January - Poem 5
Aquifer / Haley Bosse
Broken ankle, bruising like a peach
And propped in the rot of your bedroom.
Memory of the empty church, chairs stacked
And the flickering light barely grazing your face.
It’s cloudset in the street,
The scrape of your calluses on broken concrete,
The shiver you indulge in the place of desperation.
Between the pain, emptiness,
A gift of atoms, invisible
Unless you attend to them:
The worms surfacing from puddles,
Their wriggle in your palm,
The undersides of dripping leaves,
Greenbright between their veins.
Later, when you clutter with distractions,
The worms call out with inching rustle.
Place your softened feet on pavement,
Trace the shape of emptiness again.
no one young knows the names of things / Jess Bowe
i wander barefoot through the wind-pressed field, high grasses bowing to the soil, birds glittering in color, high and low, sky to Mother. clouds of every weight and form gather and drift. i pay attention. i offer up my most abundant treasure and gift it to the land. white peeks from just before me, rough and weathered bone in my palm. science asks me to drop a skull into a box. Mystery says decide to not know. i imagine a story instead of a face. i imagine survival and what it asks. i imagine i am not god. i imagine i’m as common as the wind, as ordinary as any leaf left for winter’s bed. teeth and jaw. can i call you friend? can i blur the border between body and light? can i rewind, count inward, become alive in the heartwood at my center? can i become new? i carry remnants of a living i’ve never seen, packed away in my pockets of feathers and stone.
Progress can be beautiful / Joanna Lee
There was a moment on the bridge this morning
blankly driving south to work
across the river in the leftmost lane
as we daily do when out
of nowhere,
all the small presence of traffic, all
the weight of the coming day, all the fear of failure
that tucks itself into my socks,
all the terror of losing you that never really
vanishes
vanished into just the way
the sun smacked the new downtown highrises
crimson gold, a gleam like god herself pausing,
entranced,
as she traces her name in light.
Passwords / Thomas Page
How many ways can I type recognizable
combinations of your first grade teacher
or your first pet or where you met your spouse
before online hackers access your health records?
Your healthcare provider seems to think everyone
is out to unearth every single note
between you and the doctor about flu
shots and medications and test results; like, why?
What purpose would there to be to unearth records
about all the times I’ve administered
medication your network of doctors
seem to disagree or even to disavow?
What is the value of knowing how many times
you and I have driven together to
appointments that say the same, terminal
diagnoses that washes its hands from treatments?
How could someone impersonate all memories
that are sewn together in these doctor’s
notes, hewn by the clinical manner which
your experiences are totaled in those numbers?
Can a person, a patient, be sold for crypto
on the black market blockchain for some tryst
impersonating your numerous years
for some digital exchange of goods or services?
Where’s the humanity in that?
Sonnet for Fred / Sarah Paley
Wilma goes to bed but Fred puts
Baby Puss out and gets locked out
himself. “Wil-ma!” he screams to no
avail. No one answers – not his friend
Barney. Not Betty or Bam-Bam. He sleeps
outside which shouldn’t be a hardship
for a caveman but it is. It’s cold and he
doesn’t have any shoes and only three toes –
not like he has any to spare to frost bite.
People night think I’m an alarmist for worrying
so about Fred – locked out of his house every
night. Hapless father, for-granted spouse –
he suffers for us all and we switch channels –
hoping he’ll make it to morning.
grace and mud / Amy Snodgrass
after Daniel Halpern & Seamus Heaney
expecting the northern lights
then expecting them to crumble
into glisten across mud
that white man and his canon
me holding my pen and
my rage fades to the exhaustion
of impotence and I cannot hold
but it's time to be getting on with the getting up now
and this other white man, well, he’s digging things
up, out of the bog and me, he lightens my load
like swirling arcs of orange so obvious and so rare
hindsight shatters myth into endless renditions
and it’s time to be getting on now, getting
up now and expecting the grace now
the grace rising up now out of the mud now and up
