April - Poem 4

The Day - contd / Maureen Alsop

The twilight is an abstract char in the mind of the sentinel.

Our Mission, Babe / Bob Bradshaw

I long for a future 
as optimistic
as those early Sixties,


Alan Shepard 
climbing into his
Mercury capsule
--and history.


Remember, babe,
how we watched
his capsule drop 
by parachute  
into waters off the Bahamas?


I wish we could book ourselves
on a Time Machine,
dropping back
into our early life
together, the splash
we made!


Watching old videos of us
I wonder how 
our world 
could have changed  
so much in so short
a time? 


Wasn’t love always 
our life's mission?
Isn’t it still?


What’s the urgency?
Won’t our lives, babe,
soon pass too


into history--
like Shepard’s
15 minute
flight? 

Helen Advises Infant Hermione  / Stan Galloway

Sleep now
Ignore the swords of men clanging
against each other in one hallway
after the next
Men think swords rule
But here’s the secret –
that little tickle where you pee –
that has more power than
the Harpe of Perseus
than great Xiphos swinging in Achilles’ hand,
or any dozen swords together here in Sparta.
Men will cross oceans for what you hold,
slay harpies, change themselves into
another man or
woman or
beast or
coin just to taste
the pleasure you hold
 between your thighs.
Such is the blessing and curse of
being born a woman.
Don’t let it trip you.
Use it to turn men like a top and leave them
dizzy      laughing      crying out for more.
Remember, it belongs to no one
but yourself.
Pay attention as you grow.
I’ll show you how it works.

Revelation / Ava Hu

From mid-February through early April about a million migrating sandhill cranes stop at the Platte River.

*

Path, revelation,
embodiment.

When sea ice melts
we lose reflectivity.

The sandhill crane moves north 
at the onset of spring.

Dogwood, star-faced,
cherry in bloom.

When the ice melts
we can no longer reflect.

They lean in wetlands, 
one leg, then two.

We lose reflectivity,
the ability to let go.

Some turn their heads 
or tuck them beneath a wing.  

Some stand in a creek 
while they sleep.

No compass.  
No path.

Changes in sea ice 
become extreme weather.

Lilacs loosen
and sway.

Some birds wander
or settle on the ground.

How big are you 
compared to the moon?

 *

Driving to Hurricane Ridge - cntd / Kirsten Miles

Her
young crown
cones upward ninety feet
an evergreen furrow into pale blue skies
shallow roots slip twenty feet across the street
to a curb edging an immaculate manicured lawn where
in a chair on a porch underneath thickly forested mountains

His slow drawl finds my ear a receptacle for nostalgia 
reminiscing at seventy nine —there  were no jobs 
when I graduated here from high school
I was afraid to go into the forest. People
didn’t come back, most people didn’t want to send
their boys to work in logging, so many deaths in the trees—

At the library, three local women from the 
Lower Elwah Sklallam tribe rise before us to debut 
a book celebrating  the cedar forests of the park
share their first  fishing trip to the river since 
the dam came down, their children 
dip cedar canoes in tribal rivers
for the first time in their lives 
their deep radiance and joy
drawing water from
all our
eyes





sonnet beginning with a line by 3OH!3 / nat raum

just another girl alone at the bar 
is my actual gender; stop the tape.
it is thursday and i’m genderless,

sexless—still better than fridays in love.
and lust takes me places i wouldn’t go 
with a gun. i am back where i started
without even a fraction of my youthful

glow, and still i expect history not to 
repeat itself. i think of the owens’ suitors
in practical magic (1995), doomed

to something sinister. i think there must
be a version of the same curse placed
on me, where i am the cause of death 
every time. test it at your own risk.

Search of a Mole Rat / Sergiy Pustogarov

no one understood why she crawled
with her head buried in the sand,
snorting like an anteater 
after every five steps.
constantly gazing forward,
just under the cusp of the living.

she went on for years like this,
forgetting life kept going.
the feet of a thousand people above
stomped all over the tunnels
she had created to bypass 
boundaries made by others.

crack went the sticks under their feet,
pop went the soil around her,
until there was no more movement 
underneath their feet.
no more air pockets formed 
in the wake of her journey.

she had fallen still that day.
her face buried in the dirt,
bones eroding into dust.
she had never quit the search.
never stopped mourning
until her body sank into her lover. 

Sub / Daniel Avery Weiss

The backpacks trundle in packs of mom-kid-mom-kid.
Eyes meander to the steel manufactory, the windows,
the brown drips of essenced age, all the things
that silently mythologize life in the context of steel.
Oil swims in pools of yesterday’s rainfall in the parking lot,
separating into ribbons of chrome rainbow,
and an ambiguous imports warehouse assures
Donde importamos nostalgia
and by that they mean
there is no there there.

In class, they throw pencils and tease the sub and,
as if bespectacled, steal glimpses of knowledge.
There is one flag in the room, sore with
the total stillness of the air. Oppressive.
They sneak little loves through snickers at the
pledge of their silly, no uproariously funny, allegiance.
There is so, so much here here. The children steel themselves.
O, how a flag weeps at the disembodying chaos
of a paper airplane
flying right there,
right past it,
right there and beyond.

self-portrait as a preschool art project / MK Zariel

paint me in cut-out yarn for people who can't yet
use glue without spilling something. i am a crushed & battered
yet meticulously folded piece of cardboard here. i have
no small parts, sharp edges, inherent hazards—just monochromatic neon
and the as-yet-unknown. i had an identity in the way a plastic gem does:
a self-in-quotes, a radiance in the sun, a gleam
that dulls, that falls, affixed to a shaky foundation—fabric scraps
from someone's unused napkins, recycled cardboard, wasted time,
elaborate masks. i am an origami swan with charred edges. i am the
prettiest goddamn modeling clay you've ever seen. i am a medical
incident waiting to happen when somebody swallows nonfood—i don't know how i feel
about medical help anymore. i don't know if i am who i was
when i was five. they say life is what you pay attention to, but it might be closer
to what you consume, what you deny.