April - Poem 25

untitled / Maureen Alsop

First You Grew Up, And Now You’re Leaving Us?  / Bob Bradshaw

    The doctor pulled you out,
    the room blood 
    and howling cries, 
    but we hadn’t parted
completely yet…

    that would take years.
    Even from the start I was like play-doh
    in your hands. 
    Who shaped who,
    sweetheart?

    But here we are, 
    and a young man stands
    at the altar with you—
    ready to kidnap you,
    to whisk you away.

    Who gave you permission
    to grow up, to fall in love?
    Was it your Dad?  
    I’ll never forgive him
    for allowing you to walk
    away, into what?
    A man’s arms? That’s
    all it took? 
    After decades
    of my love, my prime years
    spent focused
    on you?

    Men…they do this to us
    in the guise of love.
    They take from us
    what we value most.

    And now Dad
    insists on the bride’s
    first dance? Mom booted
    to the sidelines watching…
    Is that my place now?
    The sidelines?

    What am I to do
    tomorrow? Pick up
    your room? 
    Dust your old dollhouse?
    Oh, to retreat with you
    into its rooms again….

   The game of love and parenting
    was rigged against  
    mothers long ago. 
    That young man you married?
    He will never love you
    as much as I do.
    Never.

The Poem and I / Stan Galloway

After Denise Dunahel

My speaker wants to be someone

no generic cloud-embodied voice

the way I wanted to be Tarzan

when I was 12 and reading through an old mirror

not launching myself from branch to bole

but protecting the world from wantonness

and discovering a willing woman in my arms.

At 16 Jessica 6 escaped her false world

into mine, complete with a decrepit government,

finding her renewal, without death,

free will restored and choosing me,

or at 17 torn between the snark of Solo

and the earnestness of Skywalker

and either way embracing the cloud-clad Leia

saving my own universe, inside my head.

I tell the poem I’ve outgrown those adolescences.

The poem laughs, pointing to my college textbooks.

You just learned, the poem says, that Jane and Jessica were really

Daisy Miller and the Wife of Bath when not controlled by

male authors synthesizing life through their own broken lenses

letting characters dance inside an artificial ring.

Lolita was Nabokov’s Leia, but they don’t exist.

Well, Nabokov does, we both agree, the poem and I,

and none of us is whole without our second selves.

Love Poem / Ava Hu

What is the sound of one hand clapping? — Buddhist koan

*

Gateless gate. 
The body half 

out of the ground.
Shining lantern, mirror. 

Coincidence 
or an omen?

Proclaim, “Earth 
is my witness.”

Sound in the body.  
A bell under the skin.

At first, someone
was afraid.

Earth as my witness.
At first, someone

held back.
Earth as my witness.

The object of thought
seeking itself.

Two hands 
become one.

*

Diving into Lake Crescent under the Snow Moon / Kirsten Miles

six figures in bathrobes, phantom breath rising
nostrils frosted in the February bite

bare feet stationed  on the snowy dock
edge inky  lake lapping  below

five inaugurate the newest
a deep breath just before you jump

its warm bubble shields the heart 
paddle hard as soon as you hit the water

here, stand closest to the ladder
five bodies vanish, plunged into the still dark 

I pull the night into my lungs
The lake waits like an open cave 

I am the last witness, and now propellant
the leap is a severing

liquid ice breaks around me skin on fire 
a sudden concussion of clarity

The ladder rises like a prayer, 
and I am leaping up it, back to the dock, back

where we are  six seal skins reborn laughing
electric in the milk-glow moon

How to Apologize from a Narcissist  / Sergiy Pustogarov

say you’re sorry // but we both know you aren’t.
say you didn’t mean it, // so i shouldn’t be upset.
say you don’t really care // that it hurt me, // or whether i // flinched.
say it’s my fault // these emotions are mine, // not your problem.
tell me to stop placing // my fragile heart in your hands
while you blame me // for what you did.
say you’re sorry, // then turn away.
say that should make me happy, // now you’re wounded. 
i must have done something. // it’s never your fault.
how unfair.
say you’re sorry. // you aren’t.
say nothing. 
leave.

sonnet for syanna / nat raum

the nightmares form themselves, it seems,
and come alive in graphite on the page. 

we have this in common, rhena and i. how
else could i hope to communicate the worst

of it? words may never be enough. i close
my eyes and see every shadow of the night.

faces i do not remember take bites of me,
and i arch my back in pleasure. fantasy worlds

call when awake, glitched-out mythical 
creatures or not. all we ever wanted was to be 

understood. i haven’t taken a lover in over a year; 
the thought disgusts me over half the time. still i’d climb 

mutant vines skyward and sigh in the clouds if someone
got close enough bear me, for even a moment.

Shino Haibun/ Daniel Avery Weiss

There are two thousand three hundred and fifty steps to melting him into a sunset, each of which requires having skipped the previous step. There are centuries of bothered potters stifling silicosis so she can surface, each yielding masters who prefer mud over memory. There are fires, little golden things, little golden things that eat the sky, and little golden souls to turn the leftovers into pyrite on porcelain, each of whose bodies froth with envy at stars surrendering themselves to clay. There are ingredients which want you dead, and each must be the other to yelp the tinny spontaneity of the vase in your kitchen. Chance was born and died in this muck. Burn it.

My glaze tiles are wrong.
The porcelain wields
a false orange.

on blocking out / MK Zariel

i know the general outline of who i was: the pulsating sparks
the crushing of fire against velvet, the energy only qualified
by the bounds of time. i know i would have said i didn't have much
to live for, and i know that was a lie, and i know i was held but unseen—
i know the general outline of a constellation of parts, i know the muffled shouts,
i know the difference between bystanding and cold complicity—
i know boundaries like scattered files on the floor, i know the half-whispered
oft-repeated phrases that populate them, i know the feeling of sparks dimming
to accommodate cold touch, cold water, the weight of a body no longer real—
i know the constellation aligning.