October - Poem 13
Speaking of Love / Katerina Canyon
I speak to my heart
as a policeman to a criminal.
It is not that I am
wrong or immoral.
I am just undeserving
and unexempt.
The muddy meaning of love upon the flesh—
outside the closed fist—
slits my throat.
I detest my heart—
its vulnerability—
the way it needs to be
protected behind a cage.
It is nothing but tissue
and blood, but it feeds
my brain, my liver, and my kidneys.
If I sit still, I can hear it call to me—
an almost steady rhythm,
slightly offbeat.
Must I always bend to your whims?
My mind burns a different candle.
The smell is sweet.
My heart is a stranger without logic.
It wants the fruit
when the meat is sweeter.
Terce / Sam Calhoun
What can I offer that hasn’t already
been offered these twenty five years,
each one passing like an hour,
as if today could be a new day,
blue sky blue as the sky then,
tall gray towers moving north,
summer rain coming to break
this long drought, coming to embrace
the dust like old friends huddled in the dark.
Every breath drawn now is thunder,
every voice lifts like lightning.
Turn up the tv up until it rumbles.
I can’t bear to count raindrops
hitting our red tin roof.
I’ll Believe In Anything / at/om
Little boy falling asleep in your papaw’s lap, though he will only ever know you as a granddaughter
You deserve sunshine.
Little boy sat between your mother’s legs while she brushed your hair and twists it into braids, like the tomboy girl on tv you so admire but still don’t want to look like
You deserve sunshine.
Little boy who could never wear your catholic school shirts and jumpers quite right
You deserve sunshine.
Boy who played a prince rescuing a princess in the first grade, caught kissing a girl by his mother and though yes, you were too young they called only the fact you were both girls wrong.
You deserve sunshine.
Kiddo who declared you felt free the first time you had your hair cut
You deserve sunshine.
Learning to hide your hair in a hat and always playing the son in games of house and loving the way the word he left your friends mouths
You deserve sunshine.
Boy who heard the meaning of the word gay and thought it was incredible that love could be so strong people would still want it when others try to take it away
You deserve sunshine.
Boy who asked his father why it was that if god loved everybody why did the religion you were raised in have a problem with gay people and then cried when he barked out his answer
You deserve sunshine.
Boy who looked up every excuse for his friends to call him a man, boy who would laugh at jokes about his body not being his body
You deserve sunshine.
One of the first of your group of friends to come out, even when they laughed, even when nobody believed you.
You deserve sunshine.
Boy who flinched when they hurled a word at him he didn’t understand but grew to wear it like armor
You deserve sunshine.
Boy who would have rather died than be a girl. Would have rather died than keep up the lie. Would have rather died than explain it again to anyone else.
You deserve sunshine.
Young Man who’s had a hundred names before he found the one that fits
You deserve sunshine.
You who cried when your friend wrote your chosen name besides her and declared you her “bestie.”
You deserve sunshine.
Young man who strangled himself when he read the cruel words his father wrote on Twitter you deserve sunshine.
Young man reading a coming out poem on an open mic and begging the audience not to react
you deserve sunshine.
Young man sharing his voice on mic after mic, saying time after time that you know who you are
You deserve sunshine.
Young man, with scars on your skin, deep in your head, and in your heart, you with all the weight of the sorrow and the joy, you who loves your community more than you’ve ever loved another person, more than you have ever loved yourself.
It’s okay to step into the light.
You deserve sunshine.
Tuesday is the New Thursday / Ellen Ferguson
continued
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.
Happy Birthday
So glad you were born.
October 24th, yay!
Happy day to you!
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.
Things I know / Brett Gastineau
Love brings you the best vision of yourself which, of
course, will be led to the slaughter.
We fail to hear past our own hearts.
Homes can grow in silence.
Kindness can come too late.
Sometimes the dead can seem more alive than the living.
The haunting of our wreckage is loud with voices howling
for their lost skin. They let us see our future scheming
to get back into our lives.
You will find yourself looking for kisses pressed in books.
Clouds are never late.
Old loves smile at us from jukeboxes.
Learning the simple diction of stones is beyond us.
The body seeks what it wants, regardless if you agree to
it. In the body begins everything, embrace the testimony
of the senses.
No matter what, there are butterflies and they have no
words for grief.
You’ll find good luck sleeping in the back of old pickup
trucks.
Constellations remain steady and form images regardless if
we give them names.
Each generation will claim to live at the end of a withered
century, waiting to fall off the edge of their story.
You won’t trust the ones that say they love you. You want
to place them up high and they ask only that you hold them.
You can find proof of God in a red nightgown. Maybe it’s
the sweet secret scent of sex.
Like trees, we strain to hear what we want to remember.
You will learn forgiveness when you welcome the ripening
yellow of autumn.
We are navigating by a grace we are always relearning.
I forgot to remember / Joy Johnson
My attention diverted, exploited
by the system I swim in, by needing
(and I've worked to need less and less, I swear)
while swimming in the screaming, avoiding
all thinking through dopamine game screening,
wading to the shore, coming up for air,
pen in hand, I think I'm ready to word
today's relevance -- am I mainstreaming
the art of being? Then my own software
is glitched by sun on leaf, by laughter and …
class war.
Brooklyn Holiday Traditions / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco
Italian-American families serve a pasta course before a full Thanksgiving dinner. Ravioli or cavatelli and tomato sauce to show who they are before who they have become at the table.
On the way to Bay Ridge, house after house had its small front yard and brick facade covered in lights and decorations, a sight for adults and children. Block after block of animated cherubs, Santas, reindeer, snowmen, red and green lights, and illuminated snowflakes.
At Christmas dinner, it was either twelve or seven fishes. It depends how numerous the family is and how many cooks there are. If seven, symbolic of the biblical interpretation of God’s week creating the world and everything in it; if twelve, symbolic of Jesus’ twelve apostles as well as twelve months in a year and twelve hours in a day or night.
All the freshly-caught fruits of the sea helping promise a merry Christmas to all.
I was amazed at my husband's Brooklyn-born and raised family who brought out the first course, pasta with red seafood sauce or plain for the kids; clams oreganata, scungilli salad, calamari salad, crab legs, lobster tails, whitefish battered and fried, broiled salmon, broiled shrimp, fried shrimp, mussels in garlic and wine, and fried calamari. Desserts (!) included pine nut marzipan cookies, biscotti and homemade Italian rainbow cookies and black coffee, which is espresso.
There was also a competitive aspect to this crazy feast, that if you “only” made seven rather than twelve, you fell short, loved God less, or were a misfit outcast atheist (oops). Grandma Nanny presided over the table since Grandpa had died years before. She examined the table and the children to make sure everything was clean. She dozed in the chair as the cleanup crew sang carols while washing up, and amazingly the whole kitchen and adjoining dining room were soon as clean as possible, as if none of the cousins had worn lobster bibs and left piles of shells in the middle of the table minutes before. Children opened toys, played together and one by one were changed into pajamas to sleep on the long ride home to Jersey.
I CAN’T WAIT TO BE FINE / H.T. Reynolds
Mother tells me the gravestones come from discarded wishes—from a womb not yet ready to grant them. She says with me—the moon had leaked into the room between the pieces of a broken window, wrapped around her waist, and filled the bare room with a sickly shade of Halloween—like a rancid pumpkin or an expired jar of olives. She says I was a planted fist from a seed she held against her breast as she exhaled her last cigarette—shotgunning me to a man becoming—a broken bottle—a gaping wound on the thigh—the forehead—the small of the back. Mother says we shouldn’t worry about what’s not in our control—that God will provide more than the gap in the floor ever will—more than the soup kitchen could—the angels with their donated shopping lists, their full bellies leaking words from their perfect teeth. Mother says to stay still, that it'll all be over soon—to clench my fists together—and pray.
small boy in my mind
whispers out from the darkness
don’t be what they made
The Many Aspects of Purpose / Gabriel Phillips
And the crow calls out with silver lungs
until its breath is the size of the penny.
Ants bite. They collapse their tiny
hearts which they bite then use
their hearts as the shadows for
fire.
That sunset would have a lovely
violent birth. A cutting of leaves
against my back. And two trees
in the forest are kissing,
as the forest and floor around them
burn.
Halley’s Chapel appears once
every 75 years with its own choir. So that
deer can taste their tongues for the first time,
the gun in the hunter’s dream is sleeping.
They were the fastest and plainest
druids.
Unzip the stone which cuts
the sunrise with itself.
Then the yellow flower
whose sole purpose is to remain
nameless, can talk the leaves into
speaking.
Slow Pour / Colin Sturdevant
made men mute mere miles
by a glass of whiskey tonight
until the flood comes
