July - Poem 6
Fluid Delay / Clayre Benzadon
I arrive too late
to the party, where
I crushed confetti, tied
the strings to my hairends.
Laughed at the clowns
whom were hosting,
foolish, coconut pie
crusting their faces.
I never know when
to leave. In this city,
I always abandon
my body in the car:
throat closes, heart
hurts hard in my ears.
I want to say heavy
but it comes out as
heaving in this heat-
stroke zone. Back
at the party, at least
my face stays put. I
almost growl at the apples
in the tub, blue basket
another symbol for
fluid delay. Dilly dally
at the fun-
ction, sink your whites
into a more crunchy,
crisp afterwards.
I did not use the internet to write this poem / RJ Ingram
Imagine for a moment a witch’s road a windy enchanted pathway that connects all eighteen layers of the same story landed upon themselves like sheets creased & tucked into the top sheet / Victory road as they call it snakes around the most quintessential hellscapes / Boxcars pepper the desolate terrains & strung up like catch & release deniers / Each tiny faction of survivors of their own apocalypses is governed by a sovereign leader who lives beyond palaces & your standard public gymnasium / Parents beg their children not to run away from home & follow the train tracks onward / No one who tries to leave returns unless their guided by the foxcats / Shepards between the realms or at least their own / Every world came with a family of foxcats & the young ones latch onto a ten year old of their choosing / The parents can hardly refuse the honor / Plus to be guided by the foxcats was an important position in the villages & citadels / Guiding travelers between the eighteen apocalypses / Consider the foxcat / The evolutionary champion & harbinger of change / Consider how the foxcat wanders around the silo looking at the old tech as if hieroglyphs & consider how quietly the foxcat leaves.
Extinction 7.6
Children leave
Foxcats guided by
Citadels
Consider how quietly
Extinction
Red Velvet / MeraBaird Kuar
My apples get sauced, my stars get striped,
and stripped and paraded through the streets
My good southern Gramma drives 40 miles
To church every Sunday, she screamlaughs
She watches the news religiously, hands
folded in gracious ability, she bakes
15 cakes every holiday, she bakes
Songs you can never unhear, no
Nursery rhymes ever moved on
from her possessive voice, she is
So quiet but when she’s hot, fresh, baked
In her full color, her voice tastes
of thick honey and it's everywhere,
everywhere
She is an American dream, lips slanted
Drool-dripped before the day slipped
A noose around its neck, danced
A floppy rhythm to fall and be fooled
Yes, but to survive everything
sonnet for a crab's soft body / Kes Maro
when the stars fall in october, their husks calcify
hollow, space’s fruit rotten even before it bruises
against the soil. i can’t escape what the land looked like
at 4 o’clock, walking through the woods to your house
with the dog, lazy, pulling me back. sometimes,
the world’s noise breaks me. i always wish i had a better way
to put it, but there are only a few truths. your shoulder
was chicken wire stapled to the frame of your body
i remember us in beds of queen anne’s lace and clover.
i remember us framed by the act of falling as we now know
bodies do. did you know? i grew afraid to touch you
in case you’d realize i wanted to be near you.
most secrets are the same few things,
no matter how they take up residence in our throats.
Never-rary, Never Rarely, Sometimes, Always. / Dallas Outlaw
My stay
was measured
in almosts
in folded clothes
that never learned
which drawer was home
in promises
that grew roots
in borrowed soil
Never-rary
the place between
never and temporary
where i knew i should leave
but still watered
what was wilting
because sometimes
dying things
still look alive
when you love them
Never Rarely
because it wasn’t nothing
because the laughter had witnesses
& the memories did not disappear
just because the of yesteryear
because pain is a poor
historian when it only
remembers the fire
and forgets
there was warmth
Sometimes
we were exactly what we said
we were: two people trying
to translate languages
we never learned to speak or write
holding dictionaries
full of definitions that kept
us changing in plain sight
finding forever in moments
that could not afford it
Always
not as a promise
or as a sentence
we have to prove
and not as proof
that leaving made loving a lie
but as a place that existed within
a chapter with no periods
a book with no author
a lived experience in my imagination
yet it still knows my handwriting
And another also
is not a replacement
it is the quiet truth
that life keeps adding
another reason
another beginning
another version of myself
also deserving
also becoming
also present
Repetition Compulsion / Tammy Smith
A dream is an unfulfilled wish. Freud admitted he used his own to demystify repressed desire. He never understood women or what they wanted. Only a man puffing on a cigar would claim something so symbolic. His own anxiety drove him down the royal road to the unconscious, where a dirty syringe in his dream revealed the guilt he felt about Irma, his former patient.
pieces of glass
we step on
walking barefoot
I wonder if the therapist I saw in my early teens ever thinks about me. Does he realize I dream about him every Thanksgiving, after I run a Turkey Trot? Would he remember my name? Recognize my face if we passed each other along the New York State Thruway? What if I bumped into him buying coffee at a rest stop?
rim of the cup
coffee refills
burn the tongue
Freud believed unseen psychological forces dictated one’s destiny. I search for my old therapist everywhere I used to eat with my father—all-you-can-eat, stuff-your-face smorgasbords. No one understood better than the man I paid to listen to me the significance of my father calling me fat before ordering dumplings, glaring as I gnawed on a spare rib until my teeth caught the bone.
therapy bill—
counting my change
the receipt ripped to shreds
Letter to Gull from a Driftwood Log / Daphne Stanford
You, for whom this sleep thing comes
So easily: tell me, how do you do it?
Your one orange webbed foot tucked
Under, into bird-version of tree pose.
Without this log where I lean, I’d be
Forced to sit cross-legged & upright
Sin vergüenza—shame having been
Instilled primarily from the pulpit—
Aquellos ojos verdes/cafecitos—
Ojos para mirar el quién quiero tirar
De mi alma—words I’d rather not
Translate for anyone, let alone myself.
