October - Poem 22

Scrimmage / Lilly Frank

These bones, cut into the shape of love.

They attempt to hold the ruins of despair we had left in
our wake. A cinnamon and chamomile essence filling
the autumn wind chills. I wore your coat for months
until I realized it never quite suited my frame anyways.
And even then, I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of it.
The sentimental need for the strands left of you is not
something I am quite fond of anymore. The feeling
growing stale and exhausting, and with that, one
morning, when I had woken, it was almost as if we had
never even known each other.

These bodies, possessed by the religion of love.
These bodies, shedding cells to create an edition of me
that you have never known.
These bodies, no longer the ones we had shared.

Those bodies, I am so thankful to no longer know those
bodies.


A Font ​/ Anna Ojascastro Guzon

You are cursive
at times
the slopes and curls
of tracks at a carnival.
But also 
the countless light bulbs 
the sound of balloons popping
and riders screaming, and
the smell of sugar and fat 
resting in mid-air.
And 
the darkness after
when all have left
where only the moon
can cast shadows
of the block letters:
enter here.  




Nelson’s Trash Collection / Kathryn Johnson

Brass knuckles nestle 
between pottery, statuary, and 
one old safety razor. 

On another table, 
you are confronted with 
an army of bobbleheads, 


who grin like they know 
something you don't. It's hard 
not to acknowledge that maybe 


they do, as you navigate a sea 
of side chairs and spy your reflection 
in a stack of cracked mirrors. 


Your gaze is flooded by so many 
choices, so many choice pieces 
of trash. Treasures once loved, 


once discarded, now retrieved 
and displayed with care. To teach us 
what? To buy less? To use more? 


To make better, wiser choices? 
I think the lesson is simple. It is this: 
Find beauty where you can.

Lesson Two from the Aborted Entoloma / Kimberly McElhatten

I read in one field guide the
armillaria aborts the entoloma,
and in another the
entoloma aborts the armillaria.

One field guide after
another contradicts the one before
when the truth is more
complicated than these two tribes
of scholarship.

 

The fact is, our need
to name and prove a thing
is limited by our attention to
right or left, north or south, this or that—
and in naming things as such,
makes the mushrooms [the world]
so simply understood by
dividing our thoughts into tribes
that we forget the thing
is
and that the truth breaths
between and outside of the two,
and in our weird mushroom
we find our true dilemma.

 

What is parasitic to what?
How can we know when
mutual destruction
promises such delight?

A CONVERSATION WITH MY YOUNGER SELF  / H.T. Reynolds

You know,
I never did figure out
what they did
with those buckets of milk.


By the time it was our turn,
they were half filled with brown and pink milk—
orange juice swirls with chunks of morning cereal
somehow still floating on each separate layer.

 

We spent too much time looking
at that oil-slicked slurry
trying to glimpse the bottom
like the sea floor beneath Ursula’s trident.

 

We’d carefully tip our unfinished half-pint,
followed by the apple juice
that’d sour our stomachs moments later
pretending the fall was endless—a bucket
of brittle bones becoming,
youth resistant to dairy posters—
milk mustaches.

 

Once, we lingered by the doorway
to the cafetorium as our class rippled
for the sunlight withheld from us for so long,

 

but the buckets remained seated in the old chair—
the pinnacle of behavior          while Virgil swept
our secrets spilled beneath the foldable tables,
pretending they were pulled to another dimension;

 

mother’s molasses cookies that’d stick
in Doug’s braces, the broccoli Whitney
assured us was her favorite vegetable,
the cinnamon loaf our mother cut
that morning    hardened by the days
left upon the soiled counter—
a thin sheet of wrinkled plastic as cover.

 

We imagined our kitchen mice
never figured out how to pull off the plastic,
the scrapes were from mother’s knife—
a stranger within the chipped bread flesh,
like Goliath’s claw marks in solid stone—

 

who could leave such a thing behind for a child…

 

Mrs. Menser caught us peeking,
like it had been her we were watching,
scolded us for our curious eyes—
directed us outside

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October - Poem 21