August 25 - Poem 25
Cabin Theory
I used to think if I locked someone in a cabin
they’d just have to love me. Obviously I hate to admit this
online. Probably everyone at my high school
already knew.
I’m allegedly still young. Each night
I say a prayer to the gods of standing still. I lock myself
in a cabin. Now I love my poem and my poem loves me.
Look how lucky we are to not
escape each other. No handles on the doors.
For Your Drive / Dahhee Chung
Wake up and stare until the first song pops up,
“Friends, how many of us have them.”
Whodini tops the charts forty days now.
Curate a playlist for your day,
Mood like Cortex,
A scene with James Blake,
Add something bumpy, groovy, funky and
A joint with your coffee.
Get dolled up,
Fill the bottles,
One peanut-butter bar just in case.
Ignite the car and blast your tunes,
The clouds in the front drop
Like rad racer sped up 8-bit pixels.
Maybe you’re not moving, but Tailored side peripheral’s are racing to an infinite horizon.
Head bopping’ cuz Olive Jones is swooning Planes while
Two men under a tree talking with their arms,
And a girl crossing the street in syncopated shoes marching two coffees in both hands,
I hope they know how much she likes them.
Does anyone else imagine body parts when driving past black trash bags on the street?
Walter white was here
Sharpie on the wall.
Get lost, feel free,
The airline flight was a double feature.
Sivans Estrada’s Un Rayo De Luz evoking pictures of you driving to the end.
The last song Godspeed,
Frank Ocean will make you cry every time.
What's more fascist than fat shaming? / Ashley Kemp
after a line from Harryette Mullen
The body
unconscious
devours itself.
Take a little pill,
inject a little liquid,
you will feel
so much... less.
Susurrations / Hannah Page
Follow
me down
to the boundary where waves unfurl where I have prayed
the rosary over the fifty-nine small
scallop shells I unearthed with my curled
toes & pressed back
into the sand
in patterns contrived by the mariners
or perhaps the sirens with their slick
songs which seep far beyond
their visibility, beyond
the whole dark sea to brim at the shoreline
a high, pulsing murmur: a melody
simultaneously invented & recalled
Balcony House / PF Potvin
as you climb the ladder
imagine above
this sandstone slab
patches of corn, squash,
beans and sunsparked faces
put your hands in the holds
your feet in the grooves and squeeze
between walls cut, stacked
mortared and etched
a millennium ago when
ledges held high enough
earth turned rich enough
seeps dripped long enough
to wet thirty tongues
until one day
enough was just not enough
anymore
Hotel meditation / Janette Schafer
This bed is lovely. It’s 5:39 a.m.
and the world outside my window
in Jefferson County is already
awake and alive, the highway
buzzing, its own kind of wilderness.
My mattress, dense but soft—
my back feels delicious, tells me
I need a new boxspring when I
get home. 6:19 a.m. now, dawn
creeping in, awakening the shapes
inside—outlines of a small table
a tiny refrigerator, a television
I never turned on, a desk I wrote
two centos from, and some white
frosted lamps, now disco balls
by this refraction of sun.
Spent the afternoon in sturdy
farmhouses in need of paint
and blueprints, drove by fields of
pastoral green—the clean bright
smell of them. But the hotel is near
I-80, a few miles and mindsets
from the Pennsylvania Wilds
through which I just wandered,
an anonymous mammal burrowed
inside a temporary den, done
what I’d set out to do, sold a home
and time to return to mine.
DUNSCAITH CASTLE / Kate Thuma
Standing in Dunscaith
on same-but-different floors,
our eyes form a human chain of origin,
where our pupils connect
to form a single dark hallway
for passing letter-locked messages through time.
A blue silk ribbon
runs between each eye-door;
it flutters when I blink.
My end is woven
into a slender braid behind my ear,
so I can feel you first.
Yours hangs loose
to catch on thistles hidden in the heather.
Each tug of the ribbon whispers
original truth in an old language:
we were, we are, we will be.
