March - Poem 18
Shrine / Kathleen Bednarek
Other realms of softness guard
those laid low in severed belonging.
Follow me in the early morning
where the manholes create fog.
Choirs blow through momentary blindness.
Their songs distant yet
you can hear them in the garbage bins
rooting for echoes of mercy,
splashing in the buckets of crabs
fighting for the top of death in Chinatown.
A sword in its light through the trees,
a confusion of the barristers,
appeals of children found standing out
in the street, swooped up
placed in the back of vehicles, hiding
their cheeks against IDs.
Portraits of listening, equal nodding
and closing the eyes, equal tears and
nothing left to say but presence.
I offer you mine in the pale–
what is a small smile but the sun.
The ruth of hospital halls hovered
over when a small thud makes the woman
ask: someone help me.
When your bitterness uses the word
temporary against itself. When
the sea is filled with wrappers glinting
in the light. When
lying on your side looking left to right
you hear a shot. When it takes you
under your breath in the morning
dark, you ask the ceiling for their refuge.
Cigarette / Mymona Bibi
When you hold your cigarette,
my breath draws in
sucking in the air inside,
my body stuck at the window
watching your cigarette
clutching you back,
my friends always talk of tomorrow
and the next year so I keep
them around me like an armour
against the feeling that there is nothing
beyond the blurring of your hands,
behind smoke
now there’s no tomorrow
only - yes - for last night,
in another life
mothers might have healed
bruised skin
without held breath,
in another life
you’d drop the cigarette
and i’ll see your eyes
in my eyes
unblurred
unsmoked
I see you're by the T.V. again, / Susan Hankla
in that swell of talking-heads-news.
My outfit of the day is a gunny sack.
Historically they were worn just after
women being corseted for more than several decades.
Carry a wicker basket of hot pepper jellies,
and when you're saying and replaying
what Trump did, I shut my door.
(If only I had a chamber pot I'd never hear
T.V.). I already know the sacred things are all but
disappeared.
I blow on purple nettle Devil tea, pore over a Picasso
voluptuary. Once I hung bunting, but now the sign
on my office door says Insane Asylum. I search
for the sky
blue bra lost in surgery, spend time trying to write better,
using a grammar book from the Jeter School for Women.
Distraction / Amy Haworth
I see what you are, you rodeo clown
conniving a con
shaped like the pantry
Smooth, honey-lipped orator
selling timeshares.
untitled / Christina McCleanhan
oak trees bowing
throat locked
wet sidewalk
; do not disappear
unbuttoned cuff
holding snot
still
1834, this same day in March the first US railroad tunnel made home in Pennsylvania / Alexis Wolfe
and it has me thinking of the hush mouthed
pear eyed black Irish great great grandfather
I never met operator of Pittsburgh’s first street car
the one who walked like a cat clawing slow
on his tin roof even at ninety and when he died
five years later still had charcoal in his hair, how
when his cherry tree got sick he wrapped it
in bandages, swore hope long after the others
killed it off—the next two seasons he reaped
sweet biggest cherries you ever
seen, loved three daughters who never married
and spoke up for unions put his whole hand in
a beehive and never got stung how in the years
after retirement he’d ride that same car just to
become it, always recognized and free the same route
he’d ride for hours, prouder than if
he were flying
