October - Poem 10

Younger Wisdom  / Lilly Frank

Fists cut in the shape of brass knuckles, storing the punch of gunpowder. I was a girl before I was a woman. I once was untainted by the fallacious, yet somehow accepted notion of inherent weakness found in women, found in girls, found in us.

She, the younger version of me, had every conviction to a science. Rationale detailed on the page and signed on the dotted line of every statement she had ever made. While yes, it was truth, I’d be damned if I didn’t have a litany of reasoning to act as a spine for it.

As a grown woman, you quickly come to learn that you will seldom ever be taken seriously for this same passion, emotion, feeling. Often undermined, feeble attempts of convincing that you’re all wrong.

As a child, the emotion can be seen as, “Cute.” As a grown woman, the emotion is seen as too much power in the wrong place. So, as most of us do, I retreated. I began to disclose less and less, until the space I took up was small enough to be seen again, as, “Cute.”

It was a Tuesday afternoon when this younger girl came to me underneath a pear tree on a fall day. She grabbed my hand, and by some sense of consolation, she wordlessly shared her wisdom with me.

The next day, I woke up with courage sitting inside of my stomach and words finally feeling free to part from my lips once more. So, I clenched my brass knuckle fist and braced for the impact. I wound up my arm with power settling deep into my bones,

The girl in me, sees the girl in you. The girl in me, sees the power in me.                                                                                                    And there is nothing more that she fears than the forgetfulness of that very fact.

Facebook Marketplace: Items for Sale  ​/ Anna Ojascastro Guzon

the string section in unison 
palpable like grief

a letter handwritten 
on stationary, in ink

a painting that knows something 
that you never saw in yourself 

an ancient mosaic that makes 
you question the story of humankind

the relief of nothing transmitted 
to your eardrums or retinas

a portrait of a universe 
as a child 

poetry that invades 
the spaces between cells

On Effort / Kathryn Johnson

I am trying. And isn’t that
such a loaded word? Am I
making an attempt? Am I
putting myself to the test? Perhaps
this is a test of my endurance.
Or the act of rendering everything
to its purest state.

Rugby players score points on a try. I like that.
Still playing tug-o-war with perfectionism
at age fifty, I want to grant myself more
credit for my efforts. It has taken decades
to learn I can be pleased with progress.
What could I learn in another fifty years?
So much!

The lessons would be like
receding into a quiet corner or
relinquishing my tight hold
on being good and perfect.
Refining my knowledge of what
it means to live well. To be well.
to try.

Hatchlings Breathing in a Nest / Kimberly McElhatten

In May
among the dewy arborvitae
beside my condo
there are four hatchlings sleeping
in a nest

under the speckled shade
hey inhale—exhale—
almost together

resting their bare bodies
until mother lands

and morning
is the crisp sound of hunger
in spring.

DEATH OF THE FIRST / H.T. Reynolds