April - Poem 6

The Bridge / Maureen Alsop

Everywhere are clouds and currawongs, pale rockeries
hung with pine shadow. The wind thickens the sky,
forgets winter. You speak as ally—she was lovely you said.
Openness Alma, the sun—a mutilated rose, galactic purple
at the seam—you bury the sky
in water, in bloodwood, in ironbark.
Or stringybark or grey.
The bridge collapses in purple fuzzweed, rosella and musk okra. It is not
in your time now. Sleep’s infused regalia, your fortress—
also gone. Your identity is exposed in this space
in crossing and uncrossing. And now
the force of the sun is a bridge
You are only figuring out its power, the pressure held between spaces—
continuous, fused. Sequestered sun
wreathed in blanched roses, Shakespearean sun—sweet, sagacious, tragic.

Why I Want To Be A Painter In My Next Life   / Bob Bradshaw

  What poet has a studio
    bathed in sunlight?
    Or canvases
    lying about?
  
    A poet’s murky room 
    offers what?
    A gooseneck lamp?
 
    Who wants to watch
    a poet write? 
    But a painter?
    Now we’re talking!
      
    Isn’t it always the painter  
    who gets the Jill Clayburgh,
    the Elsa Zylberstein?
   
    Why shouldn’t I love
    a Salma Hayek?

    Pollock couldn’t draw, 
    or so his mentor
    Thomas Hart Benton
    claimed.  
    I can’t draw either!
    But I can pour paint 
    and splatter it!
    
    Like Manet’s Olympia 
    my favorite model will wear only
    a red hibiscus.
        
    Maybe I should frame
    my poems, hanging them
    on my walls? 

    Then would a painter—  
    or a poet like Frank O’Hara—
    wander in to comment?

    “This one…
    could use some color…
    orange maybe? 
    Or maybe add
    SARDINES
    to it!”
  
    Thanks, I’ll say,
    I’ll fix that. But, say,
    do you know 
    a dark-haired waitress
    or a can-can dancer looking
    for extra pay? 
    All they’d have to do
    is lie on that couch.
    Naked, of course.
    “Of course."

Night Hike  / Stan Galloway

I turned the page and the river opened. –Maureen Alsop

When I read breadcrumbs dropped along the trail
I knew someone was crying out:
I can’t, alone!
crumbs shining bright enough by moonlight
for me to follow intermittently
until a perturbation of pigeons
probably as dusk fell
swallowed up that voice
and now lay sleeping in a spruce line
stomachs talking to each other.
I tried intuition – where would I have gone next?
guessed where each step felt sound
and listened for the whisper
unsure whether I now led or followed.
When I saw glimmers,
made out come join me between branches
smelled distant rain, I quickened to the riverbank
and heard my own voice echo.

untitled / Ava Hu

Humpback whales breach
the shoreline.

Turn toward your god.
Call the waves.

Humpback whales breach
the shoreline.

The sea recedes.
The sea races forward.

Humpback whales breach
the shoreline.

Underlined,
dog-eared pages:

you must change your life.

Driving to Hurricane Ridge contd / Kirsten Miles

Blue-black drupelets shine across
the peninsula Himalayan blackberries thrust 
past native plants through every crevice swelling
drought ripened bounty pronounce
July in every vacant lot

moss and mycorrhizae sweep 
brilliant greens fan
across lawns and rooftops
loam the throat
traces of rainforest once
a moist blanket caressing this hill  

no to the silence of dust 
clouds from the inside out
feathering our nostrils
flaked across fawns and hazelnuts
and lilyponds and spotted rabbits 
under the truck on E street
next to the house whose yard has
disappeared into a sea of lavender

Icarus’s Reward  / Sergiy Pustogarov

the sun reminds me that icarus never got his reward 
for flying away from the rest of his brothers.
a pomegranate bleeds only when its home is ripped apart,
its siblings split across the dishes in my fridge. 

maybe he should have tasted something first, 
staining his face with an already broken family, 
before lifting his wings into the sun.  

the containers in my house sit 
unopened 
everything i save for hope
learns to rot. 

i have neither pomegranate seeds 
nor waxed wings. 

let’s play a love game / nat raum

in the sense that i have never known
anything but pushing pawns around,

the morning after as my goal, and queenly
i am not. it’s all strategy—risk directly

proportionate to reward. i have never
claimed to be a saint. my voice rasps

at the first sign of spring and that’s when
i haven’t dragged an errant cigarette.

i’ll be lucky if i can breathe tomorrow
but that’s not the point. i’m the pawn.

i’m the embodiment of divided by zero,
so much nothing i am become void,

destroyer of romance. (if you keep pressing 
the same buttons, they’ll go numb eventually.)

O / Daniel Avery Weiss

k so it's 9
pm right and the lights
just died, be

cause of the storm, they
went to light heaven it's like
heaven plus or like
heaven lite the

free version or

something so the candles are
out you know and we
swear

like truckers when there is a
leak later but any

way he's in the dirt and a rock
has his name on it the wet's
got the urn all
wet

running on the process / MK Zariel

an erasure poem of college marketing emails