November - Poem 13

Ashes & Absolution  / Megan Bell

Red, raw, and wrathful as the January sky, 
The girl collapses, afraid and alone, in the ashes of her life.   
She is nursing delusions; she is seeking absolution. 

The village she clutches is, also, collapsing -
under the weight of too many crooked branches.
It rattles frozen houses where the girl lingers and lingers, aching for chances. 

This is degradation; this is debasement - 
The frozen sky, gray as her pain, spits cold rain, the torture is unending. 
She tries to stand tall; she suffers more attacks.

Yet, the teenager loves the village, still. 
Would stay in the hills, forever. Would bow to them, gladly.   
The hills look down on her like neighbors, but they are weeping, silently and wildly.

How Are You? / Alison Lake

“I’m fine…” Well, actually, I am currently taking three antianxiety medications, not sleeping through the night, having nightmares about the future, feeling stretched taut, like an unraveling tightrope, worrying every day about nothing I can actually control.  I panic at the sight of cut trees, garbage on the streets, MAGA signs, loud car horns.  I cannot even hear the president’s name without spiraling , I wonder what species we are going to kill off next, how many Palestinians and Ukrainians and Sudanese have to die before we stop fighting, wonder if my young daughter has the chance of a safe, healthy future on this planet, if her nightmare about dead kids lying in the hallways is clairvoyance or only a bad dream, wonder if she is going to be stolen, trafficked, raped, or killed, what she will say when she discovers the truth that there is pain, evil, corruption and dis-ease in this world. How can I be fine?  How can I be fine with everything spinning out of my head, flinging in every direction like the shrapnel from a grenade? How can any of us be fine?  “How are you?”

juno / Maya Cheav

she’s like the oceanus sculptures 
on the trevi fountain, 
beauty carved from stone 
leading from the aqua virgo. 
she’s like the tyrhennian sea,
a quiet power 
with an unwavering undercurrent 
of intensity. 
she’s like a pile of stars
trying to be human. 
one day, 
I’ll make her my june bride. 

highs and lows  / Jada D’Antignac

the lows may feel 
more impactful than the highs.

the time seems to swallow you whole,
slowly dragging you through the depths,
whereas a high doesn’t ever seem to last too long.

i think all of this is the point:
a drag of the depths,
a thrill of the heights. 

this is called feeling, i tell myself. 
this is apart of living. 

How Are You?  /  D.C. Leach

on the top floor of the smooth
alabaster building across the way a man
pushes the French windows open
with both arms looks down searching
presumably for a woman or his car maybe contemplating
the distance to earth just once more.
he looks longer. children holler. a trash truck
sings its song. the man spits. pigeons flit upward
and settle among the wire crosses and
terracotta chimneys like dreams
or sheet metal roofs.

I. / Dawn McGuire

Saturday night, the jukebox stuck on Springsteen.
On cracked leather barstools two women sit 
drinking whiskey like it’s medicine.

TV tuned to the Shamrock Rovers, audio off.
The bartender holds a polished glass up to the light.
The whiskey burns on both sides of the silence.

I’m in boots that don’t belong to me.
I watch you. The straw between your teeth
chewed to confession. You pretend

not to watch me. Your body language all hurt
and hunger, shoulder angled toward escape.
The whiskey scalds my throat the same old way.

We meet in places strangers come to mend
where nothing good begins and most things end.

Bluebird / Samantha  Strong Murphey

My younger brother tells me lifelong musical taste is formed
in adolescence. He says that in this, and every other hungered searching,
I should seriously stop. It will never get better than Better than Ezra,
White Stripes, Third Eye Blind—I’ve never been so alone and I’ve
 never been so alive. It’ll never get better than the songs
in his head. I know all the words. He tells me his dream—he walks
into a recording studio and there she is: elf-like, eyes like lakes.
And she’ll have a bluebird tattoo on her shoulder I add. That’s how
you’ll know she’s the one. I overhear him repeat this months later.
I’m always searching his face for signs of song. Was adolescence the
origin of our shared penchant for cosmic loneliness? I was drafted first
into this life. I couldn’t hear them call his name into the atmosphere.
I was already here, already driving through this dark and shifting city,
windows down, blaring overbearing light—