October - Poem 5
Memory Lane / Lilly Frank
I keep this eclectic collection of garbage in a shoebox in
my closet. The bud from the first cigarette I ever smoked,
a broken shoelace from the stranger I met at a metal show,
a now faded movie stub from 2012, the first teeth my dog
lost in a plastic bag, the list goes on. Anyways, this
garbage, I can recall. I pinpoint each piece of memorabilia
down to the second in which I was existing, doing
something, meaning something to someone else. I
suppose it is the nostalgia of living a sweeter life. I
suppose it is the nostalgia of bliss, and naïve loving that
cozies up inside of my chest when I revisit the decrepit
box every year or so. And then there is the sting. The
recollection of what I have lost, the life I no longer live,
the youth that is now behind me, the whimsy that has
deteriorated, and the heart that has become so fractured,
that I haven’t added much to the box in years. I once felt
important, loved, cherished, and valued. I once felt these
pieces of my life – these silly and obsolete pieces of my
life, were incredibly special. Gray clouds fill the inside of
my mind, I’ve been waiting to see the sun, to see the light,
the reason, the purpose, again, for years.
What are you supposed to do when the fondest moments
of your life are merely foggy memories and tattered
artifacts?
The Backpack / Anna Ojascastro Guzon
The Tuff Stuff backpack comes in rainbow
unicorn
and blue sailboat.
Sizes
3T
to
8Y
Bulletproof Levels
IIIA for protection from most common handguns. III designed to stop common rifle rounds. And III+ for protection from AK-47s and AR-15s.
Zipper pockets on interior
for loose items like
pencils and
erasers.
Convenient
outer pockets
for easy access to a water bottle
or a
cell phone.
Adjustable
straps
so your student
can wear
her
Tuff
Stuff
backpack
comfortably
from the first day of the school year
to
the last.
Keep
your loved
ones
stylish,
safe from gunfire,
and
prepared
at a cross country meet / Kathryn Johnson
Watching the mob of JV boys
make the turn and run
up the hill in front of us reminds me
my life is not a race.
The day is hot, with full sun.
Many of these young men are already
red-faced and grim before
they reach the one-mile marker.
But so many of these flushed faces
belong to little boys who haven’t crossed
the invisible line marking the finish
of their baby fat years. This also reminds me
that, even if life is a race,
we each have our own course to follow.
The friend beside me cheers herself
hoarse for her son. She’s the one
who helps me pace myself. I hope
to do the same for her, so that each of us
may reach milestones in our own time.
At Lookout Point Mount Ararat, August 24, 2020 / Kimberly McElhatten
Just west of Schellsburg on Route 30
night shoots up the Allegheny Front
where dozens of activists—men,
mothers, and
little children—
clear Lookout Point Mount Ararat
by foot.
They have come seven hundred
miles from Milwaukee
along the Lincoln Highway—
tired of asking for justice.
While walking the roads through Indiana, police
barred their access to gas stations for restroom breaks.
In Ohio, people driving by threw food.
In Pennsylvania,
just west of Schellsburg on
the highway—
it’s the kind of response they had anticipated.
Just one mile ahead, sit before them,
actions more complicated than
life and death and good and evil,
where you don’t
see a lot of black
people and there’s a
reason for it
because they’re not
welcome—
one mile ahead. They’ll break
a little too long, in this
rural part of
dark, dark, dark, dark
Pennsylvania,
and a man will walk
up the Lincoln Highway,
shooting in the air—
shooting in the air.
Then—
he will snap
a warning and
spray buckshot [not] like a firehose
into the men with
—mothers and
little children.
One mile ahead,
the eyes of all people will be upon
exiles in their own land.
*Words in italics have been taken from newspaper articles and eye-witness reports, as well as Martin Luther King’s speech, “I Have a Dream,” and John Winthrop’s, “Dreams of a City on a Hill, 1630.”
LADY EGGDRED ADDRESSES THE CONGREGATION / H.T. Reynolds
We’re all dragon today
awaiting the knight
seeking our soulless
profit—our mattered,
promised salivation
to liver this piece to us
as palm rust cell vocation
her sun crown bloomed through the stain glass—Daniel’s head dangling from Aslan’s jowls/Moses
water skiing on stone tablets dragged behind a large arc piloted by Noah and a peacock holding a
Coor’s Light/Adam massaging a migraine at a breakfast table while Eve drips drops of a tincture
into a snake smoothie in the background/an elaborate table filled with food encircled by twelve
empty chairs/a naked man holding his palms together in prayer while fire erupts from his crotch.
Lady EggDred descends from the pulpit, retrieves her clutch of thirteen polished emerald eggs that
leak whisps of black smoke like corrupted dry ice in her stainless-steel basket, and finds a seat next
to a thin-boned man displaying an Armani suit like a wireframed manakin. He rouses, slightly, once
her blood feathers seep into his grey matter, lances his pale skin with an infecting desire to
stand—he does, and retreats through the emergency double-door exit, the mahogany pew bloating
rancid boils where he sat, spreading like an eclipse’s shadow until the room is bathed in night. Her
eggs radiate the eyes of her lord—speaking,
“Sleep, all that may be so…”
She, too, closes her eyes—though the sleep is not for her—and listens to the dimming pulse of a
room, a room that did not heed her warning, her words falling like the mass molt that will be her
signature.
TO BE CONTINUED
