June - Poem 28

Don’t Mind the Boys / Kristina Byas

Girls will be girls,
free,
wild,
laughing with ease.

Then,
here come the boys,
being boys they’ll be.

The Wound is not a Metaphor / Shavahn Dorris-Jefferson

The Wound is not a Metaphor
it’s the mangled toenail, split
and lifting. I approach it with reverence,
examine it, stand on tip-
toes, the throb of it.
My little pain baby
—foul fat flesh growing
around it. I love the way
it catches light.

cuteness aggression  / Jess Tønseth Lee Gleason

Foxgloves accordionfold out 
the hole in my chest
to the wound in yours.
I didn’t mean to let my yellowing hands
scrounge too wide, I wanted
to lounge like the sinners in limbo
with jasmine blossoms overflowing,
on your bruised face, cresting over
crusted cuts in the twinkling symmetry
ionic – iconic in its looming sun-
flickered in freckles and motes,
sloughing broken skin, and unhealing
lines in your face. I left them there –
that you asked me to leave
in a voice begging to leave
red welts, hand-shaped, 
hand slapped, shovel-dug-
slam into your body
again with a meaning I can decrypt
when I bury you in bitter thyme and roiling worms
I pray you groan and rip my skin,
feel coughed nails, lungs splintering in
each bark telling me
that I’m wanted.
Someday we’ll sit, watch the seagulls
dawn over the ocean, and fight over the crabs,
who couldn’t scuttle sideways fast enough
to avoid the sharp beaked love.

Angel Sonnet 12  / Shane Moran

Oh, mirror in the sky, what is love? Can the child within my heart 
rise above? Beryl asks sitting beside his ex-wife at their daughter’s 
graduation, dancing with his ex-wife at their daughter’s wedding,
waking from a dream of his ex-wife the day of her second wedding.

Alone is a sturdy coffin, with only one string to pull on,
put he had to feel for it in that dark space. Often, he mistook 
the fabric of his own clothes for the bellstring, until one day 
he pulled and kept pulling it and the casket opened.

For while he stood there looking at the open sky,
until he lifted himself and stepped back out into the world.
His eyes took time to adjust to the bright lights of the sun.
He left new flowers at the foot of his parents grave and asked.

──────────────────

11.    one can
       lose
  only 
      illusion

Other Home  / Jingyu Li

   for River, Komal, Kani, Nancy, David

Somehow
I think I left something behind,
possibility maybe, or a banana slug. A month and
we’ve done what my family never could or never would,
we understood each other somehow, metaphysical 
dogs and all, and in prayer we named different
gods but they all sounded like gratitude
and every day we looked for the bear
that wouldn’t hurt us, in the place
that wouldn’t hurt us. The satellites in the sky
look like fireflies, I said. But I didn’t know 
they were satellites until you told me. 
Of course metaphysical dogs are real,  you said
and so we became friends. 
We make each other laugh, you said
or I forgot the words. I’ve started talking
like you. My brother thought your voice was mine
in a video with the bear. I need to walk this off,
you could have said about anything, 
I’m wide open.

Ordinary Miracle  / Stefanie Zito

Little by little
Rain falls. Sun shines. Flower grows.
Tale as old as time.