April - Poem 26
untitled / Maureen Alsop
First Driving Lesson / Bob Bradshaw
The car—leaps—forward.
Whoa! Easy…easy, he says.
The car—jerks—ahead--
--stops--jumps again.
It's like our dog
when I’m walking him
and his radar’s picking up
another dog nearby
and I keep having
to yank him back
on his short leash
from running off.
Obviously the car
needs a tuneup.
Maybe it’s the brakes?
I offer. The instructor
shakes his head.
You might want
to keep your left foot
off the brake pedal
when you drive.
Slow down
when we take curves,
he reminds me.
Yeah yeah.
I've always aced
my classes. I'm expecting praise
as we take our first turn.
Jesus! God!
he shouts, leaning back
into his seat
as if slammed
by G-forces.
Let’s take another
turn! I need the practice,
I say, overriding
his instruction
to pull over…
Okay, the first lesson
didn’t go great.
I failed it,
my dumb instructor tells me.
I say I’m available
tomorrow. Maybe
in two weeks,
he says. That’s
when I start
vacation.
Picking Blackberries, Circa 1970 / Stan Galloway
After Erin Murphy
never quite enough bowl or bucket, balancing
the last ones like soldiers on a crumbling castle wall
Evergreen, Himalayan, Cascade, Mountain
sweet varieties of childhood, all with thorns
some small, some oblong, some without a shape
we braved the heat of August, proud
of purple fingers earned at seven cents a pound
Untitled / Ava Hu
*
We are pulled by things
we cannot name.
Is it the mind’s nature
to bend bamboo
just enough
so it won’t break?
Do thoughts have sounds?
The beating beneath my jacket,
does that have
a sound too?
We are photographs
of a river in sudden release.
A house made of rising water
before it floods the lungs.
*
If My Mother Met Noah Kahan / Sergiy Pustogarov
she’d probably hate him
just like me.
we’d be smoking weed together
in the backyard
of an old rundown
farmhouse that
we decided to visit
back in the north just
for one week.
we would be intoxicated on
speeches that
hate on the patriarchy,
while we both just keep
trying to climb the ladder ourselves,
questioning whether the world should
know our name.
will we just curse our
future with fame and money?
we would talk about
the north with all we left behind.
little black sheep running away from
the flock,
trying to see if
we could find somewhere
we belong.
and i don’t think we quite have
found that place yet.
happy here
but not truly knowing how
the way of life works.
but today we remember the beauty of
mountains and auburn leaves,
nestled within mountains named after
grandparents we never met. but
we guess that they probably fought
for the racists,
the bigots,
and the colonists.
its still got a quaint charm,
just to run away from.
we chuckle over the church next door.
where our childhood friends will
still walk in on the morrow,
dressed in their suit and ties;
reciting lines
we learned were the only thing that
mattered during childhood here.
but since then we ran
for the hills,
down on the other side of the mountains.
just trying to avoid the
wreckage that has overtaken the towns behind us.
but we still come to visit on nights like this,
telling stories unlike the way our
mothers told us for years.
but my mother won’t meet noah kahan,
his words are just to pure for my company.
but god i miss the northern lights
so i’ll just start over again.
against rot / nat raum
all the stones on my altar are red. this is how little i know
of desire right now, or maybe i know too much of desire
and not enough of the fruits it can bear—they hang low,
close enough to bite if i had the balls. indeed, i’m terrified
to even finger waxed skins, let alone pick seeds from teeth.
the sun doesn’t have to set for me to cast sex spells; hunger
can exist at all hours. i run the highlight reel and fuck off
to bed, afternoon sun-dappled ass in the air. i’m too shy
to invite company, so i have to manifest it. something
is coming. someone is cumming. and i can only see it
when i close my eyes and remember i too am body—
these folds of skin, this limerence, this soft celestial.
No, Okay, I Love You / Daniel Avery Weiss
He's in a bottle—
neck, thin and wily,
uttering stale things to
legs that can't peel
themselves from the
sheets, as corpse-like
as he will be in a
week.
No, his tongue hobbles,
one of the first words
to reject its way back
into his brain of snapped
plastic and burnt rubber.
No, no, no, he breathes,
bubbling up at nurses.
Okay, he confesses the next day,
and I see it as repentance
for his first word back
being fuck you at the
first stirrings of mortality,
a rejection of a rejection
of a rejection of a rejection
of a rejection of
the brain, the way it drags
him into its crevasses
which are really just
bigger hospitals and
myriad memories that
could have happened.
Something weasels past his lips and
I must ask for clarification:
Are you trying to say, “I love you?”
Speaker and poet now enter. We witness
as one his nod, the breathy desperation of
his I love you, witnessed as a
see you tomorrow,
and tomorrow and tomorrow,
as a have a good night,
as a good night,
as night,
as night,
as night,
letter to a straight bro / MK Zariel
the sky was the color of a week-old bruise or
a buffering screen when you stared me down
on the sidewalk, your cacophony of college merch
and offensive slogans as bright as day. you jeer out
casual judgments, vacant glances—your drunk friend
wears something overtly misogynistic—a red logo
on your tee shirt and every tee shirt—like a bloodstain
you wear to prove that vulnerability terrifies you.
i hate that i still wonder what you're thinking
when you stare at me. i will unravel any man who asks me
if i'm a boy or a girl again. i will put off transitioning
solely so i never look like you. i will, realistically,
silently judge your fashion choices and keep walking
and talk shit with my friends and hate that all i can ever do
is file away another data point on how not to be. the sidewalk
was the color of regret and spilled drinks when you stared me down like
a silent curse that ricochets through the air—i walked past, you
continued shouting. nobody shouts anymore, don't you know?
we all learned to shut up because you never did.
