October - Poem 1
Camelops / Katerina Canyon
The original camels
walked the sands
of California.
I imagine them
seven feet tall
looking tiny
beneath the redwoods
Eventually they walked
south. The rest
died out.
I moved east.
Californians can only thrive
in places where tar
sticks to the soles.
No one warned us to
be wary of the middle—
the settlement of mud
that holds you like quicksand.
We aren’t used to rivers.
We thrive in oceans and deserts.
We etch our history in sands
that have kissed the Pacific.
We sift through the ashes
of our ancestors for signs
that lead us forward.
The moon looks the same
no matter where we are.
The stars shift as we walk.
The seduction comes from
the forests we cannot see—
the oasis we imagine.
The camels are gone.
We tried to bring them back,
but they died a second time.
Problems At Night / Sam Calhoun
All evening the road
unwound like an old cassette,
the serpentine belt whine
the only sound above
radio static.
Eyes tired as the stars,
my head chokes on
distant cumulonimbus,
pretending they're
not there.
Soda cans shake
like dance rattles
across the floorboard,
boot-prints carved
like glyphs,
and outside tires grind
asphalt as combines
tear through fields,
corn husks falling
like snow.
for Pumpkinistra, Seabiscut, and War Admiral / at/om
For the last few months I’ve been
watching this girl on reels
grow a giant pumpkin named
after a race horse,
learned she was also growing
a giant squash, and zucchini,
and now as the air gets colder
and the weigh off approaches.
I am more invested than I have
ever been in another person’s
vegetable garden.
And oh isn’t it so beautiful to watch
something grow, and oh isn’t it so
great to cross your fingers that
something gains weight? And what
feels more like fall than caring so much
for another person’s harvest
you forget that this year you did not
grow a single successful vegetable.
But there is still food on your table.
And though you may not have grown it
your heart is a harvest and the love is
more abundant than the meat carved
out of the pumpkins thrown into rivers
for regattas and months of hard work
is sailed away.
Autumn is here, the days are colder,
and you still have something to root for.
MOMA / Ellen Fergusun
elevator,
on the
Up to the sixth floor
Arrive.
Study: "Now that I am in Madrid and I can think I think of you."
Think: Now that I am in MOMA and I can think I think of you.
Think: Now that I am on the street and I can think I think of you.
Think: Now that I am and I can think I think of you.
Study: Will we arrive this very night, this very this?
Think: Will we walk through these doors, this very this?
Think: Will we walk up the stairs, this very this?
Think: This very this, will it?
Study: What if Frank O'Hara had not said it first?
Think: He said it first so it could.
Think: He said it first so you could.
Think: He said it so it could you could.
The elevator came because you the elevator arrived on the sixth floor because you.
bewilderment [bih-wil-der-muhnt] n. / Brett Gastineau
1. a physical condition when heart palpitations and
shortness of breath may occur
2. the sensation of a playful madness on your shoulders
3. finding yourself in awe when the stars prick the dark
4. a warm confusion in the belly
5. when the topography of the day shifts and you are
certain you understand the dreams of trees
6. to come to know it was a mistake to grow up
No Shit, Shakespeare / Joy Johnson
For those who will forever see surface
As the only beauty, and so beauty
That must fade, I shall stand service
And reminder of truth (therefore beauty)
So much more than skin deep, so much driven
Into the crannies (evidence of age).
I offer opportunity of vision
Into science of math and verse per page
Gorgeous enough to stop a heart open
To what's not advertised, not exploitive.
If you would persist in your mere token
Interpretation of what's -poietic,
I only pity, turn away, resume
An incandescent exploration bloom.
I will / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco
In the middle of winter I will
wish to see jewel tones of fall
In the middle of spring I will
Stop for rain and be glad it isn’t hot
In the middle of life I will
Be myself and hope it is enough
In the middle of dying perhaps
I will be grateful
DERELICTION / H.T. Reynolds
I love you like a cat
loves a door
that is to say arched
along trim mewing
claws trembling
handles and locks
holding the weight
of an empty room
a dial tone pulse
for a forgotten body
receding into shadows
firelight and burn
my throat like whisky
numbing night sober
reaching for missed
calls empty streams
flowing images
collected without me
I looked so lovely
beside you
like a decomposing church
carved up and weeping
Picnics Where the Moon Can’t See Us / Gabriel Phillips
Listen to your comfortable rising.
It shakes the tall grass as though
grasshoppers were moving through it.
Light through the blanket. And grass.
And crickets that battle themselves
with lullabies. The fear of sleep
itself. None to rise to in the mornings,
but comfort, its peaceful groan.
The sun is not the grass. But it does
make the day shrink. Throughout
the yellow of each impatient breath.
You are the first of every fifth breath.
Unlike the sun. You are the calling
of wheat when there is no wind.
Unlike the sun and unlike the sunbeams.
You are the comfortable rising,
I fall into exactly one thousand pieces
trying to lie on the blanket beside you.
brotherhood / Colin Sturdevant
I know little about Dionysian
& Apollonian behavior,
but I’ve seen love. Not romantic
in the sense you’d think. It involved
a broken pipe,
a bloodied ebony lip, a set of twins.
One mild and one a bit less mild
the way the wiry hair on my chin
is latticed in salt and pepper, opposites.
How as one brother was to be carried off
with cuffs behind his back,
each drop
of moon pouring out like his sobbing mother
from his brown eyes,
the other brother slowly
caressed his sharp chin and asked: why?
Because we all know in American streets
how when you’re caught with a bit of kush
nothing ends well, especially when you’re
not white. How daylight stayed longer.
How boyhood was drawn shorter. How some
red-faced copper made me think ACAB.
I’d never known brotherhood until that afternoon.
Knew how beauty doesn’t stick around very long.
Made a spectacle into an ode. Now gone.
