November - Poem 1
A Gift from Time / Megan Bell
The past is a whisper now.
A creak of the screen door, the smell of love, ripples on a pool.
It’s the summer wind in my hair, an '80s song on the radio, my mom’s eyes staring back from my son’s face.
It’s softened what-ifs and quieted almost; it’s rounded edges.
The sting is gone.
My mind rests easy within the walls of this home.
Nestled among heritage
and heartache was a box of
healing, wrapped up with a gold bow.
Look for it, you have one too.
It's a gift from time.
After All Hallow's Eve / Alison Lake
The night is done,
the candles have burned down
leaving each pumpkin
blackened and empty.
What fruits remain
in the frosted fields
belong now to the birds,
the beasts, and the fairies.
The wheel has turned,
the days going to bed,
bright leaves turn brown
to blanket the earth.
CHERUB / Maya Cheav
the honeysuckle is ripe
and our baskets are overflowing
with waterfalls of rich, red berries.
the earth is spilling over in abundance,
blooming a soil so fertile and lush,
it colors the ground a rainbow
with all that grows there—
briers of aster, plumes of calla lillies.
you tuck a pink carnation behind my ear,
plucked from the bushes
along the tiber river.
we run barefoot through its banks,
wading through the duckweed and floating hearts.
you teach me things I didn’t know I never knew—
the depth of softness on a sunday morning,
how tender two humans could be.
together,
we try to kiss the sky.
A Lighter Hand (A Cento) / Jada D’Antignac
composed with lines from selected poems of Gwendolyn Brooks
The summer ripeness rots. But not raggedly.
Shows the old personal art, the look,
with softness and slowness touched by that everlasting gold.
The dark hangs heavily.
In yourself you stretch, you are well
because sun stays and birds continue to sing.
A girl gets sick of a rose,
leaving her to release her heart.
She sits in a red room.
Her body is like summer earth.
That room and me, rejuvenate a past.
Lurk late. We
with the half-open mouth and the half-mad eyes.
How shall we greet him?
“Come back! Or “careful!” Look, and let him go.
Suddenly you know he knows too.
A note of alliance, an eloquence of pride.
Some specialness within.
Wind tangled among bells. There is spiritual laughter.
My taste will not have turned insensitive.
I want a peek at the back,
to touch things with a lighter hand.
It’s over and over and all.
ADHDefense I / Laurie Fuhr
Maybe it stands for
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
Or maybe it stands for
Apple Dumpling Handpie Delight?
Asteroid Displaying Handsome Dust?
Alot Does Happen Daily? Or,
Actually Doesn't Have Depression?
My therapist is having a field day
with my late-diagnosis adult ADHD,
so late as to be today.
She can spot a differently-abled mind
from 200 feet.
A poster on her wall shows what I look like
as a stick figure on a couch,
so overwhelmed by number and variety
of obligations that I can't even move.
ADHD Paralysis, the caption reads.
It's true that I am either
moving too much or too little
talking too much or too little
being too much or too little, but
never just enough.
I am the stick figure, yes,
surrounded by household clutter,
and the couch is too often my body,
heavy as hopeless misery,
comfortable and effacing
as daytime sleep.
Dependent Origination in Fall with Squirrel and Beer / Dominic Leach
A squirrel scampers with the evening light down
and off the tree, looks at me, hops closer, peers
into this notebook spread open on my lap, the froth
at the head of my ink-black beer.
We sit like this a minute: me—leaned against
the rough bark at the base of the tree, he—
leaned against his peering. He looks
at my hands reaching into the grass.
Or I look at his. One of us brings an acorn
to their nose. Holds it in their teeth. No, Autumn
holds us softly in hers, carries us off this way, deeper
into the fading light.
Ekphrastic as Stanley Plumly / Dawn McGuire
After Ghirlandaio, “An Old Man and His Grandson”
Even in a suit
you are still an Ohio Valley
hobo, thumb pointing
toward the next bruised town,
a pilgrim drawn to a wound.
Any reviewer who says
you turn the ordinary into beauty
“like turning a knob” is cause enough
for you to leave before signing
Regards, S. Plumly, on the flyleaf,
even if he bought the hardcover.
Your nose is in fact a knob,
blood-bulged, shaped by pity, rosacea,
and a contempt I almost envy.
I usually treat rosacea with doxycycline--
but not yours—
yours is a banner, your brand.
Old heart, did you ever see
your nose in the Ghirlandaio
at the Louvre?
A mesmeric midface that eclipses
the robe’s crimson pigment.
At your knee,
the golden boy, gazing up
as at an enchanted beast.
You are that strange,
that loved—
Evolved to a peril:
the dangerous romance of seeing
through the stained lyric
of your own elegy.
The boy, transfixed
as if your face is the only proof
the world allows,
will love poetry
past the point of safety.
Devotion will exact its full tithe.
You won’t warn him.
Neither will I.
Limerence / Samantha Strong Murphey
I have extracted myself from you.
It is October. I beat my pulp into a fist.
Once, I told you my daughter believes she can’t fall asleep
without music, insists the music must not have words.
Lyric—its push-pins, its wide-eyed springs that might keep her
from slipping under her mind’s soft folds. These days I clench every word
that might keep me from slipping between soft folds in my mind’s
deep bed. I choose a playlist for her: Instrumental Lullabies. These wordless
arrangements shape-shift down the stairwell. Familiar, just beyond
the tip. I know it—Ed Sheeren. The Shape of You is a lullaby that keeps
me awake. Only objectively is this funny. The oven is open, bleeding
heat into the kitchen. The envelope in the drawer was sealed
with your tongue. Once, I tried to move the piano alone. There’s still a dent
in the plank. I walk it, in the dark, feet bare in the now-quite house.
Love me. Sing something. Quote me to me.
