April - Poem 21
untitled / Maureen Alsop
The Life Of A Failed Poet / Bob Bradshaw
“Poets write about misery,”
my friend said.
He appraised me
with his sad eyes.
"You’re a failure.
Happiness
doesn’t look good
on a poet’s resume.
You need more Trochees,
Dactyls in your life--
preferably
starting at the beginning
of your lines
the way Misery
must begin each day
of your life.
You’re plagued
with the Anapest,
making your poems
and your life too
lighthearted.
Not to mention
outbursts
of Spondees
when your team homers.”
And not to mention,
I add, at night
in bed with my wife!
OH, MAN!
He goes on. “All of us have rage
living quietly in us
like bullets
within a revolver’s
cylinder.
Just pull the trigger!”
Seeing me smile
my friend shakes his head.
“You’re incorrigible.
Name one good poet
who’s as happy as you!”
What should I do? I ask,
desperate to be miserable.
He shook his head,
before striding quickly off.
“Stick to limericks.”
Meriem’s Lion Song* / Stan Galloway
to her doll, Geeka
Yesterday hunters carried in a dead lion.
It smelled quite dead.
No more will he slink silently on unsuspecting prey.
No more will his great head and dark-maned shoulders
strike terror in the grass eaters drinking at the pool.
No more will his roar thunder the earth.
The lion is quite dead.
When they brought his body into the village they beat it
with their feet and the butts of spears
making sounds like a ripened melon with the carcass
but the lion didn’t mind.
He did not feel the blows, for he was dead.
When I am dead, Geeka, neither shall I feel the blows.
Then I will be happy.
*borrowed and adapted from The Son of Tarzan, chapter 5, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Ordinary, extraordinary / Ava Hu
*
Scent of summer rain
on the river. What
we take we will remember,
secret notes on a secret river,
memory as long as the wind.
What’s yours is mine,
what I remember I forget,
the way your name sounds:
bells in the churchyard,
the fresh-faced wind.
What’s yours is mine.
Everything we are:
tiny spaces between the stars.
Collisions. Blind negotiations.
We are invisible incantations.
The clamour of the river’s
slow dance
to the sea.
*
black sun / nat raum
“Black Sun is a reference to a certain eclipse, better known in the context of the Curse of the Black Sun, or Mania of Mad Eltibald. It was a prophecy made by the mage Eltibald that foretold the end of the human civilization in the hands of sixty girls born during or after a certain eclipse … It might be that the Curse became a self-fulfilling prophecy, for some of the girls who managed to flee [their] persecution later inflicted cruelty on others because of the treatment they had suffered.”
—The Official Witcher Wiki
what else could it be? the moon walked
in front of an oversized star, cast its permanent
shadow over my body. i emerged in the dark
and thought surely this must be as bright as it gets.
any brighter and it would sear, i convince
myself, and prophecy agrees—i am fated
to rend all i hold dear with my own two hands.
claustrophobic as i am, you have to believe me
when i say i’d gladly be hogtied if it stopped
the destruction of which i’m capable. my grasp
is always too hefty, too firm to gently cup a moth
i’m too chicken to let go anyway. i’ve gone and grown
attached again. divination points toward the clock.
i know what half-lives are, have felt gold degrade
in real time before. the end of you and i is no different.
it’s because i was made like this that i drive lovers
away. it’s because those lovers ran that i’m bricked further
into the holding cell of my own overreactions. clip
my tongue and watch what happens—i will still find a way
to break things anyway. and you should know: the eclipse
will take your eyes if you look directly into that corona.
Clear-cut Forest / Daniel Avery Weiss
Shreds of dank wood.
Greenbrier thorns
stab at my feet.
for the wreckage / MK Zariel
there are better days to come says a teenagerly scrawl
on a decidedly abandoned dumpster. can confirm, although the bar
is on the floor. the air is heavy with repressed emotions
and the aftermath of severe weather—it's hard to tell which—
the subreddits aching with ambient climate anxiety
and people wondering where to belong. i make a little idle
small talk with someone growing aggressive by the second,
edge away, make an excuse, come up with something
believable, if not fully true. leave, rejoin, walk away—
protect trans kids says every sticker on a decidedly
overwrought lamppost. i don't know if i need protection
anymore. maybe i just need a break. i drift through a room
avoiding interaction solely because all the cis people
seem to know each other. the gender binary is nature's
AI slop—self-replicating, impossible to distinguish
from anything real.
