February - Poem 18
Reading Rooms / Kristine Anderson
In the kitchen
cookbooks, of course
in the old days, magazines, newspapers
we’d pore over with coffee in the morning
now, a smartphone for browsing and scrolling
In the living room
handsome hardbacks, spines lined up like geometry
family photo albums resting on bottom shelves
today’s library check-out turned upside down
& open on the sofa cushion
In our room
current can’t-put-it-down, bookmarked and waiting
for after the day’s rushing around
in my nightstand drawer, last month’s birthday cards from friends,
thank-you notes from the holidays,
a handwritten letter from my ninety-four-year-old aunt
who passed away last year—
each one here and now
aching be reread and reread and reread
Gone Gras / Barbara Audet
Mornings after carnivals
Require lukewarm coffee.
Absent cream, cane sugar.
Your hand stumbles
With generic grounds,
Carafe maneuvers,
Forstall percolation,
Leading to toast
With day old brew.
Sacrifice owns satisfaction,
As a next day penance
For headlong indulgence.
Out of character,
Costumed cravings
Rather unexpected.
You waltzed.
You waltzed.
You waltzed.
Because no one
Knew your name.
Ode to spiders / Bee Cordera
Weavers of history weavers of storied weavers because they have no other option they are built perfect with their long legs for weaving and tellin stories beyond the truth. Spiders, forever vital to the structure of our world.
ON WHEAT / Ashby Logan Hill
From King Tutankamen’s Diary
The heat of a summer breeze sweeping through the night, then daylight,
Chrysanthemum can’t find in dirt its depths, and like the rice or wheat
strewn out in plats of stem and chaff, a carafe of faience for the wildflowers,
singing out like loin cloth on milk-soaked hums, the bowl of porridge
with flies on by, de dah on by, the fly speaks in whispers of the cows by the
sun-soaked reeds, and Khephra calls collect to me from the eternal glaze,
like how the sun comes up because of dung beetle’s battle with gravity,
and somewhere in this moment your third eye opens from the field of it,
soaked in the rain last week and steeped in glycerin to make your mind
wind in colorful circles, like nothing you’ve ever seen, fractals from the
ancient past illuminated from the ergot you got while harvesting. Harvesting,
always harvesting, and all I want to do is run free. Look at the light-leak
through the trees, feel the heat of the summer breeze, and of for more
this beauty seemed to speak to me nightly in my dreams.
Worthy Women / Amy Marques
take eccentricity
among women:
bright
exalted
immeasurably worthy
people:
making tools to believe.
Source: A Tale of Two Cities
Flu / Sonia Sophia Sura
Today is a morning where I cry a lot.
I listen to a song with three part harmonies
It’s so beautiful,
it’s so beautiful,
I say over and over
I go for a walk.
It’s a short one,
My fever just broke and I’m
still winded.
On my way back to my house I pass my neighbor’s car,
doors open.
I don’t want to get them sick.
I keep walking.
I reach my door and turn.
The mother says hi and I smile and wave.
She bobs her baby up and down.
I realize.
Last time I saw her,
The baby was inside her stomach.
Wow! I yell,
Congratulations!
I give a thumbs up.
I feel like a fool.
She says,
thanks! It’s so fun!
I go inside. I listen to the song again. I cry
It’s so beautiful,
I say,
It’s so beautiful.
Road Trip / Samuel Spencer
There’s that long, straight
stretch of road that seems to coincide
with silence. We’re somewhere
in Wyoming, nothing left to talk about,
no more musing to fill up the empty
air within this car. The sun half mast
on the horizon, we have a few more hours
until everything beyond us
is behind us, and there’s nothing left
to say.
