November - Poem 29
Funeral Pyre / Megan Bell
There's a place
at the end of dreams
where earth and sky
crash together, it seems.
A yawning abyss
devouring your voice.
The aftermath of terror -
you weren't given a choice.
Darkened nights filled with darker schemes.
Weary hearts ripped at worn seams.
You were destroyed at the end of those dreams.
Alone with your pain -
you searched for foundation.
Letting it go -
you became your own creation.
At the end of dreams
there's a funeral pyre.
Laying it down-
you set the world on fire.
At the end of dreams.
Formless / Alison Lake
What then is formlessness? Can it even be so? Even the breath of the trees has form, the negative space of the sky between the stars. My love for you could never be formless and yet it has no form, only the way my heart beats when I see you, the way my hands tingle at the urge to feel your hair, place my lips near the form of yours. No metaphor will suffice to give my love a form and yet it is there nonetheless, waiting, impatient even, for you, singing to you in the night as you sleep and wrapping around you in your weary, breaking days. Our love would have one form, changed and shifted though it is, yet constant, recognizable and always, ever ours.
never in this life / Maya Cheav
have I once been doomed.
the culling rain
narrows us down,
us rotten few,
with acid plumes
that pierce through skin and bone.
it sours the sky
with a frothing madness
to boil us alive
and make us tender flesh.
it’s just
bovine excision—
a reduction
to primordial soup.
tell me,
is violence the only language you speak?
tell me,
are you willing
to die by the sword?
still, like dust, i'll rise (a cento) / Jada D’Antignac
composed with lines from Maya Angelou
we long, dazed, for winter evenings.
playing romantic games
just like hopes springing high
in southern fields
and half-lighted cocktail bars,
or any place that saves a space
for life and all that’s in it.
your mind pops, exploding fiercely, briefly
hanging on your words.
i sip the tears your eyes fight to hold.
won’t you pull yourself together?
the sun struck like an arrow.
the gold of her promise
pleased me for a while.
she’d find a hidden meaning,
that’s where i found your hands
saying bye now, no need to try now.
it’s the fire in my eyes.
it’s in the reach of my arms.
i’ll help you pack, but it’s getting late.
does my sassiness upset you?
a cool new moon, a
deep swan song,
a signal end to endings.
the awful fear of losing
someone who adores you.
i had an air of mystery
and found my senses lost.
but still, like dust, i’ll rise.
did you want to see me broken?
I Can’t Believe My Eyes, Darling / D.C. Leach
sits on the floor, leans
against the wall in the basement,
not the first time he’s
sat like this—palms pressed
to his eyes wondering how love,
poppies, anger, drifting apart could all
be the same color. maybe heaven
was 86 the other pigments the day
it cooked these up. he could hear Saint Lawrence
calling through the food window, tell your tables
we only have red, the angels on expo sprinkling
red over foreign policy, pouring red
in globs into the souls of spies, like ketchup
into metal ramekins. Snoopy rubs
his eyes so hard it all goes
black-and-white, then negative.
dark stars in a white night.
fireflies above a pool of clotting blood.
or does he see himself?
My Patient’s Chronic / Dawn McGuire
She says, “I saw the panic hit him in the chest.
He was twitching like a cartoon cat,
paw in a socket. Eyes bulged out,
lips split in a rictus.”
My patient hears the buzz inside the drywall.
It waits to torch the house.
He calls her Mama Bear—
like she’s a knockoff mascot
from a discount outlet.
I see a split-knuckle mother
swinging a sword.
Her garden’s about to green.
She leaves it anyway.
Mugs in the sink—she leaves them
to the life that should be hers by now.
She’s done this before—
again.
At least, this time
it isn’t smack.
That’s the refrain.
Her burnt offering
to whatever bastard god
keeps boys from overdosing,
pants around ankles,
face on the tile.
16th and Mission: Ms Xanax
waits with her palms outstretched—
Peace in the valley, baby boy.
She can tell when he’s scored:
his body no longer hisses
like a radio tossed in the bath.
How long this round
til rehab—
My patient carves the dark into a door.
She guards it open
just as she’s done before.
A Room of One’s Own / Samantha Strong Murphey
the mouth was too wide the begging mouth
of the clouded crystal vase was too wide for the bouquet
the stems all flopped to one side bruising
she thought she had picked enough enough, a minnow
between her fingers glittering quickly and always away
the clumsy hands expectation
fumbling the moon dropping the moon the moon cracked
on the roof pitch oozed yellow light down the house the house pressed her
hand against its glass she pressed infinity into four taut walls timid knuckle knocking
on her neck she worked her feet into the creaks of old longing older than her
for months she’d been walking knock knock across pine needles looking for
pine needles she’d gotten the tattoo with a singular intention: to entice
a singular thumb to graze admiringly across her wrist she pushed
wrinkles off the pilled electric blanket on the bed her pilled body
swaying across the room how now, the room the cord dangling
at the foot there was no outlet close enough to ever make it hot
