August - Poem 7
Waterfall / Zoe Berger
12:02 AM (7 hours ago)
to me
Trust you
to surprise me
with a place I’ve been
before. In the underground
Moroccan restaurant
the hostess asks if we’d like
the waterfall table, why yes,
of course, so we eat our lamb
and drink our tea in the bedrock
holding up the building
as water creeps down the walls
and into the moss that
I assure you is real—
no drugs and alcohol today.
On the walk home we pause
on the curb
to examine a dollhouse
veiled in plastic, love scrawled
on the walls in bleeding
purple marker, a wooden moon
framing the second story window.
Who would throw away
their daughter’s dollhouse,
you say. Who cares
how old they get.
Maybe they got a bigger one,
I offer. Rivulets of rainwater
slip down the plastic valleys.
Your face wets with disbelief.
You run your fingers over the moon.
Bad Day / Dahhee Chung
Ironically blessed,
A burn blistered
And scabbed
Cured meat dried
by Friday
Picked flat
The died parts
Not the alive parts,
Pink and smooth spots
R.I.P.
the fun parts
The hard parts
Except that one part
The ripe part,
That might give my fidgets,
One more for the night.
Ode to Peaches / Ash Kemp
for Renee
Oh Peaches,
The cutest little alligator,
The hottest hot dog,
Soft and fuzzy and juicy, too!
Your bright color
Like the sunshine
Brought to life—
We value your contributions
To the pile of fluff
And your steady presence,
Which was more than enough.
We see effigies to you
At every craft store,
We want to play fetch with you
Just a little bit more.
We miss the little noises
And the tummy rubs,
We think of you often,
And will never really give you up.
Annotated Syntax / Hannah Page
I write against
the grain because it isn’t
like me to leave
stones unturned or
uncollected. It isn’t
like me to leave
lines of poetry
unparsed. I have never
not been enough. I
have never
not been found bursting
with potential/enthusiasm/ideas
like a boil or a blood
blister ripely reaching to outsize the container – beyond
the capacities of the
human membrane.
Speech & breath hold
natural rhythm; to
manipulate the
lungs like an accordion
played and stopped at
will to notes that are cutting against –
That is art. That is power.
That is
love.
When You Hear Sifting / PF Potvin
feet like sand creak
open the screen
step & stoop
down as two ravens
wheeze past your mother
takes another nap
wonder about peering
behind blinds
pinch & pluck red
weeds from bricks black
fluff tossing along
snagging in discard pile
you glance about
lower your head
both now pretending
nobody’s home
On the occasion of remembering the last time we made love / Janette Schafer
There are times you want your lover to go slow,
to pluck you like a piano tuner with the meticulous
task of resetting strings and voice hammers,
making each note correct, perfectly balanced
That day, I wanted you veloce, our bodies
a cacophony on the black and white keys
of our desire, a pounding rhapsody
I said: presto agitato faster my love my body
is agitated incalzando chase pursue urge me
stringendo press together together together
with fire con fuoco hurry affrettando hurry
Let Me Burn Bones: a Burning Haibun / Kate Thuma
My father helped me perch on my swingset trapeze bar. I felt like a bird whistling in a cartoon cage. I was
three, and soft, and smiling. He ran inside to tell my mother to look out the window at me, soaring. In that
second, I remember pride, then weightlessness, then nothing at all. My brain won’t let me keep the burn
of snapping still-small bones. It wakes up again on the x-ray table, where a technician tells a toddler to be
still so he can find the exact place my body ripped apart on the inside. I remember a door with a window,
and being held down by bigger things. I cannot see my mother’s face, but I want to be certain she is there
in my memory, that she came with me. It’s dark again in the pieces of the story I still hold, then sparkles
around a bathtub, a green sandbox, an inflatable pool, all places to keep my swaddled leg away from
while living half-in-half-out of my last baby summer. Still, when the buzzing saw finally eats down to my
now-thin leg, it’s buried in sand. That leg is still smaller. It still remembers falling.
My father helped me perch on my swingset trapeze bar. I felt like a bird whistling in a cartoon cage. I was
three, and soft, and smiling. He ran inside to tell my mother to look out the window at me, soaring. In that
second, I remember pride, then weightlessness, then nothing at all. My brain won’t let me keep the burn
of snapping still-small bones. It wakes up again on the x-ray table, where a technician tells a toddler to be
still so he can find the exact place my body ripped apart on the inside. I remember a door with a window,
and being held down by bigger things. I cannot see my mother’s face, but I want to be certain she is there
in my memory, that she came with me. It’s dark again in the pieces of the story I still hold, then sparkles
around a bathtub, a green sandbox, an inflatable pool, all places to keep my swaddled leg away from
while living half-in-half-out of my last baby summer. Still, when the buzzing saw finally eats down to my
now-thin leg, it’s buried in sand. That leg is still smaller. It still remembers falling.
My father helped me perch on my swingset trapeze bar. I felt like a bird whistling in a cartoon cage. I was
three, and soft, and smiling. He ran inside to tell my mother to look out the window at me, soaring. In that
second, I remember pride, then weightlessness, then nothing at all. My brain won’t let me keep the burn
of snapping still-small bones. It wakes up again on the x-ray table, where a technician tells a toddler to be
still so he can find the exact place my body ripped apart on the inside. I remember a door with a window,
and being held down by bigger things. I cannot see my mother’s face, but I want to be certain she is there
in my memory, that she came with me. It’s dark again in the pieces of the story I still hold, then sparkleles
around a bathtub, a green sandbox, an inflatable pool, all places to keep my swaddled leg away from
while living half-in-half-out of my last baby summer. Still, when the buzzing saw finally eats down to my
now-thin leg, it’s buried in sand. That leg is still smaller. It still remembers falling.
