August - Poem 4
Sting / Zoe Berger
Meeting you was like birthing
in both directions. Every time
I walk through your door
you happen to me all over again.
Remind me,
I have to tell you about this story
when a bee flew on stage at a reading
& stung the poet’s bottom lip
while she was talking about sweetness.
Anything can happen.
When I open my mouth
my whole life falls out.
The brain part of my brain
wants you untreasonably.
I am no longer the biggest danger
to myself. Are you?
Living Amends / Ashley Howell
“Make direct amends to such people wherever possible,
except when to do so would injure them or others.”
This footprint breathes with me
I want to embrace those who I have harmed
some I embrace with arms and hands
some with spirit and meditation
some with sliced apples and morning coffee
some with broken lids of blue and white bowls
some with heartbeat and oxygen
some salt and water
I cleanse myself only of my need to speak
never the memory of those moments
my words are heavy as I carry them
in repurposed bowls and apples and coffee
my words
if they would cause harm, are only mine
sometimes I must place them in another space
to be held for a moment
so my knees don’t buckle
underneath me
Han / Dahhee Chung
It seems like Umma and Appa only complain in their native tongue,
Of guttural
gah’s
And
Aigo’s
The onomatopoeias
an intrinsic projection of syntax
With the exact vibration from their gut tickling the receivers hair,
Contrary to their English
so polite,
The sentences phrased upwards like a question and permission to feel,
Rather than the raw Han
That is more an emotion than a word,
Pronounced imperatively without punctuation.
Han
The deep, quiet anger that can only be spoken with sharp consonants,
Or the high-frequency drilling of silence.
Flip-Flops / Alison Henderson
I walked nine miles in flip-flops
from Venice Beach
to my house near LAX,
country music blaring
under an innocent August sky,
through a desert
of dirt and piss.
Sticky sidewalks.
I didn’t get blisters,
feet free like Jesus.
I imagined him walking
neighborhood to neighborhood,
preaching the good news
in the smog,
flip-flops slapping concrete
the way mine did.
Would he live on skid row
in a tent with the others,
washing their wounds
behind shopping carts?
Would he walk out of Ralphs
with one bag of groceries
that could feed them all?
Would he say:
You are as worthy
as the billionaires.
And would that be enough
for the flock cameras
to find him in Chinatown,
for Palantir to know
his Reddit handle?
Would he stay nonviolent
and still go viral?
Would he still flip tables?
Not in the Temple.
But in the boardroom.
I can see him running
from DHS
across the South Bay,
onto the Pacific
with no surfboard.
I can see the helicopters circling.
Waves breaking on waves,
ocean remembering.
I can see Jesus in a cage.
Checking In / Ash Kemp
after Linda Gregg
I get my wristband,
then the I.V.
I start to evaporate from myself, asking,
will I know a day free of this pain?
I wake in a different room.
Original Sin / Hannah Page
At your birth they braised
you in your native tongue
and then they unwrapped
you and gave you over to the wide
web of possibility that is language
stretched taught far as the horizon
crisscrossing all over where Latin
bleeds into half a dozen living
varieties of spoken animal and now
in your middle years you still smack
of are lightly saturated with
ooze, really, that original sin.
Picking at the Homestead / PF Potvin
where the bees and trucks
hum in unison
when we pass the white flag
and keep walking
where the dunes don wigs
of tree and meadow
when the dogs squirm tall
blades like centipedes
where Reginas hang
plump before our buckets
when the jays whistle
each other to supper
where we weigh liquid
flesh and smoke
when we drive home
and kick in the front door
the second time that day
and finally remember
what was so important
in the first place
I USED TO EXPERIENCE MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE AS PANIC ATTACKS / Kate Thuma
You’ve been tapping messages to me through time --
you were still far and long away, but I heard you.
I think we were decided by an Old Testament angel.
My body couldn’t hold such bigness –
it dulled the sound but kept the sensation,
an insistent throbbing pinky knotted in thread
stretched under my bedroom door.
When we speak with voices that aren’t ours,
she is holding our mouths
and enacting what has been ordained,
extracting the always-was with silver fingertips
spider-drawn over trembling keys of ivory spine.
When you taptaptap goodbye,
you’re sending love down the line
and I’m feeling it through tears with my
tongue pressed against a twisted backwards eye tooth
and that pinky blue at the tip from the thread
between us thrumming with the coiled tension of a
string in the moment of attack.
All of the rooms in my brain that aren’t a part of consciousness
snap awake and look at you,
suspended in the wisps of the feather moon.
The angel in the corner tells me to stop screaming.
I received your message,
and I am here.
