August - Poem 30

Thank You For Letting Me Plant the Last Seed  / Dahhee Chung

A cento from Zoe Berger,Ashley Howell, Dahhee Chung, Alison Henderson, Ash Kemp, Hannah Page, PF Potvin, Janette Schafer, and Kate Thuma

A cacophony of the black and white keys of our desire, 
A pounding rhapsody
coat you,
blend you,
candy you.  
You cry and I’m born. 
I smoked each cigarette to the acrid nub  

The lotus, 
Opening in the sunlight, 
Closed to the moon,
We bloom despite our darkness, 
Wear another piece of heart, 
Scar blooming around to gleaming bar, 
A blue silk ribbon runs between each eye-door. 
Night we endure
Not silence, exactly
But the absence of other sounds outside ourselves, 

I didn’t choose to be born,
You chose it for me. 
Living is a conversation with your body 
Wedged between the breeze from my window,
And a phantom in the dark smiling madly. 
Widening mouth, wagging tongue,
Begging for a taste 
Looking for a single source of truth 
Swallow each other like bags of Saccharin and dopamine. 
Can you imagine loving something so much,
You use all the letters naming them? 
Ear to eyelid, I can see what you’re hearing. 
You open your eyes and I’m instantly cosmic.
My blush is every cell,  
At the same time, 
The picture of us smiling,
Since happiness lasts a hundred twenty-fifth of a second, 
Knitted us together. 

You’re dying.
I smell it 
I don’t think about it until my elbow hurts,
Think about how love broke me everyday,
Yes, everyday, my love. 
Nine lives, but is on the last one,
Life my visitor, admit it.
Time is running low, or down, or out.  
Can I hold another ring,
Wear another piece of heart?
A promise broken across half the sky. 
I forgot my wings, but here they are again right where I left them,
These stunted nubs at my shoulders underneath my skin. 
Thought and memory are still accepting sacrifices,
Yawn to the rhythmic march of the coming dark, 
& we found ourselves swept over the brink on the rocks 
Next to lives waiting  in dark scars  
Listening to Jeff Buckley in the car. 

They weren’t ever meant to be anything but sewn together 
Into the most exquisite knot. 
And I never sent for you
(That’s the best part, truly)    
Every dead language eventually evaporates into thin air 
One of us becomes good,
Memory becomes our last.

Hats Off” for the Tupelo Press 30/30 project  / Dahhee Chung

Twenty-one days to form a habit,
So they say.
This is my last one for the month.
I smoked a whole tree in thirty days.
I read The Vegetarian by Han Kang,
And I am now a tree.
My breeze whispers food strung together with bizarre analogies,
The month is over and I’m feeling like that taste,
You know the one everyone says,
Like how I love to eat my semi-sweet dark chocolate and wash it down with,
Don’t say milk, that’s gross,
That would be like numbing the intensity,
Black coffee. 
It brings the intensity to life and allows it to linger,
Because memory is melancholy,
And I’d rather feel uncomfortable,
And when the taste begins to fade,
There’s always another pot 
And one more bar.

What is the true meaning of a shirt / Ash Kemp

After Cypher

Yes, it holds you in its arms,
But what is its favorite sound?
Yes, it covers your top and sometimes 
Brushes allllllll the way to your legs,
But what about her laugh?
Has it ever heard anything so beautiful?
What is the meaning of a garment
Full of soft compliments and bracing seams?
Can anyone know the true meaning of a thing within a dream?

Party Games / Hannah Page

Listening to Lover with headphones in and shades on behind you in the far back seat of the mini van my friends rented to take us all to the Poconos this weekend

One of my biggest life goals was to become happily married

During Never Have I Ever you tell the table that your wife has done it all and our nonverbal exchange is that of pride 

You see you raise up all of me, including the object I (used to) like to become once in a while

Maybe we met on Snapchat and I tried to sell you XXX content

Maybe our first date I blew you in the park next to Yankee Stadium 

after you held a rolled up $20 bill to my nostril after scooping up powder with it — 

We have undergone many deaths. Transformation is nothing less 

than the casting off of everything that no longer serves, and somehow 

beneath the shedding we fit together better

Meeting Jim Again / PF Potvin

Yes, we'll gather by the river,
in the lilac grove in the back yard

counting the mind, counting crows
startled at the diamond back beneath the mesquite,

the early history of Australia. But then the movie
in the river was a trout, and I was on the bank, my heart in my

brain at boil now with heat, afternoon glistening
playing the game of becoming mountains.

I see from the air the rumpled green and beige,
with a thousand colorful birds sweeping in a circle.

Now they live inside me.

I’ll follow you down /  Janette Schafer

after “Silver Spring” by Stevie Nicks

There’s a white flag 
above my door. Somewhere
between the hors d’oeuvres and a look
you gave when you helped
with my coat, I got lost. 
Your silver-brown curls kept falling
in your eyes. Sometimes lovers
change, a hummingbird flit,
a dip in a flower, suddenly across
the way to another nectar.
Maybe they will drop a seed of warning.
I know I could have loved you,
but you would not let me. The sound
of my voice will haunt you. Never get away.

SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION   / Kate Thuma

When the rooms in my brain fill up with dry pens 
and bits of petrified wood and old paper, 
the knowing overflows into my bones, 
hollow like a bird. 

When they’re under enough pressure
a million memories can be measured 
with a bathroom scale – 
the weight of it is what keeps me from flying. 

All the bones in my fingers and toes 
scrunch together to try to stem the leaks, 
and my kneecaps screw more tightly 
to keep the heaviest in. 
Our holding arms and shaking legs 
and back-of-my-neck kisses and closed-eyed declarations
are stacked together so tightly their somehow-bones 
are kissing through a veil. 

A spark from a skinny candle 
leaps into my sternum. 

And, finally, flight.