August - Poem 12

Ngoc, like what you do to a door / Zoe Berger

  In memory of Ngoc Ngo

Please pick up the phone it’s me 
I’m almost ready to be myself
you don’t have to die to haunt me
I’m only in the next room 
pick up can’t you 
hear me through the walls don’t you 
understand the phone ringing
    and ringing 
is a door
?

Deer   / Ashley Howell

I’m thinking of a poem 
About the deer I hit
Driving down the highway

How it most likely 
Died alone in the 
Brush shortly after
Our parting

While I continued
Driving to my own
Dying in the smoky
Summer sunset 

Parting is a Such Sweet Sorrow / Dahhee Chung

You’re dying
I smell it,
  your vodka bottle marked
  with a dry erase marker
  each night,
Sweet over-ripe bananas
And I don’t like sugar.
The spoonfuls in your coffee,
Crystallized insides,
Stalagmites and Stalactites 
Threatening to puncture
Your tender pink life.
Four horizontal tally marks
And a slash when it’s done,
Counting down the days,
Or tracking what remains.

Family Portrait / Alison Henderson

There are five chairs,
but we learn early
who may sit.
Father at the head;
nobody ever remembers
selecting one.
Mother moving dishes
back and forth
gathering the storm
before it bursts.
One of us proves evidence.
One of us becomes good.
One of us learns the skill
of not being there,
while still being seated.
Years down the road,
we shall disagree about everything.
The color of the kitchen.
How it started.
Whether the door was slammed
or shut.
Whether anybody was frightened.
Memory becomes
our last family asset
to partition.
Christmas is yours.
The cottage is yours.
The picture of us smiling
since happiness lasts
a hundred twenty-fifth
of a second.
I shall take the silence
following my mention.
I shall know what is said
since nobody shall tell me.
Years pass.
The chairs stay
where they were placed.
The good one remains good.
The missing one missing.
The difficult one continues to try
to explain why
the house was burning,
to people holding pictures
of a house
which had never caught fire.
At times I believe
that is what a family is:
five people standing
in five separate ruins,
each claiming
they are home.

monostitch, untitled / Ash Kemp

The atoms in me recognize the atoms in you, even if we can’t see any stars. 

Bravery / Hannah Page

Moving in the face
of fright, drawing
near and past the shadows
against the cave wall
which Fearlessness flees –
They’re cast off of me:
shapely Forms of the Poet,
the Priestess, and the
Beast. I have
thrown out all pretense
from my cavity.
It is streaming behind
me      vital red.
Until now I never knew
a sunrise so close
on the stiletto
heels of midnight; so
eager to cast autumnal
tones over fresh-tilled
rolling earth.

Daily Reminder / PF Potvin

blue  rain
gold  rain
pink  rain
rust   rain
drip paint down the white
wall in the Banksy
print above the bed where the black
suit man with briefcase
hurryscowls under an umbrella
while a kid
on the other side stands
rust boots and jacket
eyes tight
face upturned
tongue and arms extended
each moment a choice
man
kid
or
rain

Midnight sermon /  Janette Schafer

It’s 11:56 PM, 
and as I grow older, 

I don’t see 
too many midnights.

I think of my dad now, 
how he preached at 
the Lansing Rescue Mission, 
the same place
he once slept after 
the Vietnam War. 

He volunteered there
twice a month, never forgot
how he was one of them.
Two Friday midnights,
he was their chaplain—

and though his voice was soft,
they leaned forward, listened.
Some remembered when he slept 
on those same cots, ate that same
thin soup and bologna sandwiches.

When I was tall enough to reach
past his elbow, sometimes I came too,
sang church hymns, The Old Rugged Cross,
my innocent treble reaching out,
a gift I couldn’t comprehend. 

ABIOGENESIS   / Kate Thuma

In August, the microbiome of a pond 
presses into windows closed against
the feeling of being too alive 
to be contained in our skins. 
Like peaches 
barely holding their seams together 
around all that undripped nectar, 
cold and sweating through their fuzz
and leaving peach-prints on the paper bag. 

When I crack the kitchen window 
the sea pours through the rupture
and I breathe it in, remarkably, without gills. 
This close to the coast, 
humidity returns us through time 
to the precambrian sea 
we unwillingly crawled from, 
ushered out with a sigh and a stern “go.” 

In August I long to be a mermaid – 
For a high-gone simple past 
of drifting in a foam and seaweed nest 
like Venus, unrising from the sea, 
with a sticky peach pit in her pearly teeth.