January - Poem 29
The Flower Chair / Haley Bosse
Its spray of once-cream silhouettes
For so long, too light for me to touch,
Always in the corner of my eye
As I slid in socks across the wooden floor
To throw my backpack in the closet,
Palms peeling from swinging from the monkey bars
One stubborn minute before falling in the sawdust,
Bleeding around the nails from where I’d ripped the skin,
Mostly dry and cracking even in the rainy months,
The wind blowing broken stalks
Of blackberry bushes past the window,
The summer grasses of the flower chair
A continuity of somehow unstained,
Clean enough when we spotted it
Between orphaned floor lamps
At the Goodwill, given away
While we were missing, one loss
Among everything but a week’s worth of clothes
And the books we were reading when we left,
Waterlogged pages passed from my mother’s hands to mine,
To my sister’s in the big bed in the basement
With windows too high for us to ever shut. We’d gone
To the Goodwill to replace what had been taken
With other people’s things
But found the flower chair and the dining table,
Our bookcase and the rest.
I swayed the vote to buy back the chair,
Though I’d never been allowed to sit in it and, after,
I got to sit in it
In the sunshine through the open windows,
And later, when I left for college,
My mother stored it in a corner
Of her shed, covered up and waiting
For my partner to cradle it between his arms
And totter up the metal stairs to our apartment,
How he sits there as he reads,
The chair’s thin fabric softened beneath my palm
As I pass it on my way to sleep.
a revolution / Jess Bowe
i don’t always ask for help with the chickens because i feel answers arrive, first to my legs, lifting bags of feed on my shoulder. i feel answers arrive to my rose-kissed cheeks. the wind sticks to the underside of my hair. i open the door, just as yesterday, and just as yesterday, i tell them hello, feathered friends! and i mean it: friends. i am in love with the day. i am in love with every storm. i am in love with the mid-february edge, the bottom lip of death. the cedar waxwings saying goodbye at my windowglass, crisp-weather drunkards. the pine missing half her face. the stretch between one neighbor and another. i drive to the center of town just to walk on the sidewalks and trip over bliss. my organs are electric and i pretend the light i’m made of is in every color, invisible stained-glass-sun, and today i’m the artist and i paint across the field of every stranger who walks by. i’m in love and i’m not sure how i got here. praying. i do a lot of praying, and i don’t ask if my god is wearing red or blue. i don’t assume to be speaking to a man. what i’m praying to is a river. what i’m praying to has eyes on the inside of me. what i’m praying to looks a lot like my deep breath sounds. a lot like the crackling of stars in the bowl of ice cold sky. i pray, and i pray without permission, and i pray like there’s no tomorrow because no matter how long i live, i still haven’t met one. i don’t ask permission. i don’t ask where you stand. i don’t ask you to throw a fiery hoop in the air, to jump through, to wear my own face, before i lay flowers at your front door. i’m in love, this great big place, this garden without a fence, this hill of birch, this song i find myself to be, on the tongue on the tongue on the tongue of what prays me.
Reporting on the weather (reprise) / Joanna Lee
A man
has died
of over
-exposure under
a walkway
in the city’s North End, hours
before
news spreads
of Them closing
down
the emergency
storm shelter.
Alexa tells
me there’s a
severe
weather warning
for tonight—extreme
cold—and though
I type this
from bed,
faux-down
up to my ears, the heat
tripping steady
as a pulse,
your toes
curled petals
against mine,
I don’t think
I’ll ever again
get warm.
Waiting Room / Thomas Page
2300: I’m awoken to take you to the hospital
0000: I try not to think about why I’m on the highway
0030: We arrive at the hospital and take you inside
0100: My brain finally clams down as you finish your intake forms
0200: I’ve given up on trying to rest my head against the stucco-like walls
0230: You try to lighten the mood by telling me how you feel better
0300: I realize how quiet hospitals are in the dead of night
0330: A tech tells us that the doctor is monitoring your condition
0400: I’m getting delirious at how long I have been awake; I can’t imagine how you feel
0500: The doctor comes in and explains that you’ll be admitted soon
0600: I’m told by you to go home and get some provisions / sleep
0630: I try not to think about why I’m on the highway
Release / Sarah Paley
Doors & windows flung open with abandon
when you arrived. Curtains blew this way
& that in the crisp breeze & it was fun
as you helped replace rusty hinges that lay
askew off their soggy, splintered frames.
I threw out everything & snapped linens
that we would make soft. We came upon
forgotten treasures – lost buttons in old tins.
Then the first door shut as if by accident.
I opened & you came through eventually.
Then another. This one locked. Not meant
to but did. You happened to have the key
but then others closed. Sometimes I’d unbolt.
Hear them now: slam! slam! as I let go my hold.
Facing a Writing Prompt While Missing My Mother / Amy Snodgrass
Mother and voice: my eyes grasp no other words,
of which I need five–and fast–so let’s go! Life is whirring.
A new colleague (my own age) tells me:
“I was so utterly sick, I had to call my mother.”
My heart doesn’t know what hit it, but I do: a cliff.
A cloud circles in and circles out. It drops then spreads.
My daughter admits to licking the salt lamp of my friend whenever we
go to her house. “Do not cook a baby goat in its mother’s salt,” I think.
I could not care less. I wonder what that makes me, and I wonder if it kept
her up at night, this secretive salt-licking. How long had she sat on the guilt?
I wonder: does my response (my surprise and laughter and joy) make
her someone who just takes what she wants? or does it make her feel safe?
And that’s the question, right? Are we good parents?
And how can we go on, when we are sick? And they are gone.
