Shrub Hub / Michelle Frost
Across the street is a dense shrub
Songbirds burst from the glossy leaves
a confetti blast at my bird feeder
fast back to the bush feathered darts
A car speeds past causing a flurry
Birds swoop to safety and disappear
Momentary silence
Now quickly back for seeds and a bath
They shake hop shimmy frolicking
A pop-up splash party of chickadees
Singing in a bath warmed by sunlight
Reveling in the rewards of seed and song
I watch at the window and miss my friends
Frank’s American Childhood / David Hadbawnik
Frank’s American Childhood is coming to an end. But really it never ends, because it never really started
*
Black duck paddling on brackish water, diving down to catch twigs in its beak, paddles over to thick cluster of branches, drops twig, snaps beak to make loud popping noise, a signal as if in agitation at Frank’s American Childhood. Perfect smear of clouds reflected on river, man running with two dogs strapped to his waist – “Steady… steady” – sun warming, ebbing away long morning shadows, woman coming out to open patio gate at café, dog sniffing, rushes inside, street sweeper brushes along river road, rustle of wings beating, swans long white squiggles floating along
*
Swimmers churning against current in the lido, woman snaps picture of her black labrador sitting beside her at patio picnic table, man complains about $5 coffee, boys stand rigid in trunks on gangway by swimming area, hesitating, man with dogs strapped to his waist runs by again, exhorting the dogs as they stumble together through Frank’s American Childhood, helicopter hovering nearby
untitled / Alexander Shalom Joseph
someone asks me
if where I live now
will be my forever home
she must not be from the west
for questions such as this
are no longer asked
I stopped believing in forever
when the mountains I was told
would always have snow on them
melted into granite and dust
forever is such a long time
I don’t even think
much of what I love here
will still be standing
in ten years
the forests certainly won’t
look close at any pine
and you’ll quickly stop believing
in forever
what a privilege
to live somewhere else
where a home could be forever
where the insurance companies
still think your house
is worth covering
where the forests
are not mostly kindling
where the mountains aren’t bare
and the glaciers aren’t myth
sometimes living here
is like being haunted
by all that this place used to be
a crooked image imposed
on what little remains
I remember
four foot snows
and pines that stayed green
I remember thinking for a while
that nothing would change
but that was forever ago
Inside, Thoreau, Walden / Sally Kuzma
This may be one of the last days to work outside–
bring in the lawn furniture, put the hose
in the cellar, put in the storm doors
before snow, or very cold rain, sets the season.
Thoreau spent much of his Walden time outside–
exploring the fields, ponds, rivers, railroad tracks
of his neck of the woods– but the writing happened
inside– mentally, materially.
There are eight instances of inside in Walden,
most of them in the chapter titled “Economy”
where he accounts for the cost of his
experiment in frugal living.
Unlike settlers two centuries before him,
who dug a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion,
six or seven feet deep, he bought a house,
a railroad worker’s shanty– dank, clammy, and aguish
– for boards.
I sometimes dream of…[a] house
whose inside is as open and manifest
as a bird’s nest, he wrote. So he built it,
and the pages he drafted there
track his thoughts about other interiors–
the mind of a twitchy squirrel
who plays with his food–
throwing the half-naked cobs about,
tasting only the inside of the kernel–
and a singular soaring hawk whose underfeathers gleam
like the pearly inside of a shell.
So Induced / Rachel Lee
I’m a late delinquent. My thoughts are a little different. Making the wrong decisions and abusing my prescriptions. Visual judgement by the passerby. Meandering around with only one eye. I’m sucking out the venom. No F*’s given. I’m poetic with the lyrics. Meticulously strategic. Leisurely moving to avoid all the division. Diseases spread through the region. Capsulate the muscles for the incision. I’m on stage screaming. Big city careening. At the parking lot doing jumping jacks to be the entertainer. I’m a past life inquisitive dweller. Trying to stay optimistic. But the missiles aimed at me from a distance. Chains and shackles down the wrists and ankles. Evacuation isn’t simple. Damn I miss you. My hearts a corridor and the timings perfect to explore. I see the face of the devil in pedestrians. I’m full of every antonym. Brain dead pessimist living in regrets again. Sitting for long term offenses and dreading my next sentence.
Untitled / Lincoln McElwee
We sit in a vegan steakhouse, hungry and holy,
holey and healing. How is the baking business, I ask,
wondering if he also makes cakes in heaven.
The tomatoes are cheaper than ever, he says,
and the sweet wine is so easy to find. In heaven,
there’s always wine.
You have to pay for tomatoes in the afterlife?
I ask, shaken. But the cakes, I query,
as I receive my imitation steak, its crisp of cauliflower
sizzling and seasoned. What about the cakes?
You know, the roads aren’t as long
in heaven, he says with a sweet sigh. I can walk and talk,
and I don’t grow tired. I can walk without fear of my pacemaker.
It’s a peace I never knew existed.
His eyes cloud slightly as he receives his tofu skin chicken.
It’s off the special menu, I mumble.
In heaven, he says, there is no artifice.
There is no need to think differently. I ball my fists,
more to hide my painted nails than anything else.
Dad, I say, the cakes. The cakes. The cakes.
When I was growing up in Tennessee, he says,
we kept cattle and chickens. Like the Bible says, we ate
of the earth. None of this…he gestures all around…artifice.
You said that already, dad, I say quietly.
I take a sip of vegan wine. But what is the business of heaven?
You’re a baker, I say. You were a baker. Don’t you remember?
I had my own business for a long, long time, he says.
When I met your mother, we loved to eat.
We sat in a field and ate chicken sandwiches in Carmel
on our honeymoon. We watched the butterflies flutter and flee.
Maybe this is what remembrance is, I say,
the dementia of deliverance, the useless deed
to a memory long gone. There were peaches and plums,
he says, smiling, fruit trees as far as the eye could see.
I cut into my cauliflower. I nibble at the now-cold sides.
I nod my head as always. Dutiful, even in death.
Loose threads/poem for my mother / Michelle Stoll
Like this, she'd say
wrapping masking tape
around my fingers
pressing tiny hands flat against
golden shag carpet
lifting the confetti --
threads clipped when
she sewed church dresses, playclothes,
placemats, Halloween costumes
She could have hoisted out the Hoover for the job,
but this was apprentice work
I'd never be the seamstress
or musician, not the mother
or hard worker like her
I wanted to be different fabric
unhemmed
One of a kind and her daughter:
Poet, flirt, sharp-tongued wildcat
Stitched together
Seams tight
Edges left unfinished
nakayama-tōge (中山峠) / Sandra Tan
on a three-hour drive from sapporo to niseko,
we stop by boyo nakayama for age-imo, deep fried
potatoes in mildly sweet batter. stand in the
parking lot, more of a parking spot on a plateau,
onto which late afternoon sun falls.
season of yellow light beneath orange and brown leaves,
filigreeing everything. the winding, oxbow roads.
the face of the mountain that never seems to end.
we take the slow road, sun moving across our faces
as you put on your shades. pass through kutchan,
the home of potatoes. fields of rice stalks
thinned by the cold. and who could forget
the sunflowers, large as bread plates,
drooping their heads by the roadside,
coronas of yellow petals still retaining
their warmth. we drive quietly, my ambient music
filling the car, as iced lattes sweat into cup holders.
I’m sure this is how
I want to grow older with you.
