October - Poem 12
To Love Religiously / Lilly Frank
The confession of love is a prayer.
The continuation of love is a ritual.
And the ending of that very love, is exile.
To lose love is not only a loss of
prayer
ritual
religion
but a loss of all faith.
Love becomes so integral to
our purpose. When we forfeit love,
we experience a rebirth.
A baptism of the soul.
A cleansing of the slate.
Arsenal / Anna Ojascastro Guzon
from Arabic dar as-sina'ah "workshop," literally "house of manufacture," from dar "house" + sina'ah"art, craft, skill," from sana'a "he made.” -Etymonline.com
“That’s a push from behind! Call the foul, ref!” The drunk man was yelling about my child. “No. It wasn’t!” I yell from across the bleachers not knowing to whom I was yelling, other than toward the voice of a drunk older man. I then wonder if the man will approach me after the game. “He tripped,” I think to myself. “I’d bet you a thousand dollars my kid didn’t put a hand on that player. I clearly saw what happened.” But maybe I should walk away. I decide to fold my thoughts into a napkin and shove them in my purse for another time, when people aren’t so seemingly angry about my existence in this country. But I don’t know how long I’ll keep my words to myself. I’ll have to collect piles of words if I don’t hand them out. They’ll fill my jean pockets by the end of a soccer game. Overflow several coffee cups by the end of a Zoom meeting. I’ll have to keep them in cloth bins and giant Tupperware boxes with lids to prevent moth holes and mold inside the acute angles and open curves of all those letters. I’ll become embarrassed by my hoarding. Keeping it all just in case some day I might need that retort. Or my niece might want that line when she’s older, for when a man approaches from across the bleachers, or the other side of a boardroom, or out of nowhere, while she’s walking to her car. I might polish the statements, brush away the excessive swear words I learned in middle school and the Filipino idioms I absorbed from my parents, and place them in a reused gift bag I saved from Borders or Left Bank Books. “Use these freely,” the card would say. “Love, Tita Anna”
little senses / Kathryn Johnson
I manufactured the memory
of this moment, constructed with
details from my mother's account:
The small child, perched on a radiator.
Handwashing, with the small, pink tongue
jutting from the child's mouth.
The predictable fall—
a slip and a slam.
The chin cracks against the sink.
Teeth close violently. The pink tongue
becomes red.
I can watch a movie of this moment
play through, but the details are as blurred
as the old scar crossing my tongue. I watch
from the hallway, an invisible third person,
as the young mother rushes in.
But I'm fully first person
in this memory, my first: I watch
my cold, red hands and, beyond them,
the snow falling on the dark blue figure of
my father in the yard. My mother,
that young mother, appears and
presents me with dry mittens.
This memory is pristine, exactly like
a scene captured in a snow globe.
I also remember the dark morning when
I decided to ride our dog like a horse.
She bucked just like a horse, and I fell
just like a snowflake. I think
my nightgown was green. I know
I laughed at the dog, at myself, at
the thrill of a bloodless fall in the hallway
that led to the bathroom where
I bit my tongue nearly in two.
My little senses, real,
remembered, and imagined,
make a colorful patchwork:
the white sink
the pink tongue
the red blood and
red hands against the white
backdrop of snow with
the blue figure
the black dog
the warm blood
the cold snow
All of it, memory.
On Hilltop Lane in the Endless Mountains / Kimberly McElhatten
Asters at my feet
pale purple with yellow
changed by a western sun
diffused through clouds—
two teens bouncing a
basketball across the street—
long and short waves of
semis passing
amber and evergreen trees and
Bald Mountain beyond.
