January - Poem 22
Winter Movement / Haley Bosse
Tufts of brown fur. The long faces of leaves Thin streams rippling
lifting as they dry. tunneling upward from the crux of a planter
in the sharp thrill of morning & into the air across the sidewalk & into the road
Nearly-foamed snow. The crackCRACK The pop of wet gravel
cradling the roots of oversaturated tree trunks, thrown from a tire,
of the grass popping loose at their seams its soft thump & then rest in the moss
The scuff and stomp Small clusters of cicadas A whistle breaking open
of boots & thick sneakers sleeping or suckling the midafternoon quiet,
dragging in a line at sap far below the startle of running through the cold
short bursts / Jess Bowe
for a moment, i’d like to live in the body
of a woman unafraid to leave for Paris
at the intersection of twilight and daybreak,
leave the yard for someone else to tend to, leave
the man who clings to me at midnight,
temporarily, for a stretch with no clocks
and a window to a street unfamiliar with my name.
for a moment, i’d like to pick blueberries back
when blueberries still grew here. fill my mouth
more than my basket, fill my hands with cups
of grass, bury a poem at the foot of a northern
pine and believe until i know, for a fact,
that next spring, a robin quilts her nest
with ribboned prayers, ink black as winter’s sleep.
for once, as this woman with this shape,
for once, i share my desire with the meadow flowers:
leave me be. let me be beautiful and smile
because i graced the day with a color
you haven’t seen in this way. leave me be and let me
dance in the sun, in love with this little
great adventure i find myself in. alone, surrounded
by strange friends, rainwashed and pink in the face.
Forever home / Joanna Lee
This is where we begin, in the mud with the red-
eared sliders who, in their leisure time,
sun on logs in the canal building a bridge
to nowhere, then slip off into the green
as each slow canalboat passes,
drifting through the past
before hitting the locks.
We know this city through her mud. Through her grit
and mixed politics and potholes and the still
unplanted shadows where statues once stood.
And yet,
from how many little upstairs apartments
do our students make their leaving plans…
then return two summers later because
the bigger world didn’t have that same
gently used, relaxed but stylish fit?
Like the cat at the midtown Lowe’s—we
will always be happy to be found, to return home.
Here chose us, now, our hands to reach for
her future, to dig her bones
out of the dirt
trail our fingers through the cobblestoned
gutters as rain washes down and we sit listening
to some home-grown band through
an open window on a Sunday night.
Listen, who else is gonna argue her history
and picnic in her cemeteries, with a view
out over the James where the sturgeon breach
and the trains coil along the banks like some prehistoric
steampunk black snake?
Those are our cards laid out, graffiti-tagged on the CSX,
bright against the creosote. We trace our names in
the wet tar, claiming. A small piece in the scroll of her archives,
a moment of her river. Our feet in its mud. Our footsteps
that echo all along Kanawha, at the Capitol, up Broad Street.
That will not be washed away.
Bear Documentaries / Thomas Page
While my father and I were waiting for
you to get the stitches taken out, two
receptionists were watching bear documentaries.
The bears, living out west, were hunting for
small mammals drinking river water out
of the stream unaware they were in a bear documentary.
The receptionists’ running commentary
oscillated between stating how cute
the bears were and bemoaning scary nature was.
Coyotes, then, came from over the snowy
hills to scare the bears away from their prey—
much to the chagrin of the two receptionists.
To break up the implied violence shown up
by the waiting room’s ceiling-mounted set,
receptionist #1 said to receptionist #2:
“We have a wild turkey problem at
home but the state of Maryland says we
can’t shoot it.” Receptionist #2 agreed with the absurdity.
Details of the Incident / Sarah Paley
(for Liam Conejo Ramos apprehended after
returning home from his preschool classroom)
You are at the table
and, yes,
you are beautiful
and, yes,
we are ashamed
Sometimes: an Ars Poética / Amy Snodgrass
My daughter ensconces herself in her room
for hours and hours: building her own world,
exploring her own mind, sharing only what,
when, how, she wants to share. A knock can
bring an eye roll, a grunt, a smile, a story.
I never know, but I keep knocking to see.
A poem comes when it comes. Sometimes
I invite one in and it smiles and plays along.
But most of the time it shoves out a snarky
laugh and prefers to stay away. Sometimes
the poem seems annoyed just because I’m
in the room. Sometimes I even wonder if
I’ve lost it for good. You get the connection.
So when a poem pops out like a 15-year-old girl
ready to engage with her mother, swinging a casual
“Whatssup?” and a half-grin-half-smirk, I revel in the
miracle of relief, of capillary-bursting hope, of laughter,
and (did I say relief?) Then sometimes, the poem and my
daughter are in kahoots: each one seeming to find me
a perfect vessel for their woes, a worthy speaker of their
needs, and –dare I say it?–sometimes pretty good at my job.
