October - Poem 19
Afterbirth / Katerina Canyon
What had been our marrow
burned between our bones—
a shared, broken promise
pressed against my neck.
Carry my daughter.
Finally,
I pass,
lonely,
prepared with lead
gnawing into myself.
I talk teeth into the uvula.
The tongue expels itself
in soil.
My bloodlines choose suicide and unravel
as waters hunt
voices on my forehead.
When no more kisses come,
I burn myself lightly—
carrying my head
between my knees
staring and praying
against my eyes.
Wood fires
I start
tomorrow while
kissing charcoal.
My chapped lips gnaw
through neurons.
Always handstanding
and never building.
I honeyed my lips
while waiting for cornbread
that never comes.
I strike the stomach
and never did I die
believing
I would return whole
to my home
again.
Upon Viewing Ray Kobald's sculpture “From the Waters Comes My Bounty”, Kiwanis Park, Oregon, IL / Sam Calhoun
I am every fish
thinking home
is somewhere above
this low head dam, the illusion believing
we can swim as
alive as the river,
my arms touching cold water
in the islands of chaff
left from summer,
knowing spring is far
down river, long since past,
the mountains carrying
the future like a mask,
all day I carry the world
like a weighted net,
a web of stories
I can't bear to cast
from my chest,
meanwhile, the world
goes on.
You can't ever get back upstream.
The Things I’ve Swallowed / The Things I’ve Spit Up / at/om
cw: emetophobia
There are tough
pills to swallow
and then there is
the daily cocktail
prescribed to me
to keep myself sane,
and my blood sugar
an acceptable number.
I throw up more times
than most people would
think that I do. Less than
I used to no longer once
a day but I still can’t name
the last week I made it
through without vomiting.
I try to keep my meds down,
try to avoid the clutches of
nausea when it strangles
its way upwards through
my pill rattled insides.
I promise I don’t make myself
sick anymore, I just don’t know
how to be healthy.
Maybe the pills would help more,
if I could hold them down.
Wagon Wheel / Ellen Ferguson
old crow medicine show covered
Dylan’s song
about a mom, a rocking mom
a rocking mom who calls the shots
like a train, like the rain. Moms like
this song --
many moms -- moms reading Dostoevsky’s
“White Nights” -- accept their fate
rocking wind, rocking rain, rocking trains, knowing
what Fyodor said: you get one moment, maybe
on a sidewalk, and it better be
enough.
A Story of Thorns / Brett Gastineau
Around the tower, time stumbles through the dusk
watching the castle lost in a century of sleep.
Over the wall, a willow weeps silver,
begins its slow and tangled sway.
Beyond the briers, a lame prince hobbles
following a lone and bloodied swallow.
His torch invokes the sacred flame
of the breath the maiden gave
before her world was turned to green,
before her ghost inhabited this world,
before she was born into dying.
Surrounded by thorns of iron, the spindle sleeps.
Pædophobia / Joy Johnson
Yesterday my mother came to me from
the curling fog of years gone in what
my brother said about abuse my father
lived at the hand of his step-dad. Oh but
had Mom evinced a caring about me
like the sweet sympathy she poured out for
Dad when she shared that tale refrained
again yesterday by a brother who
couldn't have known that sensitive lever
he'd happened upon-- poor man. Better to
keep away entirely from the topic
of children when nearby me: mother goose,
all that, and I'm sweating, clammy, less logic/
more panic. Abuse: phobia's dowry.
A WINTER SOWING / H.T. Reynolds
after Neon Gravestones by Twenty-One Pilots
I. Amelia Boynton Robinson
August 18, 1911 –
August 26, 2015
Never hopeless—always marching across
the bridge between the promised land
and a redacted history, casting her voice
at the ballot box below the crow-cocked
eyes below Billy clubs that Bloody Sunday
on Edmund Pettus Bridge—
then again—
marching
and again—
marching,
an ocean of twenty-five thousand
souls beaming through the darkness—
and then again—
fifty years later with the first
Black president—never hopeless
II. Irena Sendler
February 15, 1910-
May 12, 2008
Jolanta, mother of Neverland,
bless these stray children drowning,
bury their names at birth
in apple tree jars,
put them to sleep in body bags,
tuck them into suitcases,
bury them beneath stretchers,
pull them through sewer pipes,
deliver them by ambulance,
a trolley,
through the courthouse—
whatever it takes to let them fly
on the other side of a Warsaw fence,
give them their happy thoughts,
be their star upon their arm,
a faith they’ll wear straight till mourning
when lightning knocks on your door
takes you to Pawiak for a talk
but their names remain buried
beneath your clasped tongue
despite breaking your legs,
their awaiting firing squad,
you kept silent, wished
upon a Zegota star…
then Kansas kids
excavated your own secret
jar and found you
in Neverland
III. Dr. Wangari Maathai
April 1, 1940-
September 25, 2011
We all breathe easier now, professor,
with your green belt, your first degree
preventing land from receding
into government pockets,
planting tree shade and fruit
for weary mothers from millions of roots,
while private hands held the seed bag…
you believed in the people—
your class of foresters without diplomas
and we all breathe easier now, professor.
