November - Poem 23
How High Can I Jump? / Megan Bell
Working day's for the man
ain't always easy.
Being tied to any desk
can make you crazy.
Thirteen years standing steady, playing it straight and,
every pair of shoes I got, give me a crooked walk.
Lordy, I felt sure this was the land of milk and honey.
So do they....
Every morning, nine am swarming our doors, an army of men, women
burrowing - warm in winter, cool in summer.
It's why we're here.
Knowledge is power - this is what I've learned:
Digging for El Dorado on dirty floors just leaves a gaping hole.
Even our tables have a hangover
Broad shoulders don't mean I'm strong
Librarians aren't saints - there will be no laying on of hands.
My patience, too, spills over
drip
drip
drip
On turned-up pages of well-worn books, I hide inside.
Snarled by the shadows of the day, men stay.
Staring at walls they won't climb.
Sauntering about like they own the place,
telling puppets how high to jump.
Dyeing / Alison Lake
“The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.” Marcus Aurelius
For so long I lived
In the barren darkness,
More like a crypt,
Than a bed of soil.
My thoughts stained,
Black with despair,
Black without hope,
Black with self-hatred.
I thought pain
Was the mordant,
Fusing the color
Into all the fabric
Of myself, even
As I envied
The colors of others,
Longed for a different dye.
It was only once
I started tending
To myself as a sick child,
Smothered by thick blankets,
Offering it the chance
To feel true air, bathing
It in cool water, scented
With herbs, that I
Began to bleed away
The dark, as dye bleeds
From yarn, that I found
the black give way
to a burnished silver,
there the whole time.
bloodletter / Maya Cheav
have you not grown tired
of the war
in your mind?
the one you waged
against yourself?
in antithesis of love
and tenderness.
you can only be
half-hearted for so long.
softness is a muscle,
flesh and tendon.
you cannot
beat it out of you,
no matter how hard you try.
if i could go back to 2017 / Jada D’Antignac
i’d say to my younger self
keep doing the winged eyeliner
it adds to your character
straighten your hair less
learn more styles for its natural state
use the dog and flower crown filter as much as you can
one day you will outgrow snapchat and delete it
hold onto the soundcloud gems
the era will soon be over
don’t linger on the idea of boys
they’ll always be around
the one you’re always upset about
won’t even matter later
be more expressive
speak up a little more
embrace the weirder parts of you
they will form you
keep your heart close
it will hold you
keep your mind focused
it will need you
keep the pen close
it will save you
Notes from the Field, ii / D.C. Leach
another nightmare. rope like snow wrapped
around his throat. eyes still clinging
to their branches with the oak leaves.
scarlet. as a last act he painted
his suicide and sent it to Laura.
would Petrarch? abc and I quiet today.
asdfgh and asdfgh laugh by the coffee pot.
no one talks about losing the aphids
we, for years, have lived
vicariously through—
skulls in the Catacombs de Paris with their backs
caved-in; the occiput covers
the occipital lobe; the region
of sight—
two pumpkins slouch under the hot sun on the front porch,
their eyes rotten shut. the universe and things
turn gently—
dark. catacombs. limestone scrapes at my head as I walk. to be a fish
here in the bowels of the earth. to go blind, swimming
in circles in a black well someone dropped me in
so they could see—
is it all this watching warping me, or is it being watched?
perhaps it’s more flamingos. flamingos religiously
performing their pinks from the green waters
at the Baltimore Zoo—
dead mouse. neck broke in the mouse trap in the cupboard. been there
so long its eyes have sunken in, innards crusted
to the cabinet floor. Grue asks with tears if I can
bury it, in the yard, under the weeping cherry—
isn’t it like this though? naked mole rats in the National Zoo.
bumping our noses through tunnels not of our making.
eyes and fingers beyond a glass wall tracking our
discoveries of crumpled newspapers, yam slices,
each other—
Sunday. Tenby. walking the beaches, Grue and I pass
a dead seal just past the rocks. white fur. holes
in place of eyes—
on the way back from the Pembrokeshire coastal path:
dead horse, dead jelly, dead sea-bird on the rocks,
the bird, its eyes, filled with flies—
shadows nestle in the eye sockets of the dead. eyebrow ridges
on skulls, flexed as if still expressing or a photo
set to slow exposure
for life—
Catherine asks if I think my poems of late
are about watching or being watched?
the first five drafts of this poem
were about fire…
the tea candles in the pumpkins;
pumpkin rind, orange (the color of fire!);
the blaze at the end of The Thing, which we watched
while carving eyes into our pumpkins’ ghosts;
I even had this line cooked up like
“heavenly fire, hellfire,
O fire in the crucible.” but here I am,
lights off, watching the candles
in the pumpkins flicker
and my mind sinks like a pebble
into the dancing shadows of what look to be
on the floor and the walls
hundreds and hundreds of candlelit eyes
all blinking back at me.
First Quest / Dawn McGuire
I hovered over him with my white
med student’s coat full of needles of every gauge,
tubes for every orifice, little balloons to inflate
to keep in place the Foley in his penis,
the G-tube down his nose.
They found him at the Harlem Meer
where homeless go to fish,
in septic shock, a fish hook in his groin.
Assigned to me.
I lanced his pus, picked maggots from his scrotum;
the guys on the team, they just couldn’t—
A week of triple drips, Kayexalate®, packed diapers.
The trees outside the unit lost their last Fall leaves.
Day 8, I stuck the EKG leads to his chest,
their little sparks alive—this poem’s Volta—
as one carmine eye broke its seal.
Mr. McMurtry—welcome back!
The fluorescent lights shimmered like a benediction.
I raised his head and pressed a cup to his scabby lips.
He took a sip. The other eyelid opened with a jolt.
He pushed the cup away and croaked,
Why didn’t you let me go to the Great Beyond?
His voice clanged against my head like a bell clapper.
I rearranged the sheet under his chin. I had no answer.
The week’s sweaty lab sheet slipped away
and stuck to the bottom of my shoe.
Queen of Hearts / Samantha Strong Murphey
Only her tribe could see the way she had quietly shifted
across time. Alice arrived long after the real queen was
dead. It began with roses, no red quite red enough
to quell the brain’s intrusive darts. The king shrunk smaller
with every outburst, the mind he’d loved disappearing
deeper into the garden maze. He quietly passed out pardons
behind her back. Cans of paint stacked toward the celling
in the palace. A spade is a spade is a spade. Every natural thing
brushed raw in crimson. There was a short window of time,
before she slipped fully into tyrant, that she could sense the
thorns choking her away. She talked to the mirror. She knew
she was broken. She wept—Off. Off with my head.
