October - Poem 12
Batik / Katerina Canyon
I sit on a stool
too short for my long legs
and made myself dizzy
from the smell of hot wax.
I use an unfamiliar tool to draw
flowers onto cotton cloth.
It is not slow or meditative.
my flowers are smeared splotches.
This is not the art that I know.
I cannot help but think
of my mother’s sighs
when I failed at calligraphy,
and watercolors and needlepoint.
So instead, I stand, and watch
the real artist fix my errors
and boil the cloth, dye it
royal blue.
I kneel to rinse and scrub it clean.
As my batik suns on a bush,
I sit and breathe in the wind.
It is time for prayer somewhere
because I hear the Muezzin.
The tall grass dances in the breeze.
When my batik dries,
I realize messy art is still art.
Sleeping in the car at Kentucky Dam Village State Resort Park, KY / Sam Calhoun
Wet tent stuffed in the back,
crouched in the front seat
with cracked windows,
no difference between
the crack of the moon
and the cracks of my eyes,
nor streetlights and the moon,
or the neighbor's headlamp,
his dog's eyes mixing
with forest eyes mixing
with fettered stars.
I trace their shadows
the edge of woods,
how long can anyone
expect to follow
something in the dark?
Every evening the sun
chases the same shadows
to the forest, breaks
for the intermission.
I lie awake waiting
for the red morning light.
And So The World is Saved by Tom Welling Accidentally Posting His Naked Reflection to His Instagram Story / at/om
Sometimes I think I’m not crashing out hard enough, and sometimes I think I should be meaner. Sometimes I think I am too angry, and in this world that is so cruel I should be meeting it with all the love I was born with. Sometimes I think I have clenched my jaw so hard I’m surprised that my teeth haven’t all shattered. Sometimes I’m surprised the boiling anger within me hasn’t melted my eyes out of my head, rotted the skin off of my numbing fingers, and exposed to the world that I am nothing but writing cruel thoughts stuffed into a human skin.
But speaking of exposed.
Smallville actor Tom Welling uploaded an Instagram story to show the New York skyline from comic con. He shared a beautiful moment with the world and in it did not see his naked reflection distorted in the window glass. And god do I know how it feels to have your distorted reflection shown to the world.
And god, did it make me smile, even with my jaw clenched, even with the unkindness trying to crawl up my throat I smiled. I smiled and I laughed and my friends smiled and we laughed.
And Superman was real, and Superman was watching over us, and Superman saved the day.
Tuesday is the New Thursday / Ellen Ferguson
An Abecedarian Double Burning Haibun
By Ellen Ferguson
Since Sliced Bread
Not only are you
The greatest thing since sliced bread
You are also this:
A
Book, noticed on the table at Rizzoli;
Caj brown sweater confetti flecked;
Dashing approach to pastrami;
Eye for photography;
Fire of your mind;
Generous laugh;
High appreciation for Snoopy;
Intuitive reading;
Joy in Manhattan;
Knowledge of presidential libraries;
Lost memories of Kansas;
Making me better;
Nimbly pivoting away from Shakespeare;
Open to opera;
Punctuality &
Quick planning;
Row upon row of front row seats;
Spark of eyes, flashing;
Thoughtfulness;
Untouchable understanding;
Visiting your child with glee;
Writing with style/clarity of thought;
X-ray vision upon spying pastrami someone else might enjoy;
Your patience;
Zero tolerance for cruelty.
(continued…)
A Witch’s Point of View / Brett Gastineau
Hunger grazed my belly.
I had started sleeping in caves with bears again.
I have learned to enter their dreams by burrowing
my teeth into their necks.
There’s something of warmth there as I enjoy
the drinkable thread of life but
I wouldn’t say tender.
There is no love in my murderous heart.
I crave the coldness of the moon.
Bears dream of the sticky sweetness of berries
and the promise of more to come.
I find no comfort there, but the flashes of
the piercing and crunching of skin is
another of their joys (mine too!).
It was the woman their father had wanted them to call
mother that I first saw.
Her heart was already dust.
She was a creature moved by the blue winds of
jealousy, craving, and spite.
Her mouth was filled with the sugar of hatred.
The nearby village was full of death.
The fields remained barren, unyielding.
It was in an itchy Hell the family found themselves.
His tears that fell at night
became icicles on her eyelashes.
He took little convincing of what had to be done
for (to) the children.
She spoke of mercy but really wanted only
to throw them out like trash.
Her longing had soured long ago; she knew
he would never regard her as truly satisfying.
Let him fall into the emptiness she poured on their bed.
She would make his hurt golden, claim she spoke from a
place of honesty...“please, love, forgive it’s bite.”
The children found themselves caught in
what appeared to them a labyrinth of knives.
The boy tried his best to comfort his sister.
She cried out to the hateful sky above.
She bit her lip.
She cowered into his chest.
Watch out child, for your mind might run off and
leave your heart, vulnerable to the feast of thieves!
Like a cat, I can see far into the darkness.
I knew they would arrive the next day. And they did.
Not to a home of confectionery delights but to a gleaming
hearth and the promised kindness in an old woman’s eye.
How where they to know that after a warm meal and a
warm slide into a bed they would wake in a cage?
How heavy my happiness as I watched them sleep; their faces
like jars of honey I could look through and see everything.
The girl woke first and I put her straight to work
gathering wood for the oven.
Fear filled her eyes.
Fear is my beloved.
Fear is my blood. The meatiest part!
The fire grew and blossomed in its liquid violence.
The brain is not a safe place to get lost.
There is nothing thicker than one’s own sickness.
I was pushed into the delicious fire.
I became shredded starlight.
Fitting, I would die in a whirlwind of good rage.
But am I ashamed? Am I wanting of forgiveness?
One does not change the clothes their soul arrived in.
The simple answer is no.
Everyday Parting of the Ways / Joy Johnson
Soldier I onwards though I do not know
why. There is a deep divide, like a house
which needs keeping with garden to tend,
when the questioning gulf of "why" opens
and I urgent write to fill its innards
because, seems to me, that's what satisfies
the beast -- what beast? -- figment of reality
needs nothing from me. Do I excuse my
continued breathing by a subterfuge?
Better perhaps to, tea in hand, simply
stand in the wind, feel my beating heart then
flip a coin. Has my pen pitted nature
'gainst something akin to culture, has man?
What do we fight each other for: mischance?
Is solitude what battles with commons--
is't blind rancor at needing each other?
Dreaming of a purpose might be conceit
of a philosophic sort. What hole this?
In the cone of causality we've rent.
bob for apples / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco
On our deck when our kids were small. Water sloshes from a tub like when I was little. Hanging twine, a donut on each string. We try marshmallows, but they wouldn’t hold, so giggles carried me back and forth through the kitchen, oops don’t let the dog out, please and thank you. McIntoshes red and green cheeks facing up, down, up. More giggles and some “have fun but don’t get each other wet on purpose!” All while holding on because the blindfolds made them teeter. Once an apple gets fished out, the prize gets crunched and the cidery fragrance makes me thirsty and hungry, too. But I am too busy arranging kids’ snacks on a melamine tray. I will eat later.
MAMA IS THE WORM / H.T. Reynolds
Tupelo 30/30 Cento Pt. I with lines from Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco;
Gabriel Phillips; Brett Gastineau; at/om; Katerina Canyon; Colin Sturdevant
her tendrils
unplanted from my gums
through tendons and bone
—weightless as a shadow
I am small, I have fallen
from my mother’s back
and I am drowning—
an imperfect copy of Eve
duplicated over and over
putting your mouth
to the wound of my body,
the slices like a whisper—
that’s where my father swallowed me
to the womb
by hands of someone who means well
in a life as endless and narrow as an hour
and my death
pulls from my throat
a deep howl
this is what the world will do
to you—
in the middle of dying
perhaps I will be grateful…
Lengths to Which Madness Would Measure, Had Madness Been Left in the Wood / Gabriel Phillips
(written in the woods of De Soto state park)
It’s the arch between the doorways
deep in the woods.
Where I lunge myself towards the pink.
I hurt the rocks that hurt, I hurl them
against themselves until they sour.
I am the apocalypse of the deep,
deep woods. When splinters grow,
they teach the trees. Where I have hurled
myself towards anything stone.
Where the vine finds favorites, it finds
my feet pruning the roots of twilight. What woods
expect of man, is near what the burning cedar
describes as quiet noise. Near but far
enough to seek. In forms that
did not exist but could. In forms that
once had crawled. To the tops of trees
I plunder the words of their young.
I stash them in little matchboxes
in cracks in the backs of caves, where the fox,
the owl and the wintering bear,
dance together in the green terror of echoes.
Protecting the roe deer from evaporating
with the dew at midnight, every morning.
I have finished the bow. I have brought
my eyes to a close. I shudder at echoes
of deep childish metal, which tear asunder
both wood and soul.
all my tears have been used up / Colin Sturdevant
& let's not speak of poetic lineages
& yet let's speak of poetic lineages
a different kind than we are used to
Darwin's poetry found in all life
how it's not too sad to be the loneliest
man among Men. each couple I see
as if making it off the ark of love
and it's now been 21 years o' solitude
the holding of hands. the parting of lips
casual dress. a Sunday morning
& artificial rain falls on the street
& what a species we are
