January - Poem 21
The Song of Potatoes / Haley Bosse
is a gift I never expected to receive,
just like how they say
we’ll hear the birds’ true names
by the end of the winter
and how, even as we wreck her,
the Earth cries out
from countless twisting roots,
the softest crackle of their bodies
transfigured into chimes,
how when I’m dragging
my calluses through the soil,
I can't help but hum,
the cloud of my voice
dissolving in the air.
porch on the moon / Jess Bowe
tethered to rock, gray with waiting,
bone dry, a face on the night –
i see you from the deep sea of space,
imaginary and ghostlike, paper swords,
a plume of worry from the smokestack
of the mind. it’s cold here, a home
diminished and returning. i can almost
feel the golden kiss placed constant
on your blue skin. i can almost feel
the bracket of living you most often
refuse – the ordinary shade of an oak
so familiar, you’ve stopped asking his name;
the seahorse, her three-beat cantor,
salt in her seaweed mane. the orange,
still round on the branch. the subway car,
its endless journey, bottomless pocket
of noise and play and microbial
hands. you must believe it to be small,
your sight heavy with unanswerable
asks of why. you must believe it
a dark and creatured place. i can almost
hear it from here, the bombs you speak
of, fire eating what history can’t save,
licking the streets clean and bare
of anything worth passing to the open
hands of Someday. can you hear
me through the traffic between us?
can you count the stars to my front door?
i see you in heaven; globe of summer
fruit, plump and sweet, promise
at the open mouth of eternity.
Haibun: On the repetition of history / Joanna Lee
Like a funeral procession, a line of police cruisers, sirens mute in the before-dawn, their evenly paced convoy heading south on Chamberlayne, taillights a string of fire as they exit the ramp north into darkness. All week there’s been reports: Short Pump, Chesterfield, Church Hill… now Southside: Hull and Warwick, just down the road. The temperature is falling. Small birds hop in pale twittering circles across the cold cement patio. Behind the counter, the barista waves each patron out the door, on instinct calling be safe more often than see ya round—
like five summers back,
the body remembering
a same swoop-sick fear
An Erasure of an Erased Message from March 2020 / Thomas Page
I wanted to update you with what is happening with Ari. Mom and I went with her to the Howard County Medical Center after she had called mom. They requested an ambulance and she was taken to Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. They think it’s Leukemia. It’s what they feared. Mom is really stressing now. Can you drive Ari’s car from the Howard County parking lot? Mom also wants you to buy some gifts for dad’s birthday. Maybe giftcards? She wants you to do it before the quarantine. She’s on the phone with dad now. How is your meeting going? What time can you leave work? Mom said that you said that you asked for a sub for your meeting. I don’t feel well myself.
Cherry Picking in Pasa Robles 1945 / Sarah Paley
You look pretty up on the ladder
in your capri dungarees – your bobby
socks slumped down around your sneakers.
The night before, you tied one on, danced
in the dusty streets and shouted
at the locals about how you hated
their western town, their hick ways.
Now you’re feeling different surrounded
by the branches heavy with fruit. You
hand the baskets down to men who have
done this work before. You, you’re just broke
and out on a lark. Years from now you’ll grab
a tiny plastic saber and stab a maraschino cherry
out of a cocktail glass and declare: I picked that!
Dusty Learns to Drink Water / Amy Snodgrass
Something I didn't know: newborn kittens don’t know how to drink. I found him,
discarded, holding on, in a plastic bag, in an empty lot, under a warm drizzling rain.
We built a strange partnership: six weeks of every-two-hour feedings, droppers,
formula, warmth. Time passes, of course, and now, somehow, it is time to wean.
Another thing I didn’t know: kittens prefer to drink from wide and flat receptacles,
not bowls. I set out a wide, flat green plate, a field for his new and necessary adventure.
Thirst, and instinct, and no mother but me: so gigantic and strange. He has to teach himself.
At the first wet touch on the tip of his nose, he starts and shakes and sneezes, hopping back
like a frog in reverse. Mini-splashes ripple again and again. I tire before he does and so,
distracted, I miss the moment, damn it. I miss his choice to stay and see what happens
if he doesn’t start or shake. I miss his determined overcoming. By the end of the day
he has it: lapping. I stare, awash with regret and awe. Just this morning he still had to learn.
Just this morning he didn’t know. Just this morning he depended on me. It is hard
to remember now, the not-drinking. It seems as if he had always done it, as if his mother
had taught him, as if that plastic bag were being used to wrap a sandwich
somewhere else instead, as if the confusions of the past never existed.
But they did, and they do, and they will: as essential and mysterious as weaning, as water.
