October - Poem 10
Seasons / Katerina Canyon
The clouds have fallen.
Mist speckles my skin like sand.
Two points of crisp autumn
pinch me
and let go.
This amber skin
is bruised.
I am sick, otherwise
I am healthy.
When my toes go numb
I will know it is winter.
Late At Spruce Bog Lake State Natural Area / Sam Calhoun
We were late for the bogbean,
later still for the glaciers
in their retreat, late
for the morning fog
rising from this kettle lake,
the sun low, ringed
like coffee stains
on the table edge,
the lady's slipper gone,
pink having slipped
to the sky, and fading.
I wanted to see the Labrador tea,
dip my finger in the pitcher plants
to test the temperature,
rescue the dead fly
from it's viking grave,
leave it beneath yellow
birch and leatherleaf,
between boardwalk boards
where tamarack flashed
their march toward
the gold heaven above.
But the light kept changing,
I could hear it in the ground:
every step the cry
of the white-throated sparrow,
every tawny cottongrass seed
sowed to the sky a kind
of diacritic to the wind,
the lake so still, spaghnum moss
embracing every step
like night does a shadow,
folding diurnal hands into the dark.
In Response to “I Am Afraid” / at/om
I ate my own words, actually.
I am afraid of the dread in my heart,
I am afraid of the unanswered messages
and short responses and the thousand
little deaths I live every day that I can’t
kill myself just parts of me and the worst part
is I love these parts of me,
I don’t want them to die.
I thought I would rather die whole.
And yes all these things scare me,
but this haunted ass house is scarier,
and that late night knock on the door
scared me yes, and the man I met,
but scarier was knowing
some part of me still wants to live.
Logical Conclusion is an IPA / Ellen Ferguson
and something advertised as surprising but inevitable
for thirty years
your logical conclusion,
the teacher says,
should be surprising but inevitable.
both dogs: symphony on a blanket, opera on a chair;
seemed to sense the logical conclusion –
one knew the symphony had ended, the other la bohème
rising to tug at their leashes.
you can hear it in
the waiting on a sidewalk,
the voice of tables and chairs, so
why ask the waiter for it?
Why say, “I’ll have a logical conclusion,” with your fish?
Can’t we let it come, surprising but inevitable,
Like dogs do? Like the path?
I just died (Translation of “acabo de morir” by Jose Maria
Lima) / Brett Gastineau
I just died
and my death
pulls from my throat a deep howl,
leaves me ablaze in its salt.
I just died
and my death
surges rough and strong through my hands,
a rising deluge in my veins.
Death came just like that—suddenly—
while I was twisted and flailing,
yearning to be something new.
This woeful dawn casts a
faltering and wavering light
across my lost footsteps,
over my furrowed brow,
over my “indelible” mark.
Death, a cudgel, careening toward me,
overturning my life.
My life!
With this dawn, I am overwhelmed with its pulse.
Burial / Joy Johnson
Scared to death, or thereabouts, by these dreams
that keep visiting me, of tunnels close
and narrowing, speaking to me of war
and encroaching disambiguation,
I vacillate between fantasy and
escape in poetry and math, and anguish.
How to navigate this tapering, this
weakening of mood, of hope, of prospect
all while acknowledging instilled beauty
of not only what was but what remains
to luxuriate in but mindfully,
to, last kiss midst, deeply appreciate.
If the muse sits alongside my writing,
today shall have been worthwhile balancing.
friend divorce / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco
I miss her at times. Like October, with the spooky season decor that reminds me we used to trick-or-treat together around her neighborhood. She was a dancer, and often dressed in her stage costumes. My costumes were clumsy, frugal and funny like me. Our falling-out came for us like The Scream: quick and ghoulish. Our girls had a playdate and I had to cancel. She pouted and criticized me for making her break childcare plans with her parents, then it turned into a silent stone wall leading into an empty field. My daughter said, I never liked her girls anyway; they were mean. And a small demon spirit whisked away decades of chitchat & lunch dates in just one text message. I can’t un-remember all the bunches of autumn corn, hay bales and candy apples along her street. It’s my only friend divorce and it haunts me.
GRIEF COMES WITH THE RATTLE / H.T. Reynolds
after “Silence,” by Brett Gastineau
an empty bassinet with a pink bow
behind a cracked open door
still reaching out its shadow
like a midnight pendulum
a coiled viper on a doormat
spelling out WELCOME
in textured vines against
autumn colors
it comes with a prescription label
without refills, an empty bottle
and a rigid spine—trembling
upon a fiberglass couch, a lamp
spotlighting from the corner, gravel
being served for dinner, that spider
web in the corner still occupied
with the husk of a fly you watched
transform a few nights, maybe weeks
ago, while your skin protested the size
of your bones and your stomach felt
adventurous like a cat wandering
through a gap in the basement wall
nobody remembered was there—
not since the skunk debuted
and the whole house reeked
it comes from the lungs—the depths
of a throat unburdened from plastic
tubing, the machine humming
beside a lowered railing
a palm clutching a waxen fist
skin like flypaper, eyes fixed
on the scuff in the ceiling
it’s that small thing
left trembling
long after the body
stops
Persistent / Gabriel Phillips
This thought, it spins me. From my own voice
I do not hear my name, instead I’m thinking
about a whisper of you. First it undoes
the front buttons like a persistent
summer cough. Leaving, pretending to,
leaving but not left. When there is
even more salt next time. Tender
to the bones which is enough,
to crack my mind so early.
That the rest of the day is haunted.
It’s another season where the colors
of the heartbeat begin to change.
And there was a note that I mistook
as the presence of someone beside me.
It is just change, who wears a
dark hat, and is doing a terrible job
of hiding its weeping face.
Could I have been smaller, could I
have worn the holes as a necklace.
Even though wind is known to stir,
it lies dead in silence behind the open door.
dream debt / Colin Sturdevant
let me lay out each tooth
unplanted from my gums
as thanks for the wrecks avoided
and to have had two more years
& a lost career
& a burned down home
& gutted car
with kin
how she was the moon now gone
the moon still Houdini-ly there
yet not quite there anymore
a coin picked from an ear & pocketed
oh, valence shell still here
carrying ash until the death of your husband,
my father,
how we once lived when
there were still fish & cattle
& we lived to see miracles
better than technology:
bison coming home
