August - Poem 13

Body Shop / Zoe Berger

Don’t have anything to regurgitate. 
Blinkers pulsing at the light. 

Dad’s cold in his puffy blue coat, tells me 
Living is hard but dying is harder. 

At the body shop— 
my mechanic wrings his hands, 

hopes it’s okay 
if he asks me something,

How’s your dad, give him a message, even 
the atheists are praying, okay?

After your dad died,
the neighbor took your mom’s trash out 

every week in secret. 
Kindness is just love with its work boots on. 

At the bus stop I still think about jumping. 
You know this,

understand how the metal 
would weigh on me like a blanket. 

You continue existing though I look away
which feels good

like grabbing the right key on the first try. 
You happen to me every time. 

there is no name yet;   / Ashley Howell

noun: for what you can’t hold and always carry
verb: holding what you no longer carry
adjective: as if weighted with something one used to hold
adverb: to move through weight knowing you hold what you cannot carry

No Bread / Dahhee Chung

Bought three trout for 
Ten dollars,
If Jesus could feed his people with two,
I can feed mine too,
Bellies full.

Patted dried,
Lightly salted,
Fried whole 
Till the eyes pop and the fins crisp,

Crack  between our teeth,
Fish Chips
Without the chips 

A slurry of starch
To thicken the sauce,
peppers, garlic, ginger and oil, 
Poured and served,
Ten minutes fried
Five minutes gone 
Heads, tails and all.

Catfish / Alison Henderson

Anywhere else
you’d call it a pond.

In West LA
they built a lake.

It smells of carcass,
oil and eucalyptus,
the cries of disturbed geese
and a waterfall.

Catfish.
Bullhead, sunfish,
trout.

Men in T-shirts come with rods.
I take pictures of them—
they hate that,

turn quickly back
to the water.

The sign in the reeds
says a woman should
eat only one catfish a week

because of the chemicals,

higher in the skin,
fat and guts.

One.

I wonder if their wives
obey the sign.

I breathe what rises
off the surface.

Fish jump,
oblivious to
the life of an inner-city culvert,

not knowing
what the water has put in them.

The men watch me.

Dinner Among Friends, a Mad Lib Poem / Ash Kemp

Shirt stained with oil,
Verdant cabbage to shred into the pan,
Spindly onions glazed copper,
Open the next ingredient.
Forget to turn off the burner.
Weave a cloth around the finger
You foolishly burnt.
A scab an offering on your pillow.
A syncopation of kitchen and bedroom,
Sizzle and snore.
What are we but proverbial soup?

Under Construction / Hannah Page

In my haziest
recalling, I feel your height
curved over my spine
your pieces slotting 
into my pieces smoothly
like the highest end
Ikea tableau:
a modular set of
particle board shapes
varied in color
like something sturdier than
a room for a while.

Spring Rooting / PF Potvin

I’m sorting and folding
shirts into piles – tees, dress,

polos – packing them into paper
sacks topped with too skinny

jeans bound for the resale shop
heaping and huffing

books (after permanent
markering our names) to the free

little library two doors down
under the eyes of the squirrelly

oak that leaves me wondering
what to do with this ziplock

full of teeth

Sushi /  Janette Schafer

Lunch
and we do not 
talk about Nate
or how it’s been

a year and we
do not talk 
about it’s just
that the salmon

is so fresh and 
we do not talk
the roe bouncy
pops salty in

your do not
talk about 
Naturally my
sister has 

only just tried
sushi and we
do not talk 
about nature

walks we used
to take when
we were young
or how people

knock on your
do not talk about
now they bring
out the pickled

ginger you see
they forgot and
we do not talk
about Nate

Being Alive in Maine   / Kate Thuma

In the skinny triangle of time between sunset and dusk, 
cranes, spent from soaring, tuck themselves into sharp nests, 
leaning their long necks into downy corners. 
Edgecomb grey edges peel back to open doors for fireflies 
(and mosquitoes we hope the bats will find). 

Three small heart-level heads bob along the coastline, 
soft toes scrabbling against rockweed bubbles and shards of mica.
I’m just dying for a breath of their unselfconsciousness in space. 
Kids just live, you know? 
Music has never meant more than its sounds, 
and the creeping-inward ocean doesn’t trigger thalassophobic sweats yet. 

The randomness and profound intention here sleep entwined
in the soft s-curves of a twisted pine: 
that somehow, we all found each other in time, 
under the newly-brighting moon, 
where we unsay vows of solitude and separateness. 
Where I belong to myself and to everyone, at once.