August - Poem 10
Good girls go to heaven bad girls go to Roku City / Zoe Berger
bad girls light candles and leave bad girls are kissing in front of their boyfriends bad girls are building an inn for the coven bad girls are at the afters maximizing their surface area to the exposure of luck bad girls are laying in blood but not bleeding
Santa Fe / Ashley Howell
As we drove through the ghost mountains
Green fields
My ankle bone aching
From carrying too much
A deer, sign of peace, intuition
Ran into the barren highway
Right as we passed, slowed,
He swerved, head strong into
Our car, a crush of hair and metal
What does that tell me in the land of magic?
What peace is trying to find me?
Why am I running?
My Left Brain Talking to My Right Brain / Dahhee Chung
“What’s your favorite song?”
“I can listen to Frank Ocean all day!”
“Well, I want to hear everything, and never know a thing.”
“I know it in my sleep, I wake up singing it.”
“I’ve heard you. You need practice.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
text message incoming
“What were we saying?”
“I forgot.”
Hiragana Sequence / Alison Henderson
A Japanese daycare
in the back room of a pottery studio
on Venice Boulevard.
Hand-building across the hall,
wooden door ajar—
a green room,
map of Japan on the wall.
Two women teach a seated group
the fundamentals of Japanese:
あ い う え お
a i u e o
Five vowels, a map of sound.
Breath shaped by the mouth.
In the other room
I glaze a palo santo burner,
clay shaped by the hand.
A shallow bowl,
small chimney hole
for smoke to escape.
I paint it white.
Through the open door
the children repeat:
あ い う え お
Later, a piece of holy wood
will burn inside the shiny vessel.
Wood becoming smoke,
smoke becoming scent,
entering the body.
Aubade in Perimenopause / Ash Kemp
My sleep paused, arrested, interrupted, unfinished.
My skin tacky in the dark morning sheets.
Make of this what you will—
A dream delivered to the one who delivered you and continues to deliver your meals and your emotional support.
What can I say to the day when I cannot rest before it breaks?
A struggle, a loss, overwhelming exhaust-ion
No. I do not think I love this new season.
Online Shopping / Hannah Page
This morning arrived the scale
my husband ordered online
like he does so many things
to cater to my fleeting
obsessions. Softened by snake oil
ads on Facebook and the news
(this time the real deal,
this time from the
skinniest
snakes),
I say I’ve caught
wind of the shortcut anorexia
false-promised in my youth.
Everything and the scale indicate buying [in].
Joke on Us / PF Potvin
Squished on the love seat
munching
chips the kids
sprinkled with olive
oil, salt, garlic, pepper,
cayenne, a little snack
before books and bed, but first
a science show where my son
flings up his hands,
observes, “Bill Nye is so crazy
because he falls down all the time,”
and my daughter replies
without turning an eye. “Yeah,
even when he’s not
tired.”
I wish I could name the storms inside of me / Janette Schafer
after Byron Hoot
We name hurricanes,
refuse what’s inside us
delight in thunder
terrified of our own
watch trees bend
resist bending
see lightning as illumination
hide love in shadow
darkness as necessary
deny turning inward
heart as barometer
ignore storm warnings
cover our heads
smell clean after rain
Untitled / Kate Thuma
In a one-card tarot reading
I drew The World,
which you had already given me,
unstringing it as a pearl
from its invisible thread in orbit
and into my too-small hands,
leaving noon and the witching hour mixing
in a brackish aerial estuary.
A nursery of the universe.
