November - Poem 16

The Pistil of My Youth / Megan Bell

Wielding my flaming pen, bathed in its gentle glow, 
I set the page on fire with holy hopes, daring desires. \
I write in twisted tongues, curling myself around distorted light. 
I absorb the glow; the words begin to flow.  
Unfurling, my inner child unfolds, as delicate petals cascade open. 
The Pistil of my youth, now, exposed - the bone, the nerve, the hotspot. 
I reach toward the healing warmth of this moment.
My hands feel heat. My pen pours forth. My mouth tips up in a smile. 

Amen. Amen. Amen.

Fungal Portraits / Alison Lake

I.                Amanita muscoria

Although one bite
may lead to your death,
I’m not as bad
as you believe.
My plentiful mycelium
help each tree, each plant.
Through our mycorrhiza,
my hyphae hugging
each webby root,
I give them water,
pull in nutrients
from the dark earth,
asking only
for sugar in return.

II.              Armillaria mellea

You call my honey,
well honey, I bet
you didn’t know
how I strangle my host,
wrapping it up,
pulling in its life,
sucking vital energy,
everything it gets,
into my fat, greedy
mushrooms.  You fry
me up, consume me,
lick your buttered lips,
as I consume
each tree.

III.            Stropharia aeruginosa

I offer my services
in times of distress,
my pale blue-green cap
like a hearse.
I’m the mortician
of our world,
working to remove
what has died,
giving each death
its own shroud.
I eat death
and give birth

To new life.

where do we go from here? / Maya Cheav

we are people falling apart. / years and years and years / of knowing / each other, / like the backs of our hands, / so well that when we are / in front of each other / for the first time in a half step / we have run out of things to talk about. / I think / we have become cruel to each other, / not knowing when to apologize / and when to cut our losses. / am I supposed to hold your hand / still? / we’re like family / in the sense that we let the resentment build up in our bodies / because we don’t know how to say sorry. / but is it the sorry that’s really the root of it / or is the fact that we were once children / and now we are not?

only to feel   / Jada D’Antignac

let’s go without discussing past memories 
let’s not share personal opinions about life or how to live it 
let’s not say we’ve missed each other
or how we will miss each other tomorrow 
we shouldn’t blur any lines or feed each other any pity promises 

maybe this time 
we will touch only 
to remind ourselves we can still feel
nothing more complex than that
not to overthink
not to complicate

maybe this time 
we won’t meet anywhere else 
other than where we are 
in this touching only to feel

After Aleksey Parshchikov?  /  D.C. Leach

I found myself falling into the depths
of a cold, falling back
to kindergarten, from where
I saw our death.

I fell to the center
of Earth, crawled
home from there, but home
lay smoking on its back.

Nature is alive like ashes
or photographs in a frame.

Like how before new snows
some go to the forest—
some for the wood or
to breathe water,
to kill a bear and carve
on logs…

As I slept, I dreamt…envision
a worm—a cross-section
of time and blood.

O, intervals between stone and water,
Do knives sink the way my voice sinks?—wait!

Play on, rusted lyres! We’re all
turning into black bears. Look
at these haystacks of warriors. Soot
billows from the chimney.
It’s on everything. It’s up
to our childhood knees.

Home is lighting another. It’s locking
eyes with us now, it’s cupping
its hands around the flame and dragging.
My heart is erupting.

Portrait of the Artist / Dawn McGuire

—after Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Obama

The greens clutch his ankles:
leaves of myth and place, tropical,
imperial—
foliage as scrollwork,
as camouflage,
as cathedral.

The President, serene, contained,
deliberate as gospel,
his forearms on his thighs, solid as boulders,
the colors as alive as a wound
before it’s recognized.

Kehinde’s genius: Black identity reclaimed,
defiant, flourishing—
the classical white gaze refracted and reframed.

I stand before it in a vise of awe
and shame—
the double vision you get staring into a well—
seeing your own reflection,
the malignant underneath.

What is it, when we look?
The thing in itself—if such exists—
Sartre’s unconscious object,
its maker’s life concealed,
remade precisely in the image of our need.

What pressures it
outside the grand gold frame?

Young men say Kehinde Wiley raped them.
The artist’s power and prestige—
it left them poisoned,
slowly,
all at once—

A censor crawls the rhapsody of leaves,
the petal-sprawl, radiant greens
not found in nature.

The gallery grows more crowded.
A hushed, curated truth is on the placards
praising light and legacy.

Cheerful weather, rigged
to hide the ravage.

The presidential portrait hangs in one room.
Down below, basement-bubble-wrapped,
four young men churn and argue in their sleep.
They are the ugly topiary in the underpaint
we choose not to interrogate.

The artist stands beside his work of genius
in a gallery full of grant awards
and boys
and secrets hissing in the leaves.

Is beauty ever clean?

The Popes commissioned works
that bring us to our knees—
alongside the choirboys
they owned.

We once believed in art
as revelation.
This presidential chair,
a democratic throne,
depicts a poised, intelligent face,
so reasonable it hurts.
The green leaves seem about to swallow him.

We have loved the lines the artist painted,
this is true.
We love to be lied to.

reflection / Samantha  Strong Murphey

it used to hang pretty
low, the mirror above the
toilet in the little bathroom
guests always use, until
this summer when i found
out that for years all my
friends have been referring
to it as the penis mirror.
its height was precisely
perfect for viewing. anyway,
the penis mirror has been
moved. you’re welcome.
or i’m sorry, depending
on how you feel about
things