pink) “Thank you for cooking stir fry!”
(green) “Thank you for teaching me cursive.”
(black) “Thank you for letting me plant the last seed.”

A kami in Appalachia  /  Janette Schafer

after a photograph by Keith Hileman

This morning, a tree in the wood
near our homestead let me see
his face, gazed at me a moment
with his black hollowed eyes
before the kami hid again,
disappearing into wet bark.

SELKIE    / Kate Thuma

Stepping over mermaid’s nipples 
reminds my skin of its second, 
sleekly furred spirit, 
the way I am when there’s nothing 
between me and the questioning, 
opening sea. 

When my toes tangle in bladderwrack, 
my metatarsals slide like tiles 
into stronger, more seaworthy shapes. 
I can make myself beautifully monstrous
to live both lives. 

She is me and I am her, 
and we will lure a thousand sailors 
to the rocks to feel once more 
the slipping waves transform us 
to a being that watches with eyes 
only half above the surf, 
whose blood rises and falls
to match the moon.

August - Poem 21

Poem of Poor Translation, a Cento from the Hall of Immortal Poets / Zoe Berger

The star belongs 
‍ ‍To know the taste
‍ ‍Of the bitter end 
‍ ‍Singing

It’s already gone, the feeling 
Of rejoicing in the drizzle
The song of the early self-hearted 
Wind and rain, falling
Leaves in the evening
Where is the empty place?

In the cold light, the clouds are full 
Of sweet water escaped from the world
If you can find the blue,
Hold on to it
This meridian dream

Late August   / Ashley Howell

A brown leaf fell on my windshield today
Late August and the kids are going back to school

Someone sent me a video of us from 10 years ago
We were smiling, you were laughing 
That laugh I’ll never unhear

And I remember briefly how quickly things change
The person in the video looks like me, but I don’t remember much of her

I know she was unhappy 
I know she thought she was home
I know she loved you 

What would she think of us now
One of us dead 
The other far from that home
Missing it, but finally happy

West Door / Dahhee Chung

Halmuhnee brought me to Suh Moon Presbyterian Church before I knew which tongue I spoke.
I learned to read music notes before I learned my abc’s
And never learned my ga na da’s
Until English became primary.
     Suh Moon, West Door
A psychic once stopped me at a donut shop and prophesied,
“Your veil is thin. You have one foot in the living and one in the dead.”
She must have seen my foot on the west and the other on the east. 
Service held at a little home the first few years,
A Jindo barked in their backyard,
As the pastor’s older children taught us “Jesus Loves Me”. 
They didn’t know which language I sang,
Because my mouth was sewn shut
Except I could perform John 3:16 in English, Hangul and my hands
In front of the congregation,
And my Halmuhnee was proud. 
A fiery four year old was the only one who heard my voice.
The uncertainty of who we were
Knitted us together for her lifetime. 
Late night drives,
A pack of smokes and the “what if” talks till dawn,
Repeat again next day at dusk
When we both just woke again from late night escapades. 
We visited West Door every Christmas Eve,
Before our ritual midnight feast at Denny’s. 
A club sandwich with ketchup and Tabasco for me, 
and Moons Over My Hammy she chose every time. 
I had a baby and She died.
The coroner confirmed it natural at twenty-seven as divine intervention. 
I oscillated between denial and bargaining,
And the West Door God became my enemy.
My Halmuhnee outlived her a year,
Her brain forgot her cancer.
And the pastors and worshippers of West Door,
Visited like angels holding trumpets her last day here. 
Appa said she cried then saw her fly until her face turned white.
Briefly, her mind came back before hymns carried her to 
The Father, who art in 
that place with 
Her Husband, Twins,
And Debbie.
I finally cried,
And moved forward. 

Visitor / Ash Kemp

after Joseph Fasano

I have been the hot embers 
cooling among the scattered fires of this world
I have been the silence in the fog. I have been the thread in the spool,
The mist in the morning after the storm. 
But it is time. It is time. 
 Reunion is knocking at my door,
wearing its  sentient mask of flames. 
Life, my visitor, admit it. 

Getting My Navel Re-Pierced In Times Square / Hannah Page

Not a fresh prick; a
repurposing: scar blooming
around gleaming bar

Until You Know / PF Potvin

A man in red sandals, Speedo, and robe looked down into the pool. “It’s gone,” he said to  the bald man who didn’t look up, just scooped it out of the water. “You can’t really know until you know.” He let it down smooth like a blanket on the warm concrete. After a few seconds, Speedo turned and left, slamming the gate. The bald man lowered his goggles, dove back into his laps, and didn’t think about the bee again until he sat down at twilight to write a poem.

The sentinels /  Janette Schafer

after a photograph by Keith Hileman

Two pale trunks—
gateposts to 
the narrow dark
between them.

Those who 
know the signs
will turn around
and not look back. 

Those who enter 
through these ribs
may hear a whistle call—
and if they whistle back,
you will not see them at all. 

A DIAGNOSIS   / Kate Thuma

There’s an ocean stone
stitched behind my navel,
buttoning me to the ground
with my knees up,
big toes brushing. 
I can peer through the 
hazy window between 
my thighs and see the world 
with only soft edges 
as long as I don’t move.

August - Poem 20

I’m not balding / Zoe Berger

I’m just getting more head, reads the shirt I’m wearing, 
which makes you giggle, which reminds me 
we’re both on hair-loss medication, which brings up 
how my mother said she’d recognize us on the street 
by our matching whiskers, which makes us snort and start 
and roll onto our backs with our bellies up—
two stray dogs, following the smell of blood. 

Fracture  / Ashley Howell

Bones break and heal and then we forget they were ever broken, forever changed inside us and yes, you can say the same for hearts what a silly, lovely analogy for the thing that calls us out of ourselves love and heartbreak-heartache-heartsick I walk again on my broken ankle my arm healed after the kid pushed me off the jungle gym and I don’t think about it until my elbow hurts as I age or I need to balance on one foot but I think about how love broke me every day, yes, every day, my love

Fractal / Dahhee Chung

If I stare at my garden for days and weeks, every morning,
Will I understand this reality? 
Stare at the dried up blooms ready to move into the cycle of dying,
Bright baby leaves play merry-go-round beneath their elders,
A crown of paper white and dead brown flowers. 
The same bee circles its path between the third and fourth plant
Back and forth, while. 
Sprouts all look the same until they’re grown,
Like babies. 
If I stare at baby Pharaoh sleeping and count his lashes,
Will I unlock the mystieries of life? 
His breathing rhythmic,
Still down to his belly,
At night his pose matches his daddy’s.
Will reason one day click?
My eldest son  told me once,
I didn’t choose to be born,
You chose it for me,
So you’re responsible for why I feel bad. 
Can I also blame my parents for his melancholy? 
How long should I stare at the patterns before the grand pattern makes sense?

Kemp day 20- It’s Like an Owl Daydreaming He’s a Kingfisher / Ash Kemp

Which is to say, days go by without human contact. 

Days to go buy canned goods are few and far between. 

Which is to say, our stores are running low. 

The stores are below ground, hard to find if you don’t know what you’re looking for, or who. 

A king fishes in a rotten pond. 
Which is to say, I don’t have time for daydreams anymore. 

Time is running low, or down, or out, maybe. 
Maybe it was never there at all. 

I did everything all the way / Hannah Page

I smoked
each cigarette to
the acrid nub, brought
men crashing
to their knees with
the gravity of
the Colosseum
crumbling or my favorite
scheme unsewing.

Sometimes it means 

losing the
thread. Backtracking
blindly, selecting
different triggers. Pick
your battles, darling.

So much
anchored in the space
between my keystrokes
and you 

sleep safe and 

protected beside
me – my poetry
raining from my lips
and fingers, blossoming
like ink on our mattress.

Prometheus / PF Potvin

when you’re old
enough & finally see
the movie, study how
it opens at the same
waterfall in the photo
I left on your desk
with my papers
years ago when we
used it for changing
diapers & your river
washed the ink from
my black pants, green
wool sweater while
I sat crosslegged, eyes
closed in the rim
roar of Europe’s largest
prize before it all
crumbled & we found
ourselves swept
over the brink
onto rocks below
where next lives waited
in the dark scars
of eddies for a spark

Listening to Jeff Buckley in the car /  Janette Schafer

burning up my expensive gas
but I just finished a good parking lot
poetry session, wrote about 
remembered kisses, encountered bears,
how I’m still here after so many 
close calls. Start the car,

the engine turns, Jeff Buckley is next
in the music queue, “Lover, You Should
Come Over.” I dare you not to listen,
not to give that voice and song your
full attention while you are on earth

and he is not. Think of that person you
wish for. Let the gas burn. You can
refill your gas tank. You can’t 
refill time. 

An Eye in a Jar   / Kate Thuma

Inside the tree that held
a nest that rested on branches
becoming pages,
I’ve held the memory
of so many eggs hatching
in my hands
behind every poem
that’s taught me how
to be alive.
Another reason crows bring gifts
to people near them —
they can see with an eye in a jar
inside the book I pressed fingerprints
into in the Athenaeum Drum,
remembering its childhood home.

August - Poem 19

Cantor’s Theorem / Zoe Berger

when it began / no one thought to start counting / as in every set of numbers / contained another set of numbers / and so on / forever / didn’t matter if no one was looking / no / nobody kept scor

Monaco  / Ashley Howell

There’s a street in Denver
That reminds me of the East
Big trees and old houses

I dream of living in each house
Each life a new chapter of mind
And heart I listen to a song:

“It’s nice to hear your voice again”
“I like the way you say my name”
I wonder if the me in these houses

Also loved you

There Will Be Time to Murder and Create / Dahhee Chung

after T.S. Elliot

I take my vacations in spoonfuls each day,
Change the scope of eternity into one single day.
Eight to one, four days a week,
An episode can last up to an hour, each one.
Limit sleep to six hours tops,
Break fast at noon,
White rice measured two cups in the cooker,
Washed three times,
Five minutes to rest, thirty minutes cooked, 
Ten minutes rest while
Watering plants with the rice water.
Delicately scoop and fold the rice fluffy, not molded to the pot, but
Steaming hot topped with a silky six minute egg.
Sustenance in eight spoonfuls. 
The remaining minutes sitting, 
      scrolling, scrolling, scrolling
 Knowing time is up and flying out the door,
“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”
Stirring the cup though it’s black through and through. 
Otherwise go stir crazy knowing
I’ll never have time
Past the hours of the afternoon,
Each day a repetition of alarm clocks and snooze,
Hit one, two, three times. 
Vacation done. 

New Release / Ash Kemp

The perfect book just came out for you today!
Thrilling, compelling, heart-pounding, page-turning,{insert line skip} word mix
                                                          wait

  is this ai?

Practical Magic / Hannah Page

For Shevy

They say love isn’t easy.
But it’s like falling
asleep – waking up to your
warm breath on my
cheek, your overgrown
tousle spread on your pillow
beside me at 3am and I
rustle up string
cheese with the hot sauce
you keep in ready supply for
me or a strawberry muffin
dunked in the milk
your post-surgery body is
just allowed to carry now
that you picked up on
sale from CVS when you
filled my medications with
yours today. And I never
sent for you (that’s the best
part, truly). The spells,
the anchors I cast over lovers
past – They dissolved
when your downturned
eyes pinned me beneath
that subway sign and all the
fated tragedies became
my favorite stories.

Humane Society / PF Potvin

eyes enter the room
white lab with blue
pouncing
chomping
balls to bits then.
snap

back into hallways another.
show begins with black.
& white shivers
each trial a match.

stick like a test.
struck hard.
on the box.
as you peer through

your mask your shakes your head
in my hands

That which feeds us /  Janette Schafer

We like to believe
we make our own food—
but what if independence
is a failure to notice 
what feeds us? 

We are heterophytes dining on
photographs, memories,
conversations. 

Basking in light from
forests, myths,
lovers, scripture.

Poems pretending
to rise unannounced. 

A HAIKU   / Kate Thuma

Ear to my eyelid,
I can see what you’re hearing —
synesthesia loop.

August - Poem 18

untitled  / Ashley Howell

we came, 

made. made.

 admitted

we[‘]re humbly made.

made. continued.

sought
having.

Poltergeist (haiku) / Dahhee Chung

Someone is whistling
A haunting tune heard throughout
Three blind mice, slowly.

Dead Languages Sing to One Another / Ash Kemp

after Christina Gosnay

I hardly have a formal education
in language, meter, or rhyme. 
I can only describe and observe and occasionally meditate on this beautiful world.
If dead languages sing to each other,
wouldn’t you like to make some harmony?
A rhythm between us—
across oceans and boulevards—
songs of want and wander, awe and despair. 
Every dead language eventually evaporates into thin air. 
Who can find the time 
to make a meager rhyme
Stand the test of time?

Anne / Hannah Page

Invisible ink
revealed in her blood after
lifelong research in

living. Grandmother
awoke pen in hand – bursting
with ink and people,

places, things to re-
animate in black and white.
In her head, movies

in sepia, in
black and white. And in her heart,
ineffable light.

Praising La Jument / PF Potvin

You may have seen it. The man with the orange winter beanie. Some might say sailor. Some keeper. Others crazed. But it’s clear he’s outside the lighthouse door. And the colors may have been different or maybe it wasn’t a hat at all, hard to tell sometimes from the angle, a straight-on shot, center frame, blue waterwalls curling around as he stands in the middle, staring straight through the lens, which may have been mounted or held, but must have been snapped via copter in that pre-drone era, a day after he’d radioed for help and surfaced after hearing the whirling but realized it wasn’t his ride, so spun and flashed back through the door, just as the walls gave way and came down clapping.

We called them fireflies /  Janette Schafer

“The lightning bugs were out last night,
just past the gloaming, before the night sky
whisked the light away.”

—Byron Hoot

On that trail before midnight
when I could not sleep,
near the swamp I once 
befriended,
a bit of cosmic magic—

The sky, spotless black—
the stars reached down 
and joined the fireflies,
the two light sources touching

beneath a bright gibbous moon.
I laid on my back in the wet field,
shut off my flashlight, watched
as the two strands of light—
the mating bugs, the too-low stars,

reached out to one another,
joined hands, swung them back
and forth in reckless embrace.

Sometimes when I remember,
it still pierces me, that dancing 
light, swirling en pointe above
my head, my clothes gloriously

ruined in the wet grass. 

UNTITLED   / Kate Thuma

I can compel my heart 
to beat differently for you –  
marshaling the muscle 
and triggering forming neurons
to link a wish to a maneuver. 

I want my blood 
to signal your arrival 
and rush through veins 
and arteries and ventricles 
fast enough it forces goosebumps 
out of my arms. 

My blush is every cell, 
at the same time, 
reaching to touch you.

August - Poem 17

Heat / Zoe Berger

What can I say. I was young 
It was hot
The goat outside yelling 
Sounded a bit like a girl I knew
Who cares if the boat driver wanted to fuck me 
I didn’t do it but I did do worse for less 
I had lemons for eyes 
I turned months into men
A dark sky was a blanket to tear through
Something to kick my feet out from under

memory   / Ashley Howell

passion only stays as long as desire
and ghosts of friends only linger
when the mind calls or nights alone

i suppose we are the ghosts of yearnings
and while mountains shift with each step,

and each step melts in snow,
and each body moves to clay,
clay reforms to mountains

and i suppose i’ve lost control
boots sliding in mud

Monophasic Sleeper / Dahhee Chung

I took a nap today
No dreams 
The heatwave,
Taught two classes, 
Took a heated sculpt class for the cherry on top,
Last night’s double feature
Slasher films and fog,
Two hundred fifteen unchecked messages,
Eleven thousand seven hundred eighteen unopened emails,
And wedged between the breeze from my window and
The oscillating fan at the foot of my bed,
My little boy running in and out between consciousness,
“Mommy are you ok?”
Downing the ice cold water from my emotional support water bottle,
Gurgling from the straw, “I’m done, fill me up.”
“Mommy are you ok?”
“I’m done, trying to fill up.”

But I’m Just a Frog / Ash Kemp

The pond is full of sound and fury,
but I’m just a frog. 
I see them across the clearing
leaning closer, closer—
She cups his tiny cheek and pecks him 
right on the lips!
A blinding light,
And then…
I don’t know what I was doing. 
I’ve forgotten who I am. 
Where is my mate 
Do I have any children?
Chirps and caws,
reeds swaying, a heavy sigh escapes me,
I see the two unfamiliar people walking hand in hand
out of the meadow. 

Arts & Crafts / Hannah Page

One of my ex
best friends taught
me how to apply
press-ons with super
glue rather than nail
glue because then
my coffin-shaped
fakes would hold           up
for a month rather
than two weeks max
like all the sets
promised on the box.
My sharpest
pinky nail unpeeled
from concealed flesh
and nub on the day
she cut me out
like vinyl letters on her Cricut:
messily. Without regard
for proper borders.
My body is still a craft
project but I buy
proper supplies.

Beyond the Field / PF Potvin

when coyotes sing
the dog searches the house for
babies in blankets

finding only kids
he lowers his back and pulls
hair from the Barbies

but stops when someone
in the kitchen barks his name
and whistles his song

Sensei /  Janette Schafer

The way I see blades of grass
has awakened. I hear the crackle
as they emerge through the dermis 
of the ground.  Can you hear that
music? Feel their green tips stretch
towards the light. How each sweet
tender green nib delights in, makes
love with liminal dawn-water. Oh,
I never knew. No, I never knew. 

BRAIN ROOMS   / Kate Thuma

The feeling 
of sending my heart
outside my body 
and letting it make 
a safe room 
to be free in.

This is how I built a new brain room. 

It didn’t have a door, it had veins. 

The door didn’t open, it bled. 

And I filled 
every corner and crack 
with softness. 

And sounds bounced off 
the padded walls 
and back into my body 
in echoes.

August - Poem 16

Sailboats / Zoe Berger

Yawl
Sloop
Schooner
Cutter
Ketch
Smack
Junk
Dhow 
Carrack
Frigate
Cog
Pink
Snow 
Brig 

Can you believe these are all types of sailboats 
Can you imagine loving something so much 
you use up all the letters naming them 

august   / Ashley Howell

tell the truth to the ocean
drink each other like you want to drink tides

until you are all tree
swallow each other like bags of saccharine and dopamine

make a list like red waves
roll your words with her tongue like wet salt

or only foundations
shiver your cravings like orgasm through slender toes

tell the truth to the rain
that you still aren’t well

until you are granite
release your poetry in monosyllables

oh
god 
yes

let the earth cry
even though it won’t

Grey Moth / Dahhee Chung

In the days that tigers smoked,
A primordial beast with
Black-gray wings with folds highlighted by fuzz and a peak a boo
Little flare of orange flame and monarch markings,
Eat and burrow deep from when they were like green plump finger grapes,
Gripping her finger like a snake,
Until it’s coat shines like leather,
Polished by young boys from harder times,
Still breathing before it’s time
Palpitating in it’s suit,
Like her finger pulsing to the same micro beat from the proper palmer artery pumping from the palpable heart, 
Holding on to life. 

this is what I got / Ash Kemp

when I went to the store
this is what I got
a brush
reusable paper towels 
with little daisies printed on them
a brush with the lady around the corner who looked at me like I was a ghost
baking soda
lemon oil
an oily feeling that settled on my shoulders when I tried to find one more word to say thank you, but said I’m sorry, instead
vanilla 
one small bag of candy coated chocolate 
a coating of regret for all the times I never believed in myself
when I went to the store, I got lost 
Can you help me checkout, please?

Lepidopterology / Hannah Page

At my first and only big-girl job
at a crystal shop (but make it high-end)
behind the jewelry counter hung an accent
wall of taxidermied butterflies. The bluest
wings (Menelaus blue morpho) exhibited
more natural magnetism than
the punchiest reds or yellows
something cliché about swallowtails
and fresh about enigmas, about deep
deep blue suspended
between glass
panes in shadow             box frames

Filming Danaus plexippus on your
iPhone today’s long                    afternoon
tracing its orange trajectory along
the edges of the park
where verdancy flourishes   liminally
floral sprigs pushing past
filigreed fence      trembling, alive

Night Courier / PF Potvin

we abandoned the path
with our dog choosing
our own beneath an elm’s
arms muscling clouds
across the sky and stooped
here and here and there
to balltoss returning
at dusk to the locked
car key a ghost we retraced
our steps down
gullies through fields
up slopes   over bridges
while cicadas
passed their round
singing to katydids
until the light of a jangling
bike finally cut
a hole in our waiting

Wealtheow thinks of Grendel /  Janette Schafer

I think of the “monster”
outside my window
as I lie in bed.

There was something in the
soft amber of his eyes, not fire
but marsh-anguish, as if to say—

Who could love me?

Make me worthy of love—
of its heat without burning,
its touch without fear and blood.

Why does his strength spare 
when his claw could have 
destroyed me? His hand,
gentle when it comes
so near my face.

Hrothgar snores;

I turn toward
another sleepless night—

dream of mercy
ripples—tenderness 
that hides
underground,

out of reach. 

CORVIDS   / Kate Thuma

Corvids have a kind of demonic whimsy 
achievable only 
by a creature who gifts 
perfectly round white pebbles 
with blood still on its beak.  

Keep them safe – 
They’re talismans against 
ordinary living. 

Maybe this is why 
crows can be lured 
by metals and meat: 
Thought and Memory 
are still accepting sacrifices.

August - Poem 15

Tug of war / Zoe Berger

Life is teeming around us
And still everything is embarrassing

I’m convinced my dentist hates me
Anyhow I smiled all the way through

Too bad we can’t sort of die
In an attempt I went somewhere warm

I was looking for a single source of truth 
Living is a conversation with your body that never ends 

“Hey Stanley” (Letter to a stranger) / Dahhee Chung

In corpse,
 I glimpsed your water bottle,
a Clackamette Skate Park sticker
Slapped on dead center.

I was conceived there and rode down the Pacific in Umma’s belly,
I can’t remember what I saw.

I like the dings and dents,
What do you like to do?
Yeah, I like this class too.

Sometimes, I just stare at your tattoos,
And the shadow on the ceiling
Of the little girl’s frolicking profile holding a big balloon,
“Inhale, wiggle your fingers and your toes.”
Okay, until next time.

Have You Ever Seen a Baby Vape? / Alison Henderson

It’s not like I don’t care about babies. One crawls across the living-room hardwood. Maybe I don’t want one. I know I don’t. Her mother asks, Have you ever seen a baby vape? Then they leave. Dana walks into my room and suddenly I’m not angry at all. Five women, one teenager, one baby: yelling, laughing, moving furniture while I try to nap. I didn’t sleep last night. I’m trying to sleep enough for yoga, then the fire show. Last time I tried poi, they gave me two sticks with fire on the ends. I swayed while everyone watched. It was humiliating and boring. Bella was there, so I wasn’t cynical. We had fun. I ran into Robert again. The next day or the day after, we ate Caribbean food in Santa Monica. It was authentic. I thought I liked him. At the time, I did. His house was a Sprinter van. His face five inches from mine, his bare chest against mine, he said he wanted to wait before sex. I said I hadn’t in six months. So we did. I came. He didn’t. Afterward he read me his poem. He roared and wept like a bad method actor who had cast himself. He wanted it as the closing voice-over of his film about twenty years in prison for trying to kill his wife. After that, I didn’t want to fuck again. There were still hours before curfew. He kept coming on to me. I asked for a cigarette. He said, I have a cigar for you. It was not a cigarette. Then he told me Rapunzel. The tower was what made her irresistible, he said. In the story, she lets down her hair. In mine, the hair doesn’t leave the van.

Future Acrobatics / Ash Kemp

(uplift speed poetry prompts)

limbs tangled/sheets askew/arms reaching/
pulling/taking/ accepting/ breath synced/
stuttered/sighed/moaned/a
fullness/ a space/a moment/more/
music seeps from every pore/
falling back/ out of breath/
grounded/connected/bodies/inside and out/
screen goes dark/ windows shuttered/
the VR headset back in its drawer/
until next time

Ode to a Stranger in Times Square / Hannah Page

Bedtime Wonder / PF Potvin

Under the wailing boom of sirens, she huddled in the single bed each night with her daughter as the buildings shivered, telling tales of the grandmothers and inventing what she didn’t know, and when she knew but couldn’t say, she’d squeeze her hands together until the veins danced like shadow fires and repeat, “that’s good my love, that’s the way to ask a question.”

To the woman lying down on the sidewalk /  Janette Schafer

The sidewalk feels cool against your hot cheek
you’ve spread your length out from head to toe
let people stare as they walk past, go about 
their day.  No one has stopped yet and truth be
told I almost didn’t either except that you are 
young and I am old and eventually the one who
will pick you up is never the one you want if you 
just wait for them.  Sometimes we can be angels.
Someone was an angel once for me.  Today I
thought I forgot my wings, but here they are again
right where I left them, these stunted nubs at 
my shoulders underneath my skin.  I touch the 
back of your head, say: I don’t know you—
I am here.

THE RED   / Kate Thuma

After Marina Abramovic’s “The Artist is Present” 

Before she knew he arrived, 
the red sensed him. 
It surged forward, ungovernable, 
reaching out the tips of its fingers 
to kiss the edge of his collar 
into the exact shape and shade
as the hole hidden behind her knee. 

He loosens his legs to shake free 
the dust of love travelling in his cuffs. 
She’s silent, tethered, whole, controlled, 
even as the red leaps and screams and 
throws its severed edges wildly. 
It knows beyond knowing: 
there are too many threads between them. 
They weren’t ever meant to be 
anything but sewn together
into the most exquisite knot. 

She opens her eyes 
and a string of holy phenomena unfurl. 
The red sighs and softens, 
warm, bleeding, somehow carrying a heartbeat 
to a phantom limb. 

She still is. 
They both still are.

August - Poem 14

If I met you at the Bone Museum / Zoe Berger

I’d put my skeleton next to your skeleton
I say over dolma, moussaka, lamb, 

at the family-run Greek spot on Flushing. 
In a real matter of the heart you tell me of the grocery store with your mother, 

how your aunt bled her dry for thirty years, the flippant way 
your mother called you sister in the produce section, 

and stopped examining lemons to smile to herself, 
the same crowded grin as yours, a little passing fantasy. 

How you imagined being hers, stepping away 
from the fruit to cry. Over a beer 

you let out the real nasty stuff: 
your friends’ fathers, after prom 

when one of the boys got into your bed, 
how you walked home barefoot in the middle of the night, 

decided leaving would keep you safe 
but not clean. I want to know more of your insides 

so we go to the bone museum. There are signs pointing to cranial fractures 
labeled “Unknown Trauma”, bones sliced sideways 

and longways, exploded heads suspended 
in golden contraptions, every hard white thing 

tagged dutifully, precisely, with care 
to the original owner. I look at the lucky skulls 

all lined up in smudge-proof glass 
and I wish neither of us had skins. 

(to carry a plant)   / Ashley Howell

knit and cloth winds touching
point of hook
moss mountains thinning 
sprawling toward sky
will it hold
as chair
sits softly with 
pillow stagnant as cloud
cup clasps what will burn
to vapor 
to purity
hold firm small warrior
you carry so much

Crustless Sandwich / Dahhee Chung

Peanut Butter and Apple Jelly
Smeared to each side,
Cut the crusts,
Cracked open rambutan shells,
Sally sold sea shells by the sea shore,
Rolled some salted seaweed and rice,
Wrapped rice rolling, rolling rolling,
Three, four, five…
Containers of cashews and chips,
Crackles for your chomp,
We can crack down gizzards after school, son.

First day without holding my hand,
But the nice stranger’s.
My first teacher was Mrs Lake.

Brave and bold, but
Question marks furrow your brows and the crinkles of your nose,
A cacophony of crows cawing, a child crying,
And the harsh cough of the boy barfing.

I wonder if you’ll like your lunch. 

Loveseats / Alison Henderson

The horsehair loveseats
smell like cat piss,
even here, in the new condo
in South Florida,
where the walls are white,
the carpet beige,
everything else pink and green.

My mother sits, legs up,
on the long white couch,
watching the news,
then repeats what she hears
later as opinion,
like I didn’t hear it too.

I want to know what she thinks
when she paints,
but the canvases hold
only flowers,
pink opening into green.

I sit on a loveseat
writing by the window,
the golf course kept green
beyond the sliding glass.

Between us,

the beige ocean is vast.

They face each other,
a pair from the old house
before the divorce.

Instead of Self-doubt / Ash Kemp

After Andrea Gibson

call it wonder.
You can take it with you,
You can mold it,
Harness it for creativity,
Nurture it on nature walks
And bookstore trips.
Talk to your friend attention,
Take some vitamin hope,
Drink it down with a glass of warm acceptance.
Stay awake all night
And write what you might have dreamed.
Submission is not an ending,
But a chance to face a different direction.

Breaking / Hannah Page

We’re exposed to
violence every morning over
breakfast: a new
carousel of crime &
stupidity repetitioning through
the late afternoon until
enough fresh
dirt has been
spat through
the pipelines into the frigid
studios where putty
people wear too much or too
little fabric depending on
where. And on, a new
montage – hideously   ordinary
in the way we can’t feel
the heat of the car on
fire, the warm
blood pooling in the
A/C of the studio where
they excavate harder than
the forensic specialists
at the scene. They’re fighting
to keep alive
the heart of the
story economy – however
twisted where
it nestles
in the collective chest.

Ode to the Peanut / PF Potvin

smush you

cut you

cream you

gut you

boil you

into paste

strain you

ink you

oil you

crush you

sprinkle you

on the face

pickle you

pinch you

curry you

grind you

layer you

round the waist

coat you

blend you

candy you

press you

meat you

in that space

perking ears

flaring eyes

sniffing for a trace

widening mouth

wagging tongue

begging for a taste

Missing crow /  Janette Schafer

It’s been three weeks
since I’ve seen Chuck—
the crow that visits 
my porch.

I hope he has another
“girlfriend” feeding him
bread crusts and blueberries 
to explain his absence 

and hasn’t been swept
away by a hawk—
although sometimes,
wild things just leave you.

The robins and
a lone cardinal 
appreciate
the bounty he has
left behind. 

[6:32]   / Kate Thuma

I’ve been waiting for you my whole life. And for the five days of breakneck stillness before the six hours of frenetic frozenness, which are both as long as any lifetime. There are ways I’ve never met this stranger, but it feels truer to say I didn’t know I’d always known you. It makes sense to me now that it snowed when you first knocked, flakes dampening the sonic boom. 

You open your eyes 
And I’m instantly cosmic. 
You cry and I’m born.