March - Poem 5
For Art on His Birthday / Kathleen Bednarek
When I consider art it has a double meaning. As much as the Tate Modern it was a September
installation of clothing and records in front of your parent’s house, a yard sale to help you pay to make
it to Peru. The excess of your namesake Rimbaud who I always thought of as your kindred
spirit/brother. Always Adventure ADVENTURE. Excellent. Worry is a waste of the imagination
living fully is creating inspirational quotes by the way you are. And I don’t think it’s ever over?
Macchu Picchu is otherworldly, to sit up in the clouds with the condensation and stones in your hair.
Wanting to be taken rather than granted. Like death. I have no idea when. It’s something we are all
granted. It’s probably all an energy song anyway and you are still jamming at the Oasis where the
jukebox is thankfully useless. Pick B4 and keep running barefoot in my neurons. I’ll meet you at the
streetlight on the corner where atoms have vibrated into appearing as Philadelphia. And it’s be excellent
to one another, not just a quality. It’s a function. As we are all in the car coming back home laughing in
our bodies.
We never needed eyes for this / Mymona Bibi
I’ve never slept with the filth of noise stressed and stretched a place to thrive between legs and behind them - in a tent - I once nearly died in a tent suffocating underneath them - in a library chewing
on hardback for a chance to be safe before I tasted blood and flesh, teeth sunken sucking whistling inside, spitting outside, the city is loud from the curdle of birth, gutters filled - relief when the cloud silenced the sun and sometimes the running palpitation of an orgasm ripples through - lightning! off go the lights we never needed eyes for this - down sets the sun we never needed eyes for this - in a friend I feel unnamed bites bumps slow down / reconstruct / retile / sew the tarmac closed / taut / stressed and stretched / now - round 2!
I choose to live with a thumb in my mouth not my thumb but my city which tastes like everyone I’ve ever loved.
Mrs. Wyeth / Susan Hankla
A woman rests her arms on a windowsill of a wooden house and looks out.
She wears a wide-brimmed leather hat and earth brown cable knit sweater buttoned up to her throat.
Her arms are crossed on the windowsill, and one pinky is up. The gesture expresses openness, maybe.
She looks out the open window that has no screen. It swings out. What could be captured in her hatchet-blade gaze?
Who is she? She's her famous husband's, the artist's wife. But who does she think she is?
Is she counting geese? She wears a man's hat every day. My mind drifts to when my husband almost died.
I wore his brown Stetson to see him at the rehab place. He is also a well-known artist. He has nine or ten
visitors every day. Some get there before I'm even up. For years I was angry all the time. Now I've just made 5 copies
of his DNR. He tells the nurses at the rehab place that I never come see him. I'm there every day. When home by myself,
I do his laundry and turn the lights out early and look out at the sparkling snow covering unraked leaves.
Alligator Alley / Amy Haworth
The first time we drove
straight
across Florida
it was you and me.
Running away while we had a couple of hours
to be who we were before a baby.
I hoped to see an alligator
instead there were only rivers of grass and broad winged birds
Perched like Kings
Looking
Watching
Holding the sky?
After that — these birds — I no longer cared
about an alligator.
It was their nonchalance that made me pause
as we moved 70 miles per hour
they stood air-drying
Aloof to the encroaching asphalt and the noise
Part of my soul bowed as they took flight.
Their spell cast, I learned their name,
Anhinga a’ñinga anhangá
and rolled it over, tasting it, teaching my mouth to say it.
Holding your hand as we drove
straight across
something had shifted
tamed
in that wild land.
The Definition Of / Christina McCleanhan
To kiss
is to exchange
lit divinity
without interruption.
as friend
lover
family
or foe
this spit-worthy violation of vulnerability
is a mark
to be wiped across memory’s sword.
And you,
no longer my beautiful man,
you met
the ugliness of my raw eagerness
with watering can and trowel
in the sturdiness
of your gentle hands.
There.
Sunrise came early,
on your steps,
in the cold.
Our bare feet found the truth
I would leave in your home.
i was unfair…
… cruel…
The shelves were not mine to claim.
On my front stoop / Elizabeth McGraw
We’ve known each other for ages and it’s really just years.
We reach out with our stories and fears.
We share no Astro sign.
We believe in each other and it feels kind.
You say you love us but you love the unit more. What we are making together in outside circles has struck a real chord.
I don’t hear it from my family or an internal crew.
So when you travel to say you’re starting a family and it starts with you.
I’m a sister
I’m an auntie
I’m a friend
Your new sweet family is just starting out.
I hope for you the blessings of imperfection and nonsense that lets you holler and shout.
A cacophony that shatters all the rules
A love that abides and ultimately cures.
It’s a world for the loving and adventurous alike.
Don’t be fooled it’s hard but for the living it’s a calling and a dreading and a life.
And like all things never lasts.
Pinto Canyon, after the phone rings / Alexis Wolfe
Julia calls and it’s earthflight
and blinding, calls me her bright&shiny, like if
we stare too long into each other’s swirling
we get a headache. She tells me about a coworker
who didn’t cry at his girlfriend’s or mother’s
funeral, though they were only a week apart—
he makes me believe in parallel realities, she says
incoherence and your own power are hunting
you down. If a man asked me to trade
places, I’d place one hand in a hot
frying pan and the other into a blender. I walk
down the winding and know the meadowlarks
sing for me, I hold the cows’ cries of separation
and whisper may what is for them never pass
them by. Once, a bald professor read my account
of an infant’s forehead and said this beauty can only
be written by a woman. I resented it, but knew
what he meant. That same child once suffocated
on a dog toy and I fishhooked him faster
than spit, faster than fingers. The same one who,
allergic to living, sometimes turned blue chewing
oats. I would balance him on my forearm
like a small clown, thrust my palm until he blushed
pink and snot smeared his eyes. There are so many
things I still cannot do alone. Julia says, I can’t wait
to raise a child—it’s like going to war!
Of course, there are more apt metaphors.
Of course, there are a million poets
dragging tonight, but she called me
