October - Poem 3
Sacrifice, Compromise, and Suffocation / Lilly Frank
Swallowed by the scent of chamomile and fresh linen, I wipe the slate clean with the very cloth you had thrown in the wash to rinse out the stain of my blood. The grand finale felt as if it had come too soon – it seems that in love it always does. I swallowed the teeth you had knocked from my gums down the back of my throat. I smiled, I laughed, and I had never felt so alone. The start of each morning was reminiscent of a psychological horror film. Feverishly, I bargained with myself. If I could survive this, I could meet the version of you that had been hiding underneath your guise of whatever manhood meant to you, which seemingly, was everything. I endured. Faith deteriorated into defeat. My spine contorted into whatever shape fit your torso nicest, most comfortably for you. My interests morphed themselves to intertwine with yours. My fingers wrote delicately, calculated, and ultimately, dishonest. Losing sight of my personhood felt like a small price to pay to experience yours, no matter how cold.
Sometimes, time heals. Sometimes, time is a silent death sentence. And sometimes, time doesn’t really matter at all. Retrospect wags her finger in my face for the distasteful way I had spent her. The future opens her arms to me, and I am too cowardly to jump into them.
St. Louis Sonnet Two / Anna Ojascastro Guzon
Are you Black? A question
I heard more than once.
What's Filipino? The follow-up
to my response. In spring
tornado drills, foreheads pressed
against the wall, a windowless
hallway filled with kids, fingers
laced behind the neck. Knuckles
will help protect you from broken bits
in one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds.
In twenty twelve, intruder drills
a game of hide-and-seek
Who can be the quietest? Today
slide desks behind the door. Don't forget.
Inez / Kathryn Johnson
I've set a clipboard at a precarious angle
at the edge of the cabinet. I'm hoping
to deter and condition the kitten who insists
on seeking out new ways to reach the top
of the neighboring shelves.
She is a persistent little beast.
I've realized in recent years that
what annoys me—circumstances, people, cats—
is too often a reflection of some flaw I see in myself.
And if this mittened kitten is a mirror,
what do I see shining back from her sleek sides?
It shames me to admit how much alike we are.
She prowls through the house,
sniffing, pouncing, and napping,
in very much the same way I move through life.
I sample and taste new ideas,
growing bored with too much ease.
I also jump from moment to moment,
looking for the quick kill,
treating the work of my life like play—
or sometimes the converse:
I snap my jaws around the neck of an odd
moment of pleasure and shake the life out of it.
I, too, sleep in the midst of the daily hustle and bustle
that could be my greatest source of nourishment and joy.
But I am at my most feline when I echo
the kitten’s expeditionary ways.
Swiping under the couch, whether
in search of lost toys or imagined monsters.
Jumping up and onto places
I have no business being. Once,
she caught her back paw in the footboard and
scared us both. I held and soothed her,
checking for blood or breakage.
She leapt down from my arms,
shook off my concern,
and went back to exploring.
May I someday be like her in this way, too.
The Turning / Kimberly McElhatten
Cento from poems in The Bridge Lit Journal, Volume 5
Late afternoon today I returned to the bench at the end of the woods,
right after I closed the book, after I had just seen
a field of doe eyes staring back at me.
The fact of being a mother is that you will learn to bend
like aspens over a fast brook
while the distant pines snap and seep.
It was the kind of raw Saturday—
[with] a persistent wind blowing.
A lie I tell myself:
I didn’t know I was going to age like this—
I must be an animal—
but it’s as if I drove through the earth to see how old I could become.
The fact is that you cannot go back.
They say it’s better
to lean in, to observe before acting. And yes,
I remember summer on the other side of the door.
I remember that winter each morning was [is] a bundle of
problems you [I][we] don’t have—
They deserve your [my][our] close attention.
When I die, scatter my ashes
Up there, [where] the sky matches the steel—
[where] time is not welcome there, beyond—
[where] there is no angel to stop me—
[where] everything [is] holding its breath, waiting for the turn[ing].
DEADBOLT TUMBLER / H.T. Reynolds
you can’t make love
without the penetration
can’t form a home
without cheating the woods
another day
can’t become one—soul
without first finding her edges
fitting your points together like teeth
turning—forming the forward motion,
a clockwork expiration
made like a diary, a pink thumbprint
promise birthed after
your key finds the lock
twists,
and all becomes clear
