April - Poem 19
untitled / Maureen Alsop
A natural antifreeze, the body thaws, and I practiced small noises at the beginning. A room I
remember. Dawn’s false polish is a crutch. The thing I miss will not be this spell. The singing
trees? Maybe. The turn in my body, most definitely.
The moment the pasture mends, the complaint moves separate from the practice of oxygen.
Practice Amnesty, my mother feels in the water A sugar, a crack in the mouth happier than
embarrassment. Because I am here.
Personal Time / Bob Bradshaw
After sex
you quickly turn
to your cell phone,
and its glow.
You study its screen
as if it were a translucent
crystal ball,
our future just
out of focus.
Entering your life
proved as easy
as slipping
an obsidian engagement ring
onto your finger.
Babe, remember the beach,
our lives lived in sandals--
how we cuddled
in the dusk
under the pier?
Do you recall…
“Not now, I’m watching
a podcast.”
Your phone’s screen
fills with fake snow flakes,
adrift in the air
with the notes
from a Bing
Crosby song.
I’m forgotten, a chore
checked off.
Should I ask for more
personal time
for Christmas?
You laugh at your screen.
Remember when we used
to laugh together?
Magnum Opus / Ava Hu
Sun inside sun.
Water tangled inside water.
Magnum opus
as chaos among branches,
heaven to earth,
earth to body.
What conceives itself
also gives birth:
milk of nebula, salt
of the philosopher’s stone,
mercury, dew, fog,
the Holy Spirit rising.
Elemental as stars
on your eyelids
squeezed closed
tight.
The primitive answer:
go towards it,
everything that reaches for you,
everything that carries the light.
Merlin finds a blue-gray gnatcatcher / Kirsten Miles
concealed behind a post oak leaf
copy-catting bird
calls into her song (a true poet)
tail flicks spiders off branches
a cornucopia in the canopy
we feeder our birds
(away from mirrored windows)
goldfinch cardinal titmouse wren
the usuals curate
our morning reading
hold our phones up
to the moss veiled canopy
presses the mic
red-eyed vireo materializes
into my palm
her breeze-silked question
downslur tone slips
a tiny symphony in
her upswing note
livens our day
ovenbird’s s t a c c a t o b u r s t
peppers the soundscape
a cacophonic mask
(my father’s hearing aid rings)
merlin catches the worm-
eating warbler’s tri i i ll
under a phalanx
of white oak leaves
entire worlds
live in the canopy
audible and unseen
we press end recording
filing away the liquid gold of the wood thrush
(check the morning list
who remains)
left-justified images
pin each liquid tone
infinitely on recall
library of avatars
behind glass
forest abridged
One Foot in Front of This Body / Sergiy Pustogarov
one foot
placed parallel
to the cracks in the floorboards
the other waits,
perpendicular,
refusing alignment
a chandelier
hangs from the ceiling,
its arms stretched out
as walkways
for the insects all around.
they crawl their thin devotion
along glass and wire,
marching toward flight.
taking wing,
they cross the room,
land on my foot,
and i follow them,
one foot in front of this body.
sonnet for voegesite and exfoliants / nat raum
i like luxurious things. my standards
are low—this means lavender incense,
steam shower, terpinolene in bloodstream.
i wouldn’t know what to do with a porsche.
i cannot place it on my altar to manifest
the rapid demise of capitalism. instead
i suck sediment from overripe pores,
dissolve my dead skin cells with foam
and my bad dreams with the stone
of innocence. i reverse the ten of swords
and poke each person who has hurt me,
just as a warning—betrayal releases itself
in the presence of deployed spines. i am
still my own best defense in that regard.
Poem Composed of Words My Opponent Used to Defeat Me in Words With Friends in Alphabetical Order (a Pseudoabecedarian) / Daniel Avery Weiss
Airy and approximate, my eyes sample
blame as a screen declares, THEY WON!
Drat! I don’t say. These days, I sip blue light like a sad martini.
Ex post facto failure. My phone's wretched
gown of a phone case unusually physical in the moment,
its allure purring somewhere in my nervous system.
Jai! something yells. Something, something, something one
li away from someone. I am here to
outrun a thing that mothholes your digital soul.
Quai positioned to import words of no import, a
res hall comes to mind, fruitful nonsense and
runes dotting the walls. But these dreams, these sweet
veils part themselves to me only after one unskippable ad—
whup the white farmers’ flawless green landscape, harvest
wonky neon wheat that dots plaid picket fence paradise!
Zee. What a silly letter to declare itself and win
deciding / MK Zariel
the internet ripples with unexamined labels
used and discarded like clothing—being transmasculine
and butch, i have to admit that anyone who dates me
by definition is gay—and straight. i long for a discrete
category sometimes, to be gay like a historical figure
like an archival portrait, like one of those fucking losers
in the Mattachine Society, who i owe my current survival to
yet still find kind of sexist. it's funny how that works.
queer history gives us the tools to dismantle it, yet we remain
somewhat lacking in self-awareness. the anarchist infighting of
the 1920s repeats itself today, just with shorter speeches
and less of Emma Goldman being obviously closeted. we still don't know
how to plan a meeting without driving one another up the wall
and we still don't quite know whether we're gay or straight
or both at once. i don't know if i necessarily care. if someone's
Midwestern relatives would call me a slur, i'm probably gay—
and i hate that this matters so much to everyone else.
