January - Poem 9

Leaving Urgent Care / Haley Bosse

For Renée Nicole Good 

This is for every
Fleck of glitter
Exploded from the pocket
Of my hoodie, 
An unexpected birth
Of yesterday’s excitement,
New year hatching 
Six days late,
Almost enough 
To keep me 
At the sink for hours
Washing hope 
From the planes of my palms
And scratching 
Too rough 
Under the overhang
Of my pinky nail.
I could have stayed
Another minute 
Or an hour with the water,
I wouldn’t have been ready 
To see her blood
Across my screen. 
In poems, you almost
Never see a person’s 
Name exactly as it’s called,
Across a kitchen
By an exasperated mother,
Or written on their day of birth,
Or written on a grave. 
In so many ways,
She was living 
A queer dream under tyranny, 
Dropping her child
Off at daycare, 
Holding her partner’s hand. 
Renée Nicole Good. 
One more person
We shouldn’t have to march
Without.
Every word she scattered
Into the air,
Let us clutter
With their closeness,
Pray we’ll never
Wash them clean.

7 minutes after the heart stops / Jess Bowe

lights on the brain’s map
show in god’s polaroids: Love
in every background.

In the Year of the Fire Horse  / Joanna Lee

I am stuck in every tonight
somewhere

between the second
and the third

law of thermodynamics, burning
both ends even

while I know there’s an end
to the middle. come walk with me

in the cold, slipping on darkness
while our eyes

are tuned only to the stars, imagining
oceans. we’ll count out

each constellation until we’ve run
out of breath, lie down

in the wet grass and
laugh and laugh. when the sun

comes back he’ll
find us there still, hand

in hand, lighter
than we’ve ever been,

solving the equations
of this world’s messes

with fingers smeared in river mud.
we won’t fear dying.

we won’t lose sight.
we’ll make a plan to seed

small kindnesses
into the unused crawlspace

between heartbeats, sit back
to watch them grow.   

Song of Yourself  / Thomas Page

after Walt Whitman

I know every facet of yourself 
or, at least, what I assume
and you’ll shall assume that I am too
far gone to really celebrate every version of you
the versions you think you’ve hidden from me 
and the versions you carefully crafted for me. 

You who spent the summer evenings walking around the cityblocks 
looking at each strand of graffiti-spray 
discovering that each dollop of paint 
was an extension of that artist’s own lifeblood.

You who spent the autumn afternoons gazing upon the leaves 
looking at each dying fleck of maple and oak 
dissecting that each fiber of leaf 
was an extension of that tree’s own lifeblood. 

You who spent the winter mornings craving up the lawns 
looking at each snowbounded blade of grass 
digesting that each blade of grass 
was an extension of the Earth’s own lifeblood. 

I know the springtime didn’t bring you joy.
I know the springtime was spent alone. 
I know the springtime many cooed at your situation. 

But I know that you are more than that bed in that room in that ward in that hospital in that city that you felt so bound to which you just told me. 

Found in Boswell  / Sarah Paley

He had for many years a cat which he
called Hodge, that kept always in his room
at Fleet Street; but so exact was he not
to offend the human species by superfluous
attention to brutes, that when the creature
was grown sick and old, and could eat
nothing but oysters, Mr. Johnson always
went out himself to buy Hodge’s dinner
that Francis the servant’s delicacy might
not be hurt, at seeing himself employed
for the convenience of a quadruped.

Poetry  / Amy Snodgrass

after Reading “The Wheel Revolves” by Kenneth Rexroth

Like insecure but insistent leeches 
on the edges of a waterfall pool,
these buzzing squiggles in my brain 
keep me latched to the silent cruelties 
of my past.  
Oh, I am crazed!

Waking, I never remember
how much I am always 
gasping for breath above 
the spray, so close 
to drowning, unheard,

never understand
how tense with sadness 
I move, trying 
to lengthen toward the light,
never– until I read
the first poem
of the morning

and from the inside out
I smooth
like crackling ash.

Today Rexroth is the one:

a single light he writes, 
camping in the rain,
amongst a hundred 

peaks and waterfalls.

I listen to him, to his waterfall daughter.
I see their tent. I hear their talk. They tell me
all this will never be again. They tell me

to go on, to stake my own to the ground 
of my own. They wrap my tension in down. 
Singing bird years and stars swarm into my blood. 

The shame I feel 
for those latching, 
leeching squiggles– 

the campfire embers 
catch it. Screaming, 
finally, I become 

a tiny cloud.