November - Poem 22
A Cento / Megan Bell
A Cento composed by Megan Bell with main lines contributed by Mary Oliver
And from his nap he will wake into the warm darkness to boom, and thrust forward.
Walking like a woman who is balancing a sword inside her body.
Then a voice like a howling wind deep in the leaves said: I'll tell you a story about a seed.
All the while this was happening, it was growing lighter.
How everything shines in the morning light.
I read the papers; I unfold them and examine them in the sunlight.
What dark part of my soul shivers: you don't want to know more about this.
death and death, messy death -
death as history, death as a habit -
The silence then the rain dashing its silver seed against the house.
I scarcely had time to see it gleaming.
Two Roads Diverged / Alison Lake
“Too much fire gives birth to nothing. Fire can reduce a forest to ash, while it takes the water and the wind a hundred years to grow one anew” Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
I.
The path had led
through the woods once,
before the trees were taken,
their stumps left
to rot as the soil
eroded. It had led
past a river, sparkling
and rushing over
slick rocks, casting
diamonds into the sky.
Now, thick with sludge,
dyed orange and frothing,
the water trickled,
moving like a sick lamb,
burning the shore and we,
we must cover our faces
lest we breathe
the poison that is the air.
II.
For so long
we didn’t know
how to be human
animals enmeshed
in the web
of the universe.
We butchered, we
burnt, we blasphemed.
It was only after
we came to
the abyss’s edge
that we saw our blood
and bones in the earth,
the sky, the sea.
Now all paths lead to home.
body litter / Maya Cheav
in the mausoleum
of augustus,
I think about the bodies
housed inside the tomb.
those who belonged here,
for years
longer than their lives,
buried in the dirt.
what becomes a
fortress in time
was formerly
a home
for lost souls.
I wonder
if they wander the halls still,
their shades detached
and in a second state.
freedom song / Jada D’Antignac
after Maya Angelou
the caged bird collects keys
keeps them safely under the tongue
this caged bird sings a freedom song
until freedom comes
a free bird knows no clippings
or ties that hinders its route
a stalking bird creeps at the cage
waiting to learn what a caged bird is about
there’s always a place of the free
there’s always wind carrying a tune
there’s always a cage holding a heart
that will feed us a freedom song
Notes from the Field, iii / D.C. Leach
between rock walls. rock ceiling and rock floor. deep
beneath the cobblestone streets of Paris lie
skulls. more skulls than stars in a country sky;
stacked here, against their former wills.
cold water drips on them from nipples on the low ceiling—
ladybug husks, hundreds and hundreds of spotted brown shells,
some still orange, some now dust, whole piles
of their corpses lying between the panes of RF-shielded
windows, in a building I can’t say much more about.
some of them still holding each other. I’ve drunk
coffee with them for years. been since Obama, no Clinton,
a coworker says, since at least Reagan, chimes another—
hollowed-out pumpkins side by side on the stone steps
of the front porch rot and sag into each other between
the unrelenting sun and southerly wind—
all these strangers, their bones piled together like this—
I sit beside a hunched body who sits beside a hunched body who sits beside…
all of us before flashing screens, between
vault doors, in a windowless room, 8+
hours a day 5+ days a week year on year watching life
move by on a screen. assess, exploit. this one
a stallion in bed, this one a thing for boys—
before Halloween. these pumpkins. I imagine they came
from different farms, or fields, or opposite ends
of the same field, and now their guts
lie together in the same white,
plastic bowl on the cold basement floor—
someone once put three fish in a stone well at the bottom
of the Catacombs to see what would happen (before lightbulbs).
the fish swam in circles. went blind. died—
there’s a new ladybug between the panes! where did it come from? it’s watching
the sun set! it’s looking for a way out—
I walk the Catacombs with my desire, ask if she thinks the bones,
being together this way, get their particles entangled. look, I say,
they’re weaving a net, they’re casting it back over their old lives; the fish,
they’re being drawn up to the boat—
Quadratics Haibun / Dawn McGuire
In junior high we had to memorize the quadratic formula. Mr. Floyd, his face pink on a calm day, heraldic red under exasperation, threatened to call our homes at all hours and make us recite it, waking everyone up to our laziness.
So I memorized b and c and their relations, and how there are always two different solutions for x. Except when the whole bit under the circus tent √ is zero. That’s when you get a single solid answer. That would have been reassuring, as my dad was moving out and nothing was for sure.
It could have been a useful formula, like when Mom needed to rent part of our house to cover expenses. I could have told her we needed 50 boxes of bamboo floor, not 100 like the squirrely contractor tried to charge her for.
Instead, I learned how to find the maximum height of a Tomahawk missile with initial velocity v and launch angle θ. And Mom took on two jobs. And the x’s split in opposite directions.
Mr. Floyd called
to ask Mom out
Even his voice was red
Mormon Pioneer Village / Samantha Strong Murphey
it wasn’t a question it was water
in our bellies our lungs slopping under our feet dripping
from the gutters on the buildings we felt safe inside
all the girls in Sunday School sat in front of a chalkboard
CHASTITY pushed hard into the wall we watched
as the teacher hammered nails into a piece of wood
then pulled them out one by one she pointed to the holes
said there will always be holes it was my tenth summer
life was soft enough that i could act tortured without fear
of it coming true i stood with my cousins squinting into the prairie
light caught in the fuzz on the grass the fake blacksmith glistened
Chuck Taylor’s untied beneath his costume he swung
a hammer in the glow of the stove he read a script i don’t remember
he asked each of us to hold out a palm he closed
my fingers around a warm rough-hewn nail a souvenir
