March - Poem 13
Poem for Kerouac on his Birthday (3.12) / Kathleen Bednarek
God got back down from heaven on the third day,
you sd.
A bashful blue ink blot from your downward pen
pooling a dove of camellia ink under your shirt pocket
before your heart exploded onto teletype paper.
Lost, bloodshot outside a Kettle of Fish,
jukebox light reflected in your black hair, avant guarding romanticism.
What it must have been like leaning against the doorway before the dive,
your mother love in your head. You gave me the freedom to write
really bad poetry with all its rags and jewelry. I went searching too
for Pooh Bear winding my sentences at 2 am in Cawker City, Kansas around
the world’s largest ball of twine. The agony in the garden is the Golgotha
of one person in one room spent thinking.
Ah, who am I kidding?
Spring / Mymona Bibi
here is the spring,
a mirage of sweet-pea collecting,
they told us this was nature,
not the millenia of training,
redirecting woman to point at man,
some compasses need breaking.
non-men don't have the privilege of spirit,
tungsten chains strong enough to lock up the night
so that spring can pass without cleaning,
without fragrance, but with nutrient-rich
mud under our nails as we dig
up the graves of living lovers.
god is as masculine as the ‘door’ or ‘book’,
both shut by the mere flick of an
accusatory tongue as violent
as the winter before.
when will you ungender us?
so we might continue popping
bubble wrap between table legs,
carelessly playing, forgetting the position
of the sun in the sky.
Reverse Ekphrastic / Susan Hankla
Why not present all the conditions for something to be a piece of art,
by listing all details and how they coalesce
and call those a painting, or sculpture, or a sketch.
Like the way you looked when you could tell just by seeing
our friends arriving at their home from the hospital that day,
by the slow way they walked, and how they held themselves,
you knew without any exchange of words that Bill didn't make it.
Out of Stock / Amy Haworth
Patch, pellet or pill
there’s a line of ladies
released from lies.
Waiting to replace what gets lost
with energy found
Flawed studies steered generations
away from the alchemy
our mothers should have had.
A Hovel In Camelot / Christina McCleanhan
The room was small, no more than a postage stamp.
A window, a chair, a shelf for dry goods and potatoes.
When loneliness swept across her thoughts, she
danced
barefoot
across the wooden floors while
sing ing
Raising Hal
le
lujah hymns.
She bought bread with daydreams
hid in quiet from
angry rain, blew kisses at
pigeons - felt like you, like I
do after trying on the silk
of a night that sweet-talks its way
into the drawers of our intellectual
curiosity.
I have only ever been to Mars in my
nightmares.
but I understand how to ignore
lima beans served on a plate by
a big-footed giant who is too
arrogant to cover the floorboard cracks
with the rug we sewed together
My pockets, after church, are
full of holiness and fortune cookie madness:
vulnerability sounds like faith and
looks like courage, from your friend
Brené Brown.
The window was large, wider than a rich man’s sack.
A cloud, a plant, a curtain to draw against the sun.
Her laugh built fires on the coldest day.
Stabby Things / Elizabeth McGraw
It's stabbing snowflakes.
Hitting a toasted ground.
It's falling moisture in a season that slowed migration
and keeps the insects away.
No gnats on my window screen means fewer bugs on the pitch.
We wind the week towards the respite.
But no rest for us there.
It's running and running and running some more.
If the weather passes and we can stand clear.
I'd call that a victory and a good way to pass a time that belongs to my others.
