January - Poem 30
My Gender / Haley Bosse
as the last resort
in a storm-wrecked beach town,
as a slight of hand
by a man in patched-over socks,
an allergic reaction
to a friend’s unpredictable cat
or a dazzle of seagulls’
clean bellies from below,
Schrödinger’s kit
tucked away in the attic,
the birds tipping forward
to disappear in the fog
on the eve of three / Jess Bowe
you demand and you dance and you eat
three breakfasts before nine.
i watch and i watch and i watch
you run and blink and breathe.
you carry a flag and a truck
and build walls and trees
and vacuums that don’t plug in.
you chase the cat and lay on the dog
and dip your hands in the water bowl.
you sneak behind the couch and open
the window to all six degrees outside.
you fill a cup twenty-eight times
and spill christmas in paris tea
and cry when i'm first to the mess.
you refuse to nap.
you crush cereal with your bike tires.
you spin in circles when the devil
goes down to georgia, air fiddle
propped between chin and belly.
you save the chickens your apples
and say hello to the stinkbug
and you never, not once, ask
to be anyone else.
you cry and hug in the same hour.
throw a spoon across the table
and tell me that i’m okay.
not once, do you ever, look beyond
the treeline and wonder
where any of your life has gone.
Self-portrait as Bruegel’s MFA admission essay / Joanna Lee
Chemical composition of leftover stardust, of iron & saltwater & afraid to take that leap off the old pier. older, now. but not so much i can’t remember the smack of the cold Atlantic or the smell of a Chicago bus station alone, and his name, Ravi, through the long midnight blue hours / shoulders that carried such weight / in canvas i paint myself always with bigger eyes, except the time i highlighted my own skin pink to prove something to someone i refuse to recall / shoulders that still carry such weight / that want to do right but don’t always know what that means. feet turned south / collector of rosary beads and little scars, most / comfortable in corners, in lowercase i’s, but / will always walk like a surgeon : a learned instinct for tying knots : a pretender at many things / a listener / bad at disappointment and no love for rearviews, yet / a secret desire to retract the wounds of my wounded, unpick the scabs / extravasated wolf song / dehisced tideline. sadly wingless, but that applies to most of us. whatever it is you are looking for, i am not it.
Movies / Thomas Page
There isn’t much you and I can do together
except for watching movies all day long.
You tend to pick ones that I find slow
and I pick ones that you find boring.
It seems that we have different tastes—
you hate the movies that I find moving.
Maybe it’s because we’re at different stages
and I’m more willing to put up with garbage.
Glitzy garbage wrapped in a criterion shell
while you like ones like cherry bombs.
Cherry bombs exploding in bad guys’ faces
thwarting plans to blow up oil refineries.
How many two hour spans can we
watch the lives of others unravel?
How many permutations of others’ lives
can we see before we decide we’ve seen it all?
I’ve been keeping track of the movies we pick
and it seems that there’s dozens to replace them.
Is there ever an original idea that hasn’t been
made into onionskin copies?
How many yous and how many mes
have had this same conversation?
This same conversation while watching the same movies
as the snow falls like some worn out metaphor?
We Dead / Sarah Paley
I am dead along with the other dead
We are looking at ourselves dead.
The squirrel is particularly upset because, dead,
he looks like a rat and people step over him in disgust.
He had a fluffy tail he was proud of. But he’s dead
now so what does it matter?
I guess I can’t really fault him because I wish I looked better dead.
Among the dead are people I would rather not see.
It’s a real mess here. Confusing. People died
at the wrong time and now they barely know or recognize
each other. The young widow is a dead hag. Her husband
doesn’t know what to do. She looks like his mother, who is,
of course, also dead and she never liked the wife.
I die many times a day. Sometimes I am hit by a bus.
There I go up Sixth Avenue like Wile E. Coyote splayed
on the front. Children under five are amused. They think
I will be fine – just peel myself off and fill back up. But I’m dead.
Their parents try to cover their eyes to protect them.
Sometimes something falls and crushes my head.
The friend I was walking with is horrified, she has
blood all over her new jacket and does she even know who to call?
Sometimes someone kills me. Sometimes I kill myself.
Sometimes people mourn. Sometimes no one cares.
I always wince when I die to try to make it go away.
We dead are embarrassed by how we feel and how much we want.
It has always been this way.
Gratitude / Amy Snodgrass
A tree with deep and lovely grains, filled
to burst with the sweetest honey, stands
tall and proud on the horizon. Stark and
clear, it holds truth in a cheeky wave. Another
fiery fall awaits, but for me, it is time to let go.
Just now, I read Billy Collins’ “Forgetfulness”
and it about killed me. No metaphor. No hyperbole.
People don’t know how you feel unless you tell them.
Just now, I read Fia Skye’s lines about lies, lines
that set me straight or at least a little straighter,
making me believe I can strengthen the marrow in
my bones again, strong enough to pause and listentrue.
Just now, I searched for a vaguely remembered line (and succeeded
quickly–phew!): a line from David Kirby’s “This Magic Moment,” which
of course all moments are, saying “Poetry does make things happen.”
The search also resulted in Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” which
is beautiful–but did not almost kill me.
I want to be better. In 6th grade, Mrs. Haase told me my poems couldn’t
include full sentences. I was furious, in my way of not knowing what that
meant or that I had the right. I let her silence me.
She was not a good teacher. My whole style now defies her,
but I think maybe she wasn’t wrong…. She just wasn’t nice.
People don’t know how you feel unless you tell them.
Just now, this memory made me search for Herbert Kohl’s I Won't Learn from You and I
discovered it has the most fantastic subtitle that I hadn’t remembered: And Other Thoughts
on Creative Maladjustment. People don’t know how you feel unless you tell them. I want to
be better. More creatively maladjusted. Less full-sentenced. More magic. Ready to bend.
More open to being wasted by words.
So now, I will wait for myself, for the flow I trust will come, and I will write this,
my aching thank you to the dear tupelo tree: stark and cheeky, glorious and real.
