September - Poem 30

My hands surprise me like a wolf / Cento composed by Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Mother / Yael Aldana

Not everything you say is going to be profound / Catherine Bai

music is just a kind of color
a strange pause
like driving in the rain
and passing under a bridge
sometimes the bridge is the best part
you see the chorus with fresh eyes
it’s emotional all over again

Things That are Worthy of Poetry / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

What is inside the leaf

bright silver white lining

even the fleshiest of living things

The certainty that one day

all of this will no longer be

The grocery list: eggs again, milk again

Food for the cat. An overdue bill

The house down the street 

In expectant silence

Remedies for arthritis: mauby bark, moringa

Monkeys trying to find their way back 

to the dwindling forest

Capybaras lost in parking lots

Bioluminescence startling itself around ankles

All contained within music and colour

All within the limits of the word

XXX / Kendra Brooks

“The consequence of desire” ?
Sounds like a species of wild flower:
A powdery, pulpy stingy bloom
Too lumpy to press inside a book
More of a miniscule scented jewell
Than a delicate, abundant beauty.
Good thing the bees know their duty.
Only sunlight cools the flame!
Know if you play, heartbreak
wins the game. Two steps forward
Then back to square one.
Lust is barrels of fun and
Attraction is a blast but when
It comes to the consequences
The love connection rarely lasts.
So travel light and pack for rain
When you board the love train.
Trust, desire has its consequences
And may change your destination.

Cafe Promenade / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

I’ve always wanted to rhyme love with chrysanthemums. 
My goals are somewhat random—to find a use for the word  
lagoon or chasm, stay away from the orgasmic hue of blue  
some flowers flatten you with. “What is Magic 
The Gathering?” a kid asks her parents. We chortle into 
our coffee cups. I try not to overhear the eager explanation.  
Let’s lose ourselves in steam, hot and brightening. This is  
not your typical watering hole. There’s a whole landscape  
on the upper part of the wall. The paint has layers of texture,  
trees that feel dimensional. We’re ringed with Bob Ross Rocky  
Mountains. Knobby humps of crust push up and nestle a forest. 
How soon a room turns into something else entirely. 
What even was this place before? Just under the forest is a door  
that doesn’t go anywhere. Brass knocker, peaked eve, the bronze  
face of a god or lion sleeping in the freeze. So easily. 
It’s prom season—no—homecoming. A jingle of highschoolers 
stop in, sporting the wildest flower-ribbon exhibits. Love, 
mums, school spirit—what magic could even describe it? 

A Prayer and a Pep Talk for My 62nd Birthday / Yvette Perry

It’s alright now, baby, game’s over                       
olly olly oxen free
come out, come out, wherever you are
you don’t have to pretend anymore
time for the grand finale, the big reveal
everyone’s in the parlor ready for you 
to unmask whodunnit
dance like everybody can see you, and 
they’re cheering enthusiastically 
slide across home base: you may not be 
safe, but no one really ever is
be you/do you, just say yes
I think I can, I think I can—
you thought you could and
you did
you got this, smooth sailing now,
everything’s blossoming roses
it’s like riding a bicycle—you never really forget
don’t call it a comeback
you’ve been here forever, ten toes
down and head to the sky
eyes to the heavens, hair blowing in the wind
feel the breeze on your face and the sun on your lips
feel what joy feels like
feel what unbothered and unbewildered feels like
feel what having all the fucks you could ever
want but choosing to give away nary a one feels like
keep all your marbles, have and eat your cake
it’s alright, now, baby, it’s all right this time
it’s time
it’s time 
for you

Scholar / Amber Wei

Learn about me
when the books
no longer call you by your name
when identity is misspoken
because it is difficult to replace character with
emotional maturity
So heighten your gaze to the setting sun
lowering your sight
to the shoreline
where the distance
is seen light with
overbearing reflection
knowing that you were somehow
somewhere
the searing pain
light only knew as the moment
the distance showed that heat is
not an illusion
but rather the ominous
emanating of the day’s end
a cycle from which we have 
not graduated,
but rather, look to a new day

Ghost Towns and the Creative Imaginary, Part V  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 29

Carnival Glass / Yael Aldana

If you knew me before
and looked through me then
as if I were made of
milky carnival glass
but find me worthy
in my after.
ribbed in success
bloated with promise
brined with accolades.
you’ll  never make it though
my heart’s
meshed metal sheathing
as I was always worthy
even as a woman in cheap
yellow dress at the carnival
with only a dollar
to play Wack-a-Mole

Missing You / Catherine Bai

messages trickle into my phone
there’s no one to text
you’re off in the real world
in my room I reread the signs
beautiful people on the train don’t phase me
I cry when I read a poem
and can’t share it with you

Communion / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

I birthed him slick and wild as an otter,
riverine, black eyed and bound to no saviour
but undercurrents of thirst.

Our bright world of noise frightened him.
The first years he spent bound to my chest
|with a length of knotted cloth, small fingers
tangled in the estuaries of my hair.

I whispered prayers without shapes
into the swirled shell of his ear.
I fed him all the milk this body
could bear.

Now you ask what he might become.
Outside, his laughter rises, like mist,
into the agile certainty of air.

We talk about our children as though
our hands hold back the river’s flow.
The truth is, no mother knows what will grow.

In my dreams, I went alone into the darkness
to find him, in the rift where everything
and nothing lives

We build a life on a bridge made from breath.
All is tide. All is waiting.
Time flicks its tail in the depths
between us, vast and silent.

Our children come to us
along submerged pathways of spirit.
Love is a sacred crossroad,
a place where many rivers flow

In the great river’s fractured light,
we are all different beasts come here to drink.
We were all led here by the same thirst.

XXIX / Kendra Brooks

Did you think I wouldn’t 
miss you,
or not notice you
had left? 
Your keys are no longer hanging 
from the little hook in the hall.
Your car’s not in the driveway.
Did you leave your gardening gloves
on the fence, out back
the birds are still chirping
the syllables of your name.
I see you’ve taken your mismatched socks 
and your reading glasses from beside the bed.
You’ve gone completely
as if you thought you should. 
The mirror misses your side glances, 
and the day has slowed its pace. 
I knew I’d lose you the day I found you
a heart does not need love to break.

Safari / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Racer X / Yvette Perry

The first man I ever wanted drove a fast yellow car
and always wore shades. I wanted so badly to ride next to him.
I imagined him pulling the harness over my head,
securing it at my shoulders and around my waist and hips.
I could see me touching his hand gently through his red gloves
as it rested on the stick shift.

He’d look over at me. Even though his eyes were hidden behind
dark glasses, I’d know he had winked at me, just before he
broke out into a smile. I was the only one who could make him
smile. He held so much trauma in his tall, muscular body. I knew
of some of it, but I sensed there was much more.

He never said anything to me— neve
asked me about my day or shared funny stories about his day
as we sped together through the streets. I don’t know why
my fantasy was able to seat me next to him, touch him even,
but kept him mute.

Many years later, after dealing with men who were not created
from paint, I’d curse my inability to design a more
complete fantasy for myself, wonder what it said about me
that my earliest dreams of desire were such bare, silent sketches.

Remembrance /Amber Wei

Ghost Towns and the Creative Imaginary: An Essay in Forms, Part IV  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 28

Alien love poem #1 / Yael Aldana

At a party in Dumbo under the Brooklyn bridge/ You with your long Maiblu barbie hair/ Your round I-smoke-pot-glasses/ It might not have been called Dumbo then/ maybe people just started calling it Dumbo/ You in your original 70s vintage shirt from Domseys/ the hippie slash rock and roll fantasy I didn’t know existed/ didn’t know I wanted./ talk to you for a few minutes/ hear your funny little chuckle.

I ask guys out/ I am known for being sexually aggressive/ but I’m not in the mood

nursing a breakup where I asked him out first/ not in the mood/

leave you standing there.

The party goes all night/ you, me, and your roommate the only ones left/ at dawn/ I’m on couch/ right foot tucked under myself./ waiting the morning light to go home on the subway

Your roommate asks me if I want to go/ go with you guys/ to breakfast or whatever/ I really didn’t talk to her/ barely noticed her/only noticed her because of you.

I didn’t figure out till years later/ you asked her to do it.

Raising Children When the World is on Fire / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

The world is on fire
but this house is not.

Some days I am the bucket
some days I am the water

being flung on the roof
to keep it all from burning down.

XXVIII / Kendra Brooks

Poetry is like
a lighthouse:
nondescript in daylight
hours, a tourist
attraction by the sea,
too many stairs,
narrow windows,
and in summer no ac.
But bring the darkness,
what’s more a storm,
and that’s when
a lighthouse likes 
to shine
and will perform
like a brilliant beacon,
a poem.

Joplin Documentary / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Imagine the ceaseless crash of a freight  
train wind. Imagine the vortex 
whirring you out of the car window. 

You’d tried to pleasure-drive the storm 
of a generation. What was the vision? 

It bore you like a clod, like a shard, the trees 
twisting scraps into shrapnel, unzipping 
your ribs. Imagine the miracle 

that landed you engineless in a field, 
sea of muck amid all the parts 

of everything that was. You emerged, 
heart beating into the part of the story 
no one knows to ask for— 

vampire mushroom spores that rooted 
through sewn-up wounds, the ground 

vengefully undoing all it could.  
Unlike some, you didn’t leave town. 
You’ve got kids now. Life goes on, 

multiplies, branches. It can’t be easy,  
that story on the body, the memory. 

For Worse or For Better, For Whatever It’s Worth / Yvette Perry

At almost 25 years the marriage had outlasted
the times of its birth. Where once there was a
bubble, filled with so many like minded others, now it was
just them. Had they held on for 15 or so years more,

the pendulum of lifestyle alternatives may have
swung back to meet them. But Reagan, two private schools,
a few moves, and one failed business had a gravitational pull
impossible to overcome. In the wake of the marriage,

four lives, each sectioned off, each alone. She’d remain that way
long after the others had found their way to new lives.
When it was her turn to build a family, she bowed to tradition,
vowed to impart mistakes only of her own making.

Here was a new bubble, with only the four of them.
Others wanted in, even if just to observe and learn—but they were
neither welcomed nor needed. She protected the boundaries
of the bubble with her entire being.

When her own 25-year mark came and went, she believed herself
to have done something of significant importance, she believed
she had vanquished a curse. For whatever it may be worth, she was
not exactly right. But also: she wasn’t exactly wrong.

Greater Bounds / Amber Wei

Fractured along indivisible boundary
and sight occluded by
not knowing when
the world suddenly opened
to the dreamer
wrought with the cave
and the cavern of stalactites
caving smaller

Time argues with
the moon
which withstands the ability
of walls to move
and arms outstretched
the earth feels its own limits
like it saw its own reflection
shocked by the avenue of growth
and budded it splinters
in two

Ghost Towns and the Creative Imaginary: An Essay in Forms, Part III  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 27

Grifter / Yael Aldana

I admired her, although it was me
in her sights
She saw what she wanted
she was coming
by any means necessary
she        will bend and push
and pull             and yield
and tweak                        to get her way.

You are just like her
the woman who gave birth to me
but is not my mother
she is just like you
not my mother
could not be my mother
not capable of being a mother
hates me
because she hates herself
hates me because
my adopted mother loved me
hates me because I love my adopted mother
who became my mother
a real mother
hates me because my adopted
mother became my mother
no longer adopted, just a mother
hates me because I didn’t crave her abuse
like sweet breath
hates me because I turned my back on her
bullshit without giving a shit
hates because my real mother died
and she is just some woman that never
gets tired of hurting me.

 you just like her
her just like you
her
you
Just like
Just alike.

Winding Stream Party / Catherine Bai

Just because it’s ancient doesn’t mean it’s not
difficult. Ask anyone who’s given birth
or been pregnant
or fucked
or just born, really.
That’s why everyone gets a drink at the end
whether they wrote a verse or not.
The cup of rice wine wiggles in and out of sight
but don’t worry.       It’s coming.

Communion / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

I birthed him slick and wild as an otter,
riverine, black eyed and bound to no saviour
but undercurrents of thirst.

Our bright world of noise frightened him.
The first years he spent bound to my chest
with a length of knotted cloth, small fingers
tangled in the estuaries of my hair.

I whispered prayers without shapes
into the swirled shell of his ear.
I fed him all the milk this body
could bear.

Now you ask what he might become.
Outside, his laughter rises, like mist,
into the agile certainty of air.

We talk about our children as though
our hands hold back the river’s flow.
The truth is, no mother knows what will grow.

In my dreams, I went alone into the darkness
to find him, in the rift where everything
and nothing lives

We build a life on a bridge made from breath.
All is tide. All is waiting.
Time flicks its tail in the depths
between us, vast and silent.

Our children come to us
along submerged pathways of spirit.
Love is a sacred crossroad,
a place where many rivers flow

In the great river’s fractured light,
we are all different beasts come here to drink.
We were all led here by the same thirst.

XXVII / Kendra Brooks

Not another word. Promise.
Cuz when you hear onions
I’ve said tulips
And when you say
“You’re welcome!”
I’ve not felt grateful in the least.
Onions make you cry
and your beauty does the same to me.
“We’ll make it work,”
means it’s not working.
When you offer those words as encouragement,
it feels like enforcement.
Then when you say orange
I crave juice, cold and sweet, dripping from fruit
but you mean the color of a Robin’s beak
as it claims a juicy worm.
I promise. Not another word.

Monkey Business / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Ezra Klein said one day combustion engines will die
when people stop believing in them. In fact, we’ll
wonder how we ever lit those fires, why we blew up
the world with coal dust. Near dusk my husband
and I take the roadster for a topless ride. You can,
inhaling gas and the bake of asphalt, sense that
decadence. The leaching glow of the ombré sky
jewels the traffic lights. We slow to a ruby, race
the topaz. The thrill is in how fast we get to the limit,
the whirlwind in the engine fan, the boiling rumble
that takes up all the space for conversation.

At destination I order my usual—a souped up cone
of monkey business. I feel so American, licking
my banana-brownie ice cream in a parking lot
in the sticky heat of a second wave of summer.

It’s My Turn to Speak in the Circle / Yvette Perry

And I share about how
last night someone smashed
my back window, broke
into my car and stole my stereo,
Run-DMC’s Raising Hell
still in the cassette deck

Someone in the group asks,
How’d that make you feel
and I struggle to say
just how very, very angry
Why would someone
take from me, who had
so little to begin with?
Didn’t they see the broken
toothpicks in place of buttons?

All 20 around the circle nod,
several say they’re sad
this happened to me
We wrap up sharing and
I go to set out snacks

I turn round to see him
He presses something into my palm
It’s for you so no one
ever steals from you again

He runs off and I open my hand, see the
bright orange plastic snake, fresh
from a bubble gum machine capsule

I stand for several moments,
bowl of carrot sticks in one hand,
the snake in the other,
try my hardest not to cry
as I call 20 4-year-olds to
wash their hands for snack time

Gold Moon / Amber Wei

Were you left as a barley in the forest
not knowing which wilderness has captured the
ardor of imagination
that leaves forests lost
as a howling wolf
who has lost the sky

Sit senseless
on doubtful rock
of cemented nature
who knows no reprieve to weight
as carried by words
to the path that led us to become barley
as the seeds to life
giving birth to the woods
where wandering breaths of the forest
led us to become captivated in the leaves
that we mistaken
as home

Ghost Towns and the Creative Imaginary, Part 2  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 26

Slipping into Dolly / Yael Aldana

I slip into my Farrah Fawcett wig
looking more like Dolly
than Farrah.
Dolly has the right idea
hiding her tattoos and her men
slipping them beneath her skin-tight
snake-skin sequin
razzle dazzle.

slip into
silken armor
my I-can’t-breathe-corset
slip into
blue bejeweled close to heaven
high heels
slip into
triple thick
Razzmatazz.

slip past your predilections
you can’t see I’m a revolutionary
mothertrucker.
cause I’m all acrylic nails.
You miss my them/they them pronouns.
Cause I’m all over drawn red- orange lips.

slip into your propensities.
and you let me.
Because I look like a girl
from Tennessee
who needs a beer.

Cooking / Catherine Bai

how do you explain the grammar of love
to someone born without a tongue
a couple makes out wetly on the sidewalk
one reminds the other to get turmeric

the flavor won’t come through without it

Before I Lose Myself / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

I turn off the light
and let the other self in.

She folds herself into me
Spine notches into spine,

ribs pass through each other
like joinery. Her heartbeat

chases mine like a fever,
like the sound of something

slowly being broken,
pressed down against

itself till it cannot hold.
She is who I might have become

if I was not afraid of being alone.
Here in this dark room, I am both of us.

XXVI / Kendra Brooks

Our GracieLu resides inside my chest, 
she landed there on her way to rest. 
My heart beats slower on rainy days, 
and flutters gaily when it’s time to play. 
I’m sure she gave me her last word 
but when I speak it it feels absurd. 

On the porch just after dusk that night
Mel, the mobile vet came & shaved her leg,
then injected her with a deathly dose.
The big Buck moon was shining high
as she breathed in one last time, 
then flew out on flight devine.

I ducked, I quaked, I tried to dodge
as her spirit flew right into me.
Two weeks she’s stayed, and won’t dislodge.
Both GracieLu’s soul and her final pain
have settled softly into my domain. 
Most say it is impossible –a lark, 
but ever since her passing when I wake, 
I find I have the most incredible urge to bark.

star-pulse  / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

star-pulse . . . 

the cicadas 

fire drill 

Hometown / Yvette Perry

I wish I had a home, a ‘hood, a from
When roaming, meeting others when they’d ask
And where did you grow up, I’d not be dumb
I would not struggle with this basic task
Right off I’d name a city and a block,
a school where I attended all the years
I’d have from there a crew, some mates, a flock,
home girls who shared my victories and tears 
Instead of one hometown I have a list
street names for years or just a month—one where
I had pet fish, another my first kiss,
and there the playground where I learned to swear
I do not have one from, I have a sea
with waves of my become and memory

Hinges / Amber Wei

Find words that made
imaginative illusory whisper
the agony of its day
prioritization clouded by mist
of contractual obligation
unchanging to bemuse
what was altogether
frankly openness
mouth aghast
as we speak in wonder

Who is to know that the
audacious are incoherently
unstable
riddled with thoughts of peace
transience absolved

Why was the door opening
only to leave parts of the hinges
behind
opening again an impossibility
of conception
and it became an unruly
conquest
a game to yield joy as a bonus
smiling until the corners of the mouth
inched above

Ghost Towns & the Creative Imaginary  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 25

Rejected Zip Ode / Yael Aldana

3) it’s if the

3) white hot heat

0)

6) never ends. Recycles and then returns

2) morning anew.

So you wanna be a poet / Catherine Bai

the first step 
is to make it beautiful
not the poem, I mean
but your life

how do you make your life beautiful?

1. put a treat on top of the garbage bins at Christmas, so the raccoons that come nightly can have a feast

2. catalogue every shade of green that brings delight

3. give away your last bit of cash

4. make a campfire at night and kiss someone with your eyes closed

5. learn your mother’s language

6. learn an instrument and play it badly to an audience of loved ones; make a grand bow to their raucous applause at the end

7. take someone to the movies and take their hand when the main characters start to fall in love

8. eat a peach in the summertime

9. swim in the ocean, then let the sun dry off every last bead of saltwater

10. talk to children

11. make ten paintings and destroy nine of them… then destroy the tenth

12. treat the world as your life partner, meaning: don’t abandon her

Writing Poems While Boats Explode / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

It is September and
I am writing poems while boats explode
in the eyeless sea. Fear is a fault line
beneath the hot street. Somewhere
on the internet, a god with salt on his tongue
is drawing lots, deciding who will sink
and who will burn. The sea opens and closes
its vast white eye, blinking bodies
out like splinters.

XXV / Kendra Brooks

In the way you anticipate eating chocolate
you cannot have no memory of sweetness
or ignore anticipation and forget
past satisfaction.
But if you could try!!
Try to let each new taste be new;
Bite into uncharted territory
Maybe close your eyes to wipe clean 
the memory of your first sunrise, first kiss
And not return to the familiar
expectations of golden explosions.
Instead invite an introduction to darkness 
imagine yourself in the depths of a cave
Let your lungs expand in utter darkness 
like a flock of morning birds
flapping their wet wings, rising in sound
startled by the first gust of morning air.
If you could let your heart feel the weight 
of the possibility of something unknown,
and unmistakably beyond desire.
If you you could pretend that you never knew 
pleasure or even the glory of confections, 
the taste of sweetness, the satisfaction of delight
so that when it comes it could be a new
discovery all over again, would you?

Bank / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

What does it hold, 
the sky’s old gray  
belly, other than its store 
of stems and violence? Some 
thing rides toward us—mount, 
mountain, mounting. Grumble 
of Huns, their cavalry speed hard 
to perceive. The backwards of when 
in an airplane, caught in the warp of up. 
Gravity, they say mucks with time—the farther 
from core, the faster matters pass the temporal plane. 
That’s why the satellites tick thinner minutes. 
How quick I know you grow
the increased distance. 

This Poem Is a Zine / Yvette Perry

There’s no “I” in poem
The Masters decided long ago
what rules there’d be like where to
break the lines, 
what words should rhyme.
They detached feet designed for dancing
and made them into
mathematical formulae, attached prefixes
like penta- and hexa- making
mockery of beating hearts
There is no room for me here

There is an “I” in zine
I make and 
break rules as I please
I transform blank paper to possibilities
I type, I write, I paint, I draw, I glue 
I cut a slit 
partly down the paper’s center, 
fold several times this way and that, 
make a little booklet that I give to you 
This zine is so full of I
and like I, imperfect—
yet still can dance 

Refracted / Amber Wei

So tell me when you have mercy
and the night is an oblong hue
and the shade no longer covers
what warm unspoken sadness
exists where shapes have no figure
only to be called unidirectional
so what is misfigured
is rather scattered
and I yearn for you to hold the
prism of light
to allow all sadness to enter
to allow the nighttime to exit as blue

The Two Ladies of Provence, Part III  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 24

Absence / Presence / Yael Aldana

The truth is that we are never touching
anything. There are always atoms
vibrating in between
fingers and fur
elbows and couch
shoe and foot.
Nothing is solid, only vibrating
Closer or farther.
My brain doesn’t know this
as I touch the small black
paw of a smaller than usual
cat that used live  beneath
my shed.
Where does the sensation
come from of impossible
softness? She doesn’t know
as she lays against me. She
doesn’t know that this warm
feeling of her tiny body against
my arm are atoms shimming
this was rather than that way.
I don’t know this either as I kiss
her small head and she doesn’t
move, stays stock still, fur all
shiny velvet, just the trick
of light at the back of my eyes
reversed.

I make my best attempts in the dark / Catherine Bai

my hands surprise me like a wolf
my mother told me about

a man swivelled his head
and got his throat torn out

when you walk down a road at night
keep your gaze on the ground

someone taps you on the shoulder
check for fur, check for claws

Drawing a Circle on the Eve of a New Year / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

I was born on the eve of a hurricane
with the ocean in my skull,
seawater trapped between brain
and bone. I was born soundless
and unwilling, a wave breaking
over my mother’s body, born
into a house always shuttered
against some unnamed storm.
Now, on the eve of my birthday,
I am drawing a circle.
I wrap myself in a bird’s thin wing,
drink milk fat with unspent rage,
curl into a whorled shell, a question,
crest of a breaking wave.
I have always been moving
from one place to another.
See? Listen to my heartbeat.
I am still running, running
trying to find my way home,
beating down locked doors,
knocking on broken windows.
See my hands? I am folding
the years into paper boats,
tying words together like rafts
with graying thread spun
from the feathers of seabirds,
one letter tied to the next until
every last word has been said.

Balut / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

I soft-boiled  
eggs this morning,  
sat them in cups, cracked  
the tops, and daydreamed 
they were balut. Oh the fruit  
of a body, that rich soup made  
stirring an unborn, amniotic  
duck. Everything you touch  
so soft—no hard beak, no  
peaked feathers, sun of  
yolk in its tethers. 
I dream of it 
forever. 

Humble Bragging (after Nikki Giovanni) / Yvette Perry

I was born in the fall of the first dawn.
I taught teens to sit quietly, calmly
as milk and sugar were poured on their heads
and sputum flung at their faces and feet.
I spun Sunday-best three-piece suits and white
cotton dresses from DNA of seals,
then garbed my parents and children in them.
No fire hose water will pierce their skin.
I sat beside Martin in the jail cell,
slipped through the bars, the words he’d written sewn
into the lining of both of my lungs:
…moral means can’t save immoral ends… The
world heard. I can’t fly like birds in the sky,
but I am resourceful, I’ve learned to glide.

Return Trip is Necessary / Amber Wei

I wondered if humanity was ready to see the
open wound who on the heart was
a coal-fired muse

the tear talker anguish within
concealed by the setting sun doubly hidden
by the midnight gleam

Cry on me yet my clothes don’t abide by
earthly rules
they are tainted by grief grown twice
while I let the flowers bleed

Until they dried the atoms who recede
atomic being larger than the trees
that drought

Dry reality causal
unto the point where desperation riddled
by the voices become
utmost bear

In anguish my hands hold
the home of the world
because the pieces are larger than
the soul that tried to complete the puzzle

Erosion beat upon dust
that larger became the mountainous terrain
which deer tried to climb
only to teach the audacious traveler
that twice up the path
was not enough to teach him
how to come down,
returning to the path from which it started

The Two Ladies of Provence, Part II  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 23

Some words = Roman Catholic / Yael Aldana

Mantle in blue
Palms outstretched
Ave
Ave Maria
Blood on the feet
Hands clasped
Silver Rosary beads
Blood on the cross
The Wafer
Hands beckoning
Hands cradling the heart
The heart
Wine
the sacred heart
Blood
Fire
Blood

I made a painting once of a girl whose heart was outside
her chest, pierced with arrows, with Alizarin Crimson blood.
My art teacher asked
Are you Roman Catholic?
I said,
Yes.

A child is just your grief in slow motion / Catherine Bai

A kid passes in front of me, holding hands with his mom
then runs back alone, just to blow a kiss
to his friend. It is so sweet, 
I want to put it in my mouth like a peach pit
the taste makes me think of fireflies 
we used to catch and release
on summer nights after making out
and touching our private parts
like the back of your earlobe, the bottom lashes of my eye
which bend like siblings in mournful prayer.

It’s obscene
the way you caress my kidneys
our baby will squish every organ in my body
and it won’t be tender
Still, their little fingers will snatch every kiss we’ve flown
into the ether, place them in a gentle heap
like so many offerings
sweetly rotting at the altar.

Tomorrow / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

In the year of flood
and slow-growing vine

in the hour of frogsong
and giant snail,

in the owl shriek
gathering cloud

and sudden dark
in the rustle of bois cano

and sweep of batwing
tomorrow seeps in

through cracked louvre
and crumbling brick

all the things we didn’t think
would happen in our time

in this year, still
wide open, still drifting

like algae, thick as silence
tomorrow, smelling of iron

waiting in trees
beyond the window

branches cracking beneath
unseen weight of time

i am prompt / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

to the door.       yes 
every morning.      see my feet? 
see me unsheathe?     i know      u 
like the beans.     i like 
ur breathing.              slow. 
deep.     i    know   when you stop 
sleep.     see?   i     wait 
to speak.   u taught me    speak 
remember?    i member 
when u used to    leave 
the door       ajar.     i liked 
ur wiggling.      the dark.      so neat. 
wish i could repeat. 
ready for that treat.           please 
I could be so good      if    u 
just         yes       let 
the      door 

Corn / Yvette Perry

I’m going through the checklist with her (Medicare card, prescription list…), ask
if she wants to take a jacket, it’s not supposed to warm up until the afternoon.
Picking out shoes takes longer than I’d imagined: these ones make her feet hurt, 
and these (that we bought her last Christmas) are too heavy…make her feel 
like she’ll trip, this pair won’t match the pocketbook she plans to take.

I put the walker in the back and help buckle her in the seat.
I slow down a block away for yellow lights and take right turns with my foot on the brakes. 
We pass a corner where an automatic car wash used to be Red Lobster, and a football field 
expanse of concrete, weeds sprouting from jagged open scars, that used to be Sears.
She has a memory for each corner and lot, the only thing keeping their former selves alive.
She sees a mint green Caddie and is reminded of the car she and her husband and their 
friends from Ft. Lewis drove to Las Vegas. The car broke down an hour away from the strip. 

We pull up, the valet attendant greets her by name, compliments her outfit.
Inside the lobby the registration clerk asks how her grandchildren are doing in college.
Once in the room, the nurse she likes calls her by her first name. 
She doesn’t flinch as she usually does.
The doctor comes in and cradles her left foot, then uses a scalpel to gently scrape the hardened center of a penny sized skin deposit on the pad of her
big toe.
We’re headed back to the lobby exactly three minutes and 22 seconds later. 
I’m buckling her back in the car about 10 minutes after that.

Twenty-eight minutes later, we are pulling into the garage.
As I’m guiding her from the front seat, I think I hear it whispered softly, but I’m not sure.
I head to the trunk to get the walker out as she makes her way inside the house.
Yes, I decide. I definitely heard it: thank you.

Deer / Amber Wei

Was there breath on my shoulder
when you entered
for he was already there
when the starlight cast a gleam on his shadow
only to find that he was a meandering hare
So hop and scamper away
to the place where nobody can find
so that flashlights can only find brush in a forest
and the moonlight’s gleam only meets dust
there is irrevocable honor
in presence
and somehow, my gaze
meets that of yours
to tell the shadows to stop moving
So I can capture a glimpse of the future that is ours

 
Deadvlei – Conclusion / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 22

When I am 72 / Yael Aldana

I would go to the beach in my gold string bikini
My breasts slung slack in golden triangular
hammocks
I wonder who would police me?
You?
I would carry my fawn-colored Pekinese
Trained to nip at people if they get to close
I would go to hot yoga in my daughter’s used
Lululemons, that she would beg me to throw
away, that I would darn and repair when they
fray open at the seams. I would say, they
are still good. I would drive my blue Prius V
my back curved around the steering wheel
like a C. I would go to the Trader Joe’s
and ask for the star fruit they had last month,
squeeze the avocados too much, ask my
favorite employee about the star fruit.
I would call him Joe, not noticing his
name tag says James. I would drive home
fast in my blue Prius V, letting all
who want to, cut me off in traffic.

Centos are strange and difficult / Catherine Bai

I looked beneath my fingernails and found it there
magnificent pubes
the baby alligators behind our snaking road
I threw up in their mouths and they swallowed
I do whatever the light tells me to
oh how dark
his strange, mysterious babble
it’s like a spiral—we never get any closer
the long and short of our fiction

god of small beasts / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

occupy me                 like an anthill’s belly             take the broken bread

crumbling altar           ruined house              of my body

enter this room           twice cracked             earth poured    mended with need     

god of mortar              among             the overlooked things                                    find me

I have flown                            backward       through this door                   so many times

I have grown                           wordless and full                   

I have been enough.

rain, come                   let water quicken                    down the quiet paths

and                  make me clay                         make me paper           make me something

that remembers          

                                                            make me something new

for I am heavy                                    I have forgotten so much

I move blindly            toward the gasp                                 of blood and sugar

find me                        one lost                                   among             a hundred wings

God find me                                        for I am a swarm

XXII / Kendra Brooks

A late summer bloom taunts the bees
while restless birch bark sheds and peels, 
and silvery stones shine up into dusk.
Garden birds hide down by the pond, 
perched snuggly, their fears squeak in shriller tones
from the highest branches of the moulting trees.
But their warning is no more than a protest.
October advances and the moon kneels down.
Toppling corn fields bow. Overripe apples drop.
The clock’s hands turn back but do not stop.
And soon enough November will claim its time. 
Word is sent by clever crows; daylight shrinks, 
And the early night grows. Winter stands waiting 
at the end of the path as the race of the seasons 
stumbles past, soon December will take the lead
blasting its wrath into a glaring sunrise 
reflected on the frost of the leaning grass.

Stupid Human Tricks / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Each year we had to come up with something 
for bonfire night at the annual missionary kids’ 
camp. Luckily, most of what I can do is strange— 
walk on stilts, burp on command, pop my shoulder 
socket. I can, without practice, arch into a backbend.  
Last year a class of students didn’t believe me, so  
I showed them. I’m weirdly good at cracking finger joints— 
can usually hit forty with odd twists of the phalanges. 
I know nearly a dozen patterns for balloon animals, 
can inflate some large-diameter bubblegum. I’m good  
at tolerating inhuman levels of capsaicin. I can recite  
all U.S. presidents, states, and English prepositions 
to the tunes of various songs. I’ve also memorized 
some fifty verses of the book of John, all of Psalm 91. 
I punish my opponents in mini golf and foosball. 
There was something healing, those nights, parading 
our surprises in the firelight. I think about us scattered 
across countries and continents, flexing these strange 
talents, finding random ways of making sense. 

Throw Rug Dinosaur / Yvette Perry

“A question trembles in the silence: why did this remarkable thing happen to this perfectly ordinary man? It may not matter why the world shifted so drastically for him. Existence is slippery at the best of times… He’s one of us: a man determined to prevail in the world that was and the world that is—or the world that will be.”

~“Wordplay,” The Twilight Zone, 1985

My table lamping of the situation has shifted:
It’s not everyone else; it’s me.
I have moved through 
time, 
but not in the same timeyarn as the rest of
the pomegranate.
I sit at my sky and eat my dinosaur, 
one ankle listening to a podcast with words I do not table lamp,
and the other ankle to my colleagues who are laughing, in on a 
private spoon that may be about me 
or about some engine else entirely.
I cannot know.

When did I first notice the shift?
It was little engines at first—
a common word just out of my moonlight, on the tip of my spear;
new internet butter that I had to Wiggle or ask my trees what it meant…
Engines like that.
But it has gotten worse. 

 Tomorrow will be the five-year throw rug of your leaving.
We won’t grow old together, like we’d expanded.
                                    I don’t have you

                                                      to help me table lamp a pomegranate that 
                                                                        considers me already disappeared.

Regress / Amber Wei

Why were you speedily walking?
Were you trying to get somewhere?
or was the destination itself quickened by your pace
So that it seemed like the earth inched a bit further
and left some footsteps behind
But really, you are not moving
and everything is gaining together,
speed
so that one minute becomes an hour
and one moment,
an eternity
I am losing time
but time is losing hours
so we move ahead
only to come back to
exactly from which we came

 استمع إلى غنائها  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

Hops, light-winged across the rubble.
I hear her chirp—she skips and smiles:
Al Jazeera plays her voice
un-smothered by dust— the girl, now Insta-
grammed. Each burst of song is water
underground. Unstoppable
semitic drift—her glottal stops
take root in change, will root the rubble.
Hear her chirp—if words could water
hope—at the refugee camp, she smiles
like one who counts her blessings in Insta-
breaths of dirge or prayer. And if voice
where purged of fear, hers would be voice
as chirrup, warble, unstoppable
across the feathered space, now Insta-
grammed to drown the thud of rubble—
Hear her speak—she sings and smiles
each verb a pebble skimming the water. […]

September - Poem 21

Waiting / Yael Aldana

Hands intertwined behind the back, waiting,
Egg white pleated skirt dusting your knees, waiting,
Looking slightly bow-legged in brown flat shoes, waiting,
Scarlet red ring around your sweater at your wrists, waiting,
Sitting in a scarlet couch at the mall, waiting,
Dressed head to toe in pink, waiting,
Standing behind the woman in the lilac hat, waiting,
Standing with a fake red hibiscus in your hair, waiting,
Standing with your pen poised, the waitress, waiting,
Sitting on the gym floor, eleven years old, in green shorts, waiting,
Sitting by the white bed, hospital monitors humming, waiting
for your life to slip past me out the door, waiting.

Your body knows things you never could / Catherine Bai

Not everything needs to be seen
by the love of your life
just because they want to kiss you
doesn’t mean they want to squint into your uterine lining
and look for that one fragile, fading 
memory. You know the one—
I didn’t say you couldn’t show them everything
you would never say aloud to your mother
who would’ve loved you anyway, except
you couldn’t be that good, ever.
Yeah, I said it
’cause I’m that way too
the leaking yawn of your mouth 
looks so stupid now
but it was celestial, when you couldn’t imagine learning
that one day everyone you know will die
and so will everyone you didn’t know
who died anyway.
Picture the pomegranate tree 
in my neighbor’s front yard
they’re not red but green, but I bet you thought of the fruit
ripe and heaving, with scars on the skin
that someone made when the branch was still an embryo
the dark traffic swimming
in the pale, boney pip.

Returning Ashes / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

Touch this blade. This leaf.
This water. Cleanse yourself of
the dust and smoke I leave behind.
I return home in the ash-gray
footprints of mourning children,
of wives past and present who never
speak to each other except to pray.
I return in the dark spaces between
this year and seven decades gone,
each memory a thinning space
between splayed fingers on
a child’s scalp. Anoint yourself
before you enter my house for the last time,
once for the child you carry,
the one I will never meet, and again
so that you might forgive me.

XX:  / Kendra Brooks

Tr
ee
ss
tanding still,
tell.
ing
ea
ch other
how
it’s done.
In slant rhyme,
end rhyme,
and inky couplets
scrawled on
The
ir
pap
er so
uls

White Coat Syndrome / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

I’ve always had it—dragged through the dark 
halls of hospitals after hours, the behind-the-scenes 
treatment of growing up in a doctor’s family. Back 
then when it was time for shots, I’d bite Dad’s arm 
and run away. The only fun was x-rays, calming 
lead bib, the inside-out shadow world of bones  
and cartilage. I behave somewhat better now  
that my doc isn’t my parent, that it’s someone 
who changes every few years, switches clinics.  
My brain thinks I’m being enormously brave— 
voluntary boosters and well-womans. No pens 
in the top pocket, he taps a tablet, gets our visits  
over quickly, updates the medical portal, re-ups my  
birth control, weighs my risks, my milage in basic  
questions and measurements. I find most times 
I’ve hardly been touched. So why does the pressure 
always go up—so much that now I have to check 
at home, upload the results of the pinching cuff. 
I don’t know why, but I wish he knew I liked poetry, 
that the right questions might get a family history. 

Peace (Be Not Still) / Yvette Perry

People, a tempest is raging—
Tempest of would-be despots and 
tumult of their clattering kind
They’ve convinced you it’s good to
stay sleeping
Can you see?
The universe is agnostic, not moral, and 
if there is an arc it surely will break
before it bends
Justice will be the fairy tale you tell your 
grandchildren when you tuck them
under their comforters at night
Are you dozing?
You sing of the stillness of peace,
but peace is not tranquil
A strong peace is forever agitating
A lasting peace is not the default,
and takes harmonized hands and feet
to achieve and to maintain 
A true peace can be as wrathful as the
winds and waves that seek to destroy it
Are we ready?

(21 September is the International Day of Peace. The 2025 theme is Act Now for a Peaceful World)

Brighter Lights / Amber Wei

You were stronger when the earth was
circular and brighter than the sun
who called my name

Yet the daylight burns bright
the treasure, that lost is the secret garden
blooms is the soul that keeps

Find that the earth changes
but not its revolution on the axis of tilt

Deepen it inside me
and forget that it was lost
once
for pastures to bloom in the wilderness of
evermore      

Deadvlei, Part 9  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 20

Waiting to be Waylaid / Yael Aldana

Although,
I am a good waylayer
My intentions
are straight
true
I wait to be waylaid
But might do the waylaying
One or two
do the waylaying
physically capable?
emotionally.
capable?
Maybe
Who knows?
Emotional
Questionable
physically
Perhaps
Who is waylaid
and waylaying?

I stand still and nothing happens / Catherine Bai

I plan my friendships two years in advance
I want a painter to move into the casita next door
and teach me how to look for beetles
I write my best lines while rubbing my pussy
sometimes I don’t do it with my hand
I just imagine I am
and then I come
into my own, which means absolutely nothing
I want to flirt with Trotsky like Frida did
and then they probably fucked
because she was so beautiful
I scoop up spiders in my hands
and put them in sleepy corners of the house
like the dry part of my kitchen sink
and the empty flower pot
all I want in life is to find somewhere to put all this pain
and pleasure
it’s worth having every gorgeous tryst you can
no matter how calamitous
I don’t want to die with my feet in your hands
I want them to scrunch up and turn into lotuses
that wilt in a resplendent, muddy river

Mater Dolorosa / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

I am a monastery with all the lights on.

Turn off the lights. I reappear before yo
limping, feral and brave.

The clock ticks, shades go down.
I return to you much older than before.

I am the charred side of the mountain.

Close the door behind you, I will wait.
I will line my eyes and paint my lips
like an offering, shard of smashed window
glory that was.

I am an empty church.

You used to come here to pray
now you barely recognize me.

(I have been through the night, I understand.)

Set me down here, I will spin you a fine web.
I am a necklace of small moons, a pyre
learning to burn alone.

I will burn for you. Set me down here,
I will ask no questions.

XX: / Kendra Brooks

September
Is starting to float away
Like soapy bubble
Rising out over 
The incoming tide
On a last chance to hit the beach
Before October
Stumbles up behind us
And obliterates summer
With its wooden club
Of early darkness

One Art / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

I was visiting my grandmother, 
a delicious summer back in Chiang Mai. 
I’d always liked playing tourist at the night bazaar, 
amusing locals with my white face and language  
skills, haggling for discount souvenirs to take to friends  
in the States. One place painted clay into the tiniest fruit 
baskets. Another stall had little ridged-back frogs 
the drag of a stick would make ribbit. You could sit 
for caricatures or charcoal portraits, buy a heap  
of toasted crickets in crackling snaps of kaffir leaf, 
let tanks of minnows nibble callouses off your feet.
I thought I’d seen it all before, but there was a cart 
of new art—bits of buffalo leather molded 
into rose-shaped rings. I wanted one dearly. 
The sellers, of course, can tell—a carelessly long  
stare and I was done for. Still, she and I argued 
back-and-forth. I pressed, demanded calculations,  
add-ins, threatened, classically, to walk. 
She didn’t give in to my party-trick talk, saw 
my nana loaded with bags of other purchases—spun   
string lights, foldable lanterns, pinned moths. 
She wouldn’t budge, hit me with “Look at yourself; 
what is it to you, fifty baht?” It was rude, but true. 
The sting of her attitude. The way she got me to buy two. 

UnPuzzled / Yvette Perry

1.

I am no longer
accepting false fit. This time:
perfect match only.

2.

Strategy: start with
edges and corners. But my
center’s still empty.

3. 

I found a piece that had 
fallen to the floor, missing for
years…decades, even.

4. 

This is not child’s play.
I don’t have much time left to
find missing pieces.

5.

Once put together
will I look at all like the 
picture on my box?

Flew / Amber Wei

The eastern tiger swallowtail blew the
wind away
freedom longing for a
brighter breeze
among the summer
it wandered
until grass met the trees
the leaves without dew
from the night
the swallowtail drifted away
until pleasure became
the vicissitudes of life
and why was it so free
to become camouflaged
among green
when the black swallowtail came,
it changed season itself
as it found grass to be
hidden among rocks
and suddenly it approached
the creek
and it was summer, again

Deadvlei, Part 8  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 19

A Small life / Yael Aldana

Didn’t my mother live a small life?
wasn’t she just a housewife? Even
after She divorced the husband?
Besides, she’s wasn’t even my real
mother.
You spell out
ADOPTED
so I understand
a fake mother
but we looked like each other
both brown skinned and hawk-eyed.
you never saw her sweep into a room,
with her Alfred Dunner dress
both haughty and humble.
you too would fall
charmed.
you too would run up to her
ask, Ms Clarke would
some petite fours?
watch her not screw up her face
because they were bland and dry.

she was all I knew, her soft cheek
her long black hair,
until there was another mother.
who didn’t matter because she
wasn’t there.
you wouldn’t see her take off
the Alfred Dunner dress and lay it
just so, to air for twelve hours.
You wouldn’t hear her ask me to bring
her the leftover chicken wings because
she was starving. you wouldn’t hear her
say that the food was terrible, but the
people were nice, and if asked she would
go again.

The Nightmare / Catherine Bai

My father dreamt that he was bearing me 
on his back, up a steep hill that flattened 
only after waking. He said it wasn’t a nightmare, exactly,
but it was for me. I wanted to understand 
how he could find it in him to carry 
two hundred pounds, when we were both weary 
and asleep. 

As he spoke, I could feel his phantom 
sweat, the tremulous
ache of his shoulders, 
the burning calves. 
What I couldn’t imagine
was why he had carried me at all
the thick dangers lurking 
at the bottom, the certain threats to my life.
It’s no wonder most dreams begin
in the middle—
the question of why irrelevant,
incidental
when you consider the whole plot of the thing
the long and short of our fiction, it’s easy to see
it’s only love 
that makes the tale complete.

Toco / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

Objects lost at sea do not come right back to shore.
It turns out, dry land has a weak hold on us after all
in spite of our feet and lungs. The secret life
of sunken things must unravel like blue thread
a ribbon of current, a sonar spiral, spooling round
and round till it is finished.

XIX: Villanelle / Kendra Brooks

Trees are line dancing down by the lake
Ash, elm, birches and maple, especially the pines
Branches bend gently as they shimmy and shake

The wind is rising, the leaves are wide awake
It’s late autumn, colors are changing their color design
As the trees are line dancing down by the lake

Abscission is stirring, the trees know what’s at stake
The changing wind is a warning it’s a new season in time
The branches bending gently as they shimmy and shake

Nests stand empty, birds have flown to follow their fate
Ash, elm, birches, maples, and pines all moving in kind
The trees are line dancing down by the lake

Soon leaf, fruit, and flower, the trees will forsake 
Petioles hold strong in the wind, but the trees can’t deny
their branches bending gently as they shimmy and shake

The winds of change ask, and the trees make no mistake
There are decisions to be made we all know the signs
As the trees continue line dancing down by the lake
Their branches bending gently as they shimmy and shake

Redolence  / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Sans skunk hours 
    the neighborhood 
         can smell so good: 
         stony concrete bake, 
    the sprinklers’ arcs 
of petrichor, heady 
thread of charcoal. 
    I’m always listing 
         toward the garlic 
         of a certain street. 
    Bless that pestle, 
the seared steel pan  
nestling its smoke. 
    I take a slow-poke 
         pace around the lake, 
         loamy, dank, and homey. 

Confrontational Clichés / Yvette Perry

They say there’s no fury hotter than what Hell hath.
I say: Hold my gin and tonic. 

Watch while I write a sternly worded, half-star review.
Listen to the rant I’ll post that’ll receive 2.3K likes in its first four days.
Feel the daggers I shoot into your sternum from my pointed finger.
This isn’t my first rodeo: 
I have God and both local police and 
the manager on speed dial.
I am not to be trifled with.

Why yes, actually, I do have time today.
I tried to ask you nicely: I don’t recognize 
you/your car/your kid/your dog.
You are trespassing in this neighborhood.
And, no. My name’s not Karen and I
don’t care to tell you what is.
I am a Taxpayer and a Citizen, 
is all you need to know.

Oh, there you go, 
playing the race card.
My Irish ancestors were slaves, too. 
I did the 33 and me.
And one of my best friends from yoga class
is an African American woman.
I don’t see color. 
I’m deeply offended and hurt.

Watch while I begin to weep.
My flowing tears are louder than an atomic bomb
and twice as deadly.
Their salty sweetness will bend on-lookers to my will
and leave you without a leg to stand on.

You say karma’s gonna get me?
I say: Karma has bit off more than she can chew 
if she tries to mess with me.

Learner / Amber Wei

Education is the means upon which I breathe
then why is it that I haven’t learned anything
Are we adept in the experiences that scream life?
teach me more
until hunger becomes a weakened body
that feeling of insatiable pursuits
I lie flat in a 2D plane
because the third dimension wandered
and stood still
while life climbed higher
when the roots were broken
because the soil that gave me life by mind
disappointed life by living
that each day was too much a breath
to know that education was learning
concealed to know that a milestone is
unraveled not knowing where your footsteps once tread

Deadvlei, Part 7  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 18

Love’s Lonely Auspices / Yael Aldanas

I picture my mother in heaven, about to sip a from a tiny cup of tea with a raspberry floating. She has an appointment to wander through a field of Christmas candles later, gossip with her friends over tepid coffee. I wonder how she reacts when I sent the message, I need you, please help. I don’t call on her often, only when I really need her. I assume she is busy. I wonder if she sighs, puts her tea aside with a clatter. I wonder if she can be there and with me at the same time, if she waves her spirit arms to clear scales from my eyes, so I can see what is in front of me. I wonder if she whispers my name with golden angel breath to someone who can help. I know that before she leaves to her field of flowers she stops and watches her grandson sleeping, the boy with her face, with the one curl in the middle of his head. I know she tells him he’s the king of all he sees, that he is not a boy but The Boy, her boy, before she returns to her field of flowers.

Where are you really from? / Catherine Bai

You asked me where I was from
and I pointed at the moon and made bunny ears
You asked again, no, where are you really from
and I said I already told you! but maybe you'd believe me
if you turned into that little black garden snake 
hissing by your ankle
and made friends with a turtle by the lake
You shook your head and said I'm talking about your nationality
and I said I already told you twice! and I told him again
in the dialect of my father's village
in the language my mother learned
in the other language her father spoke,
when he was abandoned in the south 
and raised by wolves, who never told him where they heard 
his strange, mysterious babble

You see, I'm Polish, he said, his patience
startling and clear. I would never do this out loud
but I smiled—
my tender, pitying heart
my tangled roots, the creeping rhizomes
I didn't want to be crude
and point at his mother's vagina
One day you'll return to the soil and realize
oh how dark
what a mess
Where am I from? I asked, desperate

            the earth never says

Ortoire/ Nariva / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

My mother will not leave
the parked car, not even to stand
at the sea wall’s edge. Dark water groans
against worn rock. It calls out to her,
she says. Deep water always has.
I lean out the window, face in the wind.
To me, the waves say nothing.
People ask “You live on an island.
Why you can’t swim?”
See, communion with the tide
is a difficult science. All the bodies
in the heavens will have their turn
pulling the nets
and the course never stays
the same: mad Atlantic
two blind rivers,
ground gives way again and again.

Ortoire/ Nariva / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

My mother will not leave
the parked car, not even to stand
at the sea wall’s edge. Dark water groans
against worn rock. It calls out to her,
she says. Deep water always has.
I lean out the window, face in the wind.
To me, the waves say nothing.

People ask “You live on an island.
Why you can’t swim?”

See, communion with the tide
is a difficult science. All the bodies
in the heavens will have their turn
pulling the nets
and the course never stays
the same: mad Atlantic
two blind rivers,
ground gives way again and again.

Parable of the Pallets / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

I’ve been told fruit at chain stores is bought 
from large farm batches strapped to pallets, 
that it’s someone’s job to check for quality. 
I imagine a quick stab and slice by pocketknife,  
a taste-tester’s chin dripping at the sale. 

Chances are, oranges from a single crate made 
it here from the same orchard, but when I pry 
the white interstices of four sibling orbs,  
flay and impale their little cubicle meats, 

each one is entirely unique. One is sour as sin, 
half-turned to ferment. Another, fibers stiff 
as a grapefruit or pomelo. Next, the bitterest. 

I palm the last, caress its pores. No one knows 
where home is anymore.

Bomb Fragments / Yvette Perry

I need to tell you
something I just remembered 
I know it’s late

(or rather, it’s early)
There’s a picture, remember,
of us together

You were six, seven,
your sister was a toddler
I think it was spring—

April? Had to be
It would have been afternoon
I remember the

low bent of the sun
In the picture, you’re squinting,
wearing a green dress

We had driven down
that morning, six-hour trip, 
left at four AM

(I remember that
part specifically) and 
you were excited

that you got to ride 
in the car in your PJs
with Winnie the Pooh

You slept the whole way
Your grandfather was driving,
me, you, your sister

were in the back seat,
your grandmother in the front,
our bags in the trunk

It was just us five
And that’s what I had to tell
you: it was just us

Years ago, you asked 
me and I said Daddy was
taking the picture

But no, wouldn’t have 
been enough room in the car
Daddy wasn’t there

We got a nice man
who we’d met standing in line
to take our picture

Daddy wasn’t there,
stayed home, had to work (or, so 
he claimed at the time)

Anyway, I just
remembered about that and 
needed to tell you

Give me a call back
when you wake up and get this
message, love you, bye

Combustible / Amber Wei

An explosion of feeling
tempered by madness of regret
transitory suggestions,
neglected
for hands hold no arduous
personality to be soiled, by
perception
And instead, there is rust in the
breaks that find pedals
moving to become immobile
And suddenly we stop
Halted by the ability to halt,
itself

And we stop knowing we can
when the explosion of feeling
never cared

picking plums in her orchard / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 17

Fulcrum / Yael Aldana

A forward sway, a retraction
a teetering, over before almost,
at line opposite of before
a fulcrum
I tact the round cheek of a girl
in the oval of my mind, the fine
curve of the cheek to lip, like
fine sand stopped in an hour
glass, to pool in my mind’s
open bowl.

I wept / Catherine Bai

I-wept

Vervine Tea / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

You were expecting something beautiful,
forgetting how easily small flowers bruise.
It’s true, nothing looks the same once it has been broken.
You strip the stalk beneath cool running water,
thank the roots, rub dirt from mottled leaves.

You bring leaves to a rolling boil until water blooms
until the kitchen is thick with green ghosts.
Much as you ache, no grandmother appears to anoint head
and bind hips. You sit alone in the rising steam, leaking rivers.
The sea has ebbed now, and you are only clay and salt.

Steep yourself in silence. No murmured prayers
stir the air, only the soft hum of your breath.
Fear kneels beside you like a midwife,
tending each hour, each fraying strand of pain. 

The baby sleeps against the hot lightning of your chest
fascia and bone flaring, your core a cavern echoing
currents of blood and loss. His breathing echoes in the dark.
Alone, you oil the silvering fault lines of your belly,
murmur prayers to a god who has been torn, same as you.

XVII:  / Kendra Brooks

Upon average
One poet dies 
Every day.
Somewhere 
In the world
Right now a poet
Is facing death.

A poet died 
yesterday.
I read his poems
More out of curiosity
Than sympathy, I confess.
Including a self-portrait 
In 5 parts, each framed in regret.

It’s likely I never would have read
A single poem of his had he lived 
Or was alive today. 
Unlike poets, poetry endures
As the trees in winter 
Find new life in the spring.

I’d like to imagine, 
With a little more luck, 
One of his poems 
Might have found me
Before he was struck.
Now his death 
Has secured that fate.

When was the summer I turned pretty?  / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Or did I? 
There was no sudden strike of longing returned— 
only, it seemed, an endless paging through fantasies, 
novels smuggled, dimmed flashlight under the covers. 
What would it mean to be wholly in the dream’s triangle, 
tangled in a wallpaper’s cerulean stems and ocean 
weeds? I think I could feel home in someone else’s 
beach house. I could flit between brothers, ruin a few 
Christmases, ghost my mom in Paris. I am, I admit, 
one of the million millennial women waiting for Belly 
to make the right decisions. Funny, the high school 
interns I work with like to debate, see scenes differently. 
We're just looking from opposite ends at fate. My young 
coworker asks if I know the ending. Her eyes dance 
with revelation, long dark curls, that little slump in her  
shoulders from getting tall over this recent summer. 
She’ll never see it coming, her turn, that corner. 

Constitutional Crises / Yvette Perry

Article I. Section 2.

“Three minutes,”the anonymous caller said. I imagine the organist playing perfect 
Fifths while the Girls help each other with their sashes and bows, smiling in the mirror 
Of the basement bathroom. I imagine them singing along with the chords, lyrics
All memorized from hearing the choir sing them Sundays. I imagine the
Other worshipers climbing the steps, entering through the church doors. Other
Persons, then unknown, had already been there, installing hate beneath the steps.

Article I. Section 9.

The reverie of my fantasy shatters like the stained glass. I marinate, instead, on the Great
Migration: masses of people exchanging known dangers for new ones, 
Or escaping to North and West at the urging of those who had gone before them.
Importation of rituals, music, dreams provide a sense of warmth despite the cold 
Of the weather and/or of the reception they receive. Who can say if they will thrive in 
Such climes as these?  Hard work might not always be sufficient. Integration, when other 
Persons do not think proper to admit them, might always be a gamble.

Article VI.

Shall I continue to think about rotted promises and dreams destroyed? I may
Be, myself, rotted and destroyed,
Bound by proof of history to question the viability of democracy,
By proof of history to distrust the
Oath to the Blessings of Liberty the Constitution demands,
Or I may be required to ratify this history as
Affirmation that Overcome, for We, shall someday never be.

Ancient Time / Amber Wei

Breathing finds it hard
to be still
when air is flight in cruising altitude
transitory
so ripples in oblong heights
shifts the barometer’s measure
of the morrow’s weather
so the breath is sucked in refuge
caged by prediction
and the sundial has no direct feedback from the sun
for shade has occluded sensation
to be able to feel only what is lost
and for the rays to be missed
by the clouds

Deadvlei, Part 6  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 16

Twelve Years old / Yael Aldana

I dropped my purse under
the bleachers
of the traveling circus
Tammy’s lone white socked
foot hangs down
me under the bleachers
looking
shows me where
we were sitting
where the wayward purse
might be
where I’m going.

when I walk down the hill
to ride with Tammy to school
I think of mongooses
I see one run across the road
or maybe I imagined it
I don’t remember.

I go to Tammy’s house
to listen to her comedy record
Her mother is bathing her
fourteen-year-old brother with
Cerebral palsy on their back porch
that sits on the beach
His legs crossed
s blunted attempt
to hide his bare flesh.

His mother walks away
I don’t know where Tammy
is. I look towards the ocean
An eagle ray swims in the shallows
The tips of his wings break the surface
I don’t know if her brother sees
what I see.

Nights Before Lexapro / Catherine Bai

I was the incessant ringing of a telephone without the telephone, I was the glow of a computer screen without the computer, I was the impossible instant before a sound is made. When did I learn to turn pure potential into a steel trap, to make freedom into a fossil? When did I learn to lure the future into the very breath I’m breathing, to fish the past from the safety of having happened into the possibility of happening? I wish I could describe what dread is: the absence between the past and future that supersedes the present.

The Secret Life of Milkweed / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

Since we are speaking of plants, let me ask you about milkweed.
Last week, I brushed its leaves and a current tore through me
fingers to crown to soles and back again. I was barefoot in the dirt,
baby balanced on my hip. Was it the soil, some invisible chemistry
of burrowing creatures? Static in the charged dusk air? Or something else
a language I almost understood

I searched for it: tropical milkweed vibrating, magical properties of milkweed.
The internet offered only butterflies, wing-deep in thirst.
How do we know when something is magic? When it answers us back,
or when it leaves us even more hungry?

In the yard, buckets of animal dung ripen to soil.
Banana peels, eggshells steep in glass jars of rainwater.
Under the full moon I make rings of salt
for my loved ones to stand inside. I never told anyone this,
but when my son was new, I wanted to lick him clean
the way cats baptize their young
as if my body held the last true water.

By morning, the bucket of milkweed had toppled into mud.
Each stalk bent, waterlogged, the flowers gone slack.
I lift them, repack with soil, pour rice water,
lay down a bruised slice of fruit, a few strands of my own hair.
Maybe devotion is the only magic:
to keep touching what withers,
to keep coaxing green from what is already gone.

XVI  / Kendra Brooks

In the silvery morning air,
In the foggy, melting mist,
The spreading light is carrying
off the dread of last night’s emptiness
Being without you through the night
is not worse than finding you
gone in the morning
in this place where beauty lives!

Transference  / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

I have poet friends who bemoan that poems 
don’t use metaphors anymore, that metaphors 
are a dying breed. But really, sometimes 
I just don’t want to satisfy the verb to be. 
And anyway, what about all the other ways  
words are little vehicles? Linguists will back me. 
I remember reading George Lakoff’s seminal 
book. How he explained the profound conveyances  
prepositions make. The tenor of feeling  
you can express by saying you’re up or down. 
In English we’re spoiled with these little things 
linking the unending boxcars sentences are. 
Somewhere deep the brain still takes the dead 
trails of metaphors, my old prof Haj, a friend 
of Lakoff’s, used to claim. Haj died this past May. 
I never knew why we called him Haj. His given 
name was John. He, too, was a journey. 

Recipe / Yvette Perry

Do you remember when you tossed me
the egg and I moved aside instead of trying to catch it,

and that was not what the other girls did, so as a result
you knew you wanted me to be forever yours? How

young you then were, and how utterly uncomplicated,
to make a major life-long decision based on splattered

yolk and albumen and shattered shell. How 
foolish I’d be now to doubt the longevity of 

such straightforward discernment. And how lucky we are 
to hear echoes of our vows whenever we make a quiche.

Polygon of Light /Amber Wei

Wooded darkness, the light only reflects from
½ of the trees

Haunted hallowed truce
the panoramic expanse of geometry
forms a precipice
one step over I can breathe of another ledge
falling until legs meet another age of growth

Light protruding from the sentiments that birthed
a new aura of spoken geometrical aptitude
of angular hope

Fallen, I traverse the fields of diamond shards
and shelter pain from the grounded soil
fertile
of the memories only the light reflecting off the
dual sided branches

can penetrate the remaining
pieces of a melted patchwork heart

Deadvlei, Part 5  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 15

Blue Dressed Woman / Yael Aldana

There is a bar. We are there early
waiting
in semi-darkness, for a saccharine
band leader
so my son can set up and play
guitar, here,                  where
he’s too young to drink.
There is a woman, slight,
elf-sized,                      sloshing,
an overladen
mop.  She too is waterlogged,
weighted down, bent over,
pressed down,              the curve
of her back weighted,
pulled
downward
perhaps with life’s unkindness.
her dress swishes over her
calves, cobalt blue, polka dotted
with lively
cloud white flowers.
Fight back
I tell her.
a silent bubble in my
head,
                        Fight
back
When
she turns, I see a tiny

backpack looped over
her shoulders, jaunty
hope
                        promise.
Her mop chases our
feet. We raise them in
politeness.        She goes
leaving the floor sodden
glistening         moist.
Our eyes never
                         meet.

I’d rather be a poet saint and write devotional hymns all day / Catherine Bai

When Ammaiyar begged Shiva to release her 
from her beauty, and all worldly burdens
I was exhausted by my surrender
to the man who hailed me on the street
and I was exhausted by my dominion
over the hairs on my bathroom floor.

Give me total power
or give me none at all.

I think you have confused me for a girl
when, actually, I’m the pupil in your eye
I do whatever the light tells me to
and you accept the world like a mold
accepts its plaster, forgetting that I’ve nearly
obliterated myself, just to flail around 
in empty space. It’s exhausting to remember
that I’ll never ever be free, I can’t even
disappear, I can’t even fill up the earth,
when the distance to either pole
is the length of a cosmic universe.

Postcards Home / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

Postcards-Home

Dithyramb XV: for Jane Hirshfield / Kendra Brooks

To make sense of the world
First you must not get caught up in it
Avoid fads and trends and gossip
Instead find loose ends, grab on
And be willing to learn how things work
Together or apart
These connections help to make sense 
Refuse to bend anything to your will
Resist taking anything for granted
Instead, notice how flowers grow
How a single seed holds a universe  
Together and apart
See how the lopsided dandelion possesses 
The soul and courage of a rosebush
Observe animals and their ways
How a horse lowers its long head
To water when it drinks
Rabbits are born blind
And survive on trust and community
Try to hold humans accountable 
To the things that make sense
And question the incredulous acts
Together and apart
Follow any path that opens
Be ready to stumble and be afraid
Wisdom itself is still trying 
To make sense of the world

I’m supposed to write a poem about the beautiful unicorn / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

of long-time female friendship, but I just had dinner 
with two long-time friends, women I’ve shared  
houses, adventures, books, and embarrassments with,  
and something was different. We had sweet-potato soup 
I double-checked didn’t have gluten, let them know  
there were dairy pills for use. We sat too long  
with numb butts at the dining table, scooted to the couch.  
Our lives rhyme in similar arcs—parent retirement,  
work trials, medical specialist referrals, strange pains  
in the jaw, dreams about our teeth falling out. We used  
to tell ghost stories over campfires, cry, goad each other’s  
drunk texts, burn leftover wedding favors post-divorce.  
What force is it that keeps us in orbit? I read somewhere  \
if you’ve been friends for seven years you’ll be friends forever.  
Nothing about this body feels forever, and the new fears— 
so settled, sedate. After we ate and talked about our ailments,  
they told me thanks for hosting, but it was late. I said 
Thanks so much for coming all the way out here. It’s really far. 
Drive safe. It’s dark out here in the country. 

Diagramming Mrs. Dellmay / Yvette Perry

The message was already there when we arrived, en masse, from lunch. 
Someone had written on the chalk board, calling her the b-word in large, 
sloping, dusty block letters.

 It had to have been someone from the Regular class, not the Honors class that now occupied half the 30 neatly rowed desks. We sat giddy with nervous anticipation, awaiting her arrival from the office where she was probably running mimeographs.

She entered, 
greeted us, handed 
a stack of purplish-inked sheets 
to the first person, to be passed to the right and back. 
We were slow to huff our daily lesson, all eyes on her.

Finally, she turned, approached the board. Adjusting her glasses, she regarded the words. 
She picked up the chalk. 
She drew a straight line 
under her name (subject) and is (verb), 
then                        separated                            the two words with a 
short vertical line rising from the horizontal one.  
She inserted a c between the th of the last word and added a period at the end of the declarative sentence.

Turning to face us, 
she asked who could 
come up to the board 
to diagram a bitch.

Twice Removed from the Painting / Amber Wei

Bashful resonance replayed
unto the heart string’s nostalgia
no artwork can be the muse to which the
canvas is supplanted
the portrait is denied

For it was not enough 
to get into the fair
with two coins
so I took my flower
hoping to charm the essence into giving
what would have been twice the 
relationship renewed

And suddenly I felt life wasn’t enough to
have a night of aura
of hope lighting incense like a candle
and the blues subdued making its way
into a trickling soul, every verse where
it was leaving me
twice,

the pain 
twice
the drama

Subdued there lay no arch in which the flag
could reach the moon

and my companion became
Mona Lisa
Für Elise

the gifted virtuosos
without a creator
and with all but the breath upon
which souls were defined
could recreate as the entity one could
embody as their own

Deadvlei, Part 4  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 14

Mi Gente / Yael Aldana

My soul sparkles like stars. I was a nowhere girl with no past. pero mi sangre trae las pistas de mis orígenes (but, in my blood are the clues of my origins). I am driven, like a donkey running with her ass at the whip to find them. La mayoría de mi gente está muerta, pero puedo descubrir sus huesos (most of my people are dead, but I can discover their bones).

There is one that might still live. I want to find her before she passes from this world. If I am too late and she is lost to the ethers. I will be content to find those with her blood porque también es mi sangre (because it is also my blood).

I was too late. . .

Astoria is another word for paradise / Catherine Bai

apricot / fig           pear / hibiscus / rose
sunflower / hydrangea           Japanese maple
persimmon                  pomegranate / gingko
red and white string on a cherry blossom tree
racoons by the water / Canada geese

Oh, but how I miss the loquats outside their native soil
            the baby alligators behind our snaking road
            green apples shipped cross-country to the nearest grocery store

            the beach is alright in Brooklyn, but oh
                        how the cool riptides pull me home—

Even If They Never Loved You / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

There
is a
line
drawn
from
earth to sky
of mothers
who loved you
before you were  born
before your name
rose into the air
in baptismal
smoke.
You
Were
blessed by hands
you could not see.
You are gold
and blood
 and salt
and
water.
You are
love and
love itself
before
its name
was
Love 

XIV: Dithyramb for Kay Ryan  / Kendra Brooks

Who would have your mind 
if they could help it?
Not a dangerous kind 
of a mind, hardly
but the kind of a mind
that gets run off 
for imposing 
its cunning charm?
An ethos untamed 
in an unnatural frame 
but not shunned. 
Jokes unexplained 
except by the sound.
Like erratic facts unpacked
and shrunk down
to slip through the cracks.
How on earth do you manage
wearing the brand
of the kind of a mind
not enough in demand?

XIV / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

At his interview, the great poet 
said a sonnet can lose everything— 
It can lose the rhyme, the timing. 
It can even divorce the love note 
theme. It can get rid of all these, 
he mused, philosophically, except, 
he claimed, for the number fourteen. 
Instantly I felt a pang. Dejected, 
I wished his pithy quote had turned 
out of its insistent numerological 
bent. That day I’d spent astronomical 
energy wrestling fifteen lines to earn 
the term. He had, this beloved master, smashed  
my art, and made it move a little faster. 

Bereavement Leave  / Yvette Perry

For today this is all there is: 
these hugs—deep breaths 
inhaling Cinnabar, 
hands rubbing and patting backs, 
eyes closed against tears, 
a whispered 
I know I know baby I know

Tomorrow: stories 
told and retold 
so many times that punch lines 
are recited in unison, 
laughter so strong 
that sides stitch

The day after, 
Real Life 
will demand adherence 
to the Rituals 
of the Mundane 

But the black sheath dress 
needing to go to the cleaners 
remembers, releasing notes 
of clove, jasmine, cinnamon, 
and vanilla, 
still warm from hands 
and sounding like hymns

Ages to be Remembered / Amber Wei

Why were the listening years

substitutable
for the imagination of the
entrapped fidgets of the
collection of memories that

perplexed the handles upon which
stories become abridged
epochs
let there be a consciousness to
which a tale remains
the wandering child knowing no

remorse to the introspective
wonder that took
ages to be removed
withdrawn
was the story that
the admirers of passion
became entranced by
the desire to believe

and find me in the midst of the seaweeds from
the ocean depths looking
to find a fish make its way
through the maze of reality
shaped to gain traction of challenges

Desert Notes: Deadvlei, Part 3  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

Sept - Poem 13

Lupus lite #1 / Yael Aldana

I can see perfectly
Sometimes
Without glasses
Sometimes
I can’t see with glasses.

Can I see?
See?
Read?

Sometimes I can see
But I can’t understand
See but
can’t remember.

Glasses on
Glasses off
If I read, If I understand
If I remember

 It’s a good day.

Nothing pains me more than to see your labor  / Catherine Bai

It hurts to see you smile
when I open a book
it's not the ink that will kill you 
but the language

You don't exist
     and then it happens
I'm not your kin
     and then it happens

You get a papercut trying to turn the pages
The poem you copied with your hand 
was so beautiful on my wall, I asked 
what the characters meant

I don't know, you said, 
but here is a dot I made
and a line. Here is a curve with a hook at the end.
It's a perfect poem, isn't it?

I didn't have the heart to say 
the poem had already vanished
It ended in the sweep of her arm
when the water was drying on the parchment
it ended when she laid the brush on the table
and I could no longer watch her body 
mesmerize itself, the mother bird that regurgitates the worm 
without thinking, the tree that doesn't plan its flower or fruit
it doesn't ask if it's time or if it's good

it simply blooms—

The Cat Promises Me Nothing / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

The cat promises me nothing.
she comes and goes, just like the first night
she appeared at the front gate, all ribs,
eyes and whiskers, four hungry kittens
in tow. Just like the morning she showed up
wet and shuddering in pain, pushing against
my palm in the half-light. She goes and comes
silently, threaded with flowers and dew.

The cat comes and goes
but her kittens remain, gray and calico, curled
in warm corners and purring on bookshelves.
The cat who has promised me nothing
grows bored of the rug in the corner
and of the couch. She sets herself up
on my desk, among the paintbrushes
and the post-it notes.

Sometimes I wonder if she knows
how I watch for her shadow in the evenings,
half-hoping, half-dreading her shadowed shape
at the edge of the lamplight. I leave the window
open, blurred edges of my  heart trailing
rooftops and dark streets.

She brings the scent of wild places
moss, rainwater, the dust of pollen
as she brushes past, a reminder
that no home can hold everything,
that we all pass through warmth only
for one moment at a time.

When she comes and goes, I try not
to think of how soft she has become, and
how sharp the world outside will always be
no matter how hard I try to file its edges.

When she comes home, I remind myself
that the cat has promised me nothing.
She reminds me that nothing is ever promised,
not even when we cannot help but love.

Dithyramb 13: for Edna St. Vincent Millay  / Kendra Brooks

Millay they say had quite the way with anyone she wanted
And if you got in her way she’d lock you away in a sonnet
What lips her lips have kissed and where and why is daunting
And in what arms she’s lain I cannot say, I only know
Her poetry is full of ghosts still tapping on the glass for a reply
What loves of hers have come and gone are the secrets of a lonely tree
And her voice remains a string of colored beads forever leading to the sea
Defying definition she is neither pale nor pink in her elegant design
Like pressed flowers in daintiness, her poetry, in ageless books resides
Read on –the shanty straining under the turning of the tide,
the strong wind and shattered spray of the big surf that breaks all day
Savage beauty could not suffer her to pass, not a timid poet was she
but a summer sang in her that sings no more, and if you dare to read
Her words will breathe your soul back into you, of that you can be sure.

Threshold / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Late &  
my flash- 
light’s 
fading  
orange. 
I curse  
Duracell. 
Undercover, 
I’m hot- 
breath 
reading.  
Creak 
on a step  
is Mom at  
door-crack. 
We secret- 
wait. Some- 
times she 
knows. Some- 
times I  
only think  
she knows,  
the shush 
of slippers 
downing.  
I never  
wondered  
why she  
was up, 
why this  
eye-door 
dance. For 
years, 
we didn’t 
give  
it up.

Disorderly Conduct / Yvette Perry

Order in the court
The villains want to speak
No laughing
No smiling
No showing your teeth

Order in the court
The toddler wants to rule
No rhyme and
No reason
Just stupid and cruel

Order in the court
The rich man bends a knee
Corruption and
Kickbacks and 
Singing off key

Order in the court
The leaders race to win
Grab power
Trade favors
Then do it again

Order in the court
The judges blow the case
Turn backwards
Speak sideways
Un-do and erase

Order in the court
The papers spew their lies
Even in
Daylight
Democracy dies

Order in the court
The preacher makes a stand
Damnation
And money
And shame hand in hand

Order in the court
The college closes doors
No dreamers
No strivers
No Fall campus tours

Order in the court
The business cuts the fat
For profit
Efficient
AI can do that

Order in the court
The streamer posts a pod
Subscribe now
For rage bait
Hit like and applaud

Order in the court
The shit has hit the fans
Tyranny
Police states
And empathy bans

Order in the court
The devil’s had his way
And this time
Like all times
The People will pay

Icarus – Dreaming of Another Day / Amber Wei

Great imagination is unadjusted
to the ruinous altitudes that plague man
for our hands hold no underlying basin
and the drops just fall
trickling into the depths
that dark chasms hide as we
trip amongst our feet

Hide from me what are the obstacles of my eye
so that my steps can be merry among dust that
hide the caverns that fallen are
the emotions that escape earthly reality
that consume what imagination
cannot give

Deadvlei Part 2  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

September - Poem 12

Covid / Yael Aldana

Covid

April Showers  / Catherine Bai

What seems inevitable in winter becomes 
impossible in spring, there’s no such 
thing as watching a tree slowly 
take bloom, it’s something you notice one day 
when a child takes the red and white 
bracelet in their hand and ties it to a high branch 
They drop from their father’s shoulder to the ground 
pointing upwards on their tiptoes 
It’s not the wet, brittle blossom but his trembling chin 
He cries, the sight of magnolia petals, bursting 
brown at the edges, is happening 
yet hasn’t arrived. My love, my love— 
I’ll stand still and the world will turn on its axis. 
You’ll find me in wintertime 
where nothing grows wild and old.

Lunar Ramblings / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

You mustn’t trust anything, especially not the moon.

When you were twelve it came upon your window like a wordless god

promised you shiploads of stars on a constant sea.

It’s been years. Aren’t you tired now of swallowing storms?

There have been a thousand girls like you. They grow here, in the damp

where only the saddest things can bloom.

Each of them is beautiful, but not one of them can swim.

XII: Dithyramb for Herman Hesse  / Kendra Brooks

These trees
with limbs that will never embrace
or run or jump or lose their grace.
These trees
have served long the summer shade 
and winter stillness equally in equanimity.
Trees I call mine in spite of their freedom
and longevity. Trees I mark the seasons with
as they come and go.
These trees I call home.
Scarred and broken
Decorated in velvet leaves and tawny twigs
Bearing promising buds and hiding busy roots
These trees
I abandon in the rain and cold
These trees
whose scent I crave and know,
their silent songs play on deep beneath ground,
weighted like icebergs turned upside down. 
These trees
color my world, shape my days
remind me to not forget the sky, 
These trees
will live on after I die.

MASH / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

MASH

I Want to Tell You a Story / Yvette Perry

I want it to be full of hope, but not cliched. 
I want a tight narrative…a compelling plot…
fascinating characters. 
I want you to think you know how 
the story’s gonna go, 
and then I’ll throw in a surprise 
he-realized-he-himself-was-a-ghost type twist 
you never saw coming. 
I want you to still be thinking
about the story decades after I tell you. 
I want you to tell it to your children,
who will tell it to their own children.

This story will be an oral tale only.
I want the letters to burn through the page
if you ever try to write the story down on paper. 
I want the keyboard to liquify and spill to the floor
if you ever try to type the story out.
I want this story to be for lips to say
and ears to hear only.

I want this story to transform you on a 
molecular level. I want you to look in the mirror and 
see someone unrecognizable from who you 
were before you heard it.
I want you even to sometimes lose the 
thread of your own name. It will be on the tip of your 
tongue for a moment as you confuse yourself
for the story’s main character. 

Am I ready to speak?
Are you ready to listen? 

Journey / Amber Wei

You can let heaven glimmer
only when darkness subsides as deafness
draws closer into my soul
afraid I will hear its whisper
and that altitude gets higher
only to let oxygen and pressure
crush its depths

Get deeper into the ocean
but feel no mercy
for the waves to crash harder
and it be harder to escape
what wonders as lightness
only to be a sunken ship

Hope turns into gold
and it foils our imagination
until one day
we breathe air clouded by salt
and its pungent spice
is beautiful
romantic
because we feel that we never truly
tasted until we know what it was our
hearts were searching for

Desert Notes: Deadvlei (part 1)  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

ZAMMIT-Day-12-Deadvlei-Part-1

September - Poem 11

In the first book  / Yael Aldana

In the first book
There is the hour of the robin
Then the hour of the titmouse
Then the kookaburra whose name
I forgot, but the sound of which
I remembered
It is all very simple, she said.

Red is the color of life
of blood
and hurt
and judgement
and luck
don’t forget hurt.

She spoke so that the words
came out quickly, one behind
each other, although evenly
spaced apart
she scratched her head
nervously and twisted
a curl around her finger.

My whole body is slanted / Catherine Bai

1.

you have no idea 
what shame is 
how could I ever be shamed by 
someone like you 
who’s never even hugged their mom’s 
magnificent pubes

2.

do you think I won’t do it 
that I won’t seppuku right in front of you 
the next time you even look at me through those 
slits

3.

you likey 
me likey 
we all likey 
I want so badly
for you to see me

4.

why even try 
to be seen

The Same Dark / Danielle Boodoo Fortune

Weary of the same room
same yellowing light
same spoons clinking in teacups
same empty bowls waiting
to be filled, same need
simmering in the same
cracked saucepan, same
breadcrumbs, same trail
of sugar ants, same list
on the counter, same self
same mirror, same self
I start the day all over again
draw the same curtains,
slip again into the same dark.

XI: Dithyramb for T.S. Eliot  / Kendra Brooks

What’s all the purring about?
Just this: every poet needs a cat!
Not a dog to walk or chase or pat,
A feline who knows all the feels
& keeps her criticisms well concealed;
A cat who with her purrs protects
And praises each new word the poet selects.
You can even teach a cat the sonnet form
She can easily tap out iambs with her feet
Stressed and unstressed for each single beat
and still keep her tail perpendicular.
When it comes to the practice of poetry
what’s better than a cat who knows a dactyl?

Survey / Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Survey-1

Permission / Yvette Perry

I grant you access to the parts of me
that shrink from the light and are sensitive to 
sudden changes in barometric pressure and altitude
Your ears may pop, too, if you crawl in this cabin with me
You may go down with me and the ship if you stay
I consent to your search
You may touch me through my clothes, under my clothes,
rummage through my bags, weigh and x-ray their contents
You may carefully check the ID I carry,
hold it up to my face,
make sure my eyes match the ones in the picture
I have nothing to hide
I have everything to hide
It doesn’t matter which
I agree to your interrogation 
and I revoke my right to counsel 
I am, for you, the open bar and the free buffet 
Put that away
Your money is no good here, sir
I’m on the house
Everything, everything
My answer to everything is yes

Anachronism – Out of the Time / Amber Wei

When the aged architecture of the bone catches up to the naivete of the spoken soul
say to me what I forgot centuries ago

that birthed, the starlight vanished
and the fission of nuclear twilight was the anthem
and our memories transcended space and time

A short fusion into the remains of the Jurassic age
when the dinosaur roamed

let the remainders of the Jurassic age
not be the myth that forever adapted to the
imagination of man

For the shape-shifters were ever the
oceans that reconstructed according to the
continental drift
from Pangea

The everglades that found the sun at the equator was
the North Star of your eye

There, I emerged of the new age
the paradactyls were not prepared to hold

Desert Notes: The Tsondab  / Abigail Ardelle Zammit

ZAMMIT-Day-11-Desert-Notes-The-Tsondab-1