March - Poem 11
Poem for Offices / Kathleen Bednarek
It’s amazing anything gets done
when you consider the fact
as I do every so often that
the amount of people who
understand what to do is likely
equal to the people being trained to
do something they’ve never done before.
As I’ve been released for approximate hours
each day committed to increasing productivity
even in my off days so as not to disappoint the balance.
And there is this tension in lines and in lack of silence being
needed into all the waiting spaces and our gradations of escape
looking into wanting phones to say the war will ever end. But there
are the quiet ecru walls in the break room and people who thank you
and say goodnight. Information changes by summoning my kingdom
of data. I want to be grateful for my usage and I appreciate yours. That my
Person may be seen standing in midair without these floors pinging with the hum
of machines at night. When the Blue Heron rises from the stormwater basin at headquarters.
One light going off by timer signaling an incremental change in the sun’s position on the matter.
In / Mymona Bibi
My road to you was always in,
into the house, inside the room
we turn over our bodies
melt in our sheets.
we all hope that loss is a game
of hide and seek.
that our grief is the darkness
of the empty street corners
we’ve sought each other in.
there is a prayer between your thighs
and a god in my jugular
both throbbing to the music
in front of us.
Don’t Try this at Home / Susan Hankla
A slammed door is always wrong.
then forever out of plumb.
In another world / Amy Haworth
A blanket of tides pulled over the shores
laps the chin of the world.
Cotton candy clouds race on the wind,
currents are currency running north to south.
I push against what I know will keep me alive
and re-route breath through a workaround,
and allow the hand of the whole ocean to dunk
me under to a garden that needs no water
where the purple lattice of a sea fan bows
and a baby shark offers a pirate eye
like a submarine I move through the depths
sized wrong and manufactured for temporary survival.
The slower I go the longer I stay.
Even if I want to go up, I must stay down.
I swim in a cup of warm tea,
a cocoon cocktail of body heat and neoprene.
And I realize how easy it could have been to say
"I have no interest in that"
and how I would have missed frogfish and pygmies,
giant grouper, camouflaged flounder, and wingspans of rays --
How I would have lived never having known
us
in the ocean.
Kitchen Window Thoughts / Christina McCleanhan
When August comes,
it is complicated and trying.
Parched days unfold,
dusk attempts to seduce,
burned out mosquitoes,
drunk on muggy blood,
and stagnant creek conversations.
Morning shadows dance
across
a curated wilderness
that settles
across your freckled skin
during the honeysuckle season.
The greens will blend with time.
Washed-out January colors
brown needle scrub pines,
and the starlings
anticipate the first frost,
waiting to retire for the season.
Sycamore trees root below
tall grass.
Long forgotten trunks
fall near a horizon line
of roof peaks
peppered by telephone poles,
interrupted by bird whistles.
Listen, Darling-
when life takes
its breath
from me,
how wonderful the rest would be,
if I could lie
in peace
beneath
a walnut tree.
The Point Is / Elizabeth McGraw
Marked by a silhouette.
I’m kidding, marked by a marker more like it.
A reckoning with what we hold compared to our capacity to tell the story.
I’m being ambushed as I write this. After seeking my escape.
cracked tongue i was / Alexis Wolfe
cracked tongue i was
small child who believed in
secrets the long hallway of
light spilling from passing cars—
next it is april still we are
shedding winter’s quilt
we exist every - as patchwork
what am I? don’t know
just glad dogs know nothing
about personal space
colonized time
people can smell labor
and deer, human hair from halfmile
the night always being compared
to a wound—some things i guess
remain a given
I am all mouth stuffed with sky
wind dying spinning still
these crumbling lines
the light streaming through
