November - Poem 30

Unceasing Hunger (A Cento) / Jada D’Antignac

composed by Jada D’Antignac, with lines from Megan Bell, Alison Lake, Maya Cheav, Jada D’Antignac, Laurie Fuhr, Dominic Leach, Dawn McGuire, and Samantha Murphy 

Our talks. They ask hard questions.
We take the long road because the long one
peels the paint off memory.
We laugh too loud. Then not at all.  
There is an unceasing hunger,
it’s torture for my flesh

There are four hearts beating within my chest.
The stressful, precious inner library,
empty of the shield.
I don't know how to miss you any other way,
you teach me things i didn’t know i never knew.  
Still there is a rhythm to loneliness. 

Darkened nights filled with darker schemes,
bravely, I drove into dying light. 
Tell me what you are chasing, what you are facing, what you are craving. Tell me about the lost years.
Love me. Sing something. Quote me to me.
Regret is different than disappointment. Shame is the origin.
Maybe you are my harmful prayer.

I found myself falling into the depths 
for something safe, something suitable. 
I seek God kneeling among tall vines and tangled weeds.

The river floods into all the cracks it remembers inhabiting. 
The hills look down on her like neighbors, but they are weeping, silently and wildly. 
We try to kiss the sky.

What's Your Shade?   / Megan Bell

Give me 
the artists, 
the earth lovers, 
the poets, 
the creatives. 

I'll take them any way I can! 

For, we are 
the change-makers, 
the bell-ringers, 
the emotion-bringers.

We are the many shades of gray!

And, collectively, 
we are powering the universe. 

Reflecting (A Cento)  / Alison Lake

with lines from Meg Bell, D.C. Leach, Jada D’Antignac, Maya Cheav, Dawn McGuire and Samantha Strong Murphy

Today I am a long way from that night;
my thoughts are a line of geese.
I search for a map I've never had,
all it is is my moonlight,
the double vision you get staring into a well.
To save and feed every creature might shatter me. 

evolution / Maya Cheav

in a perfect world 
no one was hurt 
and everyone survived. 
but there is no utopia 
and no saving 
to be done,  
to scoop us up
and take us away
from all of our pain.
I am shedding my skins, 
a year turning over,
watching myself grow 
out of my old exoskeleton. 
gone are the days 
where I’ve been trapped 
in the same place 
someone has left me in. 
tell me, 
what’s waiting for you 
on the other side 
of fear? 

Making a Quilt /  D.C. Leach

my body a needle shuttling up and down
this block of fabric—our wedding night; my arms
two moons orbiting my body your dress
a white satin ring hugging the blue jewel
of your body the both of us revolving
around the bright star of this new life—

my feet and my mother’s feet piecing
an eight-pointed star to “The Great
Pumpkin Waltz”—

and at our friends’ wedding their bodies
(our bodies among them) dancing in a line
forming loops in a long basting stitch glowing
and pulling the mountains of West Virginia
into our solar system—

or as the best man
the groom and I cutting
our hands and knees this way and that
beside the pool cutting fabric
on the bias shoulders and hips
binding it all—

or at Beach Bunny
The Wombats
The Districts my head
and fists become appliqués of birds
and meteors—

the batting you ask? the marrow of us. each
of us, our lips pulling tight the last few
hand stitches, wrinkled shape of love.

Field Notes: It’s 3 a.m.  / Dawn McGuire

and William Blake
is heaving his hulk from my bed,
wearing the night’s bristles
like a bruise.

His sleeve
drags across my page.

“I try not to fool myself,”
he shouts from the john.

His beefy finger squeaks
across his teeth.

“But these pages plot!
They write better endings than I do.

And my stylus — that Judas! —
just sliced a comma on the knuckle
of my revision hand.

How do you spell tiger
again?”

I vacuum up and bleach the ink
from the sheets before it sets.

Under my eyes, his thumbprints,
dark as coal.

Soon he’ll be back in Albion,
and I’ll be late for work again.

We count little sheep
until we sleep  

December / Samantha  Strong Murphey

The sun sinks low, lower than I remember.
She is tired, loose, defiantly bright, poorly sedated
under layers of soft corroboration. I tuck her in
and she asks how do I know if God is proud of me?
The ground is cold. Nothing grows. Turtles have sucked
their heads into their echoes and are happily almost dead
and asking no questions. And where is she getting this God?
The shorter day was so long. The days before were cropped
and fevered with hoeing. We feasted, and in exhale, we feared.
We labored in fake fields, type and slog and nothing is real,
not money. Not the calendar. Though primal shadow does arch
itself over us like a clock. It’s all too late and too soon.
At the closing, our panicked animal bodies too ask
too-big questions—What if nothing grows ever again?
God, the drama. O’ to grow nothing, to make nothing, to answer
nothing. So close I am to the unlit brush pile, so close to the part where
I get to lie down. I close the fridge door covered in cave paintings,
dim the kitchen lights low, lower than I remember, blurring
the tracing of each spread hand.