November - Poem 8

Four Corners / Megan Bell

My husband asks me, How do you write a good poem?
I tell him, Hand to God, I don't know. It's not a math formula. 
What can I say other than begin with both eyes wide open, ear pressed to the door of nature, heart listening for lines that invade your sleep. 
If the words wake you and shake you, make space for them. 
Marry yourself to them. 
Like those smooth rocks we carried home from the shore in Michigan,
the ones Maggie loves.
Little things are big things. It all brings something to the table. 
I ask him, How do you build a strong house? 
He tells me the corners must be square.
I shrug my shoulders, say, This poem is out of level. Hand me your tools.

On What I Leave Behind / Alison Lake

I want what is left
to make those who come after
pause,
draw breath,
and realize they can never again look
the way they had before.

I want them to see
the world reflected in a dewdrop,
hanging from a spider’s web,
which in turn hangs
from the leaves of the overgrown boxwood,
nestled in the forgotten corner
of our yard.

Or maybe
see themselves there, tender and open,
seeking love and acknowledgement
and finding it.

I want them
to marvel
at the life of a worm,
be awed by the fungus and lichen
growing on the dying tree,
hear the skitter of insects
under the shagging bark,
hear the sap rise from roots to leaves.

I want the beauty of this place, this Earth, this Universe to rise like that and overflow
the edges of their hearts and fall to the ground,
in turn to grow more beauty.

versipellis//TURNSKIN / Maya Cheav

beheld inside the pages of the satryicon 
is a beast of odd pallor. 
one with fur like unkept wild grasses 
and claws like glinting pugios  
on the battlefields of carthage. 
one with fangs like the jagged ridges of the appenines
and eyes like yellowed amber 
with fossilized scorpions for pupils. 
there is an unceasing hunger
under the blood moon, 
a violent desire 
for carnage and catastrophe. 
if you excavate the shame 
buried in the crevices of your skin, 
you might find 
that a wrought monster, 
a wretched wolf, 
can be a beautiful thing.

coexist / Jada D’Antignac

giving love and never loving again can, 
ironically, coexist. she gives random 
“because i thought about you” gifts like money 
was never an issue. acts of service and 
gift giving compete for the number one spot 
as her love language. despite it all, she 
never learns to love again. she lets the snake 
seduce her with the apple. she lets the snake 
snatch the apple back. she lets him eat until 
she’s left with the rind. 

They Beat the Poor Horse in that Dream in Crime and Punishment / D.C. Leach

ask any Russian and most will deny
the connection between modern Russian’s nakazat’ (to punish)
and Church Slavonic’s nakazati (to instruct)
or the relation between otkryvat’/otkryt’ (to open, discover)
and otkrytka (a postcard) which I love secretly knowing
as an envoy of a small discovery but no they say
there’s no relation between
the coin behind their ear and the one that was
in my palm misdirection the key
to every good trick like verb
transitivity I’m saying nakazati
isn’t in the palm you think it is
and it wasn’t that the red octopus
in my dream last night was
in a tank on a shelf above countless
blue screens no or that the powdered
donuts lying there in the open paper box were stale
and their crumbs stale
and stale the rattling fluorescent light
overhead no
and it wasn’t so much
that when it escaped
or found the steak knives that it
slithered and slashed at all the calves
and heels it could find between
the vault doors of that windowless office
it was more
that when I pinned one of its tentacles
to the carpet tiles with the metal leg
of a chair, that in the moment
in the dream before I
stabbed it with a meat skewer, our eyes met,
and I saw
all of us reflected.

 
                        ~night mind spanning 6-7 Nov 2025,
                        wishing you were here,
                        <3 Dom

Philosophical Investigations (while unloading the dryer) / Dawn McGuire

I don’t know much about endings.
Or beginnings.
They always seem to arrive 
while I’m in the shower
or yelling at my keys.

But I get the middle part:
drip by drip, inconsistencies,
a slipshod paint job 
on the baseboard trim.

Like on the plane to Miami—
I’m trying to talk metaphysics across the aisle
to the guy in the basic gray suit.
He nods and then asks me to rate 
his Crypto pitch deck  

while Katie is talking basketball to a girl 
with a Valkyrie tattoo. She swears 
she’s an atheist, but we both notice 
she prays when the plane shakes.

The Crypto guy falls asleep.
I nudge Katie's knee, start in about how contradiction 
is what makes poetry possible.

She rolls her eyes and says it sounds like Keats
after three beers, or someone who’s never 
folded a single load of laundry.

In Miami, her friend Judith—God bless her—
finds meaning in everything:
IKEA instructions, lost socks, even the way
we talk past each other, 
Katie's Siri arguing with my Alexa
over the same left turn.

I just nod with the Obama bobblehead
in the rearview mirror.

She says math is the fingerprint of God.
I say God is just pigment with poor aim—
missed Adam by an inch 
on the Sistine ceiling, no?

Look, I know there’s probably a price 
on my head. Not much.
Maybe a coupon for carnitas from that taco truck
the health inspector missed.

Still, there’s a rhythm to loneliness. 
A three-beat waltz in orthopedic shoes.

So dance with me, Katie. 
Yes, I’m clumsy.
I hum out of tune.

Yes, I once wept
in front of a gas station sushi display
looking for my keys.

Dance with me anyway.

Don’t bring up your god, or mine.
Just move a little to the left
so I can catch your face
in the light.

Buckwild / Samantha  Strong Murphey

Be in the world but not of the world, a bad
paraphrase of John. John the Beloved or maybe
the other one. Which one had lines of yearners
watching his leg-sucked robes, soaked with
river water, all waiting their turn to go under? Which one
had his head on a pike? Freshman year, we had term
for the homeschooled kids set loose from their cage
—she’s buckwild. How quickly the moth, freshly twisted
from its crisp cocoon, burns to ash. I smoked 
my first cigarette at 37 in Paris, staged myself 
in a slip dress framed by a window under the moon. 
I thought it would be harder, all the teenagers 
coughing in movies. I watched myself 
watch myself in the glass. I was good
at being in the world—