November - Poem 12
Writing a poem (or a lesson in aggravation) / Megan Bell
I begin to wonder / will the words ever come? / Filling up my blank canvas with a pretty scene that stutters your heart / stills your tongue? /Granting me the privilege to be the one / to catch them / to share them with you./ If they appear, /will they stir up longings in your belly? /Make you arrive at the moment you've been searching for? /Give you something to hold onto / to hang on your wall / to tuck in your book. /Personally, / I want the words to bring you to your knees. /I want them to kick you in your gut,/ steal your breath,/ blow your doors wide open. /I want you drunk on them. /I want them to destroy you in the best possible way,/ then build you back up / to rip a hole in your soul. /To tear and to mend. /I might seem sweet,/ but there is nothing I want more than to render you inept. /To write my way into your heart. /To take you down with my pen. /It's a lot to ask of the words. / Maybe it's why they don't always appear?
Palimpset / Alison Lake
In this long story of our current days,
we rehash the same woes. We seem\
to fight the same fight again and again.
Over and over we mark the same marks.
Our days don’t feel fresh and clean,
like a new page waiting for what’s next,
just the same worn-out slip bearing all
the erased lines from the days before.
As I stare, I can see this lone sheet,
dog-eared, rubbed thin in some places,
but underneath it all, I can see faint indents,
a curve here, a line there, ghosts of a pen.
I close my already tired eyes, reach out
and press my sad fingers into this paper,
feeling, like reading a new kind of Braille,
what it was that we once wrote down.
I feel our love story; my hope, your patience,
the easy way we had with each other, of being
together, of finishing each other’s thoughts,
Our days progressing in a lovely, joyous script.
I am greedy to remember it all, write it
down, grab a new, empty page and begin
to transcribe everything onto it, give me
a way to start again and share it with you.
saint valentine / Maya Cheav
tell me,
is it a crime?
standing under the laurel archway
to the sound of wedding bells.
all they’ve ever wanted
is to be man and wife,
woman and wife,
man and husband.
in a world where it was once outlawed,
and they could outlaw it again
in the not so distant future,
you couldn’t pry their hands apart,
fingers in a deadlock.
you will make martyrs out of them,
watch them give up every ounce of blood
coarsing inside their beating hearts,
before they ever let go.
dazed (antidepressants) / Jada D’Antignac
for four years i watched myself from the outside. in and out, disconnected and drifting.
you know how rough it is to not feel like yourself for four years? you ever had to pinch your own skin to remind yourself you were still breathing? you ever been so numb you had to remind yourself you could still feel something?
road trip, staring through the window—everything moves fast yet stands still. dazed. in a crowded room—everyone feeling so close but so far away. dazed. in my therapist’s office, feeling like i was sinking into the couch. dazed. unable to focus on the words spilling from her mouth. dazed. leaving her office, having no recollection of what we discussed. dazed.
drifting further and further away, body disconnecting from mind. i didn't know how to find my way back to you or to myself. even when i let you inside to assist in the search, we’d always return empty handed.
my brain, too immeasurable. i worried you might drown in my whirlwind. lose yourself in my confusion. rot away in my hands. i worried i might be too dazed to even notice.
The Wind Is Blowing Trashcans Down the Alley Flipping Pages / D.C. Leach
of my journal to July 17, 2023—the fan is blowing low
this morning. still fasting. no break in the slow open
and close of eyelashes. cigarette butts a kind of pavement here,
conveying us to the foyer of something new. no A/C,
no daisy, nothing expected but the sweaty and holy epiphanies
of heat strokes. I remember three such instances,
three of everything really. the trinity never
leaving the corners of my mind, always shadows
on the periphery, cracks in the ceiling, little drops
of light falling through my faculties. attention. everything just needs
a little attention. a little break from the current pulling us
away from small details like eyelashes. eyelashes and toast crumbs.
whole bags of toast someone has made and lathered and put back
in the bag as if (and I can’t read the writing here) in case, maybe
in care. I’m afraid of not asking the right questions. of tension.
of dismissing tension. of removing dividers
between compartments. of not removing them. of being a fan like this
stuck on low.
Insomnia / Dawn McGuire
The Friend in my ear again
not like an angel, more like the neighbor
who calls when your dog’s loose
saying Give stuff away—casual, flat as tap water
So I haul my naked body
out to the garage
It’s a promiscuity of plastics—
jars of nails, Dad’s drill bits
a bin of sins I mistook for salvation
no wonder I can’t sleep
The truck from the place near the pawnshop
backs up
the high beams ricochet
off ten thousand surfaces
my eyes water
The Friend hands me a box:
Important Documents—
expired passports, certificates proving
I once mattered to some committee
love letters proving I once mattered
We load books with little fossils of thought
in the margins
conference banners
trophies for not making waves
A carton of microwave kettle corn
sweet enough to seal your teeth shut
hiding the actual hungry
the night’s incisors
The demo crew’s idling out front
crane arm poised like a gavel
Studs crack
sheetrock coughs up insulation
Certificates go last
all the initials after my name
go into the shredder’s grin-slit
What’s left hums
nothing is left
I hum back
lie down in the air where my name used to be
porous, vincible, ionizable
reusable
The Friend clears his throat
night folds its big paper wings
and I sleep.
Bathsheba / Samantha Strong Murphey
The lambs grew up pretending to be sheep.
They called the sheep wolves in no clothing.
David was supposed to be at war. She didn’t know
he was there, much less watching. Her in her private
courtyard. Him in his palace, looking down. She wasn’t
beguiling, just cleansing. A ritual, after the blood.
No one can agree on her story. The songs all mourn
the king’s fall. Nothing lasts. Not one goddamn solitary
moment, not the water poured, not the sunlight
softly filtered through the screen, not the reprieve
from punishment granted when you birth a son,
not the son.
