November / Michelle Frost
The skeleton returns to his grave
All glittering goblins and one silver skull
gently wrapped and packed away
Mr. Crow in his top hat who stood on my desk overseeing daily duties at the library and
Larger than Life Rubber Bat
a cat in a mask and flickering tea lights
All the not-so-spooky fun just Gone
3D-printed ghosts stack of scary books returned to their bins and boxes
Trick-or-treaters no longer clamor
unrecognizable in their daylight attire
Pumpkins grow sad on stoops around town
Halloween has had its Day
Who's this?
Well, Hello, Elf on a Shelf
Come in, Come in!
What Kevin Said / David Hadbawnik
You wouldn’t believe me if I told you
and I will tell you
what I mean by that
a feral worrier of cats
send image of punctured lung
looks like she had herself a snack
what I mean by that is
no you’re all good
she proposed a mimosa
troubled each breath no
but what if it really were
that simple
‘you know God killed me, right?’
maybe it means he got a
really good night’s sleep
or he was approached
by an alien I mean
it could really be something
so obvious
not having any children
probably that helps
untitled / Alexander Shalom Joseph
inside we bicker
outside the forest burns
the rivers stop
long before the sea
and the land aches
of both thirst and too much water
inside we discuss paltry things
get upset at each other
storm out of the room
outside the pika
a small rodent that lives
at high elevations
gets ready to go extinct
and ten thousand varieties
of insects will die off this year
as they have every year
for a long while yet
inside we cheer or groan
at tiny wins and losses
as at the center of the ocean
an island
made of all we have thrown away
spins and grows
look up from your screens
and out at the trees
can’t you see the brown
on their leaves
all the dead branches
this is not just a sign of fall
but the fall
a great and terrible change
which the average voter
says is not their biggest priority
how can the earth
not be our focus
how can we ignore
the very thing that keeps us alive
the only thing
that keeps us alive
while inside we bicker
and outside the forest burns
Doubt, Thoreau / Sally Kuzma
In the privacy of his journal I look for his doubts.
Are they anything like my own
on this unseasonably warm ravaged yellow
November day?
Aside from figures of speech–
doubtless, no doubt, in doubt–
his doubts tend to arise around the masks of society
where pretense and ceremony preclude sincerity
and in puzzling moral proclamations:
Feb. 20. The coward's hope is suspicion, the hero's doubt a sort of hope.
The gods neither hope nor doubt.
It get that it’s a human thing, but I find it hard to connect
until Saturday January 8, 1842
when he turns his eye to a patch of bare ground
where winter-rubbed leaves of grass–
exposed by a south wind that melted snow away–
seem in doubt whether to let go their greenness…
or absorb new juices against the coming year
There I find what we share, inhaling wet scent—
and the south wind melts my integuments also.
untitled / Rachel Lee
You are me and I am you. Fused to a metal stake with lots of glue. I’m calling to you so I can breath – say amen. What’s that you say? I’m free to defend? The clocks ticking and I’m craving to need you dear friend.
How I reach and reach and reach until I feel like Gumby. You dance and cheer on my shrine so humbly. I know you’re there. You call me. Existential words to say. I forgot them all to my dismay. The feather, the shell, the smoke I play. Pretend to be there everyday.
Enough about me. Lets hear about you. Swim to the Temple. I’m the bait, you’re the lure. Not that boisterous yet not demure. Lay me down and intertwine our souls. Show me clairvoyance and upstanding morals. 1+1=3. You emulate feelings that are so sanguine.
The Holy Trinity.
Wooly Aphids / Lincoln McElwee
I awoke to a host of nightmare,
flying bodies white and many.
I thought the sky had come undone,
that perhaps we were finally
witnessing the end of the world
in a flash of cloudy beauty.
A quick search, probably wrong,
listed them as wooly aphids.
Shrouded in a white waxy covering,
they look like the angels
of the aphid family.
And so I fell in love. How
could you not love a bug in drag?
Pear-shaped and soft-bodied
replaced gross and creepy crawly.
I watched them from my windows
and cheered their swooning destruction on.
I wept on the day that I opened
the blinds and found them gone.
To love something so completely
and watch it disappear is another type
of nightmare.
untitled / Michelle Stoll
I had a long day
heavy
two rainy trips
to the vet
my gentle gray cat
may be dying
he sounds like an old emphysemic
I'm holding my breath
on a zoom workshop
about spirituality and writing
feeling like old lettuce
Upstairs neighbors doing the dance of sacred hippos
I'll sleep with earplugs later
Let's not pretend this is poetry
this loving what slips away
this tolerance for what's in my cup
this rainy election night
Gospel of hair in my coffee
It's a sore heart
a backpack of broken eggs
gray cat against my hip
...all that matters
after “the nailsea jug” (1920), william nicholson / Sandra Tan
the nailsea glassworks was a glass and glass bottle manufacturing site established in 1788, in somerset, england. in its prime, it was the fourth largest glassworks in the country. it closed down in 1873.
moon jug, fossil-flecked,
fingerprints of clay.
once you filled the green
with plumes of smoke
dark as your glaze,
your obsidian bell.
you hold down papers
on the end table, a cat
courting fragility.
your hollow chest
rolling over wood
in a smooth motion,
clinking on though
the factory’s long closed.
