August - Poem 6

Don’t get me wrong / Zoe Berger

I don’t really want to be writing. 
I’d rather lie next to you in silence 
and not say what I mean. 
I mean what I say. I just don’t say 
all of it. You wouldn’t want 
me to. We made it this far 
because I shut the fuck up. 
I know. First time for everything. 
Let’s not ruin it with words—

a burning   / Ashley Howell

I used to bite my nails until they bled bandaids on every other digit I couldn’t let my skin I started getting manicures to help with the biting because the picture I took of holding my fathers hand as he died has fingers covered in bandages and when I picked up his ashes my nail polish matched the grey in the sky and in the urn there was no blood to be found 

I used to bite my nails until they bled bandaids on every other digit I couldn’t let my skin I started getting manicures to help with the biting because the picture I took of holding my father’s hand as he died has fingers covered in bandages and when I picked up his ashes my nail polish matched the grey in the sky and in the urn there was no blood to be found

the picture of skin
my father’s hand grey ashes
used nails in the sky

Strawberry Fields Forever / Dahhee Chung

My weed garden is beautiful,
Tall green stalks wild with tips of white fluff seeds and yellow quotation marks stamped aggressively by a five year old playing god,
In a galaxy far, far away,
An open crawl of 
“Strawberry fields 
                  forever” thick and low,
Pitch slowed,
Surviving beneath the day,
Once meticulously cared for by a hyper-focused Gardener
Who had time
To nourish the soil 
And the clowder of cats,
Like orange swirls and creamsicles 
melting down the brick wall,
“…temperatures  in the high 90s”
      butterflies and bees swarm   the prolific weed blooms,
Then scatter as the hummingbird zips down and side eyes 
The gardener 
                 who thought 
The world couldn’t thrive without her. 

The Cowgirl and the Physicist / Alison Henderson

I see us crossing bridges in Saskatoon.

You shift gears,
low to the ground,
in your mother’s old Mazda.
The dashboard rattles.
Red paint flashes
off the hood.

I open a window.
You tell me it’s called flutter
and crack yours.

Grain and gasoline.

Mohawk razed,
collared shirt, leather belt,
ghosts of neon clothing.

You are quieter now,
listening 
to my music.

Your profile
in the flat sunlight.

We stop 
because I ask you to.

The Joni Mitchell plaque
on Broadway Avenue,
bronzed and unremarkable.

We are singing
Wheat Kings
instead of Blue.

I trace the arrow of time
on your calf
as you drive us 
out of the city
where at night,
stars covered the ground.

The fields ran on. 

At night,
stars covered the ground.

You said you were
a side character
in the story of a woman
who loved life so much
it killed her.

You fell in love
with my corpse.

I drove to California
in a stolen rental.

Mission Control Told Her / Ash Kemp

Once, mission control told her communication lines were jammed.
They could no longer hear her detailed report of her body
rejecting synthetic foods and missing human touch.
Leery of a slow death,
lone soul on a desolate ship
in the outer reaches of space,
waiting to be devoured,
She returns to her reports,
as if the world isn’t behind her,
forever out of reach.

Mission Control Told Her

Once, mission control told her communication lines were jammed.
They could no longer hear her detailed report of her body
rejecting synthetic foods and missing human touch.
Leery of a slow death,
lone soul on a desolate ship
in the outer reaches of space,
waiting to be devoured,
She returns to her reports,
as if the world isn’t behind her,
forever out of reach.

Mission Control Told Her

communication lines were jammed.
They could no longer hear her body
rejecting synthetic foods and missing human touch.
Confined to a desolate ship
in the outer reaches of space,
waiting to be devoured,
connection just out of her reach.

Lip Reading / Hannah Page

Some days, my bedroom
is enough of a world.

(The womb is a very tiny
universe btw.) 

Slivers of nightstands
decorated with daily
treasures carried home
in denim pockets with
widening holes. Wan
daylight slicing the air
like a mirror, slanting
over safe landscape.
My red and black pilled
comforter becomes my
swaddling-clothes, my
amniotic sac, and all my
sustenance – food; coffee;
marijuana – materializes
atop the covers.

I am not so alone here.
My husband in the other
room and over my shoulder
the disintegrating, spectral
forms of every past
entanglement. This morning
a friend requested
space but I was looking
backwards and I heard it
as the promise of betrayal.
Sometimes I can’t understand
the words as they're meant
unless I watch the mouth
expel them.

Taking a Break / PF Potvin

On my hands and knees painting the porch the dullest of grays, the kind you lose yourself in and almost stop thinking about painting or where the mind goes when you’re not looking, which, let’s be honest, happens much of the time, especially if you’re like me and getting older, which probably begs a different question but one I won’t get into here because I’m actually taking a break and typing this instead of painting, but all work and no play and all that, but seriously, where’s the mind right now? slipping out the side door of the shop and sneaking a smoke while I’m busy here working on a poem, or maybe it’s just slunk out on an errand and will return before I know it, which can’t really happen because I’m thinking about it now, but who really knows how many levels this person in the mirror’s got or how many tiny sprinkled cakes and coffees might be offered on this table and devoured before the projects can be deemed all done?

On the occasion of waking to a dream  /  Janette Schafer

I stirred to a phantom hand on my hip.
A ghost pressed close, his coarse hairs
tingling the back of my thigh. He gentled
my hair from behind my ears, swept it
to the side. What he whispered, I do not
remember except I could feel the icy dew
from his breath. He found that space
between my neck and shoulder, that inch
of nerve and life that shuts out all thought
and outside space, save for that bundle
of electric that makes the whole of me
cry yes…yes this. Awake, I kept my eyes
shut, holding on to the specter until it was
time, until I made my legs shake.

PHOTOSYNTHESIS  / Kate Thuma

I’m so of the earth 
that moss grows happily 
in my lungs, 
and every breath 
I exhale transfers oxygen 
back into the atmosphere. 

When I kiss you, 
I am keeping you alive. 

You and I could form 
a closed system 
together at Point Nemo, 
our own biosphere
at the point of inaccessibility. 

When you breathe 
back into me, 
it’s all I need.