February - Poem 1
The Noise / Kristine Anderson
“. . . write with the noise.”
—Susan Muaddi Darraj
Inside my home
the warm kitchen silent
except for the metronomic tick
of an old-fashioned wall clock
Outside the window
late afternoon casting shadows
sharpened by triangles of sunlight
on undulating stretches of icy snow
Beyond this: clatter
of the world. Scraping
of snow plows clearing roads,
sirens of ambulances rushing
to the ER, crack of a pine branch
splitting off. Report of a gun.
And everywhere, it seems,
the breaking of glass
Belongs / Barbara Audet
Every sign I carry.
You carry.
Every raising of my hand with yours says
we are mind full.
Of worry.
Of pain.
Of awareness that only hands held, fingers squared, will have strength.
A hand held sends
its grip straight
to holding a heart
in place.
Against all
that would end
its beating.
The hand
generates the sign.
The heart maintains
its worth.
Pose 4 the Bandit / Bee Cordera
A Good Thing / Ashby Logan Hill
A loose thing, forgiveness, untethered, a skein of yarn
undoing in time, a good thing that comes like the stiff wind,
the dark night, monks on their way north, a narrow road to the
clifftop chateau, a desert sun not far from Tortilla Flats, Arizona,
a hell of a thing at Hellsgate Wilderness, a forest of pine trees
and hot springs, in the day, too hot for a bike ride, the windows
down and your friends in the back of your truck at dusk, then
moonglow thereafter, loose, untethered, a kite string’s whisper
and rattled about the sand dunes, and yet a turn you take today,
again a thing unfathomable, untouched snow drift, the ocean
and sandpiper dunes, the sun, golden topaz sandstone where
wooly mammoths used to roam, only leaving their footprints below,
mountain top cranberry bogs, Tobacco Row and lakes that look like
fingers holding all that’s left of glacial prairie, your way home
Delightful Though Disapproved / Amy Marques
Nothing agreeable trifles
in approved best:
Birds, and flowers, and books
and wonder.
Source material for erasure: A Tale of Two Cities, pg 92
Standing in the Garage / Sonia Sophia Sura
I didn’t know it yet,
but he’d become a
second
dad to me,
the man,
shirtless and waving
a sword
through the air
during a thunderstorm…
We stood in the garage,
door open,
eight or six or
ten of us,
looking for him
when the lightning was not
being our sky-lamp.
The storm had gone on for hours,
I know this because it had been hours
since I
saw clearly;
someone found my
glasses
on the bench the next day;
When the rain came,
we took off our shirts
and started running.
The creek is down the road,
a few minutes driving
(one person in the seat,
the others on top of the car),
or an 8 minute run.
I don’t remember putting my
glasses on the bench.
When the lightning struck,
some of us
got scared.
By some of us,
I mean only
the Father
of my
two friends,
who became family to me
long after
the Father arrived
at the creek
and
screamed at us.
He asked us
why we’re
idiots.
It’s dangerous,
he said,
to be standing
in the water
during
a lightning storm.
It’s dangerous,
to wave a sword around
during a
lightning storm,
but not for all
of us
delinquents (we
could be considered
as)
standing in the
garage.
Toddler Watching an AI-Generated Show / Samuel Spencer
I feel bad for the artists
who had their work stolen, all so a pair of parents
could eat and talk in peace.
I feel worse for the child, buckled down
in the restaurant highchair, anesthetized
by a screen pretending to be an acid trip.
I look around to see if anyone else sees
what I’m seeing, but no one does –
I can almost literally see the child’s life force
leaving his eyes and entering the screen,
the realm that holds his attention and (soon)
his dreams.
The restaurant revolves around the scene.
No stops and screams because they don’t see what I see:
The death of the innocence of a child;
a child so close – yet so unseen.
