November - Poem 2

Motherhood / Megan Bell

Motherhood is hard- scraps of your fingernails, your marriage, your pastimes, buried in a pile of dirty laundry until they are ten.

That’s when the rediscovery starts, recognizing weary bones have been crafting your family’s tapestry - the roots of their childhood and all your poetry.

It’s when you pick up your pen. 

It’s when you begin again.

Passing the Bay Mare / Alison Lake

Almost every day,
on my way to town,
I pass the bay mare
alone in her field.

Often she's eating,
cropping grass short,
tail twitching and flanks
trembling against flies.

In the heat, in the rain,
in cold or growing ice
she lives in her box
of electrified fence.

Horses are herd animals 
yet she is always alone,
having only her own shadow 
to curl against for comfort.

pomegranate flesh / Maya Cheav

goddess of the underworld, 
title granted to thee 
by the cult of mother and maiden—
she who returns spring 
at her sacrifice, at her expense.
shall we feast upon 
the pomegranate fruits? 
its bitter membranes,
its red arils? 
the lush taste of passion
does not take. 
there is a world 
in which she does not bite,
in which she does not eat the six seeds. 
there is a world 
where it is winter evermore, 
the ground barren, 
bitter, and bearing no fruit. 
there is a world 
where pluto does not take 
everything she had from her, 
does not pluck her from the world she knew and strip her of her body, 
of her life in the earthly plane. 
there is a life above the underworld 
waiting for her,
one of picking flowers in the meadows of sicily
and singing to herself in the plains. 
I will give it back to her, 
remove pluto’s claws from her back, 
no matter what the world shall rue. 
she has suffered long enough. 
may she ever prosper,
ever prosper. 

elegy for the attempt / Jada D’Antignac

1. sunrise 

you
eager at my feet
eyes sparkling like the stars above us
ready to take the love 
i cannot comprehend enough to give

our sun will rise
but only in a place 
where pain is nonexistent

2. gray cloud

life can bring darkness out of people.
did you know that? 
have you learned?

distance means time.
time; wonder.
wonder sparks emotion.

it’s all here for us.
we’ve arrived,
we may as well mix. 

i know how to create anything 
from nothing 
and still feel something.

you know it, right? 
haven’t you learned?
can you show me 
the darker side?
of you?

3. sunset

what i lacked then,
you lack now.

from never knowing us this way,
to exchanging everything we came with.
from standing in a place i felt was too dark for you,
to explaining how distant from that place i now am.

it’s no need to decipher the wrongs and rights,
we can let the moon greet the stars 
knowing that we tried.

ADHDefense II / Laurie Fuhr

My therapist says, Try ADHD meds
and you might not need depression 
meds anymore. Your life on the drug
that is ADHD may be depressing you,
its role in too many disappointments.
My doctor says, take them both.
Another therapist says, 
don't medicate yourself away.
Embrace what makes you you.
ADHD may be your superpower.
Then how to use it for good?
My first therapist gets jealous
that I'm seeing a second therapist
and leaves me. (There must be
a lot of psychology there).
It's so hard to embrace
the you that holds you back,
the you that won't let you be
someone easier to love, 
someone who can be on time, 
with edible cooking
and a tolerable house,
whose superpower doesn't make them
hoard books from Free Little Libraries,
get craft-beer-tipsy to Support Local,
or cry when they see babies
and be continually anxious,
drawn into hive psypocalypse
of too much wrong at once
instead of riding amphetamines 
into a Star Trek utopia 
in which to live long, prosper, and
manage to enjoy Earl Grey 
while still hot.

And Our Ghosts Come Home / Dominic Leach

most places I go fully clothed
sunglasses sometimes hoping not
to be seen how well I play
myself like someone else and in my memory
I go thus in trench coat
and fedora à la film noir denying
my name and at home I paste over
and repaint the cracks zigzagging
the plaster walls—

but in my journal I erase the clothes completely with my golden 
pencil and leave the cracks 
in the walls the white in my beard I go a bit
too far and erase the walls even and lie naked
and structureless like this
and our ghosts come home.

they say it’s warm here.
they’re not sure if they like it.

Kentucky Haibun / Dawn McGuire

We take the long road because the long one
peels the paint off memory.
Because Diane says suffering has better lighting at dusk.

She drives with one hand on the wheel,
cigarette behind her ear like a bone-handled blade,
ashes in her lap. I’m in the back
watching I Love Lucy reruns. Billy’s riding shotgun,
navigating with a 20-year-old atlas and a poetry degree.
His fingers are tracing the map like it’s a body.

He’s talking to himself, although he doesn’t seem to know it,
circling IHOPs along route 64 with a red pen.
He wants to stop for pie. And a waitress who calls him “sugar.”

We pass a Dollar General that shimmers like a mirage in the heat.
Billy asks if we should stop.
Diane says, “There’s nothing in there we didn’t already lose.”
So we don’t.

Her foot is on the gas until the old house rises
like a half-buried rib cage.
The porch slumps, the kitchen roof is peeling off like a scab.

Diane mutters, “Guess collapse takes too much commitment.”
Nobody else says a word.
We park next to the 70s bronze Buick on blocks.

My shoulder against the wood-rotted front door
opens it-- waves of mouse urine and mold.
Shelves sag with cloudy jars, the labels faded  
A mug says #1 Papaw.

Hungry Billy lifts a can of cling peaches
like a trophy and pretends to recite the label:
Repressed memories in heavy syrup, packaged
the summer we forgot we were loved. Best by?
Before the old drunk died and the house was sold.

Diane lights a joint and says,
“That’s the closest thing to scripture I’ve heard
since the ‘low fuel’ alert came on.”
We laugh too loud. Then not at all.

Outside, tiny wild strawberries crawl
across the crabgrass, red on green 
like blood on camouflage.
I put one on my tongue. Too bitter. Too soft.
Like it wants to rot in my mouth.

Around back, the barn is still lacework and shadow,
leaning like a drunk holding on to the bar.
Something is humming.
It sounds like Gray Grannie’s sewing song
turned into weather.

A red-tailed hawk shrieks and I flinch,
hearing the old man that time
he found Uncle Ray hanging—

“Stop,” Diane says, looking at me as if she hears it too.

We circle back to what’s left of the porch.
Why are we even here?

Billy pulls the lid off the cling peaches
and passes the can around. “Libations,”
he says.
“Botulism,” Diane says, taking the biggest swig.

The yellow jackets find us.
We leave the rest for them on the table.
Billy writes in the inch-thick dust:

wild strawberries
bleed on the tongue,
what to forget first

smoke machine / Samantha Strong Murphey

morning after and / everything is / deflated / the dead / are really dead / weight wandering down wet / sidewalks pulled by the dog / whose anxiety meds have worn / off / yes / i said anxiety / meds for the dog / wrappers in the cracks / the gutters / scraps of color / melted wax through the / faces / bones spread across the lawn / a ghost / hangs from a tree / a maniacal clown / on a stake / in the mulch / triggered by my / motion / laughs and I yank / the orange cord from the socket / the dog drags me up / the porch / into the house / the pieces no one wants are everywhere / the desirable / hidden away / ring of hair / dye round the tub / purple glow gone gray / I creep again to a cold / bed with a warm / body / close my eyes to the day / slip back to when / it was fun / to be / afraid