October - Poem 18
The Apple Analogy (Flare for The Dramatic) / Lilly Frank
Core the apple and sit on the kitchen floor. You have your hands; you have this knife and this cutting board and this apple and your hands. Weapons of destruction and love, and the choice is entirely yours and yours alone. I am coring this apple for the person I love, yet, I am dismantling the apple. Somehow simultaneously, your hands find a way to manifest both, and at the same damn time. Yet, you likely only saw this as an act of love – you see, we usually only see the action of our intentions, not the action of reality of them. So, take the apple, in example. The apple is now your lover’s heart. Take the person you love for example, the person you love is now someone who needs a heart transplant. Do you use the knife to slice open the body of this other person in search of a heart, or do you let the heart rot so you can have a keepsake of what remains?
How do you use your hands?
Cells / Anna Ojascastro Guzon
The inside of her cells contains a make-believe neighborhood made of Little People, with a castle and a camper. And her mother’s make-up samples that she kept in her own purse with a wooden handle. There’s a TV set with knobs, her sister’s Jackson Five ticket, tucked behind a mirror’s frame, and all the Little Debbie Snack Cakes that her classmates brought from home. Storage cubes are filled with dried corsages, cracked geodes, and mixed tapes. In the corner are milk crates of binders, lab coats, and textbooks with words highlighted in green. A maze of shelving holds a thermos from Harlem General Hospital, a pink winter coat, a purple Nokia, and neon lights. Also a brown bag for morning sickness, sidewalk smells, a subway card, a taxi cab beside a jogging stroller, forgotten in the park, a soft blue blanket, and stacks of books with hard pages. There’s a lawnmower, piles of recital programs, costumes from the mall, sand, tears, prayers, and unmatched athletic socks. And there’s a Chromebook, yellow notepads filled with notes, cracked smartphones, lists, and lines of poetry, suspended in the substance that keeps the membrane of each cell from caving in.
The patio behind the bar / Kathryn Johnson
The grass here is fake,
but the evening is mild and
we are together.
Untethered / Kimberly McElhatten
I’ve never been a crier, but as I sat on the toilet at a hotel this morning, my body yearned to cry. I reached for the toilet paper and thought, Who is this other woman in my body and in my head? This is not you. I don’t know her. Hold it together. But it wasn’t the crying that wasn’t me. It was the longingness to feel at home in my body—[again]. The longingness to stay in my PJs and forget to check out. I considered my options and what might happen if I gave in to the longingness—and the employee who’d have found me nestled into the white pillows and the duvet of room 712 of the DoubleTree, writing poems about the longingness and despair of who was me and not me; and how I'd had no option, but to wipe up the blood, stand on my achy legs, take a shower, and become the longingness of the woman who now stood outside of the body I once knew.
