October - Poem 23
Disjointed Fidelity / Lilly Frank
Heavily, my heart is so bitterly confused.
In flux with the understanding that this too,
will one day come to a conclusion
whether that be natural or not.
With this gun no longer in my hands
I am only left with my ears to hear the fire
and my feet to feel the ground beneath me
stir unnaturally.
Trust is either found, or undiscovered deep
within oneself. Usually founded upon
foolishness of believing the past, or
blinding foresight, it mangles itself between
monolithic or shadowy and indistinct.
Peering into the contemplations shared
between the brain and body (each proposing
themselves as gospel), it so happens to unravel
that both are a lie. Both are coincided, both are
unyielding, and both are entirely unconscious
of one another. I nudge myself in the
direction of whichever side tugs the rope
the hardest. And with that, I will never know
If the choice I had made was the one
sided with truth.
At the Old House / Anna Ojascastro Guzon
Hot oil in a pan
snaps. Drops scald your skin but you're
too busy to feel.
In Defense of Forgetting / Kathryn Johnson
The day started with a piece
of unpleasantness. Bad news
by phone. I sat with it. Resented it.
And then, a little miracle:
I forgot. The bad news faded
into the background of a busy day.
Naturally, it reasserted itself
this evening. I felt guilt and began
to wrap it ‘round my shoulders, to wear
the shame of not holding
on tight all day to my grief.
Then I remembered: forgetting
can serve a purpose. Forgetting
can be restorative. It can be
a blessing and a reprieve.
It can be a gift. Trouble will wait
while I embrace forgetfulness.
Lesson Three from the Aborted Entoloma / Kimberly McElhatten
Just like discovering myself too late,
burning in a bed of stinging nettle—
it’s too easy to project my story [our story]
into what I see in these weird little mushrooms.
I suspect this is true of others: to see
what’s there and imagine themselves into it.
It’s there in the common name I use—
shrimp of the woods and in the others,
a ground plum, a hunter’s heart, a pig snout.
And in the names of other fungi—
old man of the woods,
chicken of the woods,
hen of the woods,
plums and custard,
dead man’s finger,
witches’ butter,
dryad's saddle,
devil’s urn,
elf ear.
I want to speak of the lesson
I’m learning this foraging season—
the one the aborted entoloma offered.
How the choice between two is oppression
and the choice between more is freedom—
and how the dichotomy of choice can
land me [us] in a flashpoint without
knowing how I [we] got there.
SPICULE / H.T. Reynolds
babies are born with around 300 bones…
by adulthood, they’ll have just over 200 bones.
—Healthline
A body can be broken
in three hundred different ways,
decreasing as our crowns ascend
toward heaven—our limbs
becoming battering rams
denting another’s mind—a pool
of do you remember when
you used to open the door without a key
without even turning the knob
I’d never heard wood snap like an arm before,
like stretching skin at the speed of sound—
they say a whip breaks
the sound’s barrier—
it’s what we hear and I believe them,
anything with such fibrous tendrils
like a leathered squid’s praising arms,
could find God in the silence of a bedroom
heaving a door jamb splintering to sawdust
wicking up her blood—her tears,
scraped up and discarded
in the morning
My body can be broken
in three hundred different ways
and counting
