Life with Pets: The Suitcase / Michelle Frost
Sammie curls into blankets on the couch
Tina Marie sleeps by her chew toy
her favorite rug is a Native weave
arrows pointing east & west near the door
They know I'm leaving
the suitcase came out this morning
no applause only side-eye
It's only three days I plead
While I fly north and east
They will remain south and west
Asleep dreaming of tall grass
and running free in every direction
Interior Velocity / David Hadbawnik
Tiny dots glimpsed out of
the corner of the eye sometimes
actually are tiny dots
Keats’ brother George
lost everything in a scheme
devised by John Audubon
David Bowie and Prince
and Leonard Cohen all died
in 2016 in that order
compilation of last thoughts
fragments that shatter
the closer you look at them
the rapist everybody knew
was a rapist was finally
convicted of rape
anger turned inside-out
is still anger
only now it knows
put a pair of parentheses
around this and drop it
over the side of a bridge
your face is a glitch
that goes unseen
say this out loud in a mirror
dribbling down your chin
is your death here
let me wipe it for you
pronounce every fifth word
like you mean it
see if the others notice
an occasional pause
never hurt anyone
but a very long pause
untitled / Alexander Shalom Joseph
I wake in my wood paneled room
and walk across the hardwood
to the bathroom
where I blow my nose
with toilet paper
and then turn on the sink
I dreamt of a river
in the middle of the woods
and long to be held by it again
but as I brush my teeth
and wash my face
I feel the river in the tap water
feel the forest in the walls
in the floors in the roof
in all that holds me yet
and I realize
the woods and rivers
have never left us
we have just left them
forgotten where we came from
but where we came from
won’t forget us
oh that we could remember
oh that we could return
to all that we have cut down
and piped in
all the paradise
we refined for our pleasures
all that still keeps us alive
Heavy, Dickinson / Sally Kuzma
What is heavy to her, I wonder?
Hearts of course, her own, and one
not so heavy as mine
that sings like a bobolink
annoyingly, under her window.
Also a small object: a thimble
in the hand of a woman
who stitches, then sickens and dies.
I want more.
I search her poems for load,
find it in the purple of lilacs,
dew on grass, and then weight,
the freight of a delivered syllable–
burden of the spoken word.
Infant Prefiguration / Rachel Lee
Swimming around in the belly of whom
Umbilical chord thick like sinew
Personal space dark with goo
Heart, spirit, and soul anew
Audible music
Classical
Telepathic love
Natural
I heard your cry then saw your eyes
Barely open, looking curiously surprised
No comparison to meeting the love of your life
Existence is now paternal survival
Keep my head on a swivel like there’s no tomorrow
Holding you close won’t suffice
Must smell your hair and watch you sleep
Heartbeat counted not once but twice
Acquiring lost teeth, chalk on the street, playing hopscotch with our feet
Always be my baby
You growing older drives me crazy
Appreciating every second that goes by
Rewind and turn back time
That’s what would satisfy my why
Sacred Grocery Store / Lincoln McElwee
To say, holy. To say, the sacred trees of deities. To say, listen, and I will play you such sacred music. To say, this generation has a sacred responsibility. I look at the WinCo Foods parking lot and wonder if a grocery store could ever be sacred. I charge its large red letters with showing me a sign. Is it desperation, when I search online for a sacred grocery store? I get varied roti and sugarcane juice, fresh produce, clean aisles, kosher. And then, another definition: devoted exclusively to one service or use. And so a grocery store becomes sacred. Sacred grocery store. Sacred parking spot. Sacred grocery cart. And I see you alive again, singing people get ready, there’s a train a-comin’, shopping in your favorite grocery store, buying your favorite foods, the squaw bread and the slow-cooked oatmeal, the garlic and the red onions, the pasta and the quinoa. All of it sacred. And I’m there again waiting for you to finish your slow perambulations. I look at stacks of paperbacks, glossy magazines, dairy-free yogurt, red wine. How didn’t I know that all that time with you was spent in the service of the sacred? Buying gluten-free pasta in bulk, searching for your blueberry Stella Rossa wine. There are times when we hold the sacred so tightly that we tamp it down. We don’t let the sacred breathe. We don’t realize the potential in its reach.
Somnambulant / Michelle Stoll
Propped up against a kayak full of beer,
heads buzzing with the cool spring night,
the electricity
of (what we call)
a chance encounter,
you tell me you went to school to be an expert
in somnambulance. No wonder then,
you come to me in dreams.
The first time
you made me swear to save you
at any cost.
When I failed
you came again, unshackled,
radiant, wearing eternity
like a wide-brimmed hat.
Both times I felt your skin, muscle,
bones give within my hands.
Last night you arrived giggling,
bearing pawpaws, mulberries,
haloed by fireflies,
asked – (under long-gone summer streetlights) –
Can we have sex?
as if you’d asked
Can we get ice cream?
midnight baking / Sandra Tan
waking in the middle of the night
to the scent of cinnamon rolls
filling the house,
someone having finished baking
not too long ago,
and gone to sleep, along with the rolls
that lie under a cotton towel
on the dining table.
is this what it’s like to wake
from a dream into
another dream?
it brings me back to
nights at my cousins’ house,
lying awake on the mattress
on the floor, watching the beams
of light from passing vehicles
move across the ceiling,
fade back into darkness.
hours when I felt I was
floating, that I was a character
from the anime we had watched
as a family earlier on the couch,
that there was a wide world
I did not understand
but would reveal itself
in sweet increments.
