October - Poem 24

Limbo  / Lilly Frank

Oozing from the wound of shame, love comes out sloppily. All inhibitions of tenderness and trials of authenticity collapse beneath their weakening frame. The veil lifts itself from the face of a poet, in spite of her labored feet, she flees the alter as if it were a crime scene. The knife rusted with blood in between cold hands, she knows this feeling well, wickedness, but she can’t recall the details. To be loved is to transform, to lose love is to become completely and entirely alien to the person you once were. And worst of all, to be somewhere in between the two, every next step you take could lie a landmine underneath the brittle surface. 

A Haibun on the Origins ​/ Anna Ojascastro Guzon

Under the heat lamps of nature life revises said Sir Darwin. But survival of the fittest was never his coinage. Years of toiling was boiled, twisted, wrung-out, misused. The can of condensed science was popularized. 

Pet watches over
the business of falling leaves.
Wild beasts mobilize. 

This One Memory / Kathryn Johnson

Because
I’m old enough to have been a babysitter when
it was still acceptable for the father of the family
to drive me home,
I have this one memory.

This one family lived in a house on a hill, with a long,
long driveway,
with only one weak streetlight
where it met the road.

This night, the father came to the end
of the drive and brought the truck to a full stop.
He didn’t turn to me when he said, Look at this.

I heard the headlights click off.

The field in front of us, across the road,
came alive.

Hundreds,
thousands,
a million
fireflies on display.
Little green
and yellow lights,
clicking off and on,
drifting softly
up on silent wings
unfurled from beetle shells.
This one memory
is a snapshot, a pure
and perfect moment from my youth. But

in my middle years, I find myself thinking more
about that father, the man who
must have sat in his truck,
in the dark,
at the end of the drive,
enough times
to discover the holy,
floating lights alone.
There are summer nights, when
a handful of fireflies appear in my yard,
I think about returning to that night,
so that I can ask him how long
he sat there and why
he chose me
to share this memory with him.

It’s likely best that I cannot.
The simple, sweet memory is enough.

IN THE HOUSE OF MY MOTHER  / H.T. Reynolds

God sobs in my arms…
—Agha Shahid Ali

Before I knew how to create a meal
with a hot stove, I knew how to treat seared skin,
how to hold a wilting mother upon your lap,
dislodge her encrusted hair from her open
wounds—how to purr from the throat,
calm her eyes closed without them flinching

Before I knew how to trust a door
lock, I knew how it becomes a microphone,
a loudspeaker vibrating my spine
like a centipede transcending to golden—
spiraling toward God—a green couch—

a pasture—a shepherd—a father—
a mother’s soiled smile scorching