January - Poem 13

Everything, After Everything Else / Haley Bosse

Larvae

to—

wing sprout

Dawn—

freckled

with buzzing—

Moon

&—

crunch of steps

well / Jess Bowe

at the onset of curtain-fall across my eyes,
vision, glowing neon and broken apart
with patterned shape and dancing lines–
She calls from somewhere off-planet,
breaking the barrier of Time, swimming
in the canal of my ear, siren song
like Home. and i go, door of ink-swallowed
night unlocked and smiling. down 
the corridor of greenery, the long pool
a mirror angels come to see. drink,
her hands tell me, cupped and full
of cold stone water. ancestors below
the tree, mothers turned mycelium,
arrive to my throat as soldiers
of light and ice-born fire. songs 
known only to my cells echo the chambers
of metronome, cymatic grids
of symmetry bound for my bloodstream.
this is what it means to be well,
i hear me say, sight soft and able,
seven mere minutes against the hardwood.

Haibun-adjacent Semi-Ekphrastic Confessional with Uncomfortable Pauses : When I scroll before bedtime / Joanna Lee

or, tbh, on lunchbreak, or drinking coffee & catching headlines before leaving for work in the mornings, I keep coming back to this picture that doesn’t exist:    I am fourteen. Seated at our kitchen table of varnished blonde           wood, the kitchen lights fluorescing,    the kitchen-yellow linoleum bewilderingly bright.      I am   bawling.           Just back from catechism class,

where we’ve watched   Schindler’s List   in lieu of a Bible lesson.    Bawling.      My face is caught in the cage of my hands, then,          in slow motion,     my hands fall and I’m gaping up at the overheads like they might   have answers.       I don’t            understand. My teenage brain can’t process it  :              how so many were allowed      to die   while others went about their lives, sucked                  their cigarettes, conducted their business.        The trains,   the camps,       that these things                                                                      were                 

while life          elsewhere went on.      It doesn’t compute.                  My mother, the smoke             from her just-extinguished Salem Light curling empty into the air, stands at the other end of the table,            helpless.

As if a sky can
be empty,         all those questions
rising up to God

Limericks for Lowly Caretakers  / Thomas Page

I once knew a man who was very smart 
who memorized foreign verses by heart. 
He ate seven buckets of table cream 
and washed it down with beers like a stream. 
He got up passed me and let out a—

Regal gadzooks and blasted bazookas 
how could I ever imagine these days 
that I’d be the one taking care of ye
under a yellow fog smelling of flea 
that eats what those Spaniards call—

I’m not the only one who’s been affected
by these ghastly attacks orchestrated. 
The problem in this household is severe 
enough that it’s been a request sincere 
that I write about those poor—

Every day it’s been “Oh, Tommy, my son,
the one who writes about sadness for fun,
please write about our daily contritions 
based on the one’s various indigestions 
give rise to the thick airs that always stun. 

Doubting  / Sarah Paley

Do I remember frozen trees screaming in winter?
Blueberries filled with blood in summer?
Inhaling tulips till I understood their way of thinking?
Were the apples in DeVoe’s orchards larger than my head?
Did the earthworms have faces with actual expressions on them?
How did Mr. Hill learn to speak to the raccoons he kept in the parlor of his double wide?
Can it be that Mr. Rosen, the school bus driver, tied me to the pole behind his driver’s seat
and stuffed my ears with wax so I might resist the sirens?
Was the Matterhorn in the woods just up the hill from the house?
Where did the fairies get the tiny axes to destroy the twig ladders I so carefully built?
And caterpillars purring? Could that Scarlet Elm really raise me to the clouds above?
Was that old sleigh in the Ten Eyck’s barn pulled by ghosts of horses?
Possible? Probable?, that Parson, the cat, saved my life? More than once?
There was a boa constrictor in the hayloft – that is certain.

The Attic  / Amy Snodgrass

Yesterday, a moment:

Sitting on the couch, my son on my left, my mom on my right, our row of laps 
under the super-soft purple microfiber blanket we have all loved for years.

she wants to be eating napkins, the word for edges isn’t what she meant, her students are going to buy those square purple things over there to use as spoons, that white yellow thing is coming through the rectangle the wrong way because it’s too easy, and her father is on his way to pick her up from school now and she can’t be late. 

I lean my head left onto my son’s shoulder, finally 
the right height.  I am getting drunk on Sierra 
Nevada with its new yellow label that I hate.
I am thinking how others might see this as a 
beautiful three generational moment.

the keyhole is the perfect place to pour coffee, the circle on the wall should come down because it might fit nicely on her fingernail, the black turny thingy isn’t enough so we should buy more because the bagel needs one, and wouldn’t that be nice?

My son and I breathe together, heads 
touching, eyes not. He breaks first 
and leaps up the stairs and away: “I’ll be back!” 
The blanket can not be thick enough. 
I think I am tuning her out, but her words 
go and go and go in and in and in and do 
things to me, things I do not like.

the squiggles, no, the polish, yes, the prophecy, and the juice can’t fit in the rainbow, probably because it’s so cloudy with all the stripes, and can she hold my hand for just a minute?

These are the types of moments others tell me to treasure.  
Instead, I treasure that photo on the coffee table:

5-year-old me in front of our pull-down attic stairs. 
Scrambling up, fast and sneaky, I always found 
a dark triangle of silence: joyful and free. 
Of course, in the summers it was sweltering up there: 
just one tiny window, sealed shut. It must have been 
dreadful and claustrophobic. But in my memory, 
it is always cool and dreamy with nooks. 

Maybe the owners now would let us back in, let me float her up that ladder. 
Maybe the bat shit crazy could stop, just for one night.  
Maybe I could tell her how she is like that attic: always safe, and now a dream.

We could share an ice cold Sierra Nevada with the original green label.
After a while, she would understand what I am saying, and through 
the circle on the wall, we wouldn’t see the rainbow so much as hold it.