March - Poem 26
Feeding the Goats / Kathleen Bednarek
Nothing that can ever be accessed
is being disposed of at its center
through your life
Like the sunlight known only by darkness
People have said various things to me
to escape their own confusion
I give them my shoelaces &
somehow they have found a hunger for
candy
Live and Die / Mymona Bibi
We live with all our passions,
desires, memories,
exponentially changing
begging for consistency.
We ask so much of each other
so that we can blame all this
disappointment on something
that breathes.
Let's not mix our life with our world.
Those two that hold each other
from different bodies.
Skies are emptier when we forget
the places of those two
in our minds and souls,
like the street in 2020.
We both looked out-
life and world fused together.
Now, we're lucky if our skin
sags-
gravity is nothing but time passed.
Let's stop it all for a second.
Let's float.
People Invisible to History / Susan Hankla
can still have a good time.
Their music, played in kitchens after work
in the late hours, going all night
in their improvisational juke joints,
they make make-ups: lyrics thought up
on the spot, fresh songs and adding on.
You'd think I know all about this, firsthand,
but it's from meeting someone who wrote a book
on Mississippi delta blues. The man most focused on,
a gravedigger, made clay skulls with flash-cube eye sockets
and field corn teeth. Said, they're ashtrays.
His skulls live in collections
in American Folk Art museums.
The live music is what I want to witness.
Only one white man so far has accessed
–he's good people and he's written down
the "make-ups", mostly filthy.
It puts me in the clouds, said
James Son Ford Thomas,
Music is judged by feelings,
not by faith.
For Bill Ferris,
who introduced me to what is hidden
Broken / Amy Haworth
The x-ray showed
your shattered bones
healed
with shadowed lines
And I knew
one day
we'd come back to this
to mine
hope that a heart
broken
in 1000 pieces
will also
return
full
range
of
motion.
When We Art / Christina McCleanhan
plant your feet in play—
release the honest note
simple but exact
The thing no one ever tells you about being creative is how red hot your heart and loins and breast and muscles feel when you plant your feet and write the truth in simple but exact terms, and release fire in play between yourself and another actor.
The thing no one ever tells you about being creative is how everything is really about fitting circles into squares-a white elephant seated at a table crowded with personality and greed.
The thing that no one ever tells you about being creative is that the finish isn’t scary—the completion is exhilarating—it is the fear that you will be too dumb or distracted to catch the purpose of the next idea or that its intensity will be inconvenient and in reaching for the uncomplicated you may lose the most previous gift of all, but it is also having faith that whatever we acknowledge or respond to, agree to peel, will come from the poetry often buried deep within the ordinary and mundane.
whatever we acknowledge
agree to peel—buried deep
the ordinary mundane
Singularity / Elizabeth McGraw
It’s 3am and I can’t sleep. You’re up making coffee back home and I toss and turn now with notepad in hand. I read recently that writing comes back into vogue because AI can read it so well it’s easily transcribed and stored digitally. He takes his dozens of moleskins and scans it all in and discovers he’s even more findable. I wish I could scan myself. Hit control F and find what I’m looking for.
Disappointed, lately keep telling myself / Alexis Wolfe
Disappointed, lately. Keep telling myself
branch out, believing I’ve eaten all
the branches. Little tricks to makebelieve I’m younger—
hold my forehead taut and stick my tongue out
while I drive. Living east, I cursed Snowplow Days
and now I miss them—that is how these things go.
In a moment it will look like summer again—I’ll complain
about the salt stains on my camouflage hat and disappear
into some backcountry byway or another. It’s easy
to think you’re the only one sleeping
near an open window. I can’t name a single friend
with health insurance. Keep your extremities inside
the ride at all times. Years and years—that’s how much
time passes. But the moment will take care
of itself—incredible, how we bear alone.
Maybe you, too, are in search of salvation.
