February - Poem 13
As the Day Is Long / Kristine Anderson
The sun blasts through my kitchen window
before I finish my first cup of joe in the morning
though two months ago, only the slightest glow
peeked over the horizon by this early hour.
We’re in the season of lengthening days.
Already daylight hangs on for ten-plus hours.
Even the birds respond, practicing the songs
they’ll need to woo their mates in spring.
Lamps aren’t on ’til later and later,
and the dog no longer expects dinner
in the afternoon, as when it’s dark so soon.
Days are getting longer, we say with a smile.
Anticipation of sloughing off binding coats,
of melting snow releasing vast grassy lawns.
Expectation of long, generous walks—no icy
pathways limiting the range of our adventuring.
Deeper breaths. Dazzling views. Not so much longer
days we look forward to, I’d say, but unfurled ones.
Friday 13 / Barbara Audet
True Templars,
surprisingly survive.
She is
a bloodline,
centuries secured,
a renewed voice
in an unmasked face.
Templar's child,
she endures,
out from hiding
in plain sight.
That long ago
dissolution
of her relations,
brave men,
was kept alive
in odd witness.
The memory
of such broad compelling death
sought permanence
in daily aftermaths
of not so subtle acts
of periodic shame.
Born again as trepidations
fueled by inhibition.
The catalyst was singular.
A brazen, heartless
moment of betrayal,
of unchecked greed.
The force of that one
planned transgression
unleashed a sin's enormity
in a strange profusion
of tiny mimicking acts.
Short spasms
of cowardice
that transpired
in minutiae.
With a never fail you
complex futility.
to hold back those
who committed
the unthinkable.
Pain reduction acts,
solitary efforts,
made of undisputed
trivial thoughts,
unbridled
essential
avoidances.
Ladder undertakings,
cat shadow anticipation,
sidewalking by leaps, bounds.
In modern times?
Aren't these now
abandoned?
Why now
does it seem
that the flood
of superstition
is in ebbtide?
Has superstition
given way
to widespread,
grander,
ever-greed inspired,
moments, of
intentional,
less forgivable
stupidity.
Zoo psychosis / Bee Cordera
On Tik-Tok, one soul compared humanity to tigers pacing their crammed cages at the zoo, How we oggle and worler what is wrong with a pacing creature.
But we don't sit and word why we ourselves must take the faster pace through life, never stopping to ask why we wear hard pants.
ELEGY FOR MY FATHER’S COWS AND TAMALES / Ashby Logan Hill
Another batch of dough for dinner rolls, at least that’s how I’s told to tell it,
a little salty, a bit slant — nothing for a quarter more of nothing, the way
it’d always been shone to him — grazing in a gold-green pasture, your
father’s seventy-plus cows, how each in his scrapbook had their own
photograph and somewhere along the line, a red “x,” a few early morning
salutations between friends at the stockyard and then a fought farewell — “A hug
around the neck, a kiss upon the head,” Mr. Rodamer had said and so done it —
“Sold!” he said, to the highest bidder. I guess that’s how it was done back then,
and still, in a red little room, like a senate’s chambers between the railroad tracks,
the farm-raised chicken slaughter plant, and Dona Fer’s tamale spot on Saturday
mornings, a Rockingham County ritual his father and his father’s father had spent
half their lifetimes telling him — “It goes on a little better in the end with love,”
they said. “Don’t you mean ‘off?’” my father said. “Without a hitch,” they said.
A dayglow and a dying was done then, and all before dawn, a quiet breakfast.
A Godmother’s Blessing / Amy Marques
That feeling in my heart / Sonia Sophia Sura
Some moments are too precious
to write about;
Hugs and hands and
kisses on the cheek.
The warmth in my chest
is otherworldly and human,
the most human, arguably,
I can feel.
It used to be torture, that
feeling,
the bubbling of fire in my heart.
How peculiar it was to feel that
heat.
Now it comes to me
from the strangest people,
the most surprising,
the angels in human form.
At the Base of the Mountain / Samuel Spencer
I can't listen the things
I've done just to be here.
At the bottom.
I'm standing here look up
At the face of it, wondering
What it's all about.
Is it about getting to the top
And telling others you've done it,
Or is it just a chance to do
What others have done before you?
Or
Did I come to the base of the Mountain
Just to get a better look?
