November - Poem 18
I'll Take It From Here / Megan Bell
Trauma was
being driven by
the shadows of my past.
Healing was inviting
the shadows to ride shotgun
while I drove the car.
The Sun shines / Alison Lake
liquid honey
spilling
spilling
over the clouded
edge
of this world,
lighting
another day.
life on mars / Maya Cheav
bloodshed on the battlefield
is always at bay.
the vulgarity of gore—
mangled limbs and battered flesh,
born from spears and swords
wolfing the world in war.
creation takes time.
destruction is easy
and always an option.
big sister II / Jada D’Antignac
do you notice the trenches
or focus only on its treasure?
has unity been enough?
does it outweigh the division?
does my sternness guard you?
can you hear my stained teen spirit haunt?
have you broken the timer
that tracks your innocence?
one end a little more tarnished than the other,
we lay on opposite sides of this coin.
who does the toss?
who gets to decide?
i search for a map i’ve never had.
curiosity will always unfold itself.
The JP Morgan Building Has Just Turned Off Its Lights / D.C. Leach
but before I told you this it was an egregious
paint brush coloring the night
and at the corner convenience store where
I got a beef empanada and a giant cookie the guys
were dousing everything with Tchaikovsky’s
symphony No.5 and even earlier during a poetry reading
in Brooklyn in the space between mouths
and the cross-thatched skin of the microphone lived
starbursts from the string lights hanging over the stage
whole night skies bleeding over the readers' words and in Paris
too the bright blue crept through the windows
and reached its fingers over light and dark
faces and at night the glare off those same faces
painting the night sky and the gargoyles and the angels
over Notre Dame but I’m so sleepy now I keep
nodding off while typing this like the woman
on the subway nodding off in her own vape cloud
not that I could see her face through the gleam beaming
from the polished handrail and I’m wondering where
my car is or whether we're all in Grant’s
Tomb and I have to mention…something
about the sleep I’m falling into? and I want to
tell you again about the beef empanada I got
or the cookie I shared with my cousin
or the guys bathing in Tchaikovsky
but I keep getting snagged on the sirens
by the UN building and green eyes
or brown eyes or blue eyes bleeding
their lights into my notebook the way
the wine bled across the wooden hightop
no, I wanted to ask you, how do we
see anyone? our minds
bleeding over them like this—"Ladies
and gentlemen, please pardon
the interruption, we will be here
just a few more moments [static] clearing
debri from the tracks. Thank you."
untitled sonnet v / Dawn McGuire
You touched my hair
then said, don’t make this out
to be more than it is.
Like what? A nightcap? Détente? A spell?
I don’t trust spells. I snap them like a switch
before it whips—
Lyle Lovette’s on the jukebox
singing Once is Enough.
The Shamrock Rovers are u
by 2.
You reach for your glass and miss.
It shatters on the floor—last call,
one drink too much.
The lock still works. The key—marked may—
You touched me first. I left halfway.
Dolly / Samantha Strong Murphey
her lips kept moving but the sound in the Opry had cut out
years ago she signed an autograph to a young fan called
Jolene and remembered the name the story was incepted
elsewhere watching a bank teller flirt with her husband
there are many ways to send a message thumb out
two fingers to a temple click elbow out thumbnail slowly
drawn across a throat you gotta push me pretty hard
to get me stirred up but then I become my daddy
thumb to throat pointer and middle vertical at her lips
in the spotlight she blew on the tip of the barrel
of her fingers and into the microphone
she was the queen of country all right but what country
