April - Poem 23
untitled / Maureen Alsop
The Search / Bob Bradshaw
I’m sitting here,
legs dangling,
from the highest book shelf,
thinking of you
and your cat
El Senor.
Climb down
from the shelf,
my heart advises.
Go out, find someone
just like Ann.
But I could drift
down the Yangtze,
ride a barrel
down Niagara Falls,
drift through Rome,
Florence, Venice...
I could cross
Times Square,
or listen to folk music
in a coffee house
on Bleeker Street,
or scan the crowd
gathering this afternoon
in Washington Square…
What are the odds
of meeting
someone just
like you,
Ann?
She would need
to be your long lost
conjoined twin,
separated
at birth.
She would have to feel
the way I do
about your absence—
wondering
if I will ever
feel whole
again.
Cleaning Crew / Stan Galloway
A jury of turkey buzzards
presides in the old white pine
above the cabin
weighing evidence
sniffing through the rising mist
the smallest twinge of rot
knowing another deer strike on U.S 259
will feast them today.
Before the sun has topped the ridge
they flap up to a thermal and glide
in ragged spirals
down the mountain.
Possession / Ava Hu
*
This sinking boat
possessed by air.
Master of weather.
Keeper of branches.
Snowy thread
as it unwinds.
As far as the sound
of a falling branch.
White-eyed angels. The music
of branches winding into
other branches. Heaven.
White world. This boat of glass.
Who knows the sound
of a branch falling
when no one
is listening?
*
in the high-shouldered glow of May / Kirsten Miles
it appears in a topology of hardwoods, a sixty acre wedge
of forest that still speaks its first language
light filtered through lobes of white and swamp oak
spring fed ripples lined by mountain laurel, native thickets,
undiluted by invading vines, or stilt grass rivulets braid teasing sparkles
between roots and burls rising from gravel bars
in the cup of the fluvial curves
sun-tipped fingers pointing toward
slivers of sky in a secret knot of streams
the Golden Club fires its torches, lining the midstream
amidst banks lined with rare ferns, green ribs waving
a river of their own ephemeral witness,
between asphalt progress, a peninsula of concrete and
dumpsters perched above the mouth of the spring
How hard it is to shield what is quiet.
clinging to the gravel, never wet leaves, roots veined into earth
despite flood or drought refusing to vanish
until the water itself is asked to leave
What Happens with SSRIs, Abuse, and Dreams / Sergiy Pustogarov
she shook my shoulder,
calloused hands wrapping my deltoids so
hard the prints were left on my skin the next morning.
all i could hear was her shouting in my ears:
you belong to me.
you must do what i say.
shut up and sit down.
shocked with fear and perpetual confusion i
stood still.
the floor below me swayed as i questioned
my rights to not sit down.
the boards began to ebb and flow
as i told myself nowhere was safe to seat this hurting body.
the walls began to close around me
as i became closer and closer
to that final decision: i would not sit and
be beaten more.
suddenly i found my voice.
yelled no and made it all stop.
the breath left the room as her lungs
inhaled. shock swept over the
floorboards. the walls jolted in their march to
my toes.
then she marched me out the door , around
the building and through the back of
some murky place she called
the church.
Her piercing cry ripped through
the building as she yelled out
the pastors name
and ordered he come here.
does this child dare have the right to
say that they do not want another
beating
bruising
scarring.
i say they are mine.
i will treat them how i dare.
the pastor bent down his ear,
graciously held my face.
and whispered softly so almost no one could hear.
don’t worry child.
this too shall pass.
your mother doesn’t own your soul.
so i ran away.
from my mother.
and the church.
sonnet for shrike / nat raum
After “The Lesser Evil” by Andrzej Sapkowski
my apologies to blaviken, but renfri vellga
is my problematic fave—who among us,
given the chance to right our own wrongs
the old-fashioned way, wouldn’t slaughter
a village to get to the root of the problem?
solar eclipse be damned, i too would strike
all parties responsible for my misshapen
sense of self. i am not always the hero
in my own story, but so often, the cataclysm.
i won’t defend my fallout, the hollow eyes
of all i meet who plead for mercy. violence
begets violence begets violence—so the circle
spins. i find fault a funny concept, in that
it’s always mine when the fracas is done.
The Train of His Great Midwest / Daniel Avery Weiss
And what is that train I hear?
With a dozen full bodied whistles
and a hundred little passengers,
living each their little lives as they
pass? And do I hear you there,
singing some sallow song?
And what is that window that I see?
And is that you, humming some
Minnesota hymnal praying a
man into a river? Does this
glass you forge hide you from a
mountain you have mourned?
And dear, do I see the ash of a
river’s lavish valleys
sat between your teeth
as a bluebird, and dear,
for whom do you take a bluebird’s life?
Our passenger flying sideways?
And what is this home
to whom you are bound?
Its thousand bricks of clay
dug from a canyon in the meadow of
your soul? And dear, what answers are bore
of the fruits of your travel?
speculate / MK Zariel
recall the day i apologized to you for being trans—
hazy afternoon, social awkwardness, auras crashing
into each other—hazy boundaries, social change, and nobody
but the one individual most likely to accept me.
so in my friendgroup, what are most of the people?
you chide me. so what am i? says the inner voice—
i know, a few moments in, that i had only self-repression
to apologies for, among the weeping decay of the trees
among the people you were before someone tried to define you.
so in the universe, what are most of the people? you say, hoping
that bias passes like a 2010s trend long forgotten—we'll outlive them
at least long enough to learn who we are without them.
