October - Poem 28
So, I Have Learned, / Lilly Frank / Lilly Frank
Purpose to suffering is found inside of the heart (your or otherwise). Ending the cycle, putting a gap in the loop, pausing the world to spend a moment of this lifetime sharing myself with you.
The irony of being a poet. Hindsight and forethought usually craft my best linguistic response. However, stunned in surprise, I fumble over the meaning of what I truly intend to say.
There has never been a moment in a lifetime such as mine that has felt graced with such ardor. I want to reach my hand to yours and hope that is enough to show you the way that the lights flickered on behind my eyes.
If I could relive this moment in time for as long as I live, it would be enough. How lucky are we to know there awaits an abundance of this nestled inside of something cherished and parented.
Chop Suey / Anna Ojascastro Guzon
I've never tried chop suey before
I knew that beauty is the contrast
of shadows and light. The way it lands.
It's unexpected. Walls bloom;
a lonely gaze. And hues convey a plot
or a psychological ruse. Who can let go
of those ochres juxtaposed with blue?
What is it that you cannot possibly get
enough of? What luck if your reply is
chop suey; leftovers, everything between
what's contained and what you throw out.
A Rough Ghazal for the Butterfly / Kathryn Johnson
Consider the butterfly – the little insect possessing
so much beauty and imbued with the great weight of meaning.
Like when Grandfather died: one small cousin spied a butterfly.
And what? Now that tall, gruff man’s spirit has a new dwelling?
We forget, when romanticizing the butterfly, that
it becomes in a most unbecoming way: by dissolving.
The lowly caterpillar does not enter its cocoon
to simply grow wings. Does it know? Would knowing change a thing?
Would any of us choose to melt away in this exchange
if we knew what a horrible miracle was happening?
Today, I think I would. I’ve been told that the belly is
a cauldron. So, I will use it by choice for undoing.
And in my big belly cauldron, I am making a great
mess of a potion. No butterfly is emerging. Just me.
Through Pennsylvania / Kimberly McElhatten
I live on
the ridge
of a mountain
and close to the sky,
just below the
clouds and
sometimes
above.
When I first
dropped over the
Allegheny Front
and the Appalachians
rolled out beyond the
highway, ridge by
ridge, I decided
this was
home.
People talk
about energy vortexes
as concentrated Qi—where
fault lines emit magnetic forces,
where the water heals, where the
rocks speak—and they imagine
traveling long distances
to Sedona or Mount
Fuji to find them,
when I felt one
while driving
east on I-80
through
Pennsylvania.
I HAD MY FLINTSTONES PUSH-UP / H.T. Reynolds
my Spy Vs. Spy Mad Magazine
my mother with her post-nominals
my neighbor with his wheezing lungs
that’d crackle and burst into medical language
like a procedural alarm clock that accepted
ACCESS cards at midnight—scrubs
with stethoscopes determining an acceptable
degree of oxygen
hooked to his throat like a fuel pump,
but he never went anywhere—couldn’t
go anywhere—we had that in common
but long after I reminded my legs to walk
he’d discover how persistent his body could be,
his mother’s cancer claiming her before his own
his body still stuck where they planted him
